Kalais opened the way, which meant the trip along the Rails was fast as the wind and devoid of any pleasantries. There was enough time for Bayle and Tembi to exchange a few ideas about the best spots to grab a quick lunch on Earth, and then they stepped out of the Deep in front of a set of doors crafted from rich, royal mahogany, the wood so old that it was mainly held together by ’bots, polish, and tradition.
“Ready?” he asked, but Bayle pushed ahead of him, Tembi following at her heels.
Too strange, watching Bayle shed her skin and become an entirely different person. The two of them had met during their Witches’ classes, with Bayle nearly seven years her senior. Bayle had taken her on as more of a mascot than a friend, but Tembi knew the Deep, and she had shown Bayle how the Deep was more than a tool. Over time, that persistent awkward feeling of being less than Bayle, of her company being tolerated instead of enjoyed, had fallen away…except during moments like this, where Bayle was no longer her best friend but became more, when she was not merely Bayle but was also Lady Oliver, heir to the extraordinary Oliver fortune, future owner of an entire continent on the planet of Atlantis, and someone who dabbled in political gamesmanship for personal enjoyment.
Into the wolves’ den, then, with Lady Oliver as the poisoned tip of the spear.
The chamber was enormous, lined in old woods and metals, the marble floor laid in patterns like the overlapping scales of a fish. At the front of the room, the Assembly was waiting. Not all of them. Officially, the Earth Assembly was formed from a delegate from each inhabited planet, and each of them had an equal say. But it was well-known that the true power sat in the hands of this very small Council comprised of the delegate from Earth, the delegate from Found, and another dozen from the wealthiest planets in the galaxy. These notables were sitting in the first row of the auditorium, their very presence a testament to the seriousness of the matter.
Behind them, trying to blend into the background, was another cluster of people, as no one of wealth traveled without an entourage. A dozen Witches waited with the secretaries and the security, personal chaperones to move these important Council members across the galaxy at their whim. They were dressed in Lancaster’s formal uniforms to advertise how they had Witches at their command.
Tembi counted once…twice…yes, only a dozen Witches waited with the servants. Lancaster’s representative opened her own way through the Deep, which meant one Council member did without entirely. Now, who would choose to go without the prestige of having a personal Witch standing ready to serve?
“Hi, Daddy,” Bayle said, quite loudly.
“Hello, Minnow,” Lord Oliver of Atlantis replied, also loudly.
Ah. That answered that.
Tembi was introduced, and asked to do a small presentation on the broken moon. Images were provided; a grammalight display of the moon hung in the air, noteworthy details edged in blue light. She recognized Kalais’ work, as he had an artist’s eye. What a waste of talent, she thought, as the moon spun above her.
She spoke of the Deep, and how it had brought her to the Stross cluster without being asked. This meant the incident was of some great importance to the Deep, yes? If she and Kalais were both called to duty, it had something to do with the war, yes? She did not mention time travel, as there was no need to mention time travel, and kept her eyes fastened straight ahead, her chin and ears high. When she was finished, she stood, fixed in place, waiting.
The Council’s members had questions. Not many of them were about the moon, or the Deep. Mostly these were versions of “Why did you not report directly to Lancaster?” and “What are you hiding?” Tembi answered those questions as best she could. It was easier to stare into the middle distance than to focus on any of the people in the room. She even kept her distance from Bayle’s father, who had given her the opals sparkling in her ears for last year’s Solstice gift.
And Lancaster’s own representative? For the moment, Tembi pretended that the woman in white with a hundred different colors braided into her hair didn’t exist at all.
The interrogation ended. Tembi wasn’t dismissed as much as she was summarily ignored, the conversation passing up and around her as if it were water and the Council controlled the tides. There was a chair over to the side of the podium; she sat, her bare feet sticking out from beneath her robes, her hands carefully knitted together to muffle any accidental sound.
Bayle and Kalais continued to stand. Now the questions were aimed at them, slowly, then building. Within a matter of minutes, the matter of the broken moon had disappeared altogether, with questions about the war taking its place.
“Could this be the Sabenta?” That, from Earth’s own delegate, a gnarled lump of ego and venom. Tembi wasn’t completely sure that Dame Idowu was a Blackwing sympathizer, but her loathing for modded humans was always plain. Dame Idowu’s eyes drifted of their own accord down to Bayle’s boots, and then bounced back up to focus on the girl’s face.
