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There was a cool breeze, doing its best to try and mingle with the salt heavy, back of the mouth, fish flavor of the air of the wharf. It was having better luck with messing up the woman’s hair.
She sat with her back to Richard, shoulders forced low and out of her ears. Trying to look controlled. Calm. The tape recorder in her purse was almost reaching the end of side A and would have to be flipped. Recorded over to erase the seagull chatter and wave static.
Her mind was buzzing. Mia had agreed to meet with him here—on her end came the agreement that she wouldn’t bring any recording devices, only pen and paper. In exchange…Well. It didn’t matter that she had brought it, but it was curious to feel her mind tiptoeing around the knowledge of it like a child scooting around a stain in the carpet that they hoped their parents wouldn’t notice.
There wasn’t much risk for her from him—still risk, still a massive amount of risk. But her caution wasn’t tempered by fear of him hurting her, only fear of missing out. Whether she knew it or not, Mia nearly held a royal flush, already holding his face card. The ten was easy enough. And the high ace emails.
The idea that he was taking a bigger risk sat bloated and ugly at the forefront of his brain. It wasn’t precisely true. They were both risking their lives and once the story was published, that risk would be just as direct and sharp for both of them.
But she’d earned a little trust, even if his brain turned in on itself hideously at the notion, paranoia creeping in through the cracks the turn had left exposed.
She hadn’t revealed his identity yet, but that was no guarantee that she wouldn’t after this meeting. Wouldn’t mark it down in a week. Find a sketch artist to do a decent rendering. The fact that whoever she might find would still fuck up his hair was less comfort than he wanted it to be, despite the snicker behind his eardrums.
Still.
The fact that she had agreeably sidelined breaking his identity did count for something. She had been willing to wait—to believe him when he told her that he was going to give her something far more. More.
Mia asked him to show up outside of his armor. Outside of the helmet. The mask. He had. There wouldn’t be a point in showing up in the armor anyway, not when she’d already seen his face and made those electron quick connections. So much of it was already bubbling away in the center of her mind, reducing down to thick congealing potency. He’d asked her for no recorders, and she hadn’t cooperated and.
If her thoughts didn’t continually creep back over to it, tongue prodding the sore tooth, she may have even been able to hide it. It would easy enough to. To.
Far too many wriggling, pale worm fingers pulled at the back of his mind, shaking the permafrost from their fingernails as they groped. He could shift what she saw without breaking a sweat. She had no protection for her mind, save for the meager shields her psyche had made for itself. Unguarded and pathetically simple to reach in and. Voices and recordings couldn’t be changed though. Not without help. But faces.
Perhaps. Faces were all so similar, anyway. Maybe if things went badly, he’d change a few features on her memory of him. But even changing his nose and adding some buck teeth wouldn’t hide much. She knew he was involved with Herald and. Ha! What her mind stubbornly referred to as ‘that jackass Charge’. Knew about Carmichael and the tapes and had brushed the dust off of old tin foil hats to find them just as shiny as ever. And she had her mentor, who still knew about. Knew too much.
Apparently, he’d been wrong about Vernon Brown having been killed. And apparently Vernon Brown hadn’t been as wrong as Richard wished he could have been. There were clusters in Mia’s mind where Brown’s information had been steadily and delicately weaved into place, the thin strands he’d been willing to divulge filling in more than a few gaps in the tapestry.
Evidence of the government of the United States planning not a full scale invasion of the FEZ, if they should refuse to come to heel, but something so much more…sinister wasn’t even the right word, although it was all Mia’s mind was settled on. Soldiers in the streets, sure. Boosted fighters to challenge whatever and whomever refused to come sit by their master’s feet.
And there would be refusals, everyone knew.
Too many shaken heads and stubborn sneers. Too many people had lived for too long becoming the ones who held the stick—it was nearly impossible to imagine any of them willingly giving up power for carrots.
And so, patiently and steadily, money had been funneled in. Military projects disguising as national security investments disguised as medical marvels. Psychics and mind control and monstrous blue grey bodies that would just keep pushing and pushing and pushing. Kidnappings. Killings. Complacency, forced complacency. Minds taken over and warped until there was no way to tell what their own thoughts were and what had been placed there. Molded. Melded.
