I counted the seconds until the first shot.
“Two and a half minutes. That’s long enough for him to get into position. The road to the mainland ran behind that hedge. He stops his truck, sneaks into the trees ... Boom.”
“That shady little creep,” Dolph said softly. “Do we even know where he came from?”
“No.” Out in the Fringeworlds, hardly anyone comes from where they’re at, and I had long since formulated an executive policy that it did not matter to me where people came from, as long as they paid their fees. “I don’t know a damn thing about him.” I tapped around on my holobook, connecting to my customer database. “Rafael Ijiuto, wholesaler. No further details given, no links.”
“I don’t know, Mike,” Martin said. “Maybe he coulda done it, but did he? Look at his face, here. He saw something that scared him. My guess is it was Travellers hanging out in the thickets.”
I grimaced, my elation fading. Martin was right: it was by no means open and shut.
“Anyway, he’s probably on the far side of the Cluster by now,” Martin added, realistically.
“He is, but his cargo ain’t.” Dolph stubbed his cigarette out with a violent twisting motion. “Those toy fairies.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Those toy fairies.” I remembered the weird gut reflex of wariness I had had when I took one of the fairies out of its packaging. I started to mention it. Then changed my mind. What did I know about anything? I had misidentified Kimmie’s killer.
“The supplier might be able to give us a lead on Ijiuto’s whereabouts, or his identity,” Dolph said. “We have to return them to sender, anyway. I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Be careful,” I said. “Don’t let Bones catch you making enquiries. They’ll probably be watching our data logs for a while.”
Irene was sitting next to me. She did a shimmying thing with her upper body, which made her bosom move interestingly under her t-shirt. She rubbed her head against my shoulder like the big cat she was in animal form, and exclaimed in a voice that was not quite a plaintive meow: “All I want to do is support my family! Is that too much to ask?!?”
I freed the arm trapped behind her and patted her shoulder. “It’ll blow over,” I said, with a confidence I did not feel.
Dolph gave me a complicated look. He slid out of the booth. “Well, I’m gonna go see if Nevaeh is home,” he said, referring to one of his on-again, off-again girlfriends. “Heaven is big tits spelled backwards.”
“Does she know you talk about her like that?” Irene said.
“Not only do I talk about her like that, I talk to her like that,” Dolph said, grinning toothily. He put his leather jacket on. “Wanna come?” he said to me. “We’ll get her to call one of her friends.”
“I gotta give Irene a ride home,” I said.
“I’m going home, too,” Martin said. He lived in a swish downtown apartment, where we suspected that he indulged in depraved binges with his reptilian friends. It’s a common pattern among people who work in space: you’re one person off-world, another at home.
We went out to the parking lot, still hot an hour after sundown. Dolph swung a leg over his bike. In the eternal debate between air and ground, Dolph—oddly, for a spaceship pilot—was a rubber-to-the-road man all the way. His bike was similar to Martin’s, but lower-slung and lighter. They could talk bikes for hours. “See you tomorrow,” I yelled after them, and followed the now-impatient Irene to my truck.
It wasn’t that the idea of Nevaeh’s friend did not appeal. Believe it or not, ladies don’t line up to date single fathers with money worries. I had been single for so long that any female with a pulse had a certain appeal at this point.
But Lucy would be waiting up for me.
16
I live on 90th, between Shoreside and Creek. It’s Shiftertown. At night, you can see the lights of the Strip bleeding into the sky, and the hollow roar of traffic rises and falls like the sea. Folks often sit out on their front porches until late at night, catching sea breezes to save on their A/C bills. I used to live in a fancier place uptown, but that didn’t work out.
I set my kitbag down on my front porch, stepped out of my clothes, and Shifted.
“Really?” Irene said in amusement.
“Sssh,” I said, when I could speak again.
“A tiger?”
“Lucy likes it. Sssh.”
Irene shook her head and opened my front door for me, as I had no hands at the moment. Then she carried on up to her own apartment. The Seagraves lived upstairs from us. I could hear the holovision from upstairs, but from my apartment came not a sound.
