One of the things about legal work that law schools don’t exactly tell you about up front? The waiting. Oh, sure, there were deadlines aplenty, most of us had a fair few irons in the fire, and it took a fairly consistent amount of effort to remain on top of anywhere between twelve and fifty different case files.

  But a lot of that stuff was also just… following up on someone else’s progress, answering questions, sending out reminders… stuff that didn’t take more than a few minutes. And once all that was done?

  Well, there was little else to do but hurry up and wait.

  Cruz’s soon-to-be-ex-husband still had another two weeks to turn over the raw footage that served as his alibi, since what his buddy had available online had been edited down prior to upload. Yes, I could start with the available footage, but even scrubbing that smaller amount of footage was still a two-person job, and while I’d told Casey to be back yesterday in front of his parents, he wasn’t actually due back until Monday. Plus, the various parties required to disclose information on the wire transfer that set this whole affair off in the first place? Yeah, they still had that same two weeks to get everything to us, which of course meant that we’d get the info from them at the absolute last possible moment, and not a second sooner.

  As for my other official case? Well, Wayne “Pyre” McCain was currently due to be returned to the DC area and available for a face-to-face by Tuesday of next week… but I wouldn’t be surprised if that had to get pushed to Friday.

  And to top it all off? Because I’d come back from vacation only to have these criminal matters immediately dropped in my lap, I was under orders from my boss and named partner, Alice Tanaka-Schotz, to not pick back up the cases I’d handed off before leaving the country.

  All of this together meant that I was bored out of my goddamn mind, and had literally nothing better to do than use firm hours to work on something that had to stay off the books. My actual cases? Stuck sitting there with a thumb up my butt until something happened. But Lady Liberty’s creepy little stalker?

  That, I could work on. So long as I kept things quiet, at least.

  An email to Megan requesting an in-person meeting to discuss what I might need from the NMR for my cases would get me onto her schedule for next week. The message itself took a good thirty, forty minutes to draft, just because this was a situation where I had to say things without saying them. And when it came to reading and writing between the lines, no two people had the same way of going about it, so it became a tricky balancing act of “subtext that anyone can notice” against “subtext that everyone would notice”.

  Pro tip, by the way — when figuring out the latter, you only need to ask yourself one question: “if I fuck up, and this gets submitted with the rest of the evidence, who is the first person that would be looking at this to determine if it was proof?” In this instance, the answer was the military.

  And with that in mind, I finally fell into a more colloquial style, and signed not as an attorney, but as “your sister-in-law”. If there was one thing the military was allergic to, it was trying to piece together the layers of meaning between military personnel and their civilian family members. After all, families had a way of speaking in code — references, quirks, inside jokes, shreds of meaning from shared experience. And that kind of code? That sort of almost memetic pseudo-language?

  If it was enough to send codebreakers into conniption fits, then there wasn’t a damn chance whichever low-level functionary had to handle document review would stop to look at it for more than five seconds.

  Once that email had been sent, though, I was right back to hurrying up and waiting, which… actually, wait. No, I wasn’t. Not exactly. There was still something I could do to keep things rolling along.

  I just wasn’t going to enjoy it very much.

  First things first, check the calendar… okay, that meeting was scheduled to end thirty minutes ago, which of course meant it actually ended only ten minutes ago. And with that, my attempt at procrastination was promptly strangled in the crib.

  I locked my computer, stood up from my desk, headed to my door… headed back to my desk to put my flats back on once I realized I was barefoot… and made my way across the office space to the door I was looking for. And listening for, because the door was left somewhat open, and I could hear its occupant yelling.

  “—them that for the last time, they cannot exclude a grant application without proper review just because the family lives in a building advertising itself as ‘luxury apartments’! There are a dozen different things that could explain it instead, and even without those, they have to check if it’s a designated Section 8 unit first!… look, just tell them to email me, and under no circumstances are they to make those rejections without my say-so, or else!”

  The sharp crash of the phone slamming down in its cradle left me flinching, my ears reflexively folding down in case of a repeat, but thankfully the only follow-up was an aggravated, frustrated sigh. Given that the door was open, I took the end of the call as enough of an invitation to go inside, though I did briefly knock on the door just so it wasn’t that much of a surprise.

