He rocked back and forth on the two legs of his chair and hummed loudly.
Jaguar muttered something rude at his noise.
He tugged at his shirt collar, and kept humming.
Jaguar lifted a hand and slammed it down on the table, making the beer dance and causing the legs of Gerry’s chair to slip out from under him.
He came down directly on his ass, and sat on the floor. Jaguar lowered her head and continued to brood.
Gerry swore softly, rubbed his tailbone and stood. “You want something stronger than beer?” he asked. “I’m heading toward the bar.”
Jaguar raised her face and stared at him, then through him. “I have to find him,” she said.
“Yeah,” Gerry agreed. He paused. Scratched at his balding head. “How?”
“I don’t know.” She wished she could at least get invisible the way he could. Then she’d sneak in to Fiore’s new program site and get her to go hunting. It was an empathic trick he’d tried to teach her, but she just couldn’t learn. He said it was a matter of ego. Hers was too big to hide easily.
And where was he? Here, or on the home planet? How could she decide which place to look first?
“Know anyone who keeps bloodhounds?” she asked.
Gerry snorted - his version of laughter. “I know a golden retriever.”
“Do they sniff?” she asked.
“This one does,” he said. “The Golden Retriever.”
She peered up at him. “Is this a person, Gerry, or some kind of weird fantasy?”
Gerry righted his chair and sat in it, this time with all four legs firmly on the floor. “A person. Pasquale. He’s a sort of a friend, I guess. From when - you know.”
Jaguar nodded. Gerry was a drug runner before he was a musician. That brought him to the Planetoids many years ago. He said his decision to stay here had a lot to do with the people he’d left behind, and wanting to continue to leave them behind.
“And Pasquale has dogs?” she asked.
“No. He’s a sniffer. Real good. They call him the Golden Retriever.”
Jaguar felt as if something interesting was happening at last. A sniffer was someone who had empathic capacity for finding people, information, things. Sometimes they worked for the home planet police. Sometimes they worked against them. It was not officially listed as a psi capacity because the testers couldn’t isolate it, but Jaguar knew sniffers used a combination of clear seeing and empathic contact that was very specific, very focused, and often very effective.
And Gerry knew a sniffer. Pasquale. If he was from Gerry’s past, he probably worked against the law. But right now, she sat on the wrong side of the law too, so what did it matter.
“Where is he?” she asked.
Gerry shrugged. “Knowing him, somewhere warm and sunny.”
“Well, can you find him?”
Gerry scratched at his head more, and sneezed. For him, that was a sign of deep thought. “You mean it?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Because,” Gerry continued, “he’s - well, he’s a mercenary. Not someone you’d - I mean, Pasquale, he’s a mercenary,” he concluded lamely.
“Is he any good?” she asked.
“The best,” Gerry said decisively.
“Then can you get him for me?”
Gerry twisted his nose around a little, as if tuning the dials of a radio, seeking the news. He clucked a few times. Then whatever egg he was hatching emerged.
“He gave me a coin. I did a favor for him, and he’s the kind of guy who likes to repay favors. Said if I ever needed him, I should cash in my chip.”
Jaguar lifted her beer to her mouth and emptied it. She put the glass down on the table hard, and ran a finger around the rim. Something like a plan began to formulate itself. She had people who would help her, and she was figuring out what kind of help she could ask for.
“Get him,” she said. “Now.”
Gerri shifted nervously in his seat. He didn’t know anything much more unsettling than Jaguar, unless it was Jaguar with an idea. “What’re you gonna do?”
Good question, she thought. She wouldn’t just wait around for a mercenary sniffer to show up. She’d see about tracking the stone Karena dropped. There was something about it. Something important. And she thought she’d like very much to catch up with Fiore, who had the eyes of a hunter if not the nose of a sniffer. If she could lead Jaguar to the processing plant in Connecticut, they’d have something like evidence to help Alex with.
“What I’ll do first,” Jaguar said, “is find me a good woman.”