“We don’t know who is responsible,” Kalais said, for at least the third time in as many minutes, and then the Council was off, issuing cold statements about why specific people shouldn’t be allowed to have opinions.
Safely tucked away behind Bayle’s robes, Tembi was able to watch the Council. Of the fourteen members in attendance, ten were genetically Earth-normal. The one who stood out was the representative from Chollhe, who was an utterly hairless person with pale blue skin, while the remaining three could pass by putting in a little extra effort. Bayle’s father wore shiny shoes and cunningly crafted gloves, and Domino covered her head with a scarf to hide her ears—
Don’t look at her! Tembi reminded herself, her eyes darting away from the Witch.
How old was Domino? Ageless, of course. The Deep had frozen her in time centuries before Tembi was born. She had the unlined face of an Adhamantian woman a few years older than Tembi, and carried herself with an unnatural eternal grace. Domino dressed in white and layered over this the colors of the Deep, as many colors as she could wear against her dark skin or thread into her long white hair, with gold and silver glinting in the edges between these.
She was beautiful. She was intimidating. She was as irritating as a million major hells.
Focus, Tembi.
Tembi sat, pretending to be furniture as she allowed herself to listen to conversations far above her clearance level. Plans were being made. Various covert actions would be taken: nobody admitted to having a spy ring of their very own, but their language danced around the fact that everybody did, and everybody else knew that they did, and they were all planning to release their spies to investigate what had happened to the moon. After that, representatives from the Sagittarius Armed Forces and the Sabenta would be called into a meeting. How the Sabenta could sit across a table and participate in a polite series of lies with the same people who were killing them, Tembi didn’t know. Modded or not, all politicians possessed superhuman skills of their own, able to sit and talk with a clarity of detail that could be spun into arguments, and then woven into action.
How? Tembi didn’t know!
“Are we sure a device caused this?” The discussion had finally returned to the matter of the broken moon. Even if she hadn’t known Ambassador Marlowe, the set of his shoulders and the shine of his armor would have told Tembi that the speaker was from Camelot. Prickly bunch, those Arthurians. Tended to catch more than their fair share of bombs, which is why Tembi was passingly familiar with the ductwork in the central palace on the isle of Avalon. Nobody liked Arthurians, not even other Arthurians: there were hundreds of civilizations based on Old Earth mythologies scattered throughout the galaxy, but Arthurians were the only ones who fell into planet-wide civil war every few decades. They had become a joke amongst other civilizations whose societies were formed from a common canon, but Camelot’s vast wealth assured them a permanent spot on the small Council.
“What else could cause this?” Lord Oliver asked the question gently, as if asking a child to explain why the plate was suddenly empty of pastries.
Dame Idowu looked towards Kalais and Bayle, lingering on Tembi as she tried to stay hidden behind them. “What, indeed.”
Lord Oliver began to reply—from his tone, it would be a cutting one—but as he did, the air in the chamber blew apart as the Deep opened. A short Witch appeared, accompanying a man in a bomb disposal uniform that was in worse shape than Tembi’s own. He glanced around at the ornate Earth Assembly chambers, not a hint of emotion showing on his face as he stomped silvery moon dust from his boots onto the mosaic floor.
Tembi grinned. It would take more than an appearance in front of the most powerful people in the galaxy to shake Cooper. He was a rough twenty years older than she was, and wore every year on his face. He came from a modded civilization of artisans who had invested in eyesight and dexterity, and the two extra joints on each finger allowed him to manipulate tricky devices. If he couldn’t defuse a bomb via manual labor, he was also an authentic tekker with a lift rating of fifty kilos. Cooper would admit he wasn’t the strongest telekinetic in the galaxy, but he had better control over his abilities than the powerhouses who could lift a hundred kilos or more. Nerves of hyperdense plass, Cooper.
He saw Tembi and returned her grin. “Hey, kid,” he said.
“And this is?”
“Hmm?” Cooper noticed Dame Idowu. “Manno Cooper. You told me to go out to the moon.” Dame Idowu straightened in her chair, certainly on the verge of telling Cooper that she had done no such thing, but Cooper walked past her, right up to the front of the room where the grammalight display of the broken moon still rotated slowly in midair. He tapped on his personal wrist databand and the grammalight’s image updated, resolving into large pieces of machinery. “Two devices,” he said, the grammalight indicating the framework of a machine. Tembi recognized it from the fragments the Deep had pieced together on the moon. “The big one split the moon. Still don’t know what that one is. Want to get back to it. Then they used a common compression bomb to blow up the first device.”