  Sure enough, my appearance prompted little more than a roll of the eyes, a scoff, and what could very generously be interpreted as being directed towards the chairs in front of the desk.

  “I hate you for this,” Fatima Osmani, the office’s occupant, grumbled at me, closing her eyes and rubbing the bridge of her nose in annoyance.

  Fatima was one of the… well, not one of the junior attorneys at the firm anymore, actually. She was a senior attorney now, and had moved into a supervisory role that saw her spending more time behind a desk than before, much to her chagrin, though it did come with the silver lining that fewer attorneys in the Old Boys’ Club could tell the Pakistani woman to take off her hijab and smile more. So, some good with the bad.

  Fatima had been part of the trial team for the last big case I had, and had played the part of a particularly vicious attack dog, absolutely dismantling every single witness the defense could put before us and eviscerating arguments meant to stall her. Unfortunately, her particular style was almost too aggressive, and might have sunk a weaker case — hell, it had cost her the trial in a smaller case that she’d been handling concurrently to our big one. This attack dog was a bit of a glory hound, you see, and while this fox had kept a firm hand on the leash, that couldn’t always be the case.

  In the aftermath of our big case, and in accordance with our client’s will, the firm became responsible for establishing a charitable foundation in our deceased client’s memory, and which would bring to bear the couple hundred million dollars we won in court to provide opportunities and aid for lower-income families. On my advice, Fatima was instated as head of the charitable fund, both to give her the recognition she sought and to hopefully teach her a little patience.

  … well, and to direct her aggression towards something for which it was particularly well-suited: stamping out the kind of inequity and discrimination that always sprang up when cash handouts were involved. Such as the one I’d just overheard.

  “Mhmm, okay,” I agreed as I pulled out a chair from her desk. Not to sit in, just to lean against — hers had solid backs. “And how about the promotion, raise, and bonus that came with it?”

  “A-ah, I-I‘m a, ah, a homeowner now…” Fatima’s response was a bit mumbled, yes, but it was still clear as day to ears like mine. And that particular response had my ears perking up in delight.

  “Congratulations!” I exclaimed, all smiles as I leaned in a little further. “Expect a housewarming gift in the next month or so!”

  “Sure,” she said with a sigh, leaning back in her chair and spinning it so she wasn’t facing her monitor. “By the way, your tail is wagging.”

  “Wha—damn it!” I reached back with one hand and grabbed the base of my tail, but that wasn’t enough to hold the treasonous limb steady, meaning I had to reach back with my other hand too. Thankfully, another few seconds of calming myself down got my tail to behave, and I gave Fatima an apologetic little smile. “S-sorry about that, uh… I’ll get you a lint roller.”

  “Eh,” she waved it off. “I have one already. Anyway, what’s got you of all people darkening my doorstep, Naomi?” Fatima asked, propping one elbow on her desk to hold her cheek while the fingers of her other hand drummed on the desk.

  “So… let me just preface this by saying you probably won’t believe me. Especially in light of some of the, ah, spirited debate between us last year.”

  “Arguments, you mean,” she corrected. “Or shouting matches, if we want to get even more particular about it. And given that that’s how you’re leading into this?” She leaned back in her desk chair, crossed her arms, and raised an eyebrow. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Well. Um.” I floundered for a moment, my ears twitching as I tried (and failed) to find a more, er, sophisticated way to ask this question. Alas, my vocabulary was failing me, so I had no choice but to abandon dignity and just… ask. “Look, you follow superhero news, right? Particularly Lady Liberty?”

  Fatima blinked and leaned forward, surprise writ large on her face. Her arms uncrossed and she brought up one hand to pinch herself.

  “... okay, this isn’t a weird dream,” she murmured. “You actually asked me that. You, the Lady Liberty hater. Really.”

  “Yes,” I sighed, ears folding low as I sighed in exasperation. “Really.”

  “Huh.” She regarded me curiously as her surprise faded, and instead pinned me down with the look I’d last seen her use against a witness on cross-examination — the way a hungry dog looks at bacon, or the way Gorou and I look at eggs. “There’s a story here.”

  “Not much of one that’s okay to share, I’m afraid,” I said with a subtle shake of my head.

  “Fair, but that just means there is something that you can share!” she exclaimed, flashing a vicious little grin my way. “And I want to hear it. So if you want my help? First, spill.”

