A Day of Faces

Neuron

In a peculiar twist, Furey was the only one of us who understood anything of the local language. She was by no means fluent and could barely speak it but she could pick up snippets of speech and was actually pretty good at reading. Like I said: sponge. Turns out she spoke several of Locque's languages to varying degrees. She said it was for understanding leaked intel, but I wondered whether she'd always intended to find her way here, somehow, someday.

Luckily, almost everyone here was multilingual, so we'd been able to get by but had to be careful so as not to be noticed as the only westerners in town. Tonight, that was likely to change.

Furey took a drink. She seemed to like the local brew. "You sure about this?"

"Nope!"

"You should know we don't really do 'sure'," Marv said, "we tend to settle for a big, fat shrug."

"I know this is your plan," Furey continued, "but once you start this, we can't stop it. Maybe not straight away, but they'll hear about it soon enough, and then you'll be hunted again."

"That's what I'm counting on," I said, sounding more confident than I felt. "Get the idea out there and let it spread. I can't do that if I hide for the rest of my life."

"Anyway," Marv said, leaning around to where Furey was sat, "we've got you with us now, right? How wrong can it go?"

Furey nodded. "With you two, anything is possible." I wasn't sure which of us she was talking to.

Marv stood up. "One second," he said, "I'll be right back."

I watched him navigate his way through the tightly packed club, winding between tables on his way to the bar. I'd hoped that being back on Locque would make him feel better but, if anything, it had just made things worse. Being back here but stuck on the opposite side of the planet only reinforced his feeling that he'd abandoned his family. Having a pretty good idea that Cal had coerced us both into following him didn't really help much. The thing about entoma is that they can't force you to do anything against your will - they can only influence and enhance, or suppress, thoughts that were already there.

Given he was just some guy I'd met at the Black Jasmine all those months back, probably closing in on a year now, I couldn't imagine my life without him. We'd travelled across worlds together. Seen amazing and terrible things. I trusted him totally, but he was still keeping me at a distance. I couldn't figure it out. Maybe he couldn't let me in until we got back to Perlyn and found his family.

"It's not unusual to develop intimate feelings for someone if you're confined to their company for extended periods of time," Furey said quietly.

"What?"

"I see how you look at him, when he's not looking at you," she said. "But in this line of work you don't want to form too many attachments."

"Yeah, but then I might end up like you."

"Alive, you mean?"

"Debatable."

Furey laughed. It was almost impossible to insult her, because nothing could get through to her. She didn't need to have the armour-plated skin of a pangoli; it just came with her attitude. "I think I know why you don't like me," she said, "and why you reacted that way as soon as we met."

"I don't have a problem with you, Rose," I said, lying, and deliberately using her first name.

"Point is, you don't have to worry," she said. "There's no threat from me there."

"Point is," I reiterated, "can we not have this conversation?"

We sat in stony, uncomfortable silence.

I watched the singer on stage finish, bow, and replace the mic before departing. A woman jumped up, looking like apocri of some sort, and started doing a stand-up routine. Inevitably, all the other apocri in the room started hooting with laughter. Intense pheromone communication had its advantages outside of the military, apparently, although it didn't help the jokes be funny to anyone else in the room.

Marv returned with a flourish, depositing three shot glasses onto the circular table. He settled into a seat and pushed two of the glasses to each of us.

"What's this for?" I asked.

He picked up his and held it aloft. "I'm holding this glass using a hand and arm that didn't exist until a few months back," he said. "If there's a better example of what can be done if we can get our worlds to work together, I can't think of it right now."

"Someone from her world did chop it off in the first place, too," I pointed out.

Marv pointed a finger at me. "Be quiet, you." He cleared his throat. "We got into this by all kinds of messy events. But at various points we've chosen to keep going. Made active choices. And now, here we are, in a bar in Zhangao, just a thermal and a squamata and a human, about to change the world."

"Worlds," Furey corrected with a smile.

Yeah. She smiled. Non-sarcastically.

I lifted my drink. "Sounds good."

All the non-apocri were in the process of booing the comedian off the stage. I downed the shot.

"Looks like you're up," Furey said.

"Wish me luck," I said, trying to summon the courage to stand up.

"Nah," Marv said. "You got this."