Word and Breath (2 page)

Her flippant answer didn’t distract Jannie. “I wonder sometimes. Because, you know, if you want to find a man or get married, I’d feel terrible if I was standing in your way.”

Feeling a surge of affection at Jannie’s anxious face, Riana reached down and gave her sister a half-hug. “You’re not standing in the way of anything. If I wanted to find a man or get married, you wouldn’t keep me from it. But where I go, you go. That’s always going to be the deal.”

She felt Jannie relax.

Straightening up, she took a swig of water and quipped, “Of course, if I wanted to get married or even have a date, I’d be sadly out of luck, given my choice of eligible men.”

An image of Mikel—tall, lean, strong, and handsome in his sleek black clothes—flashed in her mind.

But she ignored it.

She wasn’t an idiot, after all.

Even if she decided to try something like a date, a man like Mikel wasn’t likely to try it with her.

***

Mikel stood across the street from the bakery and looked up at the lit windows of the loft above it. He could see shadows moving behind one of the windows, although the silhouettes were too obscured to identify.

Riana Cole wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d been told she was quiet, retiring, and isolated—and he’d expected someone shy and plain, perhaps with a low self-esteem. She had been clever and articulate, however. Private but not particularly shy. Despite her reticence, she’d held herself with a surprising kind of confidence and grace.

She was also startlingly pretty, with those faintly girlish braids and huge gray eyes.

The faint whiff of connection he’d gotten from her when their hands touched was fresh, deep, and spicy. Surprisingly intoxicating. And almost untouched.

This was going to be more of a challenge than he’d thought.

It took a lot of experience and control for a Soul-Breather to make calculated adjustments in the extent of connections. As Breathers matured, they learned how to open increasingly nuanced connections, pulling out varying amounts of a person’s spirit, ranging from superficial feelings to almost everything.

Only the oldest and most experienced Soul-Breathers could practice the lesser kinds of connections—breathe out a specific memory or piece of information or use their touch to sense and intensify a certain kind of passion.

Very few had mastered the skill Mikel possessed—connecting just enough to produce an effect without the other knowing what happened.

He’d done this sort of thing before, and most women were putty in his hands as soon as he brushed their bare skin, especially after the adrenalin of being mugged and then rescued by him.

Not Riana.

It was a good thing his instincts had told him not to push too hard or come on too strong. He would have spooked her for sure. He would have to be a lot more subtle and think through strategies to draw her to him.

To his surprise, he was almost looking forward to the challenge. Not just because it wasn’t easy. But also because he would get closer to Riana and her spicy, untouched spirit. She felt—tasted—new in almost every way. He couldn’t wait to see her again.

He was a Soul-Breather by genetic makeup. He was one of the Union’s covert agents by trade. He was good at his position, and he made a lot of money doing it. He had power by nature and more power given to him by the government.

But he couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked forward to a job.

***

The next morning, Smyde gave the entire Office of Readers a lecture on being careful and not making mistakes like Riana had the previous day.

Readers—like all other government employees—weren’t trusted implicitly by the Union. Their work was randomly checked to make sure nothing slipped by them. Most Union officials couldn’t read so they relied heavily on Readers to keep track of subversive information in covert circulation. The Front, the most organized of the underground movements in the country, had been disguising messages in written texts for four years, following the example of other anti-government groups in earlier decades.

Looking for suspicious messages was top priority for a Reader. Everything else—collecting valuable information from the past, archiving fragments of literary art, sorting through documentation from the Union’s early history—all fell second to tracking down possible threats.

Riana tried not to cringe as Smyde used her “error” as an example for her colleagues on what they should never do. After five minutes of humiliating her, Smyde finally moved into a more general rant. “The Union counts on us. Every employee has a role to perform in protecting its sanctity and security. Our job as Readers is vitally important. We have this maniac calling himself the
Librarian
…” He made a face as if he tasted something foul. “Using written language to stir up discord and raise rebellion. Plus, the Front isn’t the only threat the Union is facing.”

Riana knew this to be true. The Front was the most powerful and the most influential, but there were other underground movements forming every day. Some, like the Front, challenged Union values by espousing free thinking and personal liberties. It was ironically fitting that the leader of the group—whether real or mythical—called himself the Librarian, since the movement upheld the archaic ideals of a world when libraries had existed.

Other groups held up the other side of the equation, objecting to Union compromises and demanding a more absolute commitment to traditional Union values—to the point of being scarily extreme. These fanatics were popularly called Zealots. In Riana’s mind, the latter groups were more dangerous than the former.

She was Reader, though, and reading was one of the things Zealots wanted to do away with completely. She was probably rather biased on that particular issue.

“I will not allow any slack in my office to damage the Union. Remember that.” Smyde waved an arm toward Riana to remind everyone that she was the loser who had brought this lecture down on all of them. “Next time I find an error like this, someone will be penalized for it. Now get back to work.”

As they all returned to their cubicles in the huge cheerless office, Riana looked discreetly over to Jenson Talon, who was walking back to his cluttered desk. He was a quiet man in his thirties who generally minded his own business. She liked him fairly well and had always assumed he felt the same, but she never would have expected him to step up in her defense as he had the previous day, when he’d defended her claim that the diary in question couldn’t possibly hold a hidden code.

When Jenson saw her now, he flashed her a private, ironic smile—and she felt an unfamiliar sense of appreciation.

