Moira #24: A Sliver of Trust (Patreon)

“We’re not open for walk-ins right now, ma’am. Could you come back in maybe a half-hour?”

Parker pauses with her hand on the salon’s door handle, eyeing the rabbit. She hadn’t realized the woman was the receptionist, given that she’s standing outside. And well back from the building. She’s standing in a group of three others, one woman and two men, all of them giving Parker nervous looks.

“I’m not here for an appointment. I’m here to speak to one of your customers, who should be finishing up,” she glances at her watch, “at least a half-hour ago.”

The rabbit swallows, eyes darting to the salon’s windows and back to Parker’s face. “We only have one customer right now and we, uh, we close the shop for her.”

“You really want to give that woman a lot of space,” a coyote who looks like he stepped off a fashion magazine’s cover says, shivering melodramatically. The receptionist shoots him a panicked glare.

Parker sighs heavily. “Let’s presume I’ve signed all the necessary waivers. Open the door, please.” She waves a hand.

The receptionist blinks, then walks over to the vixen robotically, unlocking the front door. The stylists gape.

“Thank you.” Parker releases the bunny from the momentary spell and opens the door.

Blinking rapidly again, the receptionist shakes her head and bolts back to the relative safety of the stylists, staring at Parker accusingly. “You’re…you’re like her!”

Parker gives her a level look. “I assure you, I am not.” She heads inside without waiting for a response.

Inside, the salon is empty, except for two people. Agent One sits in a chair, holding a hand mirror in front of her face, moving it from side to side critically. A cougar stylist stands behind her, stock still. He gives Parker an alarmed look.

The honey badger keeps moving the mirror. “How do you think it looks?”

“Magnificent,” Parker says. “Your next victims will surely appreciate how wonderful it is they’re dying under the paws of someone with such lovely fur.”

Agent One looks up at her at that and pouts, then stands up, handing the mirror back to the cougar and beaming at him. “Thank you, dear. See you in six weeks.” She gives him a kiss on the cheek, making him flinch visibly, and heads toward the front door.

Parker watches her, then says sotto voce, “Did she forget to tip you?”

“She didn’t hurt me this time,” the cougar whispers back, voice strained.

Parker pulls a hundred dollar bill out of her purse, thrusting it at him and stalking after the honey badger.

“What was so important you came after me here?” Agent One says as she catches up.

“You were supposed to meet with me this morning.” Parker glances at the rest of the staff, shooting the two women fearful glances as they scurry back inside.

“Oh.” The ratel shrugs, flashing an unapologetic grin. “ I must have missed that on the calendar.”

“I’m glad it’s nothing so petty as you avoiding my meetings because you don’t like being chastised.”

“Let me guess.” Agent one clasps her hands together. “You don’t approve of the way I sealed off Test Site Three.”

“I can think of very few less discreet approaches to ‘sealing off’ an area than becoming several kilometers high and stomping it hard enough to register a six on the earthquake magnitude scale.”

“I wasn’t asked to be discreet, I was asked to be effective.” She waves a hand dismissively. “That place is—was—absolute middle of nowhere, and I did it at night under a new moon. I’d have been all but invisible to higher-flying planes, and there was almost no traffic on the road.”

“‘Almost’ is not ‘none.’”

“It was two cars, a minivan, and one bus.” Agent One tilts her muzzle up toward Parker, leaning in. “I don’t have any wheels stuck in my teeth, do I? I try to floss, but you know how it is.”

Parker grimaces.

“Oh, take the mast out of your ass, Captain.” Agent One grins widely, and rests a fiercely clawed hand on Parker’s shoulder. “I sometimes think you forget you’re not my boss, no matter how much you expect me to act like you are.”

“I’m quite aware you don’t technically report to me, Agent One.” Parker’s growl makes the pseudonym sound like an epithet. “As I’m sure you’re quite aware that in practice, you tend to make things worse for us all when you choose to ignore my recommendations.”

“Ah, so now we’re finally coming to your point.” The ratel tilts her head expectantly.

“What instructions have you been given about the new goddesses?”

“If you don’t know, maybe I’m not supposed to tell you.”

