Chapter Text
“They’re hiding something, Mom. You know they are!”
Katie’s frustration filled the kitchen like a living thing, snapping and snarling and clawing at Karen’s patience. She didn’t know if her daughter had deliberately chosen to have this conversation while Karen was juggling two pans and a half-cooked pot of pasta, or if it was the universe telling her to have patience.
The truth was, Karen Holt was not a patient woman. She’d had a lot of people fooled for a long time, but that was before she lost half her world. Sam had always been her voice of reason. Kind, unflappable, and perpetually optimistic, Sam Holt was all the things Karen was not. Her sharp tongue and belligerent personality had served her well in the courtroom, but she’d trained herself in a different set of verbal weapons to manage the condescending, red-tape-riddled boys’ club that was the Galaxy Garrison.
Thirteen years after bringing her daughter into the world, Karen was still learning the rules of this particular arena.
“Katie, I can’t do this with you right now.”
Katie groaned, a guttural sound that said she was gearing up for a fight. “You keep saying that, Mom. We’re running out of time!”
Karen turned down the heat on the front burners and gave Katie her full attention. “All right. You want to do this now?”
“Yes!”
“Fine. You’re not going.”
“What?” Katie threw down the folder full of paper she’d brought in to make her case. (Of course she’d brought it with her. Of course she had. Katie was as bad as any lawyer in her own way.)
Crossing her arms, Karen waited out the tempest. When Katie dropped into a chair at the kitchen table—piled high with mail and circuit boards and newspaper clippings—Karen raised an eyebrow. “May I continue?” Katie muttered something Karen chose to interpret as agreement. “Thank you, your Honor.”
Karen could have rendered bacon over the heat of Katie’s glare.
Instead, she contented herself with a small, vicious smile. “Let’s take a step back for a moment and examine your thought process here, shall we?” Karen had slipped into her lawyer voice, and from the curl of Katie’s lip, she knew it. Maybe it was unfair of Karen, but it was a reflex. Two weeks into her bereavement leave and she was already spoiling for a good debate.
Heaven help her, but Katie was just the person to give it to her.
“You don’t like the Garrison’s official story. Fair enough. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t tried to rearrange the facts into something easier to swallow.” Katie’s eyes were two hazel kerosene lamps burning into Karen’s head, so Karen turned to pace the kitchen. “But you didn’t stop there—oh no. You took a look at the available options and decided the best thing to do would be to start collecting criminal charges like baseball cards.” She counted them off on her fingers. “Three counts of trespassing. Two counts of B-and-E. A whole host of computer crimes—unlawful use, data theft, computer fraud probably.”
“I didn’t have a choice!” Katie protested. “They weren’t going to tell us anything if I didn’t, and--”
Karen held up a hand to silence the argument. She knew better than to say it out loud, but part of her agreed with her daughter’s hacking escapades. It terrified her, but if she’d had Katie’s skill with computers, she probably would have done it herself.
She couldn’t afford to encourage that kind of behavior.
“I know what you think you found,” she said, struggling to keep the lie from showing on her face. Karen knew exactly what Katie had found, and while it wasn’t proof, it painted a very clear and very damning picture. “But we have official channels for this sort of thing. You can’t just go breaking into Commander Iverson’s office whenever you feel like it.”
“I can’t now,” Katie muttered, flushing as Karen’s gaze fell on her. “Mom, you know the Garrison’s just going to block whatever legal mumbo-jumbo you toss at them.”
Karen bristled at the term mumb-jumbo, but didn’t let Katie derail the argument. “I overlooked the hacking incidents because I know what you’re going through. You think I don’t miss them? You think I wouldn’t break a few laws if it would bring them back alive?” A lump rose in Karen’s throat, and she turned back to the stove to salvage what was left of her composure.
