The Bunker was a few blocks up, and I got off there, holding my breath against the inevitable cloud of road dirt and exhaust as the bus pulled away. I turned the corner onto Lestrange Avenue, where a long row of food trucks jockeyed for the attention of hungry pedestrians. I found one that looked promising and got in line. While I waited, I perused the small rack of magazines the vendor had strapped to the side of her vehicle. Mostly newsprint rags with sensational headlines, along with one or two glossies. One cover caught my eye, a photo of a petite older woman, clothes stretched taut in an unnatural wind, her face a snarl of rage and determination. It was Ambassador Paulus in the heat of the sorcerous duel from two weeks ago. To her right, I could just make out the silhouette of a Mollenkampi. Broadcast live on television, the duel had taken the lifetime politician and schemer and made her a pop-culture icon. But that moment’s fame would fade, and she’d remain what she was at heart: a callous and cruel power monger, interested in an agenda that only she understood.
I tapped the paperback against my thigh and looked back at the menu. The selection promised mouth-scalding heat, and at the moment, that sounded perfect.
“What are you reading?”
I turned. Talena Michaels stood a few paces away, hands stuffed in her jeans pockets, a mild smirk on her lips. Noticeably, she wasn’t in her typical outfit of layered shirts, opting instead for a lightweight blouse topped by a linen half-jacket. Her hair was up, revealing a pair of teardrop earrings. Imps below, I thought, she’s on a date.
“Don’t normally see you in this part of town,” I said.
“I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with cops.”
“I know,” I said. She’d been arrested, falsely accused, and restrained in her hospital bed. It’d broken my heart to see someone I’d helped raise be put through that.
Talena shrugged. “It mostly started in my childhood.”
She always had been a smartass.
“I seem to recall a cop bailing you out of a bad spot on more than one occasion.” I moved to the front of the line and nodded a greeting to the woman working the grill. “Two proiler pitas, extra sauce.” I looked over my shoulder and asked Talena, “You want one? My treat.”
“Nah, I’m waiting on someone.”
“Make ’em spicy,” I told the vendor. Talena joined me as I stepped to the side to wait on my order. I pointed at the glossy magazine featuring Paulus. “That who you’re meeting?”
The silhouette beside Paulus was barely identifiable—a cop didn’t have the dramatic appeal of a sorcerer at the height of her powers—but Talena and I knew it was Jax.
She smiled. “The man in the shadows.”
“You guys have big plans?”
“Not really,” she said, giving me no information at all. “I’m meeting him across the street.” She indicated the Bunker’s front doors.
The vendor called out an exaggerated, “Pita u-u-u-pp!” and I collected my dinner.
“I’ll walk with you,” I said. We strolled to the front of the Bunker, near the large glass double doors of the public entrance. I did my best to be intelligible between bites.
“I haven’t seen you much lately.”
She gave me an exaggerated frown. “You haven’t seen me much since I’ve been an adult.”
“Probably for the best,” I said. “You cramp my style.” That at least got a laugh, and I relaxed a little. Talena and I had a way of getting under each other’s skin, and our typical conversations were strolls through a minefield of misunderstanding and stubbornness. “Last I heard you were looking for office space.”
“Community space,” she said. “Someplace for people on the street to share information. Reliable facts, with no agenda.”
“Facts, huh? I figured they could use a sandwich.”
“Sometimes that’s part of it,” she said. “What guideposts are giving out food, what buildings are safe to squat in. The kind of thing that people in power don’t want to acknowledge. Most people want to pretend no one’s forced to sleep on the street, that no one ever had the world pulled out from underneath them and is left wondering where their next meal is coming from.” She pursed her lips and glanced up at the halls of power around us. “Most people want to pretend it couldn’t happen to them.”
“And you can fix that?”
Her hands dropped to her hips, and we slowed our pace. “No one can fix that. Firefighters can’t unlight a burning house, but they can put water on the flame. I can spread information about safety and basic rights because that’s what I can do to help.” Talena’s lips curled, a verbal brawler starting to enjoy herself. “Better than your usual strategy of complaining about the heat as you watch the house burn down.”
“Let’s wait inside,” I said, hoping to find a topic that would get us less fired up. “Jax is gonna come through the lobby anyway.”
We passed through the double doors and found a pair of empty seats among the rows of interconnected hard plastic chairs that served as the Bunker’s waiting area. The desk sergeant acknowledged me with a nod, and overhead a television blared the dramatic music and prerecorded typing that signaled the start of the nightly news.
“So where is this new office?” I said, then corrected myself. “Community center, I mean.”
She chuckled. “It’s in Sylvan, near Arlington Ave.” I winced, and immediately regretted it as her jaw set and shoulders pulled back. “What? You
