Portal Jumpers

by Chloe Garner

  She had yet to see any of the other staff at the lab; Troy and Slav had managed to keep her entirely isolated in the part of the lab they had designated for ‘Slav’s Project’. Slav would go home at the end of the day each day, but Troy and Jesse stayed, sleeping in cots along the wall, often talking late into the night. The sound of their whispers were almost a substitute for the sound of the waves as she rocked to sleep.

  She hadn’t been to the ocean yet today. Troy, Slav, and Jesse had made some kind of moderate breakthrough, catching a laggard skin cell mid-transition, and they had gone to lunch to celebrate and plan out the exact sequence of tests that they wanted to run on it. Cassie glanced over at the projected slide again, her stomach going queasy.

  The cell had been morphing as they found it, and Slav had flash-frozen it in order to preserve it, and even Cassie could see that it wasn’t really acting like a cell, in its current state. Bits and pieces were wandering around inside of it, and the cell wall on one side looked like it was missing. While Jesse and Slav were excitedly discussing the find, Troy had come to sit next to Cassie.

  “That’s me, huh,” she’d murmured. He nodded.

  “That’s you.”

  “Why is it stuck?” she asked. He shook his head.

  “Wish I knew.”

  “What would happen if too much of me is like that?” she asked. He shook his head again, not looking at her.

  “Depends on which organs were like that. With your body like that, I couldn’t even guess…”

  “Yes you can.”

  “So can you.”

  She nodded as he chewed his lip.

  “We’re going to fix it.”

  She wanted to get in the water and think.

  Slav had announced the celebratory lunch and they’d piled into his car and left, promising that one of them would drive her to the ocean afterward.

  So she waited.

  She was feeling a bit macabre today. The early optimism for a quick fix had faded and while all three men had continued to treat her like an exciting science project, she caught the occasional glances that Troy and Jesse kept giving her as the reality that she might be stuck in her new body permanently began to sink in.

  She flexed her fingers, trying to move them independently of each other. The focus was quickly making her sore, but she had nothing better to do, so she kept at it.

  Her heartbeat skipped once and she sat up. There was a painful throb in her chest and then her heart stopped and her chest collapsed. She fell sideways on the cot as a wrenching pain grew in her lower abdomen. For a moment she couldn’t breathe, and then the world went black.

  She woke up in a big world.

  A big, echoing world full of big, echoing voices that made her heart tremble. Her whole body, in fact, started shaking within moments of consciousness, unable to control her panic.

  She’d never felt like this before. She’d always been confident, and the feeling of vulnerability and blind fear was something she’d never had to master.

  Someone was speaking to her. She finally realized that that’s what that voice was trying to do. She was attempting to focus when something touched her arm, and she sprang away, thrashing into a tangle of limbs on the floor. Her wings opened and she was midway up the wall before she remembered she didn’t know how to fly.

  Someone caught her and she scrambled away, finding a corner and pressing her back into it, shaking uncontrollably.

  The lights dimmed slightly and there was a familiar smell. The smell was what finally brought her back. Jesse was crouched in front of her, leaving her space but close enough that no one could get past him easily.

  “Cassie,” he said gently. “Cassie, it’s okay.”

  Troy was behind him, looking terrified.

  “Jesse,” she gasped, pushing harder into the corner.

  “We need samples now,” Slav called from somewhere out of sight.

  Cassie shook harder, her arms curled up against her chest.

  “It’s okay,” Jesse said, putting out a hand. She cringed away.

  “What is she?” Troy asked quietly, taking a step forward. Cassie managed not to scream.

  “I don’t know,” Jesse said.

  “What?” Cassie and Troy asked at the same time.

  “We call them Pixies,” Jesse said, letting his hand drop a fraction. “I have no idea what they call themselves. No one has ever managed to talk to one before.”

  Cassie turned her head aside. There were so many secrets inside of her. And so much fear.

  “Samples,” Slav called.

  “Give us a minute,” Troy called curtly.

