Mus Numena 9: Romantic Intrigue (Patreon)

Ted pulled his ringing phone out of his pocket. The caller ID read “Hammer Keller LLP.” He glanced at it, at Aurora, back at the phone. Swallowing, he answered. “Hello?”

A brusque woman’s voice responded. “Is this a Mr. Bishop?”

“Uh, yes?”

“Janet Hammer. You left a message with my office regarding insider information on Nanolab Science’s Dynamouse program?”

He rubbed his forehead, eying Aurora. “Did I. I mean, uh, that’s not exactly…is this covered by attorney-client privilege?”

“Technically, it’s covered by confidentiality, since I’m not your lawyer. But yes, anything you say remains confidential. It’s not exactly what?”

“Not exactly, uh, information. I’m with one.”

“With one what?”

“Mouse.”

“You have a Dynamouse in your possession.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. She asked me for help.”

“What did it do that you interpreted as asking for help?”

“Running up to me in the parking garage and saying ‘please help.’”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Are you saying Dynamouse Ultra models can speak, Mr. Bishop? That’s not a capability we’ve heard about.”

“We didn’t know, either, and it hasn’t gotten out yet. When it does, it’s going to be…” How had Dan put it? “There’s going to be a fountain of shit.”

“Yuck,” Aurora said.

“Uh huh.” She sounded depressingly skeptical. “Does Nanolab know you have the mouse, Mr. Bishop?”

“The police served me with a search warrant this morning looking for the mouse, so I’m guessing they suspect.”

“But you said you still have the mouse? You successfully hid it?”

“Uh. Well, she—Aurora, the mouse, I mean—kind of knocked the officers out, and we left them in my apartment. We’re, uh, on the run right now.”

“Christ on a fucking Harley.”

“Look, you represent one of those groups that protest outside Nanolab, right? PETA or the ASCPA or whatever?”

She sighed. “We’ve done work with PETA, yes.”

“If Aurora gets returned to Nanolab, they’re going to kill her. Legally, she’s their property, isn’t she?”

“She is.”

He set the phone down on the picnic table and hit the speaker button. “Say hello to your lawyer, Aurora.”

“Mr. Bishop—” Hammer began, clearly exasperated.

“Hello,” Aurora said.

Silence fell again for several seconds. “That’s the mouse…speaking.”

“Yes,” both Ted and Aurora said together.

More silence. “All right. Mr. Bishop, you understand that you’re going to have to surrender to the police, don’t you?”

“Can I trust them?”

“Shit, no. They’re cops. But unless your plan ends with you and your pet mouse living out the rest of your lives in a country with no extradition laws, you don’t have much in the way of alternatives.”

“I’m not a pet.” Aurora frowned. “I am bigger than Ted is.”

Ted lightly touched Aurora’s forearm, grinning, but spoke to the lawyer. “So you’re…taking my case?”

“I’m telling you what you need to do before I can take your case, Mr. Bishop.”

“I’m not going to surrender before I get a guarantee of safety for Aurora. She can’t be returned to Nanolab.”

Hammer sighed heavily. “I’ll make some calls, and I’ll get back in touch with you when I have further information. If you get arrested before that happens, you say nothing to the police other than demanding to call me immediately. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“Thank you,” Aurora said.

“You’re welcome,” Hammer replied, sounding discomfited. She hung up.

“Okay.” Ted put the phone away, and exhaled through pursed lips. “That’s progress, I guess.”

“What do we do now?”

“Try not to get arrested before the lawyer calls us back.” He resumed eating his sandwich. “So, we stay up here in the mountains. Probably keep heading east, assuming the roads are open. It’s early May, though, so that should be late enough in the spring.”

She tilted her head.

“You—oh. You’ve never seen snow. Of course. I think you’re in for a treat. We should be able to make the far side of the Sierras before sunset, even if we take some time for sightseeing.”

She flashed her mischievous smile again. “Aren’t you worried about anyone seeing me?”

“Terrified. But we’re at the end of the ski season and before the summer tourist season. As long as we don’t detour through Yosemite National Park, it’s going to be pretty open country.”

Aurora laughed. “You know I have no idea what you just said.”

