[Fic] International Relations
Sep. 9th, 2010 01:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesadeTitle:International Relations
Fandom: Night Watch/Human Target
Characters: Tiger Cub, Guerrero
Word Count: ~28,000
Rating: PG-13
Summary: When children who have yet to make their Choice go missing up and down the West Coast of the United States, the head of the Moscow Night Watch sends Tiger Cub to help the Americans investigate. Her encounter with the assassin Guerrero seems to be a coincidence, but the deeper she goes into the investigation the fewer coincidences there seem to be.
A/N: Written for![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
scifibigbang and beta'd by the ever-tolerant kikibug13
Maggie frowned at the red ball of clay as though trying to understand why it wasn't turning into anything other than a red ball of clay. Which wasn't far from the truth, though inverted. It was a red ball of clay, she didn't understand why they thought it would turn into anything else. Things were things. They couldn't be changed or altered unless you did things to them, not stared at them.
"I don't understand..." she looked up and told the man who was staring down at her, but he didn't seem like he was going to repeat the directions. He wasn't even looking at her.
"Fine," she muttered after a second or two of waiting. "Don't help. Buttface."
She was supposed to turn it into something else. She wasn't sure how to do that.
It occurred to her that they had given her a lump of clay.
Maggie reached for the clay and started to poke at it. She wasn't much of a sculptor. She poked around with this stuff in school and when Mommy wanted some quiet time but she didn't like it much. She liked books better. But they had given her a lump of clay, not a book, so that was what she had to work with.
They wanted her to make it into, what had they told her. A leaf. She could do a leaf, a leaf was simple. Poke and prod and pinch like that, and pretty soon she had a red leaf made of clay. Now that she thought about it like that, it was a really stupid test. What was she supposed to learn from this?
"There," she walked up, took his hand, and slapped it in there. "There's your stupid leaf. Can I go now?"
The man looked down when she grabbed his hand, as though he hadn't expected her to do that. Then he looked at her as though she wasn't speaking English. Maybe he didn't speak English? He looked from the leaf to her again, then shook his head.
"What? You told me to make it into a leaf, so I made it..."
Except he was covering her hand over the leaf over his hand, now, holding her hands in his. She tried to tug herself out of his grip but it was too strong, and it was starting to scare her. His hands were warm and sweaty.
"What are you doing? You... freak. Let me go! Let me..."
He did let her go after a second or two more. His hands opened and the leaf spilled out of their hands and drifted to the floor, reddish brown and withered, as though it was fall, only it hadn't been fall when she'd last been outside. She thought. Also, when she'd put that leaf into his hand it had been clay. She was sure it had been clay. So what was going on?
She leaned over and poked it with a fingertip, hesitating in case it crumbled into pieces under her finger.
It was smooth. It was beautiful and smooth and it wasn't clay at all, it was a leaf. And when she picked it up it did crumble a bit around the edges, bits of red and brown flaking away to leave the spiderweb brown kind of veins that leaves had in the fall. It looked like it could have come from the sidewalks around her house.
Maggie looked up at the man and frowned. He hadn't changed expression at all, hadn't moved, hadn't twitched. There was nothing to explain what had happened between their hands.
And then someone else opened the door and came in. He spoke to the man who was staring back at her in a language she didn't understand, something that sounded like chewing sticky, chunky caramels. The other man said something back, which explained why he hadn't answered her. He didn't know any English. And then he left and she was with the second man in the room, who looked even less friendly than the first.
"What do you want?" she asked, taking a step back and making what her mother called the I don't wanna face.
"I want you to do that again," the man said, leaning down and placing his hands on his knees and smiling at her. She didn't trust that smile. It did nothing to his eyes at all, and her Mommy always said never to trust anyone who didn't use all their face. "On your own, this time."
Maggie sighed. "I'm going to be in this room for a very long time, aren't I?" she glared up at him. He didn't stop smiling until she looked away and went back to the leaf, which crumbled into pieces. Then, he put another ball of clay down and stepped back, folding his arms and staring at her with the sternest expression she had ever seen, bordering on a glare. "Buttface," she called him, and started poking out another leaf.
She was able to go down for lunch after that. Maybe it was a reward, or something else, or maybe they were just feeding her so she didn't get even more cranky. Mommy told her she got cranky when she didn't eat, but she was only noticing now that she was on a strict schedule, now that she couldn't go to the kitchen and make herself a sandwich anymore.
