by Chloe Garner
Cassie sighed, looking again at the bars set in cement, top and bottom. No escape.
The woman rubbed something between her hands then paused, looking at Cassie. Cassie nodded, and the woman put her hands out to the bars, gripping them with intensity for a moment, and then pulling them like pulling up a lawn sign. They slid into the ceiling effortlessly once she got them out of the floor, then she turned around and dropped them back.
“More temporary cement?” Cassie asked.
“Something like that,” the Caladais answered. “What did you call me? Violet?”
“It’s the name of a flower on this planet that is the same color as your skin,” Cassie said.
“It’s also a color, all by itself,” the Caladais said. Cassie nodded.
“It is. But I like to think that I chose it for the flower, not just the color.”
The woman pressed her lips.
“Yes. It will… do. I…” She frowned, looking at the narrow hallway. “I might change it.”
“Feel free,” Cassie said. “We’re on a timer. You good to follow me back out, or do I need to knock you out and drag you?”
“I serve no one,” Violet said. Cassie grinned.
“Let’s get you back the America.”
*********
She passed Jesse on the street, walking next to Violet.
“You leave me a big enough hole to get in after you?” he asked. “Was expecting people to be running, screaming, by now.”
“I wasn’t even armed,” she said, glancing over her shoulder as the house blew up. Violet ducked. Cassie and Jesse held each other’s eye.
“I never carry a gun,” Jesse said. “But that’s not to say no Palta ever would.”
“Mab ended entire species without one,” Cassie said. He nodded.
“Imagine what she could have done with a real military background,” he answered, glancing at Violet. “Welcome to Earth.”
‘This isn’t over,” Cassie said.
“She’s going to take some time to get settled,” Jesse said.
Cassie took out the dart and showed it to him. He frowned, taking it and twisting it in his hands.
“Never seen one.”
“It’s because it’s mine,” Violet said. “It injects you full of tracking chips so they can find you in case you get away.”
Cassie grinned.
“Useful on just about anyone but me,” she said. “Because I’m just going to Kansas.”
“How are you getting her out of the country?” Jesse asked, looking at the house as men came running out the front door, shouting to each other.
“Embassy, then Troy. If he’s awake. Otherwise, I’ll call the Senator. She owes us one, right?”
Jesse shrugged, antsy to be moving again.
“There were two species of foreign terrestrial I’d never seen before,” Cassie told him. “Possible there are more, still alive.”
“Cass,” Jesse said playfully. “You afraid for me?”
“Don’t call me that,” Cassie answered, jerking her chin forward. “We’re going to keep moving. I’m telling you, this isn’t over.”
*********
They told him that Cassie was coming home with the woman from Brazil, special Air Force flight. Negotiating that with the authorities had been tricky, but because he’d been out of the office, it had all happened out of the Senator’s office. All Troy knew was that Cassie was coming and that the woman’s appearance had caused quite a stir. The rumors rebounding around base were all over the map, but so far no one had guessed that she was actually foreign terrestrial, outside of the people who already knew about the secondary portal.
He wondered why Cassie had gone to all the trouble, when she could just jump from Brazil to Kansas at a blink, and he worried that she’d gotten hurt or that something had gone wrong, but he figured she would have called Olivia, or him, to let them know, if that were the case.
Right?
His secretive, newly-Palta best friend was going to call him when she was in trouble?
He believed it and he moved on with his day.
When the flight touched down, Bridgette sent his driver to go get the two women from the airport, and Troy sat on the edge of his desk, unable to work until they got there.
Finally, Bridgette opened the door to his office and stepped out of the way for Cassie and a tall, purple-skinned woman with stretched dimensions and a scalp with dozens of tiny furrows instead of hair.
“Violet, this is Major Troy Rutger,” Cassie said. “Troy, this is Violet.”
He offered her his hand and she shook like she’d been doing it her whole life.
Cassie sat down in a chair, and Troy forced himself back into his own chair.
“How are you?” Cassie asked Troy.
“I’ve been better,” Troy said. “But I’ll make it.”
“Is there something I can help with?” Violet asked. Cassie shook her head.
“No, the Lumps who had you also split Troy’s spirit from his body. He’s still adapting to being one person again.”
Violet tipped her head back.
“You should let me look at you. It was my trap they used.”
“Ah,” Cassie said. “I should have recognized the design. Didn’t get much time to look at it, because it was my friend who disarmed it.”
“So it’s the Lumps that you belong to?” Troy asked. Cassie cleared her throat once and touched her nose with her thumb. “Used to belong to,” Troy corrected himself.
Violet nodded, glancing at Cassie.
“Yes.”
“What can you tell me about them?” Troy asked. “About why they might be here?”
“They’re power-hungry,” Violet said. “They like planets… like this one… where there are lots of people who are very gullible and willing to be led around.”
“These three?” Troy asked.
“Three?” Violet answered. “There were at least a dozen individuals at the house.”
Cassie looked sharply at Troy and nodded.
