by Hilari Bell
That made up his mind, and he turned the motor off and came back out into the sunlight where she waited.
“Follow me.” He led her around the house and up the steps to the deck. Even an alien-shapeshifter-hypnotist had to stop a moment to take in the view.
“It’s gorgeous at night too,” Jase told her, as she gazed out over the basin that held the city. “The lights spread out like a . . . a glowing carpet.”
That hadn’t come out as beautiful as it was, but he couldn’t think of a better way to say it. He sat down on one of the shaded benches and waited for her.
“I saw it last night,” she said. “It looks even bigger then. And for its size, it’s astonishingly clean. For most of your history, a city half that size would have been a cesspool. Or a toxic furnace.”
She sounded as if she’d seen those cities herself, and Jase’s skin prickled.
“You’re not, like, immortal or something. Are you?”
“No.” She smiled at that and came to sit beside him. “I can die. Beyond that, it gets complicated. But I wanted to explain, now that you’ve had some time to adjust to the idea, why healing the leys matters so much. To both your world and mine.”
She didn’t look like an alien, smiling at him from the other side of the bench.
“Do you really come from another world?” Jase held her gaze steadily as he spoke. Though if she was an alien, would he be able to tell if she was lying?
“Yes.”
“What’s it like?”
She sighed. “In some ways much like this one, in others utterly different. But what I said about the leys being vital to its survival, that was true. And they’re vital to your survival too! If they’re not healed, that tree plague your terrorists started won’t stop spreading. And you know what will happen then.”
“They’re not my terrorists,” said Jase. “And no one knows for certain what the tree plague will do. We’ve survived ecological disasters before.”
Raven’s brows snapped together. “Those disasters are a large part of what damaged the leys so badly in the first place! How can you be so . . .”
She took a deep breath and brought the smile back. “I’m sorry. You modern humans were trying to mend the damage, before this plague got loose. That’s the exact point I keep trying to make to the others.”
“Others?” Jase asked. “Those enemies you were talking about?”
For an alien, she had a really nice smile.
“Some of them. One of the ways our world is like yours is that we have politics too,” Raven said ruefully. “Not elections or that kind of thing, but . . .”
“People politics,” Jase helped her out.
“Exactly. And that’s why it’s so important for you to heal the leys.”
“So heal them,” said Jase. “I won’t stop you. If you have enough magic, or whatever, to change shape, you’ve got to be able to heal stuff better than I can.”
There, that got him out of it. It was true, too.
“Unfortunately,” said Raven, with another of those warm smiles, “that’s where the problems come in. You need to understand, the others’ point of view is that humans have been poisoning these leys, on which our world depends, for centuries. In the last few centuries it was acute, and we were forced to expend our own power like crazy just to make up for some of what you were doing. And our power isn’t infinite, any more than yours is. The power we spent cleaning up after you could have gone to serve other needs, and the higher the price of the cleanup went, the angrier everyone got about humans and your world. Then it got better, for a short time, but this tree plague was the last straw. A lot of my people really want to see humans destroy themselves, even if it means weakening the leys still further. They say it’s so you can’t keep doing it, over and over forever. But really, it’s anger over the past as well. Some of them feel very strongly on the subject.”
Jase shivered. A bunch of powerful aliens, hating all humanity, had never turned out well in any d-vid he’d seen.
Raven moved to sit closer, sharing her warmth as she looked at the bustling city. Ships moved smoothly in and out of the harbor, and Jase could see traffic on the highway.
“But you said you were here to heal the leys,” he protested.
“No, I’ve been given permission to help humans heal them. Using your own power, for my people have refused to spend even a spark of ley power for this. Or to let me use it, either! If I so much as touch the leys, they’ll shut me down. The only good news is that the others aren’t allowed to use ley power to stop us. If we started draining the leys to fight each other, that might cause the very collapse I’m here to prevent.”
Her hip pressed against his. It was cool in the shade. Jase, ever so casually, put his arm around her shoulders. He knew he should be concentrating on these alien power struggles, but leys and politics were beginning to seem kind of . . . abstract.
“But I’ve seen you change shape,” he said. “If you can use power to do that, why not use it to heal, or whatever?”
She hadn’t pulled away from his arm. That was good.
“Oh, I can use my own energy, the energy all life possesses. I just can’t tap into the ley. But if you’ll let me, I can teach you to do it! And if humans can heal just this one ley, from the upwelling to the terminal node, then they’ll have to concede that I’ve proved my point, that humans can clean up the mess they’ve made. And they’ll leave me in peace to get it done! Humans can fix this, I know they can! If I’m only allowed to show them how.”
Her eyes shone with enthusiasm.
“But I don’t have any magic,” Jase said. “I mean, I’d like to help, but you’ve picked the wrong guy. You want a shaman, like my grandfather.”
He didn’t want her to want anyone else. Her soft body snuggled against him, and his arm tightened on her shoulders.
“But the medicine pouch came to you,” Raven murmured. She was so close that her breath warmed his lips. “You can help me. I know you can. If you want to.”
