by Wesley Chu
Aarav, who was teaching a beginners boxing class, locked eyes with her. He looked confused. “Uh, what?”
Ella crossed her arms and stomped her feet. “Are you telling me you forgot?”
The big man looked crestfallen. “I must have forgotten.”
That poor stupid guy. Ella felt awful for putting him in this position. She promised she’d make it up to him later. She turned to the Brit and shrugged. “Heart as big as a whale. Brain as big as one too.”
Hamilton frowned.
I do not believe that metaphor works. A whale’s brain is–
“Hush, alien. I get it.”
“Well, I wouldn’t dare interrupt your plans,” said Hamilton “At least I know where your priorities are. However, this is important. We need to head back to the construction site and retake some shots.”
Tell him you will do it yourself.
“Can I? I don’t know how.”
What are you talking about? You are Ella Patel, the samrãjñī of Crate Town. Of course you can. I will guide you if you need help.
Hamilton did not look pleased when she relayed Io’s orders. He offered to come with her, and then when rebuffed, insisted. The man became insubordinate and came uncomfortably close to becoming aggressive. The spat between the two of them grew loud enough she noticed both Manish and Aarav inch closer.
Finally, Hamilton threw his hands up and stomped off. Ella didn’t bother hiding her grin. Frustrating the snobby traitorous Brit was a new form of enjoyment for her. She nodded at Manish and Aarav in thanks and went back inside the gym.
One thing nagged at Ella as she began to eviscerate the wooden practice dummy. What was Hamilton looking for? It was obvious he was looking for something specifically, but what? And what could he hope to accomplish going back for more surveillance?
Decoys. It has to be. He is trying to grab false intel to mislead us.
That had to be it. She stopped mid-slash. “So how do we know what’s real and what’s fake?”
Unfortunately, we will need to acquire detailed pictures of everything and compare its location with our satellite tracking, and then shoot it through analysis.
“I have no idea what you just said. You might as well have been speaking Korean, which, by the way, can you speak it? I’ve always wanted to learn. All the good Karaoke power ballads are in Korean.”
Focus, Ella. It means we have a lot of work cut out for us. First thing tomorrow, the Prophus is putting you out in the field.
Ella grinned as she began another set of knife exercises. She was moving up in the world.
Twenty-Six
Promotion
I feel bad not bothering to remember the names of my first few vessels. Unlike some who remember every damn vessel they ever joined with, I went through mine as if they were disposable. Let me see.
My first human vessel was one of Khat’s oarsmen shortly after he killed my whale vessel. That partnership lasted all of four minutes. His name was Torgeir or Torgo or something. We both kind of freaked out and he jumped into the ocean and drowned.
I managed to return to the boat and inhabit another human, I forget his name. This time, I stayed silent and watched and waited for an opportunity to communicate with him. When I finally did, he slit his own throat that very night. That was a poor omen of things to come.
* * *
The next morning, nearly five months since the day Io first joined with her, Ella ran her first solo job as an operative. She worked herself up to the point of hyperventilation as she readied her gear the prior evening, and ended up tossing and turning the entire night. In the morning, she threw up her breakfast five minutes after finishing it.
She left the house before dawn and made her way west across Crate Town toward the gulf. Ten minutes into her trek, she considered turning back. Not because she was too nervous or scared or had changed her mind, but because she had stashed so many knives on her person that they weighed her down. A few of the handles clanged together, making her sound like a busted wind chime whenever she took a step. It was also uncomfortable.
“I really need to go see Ando today to get some sheaths made,” she grumbled. “I don’t know if it’s safe for me to sit down with all this crap on.”
Who told you to pack every single knife you own? I told you to only bring three.
“I was worried I’d miss and run out.”
They are knives. You can reuse them.
Ella looked back the way she had come. She could just see the tip of her cluster at the end of the block. Maybe she should…
“Oh, forget it,” she sighed. “I’ve already gone too far.”
What? You are four blocks away.
“I know.”
Ella continued west, making good time while the streets were still mostly empty. She wouldn’t be so lucky on the way back. Crate Town was already waking up: children carried pots on their heads to fetch water, women hung wet clothing over lines, men stoked fires in metal drums and fire pits, and vendors pulled wagonloads of vegetables and scraps toward the market.
Ella stayed alert, treating every sight and sound as a potential threat. Behind her, a rolling metal door clicked open. A woman yelled at her husband. A dog howled. A blue piece of tarp hanging loosely off a roof slapped the side of a container as it blew in the wind.
You are taking this a little too seriously. You are going to get tired out working yourself up like this.
“I’m a secret agent now. Isn’t this what I’m supposed to do?”
Just relax. You being this jumpy is making me jumpy.
That only made Ella feel even more anxious. She reached the edge of the construction site within the hour and followed the outer fence southwest to the end near the water’s edge. There, Io had her lie down near the tip of a mound of garbage and walked her through how to use the secret agent photo and video recorder. Twenty minutes later, she was done.
