Rebirth (Cross Book 1)

by Hildred Billings

  Without her coffee to keep her hands busy, Danielle bought a price-gouged bottle of water and sat on the outskirts of the international meeting area.

  A stream of passengers from the flight eventually made their way from immigration. After scanning their faces, Danielle sat back down, teeth chomping on her bottom lip as she realized her friend had yet to come through.

  Another surge of people arrived a few minutes later. She leaped up from her seat and stood on her tip-toes to gaze over the throngs of heads bobbing, most of them coated in black hair. Many still had their passports out, flashing their unified country of origin as some broke off into tour groups, families, and businessmen on their way to their taxis.

  Danielle was looking for one woman among them all.

  She hoped that her light blonde hair would be enough to attract the attention of her anticipated guest, but the passengers continued to walk by without as much as curious glances in her direction. Danielle checked the back of her piece of paper for a small picture a woman with a round face, high cheekbones, and long, shrouding black hair that tapered below her clavicle. Half the women walking by fit that physical description.

  The group dwindled to a few stragglers coming from the bathrooms. Danielle’s face fell in dawning disappointment. She would wait a little longer. Maybe ten more minutes. Maybe an hour.

  “Please, God,” she muttered, when another twenty minutes passed and she was still alone. She checked her cell phone for any messages. After another minute, she slipped a quarter into a public computer and checked her email, like she should have done before she left her apartment earlier that morning.

  Most of it was junk, but there was one email that made her throat dry: a note from her friend informing her that she would not be able to make their scheduled trip, due to a death in her husband’s family.

  Danielle exited out before she was prompted for another quarter. She went back out to her car, where half a cup of cold coffee awaited. She closed the door, settled into the driver’s seat, pulled the keys from her jacket, and bent her head down to cry.

  How had she known this would happen? What kind of fool was she to believe that lying woman again? She gently smacked her hand against the steering wheel. What a damned fool.

  The woman she was expecting was Yuri, her host sister from the time she spent a summer homestay in Japan during high school. They were both seventeen at the time, Danielle only beginning to come to terms with her attraction to women while Yuri dropped hints that she may be interested. Although Danielle knew better than to harbor too many affections for the person she lost her virginity to, the fact that she still saw Yuri as a possible girlfriend at that time was inescapable. Even Yuri agreed, and they decided to attempt a long-distance relationship which lasted a whole four months before Danielle’s teenaged world was crushed.

  She thought she was past all that drama, until Yuri contacted her only two months before. They were to meet that day for the first time in thirteen years, but Yuri got cold feet and never boarded her plane. A part of Danielle could not blame her – Yuri had, after all, married and had a daughter. Still, it was not supposed to be anything romantic, let alone sexual. Just two old friends meeting for the first time in years. Danielle could not help but be sore about that.

  She drove to her small downtown apartment. Not bringing her guest back with her still stung like a bee, but Danielle wiped the childish tears away.

  Bed called, insisting that she take a well-deserved nap. But she was more inclined to plop onto her pillow while calling her best friend on her phone.

  “Hello, Danny-Lynn.” Troy crunched on the salad of his lunch break. “Aren’t you supposed to be on vacation with some hot lady? Or are you calling me to gloat about how you’ve already got her in bed with you?”

  Danielle rolled over in a huff. “I’m having an awful day. Try not to make fun of me.”

  “What happened? She forgot how to kiss a girl?”

  “Troy,” Danielle whined, “she didn’t come at all. She stood me up at the airport!”

  “Aww, my poor Danny-Lynn, I’m so sorry. Why did she do that?”

  “Why do you think? Cold feet or, if you want to believe her story, her husband’s uncle died and she has to go to the funeral right now at one in the morning over there.”

  “Ouch. Double ouch. So you’re calling to bitch? Sounds good, work is boring without you. Hottie pretty much gave me your workload today.”

