3
A FIRST EDITION OF SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE
XAN AND MALLORY first met in 2033 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in a twentieth-century American literature class, bonding first over Octavia Butler and then over their mutual dislike for Vonnegut Guy.
Mallory thought Vonnegut was fine, but this guy made fandom for the author look tacky. Vonnegut Guy was a thin white dude walking around with a beret and glasses that Mallory was sure were plain glass. When they started their Vonnegut section of the syllabus, he proudly came in with a first edition of Slaughterhouse-Five, ready to discuss.
The professor had calmly told him they were covering Cat’s Cradle first, and they might not even get to Slaughterhouse-Five because they had more books and authors to cover.
Mallory and Xan had spoken at the same time.
Mallory said, “What about Parable of the Sower?”
Xan said, “Like Octavia Butler?”
They had looked at each other. Xan had pointed at her and grinned widely. “She gets it.”
“Oh, come on, she’s not nearly as important as Kurt,” Vonnegut Guy said dismissively. “I’ve never heard of her.”
“That says more about you than it does about her,” Mallory said.
“You may want to search under ‘MacArthur genius grant,’ ” Xan added, pointing to the phone in Vonnegut Guy’s hand.
“Butler was brilliant, but we didn’t have room for her,” said the professor, taking control of the class again.
“You had room; you just gave it to someone else that everyone here has read a hundred times,” Xan countered. “I’m reading Heart of Darkness in two other English classes! You think I have anything more to learn about that book?”
“You haven’t been taught Heart of Darkness in my class yet,” Professor Rudnick said coldly.
Mallory raised her hand and started talking. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask: Heart of Darkness was written in 1899, so it’s not even twentieth-century lit. Can we cover something relevant?”
Professor Rudnick’s face was growing pink. He focused past Mallory and Xan and on the rest of the class. “Today we will talk about Cat’s Cradle’s historical significance, and close discussion on the first half of the book will start on Wednesday. Vonnegut was prolific, but his books aren’t long; I’m sure y’all can handle it.”
“So you’re not going to address just leaving Butler out?” Xan asked as the professor started to write on his tablet, displayed on the wall behind him.
“I’m not debating my syllabus with students,” he said without looking up.
Without another word, Xan grabbed his laptop and backpack and walked out. The rest of the class stared at him, but the professor still didn’t look up.
After class, Mallory had found him sitting on a bench outside the library. She sat beside him.
“It’s the Butler girl,” he said by way of greeting. “Why didn’t you come with? I thought we were united.” He didn’t look up from the e-book he was reading.
“I agreed with you, but I didn’t get your memo about the walkout,” she said. “I’m Mallory, by the way.”
“Good to meet you, Mallory,” he said, grinning at her and shaking her left hand awkwardly with his right. “I’m Xan.”
“And I stayed because I actually liked Cat’s Cradle,” she said, shrugging.
“That’s a fair play,” he said, nodding.
“Although class is going to suck this year if that Vonnegut Guy keeps talking like that,” she added grimly, and Xan laughed. The friendship was formed.
After a few months, Mallory was determined to ask him out, but always lost her nerve. There had been an awkward moment on the Poe-focused spring break trip to Baltimore where something might have happened, but the moment was shattered when Vonnegut Guy and a room service waiter were murdered. Even better: the murders were unrelated.
Mallory had left college soon after. She didn’t plan on seeing Xan again.
Over a decade later, Xan had shown utter surprise when he ran into Mallory at a birthday party for one of his friends.
Three weeks after that, he was absolutely baffled beyond words to find her on Eternity.
Mallory wasn’t surprised. By then, she had stopped being surprised by anything—especially coincidences.
MALLORY HAD KEPT her distance during her first few days on the station. She wanted to keep him safe, which meant keeping him away from her. What finally drove her to seek him out was hunger. Asking aliens what she could eat was pointless; they knew as little about her biology as she did about their food.
Adrian hadn’t been too sympathetic to Mallory’s situation, saying she should have thought about that before she left Earth forever. His stature and income allowed him to visit the finest restaurants where he could test his stomach’s limits, but Mallory was strapped for cash in the early days and couldn’t afford to pay for food she might not be able to digest. When she complained, Adrian told her that thousands of life-forms found something to eat every day, and his fellow diplomats had promised there would be food for human consumption, so she should just look harder.
So she went to Xan for help.