“I know you’re just trying to help, but enrolling in the Garrison—under an assumed identity, no less!” She almost had to laugh at the audacity of it. A year ago, she might have been proud. Now she just felt the fear close tighter around her throat. “That’s no way to go about this. At best you’ll be expelled and black-listed from government positions. At worst--”
“At worst I’ll spend a couple years in juvie, Mom, I know. I don’t care.”
“You could die, Katie!”
The skillet banged against the burner as Karen slammed it down and turned back toward the kitchen table. The table still set for four even though there were only two people left to use it. (They didn’t use it. Not since Iverson showed up on their door in his dress uniform with his hat in his hands. They ate on the couch now, and let the kitchen table drown under the flotsam of their shipwrecked life.)
For once, Katie was silent, staring at her socks as Karen scrubbed her hands over her face.
“Your dad and your brother died because they worked for the Garrison. What’s your endgame, Katie? You pull off this whole—this Pidge Gunderson sham and start training? What if you don’t find the answers you want in a couple of weeks? What if there are no answers to find? Are you just going to keep up the act forever? All the simulations, all the training? Are you going to go on your own Kerberos mission and die on some other god-forsaken planet?”
“I...” Katie’s shoulders hunched forward as she pulled her knees up onto the chair. She’d grabbed last Friday’s newspaper off the table and was methodically shredding it into half-inch squares. Her hands were shaking. “I’m not going to leave you, Mom. I don’t—I just--”
Something in Karen deflated. Her anger fled her, and there was nothing to fill the space it left behind. The house was too cold, Katie was too quiet, and everything about Karen’s life was empty without the other half of her family.
She finished making dinner in silence, dished out two plates of chicken fettuccine alfredo, and led Katie to the couch in the living room. The television was on, showing some made-for-TV movie, and Karen muted it. She sat sideways on the couch, her feet stretched out toward Katie, who huddled against the other arm, pushing her pasta around her plate. Karen ate mechanically, the food turning to tasteless rubber in her mouth. There was always a moment after she sat down to eat when she remembered the last dinner they’d had before Matt and Sam left for Kerberos. How happy they all had been, the way Katie’s laughter filled the room.
Sensing the sour mood, Pluto rested his head on Karen’s knee, staring at her with his big, sad eyes until she reached out to scratch his ear. He was Matt’s dog, a graduation gift from Karen and Sam. He’d found out about Kerberos four days later and had named his new dog Pluto in celebration.
Sometimes she wondered whether Pluto understood that his owner wasn’t coming back. He must have sensed Katie and Karen’s grief these last two weeks, as he’d been less rambunctious than normal, choosing instead to hover at the edge of the room, waiting for one of them to reach their rope’s end. That was always when he approached, ready with his own brand of comfort.
With a sigh, Karen set her half-finished dinner on the coffee table and looked up at Katie. She was sullen and red-eyed, but not defeated. She’d inherited her mother’s stubbornness, after all.
“You’re going to do this no matter what, aren’t you?”
Katie looked up, a little too slow to hide her guilt. “I...”
Karen shook her head. She was going to regret this in the morning, but… I’ll lose her faster if I chase her out the door. “I still think this is a terrible idea, and we will be discussing this again if you don’t find anything within a few weeks, but.” She drew in a long breath, held it for a moment, then laughed helplessly. “I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I knew you were doing this on your own. What do you need from me?”
"Birth certificate, mostly." Katie said it like a question, probing the waters to see if Karen was going to take back her offer.
All Karen did was nod. "I'll take care of it. Anything else?"
For a long moment, Katie was perfectly still, staring at Karen with a dropped jaw and a look in her eye like she'd just witnessed a cryptid walking in off the street. In a single motion, Katie tossed her plate on the coffee table, shoved Pluto out of the way, and pounced on Karen. Her arms wrapped around Karen's waist, squeezing almost to the point of suffocation, and she buried her face in Karen’s shoulder.
“Thanks, Mom.”
One year after the Kerberos disaster, almost to the day, Karen Holt’s world fell apart for a second time.
