Dirty Job Read online

  Lucy fidgeted with the rope strung along the path. “The trouble is … the trouble is … all the other kids are real Shifters. What if they find out I’m not?”

  So that’s what was on her mind.

  “Not a real Shifter?” Christy said, confused. She didn’t know my ex-wife was a mainstream human. Didn’t know anything about Sophia at all.

  I forced a smile. “You know what, Christy, I think we’ll be OK by ourselves for a while. Thanks for everything.”

  Hurt flashed in her eyes. Then she gave Lucy a quick hug. “OK, doll, see you back at the dorm.” Without looking at me again, she walked back the way we’d come.

  I led Lucy to a wooden bench overlooking the rapids. “Let’s get one thing straight. You are a real Shifter. The genes are dominant. Even with only one Shifter parent, you’re as much a Shifter as any of those kids back there, and in fact more so, because they don’t know sh—crap about our culture.”

  “But what if I’m not?” Lucy said, kicking the bench with her heels. “What if I turn out like her?”

  Her was Sophia. Cecilia Parsec had told Lucy as much as she thought she needed to know about her mother, which was a damn sight more than I ever had. She’d showed Lucy old vids of Sophia, and given her Sophia’s Traveller coat. The overall effect had left Lucy scared of this woman, this Traveller who had tried to kidnap her, who’d hurt so many people … and yet, in a way, Lucy was fascinated by her.

  This, this was why I had to find out more about Sophia’s atrocities. This was why I had to go to the Hurtworlds.

  But right now, I had to work with what I’d got.

  “She’s not all bad, sweetheart. She wasn’t always bad.”

  “Really?”

  Against my instincts, I nodded. The truth is always complicated, and this was the truth, too. I had not told Lucy anything about her mother for bad reasons as well as good. I didn’t want to give Lucy a chance to like the woman who had abandoned us.

  But now … now I was trying to be a better person. A better dad, for as long as I had left. And right now, that meant rising above my own bitterness and humanizing Sophia for my daughter, so she could see her as a person who had made bad choices, not a boogeyman.

  “She grew up on Montemayor …”

  Lucy listened, open-mouthed, as I told her what I knew about Sophia’s past. My ex-wife had been an only child, like me. But unlike me, she had grown up on a wealthy, privileged planet, one of humanity’s three Heartworlds in the Cluster. Exotic pets, private tutors, off-world holidays, you name it, she had it. Her father was a Montemayor senator, her mother a lawyer. She had never introduced me to them. Her excuse was that she was estranged from them, but that very fact should have been a red flag, because they had given her everything. “They had a summer house on Diaz de Solis. She went to a private school with music lessons, horseback-riding lessons, a world-class ballet studio, everything. Then college and graduate school.” This in an era when college admissions are ruthlessly meritocratic. A place like Montemayor University, only a fraction of a percent of people get in. “She got a doctorate in AI studies, and a master’s degree in philosophy.”

  “I could never get into college,” Lucy said.

  “You scored in the top five percent, remember?” I poked her. “I’m not saying higher education is necessarily a good thing. Our graduate schools turn out two types of people, politicians and Travellers, in about equal numbers. But you could definitely get in if you wanted.”

  Lucy screwed up her face “I like the other school she went to. With music lessons and horseback-riding, and … and everything.”

  Rashly, I said, “You will go to a school like that. You know St. Anne’s, out on Cape Silvestre? They have all that stuff. Listen. Camp lasts six weeks, and then I’ll be back. But you don’t have to go back to Shoreside Elementary in September. You’ll be going to St. Anne’s.”

  I probably shouldn’t have revealed my secret plan, but Lucy didn’t ask where I was going to find the money for it. She hugged me. “You are the best dad!”

  We sat and talked some more about St. Anne’s, while the dolphin Shifters gave people rides through the rapids. It was a humiliating, exploitative way to make a living, and it made it worse that they agreed to be exploited, because jobs for Shifters don’t exactly grow on trees. But Lucy would not fall into that trap. I would boost her out of the Shiftertown gravity well, if it was the last thing I did.