  “Look,” Slav said, appearing in Cassie’s peripheral vision. “This isn’t me being a jerk. You guys see it, same as me, and we need to know what’s going on.”

  “Cassie,” Jesse said evenly, his body not moving, “we need to take a cut of your hair and some skin scrapes…”

  “Cheek swabs and biopsies,” Slav said. Cassie’s knees trembled against her shoulders. Jesse’s face didn’t flicker.

  “Not helping,” he said.

  “Help me,” she whispered, her voice abnormally high, even to her own ears. It was the tenor of their voices that was so organically terrifying. They were too deep and spoke to something instinctive in her of predators and death.

  “It’s okay,” Jesse said again. “You can control this body, Cassie. Focus.”

  She closed her eyes and swallowed, tiny throat constricting the short distance to a tiny stomach that was pitifully empty.

  She trusted him. She’d trusted him many times before.

  He wasn’t going to hurt her or betray her or use her.

  And yet.

  Her heart thumped in her chest like it would batter itself to pieces against her ribs, and her breaths came in tiny little jolts of air in between shudders. Her body refused to recognize him, recognize Troy, recognize that she was in a safe place.

  She forced a full breath, the greatest force of will she could ever remember using, then turned her face, fraction by fraction, to face Jesse.

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  “Don’t get up,” he said. She frowned and he… blushed.

  “Adena Lampak don’t wear clothes,” he said. For the first time, she realized the sensation of skin against bare wall, and twisted her head away again.

  “Troy, bring me the case off of that pillow,” Jesse said. There was the sound of cloth tearing, and then Jesse’s voice again, softer. “Can you lean forward for me?”

  Feeling like a very small child, she leaned forward, finding his knee with her forehead, and he pulled smooth fabric over her head. There was some fidgeting with her wings, then she felt for the arm holes she knew would be there. Jesse was pulling the lace out of his shoe when she opened her eyes again, and he tied that around her waist, moving with an extreme gentleness in his attempt to not startle her again. She found Troy again standing behind Jesse, this time with a palette of instruments. She gasped, but maintained control, slowly finding her feet.

  Feet.

  Feet that hurt.

  “Why do my feet hurt?” she asked.

  “They’re still mid-transition,” Jesse said. She smoothed the pillow case so that she could see them, and found that the skin on the tops of her feet was blue, swirling with a murky gray that was slowly transitioning to a very light lavender color at her ankles.

  “If that’s still happening, what’s going on with the rest of me?” she asked.

  “That’s what we need to find out,” Troy said. “Are you ready?”

  She shuddered and pressed her face against the wall, letting Jesse take hold of her hand and turn it palm up for Troy to scrape.

  The feeling of metal against her skin made her jerk, but Jesse held firm, keeping her still. She sucked her lips into her mouth and resisted the urge to fly away again. To distract herself, she started taking an account of what her new body consisted of.

  The details weren’t particularly engrossing, but it did
help her keep herself together through the rest of the samples - hair clippings, the inside of her mouth, skin scrapes from both hands and the top of one foot. When the syringe came out, though, she shook her head, feeling nauseous and pale.

  “No.”

  “We need the data,” Troy said.

  “No.”

  “What’s wrong?” Jesse asked.

  “They have secrets,” she said. “I’m not going to let you steal them.”

  Jesse put a hand up, stopping Troy.

  “She’s right.”

  “What?” Slav called from across the room.

  “She’s right. Pixies are an unknown species. They choose that, and Cassie’s right; we should respect that.”

  “Damn,” Slav said, striding across the room. “If it were me, I’d wait until one of them kicked it, and then do a full autopsy.”

  “How would you feel if my people turned up here and snatched the first dead body they could get their hands on, with the intent of pulling it to microscopic pieces in a scientific inquiry?” Jesse asked.

  Slav hesitated, then shrugged.

  “Fair point. Can I take pictures of your eyes, du Charme?”