Duncan was there, though. She went and sat down next to him so they would both have someone to talk to.
"Hi, Maggie." He seemed surprised to see her there.
"Hi, Duncan. You want part of my sandwich?"
The offer was unnecessary, at least as far as hunger was concerned. Maybe he liked turkey better than peanut butter and jelly, but he shook his head as though he was afraid one of the adults around the corners of the room would come and jump on him if he took it.
"It's okay," Maggie shrugged, putting the sandwich back on her plate and starting in on her apple. "They don't mind if we trade food, they just want to make sure we all eat. They don't want to kill us."
Duncan looked around again. "If they don't want to kill us, where is everybody going?"
Maggie's head jerked up and she looked at him first, then around the room. She couldn't tell if anyone had disappeared, or if they had, maybe they just weren't in the room? Most of the people she would have expected to be there were there. They ate in shifts, it wasn't uncommon for some people to be missing from the room when she had her meals.
"What do you mean, where is everybody going?"
Duncan pulled his knees up against his chest and his feet up onto the bench and turned sideways, talking into his knees so she could barely hear him and no one could see his mouth moving. "They say that some of us have gone missing. Charlie said he hasn't seen Trevor in four days. Annika keeps crying because ..."
"Lee? Isn't he..."
The other boy shook his head, pulling his knees closer to his chest and hugging them for real this time. And Maggie sat back on the bench and blinked, and tried not to curl up or cry. If Duncan was going to cry she couldn't, could she? She had to be the brave one. She could cry on Mommy when she got back home.
After she felt like she had gotten ahold of herself she crawled off the bench and came over to Duncan's side of the table. "Did I tell you what I learned to do today?" she whispered. Partly because she thought it was supposed to be a secret, and partly because she didn't want anyone else looking over in case it didn't work. She still wasn't sure how it worked. But it had happened, so it must be possible.
Duncan looked up at her with reddened eyes and a bewildered expression. "No..." Of course she hadn't, they'd only been talking for a couple of minutes.
Maggie looked around their trays. There was a bit of her sandwich left, and most of his. There was an apple on his plate, and a banana on hers. Not much to work with, considering all she'd done before was clay and shapes and things. After another second or two to think she reached over and grabbed the banana, peeling it as quickly as she could and mashing it into a ball of ick. Banana mush squished out between her fingers.
"What are you doing?" Duncan asked, very bewildered. Maggie shook her head to quiet him and started poking the banana mush into a shape she felt pretty sure she could manage. A nut. A wingnut, her mother had called it, because it had those wings on. And then Mommy had told her it was also a word you called someone who was crazy that wasn't very nice, but that wasn't important.
She put her hands over the banana mush sculpture thing and took a breath. This was the hard part. The first time that man had done it she hadn't been sure what he was doing, hadn't even known that he was doing anything until he took his hands away. The second time she thought she heard something, like a hissing or a buzzing sound. The third time before she had fainted there was something there, something she tried to grab onto now. A feeling or an instinct or something. She tried to picture the wingnut in her head, shiny and not very heavy. And made of metal, not banana.
When she pulled her hands away and showed him, it wasn't perfect. It was bigger than she thought they were supposed to be, about the size of the ball of banana, and it had a kind of a yellow to it. Like someone had painted a wingnut with yellow nail paint. But the rest of it was right. It was metal, and it was light. And it had those little screw things, and the wings, and it was solid.
Duncan stared at it in her hand, until she took his hand and turned it over and put it in his palm. He looked at her, at the wingnut, and back at her again. "How... that isn't possible. That's not real." But he was poking it with a finger, like she had done to the leaf.
"It's not supposed to be possible, but I guess it is." Maggie shrugged. "I saw a man do it with a ball of clay and a... leaf."
Duncan's expression had gone at once horrified and eager, and he was staring behind her. She whipped around, for one split second terrified that they had been discovered by an adult. But the person behind her was an older child, a boy with an expression like thunder and beady brown eyes.
"What do you want?" she asked, less than friendly and already drawing lines in her mind.
To her surprise, the boy poked the wingnut too, then picked it up and looked at it. "You said only one man? You only one time?"
Maggie nodded. His expression cleared a bit. "My name is Ignat Piotrevich." And he stuck out his hand in a very stiff, formal, but (she thought) very earnest way. "I think, we work together?"