“You haven’t eaten in how long?” he’d asked, his eyes growing wide.
“Two days, I think?” she asked, running her hands through her hair, distracted.
“Did you tell the station? I don’t think she’d allow someone to starve.”
“I’m not going to be an adult woman going to someone asking for a peanut butter sandwich like a seven-year-old,” she’d snapped.
He smiled at her. “So instead you came to me asking for a sandwich?”
“We’re on the same level, both here under strange circumstances, both not having much more than what we brought with us, and both human,” she said. “Don’t give me a fish; teach me to fish! Or whatever you do for food around here!”
They started testing the cheaper places to eat. Xan admitted that his testing had been rough at the beginning, with burns, vomiting, and intense stomach cramping as he sampled alien food. But he’d found a few dishes that would sustain him, and once they began working together, they had eventually found food that was first digestible, then nourishing. Once they had found a few items that were somewhat tasty, eating almost became a thing to enjoy again rather than dread. They most frequently ended up at Ferdinand’s Crush, which Mallory considered a Gneiss dive bar. It was open all day and night to suit the needs of a never-closing shuttle bay. Ferdinand had, once he had met the humans, also been open to stocking more food that their systems could handle.
Ferdinand was on duty as usual (Gneiss didn’t sleep). He was short for a Gneiss, about seven feet tall and stocky, looking like he was made of dark gray rock veined with silver. Mallory and Xan waved at him when they entered and headed for the only seating area with a table and chairs low enough for them to sit comfortably. Most places seemed amenable to altering their interior to suit all the differently sized aliens on the station, but they’d learned that if your species had only a few aboard, most didn’t want to change things for that small a number. This had lifted Ferdinand even higher in Mallory’s eyes.
Every other table around them was about five feet off the ground, and the chairs were massive, reinforced stone that could handle a thousand pounds of sentient rock sitting to enjoy a beer—or the equivalent intoxicant.
Ferdinand lumbered over to their table and began vibrating in the way that signaled he was about to speak at a level that non-Gneiss could hear.
“How are things, Ferdinand?” Mallory asked, filling the silence with a greeting.
“Things are standard, the clients are about the usual numbers,” Ferdinand finally said. “It’s early for you to be in here, isn’t it?”
“Mallory had something to talk about and I was hungry,” Xan said.
“ ‘Something to talk about’ is a dire thing for humans, as I understand it,” Ferdinand said, turning to Mallory. “Are you ending your sexual relationship with the male? I will need to collect payment in advance, then, in case there are arguments that end with a storming out.”
“Has everyone been reading novels and watching soap operas from Earth?” Mallory demanded, hoping the low light would hide her warming complexion. “And no, I’m not, I mean—we’re not—I don’t even know how to answer that.” She took a deep breath and started again. “Look, you’re way off base.”
“No, we’re not talking about anything that personal,” Xan said, cutting in smoothly. “It has to do with other humans.”
Ferdinand waited for a moment, and Mallory wondered if he was trying to parse “way off base.” She had forgotten it was safer not to speak in vernacular phrases. “ ‘Way off base’ means you’re wrong, essentially,” she said.
“Oh,” Ferdinand said, and shrugged with a sound like a tomb being opened. “I’m pleased to see you regardless. I had heard about the humans arriving, yes. They will arrive today. Are you pleased?”
“No,” they said in unison.
“Unfortunate. Do you need time to find things you can eat?”
“No, I think I’ll have my usual,” Xan said.
“Just a coffee,” Mallory said, and Ferdinand turned, grinding, and shuffled back.
“I thought communication would be easier, but it’s like the more they learn about humanity, the more awkward things get,” Xan said with a grin.
Mallory thought about her exam that morning and hunched her shoulders. “You have no idea.” She looked around toward the door. “I had hoped Stephanie would come by once she was done sanding that shuttle or whatever she was doing.”
“Speak of the giant rock devil,” Xan said, pointing across the bar.
A purple head appeared in the doorway. Mallory waved at her, yelling, “Stephanie! Over here!”
The Gneiss heard her name, or the approximation of her name, and began shuffling over.
Everyone aboard the station who had auditory receptors had been fitted with a tiny translation device that painfully (for humans, at first) attached to their eardrums. Once you got used to it, it could translate any language in the universe, provided the language had been added to the massive central databases. Since humans had made First Contact with the rest of the universe, Earth languages were being added to the database. When last Mallory checked, the central database already had several English, Chinese, and Indian dialects, in addition to some of the dead languages like Latin. As for the names, the translating device created names that were generally understandable to the mother tongue of the listener. It was strange to look at a thin humanoid that resembled a walking stick and call her Bertha, but if that’s what the translator said, then that was what they used.