Jase wanted to. He wanted to do anything she wanted, starting with the kiss she so clearly . . . wanted. But did she want to kiss him because she wanted to? Or because she wanted him to heal the leys?
He pulled back and gazed down at her face. Her lips were half parted in invitation, but the flickering glance from under her lashes held more calculation than romance.
“You’re trying to seduce me.”
He was almost too surprised to feel outrage. No one had ever tried to seduce him before. It had all gone the other way. If his awkward attempts to interest girls could even be called seduction.
“You’re trying to use . . . use . . . to manipulate me into doing what you want!”
He shrugged out of her arms and stood, staring down at her. Outrage was arriving, right on schedule. Anger came with it.
“I need you to like me,” Raven pointed out, with a calm that struck him as utterly alien. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t push you so fast, but my enemies are trying to find you too. And once they do, we’re out of time. This is something most humans respond well to, so I thought I’d give it a—”
“Most humans? You’ve done this before?”
He should have remembered that this was the girl who’d melted in front of his eyes.
“No, don’t answer that. I don’t care how many men you’ve seduced. You’re not getting me that way!”
He turned and stomped into the house, slamming the door behind him. He knew the doors were locked; unless the door was opened from the inside, the security program would admit only someone who carried the coded pass card. But he checked them anyway, fuming.
He’d made up his mind that he’d have nothing to do with her crazy story, and she’d had him within inches of promising to do whatever she wanted. Like a damn dog, begging for a treat! Well, humans weren’t pets, whatever she might think. He almost hoped she’d come back and try again, so he could tell her that.
Right before he told her to go to hell!
Chapter 5
In school on Monday Jase looked for Raven, hoping for a chance to say some of the things he’d been rehearsing, but she wasn’t there. That night he dreamed that something was searching for him, hunting him. He didn’t know what it was, but it frightened him and he hid—even though next morning he couldn’t say what “it” had been, or where he’d hidden.
On Tuesday, Jase was so busy trying not to think about Raven that he caught a reprimand from his algebra teacher, and had to stay after school to watch a vid of the lesson. “Since you clearly aren’t paying attention to it now.”
When he finally escaped the school parking lot was nearly empty, so he saw at once that Raven wasn’t waiting by his car either. And there was no reason to feel that surge of disappointment—he didn’t want to see her again. If she’d found some other human to terrify and seduce and harass, that was fine!
As he walked toward his car, he noticed two Native boys crossing the lot, but there were a lot of school sports going on now. Jase cataloged them as football players leaving practice early . . . until they swerved toward him and grabbed his arms.
“Hey! What’s—”
The world spun as they kicked his feet from under him and shoved him face first into the pavement. Sparks of pain flashed from his knees, competing with a throbbing ache that radiated from the cheekbone resting on the asphalt.
Then thought returned. Jase had been punched once or twice by little kids expressing their parents’ frustration with Mintok v. the Native Corp. Being beaten more seriously, by teenagers, was a fear he’d been suppressing for years.
“It wasn’t my fault.” His voice sounded fuzzy, even to him. “For God’s sake, I was only three!”
He squirmed against the hands that pinned his wrists behind him, but the boys were stronger than he was and had better leverage. If he yelled for help, would the beating part begin? His stomach knotted. But Jase could hear chattering voices, a study group maybe, behind the hedge that screened the courtyard from the parking lot. This was an awfully public place for a beating, and all his attackers were doing right now was . . . going through his pockets?
They were. One held him down while the other pulled his blazer from under him to search, and then ran his hands into Jase’s trouser pockets and yanked them inside out. Robbery?
“My credit chip’s biolinked,” Jase told them. “No one else can use it.”
“I don’t sense anything,” one of them said. “You’re sure this is the same car?”
Sense what? What car?
The hands holding Jase’s wrists twitched, but no one spoke.
“Yeah? Well you were sure the last three times too,” the first speaker continued. “Get him up.”
The ground fell away from Jase as they lifted him, with an ease that warned him not to try anything stupid. They shoved him to sit on the Tesla’s hood, and then sat down beside him, each holding one of his wrists in a grip that felt more like iron than flesh.
They still looked like high school football players, or at least they were big enough to play. The tall one was thinner, with more aquiline features. The short one wasn’t much taller than Jase, but his body was thick with muscle. Linebacker to the other’s wide receiver.
Jase knew all the kids at his school, by sight at least, and he was pretty sure he’d never seen them before. The short one looked kind of like the plainclothes cop at the border, only about twenty years younger, which made no sense at all.
“Where is it?” The tall one’s voice was coldly impersonal, his indifference emphasized by the pain that throbbed in Jase’s cheek. He was going to have a bruise, one that would probably show up even in the security vid. And where was school security? Even if no one was watching the monitors, the computers were set to recognize and alert on anything that even looked like bullying. Which this surely was!
“You know, the school security guards are on their way by now.” Jase nodded to the cameras that covered the parking lot. “You should probably go before they get here.”