  Danielle could not even chuckle. “I can’t believe I’m asking this, but do you have any dates for me? I can’t take it anymore. I haven’t been on a real one in forever.”

  “A real one, huh. Guess you’re not counting that Halloween party.”

  “I barely remember that!” Danielle shot up at the mere suggestion. The big Halloween party over a week ago had seen her get so intoxicated that she spent a whole half hour locking lips with a woman she couldn’t even recall. What was the point of saying she did it when she couldn’t remember? There was nothing to brag about.

  “Just saying, you were really into it. Almost pornographic. By my standards, even.”

  “Just answer my question.”

  “All right, all right.” Troy searched for his little black book of numbers in which he kept a special section for setting up Danielle on (futile) blind dates. “I don’t know of any women right now, but there’s this one guy you may be interested in…”

  “Who? I seriously don’t care what they’re packing downstairs.”

  “Really? Okay. His name is Seth, he’s a lawyer, should live up to your haughty man-standards.”

  “Are you sure he would be into me?”

  “Uh, babe, that Halloween party? You met him there. But you were so fucking wasted you don’t remember.”

  “Oh.” Danielle did not know whether to be embarrassed. “So that means he saw…”

  “…You making out with another woman for a half hour. Oh, yeah. You should feel so lucky that I got his number for you.”

  “Do you even know him?”

  “He’s in my cooking circle. The rainbow-infested one. He’s actually straight, but his brother’s queer so they go there together. He seems pretty all right.”

  “Good. Give me his number. I need a date.”

  “I can call him for you. When are you available? I think he works weekends…”

  “Dude, I have all the time in the world right now. I’m on leave and now have absolutely nothing to fill my time with.”

  “Right,” Troy wrote something down. “I’ll let you know later. I’ve gotta finish up lunch so I can get back to work before Hottie gets me discharged.”

  They said goodbye and hung up. Danielle considered a potential date with a man… not exactly where she thought her day would go when she woke up that morning. The only two men to ever get a kiss out of her were now in places unknown. Their spiritual bond from being reincarnated mercenaries from a wasted planet made her temporarily emotionally dependent on the second one. After the Earth was saved, Danielle informed her old partner that she had no intention of forming a lasting relationship with him. They met only a few more times after that before she broke off contact with him completely. She did not regret it.

  She did, however, wonder at that moment where he was, and if he was moving on at all.

  ***

  “Anderson!”

  From beneath a cubicle desk, Devon Anderson crawled out, body covered in fiber optic cables from head to rear and his dark hair tussled from static. He tilted his eyes toward his supervisor, a man well into his forties who toted a clipboard full of papers and a highlighter in his front pocket. Behind his rectangular glasses were narrowed eyes that spelled nothing but disdain for the plebian before him.

  “How long do you plan on spending your life down there? We’ve got other machines to work on and the network has already been out on this side of the room for the past two hours. You gonna hustle or what?”

  As much as the smartass in him wanted to say maybe later, Devon shook the
cables off and nodded his sweaty brow to his irritated supervisor. “There’s a line in there that looks like it’s been chewed through by rats, and I’ve been trying to reroute the entire system over here for…”

  “I’m not instructing you to reroute the damn line! If I want that done, I’ll personally call you and Jenkins in on a fucking Sunday to do that shit, because we ain’t got time for that. What I did instruct you to do was get these computers back on the network for at least the rest of the day. I swear, are you deaf?”

  Devon kicked a cable out of his way. “Not at all. I was trying to save us from some work later.”

  The technology supervisor sighed, pulled out his highlighter, and marked something on his clipboard. “I know you’re smart, but you’re still small stuff. You’ve only been working here for two months – you can’t just go rerouting network lines. So stick to what I tell you to do, and maybe in the next few years you’ll be playing with the big boys, got it? Thought so.” He swung the clipboard to his side and clicked his tongue. “Fix this shit and clean up this mess before I’ve got you working overtime tonight. If these computers aren’t back online in the next hour without a damn good excuse, you’ll be getting a write up, and you can’t afford one at this stage.” Mr. Parker straightened his red necktie and marched off, no doubt to give anything but accolades to the other two network techs scrambling around the office trying to fix the latest in a flood of communication errors.