Ignat lived in the dormitory one over from hers, but he had already been meeting with one of the other children from his country in her dorm anyway, so it was no problem to meet after lights-out.
"Isn't it dangerous?" Duncan whispered up to her.
It probably was. She figured it was probably very dangerous, but it was either that or sit there and do nothing. Maybe talk at lunch hours, but that wouldn't give them enough time to discuss what they needed to discuss. If she even knew what that was. Which she didn't, not right now. She'd figure it out.
Ignat said he'd been working on the same kinds of lessons she had, but that there was more. And then lunch hour had ended and she hadn't gotten a chance to do much more than tell him what dormitory she was in. He told her he'd meet her there. She had her doubts.
When fingernails scraped on the side of her bunk, though, both Maggie and Duncan jumped in their beds. She clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from screeching. "Ignat!" she hissed down at him, grumpy that he'd scared her like that. His dark eyes twinkled up at her with unrepentant mischief. She resisted the urge to throw her pillow at his face.
By the time Maggie had climbed down he was already sitting by Duncan's bunk. Two people on a bunk could be seen silhouetted from the light from the door, if the guards looked in. And that was okay, she'd discovered over the past several days. Maybe because they figured it was bunkmates talking, but it was okay. Three or more people got the guards in and talking to the children, as much as they ever talked. Mostly things like, "no," and "bad," and "punishment." So Ignat, sitting on the floor, was taking great pains not to be seen as a silhouette if the door opened.
"What did you mean, you had something to show me?" Maggie leaned in close to Duncan, putting an arm around his shoulders.
Ignat opened his hand, palm up, and frowned at it. He took a breath and started to mutter something, and this time Maggie noticed the buzzing in her head almost immediately. After another second or two she didn't see anything, but he flexed his hand as though it hurt. After three or four more seconds, she saw it. Little tufts of hair growing on the back of his hand, the palm changing color and darkening and becoming maybe more coarse to the touch. She didn't dare touch him for fear she would interrupt.
His nails thickened and became longer, his fingers thickened, and then he gasped and the humming or buzzing stopped and he'd let go. She looked up at his face, and it looked like it had hurt. "Are you okay?"
He nodded. "Fine, fine. Only tired."
To her, he looked more than tired, but she didn't argue. "How did you do that?" It was important. If she could figure it out, she could do the same thing. She knew what he was doing, he was changing his shape into something else, some kind of animal. But she didn't know if he would become a very small animal, or big and strong and fierce, or what. It was hard to figure out.
"I don't understand," he shook his head. "They showed me, but..."
"What is it?"
Ignat said some words in his language, words that made Maggie impatient because she didn't understand. "It is becoming... bear. A big bear." She did understand that last part, and the way he said it. He wasn't sure how big his bear would be.
"But how did you..." she started, when the door creaked. They should, she thought, as she scrambled back up to her bunk, as Ignat scrambled underneath Duncan's bunk to hold his breath until they went away, they should oil those stupid hinges. But if they oiled them how would anyone be able to hear when they were being checked on?
Maggie held her breath and kept her head down. Buried under the pillow as though she was sleeping. Maybe they would think she was sleeping. Don't move, she couldn't move, and Duncan couldn't move, and Ignat definitely couldn't move because if anyone saw any movement they would be on them quicker than Ignat could run away. Don't move, no matter how close they get. And they got close enough that she could smell the man's breath almost, at the level of her bunk. It smelled of onions and garlic and cheese and made her eyes water. It was the stink that was making her eyes water, not anything else.
He didn't stop. He kept on going past the bunk, through all the bunks, turning his head this way and that. It seemed like it took forever. She drummed her fingers on the mattress underneath the pillow and waited for him to go, but by the time she could open her eyes again it was daytime and everyone was getting up from their bunks, slowly, and nothing had happened. She thought.
But she leaned over the edge of the bunk to see before she climbed down, and Duncan wasn't there.
She had the feeling he was taking her out because she was getting restless, and as much as she disliked being walked like someone's pet she couldn't argue. Paperwork was not her thing. City living was not her thing. And the United States certainly wasn't her thing, but she was getting used to the latter two. The first made her jitter.
He'd almost thrown her into the truck, except that he hadn't laid a hand on her. Just stared and waited with the expectation that she would do as he indicated, until she did do what he indicated.
