I KNOW WHO I am.

Somehow, deep down inside, I’ve always known.

I don’t know how to explain that statement precisely. It’s not in the “I am Alyson May Taylor” sense of knowing myself. It’s more like this presence I carry within me, this solid sense of “me-ness” that feels untouchable in some way. It shocked me as a kid, when I realized a lot of people didn’t have that.

For a lot of people, that rock-solid, “here I am” thing was more elusive. A lot of them spent their whole lives searching for it.

Funnily enough, with me, it turned out who I was didn’t end up being all that important.

What I was mattered a whole lot more.

On that front, I knew a lot less than I thought I did. I might have had that essence thing down, but I was missing a hell of a lot of pretty significant details.

“HE’S BAAAACK.” MY best friend, Cass, grinned at me from where she leaned over the fifties-style lunch counter, her butt aimed at the dining area of the diner where we both worked. Given that our uniforms consisted of short black skirts and form-fitting, low-cut white blouses, she was giving at least a few of our customers an eye-full.

Seemingly oblivious to that fact, and to the men sitting at the counter to her left and my right, pretending not to stare at her ass as she stuck it in the air, she grinned at me, her full lips looking even more dramatic than usual with their blood-red lipstick.

“Did you see, Allie?”

I pursed my lips, rolling my eyes.

“What’s the pool up to now?” she said. “Seventy bucks? Eighty?”

“Eighty-five.” I used the metal stopper to compress finely-ground espresso beans into the metal filter I held in my other hand, managing to spill a small pile of grounds on the linoleum counter in the process. “Sasquatch threw in twenty yesterday.” Remembering, I let out a snort-laugh. “He walked right up to the guy’s table. Asked him his name, point-blank.”

Cass’s black-eyeliner decorated eyes widened. “What happened?”

I smiled, shaking my head without looking up. “Same thing that always happens.”

Cass laughed, kicking up her high heels, which were red-vinyl platforms, more seventies than fifties, not like it mattered. Again, I saw the men nearby sipping their coffees while they surreptitiously stared at her legs.

Cass had been on a red kick lately. Her long, straight, raven-black, Asian hair had dark red flames coming up from the tips, the color matching her lipstick, eyeshadow, fingernail polish, and the five inch heels.

Two months ago, everything had been teal.

She could get away with just about any style she wanted, though. Her ethnicity, an odd mish-mash of Thai sprinkled with European and Ethiopian, somehow mixed inside her to make her one of the most physically beautiful women I’d ever seen.

I hated her a little for it, sometimes.

Other times, I pitied her for it. Truthfully, I hadn’t seen that it had done her a lot of favors over her life, and Cass and I had known each other since we were kids.

Looking up from where I was doing battle with the diner’s antiquated espresso maker, a machine I was convinced had it in for me, personally, I blew my much less dramatic dark brown bangs out of my face, glancing at the man in the corner booth in spite of myself.

I’d seen him walk in.

Truthfully, I’d felt him walk in.

It was unnerving as hell, the effect he had on me, simply from entering a building I happened to occupy.

This was in spite of him never saying a damned thing to me, apart from whatever single-item purchase he made off the diner’s crappy menu. He paid in cash. He never came in with anyone else. He flat-out ignored any attempts at small talk, even polite questions. He rarely made eye-contact, although I always felt his eyes on me. When I looked over, however, he was usually staring out the window, or down at his own hands on the table.

Mr. Monochrome wasn’t a talker.

He wasn’t a people person in any sense of the word. He took ignoring other sentient beings to the level of an art form. The extremes he went to in avoiding conversation didn’t just verge on rude; they were rude. Mr. Monochrome didn’t care.

Mr. Monochrome wasn’t interested in our opinions of him.

Mr. Monochrome wouldn’t even tell us his name.

That last part was the pool Cass referred to.

Given that most people paid bills with their headsets these days, the fact that he paid in cash made him frustratingly impervious to our curiosity about him. He was a blank canvas. My mind superimposed that canvas with various stories, of course, as did my co-workers––undercover cop, international fugitive from justice, spy, private detective, writer doing research, terrorist for the seer underground. Serial killer.

