“Me? I don’t have a story. I’m your basic loser, a nobody.”
Charlotte’s dark eyes went wide, looking at him with such fixation it felt like a trowel scraping at his brains.
“I see a lot going on in there, but I don’t see stupid,” Charlotte/Gurtz said. “How’s a smarter than average guy like you end up homeless?”
“Long unpleasant story involving a lot of money spent on an education I failed to get.”
“Studying what?”
“I was an English major.”
“Mm. Sympathies.”
“Noted.” Dallas sighed deeply. “I’m what’s known in this world as a slacker.”
“Looks like we have something in common, then.”
“How’s that?”
“We’re both in trouble with somebody over money. Isn’t that always the way it goes…”
“What happens if you miss your gate?”
“I’ll be stuck here.”
“And if your host dies?” Dallas had every intention of keeping Charlotte alive, but he had to ask.
“My essence gets sucked into the nearest official gate. If I survive the transfer in one piece, I’ll probably be executed.”
But Dallas’ mind was on another track. “What happens if the assassin catches us?”
“It won’t be nice. Body parts, yours and ours.”
“What’s he armed with?”
“A splitter, most likely — a stealth weapon, highly portable and deadly. You think a Japanese katana’s sharp? Phhht. A splitter’s particle beam cuts through anything with substance, boulders, steel, meteorites, you name it. Small neat handle, fits in the palm of your hand, beam opens up as wide or as narrow as you want, depending on what you need to cut.”
Dallas shivered. “I still don’t get it. That recruiter guy said this job was tailor made for me. But you need somebody from the Avengers or the Justice League, not a college dropout.”
“You’re doing okay so far. Charlotte likes you. Buster likes you. ”
He had to admit that had been the nicest part of the job — besides the money, which he received in cash at the end of each day. It felt good, being praised by someone smart and successful, which Charlotte obviously was.
Dallas cleared his throat. “How come you’re so familiar with the way things work here on Earth? You seem pretty savvy to me for a non-native.”
Charlotte closed her eyes and hugged her chest, her voice husky. “It's on my regular route. I’ve been coming here for a long time.”
Dallas felt a chill creeping over his skin despite the ninety-plus heat. "For what?"
“I thought we weren't going to talk about that.”
“I want to talk about it now.”
“I told you─I'm a Masterclass Spellcaster.”
Dallas was persistent. “Casting spells on what?”
“Body templates. I figure out the design and make the prototypes with all their thousands of variations. I have to use originals to work from, to get the details right.”
Dallas wasn’t liking where this was headed. He felt his guts tighten. “How do you get those originals?”
Charlotte had pulled herself into a near-fetal position. “Slaves. I work with the Slave Traders Guild to get body types… and do a little refurbishing for them on the side. There. Happy you asked?”
Dallas scrambled toward the door. “I knew it! You lied to me.”
“How do you figure that? You were yammering about little grey guys and medical experiments. This is about commerce.”
“But a slave means abduction! And ‘refurbishing’ means torture, I assume.” Dallas was freaking, heart pounding against his ribs.
“Offworld slaves have to be refurbished before they can be used. I take away their breathing apparatus and embed a little methane converter at the base of the throat. Eliminates their ability to talk, but they can't speak our language anyway, so no loss. I'm good at what I do. Better than most of my competitors, which doesn’t make them happy,” Gurtz conceded.
“But that's inhumane, it's horrible! You’re despicable!” He suddenly realized he had Charlotte by the throat, squeezing tighter with each shout. The Gultranz lifted partway out of the woman’s body and unfurled one of its long skinny digits. It touched Dallas on the forehead and he fell back as if he’d been tazed. A mild electric shock ran through his body, just like the time he'd stuck a fork in a toaster as a kid to get at a piece of trapped toast.
“I don’t want to harm you, but I will defend myself. You were trying to attack my host and I can’t allow that. Be assured that if I could fully manifest, you’d be dead now.” The husky voice had changed in pitch. Dallas had sort of gotten used to the timbre of that unnatural voice filtered through human vocal cords, but right now the voice had an edge that frightened him to his core. The Gultranz settled back into its host and glared at Dallas with an expression that could have meant anything from fuck you, earthling, to you poor stupid sod with the brain of a flea.
Dallas sat with his forehead on his knees and tried to rearrange his scrambled brains. Part of him just wanted things to go back to the way they were before he’d ever heard of Limbus Inc., but that was helpless loser thinking. He was sick of being a loser.
He pushed his hair out of his eyes and gave her eye contact, not confrontational, but not backing down either. “Understood. I signed a contract. So, I agree to put my personal problems with your occupation aside for now, and I will see this job through to the end.” So you can leave and get the hell off my world. Gurtz probably understood that part, too.
Charlotte leaned back against the cushions. “Alright. Just so we understand each other.” She shivered visibly and gave Dallas that haunted look. “Sorry about that.” Her normal voice was back.
Dallas let his breath out. He didn’t know if he’d won or lost, but he understood he’d had a narrow escape, his second of the day. He continued to sit on the floor, watching the light fade and listening to sounds of traffic along the street outside. The naked reality that “aliens are among us” had come crashing down with a vengeance. To be honest, the whole job experience had felt like some surreal prolonged cosplay event until tonight. This was no pop culture dress-up-like-monsters weekend, and his rational mind had ground to a halt.
Dallas felt the anger leak out of him, like an oversized gasbag punctured and wilting. He closed his eyes, too wrung out to think.
He felt her hand on his shoulder, a barely-there squeeze.
“Sleep on it. We’ll talk more tomorrow. I just want you to know, Dallas, that I think you’re a fine person.” With that, she entered the bedroom and shut the door.
Dallas curled up on the couch and willed himself not to think about the kinds of dreams she must have been having.
When Dallas woke, Charlotte had already gone to work. He rubbed his eyes and sat up, feeling fogged over. Buster was stretched out near the glass doors, watching him. He wasn’t sure how he felt this morning, but the thought that he’d lain asleep under the same roof as a creature whose race harvested humans for slaves and worse gave him goosebumps.
“Today’s the twenty-ninth,” he said to Buster. “What’s the game plan?” Dallas ran his hands through his hair. “You know what? I think we’re going at this all wrong. Chasing the gate but never quite catching it isn’t working.” It was like a game of quantum tag. All these little contiguous events looked random when you stared at them head on, but under the surface they felt deliberate, controlled, planned. What he really wanted was to see the bigger flowchart. And then the light went on in his head. He called Charlotte at work.
“I think we need to go back to the place where the gate came in and,” he wasn’t sure how to describe what his brain saw as a strategy, “cut it off at the pass, so to speak.”