  “No more of this mess,” I muttered.

  “What mess?”

  “Oh …” I gestured at the dolphins. “That.”

  “Why is that a mess?”

  “It’s the mess the Big Shift scientists made. We’re just living in it.”

  “But it’s great being a Shifter.” To their credit, her school did try to make the kids feel good about themselves. “Isn’t it?”

  “Of course it is,” I said. “It’s awesome.”

  “Poor Dad,” she said suddenly, laying her head against my upper arm, and patting my knee. “Poor, poor Dad.”

  “Why poor Dad?”

  “You have to go far away. I wish you could stay here with me.”

  Christy Day’s white limbs flashed through my mind. “So do I.”

  “But it will be OK,” Lucy said. I had started out reassuring her, and now she was reassuring me. “You’ll be back soon, and in the meantime I am going to have fun here! I feel OK about it now.” She laced her fingers through mine. “Come on. Let’s go back and find Ms. Day.”

  I swear, I didn’t deserve this child. She was enough to make me believe in a God of unaccountable blessings, who knew all the bad shit I had done and nevertheless, inexplicably, rewarded me like this.

  7

  Back at the ShifterKids Summer Experience!! building, we found Christy waiting for us with Irene and Mia. There seemed to be an odd froideur between them. Christy said, “Come on, Lucy. I’ll show you your room, and your dad can see it, too.”

  The three of us went upstairs, along high-ceilinged passages filled with kids running and chasing each other. Lucy would be bunking with seven other girls. They were unpacking under the direction of—guess what?—a tubby humanoid robot, very similar to Lucy’s former caregiver, Nanny B. I saw Lucy relax. The robot, to her, said safety.

  Christy and I went back downstairs. At the edge of the courtyard, she said, “I’ve moved.”

  “Yeah? Where to?”

  “Further downtown. I’ll give you my new address.” She sent it to my phone. There was a moment’s silence, and then we both started to speak at once. I gestured for her to go first. “I called you.”

  “I know.” I hadn’t picked up. Because I had IVK. We had no future together, because I had no future. “Sorry.”

  “Mike!” Irene shouted. “Come on!”

  “I’ll let you go,” Christy said, and walked away.

  Irene had hold of Mia’s hand. Mia was weeping. “Huh?”

  “Mia is coming home with us,” Irene said. “You might want to reconsider letting Lucy stay, as well.”

  “What the heck? Is something wrong?”

  “It depends if you consider government interference wrong.”

  “Christ, Irene. It’s funded by the government, run by the government, that’s not a secret.”

  I was frazzled by parting from Lucy and the awkward moment with Christy. I strode back to the entrance, summoning my truck. Irene dragged Mia along. The little girl was sobbing pitifully. “Stop that. I’m not having them brainwashing you.”

  I almost hit a chupacabra as I pulled out. It was getting dark. The headlights sliced across the ruthlessly pruned greenery. “All right, I’ll bite. How is it brainwashing?”

  “I talked to that counselor. There will be discernment exercises.”

  “They do those at school, too.” Discernment, in the education ministry’s parlance, means helping Shifter children to learn about various animals, in preparation for choosing one at the age of twelve, when they start to Shift.

  “Yes, but
did you see that place? Water, water everywhere. The Shifter employees? All marine mammals. Dolphins, seals, sea lions, a couple of walruses, they’ve even got an orca. These are the people who’ll be instructing the kids. So what kind of discernment do you think they’re going to do? They’re openly, blatantly pushing their agenda on our children. Sorry about the five K,” Irene added. “We’ll pay it back.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “This ‘agenda.’ What is it? Enlighten me.”

  “Rex and I think they’re breeding up marine Shifters for a reason. Remember Tech Duinn?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “Shifters won that war for humanity. And you have to figure that was not lost on the Fleet. Now they’re looking to recycle the same template, but this time, it’s not wolves and tigers they want. It’s dolphins and seals.”

  “We aren’t at war with anyone.”

