Archive of Our Own

My life as a free citizen of the Federation ended where it began.

I woke up that morning the same way I'd been waking up every morning lately, to the touch of Miya's hands, Miya's lips, Miya's mind gently whispering (Nasheirta). Soulmate, in Hydran. Elsewhere in our house on Refuge, I could hear our adopted son Joby laughing and playing. I rolled over, and gazed into my beloved's eyes, as green as my own with long, slitted pupils. After a lifetime of never knowing what it felt like, I was finally where I belonged, safe and loved.

And then I woke up for real, because it was a dream, and that's all it would ever be.

Only that morning was different, because I usually didn't wake up with a weight on my chest. Or still staring into green, slit-pupiled eyes. I blinked, uncomprehending.

And then the owner of the eyes miaowed twice, made a choking sound, and threw up.

"Jeezu!" I yelled, jumping out of bed, dislodging the animal, and accidentally slamming my right hip into the bedside table. I heard footsteps coming down the hall, as I bit back a cry of pain and fumbled for a sheet, which I managed to wrap around myself, just a split second too late to avoid showing everything to the woman who had just entered the room.

"Cat, are you okay?" she asked. I turned to find myself looking into a very different set of eyes altogether. Cloud-grey, in a smiling face framed by long midnight black hair.

Jule taMing.

Fully awake now, I remembered where I was and what I was doing here. I blushed and nodded. Meanwhile the other cat in the room began to wind itself around my ankles making a strange rumbling noise. "Um, Jule..."

She laughed. "I told you, that means he likes you."

"Got a funny way of showing it," I gestured toward the hairball it had just hacked up on my bed. She just smiled and shook her head.

The feral cat and dog population of Quarro had more than tripled since I last left. For a while, owning an animal from Earth, the human homeworld, had become a fad on Ardattee, the current Hub of the Federation. People who had more money than sense had paid a lot to import genuine, unaltered traditional companion animals from humanity's pre-Federation days. Then, about as quick as it took the moneyed population of Ardattee to realize how much work the care and feeding of a growing traditional companion animal was, the fad faded, and the cats and dogs had been tossed outside, left to fend for themselves against the elements, humanity, and what was left of the local predators.

As Jule had never been the type of person who could resist helping a stray, I was willing to bet that at least half the ones in Quarro found their way into the taMing-Siebling house sooner or later.

I liked most of Jule's pets, and they seemed to tolerate me well enough. But this was the first one that had ever stalked me around the house since I arrived. Had insisted on sleeping in my bed, in fact, somehow finding its way back into my room after I had thrown it out three times and tried blocking the door with the furniture. Which was especially strange because...

As if on cue, Jule's husband, Dr. Ardan Siebling appeared in the doorway. "Damnedest thing I ever saw," said Doc, as the little grey cat continued to wind around my ankles. "That one doesn't like anybody." As if to prove his point, the little cat suddenly arched, fluffed out his fur, hissed and spit in Doc's general direction, then disappeared under the bed, snagging the sheet currently serving as my only form of clothing with his claws, and almost dragging it with him. This seemed to be the cat's standard reaction to every other form of life on the planet that wasn't Jule taMing. I looked back up at Jule and Doc. Even though I was no longer a telepath, and they were doing their very best to maintain straight faces, I could tell both were trying not to laugh.

"So," Doc said, at last. "Breakfast?"

I'd almost missed the message that had bought me back to Quarro. I'd spent the days after being kicked off Refuge ignoring the messages from Natan Isplanasky and various members of his staff urging me to reconsider his offer of a position with the FTA, ignoring the repeated messages from Kissindre Perrymeade, calling to apologize and take responsibility for a situation she'd had nothing to do with, ignoring the xenoarchaeologists who'd called from the Floating University and a lesser known institution called Oxbridge on Earth wanting to discuss my work on the alien Monument...

I wanted to talk to Miya, and if I couldn't talk to Miya, I didn't want to talk to anybody. I sure as hell didn't want life as a Fed, and considering how things last time had gone, wasn't sure about doing any more university-sponsored research ever again.