Nicknames, however, sometimes stymied the translator. It could only do so much when languages evolved on the fly. Which, Mallory realized, nicknames sometimes did.
When it came to ordering in restaurants, Mallory had been delighted to find that nearly every race so far had their version of “hot pleasant morning drink” that translated to “coffee or tea” and so far she could drink all but one of them.
The odd thing about such a powerful little translation device was that the species who had created it had such poor eyesight compared to other races that they didn’t see the point in creating a similar tool to allow you to read any alien writing. And there was a lot of alien writing around Eternity.
She still did enjoy ordering “coffee”—or the equivalent—and she could close her eyes and imagine that for a moment she was fifteen and in a diner back home, drinking coffee with too much sugar and whining about life. Back when life was simple and her biggest problems were an upcoming math test or whether her aunt was going to yell at her for being late or whether the point guard on the basketball team had noticed her. (He never did.)
“Do you know who’s coming?” Xan asked as Stephanie lumbered their way.
“No, from what I got in the news feed this morning, it was essentially ‘humans, welcome, shuttle, soon.’ ” Those are all the words I recognized. I messaged Stephanie for a translation and she confirmed it. Humans are being welcomed to the station now; a shuttle is on its way. And Adrian says he doesn’t know anything about it.”
Xan said nothing, appearing lost in thought. Stephanie reached them and sat at the tall table next to theirs. She began warming up to speak.
“Do you think the army will send someone right away?” Mallory asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know how hard they’re looking for me. I don’t know if they’re going to piece together that I’m here. How much does that ambassador know at this point?”
She shook her head. “He’s super-paranoid and is bad at hiding it, so I think it’s safe to say he doesn’t know you’re here. But if he found out about you, I wouldn’t put it past him to turn you in to get the Earth military to like him more.”
“Why did Earth send him?”
Mallory shook her head, having no answer for him.
Stephanie started making a sound that was more like a voice. “Good morning,” she rumbled. “My grandfather is a backend waste hole. Is your day going any better?”
The translator had problems with vulgarities, too.
“It’s bad all around,” Xan said. “Humans are coming, but we don’t know who. We also don’t know why. The army could be sending someone to find me, or the shuttle could be full of tourists. And I don’t even know if they’re still trying to pin the murder back home on me.”
Mallory winced. “A lot of unknowns. And anyone who comes here is in danger from me, so I’m not looking forward to it.”
“If humans are in danger around you, why is Xan here?” Stephanie asked.
“You don’t see us together that often,” Mallory said. “But every once in a while we need to talk.”
“Is that why? You’re afraid of me dying?” Xan asked, looking at her thoughtfully.
Their food and drinks arrived, and Mallory busied herself with her mug instead of looking at him. Her “coffee” looked like watered-down lava and was almost as hot. It was made “mild” for humans and still pushed the limits of what she could handle, but she soldiered on, blowing on her mug until she could sip without burning her mouth. It had a smoky, spicy, almost fruity sweetness. It was surprisingly good once you got past the texture and the temperature.
Xan was eyeing a flat piece of something that looked like orange bread but came with a hammer and chisel. He started knocking off little pieces and sucking on them. Mallory didn’t see how he could digest rock, but it was his innards, his choice.
“It could happen,” Mallory said. “You were with me the last time it happened; you know there’s a risk.”
IN A FIT of loneliness and against her better judgment, Mallory had agreed to attend a birthday party with her pushy neighbor, Anira. She was from the upstairs apartment and was part friendly person, part textbook nosy neighbor. She’d decided that Mallory needed social time and insisted she attend a party with her.
Mallory went to the party, someone died, and that’s when she realized she was done with humanity.
Early in the evening, Mallory was actually enjoying the party, especially when she found her old college friend reading a book in the corner.
The party was in a residence inside the new North Carolina base, Fort Bowser. A very bubbly woman Mallory didn’t know had hosted a birthday party for someone else she didn’t know. After Anira introduced her to everyone (“everyone that matters, anyway!” the hostess had said), Mallory tried to do what she historically did at parties, which was gravitate toward a bookshelf and try to figure out her host’s personality by their book collection. After that, she planned on eavesdropping on conversations.
