Episode 6 - Thunder Across a Blue Sky

  Chapter 55 - Unfinished Business

  The unballing of my tension as I enter my apartment almost leaves my knees weak and I have to sit on my bed for several moments as I gather my strength.

  My bed was left unmade, crumpled white sheets still half balled to one side. The closet to my left has one door hanging open, an assortment of personal and work clothing spilling onto the floor and half-hanging from the hangers. I have three pairs of shoes now, neatly lined up underneath on the floor. I pull off my cruddy boots, tossing them across the floor to roll under my office chair. My desk across from me is scattered with pencils and fountain pens, but all my paper is neatly kept in a black folio that is leaning against the wall. Above it, I’ve now covered the room with my art.

  There are several drawings of the other symbionts at Aquila. I look at them as I lift one foot up onto my knee, massaging the ball of my foot through my sock while I think. Nessa’s Felis glares at me from one drawing, perched on the edge of the kitchen island with his tail neatly curled around his feet. Blake’s Bison has her head lowered as she waits in the ground floor stables where the vehicles are all kept, huge roller doors behind her leading to the back alley behind our building and onto the main streets.

  On my desk, the drawing I still haven’t finished. A familiar Chromatopelma tucked within a tunnel of fine webbing at the base of a fern. I’ve just started coloring the teal markings and sketching in the details of her legs and body hairs.

  I’ve not had much practice drawing invertebrates. The details of their jointed limbs and hard bodies are hard to capture and even harder to get accurate from memory. The fern was my first serious attempt at drawing a plant too. They weren’t really things I was around often at Murasaki, and never the focus of the scientific drawing I did in my Dad’s lab. Aquila has a pot plant on almost every floor and corner, mostly ferns and palms that handle the mild, indoor temperatures and low lighting without issues. There is a certain executive that I think is the main reason so many of them have collected over the years.

  I stand, push my window open to let in the first fresh air in several weeks. Then i tuck my hand within my pocket and toss the stolen lighter on my desk, watching it slide and come to a stop next to my pencils. I dock my tablet on the workstation, then from a drawer withdraw a second tablet that I power on and watch anxiously as it boots. As it loads through its diagnostics, the custom program unique to my second device fires to life and begins a data download. With a sigh of relief I watch the first few messages come through and check the date times. Most recent was just yesterday - a rather spiteful message from Harris passive-aggressively complaining about his supervisor - somehow everything is still running then. My heart sinks as another guilty weight ties itself into a knot with the rest. I plug it in to charge.

  Then I grab a towel and change of clothes from the ground, and head to the shared showers at the end of the hallway. They’re almost private, there’s only two other employees on this floor. Bloody Blake gets his own bathroom.

  I’m not surprised to find Adrian alone in Control. The lights are dimmed, only one of the six syn-screens lit up with a blue wire-frame map of a building I don’t recognize.

  As I step within the room, I'm greeted by a droning hum. The sound of uncountable wings buzzing.

  Adrian sits within the center of the room, perched on his electric wheelchair. He’s a dark-skinned, emaciated older man, with a mop of messy locs on his head that appear the result of absentminded self-care compared to conscious fashion choice. Dressed only in loose track-pants, he sits shirtless and tipped backwards as if he has an slight skeletal disfigurement. He does not turn his head as I enter behind him.

  I walk around to the front of the room and study the map, my hands planted on my hips just below the hem of my cropped jacket.

  “Smash and grab?” I ask. “Where’s Rishi?”

  Adrian doesn’t respond immediately, his hazel eyes slightly glazed as if his mind is somewhere else. As I look back at him, I blink twice and suddenly his symbiont, Espah, appears in my vision - along with her massive nest growing across Adrian’s chest. The paper-hive starts on his left shoulder, the edges of the nest curling over his collarbone and the crest of his shoulder. It travels bulging outwards diagonally across the front of his torso before curling inwards again at his waist like the arch of an overweight belly. Across its surface, several dozen Vespa crawl, tending to the edges of the nest or climbing deeper inside via the tiny tunnel entrances. Several take to the air, flying to come land on my ears and shoulders. I’ve long since grown used to the feeling of their small, pointed feet touching my skin and the paper-like flutter of their wings in my ears.

  Adrian shifts slightly, then his eyes flicker as he mentally returns to the room. “Rishi? Taking care of some of his chores. We have only one active agent.” His voice is a tired drawl.

  “You wanted to see me?” I ask, leaning on a desk and unable to take my eyes off the map. It’s a professional curiosity. I’ve watched so many missions unfold from this room I can’t help but want to understand the details of the latest puzzle.

