by Chloe Garner
“He jumped,” Troy said flatly, going to stand with his forehead an inch away from the glass. On the one hand, he was glad to be vindicated, but on the other, it meant that he really should have gone after Cassie right off the bat, rather than wasting his time here.
“That’s not possible,” the Secretary said. “You have to be in the portal building.”
Troy shook his head.
“Apparently, that’s a myth,” he said. “One that we use against ourselves to keep the implications of the technology under control.” He turned. “Jesse thinks it’s funny, how much we hide from ourselves, to keep ourselves under control.”
He looked at the Secretary, who looked over at Senator Greene. Greene shrugged.
“I’ve already seen it happen once,” she said. “You ready to believe him now?”
“About foreign terrestrials inside our government?” he asked. “No. They just kidnapped a key member of the Air Force from the Pentagon. We need to investigate…”
Troy sighed.
“That wasn’t him,” he said. “He sounded like him, and he looked like him, but he thought he had us fooled until we asked for his blood. And then he left.”
“Maybe that’s how you see it,” the Secretary said, and Troy pressed his mouth, turning around again to look at the stunned technician.
“You’re going to need to come up with an explanation that that man can accept,” he said. “I want to see my Lieutenant.”
“I won’t tolerate insubordinance,” Secretary Langer said. “You will remember my office.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Troy said. “But I also know that our best weapon against all kinds of foreign terrestrial technology gave herself up to Secret Service agents and hasn’t contacted me since. I want to know she’s still alive.”
“Still alive?” Secretary Langer asked. “What is it you think we do with people we arrest?”
Troy looked over his shoulder, feeling sad. The world wasn’t what it had been. They had been right to hide themselves away.
“I’d only give the General fifty-fifty odds of still being alive,” he said. “Major White, they probably killed the minute they were off of base. They’re trying to cover up the secondary portal, and Cassie and Jesse were the last ones who understood what’s going on well enough to do something about it. Without them, Sir, we are defenseless.”
“I’d listen to him,” Senator Greene said. “I’ve been working with him to get the base back on the right track, and he doesn’t use that kind of language carelessly.”
The Secretary glanced at her, then gritted his jaw.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll make a call. But this is going to cost me a lot of political capital, if it happens at all.”
Troy tried not to sigh as he turned around again.
Cassie was strong.
She was smart.
And she was harder and harder to surprise, the longer she spent as a Palta. Even with foreign terrestrials involved, even with Violet supplying them with technology… He couldn’t convince himself.
What good would keeping Cassie alive do them?
Or Jesse?
Maybe they’d gotten away. It wasn’t like he literally expected her to call, when she was out.
That.
That was what he was going to believe, for now. That she and Jesse had escaped, the way they had walked away from every other attempt to contain them, and that they were off doing their Palta saving-the-surprise-for-last thing.
He took a deep breath and nodded.
That was what he had to believe.
He turned as the Secretary left the room, on his phone, and he looked at Bridgette.
“You think she’s dead, sir?” she asked. He shook his head.
“No. I think she’s a step ahead of them.”
“You’re a bad liar, Major,” Senator Greene said. “I hope for your sake, and for the rest of us, that you’re wrong.”
He nodded.
He was a bad liar.
He could evade and he could refuse questions, but he didn’t lie. He was too busy working out the truth to come up with convincing things that weren’t true.
“So where is the General, if he isn’t dead?” Senator Greene asked. Troy shrugged.
“I was hoping that you could tell me that. If no one in D.C. knows, then I don’t think anyone knows.”
“How is that possible?” Bridgette asked. “How can a prisoner just go missing and no one notices?”
“Well, he had a body double,” Greene said. “Who was that?”
Troy shrugged again, chuckling morbidly.
“Foreign terrestrial,” he said.
“One of the ones missing from base?” Greene asked. Troy shook his head.
“I don’t know. We have no idea what they’re capable of, especially with…”
He stopped.
“With what?” Senator Greene said.
Troy pressed his mouth shut then sighed.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I hadn’t figured out how to handle it. Cassie did recover the foreign terrestrial from Brazil, but she wasn’t just a novelty slave. She was, is, a technical genius who was designing and implementing… things… for them. I told Cassie about the orders to send all foreign terrestrials imported illegally through the secondary portal back to their planets of origin and she and the foreign terrestrial from Brazil walked out.”
“When was this?” Greene asked.
“Yesterday afternoon,” Troy said. She twisted her mouth to the side.
“And why didn’t you report it?”
Cassie.
“Because Cassie wants to keep her here,” he said. “The woman was born into slavery. She doesn’t have a home. And Cassie doesn’t feel beholden to the chain of command.”
“So you’ll pull rank when she needs you to, and bury it when she is insubordinate?” Greene asked.
“I didn’t bury it, yet, ma’am,” Troy said. “I was trying to figure out how to manage it.”
She smiled.
