Infinity Smashed: Red Roses, Old Horses

[lb_lee]

Red Roses, Old Horses
Series: Infinity Smashed
Summary: Bob and Grey lose a coworker on Valentine's Day, freefall into Orwellian hell, and fall in love.
Word Count: 16,500
Notes: Freebie, and no context required; this is a rewrite of a VERY old story. Warnings at bottom. If you want to know what these characters look like, we posted concept sketches here. The song is that frat boy classic “Drink, Drink, Drink!” Also, thanks to VR Viking for allowing me to dick around with his car and a crowbar for purposes of artistic verisimilitude.


Jenny pulled up in her battered pick-up at 5:30 AM, all bouncy brown curls and schadenfreude.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, Bob,” she crooned.

I glared at her over my coffee and climbed in with a grumble. Witty comebacks had to wait until the second cup.

“Not that you’re a bitter old man or anything.” She traded me my second thermos of coffee for a croissant, which brightened me up.

“Relationships are a waste of the good stuff. I’m bitter about first shift.”

Jenny St. Rivers and I worked the 6 AM – 4 PM shift at Vago, Arizona’s Peripheral Immigration and Naturalization. (“Peripheral” is euphemism for “off-world,” and there’s no “Service” in the name, the old joke goes, because there isn’t any.) We shared a cube and an appreciation for text-based adventuring.

“So, another romantic evening with Button Mash, beer, and porn?” she asked as she got on the highway.

I appreciated that she thought that was the most risque thing I got up to. “Tempting, but no.” I sipped, let the caffeine wash through me. “I’m dragging Grey out.”

Specialist Grey was my Ops counterpart, a legwork guy and the main cat I had to herd. He put in sixty-hour weeks, had a bulletproof reputation as humorless killjoy, and Jenny was convinced that one day he was going to snap and kill us all.

She shuddered and pulled onto the highway. “Couldn’t you just stick with porn and video games? They’re fun.”

I rolled my eyes. “He’s not so bad.”

“He’s a workplace shooting waiting to happen, and you’re a sadist who likes pushing him around.”

“Yup.” She was joking. I was only pretending to.

I have a type—two types, really, both jocks. I like buff women who can bench-press me, and I like big men I can boss around.

I hadn’t thought Grey fit the bill, at first. We’d been assigned each other as an office joke, and he’d done a stellar job convincing me that he couldn’t pass a Turing test. Trying to irritate him into transferring me had been like pestering the Berlin Wall.

Then Thanksgiving had happened. The best thing you could say about it was that nobody had died. Even Grey had run out of gas that shift, and I’d found him haggard, disheveled, and robbing the staff fridge at 6 PM so he wouldn’t have to go home. I’d taken him by surprise, we’d had our first real conversation, and I’d realized that not only was the robot act an act, he’d been counter-trolling me with it the whole time.

Call me perverse, but I respect someone who can beat me at my own game. Add that to the color of pink he’d turned when I caught him in the fridge, and I’d wanted to bend him ever since.

Jenny raised an eyebrow. “He might think you’re asking him out.”

I snorted. “I wasn’t, and he doesn’t. He said yes.”

Even if I were a dating sort of man, we were coworkers in a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell department, and I’d barely avoided a washing once already. If I wanted sex with men, I used cyberspace. Besides, Grey had gotten married straight out of high school… to his job. He never would’ve broken protocol, unlike someone in the truck.

“Speaking of which,” I continued, “how about you and MacIntire?”

Specialist Patrick MacIntire was Jenny’s counterpart, a burly redhead. Their personal relationship had been barely a secret for the past year.

“We’re having dinner—and he remembers what day it is,” Jenny said. “We might even have a conversation.”

I shrugged. “I can talk enough for two.”

She laughed, and we arrived.

For a shady government agency, it didn’t look important, just another cluster of boxy beige buildings on the outskirts of town. Some poor optimist had hung red paper hearts in the windows to try and brighten it up. The security checkpoint had the radio tuned to love songs, and after they waved us through, we hit the Communications floor, where I found pink crepe all over the walls of our cubicle. I tore the ones down on my half while I waited for my computer to boot; Jenny left hers up.

The clock hit six. Up on the bridge, Darlene shouted, “third shift, clock out! First shift, clock in! Let’s get moving!” and we got to work.

Most of the shift went quiet—cranks and customs violators, mostly, the usual. All of my systems stayed functional, which was nice. (Back in 2002, we used four, none of which played nice with each other.) Jenny and I did our shares of printing, signing, and dating stuff for the Big Blue Binder, moving paper back and forth, and herding cats. During lunch break, Darlene passed out candy hearts; good shift captain, her.

Around three, someone came and muttered to her, interrupting a phone call. With a look of annoyance, she stood up, covered her headset mic, and shouted down at us, “all right, which of you jokers ordered delivery?”

Jenny’s friend Lila made a great show of dismay and went to go fetch.

Getting a delivery guy in was no minor task. They had to be buzzed in (by Agatha, the PIN’s least helpful bureaucrat), go through the security checkpoint, showing identification, uniform, goods, and receipt, and be kept under guard while somebody from our department went to collect the pizza or Chinese or whatever it was. Then the whole process was done in reverse to get the guy out of there. It took Lila a while, but she came back grinning with a giant paper bundle: a dozen red roses.

She laid them on Jenny’s desk with a wink. “Happy Valentine’s Day, from you-know-who.”

Jenny sat there with her hands to her mouth, eyes huge and shining.

“Aw,” I said, patting her back. “Congratulations, kiddo.”

Jenny’s hands went down. She was beaming big as the sky, and I made a mental note to buy MacIntire a drink next time I saw him. “These are beautiful,” she breathed, touching a petal. “I can’t believe he’d…”

Before she could finish, Darlene called us up to her desk. Jenny and I exchanged looks but got up.

Darlene’s desk was set above the rest of ours in a modernist glass cube that management adored but got called “the goldfish bowl” by everyone else. Usually, Darlene kept her door open and just shouted down to all of us, but now she shut us in with her and sat down, looking frazzled and apologetic.

“That was the League,” she said, pointing to the phone.

The Jaunter’s League was an off-world union, a cross between the UN and the EU. They thought we were forest monkeys in jackboots, so hadn’t invited us to join, and seeing as they still allowed slavery, we wouldn’t have accepted if they had. We sometimes worked together, but never comfortably.

“They want us to go fetch some ship and bring it back. It’s set to land somewhere in our sector within the hour, but I smell a rat. Doshi, find him. St. Rivers, find the location; you’re my best spotter. Go, and keep it quiet till you have something for me.”

She gave us a stack of grainy faxes, and we went back to our cube to divvy them up and ponder—me the what, Jenny the where.

Right away, I saw why Darlene had gotten suspicious. The mess of records, forms, and bureaucratese was gummed up with clearance back-and-forth that even Grey might’ve been baffled by, but it was all padding. The only hard data we had was the ship’s class and registration… and it was so new that we hadn’t gotten it on our system yet. Whatever it was, and whatever or whoever was on it, the League wanted the whole thing back yesterday… and they didn’t want us asking questions about it.

When I told Jenny, she made a derisive noise from her maps and dog-eared hot spotter book. “It better not be that slave catcher BS, I swear to Jesus…”

“Let’s find out.” I was already hammering at my keyboard.

This was the part of my job I enjoyed, solving puzzles. It’d gotten me into programming and hacking in the first place, and my hacking was what got me hired, involuntarily. The League had technology beyond our most utopian dreams, but it was still made, maintained, and guarded by people, who are dumb on every peripheral. Why beat your head against the wall when you can schmooze the door man? Grey had taught me that there was power in people thinking you were stupid, and I’d managed to Agatha my way into higher clearance codes for some League databases. Maybe they could tell me more.

“It’s some shiny new demo cruiser,” I told Jenny, who was hard at work with compass and ruler. “The kind of thing they send to conference shows to impress the yokels, show off the new merchandise.”

“People or things?” she asked.

I was already checking. “Well, specs say it’s small, and automated so no crew. If it’s carrying anyone, it’d be a really tight fit. I’m guessing things.”

“Things don’t hijack a ship,” she said, standing up from her finished map, covered in shaded overlapping circles. “Unless the transit records are really off, it’s headed for the big chain, Bob. That’s a person driving that thing, not broken tech.”

I looked over her shoulder and swore. “The big chain” had an official name, but nobody used it. It was an infamous necklace of hot spots that had opened up over the Vago desert and held unusually steady for decades; Grey had cut his teeth there kicking out joyriders, back in the ‘70s. Its heyday was over, but it was still famous enough to attract the desperate… who usually crashed, once they came through, saw the sudden ground, and panicked. A lot of them died at impact.

Jenny and I exchanged looks, and I went back to work, hoping to find the owner of our runaway ship. For her part, she got to work with a trace map, cleaning it up for the rest of us to copy and use.

“Good news,” I said as she worked. “The ship’s new, fancy, and not in common use yet. I can’t tell you who owns it, but I can tell you the kind of people who do.”

“Bad news?”

“They’re the kind of people who run weapons start-ups. That’s a Priority One right there.”

She gritted her teeth. “Always end of shift. Let’s go talk to Darlene.”

After that, everything became a blur of logistics. Darlene delegated the task load, then got on the phone to harangue the League; the rest of us herded cats. At least it was late enough that we had second shift to draw on, and we were able to blanket the probable crash radius before the fireworks started. Then it was hurry up and wait.

Grey was part of the waiting crew, staked out at some far-flung corner of Jenny’s map with Specialists MacIntire, Larkin (a friend of Grey’s), and Dean, a new guy I didn’t know well. And through statistical inevitability…

“Comm, this is Larkin, we have visual, target is through the hot spot at—”

Crash!

“Correction: target has landed.”

Jenny bit her lip. So far, the vehicle was behaving like something being driven by a person, right down to bungling the landing, and she didn’t look happy at being right. Across the floor, other comboys were quieting down and turning to listen to their radios. Other Ops groups discussing logistics, mostly. Then of all things, the boys upstairs came on:

“Ops, this is Management, operating on League intel.” The voice was unfamiliar. “The occupant, 107, is to be contained and returned. All clear?”

If Larkin felt hesitant, it didn’t show in her voice. “This is Larkin, 10-4.”

