Portal Jumpers

by Chloe Garner

  Surely arrows translated, right?

  She showed it to Maugh and he took another step forward.

  “What is that?” he asked. She turned it back to look at it. It wasn’t that bad, was it?

  It was pretty bad.

  Her hands weren’t trained for creating shapes, and she had spent much more time controlling her wings, at this point. She took another piece of paper and, working on impulse, drew a solar system. Big, radiant sun in the middle, lots of dots on eliptical orbits around it. She showed it to Maugh, pointing at the sun in the picture, and then at the sky overhead. He leaned in.

  “The sun?”

  “Yes,” she said, then pointed at one of the little dots - the third one out, by habit - and then picked up the picture of the planet, pointing from one to the other.

  “Yan,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, beginning to get excited. This might work. She pointed at the dot. She had no more ideas on how to communicate the concept of ‘where’, so she just kept pointing and waited to see if he would make the connection.

  “Is that us, here?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Then what is it?”

  She pushed forward the prison building and chain gang with her foot, then set down the planet and held out her arms, wrists touching. Prisoner. Come on, come on, Maugh.

  “You want to know where they took him.”

  She hopped up and down, the sudden surge of excitement almost sending her back into the forest.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked. She wasn’t sure if he was questioning her plan, or if he was questioning whether she was the person to attempt it, but either way, it was a pointless question.

  He waited, then seemed to come to the same conclusion, himself.

  “Come with me,” he said again. She started to gather the drawing materials, but he waved her forward.

  “I’ll get those,” he said. “Come with me.”

  She let them settle back onto the path again, then followed Maugh, keeping her safe distance. He led her back to his office, going in without her and returning with a broad piece of glass. He set it on the ground and tapped on it a few times.

  “You know how to read a map?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, insulted. It didn’t come through in the single word, and he continued on.

  “This is the capitol,” he said. ‘Capitol’ took a long time to translate, and she missed the next sentence. “…can’t just vault in. You’ll have to walk from here.”

  He pointed, then took a step back. Cassie edged in to look at the map, but couldn’t focus. She grabbed the corner and dragged it further away, laying down on the ground to inspect the detailed map. It worked much like the one she’d seen on Xhrahk-ni, zooming and panning intuitively. The buildings were labeled, but she obviously couldn’t read any of them. She stepped away and held her hands out, wrists together again, then pointed at the map.

  “The building is…” he said, edging closer and craning his head. “That one.”

  She pointed at the glass.

  “No. The next one. Yes.”

  The distance from the point he’d indicated wasn’t too great. If she understood the scale of the buildings correctly, it would be maybe a mile. She was much more capable of covering distance, now, than she’d been as a human. It wouldn’t be that hard to get there, she didn’t think. She quickly memorized the map, on more familiar mental territory now, then stepped away. She pointed at her chest and then at the spot on the map.

  “You want to go?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  She spread her arms again with a sigh, calling on her extremely limited vocabulary with resignation.

  “Help.”

  Maugh took her to the hamlet in the late dusk, walking through the woods in gentle quiet. Maugh hadn’t tried to talk her out of it, that she could tell. She thought she might have intimidated him with her tirade, earlier. There was a post there like the ones she had seen on Gana, and Maugh put his hands on it.

  “Good luck,” he said. She dipped her head, hoping that it communicated her gratitude, then he made another strange motion and the world blinked.

  She stood at the edge of the small capitol city. There were a few outlying areas behind her, and the edge of the woods was far enough away that it was just a dim specter in the natural daytime mist at this portion of the planet. The sun was just rising. Cassie reached into the small purse Maugh had produced for her and snacked on one of the purple fruits from Anath, forcing herself to stay still.

  It was daytime.

  Daytime in a small town, sure, but there were people - strangers - all around her. No one took any notice of her as they pursued their days, and she was aware of this at an intellectual level, but her instinctive drive clouded it, making it feel as though they were moments away from encircling her and taking her prisoner.

  Or worse.

  She chewed nervously, the sweet fruit juice the only thing she could think of that would bring her comfort, then took one hesitant step, and then another, making her way slowly toward the nearest building. She took refuge in the long shadows of the building for several minutes, gathering her nerve, then scaled the building and stood on the roof. It didn’t appear she had attracted any new attention. Alert almost to painfulness, she took off, catching a slight low breeze and flitting higher and higher.

  The sun was able to burn off the mist through the town, but the forest hugged it close, creating the illusion that the little settlement had been built in a cloud. She gained more altitude, working harder as the air currents got stronger, but the higher she was, the safer she felt.

  Eventually, the town began to resemble the map that Maugh had shown her, and she identified the prison.

  It had to be mostly underground. The little hut that sat in plain view was maybe the size of her house in Kansas; big by local standards, but much too small to house more than a few people in anything resembling humane conditions.

