Based on the adventures I've just related, you might get the impression we run a pretty slipshod organization, letting ourselves get down to only two active Primes at a time when Enclave was attacking Earth. And I suppose we'd have to plead guilty to that. Let me explain, though.
Consider that there are only seven of us Primes at a time. Wizzit says that theoretically there could be an infinite number of Primes, but the power requirements rise very quickly as you add more and more. Seven is the sweet spot. Gives us the strongest team for the least cost.
Consider also that we're pretty isolated at HQ, both physically and socially. There's the seven of us, Prime Commander, and Wizzit, and that's it. Nobody else. And HQ is fully self-contained, with no doors to the outside. You've got to keep busy, or you can get cabin fever real fast. And you've got to go out of your way to be friends with everybody; otherwise, personal feuds can quickly get out of hand.
To compensate for all this, Prime Commander is pretty generous and flexible with our leave time. He tries to give us one week off out of every seven, with the understanding that we will be called in if there's an emergency, as Trina was. I don't know about the others, but I try to schedule my off-time around college breaks. Not only does it give me more time to see my parents, it also lets me hang out with my friends from high school when they're home from university.
As the schedules happened to work out, both Nicolai and Trina were off this past week. And then we got word that Toby's grandmother had died, so the commander had given him leave to go to her funeral. Of course, Mike had to go out to bring Padma in, so . . . that's why it was just Shelley and me. Make sense?
Regardless, I woke up the next morning to find that Toby and Nicolai had arrived sometime during the night, so now we were back up to our full strength. I grabbed some breakfast and sat down opposite Toby at the kitchen table.
"How's the happy couple?" I asked. "Have a good honeymoon?" Yeah, they're never going to live down that "wedding bells" column.
Nicolai grunted. Toby looked at me over the top of the paper in his hand. "I have a note here from Mike telling me to ask you about your night out with . . . Lily, is it? He says you thought she was a 'fun date, wink wink.'"
O-kay. I grinned. "All right, I guess that makes us even." I told them a little bit about Lily, including my planting the bug, and then we exchanged small talk for a while. Toby told us about seeing his relatives at the funeral in Manchester, and Nicolai talked about his holiday in Gdansk.
The rest of the crew joined us after a few minutes, Padma last of all. After all the introductions were made, she yawned and stretched and exclaimed, "Oh, I'm sorry I am so sleepy today morning! I was having the most strange dreams all yesterday night."
Toby glanced at her, and then at Mike. Padma was sitting close enough to Mike that their thighs must have been touching, and she had given him an especially bright-eyed smile when she came in. Toby raised an eyebrow, but Mike shook his head slightly and mouthed, "Not yet." Toby is quite the fan of Mike's womanizing ways.
"Bet?" That was Nicolai, speaking to Shelley.
Shelley glanced at Padma, considering, then nodded. "Sure. One dinner shift."
"Done." Nicolai smiled. "I believe," he said to Padma, "that I can guess what you were dreaming about."
Padma gave him a shy smile. "Oh, they were most unusual dreams. I do not think you could guess it."
"Neither does Shelley," he replied. "You wore the Prime Violet belt all last night, did you not?"
"Yes, I was told I had to."
He paused dramatically. "Then you were dreaming about the number seventeen!"
Padma's jaw dropped. She half-rose from her seat; I thought she might have been about to run away. "How -- how did you know? What does the number seventeen have to do with . . .?" Then she stopped, and a look of pure delight crossed her face. "Oh, I see! Seventeen is the seventh prime, and so am I! And the belt -- it makes us dream of this? How very clever!"
I think all of us burst out laughing at the look of dismay that crossed Nicolai's face. I know he had been looking forward to explaining all that to her, and here she had figured it out on her own. He's kind of a math geek, and he has long been fascinated by the relationship the seven of us have with prime numbers. Yes, that's actually the reason we call ourselves Primes. It has something to do with base frequencies of power, harmonics, and divisibility, but that's as far as I go. Nicolai understands it, God love him, but I sure don't.
Nicolai's dismay didn't last long. Within two minutes, our pretty new Prime Violet had left her cozy perch at Mike's side and was sitting beside Nicolai, excitedly peppering him with questions about why we used primes instead of composites, why we called ourselves colors instead of our respective numbers, and anything else she could think of, and she was hanging on every word of his answers.
He had a decidedly dazed grin on his face by the time Prime Commander called us all into his office. I pulled Mike aside as the rest of them left the kitchen. "A word, if you don't mind."
"Sure, what's up?" he asked me.
"What was the idea with Padma yesterday, telling her that I hit on all the girl Primes? You know I don't work that way."
He shrugged and gave me his easy grin. "Just eliminating the competition. She's a nice-looking girl, after all. I know you'd do the same to me, given the chance."
"Not cool, Mike," I said. "Very not cool. You know we have to be able to trust each other. Now, she won't stay in the same room with me for more than five minutes. She's probably afraid I'll try to rape her at the first opportunity." I stuck a finger in his chest. "This is a problem. You made it, you fix it."
His face hardened. "Or else what . . . Indigo?"
"I'm not Indigo right now," I said calmly. "I'm just Trevor, and you're just Mike. I'm telling you that the team's got a problem and you're the one who has to make it right."
He stared hard at me for a moment longer, but then he shrugged and gave me a grin. "All right, mate. No worries. I'll take care of it. Good as done."
"Just like that?"
"Just like that. I was wrong, you were right. Thanks for pointing it out." And with that, just like Shelley's rule says, we moved on. No hard feelings.
Chapter 11