by Chloe Garner
There were fabrics out in the universe that would fix that, too, but they weren’t cotton.
She looked at the dart again. How had it been flying straight?
“Genius,” she murmured, slipping it into her back pocket. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to stab herself with it again, but there was no way she was just leaving it. She went looking for the other two, but she couldn’t find them before two men appeared at the end of the hallway.
They were huge.
Three and a half feet across at the shoulders, they wore custom-tailored suits to fit around their foot-and-a-half wide necks. They had gray skin, the kind of skin that was borne of a hostile, rocky kind of an environment, and they had almost no legs at all. Cassie could see four eyes on each of them from where she stood, but she wasn’t ruling out another pair on the backs of their heads.
More eyes meant more brain resources dedicated to sensory processing. Meant they were either highly instinct-driven or incredibly intelligent.
Neither was of much use to Cassie, because she’d never seen them before, and knew nothing about how to avoid them or incapacitate them.
One of them grunted, and she turned, finding a doorway at the other end of the hallway, and she ran.
A dark-skinned foreign terrestrial appeared and she skidded to a stop, looking him in the eye.
“You here to kill me?” she asked in English. He took a step forward and she backed off one, hearing the thumps as the two gray-skinned foreign terrestrials behind her picked up speed. Like a pair of elephantine line backers.
“You going to capture me or kill me?” she asked, trying Gana this time.
“I’m here to capture everything but your legs,” the dark-skinned man answered. He didn’t have the facilities to do it - he was faster than the gray guys by a lot - but they were certainly up to it, and he could hold her in the meantime.
It was a good plan.
Right up until it wasn’t.
She slipped to the side, probing at one of the paintings and finding it just as affixed to the wall as she’d imagined. The surface of it was relatively soft, also like she’d expected. She put her elbow through it into the electronics underneath, then she punched a hole up higher, climbing up the painting. She put her feet into the holes she’d made to reach the top of the frame, then finger-pulled her way up from there. She looked up at the ceiling, at the complex relief sculptures up there, and she jumped, catching hold of the cup of a leaf as the dark-skinned foreign terrestrial came up after her.
She didn’t know how, but there was tech here capable of keeping her from jumping. More accurately, it was going to echo back anything she jumped, so she could jump, but the tech was just going to swap her back. It didn’t matter where she went.
The thing with a caged Palta was that she was going to do an awful lot more damage on the way out than she would have, otherwise.
The dark-skinned foreign terrestrial was a better climber than she was, and the two gray ones were trying to slow in time to end up underneath her. She dropped, taking out the dart to menace them with it. No one slowed, which was exactly what she wanted to know. Either the dart wasn’t poison, or the antidote was in ready supply. She tucked it away again as she resumed running, looking at everything.
There was tech everywhere.
So many toys, so little time.
She found the breath intake sensor on the wall and she fed a strip of electronic membrane into it, waiting for it to reach the command module somewhere else in the building. She only had a few seconds, but that was plenty. She programmed it and the entire system turned around, feeding processed air back into the entire building. It would take time, but she wouldn’t be the first one to give, when the air quality dropped below acceptable.
It also told her a lot about the three men chasing her, just by smelling the air.
There was a lot of methane to it.
And while she was disappointed at the brutality of it, she had no choice.
She reprogrammed the membrane on the vent once more, then took off running again.
The gray guys weren’t going to have a lot of stamina. They were good at what they did, but they weren’t long-distance runners by any stretch of the imagination. The darker guy, though, was faster that Cassie, and he had a ruthless temper. She could tell that just by the way he moved, even before he’d talked to her.
She found a hidden control in the next doorway and kept running, turning back to watch him as he came into the room behind her.
The house was built around a central courtyard. She could see the courtyard from inside this room, but there was no door to get to it, from here. Just a series of windows that didn’t vibrate anywhere near as much as they should have, if they were plain glass. The running backs, thumping along somewhere behind her, wouldn’t have been able to get through those windows.
He dark-skinned man grinned, a strange human affectation, except that it wasn’t cruel the way a grin on a human would have been, under these circumstances. That, there, was just bared teeth, hungry violence. Cassie nodded.
“Do you know what I am?” she asked, going to stand in front of one of the windows. She put her hand on it, feeling the way it did vibrate, then pulled a strip of membrane and put it on the window.
“You won’t get out that way,” he answered. “There are just more of us.”
She shook her head.
“No,” she said. “Not out there. Too many ways of getting pictures of people, out there. You aren’t allowed in direct sunlight, are you? Too risky. You’re stuck in here.”
He grinned at her again, feet scratching on the floor now as claws came out.
There was that temper.
She moved away from the not-glass, foot over foot sideways, going for the next window.
“You think that they’re just going to let you climb over the house and get away?” he asked.
She put another strip of membrane on the next window, then took a step forward.
“I’m with the United States Air Force,” she said. “And you are holding USAF property that I am here to reclaim.”
He straightened.
