Chapter 25
Chun woke at dawn. Sleeping in a decent bed was nice. He got up, stretched out, limbered up his shoulder, and remembered to pray for the first time in weeks. Then he dressed and went out to the kitchen.
He wasn’t sure how to prepare many of the foods Bonga stocked, but he found rice in the pantry, eggs, vegetables, and a pair of good steaks in the refrigerator.
He found a pot and put rice in it, then toasted the rice over the flame until it began to brown and crackle. Then he added water and adjusted the flame to let the pot simmer and put the lid on. Then he chopped the vegetables and sliced the steaks into paper-thin strips.
A frying pan didn’t work quite like a wok, but it was close enough. He started the eggs, working them into finger-long strips as they cooked. The rice was ready when the eggs were done, and he poured it in with the eggs and gave it a good mixing. The result was far from his best work, but it would do.
Bonga entered the kitchen dressed, shaved, and alert. He put a pot of water on the stove, then went to the front door and returned with a thick sheaf of papers.
“Morning, Chun. Sleep well?”
“Yes, sir. Better than yesterday.”
“Breakfast smells good, you didn’t kill it in the yard, did you?”
“No, sir.”
Annabeth joined them. Her short blond hair was a tangle. Her feet and legs were bare, and her pants were closer to unders than pants. It was obvious that she had not wrapped her breasts.
“Huh hum,” Bonga said.
“What?” Annabeth asked.
“We have company this morning.”
“Oh. Sorry. Good morning, Chun.” She got a mug from the cupboard, spooned some tea into a strainer, then poured hot water through the tea into the mug. Chun slipped out of the kitchen and around Bonga, putting the counter and Bonga between himself and Annabeth.
“Your clothing is a bit on the immodest side,” Bonga said.
Annabeth frowned at him, then looked at Chun. “Have you ever seen a naked woman before?”
Chun nodded. “I tried not to, but I had three wives and four daughters. It was inevitable.”
“See?” Annabeth said to Bonga. “He’ll be fine.”
Bonga sighed. Clearly this was an old argument. “Annabeth--”
“Don’t Annabeth me,” she snapped. “I live here. If he’s uncomfortable, he can close his damn eyes.”
Chun smirked and reached across the counter to plate his cooking, then offered a plate to Bonga, and another to Annabeth.
“Thank you, Chun,” said Bonga, accepting the plate. He pulled out a drawer and got three forks out. “Do you prefer chopsticks, Chun?”
“What are chopsticks?” Chun raised an eyebrow.
“Two sticks that you hold in one hand. You pinch bites of food in them to get the food from your plate to your face,” Annabeth said. She took a bite of Chun’s cooking and frowned at him. “This is really good. Where did you get the meat?”
“There were two steaks in the…”
Annabeth lunged toward the chopping knife. “You took my steaks?”
Chun scrambled backward, watching her to make sure she didn’t throw the knife at him. Bonga put his face in his hands.
She’s teasing me.
Annabeth giggled. “Gotcha.”
Chun eased back to the counter and took another bite.
“Thank you for making breakfast, Chun,” Bonga said. “That was very good.”
“You’re welcome, sir.”
“I do have a tip for you. Cutting top-grade sirloin into strips borders on a felony.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, just do better.” He winked at Chun.
Chun smiled back. “Yes, sir.”
“Now let’s go visit the Sikales.”
* * *
Mr. Sikale was a small Skrit man about five feet high and a hundred pounds. Maybe. Mrs. Sikale was five feet ten and two hundred pounds. He was a wisp of fuzz floating around the house. She was a gale of energy with well-defined ideas about what she did and didn’t like.
Bonga ordered Chun, clearly and succinctly, to leave the neighbors alive. Then he went to the office.
He didn’t say I couldn’t cripple them.
Mrs. Sikale had been planning to install a water feature in the front yard. She wanted a hole ten feet wide and six feet deep, with all of the fill dirt piled beside it, on the west side of the hole.
