CHAPTER SIXTEEN

 

It took Shy the better part of the day to round up all the missing bots. With Wallis back at work tending to the animals and basic farm maintenance, she was able to haul the truckload of machines back to her workshop for a more thorough inspection.

Just as before, there were no outer signs of tampering and the bots displayed no failure messages on her smartwatch panel. She couldn’t find any obvious damage on any of them, nor was it any specific model. Harvesters, weeders, egg gatherers, and maintenance drones had all fallen silent to the mystery bug with no discernable cause. They had all simply stopped working.

Shy leaned back on her stool and rubbed her eyes, rolling her neck one way and then the other. She had expected to have more bot troubles during the storm, and it seemed strange to her that they would work without trouble until the storm cell had passed through the valley only to have a record number of bots all fail at the same time immediately after. The last time she had had to go find an unresponsive bot was the morning Thisbe had arrived. As though she were some sort of lucky charm, they had worked flawlessly until the day Thisbe left the ranch.

Shy smirked; no doubt Wallis would have pointed to this fact as proof positive that Thisbe couldn’t possibly be working against Shy’s interests. Maybe they would be right about that.

Unbidden, her mind flashed to thoughts of Thisbe. What was she doing right now? What would she be doing if she were there on Starfall? She’d have baked an apple cake by now, at the very least. Possibly some sort of walnut bread to toast and spread with goat cheese.

She smiled, then scowled and pushed the thoughts away. Thisbe Vandergoss was a liar. There was nothing more to say about it. And yet… could there be something to what Wallis had said? Was Thisbe simply running from her parents?

Shy worked through her memory of the day Thisbe had arrived. The Earthsider couldn’t have known about the severity of the storm beforehand, when even the local weather services had been surprised. She had no way of knowing in advance that she would be trapped on Starfall Ranch for the better part of the week with a strange woman. Shy had to wonder what she would have done, had she been in the same unexpected circumstance with a total stranger.

Absent-mindedly, she connected a scarecrow droid to her SDR transmission analyzer and powered it back up. As the analyzer ran tests to spot any abnormalities in radio transmissions between the bot and her command hub, Shy’s thoughts drifted back to that first day.

Something nagged at the back of her mind, but she couldn’t quite place her finger on it. She couldn’t stop picturing Thisbe, piteously clutching that seed catalog as the first drops of rain plinked against the porch awning. She could smell that ozone-charged air and the scent of raindrops hitting the sun-dried grass. But before that…

Gransel Haver. It had been chilly enough that morning to need a jacket—she remembered with ridiculous detail how cold and lost Thisbe looked in an outfit clearly intended for warmer climes—yet Gran had been sweating through his linen shirt.

He had seemed nervous, too. Far more nervous than the brash mining scion ever had acted around her before. And what was he doing lurking around the ranch so close to dawn?

It would have taken him at least a couple of hours to drive from his place to hers, and that was not counting the time it would have taken him to wake up, shower, breakfast, and so on. Not to mention, Gran never passed up an opportunity to turn any meeting into a dinner or lunch date. Not until the morning she came back from checking on a failed bot alert to find him skulking around her front porch.

Shy tried to picture that meeting. Did he have dirt on his shoes, or were they clean? She couldn’t remember. Was there an apple leaf stuck to the back of his jacket, or was that just her paranoid imagination filling in the gaps? Had she heard any vehicles passing close to the property? Had she really left the front gate open and unlocked the night before?

She had grown lax about locking it of late, that much was true. Banidavale was low on crime and her ranch was the furthest property outside of town. She’d barely ever had trouble with furry four-legged predators getting into her chicken coops, let alone any would-be burglars. It would have been easy for Gran to slip onto the property unnoticed in the hours before dawn.

The analyzer beeped loudly, drawing Shy’s attention away from her theorizing. The readout was all wonky, however. A crease formed between her brows as she tried to make sense of the data. The scarecrow was receiving and transmitting, but it was picking up a signal that her control module hadn’t noticed. Someone was using a stealth frequency to bypass her commands and render her bots useless.

“That motherless son of a douchepile!”

She grabbed a remote transmission-seeking device off the bench and sprinted for her truck. Whatever was being used to sabotage her farm, it couldn’t be far. And it explained why everything had worked fine during the storm: the low-wave frequency had been disrupted, just like the satellite networks. The temporary reprieve had allowed her own, stable and powerful localized signal, to reach the bot network unimpeded only until the storm had passed.

