by Chloe Garner
Stuck up. That was how Cassie described it, and he couldn’t say she was wrong.
“Midas was power hungry,” Cassie said. “He liked destruction and he liked being in a position of power where he could cause it. Sometime in the last thirty years, he found the intersection of the dimensions and he claimed it so that no one else could. He figured he’d come up with a way to control all five of them later and he didn’t want someone else to do it in the meantime. He had exactly one skill that he could use, and he knew that he if he was going to be able to use it to control five dimensions, he’d need a Palta to figure out the details, but he caught Mab first, and then he caught me, and neither of us were good enough because… well. You know that part. He lived in my head. When I wasn’t there, in the house, he couldn’t hear or see anything that I was doing, but his awareness stayed in my head the entire time, and if I didn’t go along with… something, anything that he wanted me to do, just pick one thing, for too long at a time…” She frowned, as if struggling to put something into words, then she nodded. “He just got noisy. Noisier and noisier until I couldn’t hear myself anymore. The only time my head was completely clear was when I was breaking something, or terrorizing someone, or in the house.”
He had questions. Lots of questions, but he’d put out the first one. Now it was up to him to be interesting enough to justify her figuring out what they were.
His father.
She was interested in his father.
He needed to figure out why.
Or at least keep her going.
“My father was… a collector,” he said. “He wanted to see everything, and to take a piece of it home with him. He collected names. He collected tokens. He collected knowledge. And he wanted to complete all of those collections, even though he set himself up collecting things that were literally infinite in number. He spent his entire life out in the universe, and I went with him for as much time as I could, because I wanted to see it, too. Same as you, I think.” He paused. “We’ve both realized that you have a share of my DNA. That was all Mab had to work with, in her virus.” He didn’t know what that meant, and neither did she. He moved on. “After I married, I went out with him, sometimes, to new planets. I know that he wanted me to be the Palta diplomat, but I was too much of a scientist, even for that, and I eventually got caught up in my project…” He stopped there. That was outside of the scope of her question, and he didn’t want to talk about it. Had he shared enough? Given her enough? Not if he wanted her to tell what she’d done. Not if he wanted her to tell him how Midas had controlled her. Not if he wanted her to tell him why Mab had been there, at all. “My father died of natural causes. His aides brought him home. I don’t know where he was when he died.”
He needed to come up with what to say for another turn. He didn’t want to be the one who started the next round.
She was watching his face.
“Midas came from an underground race,” she said. “Short, strong, and angry. Dwarves, in the classic sense. He didn’t care if he never saw the sun. He used a psychi-chemical compound that filled his entire house. It only took a few days there for it to take effect, and he built the place specifically to attract the curious. The rooms are all full of marvelous toys, some from other dimensions, and I think that’s what caught Mab. Most of the staff were there because someone else had brought them there, and they were stuck. It may have been Mab. I don’t know. He had a voice like thunder, but he didn’t know that you can’t leash a Palta. He made a deal with me and he made a deal with Mab, because he thought it would make us more complacent - and he actually thought it worked on Mab - but they were how we broke him. She and I. He couldn’t leave, so all he could see was what we saw, what we heard, what we thought, and that only while we were there. So I overloaded him with thoughts, same as Mab, so that he couldn’t go through all of them in time. She needed me to kill her for her plan to work. She couldn’t kill him, but I think she knew I could.”
Why? Why couldn’t Mab kill Midas, when she’d killed so many other people? He saw it. Pity. Not willing to say it out loud: the consciousness. Mab could have defended herself, survived, if not for the consciousness. She saw him know it, and pressed her lips. It wasn’t just that. Mab had wanted to die.
Even without Midas.
His father.
His father.
What about his father?
“Where were you?” he asked. He’d looked for her. He’d let Troy believe he hadn’t, but Jesse had looked. He’d genuinely believed she was either trapped or dead, and nothing he could do would get him back into that house.
“Do you love me?” she answered.
He’d lost the plot. Jumped the bid up too high. Asked the question he really wanted her to answer, rather than the one that would give him the information anyway. Mab. She’d talked about Mab and it had thrown him.
She’d won.
Intentionally.
He was so proud he could hardly contain it.
The problem was that she’d done it with flair.
She’d asked a true/false question, one that was intended to tell him that she wasn’t going to answer, that shut the game down. It was surrendering with a victory party. There was no answer to come after hers.
And yet.
And.
Yet.
“Yes.”
She knew.
She didn’t ask why he was avoiding her. Why he thought they couldn’t work. Even whether or not he wanted to try.
She asked the question they’d both known the answer to.
It was almost an act of cruelty, asking.
It might have been more cruel, answering.
She tipped her head slightly, watching everything, seeing everything, taking everything he would give her, then she closed her eyes, sliding onto her back and attempting to pick up her legs. He reached over, putting his arm under her knees and lifting, pulling the blankets out from under her and then laying her flat and covering her.