It reminded her, when she thought of it like that, of Gesser. Not in a good way.
"What do you expect to find here?" she asked, more out of curiosity than anything else. Her mind was already half in the Gloom, looking for signs of what might have been here.
Her companion was turning over every physical thing that could be upturned. "Evidence. Sometimes people leave bread crumbs. Sometimes there are clues ..." Whatever he said after that was lost as he stuck his head in the cabinets under the kitchen. Tiger Cub shook her head in disgust and kept looking.
There were very few signs of anyone in the Gloom. Signs that a boy had lived here, yes, who was talented. Very talented, by the looks of things. But no real sign of who might have taken him, or what they might have wanted. Which meant it had either happened very fast or very subtly. She hoped for fast, because subtle might very well mean that they were all in over their heads.
And if she was in over her head, Guerrero and his friend would drown very quickly. He didn't look up as she looked over at him, still clattering around in the kitchen.
"Anything?" she called over, restless and unwilling to get too much into the Gloom with him around.
He said something, then poked his head around the corner. "You?"
Tiger Cub shook her head. "They left no traces, which means, most likely..."
"That they were better than you?"
One eyebrow arched at her, sharp and high, and she showed him some teeth. "That, or that they were very quick and didn't stay long enough to leave a trace."
That got her both eyebrows, though he didn't say anything more than "huh" before he turned back into the kitchen, far enough away that she couldn't see what he was doing.
She took a chance that since she couldn't see him he couldn't see her and started to sniff around, in a more literal sense than her human form could manage. A young boy, a family, mostly female. Several male friends who belonged to another pride, and the faint scent of strangers or new people. Men or women who hadn't been in the house long enough to leave their traces behind.
Guerrero came out into the room just as she was finishing up. She didn't acknowledge his look of curiosity. "It was quick. They didn't stay long enough to leave a scent, either." As though he should be used to animal-people by now. "Which means they were efficient, they had practice..."
"And they knew what they were doing, yeah, I got that. I didn't get anything either, but..."
His cell phone buzzed, provoking Tiger Cub's irritation but gaining her a look of apology as well, which won him at least a point or two in his favor.
"Yeah. Really? Dude, that's... Okay." She folded her arms and waited for him to put down his phone. "They're waiting for us outside."
Fandom: Night Watch/Human Target
Characters: Tiger Cub, Guerrero
Word Count: ~28,000
Rating: PG-13
Summary: When children who have yet to make their Choice go missing up and down the West Coast of the United States, the head of the Moscow Night Watch sends Tiger Cub to help the Americans investigate. Her encounter with the assassin Guerrero seems to be a coincidence, but the deeper she goes into the investigation the fewer coincidences there seem to be.
A/N: Written for
scifibigbang and beta'd by the ever-tolerant kikibug13Maggie frowned at the red ball of clay as though trying to understand why it wasn't turning into anything other than a red ball of clay. Which wasn't far from the truth, though inverted. It was a red ball of clay, she didn't understand why they thought it would turn into anything else. Things were things. They couldn't be changed or altered unless you did things to them, not stared at them.
"I don't understand..." she looked up and told the man who was staring down at her, but he didn't seem like he was going to repeat the directions. He wasn't even looking at her.
"Fine," she muttered after a second or two of waiting. "Don't help. Buttface."
She was supposed to turn it into something else. She wasn't sure how to do that.
It occurred to her that they had given her a lump of clay.
Maggie reached for the clay and started to poke at it. She wasn't much of a sculptor. She poked around with this stuff in school and when Mommy wanted some quiet time but she didn't like it much. She liked books better. But they had given her a lump of clay, not a book, so that was what she had to work with.
They wanted her to make it into, what had they told her. A leaf. She could do a leaf, a leaf was simple. Poke and prod and pinch like that, and pretty soon she had a red leaf made of clay. Now that she thought about it like that, it was a really stupid test. What was she supposed to learn from this?
"There," she walked up, took his hand, and slapped it in there. "There's your stupid leaf. Can I go now?"
The man looked down when she grabbed his hand, as though he hadn't expected her to do that. Then he looked at her as though she wasn't speaking English. Maybe he didn't speak English? He looked from the leaf to her again, then shook his head.
"What? You told me to make it into a leaf, so I made it..."
Except he was covering her hand over the leaf over his hand, now, holding her hands in his. She tried to tug herself out of his grip but it was too strong, and it was starting to scare her. His hands were warm and sweaty.
