by Meg Ripley
“Problems?”
“Yes.” Caden turned her chair back toward the window; the conversation had taken a turn toward the more intimate, and she wasn’t interesting in pursuing it. Unfortunately for her, Umi seemed happy enough to converse with her back.
“I heard that you’re ranked top of the Minders---even the long-range marksmen.” His voice was dripping with congeniality, and the pleasant tone needled under Caden’s skin. “What problems could you have?”
“Take a guess,” Caden snapped. She tapped her left wrist cuff again, bringing up the shining projection screen and tracing their flight path with her steely gray eyes again. “What’s a cyperson’s worst nightmare?”
“Something is overwhelming you,” Umi said softly. “You’re experiencing bursts of emotion.” He paused as Caden fidgeted in her seat and dropped her eyes. “You’re not decaying, or they wouldn’t have sent you on a mission. You’re having something go off in your empathy board, something severe enough to trouble you deeply…but if that were true, how could you be so good at your job?” Despite the hypnotic quality of his voice, the words dug into Caden’s brain like hot knives.
Twenty-five minutes, Caden thought, squeezing her hands into fists to keep them from moving. Just twenty-five more minutes. “You know all this, but no one told you the details? Nobody thought to tell you about my Hulk mode?” She swiveled away from the screen and locked eyes with Umi again, squaring her shoulders.
Umi blinked slowly and let out a noise of bewilderment. “I’m not familiar with the term,” he said. “Can you explain?”
Caden leaned back in the plush seat, surprised that there was any sort of gap in the Hyppo’s knowledge. She assumed all of his kind would know everything about Earth; their lifespans were much longer than humans even now, and many of them took up Earthling studies as a kind of special interest. “The Hulk is an old-world figure from Earth media. He was a human scientist who was trying to replicate the traits and abilities of another superhero---you know that term?” Umi nodded. “He was messing with some chemicals, and he accidentally made himself radioactive.”
“So, he died?” Umi’s face frowned up, turning his handsome features into a mask of confusion. “What made this heroic?”
Caden laughed and shook her head. “He didn’t die. This is media, remember. Films and comics.”
“Comics,” Umi repeated slowly. His eyes blinked shut again, and Caden realized he was trying to locate the word in his memory bank. Hyppo people didn’t have a collective consciousness, but they could store massive amounts of information and memories in a bank-like area of their minds that they had evolved to access at will. It was, humans assumed, the reason they appeared to have such extraordinary powers; their bodies had been evolving for so long that what looked like simple harmony with the universe was actually just incredible control over their own biology and environments, right down the quarks in their electrons.
“Comics were still images of scenes, put together to form stories. They often had text over the images to help tell the stories,” Caden explained, suppressing the urge to laugh again. I’m teaching something to a Hyppo who is at least three times my age. “Everyone has been all about motion for so long that I’m not surprised you haven’t had a reason to learn about it.”
“I see,” Umi said. He leaned forward and propped his arms on his bare thighs, and Caden noticed the definition in his powerful frame for the first time. At first her was gaze was purely for pleasure---he was all long lines and compact muscle wrapped in a beautiful shade of light brown, like antique brass. Then her training kicked in a millisecond later. Almost instantly, she found two ways to disable him: by attacking his eyes and taking out his knees, which were a weak spot on his otherwise strong body, or jabbing through the bone surrounding his delicate system of organs to squeeze his heart until it stopped beating. Focus, she reminded herself. You’re supposed to protect him, not assess him as a threat.
Umi pressed on. “So, in these comics, the radiation didn’t kill him?”
“Right. It gave him powers, so that whenever he was angry or became threatened, he would turn green and swell up. He became this massive, muscle-bound beast who could beat all of his enemies into the ground as easily as you or I might swat a fly.” She watched Umi process all of this, his face slowly smoothing out as he worked through her speech.
After a moment, he smiled gently and sat up straight again, and there was an undercurrent of pride in his speech at having figured it out. “So, your Hulk mode is what happens to you in a stressful situation? You also swell to an enormous size and possess incredible strength?” His smile faltered when Caden laughed again.