A spokesman for the Galaxy Garrison said the accident is still under investigation. It may be several days before any details are made available to the public. What is known is that the incident took place late last night during a training exercise in the desert near the Carlsbad Caverns National Park…
Karen sat on the couch in her living room, curtains drawn, the only light the glow of the morning news. She’d been here, just like this, a year ago, watching the news coverage of the Kerberos disaster. Iverson had come and gone by then, and Pidge had retreated to their room.
This time the empty house felt ten times bigger. Iverson wouldn’t be by, because Iverson didn’t know Karen Holt had any connection to Pidge Gunderson. Pidge wasn’t upstairs, because they were…
Karen’s breath caught in her throat as new images replaced the shot of the news anchor. The photos were standard Garrison student portraits, used for student IDs and press releases. Three students—three children—dressed in standard-issue Garrison uniforms stood before drab backdrops, smiling.
We received confirmation that three seventeen-year-old students were killed in the accident. Alejandro “Lance” Mendoza, Hunakai “Hunk” Kahale, and Kyle “Pidge” Gunderson had recently completed their first year of specialized training under the Combat and Exploration Initiative. They were paired together as a three-man squad for exercises like the one that took place last night.
The words washed over Karen, scarcely more than white noise. She didn’t recognize the other two boys’ pictures, though Pidge had mentioned them often enough in their texts and infrequent phone calls. They had very few compliments to spare for their squadmates, but Karen couldn’t summon anything but sympathy and indignant rage on behalf of the two strangers. The grief hovered just out of sight, looming and ominous and abstract. It would come crashing in sooner or later, Karen knew, but denial was a powerful thing, especially with the right kind of reinforcement.
Her phone was warm in her hand, the flashing red LED pleading for a charge. Karen had only been up for a few hours, but she’d spent that time staring at the four-inch screen, watching professional and amateur footage as it cropped up on YouTube, Twitter, and local news sites.
Karen swiped the screen, ignoring the 15% battery warning as she navigated to her text messages.
She had no way to know whether Pidge’s final text had been sent before or after last night’s accident. If the news was right about the location—a debatable assumption, considering they’d blindly regurgitated Pidge’s false name and age—it wasn’t beyond the realm of reason to assume a poor signal. Pidge could have sent the text earlier, only to have it wandering the no service wasteland until their body—and with it their phone—was brought back to civilization.
She didn’t let herself hope too hard for the alternative: that Pidge had survived the supposed accident and sent the text several hours later, once they found safety.
The timing made all the difference, and no difference at all. Karen wasn’t ready to contemplate the likelihood that she’d just lost another child, so she focused on what she knew for a fact. For the second time in less than a year, the Garrison was lying about the disappearance of one of Karen Holt’s family members—and Pidge had finally found their proof.
The words stared up at her from the dark backdrop of the phone screen, dimmed by the device’s power-save mode but still painfully bright in the shadows of her living room. Karen had read them so many times by now they were practically tattooed on her eyelids, but she read it again anyway, trying to wring answers from those seven short words.
I found him, Mom. I found Matt.
Three hours later, Karen finally managed to pull herself together enough to shower, throw on a conservative dress and heels, and comb her hair. She put on makeup like camouflage, a mask calculated to hide her Valkyrie’s wrath from the snakes at the Garrison. Let them see nothing more than a mother and wife whose grief had been rekindled by a new tragedy. The lawyer was out for blood, and she didn’t want to give herself away until the right moment.
By now she was intimately acquainted with the administrative building at the Garrison. She’d been there a dozen times over the last year—claiming Sam and Matt’s personal effects, speaking with Iverson and the other higher-ups about the details of the accident that they were keeping out of their damage-control press conferences, and later coming as Karen Holt, Esq., using the threat of legal action to wring more details from the military Tin Men.
She couldn’t help but preen a little at the doomsday grimace with which Iverson greeted her.
“I see you haven’t forgotten me quite yet, Commander,” she said, taking a seat across the desk from him.