“What else?” The representative from Old Georgia was quite sharp for a politician. When Cooper replied that there was nothing else at this very moment, as he needed more than two hours to work, the representative asked him a number of pointed questions about background radiation, evidence of recent FTL ship propulsion, and other possible considerations. Cooper answered grudgingly, his tone suggesting that he wanted nothing more than to be out of that room and back on the moon.
“Cooper,” Dame Idowu said, pulling the questioning back under her control, “who sent you to the site?”
“To the moon?” He looked surprised. “Lancaster. I work for them.”
“Do you?” Dame Idowu leaned forward. “Did they tell you that this was caused by a new weapon?”
Before Cooper could reply, a light cough came from Lancaster’s representative to the Earth Assembly. It was a sound too soft to dominate the chamber but still loud enough to cause Dame Idowu to frown. Then: “Idowu, my dear friend, do you have something to say?”
Domino’s voice was like the rest of her—unmistakably lovely, deceptively gentle, poison through and through. She was smiling at Idowu, patiently waiting.
If Domino was subtle as poison, Idowu was an old iron cudgel. “This man works for you, and your…Witches…” she spat, “…watched the disaster as it happened. I don’t believe in coincidence.”
“Nor do we, your Grace, but we serve the Deep.” Domino was smiling as she spun her words into a web. “This event is of interest to us, and so we shall investigate.”
“Not alone.” This from another Council member, one Tembi recognized but had not met. They wore plain black robes and had their hair covered; they appeared to be Earth-normal, and could be from anywhere. “There needs to be an oversight process. If the Deep caused this—”
“My friends, please,” Domino said, spreading her hands. “The Deep wants us to be aware of the event, but cause it? No. You know as well as I that the Deep does not engage in such actions.”
“Anymore,” the representative from Old Georgia said, and then added, “You mean, the Deep doesn’t tear planets apart anymore.”
“True.” Domino nodded, smiling sadly. “There were accidents, yes. Many thousands of years ago, when the Deep was new and none of us could truly speak to it. But have we at Lancaster ever failed you? Or your grandparents? Or your ancestors all the way back to your planets’ founding?” She stood, a white cloud caressed in color, and moved to the front of the room. “You cannot put this on the Deep. Not when our history is long and storied, and unreservedly clean of events such as the destruction of moons. Is not it more likely—is not it wholly probable?—that what happened is precisely what Kalais and Tembi have said?
“Friends,” Domino said, coming to rest in front of the three young Witches, shielding them from the rest of the Council. “There is no conspiracy here. The galaxy is at war. The Deep took two of its Witches to watch the workings of a new weapon. That is all.”
A pause. Then: “Why?” Dame Idowu asked.
“I promise I shall have an answer for you, the next time we meet.” Tembi could no longer see Domino’s face, but there was a smile in her voice. “Investigate the matter of the moon, please. Learn whether this was caused by the Blackwings or by the Sabenta. Or, perhaps, this is a third party announcing their arrival on the battlefield. But whatever you find, it will not be tied to Lancaster.”
Domino bowed and moved towards the rear doors of the chamber, as if she meant to leave and give the others more room to fight. The discussion swelled again, returning to the structured reason of using conventional weapons to split a moon apart. Tembi’s ears twitched as she followed Dame Idowu’s muttered insistence that the Sabenta were sure to be at fault, and—
Tembi’s eyes locked with Domino’s own.
Scheisse!
She hauled her gaze away.
Too late.
“Tembi.”
The whispering voice was in her head, almost imagined, with none of the mass and heft that accompanied the presence of the Deep. Compared to the wild reality that was the Deep, telepathy entered your mind as barely a breeze, a voice that might as well be your own watered-down conscience for all the good it did you.
Telekinetics? Pyrokinetics? Toss a rock and hit a dozen of those, although Tembi had wondered if some of those who had unreliable, untestable abilities weren’t themselves gifted but had merely been in proximity to the Deep when it was in the mood to goof around. Telepaths, though? Despite visiting more planets and meeting more people than she could count, Tembi had met only one person who could be considered a true telepath. And that person just had to be Domino, didn’t it?
“Tembi,” the voice whispered again.
Tembi wanted to shut her eyes and run. Telepathy was far from an exact science, but eye contact helped initiate the connection. Sadly, once established, it was tricky to break. Even plunging straight into the Deep couldn’t shake off an invasion from another mind…at least, not when that other mind belonged to a fellow Witch. Motion and other physical distractions could help break one mind away from the other. Tembi had found that singing worked better than anything else. Not that singing was an option as she sat here, on display, as motionless as rock.