I knew the reality was likely a lot less interesting.

Jon, my brother, referred to him as my “current stalker,” but Jon was paranoid about that kind of thing, given the number of problems I’d had in that area back when I was a kid. Apart from the fact that Mr. Monochrome insisted on sitting in my section every day––even when we moved around which tables were mine––he didn’t seem all that interested in me, either.

He certainly hadn’t made any overtures in my direction, not even oblique ones.

He was probably just a guy who lived somewhere on the autism spectrum, and I’d fallen into his daily routine.

At most, he might be cultivating a deep-seated paranoia around being tracked by the government, one that made him reluctant to use his headset. If he did have some kind of socially-dysfunctional crush on me, he didn’t seem the type to do much about it. He likely worked at one of the tech companies nearby and came to the Lucky Cat because we still accepted cash; more and more places in San Francisco didn’t.

So yeah, a tinfoil hat weirdo, maybe… but a harmless one.

At the thought, I glanced up at the monitor on the wall.

Cass or one of the other waitstaff had turned the volume down, but the news feeds were still playing up there, showing the reaction to the latest terrorist attack in Europe. I watched the President of the United States as he gave a speech from behind a podium, his mouth moving silently. Blooming trees waved gently in a breeze behind him, framing the view of a sprawling lawn and flower gardens. His blond wife stood beside him, hands clasped, a small smile etched on her face, her expression rapt, if bland.

I knew she didn’t really look like that, of course.

Neither did he.

According to Human Protection Act rules, both were required to wear avatars to avoid being targeted by seers owned by enemy governments. Even the landscape around them was digitally altered, to prevent seers from tracking them or reading their minds.

Still, his avatar suited the speeches he gave.

Hers suited him, somehow, as well––meaning, she looked like the kind of person that the man giving those speeches would marry.

Of course, his actual voice was altered digitally, too.

I’d listened to dozens of his speeches over the past however-many years, like everyone else. Daniel Caine was the most popular president we’d ever had, at least as long as I’d been alive. There was already talk of adjusting the presidential term limits again, so he might be allowed to run for a fourth term.

Opposite Caine’s wife stood his Vice President, Ethan Wellington. His avatar showed him to be a handsome black man in his late forties, roughly the same age as Caine. I remembered reading somewhere that they’d even gone to school together.

Both were young, energetic, articulate.

Both of them bothered me.

I honestly couldn’t explain to myself why.

I certainly didn’t try to explain it to anyone else.

To be clear, I didn’t think they were evil or anything, or even that they were hiding some sinister secret; I just didn’t fall all over myself with love for them, the way most people did. Maybe it was just a random distrust of any image that had so few apparent cracks. I knew most people would think I was crazy for thinking that, even Cass. Hell, even Jon liked President Caine, and he hated most politicians, no matter what side of the spectrum they fell on.

Objectively, I got it.

Caine ended years of stalemates and infighting in congress. He’d been the one to move the country as a whole back to a more moderate middle, socially and politically. He’d brought stability, boosted the economy, created jobs, improved our image overseas. He’d even fixed healthcare, and all without raising taxes too much.

If there were conspiracy theories about Caine, they usually involved him being too perfect. Like somehow that must be a trap, which I guess is how my mind worked, too.

Still, in almost ten years of running the country, he’d managed to avoid pissing off any of the major political factions, including the military and the corporate elite.

He was pretty universally liked.

Frowning slightly, I glanced at Mr. Monochrome again, wiping the counter off with a wet rag where I’d spilled the espresso bean grounds.

If I was right in my tinfoil hat theory, Mr. Monochrome likely believed a lot of the same conspiracy theories my brother, Jon, did. Jon had a whole paranoia thing about seers, in particular, and how our own government was likely using them against us, via our headsets and whatever else. To be fair to my brother––and possibly Mr. Monochrome––I had noticed a lot more seers in San Francisco lately.

Most didn’t seem all that involved in government espionage rackets though. From what I could tell, most worked in sex fetish clubs, or for corporations downtown.

