by Zoe Chant
She took the elevator up to the fifth floor and headed down the hallway, nodding at the neighbors who had their doors open, until she got to her front door. Tirzah unlocked the doorknob, then braced her hand on the arm of her chair so she could stand and fit her key into the high top lock.
“I got it!” squealed Amy, the six-year-old next door.
She darted out of her apartment, carroty hair flying out behind her, then skidded to a stop in front of Tirzah at her father’s yell of “Ask first!”
“Want me to open the door?” Amy asked belatedly.
“Sure. Thanks, Amy.” For at least the 365th time, Tirzah promised herself that she’d call that renovator tomorrow and have her apartment made more accessible. It wasn’t like there would be any problem with the landlord, and while she could stand up to reach the top lock and high shelves and everything else that was otherwise out of reach, it made more sense to move them lower down so she could use both hands.
On the other hand, it wasn’t as if she ever had any trouble finding a neighbor to give her a hand, or that she minded giving Amy an excuse to come over and look at her collections. Sure enough, Amy stood on her tiptoes to unlock the deadbolt, handed Tirzah the key, then hung around with a hopeful look on her face.
“Want to look at my dollhouses?” Tirzah asked, grinning.
Amy nodded eagerly and followed her inside, yelling over her shoulder, “Looking at Tirzah’s dolls!”
“Yeah, sure!” her father yelled back.
“Okay if I give her a cookie?” Tirzah called.
“Please, Daddy, please please please?” Amy begged.
“Just one!” her father shouted.
Tirzah went to the kitchen, poured milk into a teacup, and opened the cabinet. “Khaliya’s lavender shortbread, Ruben’s oatmeal squares, or Circus Animals?”
“Circus Animals!” Amy exclaimed gleefully.
It was part of their ritual. Tirzah was well-supplied with delicious homemade baked goods by the other tenants, but she always kept some kind of brand-name supermarket cookie on stock for Amy. To her parents’ everlasting despair, Amy disdained all home cooking in favor of junk food, and the more artificially colored, preservative-filled, and heavily advertised, the better.
Amy dashed back to the door and shouted, “Can I have two? They’re small!”
“Yeah, sure!” her father called back. “But no refusing to eat your dinner! Yes, Amy, even it doesn’t come out of a box.”
“I won’t!” Amy shouted, clearly lying.
“Your dad’s a pushover,” Tirzah remarked.
Amy gave her a blank look. “He’s too big to push over.”
Smiling, Tirzah got out the fancy saucer with roses painted around the rim. Amy had already vanished into Tirzah’s bedroom, where the dollhouses were. Tirzah placed one pink and one white Circus Animal cookie on the saucer, then followed Amy in.
“I want to look at the lacy house,” Amy said, and pulled up a chair in front of the Victorian dollhouse, her favorite. She watched it like a TV set as she nibbled her cookies and drank her milk. “The red-headed doll looks like me.”
Tirzah considered the Little Orphan Annie doll, which she’d posed in front of a closet of tiny dresses, her arms raised to select one. “Yeah, she does. If you had curly hair.”
“You should get her a friend with straight red hair, like mine. Then they could be sisters.”
“Okay. I’ll keep an eye out for one.”
Amy finished her cookies and milk, gave Tirzah her plates, washed and dried her hands, then gleefully approached the Victorian dollhouse. “Can I move the doll who looks me?”
That, too, was part of their deal: Amy could touch all but the most fragile dolls and animals, but she had to have clean hands and ask permission first.
“Go for it.”
Ceremonially, Amy closed the closet door, lifted Little Orphan Annie, and placed her in a bedroom occupied by a Mexican doll in an embroidered dancing dress. She posed the two dolls sitting on a bed, their heads close together as if deep in conversation.
“Now she has a friend,” Amy said with satisfaction, and headed back out. Over her shoulder, she called, “Next time I want to look at the ninja house!”
“Any time!” Tirzah called back. “Just knock!”
