Infinity Smashed: Red Roses Old Horses (AKA: the Mac Dies Story)

[lb_lee]

Title: Red Roses, Old Horses
Series: Infinity Smashed
Summary: On Valentine's Day, Bob and Grey have a case that goes horribly wrong, fall into 9/11 Orwellian hell, and get laid.
Word Count: 14,000
Notes: The winner of the Patreon/Liberapay poll this month! This story has a long history; it was first started back in 2004 and spawned a whole book in its wake. It's also known as the Mac Dies Story, because it was how we first became aware of his existence--we felt bad for this random unlucky schmuck and wondered who the hell he was. Content warnings for death, 9/11 paranoia/xenophobia, and consensual sex.



Jenny pulled 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 after caffeine.

She got on the highway. “So, what’s your plan, Button Mash and beer?”

“Tempting, but no.” I sipped. “Grey and I are having singles’ night out.”

Jenny shook her head sadly and pulled onto the highway. “I can’t believe you like him now.” I couldn’t contradict the “him” no matter how I wanted to.

I rolled my eyes. “You make it sound like a character defect.”

“It is a character defect, Bob! Grey’s a mass murder waiting to happen—”

“Never. Mass murder is against policy.”

“—and you’re a sadist who likes pushing him around.”

“Yup.” She was joking. I was only pretending to. But even if Grey liked men (which I wasn’t sure she did), she’d married her job straight out of high school and never broke protocol, unlike me or Jenny. “How about you and MacIntire?”

Specialist MacIntire was Jenny’s counterpart, a burly redhead. Their personal relationship had been barely a secret since before my hire.

“We’re having a nice romantic dinner—and I won’t end up buried under his floorboards,” Jenny said. “I won’t have to do all the talking either.”

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

When we reached the Comm building, some poor optimist had hung red paper hearts in the windows and tuned the radio to love songs, and our cubicle was covered in pink crepe. I tore it down from my half while waiting for my systems to boot; Jenny left hers up.

The clock hit 6 AM. Up on the bridge, Darlene shouted, “Third shift, clock out! First shift, let’s get moving!” and we got to work.

The shift started quiet—cranks and bootleggers mostly. Most of my systems stayed functional, which was nice. Jenny and I did our shares of printing, signing, and dating stuff for the Big Blue Binder. During lunch break, Darlene passed out candy hearts, which was nice of her.

Around three, someone came up to Darlene’s cube, 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 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. It took a while, but Lila came back grinning with a dozen red roses.

She gave them to Jenny. “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 touched a petal, beaming big as the sky, and I made a mental note to buy MacIntire a drink next time I saw him. Before she could find words, though, Darlene called us up to her desk.

Darlene’s desk was set above and apart from the rest of ours, on the bridge in a modernist glass cube that probably won a design award and was nigh-unusable. Usually, Darlene left her door open and shouted down to all of us, but now she shut us into the goldfish bowl with her and sat down, looking frazzled.

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

The Jaunter’s League was an off-world 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 in our sector within the hour, and I smell a rat. Doshi, chase it. St. Rivers, you’re hot-spotting. Go, and keep it quiet til 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… which was so new that we didn’t have it on paper yet, and the database had crashed again. 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 again, I swear to Jesus…”

“Let’s find out.” I was already adjusting my headset and dialing off-world.

As much as I hated working for the PIN, I did like this part of it. 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 though it took a while, I managed to Agatha my way into finding the right League Missing Vehicles bureaucrat. Maybe they could tell me more.

When I got put on hold again, I turned to Jenny, who was hard at work with compass and ruler. “It’s some shiny sales demo cruiser, the kind they send to conference shows to show off merchandise.”

“People or things?” she asked.

“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, holding up her map, covered in shaded overlapping circles. “Unless Transit’s really off, it’s headed for the big chain. That’s a person driving that thing.”

I looked over her shoulder and swore. “The big chain” (nobody used its official name) had opened up low over the Vago desert and held unusually steady for decades; Grey had cut her teeth there back in the ‘80s. Autopilots avoided it, but not so the desperate… who usually crashed once they came through, saw the ground so close, and panicked. A lot of them died at impact.

Jenny got to work on cleaning the map up for the rest of us, but I couldn’t watch; my bureaucrat was back on the phone.

“Mixed bag,” I said when I hung up. “For once, our system isn’t at fault; the whole thing is down, so they can’t tell me who owns the ship. Good news is, I can tell you the kind of people who own it: tech and bio start-ups.”

Jenny sucked her teeth. We both knew that in the League, “tech” and “bio” could be euphemism for “constructs,” itself a euphemism for “slaves.” “That’s a Priority One for you, always at the end of shift. Let’s go talk to Darlene.”

After that, everything became logistics. Darlene delegated the task load, and we got to work herding cats. At least second shift was coming in, giving us extra hands, and we were able to blanket the probable crash radius before the fireworks started. Then it was hurry up and wait.

Grey was staked out at some far-flung corner of Jenny’s map with Larkin, MacIntire, and Dean, a new guy I didn’t know well. 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.” 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. “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 (and Bernadette, the second-shift captain) on the bridge. They seemed to be having a hushed, heated discussion; Darlene threw up her hands, and Bernadette shook her head in disgust. Whoever this licensed idiot was, he’d gone over their heads.

A buzz went up. Jenny and I both checked our pockets, but it was 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 or work phone, they shared our uneasiness. “Our size, 1, tight fit,” I replied.

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 had lost his radio.

A 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 stopped me. I could hear the clean channel from the next cube over—lots of voices, nobody from our group.

Jenny twisted her bangles around her wrists. MacIntire’s radio kept broadcasting indecipherable mayhem for a while, then cut out.

Jenny sat frozen. I put a hand on her shoulder. Then our channel kicked up again. “This is Larkin from Ops. Target has fled. We have no visual.”

A sigh went up on the Comm floor, but Larkin kept talking. Somebody was making a hell of a racket in the background, but I couldn’t make any words out.

