by Chloe Garner
Cassie peaked again and Mab shot again.
“What is this about, Mab?” Cassie called.
“Just waiting for you to impress me, Calista,” Mab called back. Cassie snorted to herself.
“You having fun then?” Cassie yelled.
“Aren’t you?” Mab answered. Her voice was different. Cassie stuck her head around the corner to see Mab hobbling slightly as she made her way further down the street. That was gratifying. Cassie rounded the corner, sprinting for the box as she shot at Mab. Mab accelerated, turning sideways to shoot back, but continuing to run away. Cassie frowned as two or three shots - hard to tell - ricocheted around the inside of the metal box. She leaned against it, watching Mab, the dying bullets throwing high-frequency vibrations through the metal.
Why was she running?
Cassie took careful aim, shooting Mab twice more, once center-of-mass and once in the back of the head. Mab’s body and head jerked, but she kept running, turning a corner and again disappearing. Cassie followed carefully, keeping low and against the buildings. She got to the corner and considered going into the building to try to see what was going on before she made a decision on what to do about it, but at the same time, this felt like the only advantage she’d had all day. Clearly, Mab was toying with her. What did she really have to lose?
She pressed it.
Swinging wide around the corner and making for the opposite wall, she saw Mab disappear into a shop. She picked up her pace to a quick run, just slow enough that she wouldn’t wind herself in less than a half mile. She paused at the door, then turned.
The door didn’t open.
She pushed against it, and found that it felt more like a wall than a door. They used sturdy materials here, but the doors gave when you leaned on them. Her hands buzzed slightly and she backed away, peering through the door. She couldn’t see Mab anywhere.
She turned back around and found the street was going the wrong way. She had been coming from directly to her right, but now the street went off at forty-five degrees. Turning ninety degrees to retrace her steps would have put her in the road. Cassie swung back to look at the doors, and found a faceless gray wall. She turned again and the street had turned ninety degrees, now angling away in the other direction. She took a step, gun up, trying to find what was lying to her.
Something was lying.
There were no shadows to work with from natural light sources; the clouds overhead were vaguely blue-gray under some kind of nocturnal light, but there was nothing that clearly told her which direction light should have been coming from and going to. She took an uncertain step forward and the buildings swiveled subtly. Cassie retreated back to the building, ducking low and putting her hand against it. It hummed under her hand.
“You look lost,” Mab called, appearing through a doorway across the street. Cassie spun, looking for cover, and went facefirst into a wall that she swore hadn’t been there a moment before.
She turned and the wall turned with her. Mab laughed. Cassie ducked.
“You were interesting for a few minutes there,” Mab said. Cassie pushed her back into the wall, turning to look at Mab behind her. “But I’m bored now.”
Mab tipped her head to the side and Cassie pushed her way up the building, watching Mab’s eyes. The building jerked out from behind her at the same moment that Mab pulled the trigger. The sound of the gun going off and the feeling of falling were simultaneous.
She heard Mab laugh as she walked away.
It was still raining. It occurred to Cassie that she should try to keep the gray rain out of the hole in her stomach.
It hurt. She rolled onto her side, red rolls of pain spreading out from her abdomen and making her gag. She curled her arms over her stomach and pulled her knees in as tight as she could, the effort flashing white.
She’d been shot before. Friendly fire as part of a burn. The species they were burning turned out not to be the only one on the planet. There had been a civil war going on, if that was the right term for it. She’d written a report on it. Couldn’t remember if that was what she’d called it. They’d set up in a region of the planet where they were safe, and it wasn’t until the war swept through that they found out about the other species. They’d had merchants on the planet-side of the portal, and they were covering a hard retreat, the security jumpers being unarmed as per regulation and their planet-side contacts in disarray. Someone had shot Cassie in the back. There had been an investigation on it, once they got back. Cassie was sure she’d found out the result, but it had never really mattered to her, and she forgot, now. She had been sure that the jump back to earth-side was the most painful thing she would ever experience. The surgeon told her that the bullet had shifted an inch perpendicular to entry, and the only thing that could have caused it was the jump. She was sure nothing could have been worse.
This was.
“Cassie. Stay awake if you can. I have you.”
She had a memory of herself curled, loose, on the sidewalk, hair matted to her face as the rain poured down from above, coloring her skin gray. Her hands had been relaxed, but one of them still had the gun Mab had given her. Why hadn’t she shot back? she’d wondered. Later, she couldn’t remember if it was a memory or a dream, or if it had been before or after Jesse had found her.
The room was white.
She’d been in white rooms before. Things whirred and hummed, no beeping, no clattering. It was very calm. She fell back asleep.
There was another white room. Big. Noisy. She didn’t like it. She fell back asleep.
Another white room. People fighting. They were quiet, but they were fighting. She wanted to know what they were fighting about, but her brain was too soggy, too heavy. She drifted away again.