“I decline,” she whispered. He nodded.
“Well done,” he answered.
*********
Cassie lay in the darkness after Jesse told the room to turn the lights off, the windows blacking out, no sound but his breath and her own. Her eyes stayed closed because there was nothing to see and because they were too tired to be open.
That had been it.
That had been everything she had.
Her body was exhausted to the point of shaking, and for the moment, she was glad that Jesse was going to stay over there, an ocean of bed away from her. If she relaxed correctly, she could keep the shakes in her core, where he wouldn’t be able to feel them.
She was doing math.
Simple probabilities, following rabbit trails of things that might happen, that could happen, that would happen. It was like counting sheep; she suspected that it was common enough among Palta, something she’d done for months, now, to court sleep. Even exhausted as she was, her body giving way around her, she couldn’t sleep without a disciplined, systematic routine to spin her mind away from the here, the now, Jesse’s breath.
The staff wore collars, bracelets, and they put out a gentle white noise that lulled her into forgetting they were there. It was the same technology that the Palta utilized natively to be unseen when they wanted to go through a place unnoticed. The one that Jesse had used to escape from under the noses of an armed guard as he testified in her court martial.
It was less fun, now, than when she’d set out the puzzle.
She was too tired to be amused by it.
“We have to go back,” she whispered into the darkness.
“Tomorrow,” he answered.
*********
Troy got up in the dark and took a three-minute shower, shaving and washing his hair before the water had completely hit warm, then got dressed and went downstairs.
A man was waiting outside of a black sedan. Troy recognized him from his picture.
“Lieutenant Venn,” he said.
&n
bsp; “Sir,” the man answered, opening the door. Troy got in, not willing to admit to himself that it was a relief to not have to lug himself into his car and try to get himself to base in the dark before his brain was actually awake.
He might have felt worse than he had the night before when he went to bed. Too little sleep was worse than none at all.
Bridgette was in the back seat, her hair tight, high, neat, a stack of files in her hand.
“This is the last of the decoded files,” she said. “Everyone. I’ve got the schedule for interviews with the foreign terrestrials set, it’s there on top.”
He blinked.
“Coffee,” he said.
She handed him a cup with a slight smirk and he shook his head, sitting deep in his seat and drinking his coffee most of the way to base before he picked up the list and looked at it, bleary eyed.
“You out that late last night?” Bridgette asked innocently and he looked over at her.
“No. I went to bed at ten-thirty. What about you?”
She raised an eyebrow.
“How do you think I got the files decoded?”
“You didn’t go home last night?” he asked. She laughed.
“I don’t even have a home yet, Major,” she said. “I’ll get to it when the danger is passed.”
“Which one?” he asked dourly, flipping to the next page.
“The danger to the base,” she said. “You’re holding it together with your fingertips, and while you must sleep, if you’re going to keep going, I don’t need to. I can function just fine without sleep for four days. It’s on my resume.”
“Yeah, I never got a copy,” Troy said, still cross. He looked over at her. “You shouldn’t just not sleep, though.” He got his keys out and held them out to her. “You know when you have time better than I do, but you go take a nap for a few hours.” She didn’t take the keys, and he looked up from his list. “That’s an order. I do still out-rank you.”
She gave him a half a smile.
“Mostly people figure out that giving me orders doesn’t do anyone any good,” she said, and he shrugged.
“Well, I haven’t yet. You can have the couch or the bed, hell if I care, but you go sleep for a few hours.”
She took the keys and put them away, and he returned his attention to the list, frowning.
“You’re missing three,” he said.
“No,” she said. “That’s from the security team. They scheduled everyone for an interview around their eating and sleeping habits, room by room.”
Troy saw Henry, there on page two, but there were three names missing.
He could have sworn.
“Double check it,” he said. “The count is off, and I feel like I’ve seen names that aren’t on this list.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
He handed her the list and started going through the new files. Names, dates, narratives, more terse than jumper reports normally were, like they were either hiding something or they had instructions to only report on the most important and obvious things.
“None of this feels right,” he muttered.
“Are they translated incorrectly?” she asked. “I had one that came back in wingdings.”
“No, that’s not it,” he said. “They just don’t do anything the way they should.”
“They didn’t train like you did,” she said. “Doesn’t make it wrong. Just unfamiliar.”
“No,” he said. “There’s hiding going on here. Or lying.”
She nodded.
“You’d see it, better than just about anyone.”
He looked over.
“Did you just say something nice to me?” he asked.
She arched an eyebrow.
“If I’m not mistaken, I’ve thrown myself in your corner at no warning, because I believe that what you’re doing is important and because I believe you can do it.”
He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead.
