Karma Patrol Read Online Free

told you that you can stop inviting me to tag along on your outings,” Luke replied. “I don’t have any interest in being dragged out on the town, and you and Patel will have plenty of fun without me.”
    Aaron raised his hands in surrender. “Just checking,” he said innocently.
    Luke resisted the urge to roll his eyes. This was the part of the conversation when Aaron would rack his brain for a change of subject, trying to divert his partner’s irritation to another target. It was football season, and Luke’s favorite team had just fumbled their way to a crushing defeat, so the most likely topic would be–
    “Hey, did you see the Giants game this weekend?”
    Luke looked away from the computer screen long enough to pin him with a disgusted glare. Aaron laughed; he didn’t care about football, and he never missed an opportunity to poke at his Brooklyn-born partner when his team lost.
    “See, that’s why I only watch baseball. At least the Yankees don’t make it their goal in life to disappoint me all season long.”

    Jade sipped her coffee as she meandered through the flow of humanity on the sidewalk, deciding she would be best served by doing a preliminary circuit of her catchment area before nailing down her plan of attack. Most catchment areas fluctuated by a few hundredths of a point on a regular basis, but the overall yearly average was all that mattered to the Powers That Be, so it was customary to let the little fluctuations happen without worrying about them. If she was going to keep her area’s karmic balance consistently low between now and the time the selections for promotion were made, though, she would have to control those fluctuations, which meant she would have to expend a lot of extra effort.
    She started off down Seventh Avenue, planning to sweep its length down to the south end of her territory. If she walked each avenue, including Broadway, for the full length of her catchment area, it would take her about two and a half hours. That was assuming she didn’t run into any trouble spots that required her intervention, of course. Sometimes righting a tangled karmic path was as easy as her deception with Interrupted Path Guy and Expensive Suit Guy, but she’d worked other path interruptions that had taken hours to resolve.
    Even worse were the ones she couldn’t resolve, either because she wasn’t there to see it happening, or because she didn’t move fast enough to prevent the interruption from severing the path. When a karmic path was severed, the subject’s plan would reset, selecting a new karmic consequence for the person in question and adjusting the degree of severity to make allowances for whatever the interruption had been. If a person whose wallet was supposed to be stolen by a certain street thug wasn’t standing in the right place at the right time, a hapless stranger’s wallet would get stolen instead, and that created further imbalances for both the thief and the hapless stranger in addition to the continued negative balance of the person whose karma had created the need for the theft in the first place.
    Jade did her best not to think about the tangled karmic webs spun by the people around her, who bustled from place to place unaware of the threads that tied them all together. The big picture, the so-called Grand Plan, was too complex for any regular human being to wrap their brain around, and she didn’t want to become one of the account enforcers who went insane trying to figure it out. It was enough for her that it worked, and she was perfectly happy to go on enforcing the status quo without knowing how or why.
    She was crossing Fiftieth Street when she spotted the telltale bright pink aura of someone from Interpersonal Relations, and she quickened her pace to catch up with Shannon Carter before the other woman reached the transit station.
    “Shannon!” she called, raising her voice to be heard above the crowd of tourists.
    The raven-haired beauty turned, looking