“Wait, Management knows there’s a driver?” Jenny asked. “Since when does the League talk to them and not us?”

We looked up to Darlene on the bridge. She looked livid, and when we caught her eye, she threw up her hands in baffled disgust. Whoever this licensed idiot was, he’d gone over her head.

A buzzing sound broke the silence. Jenny and I both went for our pockets, but it turned out to be her personal cell. Over her shoulder, I saw the text message from MacIntire: “see you tonight. Love you.”

Jenny texted back “XOXO” and put it back in her pocket.

Then my personal cell buzzed. It was a text from Grey: “how many?”

If they were privately contacting us instead of asking by radio, they shared our uneasiness. “Our size, 1, tight fit,” I replied. “Shouldn’t be there.”

Silence for a while; presumably Grey, Larkin, MacIntire, and Dean were debating what to do next. Then the radio crackled into life again. “This is MacIntire. I’m approaching the vehicle—”

The speaker erupted in chaos, making us jump, and it didn’t turn off, bogarting the whole channel: crashing, static, shouting maybe. MacIntire, it sounded like, had lost his radio.

An aggravated mutter rose up and comboys started flipping to the crisis channel; from the sound of it, Ops had the same idea. I reached for our radio, but one look from Jenny and I stopped. I could hear the clean channel from the next cube over—back-up, logistics, nobody from our group.

MacIntire’s radio kept broadcasting indecipherable mayhem, and we sat there listening to it, Jenny twisting her bangles around her wrists. It went on for a long time.

Then it cut out and there was silence.

Jenny sat frozen. I put a hand on her shoulder. Then the radio kicked up again, on our channel. It wasn’t MacIntire, but Larkin’s smooth hostage-negotiator drawl. Somebody was making a hell of a racket in the background, but I couldn’t make anything out. “This is Larkin from Ops. Target has fled. We have no visual.”

A sigh went up on the Comm floor, but Larkin kept talking.

“Request paramedics; agents are down. I ain’t walking, and Dean’s arm is no good.” The noise behind her spiked, then cut out; she must’ve silenced her radio to say something to whoever it was before coming back. When she did, the background noise was gone, and she said, “things got bad.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath against the ice in my stomach. In specialist understatement, that meant someone was dead, and we all knew which old ironass topped the betting pool.

I picked up my radio. “Larkin, this is Bob. What’s Grey’s status?”

“This is Larkin. He’s all right, Doshi.”

I released my breath and let myself slump against the support of my chair, but the relief didn’t last long. If he, Larkin, and Dean were alive, then…

I turned to look at Jenny, who was sitting at her desk, staring at nothing, rubbing a rose petal between her fingers. Her face was blank.

“Is St. Rivers with you?” Larkin continued.

Jenny just sat there. I answered for her, “yes, she’s on.”

Larkin sighed over the line. I already knew what she would say, word for word. Every time, it was the same phrase and the same tone: “I’m sorry. It was fast; he didn’t even feel it.”

Of course he didn’t. They never did.

Jenny nodded as though Larkin could see her, then reached over and pulled the roses into her lap. Then she began to cry, with her eyes, not her face; that looked confused, like it hadn’t sunk in yet.

The floor was silent except for the hum of computers and fluorescent lights. I wasn’t the only one who’d known what MacIntire meant to her; everyone had, and none of us had reported it. When you lived in an occupational cloister and most of your working life was classified, it was inevitable, falling for coworkers you didn’t have to lie to.

I looked at Randall in the cube next door, and he nodded and made a flagging-down gesture with one hand, a phone with the other; he’d handle the paramedics.

Telling Larkin, “this is Comm. Docs on the way,” I killed our radio, removed my headset, got up from my chair, and went to Jenny.

“He always went for the big gesture,” she said, shaking the roses at me as though in admonishment. Her voice trembled only slightly, and she ignored the tears on her cheeks. “Corny white boy. And now he’s…” Her face became animated and terrible for a moment; then the power went out behind it again. “Oh, the reservation. I need to cancel the reservation. Valentine’s Day, you know, everyone wants to be there on Valentine’s Day…”

“Don’t worry about it, kiddo.” I reached over to shut down her computer, and she made no move to stop me. “Let’s clock you out and get you home. There anything you need?”

“No. Nothing,” she stated. Then she changed her mind and thrust the roses at me. “Yes. Get rid of these.”

I held my hands out to push them away. “No, I—”

“Get rid of them.” Her voice cracked under the force of the words.

I couldn’t take those eyes. Feeling helpless, I took the bundle from her hand, and once the flowers were out of her line of sight, she returned to her stupor, tearing apart a spare petal.

Lila came over, fidgeting with her necklace. “Jenny? Baby?”

Jenny said nothing. Lila and I exchanged nervous looks and she knelt next to Jenny, rubbing her back. Jenny started to shake and sob, and Lila pulled her in for a hug.

“Sh. It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m going to drive you home and run you a nice hot bath, and you can cry all you want, okay? I’ll stay the night, does that sound good?”

Jenny nodded, too overcome to speak. Maybe I couldn’t give her what she needed, but at least she’d have Lila, not have to deal with it alone.

“Thanks, Lila,” I murmured to her. “You’re a good friend. Take her home, I’ll handle the paperwork.”

The rest of the shift I spent in a blur of activity, filling out as much of Jenny’s paperwork on her behalf as I could and sending it to the boys upstairs with a request for her to get some mental health leave. I didn’t hear Darlene shout, “first shift, clock out!” and realize how late it’d gotten until she came down, jabbed me in the neck with a pencil, and ordered me to go home. Then I shut my computer down, yanked my headset off, and headed out the door with the roses. When Grey wasn’t out there waiting for me, I sat on the curb.

I’d experienced coworkers’ deaths before, but never this close, never anyone I knew. And Ops was a young man’s game, and Grey was forty-three…

Health and Medical was across the street. As I looked up, the doors slid open and Specialist Dean stormed out, arm in a sling. When he came upon his car, he yanked the door open and slammed it shut going in. He’d never struck me as one of those guys who raged through a crisis, but then again, I’d never been there for one like this.

If Dean had gone to Medical, maybe Grey had too. I grabbed the flowers and headed over.

When I entered, the reek of ammonia almost knocked me over. Despite everything, I stopped in my tracks and gasped.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” That was Doc Pritchard, the tiny second shift EMT. She was probably the one who’d fixed Dean’s arm. She had a cool head, a legendary gore tolerance, and I’d never seen her looking so strung out.

“Hi Taneesha,” I said. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, putting her hands in her pockets and taking a deep breath. “Yeah, it was rough.” She seemed to force her mind off it, gave me a weak smile. “But at least it’s over, right? Well, everything but the stinking.”

“Yeah, what is that, Dean?”

“Nope, Grey.” She pulled her white earbuds from her pocket and pushed one into her ear. “For once I’m not sorry he refused an ambulance; I don’t want my rig smelling like that.”

“Where is he?”

She cocked her thumb back into the building. “Last I saw, he was out of Biohazard and making for the showers. Hope it helps.”

She went back to her ambulance to await the next call, and I headed for the locker room. At that hour, it should’ve had a few unwinding, off-duty first shifters, but the stench must’ve flushed them all out; it was empty except for one shower stall.

I rapped on the door frame: dah dit dah. “Hey, Eric. It’s me.”

He rapped back: dah dah dah, dah dit dah. He wasn’t a big talker, but he knew his Morse code.

“Can I get you anything?”

That, he had to use voice for. “Towel. Clothes. Locker key’s on the ring.”

Under the circumstances, I couldn’t blame him for bee-lining to the shower. I had to get rubber gloves out of the supply closet before I touched his uniform, which could’ve stood up by itself, encrusted as it was with blood (his?) and what looked like rancid pumpkin pie filling. I pulled Grey’s spattered keys off his belt loop and took them to the sink for decontamination.

“What is this crap?” I asked as I scrubbed.

I didn’t expect Grey to answer, but he called, “vomit,” over the running water. “Non-toxic.” As though it mattered.

The street clothes in the locker were unfashionable and needed ironing, but at least Grey wouldn’t look like my bodyguard in them. I grabbed them along with the towel and hung them on the hook outside the shower curtain.

“Towel and clothes are out for you; I’ll see if I can salvage your phone,” I called.

He rapped acceptance on the door frame, and I went to get some garbage bags from the supply closet. Hopefully double-bagging would block out the stench. Before I did, I dumped the contents of Grey’s pockets into my hand and grimaced. How much vomit could a body contain?

Fortunately, Grey used an indestructible brick phone. Even covered in filth, it was still on, though nonfunctional. I couldn’t get it to turn off and finally popped the battery pack before cleaning it as best I could.

The pager was made of weaker stuff. It was dead. I did my best for it anyway; maybe a night packed in rice would revive it.

Then there was a… flash drive? It was so disgusting I couldn’t be sure, and just as I finished washing it, I heard the shower curtain rasp back. When I turned, there was Grey, doing the top button of his shirt, scrubbed within an inch of his life, and smelling like my college chem project.

Grey was a looming, beaky-nosed fridge of a man, younger than me by a few years, not that anyone could tell by looking. He’d started going gray sometime in his twenties, his hairline had started receding not long after, and a couple of decades with the PIN had racked up miles I never wanted to see. He looked strained and I could only speculate at what he was hiding under his clothes, but he was moving smoothly. Not his blood on the uniform, I thought with relief. Must’ve been the 107’s.

“Hey, big guy,” I said, pulling off my gloves to clap my free hand to his arm. “You look like hell. MacIntire, huh?”

He nodded. “Good man.” He held out his hands for his stuff and when I handed it over, shoved it into his pockets without looking.

“You should pack the electronics in rice soon. And maybe a night in baking soda will get the smell off your keys.”

“Thank you.” He looked hangdog, and I couldn’t blame him, what with the smell. He gestured at himself questioningly.

“Tolerable, way better than it was,” I assured him, patting him.

“Enough for dinner?”

“You still want to?”

“If you do.”

Grey never left his shift on time voluntarily. “They kicked you out because of the smell, didn’t they?”

He was silent, which I presumed meant yes. But then he said, “don’t want to be alone.”

I blinked. Grey rarely said he wanted anything. Finally, I settled on, “I’m flattered,” because I was.

