by Watts Martin
“I know. I just want you to remember that you have help.” Sky bites her lower lip, two fangs gleaming against black flesh, then sets down her glass and gets up. “I need to start cooking.”
Gail grins. “Before I left, most of your dishes involved pressing combochef menu buttons.”
“Honestly, most still do. But I’ve learned to cook for friends. You remember Travis and Nevada, don’t you?”
“Travis Duarte? Oh yeah.” The stag transform had been both the first hoofed totemic she’d ever met and her first crush. She still doesn’t see many hoofed animals used for transformation templates; it’s about the most difficult and expensive transform to do short of faking non-mammals, and creates a host of practical problems ranging from hoof care to how you deal with narrow or low doors—or chandeliers—when you have goddamn antlers. She didn’t know any of that then, though. She just knew she liked watching him. A lot. And after she got up the nerve to speak to him, more than watching. It was almost too bad he’d been her first kiss: nobody since had measured up. As most teen romances did, theirs had plummeted from the highest highs to the lowest lows in a ludicrously short stretch. Later they’d become friends again, and kept in touch after she left New Coyoacán, for a while.
But Nevada? “I don’t remember a Nevada growing up, though.”
Sky pauses in the kitchen, tilting her head. “No, she wasn’t here then. She said you met her on Panorica. She used to be…oh, what was it. Linda, I think? Linda Lamport. You must have kept in touch.”
She can feel her eyes widen, her ears stand straight up. “The cisform woman I rescued from Solera.” She’d been working at a salvage yard Gail’s boyfriend managed; when Gail went there to buy her first tow engine, she learned Leon’s father, the yard’s owner, was pathologically anti-totemic. The aggravated assault charge Squarejaw had brought up came out of the resulting standoff. So had Linda.
They’d become friends, but Linda seemed fixated on totemics and New Coyoacán and maybe just a little on Gail specifically. Their relationship hung in an uncomfortable quantum state for a while, until the rat moved onto Kismet full time and the waveform collapsed. “Uh, no. We didn’t keep in touch very well.” It’s not a surprise she’s ended up here—tailchasers often do, although they rarely stay—but taking a new name suggests more than infatuation. There’s no legal requirement to do that after a transform, but many people do. “What’s her form?”
Sky’s in motion again, getting down kitchen utensils, pulling out ingredient packets and setting them on the counter. “Vixen. Gray fox. She’s very pretty.”
Of course. Those are the pictures she kept coming back to in fashion magazines, the examples she’d ask about. God, Gail should have given her much more support. Something else to feel guilty about. “No problems from transforming as an adult?”
She shakes her head. “None I’ve heard about. You didn’t know about any of this? It’s been years.”
“No. Honestly, I didn’t think she’d want to see me again. Are she and Travis a couple?”
Sky nods. “Married, and both of them want to see you again.”
“What, did you just casually tell them I’d be in town for a day or two?”
The wolf snorts, dumping a couple of the packages into one of the two sauté pans she’s set on the cooktop. Onions and garlic, from the scent. “No, I did not. But you do come up in conversation.”
“I can’t imagine I come up very often.”
There’s the reproachful big sister look. “You could make the effort to keep in touch.”
Dammit, she will not react to that she will not react to that her ears just lowered, didn’t they? “So could they.”
Now Sky’s ears lower fractionally, and she looks down at her cooking without responding. Pureed tomatoes join the other vegetables.
Gail wriggles her nose and watches as butter goes into the second pan, along with squash and corn and mild chiles. “This is starting to look complicated.”
“It feels like it is, even though it never looked that way when mom made it.”
The scent’s becoming something new, something specific. No, not new. Old. Familiar. It doesn’t click until Sky takes the casserole pan out and starts layering ingredients. Sheets of tortilla, filling from one pan, filling from the other, drizzle of sour cream, sprinkle of salt and pepper, repeat. “Oh my God. You’re making Pastel Azteca.”
“It’s not Judith’s recipe. I never had that.” Sky bites her lip again, without looking over. “But it’s as close as I’ve been able to get.” She slides it into the oven.
