Binding Foxgirls III

by Simon Archer

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I wish I was, believe me. But we have to operate under the assumption that that’s what’s going on here. The good thing is that they couldn’t see in that board room when we made most of our plan. They obviously couldn’t see us once we left Termina, not were they privy to the way Jami doles out shipping assignments. Otherwise, they would’ve been much more prepared for us here.”

  “Well, that’s something, at least,” Malthe said. “We can work with that. They know we’re coming, but not where and when.”

  “Won’t they have a decent idea once one of their ships and five of their shippers turn up missing?” Lin asked.

  “Yeah, that’s likely,” I said. “Though it’s possible that they lose ships sometimes and won’t think much of it. Still, once we get to this continent, we need to make ourselves scarce. Evade detection as much as we can. The good news is we’re already a few steps ahead of them. It’ll take them a minute to catch up, so as long as we can stay just a little bit ahead, we’re good.”

  “And we’re going to need to find a way to disguise ourselves,” Malthe said. “Look at these ads. These people aren’t dressed anything like us at all. Plus, they’ll recognize our faces from this show or whatever it is.”

  “So, what do we do?” I asked, at a loss. “And do they even have foxgirls in the outside world? I always heard they didn’t…”

  “Oh God, we’ll stick out like a sore thumb,” Cindra groaned.

  “Let me see what I can do,” Malthe said, pulling several gadgets out of the leather pack at his side and starting to fiddle around with them.

  “Here, they must have some clothes lying around here somewhere,” Lin said, getting up from the couch and walking over to one of the bedrooms. “We can dress up as shippers, at least. That’ll make us blend in somewhat until we can find some normal street clothes.”

  “I guess that makes some measure of sense,” Clem said, though he looked unconvinced as he turned to me. “Dude, I really think we’re in above our heads on this one.”

  “We felt that way about the tunnels, remember?” I reminded him.

  “That was way different, and you know it,” he snapped.

  “Bigger, yeah,” I agreed. “But not that different. Think back to how we felt before we went down to the tunnels for the first time. We had absolutely no idea what we were going to find. And then we just kind of figured it out as we went. The same principle applies here. Just… bigger, like I said.”

  “I guess so,” Clem said, still appearing unconvinced. “I just don’t know…”

  I watched as Lin bustled between the bedrooms, gathering up clothes in her arms before she came back out to us to distribute them.

  “These are clean, right?” Kira asked, looking at the garments Lin gave her with obvious disdain.

  “I… think so,” Lin said with a grimace. “Let’s just assume they are. They were in the dressers, anyway. They’ll be a loose fit on us girls, but it’s better than nothing, I guess.”

  “Better than walking around with clothes that basically throw up a giant sign saying look at me,” Cindra agreed. “Though our faces and tails probably do that all on their own.” She gestured between herself and the other foxgirls.

  “I’m working on something for that,” Malthe said absent mindedly as he continued to work. I looked over and saw that he had a virtual mechanic’s shop worth of tech strewn across the coffee table by then.

  “How did you fit all that shit in that one bag?” I asked him incredulously.

  “I know how to pack things together,” he said, waving a hand dismissively in the air as he continued to work.

  “What are you trying to do?” Kinley asked him warily. “You’re not putting any of that shit in my body, are you? I don’t want to be no cyborg.”

  “No, you won’t be a cyborg,” Malthe laughed. “I’ll be giving us all bracelets to wear to holographically alter our appearances. It’s been done before, and I can do it even better. And these people aren’t used to holo tech, apparently, so maybe they won’t notice, and it won’t trigger any surveillance mechanisms or anything.”

  “Maybe?” Clem repeated. “I don’t really like the ‘maybe’ part, little man.”

  “Do you have any better ideas?” Malthe asked him sharply, raising his gaze from his work for a brief moment to give the other binder an equally sharp look.

  “No,” Clem admitted after a moment of silence, averting his gaze from the hacker’s. “I’ll be happy to try anything you whip up, sorry.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Malthe said, turning his attention back to his work.

  “Okay, guys, we need to keep acting as a team,” I said, looking around at everyone. “I know this is tense and unpredictable and scary for everyone, and we’ve gotten even more than we bargained for. But this is where we are, and what needs to be done. If we turn back now, there’s more than just Achilles at stake.”

  “What do you mean?” Clem asked.

  “Look at it!” I cried, pointing back to the screen which had panned to the Parliament session for that morning, in which all the members were understandably freaking out about the whole situation. “They know everything about us! They’re watching us while we sleep, eat, work, hang out with our friends. We have no privacy, and we’re a spectacle for the whole world to watch whenever they want. We have to end this. We have to take our city’s dignity back.”

  “Hear hear to that,” Cindra said. “I don’t want these people in my fucking living room.”

  “And it might not even be about taking that dignity back,” Lin said darkly. “We may have never even had it in the first place. It’s about claiming it for the first time.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Clem asked, turning to her.

  “She means that we can’t even remember simple things like how Termina was founded,” I said, and Lin nodded to confirm. “This is what we were talking about back at my apartment that night after Achilles escaped. There are just so many gaps in Termina’s history. It wouldn’t surprise me if this was going on all along.”

