by Watts Martin
The squirrel clears her throat.
“I guess we’ll meet in the lounge.”
She nods. “I’ll let her know.”
“No need,” a voice calls from the opposite direction of the lounge, from the front entrance. “She’s here.”
Chapter 12
Even if you don’t count the ears, Sky stands taller than Agent Squarejaw by several centimeters. Her casual but conservative outfit—dark green buttoned shirt, matching slacks, gray jacket—isn’t at all the colorful look Gail remembers her favoring. Her own style of shorts (usually black), halter (usually black) and open shirt (usually loud) hasn’t changed much since her early twenties.
The wolf woman smiles as they approach, ears forward, no teeth showing. “You must be Agent Thomas.” She clasps his offered hand in both of hers. “Bright Sky.”
“Pleased to meet you. You can call me Jack.” Gail picks up on the slight hesitation as he works through the wolf’s speech; her canid “accent” is stronger than Ansel’s.
She nods. Then she’s got the fox’s hand in hers before he offers it. “And it’s good to meet you in person finally, Ansel.”
While he’s not quite staring up open-mouthed, he’s clearly been struck with temporary loss of suave. “Uh. Thanks. Yes.” That’s close to the look he gets when he thinks someone’s extraordinarily attractive, but she doesn’t think he’s bi. This may be an oh God please don’t eat me look.
Then Sky turns to her. Gail starts to raise her hand but she doesn’t get it all the way up before the wolf pulls her into a crushingly tight hug. “It’s been far too long since I’ve been able to do this.”
Gail puts her arms around the wolf, then squirms. “Jesus, you’re going to break my ribs.” At least part of the wheeze is genuine.
Sky doesn’t let go for another few seconds. When she does, she looks down at their bags. “We should go to your room. Where is it?”
Ansel points. “Nineteen, just down that way.”
She nods and strides in that direction, motioning for them to follow. Maybe ninety seconds at most and she’s already in charge of everyone. Naturally.
When Agent Thomas drops in behind Sky, Ansel right after both of them, Gail briefly toys with the notion of heading for the lounge instead. By the time they notice she might already have a drink in hand. Sigh. No. Be good.
The door unlocks at Squarejaw’s touch, but like the main entrance, they have to push it open manually. She doesn’t remember this being a standard around the city; maybe doing more work holds some kind of high-end appeal. Maybe she’s supposed to be employing someone who opens doors for her.
Straight across the room, a floor-to-ceiling window looks out across the river. It’s the best view yet of the green hills rising up toward the north wall. God, she’s forgotten so much about the landscape. After a few seconds of staring, the furnishings filter in: two sofas, electric “fireplace,” work desk, kitchenette. Openings on either side must lead to the bedrooms. The hardwood floor’s covered with a protective layer like the port’s, but thicker, with more give. Nearly as warm as carpet, too.
Gail drops onto one of the sofas. Both have a good ten centimeters between the lower cushions and the back, letting Ansel’s bushy tail pass through easily as he sits at the other end. Squarejaw heads toward the other couch, settling beside Sky.
“So.” The wolf’s eyes settle on Gail. She has a way of looking directly at you without blinking for what seems like hour-long stretches, like a real wolf tracking prey. Growing up, Gail thought that must be part of the lupine transformation, subtly encoded in genetics, but she’s never met another wolf totemic who had quite the same knack. “What have you learned since we last talked?”
She fidgets, then launches into a brief recap. Keces and Quanta both want the databox. The data on it might be from either company or a mix of both. What’s on it probably involves totemics, and they’ve found two code names, so two projects.
Sky remains silent until Gail gets to the part about leaving for the Ring. Then she looks at Thomas. “Do you have any idea who the leak in the PFS may be?”
“I’m not positive there’s a leak.”
“If you weren’t positive, you wouldn’t be here.”
“I’m just taking precautions.”
Gail snorts. “Pirates, Jack? About eight hours ago?”
Sky’s eyes widen. “You were attacked by pirates?”
