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ninety6tears[See Master Post]
The atmosphere was still wobbly between everyone much later that night, though only evident in petty little hiccups, like Toni grumbling Ken's name after she tripped over his ice skates in the foyer even though she had no reason to be irritated with him. The whole house was turned down to a mild sulk and I didn't feel the need to casually announce I was getting a smoke before I made a quick exit out back.
Leaning a shoulder into one of the first trees at the edge of the park, I asked as soon as Chris picked up, "Do we have Christine Chapel on call?"
Chris patched me through on the transmission; Chapel picked up promptly and went from sounding tired to somewhat eager when Chris greeted her.
"Hey, it's Jim Kirk," I said.
"Hi, Jim. What can I do for you?"
"Something came up today that made me think of a couple of Korby's artificial memory theories. I'm assuming you're familiar with them?"
I thought I heard a muffled clearing of Chapel's throat. "Of course, sure."
"I wanted to run this by you first before I go trying to convince Chris about it. Would you say, if one or more individuals in the house is aware of them having false memories, that they would have a reason to instill some taboo about talking about, maybe even thinking about certain memories? I know that he had two theories about it, but I haven't read up on it in several years."
"For the record," Chris muttered, "I don't know anything about this shit."
Chapel made an amused hum. "Well, the thing is, his second theory has been suggested to be way more likely in recent studies. The first theory, if that's what you're asking me about, is that too much preoccupation with the details of the memories can make them corruptible. Like, if one of them was to realize there's some tiny flaw, any kind of inconsistency that doesn't stack up, the entire information would basically start crashing and the memories would die."
Chris prompted, "But the second thing is...?"
"The second theory states that the memories really aren't corruptible in that sense, because memory systems have been improved much more effectively than personality programming." I heard a chinking noise, like she was drinking from an ice-filled glass. "But under that theory, it's all about the idea of, you know, the experience of what it's like to remember something. It's easy to make a very young A.I. individual believe its own memories, because in essence, they don't understand what long-term memory is really like. But as they get older and collect more and more memories, it may take a while, but sooner or later they would supposedly start to realize that maybe something that they think happened eight years ago is something they don't 'remember' the same way they remember two years ago. It's less about how well they remember or the clarity of it. Korby knew it wasn't something we could prove, since you can't exactly sit down with a cyborg and compare notes on the exact levels of emotions or thoughts attached to one memory over another, or the human versus non-human perspective. It's far too subjective...but you have to admit the theory makes a lot of sense, right?"
"So," Chris put in, "Jim, this 'no pasts' thing. Has anything else come up that could give you an idea where that came from?"
"No. But it's easy to believe they go by it all the time. And judging from the conversation, it seems like the rule is that nothing before they all met is fair game."
I heard Chris thoughtfully clicking something against a desk. "Miss Chapel, I think that's all we need you for."
"Yeah, thanks," I said.
"Okay." She sounded a bit distracted, but thought to say, "Hey, Jim. Good luck," before she clicked off.
"Jim," Chris said, his tone a bit heavier now. "You know what I'm worried about now."
I let out a long sigh.
"It would be different if Gaila hadn't been playing along, but since she did, you have to consider it a very real possibility that she's onto you. And I mean onto you."
Again with Gaila being top suspect, it was an irritating thing to keep in mind: if she was fully aware that she was surrounded by clones, and especially if she had any reason to know that Will's source is in fact a cop...
"Right," I said. "I really don't think so, but..."
"Jim, you can disagree all you want. Just don't let it affect how careful you are."
"Of course not, sir."
"Good. The point is, you were unsure about who might have initiated the little code, even when Danek was the one who interrupted; the fact that she wasn't the one who put a stop to the conversation doesn't necessarily tell us anything. I need you to try to dig up how she feels about the rules, and if you can, how anybody else does too."
"Got it."
"Now how are you holding up? Sleeping okay?"
With the amount of edginess attached to the job, lack of sleep is one of the typical concerns about undercovers, who need to be so constantly in check that it isn't one of the issues anyone's boss is eager to wave off with some advice about caffeine. I was just fine though, and told him so. Our call ended seconds after that.
When I got back inside, the place was a little less quiet. Ken and Toni had moved into the kitchen to study more and were talking at a calm murmer. I told both of them goodnight and retired to my room a little early. As if I'd jinxed my claims to Chris about sleeping well, my head was swimming with more thoughts than usual, and it took me over an hour to finally fall asleep.
The next day was my heaviest afternoon of classes, followed by an evening when I had a huge paper everyone knew about and had to retreat into busywork for a couple hours overlapping dinner. It wasn't until nighttime that I really had an excuse to be talkative, and it wasn't helped by what I couldn't help perceiving as a slight tightness in the air between everyone, even though it was just subtle enough that it might have been in my head. I had noted the night before that it was possible I wasn't being quite warm enough to Danek, so I sat right next to him after coming in from a cigarette break, sighing into the couch. I vaguely muttered, "Tired."
"Hmm." Next to my foot, Danek's left one shifted up a little, a pull of attention even as he didn't look over at me. "Did you ask for an extension on any of your work?"
"Huh," I huffed as if too tired to laugh. "What do you think?"
"I think possibly you're overly devoted to economic subjects you could teach better than the professor does."
"I wouldn't say so when you don't know the professor."
"I would say so," he said without looking up or over. "I just did say so."
I broke out into a grin and as if he felt it, I saw the tip of his mouth pull up just slightly next to me as he highlighted a passage on his PADD.
I felt like there was no acknowledgment of the disconnection between us from yesterday. He did give me a look a couple times, as if he was wondering if there was something I wanted to talk to him about. Unless we had some consequential time alone, there was nothing with him I wanted to push just yet, so I only took the opportunity to let us relax in each other's company for an hour or so before he got up to take his evening shower.
I was putting away dishes in the kitchen some time after that when I spotted Gaila out in the yard. She was talking on her personal comm and sitting on the little garden bench out in the middle of the grass just beyond where the small amount of light from the kitchen was able to easily reach.
I went outside, stepping gently so as to possibly not be heard, but not exactly sneaking. I deduced from the couple words I picked up that she was just swapping shifts with a coworker, and just when I was a yard or so behind her she quickly ended the conversation and hung up. From the way she stretched her arms back behind her and idly yawned without looking back at all I figured she didn't realize I was there. In a second her head tilted with curiosity and she stood up to take a couple steps forward, fingering at the petals blooming on the little scrap of flowers the yard had next to the old bird bath. I smirked when I came up behind her, pivoted forward slowly and then lurched to grab her shoulders.
She didn't scream, but the gasp was an ugly one: Gaila nearly fell down and her breath picked up in a snap, loud and frantic.
"—Hey hey, it's me."
"Will," she groaned in agitation, leaning over in a collapse to rest her hands on her legs.
"I'm sorry..."
"Shit." Gaila pressed her hand over her chest. She sounded like she hardly had air to speak, and when I reached to grab her by the shoulders, she was actually trembling.
"I'm so sorry. Dammit, I'm a total ass. Here, sit down..."
She was trying to shirk it off by now, smiling a little manically as she let me lead her over to sitting back down.
"My God. You're like those puppies they were selling at the park that wouldn't stop sort of vibrating..."
She laughed weakly, wiping something out of her own features. "Wait, what?"
"You know, that old guy who was trying to sell the dogs. And they were all excitable, and Ken—"
"Oh yeah. 'Do they ever stop?'" Her shoulders twitched in something close to laughing.
"Yeah." A silence fell around for a moment as Gaila consciously calmed her breathing. I said, "Sorry again."
"It's okay." In a fluid extension of a reassuring gesture I gave to her shoulder, she inched in and half-leaned against me, letting her ear rest to my shoulder.
"Do you know if Danek's angry about yesterday?" she asked after a moment.
"...No. I don't think so."
The ambient rustling of the woods was the only sound for another moment. More quietly, she added, "You're not mad, are you?"
I mentally fished for something vague. "You don't really think I'd be angry about it."
"Well, not angry exactly. The funny thing is I don't really know anymore. You almost seemed like..." A shift against me as she shrugged. "Like you'd changed your mind about the whole thing. Because you were just kind of quiet."
"I don't know. I guess I didn't want to bother with any of it just then, so I didn't exactly take a side."
A little sniffing laugh—She sat up a bit, slapped a hand on my lap to idly rest it there. "You've always been on Danek's side, though. If this whole pact or whatever was even his idea in the first place. I actually kind of thought it was yours. But, you know, we usually talk like it was just something we all wanted. And it was, but..."
I muttered, "You don't want it anymore?"
I felt the barest, slightest flinch. Gaila felt like we were edging into taboo, reacting as if it extended damage to some greater, more important idea. This whole thing was occult. And yet, she didn't resist commenting. "I just wonder sometimes...if it's sort of my fault that we decided not to talk about that stuff."
I didn't get it, but I didn't think she expected me to, so I only waited for her to go on.
"We all realized pretty quickly that none of us have had these happy lives that we want to talk about with each other, but there has to be something that's happy, or interesting, that some of you guys could share about yourselves. I just think sometimes that it's because I've got nobody. Danek's got the shittiest of emotionally unavailable fathers that ever lived, and I don't even want to know what Toni's parents did to her, the way she's hinted about it. But if you guys were to ever have anything to say about any of it, you might think, well, I shouldn't complain to the girl who doesn't even know what it's like to have a family."
"It's not like that." I was surprised by how quickly the words came, as if I had reason to firmly believe what I was saying. "It really is for everyone's sake."
For the next moment, Gaila looked out into the dark trees and I thought she looked grimly distracted by some other thought. I nudged her a bit with my shoulder, and finally she meekly said, "I feel like it's the same way with us, when we don't really think about what we're going to do."
"...What do you mean?"
"We all have this idea, like we're going to be living together forever, but it's impossible to just assume none of us will ever want other things. Any of you could....let's be real, you could meet someone. Ken talks all the time about how he'd love to go live on Terra, and he doesn't mean it like he's planning to, but sometimes when he gets really into talking about it...it's hard to hear. We even went through that time when you didn't want to hear anything about leaving Niori...but, the point is that I wouldn't want to stop anyone from doing what they want, and I'm worried that the reason we're all so close is just because..." She shrugged. "Like you all just feel sorry for me for not having anybody else. And you all talk like with all the chances you have of ever going back to where you've been, those people might as well not even exist for you. But still, it doesn't seem like it could be the same. I need all of you a lot more than you need me."
"Bullshit." It wasn't like Will to be all that vulgar, but I doubted it stuck out right then. "You know that isn't true."
She let out a long, shaky breath.
"Gaila," I said, more softly, and she slouched down farther. Her hand reached down to mine and clutched it loosely so that our hands rested clasped on my leg, comfy as fingers reaching into a pocket.