  I let out a very, extremely, incredibly quiet groan, one that was so quiet that I almost couldn’t even hear it myself, were it not for how damn big my ears were. This was going to be… awkward. Painfully awkward.

  “Do you remember that one JAG lawyer from our big case?” I began.

  “If you mean the JAG lawyer for DC?” Fatima asked, her voice deadpan. “Yes. Obviously.”

  “Well, did I mention that she’s my sister-in-law?”

  “Wait, really?” I nodded, to which Fatima let out a slight moue of surprise. “Huh. So, what does that have to do with you asking me about your least favorite superhero?”

  “As it turns out? They’re friends,” I answered. “Have been for years now, apparently. And since I owed my sister-in-law a favor for streamlining a few things during that last big case, she’s called to collect on that favor, which means I’m now helping her with something she can’t do herself.”

  “And it’s a favor on behalf of Lady Liberty, then.” Fatima hummed, tapping her fingers on the desk in thought. “I’m surprised that wasn’t a deal breaker for you.”

  “Well, I… kind of agreed to help before she told me who it was?” I couldn’t help a slight nervous giggle at the end there, my tail swaying behind me in mild embarrassment.

  “Uh-huh. And you just, what? Shoved aside all those years of bad blood because you owed your family a favor?” Fatima regarded me with suspicion, sarcasm dripping from her words. And you know what? That was entirely fair. She was right to be skeptical, given the arguments we’d had. But if I had to push past that skepticism every fifteen seconds, I’d be here all day.

  So, better I nip that in the bud.

  “No, obviously not. But!” I soldiered on, interrupting whatever it was Fatima had been about to say. “She and I sat down, like adults, and did our level best to talk our issues out, like adults. And while things aren’t fully resolved, we did agree to at least bury the hatchet and not let feelings fester. So while I won’t exactly be calling her up for a boozy brunch, we can sit down and hold a conversation without any stale hostility coloring things.”

  Fatima blinked, as if trying to process what she’d just heard. A few more seconds ticked by, and I started to grow concerned that maybe I’d broken her.

  “Audhubillah…” Fatima murmured, though it wasn’t anything I understood. She’d said something in Arabic, and it was something that I’d heard before, but God help me if I had a damn clue what it meant. “You’re serious?” I nodded. “When?”

  “Yesterday morning, actually.”

  “What? No, that can’t be right.” Fatima turned back to her computer, and while I couldn’t see what she was doing exactly, I could make an educated guess: she’d clicked over to her email and was going through the practice-group-wide emails, of which I’d had Gorou send out several while I was busy having my discussion with Mariem. “Just… how!? You could’ve scheduled some of these emails, sure, but you replied to three of them! And don’t,” she jabbed a finger at me, “give me the excuse that you were working from home! If that wasn’t you sending those, then who was it!?”

  “The six-hundred-year-old talking fox that gave me my powers and is also my many-times-great-grandfather.”

  That statement hung in the air for a few seconds. Then, Fatima let out a deep, exasperated sigh, which had me nudging the kernel of foxfire deep in my soul.

  “Naomi, I know we aren’t exactly on the best of terms, but at the very least, could you please not make fun of—”

  The sudden flare of azure foxfire in the air over her desk had Fatima cutting herself off with a strangled yelp as she shoved away from the desk, rolling chair carrying her clear of the sudden bright intruder. She looked at me with wide, panicked eyes, but managed to calm down some at the utter lack of reaction on my face, and instead looked at the roiling orb of azure flame in mild interest.

  Then her breath caught all over again when the flame faded, and revealed a silver-furred fox, four tails fanned out and swaying behind him.

  Gorou, for his part, looked my way with mild amusement in his eyes as the brilliant blue glow faded to his normal amber.

  “Using me to win arguments again, Naomi?” Gorou asked in Japanese, flicking one tail my way in amusement. “If you’re so averse to actually arguing, why are you a lawyer?”

  “Debates between coworkers aren’t the same as arguments in court,” I fired back without missing a beat. “Plus, others already know about you. But if it’s such a burden to say hello every so often, I’ll get you a treat for your troubles, okay?”

  “Mm. I could go for some blue cheese,” the fox murmured.