Of course, rich people had been importing and maintaining privately-owned seers in San Francisco for years. They’d kept their “purchases” behind closed doors for the most part until about the 1990s, however, in part because of the strict Seer Containment Codes in California, and partly because they likely didn’t want people to know they had a psychic living in their house. After two world wars prominently featuring seers––primarily as villains, or the tools of villains––most people were pretty paranoid about them still.

I knew from listening to anti-seer talk feeds that a lot of people wanted them all deported from the United States entirely. Some people wanted them exterminated––as a species, I mean. The real nutjobs even wanted to kill the more docile variety of seers living in the monkish enclave of Seertown, a quasi-mythical town somewhere in Asia, supposedly filled with chanting robed seers and their human followers.

Since the feeds weren’t allowed to go there, I had no idea what Seertown looked like, but like many people, I was curious.

According to the political feeds, and what I’d learned in history classes back in high school and college, the World Court had an agreement with the seer government that seers who lived there couldn’t be owned, just so long as they never left.

Plenty of religious types still believed seers to be children of the Nephilim, though––if not outright spawns of the Great Horned One, Satan himself. Even moderates viewed seers’ increasing integration into human society as dangerous.

On a more practical level, most people simply didn’t want someone’s pet seer reading their minds and sharing their most private secrets with their human owners.

Apparently, a lot of rich people weren’t all that cool to their friends.

Despite all this, seer numbers in San Francisco were definitely increasing.

More and more, I saw seers out on the street, especially in the business district. From stories I’d watched on the feeds, most of the new arrivals were owned by corporations, not individuals, but I knew that didn’t reassure people all that much. It didn’t help that seers weren’t always easy to spot; they blended in more or less seamlessly with the humans they accompanied, wearing business suits and sporting expensive haircuts and shoes. A lot of times, given how valuable they were, and the investment they represented to their owners, they had their own bodyguards.

I’d read in the feeds somewhere that a highly-trained seer could go for more than the cost of an entire apartment building in San Francisco.

So yeah, being a peon myself, usually I couldn’t get very close.

A few times, I got within a dozen yards or so, though.

Only once did a seer seem to notice me. A female I’d seen out in front of a sex club caught me looking at her, and stared back.

It was difficult to pin down exactly, what was so different about her, as compared to a regular person, but some of it had to do with the way she moved. The differences there evoked an animal in my mind, even though she looked more or less like a human being. Wearing nothing but a white mesh bodysuit, she stalked around the buffed, black bouncer who stood beside her, her long, dark hair hanging down her back in thick braids. The bouncer held her leash––literally, in her case––but she didn’t appear to be trying to get away. Her careful steps, graceful and precise, reminded me of a cat’s, or maybe an insect’s.

She was beautiful and wild, and yes, a bit terrifying.

From what I’d seen on the feeds, most seers tended to have beautiful features, though. A few of the corporate-owned seer pop bands had cult-like followings in part because the male and female leads were so stunningly beautiful.

If I were being honest though, I mainly spotted seers by their collars.

By law, all seers wore them.

Most of those collars were silver with a greenish tint, a kind of brushed metal that glowed faintly, even in direct sunlight. I’d seen a few seer collars decorated more like jewelry or S&M bondage wear, but it was difficult to disguise them entirely. They all sat in identical places at the base of a seer’s neck, likely because of how they attached to the spine.

It was really, really illegal to have an un-collared seer out on the street.

That wasn’t just United States law––that was World Court law.

If you broke that particular rule and someone caught you, you’d have the international branch of Seer Containment, or SCARB, breathing down your neck. You’d not only get any future license to own or operate seers permanently yanked, you’d also do jail time, most likely, and pay a fine that would leave your grandkids in debt, and maybe their kids, too.

Of course, in reality, I knew this wasn’t a problem I’d ever have.

Like most people, the closest I’d ever get to a real-live seer was a glimpse on the street. All of my knowledge of the seer race would come via online feeds, movies, gossip and stories from my friends. The seer sex-fetish bars that offered services of various kinds throughout the city were way out of my price range, too, even if I was into that kind of thing. No amount of tattoos, digital renderings, or coffee-shop gallery paintings would ever buy me access to that world.