"We shouldn't talk about this," she whispered.
"I want you to talk about anything you want to," I said easily, after a second.
I thought for a moment the conversation had gotten away; she seemed flighty and sleepy. But then she articulated this one other thing: "It's okay if we never share more with each other. Most of the time I don't think it matters at all."
"Why?" I muttered, uncertain of how I could push this far enough.
"Even though I'm curious...I wonder if it's the same for all of you as it is for me." She took a second to put the right thing into words. "It feels to me like everything that's been happening in my life since I met all of you has been so much more significant than anything else. Like it's brighter in my mind somehow. I've always been kind of afraid to ask if it's the same for the rest, this feeling that there's this thing about us that's different...But I hate not knowing whether we're all just kind of bizarre together or if it's just me."
"...What do you mean by different?"
She scoffed weakly at herself. "I don't know. Don't you ever think so? We're always saying how lucky it was that we met each other, that we were friends so fast because we realized we connected over all this ugly stuff...But sometimes I have this feeling that it's deeper than that. I know this is the kind of thing that probably sounds ridiculous to you, but don't you ever get the idea that everyone else thinks that there's something really off about us? Not in a bad way, just...off."
I allowed a pensive sigh. "I...Maybe. I don't know."
"Do you remember when we were at that party, and we were talking to Kara and Jek, and they were both kind of weirded out by the fact that none of us could remember whether we'd ever broken any bones? It started with Ken making that comment that he may have at some point but it was hard to remember whether he did when he was a kid. And then I said I definitely didn't know, and Danek agreed, and we almost had this laugh about it...But then Jek and Kara were looking at us all funny. Jek kind of said it wouldn't have been too weird if one of us couldn't remember, but when it was all of us..."
"They like us just fine, though. They could have just been messing around."
"I'm not saying they think there's something wrong with us, exactly, but what I remember the most about it is that, it wasn't that they thought it was strange that we all had that in common." Gaila spoke carefully. "The way Kara looked, I think it was more that we couldn't see why it was strange. That was what put her off so much. I think there are things about us she just can't put down. I get the impression sometimes that she's...studying us. I'm not just saying this because she annoys me sometimes. Most of the time I forget about it, but then she'll look at one of us a certain way..."
I suddenly realized, from what I remembered of Kara, that I had some idea of why she bothered Gaila so much. "I have to admit, there were a couple things she said the other night that seemed to carry this nasty implication. Like when she makes those comments about how we don't all have that much in common?"
A squeeze and agreeing shake of my hand and Gaila said, "Yeah. It's almost like she's saying she doesn't get why we're so close. Not just that, but that she's weirded out by it. What the hell is her problem?"
In my cynicism I didn't think the explanation for Kara West was all that complicated. Considering how polarizing a group can be simply for being likable but also noticeably much more into each other than other people, I had actually been surprised the few of them didn't have their share of casual enemies. To a certain shallow mindset they were too enviable to be regarded with ambivalence, but there was also the possibility that people like Kara were solely interested in collecting them into a menagerie of acquaintances who had good looks and smarts. It wasn't much of an unusual crime of Kara's if she just didn't like unpredictable.
"I guess I can't say I've never wondered. About us being different, I mean," I finally said. "...But it doesn't give me a bad feeling."
She considered for a few seconds, and decidedly affirmed, "Yeah. It doesn't really bother me either."
Another bit of silence, a mellower tone moving into the yard as we sat much more relaxed than we'd been earlier.
After a moment, candidly, Gaila said Will's name. "Hmm?" I mumbled.
There are things in this world you don't take with a grain of salt. I should have been thinking through this entire conversation with Pike's hunch held in one hand and mine in the other, and on some level I did, but it felt at the most like some mathematical equation I had no real reason to remember. It was nothing for the way Gaila felt that night against my arm and my shoulder, something opulent and young emanating from the feel of her bones and my hand in hers as careful as you might clutch the fingers of a child. Gaila moved fearlessly and cheerfully through her life, but I had noticed the moments before, when she showed a staggering vulnerability to her.
Her voice dropped to a whisper again: "Do you love me?"
For the first time since I'd entered the house, even more tensely than how I'd felt when the note had been brought up and I'd fluked, I felt myself freezing up. My mouth or my mind, something wasn't working. I took the breath in but it took me almost too long.
"Yes," I said. "Very much."
She pressed a kiss to my shoulder and I rested my cheek on her head just a bit when her head propped back down. After that we were quiet for good, except for an impulsive humming that came later, Gaila mulling out a melody I recognized gradually as the one Danek played on the piano. My mind wandered far and in many directions, but not as restlessly as it had the night before.
The theory, of course, could be that Gaila was in fact a criminal, that she had me pegged and that this entire conversation had been her attempt to throw me off the trail. Her comment about Danek or Will seeming to be the initiators of the "pact"—it could have been some means of misdirection to make it doubtful that she had been the first to ever suggest it. Aside from that, there were still little things that had me confused about what was known by everyone else in the house, and for all that had been discussed, the investigation could have been all the way back to square one. Day by day I examined all four of them in this dizzying rotation, all of them snug and secret as chambers in a revolver and I had no way of knowing if they were loaded.
It seemed like the most resounding part of what I'd learned that day was what made me able to now put more of a face to the kind of person who'd been in control of what they knew and what they felt; the vision was as vague as ever, but it had a grim and cruel twist to it.
Illogically, I connected my idea of it to the convenient details of Will Kenley's biography I'd invented that long day sitting down with Chris, even as I'd been oblivious to the eventual repercussions. In a way entirely separate from being connected genetically, it was because of a story I'd made up that Will probably believed he had a sister somewhere or that he had merely average aptitude scores from his teenage years for some incongruous reason. I felt a sense of responsibility for who he had been that you'd have to be in my shoes to really understand. I could comprehend in a sense what it would be to invent the pasts for several different people along the schematics of limited events, what it would mean to tailor their psychology for a specific use, because I had done this with the version of Will that I'd been able to control.
I could understand the cold hard function of packaging them with the kind of memories they would never be inclined to revisit whenever it was avoidable. I understood why this anonymous creator had done it, and I blindly hated him for it. It made me suspect with a heady feeling in my gut that whatever their minds or bodies had been harvested for, they were never even loved as someone's misdirected use of genius and passion, but seen only as instruments.
And this fact brought me back, sharply, to the increasingly maddening question that felt like the entire reason I was here: What the hell were they all doing in the house?
"Still staying home, Danek?" I asked, entering the kitchen to fill up a water bottle with a small bag slung over my shoulder. "It's not too late to change your mind."
He looked over from where he'd been looking out into the yard, his morning mile-high glass of grapefruit juice in hand. "I'm even less up to it than before, unfortunately."
The rest of us were preparing for a day away at the park areas in the middle of the city—"the Villages" was the common label this group used for it—and Danek was apparently the only one who occasionally neglected to join in on these trips they all made once or twice a month. He had complained about his work load the night before, but I could tell now that he simply looked exhausted. "Oh. Are you feeling alright?"
Toni came in, immediately asking me, "Did you convince him?" I ruefully shook my head.
"Let him stay," Gaila said playfully from the next room. "We don't need his backseat driving."
Danek protested that, frowning. "I can restrain myself. Except for when Ken is the one driving."
"I'm a good driver, you ass!" came Ken from the living room.
"You may be an exemplary one, my friend, but it would be at driving something other than a car—"
Laughing, Toni solidly interrupted, "So, Danek's not going. Surprise, surprise. I want to be ready in five minutes, everyone."
"Yeah, right," Ken grumbled. "Gaila couldn't be ready to go anywhere in under twenty minutes to save her—"
"You know what, sir," Gaila cut in with a wrestling squeeze at Ken's ticklish point.
We were finally in the car something like twenty-five minutes later. Gaila drove during the ride over; it was me in the passenger seat and Toni and Ken being the most talkative in the back, while Gaila or me occasionally turned down the volume of the music to get a couple words into the livelier parts of their conversation.
The drive to the center was forty or fifty minutes. I'd made the trip plenty of times, sometimes even for leisure, but in recent months I'd avoided the whole location. There was nothing I could do about the ugly reminders the areas might bring up for me now, but as the interstates narrowed to bumpier roads with greener backgrounds, it was easier than I'd expected to adopt the mood of the others.
At the entrance to one of the huge forest parks, we had to stop into one of the strip mall structures to buy day passes. The park was usually visited by people intending to camp there for the night, but as far as I could tell the group usually just partied late into the evening and then went home once they were sobered up.
Gaila complained that she'd forgotten to bring a good sweater, so we swung by one of the rustic little shops so that she could look for one. A couple minutes before we'd arrived there I'd gotten a message. It was when we split up for a few minutes at the stores that I got the chance to look at it.
Mic malfunc. Re: Pike ASAP.
I grumbled a low disbelieving curse, then backed around the building quite a bit so that I could be sure they wouldn't hear me on the comm from anywhere close to the car.
As soon as I heard Chris answer I said, "You gotta be fucking kidding me."
He sounded just as agitated as I did. "If I had anybody to replace the guy with, I would've fired my surveillance rookie, but there's shit-all for it right now."
"It's his fault?"
"Long story, but, I called up Scott and the way he explained the reason for the malfunction, it has something to do with the voice monitoring settings. You're supposed to write down this one frequency...fuckery-fuck thing when you first hook it up, and he didn't do it, and we're basically getting this jumbled distorted bullshit that's impossible to understand. You need to get your extra, but I know you can't do that until later."
"I most definitely cannot," I confirmed tersely. "I'll take care of it as soon as I can...Thankfully, I kinda doubt the conversation was going to get that heavy today anyway."
"Yeah." He sighed. "I know it's kind of the opposite of what you're used to doing, but try to keep it that way. You need to actually skirt around the heart-to-hearts."
"I think I can manage it."
"Okay. Uh, we should pick up the signal as soon as you activate the other mic, but shoot me a message when you've got it hooked up just in case?"
"Right. Look, I doubt I'll get that hung up, but don't worry if it's not until the wee hours? It's possible we won't head straight back to the house even when we're done with the trip."
"Alright."
"Oh, and Chris? Go easy on your guy. You can be a scary bastard sometimes."
I heard a laugh before Chris ended the call.
A few minutes later I was in the bathroom of the little sandwich shop across the street. I stretched down the collar of my t-shirt, reached in and ripped off the mic and then crammed it into an inner pocket of my bag.
Gaila was cocking an eyebrow at something on a poster and lazily tucking her ID into the breast pocket of the button-up plaid shirt she had on. She looked over with a distracted grin when I nudged her to get going with a little kick at her toes.