He glanced at the bundle I’d propped on the hand drier. “You have flowers.”

I inferred his question mark. “They’re Jenny’s.”

“From MacIntire.” So he had known.

“Yeah. After the shift, she didn’t want them.” I took off my glasses, breathed on the lenses, and rubbed them against my sleeve. “Mind if I keep them in your car? I haven’t decided what to do with them yet.”

We headed to the parking lot, where Grey’s long-suffering black sedan waited. If he smelled like my chem project, it smelled like the whole damned lab. We did our best to clean it, using stuff from the supply closet, but the smell barely improved. Giving it up as a job for professionals, Grey shoveled his sports drinks and snacks out of the passenger seat for me, and I got in with the roses in my lap.

The stench was even worse with the doors closed. When we sat down, Grey saw my face, sighed, and rolled the window down, despite the winter chill.

“Can’t believe you left them up,” I grumbled as I buckled up and cranked down my own.

“Break-ins.”

“Who’d be stupid enough?” My cell began to ring. Whoever it was, I didn’t want to hear it, so I silenced it and shoved it in the glove compartment, narrowly avoiding a cascade of maps, forms, and tranq tubes.

He woke up the car and pulled out of the parking lot. “Want Punjabi?”

“You hate Punjabi. You have the spice tolerance of an English kindergartner.”

“Want it?”

“No, you’ve had a worse day than me; I won’t let you humor me. Italian. Hell, I’ll even take a night at the Opera House for you.”

Some of the tension left his shoulders, and he got onto the highway. “Okay.”

As he drove, I asked, “who the hell was that guy upstairs who went over our heads?”

“New.”

I grumbled. The PIN had never been squeaky clean, and now we had the restructuring from 9/11 going on top of it. We were supposed to be working more closely with the CIA, FBI, and other acronyms, but now spooks we’d never heard of were turning up in all sorts of management positions… and disappearing just as quickly. “He sure seemed willing to do our jobs for us. The hell is going on upstairs? And why did the League talk to him and not us?”

Grey just shook his head. He didn’t know either. “Ship was a demo cruiser. What kind?”

“All sorts of crap. Weapons seemed to come up more than usual.”

The lines between his eyes deepened. “Had a coma-pod. Nothing else.”

“Ah hell, it must’ve been the merch then. Jenny was right.” That must’ve been how the 107 had fit with so little space and flimsy life support. Might’ve explained all the vomiting too; coma-pods were rough on a body. “And the boys upstairs wanted to return it. Since when do we do that?”

“Doesn’t matter now,” Grey said. “It panicked.”

True. Any chance of a peaceful resolution had gone out the window the moment it killed MacIntire. “How’d it lose you guys?”

“Kicked up a sandstorm.”

Well, at least as sick as it was, it wouldn’t get far. Maybe second shift would find it hiding in a culvert somewhere. “Any word or explanation from Management?”

He shook his head.

“Well, the hell with them. They can pay MacIntire’s funeral bills. The hell are they doing with us comboys if they aren’t going to communicate anything?”

He had no answer for me, and I was lost in thought for the rest of the ride.

When we arrived, Grey set the parking brake and gave me one of his rare, small smiles. “Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” I said, rolling up my window. Stench or no stench, this wasn’t a part of town you left your windows open in. “What for?”

“Being here.”

I felt like a heel for what I was going to say, but I put my hand on his arm and said it anyway. “I want you to leave your gun behind.”

He paused.

“I know you’re licensed, I know you’ve had a shit day, and I don’t want to fight with you. I just want to have a normal evening where we try to leave work at work and you don’t act like my bodyguard. Can you do that?”

Grey watched me for a moment, then reached down, undid his holster, and unloaded, disassembled, and locked his gun in the car safe at my feet.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. “I didn’t expect you to really do it.”

He shrugged. “Owners don’t like armed customers.”

“That’s a nice way of putting it.” Despite the area, the Opera House never got robbed. The Mob hated competition. “But I’m grateful anyway. Let’s eat.”

I gave his shoulder a squeeze and we went in.

In defiance of the rundown urban sprawl, the Opera House was a nice place, all red stone and wrought iron, with waiters who ground pepper from mills as long as their arms into olive oil I’d never seen topped. The wine menu was good and the pesto was to die for. Neither food nor staff was the problem; it was the atmosphere.

See, the Opera House was singular even in Vago: an opera karaoke bar. No shitting. There was a stage and mic at one end with an unflappable piano player who accompanied any drunken fool who could stagger up and belt an aria. (Anyone who stumped the piano player got free drinks, but nobody could.) Everyone was encouraged to sing along, including the staff, and they often did. Apparently they scheduled live performers on weekends, had some famous old tenor once, but if you asked me, they didn’t need it.

Grey adored opera. I hated it. But if it got our minds off MacIntire, even a little, it was worth it to me.

The front of house staff was well trained; they had to notice the smell, but damned if you could tell by their faces. They maneuvered us to a table in the back corner, a good distance from everyone else (good for them), which also let Grey have his back to the wall and full view of the exits (good for him). The place was decked out for Valentine’s Day—white tablecloths, red candles, pink carnations. Not roses, thank god. A bit more romantic than I intended, but oh well.

Out came the bread and the pepper mills.

“You drinking anything tonight?” I asked, looking over the wine menu.

“Water.”

“Wild man.” But I didn’t bother him. He held his liquor like a rusty cheese grater and he’d given up his gun for me. I ordered a glass for myself, to take the edge off.

Thank goodness Grey was romantically oblivious or I might’ve had to explain myself. On a normal day, the Opera House was raucous; on Valentine’s Day, everyone was belting out love songs at top volume. Most of it was in languages I didn’t know, but as the waiter came with my pesto parmigiana, someone started singing in English—a drinking song, joyful and corny, full of toasts for eyes bright as stars and lips red and sweet.

I’d heard it before.

“Wait,” I said. “I know this one; you sang it at the office Christmas party!”

Grey looked pained, but I smiled. I’d dragged him out in hopes of making a social animal out of him, only for him to wander off after some joker spiked his diet soda. I’d found him in the break room, high as a kite, serenading the coffee machine. It was then that I’d realized that under all the stiffness and silence, he had a hell of a singing voice, a bass that purred like a V8 engine in your rib cage. Never would’ve guessed, the way he talked… or didn’t.

“What is it?” I asked. “Wagner?”

A wince quirked his mouth. “Romberg. Student Prince.”

“You didn’t sing along.”

He shrugged.

I took a bite of my dinner. It felt good to enjoy it, after that awful shift. “You should go up there.”

“Did, once or twice,” Grey said, “back in training.”

I choked and grabbed for my napkin. “Wow, you must’ve been drunk.”

He said nothing, which meant he probably had.

“Go,” I ordered after clearing my airway. “Do it. You sing better than half these rummies drunk; I’ve got to hear you sober.”

“Not in the mood.”

Fair enough. I didn’t feel much like singing after that shift either. “At least take it up again sometime. They’d appreciate your voice more than the coffee machine or your showerhead.”

“Or you?”

“I have no taste; I saw that face you made when I said Wagner.” I was rewarded with a repeat. “Promise you’ll sing for me sober sometime.”

“Maybe,” he said, and resumed eating his spaghetti.

“I’ll remind you.” No skinny people believe it, but evolution’s on my side: food’s a mood stabilizer.

I finished first and when I did, the waiter laid the bill on our table without missing a beat. I reached for it, but Grey got it first. He held it up close, squinted, then held it out at arm’s length. I gave him a moment, then caught his wrist and plucked the bill from his fingers.

“Age is catching up to you, big guy. Soon you’ll need bifocals like me.”

He grimaced.

I tossed some cash down for my half, told him his and that I’d be back in a flash, then went to hit the can while he finished eating. The evening hadn’t turned out as awful as I’d feared; I was almost sure that Grey might get some sleep tonight, and I’d almost pushed away the picture of Jenny weeping at her desk. I hoped Lila was taking good care of her and made a note to call in the morning.

The Opera House’s bathrooms were one-stall affairs with small hatch windows, left cracked for ventilation. I mention them because I’d just finished my business and zipped my pants when they gave off the smell of ammonia.

Then the 107 slithered in.

I jumped and yelped, crashing back into the wall. The 107 hissed, brandished broken glass at me, and when I shut up, began signing at me.

I didn’t understand a word. I shook my head.

It paused, then signed again, slower. I caught one bit: “speak SGSL?”

I swallowed and signed, “a little.” Barely.

It didn’t take long for it to figure out just how little I knew—and it didn’t seem much better. After a lot of signing I couldn’t understand, and some wet gagging sounds (but no vomiting), it managed to get through to me: “[noun]. Have [noun]. Give [noun].”

I had to pull one of the few full phrases in SGSL I knew: “I don’t understand.”

It swelled up dangerously. “Give [noun]!”

“What is…?” I made my best effort to replicate the noun sign.

It stared at me, but at least it calmed down. After a moment of thought, it raised one of the shards of glass… not towards me, but the wall. It scratched a simple spider squid figure into the paint and pointed at it. “I. Understand?”

Yes.

It drew smaller spider-squids, made a V around them, pointed. “My [noun]. Understand?”

It couldn’t have been the sign for “children;” I would’ve recognized that one. Some other family term, then? Since I didn’t know “maybe,” I signed, “yes?”

“My. My [family],” it signed. “Have [family]! Give [family]!”

Whatever the 107 and its family were, I was damned sure I’d never seen or heard of anything like them before. “No have.”

“Yes have!” It was starting to swell up again. “Give!”

Helplessly, hoping it wouldn’t get me killed: “I don’t understand! I don’t speak SGSL!”

For a moment, it just stood there. Then, seemingly giving me up as a lost cause, it settled in front of the door, glass at the ready. When I made as if to move, it puffed up warningly. I stilled, and so did it.

We waited.

For something that’d killed my coworker, it was smaller than I expected, child or large dog size, a scrawny squishy harvestman with too many ribbon tentacle limbs. Its pink-veined putty-colored body was covered in orange vomit stains, specks of blue-green blood, plus road dust and grit like it’d gotten here by undercarriage. Every once in a while it made a wet gagging sound, but its body language never slackened, so I stayed put. Sick and small or not, it’d cut a swathe through Ops.

