Now there’s a motto that’s never going to get past the tourism board. Keep Portland weird: keep California out. We are not your quirky hipster theme park, even if we are cheaper than Disneyland, but tourists persist in treating us that way. Except instead of roller coasters, we have a guy dressed like Bigfoot playing guitar in front of the Safeway.
That’s Danny, and he doesn’t dress like a Bigfoot, he is a Bigfoot, one still young enough to shave himself and pass for a human man about five years older than he actually is. Bigfoot youth hanging out in human cities is sort of like Amish kids going on rumspringa: a chance to go out and see how the cousins live, for long enough to decide that no one with any self-respect would actually want to live that way. More Bigfoot kids go home than Amish kids, meaning that all of human civilization is less appealing than shitting in the woods and a world without cable television.
Now that’s something to think about whenever we start feeling too impressive. Everything we’ve made is not enough to keep some of our closest cousins from running to the woods and not leaving us a forwarding address. If not for the rumspringa kids, we might not know if they ever go extinct. My dad has contacts within the Bigfoot community, but the rest of us have never met them. They don’t want humans getting our weird humanity cooties all over their stuff, and honestly, I can’t blame them.
I followed the sidewalk to the end of the block, turned, and walked down to the waiting bus stop. There were two seats bolted to the concrete, both filthy with dirt and a reddish substance I really hoped was rust. It was probably rust. People don’t usually go around bleeding on the bus stops.
I still decided not to sit, hanging off the bus stop marker by one hand instead, turning the gesture into a sort of one-handed aerial plank. I don’t dance pole, mostly because if something has the word “dance” in it, Verity acts like she has the copyright on the activity—the first time someone referred to my trapeze and silk work as “aerial dance” in her hearing, I thought she was going to have a stroke—but I’ve taken a few classes, and it’s amazing for your abs and shoulders. The strength those artists need just to practice their art is ridiculous.
I only had to hang there for about five minutes before the bus pulled up with a hiss of air brakes and opened the door. I bounced into the air-conditioned dimness of the vehicle, showing my pass to the disinterested driver, and moved toward a seat.
This time of day in a residential area, the bus was less than half full, and I had no trouble securing a window for myself, so that I could watch the city roll by. I tucked my backpack into my lap, not being one of those assholes who needs two seats without good cause, and rested my forehead against the glass, unable to suppress my smile.
We were going to Emerald City Comic Con. My stupid cousin was going to leave his basement, and we were going to a real live convention, out in the real live world, where we would solve a real live problem all by ourselves. And it was going to be glorious.
I closed my eyes, smiling to myself. Absolutely glorious.
* * *
“But Mom! That isn’t fair!” My voice peaked on the last word, very nearly cracking. I sounded like a child who’d just been told that dessert was canceled, and I hated myself for it.
My mother looked at me coolly, unmoved. “You have space in the car,” she said.
“For a body, maybe. For a body and whatever luggage it wants to drag along with it, not so much!”
“You will not refer to your sister as ‘it,’” she said, voice suddenly cold. “This isn’t up for debate, Antimony. If you want to go to your convention, you will take your sister. I don’t want the three of you running around Seattle unsupervised.”
“You mean you don’t want to listen to Verity whining that someone else is having an adventure for once!” I snapped. “You think we need supervision? Artie’s the same age Very is, and Sarah’s probably older! You let Verity go to Los Angeles without a chaperone, and that’s a lot farther away!”
“Yes, but Verity gets out more.” Mom’s face softened. “I wish you would try to get along with your sister. It would mean a lot to me if I knew she could trust you at her back.”
“Of course she can trust me at her back,” I snapped. “The fact that she’s a fame-hungry, selfish brat doesn’t mean I won’t support her in the field!”
“Antimony!” Mom had the audacity to sound shocked.
I managed, through sheer force of will, not to throw my hands up and storm away. It would have been incredibly satisfying, and incredibly immature, and given that I was arguing I was adult enough to go to Seattle without a chaperone—one who was only three years older than me, no less, which had ceased to matter as far as I was concerned on the day I turned eighteen and had to start paying taxes—I didn’t want to play into her narrative.
“I’m allowed to have my opinion, and if you want to argue that it’s pejorative, I can produce supporting evidence for everything I’ve just said.”
“I’m sure she can produce supportive evidence that you’re argumentative, contrary, and irritable,” she said. “You’re still not going without her, and that’s final.”
I narrowed my eyes. “How are you going to stop us?”
“I’ll call Jane and tell her I want her to ask Artie not to go. I know you talked that boy in a circle to get him to go with you in the first place. He’ll be relieved if his mother tells him to stand down.” Mom shook her head. “I agree that he needs to get out more. I don’t think something like this is the way to start. If he’s given an out, he’ll take it.”
“Sarah—”
“My little sister loves you as a cousin,” said Mom, stressing the word “sister” all out of proportion to its importance in the sentence. “She loves me the way sisters are supposed to love each other. She’ll take my side.”
I wasn’t as sure of that as she was. Sarah loved my mom, absolutely. I knew she sometimes wished there was less of an age gap between them, so that she could have been closer to Mom than she was to Mom’s kids. As one of those kids, I was pretty content with the way things have shaken out, but people are allowed to wish for a better world if that’s what would make them happy.