"Mr. William," she said with a silly wistfulness. I smiled and let her put her arm through mine as we walked off to the car. Immediately I noticed the lightness, that my instinct to worry about her brushing up and noticing the tape at the slightest hint of contact was an unneeded one.
We stopped the car later at a place that rented out quad bikes, going through some amusingly complicated stealth to avoid the owner suspecting we were planning on doubling up on the vehicles. This involved me and Gaila whistling our way well into the beginnings of the fat hiking path until the sound of engines growled up and Ken and Toni were cranking to a stop just behind us. Gaila hopped up behind Toni and I made some joke about Danek's confidence in Ken's driving as I edged onto the back of his seat. We were off.
I think it's impossible to explain that whole day. I've never known anyone who wore the wind like these people did, their occasional giddy yells streaking colors through the breeze, the air swirling up into black and red and brown hair like the billowing motion of something underwater. Toni had a flask tucked in her belt that she took out and passed around whenever we stopped for a break. The booze hit thickly and time got diluted. Dusk had seemed to suddenly swipe its way in when we stopped at a slight clearing, setting up a blanket and huddling in a circle over the snickerdoodles somebody had brought.
Toni was decidedly the most drunk, or at least the most enthusiastically so. She and Gaila were recounting some story I was pretty sure no one needed to be told for the first time, and she had a kind of beautifully ugly laugh that wouldn't quit, husky but contagious. Next to her Gaila was the most affected by it, her forehead bouncing against Toni's shoulder. It felt like it had been a lifetime since I'd been around this kind of mirth, the way people will just be laughing at laughing after a certain point; when I actually considered it for a second, I had a brief flashback to one of the Murder squad's bar meets that had ended disastrously, or fantastically, depending on who you ask. During my first few months on the unit I could have easily gotten in trouble if it had gotten around that I once got carried away to the point of slamming my beer down and yelling, "We are the police!" when a bartender threatened to comm the law just because we got a bit loud.
"It's nice that they don't let more than a few people come out here," I commented when we'd quieted down a bit. "We passed that one group all day and that was it."
"I don't know that it's because of how many they let in," Ken said. "Business at the center isn't doing well lately, especially in this park. At least it's not a good place to do family stuff, cause kids get really creeped out."
"Creeped out, why?" Toni asked. "Because of that couple who got murdered?"
"Well, that doesn't help, considering that it was in the same vicinity, but there have been horror stories about these woods for years and years, cause of that lady who disappeared." Gaila and Toni were giving Ken curious looks. He abruptly set his drink down to his knee. "Wait. Don't tell me you don't know about that? That's like...local history 101, doesn't everybody know about it?"
Ken looked to me for some validation; I shrugged. "Sure, I've heard some stuff about that. It happened quite a while ago, right?"
Toni pouted thoughtfully. "I would be more worried about recent murders than an old story about a disappearance." She shrugged, but there was a challenge in it; she wanted the story to be good.
With a mildly protesting shake of his head, Ken said, "Murders are everywhere here though and the thing is, it was just a really really weird case. It also happened back when stuff like that wasn't nearly as common in ND...See, the totally freaky part is that whatever happened to her, her kid was with her."
Toni leaned forward a bit, confused, and Ken almost acted like he was telling a horror story now, getting a little giddy.
"So, she and her son are staying at some fancy resort, obviously one of the ones that's been taken down by now. Late in the afternoon there's nothing funny, they have dinner and she chats with somebody else in the hotel, yadda yadda, and she takes her son out for a stroll. Later on it's way after dark and somebody comms the cops because they've found this kid just standing in the middle of the woods, practically catatonic, and apparently unable to remember anything that had happened after they left the hotel. He never remembered anything."
Gaila quietly said, "Holy crap."
"And it was before New Dublin had a good amount of technology so there was only so much they could do, but they combed the area. It was hike-only, nobody should have been able to get in there with an actual vehicle...They sent out these search dogs, but the dogs went running until they got to the place where the kid had been found, and then just kind of lost the trail. And this poor kid, it's so screwed up..."
Ken got Gaila's shoulders, both of them grinning devilishly as he twisted her around at the torso. He motioned long cuts very slowly along her back at odd angles.
"He had these long scrapes that had ripped right through his clothes, just like four of five of them."
"Nuh-uh." Gaila slapped him off. "You are so full of it."
"I am not making this up—Other than that, he was untouched, he was completely fine. They didn't find blood or remains or anything for the mother anywhere. It's this totally bizarre unexplainable thing, and they never figured out what could have happened to her. It's like...a fairy story. Like something gobbled her up."
There was a stunned little pause. Slowly, Gaila was creeping an arm up around Toni, and then startled her into a tiny shriek by pinching her hard in the ribs. "Ohmygod, I hate you," Toni protested, catching her breath while Gaila laughed.
"The rips in the clothes, though? Really?" I cynically asked. (I had held the case file in my hands. I knew.) "That sounds like something teenagers would make up."
"Yes," Ken insisted, emphatic. "If you look up the old articles on it, that's what it says."
"So the kid can't remember anything?" Gaila said.
I was the one who said, "Keep in mind this happened, I'm not sure, over twenty years ago? If he was going to remember anything useful it would have happened by now."
Ken added, "Yeah, it's kind of weird to think that 'kid' is well into adulthood now. Wherever he is."
"Shit." Toni let out a long breath. She seemed to have forgotten all about her cigarette in her hand. "I just can't imagine what that would do to somebody, you know? And to a child, no less. It could drive you crazy wondering whether you're better off not knowing."
Ken, a little more grim now, said, "I actually thought of this whole thing when they told us Will couldn't remember what had happened."
That almost startled me; I'd been so busy playing civilian ignorance on the subject that I'd forgotten it was something Will could have held a little close to home. I worked with my slight surprise, shrugging and saying, "I wouldn't say that it's the same thing. With me the worst part's over. But God forbid, if one of you had been with me and..."
Toni, wide-eyed with the thought, shook her head.
There was a hissing swish through the trees, wind picking up with a slightly colder edge than it had half an hour before. I swallowed, doing an idle check of the time. "Should we get going?"
Soon after we were mounted up, riding the last mile back to the edge of camp. The breeze almost stung once we were moving faster, the wide path seeming more sliced into a crevice by the headlights and the thicketed background taller and more secretive in the melt of evening.
I'd been on these paths several times before that day, but it took me until I was further gone on the alcohol to even think of it, the last time I'd been out here riding between the trees like this.
It was a week before Op 86 got wrapped up. I got a comm well after dark from Spock and managed to realize from how he sounded rather than from what he was saying that he'd gone out to the crime scene for some reason and that he needed me to come get him.
He was far on the other side where the forest cropped into the highway. When I pulled up my bike there and he climbed on behind me I asked him if he wanted to go right home, and he said no. So I took us onto the old bumpy closed-off streets that the city hasn't been troubled to have reconstructed ever since the oldest resorts closed, and we rode.
I can't even say for how long, but it could have been hours. I'd taken one look at him when I'd first arrived and been worried I wouldn't really know what to do for him, and I kept driving as if I felt like I could suspend everything into some safer blacker limbo than what was waiting for us in the morning, what was waiting for him when he had to be alone with his thoughts again. It was a warm night but at some points I'd felt like he was shivering behind me, and there was the way his arms tightened gradually and firmly around my ribs, the way he set his chin on the nest of my shoulder. When I finally took us back out onto the main road, instead of asking him again if he wanted me to take him to his place, I took him to mine.
Running into a dead end on a big case is hard; the weather of that one was rough enough to make immaterial things freeze and sharpen in the air, turn gentle atmosphere into obstacles. It was dangerous stuff, but the coldest little treachery of it was that we'd never been closer than how we got during that case; up until that last week, up until that night, if somebody had told me it would be the end of us, I would have laughed and laughed.
"You falling asleep back there?" Ken asked.
"...What?" I yelled back.
I heard him laugh as he nudged into me with his back a little bit. "Nevermind."
Ken drove us home, and it was Gaila and Toni in the back seat with the windows down, still drunk and windblown. On an impulse, one of them broke out into some song and the other joined in abruptly. There was something that sounded very old about it, some bouncy showtunish melody; they both sang pretty decently but it was the unrehearsed, unharmonized quality that gave it all the charm. After a while Ken stopped cringing at the back seat and started to whistle along. I was half-worried I would be expected to join in, but they didn't last much longer without dissolving into a fit of self-conscious laughter.
"Hey, hey," Gaila said, shaking my seat a little. "Let's comm Danek."
We put my comm on the speaker setting; Danek answered promptly, but took a long time to get a word in between multiple greetings. He had apparently napped for several hours that afternoon and felt wide awake.
"Daneeek, you should seriously go get plastered in anticipation of our arrival," Toni urged. "We're not going to bed for years."
"Hell yeah," Ken said. "Please?"
Danek made a grudgingly thoughtful noise. "...I may indulge."
"Really?" Gaila put in giddily.
"I'll see what we have."
"Good man," I said with a bit of camp, and heard an affectionate scoff before he clicked off.
When we arrived back, Danek was leaning into the kitchen threshold waiting for us to come up the drive. He did look somehow more relaxed than usual. Ken came in pushing him back by the hips and yelling, "Heyo, Danny-boy!" and he didn't seem to mind all of our noise at all.
The bag I'd had all day was weighed down too obtrusively by my phaser for me to want to risk leaving it around, so the first thing I did was drop into my room while everyone else was clustering somewhere around the coffee table. I was about to think up my excuse for disappearing for the few minutes it would take to hook up the extra mic when Gaila came swinging into the bedroom, grabbing me by the arms and almost hopping up and down: "Toni says the O'Briens are gone, we're gonna go sneak into their pool!"
"Wha..." I laughed, "Now?..."
"Yeahyeahyeah, come on!"
There was no thought given to any kind of swimwear; most of them were happily possessed with the notion that this intrusion had to be done immediately before anyone changed their minds. The O'Briens lived two houses down, and we cut in through the narrow alley between the vine-veined south side of their house and our direct neighbors' tall white fence. Gaila tripped on something and thumped her elbow hard into the fence in the multi-tasking effort of unbuttoning her shirt. She and Toni sniggered at her clumsiness, Toni clutching her arm, wanting to run. They could barely wait long enough to strip down to their underwear; Toni's narrow jeans tangled on their way down and Ken had to grab her by the arm so that she wouldn't trip and she thanked him through a scoff skidding out of her.
"Are the boys too shy?" Gaila said with a sympathetic pout in Danek's direction, stripped down to her bra and underwear; then she backed up and hopped in fearlessly, coming up with a brief squeal at the cold.
