Chameleon Uncovered

by BR Kingsolver

  I didn’t plan to ruin any more of my clothes. When Wil came to pick me up, I wore black jeans, a black shirt, and black waterproof jacket made from ballistic cloth. It wouldn’t stop a bullet, but it would turn a knife blade, and blood washed right off. The same clothes I would have worn for a break in.

  He looked me up and down while I gave him my best defiant look, daring him to comment on my non-sexy garb.

  “Damn, Libby, did you pour yourself into that, or paint it on?” he finally asked. “I should have brought a fire extinguisher.”

  I felt my face flush. He’d seen me in those clothes before. That’s what I’d worn regularly when we worked together the previous summer.

  With a curtsey, I said, “I’m glad you like the outfit. I figured I’d save my nice clothes for someone who doesn’t consistently take me to a disaster.”

  It was gratifying to see him blush, though with his dark skin it wasn’t as apparent as it was with mine.

  We went to hole-in-the-wall kind of place that had a young and hip clientele, great hamburgers, and a girl singing with her guitar. I liked it a lot. It didn’t look like the kind of place that would get bombed by unhappy radicals, either.

  While we waited for our food, Wil said, “About the other night—”

  “Yeah, about the other night,” I said, cutting him off. “I’ve been thinking about that. I realized I was the only one out there who wasn’t getting paid to risk my neck. You’re right, I won’t do that again. My dad always said that altruism was an insidious vice, and I have to agree. No one even said thank you.”

  He opened his mouth and closed it a couple of times, then tried to recover. “You climbed up that building like some kind of spider.”

  “What did you do the last time you went on holiday?”

  “Huh?”

  “Holiday. Vacation. What do you do? What did you do the last time you had time and money?”

  “Went to Europe. I like history and museums.”

  “On my last holiday, I went to the Bruce Peninsula on Lake Huron and climbed cliffs,” I said. “Have you ever done any technical climbing?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “That’s why my nails are so short.” I held out my hand with the closely-trimmed nails painted a pretty red. Taking a drink of my beer, I asked, “Do you have any more silly questions?”

  He gave me a sheepish look.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re thinking,” I said, leaning close to him, “but the way you’re coming at me isn’t appreciated.”

  Wil leaned back in his chair, biting his lip. “I’m sorry.”

  “You should be. I don’t ask how the hell you got to your position, now do I? I could make insinuations about your age. Wonder if you’re a psychic. Ask if your boss is a woman and if you’re trading your favors. Such questions would be insulting, and you’d be right to take offense.”

  He had the grace to look embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Libby. Truly, I am.”

  “Good.” I reached out and took my meal as it slid out of the slot. “Order me another beer, if you please.”

  After I finished my burger, I said, “To answer the question you wanted to ask, my abilities to climb walls, shoot people I don’t like, and get into more trouble than any rational person should, have nothing to do with any mutations.”

  His head snapped up, and he blushed deeply.

  I smiled and winked at him. “I’m just a fun sort of girl.”

  Deborah came to my conference room on Friday afternoon. We talked for a while about how my work was progressing.

  As I pointed out something on one of the schematics, she came up behind me, wrapped her arms around me and put her hands on my breasts, pulling me tight against her.

  “I don’t understand anything about those drawings,” she whispered.

  She brushed lightly over my nipples through my blouse. They tightened in response, so sensitive that shivers ran through my body. One of her hands slid down, over my stomach and under my belt. Her clever fingers caused me to gasp.

  Her breath hot on my neck, she continued to whisper. “I can’t stop thinking about how you felt when you were beneath me. How you taste.”

  Even though I was cold sober, what she was doing to me, the images her voice recalled, sent hot lust coursing through me, enveloping my mind with longing. All the time I’d spent fantasizing about Wil probably contributed to my susceptibility as well.

  “We can go to my place and have dinner in bed. Tomorrow’s Saturday. We don’t have anywhere we have to be.”

  I whirled about and crushed her to me, covering her mouth with mine. Soon after, we spilled out of the building and into her car. She gave it the order to take us home, and then we were all over each other.

  At her house, she gave brief orders to the butler to bring us food and drink, and then pulled me by the hand after her up the stairs. We started shedding clothing before we even closed the door to her bedroom and fell together on the bed.

  We stayed there most of the weekend.

  Chapter 10

  I woke up Wednesday morning to someone hammering on the door. Before I was half out of bed, the door opened, and half a dozen Chamber Security men, a couple of Chicago police, and Wil burst into the room with drawn guns.

  “Hands in the air,” one of them barked.

  I complied, even though the sheet slid down to my waist. “Whoa. Hold on. What’s going on?”

  No one answered me as they spread out and started looking through drawers and the closet. Two of them tried to fit into the washroom. In general, there wasn’t enough room for all of them.

  I looked to Wil, who returned an angry glare, and asked him, “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

  “The museum was robbed last night,” one of the other men said.

  “And so, the first person you suspect is the security expert they hired to plug their holes? That makes sense. How stupid would I have to be?”

