Metamorphosis by mosylu

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Rita wished she’d thought to bring a lumalight, but if she went into the hospital to get one, she might lose her nerve. She kept going down the path, walking from shadowy patches to thin moonlight. His footsteps crunched on the dirt and twigs underfoot. If she’d been with anyone else, it might have been downright romantic.

But she was walking with Alonzo Solace.

All her life, he’d been a holo on the wall, a name on legal documents. His ghost had haunted family history--the one who was gone, and yet wasn’t. Now he was here, transformed from a larger-than-life figure into a very human man.

She wondered what to say.

He was the one to break the silence, eventually. "Who are you?" he asked, stopping in a smudge of shadow. "What do you want? How do you know Spanish? It’s been illegal on the stations since before you were born."

She was right. He didn’t know her. He had no idea who she was. "I was seven when they passed the Linguistic Standardization Act," she said. "Thank you for the compliment."

He brushed that aside, asking again, "How do you know Spanish?"

"Maybe I learned it in school." How petty of her, but she wanted to make him work for this. "Purely for the purposes of study. It is, as you pointed out, illegal to use in everyday surroundings."

He made a rude noise. "You don’t speak it like you learned it out of a program. You speak it like you learned it in el cuad."

"Which barrio?" she threw back.

"I don’t know. East Los, Phoenix, San Antonio--"

"Barrio Tucson, maybe?"

"Yeah," he said slowly. "Or Barrio Tucson."

She waited, arms crossed.

After a moment, he burst out, "Whatever it is you think I know, I don’t. Okay? So stop waiting for me to get it on my own, and just tell me."

Rita set her jaw. It was no use feeling disappointed. What had she expected? "Do you even know my name?"

"Rita Vasquez," he said promptly. "I asked."

"My full name."

"No, why would I?"

She put her hands on her hips and looked up at the sky, laughing mirthlessly. "He affected my entire life, why would he know my name?" she asked the half-moons, riding low in the sky.

"Look, don’t try to tell me--I’ve been on suppressors since I started sleepjumping, I’ve never missed--"

"Rita Mercedes Sepulveda Vasquez." She included her maiden name on purpose, knowing he’d seen it at least once. "That’s my name. That’s my full name."

Even in the silvery moonlight, he paled. "Rita Mercedes?"

"From my grandmothers. I was the first girl. You know how it’s done."

"Your nana Mercedes. Who was she?"

He was getting it now, she could see. "You tell me. I think you know."

He slid down the tree until he crouched on the ground, as if trying to shield himself from something. "Mercedes Angela Solace," he said in a raw voice. "She was the youngest. She had three brothers. When she was twelve, the oldest of them signed into the sleepjumpers’ training program. When she was twenty-three, he abandoned them forever."

Rita blinked. "Abandoned--?"

He lifted his head to look almost straight up at her. "You’re my great-niece."

She crouched down in front of him. "Yes." She wondered how old he was--not in real time, but how many years he’d been awake for.

"What do you want from me?" he demanded in a raw travesty of a voice.

"I don’t know," she said. "I always thought I would thank you, if I ever met you."

He tried to push away from her, forgetting that his back was braced against a tree, and fell over sideways. "You have nothing to thank me for. I abandoned you, too."

"I wasn’t even born," she said.

"If I’d been there I would have seen you when you were born." He scrambled to his feet.

"Tío," she cried.

"Don’t call me that," he said, and bolted for town.

Days until Moon Cross: 29

Julia pulled the hospital door closed behind her. "Well," she said. "That went well, didn’t it."

Devon crossed her arms over her chest. "Oh, were you there too?"

Julia said, "Devon--"

"I really could have used some help in there, you know." The medical staff had sat in front of her like waxwork dummies, with faces cast in permanently skeptical lines. She would have had better luck convincing the wall that the Terrians should heal the Syndrome children.

Julia shot her a sharp, defensive look. "I brought every scrap of data I had."

"Is there something in the Hippocratic Oath that says you can’t open your mouth to support your position?" Devon knew she was taking out her frustration on the younger woman, but she didn’t care. "I appreciate that it’s strange for you to be working with Miguel and his team right now, but--"

"Hey!" Julia flared to life for the first time in three days. "For as long as we’ve been here, you’ve never thrown that mistake in my face. God knows you had other things to accuse me of, but let’s just leave that record unblemished, shall we?"