Danek rose to the taunt, chewing his bottom lip and then beginning to undress. Ken and I laughed and followed suit as if it was a race. I had had to be conscious and careful with my clothes for the past weeks, always checking how low my collar was or if the fabric might get thinned by the rain, but now I was hiking up and shedding the t-shirt to be able to reveal nothing underneath, and it felt freeing, as if I was somehow less of a fraud in that moment, less for that one night.
Danek was taking the ladder down while Ken splashed right in; when I was down to my boxers I leapt after him. After enjoying that first tickling cascade of bubbles driving up my body, I surfaced and shook my hair off my face to the swarming giggles, Toni and Gaila splashing at each other.
It didn't even occur to me to wonder, as I had at first with a lot of their most likely programmed skills, how well they had ever learned to swim. It had become too easy to forget it, that they were miraculously only years old, but still that thought would appear to me now and again in more of a sentiment of their innocence than anything else.
I will always remember this one moment of a kind of underwater charades, when we all took in a deep breath and submerged all at once, looking about us in the blue-lighted join of the soundless water. We were all mostly naked except for the gauzy blacks and greys, but with each other they were all as confident and unassuming in their nakedness as gods or children, floating in this separated ease from the rest of the world. I felt like they could have breathed underwater if they wanted.
We came up with some of us coughing from laughing at something Gaila had done, which was when Danek shushed us. We heard a car pulling up.
"Shit shit shit," Toni hissed, and we were frantically splashing over to the edges and then out, rushing to get out of sight of the windows; Gaila went for our clothes, but Ken grabbed her away by the arm as Danek tried to kick them out of the illumination of the patio lights before turning to run with us, accidentally almost knocking me over and making me clutch at him to keep from tripping, me helplessly laughing as we kept speeding off around the side of the house. After only a second's blurred hesitation, we sprung up and hopped the fence.
There should have been something ridiculous about all of them as these figures cutting nakedly through the next yard to get to ours. But Danek was impressively quick and non-fussed for a man in nothing but navy boxer briefs, the girls were amused even as they shivered and clutched their arms over their breasts, and Ken was shaking the water out of his hair and laughing at himself for blundering the security code the first time when he was letting us into our back door; we entered the house whooping and laughing, running for the rooms to put anything on. I realized only after changing into my sweats that I hadn't even bothered shutting the bedroom door. Danek apparently hadn't either, and I saw in to meet his eyes just as he was zipping on a hoodie, having moved more leisurely than the rest of us but still touched with a generally flushed look.
"Now that Toni's ambitions for trespassing have been fulfilled," he said, with a look of being fully aware he was being a smartass, "one of us is naturally going to have to volunteer to go collect the clothes."
"Oh," I said, rueful but smiling. "I'll go with you?"
The rest were pretty thankful when they realized what we were doing, and Toni promised to have my favorite cocktail fixed up when we got back. "Thanks, hon," I said to her warmly as we went out through the front this time, planning to sneak in from the side again.
A couple minutes later found me and Danek leaning into the fence, hesitating to creep back onto the patio.
"The light's on in the bedroom," I observed, leaning out from where we were shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped space. "Should we make a go for it?"
"We could wait a couple minutes," Danek suggested. "See if they're about to go to sleep."
"Okay. You don't think they saw us earlier?"
"It's a conclusion I'm comfortable with," he replied, not looking up from messing with a jam in his zipper, eventually giving up on it with a grumble of "Damn."
I gave a little chuckle, bobbing my leg restlessly but reminding myself that Will didn't have much of an impatient bone in his body, from what I'd seen, and crossing my arms over my chest in a relaxed stance.
I really was, I realized, more relaxed than I'd been in an extremely long time. I'd begun to feel throughout the day like there was nothing much to be monitored about everyone else. I could have been pondering that Danek's eagerness to get his clothes back meant that that chip might be in his pocket, but it only belatedly occurred to me. I was falling into the feeling that this was my day off, and even while I was conscious of it, it was hard to straighten myself back up. I didn't even think about how loaded a question it was when I muttered, "I have to wonder if we're a little too old for things like this..."
Danek gave a sardonic motion with his head. "Students are students."
"Apparently."
A pleasant wind sighed up around us for a moment. I looked over at Danek, and he looked like he was blinking himself out of some reverie. He asked, "Did you enjoy today?"
"I'm pretty sure Toni's under the impression it's not over," I said, and his expression lightened in agreement. More quietly I then answered, "Yeah. It's the best weekend we've had in a while. Could have used more of you, though."
"You wouldn't find it so regrettable if you'd been around me and my headache all day."
"That bad? I hope it's out of your system by now...Hey," I then said, pointing up to where the window had gone dark.
I collected up my own clothes and any other garment I found strewn around; all impulse to sneak around quietly had dissolved, and we talked freely on the way back around to our house.
"Why?" I grumbled simply, when a car came by busting out music at way too high a volume for this late at night.
"I wonder why the unofficial law is that it's always that kind of music that gets played at ridiculous volumes," Danek said.
I laughed. "Of course. I would die laughing if somebody came around the neighborhood in some muscle car shaking the trees with some Beethoven or..."
With a hum of amusement he interrupted, "You would say that."
"I think Nietzsche would approve."
There was a pause when I thought I'd gotten it wrong. I still didn't get the joke after all, and it had been dangerous for me to try to reference it.
But then, he remembered. In the dark, it took me a while to realize the sound that came next was him laughing, a low and constant sniggering. He did laugh occasionally, but it was only then I ever heard it like that.
"Ah, Will...I'd almost forgotten about that." His hand was pressed at my shoulder for a second. With a brief snicker in return, I clapped my hand over his wrist with the arm that wasn't holding a bundle of clothes. With a final sigh Danek was saying, "I think you and I were the reason Professor Lloyd doesn't hold debates in any of his courses anymore..."
I laughed a little more easily as we were pushing the front screen door open. We found everyone in the kitchen and dealt out the clothes.
"Bottoms up!" Toni said; there was a drink waiting for everyone, and I initiated a wordless toast by tapping my glass against Danek's and there was the tinkling noise of others following suit.
Whatever Will's favorite was, it was strong. I've never sobered up particularly fast and this one was going to set me pretty far back, but I didn't try to make an excuse. I downed the whole thing, let Gaila slap-grab me by the shoulders into what was going to be some brilliant fun idea before the air was interrupted by the lights getting killed, provoking a unison of groans.
Danek had gone off to somewhere else in the house and was reappearing in the kitchen with a small towel just as this happened, rubbing the water from his ears and his neck. Toni and Gaila and Ken went hopping up to their room to grab a camping lamp or something; I felt too weighed down to go after and sunk my lower back against one of the countertops.
"I'm astonished we still haven't gotten that system fixed," Danek remarked, and then he was bringing the towel up to my hair and rubbing it down for me. I chuckled in surprise at the contact, not having seen that he was about to do it. He rubbed at my ears and then down to where the pressure at the nape of my neck sent the tiniest wave of warmth all over my body, then let the towel drop loose at my shoulders under his hands.
"Yeah," I muttered. "Ken keeps saying if one of us doesn't do something about it soon, he just might stoop to calling a professional. If it wasn't—"
Everything stopped, the kitchen itself gasping to a silence of nothing but the vague thuds of the three upstairs, a smallest bit of breath as faint as the noise of a wick burning.
I had been kissed like this so few times in my life, as a thing that was hardly an act of passionate urgency but one of those things people do when they think it just has to be done. It was just one bit past chaste and not an action that really needed anything in return. Danek pivoted me into his body and pressed his mouth to mine as if to tell me something rather than ask for something: a slow, warm push until he knew the message got through, and then I was still and dizzy in the darkness of the kitchen with Danek squeezing at one of my hands very briefly, and then he placed both of his on the counter on either side of me just to lean into my space without us touching again, not then, not just yet. Feeling the moment as if it didn't quite matter if I didn't have anything to do or say about this.
My mind was spinning into a whip-sudden clarity that ached through all the drunken stuff, steeling up for what this really meant, not about the operation or about Will but about me. I'd passed a touch to my hand with enough calm in my head for nothing to seem off. Everything about this hiccup could be clean, simple. Danek was not asking me to do anything; he had to be prepared for this to go nowhere, and as far as any kind of sanity is concerned of course nowhere was exactly where it had to go.
But I was being reminded, like a blow to the face, of why I left undercover in the first place. There was little doubt that I could make this alright by skimming out of it with some excuse, but there was also this crystallized undeniable possibility hanging in the air. For just that evening, the absence of the mic was making me weightless with the knowledge that I had nothing underneath but a naked body with the right scars. I wouldn't have, but this is the part I can't overlook: I wanted it. It wasn't so much that I wanted Danek, though I definitely can't say that I didn't. Much more than that, I wanted Will.
And I could have. I only needed to reach out and touch and I knew without a doubt, Danek would lead me into his room and I could cross that line into living another man's life in a way I wasn't even living my own anymore. The only thing I had to do was the wrong thing. It was too much. Too much power for me to have over someone else, even if I never would have used it.
I was swallowing, and then vaguely whispering Danek's name, when the stampede of Toni and Gaila—when had I memorized their footfalls?—preceded Toni yelling something about Ken's sudden determination to fix the back porch step.
I still couldn't read Danek through the dark and hoped he couldn't see me well enough to notice my knowing expression wasn't quite all there. "Gaila, don't take the steps two at a time when it's pitch black in here," I mildly scolded at a yell.
Still only inches from me, Danek may have been patiently chuckling. He was removing one hand from the counter to lean in on only one, still a little close at my side.
A heavier thudding as Ken came leading down the steps; I felt the briefest brush of Danek's fingers coming around mine again as if in some quick motion of assurance, and pulled my hand back, hoping it came off as a shifting movement oblivious to his.
I had leaned into the opposite threshold when Toni was hollering down about something else, when I turned and saw Danek in his inscrutable stenciled profile still standing over by the counter, looking like he was looking down at something. I gave a dramatic sigh. "I guess if we can't do anything about the light tonight, we might as well take care of that."
I couldn't tell what Danek was doing or thinking; he looked like he was somewhere else, but then he stood up straight, beginning to move from the counter.
Realizing then that we were effectively past it, I didn't know what else to do but say, low and with all the sweet easy familiarity I could muster, "Hey." Something simple and reaching because I knew that everything in this house was too close for apologies.
After a moment he just nodded and muttered, "May as well."
I don't remember if I even saw Danek for the rest of the night, which after that was heavily dissolving into the mood where everyone and everything seemed to be circling down a funnel. Toni kept pouring more drinks, and I had no excuse not to make an excuse to insist I'd had enough, but I apparently didn't care.
I knew in the back of my mind I was supposed to be doing something, but it kept getting lost, shoved aside with varying levels of grumpy deliberation. I probably had plenty of chances to run back and replace the mic kit, but I wanted to forget about it.