Chun disliked digging, but he had a good back and more stamina than anyone from this age. Dirt flew. Rocks cracked. Every time one of them walked behind him he had to split his attention and monitor them with his breath, so they wouldn’t shoot or stab him in the back.
It was with a sigh of satisfaction that he climbed out of the hole.
“That was not enough,” Mrs. Sikale said. She pounded her watch with a fingertip. “Two hours. No good. You come with me.”
The back garden was Mr. Sikale’s domain. He flitted around Chun, occasionally saying something Chun couldn’t follow, but generally pointing at things he wanted moved, or weeds he wanted pulled.
The true evil of the man was revealed when he directed Chun to dig out a wasp nest in the back corner.
“They’ll sting me,” Chun said.
“Go, go.”
“I could die.”
“Go, go.”
“You don’t know what I’m saying, do you?”
“Go, go.”
Chun sighed and walked over to the wasp nest. His breath told him it was a couple of feet underground, and surprisingly large. He spun out his breath and wove a repellent barrier across his skin, then started digging. The cloud of wasps was so thick at times that he couldn’t see what he was doing. They bumped into him constantly, and he had to squint to keep them out of his eyes.
Annabeth pulled up just as Chun lifted the paper nests out of the hole.
“Holy shit,” she said.
“I think they were hoping I would get stung to death,” Chun said. He walked out of the cloud of insects. The Sikales looked at him like he was a ten-horned monster.
Chun walked over to the Sikales. “I’m finished now.”
They nodded.
“Move it,” Annabeth snapped. “I’m on the clock here.”
Chun went home, showered army style, dressed, and went out to meet Annabeth.
“Get in.”
Chun opened the back door. Annabeth glared at him. “You don’t seriously think I’m going to drive with you sitting behind me?”
“How far?” Chun could feel the tension in his voice.
“About six miles.”
“I will run.”
She shook her head. “No, you fucking will not. Jhon ordered me to come and pick you up, and I’m picking you up. Now get in the car.”
Her sealed nephilim breath kept him from getting a sense of her honesty. He looked around for other options.
“Get in the car, Chun. Now.”
He spread his breath through the car, looking for traps. There was a pistol in the glove compartment. That would give him an edge if she attacked him. Chun eased into the passenger seat and clenched his teeth as she got in on the other side.
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She narrowed her eyes at him. “You seem calm all of a sudden. What changed?”
“I could not think of another alternative.”
Her head tipped sideways. “Bullshit. You know my sidearm is in the glove compartment. Damn wizards.”
* * *
The drive to the office taught Chun things about himself and this new world. Nephilim weren’t the only thing that terrified him. There was a thing called carsickness. Annabeth thrived on adrenaline. Red lights didn’t always mean stop.
During the most harrowing part of the drive, as she skidded the car around a corner and onto a bridge, high above the water, he saw her smiling in honest glee. Chun held on to the door handle and prayed that his command of his breath would save him when they crashed.
The headquarters of the Bureau of Antiquities was a four-story edifice that occupied a full city block. The building looked like it had been grand a century ago but needed repairs now. Inside the place smelled of chaos. Chun identified manure, ants, goats, pungent chemicals, various foods…a dizzying array of odors that obscured any central purpose.
“Chun,” Bonga said, stepping around a corner and extending a hand. “How did you like the drive?”
Chun moved to put Bonga between himself and Annabeth. “My guts wanted to shit, but my anus was frozen with fear.”
Annabeth laughed.
“So, it worked out alright then?” Bonga asked with a smile.
Bonga took Chun around the office and introduced him to about a few dozen people. They had a pistol range in the basement, laboratories and a cafeteria on the ground floor, operations and logistics on the second floor, and administration on the top floor.
“What do you think so far?” Bonga asked when they reached the top floor.
“Why do you have different departments on different floors?”
“I want each department to have room to grow,” Bonga said. Chun studied his face but saw no signs of sarcasm.
“You could put everyone on the ground floor, and still have three fourths of the floor left for expansion,” Chun said.
