The room was crowded. Leo Harris and Jot Musil were in chairs at Morse’s desk, with Morse herself standing to their right under a wall monitor. The only one there Natasha hadn’t technically met was the guy on the other side of the entry. Carmody. But she’d seen him around HQ the past few months, and heard he was connected to the technologie vampiri business, and recognized him from the rooftop the other day, when he had been waiting for Kali to step off the vertipad. Now he stood there looking huge in a motorcycle jacket, his arms folded across his chest.
She hadn’t expected a roomful of people. Hadn’t thought to find anyone in the office besides Morse. Seeing them all gathered here was a shock. But what had really stopped her cold in her tracks was the image on the display.
“What’s going on?” She stood flat-footed, glancing sharply at Morse. “Nobody told me this would be a fucking house party.”
“I’m sorry, Natasha—”
“Sorry? My life is my life. That’s our deal.”
Morse looked at her. “What we discuss stays with the people in this room,” she said. “But we need you to answer some questions. Give me a minute and you’ll understand.”
Almost against her will, Natasha glanced back up at the photograph filling the wide-screen display. Dark trails seemed to come off it. The alkaline smell of charcoal ashes stung her nostrils. Synesthesia was a genetic condition that involved a sort of cross-wiring of the senses, and she had manifested it before she was eight. Someone with tetrachromacy had an extra color channel in the eye, allowing him or her to pick up a far wider and more subtle palette of hues than most people. Natasha had experienced that rare mutation almost out of the womb. The odds of having both conditions—of being a combined synesthete and tetrachromat—were almost nil. But she had defied those odds and won the mixed-sense sweepstakes.
Sometimes she considered it a gift. Sometimes it seemed good and sweet and beautiful, like in that Skittles slogan about tasting the rainbow.
Not right now, though. Right now the photo was pinging her with all kinds of mixed-sensory unpleasantness.
At a glance it resembled any class picture in any country in the world, except for the variance in the students’ ages. They ranged from young children to adolescents. There were four rows of them, five or six in a row, twenty-seven in all. The older, taller ones were standing in the back two rows. The shorter ones at the front were in chairs.
The group was almost evenly divided between boys and girls. The boys wore gray trousers, gray sweaters, white shirts and red neckties. The girls wore gray skirts and vests, white blouses and red crisscross snap ties. There were triangular patches on their sweaters and vests, left side, above the heart.