The atmosphere was still wobbly between everyone much later that night, though only evident in petty little hiccups, like Toni grumbling Ken's name after she tripped over his ice skates in the foyer even though she had no reason to be irritated with him. The whole house was turned down to a mild sulk and I didn't feel the need to casually announce I was getting a smoke before I made a quick exit out back.
Leaning a shoulder into one of the first trees at the edge of the park, I asked as soon as Chris picked up, "Do we have Christine Chapel on call?"
Chris patched me through on the transmission; Chapel picked up promptly and went from sounding tired to somewhat eager when Chris greeted her.
"Hey, it's Jim Kirk," I said.
"Hi, Jim. What can I do for you?"
"Something came up today that made me think of a couple of Korby's artificial memory theories. I'm assuming you're familiar with them?"
I thought I heard a muffled clearing of Chapel's throat. "Of course, sure."
"I wanted to run this by you first before I go trying to convince Chris about it. Would you say, if one or more individuals in the house is aware of them having false memories, that they would have a reason to instill some taboo about talking about, maybe even thinking about certain memories? I know that he had two theories about it, but I haven't read up on it in several years."
"For the record," Chris muttered, "I don't know anything about this shit."
Chapel made an amused hum. "Well, the thing is, his second theory has been suggested to be way more likely in recent studies. The first theory, if that's what you're asking me about, is that too much preoccupation with the details of the memories can make them corruptible. Like, if one of them was to realize there's some tiny flaw, any kind of inconsistency that doesn't stack up, the entire information would basically start crashing and the memories would die."
Chris prompted, "But the second thing is...?"
"The second theory states that the memories really aren't corruptible in that sense, because memory systems have been improved much more effectively than personality programming." I heard a chinking noise, like she was drinking from an ice-filled glass. "But under that theory, it's all about the idea of, you know, the experience of what it's like to remember something. It's easy to make a very young A.I. individual believe its own memories, because in essence, they don't understand what long-term memory is really like. But as they get older and collect more and more memories, it may take a while, but sooner or later they would supposedly start to realize that maybe something that they think happened eight years ago is something they don't 'remember' the same way they remember two years ago. It's less about how well they remember or the clarity of it. Korby knew it wasn't something we could prove, since you can't exactly sit down with a cyborg and compare notes on the exact levels of emotions or thoughts attached to one memory over another, or the human versus non-human perspective. It's far too subjective...but you have to admit the theory makes a lot of sense, right?"
"So," Chris put in, "Jim, this 'no pasts' thing. Has anything else come up that could give you an idea where that came from?"
"No. But it's easy to believe they go by it all the time. And judging from the conversation, it seems like the rule is that nothing before they all met is fair game."
I heard Chris thoughtfully clicking something against a desk. "Miss Chapel, I think that's all we need you for."
"Yeah, thanks," I said.
"Okay." She sounded a bit distracted, but thought to say, "Hey, Jim. Good luck," before she clicked off.
"Jim," Chris said, his tone a bit heavier now. "You know what I'm worried about now."
I let out a long sigh.
"It would be different if Gaila hadn't been playing along, but since she did, you have to consider it a very real possibility that she's onto you. And I mean onto you."
Again with Gaila being top suspect, it was an irritating thing to keep in mind: if she was fully aware that she was surrounded by clones, and especially if she had any reason to know that Will's source is in fact a cop...
"Right," I said. "I really don't think so, but..."
"Jim, you can disagree all you want. Just don't let it affect how careful you are."
"Of course not, sir."
"Good. The point is, you were unsure about who might have initiated the little code, even when Danek was the one who interrupted; the fact that she wasn't the one who put a stop to the conversation doesn't necessarily tell us anything. I need you to try to dig up how she feels about the rules, and if you can, how anybody else does too."
"Got it."
"Now how are you holding up? Sleeping okay?"
With the amount of edginess attached to the job, lack of sleep is one of the typical concerns about undercovers, who need to be so constantly in check that it isn't one of the issues anyone's boss is eager to wave off with some advice about caffeine. I was just fine though, and told him so. Our call ended seconds after that.
When I got back inside, the place was a little less quiet. Ken and Toni had moved into the kitchen to study more and were talking at a calm murmer. I told both of them goodnight and retired to my room a little early. As if I'd jinxed my claims to Chris about sleeping well, my head was swimming with more thoughts than usual, and it took me over an hour to finally fall asleep.
The next day was my heaviest afternoon of classes, followed by an evening when I had a huge paper everyone knew about and had to retreat into busywork for a couple hours overlapping dinner. It wasn't until nighttime that I really had an excuse to be talkative, and it wasn't helped by what I couldn't help perceiving as a slight tightness in the air between everyone, even though it was just subtle enough that it might have been in my head. I had noted the night before that it was possible I wasn't being quite warm enough to Danek, so I sat right next to him after coming in from a cigarette break, sighing into the couch. I vaguely muttered, "Tired."
"Hmm." Next to my foot, Danek's left one shifted up a little, a pull of attention even as he didn't look over at me. "Did you ask for an extension on any of your work?"
"Huh," I huffed as if too tired to laugh. "What do you think?"
"I think possibly you're overly devoted to economic subjects you could teach better than the professor does."
"I wouldn't say so when you don't know the professor."
"I would say so," he said without looking up or over. "I just did say so."
I broke out into a grin and as if he felt it, I saw the tip of his mouth pull up just slightly next to me as he highlighted a passage on his PADD.
I felt like there was no acknowledgment of the disconnection between us from yesterday. He did give me a look a couple times, as if he was wondering if there was something I wanted to talk to him about. Unless we had some consequential time alone, there was nothing with him I wanted to push just yet, so I only took the opportunity to let us relax in each other's company for an hour or so before he got up to take his evening shower.
I was putting away dishes in the kitchen some time after that when I spotted Gaila out in the yard. She was talking on her personal comm and sitting on the little garden bench out in the middle of the grass just beyond where the small amount of light from the kitchen was able to easily reach.
I went outside, stepping gently so as to possibly not be heard, but not exactly sneaking. I deduced from the couple words I picked up that she was just swapping shifts with a coworker, and just when I was a yard or so behind her she quickly ended the conversation and hung up. From the way she stretched her arms back behind her and idly yawned without looking back at all I figured she didn't realize I was there. In a second her head tilted with curiosity and she stood up to take a couple steps forward, fingering at the petals blooming on the little scrap of flowers the yard had next to the old bird bath. I smirked when I came up behind her, pivoted forward slowly and then lurched to grab her shoulders.
She didn't scream, but the gasp was an ugly one: Gaila nearly fell down and her breath picked up in a snap, loud and frantic.
"—Hey hey, it's me."
"Will," she groaned in agitation, leaning over in a collapse to rest her hands on her legs.
"I'm sorry..."
"Shit." Gaila pressed her hand over her chest. She sounded like she hardly had air to speak, and when I reached to grab her by the shoulders, she was actually trembling.
"I'm so sorry. Dammit, I'm a total ass. Here, sit down..."
She was trying to shirk it off by now, smiling a little manically as she let me lead her over to sitting back down.
"My God. You're like those puppies they were selling at the park that wouldn't stop sort of vibrating..."
She laughed weakly, wiping something out of her own features. "Wait, what?"
"You know, that old guy who was trying to sell the dogs. And they were all excitable, and Ken—"
"Oh yeah. 'Do they ever stop?'" Her shoulders twitched in something close to laughing.
"Yeah." A silence fell around for a moment as Gaila consciously calmed her breathing. I said, "Sorry again."
"It's okay." In a fluid extension of a reassuring gesture I gave to her shoulder, she inched in and half-leaned against me, letting her ear rest to my shoulder.
"Do you know if Danek's angry about yesterday?" she asked after a moment.
"...No. I don't think so."
The ambient rustling of the woods was the only sound for another moment. More quietly, she added, "You're not mad, are you?"
I mentally fished for something vague. "You don't really think I'd be angry about it."
"Well, not angry exactly. The funny thing is I don't really know anymore. You almost seemed like..." A shift against me as she shrugged. "Like you'd changed your mind about the whole thing. Because you were just kind of quiet."
"I don't know. I guess I didn't want to bother with any of it just then, so I didn't exactly take a side."
A little sniffing laugh—She sat up a bit, slapped a hand on my lap to idly rest it there. "You've always been on Danek's side, though. If this whole pact or whatever was even his idea in the first place. I actually kind of thought it was yours. But, you know, we usually talk like it was just something we all wanted. And it was, but..."
I muttered, "You don't want it anymore?"
I felt the barest, slightest flinch. Gaila felt like we were edging into taboo, reacting as if it extended damage to some greater, more important idea. This whole thing was occult. And yet, she didn't resist commenting. "I just wonder sometimes...if it's sort of my fault that we decided not to talk about that stuff."
I didn't get it, but I didn't think she expected me to, so I only waited for her to go on.
"We all realized pretty quickly that none of us have had these happy lives that we want to talk about with each other, but there has to be something that's happy, or interesting, that some of you guys could share about yourselves. I just think sometimes that it's because I've got nobody. Danek's got the shittiest of emotionally unavailable fathers that ever lived, and I don't even want to know what Toni's parents did to her, the way she's hinted about it. But if you guys were to ever have anything to say about any of it, you might think, well, I shouldn't complain to the girl who doesn't even know what it's like to have a family."
"It's not like that." I was surprised by how quickly the words came, as if I had reason to firmly believe what I was saying. "It really is for everyone's sake."
For the next moment, Gaila looked out into the dark trees and I thought she looked grimly distracted by some other thought. I nudged her a bit with my shoulder, and finally she meekly said, "I feel like it's the same way with us, when we don't really think about what we're going to do."
"...What do you mean?"
"We all have this idea, like we're going to be living together forever, but it's impossible to just assume none of us will ever want other things. Any of you could....let's be real, you could meet someone. Ken talks all the time about how he'd love to go live on Terra, and he doesn't mean it like he's planning to, but sometimes when he gets really into talking about it...it's hard to hear. We even went through that time when you didn't want to hear anything about leaving Niori...but, the point is that I wouldn't want to stop anyone from doing what they want, and I'm worried that the reason we're all so close is just because..." She shrugged. "Like you all just feel sorry for me for not having anybody else. And you all talk like with all the chances you have of ever going back to where you've been, those people might as well not even exist for you. But still, it doesn't seem like it could be the same. I need all of you a lot more than you need me."
"Bullshit." It wasn't like Will to be all that vulgar, but I doubted it stuck out right then. "You know that isn't true."
She let out a long, shaky breath.
"Gaila," I said, more softly, and she slouched down farther. Her hand reached down to mine and clutched it loosely so that our hands rested clasped on my leg, comfy as fingers reaching into a pocket.