“Not exactly,” Caden chuckled. “I get a lot stronger and faster, but as far as I know, I don’t bloat or change color.” She sighed, then felt a sliver of dread slip into her bloodstream when she realized what she’d said. She hoped the Hyppo wouldn’t notice, but it was a vain hope. He wasn’t as slow as the humans who had surrounded her for years, and he didn’t have the same hesitancy a cyperson knew at the idea of being rude or insensitive, so he pounced on her phrasing immediately.
“As far as you know?” His broad shoulders squared, and he gasped softly. “You’re not aware of your actions during these…Hulk moments?”
Caden closed her eyes and gritted her teeth as an icy tide of regret and shame washed over her body. “No,” she said weakly. Deep breaths, that’s how you do it. Just keep breathing. Would Selina Kyle let this break her cover?
“But isn’t that dangerous?” The concern in Umi’s voice was palpable. “You could hurt yourself, or someone else. Why do they let you keep doing this?” There was barely a pause between the end of his question and the moment he found the answer. “They don’t know. The humans don’t know.” Umi’s eyes widened in shock, and this his face settled into a sober expression that made Caden’s body go numb with despair.
“Please don’t tell them,” Caden begged, fighting to keep her vitals under control as fear spread through her body. Not now, she thought. Not now!
“The other cypeople know they would suspect me of decaying or corruption,” she gasped. “I would be destroyed as a precaution.” Tears sprang to her eyes, and her vision grew blurry, but she needed to make him understand. I need to be strong. “So, the first time it happened…the first time I blacked out, I came to after killing a dozen meteor crabs, the two-hundred pound ones, like it was nothing. My team just stood back and stared at me, and none of them asked what happened. They all knew. It’s the same every time. No cyperson ever asks how I do it, because they all know that I don’t know.” Caden remembered the terror in their eyes---identical to the burning anxiety she felt after washing the slime of the meteor crabs from her body. It seemed like it would never come off. There had been bone and gristle, too.
She kept talking, unable to stop now that she had begun. “They know to stay out of my way, but that first time, I nearly ripped a teammate’s arm off. If it had been a human...” she shook her head roughly. “We just patched her up, and when the Commander asked how we’d gotten the job done without discharging any weapons…” her lungs seized up, and Caden shut her eyes, willing more coolant into her system to try to stop her impending collapse. Deep breath. Bands of tension were constricting around her body, and she was trembling like a leaf. “When he asked…”
“You lied,” Umi said softly. She heard him remove his safety belt and wondered why.
She realized why as soon as she slumped forward, sagging against the straps in her chair so the cloth bit into her neck. A long moment passed, and she wasn’t aware of any sound or motion. Then she felt two strong hands on her shoulders, and the next moment she was being pushed upward, and it was as though a knife had torn through the rings of rubber closing her airways down. She took a great, shuddering gasp, and then another, and a third; after a few more lungfuls of air, Caden’s body had cooled and her pulse was back to normal. She opened her eyes to see Umi’s face looming inches away, his brillian
t blue-green eyes glowing as he poured a cool, healing energy into her body.
“Are you all right?” Umi asked softly, and his breath washed over her like a warm breeze; it was oddly sweet-smelling, as though he’d been eating something sugary. Caden nodded weakly, and Umi slipped the safety straps from her shoulder. “This should help you breathe a little better. The straps tightened because the ship got knocked around a bit by some debris.”
Caden wondered why she didn’t feel it, and then she felt her cheeks grow warm with embarrassment. She must have blacked out, but because there had been nothing to target, her body just succumbed to the darkness. Damn. What’s wrong with you?
“You were out for several minutes,” Umi said, confirming her suspicions. “Not very long. You twitched around a bit. Is that normal?”
