New York: Allie's War, Early Years

As soon as I thought it, the black-haired man was staring at me again.

The look there was close to puzzlement.

About what, though, I had no idea.

***

We got back to the club around five o'clock, a good five hours before Jaden's band would be going onstage, and a good three before they'd open the doors to the ticket-holders, some of whom were already queued up outside the club.

We got a few dirty looks for being able to go inside, mixed with curiosity, of course, about who we might be.

Jaden's band wasn't back yet from the photos and whatever else, so Jon and Cass and I ordered a few plates of bar food from one of the kitchen guys, and settled in to wait in the mostly deserted bar.

Once we'd padded our stomachs a bit, Cass got me going on the shots.

I know that's no excuse really, for how drunk I got by the end of that night, but it started off as some serious girl-to-girl commiseration. I knew she was more bummed about Jack bailing on her than she wanted to admit, and she probably figured I needed it for the inevitable night of screaming groupies I would soon have to face. If nothing else, I needed to forget about pouty lips, at least for a little while.

So when Cass proposed we get good and proper, down and dirty drunk, for the first time in months, I felt duty bound to go there with her.

Or that's what I told myself, anyway.

We'd talked about what to do about that seer a few times that day, while we were walking around the park and various museums. Jon thought it was some kind of bagging raid by Sweepers; he was convinced the people we'd seen had been SCARB, including the tall guy with the black hair, who Jon claimed showed him some kind of badge. When I mentioned stealing seers for resale, Jon was skeptical. Like me, he thought it was pretty ballsy to pull something like that in broad daylight. He also doubted the cops were on the payroll so much as seer capture and reclamation was outside their jurisdiction.

Changing his mind about the tall guy again, Jon guessed that maybe he was a cop, and that the jurisdiction thing was why he'd seemed so pissed off. There were always those kinds of turf battles going on between the military, SCARB and the local police, Jon said.

As far as what we'd do, it was decided I'd draw them as best as I could, and we would send the pictures in anonymously, to register a brutality complaint. Since I'd have to do realistic drawings to do it right, the drawings would be illegal, so I couldn't exactly sign and hand-deliver them to the cops myself.