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He drank some of the beer and set the bottle down with great care.
“I’ve had what my family and my teachers called an ‘overactive imagination’ for as long as I can remember,” he said. “So when I started seeing auras in high school, everyone assumed I was either imagining them or trying to fool people.”
Pallas went very still. He knew then that whatever she had expected him to say, what he had just told her wasn’t it. But she did not grab the messenger bag and leave. He took that as a good sign.
“You see auras?” she asked, wary but curious now.
“Up until a few months ago all I saw were shifting waves of radiance around other people. That had some practical uses. It was a lotlike being able to read body language. It gave me a real edge when I played sports in high school. As I got older I realized I could sometimes tell when someone was lying or running a con, but not always. It complicated the hell out of my dating life.”
“I can imagine.”
“But when I realized no one believed me, I quit talking about it.” He swallowed some beer and wished he’d ordered a hamburger or a sandwich. “Didn’t want anyone thinking I was hallucinating.”
“Okay.”
“The aura reading thing was a real asset when I got my first good job,” he continued.
Pallas tipped her head a bit. At least she was paying attention.
“What was the job?” she asked.
“After floundering around for a few years I got hired as an analyst at a private security firm. Failure Analysis.”
“That’s what you did? Failure analysis? Isn’t that engineering work?”
“It’s the name of the company,” he explained. “They investigate security failures for their clients.”
“I see.”
The server arrived with the platter of buffalo-style cauliflower and dip. Pallas smiled at her again. “Two forks, please.”
“You bet.” The server produced the forks and two small plates. “Will there be anything else?”
“Not now, thanks,” Pallas said. When the server left she nudged the platter to the center of the table. “Help yourself.”
The cauliflower looked good—better than anything he had eaten in a very long time.
“Thanks,” he said. He picked up a fork.
“Go on,” Pallas said.
“Where was I?” he said around a mouthful of hot, spicy cauliflower. “Oh, right. Failure Analysis. It was a great job, but somewhere along the line I got the writing bug. The aura reading thing gave me the inspiration for the protagonist, Jake Crane. I wrote nights and weekends. Finished the book, got very, very lucky and found a publisher. Wrote another book in the series. Got an agent. Quit my day job at Failure Analysis and figured my life was damned swell.”
“And then?”
He wolfed down another chunk of cauliflower. He wasn’t just hungry, he realized. He was ravenous.
“And then shit happened,” he said.
She sipped some wine and looked at him over the rim of the glass. “Is this where you tell me how you wound up at the sleep clinic here in Carnelian?”
“I’ll get to that in a few minutes. Unfortunately there’s a prologue. You see, the night at the Institute isn’t the first night I’ve lost.”
She watched him with a new intensity. “Do you suffer from blackouts?”
He tightened his grip on the beer bottle. “No. But eight months ago I went to San Diego. I lost one night and most of my memories of the day before and the morning after that night. When I woke up, my aura reading talent had changed.”
Pallas did not even blink. She stared at him as if he had just revealed the date the world would end.
