Episode 7 - The Horned Hare

  Chapter 61 - Traps

  “Yeah. They’re here to steal something,” I conclude aloud to myself in my cell, flicking through the stills I’ve taken in the camera footage Adrian has been sending me.

  “What sort of something?” asks Adrian through the hum of Espah’s wings.

  I hum noncommittally, chewing on the inside of my cheek and staring at a still of the Lepus again. Its host is meeting with two other humans I’ve seen with him too often now to be a coincidence. I’ve also seen the symbionts of all four suspected team members now; it’s not dissimilar to a team we might assemble: A predatory invertebrate, a felid with telekinesis, and a large herbivore for brute force. The unknown is the cryptid.

  “Something big. Team is at least four.” I swipe the tab, studying a map of Apex City with annotations on it from Rishi and Adrian. “I agree their target is the A-wing apartments by the Skyspire. Soon as well. When is the operation going live?”

  The Apex contract Regina was negotiating was, as we suspected, a counter-operation against Covertus. Somehow Apex had foreknowledge it would be Covertus, and even a guess at the range of dates that Covertus agents would begin infiltrating Apex City. Their information so far has been good enough that I suspect they know exactly what Covertus is targeting, but they have not been forthcoming with those details, instead focusing our contract’s scope on ensuring Covertus does not fulfill its own.

  “Rishi is finalizing the operational plan as we speak. We intend to put agents into the field as early as tomorrow.”

  “Who is going?”

  “Nessa, Ashe, and Rhett. If I can get approval… you. We’re sorely lacking in urban firepower. Blake’s symbiont is ill-suited for this type of work. We’re strongly considering even pulling Shion in just to get more bodies in the field.”

  Aquila has been thin on field agents since Shion moved to the director role. We’ve made it work though, I don’t know what their process is for deciding to take on new employees. I tap my lips with one finger. I’ve never worked directly with Ashe in the field, although I know him well enough from my time in Control.

  Pooka rests his chin on the edge of my bed near my feet, leaning sideways with one hind foot stretched across the floor in an awkward half-sitting pose. His whiskers twitch as he waits for me. “You sure you want a live bomb in the field?”

  Adrian gives a tired sigh. “I said I’m sorry.”

  “Finally found a trap that would work on me,” I snark viciously. I tap the side of my tablet, turning off the screen.

  The silence in the Vespa wings after is practically icy. I might have actually made Adrian feel something. “I have never made any promises or allusions that might imply I’m here for anyone but me. I picked the option that kept you alive. That’s the best I can do.”

  Just because it’s true doesn’t make my feelings of betrayal less sharp.

  “You should know better than I, there are worse fates than death. Don’t give me your false pity. I know you feel nothing.”

  Adrian is silent. I hope it hurt. I hope it really hurt. I will cooperate, but I will make it everyone’s business that I do so with immense displeasure at my muzzle.

  There is a knock at my door. I pause on my cot, eyes trained on the lock, waiting to see the mechanism move. When it doesn’t shift, I sit up slightly. “What?”

  A familiar male voice, always masked carefully in disinterest. “It’s me.”

  Fucking- “Go away.”

  The lock starts to spin, and Pooka points his attention to it. The metal jams to a halt. There is a momentary pause, then a loud slam on the door that shakes the doorframe. “Let me in.”

  Where was that confident bark of command before?

  “Say whatever you want to say out there,” I yell back.

  “Blake’s out here. You want him to hear everything?”

  “When isn’t someone listening?” I snap, rolling in my cot to hug my pillow. Pooka flicks one ear in my direction, his chin unmoved from the base of the bed. With an irritated grump, he tucks his hind legs under his body and hops onto the bed near my feet, and releases his hold of the lock.

  It turns immediately, and the door pushes open as Rhett steps through. A bag of something hangs from his wrist.

  He immediately lifts his black tank, showing me his stomach and a snail trail of fine coffee-dark hair climbing upwards. “Look,” he says. He pulls on his slacks, practically unzipping them to tug them down his waist. There is an uncharacteristic haste in his tone. “You looking? Nothing. Nothing on me. Look!” He finishes by spreading his arms, bare and corded with muscle. Pell is perched on his head, her abdomen centered on the top of his skull and eight legs wrapped around each side like a protective helmet.

  I turn my head into my pillow again. “Yeah, so what.”

  “You’re not looking! I’m unarmed.”

  “So?”