Devon winced, remembering that the other woman was her friend. "I wasn’t even thinking about that." It was true; while Julia’s affair with Miguel had been more or less public knowledge within the Syndrome community, the memory had faded over the past two years as Devon got to know her. "I just meant, I know it’s an adjustment for you, working with other doctors after being on your own all this time. But I need your medical testimony to convince them."

"My testimony?" Julia’s voice dripped acid. "I’m the most junior member of the team. I’m barely qualified to be Vasquez’s intern."

Devon wondered why that sounded so familiar, then flushed. "Speaking of mistakes we’re not going to bring up," she said. "And that was over two years ago. Since then--"

"To them it was last week."

"So show them you’ve changed."

"I’m trying, but nothing happens overnight."

"A few things," Devon remarked dryly. Then she sighed and pushed her hand through her hair. "We have less than a month. We need to do something."

"Well, I don’t know what you’ll do, but I’m going to finish up the first half of my shift," Julia said, and went back into the hospital.

Devon’s day went more or less downhill from there. She dealt with more complaints, tried to talk to more unresponsive parents and medical staff, and even happened to be around when Ryan McNab had the bright idea to put the purple-gold native peaches into the cider machine. Unfortunately, it had been built for apples.

Like everyone else who’d been inside the blast radius, she took a shower. At least, that was the plan, but what screwed that up was a call just as she exited her room, clean clothes in hand.

Twenty minutes later, so far beyond the end of her rope that it had faded into the distance, she said, "Look, Jane, try to work this out with Marissa yourself. If that absolutely does not work, then find somebody to switch with. There are no single rooms. No, I will not find somebody for you. I have enough to do. Please handle this yourself." She hung up, then pulled her gear off and dropped it to the floor, giving brief thought to stomping on it.

"What happened to you?"

She gave John a baleful look. Her hair swung with the turn of her head, one sticky strand adhering to her cheek. "Peach pits jammed up the grinder. It was volcanic."

"What?" He gave her a quick up-and-down look, but the presence of all her limbs and the absence of spouting blood seemed to reassure him. That taken care of, he asked after the next most vital thing. "My machine?"

"Now a rather attractive abstract sculpture. We hosed off the juice, though." She tried to brush her hair out of her face and got her hand stuck. "Mostly."

He eyed her. "Who do I need to kill?"

"Nobody," she said, extricating her hand and wincing as a few strands came away with it. "It’s fixable. What happened to you?" He was head-to-toe grime and grease.

"Crawling around the ship," he said, rubbing his hands over his face. That only made it worse. "After twenty-four years, she’s gunky as hell, even with auto-maintenance."

Her gear went off. She looked down at it and said, "No." After a moment, it went to messaging and she picked it up, hooking it on her belt.

"Popularity wearing thin?" he asked her, pushing his own door open. He paused to roll his eyes at the tornado aftermath of True’s half of the room.

"Popularity makes it sound like I’m the head of the cheerleading squad," she muttered, leaning on the door jamb. "I feel more like the whipping boy." She hesitated, chewing on her lip. "Listen, um--question."

"Still about a month," he said, now head down in a crate.

"What?"

"The ship? It’s still going to take a month to fix."

"That’s good to know, but that’s not what I meant. Does Julia seem--strange to you lately?"

He slung a pair of pants over his shoulder. "Besides her reversion to Dr. Uptight?"

Devon let out her breath. "So you noticed too."

"I’m not blind," he said, straightening up with a shirt added to the pants. "Neither is anybody else around here. It’s ‘Lonz leaving, isn’t it? I told you--"

"I know what you told me. And I think that’s part of it."

"Part?"

"If it starts to interfere with her work, I’m going to have to do something."

"Interfere with her work?" He made a rude noise, nudging her out of the way so he could close his door behind them. "This is Julia, remember? Our Julia. She’s got doctoring right down in the DNA. Nothing interferes with her work. Anyway, what is this other part?"

"Private," she said sharply. "Honestly, you say women gossip--"

Before he could respond to that, the door leading outside opened, and Trent almost ran them both over before stopping short. "Devon! I was looking for you. Why didn’t you answer your gear?"

So that had been him. She said, "Look, Trent, can it wait?"

"I want to talk to you."

"Back off, Sadler," John said flatly.

Trent looked at him, obviously taking in every speck of grease. He turned back to Devon and said, "Alone."

"How about at dinner," she said. "Excuse me, we really need to--"

He didn’t budge. "Devon--"

"Look," she snapped, abandoning diplomacy, "I’ve had a very long day and I’m covered in drying fruit juice. If I don’t get a shower soon, I won’t be responsible for my actions. Is this an emergency that I have to address right now? Or will it wait?"

