by Chloe Garner
At any moment, she expected someone to jump out and chase after her, but nothing happened. There was breathing in a corner nearby, echoing off the walls and making it sound nearer, louder, and in the wrong direction, but she was pretty sure where the soldier was sitting.
He hadn’t moved in minutes, and she just had to hope he wasn’t paying enough attention to notice her. Perhaps he was watching the cells rather than the stairs.
She was hoping that security reflected the normal population, not renegade Pixies.
For the moment, at least, it was laxer than she had hoped.
He appeared to be asleep.
Admittedly, it was hard to tell - his natural coloring had at least a half-dozen false eyes, or eyes that she hoped were false - and he was standing upright - but a lot of animals slept standing, didn’t they? Cassie glided across the room, not touching anything, headed for the main hallway.
It was like an old game she’d played somewhere. She couldn’t place it. She could just hear the guards as they made their rounds through the cells. She didn’t have a good layout of the place - she was right that it didn’t seem to be set up in a linear pattern - and she had to stay out of visual range of all of them, while sweeping the cells looking for Jesse. Something about detectives with flashlights, she thought.
She braced herself, preparing to start the search, cell by cell, when she caught Jesse’s scent. It was faint, and it was often obscured or erased by the guards, many of whom had substantially more powerful odors, but it was there. Cassie padded on bare feet after it, the rock in the center of the hallways worn smooth from the frequent traffic there. There was nowhere to hide, if a guard turned a corner while she was in sight. There was nothing she could do but flee, and odds were good that they would catch her before she made the outside door. She had no idea if they were armed, and if they were, what ends they would go to to prevent her from escaping, but she had no other choices.
Having worked her way intentionally into this corner, all she could do, Pixie or not, was keep going.
It was a game of two steps forward, one step back. She would make it along Jesse’s scent line to a new corner, but would then have to retreat to avoid being seen. Twice, she was sure she was done, but she rounded a corner just in time, in both cases, and stood with her back against a wall, hoping with trembling limbs that the guards turned the other way. The first time, she was lucky. The second time, she had to retreat further, finding another corner and waiting, counting steps until the guards she was running from would be out of sight and hoping that it was before the ones coming up behind her got there.
She wanted to find a corner and press herself into it and cry, but there were no corners. There was no place to hide.
She kept going.
The last hallway - she could hear the characteristic pattern of Jesse’s voice through the stone, now - there were a pair of men walking down to what looked like, when she stuck her head around the corner quickly, a dead end. There were another trio of men behind her, coming quickly, and she realized she was pinched. She had to go.
She turned the corner, not breathing, and opened her wings, trusting them to glide more silently than her feet walked, and chased after the guards. She didn’t breathe, getting as close to the pair as she dared and willing them not to turn around.
Two more doors.
One more door.
They were past Jesse.
Cassie darted to the little window in the door, easing it open with a glance at the guards only feet to her left. They only had a little hallway to go before they would necessarily turn around. One of them said something to the other, and the other one answered with a grunt that could have meant anything.
“Jesse,” she whispered, peering through the little crack. He was at the door in a moment.
“Cassie,” he said. She pushed the bag through the slit, looking at the guards again. Seconds left.
“Are you okay?” Jesse asked.
“They’re going to catch me,” she said, horrified.
“Where did you…” he said, pulling the contents out of the bag, then laughing softly. “Oh, not today, du Charme.”
He laid the plastic-like sheets over his arm one after another - she was relieved to see that it had healed, though it was inconceivable how quickly he had recovered - then put his face against the door.
“Quickly,” he said. The guards had reached the end of the hallway and were turning. The door Cassie was pressing herself against opened and Jesse’s arm darted out, pulling her inside.
She threw her arms around his neck and he crushed her against his chest.
“I was so worried about you,” he said.
“Are you all right?” she answered. He frowned.
“Me? I’m fine. How did you do it?”
“Maugh,” she answered. “Can you jump us out of here?”
He shook his head.
“The space here is destabilized to make jumping impossible. But we don’t need to do that.” He turned, holding up an arm to indicate the rest of the room. There were maybe a dozen men and women there, watching her with big eyes. “Cassie, meet everybody.”
There was a long, slow attempt at introductions as Jesse switched back and forth between English and what sounded like four different other languages, introducing Cassie to the people in the room. It might have only lasted a minute or so, but Cassie was feeling the walls more and more as they stood, and the strangers even worse. Jesse’s friends or not, she didn’t want to be around them, especially not in a locked room.
“It isn’t locked,” Jesse said when she said as much.
“What?” she asked. “Then why did I have to break in down here to rescue you?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “It was. I just destroyed the mechanism once I got my stuff back. Thanks, by the way. Not many places to get that.”
“So when do we leave?” she asked, glancing at the door. He frowned at her.
