Bite Marks by Jennifer Rardin

just hard to disagree with our Seer no matter what she wore. For her, our costumers had chosen skintight blue jeans tucked into high-heeled boots and a red mock turtleneck woven with sparkly thread that reflected the gems in her jewelry. Other people might be fooled by the fact that she wore more bling than Flavor Flav, but I wasn’t. I knew she could saw off those heels, shove her hands into a pair of gloves, and muck stalls like a homegrown farm girl. Which was why I wanted so badly to make Kyphas go away for good. I couldn’t imagine another woman I could love more as a sister-in-law. Except, maybe, for Dave’s late wife, Jessie. Thinking of her and looking at Dave’s new girl made me shiver.
    I won’t let anyone hurt you, Cassandra, I promise.
    As if she’d heard my thoughts she smiled at me. But all she said was, “I have good news.”
    “Yeah? Do you See us coming out on top in this whole deal?” She shrugged. “That hasn’t been made clear to me yet. But I don’t See you traveling around in the Wheezer much longer. Perhaps one or two more trips and then you’ll be switching—”
    “Hot damn! That’s the kind of vision I like!”
    She nodded as she followed Bergman into the living room. He pulled out one of the chairs, dropped into it, and crossed his heels onto the table, oblivious to the fact that he might be permanently scarring the surface. This was the problem with beaker-sniffers. Their sense of beauty had taken such a molecular turn that they’d developed a sort of aesthetic blindness that some people found jarring.

    “Get your damn feet off the table,” I snapped.
    He dropped his boots to the floor. “Are you going to be like this when we’re partners?” he asked.
    “If you’re tearing up other people’s furniture? Yeah.”
    “But…” He motioned to the floor.
    “That’s different.”
    “Why?”
    “It’s not pretty.”
    “Oh.”
    Astral had snap-crackle-popped back to form and sidled up to Cassandra’s boots, which she seemed to find cuddly.
    “You programmed a lot of cat moves into this one,” Cassandra said to Bergman as she picked up the robokitty and sat down next to him.
    “I wanted her to blend in. That move is actually her signal that she has information she wants to share with you.”
    Cassandra nodded. “Well done on both fronts, then.” She looked at me. “Do you think we have the time?”
    “Go for it,” I said, so she whispered a few words in the cat’s ear, causing her feet to curl up underneath her belly. Astral opened her mouth wide, like she was gagging on a fish bone, and a beam of light winked on from the back of her throat, as if some industrious vet had figured out a way to test from the inside out. Since the video also came straight to my receivers, for a second the holograms blurred, twin images that made me wonder if this was how my parents had viewed Dave and I the day we were born.
    I moved to stand behind Astral. I figured I could lean against the fireplace if the dizzies kicked in, but the repositioning worked. The images connected. In fact, Astral was projecting the clearest hologram I’d ever seen from an Enkyklios. It was like watching live actors walk through a movie scene right in the front entryway. Unfortunately she hadn’t found anything on Brude. The guy she’d indexed wasn’t even a Scot, unless they’d taken to wearing chaps and Stetsons like the frontiersmen this dude resembled.
    His gear seemed even more out of place given his location, standing before an enormous gate the color of tar. It interrupted a seemingly infinite stretch of spiked fencing on which one or more of the inhabitants had set a series of freshly axed human heads. Behind the gate a river flowed sluggishly inside its broad banks as if it had been partially dammed by old tires and the gutted carcasses of washing machines.
    Fog hovered over the river and obscured nearly everything on its far side. But once in a while we could see people running, their faces