Mew part 4
by 8-bit
* * *Dana woke late the next morning, slowly, the way one wakes on a weekend. She was in a green room with a pyramid shaped roof. A pyramid shaped roof? No, it was a tent. She was lying on a cot in a field tent with a heavy blanket over her; it was the heat from the blanket that eventually woke her all the way up.
Glass was sitting on a chair beside the bed. He was reading a magazine. Dana’s eyes focused on it.
It was pornography.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I went to high school with this girl. Check it out.” He held it up.
Dana closed her eyes and went back to sleep.
A little while later Max came to see her, and asked her what she remembered of the last day and a half. She answered honestly: not much. She remembered Redhead getting friendly in the medical bay, at which point Max corrected her:
“Am.”
“What?”
“The redhead’s name was Am.”
“Oh.” She was vaguely bothered by Max’s use of the word was, but didn’t know why.
What she did remember was only nonsensical snippets, like a vivid dream. She remembered the strange green trees and being intensely interested in the movement of the branches,
and being curled up on the mattress in the hut with the sound of purring in her ear,
and the soft skin of the girls,
and the scent of sex,
and being touched,
and the kind of pleasure that’s impossible in waking life. She didn’t share most of those things with Max, though, and Max didn’t press the issue.
Later on, after she’d gotten dressed in a new uniform, she left the tent and went to the base. The sign on the front gate was still there, but it had been altered. Where before it had said
NO MEN BEYOND THIS POINT
it now said
NO MEN BEYOND THIS POINT (or Dana)
“That’s real cute,” she shouted over the fence. She went back to the tent. A card table was set up in the middle and Glass was sitting at it with deck of cards a bottle of rye whiskey in front of him. Both of their personal effects were piled in a corner.
“Poker?” he said.
Dana grunted and sat. The tracking anklet that had been on her leg since she woke up was heavy and annoying. She scratched at it.
“Don’t worry, they’re making me wear one too,” he said. He put one big boot on the table and rolled up his pant leg to show her. “They’re worried we’re going to go starry-eyed and wander off someplace. But hey, alcohol!”
Dana said nothing. She didn’t feel like talking. She had the feeling, like in the moments after being woken from a particularly good dream, of having lost something and wanting to go back to it.
They played cards, regular old five card stud. She began to notice, whenever she reached for a card, that Glass was stealing glances at her in a way that he probably thought was covert. Finally she put her cards down and said:
“What?”
“Nothin. We’re not supposed to talk about it. Max is worried it’ll upset you.”
“That’s considerate of her.”
“You thought you were a cat. It was weird. I took pictures.” He held up his phone (which, on a planet with no cell service, was pretty much only useful as a camera).
Dana looked at it. The image on the tiny screen was of her lying on a field stretcher, wearing the same nearly nonexistent outfit that the catgirls wore.
She grabbed the bottle of rye, twisted off the cap, poured three fingers and made them disappear with a grimace.
“Well, considerate makes me nervous anyway,” she said, and reached for the phone.
Later. Still playing poker, though they’d switched to hold ‘em. The transport ship that would take them to their new assignment wouldn’t arrive for another two days.
For no good reason she could think of, the hairs on the back of Dana’s neck stood up.
The sensation of a vivid, good dream, good in a way that only a dream can be, came back, and she reached for the whiskey again. As she did a flash of motion caught her eye from the right. There was a screened window on each side of the tent, with a flap that could be rolled up or fastened down if it rained. Both were rolled up.
Outside, maybe a hundred yards away, on the edge of the hill, there was a color that did not belong in the endless green of the hills.
It was a flash of copper hair in the tall grass. Green eyes peeked at her, then ducked out of sight.
Her heart skipped a beat and sped up.
She didn’t look. Her eyes flicked to Glass, but he was still looking at his cards with the slightly dull eyes of one who was drinking too early in the day. She pointed her eyes at her own cards but watched for motion out of the corners, and saw it again.
She made herself wait to the count of twenty because she was worried her voice would sound strange if she said anything just yet.
Then, as casually as she could, she put her cards down.
“I gotta use the facilities,” she said. She stood, focusing entirely too much on sliding the chair out from underneath her in a way that would seem normal. Glass still hadn’t looked up.
“Sure,” he said. “Try not to go too far, if you can. I’ll come get you in a couple hours. Max will be coming by around dinnertime to check up.”
She froze.
There was no way he’d seen Am. He was facing the wrong way and hadn’t looked at anything but his cards, his drink, or his cigar for an hour.
Max did choose her people for a reason, though.
“Thanks,” she said.
She left the tent and walked across the field, forcing herself to walk slowly, forcing her arms to swing in a way she hoped looked normal and not like someone who was thinking about how they were walking, but when she reached the edge of the hill, where the ground dropped away towards the forest, she began to run.