  She slowly dropped, watching the activity below her with mistrust, and landed on the roof of the prison. She kept an eye out for cameras, but where they did have them - a pair at the gate and one at the corner of the building - they were pointed at the ground. Jesse was right - people never did look up. With a sudden sense of why not, she went to the corner above the front door where the camera was watching it and inspected the camera.

  It couldn’t be that easy, could it?

  The camera wasn’t mechanized; it was simply mounted on the corner with a pair of joints that someone had calibrated when it was first installed to get it to point at the door and the yard.

  She turned it.

  If she had been the one mounting it, she would want to have a view of as much of the yard as possible, leaving the actual door at the edge of the frame. Without knowing how the technology worked, here, she couldn’t have a risk-free run at the door, but she could make a good guess. She didn’t want to move it so far that they came out and fixed it immediately, but she needed enough room to tailgate through the door unseen.

  She twisted the camera as far as she thought it needed to go in one even motion, then went to find another spot on the roof to see what would happen.

  For several hours, nothing did. A few soldiers came and a few left. Cassie watched.

  She took off once, when a pair of soldiers came out of the door, venturing as far out over the yard as she dared, hoping no one would see her, but she didn’t get much view through the door. She was going to have to try it blind.

  She landed on the roof again, waiting. Guards entered, and she waited. She wanted to hit the door closing behind people as they left. With any luck at all, she’d at least get to start out in an empty room, even if it did mean having almost no time to prepare.

  She had no idea if she’d freeze or not, but there was nothing else she was waiting for to make her move. The next pair of guards to leave the building, she dove for the door, slipping through it as it swung close
d and landing with her back pressed against the wall inside the building.

  A bored woman sat at a personal workstation of sorts, eyes glazed over as she stared at a screen. There was a voice on a digital communication device and she answered it. Cassie didn’t understand any of the words, but the voice held authority.

  Cassie didn’t move.

  She couldn’t.

  The woman was tall, two-legged and built like an ostrich or a giraffe. All legs and neck. She worked with a meandering efficiency, like someone whose potential was seriously under-utilized, and she spent most of her time hunched over a screen.

  Cassie didn’t know how long she’d stood there with her palms pressed flat against the unfinished wood, but her tactical mind was screaming that she needed to move. That another soldier would come into the room to leave, or more would return from outside, and they couldn’t fail to see her.

  She was nothing resembling invisible.

  She was purple, for heaven’s sake. A tiny purple pixie standing in their front room.

  She stood frozen for another few moments, then slowly, ever so slowly, dropped to her knees, crawling to the space in front of the woman’s desk. She was only inches from the tall woman, with nothing in between them but air, but at least now she wasn’t just standing there waiting for her to look up.

  She waited for her heart rate to level out, then took her first good evaluation of the room. There were two doors out of the room other than the front door and, reading the shape of the walls, Cassie identified the one that was most likely to lead to stairs. She would have expected it to have an electronic lock on it, but from where she knelt on the floor, she didn’t see anything to indicate electromagnetic controls or powered devices of any other kind. Certainly, they might have been small enough to be inconspicuously integrated into the door and frame, but there was no way to know but to try, and the security so far had been lackadaisical at best.

  She made a slow, even motion across the floor, wings tight against her back and her entire body taut as a bowstring. She made it to the door and sat on the floor, trying to remember to breathe. The door handle was at head-level for her, constructed something like a gas pump, with the action part of the handle inside of the fixed loop. She reached up for it, willing the woman at the desk not to look over, not to notice the motion out of the corner of her eye. Cassie hooked her fingers through the handle and pulled, but the latch came without resistance.

  Nothing happened.

  Cassie settled lower onto the floor, curling her arms around her knees. She loathed herself for being so easily defeated - a locked door was enough to end her plans on rescuing Jesse - but she felt optionless. She couldn’t fight her way in, and she was at her limit for how clever she could be without melting down completely. She couldn’t speak the language - any language - and she didn’t understand the culture well enough to begin to blend in.

  Worse, she missed Jesse.

  Not just realized that she needed him, or enjoyed his company, but that she missed him like something was wrong that he wasn’t there.

  She pushed herself back into the corner where the woman was least likely to see her and spent several minutes feeling sorry for herself.

  She was out of ideas. And there was no one to help her. She couldn’t even get back to Maugh, if she had to.

  She was going to starve to death hiding from the giraffe woman in this tiny little office.

  The door opened, nearly smashing Cassie into the wall.

  She peeked around it, holding it with her fingertips as the door tried to swing back closed.

  A bulky man with red skin who reminded Cassie of the Kenzi for reasons she couldn’t put her finger on walked through and started talking to the woman at the desk. Gulping, Cassie darted around the door and onto the stairs, watching with dread apprehension as the door swung closed behind her with a solid latching noise. Shaking herself, Cassie took quick stock of where she was. The stairway was narrow, leading down to a gloomy basement area and what looked like more stairs. If nothing else, she had some headroom here. She flew to the top corner above the stairs and wedged herself between the two walls - something she could have only done for a few minutes as a human, but as a Pixie, it felt as though she should be able to do this for hours on end, if need be.