  “I’m aware of that, smartass. But sooner or later, we will be. There’s always another war on the horizon, somewhere in the Cluster. And this time, they want our kids to fight it.” Irene pulled Mia onto her lap. “Well, they’re not getting my daughter.”

  Lost for words, I wove through traffic on the Strip. “And Rex is on board with this conspiracy theory?”

  “Conspiracy theory? Sure, you can call it that if you want. We can’t prove anything. That doesn’t mean it’s not happening.”

  I considered myself a contender in the paranoia stakes. But when it came to conspiracy theories, Irene and Rex left me in the dust. I could not decide if they were more sophisticated than me, or more credulous. “So let me get this straight,” I said. “The ShifterKids Summer Experience, don’t forget the two exclamation marks, is part of a long-term plan to expand the recruiting pool for a marine Shifter unit to be formed ten to fifteen years in the future to fight a marine species we haven’t even heard of yet?”

  “You know what, we’ll walk,” Irene said. The truck was stopped at a red light. She actually started to open the door

  “Jesus, Irene. I’m just saying—”

  “Well, don’t,” she snapped, smoothing Mia’s hair.

  As we drove back in silence to 90th Street, I thought about friendship. I considered it a sacred value, just one notch down from family. I was furious with Irene for splitting Lucy and Mia up. What is childhood without a best friend? I literally wouldn’t have made it through childhood without my best friend, Dolph. One of my touchstone memories was the time I got de facto banned from the sixth grade half-marathon. I was still having Chimera Syndrome episodes, and the school forbade me to participate in sports. Then Dolph, the most popular boy in our class, had announced that he wasn’t entering the half-marathon, either, unless they gave me a chance.

  Then he had trained with me day after day until I was able to complete the course.

  Holding my shoulders, picking me up when I fell over, holding onto me even when his hands went right through my bones.

  I shuddered, and pushed the memory away as I turned onto 90th Street.

  The leaves of the gravelnut in front of our building hung in a verdigris halo around the streetlight. The evening was humid and still. Mia scrambled out of the truck with a cry of “Dad,” and that was when I saw the man sitting on our front porch. Rex reverted to human form so seldom that his thuggish vibe, complete with broken nose, always came as a surprise.

  “Aw baby.” He held out his arms to Mia. “I’m sorry you couldn’t stay.” Irene must have discussed it with him on the phone when I wasn’t there. “We just can’t let them take our baby girl away from us. You understand that, right?”

  “It is not fair,” Mia howled. “I wanted to stay!”

  “Kit?” Irene said.

  “Upstairs with Nanny B.”

  Irene started towards their front door. The two front doors opened off the porch, side by side. About to turn the doorknob, she froze. “What’s that?”

  Rex sighed. “Yeah. I was about to ask you, Mike. You got any solvent?”

  The porch lights were off, and if he hadn’t said anything, I might not have noticed it.

  A word or words had been spray-painted across both front doors in letters a meter high. The paint was gone; what remained was the shadow where it had been. I pushed past Rex, trying to decipher the dull marks.

  “Happened while you were out,” Rex said. “I was upstairs. Thought I heard something. I come down and there’s Nunak, spray-painting the porch. In broad freaking daylight.”

  “Nunak?”

  “A bear,” Irene said. “He used to work with Parsec, but they fell out a while back.”

  “He’s more brain than brawn,” Rex said. “Parsec never did appreciate competition.”

  But now Parsec was off the scene.

  “He had someone waiting for him in a car. Minute I opened the door, they hightailed it. I tried to get the paint off while it was wet. Used that magic eraser stuff, but you can still see it.”

  SNITCH.

  That’s what the shadows said.

  Snitch.

  There’s no worse word in the Shifter vocabulary. Shifters do not squeal on other Shifters. That’s basically the whole of our unwritten law. But we had squealed on Parsec, and the bears knew it. OK, you could argue that framing a guy isn’t the same as snitching on him, but I would not expect the Bad-News Bears to appreciate that rhetorical point.