But Jiro taMing, Jule's cousin and heir-apparent to Centauri Transport, was nothing if not persistent, and after the twenty-seventh message, I finally played back one of his recordings.

"Jule's not going to say it-she's going to get mad when she finds out I said it, because she says you've been through enough right now and we should all just leave you alone-but she needs your help. So you'd better call her, because if you don't, I'll kick you right in Draco's logo. I mean...please." The other twenty-six were similar in tone and general idea.

So I'd called Jule, who I hadn't talked to in so long I'd almost forgotten what her voice sounded like. It sounded stressed, actually, along with concerned for me, and decidedly annoyed that Jiro had taken it upon himself to call when she'd specifically told him not to. The kid would be getting an earful later.

I made her tell me what was wrong anyway.

It was a psion. One of the ones who had come to Jule and Doc's place in Oldcity, zeroed and needing help. A telepath and empath with one of the strongest Gifts and most puzzling dysfunctions Doc had seen since...

Here Jule had trailed off and I was left to fill in my own name silently.

It seems Jule had made the mistake of mentioning that name as someone who might be able to help in a conversation with Jiro otherwise concerning funds for the institute. Hence, the twenty-seven messages.

Hell, it wasn't that I wouldn't be willing to help, but what did she expect me to do with another psion? My Gift was dead, had been dead ever since the three of us had faced down Rubiy, otherwise known as Quicksilver, and I'd killed him in self-defense.

Sure, I still got the odd flash from time to time, but without drugs or some uniquely Hydran forms of intervention, I was effectively just another deadhead.

I explained all this to Jule as if it was something she didn't already know.

"Actually," she said after a long pause, "That was why I thought you might be a good choice."

The first time I met Treia, Jule and Doc's new problem psion, I got why.

I met her in her rooms at the Oldcity clinic. She was seated one end of a table, staring straight ahead at a pack of camphs she was spinning in the air using telekinesis. She looked to be about sixteen or seventeen. At the other end of the table, a man who looked to be about my age, was tilted back in his chair so far that I wondered if it was psi keeping him from falling over. Their cinnamon-colored skin, facial structure, and, of course, slit-pupiled eyes, marked them both as half-Hydran. The similarity of their features would have told me, even if I hadn't already been briefed, that they were siblings.

When the girl saw me, she stopped what she was doing, and let the pack fall to the table. The man crossed his arms over his chest and glared.

Someone in the room was screaming.

Not out loud. I felt the *painragefearpain* of an unguarded, strong projective empath pounding at the closed doors of my mind. I winced, and caught the tech who had let me into the room rubbing his temples in before making a hasty retreat.

If I could feel this much, I knew why Jule or Doc or anybody with a fully functioning empathic or telepathic gift couldn't help her. The pain of simple proximity would have been too much to bear. Hell, even deadheads could pick up on it. They wouldn't know what was going on, but they'd find themselves suddenly feeling angry or anxious without being able to say exactly why. It had made for some bad encounters with the Corpses before Treia and her brother finally came to the institute for help.

The fact that her brother Jacen possessed neither of his sister's malfunctioning Gifts explained why he was still here. A minor precog and a teleport, according to Doc's files. Not a lot in terms of psionic ability for someone with enough Hydran heritage he was clearly marked as a freak, but at least he was in control of what he had.

In all his work with psions in Oldcity, Doc had only ever met two that were messed up beyond his ability to help. I was the first. Early trauma had turned my Gift back on itself such that it had completely shut down for pretty much the first seventeen years of my life. It finally took the direct intervention of an entire community of Hydrans on a world called Cinder to get me to work again.

A later trauma, which she still couldn't or wouldn't explain, had blown Treia's until-then minor Gifts wide open. Now she couldn't stop picking up the thoughts and feelings of everyone around her. Ever. And she couldn't stop broadcasting her own.

"Can I have one?" I asked, gesturing to the pack of camphs as I crossed the room and took the third chair. The girl shrugged. I took one, put it in my mouth, and bit down.

Neither sibling would look directly at me. I took a moment to study Treia's face. Dead, empty eyes. She reminded me of Jule, back when I'd first met her.

