In the end, Mrs. Melville was immensely thankful, since this meant that the cemetery would go back to its pre-haunting normal. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been trying even while being terrorized. Besides being frightened half out of her wits, she was embarrassed about the cemetery’s neglect. One of the Cabots decided to hire Phoebe to contact living family members to contribute to the depleted endowment fund. My best guess is that they had some sort of insider information she could present to avoid a call to the fraud squad.
Things were wrapped up here. Francine would be as happy as she ever got; Flanagan would never find out about the haunting, if I was lucky. Nigel and Lilit were hinting at stopping by for a slice at our favorite pizzeria. And me?
I still had to pull off a vampire peace treaty. Just one more day in the life of the Mage of Boston.
***
THE JOB
Maverick Smith
It was raining. Again.
Green lights flashed and flickered on my belt as my Weather Watcher™ automatically calculated the amount of acidity in the rain and attempted to determine if it fell within the “safe” limits set out in the global environmental standards. Normally, the device made noise too, an awful racket of whirs and clicks. I resisted the urge to push back the hood of my rain slicker and check the volume controls on my BatEar™. Exposing it to the rain would void its warranty. Tia was leading us through the packed pathways of the barrio. Even if my BatEar™ wasn’t working properly, Tia’s rust red jacket proclaimed her to be one of the Silenco. We would be safe enough from accidental—though maybe not intentional—confrontations. Only the most ignorant person from off-world was unaware of the significance of Silenco red.
As if sensing my gaze, Tia turned to face me and Adam, smiling broadly despite the fact that her obsidian face was streaked with raindrops. We’re almost there, she signed fluidly. I’ll give our usual spiel once we arrive. You should both stay in the back, especially you, Adam.
My BatEar™ picked up the vibration as Adam shifted his weight beside me. It appeared the echolocation feature was working even if its manual control seemed to be malfunctioning.
“Did you catch that?” I asked Adam, turning to gauge his reaction. It was always hard to predict how foreign, able-bodied, cis men would react to the barrio born, Silenco, genderqueer Tia taking the lead.
“Yes?” Adam said hesitantly. When I raised my eyebrows at him, he translated Tia’s instructions into the national lingua franca with its Anglophone roots, which folks from off-world favored.
“Excellent,” I said and painstakingly demonstrated how he should sign his acknowledgement and understanding to Tia.
The smile had dropped from Tia’s face by the end of my slow practice session with Adam. Her signs were fierce in their descriptors as she gave us directions. I was following her tight black braids around the outskirts of a marketplace when the TextTalk™ slate strapped to my forearm flashed purple, indicating she’d sent me a message.
The pause that came after my message made me think the connection had failed. TextTalk™ was a locally created technology that ran off a solar-powered relay system. The solar batteries charged during the day so it could run through the night, depending on the equipment’s quality. But regardless of the hour the grid was known to fail from time to time.
I was about to use another method to get Tia’s attention when a reply popped up on my screen.
It was unmistakably a compliment, perhaps even a flirtatious one. Ages ago, when we first opened our investigation agency, Tia and I had dated briefly. She decided it was too difficult to mix the personal with the professional and gently ended it. Was she now rethinking her decision?
I must have stopped moving in surprise because Adam walked into me. Ignorant foreigner.
Adam might have listed himself as having special skills, but paying attention to his surroundings was not one of them. Ahead of us, alerted by the proximity alarm at her belt, Tia turned and favored me with a slow unmistakably flirtatious wink before continuing on her way.
I heard the crowd before I saw them, my BatEar™ oddly magnifying their shuffling feet and crying babies. Like Tia, they were clothed in the rich red jackets of the Silenco. The adults spilled over into the street while children kept behind the ivy-covered fence. The adults broke apart from their huddles at Tia’s approach. After a moment a woman whose blue tattoos of rank indicated her as the head of the household stepped forward.
The tale she signed was a tragic one judging from the expression on Tia’s face as well as her tense replies. Punctuating the conclusion of her speech, the woman made a crushing motion even a foreigner could interpret. Tia nodded, echoed it, and gestured toward the two of us. The matriarch turned back to the huddle of her kin and Tia stamped across the muddy earth to us, her face a thundercloud to rival the ones in the skies above. A particularly hard-hitting case, I guessed. Tia’s signs confirmed as much.
The latest missing child was a five-year-old boy, born to Silenco parents, and had been stolen at sunset yesterday. He was a few moons shy of the mandatory hearing tests required by the Ministry of Education. Similar to the other Silenco children who had gone missing lately, he was believed to have some hearing. Because of the commonality, his parents suspected an intermediary had grabbed him with plans to sell him to foreigners who, as rumors went, used the Silenco children for their medical experiments.
It was a familiar tale with a usually tragic outcome, hence Tia’s grim face. But our investigative outfit already had a short list of intermediaries we suspected of such dealings. I brought the profiles up on my data pad, discarding two as unwilling to work after dark since their prosthetics required sunlight to function. That was the problem with our resource-poor planet, not even the bad people could afford to import the high-quality technology that ran off non-renewable resources.