  “Or how smart,” Wil said. “The last person anyone would suspect.”

  “Obviously that strategy didn’t work,” I said, slowly lowering my hands and pulling the sheet up over my body.

  Wil searched my clothes before he gave them to me, and didn’t include a bra. They watched me get dressed, handcuffed me, then hustled me out and down to a waiting car.

  We ended up at the city jail, but they took me to a part away from the other prisoners. Once they put me in a cell, one of the policemen threw a switch on the wall near the door and warned me that the bars were electrified. That’s when I realized I was in a special section for mutants.

  I tried not to smile. Please don’t throw me in that briar patch.

  After they all left, I took in my surroundings. The space contained six cells, and only one other cell was occupied. The girl, or young woman, I’d captured at the bombing watched from the cell across from me.

  With good light, I realized she was a chimera. Her hair was two colors in patches, dark blonde and light brown. Her skin had a swirling mosaic pattern with one color almost as light as mine, and the other a couple of shades darker. One eye was blue and the other was brown. Although she had long hair and looked female, there was no telling what she looked like with her clothes off. Chimeras’ gender might be anything on a continuum from pure male to pure female, and how she looked on the outside would tell me nothing about her internal organs. All that said, she was a very pretty girl, to some eyes exotic enough to call beautiful.

  “Welcome to hell,” she said.

  “Thank you. Is there a schedule of events and entertainments?”

  She snorted a laugh. “No schedule that I’ve figured out, but they come and ask me questions and yell at me a couple of times a day.”

  “Wonderful. I love being yelled at.”

  Standing up from her bunk, she approached within a foot of the bars. “You’re the woman who put me here. The one who killed Dan and Wally.”

  “They weren’t playing nice with others. You have to expect consequences when you take
an assault rifle and start shooting innocent people on the street.” I searched her face, trying to read her reactions. “They couldn’t have expected to get out of there alive.”

  Various emotions played across her face, from anger to sadness to resignation.

  “What do you really expect to gain by bombing and shooting people?” I asked.

  Her eyes slid up and to the side. I followed her gaze and saw the cameras lining the passage between the cells.

  “Do they turn the lights off at night?” I asked.

  “Yeah. They feed me twice while the lights are on. That’s how I know how long I’ve been here.” Her diction was educated. She hadn’t grown up in one of the mutie ghettos, or at least not one of the blight areas.

  “Food any good?”

  “Bland, but plenty of it. What did you do? I thought you were one of them.”

  “I think they just don’t like girls.”

  She told me her name was Carly, and she watched me as I checked out my cell. Her dress was dirty and a bit ragged, and I could smell her even though ten feet separated us. Water for washing was a rare commodity in many of the mutant slums, and after a week, the cops still hadn’t allowed her a shower. I didn’t consider that a good sign.

  Shortly after I arrived, two armed jailers and another man brought us unsweetened oatmeal, a peeled hard-boiled egg, and water.

  “Yum,” I said after they left.

  “Same thing every morning,” Carly said.

  Dinner wasn’t much better. A slab of fried soy cake with fried squash and applesauce. She was right about the size of the servings. The soy cake was enough for two people.

  In between the meals, nothing happened. No one came to ask me questions or yell at me. I kept expecting Wil to at least come and glower in disapproval, but he didn’t.

  Without warning, the lights went out.

  “Must be night time,” Carly said. “Good night.”

  I waited a few minutes, then grabbed hold of the bars of my cell, shorting them out, and hitched myself up so I could reach out and touch the camera trained on me. I shorted out the camera, but wasn’t sure if that had any effect on the other cells and cameras. I couldn’t know if the guards monitored the electricity, but figured I’d find out soon enough.

  My mischief done, I sat on my bunk waiting for visitors. Eventually I fell asleep.

  I awakened to the lights coming on, and shortly afterward, the guards came with our breakfast. As they opened the door, I heard one say, “…sometime during the night. They were working yesterday.”

  “Any idea when they’ll get them fixed?” another voice asked.

  “Dunno. We’ll probably have to wait until someone can come look at them.”

  I assumed they were talking about the cameras. One of the guards threw the switch that would turn off the current to the bars of our cells. After we received our food, he switched the electricity on again. I reached out and made sure the bars of my cell were still cold.

  “Carly? How strong is the current running through the bars of your cell?”

  “Knocked me on my ass the only time I touched them.”

  “Can you do me a favor and check them out again?”

  She gave me a sour look. “Why don’t you do it if you think it sounds like fun?”

  I reached out and grasped a bar. “Mine are cold. No current.”

  Her brow furrowed. Walking up to the bars, she waved her hand close to them, then tentatively reached a finger out to touch one. Next, she took hold of it like I had. “You’re right, it’s cold.”

  “Cameras aren’t working either,” I said, taking a bite of my egg.

  After thinking about it, she cocked her head and asked, “What did you do?”

  I thought that was an interesting question. I look normal, and since I went to corporate schools and university, I never lived in the mutant ghettos. I do hang out in mutie bars sometimes and rarely have a problem. Maybe my height makes me enough of an oddball that I’m accepted.

