The Price of Entanglement, Chapter 3, pt. 2

She’d just about fallen asleep when the phone buzzed in her pocket, making her jump a bit. She grabbed it out of her pocket and stared at the indicator, then grinned. Quinn. She gestured for it to pick up, then slipped it back in her pocket as his deep but quick voice filled the large interior of the cab. “Josie! Just the girl I’ve been wanting to talk to!”

“What a surprise. You called me, Quintrell. What do you want this time?” She tried and failed to keep a straight face, but she was reasonably certain she’d kept it out of her voice.

“Naturally, because I wanted to talk to you! What I want is to get together, and soon.”

“… and? Are you finally asking me out on a date?” she teased.

“Oh, if only,” he laughed. “No, not a date, not this time. Maybe next time. This time, like so many before, I’m calling for a favor. Unlike so many before, this is a favor I’m doing you.”

“Your loss,” she smiled. “What’s this favor you’re going to do for me?”

“You wouldn’t happen to be looking for work, would you, Josie?”

She leaned forward on her seat, all attention firmly on his voice. “Yes! How’d you hear? But yes, I could definitely use the work.”

“Whoa, whoa, I haven’t even told you what it is yet. It’s not really your usual deal.”

“Well stop teasing me then and spill it. What’s the job?”

“Nothing you can’t handle, I’m sure. It’s just … it’s a bit of a desk job. Corporate stuff. Mail room, in fact.”

Her stomach soured a bit at the thought, but really, running packages around the city was pretty much the same thing, and it’d be a lot more common in an office. Courier work was rare, the jobs few and far between when most deliveries were made at the speed of raw data.

“I’m in. Let’s meet tonight, I want details. You’re the best, Q-ball!”

“Great,” he said with the slightest hint of sourness in his voice; he’d always hated that nickname. “I’ll send you the when’n-wheres. Catch you later!”

She sat back with a genuine smile and sense of relief. Quinn wasn’t the first person she’d have thought of to come through when she needed work, but he did have a knack for being around at just the right time.

Fifteen minutes later, the cab dropped her off at a coffee shop she was fond of; she settled in for a few hours to study her contact lists and the local news, looking for anything that suggested opportunity. She was a firm believer in having backup plans.

Determination

By Gordon S. McLeod

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The Price of Entanglement - Chapter 3, pt. 1

The following day, Jo found herself pacing back and forth across the small living room of the house, soaking up information as fast as her phone could deliver it to her. None of it looked helpful at all. Finally she pocketed the phone and sat still just for a moment. She needed to clear her head.

Her Gran was out; she’d seen him off to visit with friends earlier in the morning. She wouldn’t have to pick him up until late afternoon, so she had plenty of time to go somewhere, preferably somewhere she could be more productive.

The rain was falling again, gentle this time, and for a wonder, it held hardly a trace of acid. It streamed all but silently down the cab windows as she crossed the city. Her destination this time was farther than the gym; she leaned her head against the glass and did her best to relax and recapture some of the calm she’d worked for after her climb.

The Price of Entanglement - Chapter 5, pt. 6

She stared at the image for a few seconds, startled. A few other items had moved just the smallest bit, too. A thumping sound caught her attention and she stared at the locker. The sound was very faint, but clear, and it repeated a few times. She thought back to the layout of the locker room and the gym outside; might be people rappelling on the wall, she supposed.

She opened her locker and to the naked eye, nothing had changed. She changed and gathered her stuff, then made her way out. She couldn’t resist casting a look back at the wall separating the change room from the gym; it was concrete. Her lip twisted down as she thought. Had to be the vibration, she told herself.

The exit was two sets of glass doors out to the street; the rain still fell, though it was a shadow of the downpour she’d been through earlier. She flipped away from the imaging app and summoned a cab. As she waited, she looked back in at those still working out, though nobody stood out as significant. “Ahh, you’re going crazy,” she told herself. “It was just a fluke.”

That thought firmly in mind, she hopped in the cab as soon as it arrived. This time she was sharing it; the other person rode in the back for the first ten minutes of the shared journey, then the cab let him out at a small market on a non-descript intersection. She rode the rest of the way alone, the rain beating lightly on the hood and windshield, the sound nearly lulling her to sleep. She snapped out of it as Sal’s house came into view.

Her visit this time was very brief; she just dropped off the delivery, though she hesitated, on the verge of asking what it was all about. She held back though. No sense getting her worked up over nothing, she figured. She got back into the waiting cab, bag a little lighter, bank account a little fuller, though not nearly full enough, and spent the trip home thinking about who else might need something from her.