Unfortunately, the hostess didn’t have any books. Mallory stared at the pictures of drunken parties and messy kisses between the hostess and a man, unsure of where to go from there.
There was one book in the house: an old copy of Slaughterhouse-Five was currently in the hands of a bored-looking bald man in a light gray army T-shirt and jeans who sat alone on the couch with a bottle of beer in front of him. He yawned as he flipped through the orange book. The beer had a peeling label, and he fiddled idly with it whenever he put the bottle down.
“Are you the guy I have to fight to look at the only book in this place?” she asked in greeting. “Or did you bring that yourself?”
He looked up at her and blinked. “Holy shit. Mallory? Is that you?”
He shut the book, but not before Mallory saw several notes scrawled in the margins.
The wave of emotions was surprising. Delight bloomed when she spotted an old friend, then her palms started to sweat because he was even better looking than she remembered, and then her stomach dropped into her boots when she realized it was a massive coincidence that she would run into him.
Coincidences were usually followed by murder.
She gestured to the book. “And what are you doing reading that?”
“Does this look like an Octavia Butler–loving house to you?” he asked in a low voice. “I brought the book as a gift for Billy, but”—he gestured to the bookcase that was full of pictures of the hostess and bowls of wooden eggs—“I unwrapped it to read because this is what the hostess has instead of books, and I got bored.” He stifled another yawn. “What are you doing here? Did you enlist?”
“Oh, no, never been on the base before. I’m here with a friend who made me get out of the apartment. I don’t know anyone here. I figured I would be the one who wandered around asking people uncomfortable questions about themselves and their relationship to one another.” She glanced at his army T-shirt and his defined muscles, something she hadn’t remembered from college. “I assume you did enlist.”
“Yeah, I had to leave school and enlist. It’s a long story.” He frowned, then continued. “Been in the service over a decade. Started in Fort Lee, then Afghanistan, then Sam Houston, and was transferred here about a year ago.”
“But if you know these people, why did you get bored?” Mallory asked.
He shrugged and pulled some torn wrapping paper out of his jeans pocket. He smoothed it out on the coffee table. “I’m not feeling very social tonight. But Billy’s a friend, so I promised I’d come.” He put the book in the center of the paper and carefully wrapped it up. It was a bit messy, considering the tape had torn the paper in a few places, but it showed real effort. There was a word written on the inside of the wrapping paper, but she could only see half of it—“kemm.”
“I don’t mean to assume, but how many people do you know who would appreciate a used Vonnegut?” she asked, grinning.
“No one still alive,” he said, and the joke fell flat as they both remembered the last time they had seen each other, eyes meeting over the broken body of their classmate. They hadn’t liked him, but he hadn’t deserved to be thrown off a balcony.
“Maybe he’ll be into a book about a soldier named Billy given to a soldier named Billy? Like those children’s books you could order with your kid’s name in it.”
“I doubt he’ll get it, anyway.” He looked around the room. “Who did you say you were here with?”
“Anira,” Mallory said, pointing at her neighbor, who was sucking cola backwash out of a foam gas station cup and laughing with the hostess. She caught Mallory’s eye and waved. Her blonde hair was braided with silver ribbons that caught the light. “She’s my neighbor, a friend of the hostess. I don’t know her that well, but I’m new to the area and she invited me. She took pity on me, I guess.”
“So, if you’re not enlisted or doing civilian work, what have you been up to for the last decade or so?” he asked.
She grimaced slightly. She didn’t like to lie, but she didn’t know how to tell people what she did for a living. “I spend most of my time volunteering at the animal shelter for the night shifts.”
“And you pay bills how?” he asked, an eyebrow going up.
She sighed. “I write books; they do okay,” she said. “I mostly live off savings and royalties.”
She never liked saying she was a writer. She wasn’t a writer, with the scarves and the chunky jewelry and the online flame wars about appropriation and use of the singular “they.” She just wrote books because she couldn’t work a job that placed her among people.
Admittedly, she had really good stories to tell. And lucky for her, the murder mysteries tended to write themselves.
“What have you written?”
In a panic, she remembered her book in which she depicted the trip to Baltimore with “Thoreau” Guy and “Eric,” the guy she’d had a crush on. There was no reason for him to have picked up that book specifically, but if he read it, he wouldn’t have any trouble identifying himself.
