by Chloe Garner
“I don’t know what to make of his daughters. There’s just so much going on there that we don’t know about.”
“Yes, there is,” Cassie said.
“So how do we find out?” Olivia asked. Cassie grinned.
“Why do you assume we’re going to find out?”
Olivia shook her head, surprised.
“You said that they didn’t want you here. And that you were going to make them angry. I just assumed that…”
Cassie watched her, and Olivia crumbled.
“I mean, I understand if that’s not our place, culturally. And maybe we shouldn’t be prying into things like that, just because…”
Cassie clicked her tongue.
“You need to learn the virtue of an honest question,” she said. “Sometimes understanding something is the best reason for doing it.”
“And sometimes understanding something ends a species,” Troy said, rather more pointedly than he had intended to. Cassie’s head snapped to stare at him, but he didn’t back down. “Look, I’m just as interested in going exploring and finding some rocks to flip over as you are, but you know as well as I do that leaving things well enough alone when they’re working is sometimes the best answer. And royal families always have politics.”
The corner of her mouth twitched up.
“And how often do those politics represent the best interests of their people?” she asked.
“What people?” he countered. “They aren’t even figureheads. All due respect, but they’re a living historical monument. Real-life reenactors.”
She tipped her head back and laughed.
“I missed you,” she said. “I always miss you.”
He shrugged, not ready to drop the point.
“Why go digging when there’s nothing wrong with how it works now?” he asked.
“And if you had evidence that there’s nothing wrong or that it even works now, you’d have an argument,” Cassie said. “But my instinct is that if they don’t want me here, simply because I’m Palta, it’s because there’s something here they don’t want me to tamper with, which just makes my fingers itch.”
There was a sighing noise at the door and Cassie went to open it, letting in a stream of Gana who set up a table in a quick whoosh of motion, then heaped it with food and vanished. She closed the door again.
“And breakfast is served. I’m going to go see how far I can get before I get in trouble. Eat up, but be ready to go when I get back.”
“Aren’t you going to eat?” Olivia asked. Cassie grinned.
“If I manage it, I’m going to eat at the kitchen. Wish me luck.”
And with that, she was gone. Troy watched after her for a second, then went to go see what was on the table.
“She’s going to get us killed,” Olivia said, not unhappily. He grinned at her.
“Better than being at the lab though, isn’t it?”
She hesitated to consider that, then she sighed.
“I don’t know, Troy. I like my lab. I miss your lab, but I like my new lab, too. Nothing moves. You can sit and just think.”
He looked around the marvelous room, his mind’s eye seeing the rest of the building, the external architecture, the surrounding forest, the city far below, and he couldn’t understand.
“It’s looking at a picture, when you could go see the place,” Troy said. Olivia smiled down at the table of food.
“Yeah, but sometimes when you go there, it smells bad and it’s full of tourists. A picture is prettier.”
He tried to see it from her perspective, but the foreign beauty of the space around them obliterated any chance he had of empathizing.
“I guess,” he said. Now she finally looked at him.
“You’ve been hoping for this your entire life,” she said. “Even when you knew you weren’t going to get it, you’ve been hoping for it. Some people aren’t as adventurous as you are.”
“You were so excited yesterday,” he said, going to sit back down. She pulled her mouth to the side and nodded.
“I know, and it’s not that anything has changed. It’s amazing here, and I know that it’s amazing that I’m going to be one of the only humans to ever see this place. I’m grateful. I am. But I woke up this morning and I wasn’t in my bed. And I was hungry, even though we basically ate all day yesterday. And I want to just sit and soak it all in and process. I want to write reports and go through debriefings, and tell people who weren’t here what we saw and what we did. But instead we’ve got another day. And it’s going to be just as unpredictable as yesterday.”
“More,” Troy agreed. There, at least, he could agree. She was watching him with a strange smile, biting her lip as though trying to keep the words in, the ideas. Afraid he wasn’t going to like them, even as she smiled at him.
“You could live on this, couldn’t you?”
He took a breath, not wanting to answer too quickly.
“I don’t know yet,” he said diplomatically, and she laughed down at her breakfast.
“You could. You’d be disappointed if we went home today, and you’d be heartbroken if you couldn’t leave again.”
That hit him like an anvil. Cassie had used the word ‘chained’ once, to describe that sense of not ever being able to jump again, hadn’t she? She’d done this for six years before they’d taken it away from her. He was hooked after one day.
“Yeah,” he said. “I would.”
She nodded, still not looking at him.
“It isn’t for everyone.”
“I guess,” he said, trying. He just wasn’t getting there. Even as he sat, it felt like energy was seeping into his body, driving him mad with stillness. There was an entire planet out there, open to him, and here he sat in a pretty but closed room, eating breakfast.
He had to keep his knee from bouncing up and down in his impatience for Cassie to get back and for them to do something. Something had to be next.
He ate.
It wasn’t much, but it was something.
The food was as foreign as it had been the morning before at the cafe, but sitting alone in a room with Olivia, it felt more like sustenance and a lot less like adventure.