"I'm Cat," I said at last. "I've come to..."

Suddenly, her face lit up. "You're Cat?" she said. "The Cat?"

"Jeezu," muttered Jacen from the other end of the table.

The Cat? I wondered silently.

"Jule thinks about you," she said.

I felt my face turning red.

"You're...quiet," she continued, and I knew she wasn't talking about my lack of conversational skills.

"It's a long story," I said.

"I know," she replied. "Jule told me some. She thinks you can help me." A pause. "Do you think you can help me."

I decided to go for honesty. "I don't know," I said. "I'd like to try."

"Why?" said Jacen.

I shrugged. "Because these people helped me once."

I couldn't tell if she was buying it. He wasn't.

I tried again. "And because...let's just say I'm trying to avoid the Feds right now, and don't have a better place to hide." It was a truth of a kind. One that seemed to go over a little bit better. I decided to try something I didn't know would work. (Can you tell me about yourself?) I sent, repeating it out loud a few seconds later.

I actually got some of what she tried to tell me mind-to-mind then. Flashes, mostly. Hunger, cold, fear, loss. Both parents were gone, I understood. A healthy fear of the Corpses, the mixture of shame and pride at doing whatever it took to survive another day in Oldcity. And then...the garbled image in my mind went black, as the table suddenly shot up about a foot in the air and slammed back down. *painfearragepainfear* pounded at my mind. I suddenly understood we'd gotten at whatever had broken her Gift. Considering the experiences these kids must have in the course of an ordinary day, if it was bad enough to register at this level, it must have been something very bad indeed.

Jacen jumped up, ready to lunge at me, but Treia shook her head and waved him off with a trembling hand. I tried to open my mind to her, to send something letting her know I understood. I don't know how much if anything got through, but eventually she stopped shaking, looked at me, and spoke.

"Who's Miya?" she asked.

And so it began.

Talking about psionics, to twist a phrase from old Earth I'd picked up at the Floating University, is a lot like tap dancing about architecture. Still, I tried. I hoped that if I could explain enough of the basics to Treia in words, she could get it enough under control to be with somebody who could show her what she needed to know.

What was even harder was letting her explore my mind as much as she was able to without hurting me. She wanted to learn from my mental blocks, explore them until she'd figured out a way to reverse-engineer a type of shield around her own thoughts that was at least strong enough to let Doc and members of his team near.

To my surprise, it actually seemed to be working.

I even managed to strike up a conversation with her brother Jacen after a few days, which turned out to be the first of many when we realized how much we recognized each other's stories. Their parents had died when they were young, and only Jacen was old enough to have memories of a human mother and a Hydran father. They'd been in Oldcity as long as they could remember, and certainly long enough to develop specialties in the kind of petty crime everyone here engaged in for a living. Treia had been an accomplished thief, something that her telekinesis, the only gift she'd always been able to control, had definitely helped with. Jacen sold drugs, himself, whatever it took for enough credits to survive another day. He told fortunes from time to time, which were sometimes aided by his actual precog, but mostly involved taking people's money to tell them what they wanted to hear.

They'd never run with the same people I had when I was his sister's age, but like I said, it was a familiar enough story.

After several days, Treia finally learned to shield. It wasn't a perfect solution. It meant that she either shut herself off completely from everybody or shouted her pain at them, which wouldn't help her communicate with other psions, but it would allow her to resume what passed for her normal life if that's what she wanted.

Jule was less than enthused with this particular idea, but Jacen wanted to celebrate. He and Treia decided to go out on the town in Oldcity and took me with them. Mostly, I figured, because I had the credits to pay for all of us to have a good time and a meal. It was an odd experience. Oldcity was and it wasn't the place I remembered. Slang and hairstyles were different, structures such as they were, had gone up and come down. I didn't even recognize half the storefronts on the Street of Dreams. I wasn't quite so clueless that I'd be completely lost if I'd gone wandering around on my own, but I realized I no longer even knew whose territory ended at which boundary, or what the current alliances were. I'd spent most of my life learning to survive in this place, and in a few short years, it had become as foreign to me as the Deep End of N'Yuk.