  But Carly found it easy to believe that I could disable cameras and electric security enclosures. Normal humans would never make that leap.

  “Do you know people who can do that sort of thing?” I asked. “Mess with electrical devices?”

  She regarded me suspiciously. “You’re one of them. They just put you in here hoping I’d tell you something.”

  With a sigh, I began spooning oatmeal into my mouth. As bad as it was, I couldn’t imagine it would get any better when it hardened into a cold lump.

  “Why don’t you tell me why your friends wanted to kill people,” I said.

  After she thought about it, I guess she decided answering my question was harmless. “The corps are killing us. Some of us fast, some of us slow. They don’t give a damn about us, so why not let them feel a little pain?”

  “Who’s us? Are you part of Democracy Now, or some other group?”

  “Us. People like me and Dan and Wally. Mutants.”

  “Which one was Dan?” I asked.

  “The vamp.”

  “And what kind of mutie was Wally?”

  “A trog.”

  She meant a troglodyte, sort of a catch-all for photosensitive people, those who didn’t do well in the daytime or outside. A vamp and a trog would make a great nighttime sniper team.

  “Which one were you in love with?”

  The question caught her off guard. I saw her eyes glaze over, she shuddered and drew a ragged breath. In a voice so low I could barely hear her, she said, “Wally.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “He shouldn’t have shot at me.”

  “Why are you here?” she asked again.

  “They seem to think I stole art worth millions of creds from a museum.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. It’s just a mix up.” I changed the subject. “You’re educated. You could get a corporate job, or a job with an indie. You don’t have to play martyr.”

  “I’m different. I’d always be different. How would you like it if people always stared at you?”

  I stood up and her head bent back so her eyes could follow my face.

  “They do. Get over yourself,” I said. “The boys used to call me a giant and a troll and throw rocks at me. When I was fourteen, I was the tallest person in the school, including the adults.”

  I resumed my seat and continued eating my breakfast.

  “Well, I might have a chance in the normal world,” Carly said, “but a lot of muties don’t.”

  “Not arguing that,” I said. “So, you just like hurting people. Maybe you should become a dominatrix. Make good money beating up norms but stay out of jail.”

  “I don’t like hurting people.” Her sullen, muted demeanor suddenly changed to animated agitation. “Sometimes you have to do radical things to make people pay attention. We’re nothing, not even background noise. We need to make people aware of the problems we face.”

  With a sigh, I said, “Carly, I have one piece of advice for you before they get those cameras working again. The only witness they have that you were with Dan and Wally is me. They actually haven’t asked me anything about you. Deny everything. Tell them you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and I jumped to conclusions. The pistol wasn’t yours, you just picked it up after my fight with the vamp.”

  She opened her mouth to say something, then stopped. “Seriously?”

  “Do you like living?”

  Four guards came for me after breakfast. They led me up two flights of stairs and into a room where Wil sat behind a table. He motioned to the chair opposite from him.

  “I’ve been sitting a lot,” I said, pacing across the room and back. “I want a lawyer.”

  “What good do you think a lawyer will do you?” he asked.

  “He’s going to sue your ass off. Neither the Chamber of Commerce nor the Chicago Police have any right to detain me without filing formal charges.”

  “Calm down, Libby.”

  “It’s Miss Nelson to you, and I’ll be da
mned if I calm down. Who in the hell do you think you are? Whose idea was it to barge into my room like a bunch of storm troopers? Somebody steals something from the museum, and instead of investigating it properly, you assume that I did it?” I realized I was screaming when I heard the echo of my own voice.

  “The robbers used weaknesses you identified in your report,” Wil said.

  “Wow. Those weaknesses were so unique. Do a little research on the past two hundred museum robberies and notice the similarities. So, I assume everyone who read that report is also in jail? The entire damn board of directors? No? Gee, you’re falling down on the job. Why is it taking you so long to round them all up?”

  The room was too small. I could only take three paces in one direction before I had to turn around. “I can’t believe this. There were ten copies of that report plus the original on a chip, and God alone knows who might have read it. I guess I should feel lucky that you didn’t literally shoot the damned messenger.”

  I stopped, leaning toward him with my fists resting on the table, and calmly said, “If I was going to rob that damned museum, nobody would even know anything was gone.”

  He held my eyes for a few moments then looked down.

  “Do you have a copy of the report?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He reached into a briefcase by his feet and pulled it out.

  “Look at page fifteen,” I suggested. That was where I documented that no one had ever checked me when I left the museum. “After that, take a look at page thirty-two.” On that page, during a discussion of some of the sloppy inventory work, I revealed that I had found an undocumented Gauguin behind a door in a workshop in the basement of the original museum building. The damned painting was worth millions, and as far as anyone could tell, had sat there for more than a hundred years. I had immediately called Deborah, who then called security and the head curator.

  Wil read those passages in the report, then looked up at me.

  “Nothing stopped me from walking out with a painting they didn’t know they had. Nothing but my own damned integrity. Now, I want a lawyer.”

  He reached for me with his right hand.