Flustered by being the center of attention for two days in a row, Riana settled back at her desk. Her desktop was nearly empty, with only an inbox spilling over with texts to read, a mug full of pencils, a notepad, and a framed photograph. Everyone else had personalized their cubicles, but she had never bothered.

She picked up the next text from her inbox. A crumpled piece of lined paper with a bulleted list scribbled on it—maybe torn from the school notebook of a student back when schools taught children to read and write.

The first word she landed on sent off warning bells in her mind. She stared at the word on the wrinkled page. It was probably just a coincidence, but all of her instincts screamed there was something important here.

She glanced over at the one photo on her desk—she’d been fourteen, just after she’d taken this job, and Jannie was eight. Both girls were grinning like maniacs into the camera. Before her sister had gotten sick.

It wasn’t even nine in the morning. Many more hours until she could go home to Jannie.

She saw again Mikel’s handsome face. He’d said he lived in her neighborhood. Maybe she would see him again.

She shook away the thought. She shouldn’t waste her time daydreaming about such things. She might as well figure out this anomaly so she wouldn’t get in trouble again.

Snatching up the page, she left the main office and hurried into the hallway.

Local Readers should be housed in the main Union administration building in Newtown, but they’d been moved a few years ago when the administrative offices had run out of room. The new building, on the north edge of downtown, was officially named after a previous Union President, but everyone just called it the Annex. Riana had liked the old building better, even though it was constantly under construction. The clean walls and shiny floors of the Annex always struck her as stark and barren.

As she turned the corner to reach the elevators, she saw a familiar face.

“Hi, Ghent,” she said to the stringy-haired young man who was waiting to go down. Ghent worked in the Regional Archives, the fancy building a few blocks away. They’d met several times, and he’d always been friendly. In fact, she suspected he might have a crush on her. “What brings you over here?”

Ghent glanced over at her greeting but then turned away as the elevator doors slid open. He didn’t smile. Didn’t even acknowledge her presence. When Riana stared at him in confusion, he purposefully looked away.

She’d just been snubbed. For absolutely no reason. They weren’t close friends, but she’d thought Ghent liked her, and she had no idea why that might have changed.

It left her feeling oddly hurt, so she forced the feeling aside the way she always did when something made her uncomfortable. She visualized squeezing the discomfort and embarrassment into a tiny space at the back of her chest until it just poofed away.

It worked—at least well enough to focus again on her purpose. She went the rest of the way down the hall to the storage room, where completed texts were filed or discarded. She quickly flipped through the stack of texts that had been sorted that week, the ones important enough for the Union to archive. It didn’t take her long to find the one she was looking for—the copy of one of the speeches from an election ten years ago.

She scanned the speech and saw the word just as she had expected to see it.

Then she went to the bin in the far corner and started digging through the pages that had been discarded recently. They were kept for at least two weeks before they were recycled so Union officials could do their random checks of the Readers’ work.

Fortunately, the page she searched for was printed on pale blue paper—an old-fashioned invitation to a birthday party. It had been trendy several years back for affluent families to use written invitations, even though few people could read them. A couple of days ago, she’d quickly glanced over the invitation and tossed it into the discard pile.

But now, after reading over the scripted lettering on card stock, she confirmed what she remembered and had just now connected to two other incidents.

There was definitely an anomaly here. It must be significant, but she couldn’t begin to guess what it meant.

Or what she should do with it.

The obvious choice would be to alert Smyde, particularly after what had just happened. She didn’t feel comfortable calling attention to herself, though, unless she was sure of her conclusions. She wasn’t inclined to talk to Smyde anytime soon anyway—not after how he’d embarrassed her a few minutes ago.

But what if this incongruity really was something important?

She normally kept to herself at work, aside from some casual banter, but right now she needed advice. For the first time in months, she wished Connor was still here. He’d been the only real friend she’d had in the office, and it was at times like this she missed him most.

As she walked back into the main office with the three sheets of paper, her eyes drifted over to Jenson’s desk. Noticing he was watching her, she decided it was worth a try and headed over in his direction

Readers came in two forms. Those who pursued the line of work temporarily as a step toward more lucrative administrative positions within the Union. And those who did it for life.

Riana was a lifer. She’d loved to read ever since her grandfather had taught her the alphabet, and she couldn’t imagine doing anything else. She wasn’t interested in power, and money wasn’t a strong motivation for her. She didn’t really like the Union, and she had no desire to move up into the inner ranks.

It had been years since she’d entertained any dreams of the world offering more than she had at the moment—a decent job, her sister, and a quiet, undisturbed life.

Jenson was a lifer too. While she’d been a Reader for eight years, he had been one for twenty. Connor wasn’t here anymore, but maybe Jenson could help her with this puzzle.

His dark eyebrows lifted as she pulled a chair up next to his desk. Jenson was attractive in an unconventional way, with brown hair, deep-set blue eyes, and slightly craggy face with high cheekbones. He’d been her mentor when she’d first started on the job.

“I appreciate your sticking up for me yesterday,” she said by way of greeting. “But there’s no sense in your getting on Smyde’s bad side too.”

Jenson shrugged. He’d taken off the brown tweed jacket he wore every day and hung it on the back of his chair. The sleeves of his dress shirt were now rolled up to his elbows. “It wouldn’t be the first time. And it’s not like they’re going to fire me.”