Parker narrows her eyes.

Agent One raises her hands in mock surrender. “Look, all I’m doing is playing spy, since they’re clearly gathering information on us. I have my sources, they have theirs. And when I find their sources, I hope they’ll be a moment’s fun.” She mashes a foot down and giggles. “Anyway, I’m supposed to report back if they start showing off divine power more publicly again.”

“I trust you’re not to stop them if they do that.”

She shrugs. “I wasn’t asked to, but I wasn’t asked not to, either. And you’d be first in line to remind me I’m not someone you call in on a stealth mission if you’re not expecting trouble. Besides, aren’t you the one who should be telling me what I should be prepared for? What I’ve heard about them seems pretty amateur. An uncontrolled orgy or two and a mouse-monster. But if Miss Moira is really the original goddess of war, and gets her mojo back…” Agent One bounces in place.

“She could kill you more easily than I could, and I assure you I could kill you easily.”

“Wouldn’t that be fun to test.” The ratel looks Parker up and down. From her grin, it’s hard to tell if she’s judging the vixen as an opponent or imagining her naked. “But the others?” She licks her lips. “I’ve always imagined gods taste like Cherry Pop Rocks.”

Parker’s voice gets sharper. “Let Ms. Lindsay and I handle Moira and her friends without interfering, unless we explicitly tell you otherwise. Mr. Nunwick’s very close to completing his plans, and once they’re in motion, it won’t matter what Moira comes up with.”

“Still don’t work for you,” Agent One says in a sing-song voice. “But I promised Darren that I’ll give your little lamb chop all the chances in the world, so I’ll promise you that, too.”

“Splendid.” Parker grunts, shaking her head. “As much trouble as these new goddesses have already caused, you’re more an embodiment of everything we stand against than any of them.”

Agent One’s smirk drops. She stops walking, making Parker stop, too. “You know how you make a light look as bright as it can be, Lily?” She leans forward. “You set it against the darkest dark you can find.”

Parker purses her lips, remaining silent.

After a moment, Agent One straightens up, her unsettlingly cheerful grin returning. “Now. It’s past lunchtime, and I’m starving. I think I’m in the mood for some tacos.” Her grin widens to fully expose her massive fangs. “Or the whole taquería.” Cackling, she snaps her fingers and disappears in a puff of luridly multicolor smoke.

Deepening her scowl, Parker mutters a curse under her breath and strides back toward the Celestial Ventures office.

• • •

“At risk of repeating myself, the full details are on a need-to-know basis, Ms. Lindsay.” Ironheart looks ever-so-slightly irritated, possibly the only other emotion besides cool disdain that Diana’s ever seen on the lioness’s face. She brings the golf cart to an abrupt stop in front of what Nunwick calls the “on-estate office,” a three-story building a mile from the country club with its own sweeping panoramic view of a valley below. There’s more construction of some kind going on at the valley’s floor. Whatever they’re building, it’s big. Nobody will give her a straight answer as to what it is, something she’s starting to get frustratingly used to.

“Something in that town was so incredible that you altered the world’s collective memory to keep people from finding it. When Moira and her new gods found it anyway, you had all physical evidence of it literally cratered, even though you’d obviously considered it valuable enough to preserve beforehand.” Diana meets the lioness’s eyes defiantly, no small trick given that they’re walking side by side. “So at risk of repeating myself, I have no chance at all of persuading them to give you even a sliver of trust if you won’t give me one.”

“I’m sure you appreciate that we’ve given you far more than a mere sliver of trust already.” They walk inside, heading toward Diana’s office. Temporary office, she reminds herself. Even though they assigned her a personal secretary, a petite white-furred wolf girl nodding to both of them as they walk past. Even with her name engraved onto a small, tasteful sign on the door, bestowing her with the zero-meaning title “Advisory Consultant.”

It’s been three weeks since they gave her this office and a suite at the estate’s private on-grounds resort, and she’s still frequently struck by how posh it all is, the club, the hotel, even the office. She can’t say it isn’t nice, but she’s more sure than ever it’s not her kind of nice. Neither is Parker’s, but she’d have preferred a modern, austere office like the vixen’s. Ironic that a former pirate queen’s aesthetic is so restrained compared to her boss’s.