I slid through the front door and crept stealthily down the hall. My tiger’s pads made no sound on the grotty cork tiles.
Nanny B, however, had superhuman hearing. She looked out of the kitchen at the end of the hall.
I raised one paw to my mouth, telling her to be silent, and peeked into Lucy’s room.
Bedcovers on the floor. Schoolbooks and toys piled in a corner, inartfully hidden by a towel. Lucy had “tidied up” in anticipation of my return. Her Gemworld Families took up most of the bed, a drift of sparkling, cuddly hailstones.
I prowled another step and peeked around the door of the living-room.
There she sat, cross-legged on the carpet, with her back to me. Gratifyingly, it looked like she was doing homework.
I silently drank in the sight of her—the thick, oak-brown braids, fuzzy after a day’s play, falling on either side of her neck; the studiously lowered head; the sweetly pudgy knees sticking out of her shorts. She had turned eight in January, and I’d convinced myself she looked nothing at all like her mother.
I gathered myself to pounce.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said.
Guess I hadn’t been as quiet as I thought.
She turned around, grinning.
I pounced, anyway. As gently as a tiger can, I knocked her sideways onto the carpet, rolled on my back, picked her up in my paws, and bounced her in the air, flying her back and forth like an airplane. She laughed and laughed. I’d been playing airplane with her since she was a baby, and I could still see the baby in her when she laughed like this. Eventually I dropped her onto my belly and folded my paws over her back. “Missed you, Lulu.”
“Missed you too, Daddy.” She snuggled into my belly fur. Her thumb crept towards her mouth.
Before it could get there, I dumped her lightly into a sitting position on the carpet. “Homework?”
“I already finished my homework,” she said, starting to sweep her hand across her crappy old holobook. The cover was held on with duct tape.
I caught her hand—tenderly—in my jaws before she could erase what she’d been doing. The whole virtual sheet of paper was covered with childish drawings of dolphins, grouped around a photograph of a real dolphin that she must have downloaded to copy.
“Great drawings,” I said.
“I like dolphins,” she said.
Despite my reluctance to be a controlling parent, I said, “Sweetie, you don’t even like swimming.”
“I do. I love swimming. Will you take me to the beach? Tomorrow? Please?”
“Well …”
“Rex said he’s going to take Mia to the beach after school. Can I go with them? Can you come? Please?”
I knew that this onslaught of demands was a reaction to her feelings of neglect. I was away far too much of the time. Whenever I was here, Lucy displayed an almost frenzied eagerness to squeeze every possible minute of dad-and-daughter time out of me. But I couldn’t take her to the beach, even if I wanted to. I had to work.
I deflected the issue by standing up and Shifting back. Lucy trotted out of the room to fetch me some clothes. Nudity is obviously not a big deal in Shifter families, and it was hot enough that I would have been just as comfortable naked, but Nanny B would have complained.
Lying on the carpet, panting, I heard the front door click.
I leapt up and bounded into the hall. Lucy was d
ragging my kitbag, which I’d left on the porch, into the apartment. “What?” she said in alarm when I shoved past her and shouldered the front door closed. It autolocked.
I managed a smile. “Just don’t want you going outside by yourself after dark.”
“I’m not a baby,” she said. “You worry too much.”
“Maybe,” I acknowledged. “All the same, better safe than sorry.”
“What are you worried about?”
“There might be bad guys around,” I said, a warning which Lucy had heard from me so many times that she ignored it.
She started to open my kitbag. “Did you bring me anything? What’s my present?”
I pulled the kitbag away and tossed it into my bedroom. I didn’t want her to find that toy fairy, which I’d stuffed in there with my dirty laundry. I unsnapped the cargo pocket of the pants I’d just taken off, and presented Lucy with the doll that Pippa, Jan, and Leaf had made.
“What is it?”
“It’s meant to be Blobby from Gemworld Families. It’s pretty cool, isn’t it?”
“It’s ugly,” she said with the clinical judgement of a child. “It doesn’t look like my other ones.”
“That’s because it’s handmade.”
“You mean, someone printed it?”