“You’d make a terrible Senator,” she said. “You only get so much leeway as base commander, and simply forgetting about a foreign terrestrial here illegally isn’t within that leeway. I’m going to assume that your report was delayed.”
“Ma’am, I disagree that sending them all home, regardless of situation, is the right thing to do.”
“And you’ve been given a direct order with the President’s signature on it,” she answered. “Even if I saw your point - and maybe I do - the base cannot survive foreign terrestrials coming here without the proper oversight, and it certainly can’t survive them coming here and staying.”
Jesse had flown here. It was different.
Somehow that made everything different.
Troy nodded.
“Yes, ma’am.”
The Secretary came back into the room, his face grim.
“They escaped,” he said.
Troy twisted his mouth to the side and nodded.
“How did they do that?” he asked.
“They killed three guards and two more are missing, and they vanished on their way to questioning at a facility here in town.”
“No,” Troy said. “Cassie would never kill someone to get out. She wouldn’t have to.”
“I’m sorry, Major. She’s now wanted for murder, and so is the other one.”
“Jesse,” Troy said. “Even if Cassie would kill someone in self defense, Jesse wouldn’t. Someone killed the guards to cover up taking Cassie and Jesse.”
“They escape custody routinely, do they not?” Langer asked.
“They do, but they’ve never hurt anyone,” Troy said, only after he said it reviewing to see whether he thought that was true. Cassie had hurt people on base, Olivia most notably, but never had she hurt anyone physically on this planet. He wasn’t sure what she might have done under Midas’ influence out in the broader universe. “Neither one of them have ever caused injury to a human being, to my knowledge,” he said, just to be thorough and co
rrect.
“Maybe this time there wasn’t any other way to escape,” Secretary Langer said. “Maybe the agents were better-trained.”
Troy wished Langer had seen what he’d seen. You wouldn’t say that it was a problem of training, if you’d watched Jesse go from cuffed and gagged to missing in the middle of his own testimony in court.
“If they’re human, they can’t hold Jesse and Cassie,” Troy said. “I guarantee that. They could only hold them if they had foreign terrestrial help.”
“You’re making a serious accusation,” Langer said.
“I’m telling you what I know,” Troy answered. “These are species with the ability to make detailed, intricate plans with unprecedented levels of prediction in what’s going to happen around them in the meantime.”
“It’s not unprecedented,” Langer said. “We call that chess.”
Troy shook his head.
“You don’t understand. You are completely underestimating both the Jalnians and the missing foreign terrestrials.”
“Foreign terrestrials that your base brought in,” Langer said. “Ought to shut down the entire program for that.”
“We’re making it right,” Troy said. “And it ignores that we are where we are. We need to deal with that.”
“You need to remember who you’re talking to, Major,” the Secretary said. “And I did call and request the informal interview. You haven’t yet identified a new course of action.”
“Neither have you,” Senator Greene said. “And you’re the one who keeps reminding us that you’re the higher-up here.”
Langer nodded. Troy didn’t like the quality of that motion. The man’s mind was closed.
“We intercepted two terrorists this morning and as part of the arrest, three Secret Service guards were killed. We now have a manhunt for two dangerous fugitives. The FBI is involved, as are local law enforcement officers. I didn’t come back in here looking for guidance. This was a courtesy to let you know that the situation has escalated and that you are no longer going to be involved in it.”
“You’re forgetting about the officer who just vanished from in front of our eyes in your own interrogation room,” Senator Greene said. “Major Rutger is the only one with any plausible theory as to how it happened. I’ll warn you again. If you block him out and it turns out to be a mistake, I will be certain that it is the end of your career.”
“I will have a uniformed officer show you to the front door,” Secretary Langer said.
Troy’s phone buzzed in his pocket and he took it out, hoping it was Cassie, but found that it was Olivia.
He put the phone back into his pocket, but it buzzed again.
And again.
The Secretary had left and it was just the three of them standing in the room waiting for an escort, so he pulled the phone out and answered it.
“I’m in a really important meeting right now,” he said quietly, hoping he didn’t sound rude.
“I’m not sure what I should have done, but it was her idea,” Olivia said. Troy took a step toward the glass, lowering his head.
“Whose?”
“Violet’s,” she said and he blinked. That hadn’t been the answer he’d expected.
“What?” he asked. “You… How do you know her?”
“Yeah,” Olivia said. “That’s why I don’t know what I should have done. Cassie…”
He tipped his head back.
“Say no more,” he said as she paused. “She asked you not to say anything about it to me, so don’t.”
Both Bridgette and Senator Greene were watching him and he shook his head. This was out of control, but it wasn’t like it was getting any better or any worse for his efforts. What the hell?
“Violet… She saw something online and she called me this morning,” Olivia said. “I didn’t even know she had a phone… I don’t know. Anyway. She said that there were some things that you were going to need, to help Cassie and she had me go shopping…”
Troy waited.
“Go on.”
She made a little popping noise that she did when she was sucking on her lips.
