It was as though the earth were just an extension of my paws. I had never been in the Andes before, but every rock, snowdrift, and bit of patchy mountain scrub called out its familiar presence to me, and my body simply reacted.
Before I knew it, I was neck and neck with Sol and about to pull ahead of her. That was when I slowed up to circle back and check on Seamus. It didn’t make any sense to try to outrun Sol, since she was the one who knew where we were going. Luckily, Seamus wasn’t injured or anything, he was just stranded on one of the smallish cliffs that I had simply jumped over at full speed.
Damn, it was good to be a cat!
I quickly scaled the ledge and sat next to him. He was still in wolf form, staring frustratedly at the cliff, which occupied a large section of the hillside and would take a while to traverse if he didn’t want to climb down the face.
I shifted to human and belatedly remembered that my clothes didn’t shift with me.
“Want to down-climb it as a human?” I asked, already starting to shiver.
Seamus glared at me with his amber wolf eyes and huffed a bit.
“Well, do you want to follow me down, then? I promise to go slow this time.”
Seamus nodded.
I happily shifted back to my snow leopard and started my descent, but this time, instead of running flat-out, I picked my way carefully down the sheer rock wall, making sure to select ledges that were big enough for wolf paws, and only making movements that would accommodate a wolf’s somewhat more rigid center of gravity.
This time, when I got to the bottom, Seamus was right behind me. With another playful howl, he took off towards Sol and Trevor in the distance. I let out a yowl of challenge and followed close on his heels.
~~~
When we got to Sol’s cabin, we were all a bit out of breath, even Trevor, which was weird since he had been flying and had needed to circle back a few times to make sure he didn’t leave us all in the dust.
“It’s the altitude,” Sol said, after we’d all filed, panting, into a tiny wooden cabin perched precariously on the side of the mountain we’d all just descended, surrounded by nothing more than a bit of mountain scrub and some boulders. “We’re at around 6,000 meters. It gets to anyone who’s not from here, or even those of us who haven’t run at altitude in a long time.”
Sol was, of course, naked as she said this, and busy rifling through a closet in the one bedroom that opened off of the living/dining/kitchen area, which constituted the majority of the cabin’s square footage, aside from a rather large porch that clung to the top of the cliff ledge opposite the cabin’s front door. None of us had bothered to carry our clothes down the mountainside, and we all stood naked and shivering in the common area waiting for Sol to kit us out.
Sol indiscriminately tossed clothing at us from inside the closet. Long wool underwear tops and bottoms, snow pants, coats… nothing terribly comfortable, but plenty that was warm. I grabbed the first thing that looked like it would fit and started pulling on layers. In a few minutes, we were all wearing enough clothing to be toasty, despite the lack of insulation in the tiny cabin and the swiftly plunging temperature outside.
Since I was the first one outfitted from the closet ransack, I set about starting a fire in the wood stove that acted as the center of the small living/dining/cooking area. The furnishings in the cabin were sparse—two low wooden couches with blankets piled up on them to make them comfortable and two large chairs. No real table to speak of, but a few small side tables next to the chairs and couches. A battered-looking upright bass leaned in one corner, looking somewhat worse for wear, and bright, woven tapestries hung on the walls, while a large alpaca rug covered most of the floor. Everything centered around the wood stove, as you might expect in a place that didn’t have central heating.
Once the kettle was heating on top of the wood stove and we were all settled on the floor around it, Sol spoke again.
“We can speak freely here. MOME doesn’t know about this place.”
Trev’s eyebrow rose, and Seamus and I looked between him and Sol for clarification.
“Why would you want a place that MOME doesn’t know about, if you work for them?” Trev asked.
“Because,” Sol said, taking a deep breath before continuing, “I have been working for MOME for the past two years as part of a larger plan to help take MOME down from the inside.”
For a long moment, the howling wind outside was the only sound.
“Wait, what?” Trev and I said in unison, while Seamus merely stared wide-eyed at Sol.
“I know it sounds far-fetched, but my family… we’re a big family, and well connected. My Abuelita has never liked the way MOME interferes with her business, and… well, we have some very personal reasons to want MOME to go down.”
Knowing what I already knew about MOME and what they’d done to my own family, I didn’t have a hard time believing that, but…
“It strikes me as more than a tiny bit suspicious that you’re trusting us with that information when you haven’t even known us for a full day,” Trev said.
I nodded.
Seamus was silent.
Sol sighed again.
“I know,” she said. “This isn’t how I’d hoped things would go down, but now… I don’t know that crazy redhead who teleported us here, and for the record I was under the impression that a teleport that far was impossible, but here we are, less than ten kilometers away from MOME’s South American Headquarters, and—”
“What?!” Trev and I shouted at the same moment, though perhaps for different reasons.
“We’re incredibly close to the Bolivian offices. My Abuelita’s territory runs right alongside theirs. I don’t know why your friend brought us here. I was hoping to have a few days of helping you evade MOME’s other agents to help bring you over to my side. I had a tidy little plan all in place, knowing what MOME was likely to throw at us and how helping you avoid it would make it easier for you to trust me…. But here we are, so what’s the point in waiting?”