  He tosses the bag in his hands at the floor between us with a frustrated snarl. Whatever is inside rattles with the sound of metal and a single clink of glass as it lands and slides half underneath the legs of my side table.

  “I told you not to fight with her! What the fuck happened?” he asks, his voice cracking with frustration.

  “She started it with me!” I yell back.

  “No, you came over and joined in something that was none of your business!”

  Fuck, I hate him! I glare back at him, his cobalt-blue eyes unflinching. He does not slip from me, meeting me back evenly as he waits for my reply. I let my eyes travel over his ears and neck, down his body, searching for evidence he’s lying to me about being unarmed. Nothing catches my eye, and no Vespa on him either.

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  I lift my hand to my ear, cupping the Vespa there before it can fly away or react. With one motion, I stand and I shove it under my opaque plastic drinking cup, trapping it against my breakfast tray on my bedside table. The cup almost vibrates with the incessant buzzing of the trapped symbiont. To Rhett’s credit, he doesn’t flinch as he watches me move. Unlike some of the other employees, who visit to bring my meals.

  I pause with my back to him, trying to calm my racing nerves. My hands grasp the front of my shirt, bunching the fabric between my fingers. I want to scream. I want to run away. I’m terrified of what he might say. I need to go first. I need to get all my feelings out before they betray me too. But the hate I’ve held onto for the past few days unravels within my very fingertips, and something that I had so resolutely tucked deep crawls up my throat. As I spin, the words I’d practised in my head to scream at him are not the first ones that tumble out desperately.

  “Why would you let her do this to me?” The corners of my eyes are already wet. I had so many other words I was going to righteously yell at him, and none of them started like this.

  His whole posture droops, his hand reaching and then curling as he hesitates. His lips part, his jaw twitches as he catches his words, taking a half step towards me. He swallows and then speaks so softly I almost can’t hear him. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why?” I didn’t expect the question to come out so strangled, my voice hitching like I’m going to cry at any moment.

  Forgetting his hesitation, he steps closer, lifting his arms to wrap his fingers around my shoulders. At his touch, I fold. I completely and utterly fold.

  I press my face down into his shoulder, and I feel a hand wrap around the back of my head as he pulls me into him, resting his chin on my shoulder. I hold back a sob, putting my hands around his waist and digging my fingers into the fabric of his back.

  “She’s my mum…” he whispers into the side of my head. “I can’t… You have to understand, I’m responsible for everyone here. Everyone.”

  I fail at holding back my second sob, clawing my hands together more and tugging at his tank.

  “I didn’t know ‘til after it was already done.” His arms tighten.

  I wait there, feeling like a wretched mess. Every emotion I’ve bottled up feels like it will boil out of me. Months of complacency were slowly drowning me, pressurizing everything, just waiting for the chance to explode. Now, suddenly, I feel worse than I’ve ever felt in my life.

  It’s as if his very presence is giving me permission to feel so many things that I’ve been hiding deep within myself. I feel worse than the day I came to Aquila, worse than the first lonely night I spent in my new apartment here. I want to cry. I want to really cry, not caring if my face gets red and puffy and snot dribbles from my nose. I just want everything inside of me out so I will be empty, and I can pick up the pieces that remain and gather myself together again.

  I crunch my eyes together and bury my nose in his shoulder. I can feel him breathing in my arms. I can feel my tears making his skin wet. I can feel his hands grip me back with almost as much force as I hold on to him. I’ve never felt so vulnerable… and so relieved. I don’t know how long we just stand there in silence while I sob.

  Eventually, I get tired and I let my fingers uncurl from the fabric of his back, drawing my head back from him. He releases me, his fingers trailing along my sides as his hands drop. I take a breath, and drop onto my cot, planting my head straight into my hands.

  He kneels, grabbing the napkin off my breakfast tray, and offers it to me to wipe my face while I gather my composure again.

  “She’s alive, in case you wanted to know.”

  “I expected as much. Given I am.”

  Rhett grunts and scoots backwards to sit against one wall, crossing his legs.

  I drag my fingers over my face, tugging on the skin of my cheeks. “How can you let her speak to you that way?”

  His face is impassive. He shrugs. “What else am I going to do?”

  “Literally anything?”

  He grimaces, looking down at his hands. “She’s not completely wrong. Most of the executives at Apex do the same thing. Dating and-” he swallows “-marriage isn’t for attraction or love like you get it. It’s a tool for business partnerships or genetics.”

