[1.1]
She smiled like the kind of pretty that would break your bank account and spill all your dirty little secrets to your closest friends in one dizzy afternoon.
Thankfully, I had none of those. Except secrets.
I would need to be careful around her. Partly because of that smile.
Mostly because she had somehow gotten into my office without me. My bugs glared at the combination lock that mathematics had sworn would be harder to guess than picking the right grain of sand on a beach. It didn't look broken.
Goes to show how far trust goes these days.
I reached back to my street as she sat on my chair, bringing in the bugs from nearby apartments to reinforce the defences that surrounded my office.
I had plenty of bugs to bring in.
Her car glistened against the sidewalk in front of my building, flanked by massive tree-trunks in black and white glowering at anybody who happened to come within spitting distance of the masterpiece they were protecting. Deep blue coat and Tinker-made, if the vertical flaps protruding from the roof were any indication. I eyed the men again, noting the obvious bulges in their suits: they didn't look impressive enough for something that was worth more than the rest of this street combined.
I gave them a quick smile as I turned by them and onto my landing, punching in another combination she shouldn't have been able to get past. The cloying musty smell of the hallway greeted me like a scorned lover. I breathed it in deep. She was leaning back on my chair, swinging it around a bit. It's faded and frayed black seemed even cheaper against the smooth blue of her dress.
She was fingering the little I had on my desk as I began to climb the staircase. I didn't have much in the way of possessions: a notebook and some pencils, an empty glass and a silvery flask with my dad's initials carved onto the bottom. A few books were stacked behind the half-drawn curtain to her side. Around the place were a couple of souvenirs from my previous relationships: a red and white lighter, filigreed with grey around its edges; the remains of a broken spectacle frame; and a small bowl in a shelf at the corner. Not enough, really, to fill up a room; not enough for a closet.
Let's just say I liked to travel light.
Opening the flask, she took a whiff and that damn smile widened. I could feel her laugh as she poured some into the glass. Even her swallows were practiced, drawing the gaze to the long pale neck.
I frowned at the thought. She looked like she was hamming it up, playing for an audience.
And that's when she did it. Holding up that amber glass, she smiled and looked at my bugs as if they were old friends.
I felt a cockroach swoon.
"Hello, Taylor Hebert," she said. "I'm Lisa. And we have a lot to talk about."
0-0
It's not often I get the urge to punch things, but her teeth were looking like exceptionally deserving targets.
Like all the pretty people I knew, she didn't hesitate in showing off her grin. Only along with her wide smiles, she was also casually throwing out my secrets.
Either she was a cape, or somebody had done a lot of homework on me.
I couldn't figure out which was worse.
"Spit it out," I said, standing in front of my own desk with my arms crossed. I felt like a kid again, just tensing my fists uselessly as a bully continued to rage and ravage my little corner of the world. "What the fuck do you want me to do?"
She spoke, slow and loud, still holding a glass and asserting her power over me as she paused in mid-sentence to beckon me, like an errant child, towards the chair. "This is just a demonstration, Taylor. Sit, sit. No need to be so tense."
I scowled.
She took a sip of my whiskey. "This is good stuff. Doesn't quite fit the décor, does it?"
I gave her a hard glance—probably not the same as the kind she was used to. She took it with a roll of the eyes.
"Then again," she added, "neither do you. I still can't figure out how a girl graduating magna cum laude in art and physics would end up in this dump in two—"
I jerked to the left, and folded myself upon the chair. She had stopped at my movement and was now just staring at me, cupping the glass with both hands. Down below, her bodyguards were grumbling and I moved a few more bugs around them to get a clearer sound. Her smile grew strained as she waited for me to speak. Only when I was sure she was about to interject did I begin. "Is that a rhetorical question, or do you actually not know why?"
"No, I do." She waited for a beat before continuing. "I would give you my condolences but I don't think they'd mean much."
"Nothing at all." I watched her fiddle for a moment before sighing. She was a goddamned amateur. I didn't know whether to be relieved or angry. "Just give it to me straight—what do you want me to do?"
Her eyes narrowed. "I want you to keep those bloody bugs away from me, for a start."
Her bodyguards were still grumbling downstairs, their absence by her side a rather conspicuous weakness. Either she was stupid and they weren't wanted, as they groused about downstairs, or she felt that she didn't need them. That would be a wholly different ballgame. Could I take the chance? I had enough bugs around us to down an elephant.
The glass slammed onto the desk. The flask toppled off. Its lid probably wasn't screwed tight because it plopped right off the neck with the first hard bounce and let the whiskey spill onto the floor. I met her eyes with more than just my usual anger.
"I'm not going to say it twice." She growled. I could see the beads of sweat on her forehead as clearly as the oblivious guards downstairs. She had some advantage, I was plenty sure of that. But what she didn't have was the nerve to keep it in reserve for as long as she should. It was stupid of me to threaten somebody who had me over the barrel like this but, well, fuck, what do you expect? There was a reason I hadn't moved up in the world.
I had dear old dad to thank for that.
The electricity arced out of her a moment later, in a bright, pretty lance that fractured into a thousand threads and speared into the walls. Lights sparked and went out. The entire eastern front of bugs fried. I tried not to react to any of it; I don't think I was successful.
Directed Electricity.
Forget the cars, this was stuff I didn't even know Tinkers put out into the market. The fight went out of me like a punctured blimp above an unsuspecting cityscape. She either had a Tinker on call, or was backed by someone rich enough to go around in circles I hadn't even heard of: she seemed far too brittle to be the one calling the shots herself.
She took a long gander at me before her face grew blank. Then, after taking a deep swallow and emptying the glass, she muttered a quiet 'fuck'. "I underestimated you," she said. "You're crazier than I thought. You realize I could have directed that towards you as easily right?" She paused. "Of course you do—that just makes it worse."
I smiled grimly. Bugs streamed from the vents in the walls towards the fallen flask. "And you think I'm going to play fetch just because you know a few things about me." Her face scrunched up, for some reason. "I guess we're both wrong."
Her expression narrowed. "Yours are not the only secrets I hold. Not threatening you, just laying out the facts." I felt my limbs grow leaden. She didn't mean… Looking right at me she barreled on. "That's exactly who I'm talking about."
The blinds in the vent weren't wide enough for the bottle to pass through, so the bugs just deposited it by the side of the shelf with the empty bowl. As always, picturing the tranquility and stillness of that empty piece of pottery failed to calm me.
Still, her words were straightjacket enough. I drew my bugs into a wide perimeter around my room, far enough to not appear overtly threatening, in case she had some Ticker gadget to measure that too.
I'd probably not said it enough: Tinkers are fucking bullshit. Worse than Thinkers. Thankfully, there were too few of them for their toys to percolate too wide—not that your garden-variety scum could ever dream of purchasing anything with a Tinker stamp. And Lisa here had at least two. And given the soft uniform shading of her skin and the perfectly sculpted look of her crossed legs, probably more.
I gave a small resigned sigh and faced her, and she volleyed back with that damned smile of hers. And less than 10 minutes later, staring at the appointment she'd typed into my calendar (and how the fuck did she know that password?), I was calling my only friend and waiting anxiously for her to pick up.
"Hey. In a bit of a rush. What's up?"
I felt the relief wash over me. "Emma. Where are you? We need to talk."
AN: Unbeta'ed and experimental. Trying to difference kind of voice and theme, as well as more rapid writing. Let's see how it works out.
