by Chloe Garner
“That was jump school,” he said.
“You were there with Cassie?” she asked. Cassie was dead, he reminded himself, trying to control what was on his face. “I’m sorry,” she followed quickly.
“It’s okay,” he said quietly. “I was there with Cassie. She was a prodigy. The best there was.”
“But they kicked her at twenty-six.”
He shrugged with a quick nod.
“That’s how it is. You know it was well as I do. That she made it to twenty-six was… really good.”
Women aged out earlier than men did. Men might make it to twenty-nine or thirty.
“It’s not fair,” Olivia said. He laughed.
“It’s not supposed to be fair. They’re keeping the people that they think are absolutely the best in the program. Everyone else…”
“But she was the best,” Olivia said. “They aged her out about two years after I started. I saw her work. She was the best.”
He felt conflicted, talking about her. The woman she had been, the woman she had become, the woman who had shown up at his apartment days ago. As he sat, on an accidental date with a lovely, smart woman who was asking perfectly innocent questions. His mind flashed back to skin on skin, the sound of gasping breath, and he felt his head snap to the side.
“What is it?” Olivia asked. “I’m sorry. You aren’t ready to talk about her yet.”
His palms were sweaty. He had to get himself under control.
“She got to do it,” he said, his voice husky, hoarse. He swallowed hard, then took a drink of water. “She got to do it, and she loved it. She never regretted it.”
Olivia was watching him hard and he faked a smile.
“Go ahead,” he said. “I’m okay.”
“Jesse,” she said.
He found himself back on stable ground, and he laughed.
“What about him?”
She shook her shoulders with distaste.
“How can you stand him?”
He laughed louder.
“Jesse is the best,” he said, taking another drink. “You just don’t know him.”
“He’s a jerk to everyone,” she said. “And you sit with him at lunch every single day… I don’t know how you put up with him.”
Troy realized that Olivia was too passive for Jesse to be anything other than patronizing to her. He bit his lips, holding on to a smile, then shook his head.
“He’s bored and he’s frustrated, and he misses Cassie. But he’s been good to us. He always comes through when you need him to.”
She shook her head.
“I don’t see it.”
He shrugged.
“He’s exhausting, but he’s worth it.”
“Agree to disagree,” she said. He grinned.
“So what do you do for fun, when you aren’t going to Wichita for bracelets?”
“Or playing with my cat?” she asked with a laugh. “Well…”
*********
They talked for two hours, until the waitress started giving them dark looks when Olivia asked for another refill on her Coke. The town was the kind of place that shut down after curfew, but Troy knew a diner that had live music and desserts until midnight, so they went there. They talked about work, they talked about the portal and the worlds on the other side of it, they talked about life. Olivia had an acerbic wit when it came to politics, and strong opinions about the way professional sports were managed.
“They’re basically holding the kids hostage, with their rules,” she argued.
“Maybe they need more time,” Troy answered. She shook her head, her hands in the air.
“These guys may not have but six or seven years in an entire career. And they’re stealing it for alumni donations and big stadiums.”
“So how young should they be allowed to play?” Troy asked. “Middle school?”
“If they would make it in middle school, they certainly shouldn’t be playing with other middle schoolers,” Olivia said. He couldn’t argue that she was wrong. She pointed at him.
“Olympians train so hard that they peak at fifteen. If we are going to continue allow children to compete harder and harder for a limited number of slots, we have to understand that they need to be able to start real, paying careers earlier in life.”
“So, you’re saying that we should limit how hard people train, so that they aren’t ready until they’re older?” Troy teased.
“You know I’m not,” she said, taking a bite of cake and chewing on it as she waggled the fork at him. “I’m saying that the world is a competitive place, and that people aren’t going to last forever at the top of their games.”
“Like jumpers,” Troy said impulsively. She put her hand across her mouth, startled, then she frowned.
“Shut up,” she said. He laughed. She laughed. The band changed out, coming to sit at tables next to them as a single woman went to take the small stage with her guitar.
It was deep dark out, and everyone else had gone home or hit the bars.
He knew he should finish his coffee and say goodnight. She wasn’t the kind of girl who was going to come home with him. And even if she were, that would break beyond recognition several rules he cared about. Bending them for one night was one thing.
That was something else.
And yet, he couldn’t say goodbye.
He couldn’t make the shift away from the table to signify that he was ready to go, to take the breath that broke the spell and made one of them say…
“Well…” she said. He swallowed. She sighed. “This was fun.”
“Yeah,” he said.
She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it, looking down to push crumbs around on her napkin. He waited.
“I’m going to start looking at other labs this weekend,” she said. “I’m going to put in an application Monday.”
He wanted to tell her not to. That it was a bad idea, that she was going to damage her career by taking a step back, out of the most prestigious lab on the base, doing the most important, sensitive work arguably in the whole country, just to see if they wanted to try a relationship.