I don’t know how long I sat there on the toilet, quiet as a mouse and feeling cold sweat plaster my shirt to my back, but finally Grey began to wonder what the hell I was doing. I heard the dah-dit-dah rap against the door, and a hesitant, “twenty?”

The 107 didn’t know English, but it must’ve recognized Grey’s voice. It jumped up and signed at me.

I threw up my hands, signed again: “I don’t speak SGSL.”

Fed up, it sprang to the wall above me, slid down, and horse-kicked me at the doorway, all fluid lightning. As if to hammer the point home, it tried to shove my face into the door.

“Grey,” I said, as calmly as I could, “the 107 wants to talk to you.”

Pause. “Now?”

The 107 thrust my face doorward, pointed a shard of glass at me.

“Now. Right now,” I babbled. Then, even though I knew the 107 couldn’t understand me, “let me unlock the door, damn you.”

It hissed at me.

Grey tried the door, and when it pulled against the lock, the 107 seemed to understand the problem. I held up one hand, empty, and went for the lock as slowly and obviously as I could. Its tendrils rippled, but it let me pull back the deadbolt. Grey came through the door as carefully as I’d opened it, holding his hands up empty, and though the 107 slithered out of reach and wielded the glass warningly, it let him come through. When it signed at him, he closed and relocked the door.

“Wants me to sit there,” he translated, indicating the john. “You over there.”

Though it was closer to the 107 than I liked, I took the corner by the sink, Grey sat, and the 107 parked itself in front of the door again. It started signing at him—I caught the “have [noun], give [noun]” bit again, and it pointed to the drawing it’d made on the wall. When it finished, Grey signed back, broad and clear enough for me to get the gist: no have. It signed more, longer this time, and he replied similarly: no, with commentary.

It didn’t like that answer. It signed harder.

Grey kept his eyes on the 107. “Bob,” he said in a calm, quiet voice, “no other refugees like this one, right?”

So it was asking about its people. “Not unless they came after we got off shift. I was trying to tell it that.”

Grey nodded like that was what he expected and signed to the 107. It didn’t look any happier and signed something short and sharp. Grey signed back a clear no, without commentary. The 107 gestured at me and he tensed.

“Grey, why is it looking at me like that?”

He signed something and without looking away from it, “be ready to run.”

“Eric…” it was starting to puff up.

“Thanks for dinner.” And then he hurled himself at the 107.

The 107 was fast and flexible, but Grey was big and there wasn’t much space to maneuver; it partially dodged, coiled around him, and started slashing at him with the glass. Me, I dashed for the door. The 107 shrieked and tried to stop me, but Grey bulldogged it, despite the punishment. Then I had the bolt open and was sprinting for the restaurant exit, leaving a wake of alarmed customers and staff.

“Call the cops!” I shouted at them, but didn’t stop running. This wasn’t the part of town where people called the cops, and whichever local gangster was in charge of the place, I doubted they’d fare much better. We needed my coworkers, and my phone was in Grey’s car.

But he had the keys. I swiped a rolling pin off the counter as I ran and hoped it was solid enough. When I made it to the parking lot and the car, I swung the rolling pin at the passenger side window as hard as I could.

The rolling pin didn’t break, but it bounced off like I’d attacked a safe, sending reverb up my wrist and leaving the glass unmarked. I heard a thunk as the locks froze, right before the car alarm went off, screaming my location to the whole block. I redoubled my efforts, but the glass wouldn’t break.

A couple teenagers in baggy pants paused to spectate.

“You’re doing it wrong, Pops,” one called.

“Yeah,” the other said. “You gotta aim for the edge of the frame.”

I was too out-of-breath to say anything to them, so just obeyed, and the window shattered all in one go. They clapped politely until screams started breaking out of the Opera House, sending them scattering. Sounded like the fight had made it out of the bathroom.

The glove compartment was an easy reach, but opening it caused another shower of junk that almost knocked my phone onto the floor. At the last second I managed to catch it and call work.

I got Agatha. “The Peripheral Immigration and Naturalization office has closed for the night; please try—”

“Agatha! It’s Bob! Get me second shift!”

“Sir, the second shift is unavailable to civilian callers—”

“Fuck you, Agatha, that 107’s going to kill Grey, send second shift out here!”

That woke her up. “Where are you?”

I rattled it off while clutching the stitch in my side. “I am going to kill the Jaunter’s League for this, them and Management! What the hell is that thing, Agatha? It’s pissed!”

I had never heard Agatha be so helpful. “Hold tight, Doshi, we’re coming.”

The cries coming from the Opera House hit a new pitch and people started flooding out. “Hurry up!”

“Don’t do anything stupid, Bob,” Agatha said. “Just wait it out and let Grey do his job.”

I stared at the roses in the passenger seat, half-covered in papers, maps, and a tranq tube. “Okay,” I said, and hung up on her.

Grey’s gun was locked up, and even if it hadn’t been, I’d never shot a gun before. But I had used auto-injectors—my sister had severe allergies—and they were damn near idiot-proof. I didn’t know how I’d get close enough long enough to tag the 107, or whether the sedatives would work on it, but I grabbed one anyway. (The rest had fallen to the floor, out of reach.)

The sounds of chaos from the Opera House were intensifying.

The back service door was open, though nobody was streaming out of it now. Once I reached it, I got down and started crawling. The kitchen had emptied and I couldn’t see past the counter, but bottles and silverware were flying, people were screaming, and it sounded like a brawl was in progress. At least the mayhem meant the 107 probably hadn’t noticed me.

When I’d made my way to the counter, I adjusted my glasses and rose to a kneel, trying to catch glimpses of what was happening and where the hell Grey was in the maelstrom. A plate spun past my forehead, but it didn’t seem to have been aimed at me.

Most people had fled, except for a few unlucky bastards barricaded behind tables. They couldn’t leave without getting hit by the 107, who was a lurchy, spinning blur hurling everything in reach—food, dishes, cutlery—and trying to get back over to my side of the counter. It seemed to be using Grey for ballast, who was pinned down on his back and losing the fight but refusing to let go.

Shit. It wasn’t that far away, but there was no way I could tag it like this. It was moving too fast, and it’d see me coming.

The latter, at least, I could do something about. Up on the counter near me was an open sack of flour, left abandoned. I snatched it and lobbed it at them. The 107 reacted on reflex and lashed out at it, sending up a cloud of powder.

“Hold it still!” I shouted to Grey.

I could barely see him under the flour and tentacles, but he heard me. He reared up, grappled, tried to lock its main body. The 107 had far more free limbs, clutching upgraded weaponry—a wine bottle, a bread knife, a frying pan—and it turned all of them on him, but he held on.

The shot would never get better. I dove over the counter, jammed the injector into its body, and smashed the button; the 107 flinched and screeched at the prick. Then it hit me with the frying pan.

When I hit the floor, back on my original side of the counter, both my glasses and the tranq tube were gone. The 107 had gotten free and taken the latter but couldn’t seem to figure out how to get a good grip on it. While it wrapped a tentacle around it in a haphazard streamer tangle, it raised the frying pan again.

Grey tackled it across the counter.

The 107 whirled and tried to jab him with the spent tranq tube, but to no effect and since it was only half his size, it couldn’t rip free. Finally, it yanked him over the stove so his clothes caught fire and fled when he let go, still clutching the worthless auto-injector. Left empty-handed, Grey finished scrambling over the counter to join me. He hit the floor with a graceless thud, bloodied, covered in flour, and with one arm hanging at an awkward angle.

“Who’s coming?” he demanded, tearing his sweater off. The smoldering went with it.

“Second shift,” I replied, delighted and terrified that we were both still alive. “I smashed your window. I’m sorry.”

“I forgive you.”

A wine bottle whizzed over our heads and smashed against the wall, spewing foam.

“Shit! If we survive this, Eric, you are teaching me SGSL! We don’t even have its damn family!”

I heard a clatter, the lights spun, and then I could see the blurry form of the 107 scuttling across the ceiling, trailing kitchenware. It shoved the tranq tube on top of a roof timber, out of our reach, and then scrambled above us, dripping blue-green blood and hurling wineglasses. Its aim was deteriorating and some of its tentacles on the injected side were going limp, but it had us pinned down.

I looked around, trying to find something we could use, and saw the big kitchen sink, abandoned and half-full of water. “Can that thing drown?”

Grey’s response was to shove me out of the way as the 107 staggered and lost its grip. It swept a cutting board of bread at me as it fell, more as cover fire than to drop me; its focus was on dropping Grey. Me, I dashed for the sink and turned the tap full blast.

Grey caught the 107, bear-hugged it, and hauled it to the sink, making no move to protect himself. He ignored its tentacles, concentrated on immobilizing its main body, and shoved it down into the water.

Then he held it there.

Drowning is a horrible, ugly way to die, and it takes a horrible ugly eternity—at least five minutes. There was vomiting. And it tried to beat Grey to death the whole time. He took it blank-faced and silent until its arms finally went limp and slid off him.

“Knife,” he told me.

I handed him one and didn’t watch what he did with it. When he was done, he put his back to the sink and slid down onto the floor next to me, covered in water and flour, stained with blood both red and blue-green, expression hollow.

“Okay?” His voice matched his face.

I shook my head. “You?”

He shook his head, and that’s when second shift arrived.

One of the Ops guys saw us first. I saw his eyes sweep—first for threats, then a double-take as he took in the candles and carnations, the ambiance.

Grey had completely shut down, so I said, “you’re late. It’s over,” and jerked my head at the mass of tentacles hanging out of the sink.

Another one of the Ops guys went to investigate. The first one asked me, “what’re you doing here, comboy?”

I didn’t like the look he was giving us, so I said, “your job, apparently.”

Before he could come up with a comeback, I heard a voice from the front. “Are we good?”

The Ops guy at the sink said, “all clear,” and then I had an EMT shining a light in my eyes and asking if I felt nauseous.

For all the horror, I’d avoided major injury. The worst I’d have to deal with was a bump and a headache. Hell, even my glasses had made it through with nothing worse than a bent and twisted earpiece. Our waiter brought them to me, and after straightening them as best as I could, I put them on, since my spares were at home.

“Hey,” the waiter said to me. “Thanks.”

“It wasn’t really me, but you’re welcome,” I replied.