It was good.
It was filling.
So he ate and he waited.
About thirty minutes later, Cassie returned, licking something sticky off her fingers. Ajilla was behind her, giving her an expression of perhaps exasperation, perhaps annoyance, maybe something else.
“I told them that we wanted to go explore Minan Gartal more today,” Cassie said. “Ajilla is going to escort us out.”
Troy stood, putting the leftovers from his breakfast back on the table.
“Thank you for breakfast,” Olivia said to Ajilla as they walked back down the white hallways. Olivia had been so enthusiastic yesterday, Troy thought. He’d been in shock, still trying to get his head around it, and she’d just been in it. And today…
“We will take our meals in the city,” Cassie said as they went out the front doors.
“You’re sure you don’t want an escort?” Ajilla asked.
“Oh, no,” Cassie said. “Exploring is so much more fun without one.”
“I’ll have your rooms ready for you tonight,” the Gana woman said, watching them quietly until they were all the way to the wall before she closed the doors behind them.
“Are we really going to the city?” Troy asked once they were out of earshot of the guards.
“Of course,” Cassie said. “You can’t miss Minan Gartal just because Kron and his family have some secrets to dig up. It’s one of the gemstone cities of the universe.”
Olivia seemed to perk up some at this, and they made their way down the awkward cobble path toward the city in a friendly silence.
*********
They spent the day doing cultural things. They went to parks, to a museum and a sporting event, to a performance whose nature Troy didn’t understand well enough to even put it into a category. The world of Minan Gartal wa
s a beautiful, amazing place full of languages his implant never heard enough of to translate, people of all manner of colors and shapes and characters with behaviors that didn’t even begin to make sense to him.
It was exhilarating.
They ate; Cassie placed a wager with someone about something complex and abstract that Troy didn’t quite understand. She acted like she felt bad taking his money when it paid out an hour later.
“His odds were nowhere near well calculated,” she murmured as she shook a handful of coins. “Anyone want a memento?”
“What are they?” Olivia asked, putting out her hand. Cassie dropped a pair of the metal disks into Olivia’s palm.
“Small units of money,” Cassie said. “What you’ve got there wouldn’t buy you a drink.” She looked over her shoulder. “Hard money isn’t in use very much around here, any more. It’s easier to steal. He’s probably illegal.”
“Then you didn’t take very much money from him,” Troy said. She laughed.
“Oh, no, this is the change above the amount he thinks will get him caught,” she said, jingling the coins in her palm and then slipping them away somewhere.
“Where’s the rest of it, then?” Olivia asked. Cassie held out her arm absentmindedly.
“Here,” she said.
“What does that mean?” Olivia asked, stopping to look at Cassie’s arm. Cassie laughed.
“Right,” she said, reaching across her body and picking at her arm for a moment. A strip of clear membrane pulled free; Troy recognized the tape that Jesse had had with the Dinalae.
“What is that?” Olivia asked, trying to get closer. Cassie let it go and it snapped back against her skin, disappearing on contact.
“Too advanced for you,” Cassie said.
“You actually believe that stuff?” Troy asked. She shrugged.
“Some of it,” she said. “If humans got a hold of the really good stuff… Look, we all just know that’s a bad idea, right?”
“Doesn’t mean we don’t want to see it,” Troy said. Cassie laughed, throwing her arms wide and startling a few people nearby.
“Enjoy,” she said.
It didn’t make him any less curious about the membranes on her arm and how they worked, but Troy did his best to move on.
In some ways, the Gana world was hauntingly familiar. There were families and people out with pets, impromptu games on the orange lawn, even a troupe of multi-species children chasing after a toy that might have been a ball a few thousand years ago.
At the same time, nothing was right. Nothing settled on his brain without some question of what it meant, what it was he was looking at. The flurry of population, one that now swirled around him, rather than being safely on the other side of a sheet of glass, was mesmerizing and disorienting, like looking for shapes in clouds or people in shadows. More than once, he almost bumped into someone because he was so busy looking at something else. Each time, Cassie snagged him at the last moment and he apologized his way away, feeling like a rube.
“You could spend weeks here and really not see much of it,” Cassie observed at one point.
“You said you were attacked the last time you were here?” Olivia asked. Cassie nodded.
“Shouldn’t be a problem, this time. They stalked us from the hotel, last time, because they knew it meant Jesse had money. They would have seen us coming down from the royal residence and know to leave us alone. That and Jesse killed them.”
“He what?” Troy asked. She looked back over her shoulder at something that wasn’t there.
“I thought we were going to die,” she said quietly.
“You thought you were going to die and he killed them,” Troy reiterated. She gave him a sly look and accelerated a fraction.
“He’s more dangerous than you’d guess,” she said. “They didn’t leave him any choice.”
“I thought you couldn’t kill Gana,” Olivia said.
“Oh, they can die,” Cassie said. “They just get insulted when you shoot them because it’s like calling them weak.”
“How did he do it?” Olivia asked.