Any time Amy wanted to look at Tirzah’s dollhouses, she could knock. If Tirzah was working or just didn’t want to be bothered, she wouldn’t answer the door. If she didn’t mind a visit, she’d let Amy in.
The door closed behind Amy with a solid thud. Tirzah could still hear the sounds of people talking, cars driving in stop-and-start traffic, the calls of crows, and the rumble of the subway. But they were faint and distant. The apartment suddenly felt very quiet and alone. And, though she was surrounded by friends and neighbors, not quite safe.
Tirzah shivered, remembering the solid thunk of the bolt sliding into place as Jerry had locked her inside. She’d escaped once, but would he try again?
There was one thing she knew for sure: she had to find out what was on that file he’d wanted her to delete.
Tirzah opened her laptop and got to work. First she set up the dead man’s switch she’d told Jerry she already had. Once she was finished, that file would be automatically mailed to all her media contacts, along with a note explaining why they were getting it, unless she manually turned off the switch every 24 hours. Then she pulled up the file itself.
She prided herself on being able to decode any file or break into any system, but the mystery file was a tough nut to crack. Three hours later, she’d barely made any headway, and took a break to eat something. Hunger made her lose focus.
As she sat munching on a hastily slapped-together peanut butter sandwich, she thought about how ironic the whole thing was. She’d downloaded the file out of nothing more than idle curiosity. It could have sat on her laptop for months or even years before she’d ever gotten around to looking at it. She might even have eventually deleted it unread while doing some virtual tidying-up. If she had tried to decode it, with no reason to believe it was anything special, she’d probably have decided it was too much work for too little clear reward, and then deleted it.
“But now?” Tirzah muttered to herself. “Nobody messes with Override!”
She returned to her laptop. It was hours later, well into the early morning when even most of Refuge City was asleep, that she finally cracked the code.
She read the file.
What the hell…?
It had been a stressful day and she’d stayed up all night; she needed to analyze this with a clear head. Tirzah went to the bathroom and splashed some cold water on her face, then returned to her laptop and read the file again.
No way.
She made herself some coffee, drank a cup, and took a second cup back to her desk to read the file for the third time.
What’s the only thing more ironic than Jerry making sure I read this file by trying to make me delete it? Tirzah thought. Jerry making sure I believed this file by trying to make me delete it.
The file labeled Apex 3.0 was a set of notes on an experiment with human subjects. Tirzah had come across that sort of thing before, and had been instrumental in getting a drug company exposed for falsifying the results of their studies on a medication. (Information removed: the part about it occasionally making people drop dead.) But this was a whole ‘nother ballgame.
If she hadn’t been locked in and threatened, she’d have assumed the file was part of a fantasy novel some government employee had been writing in their spare time and storing on the department server, and the only reason it was coded was that they were paranoid about being plagiarized. In fact, she still wasn’t one hundred percent sure that wasn’t what it was.
“Secret black ops experiments on kidnapped soldiers,” she said aloud, incredulous. “To give them super powers and make them into shapeshifters. And not even just regular shapeshifters, but shapeshifters that turn into magical or extinct animals. I’d watch the hell out of that
movie!”
She read the file for the fourth time, skimming over the more technical parts and focusing on the nitty-gritty, which included an awful lot of To Be Determineds:
Subject: Thirty
Name: Pierce, Ransom.
Occupation: Recon Marine.
Previous/Other Occupations: [Redacted]
Shift Form: Hellhound.
Powers: TBD. Possible clairvoyance?
Limitations: Ability to recognize and bond with mate has been severed. As a mythic shifter, he cannot shift while touching shiftsilver.
Subject: Thirty-One
Name: TBD.
Alias: Merrick, Merlin.
Occupation: Recon Marine.
Previous/Other Occupations: Circus performer, talk show host, rodeo clown, private language teacher, short order cook, fortune cookie writer, Olympic gymnast, stunt man, chicken sexer. [Attn: Dr. Lamorat: There were more but I stopped noting them down before he stopped talking. Do you want every occupation he claims to have had listed on this form? Unclear as to whether any of them are even real so could be a lot of work for Investigations to verify them, with no obvious benefit.]