“You’re not human,” he said.
She smiled.
“No.”
He looked at the windows. Curious? Concerned? Yes. She looked at him with bright eyes, feeling the victory even as the two gray men rounded the corner and swung their way into the room, blocking the door.
She let her posture go easy, knowing that there would be people behind security cameras watching, plotting next moves.
She needed to get to the Caladais quickly, or this was going to get out of hand.
But in the meantime, she wasn’t going to let them think she was afraid.
She felt the infrared scan as they looked at her body temperature, trying to guess her species.
They wouldn’t find anything there. Her skin was thicker than humans’ skin, and it insulated her better. They couldn’t read her core temperature without being invasive.
That, by itself, was informative, but it was hardly uncommon.
She looked around at the walls, finding the section of paint that was absorbing light, and she looked directly at it, lowering her head a fraction as the dark-skinned foreign terrestrial decided she was bluffing and charged her again.
The magnetics in the house were fascinating. Enough power to drive a dart at any speed along any path, keeping it on line even as it hit her, enough variability to take measurements almost anywhere, move things up, down, hold them in place.
She triggered the door as the windows behind her shattered. The steel crushed the gray foreign terrestrials, but the thick windows made more noise. The dark-skinned man had been expecting her to run for them, so he wasn’t prepared for her to go the other direction, opening the door as she got close, jumping over the two gray men where they lay, crushed on the floor, then closing the door again and putting a membrane on it to permanently block the control signal to it.
Would the dar
k-skinned man go out into the sunlight to come around after her, or would he and the rest of the system rely on other tools to try to catch her?
She didn’t care.
She needed to find the Caladais now.
Demoralizing.
She was working as a waitress for human guests.
They’d keep her away from light.
Away from doors.
Metal cage would be good.
But she would need tools.
Cassie needed to find something below-grade, isolated. Preferably made out of cement and steel.
It was all symbolic - it wouldn’t keep the kind of mind in that was capable of devising the security system - but it had to remind her, all day, that she was a prisoner.
Cassie found a section of wall with a magnetic actuator attached to it and she triggered it, counting down the computing power she had left with a grimace. She heard voices, human ones, and she went through the door, pulling her electronics off of it to take with her as she went down a tight spiral staircase through pitch darkness.
Good thing she could see in the dark.
She went down a bit more than a full story, coming to a cement landing in a narrow hallway. She could have touched both walls at the same time with her elbows, and the ceiling came down to the point that she had to keep her head down to make it forward.
It smelled of stale water and cement dust, but at least it didn’t smell like an unwashed prison. It was unpleasant but it wasn’t unsanitary. Cassie came to a sharp left turn in the darkness, following the narrow hallway to where it met a larger room. There were indicator lights flickering here and there around the edges of the room, but the center of it was a floor-to-ceiling steel-barred cage. Even here, if Cassie had stood too tall, her head would have hit the ceiling. And the woman in the cage was at least two inches taller than Cassie, depending on how the flex in her spine worked its way out under her natural posture.
“You’re Palta,” the woman said in Gana.
“I am,” Cassie answered. “You’re Caladais.”
“I am.”
“I’m here to get you out,” Cassie said.
The purple-skinned woman in the cage shook her head, her eyes glowing slightly in the dark. It was hard to see - it was pitch black, after all - but Cassie had a suspicion that that was not a genetic advantage that the Caladais naturally had.
“There is no way out,” she said. “I designed the entire system myself. You are trapped here.”
“You ever met a Palta?” Cassie asked.
“No,” the woman said, and Cassie nodded, stepping forward to feel at the bars of the cage.
“I’ve vibration-proofed them,” the woman said.
“No such thing, if you’re willing to shake hard enough,” Cassie answered, looking up at the way the steel was a part of the cement pour. Rebar up there would keep the whole thing from collapsing under its own weight, plus some steel I-beams…
“You didn’t bring tools,” the woman said.
“I came to tools,” Cassie answered, not inspecting the periphery of the room yet. “I really admire your work.”
“Thank you. I admire that you got here,” the woman said. Cassie looked at her.
“Calista du Charme,” she said. “My friends call me Cassie.”
“I do not know the name my mother gave me, if she even wasted the effort,” the woman answered, and Cassie frowned.
She was beautiful, even by human standards. It was hard to say what hue of purple her skin was, in the dark, but she had long arms and slender legs, a waist that went up to a boyish chest and shoulders that suggested a lot more flexibility than Cassie had ever had in her life. Her face was human-enough to pass at parties as makeup and prosthetics, but her eyes were close and low, the round of her skull high and uncovered but for the texture of her own skin. Her ears were set far back, compared to a human, and her nose was almost completely flat, but her face did form a peak that gave her an elegant symmetry. Add to that the fact that she was intensely smart, and it disgusted Cassie to see her sitting there feeling sorry for herself.
The problem was that she knew better than to reason with her. As capable as the Caladais woman was, she’d been told - her entire life, apparently - that she was never going to escape, and that this was the natural condition of her life.