  “Get that tablet over there plugged in,” commands Adrian, gesturing to a device sitting halfway across the room. I do as told, and bend around the side of one of the syn-screens to fish a cable free. I plug it in and turn the device on as Adrian lists more instructions. “Get the security footage listed as Apex D-wing apartments. It’s dated either yesterday or the day before.”

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  I bring the footage up on a new screen - a camera recording from above a plaza I recognize from deeper in the Central Business District, with dozens of Apex employees and some visitors bustling through the square. At their feet or above heads, symbionts trot or fly, myriad colors and textures compared to the black and white Apex uniforms.

  “Let me know if anything stands out to you,” he asks, giving me a meaningful raised eyebrow. I tighten my lower lip and glance up at the screen, playing it at triple speed as I watch the crowd pass below.

  “You suspect something?”

  “Regina is meeting with Apex now to discuss the contract. We suspect Covertus.”

  “They’d be idiots to try something?” I muse curiously. “They know Apex almost owns us, that we’d get bought in the moment someone caught their scent.”

  “You’d think. Which makes whatever their target is valuable - to their client and Apex.”

  I squint as I continue to watch the footage. My eyes pass over the human faces; they aren’t why Adrian called me to look at this.

  Then, from the western edge of the plaza, a familiar symbiont enters the camera’s field of vision. The Lepus bounds gracefully beneath feet, and as I slow the footage down to real-time speed, I notice it moves with an uncanny stillness. Each leap is exaggerated, traveling through the air with a gentle, buoyant grace as if the hare isn’t quite beholden to gravity like the rest of us. From the back of its head, two branching antlers curl upwards and back over the body, each nine-pointed and almost as large as the rest of the jackalope’s body.

  Pooka’s attention narrows to mine as I feel him check in and see through my eyes.

  A sister is here?

  Have you seen her?

  Your human metal-warrens are large.

  Do you know each other?

  ‘Know’ is a slippery concept in the hollow. We are one there. But some are more powerful and restless than others, ghosts with better grasps on identity and continuity. We relive, carrying parts of ourselves each cycle, whereas others fall apart and are remade anew. There is a chance we may have met here or there, but I cannot know.

  The jackalope pauses and looks over her shoulder back at someone off-screen, then the host steps into vision as well, and I scan his facial features, comparing them to my memory of the man.

  He appears to be late thirties, a lanky, pale-skinned man with a messy shock of red hair on his head.

  “Do we still have the photos we bought back from the Bio-Vats job?” I ask.

  Adrian frowns as I confirm his suspicions. “There’s something interesting then?”

  Even at Aquila, when Adrian has an ear to every doorway and an eye on every employee, we are cautious about how we talk about secrets. Adrian holds so many, he is often hesitant to give up even information on things he knows that I know. It’s like a game or a dance, where no one talks about anything properly, but we all silently trust that we can keep up. Our alliance is both easy and strained by the weight of the unsaid and our fractured communication.

  “Yeah, there’s something interesting. We’ve confirmed he’s Covertus then?” I ask.

  “No, but it seems likely.”

  I fold my arms across my chest and watch the footage a while longer, watching the stranger and his cryptid cross the plaza together. “Did you manage to see if you could get me any of the books I asked for?” I’ve been trying to collect some of the symbiont taxonomy books I remember using in my dad’s lab in my old life. My memory is good, but I was mostly focused on drawing symbionts, not memorizing their myriad abilities and traits. Publications on cryptids are even harder to come across.

  Adrian shakes his head briskly. “Mia is doing her best, but we may have to wait for a bankruptcy auction or similar. With any luck, we can just bid on an entire library and not spend a bunch of energy tracking down individual titles.”

  I tap my fingers against my wrist. “I’d give anything to have the databases City HR sit on, especially the manifestation platform management teams. Their records might be focused on utility rather than full descriptions, but it’d be better than nothing.”

  Adrain scratches at his collarbone, digging his nails into his skin where it meets the paper-nest. “Yeah, good luck with that. You get one record when someone manifests, and that’s it. Ask too many questions, and you’ll start finding your utilities cut off and access to the platforms increasingly difficult to come by.”

  “I guess Aquila doesn’t have to worry about working with them to take kids to manifest? You’ve bought everyone you’ve ever employed.”

  Adrian smirks dryly. “Kids? You’re all kids to me. But you’re right, other than Rhett a few years back, I don’t think we’ve had to worry about it. Owen got us the connections we needed to get him on their schedule, anyway.”

  “What’s the timeline then?” I ask, nodding my head back to the screen.

  “Like I said, Regina should be back tonight with details of our contract, and we’ll put together the team based on our parameters. I’m… hesitant to send you on this one.”

  “I don’t need a break,” I reply.

  “You probably need a break,” interrupts a familiar voice, and Shion enters the control room.

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