"We shouldn't talk about this," she whispered.
"I want you to talk about anything you want to," I said easily, after a second.
I thought for a moment the conversation had gotten away; she seemed flighty and sleepy. But then she articulated this one other thing: "It's okay if we never share more with each other. Most of the time I don't think it matters at all."
"Why?" I muttered, uncertain of how I could push this far enough.
"Even though I'm curious...I wonder if it's the same for all of you as it is for me." She took a second to put the right thing into words. "It feels to me like everything that's been happening in my life since I met all of you has been so much more significant than anything else. Like it's brighter in my mind somehow. I've always been kind of afraid to ask if it's the same for the rest, this feeling that there's this thing about us that's different...But I hate not knowing whether we're all just kind of bizarre together or if it's just me."
"...What do you mean by different?"
She scoffed weakly at herself. "I don't know. Don't you ever think so? We're always saying how lucky it was that we met each other, that we were friends so fast because we realized we connected over all this ugly stuff...But sometimes I have this feeling that it's deeper than that. I know this is the kind of thing that probably sounds ridiculous to you, but don't you ever get the idea that everyone else thinks that there's something really off about us? Not in a bad way, just...off."
I allowed a pensive sigh. "I...Maybe. I don't know."
"Do you remember when we were at that party, and we were talking to Kara and Jek, and they were both kind of weirded out by the fact that none of us could remember whether we'd ever broken any bones? It started with Ken making that comment that he may have at some point but it was hard to remember whether he did when he was a kid. And then I said I definitely didn't know, and Danek agreed, and we almost had this laugh about it...But then Jek and Kara were looking at us all funny. Jek kind of said it wouldn't have been too weird if one of us couldn't remember, but when it was all of us..."
"They like us just fine, though. They could have just been messing around."
"I'm not saying they think there's something wrong with us, exactly, but what I remember the most about it is that, it wasn't that they thought it was strange that we all had that in common." Gaila spoke carefully. "The way Kara looked, I think it was more that we couldn't see why it was strange. That was what put her off so much. I think there are things about us she just can't put down. I get the impression sometimes that she's...studying us. I'm not just saying this because she annoys me sometimes. Most of the time I forget about it, but then she'll look at one of us a certain way..."
I suddenly realized, from what I remembered of Kara, that I had some idea of why she bothered Gaila so much. "I have to admit, there were a couple things she said the other night that seemed to carry this nasty implication. Like when she makes those comments about how we don't all have that much in common?"
A squeeze and agreeing shake of my hand and Gaila said, "Yeah. It's almost like she's saying she doesn't get why we're so close. Not just that, but that she's weirded out by it. What the hell is her problem?"
In my cynicism I didn't think the explanation for Kara West was all that complicated. Considering how polarizing a group can be simply for being likable but also noticeably much more into each other than other people, I had actually been surprised the few of them didn't have their share of casual enemies. To a certain shallow mindset they were too enviable to be regarded with ambivalence, but there was also the possibility that people like Kara were solely interested in collecting them into a menagerie of acquaintances who had good looks and smarts. It wasn't much of an unusual crime of Kara's if she just didn't like unpredictable.
"I guess I can't say I've never wondered. About us being different, I mean," I finally said. "...But it doesn't give me a bad feeling."
She considered for a few seconds, and decidedly affirmed, "Yeah. It doesn't really bother me either."
Another bit of silence, a mellower tone moving into the yard as we sat much more relaxed than we'd been earlier.
After a moment, candidly, Gaila said Will's name. "Hmm?" I mumbled.
There are things in this world you don't take with a grain of salt. I should have been thinking through this entire conversation with Pike's hunch held in one hand and mine in the other, and on some level I did, but it felt at the most like some mathematical equation I had no real reason to remember. It was nothing for the way Gaila felt that night against my arm and my shoulder, something opulent and young emanating from the feel of her bones and my hand in hers as careful as you might clutch the fingers of a child. Gaila moved fearlessly and cheerfully through her life, but I had noticed the moments before, when she showed a staggering vulnerability to her.
Her voice dropped to a whisper again: "Do you love me?"
For the first time since I'd entered the house, even more tensely than how I'd felt when the note had been brought up and I'd fluked, I felt myself freezing up. My mouth or my mind, something wasn't working. I took the breath in but it took me almost too long.
"Yes," I said. "Very much."
She pressed a kiss to my shoulder and I rested my cheek on her head just a bit when her head propped back down. After that we were quiet for good, except for an impulsive humming that came later, Gaila mulling out a melody I recognized gradually as the one Danek played on the piano. My mind wandered far and in many directions, but not as restlessly as it had the night before.
The theory, of course, could be that Gaila was in fact a criminal, that she had me pegged and that this entire conversation had been her attempt to throw me off the trail. Her comment about Danek or Will seeming to be the initiators of the "pact"—it could have been some means of misdirection to make it doubtful that she had been the first to ever suggest it. Aside from that, there were still little things that had me confused about what was known by everyone else in the house, and for all that had been discussed, the investigation could have been all the way back to square one. Day by day I examined all four of them in this dizzying rotation, all of them snug and secret as chambers in a revolver and I had no way of knowing if they were loaded.
It seemed like the most resounding part of what I'd learned that day was what made me able to now put more of a face to the kind of person who'd been in control of what they knew and what they felt; the vision was as vague as ever, but it had a grim and cruel twist to it.
Illogically, I connected my idea of it to the convenient details of Will Kenley's biography I'd invented that long day sitting down with Chris, even as I'd been oblivious to the eventual repercussions. In a way entirely separate from being connected genetically, it was because of a story I'd made up that Will probably believed he had a sister somewhere or that he had merely average aptitude scores from his teenage years for some incongruous reason. I felt a sense of responsibility for who he had been that you'd have to be in my shoes to really understand. I could comprehend in a sense what it would be to invent the pasts for several different people along the schematics of limited events, what it would mean to tailor their psychology for a specific use, because I had done this with the version of Will that I'd been able to control.
I could understand the cold hard function of packaging them with the kind of memories they would never be inclined to revisit whenever it was avoidable. I understood why this anonymous creator had done it, and I blindly hated him for it. It made me suspect with a heady feeling in my gut that whatever their minds or bodies had been harvested for, they were never even loved as someone's misdirected use of genius and passion, but seen only as instruments.
And this fact brought me back, sharply, to the increasingly maddening question that felt like the entire reason I was here: What the hell were they all doing in the house?
"Still staying home, Danek?" I asked, entering the kitchen to fill up a water bottle with a small bag slung over my shoulder. "It's not too late to change your mind."
He looked over from where he'd been looking out into the yard, his morning mile-high glass of grapefruit juice in hand. "I'm even less up to it than before, unfortunately."
The rest of us were preparing for a day away at the park areas in the middle of the city—"the Villages" was the common label this group used for it—and Danek was apparently the only one who occasionally neglected to join in on these trips they all made once or twice a month. He had complained about his work load the night before, but I could tell now that he simply looked exhausted. "Oh. Are you feeling alright?"
Toni came in, immediately asking me, "Did you convince him?" I ruefully shook my head.
"Let him stay," Gaila said playfully from the next room. "We don't need his backseat driving."
Danek protested that, frowning. "I can restrain myself. Except for when Ken is the one driving."
"I'm a good driver, you ass!" came Ken from the living room.
"You may be an exemplary one, my friend, but it would be at driving something other than a car—"
Laughing, Toni solidly interrupted, "So, Danek's not going. Surprise, surprise. I want to be ready in five minutes, everyone."
"Yeah, right," Ken grumbled. "Gaila couldn't be ready to go anywhere in under twenty minutes to save her—"
"You know what, sir," Gaila cut in with a wrestling squeeze at Ken's ticklish point.
We were finally in the car something like twenty-five minutes later. Gaila drove during the ride over; it was me in the passenger seat and Toni and Ken being the most talkative in the back, while Gaila or me occasionally turned down the volume of the music to get a couple words into the livelier parts of their conversation.
The drive to the center was forty or fifty minutes. I'd made the trip plenty of times, sometimes even for leisure, but in recent months I'd avoided the whole location. There was nothing I could do about the ugly reminders the areas might bring up for me now, but as the interstates narrowed to bumpier roads with greener backgrounds, it was easier than I'd expected to adopt the mood of the others.
At the entrance to one of the huge forest parks, we had to stop into one of the strip mall structures to buy day passes. The park was usually visited by people intending to camp there for the night, but as far as I could tell the group usually just partied late into the evening and then went home once they were sobered up.
Gaila complained that she'd forgotten to bring a good sweater, so we swung by one of the rustic little shops so that she could look for one. A couple minutes before we'd arrived there I'd gotten a message. It was when we split up for a few minutes at the stores that I got the chance to look at it.
Mic malfunc. Re: Pike ASAP.
I grumbled a low disbelieving curse, then backed around the building quite a bit so that I could be sure they wouldn't hear me on the comm from anywhere close to the car.
As soon as I heard Chris answer I said, "You gotta be fucking kidding me."
He sounded just as agitated as I did. "If I had anybody to replace the guy with, I would've fired my surveillance rookie, but there's shit-all for it right now."
"It's his fault?"
"Long story, but, I called up Scott and the way he explained the reason for the malfunction, it has something to do with the voice monitoring settings. You're supposed to write down this one frequency...fuckery-fuck thing when you first hook it up, and he didn't do it, and we're basically getting this jumbled distorted bullshit that's impossible to understand. You need to get your extra, but I know you can't do that until later."
"I most definitely cannot," I confirmed tersely. "I'll take care of it as soon as I can...Thankfully, I kinda doubt the conversation was going to get that heavy today anyway."
"Yeah." He sighed. "I know it's kind of the opposite of what you're used to doing, but try to keep it that way. You need to actually skirt around the heart-to-hearts."
"I think I can manage it."
"Okay. Uh, we should pick up the signal as soon as you activate the other mic, but shoot me a message when you've got it hooked up just in case?"
"Right. Look, I doubt I'll get that hung up, but don't worry if it's not until the wee hours? It's possible we won't head straight back to the house even when we're done with the trip."
"Alright."
"Oh, and Chris? Go easy on your guy. You can be a scary bastard sometimes."
I heard a laugh before Chris ended the call.
A few minutes later I was in the bathroom of the little sandwich shop across the street. I stretched down the collar of my t-shirt, reached in and ripped off the mic and then crammed it into an inner pocket of my bag.
Gaila was cocking an eyebrow at something on a poster and lazily tucking her ID into the breast pocket of the button-up plaid shirt she had on. She looked over with a distracted grin when I nudged her to get going with a little kick at her toes.
