There was one good thing of having a work shift right in the middle of a crisis — it kept you so busy you didn’t have time to brood. But now that Cindy had finished her shift as receptionist at Shepardsport Pirate Radio, she found she had altogether too much time to think about the current situation.
You now know just enough about it to worry you, but not nearly enough to help resolve it. On top of that, you don’t know what’s going on with Amy or her parents. The last thing you knew, her mom and dad were both being taken to the hospital, and both of them were in bad shape.
Even as Cindy reached for her phone, she checked herself. No, Kitty had her own responsibilities, and shouldn’t be interrupted. Right now there was nothing either of them could do about Amy’s situation, assuming they could even get through whatever was making communications with other lunar settlements difficult and communications with Earth well-nigh impossible.
As Cindy arrived at the Shepardsport dining commons, she scanned the area, but didn’t see Kitty. Nor did she see any of her cousins. Which meant she could either try to find someone to sit with, or take a seat at an empty table and have whoever chose to sit down with her.
Look on the bright side. At least you don’t have to deal with a dozen or more teenage Sheps all trying to hit on you, like the girls from other lineages have to.
As she was working her way through the maze of tables, someone called her name. She turned to see a blond-haired young man waving to her. “Over here. You can sit with me.”
“Thanks.” As she went to join him, she struggled to recognize him. Not Quinn Merton, although he was definitely an Armstrong.
He must’ve picked up on her struggle, because he introduced himself. “I’m Cory Jannifer. Justin Forsythe asked me to make sure you had someone to sit with at lunch.”
“Um, that’s nice of him.” Cindy winced at how clumsy those words sounded. She’d met Cory a couple of times — he’d been Spruance Del Curtin’s junior TA in a basic science class a couple of years ago, and had come to the station fairly regularly to drop things off. But it had been a while, and Cory was hitting that age when puberty really started transforming a person’s appearance.
“He is concerned about your situation.”
The sudden clench of the spinal muscles caught Cindy by surprise. There was no rational reason that she should be alarmed by what was obviously meant as a courtesy.
Yet there was the inescapable question: just how did he knew he should be concerned? She hadn’t said anything to him about Amy, and as far as she knew, neither had Kitty or Brenda.
She knew he’d spent some time out in California, at the retreat house of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. They were a parapsychological research community, which strongly suggested he possessed some level of telepathy.
There were rumors about experiments that had gone on during the Cold War, attempts to create clone-lines of powerful telepaths by splicing feline DNA into humans. They were common enough to have even become the basis of several manga series, although those were pretty clearly fantastic, with their cute telepathic catboys and catgirls getting into mischief as much feline as human.
Although Cindy wanted to ponder why the idea should bother her so intensely, Cory was already asking her how her classes were going. Nothing intrusive, just the usual making-conversation sort of thing, but she would be remiss if she didn’t respond.
And quite possibly he was supposed to engage her in conversation specifically to take her mind off Amy’s situation.