He wanted to tell her that that wasn’t how he worked. That he’d never had a girlfriend. Not like a grown woman like Olivia would define it. That he had no idea how to do it, and that he didn’t want her to risk her future on him figuring it out on the first try.
He wanted to tell her that he was in love with someone else, someone who confused him and ignored him and who had slept with him for the very first time mere days ago, and who had left him with no warning and no indication of when she would be back.
He wanted to tell her that good girls didn’t belong with bad guys like him.
He said, instead, “Okay.”
She smiled, pulling her keys out of her pocket and clasping them in her palm.
“I’ll see you on Monday?”
He stared at the table, then looked at her happy face, feeling like he was betraying something innocent.
“Yeah.”
She nodded, then made a motion toward the band, who waved back, thanking her for coming out, and then she was gone.
Troy waited another minute, then put cash on the table for the waitress and left.
*********
Olivia’s request for transfer was on his desk Monday morning. She’d found a technical leader position in the botany lab that was a step forward for her, and if Friday hadn’t happened, he would have enthusiastically endorsed her for it. It was a good fit, and it meant that he might be able to lure her back as a team leader in a couple of years, when she had the leadership experience to justify the budget, personnel, and project responsibility.
As things stood, though, he felt selfish and underhanded, filling out his comments and signing her form before forwarding it up through the chain of command.
A few minutes before lunch, Olivia came and knelt next to his desk, putting the object from Friday afternoon down in front of him. It was in a blast-proof glass box.
He tipped his head to look at it.
“That bad?”
She nodded.
“X-rays.”
She put the prints on his desk and he compared the outline to the object.
“Any idea what these are?” he asked, pointing to dark regions inside of it, four of them, roughly spherical and at an odd spacing.
“They’re doing the math,” Olivia said. “First guess is a heavy metal of some kind.”
He nodded.
“Get the reports on physiology and go through them really carefully. We need more data on how one of the Canni would use this.”
“You’ve got it.”
“I sent your request on,” he said, trying to keep all meaning out of his voice. He knew he sounded flat, but it was better than anything else he could think of. Her eyebrows went up.
“Oh, good,” she said. “Thank you.”
“You know the drill,” he went on. “It will be at least a couple of weeks before I hear anything back, but I’ll let you know as soon as I do.”
“Okay,” she said. She gave him a sly smile and he wished he could keep her from saying whatever she was going to say next. “I’ve got my eye on the new head of artifacts and commercial testing.”
He laughed, surprised.
“I see,” he said. It was the position that he would have thought her best fit for, as her next promotion. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
She nodded emphatically.
“If it comes open, I want you to tell me.”
“You’ll be the first to know.”
She winked at him and picked up the object carefully, coming back for her notes a minute later. He looked up to find Jesse watching Olivia from the doorway.
“Why is it in that box?” Jesse asked.
“What?” Troy answered. Olivia was surprised to find Jesse addressing her.
“What?” she echoed. Jesse shook his head and walked into the room, picking up the box with rather less care than Olivia had used carrying it.
“This…” he looked at Olivia. “You think it’s a bomb?”
“We take precautions,” she said.
He laughed once, then looked at the box again and tipped his head back laughing. He tossed it back on her desk.
“It’s a toy.”
“What?” Troy asked, standing. “You know this artifact?”
Jesse snorted.
“Artifact. It’s a children’s plaything. Probably got mixed up in someone’s bag of tools, for your jumpers to think it was important.” He shook his head, kneeling next to Olivia’s desk now. “Probably the most valuable find you’ve ever had, though. They never would have let you have it on purpose.”
“What is it?” Troy asked. Jesse picked up the box and one of the sides slid away in his hand. Troy frowned. It wasn’t supposed to do that. Jesse reached into it and pulled out the hand-sized device, smiling at it.
“I didn’t have one. My parents thought it was below us. I always wanted one, though. Some of the kids made them look so cool.”
“Getting impatient,” Troy said. Jesse looked at him like he was spoiling his fun, then shrugged.
“Fine. Throw it to me.”
He handed the device to Troy and Olivia took a step back. Troy found that there were various grips he could use to hold it, and all of them were interesting. In the end, he tossed it underhanded to Jesse.
Nothing happened.
Jesse threw his head back in exasperation.
“No imagination at all.”
He held the small object on a point, like a throwing star, and with a quick snap of his wrist, threw it toward the wall. Troy watched, at first in disbelief, and then in open amazement as it flew in a pattern, twisting and turning, banking on nothing at all, missing walls, lights, desks, and doors, in a complex but ultimately predictable formation that repeated itself at angles until it made it to Troy.
He caught it, but only at the last moment, when he remembered that was what he was supposed to do.
As it stopped spinning, it fell inert, but in the final instant, as he had caught it, he had felt the force within it as it tried to push itself through the next iteration of its pattern.
He stared.
“How did it do that?” he asked, holding it out in front of himself toward Jesse. Jesse waited, and after a pause, Troy tried it, throwing it like a frisbee toward Jesse. It took a hard bank almost straight up and hit the ceiling with force, then fell to the ground like a wounded bird. Jesse picked it up and tossed it back onto Olivia’s desk with a subtle flair.