Worse than beating them down in the streets—removing the urge to fight entirely. Why fight back, after all, if there were no enemies to fight? When there were enemies everywhere and all of them looked like allies. Who could you trust, if even your own mind was working against you? When any signs of rebellion could be bent backwards at the neck. Twisted into a noose to hang yourself with, the suicide coming as a shock to friends and family.
Heartbreaking.
All those peacock proud documents in Regina’s computer. All the correspondence with Carmichael. Horror stories printed out in black and white with tastefully designed logos and headers and spreadsheets. The dull commodities of torture and terror.
Stars and stripes and everything nice.
For now, she sat, left leg bouncing, shoulders forced into stillness, mind turning and turning and turning and waiting for the click of the recorder to hit while she still had time to change it. Tracing the threads of connection over and over again. Testing their tensile strength. Making sure they’ll hold the weight of the world. They couldn’t. But she had to hope. Richard could feel the sliver thin shard working its way deeper under her skin. Under his.
How many times now had he given in to the undertow of hope? Too many.
And now he was stalling, something not unkind in the back of his mind pointed out. Rude to make her wait much longer.
Mad Dog was coming to meet her, face to face, for an exclusive interview. Story of a lifetime. Story of the century, even. If she played it right. In exchange for her temporary silence and what anonymity she might be able to provide him, the story she’d be able to break…The hound and what name was on its collar wasn’t what the headlines would be about and they both knew it, but that didn’t mean his story wasn’t worth writing down. It just meant it wouldn’t be red letter.
That honor belonged to what followed. His story was merely the baying of the dogs before the thunder of hoofbeats.
Before the crack of hunting rifles.
“Miss Ochoa,” and to her credit, she didn’t flinch. The bouncing of the knee stopped and she rotated slightly on the bench to look up over her shoulder at him, eyes nervous but firm.
“Mister…,” trailing slightly, leaving the ending open. Richard let the opening close in over itself. Let the Mad Dog persona slide into place like a second skin. It would have been easier with the armor, but. One day he might have to actually examine that. Later. It could wait. Her mind carefully trailed down a short list of names to pick from. She had gone to headquarters? And. Ah. And no one had given out his name there. He could feel the edges of annoyance there in her skull, fringes of brittle lace, that there was loyalty there.
At least at the front desk. She didn’t know how deep into the building that loyalty went.
That loyalty that still made his fingers feel numb.
Ah, beans.
“I trust you received my emails,” steady. Far steadier than he felt. Any threats of his throat sealing up were tidily tucked away to wait their turn. The edges of her lips curled down in a light frown, but she didn’t press her chances. “The encryptions weren’t too difficult for you?”
“No. I’ve seen stronger passwords at the lockers at my gym,” quiet. A joke? Yes, making a joke. Easing the tension from her own shoulders and. Richard’s mind stuttered slightly as she scooted sideways on the bench. Making room for him to sit. Muscle memory kicked in before his brain could spiral and he felt his legs moving to deposit him beside her. Not too close. Not close enough to touch, there was a flicker of something that said touching would be too dangerous. Her eyes settled to his right arm, not fully limp today, but noticeably off. That observation was placed on a low shelf, ready to be examined at any spare moment. The question being packaged up for the right time to bring to the counter.
“The last time we met, you said you wouldn’t be able to offer me protection because you had too big of a target on your back,” straight to the point, dagger tipped ball point pen already in her hand. “Is that still the case?” pressing the tip down.
Pressing in on a bruise and. The tone of her voice snagged against. Against a. Oh?
He’d planted the seed a while ago in the forefront of her mind. Well. No. That wasn’t right. He hadn’t dug out a little space with care, shifting the soil of her mind and gingerly buried the thought there. But his voiced had gotten shaky when they’d made this deal in the first place and Mia had apparently watered it until it sprouted.
That even if the creature sitting next to her on the bench wasn’t human, there was a hue of humanity to it. A gentle brush against the web of her mind confirmed just how it had taken. Oh? Deeply. Deeper roots than he had any right for it to.
Worried for him. In a distant, impersonal way. But. Relief that he wasn’t dead was still relief, even if it was fueled mostly by professional curiosity.
