House of Midas

by Chloe Garner

  Her head rocked back with each chest compression, and there was the sickening, unanticipated sensation of her ribs giving way under his hands. The dummies had a spring in them to simulate the force he needed to apply, but live ribs were like green tree limbs, with strength and flex that would only go so far before they broke. Even understanding that, it was a psychological trial to experience it, to feel that the solid cage of calcium around his best friend’s body was at best a resilient network of porous reeds.

  He pumped blood through her body, counting, preparing for sixty again.

  “Move,” Jesse ordered, shoving Troy out of the way. Troy fell back on his hands and Jesse picked Cassie up by the shoulders, leaning her back down onto his knees and cradling her head. There was a moment where it was a photograph from a familiar, foreign children’s book, in blue light and black shadow, and then Jesse leaned down and put his mouth against Cassie’s.

  Troy watched them in intrigue and horror, fearing that Jesse was giving up, saying goodbye, then Jesse sat straight and took hold of Cassie’s wrist. Troy did the same with the other wrist, and Jesse motioned to a young man nearby.

  “Check him.”

  Troy took a grip on the young man’s wrist to monitor his pulse, but both hearts were still stopped, still inanimate.

  He sat in excruciating suspense, but Jesse didn’t look at him again. He held Cassie’s head still, shifting once to even out her shoulders, and watched her.

  “Come on,” Troy heard the Palta murmur.

  And then there was a beat. Both wrists, simultaneous, and then nothing.

  Troy’s head shot up and he watched Jesse. Jesse still didn’t move, other than a small, slow nod.

  There was another beat.

  Troy looked around the room, realizing the disjointed chaos going on as the non-dancers, a few of the waitresses, the bartender, a few wallflowers, tried to make sense of what was going on. There was denial and fear, the sort of paralyzing inability to react to something of this magnitude. The door opened, spilling long, weak, orange light across the room, and then it fell closed again.

  Another beat.

  “That’s my girl,” Jesse murmured.

  “What’s going on?” Troy asked. Jesse finally looked up.

  “She’s pulling them all back,” he said. “She’s not letting go of them.”

  “Palta can kiss someone back to life?” Troy asked. Jesse shook his head, then looked back down at Cassie.

  “No. The lips are one of the most reactive organs on the body. I just triggered an electrical reset in her brain.”

  “Oh,” Troy said.

  “It’s quite difficult, if it makes you feel better,” Jesse said.

  “Oh,” Troy said again, then sprang to his feet. He scouted through the crowd of bodies for a moment to find Olivia and went to take her hand. Her lips were pale and her arm was pinned under her back. He straightened her out and quietly sat with his fingers gently against the base of her thumb.

  The beats were regular now, if still very slow, and he saw her breathe once. He looked over at Jesse to find the Palta watching him. Jesse nodded and looked away again, and Troy smiled grimly to himself.

  They’d made it.

  Now it was just patience.

  Beat.

  Beat.

  Beat.

  Her chest began to rise and fall with some regularity and Troy’s sense of on-alert began to come back down.

  Olivia’s eyes flickered open and she looked up at him.

  He smiled at her and there were a few moments of easy quiet.

  “What happened?” she asked finally.

  “What do you remember?” he asked.

  Her eyes drifted away as she thought, not uncomfortably, then her head rocked back and forth across his ankles.

  “Music,” she said. “Like a dream.”

  “It’s okay now,” he said.

  “What happened?” she asked again. He considered the answer to that, then noticed feet coming across toward them. He looked up.

  “You’ve got some explaining to do,” Jesse told him. “I expect you’re going to have to get your people involved. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what to tell them.” He paused. “I mean that. It’s completely up to you. Cassie and I need to talk.”

  Troy looked from Cassie to Jesse and back, then thought better of his instinct to argue.

  “Okay,” he said. Jesse nodded once, firmly, then they started away. Around him, people were starting to get up, trying to figure out what had happened.

  “You ready to stand?” Troy asked Olivia. She smiled at him.

  “I’m kind of comfy right here,” she said. He couldn’t help but smile back at her.

  “You’re lying in the middle of the dance floor,” he said. “I bet your shirt sticks.”

  She grimaced at him and lifted her head. He laughed as the slick material of her shirt made a noise like velcro coming up off the wood. He helped her to her feet and she wiped at her pants.

  “What did happen?” she asked. He hesitated.

  Either he was going to have to make something up or he was going to have to come clean completely. He didn’t see any middle ground.

  “Foreign terrestrials,” he said. Her eyebrows shot up and he grinned despite himself.

  “I saw them,” he said. “They were here.”

  “They what?” she asked, shaking her hand. “No. No, no, no. That doesn’t happen here.”

  “It did,” he said. “Unfortunately, they were here to kill you as part of a mass human sacrifice, but… They were here.”

  He felt like bouncing up and down. Aliens. Aliens, aliens, aliens.

  Olivia was looking at him with a certain measure of disbelief.

  Troy had a sudden realization.

  “Whisper is human,” he said.