Unable to process everything Sol had just dropped on us, I turned to Seamus.
“Seamus, it occurs to me that you just kind of got dragged into all this. What are your feelings about MOME?”
Seamus shrugged.
“No one I know is a huge fan of them. We hear stories of the kind of crap that they pull all the time, but no one in my family has been personally affected by it…. That I know of, anyway.”
Something in his face told me there was more to the story than what he’d just said, but far be it from me to press someone to relive whatever trauma an agency like MOME might have put them through. I took a minute to process what I’d heard so far. It was hard to be thrown into all of this and know how to feel about it. I had very strong feelings about an organization that had taken my brother from me at such a young age, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I was missing some vital information. After all, I’d only been part of this world for less than 24 hours.
“If MOME is so unpopular, how are they still in charge?” I asked the room at large.
“They resort to blackmail a lot,” Sol said. “And it’s not as though they’re elected and can be voted out. They’re huge, they act like they’re in charge everywhere, and… woe betide the people who don’t acknowledge their jurisdiction.”
“But if they’re really that blatantly evil, surely people would just rise up against them,” I countered. “They can’t outnumber the entire magical population can they?”
“Well, they have a surprisingly good PR branch. They spin their misdeeds in ways that most people buy into. And besides, the average magic user doesn’t run afoul of MOME very often. It’s people that MOME deems ‘dangerous’ that get their basic human rights violated left, right, and center. So, most people find it easy enough to tell themselves that MOME is there to protect them, and not question things. Add to that the fact that they actually do stop real criminals, as well as people they just don’t think should exist, and it makes it difficult
for most folks to believe that they aren’t as benevolent as they claim. If you told the whole world tomorrow that your brother was abducted at the age of eight and sent to a research facility at the base of an Andean mountain, most people would be outraged for as long as it took them to find out that he's a Phoenix.”
“But he couldn’t even turn into a Phoenix when they took him!” I objected.
“That doesn’t matter. MOME would play up the fact that they suspected he would turn into a restricted creature when he came of age, and ignore the fact that they were playing a genetic long shot to even think that was a possibility. Everyone’s afraid of the restricted creatures; they don’t know any better. MOME has gone out of its way to play up the possible dangers of shifters who can access some of the rarer creatures, for centuries.”
“Ok. Fine. So MOME are a bunch of assholes and have been for a while. Were they ever not assholes?” I asked.
Sol shrugged. “Hard to know for sure. Revisionist history and all. They’ve been around for a very, very long time.”
I sighed.
“Trev, do you feel up to talking about what happened to you? I mean… you know… not like ten years of catch-up right this second, but… maybe a highlight reel?” I tried to smile while I asked it, but I was too worried.
You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, I silently offered, just in case.
It’s fine. Most of it isn’t too bad.
“They came. They took me. I conquered, much later, by outsmarting them with computers.”
That reminded me so strongly of the Trev I’d grown up with that it made me laugh out loud.
“Seriously though, Vic. I have a strong hatred for MOME, not so much because they did anything terrible to me, besides steal me away from you guys, but mainly just because they took so many of us. They never let us spend too much time together, so it’s hard to be sure of numbers, but there were easily a hundred of us in my age group alone. Spread out, there were probably closer to five hundred. Five hundred families destroyed. Five hundred children raised by strangers. It just… it never ceases to piss me off.”
“How did you escape?” I asked.
Trev eyed Sol for a moment, as though weighing what he should say in front of her, but then shrugged and started talking.
“I suppose it will all be in my file the next time you go to work anyway,” he said to Sol. Then addressing the rest of us he continued, “I hacked the system, set off a bunch of viruses that made it impossible for MOME to monitor what was going on, and crawled out a conveniently overbuilt ventilation shaft. Easy.”
“Ha! Really? Could you seriously crawl through the ventilation system without collapsing whatever section you were in? I thought that only worked in movies!” I said, while Sol’s eyebrows rose to her hairline and Seamus smiled warmly at my brother.
“It shouldn’t work outside of a movie, but for some reason MOME built theirs strong enough to hold a grown man,” Trev explained.
“That’s weird,” I replied.
“It’s an emergency escape system,” Sol said, surprising all of us. “They built the ventilation system that way so that if part of the mountain collapses and the main entrance is cut off, there’s an alternate route out of there. Also, ventilation below ground is serious business. You don’t want that getting cut off, or people will die, so it’s a seriously robust system.”
“That makes sense, I suppose,” I conceded.
“What I want to know,” Sol said, “is why, if you have the ability to shut down the entirety of MOME’s security and monitoring systems, you didn’t escape earlier?”
Trev’s smile faded at that question.
“I could have left anytime in the past, oh… probably eight years, certainly the last five, but I didn’t…” his voice trailed off as he looked at me and then quickly away. My heart twisted in pain as I considered what might have kept him from escaping.
“You thought they would hurt us?” I asked.