“That’s true,” Bonga said, “but then ops wouldn’t have room to set up a training course, and research wouldn’t be able to open new lab space for every project, and most important, I might be able to hear Abraham and Annabeth from my office.”
Chun frowned at him.
“I’m not going to explain that one,” Bonga said. “It will be more fun if you learn that on your own.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bonga introduced Chun to Agent Altuah, who was busy typing something. He nodded at Chun, asked to be called Greg, and then went back to his task.
“This is my office,” Bonga said, opening the door and ushering Chun inside. Bonga put his coat, hat, and briefcase away, then walked Chun across the hall, where he opened a door and led him into a large room with couches on the walls, a huge desk in the center, and a young woman on the telephone. She smiled at them and motioned that she would be with them in a minute.
The nameplate on her desk read Tan Li Hua. When she put the phone down, Chun bowed to her and in Hanish said, “Good morning, Li Hua of the honorable Tan. I am Chun.”
She glanced at Bonga, “Um, nice to meet you, but I don’t understand.”
Chun blinked and switched to Anglish. “Good morning, Li Hua of the honorable Tan. I am Chun.”
“Good morning, Agent Chun. You can call me Li.” She smiled and extended her hand. Chun shook it, careful not to squeeze too hard.
“Thank you, Li,” Bonga said. “Is Sharon available?”
“Yes, sir, she is expecting you.” Li got up and opened the door for them.
“Good morning, Sharon,” Bonga said. “This is Chun. You’ve heard me speak about him several times now.”
Sharon Tbela was a striking woman, tall, black, with short, graying wooly hair. She shook Chun’s hand with surprising strength and offered the two men chairs.
“Agent Chun, nice to meet you. You can call me Agent Tbela.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Chun said.
“That also works,” she said with a smile. “I’m going to get your residency paperwork started. Your case is more complicated than most, and we’re going to have to figure out how to submit your forms in a way that the Naturalization Service will accept.”
“Will that be difficult?” Chun wasn’t sure what some of those words meant.
“I don’t expect so,” she said. “Jhon has contacts who can pressure them to be smart instead of bureaucratic, and if necessary, we can hire an attorney to represent you through the process. Frankly, I expect that we’ll get your packet completed, Jhon will drop it off, and whoever receives it will just rubber stamp it, rather than deal with upsetting another agency.”
“Rubber stamp?” Why would someone waste good rubber on postage?
She opened a desk drawer, pulled out a stamp, and offered it to him. He turned it over and studied the bottom. It said Approved, backwards.
“Rubber stamping something means that it is too much trouble to examine it closely, so you just approve it and make it someone else’s problem,” she said.
“That seems unethical,” Chun said.
“It is,” Jhon said, “but sometimes it is also the only practical response.”
“Why?”
“Well, imagine you’re in charge of the office supplies, and I stop by your desk at the end of the day and request a box of pens. I have my coat and hat on, and I’m clearly headed home. Office supplies are for the office, but I am the director. Do you tell me no, and make a lot of trouble for yourself, or do you just give me the box of pens and move on?” Bonga gestured as he spoke.
“Ah,” Chun said. “A wise general declines battle when he will surely lose.”
“Exactly,” Agent Tbela said. “Let’s figure out how to set up a battle they can’t win.”
Chun spent most of the day meditating. They shuffled him between Sharon Tbela, Lun Hui, and Tan Li Hua as each of them filled out forms, asked questions, and made telephone calls to other agencies. It bore a certain resemblance to Reception Battalion.
He had lunch in the cafeteria, which served him a good quantity of something called pizza. It was the only bright spot in a mind-numbing day.
At the end of the day Tbela asked him if he needed an advance on his pay, or if he had money. Chun held out the remains of the cash he had taken from the pimps.
“Is this enough?”
Her eyes widened, “What is that, about eight hundred dollars? If you can’t get by on that for a month, you’ll never make it on the two hundred dollars a month we pay.”