  “Okay,” Olivia said. Troy was alert, scanning.

  “He was involved.”

  “They could have been paying him,” Olivia offered. Troy glanced down at her quickly with a confused frown, then went back to looking for the DJ.

  “He has to have paperwork,” Olivia said. “An address. We need the OSI. They do this, Troy. We work in a lab.”

  He looked around quickly again, then nodded. There was an Office of Special Investigations field office at the base, specially trained to deal with portal-specific issues, and he had their information in his wallet full-time.

  “Yeah,” he said. “We need names.” She shook her head and stepped away.

  “I’m not an officer,” she said. “I can’t make anyone do anything.” She hesitated. “We need the police.”

  The dancers were quickly recovering and they were going to start leaving unless someone told them to do something else.

  The main door opened again and a group of police officers entered cautiously. Troy checked with Olivia.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. She pushed her hair behind her ear and nodded quickly.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Go do your job.”

  He squeezed her shoulder and went to go talk to the police.

  *********

  Jesse ordered them a pair of coffees and, after a quick read of the waitress and the kind of night she’d been having, a plate of french fries.

  Cassie sat across from him, inscrutable and aware, amused and alert, complex and so very Palta. The game had changed, and he wasn’t the teacher any more.

  She was beautiful, too, changed as a Palta in subtle ways that most humans who weren’t artists or anatomists would have never noticed. Her temples were more defined, her cheekbones higher and set at an elegant curve. It was the kind of shape that made a human look gaunt, and Cassie was carrying less weight because of her naturally slight Palta build, but those types of features were timeless at home.

  He forced himself to focus.

  “I tried to go back,” he said.

  “It isn’t that simple,” she answered. He shook his head.

  “No, I thought not. I should have known you were bac
k. Troy isn’t that good.”

  “No, he isn’t,” she said. “You’ve been distracted.”

  That was a bit stark. He wondered what she had actually figured out.

  “You have to let him go.”

  There was a twitch to the corner of her mouth that might have been anger, amusement, or dismissal. He couldn’t be sure how many of her facial expressions were human and how many were Palta. So hard to separate cultural background from physiology.

  “I think not,” she said.

  “There are important things going on,” Jesse said. “He needs to be able to respond to them.”

  “Then you should probably let him go, too,” she said. He kept his face still. She wasn’t supposed to surprise him this much.

  “I can’t let them know what I am,” he said. She raised an eyebrow at him, pure human irony.

  “You think they don’t know?”

  He stared at her and she nonchalantly picked up a french fry and ate it in four bites.

  “I have good reason,” he said. She shrugged.

  “So do I. When did you make an enemy out of the Dinalae?”

  “They weren’t Dinalae,” he said.

  “I know that music,” she said. He nodded.

  “Much like your own planet, they have multiple races and ethnicities capable of vastly differing outlooks on appropriate treatment of sentient species,” he said. She cursed at him in Gana. More than anything else so far, this surprised him.

  “Don’t condescend to me,” she said. “The geography of the planet does not allow for disparate cultures.”

  She remembered. Well, that made sense.

  “It’s the other pole,” he answered. The Dinalae were in a three-sun system, in a collection of little planets with inconsequential orbits in the middle of the three stars. Most of the planets there had axial tilts that kept them from being hospitable to life, but the planet that the Dinalae and the Burdalae shared had an axis that was perfectly perpendicular to the plane of orbit of the three stars, which left the poles habitable, at perpetual, three-sunned dusk.

  She nodded once, as if it didn’t much matter.

  It didn’t.

  “You figured out how to destroy Mab’s virus,” he observed. She nodded

  “I haven’t been able to replicate it, in case I decide to go back,” she said. She’d been human until maybe a year ago, when Mab had infected her with a virus that had altered her DNA at random, decreasing intervals. She’d been Palta the last time he’d seen her.

  “You didn’t tell him,” Cassie observed.

  “Didn’t think it was the right call,” he answered. She shook her head.

  “You and your secrets.”

  “Where have you been?” he asked. She gave him a knowing smile and turned her head away. He nodded.

  He’d had friends, back home. Close ones, who he spent hours with, relationships that went back decades. But somehow, embedded deep down in Palta nature, along with the highly-distractible thought process and the curiosity, was a secrecy that bordered on pathological. The desire to keep your big ideas under wraps until you’d proven them out completely, and then spring them on the world with fanfare. When he’d tried to go back, weeks later, and hit the wall, he was only partially convinced that something was wrong. It was at least as likely that she’d locked him out herself. That she’d found the switches impressed him, but wasn’t particularly surprising.

  She’d killed Mab, after all.

  “I need you to let go of Troy,” he said finally. “It’s important. Considering tonight, maybe more important than I thought.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she said. “It was good work, tonight. We work well together.”

  “We do,” he said. “I’ve missed you.”

  “You travel at all without me?”

  He shrugged and she grinned.

  He hadn’t, but he didn’t want to tell her that.