“Request paramedics; agents are down.” The noise behind her spiked, then cut out, like she’d silenced her radio to say something to whoever it was before coming back. When she did, the background noise was gone. “Things got bad.”

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath against the ice in my stomach, and picked up my radio. “What’s Grey’s status?”

“Grey’s all right, Bob.”

I released my breath and let myself slump against the support of my chair, but then I saw Jenny, sitting at her desk, staring at nothing, rubbing a rose petal between her fingers.

“Is Jenny with you?” Larkin continued.

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

Larkin sighed over the line. “I’m sorry. It was fast; he didn’t even feel it.”

It sounded like something she’d had to say many times.

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

The floor went silent except for the computers and fluorescent lights. I looked at Lila in the cube next door, who nodded and made a flagging-down gesture with one hand, a phone with the other; she’d handle the docs.

Telling Larkin, “Medics on the way,” I killed our radio, removed my headset, 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. “Corny white boy. And now he’s…” Her face became animated and terrible for a moment; then the power went out 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.” 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 splintered.

Feeling helpless, I took the bundle from her hand. Once the flowers left her line of sight, she returned to her stupor, idly 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, 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 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 known the PIN was dangerous, but this was the first time I’d had a coworker die. Ops was a youngster’s game, and Grey was forty-three…

Health and Medical was across the street. As I looked up, the glass doors slid open and Dean stormed out, foot in a boot. 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 second shift EMT who’d probably fixed Dean’s foot. She was a tiny woman with 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 this.” She waved a hand at the stench.

“Yeah, what is that, Dean?”

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

“Speaking of, where…?”

Taneesha cocked her thumb back into the building. “Last I saw, 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 men’s 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. It’s me.”

She rapped back acknowledgment, in Morse.

“Can I get you anything?”

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

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

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

I didn’t expect her to answer, but she called, “Vomit,” over the running water. “Nontoxic.” As though that helped.

The street clothes in the locker (argyle sweater, khakis) were square, 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.

“I’ll see if I can salvage your phone,” I called.

She rapped “roger” on the door frame, and I went to get some garbage bags from the supply closet. Hopefully double-bagging would block out the stench. Dumping the contents of Grey’s pockets into my hand made me grimace. How much vomit could a body contain?

Fortunately, Grey used an indestructible brick of a 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; 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, the shower curtain rasped back. When I turned, there was Grey, doing the top button of her shirt, scrubbed within an inch of her life, and smelling like my college O-chem project.

When I’d met Grace, her straight male robot act had been too good; I’d dismissed her. Now that I knew her properly, she was a big butch beauty with a bird-of-prey look to her. She was younger than me by a few years, not that anyone could tell by looking; her ash-brown hair had started going gray sometime in her twenties, and a couple of decades with the PIN was racking up mileage I never wanted to see. Under the deadpan work mask, I could see lines of strain on her face, but she was moving smoothly. Not her blood on the uniform, I thought with relief. Must’ve been the 107’s.

“Hey there, boss,” I said, pulling off my gloves to clap my free hand to her arm. “You look like hell. MacIntire, huh?”

She nodded. “Good man.” She held out her hands for her stuff and shoved it into her 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.” She looked hangdog, gestured at herself questioningly.

“Way better than it was,” I assured, patting her. “Tolerable.”

“Enough for dinner?”

“You still want to?” Grey’s people tolerance was low on a good day.

“Don’t want to be alone.”

Grey rarely said she wanted anything. “I’m flattered,” I said.

She glanced at the flowers on the hand drier, tilted her head.

I inferred the question. “They’re Jenny’s.”

“From MacIntire?” So she had known.

“Yeah. She doesn’t want them now.” I took off my glasses, rubbed them against my sleeve. “Mind if I keep them in your car? I haven’t decided what to do with them yet.”

If Grey smelled like my chem project, her car smelled like the whole damn lab. We did what we could, gave up the rest as a job for professionals, and Grey shoveled her crap out of the passenger seat for me.

The stench was even worse with the doors shut. Grey saw my face, sighed, and rolled the window down. I sent her a grateful look and cranked mine down too, despite the winter chill.

“I promise I’ll put it back up when we arrive; I know what Vago is like—” My cell began to ring. I silenced it and shoved it in the glove compartment, narrowly avoiding a cascade of maps, forms, and tranq tubes.

She saw it. “Okay?”

I sighed, rubbed my face. “I just… don’t want to deal with anyone else right now.” I couldn’t tell my friends outside of work about the job, and Grey was the only coworker I was out to. “Where to, Grace?”

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

“You hate Punjabi.”

“Want it?”

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

Her face quirked. “Valentine’s Day.”

“What? Oh.” Even with Jenny’s roses in my lap, I’d forgotten. The Opera House would be all hearts and flowers. “The offer still stands.”

On a better day, I might’ve made it an invitation, but after that shift, I wasn’t up to it.

Grey’s shoulders relaxed a little. “Okay.” She got onto the highway.

“Who the hell was that guy who went over our heads?” I asked.

She shrugged. “New.”

I grumbled. Since the rise of the Department of Homeland Security, all kinds of acronymed spooks we’d never heard of were turning up in all sorts of management positions… and disappearing just as quickly with zero discussion. “The hell is going on upstairs? And why did the League talk to him?”

Grey just shook her head. She didn’t know either. “Ship had a coma-pod. Nothing else.”

“Ah hell, so Jenny was right. Another runaway.” 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?”

“Smoke. Ship was on fire.”

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

She shook her head.

“Well, they can pay MacIntire’s funeral bills. The hell with them; if they’re going to force me to work here, why won’t they use me?”

Grey had no answer for me. Usually, she shed the robot act the moment we left work, but today, her face stayed frozen, her body tense. When we arrived and started rolling up our windows, I asked, “Leave your gun for me, Grace?”

She paused.

“I know you’re licensed, I know you’ve had a shit day, and I don’t want to fight. But I want to spend my evening with you, not Specialist Ironass.”

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

“Thank you,” I said, surprised. I’d expected resistance.

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

“That’s a nice way of putting it.” The Opera House never got robbed; the mob hated competition. “I’m grateful anyway. Let’s eat.”