  She swallowed and nodded, letting them guide her over to a machine with a very bright light, a very big lens, and a very nice camera. They’d taken pictures of her Adena Lampak eyes as well, but somehow that hadn’t been a big deal. This time, it felt like an interrogation with the threat of torture. She sat only as long as they needed her to, then got away, ending up in the corner again after about a minute of steady retreat. Her hands were shaking, but for a different reason this time.

  “Jesse, I’m hungry.”

  “Okay,” he answered.

  “What does she eat?” Slav asked.

  “Could tell you, with the right equipment, but right now your guess is as good as mine,” Jesse answered.

  “I’ve got microwave chicken wings in the freezer,” Slav said.

  “Okay, maybe my guess is a lot better than yours,” Jesse said.

  “Then enlighten us,” Slav told him. Cassie realized that the chicken wings had been a joke, but not before her stomach lurched at the thought. Jesse sighed.

  “What does any forest-dwelling, winged creature eat?” he asked.

  “Bugs,” Slav said, driving another wave of nausea across Cassie’s body.

  “Nectar,” Troy said.

  “That or fruit juice,” Jesse agreed.

  “I do have orange juice,” Slav said.

  “That’s probably a little strong for a first try,” Jesse said. “You mind going out to find something like pear juice or melon juice?”

  “I’d have to go to Seattle for that,” Slav said.

  “Wait,” Troy said. “Cassie, let me see your teeth again.”

  She opened her mouth to let him look, knowing what he would conclude, but too timid to say it herself, for some reason.

  “Berries,” Troy said. “Bring back any kind of berries you can get.”

  “Well done,” Jesse said.

  “You sure I can’t just go to a garden store and get hummingbird sugar water?” Slav asked. This time, Cassie caught that it was a joke before it could offend her.

  “Be quick,” Jesse said.

  “Those samples are changing fast,” Troy agreed.

  “No,” Jesse said. “She needs food soon.”

  Her metabolism was incredible. That first night, she got up three times to eat, half-walking, half-gliding across the room to the little refrigerator Slav brought from his office to raid the store of fruits stashed there. She couldn’t help getting juice down her chin and her front, she was so ravenous. Her core temperature was more than ten degrees above a normal human’s temperature, and both she and Jesse suspected that that was normal, not sick. She wasn’t cold, but everything around her was. Jesse kept throwing cautious glances at her, though that first day, and her perfect hearing that night picked up every word of the conversation he and Troy had about the need for specific nutrient formations that she wasn’t going to get from fruit on earth. Jesse was just making well-informed guesses, but her fast metabolism and narrow diet made him suspect that her body was tuned for very specific vitamin-like nutrients, and that she would get sick - quickly - if she didn’t get them.

  Troy had suggested taking her to wherever the pixies were and letting her eat there.

  “I mean, sure, getting onto the portal room floor with the wrong foreign terrestrial might be a trick, but surely you could manage,” Troy said.

  “It’s not getting there I’m worried about,” Jesse answered. “It’s what would happen once we got there. They might attack her, or she might join them. I could lose her and not ever find her again.”

  “So what do we do?” Troy asked.

  “Work faster,” Jesse had told him. Cassie flexed her wings and rolled over, troubled.

  Her nerves hadn’t gotten any better as the day had gone on. She was still jumpy and flew at random into walls when things surprised her - like a bird hitting a window, Troy had told her - and found herself less and less willing to speak up in conversation. Rather, she hid behind Jesse and tried to be invisible, absurd as that was.

  Night was a welcome relief. Apart from Troy’s sporadic snorts - that had once been familiar to her - there was nothing to frighten her, and the cool, open space of the darkness made it feel like she could finally breathe. It seemed almost a shame to waste it with sleeping.

  So she practiced flying.