Caden shrugged and looked around the ship, wondering how close they were to the destination now. When they got to Xondux, Caden was supposed to take him directly to his planet’s Hall of Meetings to be officially debriefed on her new assignment. The time couldn’t come soon enough; Caden was starting to feel antsy having only the stars and a beautiful alien Council member to gaze at. She was about to tap her wrist to check their progress again, but the ship lurched violently to one side, and she collapsed on to the floor, feeling her skull collide with the steel of the ship as it turned.
Umi toppled into her, and their heads knocked together painfully. Her vision went white for a moment, and then the cabin was filled with the screeching sound of static; her body vibrated from the force of it, but it wasn’t painful at all. The reinforced ceramic of her teeth was emitting a gentle hum, and she looked up to see Umi gazing at her with all of his eyes wide with astonishment. Then she noticed the red spot of a planet rapidly approaching the window of the vessel.
“Umi?” Caden felt herself speak, but she didn’t hear it---she didn’t hear anything anymore, in fact. The ship was still wobbling, and the realization swept over her as soon as the sparks began to rain down from the ceiling.
Caden crawled over to Umi and dragged him over to the back of the ship with one hand. She still couldn’t hear, but she was shouting anyway, trying to tell him what she was doing while she performed the actions so he wouldn’t be afraid; it was part of her training she couldn’t unlearn. The entire ship started to vibrate as Caden dug her fingers into a steel panel and ripped it away from the wall, showering both of them in sparks. She reached behind her and grabbed Umi’s shoulder, flinging him into the escape pod she hoped would still work while the ship was breaking apart. Umi covered his face as she sailed in behind him, and he peeked at her from between his golden-brown fingers as she pulled the hatch door shut, plunging them both into darkness. Please work, she mused internally, not even sure who she was praying too. Odin’s son, please let this work.
Caden slammed her palm into the top of the pod, and there was a second where it seemed to do nothing. Then the pod flared to life, illuminating all the system displays and dousing them in soft pink light.
Eject? Asked the glowing screen in front of her. Y/N.
Caden hit the Y button and threw her body across Umi just in time for the pod to shoot away from the ship. The vessel exploded in a massive cloud of fire. Caden thought she saw another asteroid hit its side as it was engulfed in flames, and then there was a second impact as the spherical pod broke through Xondux’s atmosphere and crashed into the ground. Caden’s last action was to curl her body around Umi’s, hoping her five feet of super-reinforced steel and hyperplastic foam would be enough to save them.
****
For the second time that day, Caden opened her eyes to find a breathtaking visage inches from her own. Umi’s eyes were glowing again, and Caden felt a gentle heat suffusing her body. She tried to raise her head to see what was happening, but found herself unable to move; she contented herself with moving her eyes instead. She could tell she was on her back, and Umi was straddling her body with his hands outstretched and moving a few inches above her. Confusion tinged her thoughts, and then she realized he was the source of the strange heat she was feeling. It was sapping the ache from her skeleton, and smoothing over the raw edges of her skin. He’s healing me, she thought. She watched his hands move above her, then let her eyes drift away. She saw tiny hairs on his forearms, and she noticed a barely perceptible movement of the muscles in his rigid pecs. His abdomen was taught and smooth, narrowing down to a slim waist before the kilt stole the rest from view. The muscles of his thighs were bunched, as well, probably tensed because of his concentration.
Caden thought it was their proximity, but she had a sudden urge to reach up, seize the back of his head, and press her lips to his, perhaps nibbling on the skin of his bare shoulders and chest for good measure. The urge intensified, and it occurred to her that the air was a little harder to breathe; Umi’s eyes were glowing brighter, his skin shining like polished brass. Then the glow faded and the alien spoke, startling her although she couldn’t show it.
“Welcome back.” Umi smiled gently, and Caden’s eyes snapped up to his. “You took quite a beating for me. Thank you so much, I really can’t express my gratitude enough. You should be fine now, but you might have taken some damage in the crash that I can’t sense yet.” The glow was gone, and he lowered his hands and stood up. Caden caught a glimpse of a tuft of dark green curls beneath his kilt before he backed away, and something like lust stirred in the lower part of her body before she batted it down. Focus! Caden didn’t have urges often, and rarely twice in one day; most cypeople had sexual urges about as often as they got angry, once or twice a month. What was wrong with her?
