by Chloe Garner
She grunted at him and he waved as he left. She turned to look at Slav and Troy.
“So what will you do?” she asked. Slav shook his head.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if they’ll let me back on base, contract.”
“No way I’m letting you go rent-a-cop,” Troy said. “I’ve got a lab in Seattle that has a full civilian staff. You’re coming to work for me.”
“That’s cool of you, but they aren’t going to let you hire me,” Slav said.
“I don’t staff it through the base, and no one signs off on the hires here,” Troy said. “If the lab manager likes you, you’re good.”
“What about you?” Slav asked. Troy pressed his lips, then turned and waved at the waitress.
“I’ll hold it together here as long as I can,” he said. “Do my job, keep my head down, try not to start any wars.”
“So we just let them win?” Slav asked.
“We won this round,” Troy said. “We keep our powder dry until the next battle that matters.”
Slav shook his head.
“You ever feel like you’re the dinosaur that happened to see the comet landing?” he asked as Troy ordered a drink.
“Don’t give up on me, man,” Troy said. Cassie shook her head.
“I hate you two making sacrifices like this just so I can keep playing at jumps,” she said. Slav and Troy exchanged a glance and Slav licked his lips.
“You don’t change anything,” he said. “It isn’t right, what they’re doing.”
“We’re grownups, Cass,” Troy said.
“Maybe I should just send him away,” Cassie said. “Get rid of the temptation, get rid of what they’re after.”
“You think he would go?” Slav asked.
She considered, then nodded.
“I think so.”
“No,” Troy said. “You can’t do that.” He accepted his drink from the waitress and took several large swallows before setting it down on the table. “He needs you, Cass. And I think we need him.”
Slav set his drink on the table in front of him and nodded.
“Go, du Charme. Let us worry about us.”
Cassie hesitated, then stood.
“Thank you,” she said. “For everything.”
Her new badge worked.
So that was interesting.
They made their way through to the portal room unchecked, and Cassie had to admit that it was probably a lot easier because no one knew her anymore. General Donovan’s housecleaning had left her anonymous and free to go wherever her security clearance allowed her. Which was quite a lot, given everything. The only doors closed to her were the ones that led back to the operators, and even General Donovan himself wouldn’t have been allowed back there.
“So where are we going?” Cassie asked as they walked across the broad expanse of the portal room floor.
“Someplace I’ve been before,” Jesse said. “One where Mab shouldn’t expect me to go… where she should be pretty harmless.”
“Where would she be harmless?” Cassie asked.
“Certain advanced societies that are appropriately diversified,” Jesse said. “She could put a dent in them, no question, but the other parts of the population would be insulated by cultural barriers or genetic differences.”
“Xhrahk-ni wasn’t advanced enough?” Cassie asked.
“Too homogeneous,” Jesse said. “Find the one weakness, and take out all of them.”
“And what about us?” Cassie asked.
“What about us?” Jesse asked. She shook her head.
“No, humans.”
He glanced at her.
“I’ve identified any of a dozen ways to wipe out the species,” he said. “There are probably more; it isn’t my gift.”
“That’s comforting,” she said. He shrugged.
“Don’t ask questions that you don’t want the answer to.”
“Fair enough.”
“Cassie!” someone called. Cassie turned, finding one of the young jumpers she had worked with once shortly before they’d retired her. “Lieutenant du Charme!”
The young man was jogging across the portal room floor, clearly uncomfortable being there without justification.
“Time to go,” Jesse said, grabbing Cassie’s arm. There was the now less-familiar jolt as the world turned itself into a different one, and the still air of the portal room became a sharp, sweet-scented breeze.
The sky was a swirling mix of pink and sherbet orange, like cotton candy. The air was thick with the smell of sweet nectar, like fruit or flowers, but not specifically either one, and the ground vibrated with the sound of music.
Loud, thumping music lacking melody but replete with rhythm, like a heartbeat or a runner’s footsteps.
It took her a moment to identify it for what it was, it was so primal and earthy, felt more through her feet than her ears, but it was indeed music.
“Three low-angle suns here,” Jesse was saying, looking up at the sky. “Most of the planet is uninhabitable, but the poles have been covered with prolific life for as long as any recorded history can say. No seasons, no night, just a constant sunset and predictable amounts of light.”
“What do they do for water?” Cassie asked, more a reflex as an analyst than a primary curiosity. She wanted to know what smelled so good.
“Underground, mostly,” Jesse said. “The water cycle is a bit strange.”
She nodded, wandering down the street toward the scent.
“I should warn you,” Jesse said, following with what sounded like amusement in his voice. “Your implant isn’t going to help you any.”
“What?” she asked, turning her head to indicate she was listening to him, but keeping her eyes forward.
“Your implant,” he said. “This is the one language I’ve never been able to learn.”
Now she did turn to look at him.
“You?”
He shrugged, then grinned.
“You’ll see.”
Cassie stood in the middle of the market stand, mind boggled.
They moved.