Framing the remaining three names in black on a yellow background for easy viewing, I passed the data pad to Tia who signed a quick thank you before scanning the list. Selecting from a drop-down menu, she put a grave marker beside one of the names and a question mark beside another. Dead and maybe disappeared. That narrowed our list down to one. Unfortunately he had an entire city to hide in.
It was dusk before we found our target quenching his thirst at a downtown bar. Our muscleman actually earned his salary, escorting him out of the bar and tossing a hood over his head before he could recognize Tia or me. One of the advantages of hiring the ex-military was that when Adam marched our captive through the streets, people edged out of the way rather than crowding him with questions. This fortunate trend held until we reached our destination, one of the rundown properties our firm had purchased for precisely this purpose.
Adam wrenched the hood off our captive once he was strapped into an ancient wooden chair for interrogation. He quailed at the army uniform Adam wore, but it wasn’t until Tia, garbed in red, stepped out of the shadows and fixed her angry gaze on him that the man began to talk. And talk.
When the words started to spill from his lips, I stepped forward so Tia could see me, interpreting what our captive said until long after my fingers had grown sore. When he ran out of secrets to spill, I let Adam earn his keep by hooding him again. The three of us stepped into the hall to discuss how this retrieval operation would go.
“The foreign medical company he named is near the port,” Adam said unnecessarily. I’d inferred that already without looking at a map. Foreign companies used the buildings nearest the port as warehouses for holding goods before they were shipped off-world. It made sense that the abductors would be holding the kid there. And there would pro
bably be others.
Tia obviously agreed with me because she signed fast and angry, starting her sentence with an insult about Adam’s intelligence. For the stake of maintaining relations between colleagues, I didn’t translate the insult but instead focused on the logistics of her plan.
We would hire a new muscleman after this case, for certain. There were always unemployed, ex-military types eager to obtain visa permits by working for locals. The alternative was going back to their ruined, war-torn home worlds.
“Tia thinks we should visit the local weapons dealer. Storm the place. Expose the operation and the scientists will scatter like skitters. They know the global government won’t look kindly on this affront to their Silenco citizens. I concur.”
“As do I,” Adam stated, thankfully proving he had read at least one entire document in his life. “What these off-worlders are doing falls outside the Codes and Conventions.”
Our outfit made decisions collectively. Now that we knew how we would handle the situation, the question of when still needed to be considered.
Two hours before the port opens, Tia argued. That way we can catch a few hours’ sleep.
No—
You’re exhausted. So am I. We could use the rest.
The sign she used specified the more personal “we.” My flying fingers froze before I folded them into fists.
It’s too busy this time of night to confront them, Tia added. Besides, the criminals won’t move the kid off-world until the dawn. All ships are grounded during petite-mort.
I translated the second part of our conversation to Adam just in case, not caring if he’d understood the first, flirtatious exchange. By petite-mort, Tia meant the ión storms that raged in the exosfera and mesósfera prevented any light from reaching the ground for several hours after our planet had spun away from our sun. Due to the havoc this played with our communications technology, petite-mort effectively grounded all inter- and intra-planetary craft. Off-world travelers hated the inconvenience, but that was the price they paid to dock here.
“Ok.” Adam said after a moment. “In four hours, then. The three of us will meet …”
At the office. Tia finished his trailing sentence before extending one hand for me to take. My pulse leapt at the open invitation and I almost forgot to translate her last statement before slipping my non-dominant hand into hers.
The two of us conversed one-handed as she led us toward her place. Her suite of rooms were as I remembered them, painted in brilliant bright hues that one of her ex-lovers had scorned as feminine but which I had always understood as fierce. And femme. The owner of the flat, eagerly divesting us both of our clothing as we slowly progressed toward the bedroom, was unashamedly both.
I just want to sleep, Tia told me. Sleep, skin to skin. Safe. Then go rescue the kid. After we can celebrate. Together.
I sketched an affirmative, set the alarm to wake us at the appropriate time and set about detaching my BatEar™. I would get it looked at by a technician after this case but in the meantime I needed to put it in some sheltered spot so as not to void its warranty. I opened the bedside drawer in front of me … and paused.
An extra carrying case for the device was already there, in my favorite shade of purple. I glanced over at Tia’s figure on the bed, her mouth open in what I guessed was a snore. Inviting me over for these next four hours was not a decision she’d made on a whim. If she’d gone to the trouble of tracking down a carrying case for this particular BatEar™ model in my favorite color … well. I felt my cheeks heat as I slid under the sheets with her to spend the next few hours in slumber.
The alarm awakened me, vibrating the bed with an insistent, dissonant pulse that was impossible to sleep through. Tia flicked her fingers through an impressive display of insults before sitting up to slap the alarm off. I gathered up our clothes. While I dressed and laid out Tia’s fighting garb, Tia defrosted and heated two FeastsForFightin’™ burritos in her compact cooker. She fetched a very familiar jacket from her front closet. It was one of the two fighting jackets I owned. I’d left it there during our brief foray into dating and I had never gotten around to asking for it back. Like the one I had at home, the jacket was reinforced to be resistant to blaster fire. The fact she had kept it was more evidence that she had intended to have me over again.