Trev nodded, and wiped at the corner of his eyes. “For a long time they insisted that they had access to you and could get to you anytime if I didn’t do what they asked, or if I tried to escape. I believed them until I was finally able to hack the system well enough to find your file. Then I realized that they didn’t actually know where you guys were. That was a huge relief, and it certainly made me more confident in my rule breaking and trouble making efforts, but...”
“Why didn’t you come find us?” I asked, my heart breaking all over again for the things my brother had gone through in the past ten years.
“I didn’t want to lead them to you, Vic! I had nowhere else to go. What would I have done when I’d gotten out of there? Lived on the streets? I wasn’t brave enough for that. At least with MOME I had a roof over my head and food in my belly. But I knew I wouldn’t be welcome anywhere in the magical world. What Sol said about the restricted creatures is true. If anyone found out I was a Phoenix I would be ostracized, or worse, and certainly whoever found out would report me to MOME and then I’d be right back where I started. I knew that I would have eventually become desperate and tracked you guys down, and… and I probably would have led MOME right to your front door.”
I suppressed a quiet sob and nodded my head. He had a point, damn it.
“So, what changed?” I asked, when my voice was under my control once more.
“Whatever you did to tip MOME off to where you were,” Trev said. “The files I had flagged popped up with a new last known location. Which meant that MOME already knew where you were, so I did too. If MOME knew where to find you, then I had no reason not to try to get to you first. But I guess I didn’t make it.”
We all stared at Sol, but she just shrugged.
“My department found you because of the report filed by the Flagstaff police department. MOME has a database of ‘dangerous’ individuals that it cross-checks with every police database in the world. I’d been assigned to your file months ago. Knowing a bit about your parents, and what had happened to Trevor, I decided you were likely to see my family’s side of things, so I did everything I could to get my superior to send me after you instead of someone else in my department. My family is keen to recruit as much help as we can get, and I thought offering to help you rescue your brother would get you both on our side.”
We were all silent for a long moment, while we contemplated what all of that meant. I still had a million questions for Trevor, but I didn’t want to make him recount every detail of his entire existence for the last ten years right away. He’d made it clear he wanted to give as few details as possible.
“So now what do we do?” I asked, eventually.
“Now,” said Trev, “we go rescue my friends.”
TREV?
Nothing.
Trev?
“Damn it.” I slapped my hands against the slightly damp rock beneath me and bounced my head off the rock wall behind me. Thankfully, rather than the urine I had feared it would smell like, it just smelled like wet rock and a bit of mold.
Trev, it’s fucking pitch black down here. I can’t even see my own hands.
I was supposed to be able to reach Trev from here. We weren’t sure what the effective range on our telepathy was, but we’d tested it up to a kilometer earlier, and he shouldn’t have been anywhere near that far away.
Is the rock messing with us? I asked the void.
And then I snickered. The Rock doesn’t want you to talk to your brother. The Rock will crush you after gratuitously referring to himself in the third person!
It was a shame Trev wasn’t getting any of this, because I was hilarious. Well, Trev would have found it hilarious, anyway. We used to watch WWF reruns with our dad—Mom preferred MMA.
I wondered how the rest of the rescue mission was going, now that I was locked up in this dank bit of dungeon.
It had been harder than I’d expected for Trev to bring us all on board with the rescue plan. To my surprise, it had been Seamus, and not Sol, who had been the most dif
ficult to convince. Considering how often Seamus seemed determined to ‘rescue’ me, whether I needed it or not, I figured he’d be all for having a chance to play hero. It had only taken Trev explaining how many young kids were still being picked up by MOME every year to convince Sol to join in on the rescue mission. Apparently, while she didn’t seem overly worried about how people Trev’s age were still held captive by MOME, she couldn’t abide the thought that small children were still being abducted. Seamus, on the other hand, objected to the risk to all of us, and I couldn’t help but notice and be annoyed at how often he looked at me while he listed the possible ‘perils’ of taking the offensive and entering MOME territory. I happily informed Seamus that he didn’t have to go at all if he was worried about the supposed perils, and he’d seemed half-inclined to take me up on my offer, until Trev admitted that part of the reason he was hell-bent on staging a rescue was to release his ‘girlfriend’ from MOME’s grasp. That had made me want to pepper him with questions and a light hail of sibling teasing, but I refrained, since we had more important issues to address. Suddenly, Seamus was all in favor of the rescue mission, a change in stance that completely mystified me, but which I didn’t bother to question at the time. We had spent the next few hours planning the details of our mission.
I sighed, wishing there were enough light to see by. I wanted to confirm that my disguise was still in place.
In what I was coming to understand as “standard Gwen behavior,” the woman had shown up just before we were within sight of MOME and insisted that everyone but Sol needed a disguise. She had then turned all of us into pale-skinned, blonde-haired, blue-eyed people. Or at least, that’s what she’d done with Trevor and Seamus, so I had to assume it was what she’d done to me. All I could see of my own disguise was the pasty white skin she’d given me. I had to admit that if Seamus and Trevor were anything to go by, no one was going to recognize us from this little adventure, assuming our disguises lasted for the duration. How Gwen had even known where we were, or what we were up to, was still a mystery to me, but I won’t pretend we didn’t appreciate the disguises.
Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series Page 9