Jacen confirmed it when I brought it up. "Your accent's funny, for one thing. You almost sound like you're from around here, but you ain't. Mostly it's 'cause you sound...educated." He managed to say that like it was a dirty word.

"Well, I have been..." I began.

"I know, you can't help it," he said. "And then there's that." He was indicating my databand, the thing that proved, as far as the Federation was concerned, that I was a full-fledged citizen and member of the human race. I'd taken it off willingly only once, and wasn't about to do it again, not even in to fit in back in the old hometown.

"Face it, you're an outsider now," said Jacen. Figures, I thought. The Hydrans on Refuge had named me Bian, which translated into the same thing. "But if you ever get tired of the Lady and the Doc for a night," he continued, "And if you ever find yourself missing the old feeder tank, you can always crash with us..."

There was assumption and innuendo in the way he'd said that sentence. "Wait," I said, "You think Jule and Doc and I are...?"

"You mean you're not?" he said.

I shook my head.

"They've never," Treia, who by this point knew more about me than I was strictly comfortable with, confirmed.

"Ever?!"

I shook my head again.

"Well, why the hell not?" he sputtered in confusion.

"It's...complicated," I said. There was a time when being intimate with Jule in that way would have been all I ever wanted. But she didn't love me the way she loved Siebling, and every time Doc looked at me, he still couldn't help seeing his son, and well, there were just some things that were never going to happen. It was, as I said, complicated. Treia just put her hand on my shoulder and sent me a though that, from what I could pick up, meant that she understood and would find some way to explain it all to her brother later.

"But," he still wasn't going to let it go. "You all did that brain thing once, right?" He was talking about the mind-to-mind joining that was almost as close as two-or three-telepaths could ever be.

"We did," I said. "But it wasn't exactly the happiest occasion, and it didn't end well."

I don't know why I did it. Maybe it was because I caught Jacen's frustration. He knew about joinings, but because of the limitations of his Gifts, they were something he was never going to experience. Maybe I caught Treia's, who wanted to experience it more than anything, but would never trust herself or her own control enough to believe that she wouldn't hurt the person she tried to share with.

Like I said, I don't know why I did it, and maybe things would have turned out differently if I hadn't, but there in Oldcity, with two near strangers who reminded me too much of me, I found myself spilling my guts about Doc and Jule, about the criminal psion Rubiy, who claimed to be like me-like us-but let the world twist him into something else. I told them what he had planned, what had happened when we faced him for the last time, and what it had cost me.

I hadn't noticed how quiet Treia was through all of that until she asked, (Would you do it again?)

(Would I do what again?) I asked.

(Stop another Quicksilver, if you had to?)

(You mean kill? I don't want to ever have to!)

*fearpainrage* at that.

(I hope there never is another Quicksilver) I said. Adding (Because gods know we have enough else to hurt us out here), mostly to myself. I focused back on Treia. (But if I had to stop one, I would try.)

(Promise?) she asked.

(Promise) I said, wondering where this was going.

"Hey, you guys are being damn quiet all of a sudden," said Jacen. It was only in that moment I realized that at least a substantial part of that conversation hadn't been out loud. I didn't kid myself that my psi was returning. It was a fluke, and they happened. Instead, I made my excuses and got ready to leave for Jule's.

"Remember! If you get bored topside, come find me!" Jacen called after.

And I did, though I hadn't intended to take him up on his offer until the argument.

It started with the little grey cat. It was still following me around like I was its long-lost best friend whenever I was at Jule and Doc's place. It was curled up on my lap purring, like it did whenever I sat down for more than a second, when Jule remarked on how confusing it was to keep calling us both "Cat" when we were both in the room, which was always.

"Why haven't you given him a name yet?" asked Doc. Most of Jule's pets had names, right down to the litter of pit dog puppies she had rescued just this week from a breeder who would have trained them to fight. Teleportation as a skill for petty theft didn't just come in handy in Oldcity.

"He hasn't told me his name yet," said Jule. "Maybe he's waiting for you to name him, Cat."