  Fatima, for her part, had recovered enough that she’d gone from shock, to confusion, to annoyance that we were speaking a language she couldn’t understand. I knew that look well — I used to have it whenever my cousin Satsuki spoke to the rest of my Japanese cousins in their native language, before briefly sharing a soul with Gorou left me knowing it too.

  “Oh, and we’re out of eggs.”

  My palm met my forehead in a rather meaty thwap of flesh on flesh, my ears falling limp in dismay.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “Gorou, there were eight eggs left in the fridge,” I grumbled, deliberately swapping back to English. Fatima, reduced to an onlooker in her own office, barely caught herself from letting out what could only have been a giggle-snort.

  “I was feeling peckish. Regardless.” The fox let his attention drift over to Fatima ever so briefly before giving me a bit of a side-eye. “Was there anything else? I have a prior engagement.”

  “Televised idol performances don’t count as ‘prior engagements’.”

  This time, Fatima couldn’t stop the giggle. Gorou treated me to one last high-pitched screek of annoyance, then hopped off the desk, vanishing in a flash of foxfire the instant all four paws left its surface, and leaving me alone with Fatima in her office as I lamented the need to buy two dozen eggs for the second time this week.

  And it was only Thursday!

  “… So, um. Six hundred years old?”

  I turned to look at Fatima, who had a somewhat uneasy expression on her face, worry and amusement visibly warring for control.

  “He’s been a primary source for enough historians within the past almost two decades, so…” I shrugged, one ear flicking without my conscious control. “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “But haven’t Moonshot only been a thing since the moon landing?”

  Okay, no, abort, about face, don’t go there!

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Fatima?” I grimaced, ears pulling low. “That’s one of those questions I’m literally not allowed to actually answer. Hint? Sure. Drop a piece of info in your lap? Fine. Point at something, or someone? Yes. But I can’t actually tell you. Also, we’re hideously off-topic now, so just suffice to say that yes, I did meet with Lady Liberty yesterday, and the talking fox who ate all the eggs was answering some emails on my behalf. Okay?”

  “… I’m going to circle back with you on this later,” she warned, pinning me down with narrowed eyes.

  “So long as ‘later’ actually is later,” I agreed. “Anyways. Lady Liberty.”

  “Lady Liberty,” Fatima agreed, sitting back down in her office chair and wheeling it back up to the desk. “What do you want to know? Hell, what can I even help with in the first place? I don’t think we actually got that far before sniping at each other a little, there.”

  “… yeah, um. Sorry about that,” I murmured. “Trying to be better on that front, but, well, old habits.” Fatima nodded, humming in agreement. “Anyways. If somebody wanted to track Lady Liberty’s comings and goings, her various flight paths and locations over time, where would they look?”

  “Twitter,” Fatima answered without missing a beat. “There’s three competing hashtags for sightings, but the most popular one is LibertyWatch. That said, the Weather Channel also sends out alerts if she responds to an emergency in your area, given she can apparently fly fast enough to break a storm system?”

  “Okay… that both makes this easier and harder,” I mused. Social media, my beloathed… never understood how to navigate that stuff, which was just part of why Casey had come in so clutch earlier this year. Maybe I could have Gorou do the Twitter deep dive for me? He was shockingly adroit with technology for someone so old and, well, quadrupedal. “And how much info is usually in these posts? Just the tag with a photo? Location? Description of what was going on?”

  “Tag and photo posts usually get dogpiled with demands for more info and alt-text on the photo. Oh, alt-text is a description of an image for the visually impaired,” Fatima added, probably due to seeing my ears tilt back in question.

  “Okay… and I’m sorry if this seems obvious, but I’m a bit of a social media Luddite, but let’s say I wanted to look for a specific date range?” I suggested. “Cross-reference that with public appearances to try and find a pattern? Say, for 2018?”

  “Oh, you’re not going to find a pattern for 2018,” Fatima said confidently. “That or 2017, what with, well,” she shrugged. “You know.”

  “Uh… no? I don’t?”

  “Really, Naomi.” She rolled her eyes. “Yes, you’ve said you’re far from Lady Liberty’s fan, and if it was something like the Seaworld debacle that’d be one thing, but…” Fatima trailed off, her expression of disdain and contemptuous disbelief, fading into one of moderate horror, which only made me even more confused. “No. Don’t tell me you — you don’t know?”