She sat up slowly, suspicious of the lack of pain in her body. When she was sure she could, she stood on her feet, craning her neck to examine all of her angles. Her suit was unharmed, and the only things broken seemed to be the actual projection lens and the metallic headband that held her communication device. The backup com was lost, too; she saw the wreckage of the pod lying in a burning heap some two hundred feet away. Then Caden gasped as she saw the red clay of the ground, the gentle motions of the grasses in the distance behind them, and the twin suns in the sky, realizing exactly where they were.
“How did we get here?” she asked uncertainly.
“I teleported us,” Umi answered. “Seemed smart to get away from the fire. How are you feeling?” He took a step toward her, sweeping his triad of eyes up and down her body quizzically, as though he knew something about cyborg crashes that she didn’t. Caden ignored him, a thought forming in her head. She still had a job to do, after all.
“We’re almost to your meeting hall.” She spun in a slow circle, scanning the horizon for the landmarks she knew would be there. “This is the Blood Desert, and it’s only fifty miles from the hall, even if we’re on the other side. Less if we’re further north, which I think we are, if that’s the Ibi Oasis.” Her mind was whizzing through her options, and she was glad she spent so much time training her instincts to make up for what could go wrong.
“You know my planet’s geography well,” Umi said. “But do you know its wildlife?”
“Sure,” Caden said, smiling as she turned to face him. She felt confident and in control, and a little light-headed. “You guys have Bezoar and Bezoar variants. They’ve pretty much wiped everything else out.”
“And do you know what Bezoar are?” Umi asked patiently. Caden bristled at his tone; he sounded like one of her old teachers trying to make her see why she was being childish.
“Little fuzzy guys,” Caden said shortly, tapping one of her boots in the sand and crossing her arms over her chest. “Look like fat, round cats with too much fur. Usually have two or three mouths, and will sometimes merge into one creature if they’re badly hurt in a group. That’s where the variants come from.” Caden put her fists on her hips and narrowed her eyes at the Hyppo. “What’s the big deal? Didn’t you hear me talk about those huge crabs I killed?”
“You’re forgetting their most deadly quality.” Umi’s dark green hair r
uffled in the dry wind. “They’re electric. What if you get shocked and die?”
Caden snorted. “I face death more often than you think, Umi. I’m a Minder. It’s my job to look out for danger and dispatch of it. I can handle anything that comes our way. If not, you can get yourself out of here.”
“What if you get shocked and corrupted?” Umi asked, his voice low and pleading. He took another step toward her, and Caden wanted to take a step back automatically, but the urgency in his gaze stopped her. “What am I supposed to do then?”
The question stopped her; she hadn’t expected him to be so concerned, even though his kind were natural bleeding hearts. “Again, you get yourself out of here. What’s the big deal? Come on, you have a meeting to get to.” She started to take a step around him, but he put his arm out and caught her waist. The movement was too intimate, coming from him, but rather than be upset, she felt a frisson of desire roll across her skin. Her heartbeat sped, and Caden froze and turned slowly toward him, locking her stormy gray eyes on his trembling cerulean irises. She still didn’t feel any anger, or even any fear over why she didn’t feel anger. All she felt was a slowly strengthening desire to move closer and kiss the full lips that looked so deliciously soft.
“I can’t leave you,” he whispered. “Caden. I just…couldn’t.” He swallowed, and Caden tried to figure out what had changed between them---and what had changed about her. She stepped toward him, and he kept his hand on her waist while she stood squarely in front of him. Nothing about him made her feel nervous, annoyed, or made her want to look away. Earlier she had been jumping out of her skin, and now she was being touched by him…and actually enjoying it a little, if the tingle in her waist was to be trusted. What had changed when she was knocked out? What happened to her while she was being healed? The answer hit her in the gut right on the heels of her question.