“I hadn’t gotten to that part yet. Yeah, someone came after us on the way here, and only the people Agent Thomas has been working with knew our destination.”
“Anyone monitoring Port Panorica departures would, too,” he says.
Sky takes a slow breath, looking out the window. “And Randall Corbett’s involved, and is the reason you’re involved.”
“That’s about the course of it.”
Squarejaw steps in. “We still haven’t found how Mr. Corbett’s connected, though.” He and Ansel take over the narrative.
Sky lids her eyes, falling silent several seconds, then looks at Ansel, wolf gaze on full power. He shifts like the couch has suddenly grown spikes. “You said Randall worked with a charity. Have you looked into them yet?”
“Uh, Lantern. The Lantern Foundation. No.”
“Then I suggest you start now.” The gaze of skewering shifts to Squarejaw. “And begin forensic work on the databox.”
“That was my plan. Mr. Santara and Ms. Simmons were also trying to draw a connection between the wreck she found and Quanta or Lantern.”
Sky looks back to Ansel. Gail finds it weirdly relieving to watch both of them get as nonplussed as she does—it’s not just the family relation. “Can you perform both analyses concurrently?”
His ears fold down. “Maybe. I mean, yes for the data reduction tasks, but there’s a lot of work that’s manual, and I have to do it serially.”
“What can I provide that will help you?”
“If there’s somewhere I have at least tier two data access, I have nearly everything I’d have at home. If you’re stuck on tier three I can probably muddle through.”
“All of the Ring is tier one.” Sky’s voice remains level.
“Oh. Well, uh, if you have local calculation engines you can make available that I can allocate securely, that would speed things up.”
“Done. What else?”
“They need to be isolated, so nothing can get off the box into publicly accessible dataspace.”
“Of course.”
“Of course,” he repeats, then sighs. “I can’t think of anything besides that. Thanks.”
The gaze shifts back to Squarejaw. “And is there anything I can provide for you?”
“I don’t think there’s anything else you should provide to me, since the Ring Judicial Cooperative isn’t officially involved.”
Sky clears her throat, a bass rumble very easy to mistake for a canine warning growl. “Your work is being done in our city, at my invitation, to provide cover for you and legal assistance for Gail. We’re not officially participating, but I’d say we’re officially involved, wouldn’t you?”
His brows try to vault off his forehead. Gail doesn’t get much of a chance to smirk before Sky’s looking back at her, though. “Are you planning to stay here, at the inn?”
“Yeah. I figured that was easiest.”
“You know I have space.”
“I know you could make space, sure, but…” She waves around. “I don’t want to put you out. And I mean, Interpol’s already paying for this, right? I don’t want to make them waste it.”
Sky’s ears lower a fraction and she looks away. “No. Of course not.” The hesitant softness in her voice startles Gail. That’s not the woman who was just here a second ago, not the one she grew up with. Is it?
“Hey, we’ll still get a chance to catch up.” Come on, the distance isn’t new. It shouldn’t surprise her, dammit.
Sky nods, and takes a deep breath. “Would you come home with me tonight, at least? We can talk over dinner
. It’s been a very long time since we were together.”
Crap. Gail glances furtively to both Ansel and Thomas; they’re both making a point of looking somewhere else. Not that they’d be able to give her an excuse to say no. If she doesn’t want to, she should just say that on her own, anyway. Sky will understand. Probably.
“I…uh.” She runs a hand through her hair. Oh, come on, get the words out.
Sky stands. “It doesn’t have to be tonight. Or any night, I know. But the offer’s open as long as you’re here.” She starts to turn away.
“Yes,” she blurts.
Sky’s ears lift and she turns around again. Her tail starts wagging. Gail smiles weakly. She says something to Ansel and Squarejaw as she follows the wolf out of the room, they say something back. She hopes her once and future big sister is willing to call a tram, because right now she’s feeling kind of faint.
“Thank you.”
