The Walls of Orion

by T. D. Fox

  She’d thought she’d made a decision the night their uncertain acquaintance sputtered to an end; after that shocking whistle in the alley, when she’d put two and two together—but there, he’d simply ducked out of her life. No more showing up at the café, no more late night talks while the last of the customers trickled away.

  I tried to avoid you. His words drifted back to her. You don’t belong in my world.

  He’d made that choice for her. But then came the Change, and suddenly, he was back in her life whether she wanted him there or not. Again, something outside her control. Then drugging her, throwing her back out of his world and into her lifeless apartment, so forcibly removing any choice she could’ve made that irritation still flashed up inside her at the memory.

  But now... Here he was, no longer standing on the heavier half of the scale. He was weak. He needed her. For the first time, the power rested completely in her hands.

  And she hadn’t the faintest clue what to do with it.

  The phone on her wooden countertop lit up. Her stomach sank at the face that filled the screen. For what felt like minutes, the buzzing trill filled the kitchen. She thought about letting it go to voicemail. But what if he didn’t call again, and just came over?

  Checking her voice, she answered. “Hey.”

  “Courtney. Hey.” Jasper’s voice had a weird mix of notes in it. Relief. Wariness. And something else she couldn’t place. “I was hoping we could talk. Are you at work?”

  “No. I’m home sick today.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Just a bad cold.” She realized she didn’t sound like she had a cold at all, so she coughed off to one side of the phone, making it as convincing as she could.

  A beat. “I’ll come over. I could bring some tea.”

  “Thanks, but I’ve got lots of tea here. I don’t want to get you sick.”

  “I need to talk to you about something.”

  “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well...” Courtney looked over at the couch. “I’m really not in a great headspace to talk right now. My brain feels all fuzzy.”

  A low breath. “I’ll come by tomorrow, then. I need your memory sharp. Sure there’s nothing I can bring you?”

  Her memory? “I’m sure.” She frowned. “Is everything okay?”

  “Peachy.” Jasper never sounded like this. He usually came right out and told her what was on his mind. “Drink water and sleep. I’ll be over tomorrow.”

  “Actually, I’ll meet you at the café,” Courtney said quickly. “Not mine, the one on fifth.”

  “Why?”

  “This place is a germ-fest. You don’t want to come over here, trust me, I’ve filled this apartment with so many tissues it looks like a small avalanche buried everything. And I don’t cover my mouth when I cough.”

  He exhaled a short laugh. “Perks of living alone. Okay, I guess I can meet you there, if you’re up for it.”

  “Tomorrow morning. Ten?”

  “Ten,” he said. “Courtney... I hope you know you can trust me.”

  The words came so out of the blue she almost forgot to sound sick. “What?”

  “Just... I care about you.” His voice sounded guarded, loaded with an emotion she couldn’t read. “I wouldn’t want to see you get hurt.”

  She stared at the noodles frothing in the pot. “I don’t know why you would be worried about that,” she hedged. “But... I care about you too.”

  He rustled with the phone. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She looked at the phone after he’d hung up, frowning at his contact picture. It was a snapshot of the two of them in the café, at the beginning of their relationship. He stood with his arm around her, smiling widely at the camera. Her face looked different. Her smile didn’t show all of her teeth, and her eyes looked less squinty at the corners.

  She did care about him. He was the sort of person it’d be hard not to care about, with how thoughtful and kind and dedicated he was. His passion for justice influenced everything he did. He knew exactly where he stood, and he stood tall, no matter who pressured him to back down. But now, she felt removed from his two-toned view of the world. There were a whole lot of grays mixed in with the black. And now quite a few shades of it were splashed on her. She wondered what he’d see if he looked at her, knowing the whole truth.

  She glanced toward the couch again. It was a stupid question. Of course, she knew what he would see.

  Black, black, black.

  Courtney took the noodles off the heat and killed the flame. Tossing in the packet of flavor, she carried the whole pot with her toward the living room, setting it on a hot pad on the coffee table. Time to administer the next dose of antibiotics.

  When she straightened back up from grabbing the next med vial from the tote bag, she jumped. W was looking at her.

  She scooted back. His eyes followed. They seemed a touch clearer.

  “Never could sleep through the smell of cooking food.” His voice came out even. Still raspy, but less slurred.

  She measured the light glancing off his eyes. “Who am I?”

  One eyebrow lifted. “Identity crisis after only a few Changes?”

  “Which W am I talking to?”

  “Hopefully the only one. I don’t mind twinning other people, but if someone’s going around twinning me that’ll just get confusing.”

  She kept well out of arm’s reach. “Tell me you know who I am.”

  He lifted a hand—she leaned back—but he just wiggled his fingers, rippling the tendons around the IV catheter. “Courtney Spencer. Barista who moonlights as a trauma surgeon. Nice work.”

  Wary, but her heartbeat slowing down, she lifted a hand to his forehead. The fever still blazed. But he was lucid. How long would this last?