“Huh,” Gerry said. “I never guessed that about you.”
Jaguar rolled her eyes. She pressed her hands to the table and stood.
“Hey. Where you going?”
She paused and looked down at him, as if he was already very far away. “I’ve got work to do, Gerry.”
“That mean you’re not singing tonight?”
“You can safely assume that,” Jaguar said.
“Damn,” Gerry said. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
Chapter 12
The earth was very brown and the sun was very bright. Somewhere between the two, the color green invaded him. It was in him and around him. Above him and below him. As they walked, Alex reached up for it. He held his hand up to try and touch it, wanting to know if it was something alive. An animal. A spirit. Matter trapped in color. Energy trapped in matter, waiting to burst free in its purest form.
Or perhaps eyes. Green eyes that pierced him with desire and called to him. Called to him. Eyes he knew, watching him.
But when he lifted his hand between the brown of earth and fire of sun, his foot caught on a root and he fell, his body slamming into ground with a thud. He lay there, breathing earth, with his eyes closed.
Ahead of him, the crunch of footsteps stopped, then started, growing closer to him. He opened his eyes and saw Brendan’s brown sandals, noticed that his toenails were long and curled down over the end of his toes.
“I think we should keep walking,” Brendan observed.
Alex lay still, aware of his own breathing, aware of his body as an entity that contained, him, aware that his thoughts and emotions were moving in circles he couldn’t contain. Time seemed to pass, but he wasn’t sure how much.
“What?” he asked.
“The wind,” Brendan said. “It’s rather peculiar here.”
Alex pushed himself to a sitting position and stared up at Brendan, who stood squinting toward the top of the tree canopy, his face pursed in disapproval. “I usually like the wind,” he continued. “It moves around objects intimately. But it’s peculiar here.”
Alex looked around. The world seemed to be returning. He saw trees and heard birds and the rustlings of animal motion. Colors recombined themselves with the life forms they were attached to, and Brendan’s voice was emanating from his mouth again, instead of occuring in the air around them.
He didn’t know exactly how long they’d been wandering the eco-site. No more than a few days if he judged by the growth of his beard and his hunger level, both of which were still minimal. He supposed he was somehow tending to all his bodily needs, though he wasn’t sure how or when. There were fruit trees here. Space enough to pee. Streams to drink from.
Brendan rattled something in his hands. “Here,” he said, handing Alex a bottle of pills. “Take one of these.”
Alex rose stiffly and unsteadily and took the bottle from Brendan. He looked it over. It was a standard nutritional prescription used with prisoners who stopped eating during their programs. It had Nance’s ID code on it, which gave Alex a small shock.
“Nance gave these to you?” he asked, surprised to hear that his voice still worked normally.
“Who?” Brendan asked.
“Nance. The woman you were with before.”
“Oh,” he said. “Her. Yes. She was concerned that I wasn’t eating. I told her eating was a sensual pleasure, and an abuse of The Mother. To eat off
her body in that way is so....incestuous.”
Alex opened the bottle and took one, swallowed it dry. “I see,” he said. A question niggled at the back of his mind. Something he wanted to ask that had nothing to do with Brendan’s strange philosophy. “Brendan, where do those stones come from? Did you bring them here with you?”
Brendan’s hand went to the pocket of his jeans and he pulled out one of the smooth gray stones, rubbed it lovingly. “They’re gifts. From the Mother.”
He turned full face to Alex and smiled. His eyes glowed softly behind his glasses. They seemed to swell and grow, increase in luminescence.
Alex felt the obliquity of earth inside them, the tilt of the axis and the swift motion. He felt himself coursing an orbit through space at 900 miles an hour. He put his hand out to steady himself, but felt himself falling like Alice into the rabbit hole, slow enough to watch the moon pass by, to see Jaguar’s face as he rolled past her, to know something was happening to him and he’d better make it stop.
