Page 23 of Gifted & Talented

“You like her. Wow.” Thayer mimicked an explosion beside his head. “Groundbreaking.”

“I love her. Of course I love her.” And Arthur did love her. Though, how meaningful was that love, exactly? Seeing as Arthur could love almost anything if he thought about it long enough. Whether Arthur was actually aware of this remains critically unstudied, despite it being pointed out to him many times. Candidly, between you and me, that was just Arthur’s way, in some ways his fundamental flaw, and the reason he was actually quite fond of his sister Meredith. Arthur was just one of those people who could feel something for anyone, which many people in his life would mistake for a sort of saintly quality, but of course wasn’t. Because in his own way, Arthur was an asshole, too, and worse, he was an idiot. But obviously we’ll get to that.

Three years from the date of their marriage, Gillian Wren would be wellon her way to a doctorate in Napoleonic military tactics with an emphasis on the flexible use of artillery (which at one point during her initial dissertation proposal Gillian had compared quite brilliantly to the triangle offense of Phil Jackson’s Chicago Bulls, before Wrenfare’s experimental technomantic program made human coaching largely irrelevant) and Arthur would perform multiple congressional duties with his boxers on inside out due to the ministrations of Yves Reza from the bathroom of Philippa’s hotel.

But before any of that happened, there was just one moment of significance, of utter, ringing clarity, which would define all the days of Arthur’s life right up until the moment he learned of his father’s passing.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur said to Gillian as they parted from their first official kiss as husband and wife, though he wasn’t quite sure why he’d said it, as he hadn’t technically done anything wrong. He’d performed just as they’d rehearsed, and at the time, pre–Philippa and Yves, he’d been perfectly behaved. Gillian had wanted to wait for any physical intimacy until their wedding day, and Arthur had been delighted to oblige. It seemed romantic to him, and pleasantly—almost cozily—old-fashioned, and he’d assumed that his attraction to her mind would ultimately reveal itself insatiably in the bedroom.

At the moment of avowal, though, Arthur understood the truth, which was that he was a lifeline of some sort for Gillian, and now that the rings were exchanged, she could relax, set down the weight she’d been carrying around—presumably that of any woman in her late twenties—and stop worrying about the whole thing, because everything would be fine. Because Arthur would never leave her—a divorce would be ugly for his political ambitions, and anyway, he had obvious attachment issues—and they would almost certainly receive a pastel stand mixer that would look lovely in her dream kitchen, and she would never want for anything again, and there was only one small catch, which was that she did not, at all, want him to touch her.

Which was how Arthur Wren came to understand that he had tied himself to a woman who did not love him, which was an almost unbearable irony, because as we have already established, Arthur Wren wanted nothing so much as he wanted to be loved.

“Don’t cry,” whispered Gillian kindly, and Arthur was grateful to her for that, because he understood that she would keep it secret. Him, that is. His heart and his heartbreak, everything he would one day do, everything he couldalreadydo—that is, Arthur’s magic, which was then an eccentricity too ridiculous to be worth sharing, something he thought was buried deeply in the past, like Lou—and Gillian would keep all of that a secret on his behalf. She had bound her life to his and so their marriage was a vault, a fact driven by either genuine fondness or the artillery-driven tactic at which Gillian was already so adept.In the end,asked a voice that Arthur felt morbidly certain was his sister Meredith’s,does it really matter which?

And it was at that very moment that Arthur Wren started to die.

10

“So you’ve kidnapped me, is what you’re saying,” commented Jamie ruefully from the passenger side of Meredith’s rented vehicle. It was a gas model, of all things—urgency had left little room for choosiness, despite the fact that she had the money for a magitech model, or even a normal electric car that was just as good and cheaper to manufacture than the M-batteries her father had developed—though this one had come equipped with external Wrenfare GPS, so if Meredith got lost, she would know precisely which dead man to blame. “You never intended to tell me anything at all, did you?”

It was then hour three of Meredith’s… “abduction” was a strong word. Indeed, it had not felt like abduction at the moment she’d had the idea. (We know; we were all there.) Instead, Meredith had sagely thought,Well, can’t let Jamie run free with his silly little story about my massive corporate fraud—and had not, at the time, considered what preventing him from doing so might mean.

Within the first hour, though, it became very obvious that the lie she’d always intended to tell—something about how Jamie hadn’t understood what he’d seen her do back when he’d seen her do it, or that he was letting his personal feelings get the better of him, or that the problem was in Chirp’s popularity leading to it being distributed so indiscriminately, creating a mythos of negativity and the general sense that it was not, per se, good, as with paranormal romances of the aughts—was actually a very short conversation. She said all three things in the span of about five minutes and then realized there were five hours left of the drive, possibly more with traffic (and there would be traffic, heaven help them, because no amount of magitech could get the political support for an at-grade train line built across a landscape intended in obscure but unignorable ways for military defense).

Which was when Meredith had called her sister, forced Jamie to tell Eilidh the news of their father’s death, and then put on an audiobook that wasactually fairly engaging until Jamie abruptly turned it off, having realized the predicament he’d put himself in.

“What am I supposed to do when we get to Marin?” he asked her. “What did you foresee happening from there?”

“I could ask you the same question,” Meredith pointed out. “You’re the one who got in the car with me. By the way, do you need to use the restroom?”

“A bit, yeah, now that you mention it,” said Jamie. “But aren’t you concerned I’ll run?”

“Run where? You live three hours in the opposite direction. Want to switch when we get to the rest stop?”

“Switch? Switch?” Jamie’s voice sounded maniacal with indignation. “You think I’m going to drive?”

“I’m justasking,for heaven’s sake, James—”

“And for the record, I don’t even live in Venice anymore,” Jamie muttered. “I was only in town to cover your tech talk forMagitek.”

“What do you mean you don’t live in Veniceanymore? You were living in Venice ever? At all?” asked Meredith, stunned enough to look at him then. “But I live in Venice.”

“I know.” Jamie was looking resolutely out the window. “I didn’t live there long.”

“How long did you live there?” Her voice sounded very strange to her, with a porous element, like there were holes in it.

Jamie shrugged, or gave the indication of having been trying to shrug. “Just a couple of years.”

“A couple of—” They missed the exit for the rest stop. “You’ve justbeenthere? Skulking in the shadows? This whole time?”

“I told you, I don’t live there anymore, I’ve been on the road for the past six months. And I was never skulking in the shadows. I was writing out of the coworking place on Rose and shopping at the grocery store and surfing on Thursday mornings. None of those things are considered skulking.”

“What grocery store?” demanded Meredith, and this time it sounded a little like a shriek.

“Not Demeter, if that’s what you’re asking.” Jamie’s tone of judgment was audibly insulting. “I’m a freelance writer, Meredith. I shop at places that don’t slice their own kiwis or get milk from the happiest cows. And anyway, you’re in cahoots with Demeter. And in bed with Tyche.” He gave her a meaningful look then. “What made you agree to it?”

“Agree to what?” Meredith drummed the steering wheel innocently and missed the exit for the next potential place to stop, which meant at least fifty more miles.

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