So yeah, unless I had a rich relative somewhere I didn’t know about, waiting to donate a few million my way after they died, I would have to appreciate the beauty of seers from afar.

I was curious, though.

Most people were curious, I suppose.

Cass poked my arm, pulling me out of my reverie. When I looked up, she raised her eyebrows a few times at me suggestively.

“What’ll you give me if I go over there right now?” she grinned. “…and offer to blow him if he’ll give up his name?”

The man at the counter next to her coughed, spitting out some of his coffee.

Glancing at him, I grunted an involuntary half-laugh at Cass.

Realizing I’d forgotten the cappuccino I’d been making, I turned my back on her briefly, hooking the metal filter into the corresponding threads on the machine. After a bit of a struggle, I got it locked in place and stuck a wide-mouthed coffee cup under it, hitting the red button to turn it on. I waited for the tell-tale hiss, then turned towards her once more, quirking an eyebrow.

“What’ll I give you to blow my stalker? Hmmm.” I pretended to think. “How about a grilled cheese sandwich?” I said. “You like those, right?”

She exhaled in mock drama. “Cheapskate.”

“What were you hoping for?” I snorted. “I’m a starving artist, remember? I’m basically offering you my dinner.”

“Right.” She gave me a mock-serious look. “I guess I’d better let you blow him instead. If you do a good enough job, maybe he’ll give you a tip.” When I let out an outraged sound, smacking her arm with the counter rag, she laughed, tugging on my wrist. “Hey, starving artist. We’re going out tonight, right? You’re still in your ‘I’m getting even with my lousy, cheating, fuckwad, loser ex-boyfriend Jaden by going out to clubs, getting rip-roaring drunk, and picking up cute strangers with my best pal Cass’ phase, right?”

I snorted. “I think that phase has run its course.”

“Aww.” She pouted. “No. One more night. It’s Saturday.”

Again, I could only shake my head. “I’m supposed to work at Spider’s new tattoo shop tomorrow. He and Angie wanted to see a few more designs… so that’s what I’ll be doing tonight. I can’t draw drunk, so partying’s out, sorry.”

She frowned. “Boring. At least call that Nick guy, the bartender. Get him to come over and screw your brains out when he gets off work.”

I grimaced, shaking my head. “Ugh. No. I had to end that.”

“What?” Her mouth puckered disapprovingly. “Why? He was cute!”

“He started getting weird.”

She rolled her eyes dramatically. “Define ‘weird,’ Allie.”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Just weird. Clingy, I guess.”

Staring at me in disbelief, Cass snorted. “Jesus. The magic pussy strikes again.” Pouting her lips, she added, “You have to tell me how you do it, Al. I think I have the opposite… the anti-magic, dick-repellent pussy. They all want to bang me, then… poof! They’re gone. You get marriage proposals, I get vomit-stained notes on my bed stand.”

I let out an involuntary laugh. “You have bad taste in guys, Cassandra. That’s not the same thing as being dick-repellent or whatever. If I slept with those guys, they’d leave me crappy notes, too.”

“Sure, they would.”

“They would,” I insisted. “And you know it.”

Sighing, she propped her jaw on her hand, looking down the bar. “Maybe. I do manage to find the major bag of dicks in every crowd, don’t I?” she said, glum. Perking up slightly, she glanced at me. “Hey, is Jon coming in today? After his morning kung fu class?”

I nodded. “Far as I know.” Glancing up at the cat clock with the eyes that flicked back and forth for each second, its tail twitching in time, I sighed. “He should be here any minute, actually.”

“Now, he’s someone I’d blow for free,” she said wistfully.

I grimaced for real that time. “Seriously? Can you just… not? Talk about him like that, I mean? He’s my brother.”

“Your brother is seriously fine. And he’s an adoptive brother, right? So no reason to get all skeeved over hearing me lust over your non-blood relative.”

I winced, shaking my head as I hung the rag on the counter behind the bar. “You know he’s gay, right? I mean, it’s not like we haven’t known that since, what, kindergarten?”

She sighed wistfully. “A girl can dream.”

Internally, I sighed. Not only was Jon probably the person I was closest to in the entire world, but my mental image of him was still closer to how he’d looked when he was fifteen than it was to how he looked now.