And none of that changed the fact that Sarah was utterly, ridiculously, stupid in love with Artie, and was about to leave him again, this time without a confirmed return date. She needed this time with him as much as he needed this time with her. Neither one of them was going to go gently if someone tried to interfere.
Artie might feel tricked by the way we’d gone about getting him to sort-of-agree to do this, but now it was an opportunity to spend eight hours in the car with Sarah, plus sharing a hotel room, plus seeing the convention itself. And Sarah had been onboard from the moment I’d told her about the probable siren. I looked at Mom, resisting the urge to huff or roll my eyes or anything else she might take as proof that I was too immature to make these choices on my own.
Mom squirmed, finally looking away. “I really wish you’d work harder to get along with her,” she said, quietly.
Guilt is one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of mothers, especially when trying to make sisters get along. I took a deep breath. “I wish she’d work at all to get along with me,” I said.
Mom sighed. “I’ll talk to her before you go.”
“Thank you.”
“But she is going with you.”
“Mom—”
“I know why you don’t want her to. You’ve been very clear about that. Sarah’s a non-combatant, Artie’s going to be overwhelmed with all the people, and I don’t want you facing off against a siren by yourself.”
“Lilu are immune to siren songs.” That was part of why I’d wanted Artie along in the first place. We might not have many drivers in the family, but there are buses and trains between Seattle and Portland. Sarah and I could have gone without him if we’d been left with no other choice. From the way Mom was carrying on, that
might still be the way we had to do this.
Her desire for family bonding couldn’t be more important than the need to stop a siren from preying on the geek community. No matter how much she wanted me to get along with my sister.
Why couldn’t she have been passionately invested in the idea of me spending time with Alex? I liked Alex. Sure, he was the kind of nerd whose face basically screamed for punching and whose lunch money would probably have been stolen all the way through school if not for his fondness for dressing up in reproduction armor and whaling the crap out of people in the woods, but listening to him explain the life cycles of various newts had been the background of my childhood, and on nights when I couldn’t sleep, sometimes I’d call him up, put him on speaker, and let him lull me into dreamland with lengthy explanations of the axolotl feeding cycle, or the fricken mating requirements, or the rearing of baby garter snakes. Taking Alex to a comic book convention would be fun. It would be a way to add a little recreation to a job.
Maybe that was the answer. I just needed to remember that this was a job before it was anything else. I looked Mom in the eye, keeping my breathing slow and level, waiting for her to speak first.
After almost a full minute, she did. “It doesn’t matter if Lilu are immune, since you’re taking backup to be able to cover more of what you’ve described as a fairly large convention,” she said, a pleading note in her voice. “You could be alone when you find the siren. I want to know that you’ll have the backup you need, or I want to know how you’re intending to account for its absence. You have to keep all three of you safe out there. And it’s not like you’ve had that much time in the field without one of us—”
It looks like it’s causing her physical pain not to say “without an adult,” but she manages it. I sigh, interrupting. “You’re right.”
“—there to help if something— Wait what, I’m sorry, did you just say I was right?”
“I did. You’re right. If part of the point of us going without our parents is proving that we’re mature enough to go out into the field by ourselves, fighting with you over who’s going to serve as my backup isn’t the way to make my case.” It was hard to keep the words from twisting and turning sarcastic in my mouth, but I thought of them as if they were Aeslin writ, something to be echoed back exactly as it had been heard originally, and that helped. “I am willing to take Verity with us, providing you are able to provide me with certain assurances.”
Mom was smart enough not to leap on the bait. She pursed her lips, interest clearly aroused, and asked, “What would those assurances be, exactly?”
“First, she needs to understand that this is my mission, my field trial, not hers. She doesn’t get to push me out of the way and take credit for any success. As a concession, I will agree not to try to sideline her, order her to stay in the hotel room, or otherwise minimize her opportunities to contribute.”
Mom thought about this for a moment, looking for a loophole, before she nodded. “Agreed.”
I did not punch the air. It was a near thing.
We would be traveling with a telepath—and Sarah’s personal motto is “don’t lie to the telepath” for very good reasons—and the Aeslin mice are not only incapable of lying, they remember everything they’ve ever seen and are absolutely overjoyed by the opportunity to recite it to anyone who’ll stand still long enough. If Verity tried to be a jerk about who was in charge, I could demand the Holy Rite of Goddammit, Verity, Mom Said This Was My Mission the second we got home.
It wouldn’t give me back the mission I’d been planning, but one strength of being the youngest sibling: I have no qualms about running to my parents when my siblings start bullying me. Who cares if snitches get stitches? I can do field medicine as well as anyone else with a lick of training, and snitches also get the satisfaction of seeing their tormentors get grounded. If Mom told Verity to listen to me, she wouldn’t have a choice. Either she’d obey, or the mice would rat her out and she’d go down.
“What else?”
“My second condition is that she not decide she’s my second-in-command and start trying to give orders to Sarah and Artie. Sarah and I have a plan, and it depends partially on Artie being as relaxed as he ever gets when there are other people around. Verity is coming as support, not as a new branch of the command structure.”