“Mrs. Holt. A pleasure, I’m sure. What brings you all the way out here?” Iverson seemed wary, yet utterly baffled by her presence. Good.
Karen had spent the morning thinking. Thinking, and writing. For the first time in a year, the kitchen table was clear of detritus—though in short order it had acquired a fresh veneer of obsession. Everything Karen had learned throwing her legal weight around, everything Pidge had gleaned from Garrison computers, every possibility and implication of the morning’s headline. It was all spread out on the kitchen table, connected with twine and Sharpie arrows and a liberal application of sticky notes. The conspiracy board was a bad habit Sam had spread to the whole family like a particularly virulent case of the flu.
It helped her think.
If there was one thing she was sure of by the end of her arts and crafts session, it was this: Whatever had happened to Pidge last night, Iverson didn’t have their body. An autopsy would have raised red flags that would have led them straight back to Karen Holt and her second child. There would have been an officer at her door before she’d had a chance to hear the news second hand. There would have been questions and threats and maybe, if she was good at lying, there would have been condolences and a boost to her pension to keep her from raising another fuss.
Smiling coolly, Karen let Iverson stew for a moment before she spoke. “I heard about the accident."
Iverson blanched, but he recovered quickly. “Ma’am, that is an internal matter, and I’m afraid I can’t divulge any details until we have completed our investigation.”
“I’m aware.” Karen schooled her features, wearing the bland smile normally reserved for opposing counsel and particularly sleezy Garrison officers who thought they could use her husband as a springboard to the top. Sam always had been too genuine to see the military politics going on around him. “I only stopped by to make sure you still had my card. I’ll be back, of course, but I thought you might spare yourself some pain and deliver your findings to me as soon as they are made available.”
“And why the hell would I want to do that?”
With a flick of her wrist, Karen produced a business card. “The family of one of your dead students contacted me this morning,” she said sweetly. “And as I’m sure you remember, I know how to get answers out of this festering pit of bureaucracy. It’s in your own best interest not to piss me off.”
With that hook set, Karen stood and turned toward the door, counting her steps. Three, four--
“Wait.”
It was nice to know she could still predict Iverson’s self-preservation instinct.
She turned, blinking. “Yes?”
“Which family?” Iverson glared at her business card like he might convince it to tuck tail and run out the door, then turned the full force of his displeasure on her. “Which family are you talking to?”
“Hmm.” Karen ran a thumb along her lower lip, giving Iverson a once-over. He looked tired and stressed. Maybe that was because of the media breathing down his neck. Maybe it was because of all the cover-up he'd had to do to prepare for the media. “Technically, this is a courtesy call, not business. I’m tempted not to tell you, just to see your face—ah, yes. That one. Thank you.” She lifted one shoulder in a shrug as Iverson’s face turned an interesting shade of red. “If you must know… Gunderson.”
Red deepened to an ugly purple, and Karen honestly though Iverson might pop an aneurysm if she taunted him any longer. “Gunderson doesn’t have relatives.”
That teased a laugh out of her, genuine if bitter. “They’re unlisted,” she said. “Incidentally, they also said they’d prefer to avoid direct contact with the bastards who killed their kid—their words, not mine—so from this point on, anything you have for the Gundersons can be delivered to my offices.”
“You—they--” Iverson faltered, positively apoplectic with rage. He still hadn’t figured out how to express himself when shouting orders wasn’t an option “I ought to have to escorted off the property,” he finally managed.
Karen smiled and slung her purse over her shoulder. “No need for that, Commander. Until next time.”
She left the office with an adrenaline-fueled spring in her step. She would have to clear her schedule at work. She couldn’t technically put in for another bereavement period, not as long as she was going to keep up this charade of working for the Gundersons. That was fine, though. Despite returning early from her last bereavement, the last year had been filled with mostly busywork. Her partner would be glad to see her sink her teeth into a case again.
He didn’t need to know how personal this case was.