Big, pinkish creatures like hippos in tutus, only mind-blowingly fit, with nuanced body control like ballet dancers or octopi.
They had mouths, and were apparently capable of speech - the proprietor had greeted Jesse in Gana - but their language was motion.
Dance.
Cassie found herself breathing with the steady beat of the music, moving with the drive of the rhythm. There, by the bright blue foodstuffs - fruits? vegetables? other? - was a sale in progress. He wanted a bulk discount, she insisted that the list price was firm.
How did she know that? Cassie wondered.
It felt native, like using her eyes for the first time, discovering what that organ had been there for, all along. Her body hummed with a desire to join into a conversation - any conversation - just to be a part of the flow of motion around her, through her. There was a strange vibration beside her, and she found herself reacting to Jesse as an outsider. He was still, a rock in flowing water, and the motion rippled around him as it broke against his foreignness. He was watching her.
“You understand it, don’t you?” he asked. She had to remind herself how to speak.
“I do.”
He nodded.
“I thought you might. The preoccupation with formation.”
She shook her head. It was jarring, speech, against the easy flow of conversation in the shop. He grinned.
“You don’t even know about it, do you?”
“How?” she asked. He shrugged, picking up a neon green plant and putting it to his nose. She had almost forgotten the smells. The shop was the source of them, a cornucopia of super-sweet plants of various forms, and Cassie still wanted to investigate them.
“It’s a predetermined likelihood in any species that they can speak in motion,” he said. “Palta are surprisingly bad at it, I can’t say why. Maybe ten percent of us can do it. I’d say humans aren’t much better, no more than tw
enty-five percent, for sure. There are actually Dinalae who can’t do it. Not many, but a few.”
“What do they do?” Cassie asked.
“Used to be they died. Then they were outcasts and weren’t able to marry or reproduce. Any more, they generally leave. A disgraced Dinalae here is a champion choreographer anywhere else in the universe.”
“Choreographers,” Cassie said, moving among the foods and touching, smelling things as she went.
Someone greeted her.
A shopkeeper, young, friendly.
“You speak,” she said.
It was an opening, an invitation to join the conversation, and Cassie…
… froze.
She had no vocabulary.
Her implant didn’t bridge the gaps for her or learn patterns in grammar and context. While she understood like a native, she couldn’t create the language. She couldn’t improvise it. The young woman laughed, a pleasant, quick little motion and Cassie echoed it.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You’ll learn. We haven’t had a Palta here in a while.”
Cassie opened her mouth to say she wasn’t Palta, but thought better of it. Human didn’t mean anything to them, and it wasn’t really that important.
“Do you know Jesse?” Cassie asked.
“Should I?” the woman answered in Gana. It hurt Cassie to watch the woman go still, like the moment spirit left body.
“Lots of people do,” Cassie said. “He isn’t that special, though. Your people are amazing. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Won’t, anywhere else in the known universe,” the girl said. Cassie continued to scan the shop, feeling anew the call of the music. “There are species with signals and species that sing, but the Dinalae are the only ones who dance.”
“That sounds like it comes out of a tourist guide,” Cassie said.
“Tourism is big business for Dinal,” Jesse said from behind her. “They say the fruits have healing powers.”
“You sound skeptical,” the Dinalae woman said coyly.
“Just a cautious customer,” Jesse answered.
“If it tastes as good as it smells, I don’t need anything else out of it,” Cassie said.
“What would you like to try?” the salesgirl asked. Cassie looked at Jesse for some indication of what was safe and what wasn’t.
“Try anything you like,” Jesse said, “except the little pink ones over there.”
The Dinalae girl giggled in her own language - different from the laugh, but related - and continued in her own language.
“Your friend is a big baby.”
“Why not those?” Cassie asked Jesse.
“I have a hunch they’d make you smell like either fish or rotten meat for about three weeks,” he said. “It’s one of their jokes.”
“You have to have a sense of humor,” the girl said. Cassie raised an eyebrow at her, a gesture the girl completely missed, then shook her head. She looked around the shop again, taking a long drag of the heady smells, closing her eyes for a moment to savor, then smiled and turned to the girl again.
“What’s good?”
She’d eaten herself sick.
The sugars were heavy, almost more like liquors, and the brightly-colored treats had filled her head with their lingering scents for hours after as she had contentedly trundled about after Jesse.
They’d gone to a museum and a park, and now they sat in the ornate gardens at the end of the park watching the strange, vibrant insects that wandered from plant to plant.
“This place is beautiful,” she said.
“I told you it was time for a vacation,” Jesse answered.
“And what exactly have we been doing?” Cassie asked, shifting slightly as she leaned with her shoulder against him.
“What do you mean?” he teased. “We’ve obviously been working.”
“Obviously,” she said, holding out a hand as a winged creature the size of a bird flitted by, light as spun sugar.
“Poisonous,” Jesse said. She let her hand drop.
“Oh.”
“Most fearless things are,” he observed as they both watched the creature make its unconcerned way across the space to a cluster of multi-colored stalks vaguely resembling bamboo, settling eventually on one of the splits in the body of the plant that drooled nectar.