“Yes, but I know you can look it all up with the power of your mind.” He finished the grinder and pulled up a map on his phone. “Okay, I think…hmm. It looks like 4 is closed past Bear Valley, so we’ll take 49 north to Jackson, then head across the mountains on 88 toward Lake Tahoe.”

“I don’t know what that means, either, but I trust you. I would love to see snow and more mountains.” The mouse still had about half of her sandwich left, but pushed it all into her mouth, tilted her head back, and swallowed the rest whole.

Ted stared.

“Hmm?” She licked her fingers clean.

“It’s…” Oh, the licking was distracting. “That’s…not…did you just unhinge your jaw?”

She shook her head. “No. I could, though.”

“That’s…something.” He wasn’t sure exactly what, but terrifying captured most of it. He didn’t think it captured all of it, but he also didn’t think he wanted to contemplate it too hard. Aurora scrambled his brain enough as it was.

Someone else had arrived at the park while they were there, a Hispanic family with two children. Three of them weren’t paying attention to Ted and Aurora, but the young girl, maybe five or six, stared at them—no, definitely at Aurora, not the boring white dude with her—wide-eyed.

“We should leave before they notice you’re a mouse. And nude.”

“Is being nude bad?” She followed him back to the car.

“It’s not something you’re supposed to do in public.”

“So that’s why you asked me to wear clothes.” She took a seat.

“Yep.” He pulled out of the parking lot, and headed back to State Road 49.

“I don’t think I like clothes. Why do humans wear them in public?” She touched his shoulder with a finger. “And at home, too. I have never seen you out of clothes.”

Oh, boy. “Well, there’s protection, first and foremost. We don’t have fur. But there’s also decoration, all sorts of other social functions. Clothes can be signifiers of your job or your class, can show off style, can add a sort of romantic intrigue.”

“Romantic intrigue.” She considered that, then laughed. “Clothes can make you want to see what someone looks like without them.”

“Well, yeah, they can.”

She flashed another impish grin. “Should I have been wearing clothes when we met?”

“I don’t think you wanted to create romantic intrigue between us.”

She laughed again. “No.” Aurora crossed her long legs, leaning the seat back a bit more, and looked out the window. “Not then.”

Ted chewed on his lip and stayed silent.

Aurora watched the road outside intently for a while, but as pretty as the country was, it didn’t vary much on this leg, and she drifted off to sleep. She didn’t wake up until they were through Jackson, and Ted stopped for gas in Pine Grove.

As he was pumping the gas, she got out, her “jumpsuit” shimmering into place around her. She didn’t make herself look any more humanlike, or any shorter than a star NBA player. Ted saw the clerk inside the store stare open-mouthed, and tried not to wince.

“We still have not seen snow,” she noted.

“No, but we’re not even at 3,000 feet elevation yet. As we get closer to Carson Pass, there’s going to be a lot.”

“What are the tall trees here?”

“Hmm.” He looked up at them. “These are pines. Probably Ponderosa pines. As we get higher, we’ll likely see some Giant Sequoias. Those get up past two hundred feet high.”

“Oh.” Her eyes widened, and she looked up past the Ponderosas, as if picturing that.

“You seem to like big things.” He finished pumping the gas and hung up the nozzle.

She kept looking up. “How do you think I would look, that big?”

“I…” He trailed off. Again, terrifying definitely captured part of the thought, but just part. There was more to it that, again, he absolutely did not want to think about right now.

Aurora lowered her gaze to look at him, tilting her head.

“You keep giving me a lot to imagine,” he muttered, then squeezed his eyes shut, feeling his heart skip. At least he hadn’t said fantasize. “Think. Think about. A lot to think about.” He took a deep breath and got back into the car.

Aurora got in, too. “So do you.”

He glanced over—and up—at her—curiously. There was something in her gaze he wasn’t sure how to read. Whatever it was, it didn’t help make his heart rate drop. Offering her a weak smile in return, he pulled back out onto the road.