I gave her shoulder a squeeze and we went in.

In defiance of the urban decay, the Opera House was clean red stone and black wrought iron, with waiters who ground pepper from mills as long as their arms into olive oil made by God. The wine menu was good, the pesto divine. But then you had the atmosphere.

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 old piano player who’d accompany any drunken fool who belted an aria. (Anyone who stumped the piano player got free drinks, but nobody ever did.) Everyone was encouraged to sing along, including the staff, and while they scheduled proper performers on weekends, they hardly needed them.

Grey hated socializing, but she adored opera. I didn’t, but if it got the mask off her face and helped us forget MacIntire a little, it was worth it.

The front of house staff was well trained; they must’ve noticed the smell, but they didn’t show it. They gave us a table in a back corner, away from everyone else, which let Grey have her back to the wall and eyes on the exits. The place was decked out for the holiday—white tablecloths, red candles, pink carnations—but no roses, thankfully.

Out came the bread and the pepper mills.

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

“Water.”

“Wild woman.” I ordered a glass for myself; I needed it.

On a normal day, the Opera House was raucous; on Valentine’s Day, people were practically hanging from the chandeliers to proclaim their love in song.

“I have to know,” I asked. “Why this place? Don’t people wear you out?”

“Music is different,” she replied. “Don’t have to talk. It all…” she made an undulating gesture with one hand. “Flows. It’s nice.”

Fair enough; music didn’t demand attention or response. It wasn’t even in English until a waiter came with my pesto parmigiana. Then someone started singing a drinking song, full of eyes bright as stars and lips red and sweet.

“Wait,” I said. “Didn’t you sing this drunk at that shitty Christmas party?”

Grey hid her face, but I smiled—and not just because it was a sign she was relaxing. That party might’ve been shit, but it’d started our friendship. After months wondering if Grey could stand me, I’d discovered that what I’d taken for dislike was really the grim tension of playing straight man all the time.

“What is it?” I asked. “Wagner?”

She gave me a pained look. “Romberg. Student Prince.”

I gestured. “Well? What’re you waiting for?”

But she shook her head. “I don’t sing around people.”

“That’s a shame. I’d love to hear you sing for me.”

I was pulling her pigtails, but after a moment’s hesitation, she joined in on the next verse, and it stopped being a joke. Her singing voice didn’t lurch or stutter. It was smooth, deep, and rich and purred in my rib cage like a V8 engine. And hearing her sing a love song with all the feeling she didn’t allow herself in robot mode… well. It made me wish I had made an invitation.

“Wow,” I said when she finished. “Who taught you that?”

She looked away. “Grandparents. They liked opera.”

Grey never mentioned family. I settled on, “Your voice is beautiful.”

She turned pink, which I liked. “Thank you.” I liked that even more.

It’d been a long day. We were tired. That meant I shouldn’t proposition her, but I was tempted. Maybe, once we were in the car; that way, if the answer was no, the awkwardness would only last until we reached my apartment. And if it was yes, well…

I finished my (delicious) dinner right as the waiter dropped us the bill. Since Grey refused to wear reading glasses even though she was starting to need them, I told her what she owed, tossed some cash down for my half, then went to hit the can while she finished eating.

The Opera House had one-stall unisex bathrooms with hatch windows left cracked for ventilation. I’d never paid them much attention before, but I’d just finished my business and zipped my pants when I smelled ammonia.

Then an off-white spider-squid slithered in.

I jumped and yelped, crashing back into the wall. The 107 hissed and brandished broken glass at me to make me shut up, then gave me a hard stare-down. My head began to buzz, and after a tense few seconds, it began signing.

I didn’t understand. I shook my head.

It signed again, slower: “Speak SGSL?”

I swallowed and signed back, “A little?”

It didn’t take long for it to figure out just how little I knew—and judging by the hesitant, jerky way it moved, it wasn’t much better. After a lot of back-and-forth, it managed to get through to me: “[Noun]. Have [noun]. Give [noun].”

“I don’t understand,” I signed.

It swelled up dangerously. “Give [noun]!” My head started buzzing again.

“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;” even I knew 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. “Smell! Give!”

I had no choice but to say, “I don’t understand! I don’t speak SGSL!”

For a moment, it just stood there. I felt my head fill with static—I’d never felt anything like it, and I didn’t care for the experience one bit. Then it gave me up as a lost cause, my head cleared, and it settled by 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 dark-veined putty-colored body was covered in orange vomit stains and 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, feeling cold sweat plaster my shirt to my back, but finally Grey began to wonder what the hell I was doing. I heard a dah-dit-dah rap against the door, a hesitant, “Twenty?”

The 107 didn’t know English, but it must’ve recognized Grey’s voice. It jumped up and signed at me. My head started buzzing again. The hell was that?

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

Fed up, it sprang above me and horse-kicked me at the doorway. 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 me doorward amd waved a shard of glass in my face.

“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; when it wouldn’t open, the 107 seemed to understand the problem. I held up one hand and went for the lock as obviously as I could. The 107’s tentacles rippled, but it let me pull back the deadbolt. Grey came through the door as carefully as I’d opened it, holding her hands up empty, and though the 107 slithered out of reach and wielded the glass warningly, it let her come through. It stared hard at her.

Grey jerked, then cocked her head. She signed, “Stop. SGSL only.”

I frowned, but before I could ask, she waved at me to be silent. When the 107 signed at her, she closed and relocked the door.

“Wants me there,” she 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 her—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 she signed again: no.

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

Grey kept her eyes on the 107. “Bob,” she said in her robot 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 signed to the 107. It didn’t look any happier and signed something short and sharp. Grey signed back: no. The 107 gestured at me, and she tensed.

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

“Run soon,” she replied.

“Grace…” it was starting to puff up.