  “You were right about the portal technology,” she said after a moment. “It’s just trivially simple, isn’t it? You just define the two spaces to be on top of each other and do the math. The only real hurdle is dealing with the noise on the power supply, here. And us parading around like we’ve solved one of the universe’s great problems.”

  He smiled at her, wondering how far she was into creating a completely autonomous theory of noise prediction. She was a soldier, not a scientist, he reminded himself. That was probably why she hadn’t solved Mab’s virus well enough to turn herself human again. But she was still frighteningly astute, for a human. He wondered how much of that translated into Palta.

  “How are you filling your hours?” she asked after another minute of silence.

  “Mostly annoying people,” he said, mostly truthfully. She smiled.

  “That sounds like you.” There was a hesitation, something that he should have been able to read that flashed behind her eyes, and then it was gone. She sipped her coffee and wrinkled her nose at it. “What is this?”

  “Coffee,” he said.

  “Is not,” she said. “It’s too bitter.”

  He sipped his own, now mostly cooled, and shrugged.

  “It’s coffee,” he said.

  She took his cup and he waited as she wrinkled her nose at that, too. Then he figured it out and laughed.

  “It’s an acquired taste. You’ve lost yours.”

  She gave him an exasperated look.

  “Like hell. I live on coffee.”

  She tried it again and put it down.

  “Apparently not,” he said. She shrugged.

  “Listen,” she said. “I’m not playing your game any more. I’ve got my own game, and it’s got its own rules. And your game isn’t more important than mine, any more. Okay? You need to know that.”

  He listened carefully, looking for clues in the words, but there weren’t any. It was a pure riddle, not intended that he solve it. He nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. He wanted to touch her, just to prove they were both actually there, that they weren’t just two minds. He folded his hands in his lap. “It’s good to see you. To know you’re okay.”

  She was looking at the door with her brisk, Cassie-esque sense of the next thing.

  “Yeah. I would have come earlier, but…”

  And without looking at him again, she breezed past and was gone.

  *********

  The police took IDs and statements. Troy had a private conversation with a detective that ended up with them getting on the phone with the head of the OSI in Kansas. There was too much that Troy knew was confidential for him to be very clear with Detective Baker, but the OSI agent was able to say things with enough authority that Troy left the conversation feeling like the right things were going to happen.

  Whisper left with another detective shortly after that.

  Troy stood with Olivia and watched the young man leave with a sense of quiet sadness.

  “They’re going to make him disappear,” he said.

  “They are,” Olivia agreed.

  “I wanted to talk to him, first,” Troy said. She laughed, leaning her face against his arm.

  “That sounds like you. Troy, I’m tired.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, shifting to put his arm around her and hold her up. “We should go. This will all still be here in the morning.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “I don’t want to pull you away while there’s still stuff you should be doing.”

  “No,” he said, waving his hand at the now-legion police officers taking statements and checking on people. Medics were working from person to person taking vitals and conducting interviews. “They’ve got this under control. Did you get checked out?”

  “They couldn’t find anything wrong with any of us,” Olivia said.

  “You’re sure?” he asked. He was running on too much adrenaline. He wasn’t focusing on the small things like he should have been.

  She’d almost died. They all had.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I just want to go
sleep.”

  He let her lean harder against his shoulder as they walked out. He pulled his ID out for the officer at the door and he and Olivia got checked off the man’s list.

  “Have you found anyone with anything wrong with them?” Troy asked.

  “Sorry, sir. I can’t tell you that, even if I knew,” the officer answered, giving Troy a tired, but not unfriendly, nod. Troy took the hint and they left, walking toward a street where a number of people were trying to get taxis.

  “Am I supposed to monitor you or anything?” Troy asked. Olivia laughed.

  “Is it like a concussion? I don’t know. No one does.”

  “What did the paramedic say?” Troy asked.

  “He checked my pupillary response, he took my pulse, listened to my heart. He asked me what day of the week it was and whether I could feel my fingers and my toes,” Olivia said. “A couple of people went to the hospital for more testing. If they find anything, they’ll call everyone in. But there’s nothing wrong with us,” she said, wiggling her fingers at him. “I feel fine.”

  “Just tired,” Troy said. She shrugged, leaning her face against him again.

  “You said my heart stopped,” she said. “That it stopped for a while.”

  The idea left him a little cold.

  “Yes.”

  “And that Cassie brought us all back.”

  “Somehow,” he agreed.

  “I’m tired, Troy,” she said. “But I’m okay. They wouldn’t have just left if there was going to be a problem later.”

  “But you feel normal,” he said. She nodded. “And you’ll tell me if you don’t.” She hugged him.

  “Of course.”

  “Stay with me tonight,” he said. It was impulsive, but if he didn’t say it he was going to regret it all night.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I mean it,” he said, turning to face her. She was close, and he could smell her pure scent on her skin, healthy and clean from dancing, the kind of smell everyone was always trying to wash off, but that only made him want to hold her there forever. “I mean it,” he said again. “I need to know you’re okay. You died tonight. Cassie brought you back, but your heart stopped.”