"What are you doing? You... freak. Let me go! Let me..."
He did let her go after a second or two more. His hands opened and the leaf spilled out of their hands and drifted to the floor, reddish brown and withered, as though it was fall, only it hadn't been fall when she'd last been outside. She thought. Also, when she'd put that leaf into his hand it had been clay. She was sure it had been clay. So what was going on?
She leaned over and poked it with a fingertip, hesitating in case it crumbled into pieces under her finger.
It was smooth. It was beautiful and smooth and it wasn't clay at all, it was a leaf. And when she picked it up it did crumble a bit around the edges, bits of red and brown flaking away to leave the spiderweb brown kind of veins that leaves had in the fall. It looked like it could have come from the sidewalks around her house.
Maggie looked up at the man and frowned. He hadn't changed expression at all, hadn't moved, hadn't twitched. There was nothing to explain what had happened between their hands.
And then someone else opened the door and came in. He spoke to the man who was staring back at her in a language she didn't understand, something that sounded like chewing sticky, chunky caramels. The other man said something back, which explained why he hadn't answered her. He didn't know any English. And then he left and she was with the second man in the room, who looked even less friendly than the first.
"What do you want?" she asked, taking a step back and making what her mother called the I don't wanna face.
"I want you to do that again," the man said, leaning down and placing his hands on his knees and smiling at her. She didn't trust that smile. It did nothing to his eyes at all, and her Mommy always said never to trust anyone who didn't use all their face. "On your own, this time."
Maggie sighed. "I'm going to be in this room for a very long time, aren't I?" she glared up at him. He didn't stop smiling until she looked away and went back to the leaf, which crumbled into pieces. Then, he put another ball of clay down and stepped back, folding his arms and staring at her with the sternest expression she had ever seen, bordering on a glare. "Buttface," she called him, and started poking out another leaf.
She was able to go down for lunch after that. Maybe it was a reward, or something else, or maybe they were just feeding her so she didn't get even more cranky. Mommy told her she got cranky when she didn't eat, but she was only noticing now that she was on a strict schedule, now that she couldn't go to the kitchen and make herself a sandwich anymore.
Duncan was there, though. She went and sat down next to him so they would both have someone to talk to.
"Hi, Maggie." He seemed surprised to see her there.
"Hi, Duncan. You want part of my sandwich?"
The offer was unnecessary, at least as far as hunger was concerned. Maybe he liked turkey better than peanut butter and jelly, but he shook his head as though he was afraid one of the adults around the corners of the room would come and jump on him if he took it.
"It's okay," Maggie shrugged, putting the sandwich back on her plate and starting in on her apple. "They don't mind if we trade food, they just want to make sure we all eat. They don't want to kill us."
Duncan looked around again. "If they don't want to kill us, where is everybody going?"
Maggie's head jerked up and she looked at him first, then around the room. She couldn't tell if anyone had disappeared, or if they had, maybe they just weren't in the room? Most of the people she would have expected to be there were there. They ate in shifts, it wasn't uncommon for some people to be missing from the room when she had her meals.
"What do you mean, where is everybody going?"
Duncan pulled his knees up against his chest and his feet up onto the bench and turned sideways, talking into his knees so she could barely hear him and no one could see his mouth moving. "They say that some of us have gone missing. Charlie said he hasn't seen Trevor in four days. Annika keeps crying because ..."
"Lee? Isn't he..."
The other boy shook his head, pulling his knees closer to his chest and hugging them for real this time. And Maggie sat back on the bench and blinked, and tried not to curl up or cry. If Duncan was going to cry she couldn't, could she? She had to be the brave one. She could cry on Mommy when she got back home.
After she felt like she had gotten ahold of herself she crawled off the bench and came over to Duncan's side of the table. "Did I tell you what I learned to do today?" she whispered. Partly because she thought it was supposed to be a secret, and partly because she didn't want anyone else looking over in case it didn't work. She still wasn't sure how it worked. But it had happened, so it must be possible.
Duncan looked up at her with reddened eyes and a bewildered expression. "No..." Of course she hadn't, they'd only been talking for a couple of minutes.
Maggie looked around their trays. There was a bit of her sandwich left, and most of his. There was an apple on his plate, and a banana on hers. Not much to work with, considering all she'd done before was clay and shapes and things. After another second or two to think she reached over and grabbed the banana, peeling it as quickly as she could and mashing it into a ball of ick. Banana mush squished out between her fingers.