“Thanks for dinner.” And then she 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 her, and started slashing at her with the glass. Me, I ran for the door. The 107 shrieked and tried to stop me, but I got the bolt open and sprinted for the restaurant exit, leaving a wake of alarmed customers and staff. I shouted at them to call the cops, but this wasn’t the police part of town, and whichever local gangster was in charge was unlikely to fare better. We needed my coworkers, but my phone was in Grey’s car, and she 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 at the passenger side window as hard as I could, but the rolling pin 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 started wailing. 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 got to aim for the edge of the frame.”

I obeyed, and the window shattered all in one go. They clapped politely until screams started erupting from the Opera House, sending them scattering. The fight must’ve 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. “Our office has closed for the night—”

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

“Sir, the second shift is unavailable to—”

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

That woke her up. “Where are you?”

I rattled off the address while clutching the stitch in my side. “I am going to kill the League, them and Management! What the hell is this, Agatha?”

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 be stupid, Bob,” Agatha said. “Just let Grey do his job.”

I stared at the roses in the passenger seat, half-covered in papers, maps, and a tranq tube. I 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 allergies. I didn’t know how I’d get close enough to tag the 107 or whether the sedatives would work on it, but I grabbed one anyway. (The rest had fallen 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.

My head started buzzing again, at a higher pitch. It made my fillings rattle, and I realized that it was the 107 doing it… whatever it was. All I could do was try to tune it out.

When I made my way to the counter, I rose to a kneel, trying to catch a glimpse of what was happening and where Grey was in the maelstrom. A plate whizzed past my forehead but 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 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 her back and losing the fight but refusing to let go.

Shit. It was in reach, but moving too fast to tag. It’d see me coming.

The latter, at least, I could do something about. Up on the counter near me was an abandoned sack of flour. I snatched it, lobbed it at them, and the 107 reflexively slashed it, sending up a cloud.

“Hold it still!” I shouted to Grey.

I could barely see her under the flour and tentacles, but she heard me. She 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 her, but she held on.

The shot would never get better. I dove over the counter, jammed the injector against the 107, and mashed the button. The 107 screeched and 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 what it was or how to make it work. Giving it up as a concern for later, it raised the frying pan again.

Grey tackled it across the counter.

The 107 whirled and hit her but couldn’t rip free. Finally, it yanked her over the hot stove until her clothes ignited and she had to let go. Left empty-handed, Grey finished scrambling over the counter to join me. She hit the floor with a graceless thud, bloodied, smoldering, covered in flour, one arm hanging stiff. I rushed to help her get her sweater off. The smoke went with it.

“Who’s coming?” she demanded.

“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, Grace, you are teaching me more SGSL! We don’t even have its damn family!”

I heard a clatter, the lights spun, and when I looked up, a blur of movement was scuttling across the ceiling, sparkling with what I presumed was more kitchenware—wineglasses, I discovered, when it started hurling them at us. It seemed to be getting dopey, and its aim wasn’t good, but it had us pinned down, and the buzzing in my head was getting nauseating and disorienting.

I looked around, saw the big kitchen sink half-full of water. “Can it drown?”

Grey’s response was to shove me out of the way as the 107 lost its grip. It swept a cutting board at me as it fell but focused 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. She ignored its tentacles, ignored the weapons, focused entirely on immobilizing its main body. Then she shoved it into the water and held it there.

Drowning is a bad way to die. It takes an eternity—at least five minutes. The buzzing in my head pulsed in red and black. When it vomited, I felt it. And it tried to beat Grey to death the whole time. She took it, blank-faced and silent, until its arms went limp and slid off her. The screaming in my head stopped.

“Knife,” she told me.

I handed her one and didn’t watch what she did with it. When she was done, she put her 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.

“Okay?” Her voice and face were hollow.

I shook my head. “You?”

She shook her head, and that’s when second shift arrived.

One of the Ops guys saw us first, double-taking at the candles and flowers.

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 Ops guy went to investigate. The first one saw my Comm sweater. “What’re you doing here, comboy?”

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

Someone asked, “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. (Not anymore.)

Despite the horror, my only injuries were a bump and a headache; even my glasses only had a bent earpiece and a cracked lens. Our waiter brought them to me… along with a complimentary gift card.

“Our thanks,” he said.

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

I stood up to find out.

Turned out she was in the other restroom, the only place not trashed. When I came in, she was propped up against the wall, still gripping the knife, while Doc Pritchard bandaged and argued with her in equal measure.

“Bob! This is your dumbass, right?”

“Hi Taneesha,” I said, locking the door to keep out rubberneckers… and in case I slipped on pronouns. “Yup, that’s my dumbass. How you doing, boss?”

“Like shit,” Pritchard said. “And she won’t listen to me, so explain to your dumbass why she has to go to Medical and see Richardson.”

I came over and pried the knife out of Grey’s hand. “Grace, why are you arguing with the woman who saves your life? Do what she says.”

Grey made a face and said to Pritchard, “Okay. No painkillers til after.”

“After what?” I asked, but Pritchard held up a hand to silence me and said, “Your choice.”

I stared at her, but all she said was, “Now persuade your dumbass she needs an ambulance.”

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

“No.”

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

Pritchard lost that battle, but won the one over getting Grey to her car by gurney. When Grey saw the shattered glass of the window, she sighed.

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

She didn’t fight me, just reached for her belt loop, but it was on the side of her bad arm and the hand on her good side was gashed. Before she could figure it out or hurt herself, I said, “May I?” and when she nodded, finagled it off for her. To hell with what second shift thought; they weren’t hurt.

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

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

“I tell you, I’m fine—”

“Promise me.” Her voice was sharp, glitchy, and she was giving me the stare that had half the department petrified of her.

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?”

She stared at me hard, saw I was serious, and calmed down. “Later.”

I didn’t like that answer, but a distraction came when I opened the car door, unleashing a wave of the reeking astringent vomit smell.

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

Grey shook her head; she didn’t know.

Grey’s SGSL was pretty good. Maybe the 107 had used local slang for its third cousin, but why? Even I knew the signs for “family” and “friend.”

I gave Grey my shoulder to lean on, helped her into the car, and did her seat belt for her before she could try.

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

Neither did Grey. “No,” she said in a horrible empty voice. “Telepath. Not a good one, but lucid. Knew it was drowning.”