“Wait, what? That’s it?” she exclaimed, feeling a little short-changed.
That is it. We can go home now.
“I got dressed for this? Gods, it took me longer to sheathe all my knives.”
It is your fault for working yourself up into a tizzy. I do not know what you thought you were going to do your first time out.
“I strapped twenty knives on me!”
No one told you to prepare to invade Pakistan.
“I feel like this job is incomplete if I don’t get to at least throw a knife at someone, or something.”
Arm a girl and suddenly she thinks she is ready to take on the world. Come on, go home before a patrol catches you loitering and asks questions. You will get your chance to stab someone tomorrow.
“We’re doing this again?”
Every day until further notice.
The next day, Io brought Ella to the same place and had her take the same photos, taking special notice of a truck bed that held several large curved dome-shaped panels. She did the same thing the day after that, and the next. For an entire week, Ella would come to this exact same spot near the top of a pile of refuse and record the types of machinery and materials parked under a wall-less building with a triangular A-frame roof.
By the end of the fourth day, any excitement and thrill she held for the job of being an operative was crushed by the sheer drudgery of the tasks. Io added a few more bits of information to acquire: snapshots of ships off the coast, the names of the supply companies on the sides of trucks and vans, and anyone going in and out of the buildings who didn’t look like a nobody.
The construction crews started early each day. Ella even saw Deputy Minister Kapoor walking the grounds several times, and entering and exiting buildings, particularly a busier finished one in the back corner next to the really giant building that was still being built. Io was really big on getting shots of the minister, which felt weird to her because the man’s mug was hanging off a giant poster on one of the construction billboards. Still, she did as instructed and clicked away at the minister as if he were a Bollywood star
and she a paparazzo.
A couple of times, she caught a few shots of that strange-looking blonde woman touring the site with an entourage trailing close by. She grabbed a few shots before Io told her to move on and focus more on the minister. Something about the woman piqued her curiosity though. She seemed completely out of place. Who was she? What was she doing here?
For one thing, her hair was so blonde and shiny it glowed like a light bulb. Ella wished she had hair like that. She had never had long hair. It wasn’t a good idea in her line of work with people always grabbing at her, not to mention it probably wouldn’t be very hygienic in Crate Town. Who knew what bugs made their nests–
Can you focus on the task at hand and worry about hair later?
“Sorry.”
Ella moved on, climbing down a mound of shattered appliances and furniture and up a hill spiced with rotten food. She moved onto the impressive pile of moldy clothing stacked two stories high and then was forced to wade through a lake of… she didn’t even want to know what it was filled with.
Io’s confidence in her grew by the day. By the second week, Ella was spending most of her days surveying the entire site, from the main complexes in the south to the current Dumas construction area all the way up to the docks. She enjoyed this process and almost felt like a real spy, except when the job was painfully, tediously boring. Soon, she had her favorite spots surrounding the entire construction site picked out, and every day she made her rounds, snapping at the work and documenting the daily changes.
In the first two weeks, she had come across a patrol three times. All three times, they were extraordinarily easy to avoid. Those teams of three guards, wearing mismatched clothes, looked more like dockworkers than soldiers, and they seemed more interested in talking and smoking and kicking cans than actually patrolling. Each time, she stayed hidden, took a couple of snaps of them with her camera, waited until they passed, and then moved onto her next position.
It made her wonder again how an old expert like Bijan got caught. Poor guy must have just not known the terrain. She began to beat herself up again for not accompanying him, at least for the first day.
If I beat myself up over every defeat, I would have time to do little else.
“Yeah, like what?”
I would rather not talk about it.
“Give me an example.”
If you must know, I was one of the advisers to the chief architect for the Maginot Line.
“What’s that? I don’t remember this in your stories.”
We are still working our way through the Dark Ages. The events involving the Maginot Line happened way later.
An image of several round concrete forts flashed into her head. They reminded Ella of a movie she once saw about little people who lived in homes buried underground. “They look cute. What were they for?”
It was a defensive line to repel a German invasion.
“What happened?”
Uh, the Germans just drove around them.
Ella laughed so loud she worried that the patrol that had disappeared over the next mound would hear. She covered her mouth and retreated into a refrigerator missing its door. She stayed there for fifteen minutes and waited for the coast to clear.
As the minutes ticked by, Io clarified some of the dreams of her glorious career inhabiting humans. If anything, it comforted Ella that the Quasing weren’t all-knowing and powerful, that they were just as culpable and mistake-prone as any human.
“So, explain this thing with these first humans? How did you know their language if it was your first time?”
That was part of the problem. I could not speak with this man. Having been used to certain types of animals for so long, the transition was difficult.
“You couldn’t just read his brain and pick it up?”
Assimilating human thought takes time. It is often like reading a book. That is why I did not know everything about you right when I joined with you.
“I get it. So what am I thinking now?”