"What are you doing?" Duncan asked, very bewildered. Maggie shook her head to quiet him and started poking the banana mush into a shape she felt pretty sure she could manage. A nut. A wingnut, her mother had called it, because it had those wings on. And then Mommy had told her it was also a word you called someone who was crazy that wasn't very nice, but that wasn't important.
She put her hands over the banana mush sculpture thing and took a breath. This was the hard part. The first time that man had done it she hadn't been sure what he was doing, hadn't even known that he was doing anything until he took his hands away. The second time she thought she heard something, like a hissing or a buzzing sound. The third time before she had fainted there was something there, something she tried to grab onto now. A feeling or an instinct or something. She tried to picture the wingnut in her head, shiny and not very heavy. And made of metal, not banana.
When she pulled her hands away and showed him, it wasn't perfect. It was bigger than she thought they were supposed to be, about the size of the ball of banana, and it had a kind of a yellow to it. Like someone had painted a wingnut with yellow nail paint. But the rest of it was right. It was metal, and it was light. And it had those little screw things, and the wings, and it was solid.
Duncan stared at it in her hand, until she took his hand and turned it over and put it in his palm. He looked at her, at the wingnut, and back at her again. "How... that isn't possible. That's not real." But he was poking it with a finger, like she had done to the leaf.
"It's not supposed to be possible, but I guess it is." Maggie shrugged. "I saw a man do it with a ball of clay and a... leaf."
Duncan's expression had gone at once horrified and eager, and he was staring behind her. She whipped around, for one split second terrified that they had been discovered by an adult. But the person behind her was an older child, a boy with an expression like thunder and beady brown eyes.
"What do you want?" she asked, less than friendly and already drawing lines in her mind.
To her surprise, the boy poked the wingnut too, then picked it up and looked at it. "You said only one man? You only one time?"
Maggie nodded. His expression cleared a bit. "My name is Ignat Piotrevich." And he stuck out his hand in a very stiff, formal, but (she thought) very earnest way. "I think, we work together?"
Ignat lived in the dormitory one over from hers, but he had already been meeting with one of the other children from his country in her dorm anyway, so it was no problem to meet after lights-out.
"Isn't it dangerous?" Duncan whispered up to her.
It probably was. She figured it was probably very dangerous, but it was either that or sit there and do nothing. Maybe talk at lunch hours, but that wouldn't give them enough time to discuss what they needed to discuss. If she even knew what that was. Which she didn't, not right now. She'd figure it out.
Ignat said he'd been working on the same kinds of lessons she had, but that there was more. And then lunch hour had ended and she hadn't gotten a chance to do much more than tell him what dormitory she was in. He told her he'd meet her there. She had her doubts.
When fingernails scraped on the side of her bunk, though, both Maggie and Duncan jumped in their beds. She clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from screeching. "Ignat!" she hissed down at him, grumpy that he'd scared her like that. His dark eyes twinkled up at her with unrepentant mischief. She resisted the urge to throw her pillow at his face.
By the time Maggie had climbed down he was already sitting by Duncan's bunk. Two people on a bunk could be seen silhouetted from the light from the door, if the guards looked in. And that was okay, she'd discovered over the past several days. Maybe because they figured it was bunkmates talking, but it was okay. Three or more people got the guards in and talking to the children, as much as they ever talked. Mostly things like, "no," and "bad," and "punishment." So Ignat, sitting on the floor, was taking great pains not to be seen as a silhouette if the door opened.
"What did you mean, you had something to show me?" Maggie leaned in close to Duncan, putting an arm around his shoulders.
Ignat opened his hand, palm up, and frowned at it. He took a breath and started to mutter something, and this time Maggie noticed the buzzing in her head almost immediately. After another second or two she didn't see anything, but he flexed his hand as though it hurt. After three or four more seconds, she saw it. Little tufts of hair growing on the back of his hand, the palm changing color and darkening and becoming maybe more coarse to the touch. She didn't dare touch him for fear she would interrupt.
His nails thickened and became longer, his fingers thickened, and then he gasped and the humming or buzzing stopped and he'd let go. She looked up at his face, and it looked like it had hurt. "Are you okay?"
He nodded. "Fine, fine. Only tired."