“I didn’t see any of them, but I fought with two other kinds of foreign terrestrials, just to get to her.”
“How are they getting here?” Troy asked.
“Camel’s nose,” Cassie said. “We led them home.”
“I built the technology to do point-to-point transfers on site,” Violet said. “They could get here, but they couldn’t get home again, without me.”
Troy shook his head, sitting back in his chair.
“We let them in, and then we brought across the tool they needed to kick the door wide open for all the rest of them.”
“Your species is rather dim,” Violet said. Cassie grinned, and Troy frowned.
“I’ve been informed.”
“Sorry,” Violet said. “I’m normally much more polite, but I’m learning… a new set of boundaries.”
Cassie nodded.
“You’re allowed to be insulting when it’s true and it needs to be said,” Cassie told her. “That’s how I live.”
“How do you know if it needs to be said?” Violet asked.
“If you don’t say it, are they going to keep doing whatever it is you’re about to insult them about, and if you say something, might they change? And does the size of the insult compare favorably to the size of the correction?”
Violet nodded and Troy closed his eyes. Cassie was going to teach Violet her social skills.
Great.
“Do you know what they’re planning on doing, here?” Troy asked.
“They don’t talk about plans in front of me,” Violet said. “It would make me feel empowered and included.”
“They just make her make all the tools. I have a list,” Cassie said, raising her eyebrows. “Troy, she’s a genius. The things she’s thought of…”
“I need a work space, if I’m going to get the tracking chips out of you,” Violet asked.
“Tracking chips?” Troy asked. Cassie shrugged.
“Yeah. Apparently they shot me
full of ‘em, down at the house in Brazil. Can tell where I am all the time, now.”
Troy looked at her, very confused by her lack of concern.
“Oh,” she said. “No. I’m going to stick ‘em in Olivia or Conrad or someone and take the rest out of me, so that they think I’m here all the time.”
“They will be tagged to your biometrics,” Violet said. Cassie turned to face her.
“No kidding? They’ll know when I take them out?”
Violet nodded, and Cassie shrugged, still impressed.
“Clever. I can override that, but thanks for the heads up.”
Violet dipped her head.
“What do you need?” Troy asked, looking at Violet. “In order to be comfortable?”
“Tools,” she said. “Resources. I can make myself comfortable anywhere.”
“An apartment,” Cassie said. “And a budget. You can draw up a simplified working contract like we had with Jesse. Keep her out of the labs, though. He had restraint. She… doesn’t.”
“Is that bad?” Violet asked.
“Oh, no,” Cassie said. “You and I are going to be seeing a lot of each other once I get everything knocked out, here. You are my new best friend. I want to know everything you’ve ever done. Jesse is… cagey. I hate that.”
“So what would the terms of her employment be?” Troy asked. “If we’re going to be paying her.”
“First is just reparation for being a part of the slave trade,” Cassie said. “And she signs a waiver not to sue. After that? You send her puzzles that the labs can’t figure out and she sends back the answers. But with restraint. You want her to be an unidentified Air Force asset, not a foreign terrestrial genius on the payroll. It keeps her from being a target.”
“Who would target her?” Troy asked.
Cassie censored herself, looking over at Violet.
“Anyone who knows who I am and thinks they can break me,” Violet said evenly, looking back at Cassie. “You don’t have to hold back from saying it. We both know it’s true.”
“Break you?” Troy asked.
“How else do you think you hold someone who’s that much smarter than you?” Cassie asked.
“With a massive contract and a lot of hope,” Troy answered. “No one is going to put you back into slavery. We don’t stand for that, here.”
“Cassie has been explaining that to me,” Violet said. “I don’t really know what to do with myself, but if I can be helpful to you…”
“No,” Cassie said. “No, that’s not how this goes. You aren’t being helpful to him. You are in the position of power here…” She shook her head, lifting her chin to look at Troy. “I’m her agent.”
“You’re what?”
Cassie nodded.
“You heard me. Any negotiation with my client has to go through me, first. All offers of remuneration or employment, I will review and advise her whether or not she should accept them.”
“How does that help anything?” Troy asked, refusing to match her new, formal tone.
“She won’t be working for me, and I won’t take compensation for it. I will help her maintain her autonomy until I’m sure that she can be responsible for it on her own.”
Violet looked from Troy to Cassie and back.
“No,” she said. “At best, that would make you my patron and at worst, my slave. I will… accept your council as a wise friend, but I will not allow you to put yourself between others and me.”
“Agents are a completely legitimate way of interacting between talent and capital,” Cassie said.
“Nonetheless, Calista,” Violet said. “I will take responsibility for myself and I will make my own mistakes.”
“What about the Lumps?” Cassie asked.
Violet looked around the room.
“This is a very nice office,” she said.
“Thank you,” Troy said hesitantly.
“Is this what authority looks like, here?”
Troy looked around.
To him, it was what an office looked like when the guy working there didn’t plan on staying long.
“The size of it is, I guess,” he said.
“It is very undefended,” Violet said.