“You know anything about your people?” Cassie asked, continuing to work her way around the cage.
“They’ll be coming down to collect you, soon,” the woman answered. “If you go quietly, they may not kill you. They might take you prisoner to work with me.”
A spark of hope. Cassie shook her head.
“You’d like that. They’d never do anything that would make you happy. Too dangerous.”
The woman knelt, rolling her ankles underneath herself and sitting on her feet with her knees curled against her chest. Cassie kept looking.
“Why haven’t they come?” the woman asked.
“I trapped a few of them in a room and I squished a couple with a door. Possible they figure they’ve got me trapped and they have a few minutes to regroup.”
“You… squished…?”
“The gray ones,” Cassie said, putting her elbows out to either side to indicate bulk. “The actuation on that door was impressive.”
The woman put her hand over her mouth. Stockholm? Maybe.
Cassie looked around the room, taking in all of the equipment.
Home-grown.
Unique.
With a genius, Palta-rival mind behind it.
Cassie could figure it out.
Desperately, itchingly wanted to figure it out.
But she really didn’t have time. She looked at the woman in the cage.
“Violet,” she said. “Listen to me. Not to them. To me. You’re in a box. It’s one that you made. They told you what to do, and you did it, because you knew you were never going to get out. That’s fine. I get it. But what I think I know is that you put a door in it. One you’d never use. One that you put there to scare yourself, knowing it was there. Because you can’t be as smart as you are and be trapped without a door that you choose not to use. If there weren’t a way out, you’d find one. So you put one, to keep yourself from looking. You surrendered.”
The woman swayed slightly, fingers working on the ground in the way Cassie had so often seen Jesse do it. The way she’d started to do it, herself. Cuing thoughts through physical motion.
“Methane,” Cassie said, seeing it herself as she spoke. “It’s too easy, and it’s there because you put it there.”
The woman looked up. Cassie shook her head.
“And they can’t even smell it. They don’t know what happens to the sample air, because who thinks about what happens after you flush the toilet? They gave you two great big walking time bombs, and… you kept them.” She shook her head again. “That’s more than just a door, Violet. That’s a whole escape plan.”
“You reversed the sensor flow,” the Caladais woman said. Cassie nodded, raising her eyebrows.
“I did. Figured if it came to it, I’d smoke ‘em out, but it’s so much more than that.”
The woman stood.
“We aren’t safe here,” she said. Cassie shook her head.
“That’s definitely where the rush is coming from,” she agreed. “I actually lit the fuse. My override is going to stick the wall power full-on through the intake valve in just a few minutes…”
“And it’s going to get hot,” the woman said.
“Very hot,” Cassie answered. “It’s on your power, not ours. We run fifty-eight Gill.”
“And I’m at two-hundred,” the woman mused. “Very hot.”
“When you need a spark,” Cassie said.
“It’s going to burn all of the oxygen out of the whole building,” the woman said.
“Won’t bother me,” Cassie said. “How about you?”
The woman shook her head slowly.
“It isn’t the oxygen,” she said, and Cassie shook her he
ad, agreeing.
“It’s the floor. That much force, this human construction…”
The woman nodded, coming to stand at the bars, her head off to the side as she looked through them.
“They won’t let me escape,” she said. “I’m not meant for freedom.”
“Well, I think that let is well past their capacity to decide for you at this point,” Cassie said. “And I’m walking out of here, one way or another. But they brought you in through my installation, which means that I’m honor-bound to go back with you, either alive or dead. So that’s the decision you’re making right now.”
She looked the woman in the eye, greenish glints under blue eyelids.
“I don’t know how to be free,” the woman said. Cassie pulled her mouth to the side.
“I didn’t know how to be Palta until recently. I promise that’s more complicated. You’ll figure it out. You’re Caladais. I didn’t know what that even meant, thirty minutes ago, and I know that you figure things out.”
The other woman walked slowly to the corner of the cage, kneeling again with the odd inward-turning ankle motion and sitting with her knees against her shoulders. Cassie was beginning to worry that she really was going to have to come back for a body, but then the Caladais woman put her fingers to the floor at the very corner of the cage, scraping at it with her fingernails. The floor came away like clay.
“That’s very clever,” Cassie said, coming to watch. She took some of the peelings, standing carefully and smashing them between her fingers. It was cement. The hardening agents were still working. They were just confused, at a molecular level, about how to hold on to each other.
“You’re going to have to show me how you did that, when we get out of here,” Cassie said.
“It’s temporary,” the woman answered. “Once the power runs out, it will go back. Here. Give it back.”
Cassie handed the wad of mushy cement back to the Caladais woman, and she re-finished the floor, pressing it flat with her fingers and standing.
“How long have you been in here?” Cassie asked.
“I don’t know,” the woman answered. “I can make no sense of the cycles of the guards, and there’s never any light that the machines don’t give off.”