It wasn’t until they got past Grizzly Flats that they first saw snow. It wasn’t on the road, yet, but at a scenic viewpoint facing east, snow-capped mountains lined the horizon. Aurora squealed, the least human sound she’d made in a day and somehow the most adorable. She rolled down the window. The wind rushing into the cabin had a cold bite to it that the picnic area in Sonora, just an hour and a half ago, had lacked, but he couldn’t tell her to roll it back up.

As they approached Carson Pass, the trees and grass on the sides of the road took on a dusting of snow—and the trees became junipers, aspens, and yes, giant sequoias. Aurora remained entranced. When they reached the crest, he pulled over, and they walked to the vista that overlooked Red Lake.

“This is…” She shook her head, eyes wide. “I don’t have the words yet.”

He nodded, looking around slowly. “I haven’t been here in years. It’s… I love the Sierras, and the North Coast ranges, too. I just don’t make the time.”

“I’m glad you like it, too. I’m sorry I’ve turned you into a fugitive, though.”

Ted gave her a lopsided grin. “Well, my life had needed some adventure. Even if this is more than I’d expected.” Her conversation was getting more…hmm. More what? More confident? More knowledgeable? Yes, to both. Even as a “mere” Dynamouse Max, had she been this intelligent and capable? So many questions.

She nodded, looking uncomfortable, and returned to taking in the panorama, breathing in deeply and slowly. He couldn’t help watch her chest rise and fall; it was, after all, right at his eye level. “I hope you’re not imagining being as tall as the mountains across the lake.”

Aurora laughed. “No, I wasn’t. I don’t know what that size would be good for. And as much as I’d like to try being bigger, I could only do it here by absorbing one of these beautiful trees, and I wouldn’t want to do that.” She waved a hand. “I suppose we could wait for another car to go past.”

He looked at her sharply.

She grinned down at him. “I’m teasing.”

“Good. No consuming innocent bystanders.” He grunted. “I wonder how many humans are going to seem innocent to Dynamice, though, the more you get to know us.”

“Our experience so far has been…mixed.”

“You’re probably being too kind.” He waited for her by the car until she was ready.

It was another fifteen minutes before the road met the junction to Lake Tahoe. Ted paused a moment there. “I’d love to show you Tahoe, but it’s going to be crowded.”

“I understand.”

Another few minutes of driving took them on into the tiny town of Markleeville, nestled among alpine trees. The air was cool, not cold, but snow still dusted the ground here and there. “Okay, it looks like our choice of hotels is that one right there.” He pulled into the front parking lot for the Creekside Lodge. “Hopefully they still have a room. They look pretty small. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like we have to go through the hotel to get to the rooms. Wait here, okay?”

She nodded.

Ted got out of the car and walked on into the lobby. It took about a minute for a clerk, a silver-haired woman who might as well have just stepped off the set of a made-for-TV western, to appear from somewhere and walk behind the front desk. “Afternoon. Do we have a reservation?”

“We don’t,” Ted said. “Do you have any rooms left with king beds?” He didn’t like king beds too much himself, but unless he convinced Aurora to return to a more standard human woman size—something she didn’t seem too keen on—the more space the better.

She looked at her computer screen, tapping on the keyboard lackadaisically every few seconds, then nodded. “How many nights?”

“Just one.”

“All right.” Tap. Tap. Tap. “That’s one forty-four a night. With taxes, one sixty-four and sixteen cents.”

“Okay.” He reached into his pocket for some of the crisp, stolen bills, trying not to wince, and counted out nine twenties.

“Huh.” She took the money and opened the register drawer. “Don’t see folks paying with cash too much these days.” She sounded approving. “How many keys do you need?”

“Just one.”

She slid a key—a real, physical key, not a card—across the counter to him, along with his change. “Pull around into the parking lot. The room’s all the way in the back.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

He headed back out to the car and drove around as indicated, getting a space right in front of the door to room 12. Perfect. “Okay, here we are.” He got out and got his hurriedly-packed suitcase out of the back.

Aurora got out with him, and watched him unlock the room door, following him inside.

The room wasn’t big, but it was pretty enough, with hardwood floors and a wooden plank wall behind the bed. He headed in, setting down the suitcase on the bed, and got halfway through unzipping it before he paused.

Bed. Singular.