He wouldn’t dream of trying to stop them.
The tall one didn’t seem to care about the cameras. “Where is it?” he repeated. “Where’s the catalyst?”
“The what?” If this wasn’t a revenge beating or a robbery, what was it? “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you sure I’m the guy you’re looking for?”
The tall one scowled at the short one, who shrugged.
“The medicine pouch,” the tall one said. “The one you picked up at the border eleven days ago.”
Realization shot through Jase on a blast of adrenaline. But the tall one had given him time to gather his wits.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I haven’t been near any border for five months, and I didn’t pick up a pouch or anything. I just drove off the ferry and through customs. And if you’re customs agents, I want to talk to your supervisor! And call my father. He’s a lawyer,” Jase added.
His heart was hammering so hard they could probably feel the pulse in his wrists. Would they buy it? And if they didn’t, was he willing to let them beat him up just to keep the pouch away from them? He’d promised Raven, sort of. But she hadn’t done anything to earn that much loyalty.
The shapeshifters, Raven’s enemies, looked at each other.
“What do you think?” the tall one asked.
The short one’s answer was to twist Jase’s arm up behind him so hard it felt like his shoulder was coming out of its socket.
“Hey!” Pain made up Jase’s mind. “Help! Somebody call security, call the cops, somebody help me!”
He was yelling the final words, but in the silence after he stopped he could hear the voices of the study group on the other side of the bushes. They didn’t sound like they’d heard him. Real fear prickled down his spine.
“Help me!” Jase put all the volume, all the fear he could muster into that scream.
The oblivious chatter went on without missing a beat.
The tall one didn’t even glance at the hedge. He rose to his feet and pulled a knife out of his pocket, old-fashioned steel, with a five-inch blade that should have set off every security siren in the school the moment the cameras spotted it.
Nothing happened.
Jase threw his weight against the short one’s grip, with all his panicked strength. For a moment he thought his shoulder would dislocate, but then his wrist, slippery with sweat, turned in his captor’s grip. Jase twisted his arm free and ran.
Looking back would have cost him half a second, and he didn’t dare lose even that much speed. He headed straight for the hedge, diving and rolling like an acrobat over any car that blocked his path.
He was shouting for help at the top of his lungs, but it wasn’t till he burst through a gap in the bushes and into sight that they finally heard him.
***
The head of school security didn’t believe him.
The bruise on Jase’s face wasn’t as dark as he’d expected, only faintly blue, and all the kids who’d been working in the courtyard swore they hadn’t heard a thing till Jase thrashed through the hedge yelling about cops.
Jase hadn’t felt up to explaining alien shapeshifters to his principal—not to mention medicine pouches of contraband. He’d said his assailants were Native teens with a grudge against his father. And that they’d worn hats and had their collars pulled up, so he couldn’t identify them.
The head of security promptly offered to bring up security footage of the parking lot during that time period, which gave Jase some bad moments . . . until they found that every security camera fixed on the lot at that time displayed nothing but static.
The principal gave the baffled security chief a look that promised a serious discussion when there were no students around.
The security chief accused Jase of jamming the feed to conceal whatever it was he’d been up to.
Jase said he didn’t know enough tech to do that, and that his science teacher would confirm it.
The principal said no one should be able
to do that, as the security chief had promised when he recommended that system to the school.
The security chief reminded the principal that no one in the vicinity had heard Jase’s alleged shouts for help, either.
Maybe, the principal said fairly, the study group was making too much noise to hear anything else. And the hedge could have muffled the shouts, too.
Jase didn’t believe it, and that worried him more than the static on the vid. Jamming a security camera was possible, though it took really competent tech. Preventing sound from traveling out of an open-air parking lot was . . . Well, maybe the aliens did have some way to do that. And if Jase’s great-great-grandmother could whistle for wind, then maybe it was some sort of magic.
And if they could do that, what else could they do?
This disturbing train of thought derailed when the principal said it was time to call Jase’s parents.
He didn’t want his parents to know about this. His mother would worry, and that was bad enough. His father would think he’d brought this down on Jase himself. And that guilt would translate to demanding that the police arrest his son’s attackers, immediately.
At best, they wouldn’t find anyone. At worst they’d arrest a couple of blameless Native kids. And Jase, who’d just sworn that he couldn’t possibly identify his assailants, would have to explain why he was so certain those kids weren’t guilty.
Jase told the principal that there wasn’t much harm done, and he’d rather tell his parents about it himself.
The principal said he’d delay any further action till he heard from Jase’s parents regarding their wishes in this matter.
Jase was pretty sure the principal knew he wouldn’t be hearing from anyone, but his civilized ass was covered so the matter would be allowed to drop.
He drove home, very late now, with all the car doors locked, looking for football player–sized boys on every block.
When he got home he told his parents he’d fallen on the stairs, but that the school nurse had taken scans and said there was no serious damage. At least that part was true.
He waited till they went to bed before he patrolled the house and checked the locks on every door and window, so he didn’t have to explain that either.