“I haven’t had it since…since I was twelve.”
Sky straightens up and flashes Gail a self-conscious smile. They’d looked for packaged versions when they lived together, but never found one. Then the wolf had gotten hung up on some meat-centric diet fad and stopped looking. Gail had tried making it on her own once, and had ended up with a screaming fit, two ruined pans, and an order for a combochef the next day.
“I don’t know if anyone on Panorica has ever even heard of it.” Gail shakes her head. “I looked a couple times, but I didn’t know it was as rare as it is.”
“I hope you still like it.”
She takes a deep breath, and memories rush in with the scent: a seat at a wooden table in the kitchen, high and huge to a girl of ten, looking across at her new and strange and impossibly tall fifteen-year-old wolf sister, both sets of young eyes lighting up as her mother sets down a steaming baking dish. “I do.” Her throat’s threatening to close up, but she’s not crying, not at all, she just has to dab at one eye.
If Sky notices, she doesn’t say anything.
Chapter 13
Squinting, Gail pushes herself up on her elbows, then sits up the rest of the way, kicking off the sheet and sniffing at the air. The sheet slides off the sofa to puddle on Sky’s floor.
The last time she’d woken under natural light streaming in from a window had to be the day of their last big fight over Kismet, shortly after Gail’s nineteenth birthday. That night she’d slept on her ship, and the next day she set off for Panorica, paying movers to collect her belongings and ship them after her. She hadn’t spoken to Sky again for over a year.
What’s woken her, though, is the smell of coffee, a dark roast and strong brew, saturating the air like over-applied perfume. There’s a thick, sweet undertone to it which takes her a moment to place: sweetened, condensed milk. Her mother never drank coffee at home without adding a spoonful, and Gail started drinking it like that very young—it wasn’t until years after she’d left that she ever tried coffee straight, and not until years after that that she learned to like it for what it was on its own.
She rescues the sheet and folds it. She recognizes this one, the worn light violet floral pattern, the scents of three homes and two owners. When she’d moved to Panorica she’d found sheets that looked almost the same, but hadn’t known that she’d need to buy ones labeled as claw-safe. She’d woken up to half a sheet and a dozen cloth strips.
“Good morning.” Sky’s voice comes from the kitchen area.
Gail stifles a yawn as she pulls her shorts back on over her underwear, stands up and finds where she’s put her shirt. “As far as mornings go, yeah. I shouldn’t have let you talk me into sleeping here.”
“We were up past midnight, Rattie.”
“Yeah.” For the first time in a very long time, no fights. Shared memories, at first carefully chosen to avoid pulling one another’s triggers. That somehow led to talking about mom’s vintage cloth dolls, at least two generations old if not three, and Sky’s insistence that Gail should finally take them. That led to more than one cry, more than one hug, and more than one glass of wine.
She woke up once during the night and stared at the ceiling and thought: what in the hell are you doing here? This is exactly what you didn’t want. You haven’t been called Rattie in nearly two decades and you haven’t missed it. But just what is it you don’t want, Rattie? To have her ask why you’ve kept a
hundred-odd thousand kilometers between you and the one family member you have left in the entire fucking universe?
“Are you going to wear the same clothes again?”
“Unless we go back by the hotel, yeah. They’re clean.”
“I still have those old clothes of our mother’s in the back closet. I can’t wear any of them, but I’m still sure you could.”
Still? Like the dolls, Sky wanted to send them to her years ago and she said no. She wouldn’t be able to wear them either, not because they wouldn’t fit but because, like the dolls, she’d burst into tears if she looked at them. “It’s okay, really. These are fine.”
“All right, if you’re sure. I thought we could meet Nevada and Travis for breakfast, then get a status report from Jack and Ansel.” She walks around the divider wall, carrying a tray with two mugs.
“Wow. Okay.”
Setting down the tray, Sky lifts her brows. “We don’t have to meet them if you don’t want to.”
“No, it’s okay, really.” She’s just having a whole lot of past broadside her in a very short amount of time.