It had to have been Gran, then. How could she have been so stupid, so trusting to think he had come all the way out to the ranch simply to make her an offer he had to have known she would refuse outright? An offer she’d already refused multiple times before? Why hadn’t she stopped to think about why he would so obviously waste his time like that, at such an unlikely hour of the day, no less?

He hadn’t been drenched in sweat that morning because he was just naturally gross (though he definitely was also that), he had been sweating because he’d just come back from intentionally breaking her livelihood!

“I’m going to use the shit-licker’s motherfucking balls to decorate my pickup,” Shy seethed as her truck skidded around on the gravel road and she drove as fast as she dared, following the signal to its source.

She found the transmitter hidden in a thicket of overgrown blackberry brambles out back near the compost heaps. It was a lonely, overlooked part of the ranch, ideal for hiding small transmitters that you never wanted anyone to find again Shy still felt like the world’s biggest idiot for not thinking to check sooner. She stared at the softly blinking device, snug in her palm, and shook her head in self-disgust.

“If this had brought down Starfall Ranch, I would have deserved to lose the place,” she said aloud to herself.

But she hadn’t lost the ranch, and there was still time to salvage the damage that had been done. Tempting as it was to simply smash the transmitter against a rock and be done with it, Shy carefully switched it off and locked it in the glove box of her truck. She’d need it as evidence if she was going to have a hope of getting any sort of justice for the saboteur.

✽✽✽

Back home at the farmhouse, Shy checked the security footage from the morning Gran had made his unexpected visit. She sped up the recording until she saw a dark blur at the edge of the camera and slowed it down. There!

The figure’s face was obscured in the grey light of pre-dawn, but the physique and the suit matched. It was Gran, no doubt about it. She checked the timestamp as she watched him make his way on foot to the brambles, activate the device, and throw it in. the bushes. It was twenty minutes before she had received the notification that morning that a bot had gone offline.

“Got you, you sneaky little fucker,” she crowed with great satisfaction.

Shy made a copy of the security clip and saved it to her local cloud storage just as the house lights came on. Seven o’clock in the evening. She looked up, startled, at the dark autumn sky outside the window and frowned. She hadn’t stopped for a break all day and Wallis didn’t stop in to say good-bye before they left for the night.

Shy left her office and went back downstairs to the kitchen, checking to be sure. Wallis was long gone, but they had left Thisbe’s belongings by the kitchen table, along with a note. Shy picked it up, already anticipating what it would say.

 

Bitch, go talk to her! You know she’s not here to buy out your land! She’s hot, you’re hot, and you are soooo weirdly cute together in this video! If you do not go and get your woman I swear on the pussy-pink rings of Bel that I quit! Love you boss, good luck! xx –Wallis

 

Shy pocketed the note with a wry smile and grabbed Thisbe’s bag. Maybe it wouldn’t be the absolute worst thing to see her again. She still wasn’t one hundred percent certain that Thisbe hadn’t been in on the sabotage from the start, but it was looking increasingly unlikely that that was the case.

A sharp pang of bitter memories hit Shy’s heart. For a moment, she could remember a time when she didn’t view everyone with suspicion. When she could meet a gorgeous woman by chance and not automatically see a monster lurking beneath beautiful skin. She was heartsick for her own innocence lost, and for how she lost it.

But then again, maybe it was time to at least try. The people who hurt her were a galaxy away, and Thisbe…

“I miss her,” Shy said aloud, wonderingly. It had been a long, long time since she had missed someone with her whole heart.

What’s more, the entire ranch seemed different without her. Less colorful, less like home. Certainly less delicious. Shy slipped into her jacket and grabbed her truck keys once again. She had solved the mystery of who was behind the sabotage and work was done for the evening. She might as well head back into town and drop off Thisbe’s things while she was there. And who knew? Maybe they could grab a bite to eat and talk things over.

Shy pulled out onto the lonely country highway with a hopeful song in her heart and a jangly love song on the radio.

✽✽✽

Hotel Moonflower sat across the street from the best restaurant in town, a trendy farm-to-table “lunar cuisine” restaurant called Ivy Crown that boasted romantically lit cozy booths and a bar that was always filled with the local movers and shakers of the valley (alongside a lot of tourists).

