For the NaNo Excerpt Blog Chain.

“There’s our LK.” I almost jumped when the whispered words came over my shoulder. It took a moment for me to realize that they came from the small two-person table behind my computer, in the general seating area of Inky’s, where someone had come in and unobtrusively sat down. It was a guy’s voice, explaining why I hadn’t noticed—if it had been a girl I’d have been fretting about that to an empty chair in Natalie’s apartment instead.

“One of Jim’s friends?” I said as quietly and nonchalantly as I could.

“Yeah. Friend of Max’s too, and a lot of other people at the meeting the other night,” the guy said. “Name’s Oren.”

That at least was an unusual enough name that I stood a decent chance of remembering it. “So is that really pretty girl with the blond dreadlocks the LK we’re waiting for?” I whispered, still making a show of using my computer. It was about all the dime-store espionage I could do in a well-lit room.

“Yeah, I think there’s a pretty good chance of that,” said Oren. “Lily Kaiserin, the treasurer and secretary for the Southern Michigan branch of Students for a Sustainable Earth.”

That was right; I’d seen Strasser talking to her at the student organization bazaar in the union; Jim had called her—what was it?—”the world’s most attractive crazy hippie.”

“I guess that sort of fits the profile inasmuch as you’d expect someone from the Nothing to be a little left of center,” I said in a low voice. “But what could Students for a Sustainable Earth possibly have that the Nothing would want?”

“That’s what all of us are going to find out,” said Oren.

“All of us?”

“There’s three of us here not including you,” Oren said. “Jim and Max had us come in at irregular times over the last two hours. At my signal—closing my laptop—we move.”

Not quite Mata Hari, but cloak and dagger enough to impress me. “What’s she doing now?” I said, at a disadvantage as I could only see what was going on in the greater Inky’s with my peripheral vision.

“Standing by the door with a cup of Inky’s vegan fair-trade coffee in the biodegradable cup that costs a dollar extra and looking out the window,” Oren said. “I bet—yes, I think that’s Strasser coming by now.”

I reached into my coat pocket and produced the RFID scanner that Jim had given me. Contrary to his instructions, I had not only not given it back but also spilled spaghetti sauce on it a few dinners ago. Strasser couldn’t have been wearing the same coat, could he? Even so, surely in the process of futzing with it or washing it he must have found the RFID sticker I slipped under his collar.

The scanner lit up with a blip approximately 20 feet behind me; apparently not.

“I can track Strasser with this,” I said, holding out the scanner. “No need to follow him line-of-sight,” I added, borrowing a term from one of the tactical RPGs in my Playstation stack at home.

“Hm,” said Oren. “We’ll split the difference, I think. Me and the others can follow Kaiserin and Strasser visually, and you can use the scanner.” He stood up and stretched. “My cell number is written on the underside of the napkin on my table,” he said. “Text me if you lose them, or if you make it to wherever they’re going and we’re not there.”

Not exactly what I had in mind when I’d complained to Jim that it was too hard to get peoples’ numbers.

  • Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!