He thrust some cash at me. “Consider your meal on the house. You’ll always have a table at the Opera House, both of you.”

I was starting to see why Grey kept coming back here. “Keep it as a tip. Anyone hurt?”

“A few, but your guy took most of it. He’s crazy.” The waiter’s tone said this was a compliment. “Where is he anyway?”

Good question. I stood up to find out.

Turned out, he was in the other restroom, the only part of the restaurant not trashed. When I came in, he was propped up against the wall, still gripping the knife, while Doc Pritchard bandaged and argued with him in equal measure. She looked up at me with hope.

“Bob! This is your dumbass, right?”

“Hi Taneesha,” I said with a sigh, locking the door to keep out rubberneckers. “Yup, he’s my dumbass. How you doing, Eric?”

He said nothing. Pritchard said, “he’s a fucking mess is what he is, and he won’t listen to me, so you explain to him why he has to go to Medical and see Richardson.”

I came over and pried the knife out of his hand, smearing blood across my fingers. “Eric, why are you arguing with the woman who saves your life? Do what she says.”

He sighed but said, “okay.” Then, to Pritchard, “no painkillers till after.”

“After what?” I started, but Pritchard held up a hand and said, “your choice.”

I stared at her but all she said to me was, “now persuade your dumbass he needs an ambulance.”

I looked at Grey. “You need an ambulance?”

“No.”

I looked back at Pritchard and shrugged. “I tried.”

Pritchard lost that battle, but won the one over getting Grey to his car by gurney. He protested about neither that nor the state of his window; his only reaction was to look at the shattered glass and sigh.

Pritchard hustled off to help restaurant patrons, rubbing her back, and I held out my hand to Grey. “Keys. I’m driving.”

He didn’t fight me, just reached for his pocket, but it was on the side of his bad arm and the hand on his good side was gashed. Before he could figure it out or hurt himself, I shoved my hand down his pants and grabbed them myself. He jumped, but I was beyond caring. The second shift Ops guys were already thinking it anyway.

“No painkillers?” I snarled as I unlocked the car and shut off the alarm. “Really?”

“Later,” he said. “When we get to Medical, stick with Pritchard.”

“Eric, I’m fine—”

“Promise me.” His voice was sharp, glitchy, and he was giving me the stare that had half the department petrified of him.

It didn’t scare me, but I backed down. “Okay, okay, if it makes you feel better, I promise I’ll stick close to Pritchard, show you my clean bill of health. Will you take your damn painkillers?”

He stared at me hard a moment, saw I was serious, and calmed down. He said, “yes. Later.”

I could tell that was the best I was going to get, so let it go. A distraction came in the form of getting the car door open, which released a wave of the reeking astringent vomit smell. No bets how the 107 had tracked us.

“Son of a bitch,” I said, sweeping the glass off the seat with my jacket and laying it down for him to sit on. “Worst case of coma pod’s revenge I’ve ever seen. And it still scented you across town to demand you return its… what? Family?”

Grey shook his head; he didn’t know. “Not SGSL.”

By all accounts, Grey’s SGSL was better than his English. He’d know. Maybe the 107 had used some local slang word for its third cousin, but why? Even I knew the signs for “family” and “friend.”

Grey got himself to a sitting position; I gave him my shoulder to lean on and helped him into the car. At least he was able to do his seat belt with his good arm, though he got blood on it. I got into the driver’s seat, pulled the seat forward to fit my shorter legs, and woke up the car to pull onto the road.

“Maybe it was delirious,” I said finally, but I didn’t like that answer.

Neither did Grey. “No,” he said in a horrible empty voice. “Signed clear. And it knew it was drowning.”

I shuddered. The 107 had been dangerous. It’d killed MacIntire, and it would’ve killed us too. But the more I heard and saw, the more it sounded like it hadn’t understood what the hell was going on anymore than we had. The whole bloodbath might’ve been avoided with a proper translator.

“That shouldn’t have happened,” I said. Then, seeing what he thought I meant, “no, none of that should’ve happened. The League should’ve told us what the hell the 107 was, what language it spoke, that it was a scent-tracker, and the boys upstairs shouldn’t have frozen us out.” I was icy calm now, and furious. “Instead, their cloak-and-dagger games almost killed us. They did kill MacIntire, and now Jenny’s a mess and her roses are in the backseat and the hell are we even doing in this job?” Some guy cut me off and I honked at him.

Grey didn’t seem to get why I was upset. “Not your fault.”

“Damn right it wasn’t my fault! It wasn’t yours either. I know you’re married to your job, but it’s cheating on you, Eric. It could’ve killed you today. And one day, it will.” I pulled onto I10. “You’re not twenty-five anymore. You can’t keep this up forever. They don’t care about you. Why the hell did you even take up with these people?”

Grey’s voice was tired. “That or the Army.”

We spent the rest of the ride to Medical in silence.

Doc Richardson turned out to be a pointy-faced iceberg blond with an imperious look.

“I see you’ve recovered,” he told Grey as I wheeled him in. “My congratulations.”

“Yeah, he’s in great shape,” I snarled at him. “With those insights, I can see why Doc Pritchard thinks he needs you.”

Richardson just raised an eyebrow at me and corrected me with, “Paramedic Pritchard.”

At first, it was a repeat of the end-of-shift paper whirlwind. Since Grey was busy getting put back together and I didn’t want to think, I taped a garbage bag over the shattered window, swept out the glass, and took on signing all the multicolored forms in triplicate. I had almost finished the stack when I heard, “Babubhai Doshi?”

“I’m off-shift,” I snapped. Whoever it was, if they were calling me Babubhai, I didn’t want to talk to them.

“Mr. Doshi, if you could come with us for a moment…”

The tone made me look up. There were two guys I didn’t know, one from Ops who hadn’t earned his gold rings yet and one from Management who rang all my “September 11th spook” bells, neither of whom looked like they’d accept a no. There was also one guy I recognized: Harmonius, from Neurophysics. He’d been involved with my hire and subsequent saddling with Grey, and both times, he’d had an imperturbable Buddha smile. Now, though, he was sweaty, tense, and kept fidgeting with the cable that twined up into his skull.

Like I’d promised Grey, I’d stuck close to Doc Pritchard the whole time we’d been there. She’d been leaning against the wall a ways away, listening to music, but the moment these guys approached, she stiffened, got up, and left, disappearing around a corner.

Something was up, but I didn’t see how I could refuse, so I got up and followed them into a spare office, where they sat me down on a hard chair. The Ops guy took up a station in front of the door, and the spook said, “why don’t you tell us what happened tonight, Doshi.”

I just stared at them. They weren’t giving me this because Grey and I had gone to dinner, were they? The whole point of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was don’t ask.

I looked to Harmonius, but he just sent me a pleading look. So I held up my stack of forms and said, “you give me a minute, you’ll have it all on paper.”

The spook didn’t seem impressed. “What’s your immigration status, Doshi?”

“Excuse me?” I started to stand up, but the Ops guy put a hand on my shoulder before I got anywhere. “Check my hiring record.”

“Just answer the question.”

“Like my record says, I’ve got dual citizenship.”

The spook looked at Harmonius, who nodded, then turned back to me. “And your family? How about them?”

A chill was setting in. They were serious about this. “What the hell is this about?”

The door burst open and Grey stormed in like a blizzard, bloody, burned, bandaged, and mad as a hornet. The strangers bristled… but lost some of the macho composure when the smell hit them.

Harmonius, on the other hand, was beaming again. “Hey, Grey,” he drawled. “Don’t worry, it’s copacetic.”

Grey ignored him. I’d never seen him so angry.

The new manager said, “do you mind? This is a private meeting.”

Grey looked at me. “Is it?”

“News to me.” I jumped up. The other Ops guy made as if to stop me, but Grey glared at him full force, and even in civilian clothes and covered in flour, there was no contest. The poor schmuck backed down, tail between his legs. The manager didn’t.

“You’re one of Andersen’s hires.” The manager didn’t sound happy about it—Andersen was as old guard as the PIN got, and a notorious hardass. “Eric Grey, right?”

Grey moved the glare to him. He liked being called Eric by higher-ups about as much as I liked being called Babubhai.

“Why don’t you tell us what happened, Grey?” No Specialist.

Instead, Grey started arguing protocol and staring down the manager, who started red tape-gunning back. Me, I watched Harmonius. He kept looking at me, then Grey, then the manager, making faces like he was trying to explain a thesis paper with his eyes alone.

I got it. My inclination was to touch Grey to get his attention, but that seemed dangerous under the circumstances, so I cleared my throat instead. Grey glanced at me, followed my eyes to Harmonius.

Harmonius looked like he was struggling to keep his cheerful stoner face on. “Come on, man, we’re all honest men here,” he said. “Nobody needs a formal meeting, huh? Just answer the questions and we can all get out of here.”

Grey clearly didn’t like it, but he glanced at me and said in an icy, robotic voice, “there was an incident, shift-end. We were there. Afterward, we got dinner for an informal post-op. Nothing else.”

“Fraternizing?” the spook asked.

Grey’s voice hit subzero. “No.”

“Telling tales out of school?”

“No.”

The manager looked to Harmonius, who beamed and gave a thumbs-up. “As an arrow, boss.”

The manager frowned, but Grey just said, “I’m going home,” and stormed out, taking me with him.

Doc Pritchard was in the hall, looking alarmed. She must’ve run to grab Grey the moment she saw the goons coming for me, and now she ran for him again as he started to sway.

“Catch him, catch him!”

Between us, we caught Grey before he pitched over. I expected Pritchard to get him to a chair, but she got under one arm and directed me to the other so we could half-carry him down the hall. It clearly hurt like hell but Grey just gritted his teeth and kept moving as best he could.

“Jesus Christ, Eric, what the hell—”

“Stupid, stupid motherfucker,” Pritchard swore. I’d never heard that tone in her voice before. “What were you thinking?”

Grey said nothing.

“Are you okay?” It took me a moment to realize Pritchard was asking me, not him.

“Just rattled. What the hell was that?”

Pritchard and Grey exchanged looks. “Where?” she asked.

“Car,” he replied.

And they refused to tell me anything until we got there. Pritchard didn’t even remark on the stench. The moment we were all in and the doors were all shut and locked, she said, “that was an informal sedition meeting they sprung on you, Bob.”