  So she did.

  Guards came and went, some with intent and others meandering or in conversation, but none of them so much as glanced at the dim corner above the bottom of the stairs. It was demoralizing, sitting in the murk, but it was better than doing anything else, and she wasn’t quite so depressed at having nothing to try next. The longer she could string out the feeling of simply waiting for the right opportunity, the longer she could hold off the sense of desperation she had had in the lobby.

  Eventually she got to a point where, in between guards, she promised herself that she was ready to try for it. She was going to drop down to the stairs and see what she had to do next to find Jesse. But if a guard had gone past recently, she would reason that there might be some changing of shifts or other event that would bring another soon, and the longer she waited, the higher the odds seemed to be that one would come.

  She had no idea how long she waited like that, hoping for some sign that it was time, but none was coming - she knew. She just had to risk it.

  A pair of guards went past, talking in a language that Cassie didn’t have the means to identify, and she just stopped thinking, dropping to the level of the ceiling of the lower level and then sticking her head around the corner to see what was there.

  At the landing of the stairs, there was a small common area with various forms of seating and what might have been workstations or just tables. There was a pair of double-wide doors into a larger area that could have been a conference room or a cafeteria. Or any number of other things. She could hear the foreign terrestrials working at the far side of the large room, but they didn’t seem to be getting any closer. Realizing, stupidly, that she could hear people coming if she tried, she landed, straining her ears now to locate anyone who might otherwise surprise her. There were people everywhere, and she couldn’t exactly pinpoint them as individuals, but she did know that the room to her left, away from the conference room, was unoccupied. She went into it, closing the door behind her, and took a moment to breathe again.

  She had come maybe a hundred feet from the rooftop, but it felt like it had been ten years.

  She listened hard again, imagination playing tricks on her. She felt caged and wanted nothing more than to be up in the tops of the trees again, where she could see things coming from long, long away, but forced herself to press on. She’d come this far.

  She looked around the room.

  It was a bit of a cesspit of boxes and bags and stray items, like a yardsale or the aftermath of a storm. Cassie picked through it, finding bits of clothing and what might have been jewelry, broken electronics - or at least ones she couldn’t figure out how to turn on - and stray pieces of paper. In one bag, she found a handful of the heavy waxes Maugh had given her to draw with, a broken pair of spectacles, and a notebook.

  The contents of someone’s desk.

  Everything had been picked through, and the valuables taken, and this was what was left of the lives of the people that they’d arrested.

  Cassie sat, dumbfounded, at a table against one wall, and looked at the piles of stuff. Trash. It was outrageous. She tapped her fingers on the table and sucked on her lower lip, getting madder and madder, when her fingers touched something with an ethereal slickness that slid away from her forcelessly. She looked, frowning, to find a puzzle of slides like the old-school transparency paper she’d seen once in a class. They slid over top of each other like coasters on an air-hockey table, and she picked one up, holding it up to the dingy light in the ceiling.

  She put her hand over her mouth.

  “Well, that’s unexpected.”

  Things were getting quieter outside. She realized that it was probably nighttime for most of the guards. She s
hould have slept several times by now, and she could feel the wear on her system from too little sleep, too much attentiveness, and - she reached into her bag, feeling the last few berries that were there - too little food.

  She didn’t have much time left. She needed to go now.

  She opened the door, looking around quickly, even though her ears told her the room was empty, then made her way tentatively to the stairwell.

  She could hear the depth of it. Echoing back up at her.

  She pulled the little bag she’d packed higher over her shoulder, trying to get it out of the way of her wings, then took off, gliding over the stairs and listening hard, staying as high as she could. If they found her now, she might not get away, but they’d have a hell of a time catching her.

  There was a psychology to prisons, she reasoned as she descended. You wanted them to be demoralizing, to limit the likelihood of escape attempts and other insubordination, and you wanted them to be the most demoralizing for the most dangerous and long-term prisoners.

  Like political prisoners.

  Jesse, if they knew anything about Palta, would be on the bottom floor, deep in the back of a maze of cells, somewhere where he couldn’t see out unless they let him. The control was worth the risk of the window.

  She figured.

  As she got further under ground, two floors, three floors, four floors, the sound of patrols got louder, more frequent, and nearer. She heard them on each floor, but the bottom floor was thick with troops, sitting, standing, walking. There was some conversation, but not much. The stairs underground were wider - made for moving more people around than the ones upstairs. Interrogations, maybe. Maybe the soldiers just lived underground. The first three floors had been made from some sturdy construction materials that had likely been imported, but the fourth floor looked like it had been cut out of the bedrock itself.

  It was cold.

  Cassie ate the last of her berries mid-flight, staying just above the ceiling level of the last floor, then pressed herself as close to the wall as she could while flying and dropped slowly.