Shy parked her truck nearby, already self-conscious of her own humble appearance compared to the couple she saw leaving the restaurant. She took a deep breath to steady her nerves. Thisbe had seen her in her most intimate element already, she reasoned, and the woman had still wanted to go out with her. She had still wanted to dance in Shy’s lap in front of everyone. Shy regretted turning that offer down just a little bit.

Thisbe wasn’t going to care if Shy didn’t show up dressed like a model for dinner. Hell, she didn’t even know if Thisbe would agree to dinner in the first place. Or maybe she had already eaten—it was quite late. Or maybe…

Shy caught a glimpse of a familiar face on the other side of Ivy Crown’s large bay windows and did a double take. She stood transfixed in the golden pool of light from the restaurant and felt her heart grow colder with each passing second.

No fucking way.

Thisbe (looking extremely fine in a halter-neck little black dress) was sipping wine and laughing over the cheese course with her dining companion… Gransel Haver himself. From where Shy stood, it looked like they were having the time of their lives together. Thisbe was practically glowing.

Shy gripped the handle of Thisbe’s suitcase so hard her knuckles turned white. She stormed up the steps of the restaurant and pushed past the bewildered host at the front desk who tried in vain to ask her if she had a reservation for the evening.

Well aware of the scene she was making, Shy marched past the other diners until she stood, quivering and red-faced with indignant rage and a heart twice-broken, in front of Thisbe and Gran. Both of them at least had the decency to look shocked and embarrassed.

“Shy!” Thisbe’s eyes were wide. Was that panic that Shy saw? Guilt? She decided it didn’t matter.

“Ah, Shiloh! What a pleasant surprise,” Gran stammered. “Are you eating alone? Let’s see if we can get a third seat for our table.”

“Both of you, shut it,” Shy snapped. “I can’t believe I fell for your act twice, Thisbe! Do you know what I’m even doing in town right now? I came here to find you, to see if you wanted to join me for a late meal at this very restaurant. To see if we could maybe smooth things over and sort out what happened. And yeah, it’s really late, so the chances of you having not eaten already were pretty slim and that’s on me. But to find you here with him? The town jagoff?”

She jabbed a finger in Gran’s direction and heard several stifled giggles from nearby tables.

“Shiloh, you are making a spectacle out of yourself,” Gran hissed. “Are you on something?”

“You don’t want to engage with me right now, Haver! I’ve got some pretty interesting security footage from the ranch that would make for a good public spectacle, though. And I assure you that you and I will have a chat about that footage soon enough.”

Gran went pale at that and swallowed hard but doubled down on his bluster.

“Has anyone called the authorities yet?” He asked the now-enthralled restaurant. “Can someone do so? Ms. Kerridan is clearly suffering some kind of stress-induced—”

“Oh fuck you, Gran, and fuck your condescending shield of civility!” Shy turned back to Thisbe. “Here. Here’s all your goddamned shit.”

She hauled Thisbe’s suitcase up off the ground and tossed it unceremoniously on the table, directly into the cheeseboard. The impact upset a wine glass, which crashed to the ground and had the effect of waking the restaurant up from the spell of drama Shy had cast. Startled exclamations and murmurs spread through the room. Shy felt two burly pairs of arms pulling her towards the exit.

“That’s enough, Shy, get out of here.” The host glared daggers at her as a cleaning droid whirred past to sweep the shards of glass off the floor.

“I was on my fucking way out anyway. Have a nice life, Thisbe. I hope you whatever you’re getting out of this is worth… that.” Shy gestured to Gran, who wore an expression as though he had swallowed some of those glass shards, then stormed back out to the street without another word.

Shy walked past her truck and kept on walking. She wasn’t in the mood to drive. She needed to move her body, to physically feel her heart pumping, feel her skin heat in response to the exertion.

With each step, however, she felt incrementally more like a complete asshole. She had been working on a supplier contract with Ivy Crown before the troubles on the ranch started up. After the scene she just caused, she couldn’t imagine that was still even a remote possibility. And for what? To cry angrily at Thisbe? To tell Gran to fuck off? That had felt good, at least.

“Why am I like this?” Shy asked the stars overhead.