Me? I had never named anything before. I stared into the cat's green eyes, as it continued to move its claws rhythmically in and out of my pants leg. "Bian," I said. My name on Refuge. I wasn't going to need it again for as long as the Net remembered me, and I figured since I was taking his name, he might as well have the one I wasn't using.

"Bian, huh?" said Siebling. "Well, welcome to the family, Bian." He reached down to scratch Bian between the ears absentmindedly, like he did with every other cat Jule dragged home.

Only this was the most temperamental cat in all of Quarro, and he hadn't gotten around to trusting Doc yet. He fuzzed up, clawing the shit out my legs in the process, growled, and leapt towards Doc.

The sight of a very small kitten chasing a fully-grown man out of his own living room remains one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

Doc barricaded himself behind the door of the downstairs bathroom. (Jule!) he yelled. (Do something!)

Jule was laughing so hard tears were running down her cheeks.

I scooped up the still-growling Bian, deposited him in my own room, and shut the door. Not owning much meant I didn't have a lot of stuff he could tear up before he calmed down.

(Jule!) called Siebling again.

"I've got him Doc, you can stop yelling," I called.

Siebling opened the door and stepped out of the bathroom, his eyes wide with surprise. "I wasn't yelling."

Shit.

"You heard me?" He was trying to send something else now, I could tell, but my Gift had gone dead again. It sounded like someone trying to shout from a distance, and then, nothing at all.

"Sorry Doc," I said. "I've told you before, it comes and goes."

But this was the first time Siebling had ever witnessed one of my flashes since Cinder, and it seemed to give him a new sense of urgency. "Come on, Cat. Just try, okay?" he said. He was probably trying to send something again.

"I'm sorry," I repeated. "I can't."

"Just try," he insisted again.

"I am trying! I've been trying for years, dammit!"

"You've told me yourself the Hydrans said it isn't that you can't use your Gift, it's that you won't..." he began.

"Ardan," Jule said softly.

But he wasn't listening. "You were one of the most powerful telepaths we've even seen, including most full-blooded Hydrans. I don't understand why you want to let it go to waste," he said to me.

"I don't want to let anything go waste, but I can't change what I am or what I've done!" I said. I was trying not to yell, but not succeeding particularly well.

"Cat, godsdammit...!" Siebling began.

"Ardan," Jule said again. "Cat." Jule was an empath, we were two of the people she cared about most, and we both suddenly realized the pain we were causing her with this argument.

"Jule," said Siebling, and they began conversing mind-to-mind while I fled to the sanctity of my own room. I sprawled on the bed, and a still-angry cat crawled from underneath it, and settled on my chest, paws folded under his body.

I couldn't hear them, not properly, anyway, but I couldn't block them out entirely, either. It was like hearing raised voices shouting in the distance when you were trying to sleep. I'd wanted to help Jule, not hurt her. And I realized Doc's anger came mostly out a very real desire to help me, as well as his own guilt over me losing my psi in the first place, but that didn't make it better.

I checked my messages, deleted three from Isplanasky and one from Kissindre before finally going to sleep.

The next day I announced I was spending the night in Oldcity, at the institute. Jule looked hurt and Siebling looked angry, while Treia looked thrilled, but nobody said anything but Jacen, who remarked, "Cool."

And that was why I was there when it all went down.

I should have suspected something was up when Treia made an excuse about errands to run and said she would be back later, but my mind was still on the problem with Jule and Siebling, and besides, I knew how stir-crazy she'd gotten being cooped up in here for so long. I would have thought the rooms in the institute the height of luxury when I was Treia's age, but I would have had the same reaction if I'd been forced to give up all I ever knew to live there. Did have much the same reaction, if I recalled correctly. I guess I was too busy reminiscing about the bad old days to recognize what was clearly a set up before I walked into it.

It shocked me right the hell out of my memories when Jacen kissed me.

"Sorry," he said, pulling away as I startled, but otherwise failed to respond.

"Don't be sorry," I said. "It's just..."

"You don't like men," he said.