  “No!” I snapped, my ears folding back and low in response to the brief surge of frustration that I couldn’t quite tamp down. “No, I — look. Fatima. I don’t keep on top of superhero stuff, it—”

  “This isn’t even a superhero thing!” she interrupted, all but yelling as she stood from her chair. “This was national news! This would be like not knowing Dirksen happened!” Right after saying that, she got this oddly cross-eyed expression, then fixed me with a glare that was halfway between angry and concerned. “You do know what Dirksen was, right?”

  “Of course I know what the Decimation of Dirksen was!” I hissed as I stood from my half-seated position on the arm of my chair, teeth bared and tail lashing behind me. “I lost a friend to it, the only friend I had at law school, and I was on a call with her when she was murdered! And if that wasn’t enough, I got forced back to active duty to spend sixteen fucking hours teleporting across the entire goddamn DMV because I was the fastest-moving Moonshot available! I know damn well what happened that day!”

  I felt a brief stirring in my soul, and a slight pressure behind my eyes, so I closed them, stepped back, unclenched my fists, and took a deep breath. Then I took another, forced my ears up from my head, and relaxed my tail as best I could, though it would take a bit for my fur to lie normally after getting puffed up from my anger.

  “... I’m sorry for yelling,” I muttered, not willing to meet Fatima’s gaze. “The call I got demanding I assist after Dirksen made me disclose what I knew of the events, said it was good I didn’t need a debrief. Then they started ordering me around, or else. No warning, no fanfare, only orders. So I just… look, I know, I know it’s stupid, but I can’t pay attention to those things, because some part of me starts worrying about getting dragged away to deal with them, and it just… spirals.” I sighed. “It’s… it’s stupid, and irrational, but I just — can’t help it. So I don’t watch.”

  “That’s — astaghfirullah,” Fatima fell back into Arabic again, once more murmuring something that I’d heard spoken before but didn’t understand. “That… I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “I never said anything. I shouldn’t have blown up at you.”

  “You can’t control trauma,” Fatima countered. “So let’s… just call it even?”

  “... yeah, let’s,” I sighed, then noticed we were both still standing. I half-sat on the arm of the chair again, while Fatima sat down properly. “So… uh. What about 2017 and 2018?”

  “It, um. It was the Saccharine attacks,” Fatima started, worrying at her fingernails. Huh, that was a new habit. Or it was one I hadn’t noticed before. “I think the consensus fell on calling them firebombings? Anyway, I don’t know the exact numbers, just look it up, but Lady Liberty was the only rapid-response superhero who could actually help without being at risk. Then she stuck around for a while longer to help with disaster relief, so. Anyone looking for a pattern won’t find one. Assuming that’s what matters, I mean, going off of what you asked for in the first place.”

  “It is,” I confirmed for her, but my mind was abuzz with thoughts. Mariem had said that the last straw for her family was in 2016, but I didn’t have the exact date, and odds were she didn’t either, if the next two years after that were a constant mess of manhunts and disaster relief. But for there to have been a two-year period of inconsistency after she’d moved her family from west to east, during which a pattern in her movements would’ve been impossible to discern because her location was predicated on the actions of a third party?

  That would handily explain the gap, actually. Starting from zero, getting maybe a few months of useful information before two years of junk ruined the data set, then allowing some amount of extra time for everything to settle back to a predictive state?

  Shit. As awful as these attacks must have been — and damn it, I was not looking forward to researching them, but I’d already gotten caught flat-footed with Fatima, and it would reflect rather awfully on me if that happened again while discussing matters with Mariem — they did indeed have a silver lining, no matter how horrendously dark the cloud.

  “Well, that looks to have been useful.” Fatima’s sudden interjection had my ears perking up and pointing her way, which also let me know that they’d been moving a bit in response to my thoughts. I squeaked a bit, embarrassment heating up my cheeks as my ears pulled flat atop my head, which drew a lone raised eyebrow from Fatima. “So… I take it that you got what you needed?”

  “I, yeah. I did,” I agreed hastily.

  “Alright then. Anything else, or do I need to push my next call back a few minutes?”

  “No, not right now, but I’ll let you know if I think of anything else,” I assured her. “Oh, uh, actually, one last thing.”

  “What?” Fatima sighed.