Shift Form: Raptor.
Powers: TBD.
Limitations: Ability to recognize and bond with mate has been severed.
Subject: Thirty-Two
Name: Valdez, Pete.
Shift Form: Cave bear.
Occupation: Recon Marine.
Previous/Other Occupations: Police Officer. [Attn: Dr. Lamorat: Portions of his police file appear to have been deleted and/or altered. Do you want me to have Investigations look into this?]
Powers: TBD.
Limitations: Ability to recognize and bond with mate has been severed.
Tirzah leaned back with a sigh. The file left her with so many unanswered questions.
What was a mate, and why did it matter if the men couldn’t recognize or bond with one?
What were the men’s powers?
Who was Dr. Lamorat?
Most importantly, was any of it even real?
Cave bear, Tirzah thought. Raptor. Hellhound. Seriously?
But Jerry had sure been serious about threatening her. If she’d obeyed him and deleted the file, she was sure he’d have killed her. And then the cover-up would be complete. The whole thing made no sense if the file was fiction. At the very least, Jerry must believe it was for real.
And he’d somehow figured out that she was Override. Tirzah’s fingers drummed nervously on her desk. Journalists, the FBI, and powerful corporations had tried to track down Override’s identity, and all of them had failed. She hadn’t gotten to be Override by failing to cover her virtual tracks. But Jerry—or the people behind Jerry—had managed to identify her.
The fear she’d kept at bay until that moment washed over her in an icy wave. Jerry knew who she was. He knew she gave money to cat rescues. He knew the streets where she took her daily walk. (My daily roll, she sardonically corrected herself.) He had to know her address, too. He—or someone worse than him—could be coming up the stairs, right now, while most of her neighbors were asleep…
“Stop,” she said. The sound of her own voice calmed her. She spent so much time alone, she’d gotten in the habit of talking to herself. “If he wanted to do that, he’d have tried that first. He obviously doesn’t want to risk drawing attention to himself.”
But now he knew she’d been alerted. He might decide that keeping his bizarre secret was worth taking more risks. Besides, she couldn’t just stay in her apartment for the rest of her life.
She needed protection. And she couldn’t go to the police.
For the first time since Amy had left, Tirzah smiled. Maybe nothing else going on was simple, but that particular problem had a very simple and easy solution. She’d just hire a personal bodyguard. She sure wasn’t going to mention Override, but she could just tell the bodyguard and her curious neighbors that she had a stalker.
The nice thing about being a hacker was that if you had the skills to hack, you also had the skills to make money legally. She could afford the best. And she could do better research than googling “What’s the best security agency in Refuge City,” which would just get her every agency that put that phrase on their website. Her fingers flew across the keyboard.
It wasn’t long before she’d figured out that the answer was Defenders, which was the new East Coast branch of the security agency Protection, Inc. Their website was nice and professional. The names of the individual bodyguards weren’t listed, unsurprisingly, but it was child’s play for Override to find that out…
A few minutes later, Tirzah sat dumbstruck, staring at her laptop screen.
“You have got to be kidding,” she said aloud. “Defenders is the hellhound and the cave bear and the velociraptor?”
And some other guy, too, the boss: Roland Walker. She looked him up, but found nothing but an exemplary Army record. Then again, the Apex 3.0 file had records for subjects thirty through thirty-two. For all she knew, Walker was subject twenty-nine or thirty-three.
She tried digging deeper, both into Defenders itself and into the individual men, but hit a wall. Their servers had better protections than the Pentagon, and the men’s information seemed to have been wiped beyond some public record stuff that didn’t tell her much.
“Okay,” she muttered. “So this’ll be a challenge.”