“Sorry. Sorry. I’m tired.”
“Drink your coffee,” she said. “I’ll have another one for you before the lawyers show up.”
He wrinkled his nose.
“Any news on the subpoena?”
“Heard late last night about a raid,” she said. “State investigators went in and seized all of the records at Otherworld.”
He closed his eyes and sighed.
“I don’t want everything,” he said. “I just want the ones about shipments from the second portal in the last six months.”
“But you’re gonna get all of them,” she said. “You need someone who can go through all of them and find the ones that are important.”
He shook his head.
It was an analysts’ job. The problem was that he didn’t know anyone working the room anymore. The only place he knew people was the labs.
“I’ll go talk to them this afternoon,” he said, drinking his coffee and resting his head against the headrest. “I need food.”
“Done,” Bridgette said. “You want greasy grill food or a whole-grain balanced breakfast?”
“Treat it like a hangover,” he said, blinking quickly and trying to read reports again. His eyes crossed. “Why am I so tired?”
“I’ve seen this a few times with people new to this kind of authority or crisis. It’s like going into shock. You can’t really fight it, but you do need to stay checked in, and you’ll get through it.”
“Lady, you don’t know crisis until you’ve chased space frogs around an active portal floor.”
“I’m sure I don’t,” she answered with a smile in her voice.
“Pen,” he said, taking the one she offered him and starting to make notes on the pages. Where the holes were. He’d give a list of important areas for questions to the interrogators. They wouldn’t like it, but he’d do it anyway.
That was his job.
They got to the General’s building and the driver let them out and Troy walked in with Bridgette, the inescapable sense that he was in trouble, having to come here, still present.
He walked down the hallway to his office, then paused and let Bridgette unlock it for him with his keys.
“You shouldn’t keep your house key on the same ring with your office key,” she said. “Classified information should be on its own ring.”
“Why not just hire a doorman for me, too, so I don’t have to unlock my own apartment door anymore?” he asked, but he didn’t get any rise out of her for that. He went to sit at his desk and she came in a minute later with coffee.
“They’re bringing a couch today,” she said. “And they’ve repaired the General’s desk so you can use it again.”
Troy wrinkled his nose.
“Can I just pick a new one of those, too?” he asked. “Don’t they come in a catalogue like the chair?”
She shook her head.
“Not the ones with the security components that the desk has,” she said. “Once they install it, you should use it. No more piles of papers around the corners.”
He shrugged.
“I’ll try.”
“Not negotiable, Major,” she said. “I’m going to go out and wait for the lawyers.”
He sighed and nodded, spreading the rest of the files across his desk and continuing to work through them.
The three lawyers showed up on schedule and confirmed what Bridgette had heard: that the records from the security company were on their way, and that they should show up by Monday, but that they were going to be room-sized.
“Progress on the NDAs?” Troy asked, taking notes.
“We have a few people who are willing to sign addendums,” the woman said, “but most everyone just wants to pretend it never happened.”
Troy nodded.
“Keep working on it. How about the employees at the portal?”
All three of them were quiet for a moment and Troy looked up.
“What’s going on?”
“We have… instruction…” the tall lawyer started, “that we shouldn’t worry abou
t their status. That Washington is going to take care of what happens to all of them, once you’ve interviewed them.”
“Regardless of what I decide about the outcome of those interviews?” Troy asked. “Who has been talking to you? I need to confirm with Senator Greene…”
“The Pentagon,” the taller lawyer said. “The Air Force is going to deal with them. They’re taking them off base.”
“They’re my people,” Troy said. “I’m not just going to hand them over.”
“Yes you will,” the shorter lawyer said. “You don’t have an option.”
“Some of them haven’t done anything wrong,” Troy said. “And some of them are a security risk, anywhere off base. No. Not after a couple of guys with badges walk up and abduct a Major off of my base. They stay until I release them, and then I decide who to release them to.”
“Major, this isn’t the place to draw the line,” the taller lawyer said. “You aren’t even a General. You’re way out of your league, here.”
“I’m still the commanding officer on this base until they tell me otherwise, and I’m not releasing my people to anyone until I know where they’re going and that the people I release them to are the people they say they are.”
“You don’t want to know where they’re going,” the shorter man said. “You shouldn’t look under that rock.”
“They’re my people,” Troy said. “Moving on. How are we doing on a plan to get our shipments back?”
“It depends on where they’ve gone,” the woman said. Troy shook his head.
“We know where the money is. We can make educated guesses. In the US, I want channels open with the FBI or Homeland or whoever is going to go snatch things for us and bring them back. I need you figuring out how we’re going to do it across Europe and the Middle East. We’re talking about potentially hundreds of shipments, looking at the financial numbers. You aren’t going to guess wrong.”
They didn’t argue, and Troy moved on again.