The Walls of Orion

by T. D. Fox

  Despite her initial revulsion to his cop badge, after meeting him in person even Dina had jumped on board. In fact, Dina probably liked him a little too much. Courtney wasn’t sure what to make of her best friend wanting to see her new boyfriend more often than she did.

  She had fun with Jasper. They went to movies, had dinner, talked about silly things and deeper things, and he never went too far. He always insisted on walking her home if it was past six o’clock. He was sweet. She liked him. He even made her forget that she was...

  Well, bored.

  The doorbell jangled. One jangle out of a hundred jangles, so she almost didn’t notice it.

  “Hey there, C.”

  Courtney looked up sharply from behind the register. There he stood, in all his towering glory. That silver tooth flashed in his smile. A strange déja vu triggered, followed by the startling slam of her heart against her ribs.

  “W,” she said.

  “Courtney!” Jess called from behind her. “Take register, I’ve got to restock the bakery.”

  The hollering, the whir of the blenders, the commotion of the customers packed in line—all blurred to a high whine in her ears. Shaking herself, Courtney picked her way through her fellow baristas and took Jess’ place at the register. When she glanced up again, W had melted into the crowd.

  “Excuse me,” snapped the lady at the head of the line. “I’m ready.”

  Her service skills were flagging. By the time Jess finally sent her on a break, Courtney felt like a too-tight rubber band. Stretched to its limit, ready to pop off and hit someone.

  She found the emptiest section of the café, sank down into a booth, and put her head down on folded arms. The pounding headache rattled deeper.

  The doc had told her to go back in if the concussion symptoms didn’t fade soon. Jasper had expressed concern over the lingering headaches, but Courtney figured they’d be gone soon. She was already sleeping better. Sometimes she even got her old dreams about the empty road and the hills and the sky. The dizziness was gone, along with the nausea, so the headaches would probably be the last to go.

  Hopefully the whistling would follow.

  A shadow fell across her. Courtney sighed, scrambling for the tattered scraps of her customer-service voice.

  “I’m on my break. Go ask one of the baristas behind the counter if you need something.”

  “But those other baristas are boring.”

  Her eyes snapped open. W settled into the seat across from her. Weariness evaporated, replaced by the sharp edge of... something else.

  His eyes fixed above her brow. “That looks bad. What’d you do, clock yourself on a taller kitchen appliance this time?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” An unexpected, irrational anger burned in her veins. She didn’t know where it came from. But it had been... weeks. And then he shows up and makes a joke about that. Blasé as all get out.

  “I’m kidding. I saw the Orion Times. They did a whole article on you, you know. Brave little barista steps in front of a gun to save her coworker.” He smirked. “Looks like the hypothetical what-would-you-do scenario played out better than you thought.”

  Glaring made her headache worse. She put her head back down on her arms. “If you showed up just to hear the juicy details, go bother one of the other eye-witnesses. They love telling the story. I don’t care to relive it.”

  He hummed. “Don’t you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Wait—actually, no. I don’t care.” She rubbed a hand over her eyes. Her head was in no state for his mind games. “What do you want?”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “Why would I be mad at you?”

  “You tell me.”

  She sighed, sinking down into her seat. There was no rational reason to be angry. Sure, he’d disappeared for weeks before the incident without so much as a goodbye, but that didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t like they were actually friends. They were barely acquaintances. She knew next to nothing about him. So what if, after the reopening, he’d continued his absence only to finally show up and tease her about the cut on her face, dismissing any trauma she might’ve experienced. That was W. He wasn’t nice. He didn’t say socially acceptable things. She should know by now not to take that personally.

  “It’s nothing,” she said, weariness sliding back in.

  Pale eyes measured her. Across the store, the bell jangled, and another barista bid Jess goodnight. W leaned back and said in an inflectionless voice:

  “Is it hard to talk about?”

  “No. Just not something appropriate to tease about.”