I remembered the screaming in my head, the nausea, and 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 fizzy like Harmonius around.

“That shouldn’t have happened,” I said, pulling out. Then, seeing what she thought I meant, “No, none of that should’ve happened. The League should’ve told us what the 107 was, that it was a telepathic scent-tracker, and the boys upstairs shouldn’t have frozen us out.” I was icy calm now and furious. “Their cloak-and-dagger games killed MacIntire and almost killed us, and now Jenny’s a mess and her roses are in the backseat and the hell are we even doing in this job?”

Grey didn’t seem to understand 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, Grace, but it’s cheating on you, and it’s going to kill you one day.” I got onto I10. “You’re not twenty-five anymore. You can’t keep doing this to your body. They don’t care about you.”

Grey’s voice was tired. “They don’t have to.”

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

Doc Richardson turned out to be a pointy-faced, imperious iceberg blond. “I see you’ve recovered,” he told Grey as I wheeled her in. “My congratulations.”

I could be catty too. “This is who Doc Pritchard thinks we need?”

Richardson looked contemptuous and corrected me, “Paramedic Pritchard.”

While Grey was busy getting put back together, I attended to her long-suffering sedan, taping cardboard over the shattered window and sweeping out the glass. Then I set myself on the multicolored forms in triplicate. I had almost finished the stack when I heard, “Babubhai Doshi?”

“I’m off-shift,” I snapped.

“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 and one from Management with a DARPA IAO tag, whatever that meant. With them was Harmonius. I’d never seen him without his imperturbable Buddha smile, but now he was tense and kept fidgeting with the cable that twined from his box up into his skull.

Like I’d promised Grey, I’d stuck close to Doc Pritchard. She’d been leaning against the wall, listening to music, but the moment these guys approached, she stiffened and disappeared 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 Management 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? Half of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was don’t ask.

I looked to Harmonius, but he just gave 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 was unimpressed. “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 said, chill setting in, “I’m an American citizen.”

The spook looked to Harmonius, who nodded. “And?”

Now I was getting scared. “And an overseas citizen of India.”

“Is that like dual citizenship?”

“India doesn’t allow—it’s—” I choked down my emotions, stilled my hands, and said, as calmly as I could, “like I said, it’s in my hiring record. Now what is this about?”

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

Harmonius, on the other hand, returned to his usual smiling self. “Hey, Grey,” he drawled. “Don’t forget the Vicodin.”

Grey ignored him. I’d never seen her so angry. “Who are you?”

“Do you mind?” the new manager said. “This is a private meeting.”

She looked at me. “Is it?”

“News to me.” I jumped up. The Ops goon made as if to stop me, but Grey glared at him full force, and even injured and covered in flour, there was no contest. He recoiled and backed down; the manager didn’t.

“You’re one of Andersen’s hires.” He didn’t sound pleased—Andersen was one of the oldest horses in the PIN, a notorious hardass. “He said you were a good soldier, but I’m starting to doubt, Grey.”

That just made Grey madder. “Specialist Grey,” she corrected.

He ignored her. “Why don’t you tell us what happened, Grey?”

Instead, she started arguing protocol with the spook, who started red tape-gunning back. He still wasn’t giving us a name. Me, I watched Harmonius. He kept looking hard at me, Grey, then the manager, trying to explain a thesis paper with his eyes.

I got it. My inclination was to touch Grey to get her attention, but I chose to clear my throat instead. Grey glanced at me, followed my eyes to Harmonius.

Harmonius kept his cheerful stoner face on, but it was clearly a strain. “Come on, Grey, we’re all honest folk here,” he said. “Nobody needs formalities, huh? Just answer the man’s questions and we can all get out of here.”

Grey didn’t like it, but she glanced at me and said in an icy robot voice, “Incident, shift-end. Dinner for 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 said, “I’m going home,” and stormed out, taking me with her.

Doc Pritchard was outside, looking tense; she must’ve grabbed Grey the moment the goons came. Now she ran for her again as Grey started to sway.

“Catch him, catch him!”

Between us, we kept Grey from pitching over. I expected Pritchard to get her to a chair, but instead she got under Grey’s arm and directed me to the other so we could half-carry her down the hall. It clearly hurt like hell, but Grey gritted her teeth and kept moving as best she could.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

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

Grey said nothing.

“You okay?” Pritchard was asking me, not Grey.

“Just rattled. What the hell was that?”

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

“Car,” Grey replied.

They said nothing until we got there. Pritchard didn’t even remark on the stench or broken window. The moment we were all in and the doors were shut, 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.”

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

“They pulled one on Larkin not too long ago,” Pritchard continued, passing a bottle of pills to Grey. “Fortunately, she got hired the normal way, and I’m friends with a lot of fizzies; Harmonius covered for her, Grey vouched and helped me peg them on trying to skip the paperwork.”

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

“Look, things have gotten weird since September 11th. Everyone’s gone paranoid,” Pritchard said. “Scuttlebutt is the boys upstairs are having some kind of power struggle like when Johnson died, trying to purge the ranks, get the old horses out and their people in ‘to fight terrorism.’”

I thought about how they’d gone above Comm’s head, hidden info from us.

“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 and request health leave for you 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. You going to be okay after that stunt?”

Grey had spent everything on that performance in the sedition meeting. She wouldn’t be going anywhere or doing anything on her own for a while.

She looked to me. “Stay with me?”

“Absolutely.” I squeezed her shoulder. “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 pills!”

Grey waved to her, and then Pritchard was gone, leaving us in the car. For a moment, I was still. 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 sob, too strung out to be ashamed. The 107 business had been bad enough, but for my own workplace, my own country to treat me like this…

Grey tried to pass me her handkerchief, but I didn’t take it. After helplessly watching me, she touched a hand to my shoulder, hesitant, like I might bite her head off. When I didn’t, she got more confident and started rubbing my back. She’d never really touched me unprompted before; it helped. She was here. She’d saved my ass, again. I was safe… for now.

And the moment I could, I was getting the hell out of here.