  Devon took a second to recollect his thoughts before plunging back into the abyss of cables and ear-aching sounds of eternal humming. He did not appreciate being told for the second time that month that his abilities as a network guru were low standard. Devon made it no secret that he hated his job, but was also not about to get himself fired even before the year was over. He had just been promoted from trainee to grunt capable of doing work independently, and he was already flubbing it up by not reaching the specifications of his out-of-date supervisor. The pulsating heat of the electric cables surrounding him made Devon hate his job even more.

  “I bet if he knew I saved this god-forsaken planet last summer he’d shut the fuck up.” Devon continued to mess with one of the rerouted cables. It refused to budge. “Or maybe he’d kill me for sure, because there’s no way he likes his life.”

  Regardless of how much Devon hated his job, he hated the idea of overtime even more and put everything back together, functionality be damned. Once he was finished, he emerged from the cable-cave a sweaty, disgruntled man, shoved aside by the five office employees who needed to use those computers to finish up their work before their boss could have their skins flayed. Devon crawled to the tech office, his supervisor nowhere to be seen. Thank the Void.

  “Hey, Devon,” one of his unfortunate co-workers, a slightly older man made of string beans and hair gel named Neil, sauntered into the office and pulled an empty mug off the wall. “’Sup? Get those comps taken care of?”

  Devon planted his forehead onto the counter. “It’s four-thirty and all I want to do is go home, shower, and then shower again. Save me.”

  “Nah, you get used to it. The thankless work, the fried lines, the thankless work, the yelling employees who downloaded more viruses onto their computers, the thankless work, the shithead boss, the thankless work…” Neil’s voice trailed off as he emptied the last of the cooling coffee in the pot. “This should be just enough to get me home tonight.”

  Devon moved his forehead across the table in workplace agony.

  “Come on, now, it’s only Wednesday. Two more days of this. You can’t go breaking down on hump day, yo. This is why guys like the admin make total bank, because this job tries to kill you.”

  In no way was Devon in the mood to listen to his coworker ramble on about work ethics. “I just keep telling myself it’s only forty hours of my life a week.”

  Neil shucked back the stale coffee, his face unfettered by the awful taste and the shockingly cool texture from already working years for the company. “Don’t you have a girlfriend? Should make things a little more bearable, right? Unless she’s a total bitch, I guess.”

  “No,” Devon shot back, “I don’t.” He massaged his shoulder for the fifth time that day. I had a girlfriend earlier this year, he thought, although Devon had no idea where Alicia was now and could not give a solid damn. Since their breakup, he had been on dates with other women, but nothing came from them except a single one-night-stand. It did not make going home every day to an empty studio apartment across town suck any less.

  “Oh, well, tough luck then. But I could have sworn you had a girlfriend, mate. Oh wait, no, that’s Ted. Ted has the girlfriend. Huh.” Neil finished his coffee. “Hey, man, in that case we should go get some beers as soon as we clock out of here.”

  Devon’s cell phone buzzed. He held it up to his ear to listen to the ramblings of his best friend, Clyde, on the other end.

  “Hey, dude, I know you’re not off work yet, but when you are, you better come down to the stage to check this shit out. Serge set us up with an audition and you’ve gotta see ‘em.”

  “Yeah, okay, I’ll be there on the condition you’ve got dinner waiting for me. I’ve had a shit day, and the only way I’m not going straight home is if you buy me food.”

  “Me? You’re the one with a job.”

  “You have one too!”

  “Yeah, but I’m still in college.”

  “Oh, yeah, and I’m not paying off my loans.”

  “Okay, okay,” Clyde conceded. “I’ll get you some food if you come down here in a half hour. I won’t even make you play.”