It’s the stones, he told himself. He was falling, and there was nothing to grab hold of except Brendan, who held the stones.
Brendan was smiling, nodding at him. Not good, that nod. He saw it on the bridge. He was nodding and holding out his hand for Alex to grab, but he didn’t. He knew better by now. Instead he thought of Jaguar’s prime directive: if you can’t make it better, make it worse.
He reached up, pressed a hand against Brendan’s forehead, and whispered into him.
Brendan Farley - See who you are. Be what you see.
Motion ceased.
He stood still.
He stood still inside a very white room where Brendan lay still on a metal cot, and a woman bent over him, singing to him, smoothing his forehead, smoothing his hair. He closed his eyes and slept, and she stood back viewing him.
She placed stones in his pockets like small gifts, and left him alone.
Then, Brendan sat up and pushed Alex away. He felt himself falling again, faster this time, and through the darkness of space. The way down was long, and his resting place uncertain, but all the way he knew he was riding somehow secure on the backbone of the moon.
* * * *
Jaguar strolled through the door of the Supervisor and Teacher’s Building just as she had hundreds of times before. She pressed her thumb against the elevator button to give her imprint, and got on when the doors opened, requested the floor that Rachel’s office was on. When the elevator stopped and the doors opened, a guard blocked her from further progress.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m just passing through here.”
“No, ma’am,” the guard said, and continued to stand in front of her.
“Yes, sir,” she responded, and took a step up to his chest.
He walked forward, and she raised her right hand in a fist. As he watched it, her left hand reached for his more private parts.
“Jaguar,” a bright and frantic voice said.
She peered over the guard’s shoulder to see Rachel’s wild eyes staring at her. “Here for your things?” she asked quickly. “They’re in my office.”
“It’s not my things that were chiefly on my mind,” she said, looking down at the guard’s crotch.
“Ha,” Rachel said. “Ha ha. Well, yes.” She turned a cheerful smile on the guard.
“She’s not allowed in here,” he said gruffly. “I was told to stop her if her imprint came through.”
“She can get her personal items if she stays with me,” Rachel said, “and she will.” She grabbed Jaguar by the arm, pulled her down the hall.
“Xipetotec flay them all,” Jaguar said, “I can’t even get in the front door?”
“You’re suspended,” Rachel hissed back at her. “What did you expect? They’d just let you waltz in and take whatever information you want? They know you, Jaguar.”
She pulled her arm from Rachel’s grasp, and walked at a rapid pace next to her, head held high.
“What did you want, anyway?” Rachel asked.
“I want a location for Fiore,” she said. “And I want files on Miriam Whitehall.”
Rachel stopped walking, stared at Jaguar’s back as it moved down the hall. A few more steps and Jaguar stopped. Her shoulders lifted and fell. She turned around, faced Rachel. “What?” she asked.
Rachel stepped over to her. “Why do you want Fiore’s location?” she asked quietly.
“I have an important fashion question for her. Like what do you wear to break into a Lunar crystallization plant.”
Rachel blinked. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Very. I also want to find out if anyone mentioned a small stone found in Karena’s vicinity. Or maybe one in her pocket.”
“A stone?”
“Stone. Small. Smooth. Grey. “
Rachel cast a glance up and down the hall. “We shouldn’t talk here,” she said.
“Dammit, Rachel, why shouldn’t we? Haven’t I worked here for about six years? Hasn’t Alex been -” she stopped talking, breathed hard with her eyes closed.
“Tell me what I can do,” Rachel said.
Jaguar opened her eyes, looked at her gratefully. “Are you sure? I won’t be playing by the rules. You could get in as much trouble as I am.”
“I know,” Rachel said patiently. “Just tell me what I can do.”
“I need the files on Fiore, anything at all you can find on Miriam, and the stone Karena had. She dropped it, but maybe someone picked it up and put it in her personal effects or the evidence bag. If it’s there, get it out, but put it in a sealed box. Don’t touch it too much.”