Jesse sat against the wall in the waiting room, eyes distant. The ankles crossed, the hands in the pocket, it just made Troy angry. So casual.
“She’s going to be fine,” Jesse murmured. Troy hadn’t realized the Palta had known he was there. Troy took a breath, sitting down next to Jesse.
“I think you should go,” he said.
“Where?” Jesse asked.
“Right now, I don’t care,” Troy answered. “Anywhere you like. Just leave.”
“Is this an official opinion?” Jesse asked.
“No,” Troy said. He thought about the little fiberglass rods they’d pulled out of Cassie’s stomach, the ones Jesse had missed, and the zoo they had turned his lab into.
Weapons.
Real live foreign terrestrial weapons.
Jesse wouldn’t say who had shot Cassie; Troy wasn’t convinced he knew. But her intestines had been a mess, riddled with needle holes and tears, even after you considered the bullet that had gone through her liver.
Jesse had done a decent job at triage.
Okay, an astonishing job at triage.
Okay, if you listened to what the residents were saying when they thought no one was listening, he’d saved her life when most of them probably wouldn’t have been able to.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Jesse said.
“I doubt it,” Troy said. Jesse laughed to himself, taking his hands out of his pockets and folding his arms across his chest.
“You’re supposed to be thinking about how, after that first time, every time I’ve brought her back, she’s been injured. You’re supposed to be indignant and protective. But what you’re actually thinking about is how I saved her life.” Jesse turned his head to look at Troy, eyes somewhere between playful and sympathetic. “And the glass they took out of her. You can’t stop thinking about it because you don’t know what it is.”
“Do you?” Troy asked. Jesse’s head snapped back forward.
“No.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Of course,” Jesse said, “but curiosity and answers are… complicated when you involve certain parties.”
“That you aren’t going to tell me about,” Troy said.
“That I’m not going to tell you abo
ut.” Jesse paused. “You’ve thought this whole thing out. Had your words picked out and your outrage all built up. Evenhanded, but keeping your moral superiority in sight.”
Troy hadn’t thought about it like that, and the Palta putting it that baldly annoyed him.
“You haven’t said I’m wrong,” Troy said.
“I’m not stealing her from you,” Jesse said back.
“She was never mine to lose,” Troy said.
“No. She wasn’t.”
There was a long silence.
“What would she say?” Jesse finally asked. Troy wanted to snap back ‘to what?’ just to make Jesse say it, but it felt childish and defensive. The fact that he was working not to look defensive just made Jesse seem more right, and it made Troy angrier.
“She’d say that it’s not about me,” Troy said finally.
“No she wouldn’t,” Jesse said. “That’s what you’d say for her, but that’s not what she would say.”
Another long silence. Troy was bristling.
“Then what would she say?”
“That you wouldn’t understand.”
Damn straight he didn’t understand. She was volunteering for something that was inevitably going to get her killed. If she couldn’t see that… if she couldn’t stop herself before something happened…
“It’s got nothing to do with you,” Troy admitted.
“It’s got everything to do with me,” Jesse said. “Without me, she’d be stuck here. She’d do her best. You humans are resilient. She’d even be happy most of the time. But you’re right that I’m not the one you want to stop.”
“It’s her.”
Jesse nodded.
“I know it hurts to hear it, but you don’t understand.”
“And you do?”
Jesse nodded again.
“And I’ll never be in on your little secret, the two of you?”
“I never said that,” Jesse said. “I don’t know if you could understand or not. I just know that right now you don’t and you can’t.”
Troy leaned his head back against the wall.
“Stuff goes wrong on jumps,” he said after a while. “I see that. But not like it does with you two. Not consistently, like that.”
“You people are careful,” Jesse answered. “I actually respect that. I do.” Troy heard the thoughtful pause, but didn’t turn his head to look. “We aren’t. The things I’ve seen her do, trying to keep people safe, trying to defend herself…” There was another long pause. “There are species out there that hold to the ideal of the one perfect dream. They spend their entire lives chasing after it, and when it fails, when there are no more paths forward, when it’s truly dead… They shut down. I’ve met them.
“Some of them don’t last very long. They stop feeding themselves and they die pretty quickly. Others, though…” Troy turned his head to listen, the pain in Jesse’s voice drawing his attention. Jesse looked at him, running his hand through his hair and then looking at his fingers. “Others do everything they’re supposed to, to live. They eat, they drink, they bathe. Most of them find some kind of mindless industry, some live with family. A few go to collectives where the dead dreams live, and they have people take care of them. And they’re just… empty for the rest of their lives.”
“It’s the same here,” Troy said. “People give up.”
“What do you do, when you see it?”
Troy wondered where this was going.
“Nothing, mostly.”
Jesse laughed.
“I can’t stand it,” he said. “Here, I would try to make them come alive again. There’s hope for them, here. They’re human. You may be a bunch of dumb apes, but you have so much potential. It’s never really dead.”
Troy looked at Jesse for a second, then turned his head back to face the room.
