“Taki, we’re being stupid,” Kevin said.
“Oh, I see. It’s I risk wrath and anger, but we are being stupid. How come?”
“What’s the obvious way to find out where a lost mec is?”
Taki thought, shrugged. “Put an ad in the Lost Mecs section?”
Kevin nodded in the direction the cat had disappeared in. “Go downstairs and activate it from a coupler, then look around and see where you are.” Taki spread his hands. What more was there to say? He followed Kevin to the stairs, and they went down to the lab.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Kevin was enveloped in blackness. Although his attenuated sense of touch did not enable him to distinguish fine details of structure or texture, he felt himself confined and his movement restricted. It was about what he’d expected the inside of a folded black plastic bag to be like. And Taki said he’d wrapped the mec in another piece of plastic inside that.
“Any luck?” Taki’s voice said in his ear.
“Well, I’m through, but mummified. Now I have to try and get out of this stuff.”
There seemed to be light of some sort coming from the outside. . . .
“Is there—”
“Shh.”
And the muffled sound of a voice—a woman’s.
“I’m not anywhere in this house, and that’s for sure,” Kevin said.
“How could it not be in the house? That’s crazy.”
“Well, either it got taken out by mom, or it got taken out by Harriet. Nobody else has been here, have they?”
“Oh, okay. . . . I guess so.”
“Logic, Taki. Logic.”
Bending his body forward to create space in front of him, Kevin brought his arms together and gripped one of his claw hands with the other. He released the wrist catches, enabling the hand to come free, and clipped it into a receptacle in the mec’s accessory belt. Feeling farther along, he located a blade attachment and secured it in the empty wrist socket. A couple of slow slicing motions through the inner wrappings, one vertical and one horizontal like a papal blessing from the Vatican balcony, gave him some working room. Then, cutting a layer at a time and using his claw hand to clear the way, he made an incision through the outer bag.
The light was coming from somewhere on the floor. . . . No it wasn’t—he was upside down. He could hear more clearly now, but the voice that was speaking was now a man’s. Kevin pushed aside the curtains of waxy blanket, thrust his head and shoulders through, and twisted until he could view the world right side up.
“There are plenty of places in Bellevue to eat,” the man’s voice was saying. “Or Trev could rustle up something here. Whatever you prefer.”
“Oh, let’s go out somewhere. I could use some air and exercise after driving.” The woman’s voice again. It sounded like Vanessa’s.
A high, narrow canyon above opened to a yellow-brown sky. One side of the canyon was a smooth, maroon colored wall, most of it in shadow but the top part catching the light. The other side was dark and bumpy, curving toward the top like the wall of a cavern. Kevin had just recognized the maroon wall as a regular office file folder, when Taki’s voice said, “I think you’re in a plastic bag of folders and stuff. I saw it on the hall table.” It meant that Taki had tuned in on the lab monitor.
“I thought you said you didn’t leave it in the hall,” Kevin accused.
“I said I didn’t remember.”
The man’s voice came again. “Let’s get the business out of the way while we’re here. I don’t like discussing it in public places, anyway.” His voice fell to a more suggestive tone. “Besides, that way, we can get more relaxed over dinner for later.”
“I’ve brought copies of the QA reports that I told you about. The figures for—” The voice that sounded like Vanessa’s grew suddenly louder, but Kevin missed the rest as an enormous hand closed around the top of the maroon wall and lifted it away. For a moment the canyon mouth above yawned wider, bounded now by a green folder back from where the maroon one had been; then the green wall leaned and toppled, crushing down the plastic side opposite to transform the vertical canyon into a cave, and tipping over the package containing Kevin in the process. Now he was underneath the green folder, looking up toward the light over a hump formed by the bowed-over underside of the bag. He squirmed and kicked to extricate himself from the plastic, and then crawled up the hump. From the top, beyond the opening between the folder above and the sagging side of the bag below, he could see part of a room. Still keeping to a crawl on the swaying surface, he moved closer to the rim to take in more of the surroundings.