“I do.” Diana holds the office door open for Ironheart, and then closes it behind her as she heads to the huge mahogany desk and sits behind it. Ironheart sits in a facing chair. “I appreciate that you want Moira and her new goddesses—including me—out of the way while you finish whatever huge project you’ve been working on for years, one that I can only guess is intended to break the mythological cycle.”

The lioness inclines her head in her characteristic neither-confirm-nor-deny acknowledgement.

“Moira has been betrayed by the old gods, exiled by them, and abandoned by them. Then you new gods left her in the dark until she started using her powers again and revealed herself as a potential threat.” She rests her hands on the desk and laces her fingers together, hoof nails clacking softly. “And now, after being the first goddess deified by her in millennia, I’m expected to go to her and say, ‘These new gods, who’ve come together to keep mortals from overthrowing the natural order, to make sure your old dream of rebellion stays extinguished? You need to trust them, too.’”

“You’re surely the best positioned among us to assuage Lady Moira’s trust issues.”

“Right here, right now, you’re the best positioned to assuage mine.”

Ironheart’s tail lashes, and she looks away. At length, she sighs. “Yes, the Black Oak test site was related to the Order’s original project of breaking the cycle. We believe this project will enable Mr. Nunwick to end the threat of the next turn once and for all, and we believe we’re very close. We keep details secret from mortals—even those who work with us—because they might cause a level of panic that, in the absolute worst case, would become difficult for us to control.”

Diana looks down at her hands. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but somehow that sounds even more sinister than I imagined. What happened to the people who lived in Black Oak? To the next ‘test site’?”

Ironheart doesn’t answer until the sheep fixes her gaze on the lioness, and the staring contest goes on for an uncomfortable length of time. This time she never looks away. “Sometimes sacrifices are necessary for the greater good, Ms. Lindsay. What we’ve learned from Black Oak should enable us to have far fewer…negative externalities in production.”

Diana’s the one who finally looks down. “And what do you expect me to say if—when—Moira asks what I know?”

The lioness stands, smoothing down her skirt. “I expect you to use your judgement. If telling the truth serves your purpose, tell the truth. You don’t fully trust us, and that’s likely to make your case for us stronger.”

“It doesn’t help my case that you and Mr. Nunwick so clearly see me as a means to an end, Ms. Ironheart.”

She walks to the office door, and looks back at the sheep with a raised brow. “Surely you see us the same way, Ms. Lindsay. After all, you came to us.” She closes the door behind her.

Diana stares straight ahead for a few seconds, then drops her head to the desk.

Sometimes sacrifices are necessary.

Rhiannon had been so dismayed, on that first trip to Briley’s farm, at realizing she wasn’t bothered by the thought there might have been someone in her old office building when she brought it down. But Diana had been through that in her first, what, two or three minutes of divinity, when she’d point-blank flattened someone under a hoof for insolence—and she’d barely had time to process what she’d done before people in the grocery store started dropping to their knees around her.

Are you horrified because you’re not horrified?

She’d told herself that moment of being cavalierly awful had shaped her into being more benevolent, more mindful, later. They’d all had their moments, and they’d all learned.

But it hadn’t helped any of her worshippers. It hadn’t helped William.

Taking a deep breath, she straightens up. All right, she doesn’t fully trust anyone at Celestial. Certainly not Ironheart or Nunwick, not even Parker, even if she’s somehow come to distrust the vixen the least. She has to assume Moira, Rhiannon, and Hazel won’t fully trust her; she can’t just ring them up and ask how much they know about Black Oak.

The real question, though, might be how much do they know that she doesn’t.

She starts to pick up her phone, then sets it down and walks out of her office to her secretary’s desk. “Daisy, I’d like you to help with a tiny project, just between us.”

The wolf looks up, wagging her tail once. “What’s that, Ms. Lindsay?”