The Price of Entanglement, Chapter 2, pt. 5

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The locker room was empty when Jo returned, thoroughly wiped out and far more centered after her workout. She stretched several times and took a few deep breaths in front of her locker, then brought her phone out of her pocket. "Let's see if everything's as it should be," she muttered under her breath. It was habit mostly, years of shared change room experience mixed with professionalism since her locker still held the package intended for Sal, but she had to make sure nothing had been tampered with.

She brought the phone up to the locker door and triggered a command that caused it to emit a high-frequency note beyond the range of natural human hearing. Anyone in the building with augmented hearing might be irritated with her, she supposed. Almost instantaneously after the sound was produced, the interior of the locker was mapped and projected next to the mapping she'd created before heading out for her climb.

She frowned. The two were supposed to be a perfect match. Her hair brush was out of place.

She looked around the room, but it had been empty when she'd arrived, and nobody had arrived since. She'd been too preoccupied while climbing to notice who had come and gone from the room since she'd left it.

The before imaging showed the brush against the back wall of the locker, just on top of the package. The sonar-like image was clear as day; the brush had shifted by several millimeters in the imaging she'd just performed.

The Price of Entanglement - Chapter 2, pt. 4

Fidgeting restlessly, the growing subtle anger left her anxious to get to the gym; she needed to burn off some energy. Today was definitely going to be a tall overhang kind of day, she thought.

The cab passed the last few blocks in a downpour so hard she could barely see out the windows until it had slowed to a stop out in front of the Society building; it was an old concrete building distinguished mostly by its complete lack of distinguishing features. It looked faded and somehow worn down; she couldn’t decide if that boded well or ill for an organization that was known primarily for the restoration of historic buildings. What did it say about them that they couldn’t, or didn’t, maintain their own?

She opened the car door and left the thought aside as she struggled to open her umbrella and get out without getting soaked. The sound of the rain pelting the windshield yielded to the sharp patter of rain on concrete as she dashed up the steps and inside; behind her, she heard the cab drive off. Luckily for her the gym wasn’t far.

Inside, the building lived up to its own exterior. The walls were that shade somewhere between off-white and yellow that said they were seriously overdue for repainting, and the carpeted floor was badly worn in distinct paths crisscrossing the room. It was the sort of place you in which you expected to encounter short tempers and irritated glares; to her mild surprise, though, the reception staff were polite and friendly, and she was on her way again within minutes. The new package bound for Sal was almost indistinguishable from the two she’d brought, though it was wrapped in new-looking heavy white paper rather than brown.

The rain had eased off again somewhat when she left the building; she’d been toying in the back of her mind with the idea of summoning another cab, but with some relief she decided to walk it. Downtown wasn’t her favorite place to walk anymore; it had used to be nicer, when it had green spaces and trees planted here and there, but over the last decade, everything had died and eventually just about everyone gave up trying to get anything to grow.

Twenty minutes later, she was too busy clinging to the underside of an underhang to think much about rain and dead plants. Sweat beaded her forehead and her muscles burned; it’d been too long since she climbed this course, she decided. She’d been too easy on herself lately.​

Determination

By Gordon S. McLeod

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The Price of Entanglement - Chapter 2, pt. 3

“I’ll drop by in a few hours with the return package, Sal. Thanks for the coffee and the chat.”

The Dolesham Heritage Society was downtown, a trip that took her past home and closer to the city, but that was fine by her. On a paying job, she didn’t have to hesitate to use a cab, especially if she could multitask; she hailed a cab for two stops with her phone, plugging in her origin point and two destination points, one at home and one downtown to the Society’s offices. She had some luck; there was nobody else using the cab when it showed up. They were roomy enough inside that they often did service multiple people at the same time, like small busses.

A quick trip into the house let her grab her athletic gear; she could use some gym time as long as she was headed downtown anyway. The cab waited on her as she grabbed her workout outfit and some basic climbing gear. The sky was still clouded over; her instinct told her rain was on the way again. She grabbed the new umbrella on her way out the door.

The drive to the Society was longer than the trip home had been; she spent a good part of it watching the roads go by as they passed near-silently over them. They were less than halfway there when the rain began again, beating slowly against the windows and roof, growing faster and harder as they drove. She grimaced. “What kind of rain is it? Is it acidic?”

“The average pH value of the rain is 2.4.”

It was getting worse. 2.4 pH shouldn’t hurt your skin, though you wouldn’t want it in your eyes; it was almost as bad as lemon juice, if she recalled correctly. She glared off to the right as they drove downtown, to where the clouds above were met by clouds below; plumes of gasses and waste rising to mingle with the clouds were making life hell, but the degradation of environmental law seemed unending, and so nothing was done about it.