  “No,” Lin agreed. “It wouldn’t surprise me either.”

  We all fell silent and watched as all the Parliament members quibbled and pontificated about what to do. They all kept saying they wanted to hear from me directly. A couple of hold-outs from Elias Berg’s time even bought into the theory that Achilles was the good guy who was trying to save the city while I was trying to destroy it. Thankfully, the rest of the members shot that down, but given that this meeting was also broadcast to all the citizens of Termina, the crazy conspiracy theory now had more traction than it ever had before.

  “Great,” I said when the screen went back to commercial break. “Now, people will have less faith in us than ever.”

  “But we still have the government,” Lin reminded everyone. “It’s not time to panic yet.” We all burst out laughing at that, given our situation. If there was ever a time to panic, it was now, no matter how unproductive that would be.

  “Well,” I said, wiping away a tear and thankful for the brief stress reliever. “I wish we could go back home and talk to them, but Semra’s going to have to handle it. I kind of wish we couldn’t see what was going on back home. We have enough to worry about here.”

  “It’s almost worse seeing it and not being able to contact them to give advice,” Lin agreed. I nodded.

  “It’s definitely worse,” I said.

  “Okay,” Malthe said at long last. “I think I’ve got it. Here, put on the other clothes and then try these on.” He set seven small metal bracelets with little square screens on them out on the coffee table, almost like archaic-looking smartwatches.

  “Will these work?” I asked him.

  “We’ll find out, won’t we?” he said, clapping his hands on his knees and rising to change his own clothes. “But it’s the best shot we have. I’m sure of that much.”

  We spread out to change. The clothes Lin had handed me were a tight fit for m
e, but they were the best thing available. All the clothes were brown leather jackets and pants like the ones the shippers had worn before we killed them. The clothes seemed clean enough, though they had a tinge of a saltwater smell to them. It wasn’t overly unpleasant, actually.

  The clothes hung loose on the women, especially Kira and Lin. Cindra and Kinley had more muscle to fill out the open space. The foxgirls hid their tails inside the clothing, which helped a little but still looked a bit awkward.

  “Well, I suppose it could be worse,” Kira grumbled, scratching at her shoulder with an unpleasant look on her face.

  “It could always be worse,” Kinley said sardonically.

  “Don’t say that,” Clem snapped. “You’ll jinx it.”

  “I hate to break it to you, Clem, but I think we’re already jinxed,” Cindra laughed, and he glowered at the floor, probably because he knew she was right.

  When I was dressed, I picked up one of the bracelets.

  It fit cleanly on my wrist, the metal cool and rough against my skin. I shook my arm to make sure it wouldn’t fall off, but it held tight to me.

  Then, one by one, the others put on their own bracelets. Malthe had to make some adjustments for Lin and Kira since theirs were too loose, but in the end, they all fit nicely enough.

  “Do we look any different?” Clem asked when we were all fitted with our bracelets, looking around at us. “You guys don’t look any different to me.”

  “We have to turn them on, dumbass,” Malthe grinned, clearly taking joy in Clem being the dumb one for a change instead of him. “Just tap the screen on and then tap it again, then let it go off on its own. If you tap it a third time, it’ll stop working.”

  I followed his instructions and tapped the small screen once until it glowed on to a plain gray screen, and then a second time. Then, I left it until it faded back to black. Cindra gasped.

  “Nic, you look… completely different,” she cried. “It worked!”

  “It did?” I asked, looking around at them. They all looked the same. “Someone else try it, too.”

  Cindra tapped her bracelet twice, then, and I watched mesmerized as her fox-like features disappeared, replaced by a random woman’s face. She was pretty enough, but she wasn’t Cindra.

  “Whoa,” I said, taking a step back. “It looks so real.”

  “Slam dunk,” Malthe grinned. “I knew I had it in me. I really knew it.”

  “Oh shut up and make sure the rest of them work,” Cindra snapped. Yep, it was still her buried in there, alright. Her voice was the same, too.

  “Is it going to be a problem that we still sound the same?” I asked, noting that was my own voice was unchanged, as well.

  “Well, I don’t know how to fix that, so it’d better not,” Malthe said. “I mean, think about it, how many holovision characters would you recognize just by voice?”

  “A few of my favorite ones,” Lin admitted as she tapped her own bracelet a second time and morphed into a completely different person before our eyes.

  “Okay, well, let’s just not talk in public then if we can help it,” I said. “And try to change our voices ourselves if we can’t. Like this.” I made my voice deeper and more gravelly on the last two words.

  “Hey, isn’t that your voice you used in that disguise when you rescued us?” Cindra asked with a giggle. “So, no one watching security footage would know it was you?”

  “Yeah, I guess it’s making a comeback,” I laughed.

  I looked around at everyone again. I didn’t recognize a single person in the room.

  “Well, Malthe,” I said, shaking my head. “You’ve done it again. You’ve managed to surprise me.”

  “Yeah, little dude, is there anything you can’t do?” Clem asked, reaching out and punching Malthe playfully in the arm. He laughed sheepishly and grinned.