“I write murder mysteries under a pen name,” she said, shrugging. “Cozies, mostly. What about you?”
He frowned at her, looking confused that she didn’t want to talk about herself. Then he gave a little shrug and said, “I’m with the 919th Quartermaster Company. We’re a new branch off from the Fort Lee Quartermaster Company. I started out doing machinery repair. Then they put me on mortuary affairs.” He paused as if waiting for her to respond with a joke.
She didn’t. “If you’re not in a war zone, is there much call for those skills?”
“Not directly, but we do drills, train new recruits, keep up on mortuary science. And there are some domestic requirements.” He shrugged. “And we do other quartermaster duties where they need us to fit in.” His eyes dropped down to the book and he frowned.
“That’s fascinating,” she said.
The birthday boy—Billy?—was laughing loudly across the room, holding court for several other folks. “Symbies. Something. Aliens got ’em. You wouldn’t fucking believe it.” On overhearing this, Xan’s head snapped up. His face went still.
“ ‘Symbies’?” Mallory asked Xan.
“He’s not supposed to be talking about that,” Xan said, stuffing the book and wrapping paper in his back pocket.
“It’s okay. I have no idea what a symbie is,” Mallory said, shrugging.
“Doesn’t mean he shouldn’t know better,” Xan replied.
“—no better than a parasite!” Billy said, laughing again. “And they all got ’em!”
“Goddammit,” Xan said, politely but firmly edging past Mallory to approach his friend, but someone else, a strong-looking woman with blonde hair, got to him first. She guided him out of the room, talking to him, her head close. “All right. She’s got him. Moron.” Xan turned back to her and took a visible deep breath to calm down.
“So, you’re studying alien stuff here?”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “You know I can’t talk about that.”
She grinned. “I had to try.”
He was about to respond, but the hostess banged her tacky, costume-worthy ring on her beer bottle to get attention. The party’s energy came to a halt as everyone focused on her.
“Okay, y’all,” the hostess said, turning to all of them in turn. She had a way of moving that made her hair bounce like a shampoo commercial. “We’re gonna play a little game! Has everyone played ‘Werewolf’?”
Mallory’s stomach clenched. She stepped away from the wall and nodded an apology to Xan. “This is my cue to get a drink. I’ll see you later.”
He smothered another yawn with his hand and shook his head. “But this is a cool game. Why don’t you play a round, then we can get a fresh drink together?” He downed the rest of his beer and put the bottle on the table. “I’d really like to catch up with you.”
Mallory ground her teeth, knowing she was being handed a golden opportunity to reconnect with this guy, but she also had a bad feeling.
“I’ve played it before. It’s . . . not for me,” Mallory said. She took a few steps toward the kitchen, then turned around and said, “I’d recommend not playing. It’s not a good game for this party.”
She went to the kitchen then, leaving his puzzled face behind, knowing he wouldn’t take her advice. They never did.
Xan didn’t follow, but Mallory’s neighbor did. Anira had abandoned her almost immediately after they arrived, so she figured Anira had forgotten about her.
The swinging kitchen door shut behind them and Anira faced Mallory, crossed her arms, and rolled her eyes almost audibly.
“Why are you hiding in here? Is this that murder fear thing?” she asked.
“Would you believe me if I said I was getting another beer?” Mallory asked.
“Sure, if you weren’t drinking a soda right now,” Anira said. “You know that in Werewolf, they only pretend to kill people, right?” She got her own beer from the fridge, twisted the cap off, and took a long drink.
“Aren’t you driving us?” Mallory asked her, eyeing the beer.
Anira waved her hand. Her cheeks were flushed, and she looked excited. “Don’t change the subject. What do you think is going to happen?”
Mallory regretted ever letting Anira look at her apartment. A few weeks prior, Anira had visited to be neighborly, and, hungry for human contact, Mallory had let her in and given her a tour of the spare space. Anira had spied Mallory’s bookshelf full of her own Charlotte Queen mysteries. Anira had asked lots of questions and figured out pretty quickly that Mallory was both the author and the subject of the books. She didn’t believe that they were true stories, of course. No one ever did until it was proven. And then it was too late.
From the living room, the hostess was explaining the rules of the game. Sweat began to bead on Mallory’s forehead.
Mallory hopped up on the kitchen counter, not caring that the toaster oven door handle dug into her back. “I have a set of personal rules.” She held out one finger. “Rule One is not to be at a party like this in the first place. I already broke that.”