Maybe she just needed more experience with telepaths.
“Domino?” Tembi replied, as if she had realized too late that the other woman was speaking to her. She straightened and looked towards Lancaster’s delegate to the Earth Assembly. “Is that you?”
Was Domino fooled? Who knew? Domino stood, her posture a mirror of Tembi’s own, with her chin and ears high. They were members of a found sisterhood, Domino had told her more than once. Perhaps she had meant it as a play on words—two women from the same homeworld called to the Deep’s service on Found—or perhaps she was trying to be sincere. Tembi could never tell. Not with Domino.
Tembi shoved those emotions down, down, and concentrated on Domino’s physical presence instead. Telepaths couldn’t read whole minds, not the secret thoughts which crawled like worms beneath the soil. They could only pluck at the low-hanging fruits. She embraced how perfect Domino looked, how she was the only member of the Council with a sense of poise while the others fought and bickered like children—
“Come.” The whispered voice sounded almost satisfied; Tembi nearly allowed herself to relax before Domino left the room in a swirl of white and color.
Leave the meeting? Tembi thought to herself. Is that allowed?
“With me? Yes. Come along, Tembi.”
She went. As she left, she shot a pleading glance at Bayle and Cooper. Bayle raised an eyebrow, while Cooper chuckled.
Domino led the way, silently, gliding across the marbled floors on bare feet. No shoes for the daughters of Adhama, no, not when the stress of everyday life served them better than leather. She wore no headscarf, but an opalescent shawl fluttered in the breeze. They left the meeting chamber, and then the building, walking all the way. They passed some people who nodded to Domino, and several who stepped aside and bowed at the waist to her. A niggling idea tried to fight its way into Tembi’s consciousness, where Domino was intentionally showing off her power—
Focus, Tembi.
The first time she had met Domino, Tembi had been awestruck. Domino was everything that Tembi wished she could be: she put lie to the stereotypes that Adhamantians were driven by anger. She was always calm, always present, a governing force at Lancaster’s helm. That awe had quickly faded; Domino had shown Tembi that she held not a single iota of kindness in her soul, and while Tembi could overlook a lot, she couldn’t overlook that. Since then, Domino seemed intent on winning Tembi over again. A head full of complimentary thoughts about Domino was usually the surest way for Tembi to escape.
Domino is so beautiful and graceful and—
Tembi always felt these encounters would go easier on the both of them if these thoughts weren’t also true.
The foundation of Domino’s robes was always white. Over this, she layered colors, bold and iridescent scarves fluttering in the breeze. Today, she wore ribbons along with the scarves. On anyone else, these would be knotted up before they were finished dressing, but Domino? Well, telekinetics weren’t always telepaths, but telepaths were always telekinetics. She could waste a little energy keeping herself untangled.
“I serve Lancaster in all things,” Domino finally said, after they had been walking for several minutes. A private café, small but dignified, and groaning in crystal and candles, was waiting for them at the bottom of a spiraling staircase.
“I know,” Tembi replied, as she slowed herself to take the steps one at a time. “Matindi says you always put Lancaster first.”
“I do.” Domino nodded. The sealed doors of the restaurant slid open for the Witches. “The galaxy depends on us. We keep our organization healthy and strong, thus we serve the galaxy. It is a mighty obligation.”
This last statement had been timed perfectly, allowing the words to run through Tembi’s head while the maître d’ greeted and seated them. The table was spread in silver, with live flowers drooping artfully in the centerpiece. A glass of something sparkling was waiting for Domino, and Tembi ordered the same.
As the waiter left, Domino said, “Matindi has returned.”
“Yes.”
“She and I have not always shared the same outlook for Lancaster.”
Tembi wasn’t sure if Domino was still in her head, but as the other Witch didn’t burst into outraged flames at what Tembi chose to keep to herself, it was likely their telepathic link had faded. When Tembi trusted herself to speak, she said, “I’ve noticed.”
“I’m sure she’s expressed her position to you. Today, you’ve seen mine in action. Dame Idowu would gladly do without Lancaster. Most of those on the Council would do the same. So, too, with the whole of the Earth Assembly. We are unwanted.”
Tembi nodded.