  “What happened to you?” she asked, hoping to take advantage of his clarity while it lasted, and maybe gain some clarity of her own.

  He grunted. “Just another day on the job.”

  “You got shot.”

  “Yes,” he said, as if it were a thing that happened every other Saturday.

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “I think you owe me some explanations.”

  He glanced sideways at her, hand with the IV still in the air, and lifted the corner of his mouth. “I suppose that’d be the polite thing to do.”

  “Who’s Jessica?”

  The impact of that name struck like a physical blow. W’s smile vanished. His eyes slid from hers, fixed on the ceiling.

  “Where did you hear that name?”

  “From you.” She watched his expression, trying to calculate who this person was from the way his lips pressed together. Obviously someone who’d meant a lot to him. A girl? Someone he loved, maybe someone from the streets?

  “She was someone from a different life.”

  A certain note in his voice ignited dozens more questions, but that very same note stopped her from pressing. She’d never heard that sound in his voice. It unnerved her in the same sort of way as when he’d grabbed her hand in a delirium, thinking she was his mother.

  “What I do owe you,” he said, “is a thank you.”

  Courtney remembered what she was supposed to be doing, and reached down to set up the new flow of medications into his IV line.

  “Why did you come to me?” she asked. “I thought you had people to do this sort of thing. You know, a gang or henchmen or something.”

  He’d spoken of sending “one of his people” thrifting to get clothes for her when she’d had none of her own in his apartment. And from the way everyone knew his name on the streets, whispering of a network all doing the bidding of the Whistler, she figured he had at least someone to go to if he was in trouble. A shady doctor, or someone with medical training who’d turned crook. Maybe he could’ve even blackmailed someone to help him. She didn’t know how things like that worked in the underworld. But the last thing that could’ve made sense was for him to come to her.
In such a vulnerable state, she could have easily turned him into the cops and walked away from it safer than she’d started.

  “Or something.” His eyes didn’t stray from the ceiling. “I’ve got people on every block in this city. But I could count on two fingers the number of them I trust.”

  It hit her in a strange way to realize that by one of those two fingers, he meant her.

  “That’s an awful lot of presumption, on your part. I am dating a cop.”

  “I know.” A funny sort of smile touched his lips, like he knew something she didn’t. “Straight shooter, that one.”

  She couldn’t pinpoint the double entendre behind those words, but she’d had enough of him making light of the whole situation. “I’m not a criminal. I’m not one of your people. Trusting me, coming to me and expecting me to help you and keep quiet about all this? That’s not fair.”

  “Don’t know where you got the idea that I was fair.”

  “I’m going to turn you in.”

  She hadn’t realized she’d reached that decision, and even as it came out of her mouth, she didn’t like it. He finally looked over at her. Much like that night in the alley, when she’d maced him in the face, his eyes had red in them. The icy gray hue of his irises looked startling in that bloodshot gaze. He blinked, slowly.

  “Then do it.”

  She returned his stare, refusing to blink. Pressure built up within her. At first, she thought it was fear. But it was too warm. Adrenaline? No. She held his eyes.

  Her phone lay where she’d left it on the counter. All she had to do was stand up and get it. But a gravity that had nothing to do with physics rooted her to the floor.

  After a minute, W looked back at the ceiling. “You’ve got some time to make up your mind. I’m not going anywhere.”

  That was the last coherent sentence she got from him for a while.

  ⬥◆⬥

  After she finished administering the next dose of antibiotics into his IV line, she left him to rest. He didn’t have the stamina to talk for long. Even their short conversation had drained him; he’d slipped back into sleep by the time she’d stood to walk back to the kitchen.

  The afternoon passed like the one before, tense and lonely. W drifted in and out of silence. When he spoke, it wasn’t to her anymore. Invisible ghosts surrounded him, and he cursed them, threatened them, pleaded with them. Courtney remained close, but not too close—she didn’t want a repeat of last night. She kept an eye on him from her vantage point in the kitchen.

  Her hands itched for something to do. The bloodstains in the living room carpet would have to be soaked in bleach, but she wasn’t going to do that so close to W. She’d just risked her neck to save his life; poisoning him with toxic fumes would be counterproductive. That left the jacket she’d used to slow his bleeding—her only warm jacket left, after she’d given her peacoat away. She cleared the sink, ran the tap at its coldest, and grabbed a bottle of lemon juice from the refrigerator.

  She set up her phone to play the radio as she worked. Force of habit. Then she looked up, remembering herself. Would the sound of music agitate W more? It was a jazz station, and the volume wasn’t too high. Maybe it would soothe him. Drive away the hallucinations, which disturbed her to watch as much as they disturbed him to experience. She decided to let it play. It soothed her own nerves, at least.

  She began scrubbing away at the jacket. The dish soap foamed a dull red. She added more soap, and lemon juice. Her hands stiffened under the cold water. She kept scrubbing.

