Free A Division of Souls - A Novel of the Mendaihu Universe by Jon Chaisson

admit there isn't much, but
I haven't read through all of it myself yet.”
    Poe took the data crystal and shoved it in
his inside jacket pocket. “By the way…do you suspect the Shenaihu
as the impetus behind the Mendaihu’s ritual?”
    He merely shrugged. “Just a guess, really.
Nothing this intense happens in B-town without the either one
involved somehow, even if the Mendaihu were behind it. Could just
be a rogue adept, but I doubt it.”
    “Why is that?” Caren asked.
    Matthew's face brightened briefly. “I
learned from my dad how to read politics. From politics I learned
how to read people. Again, I’m no sociologist, but I know the seeds
of an uprising when I see one.” He paused, glancing at his screen
one last time, his expression fading as quickly as it had appeared.
“And this is a spiritual one, no doubt.”
    Caren nodded…she hated the idea, but she
understood. Both of them had avoided saying anything or admitting
it to themselves, but Matthew was right. This was more than just a
ritual or an uprising…it was an awakening, and one that would
continue to affect Bridgetown — and eventually, possibly, the world
— if it were not controlled.
    Matthew faced them again. “Go talk to
Reverend Miriam if you need a spiritual explanation,” he said.
“He’s over at Saint Patrick’s up near your neighborhood, Poe. He
should be able to explain it better than I could.”
     
    *
     
    Caren finally reentered her apartment almost
thirteen hours after she had last exited it. It was just past two
in the afternoon, certainly not the first time she wandered home
after a long shift with the sun shining high overhead. Such was the
job of the ARU. She dropped her work duffel bag on the living room
floor and groaned, every overtired muscle screaming for rest. And
yet like damned clockwork, she couldn’t stop her brain from heading
off in twenty different directions at once. Every time…every damned
time she and Poe were roped into a particularly intense case. Her
muscles ached, her eyes stung, and her brain was stuck in
overdrive. It was going to take hours for her to fall asleep.
    But she was home again, and that meant more
to her than anything else. She closed her apartment door, locked
it, and leaned heavily against it, exhaling deeply. She scanned the
small front room, searching for an anchor to quiet this chaos in
her head. This constant, unending buzz in her brain, more intense
than ever, that would not go away without a fight. It never did.
But she was home…it always calmed her, one way or another. She
enjoyed the familiarity of her surroundings, yet she now felt
alienated from her own belongings. They were like a lucid
dream…distant, forgotten, yet she knew them to be hers.
    And right now, she was too tired to fight
it. She wouldn’t find peace here. Not yet.
    She escaped the front room to her own cave,
her bedroom. It was still pathetically, distressingly out of order,
just as she’d left it. Madeleine, her elderly next door neighbor
and an old family friend, had taken care of their apartment when
needed, but the woman would always leave Caren's bedroom for her to
clean up. She rarely had the time to do so, but his was actually a
good thing, because this mess added to the familiarity she needed.
This was the one room out of the billions of rooms in the Sprawl
that was truly hers and hers alone.
    Denni had taped a note on her bedroom door
to say she was over at Madeleine’s and would let her sleep in.
Caren felt a knot in her stomach…she felt guilty that she had
missed tucking her in for the night. That she'd missed seeing her
off to school. Seeing her coming home. Of all the things she hated
about this job, this was the worst. If this case was as big as she
feared, there was a good chance she wouldn’t be seeing her for days
at a time. She stopped herself from getting angry, however…now was
not the time. She was home and on familiar ground, and she
desperately needed to sleep. Exhaling one last