“Yes and no,” feeling himself shrugging and offering a sympathetic wince when she frowned again. “There’s likely an even larger target on me now, as I’m sure you’ve pieced together,”
“You mean you weren’t subtle when you…finished speaking with the director of the programs outlined in your email,” she corrected with a slight roll of her eyes. A little flare up of sarcasm that he tried not to let tug the corners of his mouth upwards. Failed and. Ah, beans, her fingers were quick, writing down his reactions in real time.
“Obviously.”
“And you still can’t guarantee that I won’t get caught in some unfortunate crossfire?”
“No one can guarantee that, Miss Ochoa. But no, I can’t. However, I think you’d agree that the risk I’ve asked you to take,” the danger he put her in did not need to be brought up. She knew what she was getting into when she decided to start pestering supervillains. “Has been worth the payout,”
“I haven’t gotten a check yet,” she pointed out, but she was playing along, crossing her legs at the knee and settling in with her notepad, ready for the actual interview to commence. “But I won’t argue,” another pause. “No one’s tried to kill me yet,” Yet. Another fly paper sticky pause.
Longer. Digging in between the two bodies on the bench until there was a sizeable trench of silence, big enough to bury them both. Broken only by the very soft click of. She didn’t flinch, but the profanity was loud and clear in her head. As was the connection that he must have known. Must have seen her thinking about the tape recorder in her bag.
“Ready to begin?”
An edge of a glare, but it was dulled and pushed back. She could take notes fast enough in shorthand. “In your own time, Mister…Mad Dog,”
The next inhale tasted like salt. Copper. Blood at the back of his throat, just faint. Just. Barely. Bit into his own cheek while he had waited for the recorder to run out of tape. And something severe enough must have passed over his face for Mia to uncross her legs.
Just in case she needed to bolt.
Richard felt his hand coming up to rub over his face before his brain registered that it had even sent out the impulse. “No better place to start than the beginning, right?” fingers coming away from his forehead numb. Ghosts running through him and burrowing into the nooks and crannies of his spine. Leaving behind scalpel sharp icicles to slice into his spinal cord if he twisted wrong. He heard his throat click with the next swallow. Heard the tip of Mia’s pen touching paper.
“Right,” and then with a certain measure of something Richard couldn’t even begin to name, came the quiet prompt. “The documents referred to certain individuals being,”
“Decanted,” edging closer to that unwelcome precipice. Siren song on the ocean wind, urging him to jump. Again and again and again. Easier every time.
His stomach, offended at the notion of this being easy, dropped into his ankles in protest. Bile rose to counterbalance it, filling his throat and dissolving his voice until all that came out was tissue paper thin. “Regenes are decanted,” clearing out acid with the next half cough. Eyes settling down on Mia’s pen, bobbing on the page. Focus on the pen. Writing out his. His. Life. Secrets. Whatever he was going to give her.
Didn’t matter.
Wasn’t important that it hurt.
Focus. Bigger than him. “I was. In two thousand. September, I think,” this was bigger than he could ever be. Ideally, one story out of dozens, if not hundreds. If that wretched cat hadn’t killed everyone in the farm.
The pen paused. Richard did his best to ignore the way Mia’s thoughts circled that. The same. Wait, really? The same age as her then. She was even older than him, by a few months. He felt something twinging and tangling in her wires and pulled back, unwilling to see what might be scuttling along them to get a better look at that information. Turning to look back at the ocean and willing himself not to feel.
Not to.
No point in not feeling exposed. Not when he was going rib by rib and labeling them for her, for easy and convenient future dissections and breakdowns.
At least he didn’t have to go into detail about the processes. The boosting. The culling. The training. The…recycling. She had that information all neatly tucked away in a manila folder and ready for when it was time to break the story. Tucked away less neatly in the corners of her mind, as well, where her nightmares digested themselves in slim cocoons.
No, what she didn’t have was his personal experience. After all, for most of his time at the farm, he had been nothing but a serial number.
“I went through the standard training,” couldn’t look at her. Couldn’t make his eyes raise up to see what her face was doing and. There were dull minds around them. The wharf was never fully deserted, but the few human minds he could sense were few and far between. A jogger with their earphones on. A few teenage girls buying candy from the drugstore on the corner where the asphalt met the beach of the sand. “And then I was trained to be an infiltrator,” best to avoid the slang for now.
