of the Escana clan in low regard. Had the rumors proven true, the struggling Escana Family would have reaped great financial benefits..."
"Castilla de Solis, image," Claire said.
A picture of a woman filled the screen. Tall, slender, athletic, she leaned back, laughing, the bright lavender dress falling off her shoulders, held up seemingly by her breasts alone. Jet black hair spilled down her back in a glossy wave.
No way to gauge her psycher capacity.
If that was Venturo's type, she'd chosen the wrong hair color. She should've dyed her hair black.
Claire leaned back. "Delete."
Castilla disappeared, replaced by an image of Venturo: golden, muscular, his green eyes sharp with intellect. Her body tightened in response, eager for contact. She imagined sliding her hands along those carved arms...
Claire exhaled slowly. There was no rational explanation why when she looked at him, she thought of sex. It was an involuntary response, completely at odds with her personality and training.
Sex was a means of relief. On Uley, it was an understood fact that one engaged in it, but it was rarely discussed. She had a sexual partner once. His name was Dominic. She was eighteen, he was twenty-two. She had just made lieutenant and he was in line for the captain promotion. They had three months together and in those three months she had something to look forward to when she returned to her apartment. She could still recall the feel of his hands on her, the way he said her name, the way he felt inside her.
The Intelligence had transferred him across the city. They had no warning. One day he was simply gone. It didn't take her long to put it together: she was a rising star and he was perceived as a distraction. He didn't try to look for her. He didn't put up a fight. Since then, she'd kept her sexual impulses under lock and key. Masturbation brought her the same relief, and while it came with no intimacy, it didn't carry a burden of disappointment either. In her last weeks on Uley she hadn't even felt the need for it.
She looked at Venturo Escana on the screen. It was as if some vital part of her, the one that was female and craved male contact, sex, and love, had withered. Somehow this man had managed to resuscitate it without doing anything at all. And he felt nothing except pity for her. The irony made her laugh.
She would see him again on Monday. She had to make sure to not make a fool of herself.
Her supervisor was a woman three years her junior. Her name was Renata, her hair was dark brown, her nails bright yellow, and when she was surprised, she opened her brown eyes so wide, she looked slightly deranged.
"How did you get through these so fast?"
"I'm motivated." Claire smiled.
Renata scrolled through the bionet activity reports with rows of tabled data. "Hang on, I have to find something to gripe about." She kept scrolling. "Oh. Here, look, the Radon sector heading should be in blue and you have it in grey." Her fingers flew over her keyboard. "Fix, fix, fix! Fixed."
Claire studied Renata out of the corner of her eye. Her mannerisms were so... carefree. Not exactly childlike but completely devoid of the somber poise common to Uley. If you dropped Renata, the big smile, wide eyes, and purple dress, in the middle of an Uley skyscraper, people would pretend she wasn't there. They'd just refuse to see her. Maybe some well-meaning soul would walk up to her and confidentially inform her that her hair was too bright and she was making a fool of herself...
A mental tug interrupted Claire's musings. Venturo Escana, approaching fast. A walking mental firestorm of a mind behind an invisible wall of steel will.
"All set." Renata raised her hands from the keys. "Did you review the Sangori file?"
"Yes." Venturo's mind was coming closer.
"And the recommendations?
"Yes."
"Good! Be ready to spit it all back at Ven when he comes by. He has a meeting with them later this afternoon and he prefers the spoken summary. But don't worry, he knows most of the file already. He just needs a refresher course."
He had a heightened auditory focus - his mind processed sound better than visual cues. Although for most people the theory of learning styles had long been debunked, for psychers it remained true: some were visual learners, some listened, and others had to write every scrap of information down. She'd worked with auditory psychers like that before.