“Isn’t Rule One of Murder Club ‘don’t talk about murder club’?” Anira asked, grinning.
Mallory glared at her. “Rule Two is, if I do end up in a situation like a party, identify the hot spots in the room.”
“ ‘Hot spots,’ ” Anira said. “That guy you were talking to was definitely hot. Does he count?”
“Well, yes, but I’m not going to tell you this if you aren’t going to take me seriously.”
Anira made a visible attempt to stop smiling. “Yes, sorry, go ahead.”
“What I call hot spots are people with a lot of connections. While it’s true that people will kill strangers, it never happens around me. The murderer always has some connection to the victim. So at this party, there’s your hostess, of course. She has a bunch of friends here, but mainly there’s her sister and brother, you, her friend, and a guy they serve with who I’m pretty sure your hostess has a crush on. Her husband’s deployed, so she could also be cheating on her husband with anyone here.”
Anira opened her mouth, looking like she was going to argue, but Mallory held up a hand. “I’m not judging or even accusing. I’m saying these are possibilities I see. The birthday boy, Billy, right? He’s got the most connections, obviously. His sister is the hostess, and he also has an ex-girlfriend here, and he’s close with his brother-in-law, who’s not here. They’re both the center of several possible conflicts.”
“Wow. You remember all that? You haven’t even met the people who haven’t arrived yet.”
“That will probably be too late. If it’s going to happen, it’ll happen soon.”
Mallory paused, waiting for the inevitable question. Anira didn’t disappoint her.
“Okay, so why don’t you go warn them, if you’re so sure someone’s going to die?”
“That doesn’t work. I’ve tried that before,” Mallory said, rubbing her hands together as if to wash something off them. “No one believes me, so if I warn someone, we will still have a murder, and I’ll be a suspect because I knew it was coming. It’s like I’m a Greek chorus or Cassandra or something.
“Anyway, that was Rule Two,” she continued, holding out another finger. “Rule Three is get out of the room when something bad very obviously is about to happen.” She gave a meaningful look toward the living room, which had gone silent. She reached over and pushed the swinging door so she could peek through. The room and hallway were dark.
“It’s nighttime. The werewolf is about to claim their first victim,” the hostess called in a spooky voice.
Anira looked from her to the living room. “You mean right now?”
“Probably,” Mallory confirmed. “Look, no one will be happier than me if I’m wrong. If they play a fun party game and nothing happens, you can crow and make fun of me for the next month.” She paused, then added, “Or until the next murder, anyway.”
The lights in the living room came on. Laughter sounded from the room, and Mallory felt the fist around her stomach unclench a bit. Maybe this time it would be okay; maybe she could enjoy the party; maybe she could talk to Xan some more.
Anira grinned. “I’m gonna milk this for all it’s—” She stopped when someone screamed.
“OKAY, SO WHO do you think is going to die?” Xan asked, sucking on a piece of rock.
She blinked at him. He believed her, and he still didn’t get it. “I have no idea, because I don’t know who is coming. But odds are there will be people aboard who are connected to each other in ways that are not obviously apparent. Old lovers, or unknown biological children, or former classmates.”
He shrugged and crunched down on the rock. Mallory winced. “I didn’t know if you were definitely sure a human would die, or you think it’s going to be someone else.” He gestured around the bar as if encompassing the whole station, but there were only a few Gneiss in the bar.
“It’s really hard to kill one of us,” Stephanie said helpfully. “It’s hard for us to kill each other. I don’t imagine your people would find it easy.”
“You’d be surprised,” Mallory grumbled. “Humans are innovative when they want to be.” She took a sip of her lava drink and forced down the thick substance. The problem with waiting for the liquid to cool was that, like lava, it thickened as it did so. At least she’d stopped worrying about what the stuff was doing to her insides. “Anyway, if I knew who was coming, then I might be able to guess who the victim will be. But as for now, the only real guess I have is you or me or Adrian. And I’ve never been the target of a murder attempt.”
“Well, let’s hope it’s Adrian,” Xan said dryly.
Ferdinand came up and served Stephanie a plate of small, shining rocks. She’d never ordered, as far as Mallory could see. “What did you want to talk about?” Stephanie asked, crunching loudly.
“If we had to leave the station, could you help us?” Mallory asked. “It’s not safe for Xan, and I don’t want to be in the middle of a murder investigation again.”
