After the meeting adjourned, a Combined Fleet guard escorted Isaac up a few flights of stairs to a small office room. When Isaac entered, a lone lightbulb on the ceiling illuminated Lynn as she sat behind a desk, stacks of papers next to her. The guard closed the door behind Isaac, and Lynn beckoned for him to sit in a chair across from her.
They said nothing at first - Lynn simply studied him with her green eyes. They hadn’t talked in a long while, with Isaac under quasi-observation and doing missions for Stockham while Lynn did…Lynn things. Isaac wasn’t quite sure. He knew she hadn’t been on combat duty for a while, performing maintenance tasks around the base instead. Somewhere along the way, apparently, she ended up doing intelligence work for Admiral Leyton.
Compared to when they last met one-on-one, Lynn’s face now had a healthy glow to it. Her uniform appeared crisp, perhaps even freshly-ironed that morning, and she re-dyed a streak of fading colored hair so it now shone with a blue as light as the summer sky. Even the bags beneath her eyes were fully gone.
Lynn spoke pleasantly, apparently eager to work with Isaac on an assignment again. “Hey, how have you been? I heard you got mixed up with those recent terrorist attacks. Somehow, in some way, it seems like you get yourself involved in everything.”
She seemed like the glowing picture of health, at least on the surface. But the way she stared at him, the way she tended to let out a fluttering giggle at the end of each sentence - it unnerved Isaac just as much as the other oddities he encountered on his journey so far.
“...just another day at the office,” he answered.
“Sounds about right.” Lynn leaned back in her seat, placing her arms behind her head. “In just a couple of days, we’ll be solving your little Coleridge problem. I know he’s quite the lazy bastard, so lazy it’s almost suspicious, but we’ll make him go from minor annoyance to completely out of the picture.”
The way she talked reminded Isaac of his pulp fiction novels where mobsters dropped “minor annoyances” to the bottom of the harbor with concrete shoes.
“Oh, we’re not killing him,” Lynn clarified. She picked up a ballpoint pen and spun it smoothly between her fingers. “Just gonna do a little bit of blackmail.”
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Two days went by until the weekend arrived and Coleridge had a day pass out to the city. During those two days, Isaac did the usual routine - morning reveille, cultivation, rifle training, other military practice. Coleridge checked in throughout the day, taking a statement from Isaac, before scurrying off to chase skirts or “pump some iron” as he always proclaimed while flexing alleged biceps hidden beneath his jacket. During these days, Isaac pumped iron slugs out of a shotgun, blowing the heads off of wooden targets, feeling the recoil in his hands.
But, compared to earlier, he found himself going back to cultivation more. Guns, while useful, had a cold, mechanical feel to them. Shooting a gun at an opponent was impersonal. But cultivation was more of an art than a science, a personal affair, a close-up fight where you could feel the heat and sting of the other opponent. Isaac was growing increasingly cognizant of the vast mass society and its organizations that he found himself in - cultivation helped ground him, keep him focused on his mission.
Once the weekend arrived, Isaac sat in an unmarked white van out at a Narragansett entertainment district. Under the night sky, women in fur collars walked with well-dressed businessmen. The air was frigid, so they hurried out of their vehicles and into the various love hotels lining the street. No questions asked, no answers needed. Isaac had been watching the plainly-named “54th Street Motel” for the past couple of hours now.
At least he could take turns watching with Lynn, who sat in the driver’s seat. When it was her turn to keep up the watch, he cultivated in the passenger seat, the windows tinted to prevent anyone from peering inside. While Lynn hummed along to the big band jazz songs coming over the radio - and Isaac only needed to turn it down twice - he breathed in and out, completing the work of the past two days. With a satisfying pop followed by a long exhale, he felt a meridian in his arm open up as the channel he metaphysically dug from the existing paths finally connected.
Opening the meridian stung, so Isaac flexed his left hand until the pain died down. He opened this meridian in the center of the radius bone - the outer bone of the arm. After this love hotel business, he would get started on a defensive art, some sort of Shield power, that he could slot into the open meridian. He wasn’t quite sure which sort of shield yet, but he had a few ideas, and a trip to the archives would help him choose.
Lynn watched the sparks go through him. She leaned forward, resting both of her arms on top of the steering wheel, resting her head on that pile and gazing sideways with a subdued look.
“Congratulations,” she offered. Her eyes gestured at the plain sign of the 54th Street Motel down the street. “Want me to give you a reward?”
He ignored her needling. “I’ll take some of your rations, if that’s what you're asking.”
Lynn let out that fluttery giggle and, to her credit, tossed him a spare ration bar that supposedly tasted like chocolate but ended up tasting like a poorly-baked potato. Yet Isaac ate it anyhow since clearing the meridian made him hungry, as did spending hours staring and staring at a motel.
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The jazz music continued to play softly. Lynn, her eyes displaying an amused sort of boredom, watched Isaac eat. “What do you think of this whole thing?”
Isaac collected his thoughts while he ate. “I feel bad for Coleridge.”
Lynn briefly lifted her head as a car passed by. “I’ve been stalking him for weeks now. You should be feeling sorry for me.”
The briefing for tonight's assignment took place that morning, a little after dawn. Assigned by Leyton to solve the Coleridge problem, Lynn took up the task with vigor, using a small team given to her to stalk the Naval Police officer to see if anything came up. Her efforts bore fruit the first time they followed Coleridge off-base. A taxi brought Coleridge to a dance hall downtown, where they still could afford dance halls with fancy wine and sparkling water. He met up with a dancer there, a pretty woman with flowing brown hair by the name of Yulia.