“I got her what she asked for. Cassie trusts her.”
“I know she does.”
“But she made me a box of stuff and said that I had to get it to you at any cost.”
“At any cost?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” he said. “The problem is that I’m in Washington.”
“So am I.”
He drew his head back, surprised once more.
“Well, then.”
*********
Cassie put her palms against the door. There wasn’t much of anything to feel, there, other than that the mass of it was impressive. It had almost no vibration at all, compared to the other surfaces in the room. Cassie could feel everything through the soles of her feet, the paper shoes having no padding in them at all.
She could feel when people went walking by outside, and when they were talking, though the metal floor had too much dampening in it for her to be able to understand their words.
The inside of the room had smooth edges to each corner, with a ceiling that was just out of reach, standing on her toes. The door was seated exactly into the walls, with a space that was just wide enough for her fingernails all the way around. It was a clever hinge, almost like a French hinge, where the door settled into the wall, once it was done swinging. Cassie was already designing one in her head that would have done what this one did, including the thump at the end, when the door had dropped into a groove in the doorway with a real sense of finality. She would have to physically lift the door before she could even think about opening it, and there was nothing to grip on this side. She’d have been using the friction of her palms, alone, to lift a door that might have weighed three-hundred pounds.
The magnets in her cuffs didn’t respond to much of anything as she scanned the room with them, sliding them up and down in a search pattern on the walls and the floor. There might have been some nails in wood, in two of the corners, but they weren’t nearby. The room was made of a high-tech, non-reactive material that had Violet written all over it.
She did have all of the pieces of the car door that she’d stashed inside the armbuckles, but none of them seemed relevant to where she was now.
If she could have gotten to the back of her forearm, she would have jumped out, auto-return or otherwise, just to get a feel for how everything around her was working, but she didn’t even have that.
What she did have was a bloody great basher attached to the ends of her arms, and she did have a native affection for that. One of the Lumps turned their backs on her, she was going to see how they did with blunt force. Gana, it would have just made them angrier, but most species she’d come across in the universe had a hard time springing back immediately from being hit really hard in the head.
She hadn’t spent enough time with Violet to have any firm guesses about how the woman would work or behave. The universe was open to her, as far as Cassie could tell, and it made guesswork impossible.
That was frustrating.
So Cassie sat in the middle of the cell and started mentally measuring it and fitting it into a floor plan based on where she had been in the building so far and the footsteps she could follow as they went by.
It was something to do.
*********
“Where are you?” Troy asked.
“I’m at Reagan,” Olivia answered. “I took the first flight I could get.”
“Did she give you any clues about how to find Cassie?” he asked.
“They arrested her,” Olivia said. “Don’t they have her?”
Troy sighed.
“We’re on our way.”
He hung up and looked at Senator Greene and Bridgette.
“Ma’am,” he said to the Senator. Paused. Wanted to cover for Olivia hiding Violet, but things were spiraling too quickly for him to do it on the fly. She raised her eyebrows and crossed her arms.
>
“Yes, Major?”
“I need a ride to Reagan International,” he said. One of her eyebrows lifted a fraction higher. “I have someone there with some equipment I might need.”
“Please don’t tell me that you’ve got a foreign terrestrial wandering around the country and haven’t done a thing to stop it.”
“No, ma’am,” Troy said. “It’s someone from one of the labs at base. Civilian.”
She nodded.
“All right. I expect a very complete report about what’s going on right now, but I’ll give you slack for now. Call Malcolm and have him arrange a separate car. I’ll be taking my own car back to the Hill. More things to do, yet today.” She indicated the interview room. “I assume I can rely on you to follow up with him appropriately?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Troy said. “Just as soon as I’m sure that there is no imminent threat to the country or my people.”
The corner of her mouth came up.
“Just another day at the office, then,” she answered. “Very well. Good luck.”
He nodded, glancing at Bridgette, who was already on the phone, apparently with Malcolm. He suspected she could have come up with a car just as easily, but this kept the Senator in the loop.
A young man opened the door and peeked in at them.
“I’m here to walk you to the front door,” he said quietly, opening the door the rest of the way.
Senator Greene led the way back out of the interview room and through a hallway where people got very quiet very quickly. Everyone here knew that General Donovan had gone into that room, and he hadn’t come out, and that something had happened. Troy couldn’t read off of them just how much they were guessing about it, but this was going to be a secret that was going to get harder and harder to keep.
He couldn’t think about it, right then.
He followed Senator Greene and their escort back out of the building and walked to the parking lot, where Senator Greene’s car was waiting. She left with a wave, already on her phone again, and Troy looked at Bridgette.
“There may be actual danger involved, here, at some point,” he said. “You can go back to base if you want to.”
“Major, I’ve served in war zones,” Bridgette said. “You aren’t going to scare me off with a few rogue foreign terrestrials, even if they are more dangerous than most armies. And I’m not conceding that.”