“A what?”

“It’s something they do for suspected subversives in-house. Looks like you’ve gotten on the list.”

“You’re serious? I’m a programmer.”

“Bob,” Pritchard said with strained patience, “you’re a hacker.”

“Easier target.” Grey was still angry. “Picked you instead of me.”

“They pulled one on me and Larkin not too long ago,” Pritchard said, passing a bottle of pills to Grey.

“What’d they have on you?”

“We’re girlfriends. Fortunately, I got hired the normal way and I’m friends with a lot of fizzies; Harmonius covered for me, Grey vouched and helped me peg them on trying to skip the paperwork.”

“They’re using fizzies for secret police?” I said. “Those damn boxes catch a thought in ten at best; I escaped washing because none of them spoke Gujarati!”

“Look, things have gotten weird since September 11th. The new management, everyone’s gone paranoid,” she said. “Now, we don’t know this for sure, but scuttlebutt is the boys upstairs are having some kind of power struggle and looking to purge the ranks. The whole ‘protection from terrorists’ thing is just the excuse to get our people out and their people in.”

I sat there, taking it all in. The going above Darlene’s head, the hiding information from us about the 107…

“Okay,” I said finally. “What do we do?”

Pritchard reached out and took my multicolored stack of forms, which were crumpled but still with me. “I am going to file this paperwork for you and request health leave on account of stress from nearly getting murdered. You want my advice? Lay low. Horrible as it sounds, this probably isn’t personal; they’ll move on to weaker links.” She looked to Grey. “I have to stay with Ebony tonight. Are you going to be okay after that stunt?”

Her tone made it clear that she was thinking what I was: Grey had spent everything on that performance in the sedition meeting. He wouldn’t be going anywhere or doing anything on his own for a while.

He looked to me. “Stay with me?”

“Absolutely,” I said, putting a hand on his knee. “Thanks, Taneesha. I owe you.”

“Hey, us lower-downs got to stick together,” she said, saluting me with the paperwork. She got out of the car and called to Grey, “and take your damn Vicodin!”

He waved to her and then she was gone, leaving us in the car together. For a moment, there was quiet stillness; then everything caught up with me and I started to shake.

Grey saw it. “Okay?”

I tried to talk, couldn’t. Shook my head instead. I leaned my elbows on my knees and held my head in my hands, chilled even in my thick work clothes. I felt lightheaded, tight-chested; breathing felt like drowning. Then I started to cry. After the day we’d had, I was too strung out to be ashamed. The 107 business had been bad enough, but for my own workplace to treat me like this… I hadn’t thought my expectations were high enough to feel betrayed.

Grey tried to pass me a handkerchief, but I wouldn’t take it. After a moment of helplessly watching me, he touched a hand to my shoulder, hesitant, like I might bite his head off. When I didn’t, he got more confident and started rubbing my back. He’d never really touched me before, that’d all been one way, and he was awkward as hell, but it worked. He was here. He’d bailed me out. We were safe.

Eventually, I could breathe again and straighten up. “God, what a shit day. I’m okay now. Thank you.” He’d already pulled back, and now I took his handkerchief. “Nice alpha male act, earlier. I’ve never seen that side of you before.”

“Don’t like doing it.” He slumped against the seat. “Hurts.”

“I’ll get you home and horizontal.” I passed him a water bottle from the cup holder. “Now take your damn painkillers; you look like you’re about to pass out. Don’t know why you were so damned macho about it…”

He tipped two pills into his bandaged hand, grimacing. “Make me stupid.”

Something clicked. “And you wanted to be smart for the sedition meeting. You knew this was going to happen.”

He said nothing.

“Well, congratulations, Eric, you made it. Go ahead and be as stoned stupid as you want. I won’t tell.”

He shifted, looked uncomfortable. “Make me…” He let it hang.

I raised my eyebrows.

“…Chatty.”

I snorted. “You? Really? This I have to see…”

That seemed to reassure him. He took his pills, and I started up the car. I wasn’t as familiar with his apartment as I was our workplace, and I didn’t trust his ability to give directions for much longer, so I grabbed the massive map book from between the parking brake and the driver’s seat and wrote them down myself.

It was a sizable drive, made longer by a hunt for a gas station, and for most of it, Grey stayed silent, slumped in his seat, staring out the window. I figured he’d conked out until he spoke, pulled in at the gas station.

“Bob.”

“Mm?” I was digging through the map book, making sure I could get back on route.

“Have to tell you.” The pills had kicked in; his voice was fuzzy and he had the tone of a stoner desperate to communicate some cosmic truth. “MacIntire.”

“Yeah? What about him?”

“He was dying.”

“Uh huh.”

“It was bad.”

“Okay.”

Grey was quiet for long enough that I almost thought that was all he was going to say. Then he said, “real bad.”

I put the maps down. “Okay…”

“There was… it was a water pipe it got him with. Sharp, broken. From the boat.”

“Ship?”

“Ship, yeah.” I couldn’t remember ever hearing him say “yeah” before. “There are rules. It’s important. Have to follow them or it gets worse.” He made a frustrated sound. “Not saying this right.”

This didn’t sound like news I’d want to be driving for, so I moved the car from the pump to a parking spot. Grey didn’t even seem to notice; he was too focused on knitting the words together in his head. I put the car in park and waited for him.

Finally, he got it. He looked at me and said, “I put him down.”

I just sat there.

“He asked me to,” Grey said, desperately, like I needed to know. “It was bad. Said it was going to start hurting soon.”

I remembered the red blood on Grey’s uniform—blood that hadn’t been his or the 107’s. I remembered the sounds of chaos through the radio. I remembered how furious Dean had been, thundering out of Health and Medical, how strung out Pritchard had been. I remembered how easily Grey gave up his gun at the Opera House, had wanted it away from him.

“There are rules,” Grey said again.

I was silent.

“Say something. Please.”

“Okay, Eric,” I said. “Okay.”

He had a horrible expression on his face. “Be angry.”

I sighed, patted his good shoulder. “I’m not angry. I’m not even surprised.”

He just looked at me.

“You Ops guys always say the same thing whenever anyone dies on the job—that whole line about it being fast and painless. And you always look like hell. Dean’s new, isn’t he? He disagreed with you and Larkin about it.”

He nodded.

“What’re you going to do?”

“Avoid him.”

Stupid question, in retrospect. What else could he do?

He was still looking at me with that awful look. “You’re not angry.”

I patted him and rubbed his back like he had for me. “No. Sorry, big guy; you’re stuck with me.”

He made a horrible sound, and that was the last either of us said until we got to his apartment building.

It was a hideous concrete tower, the kind scattered all over Vago for mostly working class families. A few kids chased a ball around the parking lot, but they stopped when they saw Grey’s smashed-up car. When I opened the door, the smell hit them; they dropped the ball, gasped, and fled squealing into the night. Grey’s shoulders slumped.

I looked up at the building dubiously. “Still on the seventh floor?”

He nodded. I reached out my hands to help him up. “Can you make it with me, or should I call on the neighbors?”

A wince crossed his face—out of pain or the idea of having to talk to his neighbors, I wasn’t sure. “You.”

I got under his good arm and took as much of his weight as I could. “Point us to the elevator.”

Even with his legs semi-working, Grey was the size of a fridge and about as heavy. We crossed a good few able-bodied adults in the halls, but none offered to help, just averted their eyes and pretended their kids weren’t holding their noses and gripping their throats. They let us have the elevator to ourselves.

“Nice neighbors you’ve got,” I grumbled as the doors shut with a ping.

Grey snorted—a sound I’d never heard him make. “Think I’m a gangster.”

I sighed. “Of course they do.” In this town, what else could he be? I wondered what they made of the smell… or me.

At least we made it to his apartment without incident, though getting the door unlocked and open without dropping him was a trick, and I nearly knocked the TV over fishing for the light switch.

Once we got in, I asked, “couch or bed?”

“Shower.”

Across the apartment. Should’ve known.

I barked my hip against the massive sofa getting there, but I got him to the bathroom. Thank god he had a shower stool in it, implying he’d washed up injured before and wouldn’t need my assistance. I was uncertain he could undress by himself, but there was no way I could’ve offered help without it sounding, being suggestive, and since Grey didn’t ask, I left him to take care of it himself and went to hunt down clothes that he could get on and off one-handed without too much trouble.

I’d been in Grey’s apartment before, but never for long, and it was my first time in his bedroom. Judging by the look of it, Grey had spent about as much time there as I had. It had the color scheme of my office (sans holiday crepe), no wall hangings, and the way he made his bed sheets, I could’ve cut myself on the corners. The most exciting things in it were a filing cabinet, a desk with paperwork, and an honest-to-god electric typewriter, just like I’d had back in school. No computer.

At least he was organized; I had no trouble finding a new set of clean clothes in his dresser. I found him some sweatpants, an undershirt (I’d probably have to help him into that, with his shoulder, but it was that or work shirts), and tried not to feel like a lech grabbing him underwear.

I found a spare hanger and came over to the bathroom. I hung the clothes on the knob, banged on the door (dah dit dah, déjà vu), then called over the running water, “give me your stuff and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Working on it.”

It’d been a few minutes, and his voice sounded strained. He was having trouble.

“Okay. Go easy in there. Call if—” you need me, want me, want— “if you need help.” Not much better.

While I waited, I decided to set up a makeshift bed. Coming in, I’d noticed only how huge, ugly, and inconveniently placed the sofa was—some blue floral monster covered in fringe. Blankets and a pillow on the coffee table cued me to check for a fold-out bed, which turned out to be surprisingly comfortable, and while testing it out, I realized why Grey had placed it where he had: it gave him a clear line of sight to the front door.

The living room looked a lot more homey than the bedroom. Besides the TV, the dresser it was perched on, and the couch, there was also a big black stereo (with an eight-track player!) and a substantial music collection, mostly vinyl: opera, waltz, and the darkest pits of post-Elvis, pre-Beatles hell, even though Grey was young for that. Aside from the bedding (left for who?), the coffee table held snacks, a water bottle full of some chartreuse sports drink… and a big old book of poetry, which was a surprise. Grey hadn’t struck me as the type.