  “Marriage isn’t for fun for serfs either,” I reply. “We've gotta get permission from management.”

  “Yeah, but no one is telling you no as long as it doesn’t get in the way of anything. It’s just paperwork. I… I need to make sure I can take care of everyone.”

  “How many women has she tried to set you up with?”

  “I dunno. Like six or something.”

  “Have you-”

  “I don’t really want to talk about it. None of them turned into anything is really all that matters. Look… You and Pooka cannot attack Aquila’s people like that, never again.”

  “What is it?” I ask breathlessly.

  “It’s a small device, planted right next to your spine,” he twists in place, placing his finger around his back in the vicinity of where my almost-closed incision site is. “It can be remotely activated to rapidly dose you with a symbiont-originated tranquilizer straight into your central nervous system. Same thing Regina stabbed you with. It’s made from our symbiont’s venom. Incredibly fast-acting and chemically stable. Dose and administration method should be enough to knock you out cold instantly if Pooka is out of control. What makes it particularly useful is that an antivenom is needed to wake you up again - otherwise someone can just leave you knocked out until you pass away from its effects. Don’t give them the opportunity to use it. And don’t fuck with it, you’ll give yourself nerve damage and potentially paralyze yourself.”

  “Who controls it?”

  “Co-owners. Regina, Owen, Adrian.”

  “That fucking bitch.” At least some of my sadness is giving way to anger again. I feel better fueled by anger. “How long is the range of the controls?”

  “Long enough, I’ve already told you too much. You're the second person I’ve ever heard of getting this thing placed, it's an extreme measure for symbiont control when the public safety risk is too high. You are literally a danger to others. Take this seriously, please.”

  “She basically threatened me. Treated me like genetic soup to be cross-bred against my will-”

  “Aren’t we all?” interrupts Rhett, raising his voice. “You think I don’t know what she was hoping to breed for herself when she seduced my dad? She’s a shit mother. To her, children are just investment opportunities. You’re not getting any kind of special extra fucked up treatment here. Things are what they are.”

  I bite my lip, chewing down all of my useless retorts. His words are bitter, but they’ve always, always been true. Finally, I ask, “What do I do now?”

  His eyebrows knit together. “Just don’t make a mess of things. Do what you are told for once, no ‘side projects’ right now. Please. Can you do that? And don’t lie to me.”

  I swallow. “I’ll try. I’ve been trying.”

  Rhett's face softens, and he tips his head toward the upturned cup on my tray again. “Let Adrian out. I’ll get you out of here for the operation tomorrow or the day after, if I can. Adrian reckons Covertus has their cryptid here. We’ll need you and Pooka.”

  He stands, rapping on the door for Blake to unlock it from the other side. I wipe under my nose again, wondering how much of a mess I must look.

  After the door is shut, I remember the bag he tossed to the floor, and I stoop to retrieve it. In it I find my metal pencil tin, and a couple of random sheets of paper he’s tucked between the hard-sided folio I remember leaving on my desk. The glass sound is something new, a pair of dropper bottles with delicate labels containing high-quality inks - one in black and one in ‘Stormcloud Blue’. They’re tied together with a small scrap of red ribbon and a handwritten tag at the end saying ‘Happy Birthday’. I tip one, watching the colored liquid within run down the inside of the glass, leaving behind a thin stain revealing the dark gunmetal color of the ‘Stormcloud Blue’.

  I can’t believe he had the gall to go into my room.

  and miss-balanced endemic management was important. I've worked with communities where hunting is normal and common. Let me tell you, you have never had a conversation that challenges you more than sitting between someone who is vegan and someone from a community reclaiming their oppressed culture through hunting. I've worked in shelters and wildlife rehabilitation settings, and I've fostered animals. How do I reconcile all of the experiences I've gained in those places into one overarching philosophy that can be applied to all contexts? And then if I take that philosophy and apply it to humans, does it fall apart? When I examine the things that I find confronting about substituting a human into that philosophy, why do I feel less confronted when it's an animal? What about if I applied that same philosophy to plants - or things even more alien to my own experiences? I can actually watch my ability to have empathy begin to slip through my fingers as 'logic' tries to ease the literal physical discomfort of the dissonance, and I watch my mind trying to draw lines around concepts like 'pain' that get torn to shreds when you point back and say 'Pain is just chemistry, does it have to be painful to be wrong?'

  think my goal is to walk back some of the bleakness and give readers a little more relief, but I want to get the amount right.