  Song blended into song. She hummed along to the ones she knew—oldies her Mom had once played when she cleaned their old house all those years ago. Courtney sort of liked that she’d inherited one of her habits. There weren’t many she could remember. But her mother’s clear, low voice singing over the sound of the kitchen sink was a memory she treasured. She knew her own voice wasn’t nearly so sweet, but she sang along to Louis Armstrong just the same. Mom had loved jazz.

  Orion City didn’t have much in the way of good radio. A few stations, carefully streamed in from Outside while all other frequencies were blocked. She’d heard beyond the Wall the rest of the world had music at their fingertips, access to any song they desired in an instant. Trapped in a concrete time bubble of sorts, Orion got nonessential media and technologies either late or not at all. And so it came down to old fashioned radio. One or two oldies stations like this one, a few newer pop stations, and then some talk channels thrown in between. Courtney didn’t much care for the newer stuff. She kept her radio tuned to the oldies station, not minding if she fell out of touch with pop culture. Most of Orion City was out of touch anyway. Quarantine tended to do that to folks.

  She didn’t hear the footsteps behind her until he spoke.

  “Mack the Knife. A good song.”

  Courtney spun so fast she hit her hand on the edge of the sink. She swore, cradling her bruising knuckles, and looked straight up into W’s face.

  “Don’t stop singing on my account.”

  “You shouldn’t be walking,” she snapped. “You’ll tear your stitches. Did you rip out your IV?”

  He lifted the hand, showing her the tube still taped to the back. He’d disconnected it the way a nurse might, closing the clamp embedded in the tube so he wouldn’t bleed out.

  “The stitches are sealing,” he said. “I can feel them.”

  “That’s your delirium talking.” She lifted a hand to his forehead, stretching up on her toes to do so. “You still have a fever. Go lie down.”

  He reached up. Pulling her hand away from his face, he stared at it, fingers curling over hers. One might’ve thought he’d never seen a human hand before, the way he studied it. She started to pull away.

  “If you’re hallucinating again—”

  His fingers tightened, pulling her in, so close her words trailed off. Their joined hands lifted to hover beside her shoulder. She felt an arm curl around her waist.

  “What are you...”

  “Shh, you are going to miss the song.”

  His feet began to move. Slow steps, forward, back, sideways. He pulled her along. This close, it felt like she was leaning against a furnace, the heat of his fever washing over her.

  A new song filled the kitchen. Something slow, almost bluesy. She followed W, too stunned to resist as they swayed to the music.

  “Do you know who I am?” she couldn’t help but ask. How lucid was he? Did he think she was Jessica, some lost girl from his past? The way he was holding her... it did a funny kind of thing to her stomach. She didn’t like it.

  “Mm,” he said over her shoulder. Which could mean yes, or no, or nothing at all.

  The singer on the radio had a rough voice, ragged like he’d poured his entire soul into the lyrics. Maybe he had. She couldn’t pay attention to the words. W rested his chin on the top of her head. She waited for him to say something, to explain himself. No words came.

  Fine. If he was delirious now, maybe he’d be less tight-lipped if she decided to pry.

  “Who’s Jessica?” she asked again.

  She felt the sigh more than heard it. It rippled the hair at the back of her head, sending a shiver through her. “Why do you want to know?”

  “The things I know about you wouldn’t fill half a shot glass. I saved your life. You could give me an answer.”

  “How about a trade?”

  She would’ve looked at him, but couldn’t this close. “What?”

  “I give you an answer, then you give me one.”

  “I’m an open book.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Courtney finally rested her hand on his arm, letting herself fall into the sway of an old-fashioned dance. It was surreal.

  “Jessica was a girl who died,” W said. He added nothing else.

  “Were you two—?”

  “That’s not how this works. My turn.”

  “But—”

  “If you could find the people who took your father,” he said. “How far would you go
to get him back?”

  She stopped. But the movement of his feet forced her to move with him. “You mean, would I go outside the law? Or... kill, like you?”

  “However you’d like to take the question.”

  “I don’t know.” She was glad he couldn’t see her face, because she had no idea what might be flitting across it. “I don’t think I could kill someone. If there were a way to save my father, I’d take it, even if I had to break the law. But killing...” She shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s not my place to take a life.”

  “It’s just your place to watch it happen.”

  She stiffened, and she knew he could feel it. “That’s not what I said.”

  “But it’s what happens. There are people in this city killing other people. Innocent people, you might call them. And no one stops them, because everyone thinks: it’s not my place.”

  “You’re talking about that organization. AITO.”

  “It’s a general rule of thumb across the whole world. But yes, AITO’s our particular devil.”

  He didn’t talk like he was delirious. But the fever radiated out from him, and his words sounded a tad slower than usual. At least he knew who she was.

  “There are more ways to stop evil than killing.”

  “Really? I can’t think of any quite so effective.”

  They swayed in silence, listening to the lilting notes of the radio. Maybe he was right. But he sounded almost like Jasper, with his two extremes. Black and white. Like walking on a knife edge, tipping one way into violence, the other way into apathy.

  There had to be a way to balance. A middle ground. A higher ground. She’d figure out a way to walk that edge, without slicing herself open in the process.