The coffee’s good, although not quite as good as Brio’s and nowhere near Ansel’s, and the condensed milk makes it taste like hot melted ice cream. It’s markedly better than what she stocks on Kismet, and she’s going to have to kick Ansel’s ass for making her aware of that again. She doesn’t have the income to be a coffee snob.
Income. Money. She feels her whiskers droop. Wasn’t the bank supposed to get back to her already? No, they didn’t promise anything beyond sending the case to the resolution department.
“What’s wrong?”
Damn whiskers. She can tell from Sky’s tone that the wolf figures it’s something about her, or New Coyoacán, or the coffee, or something else that’ll lead to a fight. “Nothing. Um. Well, thinking about financial—issues I need to deal with.”
“Worry about your job after this is over.”
“It’s not that. Somebody I used to know on Carmona accused me of fraud, and he’s the one committing fraud but it seems like he’s got somebody at the bank in his pocket. I’m kinda stuck until the resolution department gets back to me.”
The wolf lap-sips some coffee, looking contemplative. “I’d try to help, but Carmona doesn’t hold Ring mediators in very high regard, and even if they did I can’t testify to any business you conducted then. Please tell me you had a judiciary while you were there?”
Did she? She squeezes her eyes shut, thinking. “Yeah. Yeah, I’d joined up with the one on Panorica by then.”
“They’re the ones you had on retainer until you stopped paying them this year.”
“Right. But—how do they help? I did stop paying them.”
“All they need to do is provide archive access to your accuser’s judiciary, to show your side of any disputed transactions.”
“How’s that do anything for me? Tom’s probably accusing me of something now.”
Sky shakes her head. “If he was it’d already have been thrown out, unless you did business with someone on Carmona without knowing it. It has to be something that your bank couldn’t immediately disprove.”
“Huh. I didn’t know judiciaries would do that for former clients, just current ones.”
“They’ll charge you a processing fee.”
“Terrific. All right. Kis, you there?”
Of course she is. She always is. “Yes, Gail.”
The wolf’s ears perk up. Can she actually hear that? No. She’s just reacting to Gail suddenly speaking to her imaginary friend.
“Send all my old account information with Lopez and Bowens to my bank, and attach a note saying to contact them for the dispute resolution with the judiciary on Carmona. Ask them to deduct the processing fee directly from my account with them, but ask me for clearance if it’s over five thousand. And copy Sky on everything.” She bets they won’t limit what they can withdraw from her account.
“Yes, Gail.”
That was easier than she thought it’d be. That almost certainly means it isn’t going to be easy at all, but maybe it won’t boomerang back for another day or two.
Sky’s still giving her an odd look.
“You know I can do that with Kis. It’s not that weird to have a vocal interface implant.”
The wolf grins in a way that sets her at ease despite showing way too many teeth, an expression Gail used to think of as the Canonical Sky Smile. “It’s you using her as a personal assistant.”
“She’s a pretty good one. More functional than any home hub I’ve seen other than maybe Ansel’s, and his isn’t nearly as usable by people who, well, aren’t like Ansel. Uh, you’re not upset I copied you on it, are you? I figure you might be able to catch something fishy I miss.”
“No, that’s fine.”
“Great.” She takes another sip of coffee. “Have you gotten in touch with Travis and Nevada yet?” Nevada. Nevada. That’s a name she’ll have to get used to.
“I told them we’d meet them there at nine.”
“Oh.” A glance at Sky’s sensibly digital wall clock reveals it’s already eight-thirty-five. “When do we have to get going?”
“The café’s in Midtown. It’s on the way to your hotel. Sort of. We should set off in ten minutes.”
Which Sky will measure to the second. “Got it.”
If Midtown had been called “Midtown” when Gail was growing up, she never noticed. The businesses all look new, but in a shabby/chic new-place-in-old-building fashion she sees a lot on Panorica. Just like there, it’s fallen out in a typical mix of boutiques and restaurants and workspaces. The Starlight Café takes up a corner facing two streets restricted to pedestrians and personal scooters; a sign outside proudly announces its upcoming fifth anniversary party, a week from next Saturday.