Gail looks over at Sky. Naturally, the wolf had walked here, but she’d consented to summoning a two-person standing scooter to ride back into town, following a paved road rather than the wooded trail. After they’d gotten underway, neither of them had spoken. Until just now. “For what?”
“Coming along. I know you didn’t want to.”
“It’s not that I didn’t want to.” Isn’t it exactly that, though? No, it’s not that simple, yet she doesn’t have an answer to—
“Then what was it?”
—the obvious next question. “It’s…it’s complicated, Sky. Everything’s complicated. I wouldn’t even be back here if I wasn’t in trouble.”
“I know. I just don’t understand why that’s the only reason you’d come back.”
“Because this isn’t my home anymore.”
Sky turns to look at her, but doesn’t say anything. The scooter’s reached the edge of the city proper, meadow transitioning abruptly to a neighborhood of densely packed freestanding homes.
“Look. I…” I don’t see what’s hard to understand here. I left. I left a long time ago. I left that little apartment and I left this city full of people who don’t see why anyone would ever possibly want to live anywhere else and I left everyone who didn’t see me when they looked at me but only saw a symbol, a child of a martyr, some kind of holy rodent for them to rally around. The here and now is tough enough to navigate as it is without lashing myself to someone else’s cause. “I left.”
As the wolf’s gaze lingers on her, it’s less piercing than searching. “I understand you think of Kismet as your home now. I just want you to understand this is also your home.”
No, it isn’t, and also that’s insipid. “Yeah.”
Sky’s ears flick and she turns away again, hands tightening over the scooter’s rails.
The vehicle turns left down another street, and the standalone homes give way to row houses, three stories high. It’s neither the neighborhood she grew up in nor the one she last lived in. She knows Sky’s lived somewhere new for years, long enough that it’s not new. But she’s never seen the outside, just a few shared pictures of the living room and kitchen. Isn’t it bigger than these places? Isn’t it a full house like mom’s? Maybe they’re just passing through.
No, they’re not. The scooter glides to a stop and Sky steps off. Gail follows; the scooter chimes and rolls away to find its next passenger. The wolf heads toward a staircase alcove.
At the top floor—of course—she walks down a shadowed hallway and faces the second door on the right. When it slides open the way a door’s supposed to, Gail can’t stop herself from commenting on it. “I was starting to wonder if New Coyoacán had banned normal locks.”
Lights switch on as Sky steps in. “I hope that’s a joke. Take off your sandals by the door.”
“Yeah, just a joke.” Slipping off her sandals, she starts to set them down on the carpet’s edge, then sees the wooden rack for them, Sky’s bigger sandals already lined up just so. The wolf always went barepawed growing up—she’d said she hated the feel of even the lightest footwear. Maybe walking back and forth to work finally convinced her otherwise, although Gail’s not sure how much of an office job being an RJC mediator is.
The place is big after all. The living/dining space has to be twenty-four or twenty-five square meters, at least a third more than the old place. How large was her family home? It seemed huge when she was nine or ten but she’d assumed that was just the child’s-eye view. It wasn’t as big as the homes she’s seen from the outside today, but this flat is bigger than Ansel’s.
After tossing her sandals on the rack, she crosses the carpet and perches on the sofa. It faces a long coffee table, looking toward the kitchen; when she twists around, the wall behind her is a sliding glass door opening onto a garden. Maybe that’s where the flower arrangement on the coffee table is from. Non-flowering plants sit at the room’s corners. “This is a nice place.”
“Thank you.” Sky heads toward the kitchen. “Do you still like ginger apple?”
She can’t stop a surprised laugh. “I haven’t had it for years. Uh, sure, thanks.”
Nodding, the wolf touches the beverage dispenser’s control panel. “Two ginger apple sodas.”
Sodas? Right. Sodas. God, it’s like being fifteen again.
The machine clunks and whirrs and hisses, quickly printing two clear glasses, filling them with ice and bubbly gold liquid. Sky brings them over, setting them down on the coffee table, then sits down in a chair at one end of the couch instead of by Gail, like she’s worried the rat will bite her.