  “Well, I’m gonna have to sit back down with Lady Liberty at some point, so if you want anything autographed—”

  “Yes!” she yelled loud enough to send me flinching, ears folding low to try and muffle the sound. “Sorry sorry, but yes, definitely! I’ll just — I’ll put it on your desk!”

  “Yup, that works! And with that, I’ll…”

  The phone on Fatima’s desk chose that exact moment to start ringing. This was absolutely perfect for me, because I now had the easiest out in the world.

  “Alright, I’ll just leave you to it, then!” With that, and little more than a dismissive wave from Fatima as she picked up the phone and greeted the caller on the other end, I exited her office, leaving the door slightly ajar—

  “Oh? Would you care to repeat that, please?” she asked the person on the other end, tone sickeningly, venomously sweet.

  —correction, door closed, probably for the best that that conversation not leak out to the rest of the office.

  I wasted absolutely no time retreating back to my own office. As much as I’d somewhat dreaded that discussion, I could honestly say it had gone both better and worse than I’d expected. Just not necessarily in the same ways. But at the very least, the awkward, uncomfortable conversation with my unruly once-subordinate was over. I’d gotten it over with. It was done, dusted, and hopefully wouldn’t need to happen again.

  I closed the door to my office, sat down in my comfy office chair, leaned back, and just… let myself breathe, for a minute. Closed my eyes. Let myself process that discussion, the parts that were uncomfortable and difficult.

  In hindsight, living under a rock insofar as any Moonshot-related news that didn’t happen in my direct vicinity? Yeah, that was… no, no sugarcoating it. It was stupid. It was the exact kind of ridiculous avoidant behavior that’d had me feeling stagnant in the first place, the sort of thing I’d started getting better about noticing. And I’d genuinely been improving! Hell, the me from just a few months ago would’ve demanded Megan tell me who the favor was first, and probably paid the bill and left the moment she told me it was for Lady Liberty. That me wouldn’t have so much as entertained the idea of talking to Mariem for even five minutes, let alone agreeing to go to her home for such a meeting!

  Maybe… maybe it was because I’d finally started to notice these behaviors for what they were that having a past example unceremoniously shoved in my face felt so galling.

  Past mistakes felt so much worse once you recognized them as such.

  Ugh, okay, no, this felt too much like wallowing now, and wallowing was bad news! I leaned forward in my chair, shook the cobwebs out of my head, flicked my ears a few times, and gave my tail a good shake. Even if I was stuck in the limbo of hurry-up-and-wait, I could still find something at least semi-productive to pass the time. Even if it meant diving into social media archives. First things first, though: putting in a grocery order, because I was not going without eggs tomorrow morning, and the only thing that would keep Gorou away from them was his beloved stinky cheese.

  Once that was paid for and set to deliver within the next hour or so, I put my phone away and woke my computer back up. A quick check of new emails showed… oh? Oh!

  There was an automated email from the Prop Room in my inbox, confirming that my PIN had been used to check three items out of the prop room, complete with an attachment showing what they were. I didn’t bother opening up the attachment, because if I was up here, my PIN had been used all the way down there, and I’d shown my PIN to exactly one other person, then this email could only mean one thing:

  Casey was back!

  I practically bounced out of my chair, feeling properly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for only the second time this week. If any of the secretaries had thoughts about how I was humming on my way out the door, or noticed that my tail was wagging up a storm on my way out of the office, they didn’t say anything. I slipped into the stairwell and practically skipped down the steps, my humming filling the stairwell as I made my way down to the bottom level.

  I’d admittedly been a little worried about Casey. Not getting much in the way of response beyond a neutral thumb had left me a tad worried, even more so when he briefly left a thumbs-down instead. Given he was in the Prop Room, odds were that he badly needed something on which to take out his family frustrations. And let me be clear: I wasn’t going there to stop him.

  I was going there to join him, and offer a friendly ear to which he could kvetch and rant.

  I exited the stairwell, practically skipped across the concrete of the sidewalk, pushed past the fence, unlocked the door with my keyfob, and pushed—

  The door only opened two, maybe three inches before something stopped it.

  I frowned, let the door almost close, then tried to push it open once more. It again hit something and stopped, but this time, I felt some give to whatever was keeping the door from opening.

  “Casey?” I called through the crack in the door.