  Her wings were in two pieces each, each connected to a separate, strong muscular appendage that connected just above her center of gravity on her back, and were constructed of a fleshy tissue more like a butterfly’s wings than a dragonfly’s. They folded down when she wasn’t using them, the top half down and the bottom half up, and crossed behind her so that she didn’t notice them when she walked or moved. There was enough spring to them that she wasn’t uncomfortable laying on them, and while there didn’t appear to be any nerves in them, the warmth that radiated off of them told her that there was bloodflow through them - of whatever nature there was in the rest of her body - and that it was likely that they could self-repair from small injuries. They tended to flare when she was alarmed, an instinct to flee that she couldn’t quite turn off.

  She was getting decent at gliding by the time morning arrived, to the point that she could make it from her cot to the refrigerator without touching the floor more times than not, when she heard the click of the lock on the front door. She stuffed another handful of blackberries in her mouth and darted back to her cot, pressing her body against the wall and squeezing her eyes shut as Jesse stirred.

  “Morning,” Troy said a moment later. They disappeared to the bathroom to take care of morning routines, and Cassie made one last dash for food before Slav showed up.

  “Is she still sleeping?” Slav asked when Jesse got back.

  “Looks like,” Jesse answered. “I want to look at that clump of cells we found yesterday again.”

  “The weird ones,” Slav said, making searching noises as he dug through piles of papers to find the sample Jesse was talking about.

  “I think they’re human,” Jesse said.

  “Not like any human cells I’ve ever looked at,” Slav said. There was more noise as he loaded the microscope.

  “They’re dying,” Jesse said. There was a long silence. “Being fed the wrong things and kept at the wrong temperature. But I think that’s a piece of her gall bladder.”

  There was a long silence while they both let that sink in and Cassie waited for one of them to verbalize what it meant.

  Then she realized what it meant.

  Bits of her, the bits that the new body didn’t recognize or wasn’t going to use, were remaining stagnant, slowly dying, scattered around her body. And unless whatever the process was that was changing her was intentionally pushing them to her skin, they could be anywhere, rotting away in more important parts of her body. Her heart. Her lungs. Her brain.

  Lik
e tiny bits of biological trash, they would build up if she kept changing, eventually choking her body’s ability to function.

  She squeezed her eyes more tightly, as if that would keep out the reality of what was going on, and reminded herself that Jesse was taking care of her.

  He would figure it out.

  That day went much the same way the previous afternoon had, with Cassie trying to stay invisible and Troy, Slav, and Jesse poring over reams of data as various machines spat it out.

  That night, again, Cassie heard Jesse and Troy talking.

  “She’s in trouble, isn’t she?” Troy asked. This shook Cassie to her very core, but Jesse’s answer was worse.

  “She is.”

  “Can you stop it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought you were invincible,” Troy said after a minute. “That you could figure out anything.”

  “Have you given any thought to where it came from?” Jesse asked.

  “The swizzles,” Troy said. “What about them?”

  “The woman who did this,” Jesse said. “She’s out to hurt me, and she’s Palta. Natural circumstances and species-wide problems pale in comparison to the complexity of what she could have done to a single individual. I’m up against a mind that is nearly as clever as my own, and she had a long head start, coming up with the puzzle.”

  “She could die,” Troy said. “You can’t let that happen. What if she’s on the logarithmic decay curve?”

  “We have two datapoints,” Jesse said. “There’s no way to form any kind of prediction from that.”

  “But the worst-case is really bad,” Troy said. “Really, really bad.”

  “The worst-case is always worse than you could possibly know,” Jesse answered.

  “Gee, that’s comforting.”

  “The species is always on the brink of extinction. Every species is. Worst case, the right thing happens at the exact right time, and every single individual gets wiped out. It just never happens, and you never know about it.”

  Cassie rolled again, trying to block out the conversation, now. It was more than she could bear, the thought of species dying. The haunting buildings full of buzzing technology at Xhrahk’ni echoed in her mind’s eye, with the sound of Charm’s noise of grief at the devastation of the Kenzi. Somehow before she’d been able to ignore the tragedy of it, taking it with a soldier’s grim acceptance of what was, but now she was incapable of blocking it out.