Eventually, I could breathe again and straighten up. “God, what a shit day. I’m okay now. Thanks.” She pulled back, and I took her handkerchief to mop my eyes. “Nice mama wolf act, earlier. I’ve never seen that side of you before.”

She grimaced and slumped against the seat. “Don’t like doing it. Hurts.”

“I’ll get you home and horizontal.” That only reminded me of my hopes before the 107 crashed in. What a joke. I shoved the handkerchief into my breast pocket, opened the pill bottle, and passed it to her with a water bottle. “Now take your damn painkillers; you look like you’re about to pass out.”

She tipped two pills into her 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.”

She said nothing.

“Well, congratulations, Grace, you made it. Be as stoned stupid as you want. I won’t tell.”

She shifted, looked uncomfortable. “Make me…”

She faltered. I raised my eyebrows.

“…Frisky.”

If I hadn’t been so drained, I would’ve laughed. “Well, this I have to see…”

That seemed to reassure her. She took her pills, and I started up the car. I didn’t trust her ability to give directions for much longer, so I grabbed the map book from between the seats 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 her seat, staring out the window. I figured she’d conked out until I paid for the gas.

“Bob.”

“Mm?” I was digging through the map book, checking our route.

“Have to tell you.” Her voice was fuzzy. “MacIntire.”

“Yeah? What about him?”

“He was dying.”

“Uh huh.”

“It was bad.”

“Okay.”

Grey was quiet a while, then repeated, “It was bad.”

I put the maps down. “Okay…”

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

“Ship?”

“Ship, yeah.” I couldn’t remember hearing her say “yeah” before. “Rules. Important. Have to follow them, or it gets worse.” She made a frustrated sound. “Not saying this right.”

This didn’t sound like news I wanted to be driving for, so I moved the car from the pump to a parking spot. Grey didn’t notice, too focused on putting the words together in her head. I put the car in park and waited for her.

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



I just sat there.

“He asked me to,” Grey said, desperately, like I needed to understand. “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 hers or the 107’s, which was blue-green. 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 her gun at the Opera House, like she wanted it away from her.

“There are rules,” Grey said again.

I was silent.

“Say something. Please?”

“Okay, Grace,” I said. “Okay.”

She had a horrible look on her face. “Be angry.”

I sighed, patted her arm. “I’m not angry. Or surprised.”

She just looked at me.

I remembered how she’d drowned the 107. No triumph, no pleasure, only sad, robotic weariness. “How you treated the 107, it just made me think that this was something you’ve had to do before. And the whole line about quick and painless… well, it felt like a line.” I remembered how Dean stomped off. “Dean’s new, isn’t he? He disagree with the old horse policy?”

She nodded.

“What’re you going to do?”

“Avoid him.”

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

She was still looking at me with that awful look. She started to rock. “You’re not angry.”

I petted her back. “Sorry, beautiful; you’re stuck with me.”

She made a horrible sound. She didn’t seem able to cry, only rock. The car wasn’t big enough to let me hold her, but I kept my hand on her back until it passed. It was the last either of us said until we got to her apartment building.

It was one of the hideous concrete towers scattered all over Vago for working class families. 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. She liked kids, even when they didn’t like her.

I looked at the building dubiously. “Which floor are you on?”

“Seventh.”

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

A wince crossed her face. “You.”

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

We crossed able-bodied adults in the halls, but none offered to help; they just averted their eyes and pretended their kids weren’t holding their noses and gripping their throats. We got 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 her make. “Think I’m a gangster.”

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

Even with the smell, I couldn’t help notice how much she was letting me touch her. Obviously, this wasn’t the “going up to your place” I’d had in mind at the Opera House, but my libido had yet to catch on, and after a day like that, I wanted to feel good about damn near anything. So I didn’t resist it.

We made it to her apartment without incident, though getting the door unlocked and open without dropping her was a trick, and I knocked something off the TV stand, fishing for the light switch.

“Couch or bed?” I asked.

“Shower.” Should’ve known.

I barked my hip on the sofa but got her there. Thank god it had a shower stool, implying she’d washed up injured before and wouldn’t need assistance. I couldn’t offer help without it being suggestive, and Grey didn’t ask, so I went to hunt down clothes that she could get on and off one-handed.

Grey had been to my place, but this was my first time in hers. Judging by the look of her bedroom, she’d spent about as much time in it as I had. No wall hangings, military-made bed, a couple filing cabinets, and a desk with an honest-to-god electric typewriter. No computer.

When I opened her dresser, I found everything sorted by item and color. Trying not to feel like a lech, I grabbed some sweatpants, a Barbarian Barbara T-shirt (I’d probably have to help her into it, but it was that or work shirts), and underwear (which she folded). I found a spare hanger, hung the clothes on the bathroom doorknob, and called over the running water, “Give me your stuff, and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Trying.” Her voice sounded strained. She 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 set up on the big, ugly couch—a blue floral monster covered in fringe. Blankets and a pillow on one end cued me to check for a fold-out bed, which turned out to be surprisingly comfortable. I wondered who it was for, then realized Grey’d placed the couch in clear line of sight to the doors. Maybe she never slept in her own bed.

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 a big black stereo (with an eight-track player!) and a substantial music collection, mostly vinyl: classical and the darkest pits of pre-Kennedy-assassination pop, even though Grey was a ‘70s kid like me. I also discovered what I’d knocked over while groping for the lights: a yahrzeit candle (burned-out, thankfully). When I put it back, I found an old photo, the only one I’d seen so far, of two smiling, wrinkled little ancients bundled in wheelchairs in front of a mural. No Grey.

The TV remote turned up in the top drawer of the dresser, along with a lot of homemade videotapes of Barbarian Barbara… and the Joy of Painting, oddly.

I was scratching my head over that one when I heard the thump of clothes hitting the bathroom door. Despite her injuries, Grey had managed. 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 previously. 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 she 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 kitchen table, which left the USB drive… 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 at the door. Finally I knocked—dah dit dah.

“Twenty?” I asked.