To her, he looked more than tired, but she didn't argue. "How did you do that?" It was important. If she could figure it out, she could do the same thing. She knew what he was doing, he was changing his shape into something else, some kind of animal. But she didn't know if he would become a very small animal, or big and strong and fierce, or what. It was hard to figure out.
"I don't understand," he shook his head. "They showed me, but..."
"What is it?"
Ignat said some words in his language, words that made Maggie impatient because she didn't understand. "It is becoming... bear. A big bear." She did understand that last part, and the way he said it. He wasn't sure how big his bear would be.
"But how did you..." she started, when the door creaked. They should, she thought, as she scrambled back up to her bunk, as Ignat scrambled underneath Duncan's bunk to hold his breath until they went away, they should oil those stupid hinges. But if they oiled them how would anyone be able to hear when they were being checked on?
Maggie held her breath and kept her head down. Buried under the pillow as though she was sleeping. Maybe they would think she was sleeping. Don't move, she couldn't move, and Duncan couldn't move, and Ignat definitely couldn't move because if anyone saw any movement they would be on them quicker than Ignat could run away. Don't move, no matter how close they get. And they got close enough that she could smell the man's breath almost, at the level of her bunk. It smelled of onions and garlic and cheese and made her eyes water. It was the stink that was making her eyes water, not anything else.
He didn't stop. He kept on going past the bunk, through all the bunks, turning his head this way and that. It seemed like it took forever. She drummed her fingers on the mattress underneath the pillow and waited for him to go, but by the time she could open her eyes again it was daytime and everyone was getting up from their bunks, slowly, and nothing had happened. She thought.
But she leaned over the edge of the bunk to see before she climbed down, and Duncan wasn't there.
She had the feeling he was taking her out because she was getting restless, and as much as she disliked being walked like someone's pet she couldn't argue. Paperwork was not her thing. City living was not her thing. And the United States certainly wasn't her thing, but she was getting used to the latter two. The first made her jitter.
He'd almost thrown her into the truck, except that he hadn't laid a hand on her. Just stared and waited with the expectation that she would do as he indicated, until she did do what he indicated.
It reminded her, when she thought of it like that, of Gesser. Not in a good way.
"What do you expect to find here?" she asked, more out of curiosity than anything else. Her mind was already half in the Gloom, looking for signs of what might have been here.
Her companion was turning over every physical thing that could be upturned. "Evidence. Sometimes people leave bread crumbs. Sometimes there are clues ..." Whatever he said after that was lost as he stuck his head in the cabinets under the kitchen. Tiger Cub shook her head in disgust and kept looking.
There were very few signs of anyone in the Gloom. Signs that a boy had lived here, yes, who was talented. Very talented, by the looks of things. But no real sign of who might have taken him, or what they might have wanted. Which meant it had either happened very fast or very subtly. She hoped for fast, because subtle might very well mean that they were all in over their heads.
And if she was in over her head, Guerrero and his friend would drown very quickly. He didn't look up as she looked over at him, still clattering around in the kitchen.
"Anything?" she called over, restless and unwilling to get too much into the Gloom with him around.
He said something, then poked his head around the corner. "You?"
Tiger Cub shook her head. "They left no traces, which means, most likely..."
"That they were better than you?"
One eyebrow arched at her, sharp and high, and she showed him some teeth. "That, or that they were very quick and didn't stay long enough to leave a trace."
That got her both eyebrows, though he didn't say anything more than "huh" before he turned back into the kitchen, far enough away that she couldn't see what he was doing.
She took a chance that since she couldn't see him he couldn't see her and started to sniff around, in a more literal sense than her human form could manage. A young boy, a family, mostly female. Several male friends who belonged to another pride, and the faint scent of strangers or new people. Men or women who hadn't been in the house long enough to leave their traces behind.
Guerrero came out into the room just as she was finishing up. She didn't acknowledge his look of curiosity. "It was quick. They didn't stay long enough to leave a scent, either." As though he should be used to animal-people by now. "Which means they were efficient, they had practice..."
"And they knew what they were doing, yeah, I got that. I didn't get anything either, but..."
His cell phone buzzed, provoking Tiger Cub's irritation but gaining her a look of apology as well, which won him at least a point or two in his favor.
"Yeah. Really? Dude, that's... Okay." She folded her arms and waited for him to put down his phone. "They're waiting for us outside."