  “Guess Larry K wasn’t kidding around,” Irene breathed.

  Instinctively, I swung around to see if any of our neighbors were out on the street. At the same time, righteous indignation boiled up. Irene had framed Parsec to save me. If anyone had squealed to the cops, it was me. And yet she was taking the brunt of the bears’ wrath.

  “Solvent isn’t gonna help,” I said. “You already damaged the original paint. The only thing to do is repaint it.”

  “Repaint it?” Rex said. “Damn.”

  “Start with scraping and sanding it down.”

  “Guess we should do that tonight, before the neighbors—”

  A scream seeped out from the second floor balcony. Irene said, “That’s Kit.” She dashed upstairs.

  “I’ll come down and borrow your paint scraper later,” Rex said.

  I followed them upstairs. I felt like I owed them an apology.

  The door at the top of the stairs opened directly onto their kitchen, a cozy, chaotic room with two pink walls and two orange ones. Nanny B sat beside the kitchen table, pawing at an inhuman, writhing, screaming knot of limbs. A scaly foot turned into a shaggy wing and slid through her grippers. “If you calm down, you may have a cookie, Kit,” she quacked.

  Irene and Rex bowled the nanny bot aside. They knelt over the thrashing, Shifting form of their son, telling him they loved him, pleading with him to stop it.

  I leaned against the door jamb, feeling sick. Kit kept screaming. I knew that he could not hear a word that Nanny B or his parents were saying to him right now. He was having a Chimera Syndrome episode.

  “When did this start?” I said.

  “About a week ago,” Rex said. “Figure it was the Founding Day thing that set him off.”

  “And then you had to go and take him to the game,” Irene said.

  “Yeah, guess that didn’t help.”

  “But no, actually, why shouldn’t you have?” Irene reached for Kit, and jerked back as his body melted under her hand. “Why can’t we—just—be—normal?”

  As if in response, Kit screamed louder. His forelimbs bifurcated, and white fur flowed over them.

  “C’mere, Kitster. It’s OK, It’s OK.” Rex tried to pull Kit onto his lap. Kit slid bonelessly off in a puddle of fur that was already turning into iridescent feathers.

  I had known for a while that Kit had Chimera Syndrome, just like me. He was a little young, at five years old, to start having episodes. They might have expected to have another good year with him. But as Rex said, the children had all gone through a stressful time lately. Irene and Rex were trying to speak to him in calm, soothing voices, but I cou
ld hear their barely-concealed panic. In fact, I felt a touch of panic myself, suddenly confronted with this nightmare vision from my past.

  Feathers melted into sleek black skin. A tail whipped Irene in the face, making her cry out. For a moment Kit was a snake with feet. Then the feet elongated into clawed legs, and he became a naked canine with a pig’s snout. All the animals he had obsessively studied since he was old enough to talk were blending together in unnatural hybrids … chimeras.

  I could have told them that he was under the table because he wanted to be in a dark, quiet place. I could have told them that talking at him would do no good. The only thing that would help was holding onto him.

  But if I said that, Irene and Rex would want to know why my advice contradicted the advice they’d got from the doctor and the internet. I didn’t want to tell them that I had Chimera Syndrome. That I’d lived through this myself. Survival rates are vanishingly low, and I didn’t want to give them false hope. Honestly, the chances were a thousand to one that Kit would not make it. That sometime—not tonight, not this year, but in another few years—he would start to Shift like this … and get stuck as a snake-dog-chicken, or a wolf-seal-bat. For the rest of his short life.

  Mia crouched in the bathroom door, white with fear. Nanny B wrapped a gripper around her. I squatted down in front of them. “Mia. Next time your brother does this, see if you can get him inside a closet, or under a bed. It helps.”

  She just stared at me woefully. It had to be as tough for her as it was for her parents.

  All at once, Kit’s screams ceased. His coat of spotted fur melted into little-boy skin, he had the right number of limbs again, and his big dark eyes gazed confusedly up at his parents. They were not even wet. Those horrifying screams had come from his head, not his heart.