She organized the few photos she’d found of the bodyguards/experimental test subjects into a neat collage. Which one to research first? The cave bear who used to be a cop before…something? The hellhound with the top secret past? The raptor who either had a lot of weird jobs or a quirky sense of humor? The boss who might or might not be some sort of strange shapeshifter too?
Tirzah decided to start with the cave bear cop. A clumsily falsified police record would probably be the easiest thing to sort out. She quickly broke into the police database and pulled it up. Whoever had written up the Apex file had been correct about Pete Valdez’s police records: someone who clearly wasn’t used to falsifying records had indeed altered portions, inserting assorted minor infractions and acts of poor judgment in an apparent effort to make him look bad.
Further digging uncovered the intriguing tidbit that much of his department had been indicted for corruption and drug trafficking shortly after he’d resigned from the force. Coincidence? Had he left in disgust at what the other cops were up to? Or had he been involved, but had been smart enough to flee before everyone else got scooped up?
Her gaze returned to one of the photos she’d found of him. It was from a few years ago, and was part of photo-essay on Recon Marines by a war reporter. The caption read, Wounded Marine waits for medical evacuation.
A Marine lay on a stretcher, with a medic crouched beside him. Valdez stood over them both, guarding them. His handsome face was streaked with blood and grime, and his camouflage shirt was ripped half off his body, exposing muscles way more impressive than anything she’d seen at the gym. Not that she spent much time in gyms.
But what kept drawing her attention was his eyes, which were big and brown, with an unexpected depth of feeling, and his stance, which looked like you could push the world out from under his feet sooner than you could move him away from the men he was shielding.
He did not look like a crooked cop. He did look like he’d be one hell of a bodyguard.
He looked like he’d be one hell of a boyfriend, come to think of it. Those soulful eyes… Those enormous biceps… That fiercely protective expression…
Tirzah cut off that line of thinking right away. What she needed was a competent person to do a job for her, not a soulmate or a roll in the hay. She had way too much on her plate to deal with a relationship. Just the thought of a first-date conversation made her shudder:
“Hi, I’m Tirzah Lowenstein. I’ve spent most of the last year recovering from some injuries and adjusting to using a wheelchair. NO I don’t want to talk about how the injuries happened. Anyway, I only recently got back to what I norma
lly do, which is illegally hacking for the greater good. Oh, and yesterday someone tried to kill me because I found out about secret government experiments to turn Marines into dinosaurs. And you? What do you do?”
Ugh!
Well, no point brooding over things she couldn’t have. She’d stayed up so long that the scrap of sky outside her window was brightening with dawn. No, she didn’t need a man. What she needed was more coffee. Tirzah started to push herself away from the desk.
Something slammed into the window, making it rattle in its frame. The thing that had struck the window stayed there, a black blob clinging to the screen.
Tirzah recoiled, instinctively scrabbling for a weapon. She snatched up her phone in one hand and a pen in the other.
The black blob opened a rose-pink mouth and let out a tiny meow.
Her pen fell unnoticed to the floor. She barely managed to lay her phone back on the desk rather than dropping it as well. The creature hanging on to her screen was a very tiny, very furry black kitten.
Five stories up. How had it managed to get that high? More importantly, how could she get it in without scaring it and making it fall to its death?
Her heart pounding, Tirzah reached up very slowly, giving the kitten plenty of time to see her coming, and eased the window open a crack. To her immense relief, the kitten did nothing but stare at her with huge golden eyes, brilliant against its black fur. Even more slowly, Tirzah pulled the window inward.
When the kitten, still clinging to the screen with tiny translucent claws, was inside the apartment, Tirzah heaved such a sigh of relief that she ruffled its fur. The kitten meowed indignantly, then jumped from the screen to her thigh. Tirzah hurriedly slammed the window shut and latched it. The kitten yawned and stretched, arching its back and digging in its pinprick claws.
A pair of wings, as furry and black as the rest of the kitten, unfurled and spread out before Tirzah’s disbelieving eyes. The kitten’s hindquarters bunched, its little tail twitched, and it launched itself off her thigh.