  “Who’s teasing? I’m the most serious person you’ve ever met.”

  She rolled her eyes. “What about you? You were away a while.”

  “Work’s been keeping me busy.”

  “I thought you kept your own hours.”

  “Those hours have been pretty demanding.”

  She shook her head. “Must be nice. Being your own boss.”

  “Don’t be too envious. At least yours likes you.”

  She frowned, unsure how to interpret that. W cleared his throat, as if catching himself.

  “They didn’t say on the news exactly what happened,” he said. “A robbery, eh? Sounds like someone really was desperate enough to go after the one-fifty in the cash register.”

  Courtney sighed. “You still want to hear the full story.”

  “From you, yes.”

  “It wasn’t a robbery. It was an insane man with a gun and an ax to grind with my coworker.”

  “Insane. Strong word,” W said. “I thought we established breaking the law didn’t make someone crazy.”

  “It does when he’s an armed lunatic with no predictability.”

  “Predictability is sanity?”

  Courtney scowled. “He beat up my friend.”

  “Not very nice. But insane?”

  “He shot his own man! For no reason!”

  “Where?”

  “Right in front of me.”

  “No.” W leaned forward. “Where did he shoot him?”

  “Why is that important?”

  Those freezing gray eyes pinned her to her seat. Startled, Courtney found herself drawing up the memory. The gunshot ricocheted through her mind. Ripper falling. Blood spreading. The hole punched in the side of his head. She was there, on the floor again, backed against the shooter’s knees. Staring at the body. At the entry wound.

  Unconsciously, her fingers skimmed the mark near her left temple. The bruise tingled.

  “Left side,” she murmured. “His forehead.”

  “Hm. That significant?”

  Courtney blinked, back in the booth with W. She lowered her hand. “No.”

  “No? Not at all?”

  “It was random,” she said. “He wanted to shoot his guy in the head, so he shot his guy in the head. He wasn’t aiming for...” She shivered. “No one’s that good of a shot.”

  Something fleeting and sharp passed behind W’s features. It vanished before she could discern it.

  “Well,” he said. “That does sound like insanity. One of the rare cases.”

  Courtney sighed. “Perfect. Are you done analyzing what happened to me?”

  “I’m sorry you had to go through that.” It sounded like he meant it.

  She relaxed a fraction. “Thank you.”

  “Your head still bugging you?”

  “I go through three ice packs a day. Two now, though, since it’s been getting better.”

  “He really got you.”

  “I’m okay.” Courtney avoided his eyes. “It’s been two weeks, so I’m sure the headaches will be gone soon. They’re not as intense as they were at first.”

  “Mm.” W’s one-syllable reply reminded her of Jess’. It would’ve been funny, if his didn’t sound so much darker.

  After a long, stiffer-than-usual pause, he stood. She thought he was going to leave, with his usual impromptu flair, but instead he paused. His hand ticked ag
ainst the table, tapping out a fidgety beat. She looked up.

  He was staring at her, in a way that made her stomach tighten and her lungs forget to move.

  An inscrutable fire burned behind those frosted irises. “Next time someone walks in here with a gun, don’t be an idiot. You get down on the floor like everybody else. Heroes don’t usually get off with a headache.”

  She blinked, but before she could inhale he was already striding away. The crowd swallowed him up, and she heard the door open. Blood racing for reasons she couldn’t define, she looked back down at the table.

  All of Orion City thought she was a hero, apparently. Someone must’ve got the details wrong in that news story, because she didn’t feel like a hero. Would a hero lie awake at night thinking about staring down a gun barrel? Remembering how the light caught the edges of the rim, and the darkness a centimeter lower that swallowed up every trace of it. The image brought fear, yes. But what frightened her more was how much less fear she felt than everyone assumed. She wasn’t a hero. She was some sort of twisted adrenaline junkie.

  She’d stepped in front of the gun to save Max. But she’d stepped away from it a different person.