“Sewed it.”
“Oh.” She set the doll on the living-room table. “So … I’m not getting a new holobook?”
I grimaced. Goddamn Rafael Ijiuto hadn’t paid me, and the kill fee for the toy fairies would only be in the region of 2 KGCs. “Not yet, sweetie. You can still use that one, can’t you?”
Lucy’s shoulders sagged. Disappointment settled around her like a black cloud. “Yeah. It doesn’t play holos anymore. But I don’t really like watching holos, anyway. It’s OK, Daddy, I don’t mind.”
I knew I had let her down. “Well,” I said. “Let’s have some ice cream, anyway.”
“Nanny B will say no,” Lucy predicted.
“We’ll see about that. Nanny B,” I called out, “how about some ice cream?”
“Lucy has already had her dessert,” Nanny B said, trundling in on her short legs.
Nanny B was a bot. I’d bought her after Sophia left. She had cost a fortune, in installments that took me years to pay off, but she was worth it. Four feet nothing, royal blue, she had a blandly smiling, rather simian face, a screen on her rounded tummy, and antennas bobbing on her head. Every aspect of her design was appealing and non-threatening. Yet, thanks to my copious and detailed orders, her teddy-bearish exterior hid a caregiver as strict as any drill sergeant.
“You have had enough added sugar for one day, Lucy,” she said. “If you are still hungry, you may have a banana or an apple.”
“See,” Lucy said to me. “I told you.” Sadly, she sat down with her beat-up old holobook.
I grabbed her around the middle. “Heck,” I said, “Once in a while won’t hurt. Nanny, override that. A scoop of chocolate ice cream for Lulu, and I’ll have some, too.”
As we cuddled on the sofa, licking our ice cream from big silver spoons, I felt a sense of peace that no amount of bourbon could deliver. No matter what I may have done out there, I was still a pretty good father. Lucy’s love for me proved it.
And to think that I could’ve ended the day in jail! It didn’t bear thinking about. And yet I couldn’t help thinking about it. I privately renewed my vow to keep my nose clean from now on. If it hurt my business, so be it. Lucy could do without nice stuff. She couldn’t do without her father.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“What do you mean what?”
“You’re shivering.”
She was right. I was trembling. It was a bad old sign that my humanity was wobbling, no doubt a reaction to everything I’d been through today. I felt a pang of pure panic. Waiting for it to pass, I said in a silly voice, “I need more ice cream. I ain’t frosty enough yet.”
The next morning, when I went into Lucy’s room to wake her for school, I saw the handmade Blobby doll lying on her pillow. She had given it pride of place over all her other Gemworld Families dolls. One small hand pinned it possessively to the pillow.
I smiled, and made an impulsive decision. “Rise and shine,” I said. “We’re going to the beach today.”
I needed to talk to Rex, anyhow.
17
Irene’s husband was a lion. By this, I mean not only that his preferred animal form was a lion, but that he was a lazy bastard who was quite happy to let his wife bring home the bacon. The scientists—yes, there are Shifter scientists, on San Damiano, not here—say that our animal forms have no relation to our personalities. A tiger, they say, is just as likely to be risk-averse as a snake; a dog can be just as independent as a cheetah. To that, I say bullcrap. We pick our animal forms ourselves, so obviously we pick ones that suit our personalities, based on preconceived ideas going back to the Stone Age. We can transform our own bodies in half a minute, but cultural assumptions aren’t shifted so easily.
Of course, I’m the exception that proves the rule. But as far as I know, there’s only one of me.
Anyway, Rex was lazy by predilection, not so much in reality. I was the last person to minimize the difficulties of being a house-husband to two young kids. By the time I met him outside the girls’ school at home time, he already looked fed up. He was wrangling Kit, their five-year-old, in a pair of toddler reins that drew stares.
“Slow day at the office, Mike?” he rumbled from his 6’5” height. His shoulders, the width of an upright piano, strained a rugby shirt.