“No kidding,” Cassie commented, and Troy frowned.
“It’s on a military base,” he said. Violet turned to look at him again. Her facial affectations were very human.
“What does what’s outside of the walls have to do with it?” she asked.
“They only think in linear travel, here,” Cassie said.
“Even though this is the place where they have the technology…?”
Cassie nodded.
“Even though. They think that the space that you jump from is special.”
Violet frowned.
“How could it be?”
Cassie shook her head.
“The technology that runs it is secret.”
“Why?”
“Because if anyone had it, anyone could use it,” Troy said. “And we’re trying not to destroy other civilizations by accident.”
Even he didn’t really believe it anymore, but it was easy to say after all the years at jump school.
“But what about local transit?” Violet asked.
“They’re nowhere near wealthy enough to afford it,” Cassie said. “It really is only viable as an inter-galactic method of travel.”
“But you use it, surely,” Violet said. Cassie glanced at Troy. He wasn’t sure why, other than that it bothered him that, yes, she did.
“Yes,” she said. “But I’m very wealthy.”
“Compared to your planet?” Violet asked, frowning. “You are more complex than I’ve assumed, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Cassie said. She turned to face Troy once more. “We need to get her settled in, and then I need to go catch up with Jesse.”
“Jesse who hasn’t reported in, in weeks?” Troy asked.
“Is he the one we saw outside the house?” Violet asked.
“That’s the one,” Cassie said. Troy’s eyebrows went up.
“I beat him to the foreign terrestrials he was tracking?” he asked. She grinned.
“Please, please let me be there when you point that out,” she said.
He couldn’t help grinning back.
“So… Did we just win?” he asked. Jesse was there, Cassie was there, the Lumps were there… Surely that meant it was over, right?
Cassie blew air through her lips.
“We’re still working on battle maps,” she said. “Jesse’s got a lead on them, but it’s pretty slim, and I never even saw them.”
“No, you just blew up the house,” Violet said. Troy’s eyebrows skyrocketed.
“You did what? Did you go down there and cause an international incident?”
“It was a gas explosion,” Cassie said. “And the foreign terrestrials hiding there aren’t going to want any more attention than we do. I may have caused an intergalactic incident, but not an international one.”
Troy pursed his lips.
“You blew up the house.”
“Jesse asked me to blow a hole in it so he could go poke around,” she said. “Only mistake was that I blew everything up too small for there to be much to poke at.”
Troy blinked.
Once.
She shrugged.
“You went through training with me,” she said. “Sometimes, you have to do what you have to do, to survive, and any tool is a legitimate one, at that point.”
“Including breath exhaust from Vey-Nogs,” Violet said. Cassie gave Troy a firm nod.
“Including the breath exhaust from Vey-Nogs.”
He knew better.
He did.
But he still wanted to ask what a Vey-Nog was.
Cassie grinned at him.
“Think rhinoceros in a suit.”
“She beat my system,” Violet said. “I didn’t think anyone could.”
Cassie grinned over at the purple foreign terrestrial.
“Best system I’ve ever seen, and I broke out of Kable Telk.”
Violet’s eyes got wider.
“I’ve served at Kable Telk. Do you know they keep one of their offspring in the basement?”
“I did,” Cassie said. “How did you know?”
Violet looked at the floor.
“I thought the building was beautiful, so I built a small robot to show me all of it. I saw her, but I did not free her. She was like me.”
“I unplugged her and put her somewhere they’ll never find her,” Cassie said. “They didn’t break you. They thought they did, but they didn’t.”
Violet raised her eyes, and Cassie smiled, then turned to Troy.
“So let’s get her set up. Okay? Apartment, bank account, and liaison.”
“Conrad?” Troy asked. Cassie shook her head.
“Olivia.”
“No,” Troy said reflexively. “She’s not getting involved in this.”
“Troy, she went world-hopping with me, to find you, and even after I almost drowned her, getting there, at the end of it all, she said she’d go out with me again, if I needed her. She spent two full days doing science in a blacked-out basement…”
She hesitated, and Violet nodded.
“You can say it. Like mine.”
“It wasn’t like yours,” Cassie said. “She could leave, there were no bars, and she could stand up without hitting her head. But… She sat on the floor of a blacked-out basement looking at leaf samples for two days and she saved an entire city from war. This is perfect for her. It’s safe adventure.”
“Is Olivia the right choice for her?” Troy asked, indicating Violet. “She’s kind of… passive.”
“That woman has a spine of steel underneath a very, very polite exterior,” Cassie said. “I don’t know anyone who more firmly believes in right and wrong than her. And, let’s face it, I’m kind of abrasive and antisocial. You want me being her only point of contact?”
“May I meet her?” Violet asked. “Before you lock me away again with only one person bringing me my meals?”
Troy looked at Cassie.
“No,” he said. “That’s not going to work.”
“She needs a circle,” Cassie agreed. “Even if it’s limited to people who know about the second portal, she needs a circle.”
“She needs to go home,” Troy said.