Stephanie looked at Xan for a long time. He was calm under her scrutiny, chipping off pieces of his breakfast as if he didn’t know she was staring at him. Mallory looked from one to the other. She had an uncomfortable feeling of being out of whatever was going on between them, as she had in college when two friends of hers started dating and decided not to tell her. Mallory could figure out who killed someone, but when friends were hiding something from her, she was cheerfully oblivious.
“Guys? Hello?”
“No,” Stephanie said at last. “You couldn’t survive on our world.”
“What about another station—”
“You don’t want to go to another station,” Stephanie said. Mallory’s eyebrows shot up. She’d never heard Stephanie talk fast enough to interrupt a human.
“All right, we’ll unpack that later,” she muttered. “Do you have any advice on how to get the station to listen to us?”
“The humans are already on their way. Most shuttles have the right amount of fuel for a trip to the station. If they’re too far along, they won’t be able to turn back.” She paused. “Then the shuttle itself will fail and everyone on board will die, and you’ll be the murderer.”
“I can’t tell if you’re joking or not,” Mallory said, unamused.
“I was.”
“Tell me this, did you know who was going to die at the birthday party?” Xan asked.
She sighed. “I had a pretty good idea, but I wasn’t sure.”
WILLIAM WILLIAMS III—“BILLY” to his friends, “Trey” to his parents, and “Will Will Will” to his sister—was the poor bastard who went from birthday boy to murder victim. He died on his birthday, stabbed through the heart. The coroner said he died instantly.
When the screaming started, Anira and Mallory ran into the living room. The lights were on and Xan was lowering a bleeding Billy to the floor. Xan’s shirt was soaked in blood, and his face was slack with shock. People, Anira included, rushed forward and tried to put pressure on the wound in Billy’s chest, but it didn’t do any good. He was already dead.
The door was open. Mallory did a quick scan of the room and didn’t see anyone obvious missing. Who had opened the door? Had someone come in and killed Billy and then run away?
Xan was still standing, covered in blood, shaking his head either in denial or as if trying to clear it. He backed up a few steps. Then he turned and stumbled out the open door.
The hole in Billy’s chest was gaping, but the murder weapon was not obvious. It should have been in someone’s hands, or on the carpet. Mallory wondered if it was under the body. The obvious answer was that Xan had taken it, but these cases almost always steered away from the obvious answer.
Mallory started to look around the room, dodging the weeping hostess and the still-shocked guests. Her brain logged information whether she wanted it to or not. Beer bottles everywhere. A tablet sat on a coffee table with the rules of Werewolf showing; an overturned bowl of chips littered the floor and had been ground into the carpet. She walked to the chair where Xan had been sitting when she’d gotten there. Beside it was an overturned foam cup, its lid knocked free and ice leaking out. Lipstick was at the top of the discarded straw.
His beer bottle with the peeling label was on the coffee table, overturned.
She didn’t want to get involved, but she couldn’t not look for clues when everyone else was losing their shit. A woman who looked as if she had just stepped off a glacier in Norway sat in the chair Xan had occupied earlier. Her face was slack with shock and her phone trembled in her hands.
“You calling the cops?” Mallory asked her.
She gave a quick nod, her white-blonde braid bobbing. “Yeah. I mean, no. I’m calling the MPs. Rodney’s calling 911.”
“All right, then,” Mallory said. “I’ll look around outside.” But the woman wasn’t paying attention to her anymore, her ice-blue eyes focused on Billy’s corpse. Tears welled, collected on her lashes, and then spilled down her cheeks.
Mallory retrieved her light jacket and carried it with her outside, fishing through the interior pockets for a business card. The summer had been hot and dry and she would regret wearing it, but she had things in her jacket she liked to keep with her. Outside she searched the bushes and lawn carefully, using her phone’s flashlight to supplement the streetlights. She was unsure of what she was looking for, but that never stopped her.
The sun had just gone down, and the blacktop driveway was still warm. Mallory crouched and looked under the cars. A wet spot was under one of them. A leaking radiator?
She stood, looked inside at the chaos and tears, and then back outside. Something clicked, a dopamine-like hit to her brain as it all became clear.
“Okay, then,” she said, satisfied. Now all she had to do was wait. She took the well-worn business card and turned it over, reading the rude words on the back and then the official words on the front. She watched the waning light in the field at the edge of the base as she waited.
