Episode 5 - The Tide Recedes, and What it Leaves Behind

  Chapter 50 - Black Tea

  I think I would have felt better if I’d been hit by a train. I’m fairly certain a trampling by an Equus probably feels pretty similar to the rough ride I endured leaping our way back across the roofs to Bio-Vats. Rhett rode behind me to try and keep me balanced for once; my connection to the communion constantly fizzled out with each bump and landing. I’m also fairly certain I was barely coherent through the pain for most of the ride. We had some painkillers in our rudimentary medical supplies, but I won’t get proper treatment till we make it back to Aquila.

  It hurts to move. It hurts to breathe. I stumble into the mess hall clutching my side and hobble onto a bench at the back of the hall. Bent in two, I nurse my injuries, propping my chin up with one wrist.

  A ceramic mug plonks itself down in front of me.

  “What is it?”

  “Tea.”

  “What kind?”

  Rhett shrugs. “Something black. Who knows.”

  That boy really is spoiled, and he has no clue. I drag the mug closer and sniff it, then put it back down. Based on the wisps of steam rising from the surface, it's far too hot at the moment.

  “Any news?” he asks, not watching me as he sips his own cup of tea. He smacks his lips together after the first sip and puts the mug down almost as if he’s going to push it aside and refuse to drink the rest.

  “How hard is it to get multiple people out?” I ask. We’re far enough away from any listening ears.

  “Hypothetically?”

  “Sure.”

  “Depends on who it is. How valuable they are.”

  “Let’s say, a generator.”

  “Difficult to extract, easy to place in a new home.”

  I grunt and sip my own tea. It’s bland, but the warmth is welcome and soothes some of my aching body.

  I draw out my tablet from my back hip pocket and drop it on the table between us, opening the screen on the message that I closed it on last night, and then I push it across the table to him. Rhett cocks his head to one side, a curl falling across his brow as he reads.

  The ultrasounds looked good. I’ll show you the pictures when I get home. - MK, ID:MRG2002322G

  “This-”

  “Let’s say they’re pregnant…”

  He frowns. “A lot harder. The generator asset is more valuable if the child is likely to manifest the same as well.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured. I hope she got her window.” I sigh.

  I don’t even know what this entire operation was meant to achieve. I thought I’d feel better seeing ‘real’ words. But I feel nothing different. There’s a pit in my stomach that has been empty for months, that is still empty. If anything, it feels more hollow now, scooped out by the knowledge their lives have moved on without me.

  What are they meant to do? They probably mourned me as if I were dead. It’d be cruel to expect them to live their lives carrying that weight. But… I wish there had been at least one mention of me somewhere in their messages.

  Then again, knowing myself, I’d never be able to mention a lost friend again. I was stupid enough to ignore a goodbye letter? for months because I wasn’t strong enough to look at it. I know I can’t blame them.

  I really am a mess.

  “We’ve still got to finish up here,” mutters Rhett, dragging my attention back to breakfast.

  I lean back, gripping my side as I do so. And now I have to deal with this. One problem after another. At least it might distract me from dwelling on my self-disgust.

  “Are there other companies that do what Aquila does?” I ask, wandering my mind back to the horned Lepus.

  “Hmm, a few.”

  “I’ve been thinking about something similar. A cryptid would explain our current mystery,” chimes in Adrian suddenly at my opening.

  Rhett raises an eyebrow, quickly doing the math on his own. “You think?”

  “Pooka doesn’t show up on most sensors-”

  “No cryptid will. Only the static higher-powered sensors built into manifest platforms or with direct connections to them are strong enough to detect cryptids,” finishes Rhett nursing his tea again. I squint at him, curious about how he knows that fact so certainly.

  “So it’d make sense. It’s a fairly common vertebrate ability to manipulate heat,” I say.

  “It’d certainly give us a ‘what’. Actually tracking it down to remove it or the host will be an interesting problem for Bio-Vats. We’d need proof… but, maybe it’s the missing symbiont we need to count… like on the Borough job,” says Rhett scratching at his chin.