"Mr. William," she said with a silly wistfulness. I smiled and let her put her arm through mine as we walked off to the car. Immediately I noticed the lightness, that my instinct to worry about her brushing up and noticing the tape at the slightest hint of contact was an unneeded one.
We stopped the car later at a place that rented out quad bikes, going through some amusingly complicated stealth to avoid the owner suspecting we were planning on doubling up on the vehicles. This involved me and Gaila whistling our way well into the beginnings of the fat hiking path until the sound of engines growled up and Ken and Toni were cranking to a stop just behind us. Gaila hopped up behind Toni and I made some joke about Danek's confidence in Ken's driving as I edged onto the back of his seat. We were off.
I think it's impossible to explain that whole day. I've never known anyone who wore the wind like these people did, their occasional giddy yells streaking colors through the breeze, the air swirling up into black and red and brown hair like the billowing motion of something underwater. Toni had a flask tucked in her belt that she took out and passed around whenever we stopped for a break. The booze hit thickly and time got diluted. Dusk had seemed to suddenly swipe its way in when we stopped at a slight clearing, setting up a blanket and huddling in a circle over the snickerdoodles somebody had brought.
Toni was decidedly the most drunk, or at least the most enthusiastically so. She and Gaila were recounting some story I was pretty sure no one needed to be told for the first time, and she had a kind of beautifully ugly laugh that wouldn't quit, husky but contagious. Next to her Gaila was the most affected by it, her forehead bouncing against Toni's shoulder. It felt like it had been a lifetime since I'd been around this kind of mirth, the way people will just be laughing at laughing after a certain point; when I actually considered it for a second, I had a brief flashback to one of the Murder squad's bar meets that had ended disastrously, or fantastically, depending on who you ask. During my first few months on the unit I could have easily gotten in trouble if it had gotten around that I once got carried away to the point of slamming my beer down and yelling, "We are the police!" when a bartender threatened to comm the law just because we got a bit loud.
"It's nice that they don't let more than a few people come out here," I commented when we'd quieted down a bit. "We passed that one group all day and that was it."
"I don't know that it's because of how many they let in," Ken said. "Business at the center isn't doing well lately, especially in this park. At least it's not a good place to do family stuff, cause kids get really creeped out."
"Creeped out, why?" Toni asked. "Because of that couple who got murdered?"
"Well, that doesn't help, considering that it was in the same vicinity, but there have been horror stories about these woods for years and years, cause of that lady who disappeared." Gaila and Toni were giving Ken curious looks. He abruptly set his drink down to his knee. "Wait. Don't tell me you don't know about that? That's like...local history 101, doesn't everybody know about it?"
Ken looked to me for some validation; I shrugged. "Sure, I've heard some stuff about that. It happened quite a while ago, right?"
Toni pouted thoughtfully. "I would be more worried about recent murders than an old story about a disappearance." She shrugged, but there was a challenge in it; she wanted the story to be good.
With a mildly protesting shake of his head, Ken said, "Murders are everywhere here though and the thing is, it was just a really really weird case. It also happened back when stuff like that wasn't nearly as common in ND...See, the totally freaky part is that whatever happened to her, her kid was with her."
Toni leaned forward a bit, confused, and Ken almost acted like he was telling a horror story now, getting a little giddy.
"So, she and her son are staying at some fancy resort, obviously one of the ones that's been taken down by now. Late in the afternoon there's nothing funny, they have dinner and she chats with somebody else in the hotel, yadda yadda, and she takes her son out for a stroll. Later on it's way after dark and somebody comms the cops because they've found this kid just standing in the middle of the woods, practically catatonic, and apparently unable to remember anything that had happened after they left the hotel. He never remembered anything."
Gaila quietly said, "Holy crap."
"And it was before New Dublin had a good amount of technology so there was only so much they could do, but they combed the area. It was hike-only, nobody should have been able to get in there with an actual vehicle...They sent out these search dogs, but the dogs went running until they got to the place where the kid had been found, and then just kind of lost the trail. And this poor kid, it's so screwed up..."
Ken got Gaila's shoulders, both of them grinning devilishly as he twisted her around at the torso. He motioned long cuts very slowly along her back at odd angles.
"He had these long scrapes that had ripped right through his clothes, just like four of five of them."
"Nuh-uh." Gaila slapped him off. "You are so full of it."
"I am not making this up—Other than that, he was untouched, he was completely fine. They didn't find blood or remains or anything for the mother anywhere. It's this totally bizarre unexplainable thing, and they never figured out what could have happened to her. It's like...a fairy story. Like something gobbled her up."
There was a stunned little pause. Slowly, Gaila was creeping an arm up around Toni, and then startled her into a tiny shriek by pinching her hard in the ribs. "Ohmygod, I hate you," Toni protested, catching her breath while Gaila laughed.
"The rips in the clothes, though? Really?" I cynically asked. (I had held the case file in my hands. I knew.) "That sounds like something teenagers would make up."
"Yes," Ken insisted, emphatic. "If you look up the old articles on it, that's what it says."
"So the kid can't remember anything?" Gaila said.
I was the one who said, "Keep in mind this happened, I'm not sure, over twenty years ago? If he was going to remember anything useful it would have happened by now."
Ken added, "Yeah, it's kind of weird to think that 'kid' is well into adulthood now. Wherever he is."
"Shit." Toni let out a long breath. She seemed to have forgotten all about her cigarette in her hand. "I just can't imagine what that would do to somebody, you know? And to a child, no less. It could drive you crazy wondering whether you're better off not knowing."
Ken, a little more grim now, said, "I actually thought of this whole thing when they told us Will couldn't remember what had happened."
That almost startled me; I'd been so busy playing civilian ignorance on the subject that I'd forgotten it was something Will could have held a little close to home. I worked with my slight surprise, shrugging and saying, "I wouldn't say that it's the same thing. With me the worst part's over. But God forbid, if one of you had been with me and..."
Toni, wide-eyed with the thought, shook her head.
There was a hissing swish through the trees, wind picking up with a slightly colder edge than it had half an hour before. I swallowed, doing an idle check of the time. "Should we get going?"
Soon after we were mounted up, riding the last mile back to the edge of camp. The breeze almost stung once we were moving faster, the wide path seeming more sliced into a crevice by the headlights and the thicketed background taller and more secretive in the melt of evening.
I'd been on these paths several times before that day, but it took me until I was further gone on the alcohol to even think of it, the last time I'd been out here riding between the trees like this.
It was a week before Op 86 got wrapped up. I got a comm well after dark from Spock and managed to realize from how he sounded rather than from what he was saying that he'd gone out to the crime scene for some reason and that he needed me to come get him.
He was far on the other side where the forest cropped into the highway. When I pulled up my bike there and he climbed on behind me I asked him if he wanted to go right home, and he said no. So I took us onto the old bumpy closed-off streets that the city hasn't been troubled to have reconstructed ever since the oldest resorts closed, and we rode.
I can't even say for how long, but it could have been hours. I'd taken one look at him when I'd first arrived and been worried I wouldn't really know what to do for him, and I kept driving as if I felt like I could suspend everything into some safer blacker limbo than what was waiting for us in the morning, what was waiting for him when he had to be alone with his thoughts again. It was a warm night but at some points I'd felt like he was shivering behind me, and there was the way his arms tightened gradually and firmly around my ribs, the way he set his chin on the nest of my shoulder. When I finally took us back out onto the main road, instead of asking him again if he wanted me to take him to his place, I took him to mine.
Running into a dead end on a big case is hard; the weather of that one was rough enough to make immaterial things freeze and sharpen in the air, turn gentle atmosphere into obstacles. It was dangerous stuff, but the coldest little treachery of it was that we'd never been closer than how we got during that case; up until that last week, up until that night, if somebody had told me it would be the end of us, I would have laughed and laughed.
"You falling asleep back there?" Ken asked.
"...What?" I yelled back.
I heard him laugh as he nudged into me with his back a little bit. "Nevermind."
Ken drove us home, and it was Gaila and Toni in the back seat with the windows down, still drunk and windblown. On an impulse, one of them broke out into some song and the other joined in abruptly. There was something that sounded very old about it, some bouncy showtunish melody; they both sang pretty decently but it was the unrehearsed, unharmonized quality that gave it all the charm. After a while Ken stopped cringing at the back seat and started to whistle along. I was half-worried I would be expected to join in, but they didn't last much longer without dissolving into a fit of self-conscious laughter.
"Hey, hey," Gaila said, shaking my seat a little. "Let's comm Danek."
We put my comm on the speaker setting; Danek answered promptly, but took a long time to get a word in between multiple greetings. He had apparently napped for several hours that afternoon and felt wide awake.
"Daneeek, you should seriously go get plastered in anticipation of our arrival," Toni urged. "We're not going to bed for years."
"Hell yeah," Ken said. "Please?"
Danek made a grudgingly thoughtful noise. "...I may indulge."
"Really?" Gaila put in giddily.
"I'll see what we have."
"Good man," I said with a bit of camp, and heard an affectionate scoff before he clicked off.
When we arrived back, Danek was leaning into the kitchen threshold waiting for us to come up the drive. He did look somehow more relaxed than usual. Ken came in pushing him back by the hips and yelling, "Heyo, Danny-boy!" and he didn't seem to mind all of our noise at all.
The bag I'd had all day was weighed down too obtrusively by my phaser for me to want to risk leaving it around, so the first thing I did was drop into my room while everyone else was clustering somewhere around the coffee table. I was about to think up my excuse for disappearing for the few minutes it would take to hook up the extra mic when Gaila came swinging into the bedroom, grabbing me by the arms and almost hopping up and down: "Toni says the O'Briens are gone, we're gonna go sneak into their pool!"
"Wha..." I laughed, "Now?..."
"Yeahyeahyeah, come on!"
There was no thought given to any kind of swimwear; most of them were happily possessed with the notion that this intrusion had to be done immediately before anyone changed their minds. The O'Briens lived two houses down, and we cut in through the narrow alley between the vine-veined south side of their house and our direct neighbors' tall white fence. Gaila tripped on something and thumped her elbow hard into the fence in the multi-tasking effort of unbuttoning her shirt. She and Toni sniggered at her clumsiness, Toni clutching her arm, wanting to run. They could barely wait long enough to strip down to their underwear; Toni's narrow jeans tangled on their way down and Ken had to grab her by the arm so that she wouldn't trip and she thanked him through a scoff skidding out of her.
"Are the boys too shy?" Gaila said with a sympathetic pout in Danek's direction, stripped down to her bra and underwear; then she backed up and hopped in fearlessly, coming up with a brief squeal at the cold.