  Just then, there was a knock at the door, and Iggy came walking inside. He screamed and doubled back when he saw us. I quickly tapped my bracelet twice again and went back to normal.

  “Iggy, don’t worry, it’s us,” I said, holding up my arms to show we weren’t a threat. “Malthe made this new holo tech for us to look different since those shippers recognized us.”

  “Oh,” Iggy said, clutching his chest. “Okay. Wait, what’s that?” He pointed at the screen which was now showing some shippers working at the docks.

  “Uh, don’t worry about that for now, just show it to Semra when you get home,” I said. “Seriously, don’t even look at it until you get home. It’s not worth worrying about right now.” Malthe leaned down to touch a button on a rectangular object on the table, and the screen switched off.

  “Okay, if you say so, kids,” Iggy said, looking very overwhelmed, and understandably so. “Well, we’re gettin’ to the shore soon. I can see the next continent on the horizon. I’ve lowered some lifeboats down and stopped the boat. I think this’s got to be where we part ways.”

  18

  We reluctantly bid farewell to Iggy as he lowered us down on the lifeboat into the water. We could see the long, brown line of land looming on the horizon, and as we grew closer, I couldn’t help but notice that it had a very different appearance when compared to what Termina looked like from this angle.

  There were buildings, but they weren’t sprawling skyscrapers like the ones in Termina. And they weren’t as condensed and packed together. There were people on the beach, mere specks to us, but there didn’t seem to be as many of them as I would expect back home.

  “It’s different,” Cindra murmured, echoing my own thoughts as she stared ahead at the scene, too.

  “Yeah, it is,” I said as I continued to paddle along with Clem and Cindra. “But we need to make sure we steer away from the main beach with all the people. We don’t want to run into any shippers or anything. We need to find a quiet spot. Even though they won’t recognize us, we don’t know anything about these people. We could give ourselves away just by trying to talk to them.”

  “That’s… painfully accurate,” Kinley muttered. “So what do we do when we get there? Where do we go?”

  “We need to find a place to stay, first of all,” I said. “Hopefully, some kind of hotel where we can access whatever their version of the holonet is and find something out about these people without tipping them off by using our own tech.”

  “Eh, our own tech probably wouldn’t work anyway,” Malthe said, wrapping his knuckles against the back of his E-pad, which he’d been fiddling with.

  “Why? Have you tried?” I asked him sharply, given that we’d agreed that he would do no such thing.

  “No, I just don’t think it would work without some serious maneuvering on my part,” Malthe said. “If then. They probably use completely different signals than we do, and possibly completely different tech, judging by that TV or whatever it was they called it that we were watching shit back in Termina on.”

  “Okay, that makes sense,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief as I steered the ship in another direction. Clem and Cindra followed my lead. There were only three sets of oars in the narrow but long wooden lifeboat. Judging by its thickness and build, Iggy had probably been right not to send us out in the thing in the first place. We probably never would’ve made it with such a flimsy boat all that way.

  “So basically we get there, and try to find a hotel,” Kira said, nodding nervously, which despite her different from usual facial features, was a very Kira-like expression. “How are we going to pay for it, exactly?”

  “I think I have that covered,” Lin said, pulling a large pouch out of one of the gaping pockets on her far too large jacket. “I swiped this from one of their dressers, and a couple more like it. It’s probably not much, but it’s better than nothing.”

  “Damn, am I glad we brought you along,” I said, grinning at her. “I didn’t even think of that back there with so much going on.”

  “Told you you’d need me,” she said, winking at me. It was weird, seeing everyone with different facial features, but bei
ng a binder, I was still tapped into their souls, so they all felt familiar and warm to me, anyway. And not only that, but their fake eyes didn’t exactly match their souls, so I could tell they were fake features. That made me think of something.

  “Do we think there are other binders here?” I asked, turning to Clem. “Because if there are, we’d best steer clear of them. They’ll see right through this trick Malthe made for us and know we’re imposters on the spot if they’re any good.”

  “I don’t know,” Clem said. “I mean, why wouldn’t they have binders? Like five percent of the population has an aptitude for it. And it’s at least partly genetic, so that number doesn’t exactly go down as time goes on, as long as people keep having kids.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “But how would we be able to identify them?” Malthe asked. “You guys wear those weird coats and stuff. What are the tells for the binders here?”

  “They might not have any,” I said darkly.

  “Well, that’s a happy thought,” Clem said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. I shook my head to clear it.

  “There’s no use worrying about any of this right now,” I said. “We just need to get the hell to a hotel and hole up in there until we can figure out more about this society.”

  “And if we get spotted before then?” Lin asked.

  “Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess,” I snapped.

  “Okay,” Lin said.

  So we kept paddling around until we found a spot that seemed pretty barren. The shore was just a bunch of rocks leading up to what looked like some houses at the top, but that was pretty distant. We pulled the lifeboat into shore and began to disembark one after another.

  Once we were all out on the rocky surface, my legs wobbled. I’d become very used to being at sea, I realized, and being back on dry land was a shock to my system.

  “Everybody got everything?” I asked, looking around at the rest of my team and realizing that they were all just about in the same predicament, their legs shaking and their knees wobbly.