I didn’t comment on it, though. I knew better than to talk to Tia before she had her morning caffeine. We ate on the way to the office, only stopping at the all-hours caffeine joint Tia preferred. It was cold during the petite-mort, but her smile as I paid for her purchase warmed my heart like the midday sun.
The muscleman was already at the office when we got there, methodically cleaning and laying out our arsenal. Adam had listed weapons as a specialty, and based on the devices of destruction laid out around him, he hadn’t falsified that part of his résumé. And he had some extremely inventive ideas for how we could place them on our persons for maximum maneuverability and accessibility.
Hmm, I remarked to Tia. Perhaps we should keep this one around after all.
Her resulting answer was ambiguous. But then it was a conversation we could have after the case was closed, and after we learned if there were any vices or ill habits Adam spent his earnings on.
Tia led the three of us through the darkness of petite-mort, her red Silenco jacket looking almost black when we passed out of range of the streetlights. Few people were foolhardy enough to challenge folks that walked abroad during this, the darkest, coldest part of the night. The port and the area nearby resembled a ghost town during petit-mort as starship captains and crews headed to the entertainment district to mix with the locals.
Once we were there, I shot out the security camera. Adam unhooked a tube from his belt and used it to spread paste over the door hinges. He repeated the process using another substance from a different tube. The resulting mess began to sizzle and corrode the hinges. Then Adam demonstrated why we had hired him and kicked open the battered steel door.
Tia, brave, bold and beautiful, strode in first, taking out everything—person or ‘bot—that crossed her path. Several stunned scientists and scattered ‘bot bits later, the muscleman kicked open an unmarked locked door to a sight that made my face taut with anger.
Obviously a place where off-worlders performed their “science” on human subjects, the room was dominated by an ancient repurposed starship seat that had had cuffs for restraints welded on at the wrists and ankles. In the shadows beyond the chair, someone whimpered. My BatEar™ magnified the sound.
Light, I signed. It was Adam who shone a light in the direction I indicated. Perhaps there was hope for him yet. The light moved rapidly over a number of white-clad forms with stubble for hair. I revised my opinion. He didn’t move slowly enough for them to sign to us.
Huffing out an angry breath, Tia stepped forward, positioning herself under the blinding light that shone down around the chair. Her bright Silenco jacket was the symbol the abductees had been waiting for. They flowed out of the shadows to surround Tia in a short, silent huddle, fingers moving in the signs for rescue and home and safe.
Tia signed affirmations to them all, then looked over their hands at me. She nodded once, a muscle clenched in her jaw. We had rescued twelve other kids in addition to the one whose family was paying us for the job. Thirteen Silenco kids who would’ve been lost had we waited any longer.
Tia sent a message ahead. The matriarch’s family was waiting when the sixteen of us crested the hill. The moment we did so, the kid was enveloped in his mother’s arms. Other members of the clan took turns patting his hand or ankle to reassure themselves of his presence. The other twelve kids were similarly welcomed with hugs and careful repetitions of sign-names. Jubilantly, the crowd escorted us to the matriarch who stood waiting, clutching a brilliant blue purse.
The matriarch kissed Tia on both cheeks before enfolding her in a quick hug. She formally presented her a heavy pouch of money. It sounded like a luxurious amount; because of my BatEar™, despite
the folds of the bag, I could hear the clinking of coins from where I stood three paces behind Tia. When she stepped back, Tia made her way over to me, slipping her arm into mine.
The matriarch is happy to welcome the twelve other kids to her home until their kinfolk can be located, Tia said. She invites us to stay for the celebration tonight. We would be honored guests.
Honored guests? All of us? I looked over my shoulder for the muscleman. He was surrounded by a crowd of young people of all genders who were patiently demonstrating signs for him to replicate. Tia was still waiting for my reply.
I think that sounds like a splendid idea, I told her. A fitting way to celebrate the closure of a successful case.
Her answering smile made the red clothing of the Silenco around me seem dim by comparison. And I knew despite what others might think I had the made the right choice to register as a private investigator. It brought me moments like this, surrounded by community with my lover at my side.
***
THE CLIMAX
Tonya Marie Stremlau
Dec. 14
Dear Mom—
Wanted to let you know that I turned in my last paper today! I’m so excited to be done. Also, I got an email from Prof. Johns today that there’s an immediate opening for an English teacher at the Midwestern School for the Deaf. I sent in my application! It’s lucky I had my resume and a videotape of my teaching philosophy already done from a class. (: Wish me luck! That would be a much better job than substitute teaching at Clerc Center! The bad news is that if I get it, I can’t come home for the holidays because I’ll need to pack up and move.
Love,
MJ
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