“You will never understand the technology in that toy,” Jesse said flatly. “I’m sorry, it’s the truth. Not in this generation of technology or the next will you even produce someone capable of understanding how it works.”
“But…” Olivia said. “It’s just a toy.”
Jesse nodded.
“A cheap one, too,” he said. “And yet, if you could replicate what it does, it would be the greatest breakthrough this lab ever made.”
He looked at it now with a kind of sadness.
“It’s a kind of innocence, a tinglo. Something with nothing powering it but your imagination.” He looked at Troy. “I should tell you to destroy it. But you won’t, so I won’t. But that’s a wall, right there. Don’t hurt yourself running into it too hard.”
Troy looked hard at the toy on Olivia’s desk, noting that she had snatched a notepad and was writing frantically on it.
He could hear what Jesse was saying. Selling this idea at its true potential was just going to create an ever-increasing need for him to solve the puzzle that was there, and he trusted Jesse to know when Troy was out of his league.
But he couldn’t tell Olivia to ignore it.
“Intriguing as that may be, Jalnian,” he finally said, “we really can’t take your word on it, can we?” He motioned to Olivia, who paused, turning to face him. “You should continue to be cautious with that, just in case Jesse is not well-informed, and we will draw our own conclusions about it.”
She hesitated.
“You think he’s lying?”
“I think he has a miraculous ability to make you hear something entirely different from what he said,” Troy said. “I don’t think he’s really going to be much help, here.”
She looked confused, but she sat back down and put the device back into the box, frowning from it to Jesse to Troy, then moving to try to reattach the missing side to the box.
“I’m burning my lunch break,” Jesse said.
“You want to get something off base?” Troy asked. Jesse grinned.
“I’d love to have you as an excuse for being late,” he said brightly.
“For once,” Olivia muttered, turning the box over carefully. The last side wasn’t ever going to reattach, Troy could tell from where he stood - not without Jesse doing it - but he didn’t want to humiliate her by pointing it out.
“I’ll be back a bit late,” he said and Olivia waved him off. In the hallway, Jesse snorted.
“So that’s why you’ve been so distracted,” he said.
“What?” Troy asked, but interrupted himself. He didn’t want to listen to Jesse crow about how much he’d figured out about what was going on between Troy and Olivia. “What’s your excuse?”
“Oh, you’re going to suddenly show some potential, yourself,” Jesse laughed.
“What does that mean?” Troy asked, getting his keys out of his pocket to play with them as they walked toward the parking lot.
“I have been distracted,” Jesse said. “And I’ve been missing a lot, it would seem. How long has it been going on?”
Troy shook his head.
“I don’t want to talk to you about it.”
“You don’t want to talk to me, or you don’t want to talk to me here?”
“Shut up.”
Jesse laughed, and Troy suddenly realized something.
“What’s gotten into you? You haven’t been this cheerful…” He had to stop there to avoid brushing up agai
nst things he really didn’t want to talk about. Jesse sighed.
“I don’t know. Something about seeing a tinglo. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about things the way I did, back when I wanted one.”
“What is it?” Troy asked. Jesse sighed.
“If you still have to ask that…”
“No, I get that it’s a thing,” Troy said. “But what is it?”
Jesse screwed one eye up and faced him, walking sideways
“You know, I’m the champ of making sense of things that don’t make any sense, but that literally said nothing.”
“Nothing can do that,” Troy said, mind spinning as he reviewed what the tiny object had done, whirling around the lab overhead. “Nothing. It has to have an energy source, but I know Olivia would have scanned for that first thing.”
“It had an energy source,” Jesse said, as though explaining high school physics to a college graduate.
“What was it?” Troy asked.
“My hand,” Jesse said, even more incredulous. “I had a higher estimate of you ten minutes ago.”
Troy opened his mouth and closed it. Kinetic energy to potential energy. Magnetic energy? Where did it get the energy to turn, to go up? What were the forces acting on it?
And that pattern.
“You aren’t going to tell me, are you?” he finally asked. Jesse shrugged.
“I already told you that.”
“This is me,” Troy tried, knowing better. Jesse scoffed.
“Said just another ant.”
“Would you have explained it to Cassie?” Troy asked.
“What about her?” Jesse asked, stopping short.
“Nothing,” Troy said. “I’m just frustrated. You never tell me anything.”
Jesse was still looking at him strangely, and Troy worried that he had given something away.
“I don’t know,” Jesse said.
“What?” Troy asked. Jesse was still paused, looking away.
“I don’t know if I would have told her. I don’t know what I would have told her. I don’t know what I should have told her.”
“What’s going on?” Troy asked. Jesse was gone for a beat, then he shook his head and started walking again.
“You’re buying me lunch for saving you a lot of embarrassment with the tinglo, and then I’m going back to work in the salt mines.”