Gail pulls up Linda’s presence information in her HUD to see if she’s already at the café. It’s only after it works—redirecting the lookup to “Nevada Argent”—that she realizes it shouldn’t have. Not Linda anymore. Is she that public about who she was? No, not if she’s changed her family name, too; you do that if you don’t want it to be trivially easy to find who you were. Gail must still be on her priority list. Way to make her feel just a little crappier about herself: if Nevada was still on her priority list, she’d have known about the name change when it happened.
Also, Argent? Really? How many other gray/silver foxes and wolves have that somewhere in their name? Not that any other gray-furred totemic couldn’t use it, but it sure seems like a dog thing to do.
Anyway, L—Nevada, Christ, do not screw up and use her old name—Nevada’s here. Travis is here with her. Somewhere. She stops at the café entrance and scans around, but Sky strides on past her, waving.
The restaurant’s interior is bright and open, high ceilings, dandelion yellow walls and polished stone floor, round wooden tables with metal chairs. About three-quarters of the tables are full and about three-quarters of the clientele are totemics. Sky’s waving at someone. Someone’s standing up and waving back. Nevada.
As they approach, the vixen smiles broadly, but her blue-gray eyes betray her uncertainty. “Gail. It’s been…a lifetime ago. Almost literally.” If she hadn’t known who Nevada was—used to be—she couldn’t have connected that smoky voice back with Linda’s, but it’s the same cadence she used to have. And the same nervous laugh.
“Yeah, it has been. I’m sorry I didn’t…” Didn’t what? Didn’t know what to make of her obsession with totemics? Didn’t recommend someone for her to talk with about species dysphoria? Didn’t do a better job of being that person herself? “You’re absolutely stunning.” That, at least, is unequivocally true. She takes the fox’s hands in hers and leans up, kissing her nose.
Nevada’s ears shift forward and her tail starts to wag.
“And you’re still as attractive as I remember you, Gail.”
She hasn’t looked to her right, but she knows the voice—deeper and richer than she remembers, but unmistakab
ly Travis. Older, yes. But she’d still recognize him in an instant. He hasn’t aged well, he’s aged spectacularly. Broader shoulders, bigger arms, bigger pecs, a face that’s gone from youthfully round to handsomely chiseled. Those magnificent, absurd antlers are bigger too. As he stands up she wonders if he has trouble fitting through some doorways, but he looks strong enough to just shoulder his way through.
“Thank you. You’re, uh…wow.” That was kind of a flirtatious opening, not just because it’s been fifteen-odd years but because his wife’s sitting right next to him and God his wife had a crush on Gail way back when and this is all beyond awkward maybe she’d just better not say anything. Also the only thing in her mind right this second is more wow which is a whole lot less witty than she wants. “It’s really good to see you—”
She gets cut off by the stag pulling her into a hug, her cheek pressed against the fabric over his chest. “It’s great to see you, too.”
When she’s released, Sky’s giving her a look that might reflect disapproval or might reflect amusement. Or both. Damn enigmatic wolves.
As they sit down again, Gail picks up the menu, glancing over it. She starts to select the orange juice, then sees they have mimosas. It’s a mimosa morning. She circles that with her finger.
Nevada leans forward. “So you’re still a salvage operator? And you’re living on…um…the Kismet, isn’t it?” The vixen has a mimosa already. Travis has a big glass of boring unadulterated orange juice.
“Yeah.” She flips the menu over. True vat-grown bacon, a footnote proclaims. “As opposed to what, fake vat-grown bacon?” she mutters.
Travis laughs. “As opposed to plant-based. A lot of the meat off the Ring has little or no animal protein in it. Vat-grown meat takes up more resources, and—” He stretches his arms out, as if embracing all the resources they have here that the rest of the River doesn’t.
“Travis is an agronomist.” Nevada sounds very proud of this.
“Does vat-grown meat count as a crop?”
He grins. “It involves a lot of the same work to produce.”