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Her breathing shuddered, her eh wire in a wind The problehter was how fast it could turn into tears And she was totally, couilt and tears

So she squashed it down hard, until she recovered the steadying numbness she had worked so hard to achieve

She turned a deterray cap of tousled curls looked as unsenatorial as you could get But Bird was Godiva’s favorite victi in very dramatic ways

Godiva’s vast readership expected herup the nehodunnit And to get that vividness, Godiva turned to Jen, Bird, and Doris, the other three of what she called their Gang of Four—friends who’d met in the Baker Street Writers’ Workshop Bird was the dead victiood at acting, played a wide variety of roles—if she wasn’t behind the camera

Jen, six feet tall and built like her Viking ancestors, was invariably the villain

For this scenario, they had the benefit of two extras, Bird’s husband Mikhail, and Doris’s new boyfriend Joey, who had offered to serve as cameraman

“Okay” Godiva sonna beJen, who is a cyber-enhanced Big Evil Bullets are no good I want you to shoot at Jen two or three tiive the cop a super-villain oes down, and Mikhail, you come to the rescue, and we see some hand to hand What I really want here is karate razzle-dazzle Since I don’t know spit about et it all down on paper Got it?”

Mikhail was taller than Jen—not many people were, htened with the quiet sreatme to be in one of your scenes I look forward to the result”

Godiva cackled “Well, by the tinize yourself in the book But thank you for playing along Ready, everybody?”

Jen cast a quick glance around, assessing the space she had to move in They stood on a side-street in Playa del Encanto, the small town on the coast of Southern California where Jen and her friends had lived for , before there was any traffic in the sleepy little town Behind them lay the Baker Street Pastry Shop, owned and run by the current moderator of the writers’ workshop Godiva had promised to treat the

Jen pushed away fro to do martial arts, she’d worn her black practice T-shirt and loose white yoga pants instead of her usual jeans and top Mikhail, she noticed, wore dark slacks and a loose shirt that she suspected was his workout outfit—for a guy in his seventies or so, he was as fit as anyone at her studio