She rapped back SOS. I went in and found her sitting clean and shirtless on the can, surrounded by the contents of her first aid kit. She’d gotten the old bandages off by herself and put some new ones on her leg, only to drop the rest. She looked up at me helplessly, arms over her chest.

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

She didn’t seem to like me looking at her, so I pretended to be absorbed in gathering things up. When the silence got heavy, I asked, “Are those your musical grandparents in that photo? The one with the mural?”

She nodded. “One of Bubbe’s. Muralist. Zayde was a sculptor. Had custody of me a few years. Died before I made specialist.”

In the months I’d known her, Grey had never discussed her parents, or any other family. Between her gender, the lack of photos, and now this mention of spending a few years away, I could make a guess why.

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

She nodded, then saw my eyes on her chest and curled in on herself.

I shook myself and grabbed bandages. “No, sorry, I shouldn’t… it’s okay.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Messy.”

“No,” I said, sharply enough that she looked up. “You look,” good, “fine. I was just… impressed.” Shit. “I mean, you’ve survived everything.” My babbling sounded like compensating for disgust, so I blurted out the truth: “I have a thing for scars, that’s all. You don’t have to do anything. It doesn’t bother me.”

She froze and blinked at me. “Why?”

“I need a reason?”

She thought that over, then straightened and uncrossed her arms.

I’d never seen Grey with her shirt off; why would I have? Now I saw jagged arcs from a broken bottle, bruises, stitches across her chest (and, I suspected, the leg she’d managed to bandage). It was worse on the side of her bad arm, the shoulder of which had a couple of old crater scars. Her forearms were covered with old slashes, and there were other marks, smaller and anonymous.

And then there was the big one, arcing down her collarbone, across her ribs, down her stomach, and disappearing under her waistband like a weld. I yanked my eyes away before she caught me wanting to lick it. “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 she felt. She’d never let me this close before, and she was warm and beautiful and alive; I wanted to map her with my hands, my tongue, follow that weld job down and—

Then I noticed something else.

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

She’d been avoiding my eyes the whole time, but now she tensed under my hands. She let me finish wrapping gauze around her hand and then pulled away, curling in on herself again. My heart sank.

“Hurting?” I asked.

Her eyes flicked towards me, then away. “No.”

Shit. This wasn’t when and how I’d wanted to have this conversation, but I put the gauze down and bit the bullet. “Look, Grace…”

At the same time she said, “It’s not the pills.”

“I… come again?”

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

I blinked at her. “Okay.”

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

At my incomprehension, she looked frustrated, wrestled with herself, and finally grabbed my hand and pressed it to her cheek.

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

She let me go.

“Oh,” I said.

I sat down on the side of the bathtub, even though it was wet, and took off my battered glasses to clean them. There wasn’t much to be done for them, but I needed something to do with my hands, something that didn’t involve her.

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

“I know.”

“You knew I was…”

Grey gave me an incredulous look. “Since New Year’s.”

Well, that wasn’t so bad. By my accounts, I’d started flirting with her on Thanksgiving. “Well hell, why didn’t you say so? If I’d known, I would’ve asked sooner. And since the boys upstairs are gunning for me anyway…” I put a hand on her knee, slid it up her thigh. “Want to fuck?”

Grey’s breath caught. “Can’t do casual sex.”

That wasn’t a no. “First base, then?”

Silence. Maybe it was a no.

“Help me out here, Grace. Tell me what you want.”

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

I took my hand back. “For how long?”

“Forever,” she blurted, then winced and hastily amended, “as long as I can. And you don’t do relationships.”

Well, shit. Any other day, that would’ve sent me sprinting for the door, and judging by her face, she expected me to do just that.

I could. I could walk away from her over-committed ass, and Grey could go back to working her heart out in the rut that was her own personal chasm. We could go back to being good, sexless little worker bees like the PIN wanted.

Or… “Well, I don’t know about everything forever… but I can give you everything I’ve got for one night, at least. How about that?”

She stared at me.

I shrugged. “Why the hell not? Today’s been full of bad ideas; at least this one will feel good.” I touched her cheek; she closed her eyes and nuzzled into it. “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?”

She must’ve been as tired of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell as I was, because her eyes dropped to my mouth, and when I leaned in, she met me halfway. She kissed like a girder, tense and nervous, clearly out of practice, but when I touched her cheek and kissed her back, the breath went out of her. When she pulled back, her eyes were full of stars, and she touched her mouth disbelievingly, like it’d been years. “Yes,” she said, and reached for me, then pulled back.

“You can touch me,” I said. “That’s part of the idea.”

I expected her to kiss me again, but instead, she ran her hands over my hair, my cheeks, my shoulders, like she was making sure I was real. Her expression was wondering.

My back was starting to protest, so I pulled away to stretch. “We should do this somewhere else. Do you want a shirt for this?”

She thought about it. “Yes.”

I concealed my disappointment. “Need help putting it on?”

She did, but at least I didn’t have to be conservative with my hands now. We got it on her without too much trouble, and the skin of her stomach rippled when I brushed it.

“Bed or sofa?”

“Sofa.”

This time, she didn’t hesitate to put her arm around me, and once I got her comfortably horizontal, I asked, “So, how far do you want to go?”

Her answer was to tug me down on the sofa-bed with her; there was just enough room for the both of us. She nudged off my sweater, ran her fingertips up my arms, cupped my face in her bandaged hands. This time, she kissed how she signed, slow and thorough, and the sound she made when I brushed my tongue against her mouth was everything, as was how she opened to it and clutched my shoulders.

“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?”

She tapped out twice against my shoulder.

“And if it’s good?”

Squeeze.

I grinned. “We’re in business. Show me where to touch you.”

She put my hands up her shirt, one to the weld job. She looked up, hesitant. I laughed nervously. “You’re okay with that? You don’t have to indulge me…”

She squeezed yes, and I ran my hands under her shirt, tracing up her ribs and stomach and back down again, enjoying how she squirmed, until I hit her waistband and toyed with it. “Nice. You really have survived everything.” Then I realized something. “You… you don’t have condoms, do you.”