Of course, objectively, I knew he barely resembled that person anymore.

Back then, everyone called him “Bug” and he got stuffed into garbage cans and gym lockers on a semi-regular basis. Predictably, he got picked on mainly for being a “little faggot,” since kids were oddly perceptive about that kind of thing. Sometimes, though, they went after him for being a bookworm, being a know-it-all, being skinny, or for wearing corrective glasses so thick they distorted the size of his eyes––thus earning him his nickname––or just because he wouldn’t back down or cower like they felt he should.

Eventually, though, as people do, Jon got older.

He picked up martial arts at the end of high school, not long before Dad died. He also switched from glasses to contact lenses, filled out, and started getting tattoos.

Now Jon had like five black belts, part ownership of a software company, and taught Choy Li Fut, a type of kung fu, as his day job.

No one had stuffed Jon into a gym locker in a very long time.

“You’re sure he’s not bi?” Cass said. “Not even a little? Like a secret bi?”

I let out an involuntary laugh. “You’re welcome to ask him.”

Her lips pursed. “Maybe I’ll just show up at his place in a trench coat and a teddy one of these days. See how he responds to actual real-girl stimulus.”

The men sitting there all looked away as her eyes turned in their direction, trying to hide the fact that they were staring at her.

“Yeah,” I grunted. “Good luck with that.” Walking the cappuccino over to the guy at the counter who’d ordered it, I walked back to her, shrugging. “Personally, though, if you’re going to start going after guys who aren’t card-carrying members of the bag-of-dicks crowd, I’d suggest trying with males of the species who actually like sleeping with, you know, women.”

She grinned, shrugging eloquently. “Where’s the fun in that?”

Thinking, I added, “Speaking of dating non-jerks, Jon has good taste in guys usually.” I quirked my mouth in a half-smile. “Instead of playing ‘scare the hot gay guy,’ maybe just ask him for tips on how to pick up, you know, men. With an emphasis on guys who aren’t anything like your father or your bag-of-dicks brothers.”

She laughed, but I saw my words reach her, even as she shook her head ruefully.

“Yeah,” she conceded, dumping part of a salt-shaker on a napkin and spreading the granules around with her index finger.

We’d been friends since we were kids, like I said. There were advantages to that.

“How’s your mom doing?” she said, even as I thought it.

I shrugged. “She’s okay.”

“Really?”

I looked up from where I’d been rearranging the stack of paper napkins behind the counter. Seeing the probing look in her eyes, I inclined my head. “More or less. Her last bender was two weeks ago, so she’s probably due for another one pretty soon. Last time I went over there, she was watching old tapes of us when me and Jon were kids.” I grimaced, remembering. “She yelled at me when I tried to turn it off, then started crying.”

“Jesus,” Cass said, wincing.

“Yeah,” I said flatly. “It was awesome.” Frowning, I shrugged. “Jon tried to talk her into going to rehab again… or at least some kind of grief therapy, but no go. She still won’t even talk about Dad. She watches those videos of him with us, you know, before he got sick… I swear she wants to pretend it never happened. Like he’s on a business trip or something.”

Cass frowned, watching my eyes. “I really like your mom.”

I nodded, my throat tightening. “Me, too.”

I didn’t add that I missed her, but I thought it. In a lot of ways, it felt like my mom died when my dad did.

Shoving the thought aside, I bit the inside of my cheek, annoyed with myself for even going there.

I was still lost in my own head when a throat cleared not far from where we were talking.

I turned, a little startled that it came from so close. I usually had better peripheral radar than that, but this guy walked right up on us like a ninja.

When I glanced up, I felt my jaw loosen.

Light, strangely glass-like eyes met mine. A narrow mouth pursed under absurdly high cheekbones and a narrow, angular face. His almond-shaped eyes hinted at what might have been Eurasian ancestry, but his ethnicity was impossible to pin down, and could have been anything from Native American to Mongolian. Whatever it was, it had to be mixed with Scandinavian or German or something, given how tall he was. His coal black hair was straight but curled just the smallest bit where hung down by his ears.

It was Mr. Monochrome.