  I blink. It’s not a bad idea. They might have logs and scanners in and out of the city. We could narrow a list down from security records accordingly. Not everyone travels with a symbiont; the large ones stay in stables. But a short list is better than nothing at all.

  Rhett takes a sip of his tea. “Adrian probably has a better count than me on the total number of cryptids, but to my knowledge there are at least six in our hemisphere, not counting you.”

  The Vespa on my ear buzzes. “Covertus has one. They’re a regular competitor. We think Midnight Inc. has one as well. Another two work for paramilitary corporations.”

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  “And the final two?”

  “They run with the black market crews,” finishes Rhett.

  “Are any of them women? In their forties. With light-brown eyes like mine?”

  Rhett cups his mug and looks across the table at me, casual disregard dropping for a spark of curiosity. “Your-”

  “Mum, yeah.”

  “Unfortunately, we only know exactly who two of them are - the two with the black market crews. This would be very useful information if we could identify a third.”

  I lean back, wincing as my side pulls. “Cause one is…”

  “My dad, yes,” replies Rhett.

  I sniff. “You got unlucky, didn’t you?”

  The ceramic of Rhett’s mug clicks audibly as he drops it to the table again. “Some might say that. You sure you want to be antagonizing me after last night?”

  I bite my lip and narrow my eyes to meet the steady gaze Rhett levels on me. “I’m sorry,” I reply. “I saved you in the end.”

  “You cleaned up ?your mistakes. It doesn’t excuse your disobeying my orders and going off on your own. What happened to me getting the final sign-off?”

  “I know, I know.”

  Rhett points a finger at me, his blue eyes locked onto me, and the sight feels so close to the beast-man I saw in Adrian’s memories. “That's the last time. Don't lie to me, I can tell when you do. I don't give a shit that you have 'side projects', as long as they don't affect anyone other than me. I will take back my protection if I have to.”

  The finality in his voice leaves me no doubt he means it. So this is his line. I’ve finally stumbled across it. Still, a stubborn part of me bristles defiantly. “I don’t need your protection.”

  He pushes out his bench and stands. “And Aquila doesn’t need you.”

  “What are you gonna do? Cull me?”

  “I won’t. Regina might.”

  I watch him leave, staring into my mug.

  “You’re not very good at learning when to shut your mouth.”

  “Keep out of it,” I bite back as a whisper. “He was that hairy-man in your memory? Rhett’s bio-Dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why was he like that?”

  “Lupus lycanthropus. His symbiont can fuse its body with him. Strength of a beast, smarts of a man, and the ability to disappear from human sight like a symbiont on command.”

  And sensors too then, I bet. No wonder Regina wanted it.

  “The Wolf-Prince, eh?” I mutter. “Isn’t that nickname a little cruel?”

  “Aster likes to tease a little too much. Can you see symbionts in camera footage?”

  “Yup.”

  He inhales a breath of awe or concern, I can’t tell, the sound travelling in the Vespa’s wings. “Conrad... Regina can never know this.”

  “Yeah. I know. I’m certainly not telling her.” I let go of a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “Was he right… that Regina has-”

  “Yes.”

  I chew on the inside of my cheek and watch Rhett’s back disappear between the other Bio-Vats workers.

  I lie on my back in my bedroom, watching the streams from four different security recordings while a log of symbiont registrations scrolls on the corner of my screen. My tablet is mounted near the side of my bed in its workstation, wired into the intranet to stream the security feeds we’ve been given access to. Rhett is doing the same thing somewhere in his own room or an office, I don’t know. My side is a constant ache, and I just cannot face moving around too much still. Unlike me, he has to actually cross-reference the count of registrations with the passing people. I’m just pretending.

  I’ve reviewed hours, even playing them at double or triple speed. We don’t know the exact date the cryptid entered or if it even entered with its host. We’ve just been working backwards from the first day they started having temperature issues. Rhett wants a picture of any likely suspects for Aquila’s own use, then we’ll hand our evidence over to Bio-Vats for their own security to take care of. Our contract was just to find out the reason after all, no scope creep allowed.

  As I sleepily blink, a message pops up on my screen. I groan as I sit up and tap it open.

  I’m taking a day off next week. Can you help Priya with her paper? - AD, ID:SB0088907A.