  I heard a sharp hiss, followed by rapid breathing and hurried motions. My ears twitched as I tried to pick up more details, and with a moment’s focus, I caught the rustling of cloth, along with… was that a belt dropping to the floor?

  “Casey? Are you okay?” I asked, finally looking through the gap to see what was holding the door shut, and frowned. One of the heavy shelves was set so that it stood in front of the door, blocking me from seeing anything below chest height. And sure, it had some heft to it, but I should still have been able to push it aside given the dimensions.

  And more than that, there was zero reason for it to be in front of the door without somebody deliberately putting it there.

  And the only person who could’ve done that… was Casey.

  “Casey, please, I know you’re in there,” I said, trying my level best to keep any frustration out of my voice. I was a little frustrated, yes, because something was clearly wrong, and I didn’t know how to help. The problem was in there, and I was out here. And whatever the hell was going on, it was bad enough for Casey to decide he needed to secret himself away in a place that very few people even knew existed, and which also had numerous dangerous… weapons… and whose door Casey had barred.

  … ooh, no, no no no, no that was very not good—

  Okay, Naomi, calm the fuck down and think. There was a secondary door to the Prop Room — that was mandatory, an escape of sorts in case something happened to make sure nobody could get trapped in here. The problem? That secondary door was behind some of the clothing racks, and given Casey had been moving the shelves and other items around, I couldn’t be certain he hadn’t already found that door and blocked it off too.

  Time was of the essence. I wasn’t sure what was occupying the space directly in front of the shelf that blocked the door, simply because I couldn’t see over it. If I flickered inside, and there was something flammable where I wanted to show back up, it would catch on fire, and I’d have to hopefully not fall over before too many other things caught on fire for me to handle it.

  Either flip a coin on whether I could get inside before Casey maybe did something stupid, or flip a coin on whether I light something on fire in the process of getting inside before Casey could maybe do something stupid.

  It wasn’t much of a choice.

  “Casey?” I called out. “I’m coming in.”

  “Wait wait no please wait don’t—”

  Whatever else Casey was going to say fell away as my existence faded into flame. The moment I reappeared, several feet forward from my initial position and now inside the Prop Room, I checked around my feet to see if I’d lit anything on fire, but thank goodness, I hadn’t. I immediately turned towards where I could still hear Casey’s voice, muttering something indistinct and undecipherable in between quickened, harried breaths, and—

  I froze. My ears fell limp, and I could feel my heart in my throat.

  “Oh,” I breathed, an almost painful cocktail of emotions warring for dominance. “Oh, Casey…”

  Casey was sitting on the ground, hyperventilating and rocking back and forth, arms wrapped around pulled-in knees that hid almost all of a crying face. Hastily-discarded clothes, still bearing their purchase tags like all the other articles of clothing in the Prop Room, lay strewn about Casey’s feet, and when I saw what they were, my mouth went dry: a navy-blue midi skirt; a pair of women’s flats; a white peasant blouse. And while Casey had managed to pull up a pair of pants, the accompanying men’s short-sleeve button-up was still open.

  Beneath that button-up lay what could only be a bralette.

  “Oh, hun,” I whispered, my voice deafeningly quiet in the confines of the Prop Room.

  Casey’s cries and whimpering grew louder as I approached, and part of me wanted to turn around, to just… give back at least some semblance of the privacy I’d intruded upon, an illusion of it. But I couldn’t. The cat couldn’t go back in the box. The genie was already out of the bottle.

  “It’s okay,” I murmured into Casey’s ear as I laid one hand on a shaking shoulder. The poor dear froze beneath my touch, at first, but red-rimmed hazel eyes still looked up at me in fear, then disbelief, and finally, hope.

  Another keening wail faded into a sob, and then a pair of shaking arms grabbed onto me for dear life.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered again, hugging Casey back. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

  This was…

  This revelation was going to happen eventually. But it shouldn’t have happened like this. It shouldn’t have come about because I walked in on Casey, intruded on what had been expected to be privacy. But it had happened anyway, and we couldn’t just go back to not knowing. And it made so much sense. All those odd feelings of familiarity, those thoughts and hunches about something that reminded me of something I hadn’t quite been able to put my finger on. In hindsight, it was obvious. It was so, so damn obvious.

  We were both transgender.

  And now I needed to figure out how to say that without hurting Casey even more than I already had.