The TV remote turned up in the top drawer of the dresser, along with a lot of videotapes, mostly homemade, overwhelmingly the Joy of Painting, even though I hadn’t seen so much as a paintbrush in the place.

I was scratching my head over that one when I heard a soft thump of clothes hitting the bathroom door. Grey had managed, despite his injuries. Without looking, I opened the door a crack, grabbed the old clothes, and got to work.

Like the uniform before them, they were unsalvageable—ripped, burned, and bloodied. I didn’t like looking at them so I pulled a garbage bag from under the kitchen sink and bagged them just like I had the first time. Once they were out of my sight, I felt better.

The kitchen was worse than the bedroom—not a seasoning in sight, and Grey apparently lived off sandwiches, salad without dressing, and tinned soup. For a horrible moment, I thought I wouldn’t find any rice, but a long-neglected bag finally turned up in the back. At least he wouldn’t miss it, I thought as I emptied it into Tupperware.

In went phone and pager. Grey’s wallet and keys went on the counter, which left that USB drive again… though now that I was looking closer at it, I was less sure. The hell was it?

Crash!

I shoved it in my pocket and rushed over to the bathroom, only to hover awkwardly at the door. Finally I knocked—dah dit dah.

“Twenty?” I asked.

Sigh. “10-78.”

He needed help. I came in.

Grey was sitting on the toilet, half-dressed with one pant leg rolled up, surrounded by the contents of his first aid kit. He’d managed to get the old bandages off by himself (they were piled in the wastebasket) and put some new ones on his leg, only to drop the rest and be unable to pick them back up again. He looked at me helplessly.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “I’ll do it.”

I could see the frustration in the lines of his face. He was the brawn, used to doing everything himself. He didn’t seem to like me looking at him, so I pretended to be absorbed in gathering things up.

“So… why all the Bob Ross?” I asked.

He rubbed his eyes with his good hand. “Something to come home to.”

“You come home… to watch paint dry on TV.”

“I like his voice. It’s…” he made an undulating motion with his good hand. “Tingly.”

“Tingly?”

“And nothing bad happens.”

Ah. So that was what Grey did. He bundled himself onto the couch with his pillows and sports drinks and he watched Bob Ross talk in a soothing voice and paint happy little landscapes. Maybe he never slept in his own bed.

Once I got the first aid kit back together on the bathroom sink, I asked, “do you need help with the new bandages?”

He nodded, then saw my eyes on his chest and curled in on himself as though trying to hide.

Realizing why he thought I was staring, I shook myself and grabbed a roll of bandages. “No need for that. Just surprised was all.”

I nudged his good arm, and he straightened but still wouldn’t look at me. “Sorry,” he said. “Messy.”

“No,” I said, sharply enough that he looked up. “You look,” good, “fine. I was just… impressed.” Shit. “I mean, you’ve survived everything.” I was babbling. “It doesn’t bother me.”

I’d never seen Grey with his shirt off. He’d always been anal about that, and now I saw why. In uniform, he could pass as semi-respectable; out of it, he was a mess. The 107 had gotten him pretty good with the weaponry it’d had at hand, leaving jagged arcs from a broken bottle, bruises from whatever it’d thrown at him, stitches across his chest (and, I suspected, the thigh he’d managed to bandage). It was worse across his right side, the bad arm side, where the 107’s tentacles had stayed strong till the end.

And then there was the old scar tissue. The two round craters in his shoulder, which he’d gotten long before he’d met me. The slashes on his chest he’d gotten during my tenure; some off-world dancer had taken a disliking to him, and while I’d missed the fight itself, I hadn’t missed his limping for a week afterward.

There were other scars, smaller and more anonymous, and then a big one I didn’t recognize. Arcing from his collarbone, across his ribs, down his stomach, and disappearing under his waistband, thick as my finger, it looked like a bad weld job on flesh. It didn’t look too old, but I hadn’t heard about it.

I pulled my eyes away before Grey caught me staring again. “Okay, I’m not Pritchard. How do I do this right?”

Grey coached me through bandaging and taping so they wouldn’t pull the wounds open or tug on the stitches coming off, and I tried not to notice how good his skin felt under my hands. I’d never gotten this close to him before, and even battered and loopy on painkillers, he was warm and solid and alive. I didn’t want to just bandage him; I wanted to map him with my hands, see how far down that scar went, touch him.

Then I realized something else.

“Oh hey, that shower did it,” I said. “You smell good again.” I bit my tongue.

He’d been avoiding my eyes the whole time, but now his muscles tensed under my hands. He let me finish wrapping gauze around the gashes on his left hand and then pulled away. My heart sank.

“Hurting?” I asked.

His eyes flicked towards me, then skittered away. “No.”

Shit. No more avoiding it; I put the gauze down and bit the bullet. “Look, Eric, we’ve been dancing around it all night…”

At the same time he said, “it’s not the pills.”

“I… come again?”

Grey waved his bandaged hand at me, looked like he was struggling to put the words together. “The Vicodin isn’t doing this.”

I blinked at him. “Okay.”

“It’s not.” He gave me a pleading look. “It’s you.”

He must’ve seen from my face that I wasn’t getting it; he made a sound of frustration, wrestled with himself, and finally grabbed my hand and put it to his chest.

“This.” He met my eyes, and now I saw the want in them. “I like this.”

He let me go.

“Oh,” I said.

I sat down on the side of the bathtub and took off my glasses to clean them. They didn’t need it but I needed something to do with my hands, something that didn’t involve him.

Finally, I said, “I like it too. Always have, really.”

“I know.”

“You knew I was…”

Grey gave me an incredulous look. Apparently I hadn’t been subtle. “Since Christmas.”

Well, that wasn’t so bad. By my accounts, I’d started flirting with him around Thanksgiving. “Well hell, why didn’t you say so? If I’d known you were interested, I wouldn’t have wasted all those months playing softball. And if the boys upstairs are gunning for me anyway…” I put a hand on his knee, slid it up. “Want me to do more than flirt?”

Grey’s breath caught but he said, “no.”

“No? I’m not asking for an anniversary here…”

He took my hand and removed it from his thigh. “I can’t do casual sex.”

“You’re serious? What do you want, then?”

Silence.

“Eric—”

“Everything.” His face hurt to see. “I want everything.”

I chewed on that for a while, then, “for how long?”

“Forever.” Then, chagrined, “as long as I can. And you don’t do relationships.”

No wonder he’d kept his mouth shut; any other day, that would’ve sent me sprinting for the door, and judging by his face, he expected me to do just that.

I could. I could walk away from his over-committed ass, say no, and Grey could go back to working his heart out in the rut that was his own personal chasm, just like our workplace wanted. I could go back to pretending I wasn’t making passes at him, and he could go back to pretending he didn’t notice. That he didn’t like it.

I started laughing. “Son of a bitch. You got me twice.”

It was his turn to look confused.

“I have to stop underestimating you,” I said, leaning forward. My hand was on his jaw but he didn’t pull away. “I should’ve figured it out when you said yes to the Opera House, you knew what it’d be like…”

I kissed him, and the breath went out of him.

When I pulled back, I said, “I don’t know about forever… but I can give you everything I’ve got for one night, at least.”

He stared at me. I shrugged.

“Why the hell not? Today’s been full of bad ideas and worse outcomes; at least this one will feel good. Besides, if I’m going to get fired and washed, I want it to be for more than a nice chaste dinner with you. Now, are we going to do this, or are we just going to talk about it?”

Had it been any other night, Grey would’ve stonewalled me. Instead, he touched his mouth like he couldn’t believe I’d kissed him and said, “okay.”

A thought struck me. “You… you don’t have condoms, do you?”

He gave me a startled, flustered look, shook his head. Of course he didn’t. He spent his nights with PBS.

I sighed. Ah well, stoned as he was, I shouldn’t have been thinking about fucking him anyway. I got up, stretched my back, and reached for his hands to pull him up. “Well, whatever we end up doing, my knees are no good on tile. Bed or sofa?”

“Sofa.”

This time, there was no need to be conservative with my hands. I touched him how I wanted, and he relaxed into it, and once I got him horizontal on the sofa bed, I asked, “so? How far do you want to go?”

His answer was to grab my collar and kiss me.

He clearly hadn’t had a lot of practice at it. Even when he was trying, he kissed like a girder, but he melted when I put my tongue in his mouth, which improved things.

“No, but really,” I said when we came up for air. “You’re hurt, you’re high, and I don’t trust your voice. If we need to stop?”

He tapped out twice against my shoulder.

“Pause?”

Dah dit dah.

“And if it’s good?”

Squeeze.

“Then we’re in business. Move over.”

He still had a grip on my collar, and he used it to pull me over on top of him—which felt nice but also meant I felt him flinch.

“Watch the stitches, watch—”

He shoved me down between his good side and the edge of the sofa bed, still half on top of him, and went back to kissing me. Between his bulk and my girth, it was a tight fit, but I didn’t care; he knew his limits and if this was fine by him, it was fine by me. I put my hands on him, since he’d said he liked it, and he pushed into it.

I traced the weld scar down his ribs and stomach, enjoying how he squirmed. “So, how far does this go?” I hit his waistband. “And are you up to getting jerked off tonight?”

His hips hitched up under my hand, but he sighed and tapped pause against my shoulder. I pulled back, but he held on to keep me from leaving entirely.

“Problem?”

“It goes far,” he said. “And it doesn’t work.”

“Meaning…?”

No answer.

“Two questions: do you want me to, and does it feel good?”

He nodded.

I grinned and kissed his cheek. “All that matters.”

He squeezed to go ahead, and I went down his pants.

The weld job did indeed go all the way down, and while some doc must’ve gotten a promotion out of the repair work, it was still missing a chunk and had a heavy curve to the side. When I groped, I could feel scar tissue pretty deep in, but he thrust and breathed hard and squeezed for more, and that was what I cared about.

“Nice,” I said. “You really have lived through everything. Next chance we get, I’m buying a box of condoms and sucking you off; that looks like it’d be fun. What do you think?”

He had a look on his face like he was expecting to wake up. “That’d be nice.”

“Well, until then…” I started stroking, but Grey caught my hand, only to hesitate. “No, show me how you like it.”

Turned out that surface sensation didn’t come through so well, but deep pressure did, and his dick could take some manhandling. He turned my hand so the heel pressed against him and started grinding against me, and when I got my thigh between his legs, it tore a pretty sound out of him. No scar tissue there!