Cassie shook her head.
“I’m not specifically sure. I have a few guesses, but I never asked.”
“You never asked?” Troy echoed. “I find that hard to believe.”
She laughed.
“No, of course I asked at the time. I just never asked, once I had the capacity to understand.”
There was a moment of quiet that Olivia finally broke.
“That’s kind of insulting,” she said.
“You expected me to be more empathetic because I used to be human?” Cassie asked.
“Do you miss it?” Troy asked her.
The long pause, like a held breath, told him he’d struck on a good question.
“I thought I would,” she said finally. “I spent all that time in all of those bodies, knowing that eventually reality was going to hit and I was going to want to go back. But I never really did. There’s too much out there in the universe to be disappointed.”
Troy played that back through his head a couple of times, trying to hear whether his Cassie would have said it, but it was close. He couldn’t be sure.
That bothered him.
He should have known. For sure.
He would have, before.
He would have missed being human, he was almost sure.
What was he, if he wasn’t human?
Olivia had asked Cassie something else, and Cassie was off onto a tirade that didn’t make enough sense to even guess at what had started it.
“Well, it’s time,” Cassie said, turning to face the mountainside. She stood quietly for a moment, then nodded. “It’s time.”
Olivia gave Troy a look, and he raised his eyebrows, shaking his head. He wasn’t sure what was going on any more than she was.
“Stay close,” Cassie said. “We’re about to disappear.”
“What does that mean?” Olivia asked. Cassie put a finger to her lips.
“It means that I’m about to do some Palta stuff, and I need you two to keep up.”
Troy’s pulse picked up. Cassie flashed him a look, one he knew from school. Glee. When they’d played war games, this was the look that meant that she was about to win, but no one knew it but the two of them. She flared her nostrils at him, then ducked into a crowd of families out enjoying the pristine weather, their language popcorning in and out of Gana in a bewildering mix of words. Troy grabbed Olivia’s wrist and followed.
The crowd around them barely took note as Troy struggled to follow Cassie, finally emerging from the chatty group at the corner of a building. Cassie was at full speed, and Troy kept Olivia moving as fast as he could without standing out. She turned down another street, this one narrower than any of the ones they’d been on, and she tried a door. It opened, and she stood back to let Troy and Olivia in past her.
“What are we doing?” Olivia asked. Troy shook his head at her, hoping that was enough to let her know that she needed to be quiet. She frowned at him, but it seemed to get across. Cassie waited, listening to something they couldn’t hear. He was guessing she was counting out time, but he couldn’t be sure any more.
After a couple of minutes she nodded and opened the door again, leading them down the empty street to another turn, and another one.
“Put these on,” she said, handing them cloth that might have been clothing. Troy handed the red-colored material to Olivia and kept the blue. Cassie shook her head.
“Backwards.”
They swapped and Troy started to try to figure out how to assemble the complex garment into its correct shape. Olivia stood.
“What are we doing?” she asked again.
“Sneaking into the palace,” Cassie said.
“How?” Olivia asked flatly. “And why? We’re guests.”
“And as guests, they watch us all the time,” Cassie said. “We need to get in there as unimportant people.”
“How?” Olivia asked again. Cassie fla
shed her a grin as she untangled a clump of straps that magically reformed themselves into a covering that fit Troy.
It felt a bit feminine, in a flowing, shapeless kind of way, but it was comfortable and it went over his clothes easily. Cassie frowned at him.
“You’ve still got that wrong,” she said.
“How?” Olivia asked.
“You’ve got no sense of adventure at all,” Cassie said.
“No, I don’t,” Olivia asked. “What are they going to do if they catch us?”
“For breaking into a royal residence?” Cassie asked with a shrug as she pulled a strap up and over Troy’s head. The garment relaxed again and he found that movement came easily in almost every direction. “They’d execute us.”
Olivia stared for a second before dropping the blue cloth on the ground and turning to face Troy.
“You’re just going to go along with this?” she asked. He paused to consider.
“She doesn’t want to die either,” he said finally. She gave him an exasperated look and he tried not to laugh. “She’s like Jesse, now. No one’s going to catch her when she doesn’t want to be caught.”
“She may be, but we aren’t,” Olivia said.
“You think she’d let something bad happen to us?” he asked, shocked. She widened her eyes at him.
“How many bad things did Jesse let happen to her?” she asked. Again, it felt too obvious.
“She’s Cassie,” he said. She threw her hands up.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Troy’s a better soldier than I am,” Cassie said distantly, looking around the corner while standing on one foot. “I don’t stay out of trouble well.”
“Neither does he,” Olivia complained. Cassie laughed.
“You have a point, there. But not like me.”
“How would you know?” Olivia asked. “You’ve spent most of the last, what, eight years on the other side of a jump.”
Cassie’s other foot came back down and she turned to face Olivia, her head at an odd angle.
“How would I know?” she asked. “How would I know?” Her head snapped straight. “For one, he just put on a slave dress without so much as asking what it was.”
“I’m asking,” Olivia said.