“If you’re trying to tell me something, you’re going to have to just spell it out.”
“It’s what she is,” Jesse said. “I hate that she’s gotten tangled up in some of the stuff that’s been going on - honestly, I am - but you aren’t interested in my apology. You want to change what she is.”
“No. I just don’t want her dead,” Troy said, shoving his hands into his pockets. Jesse chortled, and they sat.
Cassie lay in the white bed with the obnoxious bedrails, feeling like an invalid.
The fact that she was an invalid never would have occurred to her until they put her in a bed that assumed she was going to roll onto the floor and not be able to get back up.
It wasn’t that far from the truth, but she’d have given the floor a shoulder-check it wouldn’t have soon forgotten.
Jesse had been by a few hours before, and Troy the previous evening. Jesse was behaving well enough with his temporary assignments, but Cassie got the impression there was tension going on that no one was telling her about. Especially not the armed guard outside of her room.
In case she tried to sneak off and managed not to leave a blood trail.
She was hooked up to so many machines.
There were Protocols. And Procedures. And the medical staff was following them to the letter, despite the fact that many of them had never been exercised before.
She was contaminated.
She had no idea what was going on in the outside world because a base supervisor came in with any non-medical visitor to her room, and it was clear that Troy was feeling limited in what he could say to her.
Jesse showed no hesitation speaking openly with her, but his visits rarely lasted more than thirty seconds before the supervisor would usher him back out. Jesse’s eyes would twinkle, like this was the secret he wanted her to know about, and she would be left alone in her room again, frustrated that he was being obtuse and enjoying it.
The doctors said she should be clear to go home tomorrow. She intended to check out tonight, but she suspected that ‘home’ was a bit generous. The Protocols and Procedures said that she was to be kept in isolation for six weeks; they made Troy wear a breathing mask when he came. Jesse was apparently too difficult to manage that they gave up forcing one on him. This pleased Cassie.
Donovan hadn’t managed to completely get his own way.
She shifted, moving her head to see the brute’s shoulder who stood outside her door. He checked credentials, but rarely did anything more than grunt.
The whole thing reeked of Donovan.
Cassie had asked after various members of her previous chain of command and found them all gone. Whenever Troy told her there was someone who was still on base, his eyes flagged that there was more to the story than that. It made her angry.
Someone was systematically deconstructing her home.
She scratched at the tape on her arm, watching the door. She had woken up to find herself intubated and on a feeding tube. She’d pulled them out. The needles up and down her arms she only just barely tolerated, if only because one of them had pain killers in it. They were monitoring her for everything; anything. Troy had sequenced her DNA and checked it against her records, informing her after she woke up that she was within normal mutative variation ranges on unimportant chromosomes. She was supposed to find that reassuring.
The nurse had finally taken the catheter out and let her go pee on her own, but only so long as her rolling assortment of beeping, dripping, and whirring equipment waited outside the door for her. Cassie suspected the man thought she was going to take all of the needles out while he wasn’t looking.
It wasn’t that it hadn’t crossed her mind.
She just figured that letting them put them all back would be more defeating than taking them out would have been victory.
But, truly, she was this close to kicking the next medical professional in the stomach who came in to examine, prod, or observe her. They didn’t use her name, and they spoke about her without leaving the room.
Tonight.
She was checking out tonight, and General Donovan and his burly guard outside her room could do whatever they wanted about it, b
ut she wasn’t staying another day.
She watched the clock, restraining herself as yet another doctor came in, tugging at tubing and poking buttons on a monitor.
“I’m leaving tonight,” she said. He glanced at her but didn’t answer. She raised her eyebrows. “I’m serious. You can send someone in here to take all of this stuff out of me, or I’ll do it myself.”
He licked his lips and swallowed, then ripped a printout off of a machine and left.
Cassie sighed.
She was bored.
She wanted to go home and get her thoughts organized; to put some energy into figuring out exactly what had happened to her and why, but here she sat, basically tied to a bed with medical tubing and wires, waiting for someone to give her permission.
Someone not in her chain of command.
Sitting up was complicated. It involved more use of her arms than she was comfortable with, and sort of a back-and-forth sway, trying to find the bits of muscle that hadn’t been exploded or severed, between the gun and the subsequent surgeries. She was getting stronger, but she needed help, and it infuriated her.
Put her in a wheelchair, point her at the door, though, and she was out of here. Screw their painkillers and their medical observation. In a wheelchair and in pain was better than this endless time alone, not knowing.
She sat and waited for something to change her mind.
Nothing did.
She started pulling out needles.
“Hold,” someone said. She looked up to find Jesse slipping in the door. He glanced at the back of the guard’s head through the window, then pulled the blinds, unfolding the wheeled mechanism that would eventually be a wheelchair.
“How did you do that?” Cassie asked.
“I have my ways,” Jesse answered. “You’re breaking out?”
“I’m leaving,” she said.