“It’s like Willy Wonka,” Cassie said, shaking her head again.
“It’s the light,” Jesse said.
“For once, I don’t care,” Cassie said. “Let it just be magic, okay?”
He laughed.
They sat a bit longer in silence, just watching, and then Jesse sighed.
“We need to talk about Donovan,” he said.
“What about him?” Cassie asked. “He’s a power-hungry politician. Won’t be the last to push through.”
“I don’t think so,” Jesse said. Cassie laughed wryly.
“You think he’s the last? That’s awfully optimistic of you.”
“Ha,” Jesse answered. Cassie sighed and sat up.
“Okay, what about him?”
“He wants to control me.”
“We’ve established that.”
“And you three were discussing asking me to go,” Jesse said. “For my own good and yours.”
“So?”
“And you decided not to.”
“Am I supposed to be impressed?” Cassie asked. “I didn’t ask you to leave. It’s not that surprising that you can guess what we talked about.”
“You were too dismissive,” he said softly. She looked over at him, but he had his face turned away. The dark pigment behind his ears was all that gave him away as not human, the soft, young skin along his jaw not showing even the faintest signs of stubble, his freckles suggesting somehow that he had only just recently outgrown a phase of acne. Cassie wondered what kind of things he’d been told his whole life, to believe the things he did.
“I don’t think so,” she said. He laughed.
“Of course not. But you should have at least considered it.” Now he turned to face her. “Seriously. We’re dangerous, Cassie.”
“Palta?”
“Yes.”
“How many times in your life have you been told that?” she asked.
“What?”
“That you have to be careful, that there are such big consequences if you mess up.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Have you forgotten why I ended up on Earth in the first place?” he asked.
She twisted her mouth to the side.
“Okay, so that, but… Someone screwed up, but it doesn’t make all of you dangerous, all the time.”
Jesse sighed.
“Yes it does.”
“Just because one of two Palta I’ve met is responsible for wiping out a species doesn’t mean you’re all on the verge of genocide,” Cassie said.
“Speaking of other good reasons I shouldn’t be around,” Jesse said.
“Can you track jumps?” Cassie asked.
He tipped his head back and forth.
“You can, if you’ve got the right background in technology and the right mathematical skillset, plus the right equipment.”
“Do you?” Cassie asked.
“Here on my arm?” he asked mockingly. He waited for her to be stung, then grunted and shook his head. “No. It’s real equipment, meant for analyzing the air that gets swapped out and using some of the molecular qualities to predict where it came from.”
“So…”
“I don’t know if Mab can track us or not, but so far she’s shown nothing more conclusive than excellent predictive logic skills.”
The beautiful enclave suddenly felt more shadowy and less enchanted. The dreamy haze from the fruit swept away and Cassie sighed, resuming her normal, strict posture.
“What are we going to do about her?” Cassie asked.
“You’re going to avoid her as much as you possibly can. I’ll deal with her.” He paused. “And that is an order.”
“Is that what you’ve been doing? Dealing with her?” Cassie asked.
“Oh, Cassie D.C., do you think I’d jump without you?” he asked.
“Then where have you been these past few weeks?”
“Took your car,” he said. “Went to Wichita. Topeka.” Cassie snorted. He went on. “Denver. Chicago. Even got a ticket once.”
“You haven’t got a license,” Cassie said. “How did they not find you after that?”
“Amazing how little you people will do to look for something when you know where it isn’t,” Jesse said. “Obviously I was off-planet, so why even try looking on-planet?”
“I guess,” Cassie said. “You have fun?”
“Learned a lot,” he answered. “That’s pretty close.”
“Wichita,” Cassie said.
“Wichita.”
“Chicago, I get,” she said.
“You’re a snob,” Jesse said with a smile. “Come on, let’s go find some place to stay tonight. You’ve had a long day.”
She was stunned to realize that his shenanigans at the trial had been that morning.
“The sun doesn’t go down here, does it?” she asked.
“Denalae have always woke and slept when they wanted,” Jesse said. “Lots of scientists come here to study species’ sleep habits, though most species struggle to be healthy without having some darkness in their days.”
“We have a lot of that kind of data,” Cassie said. “Light room testing for jumpers.”
“You lot are messed up,” Jesse said, standing. “You want dinner?”
Cassie held her stomach and he laughed.
“I should have stopped you after the purple ones,” he said.
“It was all so good,” she said.
“We’ll see tomorrow how well I did steering you away from the pranks,” Jesse said.
“Actually, the sales girl wasn’t very good at keeping a secret,” Cassie said. She had caught the girl’s name, but it was a series of motions to the still-permeating music and it wouldn’t mean anything to Jesse. Too, she’d been able to identify the subtle change in the way the girl had moved that gave her away when she was offering a food that was intended as a joke. A verbal tell, a strange turn of phrase that she used. Cassie half thought it was on purpose, a gift for the select few who could understand it.