"Not an emergency but--"

"Then we’ll talk at dinner." She pushed past him.

With a groan of relief, John tossed his shirt on the shower stall’s bench. At the moment, peeling out of his greasy, dirty clothes was a pleasure right up there with kissing Devon. Or watching her chew out that Sadler. Which reminded him . . .

"Listen, I gotta know," he called over the wall. "What happened with you two?"

"The two of who?" In her stall, something hit the floor with a plop. "Me and my imaginary friend?" In the proximity of hot water, her mood had taken an obvious upswing.

"Sadler."

"Oh, him." She had to raise her voice over the sound of running water. "You see, we had a mad passionate affair. Uly is really his child, but we had to keep it from his scheming wife--"

"Adair," he said flatly. "C’mon now."

She dropped the silliness. "Honestly, there wasn’t anything."

The knob squeaked loudly as he turned on the water. "Does he know that? Cuz the looks he’s giving me, I could use in the garage to solder joints."

"We had a couple of dates," she said as he ducked into the lukewarming-up spray, "and--"

"Missed that last," he called out, scrubbing soap into his hair.

"I said, we had a couple of dates, but we decided not to pursue anything."

Okay, that was better, but not everything he wanted to hear. "Yeah? Why not?"

"It was a bad time for a relationship. It was right before we left. Things were complicated. We discussed it, and made a mutual agreement to table the issue until a more convenient time for both of us."

John’s brows shot up, and he grinned. "You tabled the issue," he echoed, bracing his arm against the wall and letting the water slide down his back, rinsing away the soap. "Was this in the board room? Did you have a mediator?"

"Are you going to be impossible about this?"

He scrubbed until the water sloshing into the gutter drain ran clear. "Adair, was it a romance or a quarterly meeting? Cuz it sounds an awful lot like the second."

"It wasn’t that cold-blooded. We were just being sensible. A relationship at that time would have been highly problematic."

He shut off the water and grabbed his towel. "Problematic like taking up with me in the middle of a cross-continental trek, six weeks after you nearly died? Not to mention the kids."

She threw a sponge over the wall. He caught it and threw it back. There was a splat. "Hey! Fine, you made your point."

He was sitting on the bench, working his feet into his beat-up boots, when she put her head around the curtain to his stall. "John, you’re not jealous, are you? Of Trent?"

"Hell, no," he said with perfect honesty. "I’m way more inconvenient than he is, and you’re still around. Means I’ve got something going for me."

She came all the way in and put her arms around his neck. "Maybe I’m just using you for sex."

He grabbed her around the waist and hauled her, laughing, onto his lap. "Yeah? Tell me more."

He wasn’t the only advancer who’d noticed Sadler’s dirty looks. Over poker that night, Baines asked him about it, and ears pricked up all around the table. He told them what Devon had told him, and most of them looked a little deflated that the story wasn’t more spectacular. But Magus said, "Gotta feel sorry for the guy."

John curled his lip and made his discards. "Sure," he said, taking the two cards Baines handed him. Hunh. Not much better. "I’m all broken up over it."

"No, really," Magus insisted. "He has a real case on Devon, you can tell. They were starting something, even if it was on hold, and then he gets here and finds out she’s gone on without him."

"Sleepjumper's gap," Alonzo said, speaking up for one of the first times all evening.

"What?" John forgot about his cards for a moment and looked up.

"Sleepjumper's gap. It's what happens when you get back from a run and everything's different from the way it was just a couple of days ago." Alonzo wagged his cards at John. "You did--what, a year and a half once? Tell me, wasn’t it weird when you got back to Chicago block?"

John considered that. "I missed my mom’s birthday. Twice. Had to get her two presents." He thought of Braxton, acting like they were still back on the stations and should hate all top-levelers, and frowned.

"It gets worse the longer you’re away," Alonzo said. "You come back and your baby sister's grown up, your dad's got grey hair, that hot chick used to live on the corner is married."

They all looked at Alonzo in fascination. He never talked about his station life this much, even obliquely. "What do you do for it?" Baines asked.

"The only thing us jumpers knew how to do was go out on another run. 'Course, we'd get back and it was even worse . . . your sister got married and has a kid, dad's dead, hot chick packed on about a hundred pounds. So you just stop going home, because it's not home anymore." His shoulders moved restlessly. "It's not really fixable."

"Well, they're not going anywhere," John commented. "So I guess we just put it on our list of deal-with and move on." He stirred up his pile of markers. "We gonna play poker or what?"

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