When the cops and ambulance made their loud, flashy arrival, she stood silently for a pat-down, and then handed the card to a detective. “You’ll want to call this man.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” the detective said. She was short, pink-skinned, and stocky, with her brown hair pulled into a messy bun at the nape of her neck. The badge she wore said morris. “Call your own damn lawyer if you think you’re going to be charged.” She hadn’t looked at the card yet.
“No, I can’t call that number. You have to. And I guarantee if you don’t, things will get complicated fast.” Mallory pushed the card at her again.
“Is that a threat?” the detective asked sharply, and then she looked at the card and her eyes widened. “North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation. This is Fort Bowser jurisdiction, or Wake County at most. What does the SBI have to do with anything?” She narrowed her eyes and looked at Mallory. “Who are you?”
“Turn the card over,” Mallory instructed. Morris did so and read the words aloud: “call right fucking now—d draughn.”
“They won’t have interest in your case,” Mallory said. “They just have interest in me.”
“You’re part of the case; you’re a suspect,” Morris said, handing the card back to her. She followed the other officers inside.
An officer remained inside one of the cars, talking on a radio with his eyes on Mallory.
“I tried,” she said to the officer, who looked startled. “Back me up when he gets here. I tried.”
Without waiting for an answer, she dialed the number on the card.
“This had better be an ass-dial,” a voice on the other end snarled.
“It’s not. I tried to get the detective to call you, but she ignored me.”
“How many dead?”
“One. Birthday party in Fort Bowser family housing. I can give the address if you want to send someone.”
The voice, rough from years of either yelling or drinking, swore loudly. Mallory pulled the phone away from her ear.
“You had to go to an army base? Are you nuts?” he yelled.
“Look, you always say to tell the cops to call you the next time it happened!” she said. “It’s the next time. Do you want the address, or do you want to leave this to the MPs and Wake County PD?”
SBI agent Donald Draughn arrived fifteen minutes later. He got out of his blue Honda Accord in sweatpants and a denim jacket. He was rude on his best days, but when she had to call him at home, his angst was at a level she had only seen in high school science teachers awaiting retirement.
“I hate seeing you,” he said without venom. He sounded tired. “I really do. How many is this?”
He knew how many it was, or thought he did. Mallory got to her feet. “Who’s counting? And don’t be so cranky, Agent. I figured you’d be glad I’ve moved closer to Raleigh. Remember when I was in Charlotte? That was a really long drive for you.”
“You’re proud that you’ve shortened my commute to your murders?” he asked flatly.
“They’re my murders now? All right,” she said, crossing her arms. “Here are the details. I’m here with a neighbor. You’ll want to detain her, by the way. She’s an accessory. The murder weapon is under that red car, but you won’t find it because it’s melted.”
“You know who an accessory was, and the murder weapon, but not who the actual murderer was?” he asked, getting on his knees to look under the car.
“Stay with me,” she instructed. “I got here about an hour ago. I knew one party guest—who’s probably your main suspect, by the way, although he didn’t do it—and we talked for a few minutes. The hostess started a game and turned the lights out. I went to the kitchen with my neighbor, and that’s when the birthday boy got stabbed, fell against the guy I know, and bled to death. The murderer threw the ice knife out the door, where I’m guessing it shattered and melted. Then my friend ran before anyone could stop him.”
The agent peered up from his vantage point on the ground. “Ice knife? Seriously? How do you figure that?”
“We go through this every damn time! I don’t know; it’s a gut feeling. But when everyone else was drinking beer, my neighbor had a giant foam cup with her all night, but liquid never went up the straw. When the murder was happening, she was with me, with a beer. She’d left the cup in the living room. You’ll find it next to the easy chair. When you search the house and the people inside, you won’t find a knife. When you test the driveway, you will find blood from the murder victim where that damp spot is. Possibly also blood from the guy I know. I don’t know if he got cut or not. Is that enough detail for you?”
“Ice knives are hard to wield,” he said. “Slippery.”
“You’ll probably find some gloves somewhere inside, then,” Mallory said.
Agent Draughn looked around the street and across the field, which had the base fence on the other side. “It’s a small base. Shouldn’t be too hard to find that guy who ran.”
“Yeah . . . this is the part you’re really going to hate,” Mallory said, wincing. She had been trying to figure out how to drop this bit of information, and she still hadn’t come up with a good opener, so she just told him, “You won’t find him. He’s been abducted by aliens.”