“I don’t think you understand what you’ve done, du Charme,” he said.
“Broke into a military facility with nothing but toothpicks for arms and legs and tissue paper for wings,” she said bitterly. He shook his head, motioning to the room again.
“These are political prisoners,” he said. She nodded exaggeratedly, stepping closer to Jesse again as he forced her to confront the reality of the number of people in the room.
“I get that,” she said. “It’s how I knew where to look for you.”
He grinned.
“That’s my girl. You’re missing it, though. They’re all here. Together.”
Her brain was having difficulty processing what he was telling her. She just wanted him to magic them out, not introduce her to various leaders of the revolution.
“Oh,” she said. He nodded.
“A lot of them have been here for months. With nothing to do but talk about what they would do if they ever got out.”
She looked around the room again with new eyes. There were defiant expressions all around, so much unlike the ones she had seen in the village and from Maugh.
“Oh,” she said again. He grinned.
“We’re letting them all out,” he said.
“There are guards out there,” she said. “With guns.”
The fact that she didn’t know this without a shadow of a doubt didn’t make the specter of firearms any less devastating to her.
“They know the risks. If they want to stay in the cells, they will. But you watch how many don’t,” Jesse told her, having another quick conversation with one of the men in the room, then peeling a bit of plastic off of the door and putting it back on his arm. He touched the electronics there a few times, then peeled strip after strip off, handing them out. He looked at Cassie.
“Do you want one?”
She shook her head quickly.
“I’m staying with you.”
He nodded and she took off, landing on his back and wrapping her arms around his neck.
“Is that too much weight?” she asked
.
“You hardly weigh a thing,” he said. “Are you ready?”
Her feet found his back pockets and she tucked them in toes-first, then nodded into the back of his neck.
“Let’s go.”
He said something to the room at large and Cassie strained her ears for guards outside. The nearest ones were far away, around several corners, if she was getting it right through the door.
“It’s clear,” she said. Jesse looked back at her.
“What?”
“There isn’t anyone outside.”
She could hear the prisoners in the nearby rooms, moving, talking, but no boots walking with that soldier confidence.
“How do you know that?”
“I can hear,” she said. He twisted harder.
“Really?”
She shrugged.
“How do you think I got here?”
He frowned.
“Impressive,” he said. She buried her face into the back of his neck and he pulled the door open. The revolution had begun.
The first wing went smoothly. The people from Jesse’s room scattered with unpracticed determination, opening the nearest doors quickly and moved on to the next block as the hallway filled. Cassie hugged Jesse tighter, struggling to keep from squealing as people brushed up against her.
After the third block, there were simply too many of them to stay secret. The noise was cacophonic to Cassie’s over-sensitive ears.
“You’re doing great,” Jesse murmured to her at one point as they moved on to the next set of cells. “How are you feeling?”
“Hungry,” she answered. He laughed.
“I missed you,” he said.
“I missed you, too,” she answered.
The next set of doors started opening and there was the same confused set of excited whispers as the new prisoners came to grips with what was happening. Cassie stood up higher on her toes, trying to differentiate noises.
“They’re coming,” she said.
“I’m going to be at the front of this,” Jesse said. “Do you want to go and wait for it to settle?”
She squeezed his neck yet harder.
“I’m staying,” she said. He put his hand over her arms.
“Stick with me,” he said. “I don’t know how bad this could go.”
She pointed.
“That corner. Coming around the corner in… ten seconds.”
There was yelling.
Lots of scary yelling.
Men talked into radios and shouted and guns went off.
It was more than Cassie could process, so she didn’t. She kept track of the cells, letting Jesse know when they had missed one, and she kept track of the guards, doing her best to give Jesse the running total of how many were where. The stairs, lifetimes away, shuddered under boots.
There was the smell of blood.
Lifeblood had so many different smells, but it always smelled like blood, and it always upset her.
“It’s not so bad,” Jesse said once when she said something absently about it, eyes shut hard and ears at their limit.
They were taking guns from the guards. Shots went both directions. More soldiers showed up.
More yelling.
There were hundreds of prisoners. Then thousands. They fought their way to the stairway, then up it.
There were losses on the stairs. Some of the guards had been disarmed easily enough and were put into cells, but at the stairs, there was an entrenchment that neither side could back down from without a huge confrontation. Cassie felt the tension build in Jesse’s body as the fight dragged on, hour after hour.
“Enough,” he finally muttered.
He stood from where he had been crouched and shouted something.
Both sides went quiet.
He shouted more things, and a whisper went up the stairs among the guards.
A frightened one.
“It’s working,” Cassie murmured into Jesse’s ear, opening her eyes. She could see several of the front line soldiers, laying flat on their stomachs on the first landing.
Their faces were white.
Well, purple and green, really, but if they’d been human, their faces would have been white, she was sure of it.