She was a former ballerina who emigrated from Rusalka in her teenage years with her family. According to Lynn, this was not the first meeting of the young Naval Police officer and the beautiful Rusalkan dancer - they approached each other with warm familiarity. As curfew approached, Coleridge and Yulia caught a taxi, one followed by an unmarked white van a half-mile back, and ended up at the 54th Street Motel. Every time Coleridge had a day pass off base, he and Yulia followed the same routine.
Tonight would be no different. Lynn’s team confirmed via wireless radio that Coleridge and Yulia had been spotted at the dance club as usual. Now, all Isaac and Lynn had to do was wait until the odd couple arrived here.
“The poor guy’s getting his heart played with,” Isaac reminded her.
The morning briefing had been accompanied by pictures of Coleridge and Yulia individually and together, along with ones of the dance hall and the motel. There were more pictures - Coleridge getting picked up in the morning for reveille by Naval Police buddies, Yulia waiting until the late morning checkout to depart. The pictures and reports spread out by Lynn on the table at the briefing showed Yulia’s next steps - returning to an apartment filled with roommates, all of them her fellow dancers at the hall, heading out of the apartment with a small paper bag, arriving at a local park, sitting on a bench with peeling green paint, calmly smoking a cigarette, setting the bag down next to her.
The pictures, taken from bushes and rooftops, showed a man in a dark fedora approach the bench, idly smoking his own cigarette. They sat far apart from each other - strangers that just happened to pass upon the same bench for a smoke. When Julia finished, she tossed the butt away and departed. The man, meanwhile, swung a leg over the other and read the morning edition of the Narragansett Observer until he felt like it was time to depart. He casually picked up the paper bag left behind by Yulia and headed off, calling a taxi to take him to a red-brick apartment building not that far from the housing of foreign diplomats.
When the man emerged from the taxi, the paper bag was nowhere to be seen. He still held the newspaper bundle in his hands as he rang the doorbell and was allowed inside. When he exited an hour later, he still carried the newspaper as he hailed a taxi and left for a tenement flat on the other side of the city. The series of pictures then concluded with twenty-or-so photos of the apartment building’s inhabitants.
Isaac still didn’t understand, so Lynn picked out a photo of a man with sand-colored hair and a splash of dark freckles across his face. She then showed him a picture of the Lawrence naval attaché's arrival in Arcadia ten months ago. Among the attaché's entourage was the same man with sand-colored hair.
“You see now?” Lynn asked that morning, sliding a dainty finger through an invisible web connecting everything. “Coleridge is the son of Commodore John Coleridge, a senior figure in the Naval Police. Yulia’s mining Coleridge for information about the Arcadian Navy. Most likely, she passes that info along by writing it down and stuffing the paper inside that bag, where it ends up in the hands of that go-between, just a local Arcadian go-fer paid under the table by the attaché. He crumples the bag in his jacket or something, places the paper inside the bundle of newspapers, and delivers it to the man with sand-colored hair, who’s part of the attaché's team.”
Isaac now realized the enormity of the affair. “If it comes out that the son of a senior military figure was caught in a Lawrence spy ring…”
“It would hurt a lot of people,” Lynn concluded for him. “John Coleridge might have to resign. So we’re gonna put the screws on the younger Coleridge so he can get off your back for good.”
That’s how the briefing went. Sitting in the passenger seat of the van, Isaac still wasn’t sure how to feel about blackmail. It seemed a bit underhanded compared to his usual method of punching his opponents’ lights out, but he was currently navigating an underhanded world. He would not kill innocents, that much he knew, but compared to everything he had been through so far, blackmailing an officer didn’t seem too far off the usual mark.
But they say that the waiting’s the hardest part, and now that he finished opening the meridian in his lower arm, he had little to do but wait and watch.
“I can take over now,” Isaac offered, but Lynn shook her head.
“I’m alright. We can watch together.”
And so they did, studying this chilly street, waiting for Coleridge and Yulia to show up. Somewhere along the way, Isaac glanced at the rearview mirror and saw Lynn looking at his face with an amused, subdued smile.
Her reflection spoke to his own in the rearview mirror. “After nabbing Coleridge, we’ll still be on a street full of love hotels. Want to book one, Isaac?”
Isaac thought about it, looking at the way her blonde hair flowed down her sleepy face, the teasing look in her eyes.
“Nah.”
“Eh?” She answered dreamily without stirring from her resting spot on the steering wheel. “Why not?”
Isaac shrugged and kept his eyes on the road. “Not really my type. And I don’t really think about sleeping around while in a professional setting.”
To be fair, his answers made her giggle, so he felt like he was doing something right.
“What’s your type then?”
“I don’t know. Tall girls, I guess.”
“When we were all trapped by Harburg at Machigonne,” she said softly. “When I lived as you, I found out that you saw Mackenzie as the most attractive of us. She’s tall, so I guess that checks out. Poor me. I guess I’m too short.”
Isaac smirked as he looked at the row of motels. “It’s really unfortunate, isn’t it?”
Lynn laughed on the steering wheel. Isaac couldn’t help but laugh a little, too, and that’s when a taxi approached the 54th Street Motel and let out Coleridge and Yulia from the backseat.