The blank flustered look was all the answer I needed. Of course she didn’t. She probably hadn’t gotten laid since the Reagan administration, and anyway, I had no business fucking her in this condition, no matter what my libido said.

“That’s fine, new plan. You up to getting stroked off tonight?”

Her hips hitched under my hand, but she tapped out against my shoulder.

I stopped. “What’s wrong? Do you want it like this?”

She had a hangdog, test-I-haven’t-studied-for face. “Yes, but…”

Grey was precise with her words. With casual sex, she’d said “can’t,” not “won’t.” I imagined all the explanations (apologies, really) that she might feel obligated to give about her body, how that’d mesh with her word budget, and how it would not get us laid. So far, she’d talked just fine with her hands.

“Okay, two questions,” I said. “Do you want me to, and does it feel good?”

She held up one, two fingers and nodded: yes to both.

I kissed her cheek. “All I care about. Show me how you like it.”

I saw a moment of struggle in her face, but then she decided to hell with it, buried her hand in my hair, and shoved my hand down her pants, deeper than I expected, further back. She spread her legs for me, pushed into it, and—

“Ah,” I said, “I got you. No scar tissue here.”

I curled my fingers and the sound it tore out of her was everything I could’ve hoped for. She thrust against me and tried to get up my shirt with her good hand, kissing me harder. (Which suited me fine; I needed to get inside her somehow.)

If this was what she was like injured and getting touched from the outside, getting inside her would bring the house down. I wanted to see her like that, without the uniform, without the self-control, wanted to fuck her til she sang for me, til she gave and opened and fell apart.

She stayed soft, and I never did get her pants down, but who gave a damn as long as I had her grinding against my wrist, making pretty sounds, and clutching me like it was the end of the world. When I started sucking on her neck, she squeezed for yes and started shaking. When my teeth grazed her, she gasped and pushed me harder into her shoulder.

I laughed. “Want me to bite you?”

“Yes!”

There was no arguing with that tone. I sank my teeth in, harder than intended, and she came with a gasp.

“Soft girl likes it rough,” I remarked, watching, and she shivered and squeezed me with her thighs before going limp, panting. I kissed the marks I’d left. “That sounded overdue.”

She brushed her fingers over them, then my mouth. “Yes. Thank you.”

“Well now, aren’t you polite.” I pulled her handkerchief from my pocket to wipe the fog from my glasses, then clean us up. “Any time, Grace.”

She smiled then, really smiled. It lit up her whole face, crinkled her eyes, and made something in me turn over. I’d found her attractive enough already, but when she smiled like that, she was a damn heartbreaker.



As Grey shifted against me, trying to find a good position to touch me that didn’t hurt, 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 her. “Here. This is yours.”

Grey frowned. “It’s not.”

“What do you mean, 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 her good arm out from under me and took the plug, an anonymous peg of metal and ceramic, strong enough to survive a 107’s guts. She 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 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 in frozen silence. 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. She nodded, tried to twist and look over her shoulder.

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

She hesitated. “Touching okay?”

“What? Sure.”

She shifted over onto her side—carefully—and snuggled to my chest.

“Okay,” I said, brushing a hand over her buzzed scalp. The fuzz at her nape was soft. “Maybe more than one night.”

She nuzzled my throat. “Okay.”

She fell asleep facing me, not the door. I stayed awake with her in my arms, petting her hair and feeling her breathe. Thinking.

...

MacIntire turned out to have no will, and if he had any family, none of us knew how to find them, so us coworkers managed his last affairs. I ran the phone tree. Grey was too beat up to do anything physical, but she handled the paperwork, informing MacIntire’s landlord and shutting off the utilities. I could tell that she’d done it before, many times.

We didn’t ask Jenny to help, but she showed up anyway with her battered 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, as though to prove to herself that she could do it without falling apart.

Larkin turned out to have a van, so she and Jenny handled driving the unclaimed possessions to secondhand stores or the landfill. Since Larkin’s arm was still in a sling 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 showed no sign of being cold. Her skirts fluttered in the wind, her gold jewelry shone, and she clasped a large pack of tissue.



There was one more tradition with PIN funerals, one we comboys were in charge of. Normally, Darlene would’ve done it, being shift captain, but when Jenny 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 them. She took a deep breath and turned on her mic.

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

Silence, of course. She called him three times, then turned off her radio and looked to all of us. Tears streamed down her cheeks, but her eyes were alive and her voice 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, shaky but real. “Awful. I didn’t think I’d manage last call.”

“You did great.”

She pulled away, blotting her eyes with a tissue and nodding. “Yeah. And I know y’all would’ve done it for me, but I wanted to do it. It’s always in my head; now maybe it can start to end.”

A core of worry in my chest loosened. 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 alone?” I cocked my thumb over to where she stood at the back of the crowd, looking stiff and uncomfortable. “What kind of cube-mate would I be if I left you with your least favorite serial killer?”

“How is he?”

“Back on her feet, at least.” Shit. Jenny blinked at me, and I tried to roll on. “The stitches will be coming out soon. Here, 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 took the bundle to examine the slightly-wilted blossoms. She touched a petal. “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.

I patted her hair. “Hey, none of that. I’m okay. I’m not joining Ops.”

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.”

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

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

“I get why you like her now,” 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. “Take care of yourselves. See you on shift.”

I smiled. “See you on shift.”

I went to rejoin Grey. Together we hiked up the cemetery hillside to where she’d parked her newly repaired car. We didn’t get in, just sat on the back and watched everyone gradually disperse, leaving Jenny. She stood alone in her orange and yellow dress, holding one last rose. Finally she left too, clutching her Kleenex. Her pickup drove off. 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,” she repeated. Then, to me, “No forevers.”

“No,” I agreed. “But I’ll give you tomorrow, if you like.”

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

Comments

[pantha]

I will read this properly (again-again-again) asap. However, just leaving this here in the meantime: <3

[lb_lee]

Haha, you must've read four versions of this story by now!

[pantha]

And I've loved every one of them. <3