Upstairs somewhere, someone yelled something, and Jesse answered it. The soldiers on the stairs looked torn. There was another yell, and then something that might have been anger rippled down the ranks of soldiers and the shooting started again.
Jesse dived to the side, into a tiny room.
“What was that about?” Cassie asked.
“Only way to get here,” he answered, rubbing his hands together.
“What is here?” Cassie asked. She wasn’t sure what was worse, the tiny room or the fighting outside.
“Hold on tight, du Charme,” he said.
“What?” she asked.
He didn’t answer.
“Jesse?”
He still didn’t answer, his hands busy with things she couldn’t identify.
“Palta.”
She woke up with her body curled around Jesse’s back, like a child at an amusement park.
“What happened?” she asked drowsily.
“Knockout bomb,” he answered happily.
“What?”
“Too many casualties,” he said. “I decided to end it.”
“With knockout gas?” she asked.
“Both sides go down, gives me a chance to tidy things up,” he told her. She finally cleared her head enough to see that they were up in the main office.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“Oh, you know, find the handcuffs, put them on the right people, lock everything down. Like that.”
She shook her head.
“And you were magically the only one who was immune?”
“Magically,” he said, blowing air through his lips. “I’m Palta. Takes more than heavy-duty cleaning solvents to put us down.”
“Jesse, have you given me brain damage?”
“No, I was very careful,” he said. “The founding fathers of Yan were down there.”
She grunted, not happy with that answer, but letting it go. She turned her head to look at the stairway leading downstairs.
“It isn’t over, though, is it?” Cassie asked. Jesse sighed.
“No. I won their first battle, but they’re going to have to do the rest. Peaceful as they are, it won’t be this easy again to win. They’re going to have to fight for it.”
Cassie nodded.
“Everything worth having.”
He gave her arms a squeeze.
“I’ve got all of my digitals back. We should go. I’ve got a few more ideas on what might be wrong with you, and I want to see what Troy and Slav have turned up.”
“I thought we were stuck in here.”
“We are,” he said. “I’m going to walk through that door and lock it behind us, and then we’re going to go.”
“Aren’t there going to be people out there who are going to shoot at us?” Cassie asked. He nodded.
“That’s why I’m going to do it very, very quickly,” he said.
“Jesse, I don’t like this plan,” she said. He stood and walked toward the door.
“Jesse?”
He ignored her.
“Jesse!”
Cassie grunted, the pain building as the organs in her chest reorganized.
“Are you sure you can’t give her anything?” Slav asked.
“Metabolism is too variable,” Jesse answered. “I told you that.”
“I still say we should pump her full of morphine, just in case,” Slav told him.
“Too late,” Cassie muttered as her blood flow stopped. Charming new development.
“I can name a dozen species, in alphabetical order, whose nervous systems morphine would completely destroy,” Jesse said.
Four transformations in three days. Each slower and more painful than the last. She was an hour into this latest one, and her skin still hadn’t star
ted to shift from the scaly green she’d had as a Gen-roth.
“Maybe she’s faking,” Slav said, starting another slide preparation.
Jesse had isolated a virus in her blood soon after they had returned from Yan, and the three of them had started analysis on it, but the problem was, as they found them and looked at them, they kept finding new ones. Only two of them, so far, had been the same, and the rest of them were largely unique.
Jesse wasn’t sure what that meant.
Cassie was ready to pass out from lack of circulation, but her brain was mid-transition and one side or the other of the transition was resisting. Unconscious would have been better, except that she was afraid she wouldn’t wake up.
They all were.
“Her skin is starting to turn,” Troy said a few minutes later. Cassie’s vision was gone, at this point, and Gen-roth had a miserable scent perception and worse hearing, so she could only imagine that Jesse came over to peer at her from inches away.
“You’re right,” the Palta said.
“You recognize it?” Slav asked. “What’s she going to be this time?”
It was a jumper attitude that Cassie recognized, the barely-contained glee at getting to see something new. She sympathized. She was actually excited, herself, to see the new body that she would have, to get to know the creature from the inside. It was the greatest opportunity she could have ever imagined, perhaps next to traveling with Jesse, if only it didn’t hurt so much.
And require re-learning how to walk every time.
Which was admittedly frustrating.
“I don’t know,” Jesse told Slav. “Maybe.”
Cassie wiggled her face, feeling the itch where the two skin compositions were fighting each other. Gen-roth had leathery scales, supple and made for acrobatics. The new skin felt tight and stiff by comparison. She jumped in surprise when Jesse touched her face.
“You okay?” he asked.
It was at that moment that her heart, now a long, thin organ that seemed to originate somewhere near her stomach, started to beat again. She coughed with brand new, and inordinately tiny lungs, and nodded.
“Strath,” Jesse said. “From Stran. Hard to kill.”
