Unknown - The_Growing_589064

“Please don’t leave. Not right now.”

“Look. I’ve already explained—.”

“I know, but I’m asking you to hear me out. I’m not saying that freeing those women isn’t important. It is. But you’re needed here, too.”

“Not as much as I’m needed there.”

“What about the wolf and her pup? Shannon’s a decent tech, but you saw the look in her eyes last night. She’s absolutely terrified having that little pup in her charge, let alone his mother.”

“Tacoma can handle it. Manny, as well. They know what to do.”

Kirsten sighs. “Well, would you at least consider taking some backup with you?”

“No.”

“But—.”

“No. It’s already been decided. By me.”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why? Why do you feel you have to do this alone? Why won’t you accept help? There are a couple hundred men and women there who would die for you if you asked it of them.” She winces as the words leave her mouth, having somehow stumbled on exactly the wrong thing to say. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t what I mea—.”

Koda holds up a hand. Their gazes meet again. This time, those blue eyes soften the tiniest shard. “Look. I—I need to be…alone right now, okay? This place, these people, they’re all…it’s just…too much right now. I need some time…to think.” She smiles, very slightly. “Besides, what I’m doing isn’t all that difficult. The facility is small, and there are, at most, three androids there.” The smile falls from her face. “Look. Despite what Maggie says, I’m not on a mission to end my own life. It’s just—trust me, okay? I know what I’m doing.”

A moment longer, and Kirsten nods, accepting Dakota’s words for truth. She can see it in the other woman’s eyes, in the set of her shoulders, in the clench of her jaw. “Alright,” she replies, nodding. “I’d rather you just hunkered yourself out in the woods somewhere for a couple of days, but…alright. Can you do me a favor, though?”

Koda’s walls go up. Kirsten can fairly hear the alarm bells going off in her head. She smiles to diffuse the situation. “Just wait here. I’ll be right back.”

A moment later, she returns and hands Koda a minicomp the size of a credit card. Dakota looks at her questioningly. “This morning,” Kirsten explains, “while I was running the code, I came across this slight anomaly. I traced it through to the end, and discovered a way to temporarily disable the androids’ motor functions.”

Dakota’s eyebrow raises. “Impressive. How temporary is temporary?”

“I’m…not sure. Exactly. Five, ten minutes max. Theoretically.”

“Theoretically?”

“Well, I just discovered the code this morning, and it’s not as if we have a handy supply of androids to test it out on. It works in simulation. Beyond that….” She shrugs. “I’ve put the chip with the code in that minicomp. All you have to do is activate it when you’re ready, and set it down somewhere. The transmission will go through just about anything, so you don’t’ have to be in the same room with the droids when you set it off.” She smiles a little. “Think of it as a concussion grenade on a grander scale.”

Koda nods and slips the minicomp into the breast pocket of her light jacket. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

A moment of uncomfortable silence descends between them. “Well…I’ll see you later.”

As she turns to leave, Kirsten draws her back with a touch to her arm.

“What?”

Kirsten takes in a deep breath and lets it out very slowly, gathering her thoughts. “Just…be careful, okay?”

“I will.”

“These people, Dakota,” Kirsten continues, “like it or not, they depend on you. You’re important to them.” She pauses very briefly, gathering her courage, yet unable, for all that, to meet Koda’s intent gaze. Her voice, when she finally speaks, is soft as a rose-petal. “You’re important to me.”

With an expression that is equal parts fondness and sadness, Dakota lifts a hand to tenderly cup Kirsten’s cheek. The eyes that finally meet hers are stormy with indecision and, if looks closely enough, fear as well. The fear of a child who has just spilled her deepest secret and now waits for the lash of a palm against her face. Who hurt you? she finds herself thinking even as her head lowers, drawn down by the shining, fearful countenance of the woman before her. Who made you so afraid to speak your heart?

As if in a dream, Kirsten feels the brush of Koda’s lips; soft, like the wings of a butterfly, warm as a promise kept.

Fundamental, like a piece of her soul, long knocked askew, finally coming home to rest.

It is over in an instant of an instant, but when she opens her eyes, she knows that she has been forever changed. Koda is smiling at her, a sweet, tender smile filled with so much, with…everything.

And as the other woman bids her a soft “goodbye” and turns away, she can only stand, stunned, her fingers trailing gingerly over her lips.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

“THIS IS IT. The end!”

Asi, no sign of belief in his idiot grin or tensely poised body, never takes his eyes off the birch twig in Kirsten’s raised hand. She feints as if to throw it, and his head jerks to follow the movement. His feet, though, remain firmly planted on the tarmac of the Base vet clinic’s parking lot.

“You got it? This is the last one! No more!”

Asi’s ears quiver in anticipation, tail up and alert. If he ‘gets it,’ he gives no sign.

Drawing her arm back as far as she can, Kirsten puts her back into the pitch, sending the much-chewed piece of wood unerringly onto the clinic’s doorstep. “Go!”

Asi leaps to retrieve it, covering the ten yards there and the ten yards back to her in huge, galloping bounds and coming to a skidding halt to drop the stick at her feet. He whines softly, looking up at her face, then fixes his attention once again on her throwing hand. “No, that’s it. Done for the day.” She shakes her head at his expression, which segues from anticipation to incomprehension to utter canine dejection. “And making me feel guilty won’t work, either. How’d you like to go visit the new pup? Since we’re already here?”

Asi does not respond to that, and she ruffles the fur of his neck lightly, tugging at his collar as she moves toward the entrance. “Come on, fella.”

It is purely by chance, of course, that she finds herself just outside the veterinary hospital. Wearied by endless and endlessly futile sifting of code strings for the single line of integers that will shut down the androids once and permanently, she has shut her mathematical conundrums firmly in the house behind her and fled into the open air. It is something she finds herself doing more and more often as the March light warms toward the inevitable spring and the wind softens and veers about into the south. And, purely by chance, her walk has led her here. Her only deliberate choice, she assures herself, has been been to avoid the woods, inhabited as they are by motor-mouthed raccoons and god knows what else. Banshees, maybe.

Fra ghoulies an’ ghaisties,An’ lang-leggedy beasties,An’ things that gae bump in the nicht,Guid Lord, deliver us.

The ancient rhyme says nothing about beasties with long, bushy ringed tails and black masks, but she’s sure the omission is inadvertent.

If they’d only known. . . .

A wailing from hell greets her as she pushes open the door, its chime lost in the howling that rips its way up and down the scale. Asi barks sharply, and Kirsten shushes him. The single person in the waiting room, an airman in a flight suit, leaps to his feet and unzips the side of an over-the –shoulder carrier, nervously adjusting the towel on its floor. “Sorry Ma’am. Callas doesn’t like to have her ears touched.”