“What they want is the Deep, but what they get is us.” Domino said. Her eyes were dark brown, neatly matching the color of her skin. She had tinted the lids and her lips in matching hues of light blue, the same color of blue in the Witch’s mark painted in prisms across her face. The room had no windows, leaving the candlelight to spark against the blue and cause it to glow. “Witches are a barrier to their goals. They would tear apart reality if they thought it would allow them to access the Deep—they’ve tried! Oh, Tembi, how they’ve tried. They’ve set their scientists to work. Three thousand years, they’ve tried, but the Deep lets only us in.
“Their reliance on us is the only protection we have against them. Do you understand?” Domino’s hands were folded, her posture straight, but her long ears tipped forward to shout attention! sincerity! at Tembi. “It is the weapon we have to protect the Deep against them.”
It was a good, solid argument, and if Tembi hadn’t heard countless versions by eavesdropping on Matindi’s fights with Domino, it might have actually made an impact. As it was, Tembi merely nodded again, and tilted her own ears to signify agreement. Domino wasn’t wrong, after all. The problem was that Domino assumed what was best for Lancaster was also best for the Deep.
“You agree?” Domino seemed surprised.
“Yes,” replied Tembi. “I’ve always agreed with both you and Matindi.”
Tembi’s drink arrived, and the conversation paused for pleasantries and orders. When the waiter had left again, Domino said, “Tembi? Let me be honest.”
Here it comes, Tembi thought. She tested her drink. Cider? No, something from berries, fermented and changed to white.
“I cannot manage the Council and a rebellion from within Lancaster itself.”
“Rebellion?” Domino gave a very slight nod, her eyes fixed on Tembi’s own, and Tembi was suddenly sure that Domino was still lurking in her head. She would find nothing she could use: Tembi had more than a decade’s practice hiding her true emotions from the Deep, and misdirecting a human telepath was surely nothing compared to that! So Tembi kept her mind fixed on the truth of the situation—there was no rebellion, there were merely policy discussions over drinks, where friends came together and talked about what served as best practices at Lancaster. Much like this very conversation, as a matter of fact.
Domino rocked back in her chair, shaking her head slightly. “You’re very good,” she said in her implacable way.
“No,” Tembi said. “I just know the truth.”
“Oh, I wish I was as sure of that as you are,” sighed Domino. “But the very nature of rebellion makes it difficult to understand.”
“I’ll pretend you didn’t just insult my intelligence,” Tembi said.
Domino smiled and gave Tembi a small nod. “I forget you are no longer a child.”
“I wasn’t allowed to be a child,” replied Tembi. “Not since I was brought to Lancaster.”
“That, at least, is pure truth.” Their food arrived, along with someone to taste it. Domino waved them off. The perils of dining near the Earth Assembly meant there was surely some form of poison somewhere in the food, or perhaps the drink, or even the air itself. The trick was to know your own defenses were superior to the poison. Having someone taste the food was a sign of weakness.
(Tembi wouldn’t have minded a taster. On Earth, she was a nobody of a Witch, and while nobody would try to poison her specifically, what about while she was in Domino’s company? However, Domino knew poison better than anyone, and if she thought the Deep was able to pick out poison molecules from their food? Tembi could live with that.)
(She hoped.)
The topic of conversation moved from internal organizational rebellion to the war itself, mostly recent action reports about the bombs she had disarmed with the help of the Deep. As with all her meetings with Domino, Tembi knew she was being tested. She’d resent it—she did resent it!—but Domino was gently charismatic, and even though they had come from opposite sides of the same planet, it was always good to talk to someone else from Adhama. Whenever she spoke to someone who didn’t use their ears as part of their body language, it felt as if a layer of depth was removed. Adhamantians live in a galaxy full of small talk, she thought, and Domino couldn’t help but smile at that.
When Tembi explained how she had disarmed the bomb on the shipping station that morning, Domino’s ears went straight up. “You did what?!”
Tembi steeled herself against the pain, and then held up the butter knife so Domino could watch her drag her fingertip through the dense ceramic.
“Small gods,” Domino exhaled, as she reached out to take the knife from Tembi. She inspected it as if it might crumble. “I’ve never heard of a Witch doing anything like this!”
“I’m not the first.” The Deep had made that clear, layering an image of Tembi over another human form, followed by another, and then another. She was the fourth, but she didn’t recognize any of those other Witches it had shown her; she wondered if they were dead, and if so, how. “It hurts. It hurts a lot. I only do it when we have no other choice.”
“And yet you showed me?”
“It’ll be a few days before I fully recover.” Tembi stared at her own hands. “This is the best time to show off.