“To be a spy?” Mia clarified, although the clarification was just for the looping shorthand on her page. She knew what he meant.
“Sort of,” a thickness began to enter Richard’s throat, piling up behind his back molars. “It’s why I don’t have the blue skin, because they designed me to be able to blend in with humans,” he felt her wince before her muscles could make it and his face followed suit.
That was her choice to make. He could insist until he was red in the face that cuckoos weren’t being used to actually replace people. But if Mia wanted to frame her story as a shadow agency kidnapping your neighbors and replacing them with carbon copy drones, there wasn’t much he could do to stop her.
Not much he was willing to do, that is.
“Mostly it was for basic reconnaissance. Blending in at dull parties,” there was a lighting change in Mia’s mind that politely pointed out his height. Richard ignored it, hackles that would have raised up a year ago no longer wanting to waste their energy on how absurd certain parts of him looked. “The best missions were…Occasionally I was asked to be someone’s bodyguard,”
“Really?” eyebrows lifting sharply and it took everything in him to. To fail. He let the huff out anyway. That cherry pit bitter laugh.
“Strange to hear, I know. But apparently I scored high in protective instincts, so my handlers would single me out for those types of jobs,” and without warning, Mia’s mind shot to how the Mad Dog armor, and him inside it, had been so careful when he handled her. Had been sure to place itself between her and the police. Rumors of how he helped civilians escape crumbling buildings and falling structures and putting himself between. And damn her, she even noticed and noted down that he was blushing.
“Not as strange as you think,” the sidestep connection wasn’t fully there, but spider silk strands were beginning to flick out in its direction. The idea that he’d been a hero was closer to the center of the tangle, the jumping off point for the rest of her evidence. But it was shuffled aside. “How did you get involved with the rangers?”
It was a struggle to keep his thighs from tensing up, but he managed. Barely. “Let’s ah. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I wasn’t involved with them during those days, though, if that’s what you were thinking,” it wasn’t, but she thought it would make a decent segue.
“Alright. How did you…escape?” the word had weight to it, dragging the question ‘was it an escape? Were you let go?’ deep in the sand behind it. Richard didn’t wait for his own thoughts to make sandcastles out of it.
“It was back in two thousand seven, I think,” ignoring the scrit scrit of pen on paper and focusing back on. Back.
“You were only seven years old?” she knew he wasn’t. Hadn’t been, but. For the sake of her notes. The sake of her future readers. Better to get a quote than to have an aside explaining regene physiology.
“I had been decanted seven years prior,” easy enough to correct. Easy enough to let the space fill his lungs and let him breathe again. “Physically I was…call it eighteen? Maybe nineteen,” the obedient pen marked down the amendment. “A mission went sideways and our transport got hit by…something. I’m still not sure entirely what. But it took out the truck, nearly everyone on board,” easy to talk about, Richard’s stomach grumbled again, sending another sour peal onto the back of his tongue, threatening to fill his mouth. Easy to talk about. Don’t talk about the fear, the thick acrid thing that had filled his lungs, drowning him. Or the confusion. The throat tight knees weak blood everywhere panic that had locked him in place for far too long. Watching.
That wide eyed dreadful adrenaline that had pumped into his system. Vertigo with his feet firmly planted. The feeling of falling and seeing the ground rising up to meet the falling meat and.
“Mister…um…Dog?”
The laugh only sounded slightly unhinged. Mia still shifted slightly back. “Sorry,” a quick pass and. No, he’d kept his thoughts to himself. Hands to himself. Hand. Twisting into itself and cracking its knuckles while the other sat restfully in his lap. “It ah. It killed my handler and the other regenes who had been sent on the job. And it blew out the communications on our vehicle, so I couldn’t radio back and ask for more instructions,” another clot of acid cleared itself from his throat, burning onto his tongue. Filling his mind with the ghosts of burnt flesh—one of them had been pinned beneath the burning engine block. “Or ask for help.”
What had his name been? What had. Knuckles knocked against the salt worn wood.
Mia tilted her head slightly; the knocks were recorded by a too observant mind. Not by her pen though. “What did you do, then?”
“I ran,”