He stayed soft the whole time, but there was no mistaking his enjoyment, riding my thigh, thrusting against my hand and trying to get under my shirt with his good hand. If this was what he was like just getting touched from the outside, getting inside him would bring the house down. I wanted to see him like that, without the uniform, without the self-control, wanted to fuck him till he sang for me, till he gave and opened and fell apart.

I was rubbing up against his hip but didn’t care, sucking on his neck hard enough to bruise, and he kept squeezing for yes, was starting to shake. When I nipped, he gasped and pushed me harder into his neck.

I laughed. “Want me to bite you?”

“Yes!”

That wasn’t a tone for arguing with. I sank my teeth into him, harder than I intended, and he jerked, yelped, and came.

“Good,” I panted, watching. “That’s good…”

He shuddered, rode through the aftershocks, and went loose and languid under me. My teeth had left marks.

“Sorry about that,” I said, kissing them. “Got carried away.”

He made a purring noise, brushed his fingers over them, then my mouth. “Good. Thank you.” His voice was deep and unraveled, damn appealing.

“Well, aren’t you polite,” I laughed and took off my glasses to wipe the fog from the lenses, then used his handkerchief to clean him up. “That sounded overdue.”

He chuckled and smiled at me, really smiled—broad and open, hesitant but happy, none of the grim tension he had all the time, and something in me turned over. I’d found him attractive enough already, but when he smiled like that, he was a damn heartbreaker.



Then he shifted, trying to find a position that let him touch me better, and something gouged into my hip.

“Ow! Hold on a second.” I dug into my pocket, found the USB that’d been digging into me, and shoved it at him. “Here. This is yours.”

Grey frowned. “It’s not.”

“What do you mean it’s not, it—” Then I remembered the electric typewriter. Grey didn’t own a computer. “Well, how’d it get in your pockets then?”

We looked at each other, and we knew.

Grey shifted to get his good arm out from under me and took the plug, an anonymous peg of metal and ceramic, strong enough to survive even a 107’s guts. He gave it a twist and a squeeze, and what I’d taken for a port became an unsheathed lens. It sent up a V of light.

Then it started projecting figures, 3D photos in shades of red. No backgrounds, only people: the 107, with others like it. Tiny ones, battered older ones missing limbs, one its size with a big scar across its face. The pictures cycled through automatically. A tinny little tune played.

We watched the slideshow play in silence. Neither of us moved to stop it. This was what had propelled the 107 across town, full of the coma pod bends, to take on a restaurant full of people: a cheap 3D photo album. Its family.

The projector stopped and turned itself off.

Chastened and chilled, I tapped out on Grey’s shoulder. He nodded.

“So,” I said. “What do we do now?”

Grey thought about it, then asked, “touching okay?”

“What? Sure.”

He shifted over onto his side—carefully, to favor his injuries—and curled to my chest.

“We make this never happen again,” he replied. He sounded like he was starting to doze off.

I knew he meant work, not play. But I thought about it anyway, lying there on his oversized ugly couch with him in my arms. I’d gotten what I wanted, made him bend, made him come even. But…

“I don’t know about forever,” I said, brushing a hand over his buzzed scalp. The fuzz at his nape was surprisingly soft. “But I can give you tomorrow.”

He nuzzled my throat. “Okay.” His voice was sleepy, but then he stiffened, tried to twist and look back over his shoulder.

I realized why. “It’s okay, Eric; I’ll watch the door.”

For a moment, I thought he wouldn’t go for it. But then he said, “thank you,” relaxed, and settled back against me.

He slept like that, facing me, not the door, and I let him stay there even as my arm fell asleep. My day hadn’t been much shorter than his, but I stayed awake, petting him and feeling him breathe. Thinking.


MacIntire turned out to have no will, and if he had any family, none of us knew how to find them, so it was up to his coworkers to take care of his last affairs. All of us pitched in (I myself ran the phone tree and herded cats), but I couldn’t help but notice how smoothly Ops moved into action; Specialist Larkin and Dean took over the planning without anyone hardly noticing. Grey was too beat up to do anything physical, but he handled the paperwork and took care of the grunt work of informing MacIntire’s landlord and shutting off all the utilities. The ease with which he managed it told me he’d done it before, many times.

We didn’t ask Jenny to help, but she showed up anyway, with a battered Toyota pick-up, red eyes, and a determined expression. She cried while going through MacIntire’s stuff, but silently, and she threw off any attempts to comfort her. She seemed determined to see it through to the end, prove to herself that she could do it without falling apart.

Larkin turned out to own a van, so she and Jenny handled driving the unclaimed possessions to secondhand stores or the landfill. Since Larkin’s leg was still in a boot from her own injuries on Valentine’s Day, Doc Pritchard and a few grunts I didn’t know handled the hauling.

The PIN paid for the funeral—a grim perk—and MacIntire had been well-liked. A lot of people showed up—not Dean, though.

Jenny refused to wear mourning clothes. Instead, she wore an orange and yellow dress and dancing shoes, too thin to do much good in February, but she didn’t show any sign of being cold. Her skirts fluttered in the wind, her bulky gold jewelry shone, and nobody cast a second glance at her. She clasped a large pack of tissue in front of her, but her eyes were dry.

There was one more tradition with PIN funerals, one us comboys were in charge of. Normally, Darlene would’ve been the one to do it, being head dispatcher, but Jenny had been MacIntire’s comboy; when she asked for the job, nobody said no.

When the time came, Jenny put on her headset; the rest of us pulled out our radios and tuned it to the frequency. She took a deep breath and turned on her mic.

“Specialist MacIntire, this is Comm, come in.”

Silence, of course. She called for him three times, and of course, he didn’t answer. Then she turned off her radio and looked to all of us. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, but her eyes were alive and her voice was clear as a bell.

“Specialist MacIntire has completed his final assignment,” she announced. “He is now off-duty. First shift, clock out.”

We turned off our radios, and that was that.

I came over when I got a chance. She was crying again, but in a way that didn’t frighten me as much, especially when she saw me and hugged me.

“How you holding up, kiddo?” I asked, patting her back.

She laughed a little, shaky but real. “Awful. I didn’t know that I’d make it through last call.”

“You did great.”

She pulled away, blotting at her eyes with a Kleenex and nodding. “Yeah. And I know all y’all would’ve done it for me, but… I wanted to do it. It’s always in my head; I didn’t want to pretend it wasn’t. Now it feels like maybe it can start to end.”

I nodded, and a core of worry in my chest loosened. She was going to be sad, but she was going to be okay.

She smacked my shoulder playfully. “You didn’t have to show up. You barely knew the corny bastard.”

“What, and leave Grey on his own?” I cocked my thumb over to where he stood at the back of the crowd, looking stiff and uncomfortable. People were giving him space. “What kind of cube-mate would I be if I left you with your least favorite serial killer?”

“How is he?”

“Back on his feet, at least. The stitches will be coming out soon. Hey, I don’t know if you still want them, but…” I pulled out a paper bundle.

Her eyes grew wide, and for a moment, she couldn’t speak; when she did, it was in a broken whisper. “Are those…?”

“Your roses, yeah. I babysat them for a while. If you don’t want them, I figured I’d leave them with MacIntire.”

She stared at them for a moment, then took the bundle to examine the slightly-wilted blossoms. She touched a petal and her voice broke when she said, “You took care of them for me.” Then she looked up and blurted, “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there when… you could’ve…” She hugged me again, harder this time.

I patted her hair. “Hey, none of that. I’m still here. We’re both still here. I’m not joining Ops any time soon.”

She nodded and pulled away, looking me over as though to make sure. “You okay, though? You look a little…”

“Yeah, I’ll be okay. Just had to rethink some things. We’ll be back on shift, have a rematch in Button Mash before you know it.”

“That’s good to hear. Should’ve known, old dog like you has more tricks up your sleeve than I’ll get in a lifetime. Here, let’s go give these flowers to MacIntire.”

We went and laid most of the roses over the fresh-turned sod together. Nobody else was that close to the grave, so it gave us a little privacy.

“Take care of yourselves,” she whispered to me. For a moment, her smile became something like it’d used to be, and she turned away, her dress rippling in the breeze. “Both of you. See you on shift.”

I smiled. “See you on shift.”

I went to rejoin Grey, who was talking (well, listening) to Larkin. She nodded at me and went off to Pritchard. Without a word, Grey turned with me and together we hiked up the cemetery hillside to where he’d parked his newly repaired car. We didn’t get in, only sat on the back and watched the rest of the group at the cemetery gradually disperse, leaving only Jenny. We stood in peaceful silence as she stood alone in her orange and yellow dress, holding the last rose. Finally she left too, clutching her Kleenex. We watched as her battered Toyota pickup drove off into the distance. It was beginning to get dark.

“She’s a good woman.” Grey said finally.

I nodded. “Smart one, too. But she won’t out us.”

“Good woman,” he repeated. Then, to me, “I don’t need forever.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll give you tomorrow anyway.”

We got into his car and left the cemetery behind in a spray of gravel.

Warnings: death, violence, trauma for everybody, also some consensual sex.

Comments

[pantha]

I literally had to suppress a scream of joy when I saw this. Don't want to weird out the neighbours too much...

Shall be reading it later!!! <3 <3 <3

[pantha]

Well, read it now. I don't think I have much more to add other than incoherent screams of joy... So, umm? Yeah? I guess you can have those?

But yes, I will forever adore this story and these two and ... <3 <3 <3

[lb_lee]

Thanks! I've just kept this comment in my inbox so as to savor and enjoy regularly. It felt good to remake this!

[pantha]

Yay! <3

Savour and enjoy regularly is exactly what I do with this story (and did with its previous iteration), so I'm glad to pay it back in some small way.

[lb_lee]

Looking at the new version, I realized that the page count means I can print a run without too much trouble, even during Pestilence. (There's even some wiggle room to illustrate it.) Is that something you'd be interested in at all?

[pantha]

OMFG YES! <3<3<3

[lb_lee]

Consider it on my to-do list then, and thank you for singlehandedly making this happen, hahaha.

[pantha]

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

You are so frikking awesome! You know that, right?

<3 <3 <3