“I don’t know if every Witch can do this,” she slowly began, groping her way towards an explanation she hadn’t yet fully explored. “I think it’s easier for me since I’m from Adhama, and working with bombs is all stress.” She rubbed her fingertips together, and the sound of grating stone caused some of the other patrons to glance at their table in thinly masked disgust. “Since the nerve endings in my skin are already numb, there’s not much pain. Starts to burn once it hits muscle, though.
“You could do it,” Tembi added. Domino’s skin was as smooth as polished marble, and probably twice as tough.
Lancaster’s Assembly member stared at the butter knife in her hand, turning it over and over. “Perhaps later,” she said with a shy smile, and set the knife back in its cradle. “There is still so much about the Deep we don’t know. What a miracle it is.”
“I don’t like how we treat it,” Tembi said. She tipped her chin up and met Domino’s eyes, trying to punch as much meaning as she could into whatever telepathic link still existed. “We use it—we’re cruel to it, and Lancaster needs to change.”
Domino smiled. “Tembi, believe it or not, I agree.”
Tembi blinked. “Really?”
“Aye,” Domino said, still smiling. “One problem with living forever is that we forget how to see the world through another’s eyes. I’ve fought with Matindi so long that it has become our routine. But when Matindi brought you to Lancaster, you were proof that the Deep was changing. I’ve been trying to change, too, ever since.”
Tembi weighed this. “Matthew has said something like that. How it’s easy to get stuck in thinking that things are the way they’re supposed to be, and it’s hard to change.”
“Matthew and I have discussed the situation.” Domino reached out to touch the flowers in the centerpiece. They were going blowsy: any decent restaurant could invest in a vase full of live flowers permanently preserved at the peak of freshness; only the wealthiest ones could afford to bring in new bouquets. “We are…at odds. I think we need new insight to understand what it is we need to do to bring Lancaster into alignment with what the Deep wants.”
Tembi watched Domino, wondering. Then, she nodded. “Too good to be true,” she said, “but if you mean it…?”
“I do.” Domino bowed her head. “I can’t help but think that death serves a purpose, to clean out the old and make room for the new. We immortals? We might believe we know all from experience and time, but perhaps we refuse to see how we’ve just become clutter in the room.”
Ah, there it is. It didn’t happen often, but some Witches who were once immortal resumed the aging process. In whispers, Witches called it losing the Deep’s favor. No one knew what caused it, but while the fallen Witch could still use the Deep to travel, they lost their status among their peers. No longer welcome at Lancaster, they took their centuries of amassed wealth to go to live out their remaining decades in anonymous luxury. Domino could go on about how death was a cleansing process, but if the Deep was changing its opinions about how Lancaster should be run, then she must have been worried about her own mortality.
(And Matthew? the nastiest part of Tembi hissed at rest of her. How much of his willingness to help is self-preservation?)
She sighed. Focus, Tembi.
“Have you talked to the Deep about this?” she asked Domino. “Maybe it can guide you.”
“I have, but…” The other woman looked up, almost bashfully. “I was hoping, perhaps, you could help guide me, too.”
Tembi, halfway through a bite of her curry, spent a few moments choking on her food. Domino waited, eyebrows arched.
“Do you need—” she began.
“No! No.” Tembi waved her off. She hated when the Deep intervened in her bodily functions. A swallow of water goes down the wrong pipe, and the body knows how to manage it. A swallow of water goes down one way, disappears, and then reappears in the right place? Her body usually responded to that by hastily penciling an unplanned afternoon of vomiting into her schedule. When she had recovered, Tembi took another, cautious, drink, and said, “What do you mean?”
“It’s easy enough,” Domino dabbed at her lips with her napkin. “Matthew sits at my right hand. Matindi used to sit at my left. I have been without a left hand for too long. You can teach me new ways of thinking.
“Besides,” she added with a conspiratorial smile. “I am left-handed.”
Tembi chuckled in spite of herself. She knew she was being played. But this? This opportunity to slide into Domino’s inner circle? This was an opportunity. If Domino was serious about wanting Lancaster to change, then she could work with this woman. Oh, yes, she certainly could.
“You’ve been doing well with bomb disposal,” Domino continued. “Consistently high performances in crisis scenarios? That’s what I look for in a lieutenant.” She leaned forward, her eyes fixed on Tembi’s, no doubt snatching up those low-hanging surface thoughts like ripe fruit. “I have another task for you.”