“So. My job and your ship.”
Gail pauses as she reaches for the glass, looking up.
“You said I was married to my job and you were married to your ship. I’ve been thinking about that.” Sky picks up her own glass, with the wider brim that dips down to a spout-like point on one side, and takes a careful sip. It’s more like dripping it into her long muzzle.
“Sorry.” She suppresses a sigh. “I was kinda angry.”
“You were also right.” Sky laughs, but there’s melancholy rather than humor behind it. “I didn’t even know if I’d stay in New Coyoacán after I grew up.”
“Really? I couldn’t imagine you anywhere else.”
“I’d already moved to Lariat before the bombing.”
“But you were just there setting up the RTEA office. You weren’t going to live there, were you?”
“No. I thought I’d be doing that for other offices, leading protests, following in Judith’s footsteps. Then at some point the battle would be over and we’d all be equal, and I’d settle down somewhere and start a family.” She laughs, then furrows her brow, looking into her glass. “Then I came back here.”
She came back to settle Judith’s affairs, and found herself becoming mother to her adopted sister, even though they were barely six years apart. Gail was too young to fully understand what Sky was giving up—and hell, Sky was too young to understand it then, either. She finally takes a sip of the drink. Yes, she still likes ginger apple soda, even if right now a splash of rum would make a great addition. “I think you’re doing pretty well.” God, that sounds forced.
“I am. Thank you. I—I still wish you were doing better.”
She tries to summon a reassuring smile. “Normally I’m doing pretty well, too.”
“Are you? You’re always lurching from crisis to crisis. Don’t your docking and fuel costs add up to more than you’d pay in rent?”
“Depends on where I dock. But look, there are years I’ve made more than you.” That’s a guess; she doesn’t know what Sky’s income is, but she’s paid by Ring Services, the nonprofit group that Ansel would point to as the State By Another Name when he got halfway through his third Electric Lemon Sour. She also knows the rest of this conversation with Sky, word for word. I just wish you’d find a way to be more stable.
“I just wish you’d find a way to be more—more stable.”
This is the next branch point in the conversation tree. Touch here for So you want me to sell my
ship?, here for This is what I love doing. Don’t you want me to be happy?, or here for I’d like it to be more stable, too, but what do you expect me to do?
Or she can short-circuit the script. “Maybe not everyone’s meant for a stable life. I’ve seen a lot more of the River than you have now, Sky, and I’m not even sure stability’s the norm. I think I know exactly one person who’s been in the same job for more than five years and isn’t working for themselves: you. Maybe two if I count Agent Squarejaw.”
Sky laughs. “Don’t call him that.”
“Come on, the man has the squarest jaw in the solar system.”
The wolf shakes her head, taking another pour-sip of her drink and grinning. “But here you’d have the living allowance. Is New Coyoacán really that unbearable?”
“No, it isn’t.” She never got that allowance, but Sky had, and it made the difference between eating into the inheritance and insurance money and conserving it. It’s what allowed her to have enough money to buy Kismet, over Sky’s objections that it would leave her essentially broke. “It’s just…” Just what?
Sky looks at her expectantly.
“I know you’re happy being in one place with one job, but I don’t know if I ever could be. You know that about me. And I can think of a few people who’ve destroyed their lives trying to find stability. Hell, that’s what Dad did, right? He couldn’t stand the uncertainty of living with an activist, fled back to the inner system, and spent the rest of his life drifting miserably. I’m drifting happily. I think I’m doing it right.”
Sky’s gaze grows unfocused, like she’s looking at a point somewhere very far off the Ring. “You’re right. Life isn’t stable. But you know I can’t help but worry about you.” The focus returns. “We’re the only family both of us have.”
Yes, that’s true. That’s the whole damn problem: they are family. If they’d met under other circumstances, met later in life, they’d have been easy friends. It’s not nearly as easy when you know one another this well. “I know. I worry about me, too.” She smiles. “But I’ve made it this far.”