Active thoughts are much easier to pick up. You are thinking about trying that new restaurant that opened just outside of Crate Town. I warn you, I do not think you will take well to fried chicken.
“Is chicken from Kentucky bad?”
It is not actually from Kentucky.
After the chatter from the patrols had died, Ella crawled out and made her way to Metal Mountain at the far northern end by the Tapi. There, on the south shore of the river mouth a ways from the docks was a giant mountain of broken containers piled five stories high.
This was where the docks discarded their unused containers. During the early days of the war, when any semblance of order had broken down, the docks and the ships that unloaded there began to dump empty containers at the northern refuse site. Eventually, a cone-shaped mountain of empty cargo containers grew, complete with tunnels and crevices and caves.
Back when Ella first became homeless after the Vadsar Air Base had fallen, she and hundreds of others had sought refuge in Metal Mountain. Unfortunately, the mountain also attracted the sort of people who found the complex tunnels useful to hide in. Now, most residents of Crate Town stayed away from Metal Mountain unless they were conducting shady business.
It gave Ella the perfect vantage point for her surveillance, and she spent the rest of the day hidden near the tip of the mountain taking dozens of photos of the construction site. Over the course of these day-long jaunts, she and Io finally fell into a rhythm. She soon learned that she could get a lot more accomplished and with less effort if they worked together instead of butting heads all the time. It was also a lot less exhausting.
Good communication is key. You will learn that we often share the same goals.
“Are your goals to eat and make money?”
Well, not directly, but–
“Then we really don’t have the same goals.”
What if I can guarantee that working together will lead to more food and money?
“Hmm, if you put it that way, sure. Seventy-thirty split?”
Whatever you say, Ella.
Working with others was new to her, and for the first time, Ella discovered she enjoyed having a partner, especially as her surveillance runs grew longer. It was nice having someone to talk to during those long boring stretches, and she had to admit, albeit reluctantly, that Io gave pretty solid advice. She began to trust the alien, which was a difficult thing to earn from someone who survived on the streets. As long as Io knew who the boss of her body was, Ella could see this partnership working out.
I am the brain, you are the muscle?
“Hah, fat chance, alien. More like I’m the muscle and the brain, and you have an advisory role.”
How about you are the brain and the muscle, except when I have advice you need to follow, and then you follow it.
“All right, that sounds good. Wait, you’re trying to trick me.”
I would never do that.
Those thoughts lingered as she lay in bed and studied the moonbeams that poked through the small holes of the ceiling. It had been less than half a year since Io had come into her life and already, things felt so different. It was weird, but Ella could barely remember how she had lived before that fateful night. She murmured a blessing to Emily for bringing her Io.
For the first time since her mother died and her father abandoned her, someone had her back. Manish had become the father she always thought fathers were like. Aarav was the big brother she couldn’t stand but knew she could lean on if she needed, and Io was the imaginary friend who wouldn’t shut up but Ella knew she would miss if she ever disappeared.
Really? You see Manish as your dad, Aarav your brother, and I am a talking teddy bear?
“Hey, that’s a step up from my previous opinion of you.”
Fair enough.
“If it makes you feel better, you’re also my teacher now too.”
That does. Thank you.
“So what am I going to dream about tonight?”
Where
did I leave off? Oh yes, my hosts were dropping like flies. By the way, I am not trying to be flippant about killing humans. Your kind is just really hard to keep alive…
Twenty-Seven
New Management
Next was the midwife named Agata. Then the woodcutter with the long beard, and then the young human experiencing puberty. That last one was the worst. They all suffered tragic and quick deaths. It was a very confusing time for me. None of the creatures I inhabited before had ever tried to kill themselves.
That is a very distinctly human trait.
I asked Khat why I was not able to keep my humans alive while other Quasing could, and he explained that most Quasing with human vessels had thousands of years of experience within them, and in the Cro-Magnons, Neanderthals, and primates that came before them.
Coming in late, I had a much steeper learning curve.
* * *
Shura hit send on her tablet and watched as her instructions were wrapped with several layers of encryption and dispatched. It was time to put the wheels in motion. Her gaze lingered on the screen at the little graphic of the message being folded into a locked chest and disintegrating into the ether. Who said the Genjix did not have a sense of humor?
That graphic makes no sense. Whoever in Security created it is wasting time and resources and should be disciplined.
“I take that back. We really don’t have a sense of humor.”
Shura had been in constant contact with this Riseevar and had negotiated her own deal, superseding the arrangement Surrett had made. Whereas the minister had dangled vague promises and strung the Prophus operative along, she didn’t mess around and set firm deliverables. So far, Surrett had been squandering this resource and only using the double agent to run interference and counterintelligence on the Bio Comm Array project.
Shura needed and wanted to catch something larger and much more significant. If this Riseevar could deliver her that, then she would bring the defector into the Genjix fold with a guaranteed elevation to moderately high standing. That was the price of admission.