I had to think about that one. It wasn't that I didn't like men. I'd been with men in the past, when it was a matter of mutual need or even credits. But lately...I thought over the handful of male names on the short list of people I trusted. Siebling was a father figure, Jiro was a kid, Dere Cortelyou was dead, Natan Isplanasky was the Head of Contract Labor, Wauno never asked, Mikah on N'Yuk, with whom it otherwise might have been a possibility, spent every other sentence of any given conversation reminding me I wasn't his type...

But with Jacen here and making the first the first move, I considered. "It isn't that," I said at last. "It's just..."

"Miya," he said. "You've got a soulmate." I wondered when I'd ever told him the full story about Miya, than realized that Treia probably had. I'd been emoting so loudly when I first got here that even my closed mind hadn't been able to keep that particular secret from his sister.

I nodded. "Besides, I...can't."

He gave me a look and raised an eyebrow. "You can't?"

"Not that kind of can't," I said quickly. "I'm braindead. I wouldn't be able to hear you, feel you..."

"You never did this before you discovered you were a telepath?"

"Well, yeah, but..." I couldn't explain what made it different, how it paled in comparison to making love mind-to-mind, and how even that was a poor imitation of what I'd felt when I joined with Miya.

"But it isn't enough for you, since you discovered you were special," said Jacen. I realized again that for him nothing else would ever be a possibility. No, I admitted to myself, it wasn't-could never be-everything I wanted when I was with another person, but it was what I had right now.

I kissed Jacen back.

And found, to my surprise, everything we could offer each other was enough in that place, for that night.

I don't remember when I drifted off. I only remember Jacen shaking me awake gasping "Corpses...They've got Treia..." and the noise of *fearpainrage* in my mind that let me know something had gone suddenly and horribly wrong.

I don't know if he would have gotten there in time if he'd just teleported on his own instead of pausing to take me with him. I don't know if one or both of us could have stopped her anyway.

In the end, all I had was the look of horror in Jacen's eyes when he got there and realized what his sister had done and why, and the dead look in Treia's, as she stood surround by five corpses that were once Corpses and said, "It didn't work, Cat. I can still feel everything."

"Can I take those for you, sir?" asked the steward that came with my own personal transport from Quarro to N'Yuk. I gave him the piece of luggage that wasn't spitting and growling, and held onto the one that was.

"You know, they have those back on Earth," said Ronin, the Fed who'd come to escort me back there, pointing at the bag that held what was now my cat. "And it cost a lot less to get one there, than to transport this one halfway across the galaxy then pay the fees for importing a live animal."

"Yeah, well, Isplanasky can afford it," I told him. Bian was the last thing Jule gave me, the last thing Doc had absolutely insisted I take, when I'd told them I was leaving to start my new career as a Fed.

Jacen and Treia were still at large. Jacen hadn't even hesitated before grabbing his sister and teleporting both of them away. I was still there when the Feds showed up, and spent a very uncomfortable night in custody before Jule and Siebling were able to track me down.

Even the considerable influence of Lady Jule taMing of the Centauri Transport taMings wasn't going to convince anybody that five Corporate Security agents had suddenly dropped dead of simultaneous heart attacks, but her intervention and a sudden call from the Head of Contract Labor had at least managed to convince them I wasn't at fault, and to let me go.

It wasn't that I suddenly decided to trust the FTA, but I couldn't stay here anymore. Of all the possible options, the one where I stood a chance of solving problems instead of causing them seemed the only one worth taking.

My last day of life as an ordinary free citizen of the Federation had ended today in Quarro. My new life as Cat the Fed would begin on Earth.

Siebling apologized, but couldn't resist one last meant-to-be-helpful remark on how he was sure I could use my psi again if I just kept trying. What he didn't know was that it had flashed on at least one last time. I'd heard the message Treia had sent me before she vanished with her brother.

(You promised), she'd said.

I thought about Rubiy again, and wondered how he had really started. Thought about what a life like the one in Oldcity had made of him, and what it had made of me.

(I promise), I said, even though there was no one around to hear me, even if I could make ever again myself heard.