Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games by Marion G. Harmon Read Free Book Online Page A

maybe twenty and wearing her now-black hair in a short bob. Shelly looked her seventeen biological years and sported her original long red hair. She also wore the tailored office suit she was almost certainly wearing in her office at the Institute, a continent and a gulf away.
     
    I sighed, let myself wilt. “Nobody’s taking me seriously.”
     
    Did I have a right to my attitude? Yes . Because it wasn’t just a problem of nocturnal wandering anymore. Ozma agreed with Doctor Cornelius’ diagnosis; my recent visit to an extrareality pocket (Littleton, which I could neither confirm nor deny for him) had weakened my “tether” on reality.
     
    This wouldn’t normally be a problem—and wasn’t for anyone else—but Kitsune happened to have previously introduced me to a powerful if vegetable kami on the Plane of Heaven. Apparently it wanted to deepen our acquaintance, and judging from the cherry blossoms, there was a very real possibility that some night soon—based on the rate of increase in dream-regularity and something Dr. Cornelius called resonance , probably less than a month but likely no sooner than two weeks—I was going to go to sleep and fall into an unknown extrareality realm.
     
    “I am not going to disappear down some cosmic rabbit hole and leave Dad and Mom wondering whatever happened to me.”
     
    Riptide shrugged. Taking   a sip of his beer, he checked the label.
     
    “That’s some fancy stuff. No worries, chica . Our bruja and brujo will find some way to fix you up. Or we’ll find Kitsune, get him to do it.”
     
    “What he said,” Grendel seconded. I scowled, sighed again. Shell and Shelly shared a look.
     
    “We’ve got a solution for now—”
     
    “—at least we think so.”
     
    “We’re working on it and you’ll know when you go to sleep tonight.”
     
    “But we’ve been looking for Kitsune since you told us about getting more dreams—”
     
    “—and he’s not on anyone’s radar—”
     
    “—even with the DSA, CIA, Interpol, pretty much everyone looking for him—”
     
    “—we’re not going to find him that way,” Shell finished.
     
    Their worry was pushing them into quantum-linked gestalt and making me dizzy; Riptide and Grendel didn’t even notice them swapping lines but I sat up, closed my mouth. Great pity-party, Hope—way to scare your friends.
     
    “If I’m good for now…could you let Blackstone know what’s going on, Shell?”
     
    “Already done.”
     
    Riptide finished his beer. “Well I don’t know about you guys, but all this luxury is making me itch. I’m going to head down to the barrio, get some real food, see how it all looks on the ground.”
     
    “Are you sure—” I shook my head.
     
    We knew it wouldn’t look good. A year and a half after the Big One, you almost couldn’t see the scars the quake had left in the city’s downtown. The holes in LA’s skyline were almost filled (even if most of the new buildings were shorter) and most of the broken-up roads and wrecked utilities were fixed up or at least patched and workable. But flying in, I’d seen the empty and bulldozed spaces where older apartments and homes had been shaken down and gas-line fires had spread to burn out whole neighborhoods.
     
    Real recovery depended on local economics but a lot of companies were leaving California, taking the jobs and the taxes needed to rebuild with them. Southern California was actually still losing population as residents looked for opportunities elsewhere, and Riptide’s old surf-and-biker gang territory had been one of the worst hit. To make the “quake-blight” worse, parts of LA were blowing up into open street warfare. The local gangs, cartel-members, and refugees from Mexico’s civil war were killing each other over the territory that was left.
     
    “I feel like some real Mexican food,” Grendel spoke up. He hadn’t said much all day, just loomed like he was the Army of Oz. Which he was, half of it anyway. “Or