Danek rose to the taunt, chewing his bottom lip and then beginning to undress. Ken and I laughed and followed suit as if it was a race. I had had to be conscious and careful with my clothes for the past weeks, always checking how low my collar was or if the fabric might get thinned by the rain, but now I was hiking up and shedding the t-shirt to be able to reveal nothing underneath, and it felt freeing, as if I was somehow less of a fraud in that moment, less for that one night.
Danek was taking the ladder down while Ken splashed right in; when I was down to my boxers I leapt after him. After enjoying that first tickling cascade of bubbles driving up my body, I surfaced and shook my hair off my face to the swarming giggles, Toni and Gaila splashing at each other.
It didn't even occur to me to wonder, as I had at first with a lot of their most likely programmed skills, how well they had ever learned to swim. It had become too easy to forget it, that they were miraculously only years old, but still that thought would appear to me now and again in more of a sentiment of their innocence than anything else.
I will always remember this one moment of a kind of underwater charades, when we all took in a deep breath and submerged all at once, looking about us in the blue-lighted join of the soundless water. We were all mostly naked except for the gauzy blacks and greys, but with each other they were all as confident and unassuming in their nakedness as gods or children, floating in this separated ease from the rest of the world. I felt like they could have breathed underwater if they wanted.
We came up with some of us coughing from laughing at something Gaila had done, which was when Danek shushed us. We heard a car pulling up.
"Shit shit shit," Toni hissed, and we were frantically splashing over to the edges and then out, rushing to get out of sight of the windows; Gaila went for our clothes, but Ken grabbed her away by the arm as Danek tried to kick them out of the illumination of the patio lights before turning to run with us, accidentally almost knocking me over and making me clutch at him to keep from tripping, me helplessly laughing as we kept speeding off around the side of the house. After only a second's blurred hesitation, we sprung up and hopped the fence.
There should have been something ridiculous about all of them as these figures cutting nakedly through the next yard to get to ours. But Danek was impressively quick and non-fussed for a man in nothing but navy boxer briefs, the girls were amused even as they shivered and clutched their arms over their breasts, and Ken was shaking the water out of his hair and laughing at himself for blundering the security code the first time when he was letting us into our back door; we entered the house whooping and laughing, running for the rooms to put anything on. I realized only after changing into my sweats that I hadn't even bothered shutting the bedroom door. Danek apparently hadn't either, and I saw in to meet his eyes just as he was zipping on a hoodie, having moved more leisurely than the rest of us but still touched with a generally flushed look.
"Now that Toni's ambitions for trespassing have been fulfilled," he said, with a look of being fully aware he was being a smartass, "one of us is naturally going to have to volunteer to go collect the clothes."
"Oh," I said, rueful but smiling. "I'll go with you?"
The rest were pretty thankful when they realized what we were doing, and Toni promised to have my favorite cocktail fixed up when we got back. "Thanks, hon," I said to her warmly as we went out through the front this time, planning to sneak in from the side again.
A couple minutes later found me and Danek leaning into the fence, hesitating to creep back onto the patio.
"The light's on in the bedroom," I observed, leaning out from where we were shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped space. "Should we make a go for it?"
"We could wait a couple minutes," Danek suggested. "See if they're about to go to sleep."
"Okay. You don't think they saw us earlier?"
"It's a conclusion I'm comfortable with," he replied, not looking up from messing with a jam in his zipper, eventually giving up on it with a grumble of "Damn."
I gave a little chuckle, bobbing my leg restlessly but reminding myself that Will didn't have much of an impatient bone in his body, from what I'd seen, and crossing my arms over my chest in a relaxed stance.
I really was, I realized, more relaxed than I'd been in an extremely long time. I'd begun to feel throughout the day like there was nothing much to be monitored about everyone else. I could have been pondering that Danek's eagerness to get his clothes back meant that that chip might be in his pocket, but it only belatedly occurred to me. I was falling into the feeling that this was my day off, and even while I was conscious of it, it was hard to straighten myself back up. I didn't even think about how loaded a question it was when I muttered, "I have to wonder if we're a little too old for things like this..."
Danek gave a sardonic motion with his head. "Students are students."
"Apparently."
A pleasant wind sighed up around us for a moment. I looked over at Danek, and he looked like he was blinking himself out of some reverie. He asked, "Did you enjoy today?"
"I'm pretty sure Toni's under the impression it's not over," I said, and his expression lightened in agreement. More quietly I then answered, "Yeah. It's the best weekend we've had in a while. Could have used more of you, though."
"You wouldn't find it so regrettable if you'd been around me and my headache all day."
"That bad? I hope it's out of your system by now...Hey," I then said, pointing up to where the window had gone dark.
I collected up my own clothes and any other garment I found strewn around; all impulse to sneak around quietly had dissolved, and we talked freely on the way back around to our house.
"Why?" I grumbled simply, when a car came by busting out music at way too high a volume for this late at night.
"I wonder why the unofficial law is that it's always that kind of music that gets played at ridiculous volumes," Danek said.
I laughed. "Of course. I would die laughing if somebody came around the neighborhood in some muscle car shaking the trees with some Beethoven or..."
With a hum of amusement he interrupted, "You would say that."
"I think Nietzsche would approve."
There was a pause when I thought I'd gotten it wrong. I still didn't get the joke after all, and it had been dangerous for me to try to reference it.
But then, he remembered. In the dark, it took me a while to realize the sound that came next was him laughing, a low and constant sniggering. He did laugh occasionally, but it was only then I ever heard it like that.
"Ah, Will...I'd almost forgotten about that." His hand was pressed at my shoulder for a second. With a brief snicker in return, I clapped my hand over his wrist with the arm that wasn't holding a bundle of clothes. With a final sigh Danek was saying, "I think you and I were the reason Professor Lloyd doesn't hold debates in any of his courses anymore..."
I laughed a little more easily as we were pushing the front screen door open. We found everyone in the kitchen and dealt out the clothes.
"Bottoms up!" Toni said; there was a drink waiting for everyone, and I initiated a wordless toast by tapping my glass against Danek's and there was the tinkling noise of others following suit.
Whatever Will's favorite was, it was strong. I've never sobered up particularly fast and this one was going to set me pretty far back, but I didn't try to make an excuse. I downed the whole thing, let Gaila slap-grab me by the shoulders into what was going to be some brilliant fun idea before the air was interrupted by the lights getting killed, provoking a unison of groans.
Danek had gone off to somewhere else in the house and was reappearing in the kitchen with a small towel just as this happened, rubbing the water from his ears and his neck. Toni and Gaila and Ken went hopping up to their room to grab a camping lamp or something; I felt too weighed down to go after and sunk my lower back against one of the countertops.
"I'm astonished we still haven't gotten that system fixed," Danek remarked, and then he was bringing the towel up to my hair and rubbing it down for me. I chuckled in surprise at the contact, not having seen that he was about to do it. He rubbed at my ears and then down to where the pressure at the nape of my neck sent the tiniest wave of warmth all over my body, then let the towel drop loose at my shoulders under his hands.
"Yeah," I muttered. "Ken keeps saying if one of us doesn't do something about it soon, he just might stoop to calling a professional. If it wasn't—"
Everything stopped, the kitchen itself gasping to a silence of nothing but the vague thuds of the three upstairs, a smallest bit of breath as faint as the noise of a wick burning.
I had been kissed like this so few times in my life, as a thing that was hardly an act of passionate urgency but one of those things people do when they think it just has to be done. It was just one bit past chaste and not an action that really needed anything in return. Danek pivoted me into his body and pressed his mouth to mine as if to tell me something rather than ask for something: a slow, warm push until he knew the message got through, and then I was still and dizzy in the darkness of the kitchen with Danek squeezing at one of my hands very briefly, and then he placed both of his on the counter on either side of me just to lean into my space without us touching again, not then, not just yet. Feeling the moment as if it didn't quite matter if I didn't have anything to do or say about this.
My mind was spinning into a whip-sudden clarity that ached through all the drunken stuff, steeling up for what this really meant, not about the operation or about Will but about me. I'd passed a touch to my hand with enough calm in my head for nothing to seem off. Everything about this hiccup could be clean, simple. Danek was not asking me to do anything; he had to be prepared for this to go nowhere, and as far as any kind of sanity is concerned of course nowhere was exactly where it had to go.
But I was being reminded, like a blow to the face, of why I left undercover in the first place. There was little doubt that I could make this alright by skimming out of it with some excuse, but there was also this crystallized undeniable possibility hanging in the air. For just that evening, the absence of the mic was making me weightless with the knowledge that I had nothing underneath but a naked body with the right scars. I wouldn't have, but this is the part I can't overlook: I wanted it. It wasn't so much that I wanted Danek, though I definitely can't say that I didn't. Much more than that, I wanted Will.
And I could have. I only needed to reach out and touch and I knew without a doubt, Danek would lead me into his room and I could cross that line into living another man's life in a way I wasn't even living my own anymore. The only thing I had to do was the wrong thing. It was too much. Too much power for me to have over someone else, even if I never would have used it.
I was swallowing, and then vaguely whispering Danek's name, when the stampede of Toni and Gaila—when had I memorized their footfalls?—preceded Toni yelling something about Ken's sudden determination to fix the back porch step.
I still couldn't read Danek through the dark and hoped he couldn't see me well enough to notice my knowing expression wasn't quite all there. "Gaila, don't take the steps two at a time when it's pitch black in here," I mildly scolded at a yell.
Still only inches from me, Danek may have been patiently chuckling. He was removing one hand from the counter to lean in on only one, still a little close at my side.
A heavier thudding as Ken came leading down the steps; I felt the briefest brush of Danek's fingers coming around mine again as if in some quick motion of assurance, and pulled my hand back, hoping it came off as a shifting movement oblivious to his.
I had leaned into the opposite threshold when Toni was hollering down about something else, when I turned and saw Danek in his inscrutable stenciled profile still standing over by the counter, looking like he was looking down at something. I gave a dramatic sigh. "I guess if we can't do anything about the light tonight, we might as well take care of that."
I couldn't tell what Danek was doing or thinking; he looked like he was somewhere else, but then he stood up straight, beginning to move from the counter.
Realizing then that we were effectively past it, I didn't know what else to do but say, low and with all the sweet easy familiarity I could muster, "Hey." Something simple and reaching because I knew that everything in this house was too close for apologies.
After a moment he just nodded and muttered, "May as well."
I don't remember if I even saw Danek for the rest of the night, which after that was heavily dissolving into the mood where everyone and everything seemed to be circling down a funnel. Toni kept pouring more drinks, and I had no excuse not to make an excuse to insist I'd had enough, but I apparently didn't care.
I knew in the back of my mind I was supposed to be doing something, but it kept getting lost, shoved aside with varying levels of grumpy deliberation. I probably had plenty of chances to run back and replace the mic kit, but I wanted to forget about it.