  And she wasn’t sure she liked that person.

  12. DEAD MAN WALKING

  DR. JEANINE CAMPBELL preferred to complete her paperwork in silence—quickly and efficiently, without an audience where possible. Particularly when said audience contained a gaze that drilled into the back of her head with a weight that belied the owner’s slight frame.

  She paused the rapid scratch of her pen, halfway through the final loop in her signature.

  “Something on your mind, Mr. Grimes?”

  She heard her assistant clear his throat and shift his stance, as if ashamed to be caught staring.

  “You are...” His soft voice trailed for a moment. “You are signing the order, then? For all of them?”

  An irritated flash swept the pen back into motion. She finished marking the document under her hand and flipped to the next one.

  “Euthanization is humane,” she replied. “We have learned all we can from them. The sample brought in last month is unremarkable at best, faulty at worst. Un-useful for any meaningful research into the theriomutation gene. Keeping them in our care becomes a liability.”

  Evan let her words echo and die in the cold room. Jeanine’s irritation rose.

  She had long suspected her young assistant was a little softer on the inside, despite his cool, calm exterior. His gentle voice and mannerisms could talk down the most far-gone subjects from an explosive episode, and his quiet presence was a coveted safety-net across the wards in the compound. However, on some level, Jeanine wondered if he were a poor fit for the job after all. His blood didn’t run quite as cold as the others’. He didn’t have what it took to push science forward—not at the cost evolution required.

  But Evan surprised her, as he often did. His next words reeled her assumptions into an uncertain pause.

  “Why not the Torch?” came the soft inquiry. “We’ve had him the longest.”

  Interesting. She resisted the urge to turn and study his freckled face, focusing instead on filling the next two documents with her authority, ink not dry as she turned to the next page.

  “Reginald’s unique theriomutation begs further study,” she replied. “We will keep him alive a while longer.”

  “Despite the risks?” Evan remarked. “He nearly killed the nurse sent to administer his Ativan last week.”

  “Risk is what every member of this compound assumed when they entered this job.”

  She didn’t like the sound of his silence. It bled judgment. As if he hadn’t signed up for the exact cause they had.

  “You have something to say,” she clipped. “Let it out.”

  It took a minute for him to do so, and she marked away the final few orders. Patient Z-48, T-33... Too many subjects wasted. She clung to the hope that the next batch would be better.

  “We have euthanized nearly half the Changers we’ve brought in.”

  “Changers, Mr. Grimes?”

  “Theriomutants,” he corrected.

  Finishing the last stroke of her signature, Jeanine gathered the documents, tapped them into one thick stack, and handed them off to the orderly waiting at the door. He ducked away without a word, face sober as the duty in front of him.

  “We’re down to half the number of subjects we once had.” Evan’s voice was calm, as always, but there was a note there Jeanine couldn’t identify. It made her turn. Though his face remained blank as the orderly’s, she noticed the almost-hidden tension in his shoulders. “How can we progress in our study of theriomutation if we kill them at such a rate?”

  Kill. She did not miss the word choice. But preparing a lecture for her soft-spined protégé felt too draining at the moment. Weariness often stole into her after signing euthanization orders; an exhaustion she did not want to analyze.

  Thankfully, he caught his own mistake, and dropped his eyes to the floor. “I meant... if we continue to deplete our resources of study, I’m worried we won’t ever find the cure we’re looking for.”

  Her earlier frustration with him melted at the naiveté behind that statement. It was almost endearing.

  She sighed. “Then we must collect more.” Striding for the door, she glanced back at him with a rare softening of her red contoured lips. “Resources are finite, after all.”

  She left him standing in the concrete room, knowing he would follow once his keen young mind found the logic of her words. She hoped it reminded him sooner, rather than later, why he’d signed his life over to the noble advancement of science.

  ⬥◆⬥

  “You use chopsticks surprisingly well for a...”

