THIRTY-EIGHT: Caged

Once at the Refuge she looked into each of the cages.  Pair after pair of empty eyes stared back at her.  She spotted a litter of kittens.  None of them quite matched the one in her dream.

“Can I help you?” said a boy who worked there.

“Well, I’m just looking for a cat, a kitten. But something not as small as these cuties here.”

“We’ve got plenty of them.” The young man smiled.  His jeans were torn at one knee and the logo on his T-shirt was faded and ripped a bit at one shoulder.  She began walking along the cages toward the end.  She noticed a sharp smell.

“What’s that smell?”

“Bleach?” he asked. “We use it to clean the cages.”

“It doesn’t smell clean,” she said. “It smells like it would hurt.”

“Uh.” He paused.

She spied a large kitten huddling and shaking in the corner of his cage. There was a yellow ribbon tied around the upper part of his cage door.

It was the cat from her dream. It was Octavius.

THIRTY-SEVEN: I’m coming to get you, Octavius

This time Octavius came to me. Maybe I was the one watching out for him. Maybe it’s because I don’t sleep.  Sometimes it’s easier to come to someone in the light when they are meditating than it is to navigate the maze and fog of dreams.  You can get lost in someone else’s dream and it can be frightening.

It was Nighting and I was sitting on the front porch meditating which most of the residents of the Bowl did during Nighting.  Before Edlawit came, it was always daylight.  Once Edlawit and Arous came to live with us in the Bowl, the Diofe invited the warmth of Nighting since their mortal bodies couldn’t handle constant daytime.  We called it Nighting and Lighting.  We never saw the sunrise but the Diofe allowed the moon to shine through so Arous would always be able to connect with the home planet of her mother. We are where we’ve been; he didn’t want Arous to forget her mother.

I ran into the house and through the labyrinthine halls until I came to Edlawit’s room. I walked through the door and she shot straing up.

“Miguel!” she yelled. “It’s mid-Nighting!”  She flung herself back down and jerked the covers over her head.

“I know,” I said.  “Octavius is in the light waiting for us.”

“Who’s Octavius?” she said the covers muffling her voice.

“The cat. We have to hold him in the light and we have to hope that Arous is dreaming.  Do you think you can get in?”

She had woken up from a dream that morning by the sound of a cat’s mewing.   She had been with the Diofe in the Jardin de Fluer trying to save some ducklings that were caught in the storm drain.

She went to the ID3-Wall.  She put her palm to the panel on the wall and it chirped awake.

“Abandoned cats?” she asked. “Where would I find them?”

She was sure that was what she had felt in her dreams.

The Tennant-12 stepped out from the wall.

“Good morning,” it said. “There is the Animal Protection Society, Animal Refuge, and Association for the Deterrence of Cruelty. The Animal Refuge is four blocks west of Broad Street on Anne. You were on Broad Street just two weeks ago.”

“I’m coming to get you, Octavius,” she said as she turned from the hologram.

Tennant-12 beamed.

“Allons-y.”

THIRTY-SIX: Two of four

On the way home she stopped by a café and got a vanilla steamed milk.  She thought about sending a VIH-dot to the Diofe.  She knew that taking the debdot was a wall between her and him that he couldn’t cross without her making a step toward him.

She didn’t send the dot.

She walked around the corner and under the windows of her apartment but didn’t stop. She didn’t notice the steam coming from the manhole cover as she approached it.  She didn’t see the Amalgamese man or his much younger protégé standing there talking, in the miasma.

The two could have been father and son except they looked nothing alike.  The steam hid them from Arous’ sight.

“Miguel,” said Edlawit.  “That’s Simon.”

“I know,” I said. “Who’s side is the Pawn really on?”

Ricci looked up at the windows. They were paint-stained, old, cracked, laser gun burned. Today, his daughter lived up there. He looked to the young man beside him.

“Your personal assignment:  she has what she wants. If she makes a request of the landlord make sure you know it. She can’t find out about me. Not yet. She’s your most important assignment. Do it well, do it thoroughly and we won’t call you Cadet Hodges-Baire anymore.”

“You said last week-” the cadet began.

“I know what I said last week about the Lady. Now, you will take care of my daughter,” Ricci said.

At that moment Arous walked right through their mist. She didn’t even notice.

“How does it feel to have the most beautiful assignment in the world, Simon? And you’re barely sixteen.  You’re younger cousin, Jude, could stand to learn a few lessons from you.”

The cadet was eager about a new assignment; Lady Grey scared him. At first, he couldn’t imagine any of Ricci’s features looking comely on a girl. Then he saw her: she looked like the Lady he had guarded in the HaleSpa but more mercury than platinum. As Arous passed by he got the scent of sweet warm milk and vanilla. Peace, home.

Home. He was a little boy again. He remembered seeing the blood on the floor in the kitchen. He remembered walking to his mother’s body and laying his head on her back, away from the blood up near her hair line. She had just turned off the stove that night where she had been warming milk before she sent him off to bed. He had been a good boy that day and she had added a touch of vanilla to the bedtime routine of a cup of warm milk.

Simon was barely three when his mother was murdered.  He had been raised by his single father who was known as Ambassador Hodges-Baire.  It was less than a month after that when his mother’s twin sister was also murdered.  His mother’s murder had been a needless mistake.  The wastefulness still made him angry when he thought about it but he enjoyed growing up with his cousin Jude. Simon was the sandy-haired, freckle-faced golden-faire-sunshine boy full of adventurous ideas and Jude was the dark haired, blue-eyed brooding boy always with a good story to tell.

Simon’s mother was a stay at home mom; his aunt was a biomedical activist. His aunt had gotten ostracized from the MOTA only two months before her murder and she hadn’t kept quiet.  His mother was at the wrong place at the wrong time: she was babysitting two-year-old Jude at her sister’s house when the assassins broke in.  Somewhere along the way they hadn’t gotten the memo that their real target was at a secret meeting with other biomedical activists and her twin sister was at her home babysitting.

Once he was older, Simon had vowed never to make the mistake of crossing the wrong people, the powerful people; he’d be one of the powerful people. Before he was a teenager, his father began to take him to Assembly meetings and he met all the famous MOTAS of Pantaganent Six.  He met Ricci when he was twelve and became his page. That was four years ago. Now he was a Cadet, head of his class and would love nothing more than to make Ricci proud.  He really could care less about what his father thought.

He smiled at Ricci. “Yes, sir,” he said and the two vanished into the steam. They made a quick stop at Rose’s before returning where they had ported from.

           

            “They can port!” Edlawit was shocked.

            “Oh,” I said. “Ricci is just full of surprises.”