  “Make me play? As if you have the authority.” Devon checked himself before his coworker gave him a bigger side-eye. “Fine, I’ll be there. Yeah, talk to you later. Bye.” He hung up and shoved his phone back into his pocket. “Sorry, can’t. Got another engagement tonight.”

  “What was that all about, eh? Sounded like girlfriend problems to me.”

  Devon nearly chortled on his own spit. Girlfriend? Clyde? He supposed they acted like jilted lovers half the time as opposed to best friends. “No, that was band crap. We’re apparently auditioning for a new drummer… again.”

  “Oh. I thought you guys had a drummer.”

  “Yeah, well, guy couldn’t stay out of jail.”

  “Oh, snap.”

  Neil went back to work shortly after that. Devon checked the time and decided to use his remaining fifteen minutes of work to run diagnostics on computers he knew were fine, if only to keep his supervisor off his back and his total clocked overtime nonexistent. When five rolled around, he bailed, which turned out to be the best decision all day since Mr. Parker was already corralling Neil to do some last-minute work.

  Devon booked himself a one-way trip to where the rest of his friends met to deal with band issues. With more gigs lining up on the weekends, they really needed to find a permanent drummer again, and soon.

  He pulled into the parking lot of his alma-mater’s second auditorium, the cold fog nipping through his fleece jacket as he rummaged through his trunk to find his guitar. His fingers were numb from the frost and from handling cables all day – he had no idea how he was going to play at all, let alone well.

  “Devon!” His name echoed as soon as entered the auditorium. He looked over and saw his red-headed friend Clyde flagging him down near the stage. “I got you pizza, is that good enough?”

  Devon propped his guitar on a front row seat and sat himself down. “Just remind me why I’m here again.”

  “Serge and I auditioned somebody for the band ourselves earlier, but you’ve gotta see ‘em for yourself. They are so good, man, gonna blow your mind.”

  “More food, less talking, please.”

  Clyde trotted off to fetch the pizza box for his soul-sucked friend. While he was gone, Devon settled into his chair and stared at the stage before him, until he realized that there was a body blocking his view.

  She was relatively tiny, probably a mere five or so feet and even smaller as she slouch
ed into a sitting position over the side of the stage. The ceiling lights blinded his ability to see any great details beyond her long, brown hair that sat atop her hunched shoulders, her brow covered by a wool-knit hat that was pulled down over her eyes. Her entire dress consisted of patchwork toppings and beads that stitched across her bodice and down her arm, her feet protected by a pair of thin moccasins and her satchel attached to her side by a thick strap. Tiny hands sat folded in her lap; even tinier eyes stared at him from a sunken face.

  She waved, and he was obliged to twiddle his fingers back at her. The only women who frequented the auditorium were girlfriends of band members, and this young woman barely appeared to be out of high school. Devon turned his face away. Where was Clyde?

  He returned, pizza box in hand, the aroma of greasy cheese filling Devon’s hungry nostrils as he lunged for food. Serge and his colorful girlfriend Andy appeared on the stage, coming over to join the small group.

  “Ah, great, you made it!” Serge sat down next to the strange woman while Andy hopped down and proclaimed herself gatekeeper to Devon’s guitar. “Good to know that ‘the man’ hasn’t killed you yet.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s trying,” Devon said between bites of pizza.

  “Aw, lighten up on poor Devon…” Andy shoved aside his guitar and rested her blue hair on Devon’s shoulder. “He’s the only one here with an actual tie-wearing job!” She meant that mostly as a jibe to her boyfriend who, while he held down a full-time job, could hardly say he worked hard.

  “I don’t actually wear a tie.”

  “But you would look cute in one.”

  Devon ignored that. “So where’s this guy at so we can get this audition over with?” Devon shoved the pizza box once he had his fill.

  “Voila,” Clyde said, gesturing to the strange woman still sitting on the stage. “The answer to our problems.”