  “For a white person?” Jasper grinned, grabbing a dumpling off the plate. “I get that a lot around here.”

  Courtney attempted to snag one of the smaller pieces of dim sum off the shared platter. It kept popping out from between her chopsticks.

  Around them, the little outdoor market bustled with lights and shouts. People milled about, clumping near the electric heaters that glowed along the street. The open-air eatery had enough customers packed around that Courtney felt toasty even as she saw her breath float. In a Midwest town closed off to everything foreign—literally—it wasn’t often she got to be a minority in a crowd. She found she liked it.

  “You hang out in Chinatown a lot?” she asked.

  “Yeah, actually. A good buddy of mine’s from this area. Met him my second day on the job, and he’s kind of stuck around since.”

  “You work with him?” Courtney gave up and stabbed the ball of dough. Jasper tried to hide his smirk, but she caught it.

  “Not exactly,” he said. “I mean, he’s not on the force. He started out as a handy street source for a couple of cases. Just seems to be around the right places at the right times. Before I knew it, I was consulting him so much he turned into a confidant.”

  Courtney held up her skewered dumpling like a kabob. “So did you consult him about me?”

  Jasper cleared his throat. It was so easy to make him blush. “I mean, yeah, a little bit. I mentioned potentially asking a witness out. He knows you, actually. Gave me the thumbs-up.”

  “Knows me?”

  “He comes into your shop sometimes. His name’s Oliver.”

  Courtney blinked. “Small town. I ran into him the other day. He was upset he wasn’t there during the holdup.”

  “Really? I never took him for a thrill seeker.”

  “I don’t think that was it. He seemed to think he could have done something. Stopped the shooting, saved Max or me or something.”

  “Oliver? Like, hundred-pound, five-foot-four Oliver?”

  “I thought it was weird, too, but he seemed genuinely upset about—” She sputtered when the wind blew her hair straight into the chopsticks she was lifting to her mouth. Laughing, she untangled the loose copper strands. “This is why I keep dropping everything! Someday I’m
going to chop this lion’s mane off.”

  “Don’t do that,” Jasper protested. “Your hair is why I first noticed you.”

  “I would’ve hoped you noticed me because I was your lead witness.” Courtney sighed, tugging her unruly hair into a quick side braid out of the wind. “Every man in my life has told me what to do with my hair.”

  “Well, maybe they know what they’re talking about.” At her frown, Jasper smiled and leaned forward, catching a stray lock that didn’t make it into her braid. He tucked it behind her ear. “Don’t cut it. It’s worth the trouble.”

  “To who?” She fired back, but his eyes had moved to her forehead, a frown deepening over his own brow.

  “Your scar still looks nasty. You’d think it’d have faded by now.”

  “Thanks. What every girl wants to hear.”

  “I meant, how’s your head feeling? Is it really feeling better, or should we take you in?”

  “Take me in?” She laughed to shake off the discomfort from his earlier comment. “You make it sound like an arrest.”

  “To the doctor,” he clarified. He’d gotten used to her teasing him enough to stop blustering every other time. “I’m worried about your headaches.”

  “They’re pretty much gone.”

  “You were complaining about one the other day.”

  “I didn’t complain. You asked me about it, and I told you I had a little one. Just a little one.”

  “They should be gone by now. Maybe you should get your head checked out again.”

  “Fine, I’ll ask Dina to take a look at me. Happy?”

  “Never happy if you’re feeling bad.”

  “I’m not feeling bad.” She forced a smile. “All the other symptoms are gone. I’m feeling like my normal self again.”

  “Really? All the other symptoms? I thought you were still having trouble sleeping.”

  She hesitated, a certain melody echoing in her head. She hadn’t heard it for a few days. If it was part of the concussion, maybe it had finally gone.

  “I’m sleeping fine now,” she lied. “Anyway, enough about me. How’s your case-cracking coming along? Any luck finding the whistling shooter? Still think he’s connected with that crime syndicate?”