“How come?”
“I think it’s what’s causing all the trouble. Meet me at Marie’s as soon as you can, okay?”
“The sooner you clear out of here,” Rachel said. “The sooner I’ll meet you there.”
Jaguar opened her mouth to say something that might begin to express how grateful she was, and found nothing to cover it. “Okay,” she said instead. “See you there.”
* * * *
It took Rachel less than two hours to get what Jaguar wanted. When she arrived at Marie’s house situated within the breeding complex, Jaguar and Gerry and Pinkie Horton were already there, sitting at Marie’s kitchen table, drinking coffee and eating bread warm from the oven. Pinkie lifted a hand and blew a kiss at Rachel, who smiled and flushed. She was still shy about having a girlfriend.
“Tea party?” she asked.
“Rescue party,” Jaguar answered. “Did you get anything?”
“Stuff on Miriam,” Rachel said, and gave Jaguar two discs. “Fiore’s in Normal house 7 with Peter Cooper.”
“Because they couldn’t find anyone less suitable?”
“He works with child killers,” Rachel noted.
“She’s not a child killer. She’s a hunter.”
Pinkie waved an arm at the table, inviting Rachel to sit. She found a place across from Pinkie and Marie moved from the stove toward Rachel with a basket of bread and a cup of coffee.
“Thanks,” Rachel said. “You joining us?”
Marie shook her head. “Just peripherally.”
Jaguar took a seat. “Marie thinks we’re nuts. I think she’s right.”
She surveyed the others. Gerry, looking vaguely interested in the proceedings when he wasn’t focused on buttering his bread. Pinkie, whose blue mohawk highlighted the green paint she circled her eyes with to ward off evil spirits. Rachel, looking far too normal to be sitting among them. And, of course, herself. Her long braid had bright red feathers hanging in it, and she wore the obsidian earring that marked her as an empath, as did her sage green shirt and soft sage green pants.
Marie was the next closest to normal, in her usual coveralls, her grey hair cropped close to her head, her hands rough with the years of tending gardens for food that went to the animals she loved more than any human.
Jaguar ran a hand across her face. She was about to ask all of them to risk their jobs. Maybe their lives. And while she was
accustomed to risking her own on a regular basis, she didn’t like to drag others along for the ride. She reminded herself that they were here as much for Alex as for her. His life was the closest to danger right now.
“Marie,” she said, “where’s 7 from here?”
“I’ll get a map,” she said, and exited.
Jaguar turned to Rachel again. “Anything about the stone?” she asked.
“Funny you should mention that,” Rachel said. “Nobody picked one up in the parking lot, but she had one in her pocket. She didn’t have one coming in. But she wasn’t the only one.”
“Fiore, or Terez?” Jaguar asked.
“Neither. The woman Alex is accused of murdering. Found clutched in her hand.”
Jaguar whistled, long and low. “Can you get it?” she asked.
“Not a chance. All the evidence went to a Board governor’s office. Miriam Whitehall. I did get a copy of the inventory from Karena’s effects, though. The one that lists the stone as there.”
Jaguar closed her eyes and smiled blissfully. “What do I owe you?” she asked.
“Your life. So don’t go throwing it away.”
“I have no plans in that direction,” she said. She turned to Marie, who came over with the map. Jaguar opened it as the others drew in close around her.
“There,” she said, pointing at Normal house 7. “Perfect.”
She smiled over at Marie. “A direct hit.”
Marie made a dismissive sound. “You have the devil’s luck, Jaguar.”
“What?” Gerry asked. “What’re you talking about?”
“Just something Marie and I cooked up earlier as a preliminary plan. We didn’t know if it’d work, but now it looks good. See how Normal 7 sits just behind the fence separating the breeding complex from the public zoo? And see how close it is to the jaguar habitat?”
Rachel picked up a piece of bread and began tearing strips off it.
“What’s the plan?” Pinkie asked.
A Lunatic Fear Page 13