I shrugged. “Figured I’d take the afternoon off.” In reality, Dolph and I had spent the morning surreptitiously searching for information about the crashed Traveller ship, to make sure there had really been no survivors. But I figured Rex had already had the whole story from Irene, and I didn’t want to get into it now.
Waiting for the kids to come out, I shifted my weight from foot to foot and whistled through my teeth. Mentally, I was still not all the way home yet, and could not fully appreciate the bright pastel mosaic of Shiftertown row houses on either side of the school, or the tinkling bell of a candy seller, or the smell of the gravelnut trees lining the street. In the case of the gravelnuts, that was a good thing. They smell like dog poop. Rex grumbled about the heat, and I envied his effortless way of belonging here. He was as rooted in Shiftertown as a gravelnut tree.
“I don’t like this,” I said, gesturing at the school gates. Beyond them, a gravelled yard fronted the decrepit school building.
“Neither do I,” Rex said. “Mia’s teacher told them the other day that genetic modification is dangerous. So then she starts having nightmares that she’s turning into an alien.”
I cursed. “How about a bit of historical context?”
Given that this is Shiftertown, nearly all the kids at Shoreside Elementary are Shifters. However, their teachers mostly are not. And even the ones that are, have to follow the mainstream human curriculum, which contains a fair bit of propaganda against genetic modification. Sure, it’s dangerous. Thousands of lives were sacrificed in the Big Shift. But that was centuries ago. It’s a done deal, and now we are what we are, so what’s the point of making kids feel bad about themselves?
Actually, though, that hadn’t been what I was talking about. I pointed to the white-painted wrought iron gates and the low wall in front of the schoolyard, which was set back between closely packed buildings. “I was thinking about security,” I said. “That’s not gonna keep a dog out.”
“This is Shiftertown,” Rex said, meaning that we were among our own here, so who would want to break into the local elementary school, anyway?
“They could at least put a force field on top of that wall.” I shook my head. “I’m gonna send her to St. Anne’s next year.”
“Sure,” Rex said. “Let me know when they start offering scholarships to impoverished Shifters.”
St. Anne’s was one of the most exclusive schools on Ponce de Leon. It had a
Catholic ethos, which appealed to my cultural preferences. I also liked the sound of the ultra-secure campus in the hills, with force-field fences that could keep out everything from mosquitoes to spaceships. I was in two minds about sending Lucy to a normie school. She’d have to live in a normie world when she grew up, anyway … but in reality, it was a moot question. I could no more afford St. Anne’s fees than I could afford to live in the hills.
“Next run,” I said automatically, “is gonna be huge.”
Rex was still mocking my pretensions when the kids poured out of school. Their voices echoed off the sides of the narrow street in an exuberant cacophony. Lucy and Mia ran up to us. We headed for the beach.
Nowhere in Mag-Ingat is far from the beach. It’s a coastal city, cupped in the hills around Mag-Ingat Harbor, protected from storms by the high ridges of headlands that run out into the sea. However, we in Shiftertown are blessed to live within five minutes’ actual walking distance of the sand. It makes up somewhat for the flooding (in winter), the sweltering humidity (in summer), and the bugs (all year round).
We crossed Shoreside Avenue, amidst traffic wobbling in heat mirages. The sea breeze flapped our clothes and threatened to carry the girls’ school hats off. They had barely stepped foot on the baking sand before they were stripping to their bathing suits and dashing towards the water.
I rolled up my slacks and went in up to my knees to keep an eye on them. When the sun got too much for me, I told them to stay in their depth, and retreated to where Rex had parked himself in the shade of St. Andrew’s Pier. The fairground rides rattled and jingled above us. The wet sand smelled of seaweed. Waves slopped and sucked around the pier’s massive, seashell-encrusted supports. Kit was building a sand fort.
“Beer?” Rex said. He had brought folding sun loungers as well as a cooler of beer and fizzy drinks.
“I was wondering,” I said.
“What?”
I accepted a beer with a nod of thanks and popped the tab. It was cheap lager, now warm. “I’m gonna need a new admin officer. I guess Irene told you what happened.”
Rex nodded heavily. “Sounds like it was a bad run.”
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