Free Lady Superior by Alex Ziebart Page B

how?”
    “Let’s pretend I’d made first contact with you in a bar. I introduced myself, we hung out, we became good friends. After a month or two, when you started to trust me, I’d tell you what I actually wanted. That’s one hell of a betrayal. It’s cruel.”
    Kristen rolled her bottle in her hands, elbows on the table. “Okay. Fair enough.”
    Jane plated the hamburgers on paper plates and set one before Kristen. She sat on the bench across from her. “And it isn’t uncommon for someone to stay in denial their whole lives. Our culture trains us so thoroughly to believe that this kind of thing can’t exist that even when we see it, we deny it. If you feel like this is all a dream, or you’re the star of a modern Truman Show , you aren’t alone. But the choice is simple: accept it and use your gift, or deny it and live without it.”
    Kristen took solace in that: she wasn’t alone in the dream. Still, she shook her head. “It really isn’t that simple.”
    “It is, though. Do or don’t. If you can’t shake the feeling it’s a dream, maybe walking away is the best thing for you. If you can get over it, then you can do this.”
    She picked up her burger, but didn’t take a bite. “That isn’t the biggest hurdle here. You’re asking me to work for people I don’t know anything about. A bank? Seriously? Is this some kind of shadow government agency thing?”
    Jane shook her head. “Not at all. When my boss hired me, he put it like this: governments don’t last long enough to do what we do. We deal with long-term issues. I mean seriously long-term. Temple, in its current form, has been doing what it does since the Crusades. This is going to sound absurd, but it’s true: the longest-lasting continuous government in the world is the United States of America. The USA is less than two hundred and fifty years old. When dealing with delicate issues that require global reach, governments just aren’t up to the task. More, the unfortunate truth is that in our world, wealth is the ultimate power. Money alone can’t solve all problems, but I guarantee that money helps grease the wheels. The moneylender is the most powerful person in the world. It’s always been that way.”
    Kristen finally took a bite of her burger and spoke with a full mouth. “But what does Temple actually do? Besides the bank stuff.”
    “Put simply? We protect people.” Jane reached across the table and moved Kristen’s plate aside. So many names and symbols had been carved onto that table's weathered surface over the years, it was impossible to make sense of any but one. Jane tapped a finger on a single carving: a Venn diagram with three circles, its overlapping parts forming a flower with three thin petals. “See this here? This is the same table Michael used when he brought me into the fold. He put that there. That’s how he sees our existence. Not one world, but three.”
    Kristen looked down at the carving, mouth lopsided with skepticism. Had Jane actually planned this down to the table? “Explain.”
    Jane tapped the top circle. “This is the world everyone considers normal. Almost everyone you know belongs to that one. Hell, I belong to that one. There’s nothing special about me other than my knowledge.”
    She tapped the other two circles, one after the other. “The next one is the world of the gifted. That’s people like you. The third one…that’s something else.”
    “Something else?”
    “Will you let me get away with saying you won’t have to deal with that one, and if you ever do, I’ll make sure you’re prepared?”
    Kristen grumbled. “For now, I guess.”
    “The three worlds all bump into each other. Slowly, they’re merging. Temple, and organizations like Temple across the globe, stand in the middle, where all three overlap.” She tapped the center of the diagram. “We protect them from each other. We learn about them. We prevent one from swallowing the others. Yes, sometimes that means doing