  My communicator is live? They’ve not found it then, yet. I scroll over to the diagnostics Pell installed and check the status of everything. It must have come through on Bio-Vats radio receiver and been passed along the intranet, Pell’s program picking it up and decrypting it for me.

  A wave of exhausted relief washes over me, and I rub my eyes as my hands tremble. This whole farce wasn’t a complete waste of time.

  I don’t know what to feel. I thought it would be something else, but I just feel tired all the way to my bones. Who knows how long it will last, someone will spot it one day - either while they continue to sweep the building trying to identify what else we might have done beyond the absolute mess that Pooka left for them, or later one day when a mechanic sees a cable that doesn’t seem right or an alarm box that should have never been there. Maybe it’ll be someone checking on the broken roof door motion sensor. Something, one day, will take this lifeline away from me.

  But, maybe next time I come… We’ll race across the rooftops again, and I can clean things up a little. Make it a little more professional and secure anything out of place. Maybe I’ll know exactly where Dad is next time if I’m still getting his messages, and I can come down from the skyline and track him down in an alley between the walk from his labs and our apartment. Maybe I’ll know which unit Meiko lives in, and I can take a peek through a window. There might be a new face to see. And if I knock on the door, she might let me in. Maybe I might find Harris from afar, and say a goodbye that I never properly said, and an apology that I probably owe him.

  I won’t be able to tell them what I am now. I won’t be able to tell them about Pooka or my new life. But it’s not so different. I always kept my secrets.

  Maybe, next time, I might be putting together a plan for getting someone out.

  Pooka sleeps at the foot of my bed, his whiskers twitching as he breathes, his mind distant. I can’t imagine my life without him now. And all his savage, raw emotions. I ached, my entire life, for sharp and painful things. Real things. I’ve found them now, here and there since joining Aquila. And they’ve hurt, or they’ve left me hollow and tired. And, just as often, they have been everything my heart always wanted them to be.

  And sometimes, I can almost hear the roar of rushing wind from Pooka’s memories. Or feel the spray of ocean foam on my face, and the taste of salt on my lips.

  Maybe, one day, we’ll feel the falling rain on our skin together. And if not, I will do as the women in his memories once did for him and free the only chain I hold the keys to.

  I close the diagnostics panel and the message with a sigh, and tip my head back to stare at the ceiling, brushing my grey-streaked hair back over my head. The movement pulls my sore muscles again, and with a frustrated grimace of pain I double over on my bed again gripping my side. The bruising has bloomed angry purple and red, spreading across my waist and round to my back where I can’t even see the full extent of it. Painkillers take the edge off it at best.

  With a sniff, I return to my work, reversing the security footage to go back over the clips that played while I was focused on other tabs.

  Then I blink. It happens so quickly I almost miss it.

  Walking backwards, on the edge of camera three, a slim red-headed man passes through security with a familiar horned-hare loping at his feet. I pause and cross-reference the logs, counting the other faces passing through the view of the camera.

  One symbiont short.

  “Adrian,” I say aloud. “I’ve found him.”

  END OF SEASON 1 | BOOK 1

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  if you have not reviewed or rated, followed/fav'd all the things, I would love it if you did! I appreciate it so much as motivation, and it helps new readers find this fiction! Ratings/reviews are the most valuable to me as they also help improve visibility for new readers.

  are meant to be making physical sound (they vibrate their wings to act as speakers), so I need it to not be confusing with internal dialogue. The challenge I'm also going to have to resolve is a formatting solution that will work for ebooks (which often have settings where a user chooses their own font). I think bolding works great for Pooka, the rest of the formatting will take some thinking.

  are their names in this world. I just could not keep it up, it's really surprising how much English language uses animal 'terms' once you start trying to avoid them, and it proved very difficult to stick with so sometimes it slipped through final drafts because it was exhausting to rewrite for. I do want to keep this and clean it up where I missed, the flavor it adds in terms of my world building is great, I just need to work out how to get it right without sacrificing any readability. There are some other phrases here and there I debated whether or not their use made sense in this world too, so I may rethink a few of those.