Mom nodded again, more reluctantly. “I’ll talk to her,” she said.
“Good. My last condition is this: she’s joining us for an infiltration mission, not for a safari. These are my people. My nerds, freaks, and geeks. She’s not to behave like a townie attending the carnival for the first time. If she wants to come with us, she needs to come with us. She needs to be a part of the group, and treat the people she sees there with respect.”
Mom frowned. “Verity is respectful of people with different interests.”
I scoffed. “Not to argue after we’ve both won, Mom, but Verity has never in her life been respectful of someone she considers a ‘nerd.’ She even makes fun of Sarah for reading comic books.”
As if reading comics were anything unusual in a world where Iron Man is still breaking merchandising and box office records and Marvel Studios looks primed to swing for the moon with an interconnected series of movies focusing on different superhero properties. Age of the geek, baby. It may have taken a little longer than we thought, but it’s finally here, and we won.
Now if only we weren’t by and large assholes about it.
“Okay, so exactly what do you want me to ask her to do?”
I smiled, aware that the expression would probably look more than half-feral, and unwilling to do anything to change it. “Tell her to blend in.”
Mom slumped, and didn’t say anything.
* * *
As was usually the case, Sarah was the first one out of bed. We don’t have a large enough sample size to prove it, but she makes me think that Johrlac probably need less sleep than humans do. Do wasps sleep? They must, everything sleeps, but she’s as much a person as she is a pollinator, and she doesn’t sleep enough. The telepathic hum of her approaching presence woke me up about thirty seconds before she opened my bedroom door and stuck her head inside, triggering a drowsy cheer from the mice clustered at the foot of my bed. They’d been up as late as I was, and only the most junior clergy were assigned to sleep on the bed, in case something happened in the middle of the night that needed to be added to the scripture.
The life of the mice is not as idyllic as some people would like to believe. I pushed myself up onto one elbow, using my other hand to wipe the bleary ghosts of sleep from my eyes. Sarah was still there, pushing the door further open, carrying a tray that smelled like—
“Coffee.” I held out my free hand, opening and closing it in a classic “gimme” motion. When I was a kid, growing up with a telepath and an empath, I used to hope that my secret telekinesis would kick in one day and let me Jedi things out of people’s hands. It would have been amazing for the times when Verity decided to play keep-away with my toys, or “borrow” my knives.
“Coffee and waffles,” said Sarah. She crossed the room to the bed, setting the tray down where I could see it. In addition to the coffee, there were two plates, and one glass of virulently salmon-pink juice which I knew better than to touch. You can get that color, roughly, by blending cranberry and orange juice. That wasn’t Sarah’s approach. She was drinking orange juice blended with Heinz Ketchup and powdered Tang, and she was going to do it with a smile on her face.
Knowing your family doesn’t make them any less disgusting. It just makes them marginally more comprehensible.
The plates each contained a small stack of waffles, a pile of scrambled eggs, and three slices of bacon. It was a veritable feast of breakfast foods, even considering that I would have to share mine with the mice or face their regretful stares. Aeslin mice don’t so much do “wrath.” Wrath is for bigger creatures.
“
The Communion of Bacon is upon us,” I rasped, and threw a strip of bacon down the bed to the suddenly much more animated congregation. One strip wouldn’t feed the gathered clergy, but it would keep them from rushing the tray while I got some caffeine into me. I picked up the mug of coffee, cupping it in my hands, and relaxing as the warmth of the liquid seeped through the ceramic and into my fingers.
I’m always cold these days. I don’t know why. It’s not the flu—it’s been going on for months. And it’s not weight loss destabilizing my own ability to regulate my core temperature, which has happened to me twice, when I first started doing trapeze and then again when I took up roller derby. Some people lose fat in the process of building muscle, and that can make it difficult for your body to tell whether or not it’s warm enough. But my weight has been steady for a year, and this wasn’t that.
Ugh. I hate mornings. I sipped my coffee and looked at Sarah, frowning.
“Why are you trying to suck up with breakfast in bed?” I asked. “Are we not going to Seattle?”
“Technically, I’m only sucking up with the ‘in bed’ part,” she said. “Verity’s downstairs making breakfast. She feels bad about your mom insisting that we take her with us, and she’s trying to make sure we get off to a good start.”
And a good start always begins with a balanced breakfast. I blinked slowly at Sarah, taking another sip of coffee.
“Verity . . . feels bad?” The idea was alien.
“I mean, she did once I finished telling her she was supposed to.”
Ah. That made more sense. I put the mug back on the tray and used my knife to slice the waffle in half. Sarah had fixed it to my preferences, with butter and strawberry jam. I pushed it and half of the eggs to one side of the plate before calling, “Come and get it, but don’t touch mine,” to the mice.
They cheered and swarmed forward, and when they continued past us, toward the spiral stairway built along the leg of my bedside table, they took exactly half the food with them. That side of the plate was spotlessly clean, not a crumb or dollop of jam left behind. I began cutting the remaining waffle into smaller pieces.
Calculated Risks Page 39