“Remember last week ago when I asked you about the project Ms. Ironheart and Mr. Nunwick were working on in a town called Black Oak?” She sees the wolf’s ears immediately dip, but keeps speaking, holding up a hand. “I understand that they’re keeping details of that rather close and that you’re not privy to everything they have, but…” She lowers her voice, as if she were bringing the wolf in on a secret. “I can’t do what they’ve brought me on board to do without just a little more information.”

Daisy swallows nervously. “Like what?”

“A list of test sites relating to that project. I need to know how many there were before, how many there are still to go, and where the next one in particular is.”

“I don’t think I can do that, ma’am.” Daisy shakes her head firmly, causing some of her coiffed hair to dislodge and flop in front of one eye. “That’s…very high level, like executive-only level. Even if I have that kind of access,” she looks apologetic, “I don’t think I can give it to you.”

The sheep touches a hand to her chest. “You know I’m supposed to have the highest level access. As a consultant, nothing should be off limits.” Nothing in her contract says that, but as far as she knows, Daisy hasn’t read that contract.

The wolf brushes back her hair, biting her lip. “I’m sure that’s true, Ms. Lindsay, but…” She looks around as if someone might be watching, and lowers her voice to a strained whisper. “That’s top level. Like, only for…top.”

Diana had quickly learned a pillar of Celestial corporate culture is tacitly denying that the people at the very top levels are literal gods. The majority of workers, even here on Nunwick’s estate, haven’t been told, and keep any suspicions to themselves. Those that do know quickly learn to never talk about it. She’s never heard anyone but other gods use the term. Daisy, though, has worked directly with Ironheart and Nunwick before, even though she seems to still be fully mortal. She has to know, even if she doesn’t want to say it.

So maybe it’s time to pull rank.

“Only for gods,” Diana says.

Daisy’s eyes widen. She nods, almost imperceptibly.

Diana tilts her head up, so she has to look down at the wolf as if from a great height. And then, for Daisy, the world disappears, leaving nothing but her and the goddess. The black sheep, divinely beautiful, divinely terrible, is looking down at her from a great height, the tiny wolf gaping at hooves taller than she is.

Crouching, Diana plucks the wolf up between two fingers, holding her in front of her muzzle. Daisy’s eyes are as wide as saucers now, tail tucked meekly between her legs.

Diana smiles, showing just the tips of teeth that could crush tanks like tinfoil. “Can we agree that I count, little one?” Without waiting for a response, she blows Daisy a kiss—

—and abruptly the world’s back to normal, Diana standing demurely in front of her secretary’s desk, hands folded. Daisy slips out of her office chair to her knees, staring shell-shocked up at the sheep.

“That list, please, Daisy?”

After taking a shuddering breath, the wolf climbs back into her seat and starts rapidly typing.

By the time Diana reaches her office, there’s an email waiting for her, with a short, cryptic spreadsheet attached to it—columns of dates, location codes, and site numbers. There’s only six rows.

She’s seen the location codes before on internal Celestial documents. Isn’t there a lookup tool on the company intranet? She clicks around until she finds it, then enters the first location code, test site zero, dated nearly two thousand years ago. The lookup tool shows her ocean, the north side of a relatively narrow intercontinental channel.

The next two locations, the first from a century ago and the second from just three years ago, are almost as puzzling, but at least they’re on land. She frowns. Are these towns that no longer exist? Did she have her memory of them wiped along with the rest of the world?

The fourth row, though, site three: that’s dated last month. And the location code is where she’s pretty sure Black Oak had been.

The next date, on the next-to-last row, is in the future, just two weeks away. Fresno, a city of about a hundred thousand, in her home state’s central valley. Hasn’t it been in the news recently? Yes, she remembers reading an article in the actual, printed newspaper she had delivered for a while at her mountain home. All about how it had become an orderly, crime-free paradise thanks to turning virtually all government functions over to private corporations. It had sounded suspiciously like Celestial’s work then; she can’t imagine more definitive confirmation than this. Surely they don’t expect that test to do…whatever the test in Black Oak did, though? Magically making the world forget about a tiny town in the middle of nowhere is one thing, but making it forget a city hundreds of millions of people have heard of seems like much more of a challenge.

The last row has a blank site number column and a date about a half a year from now—and its location is Nunwick’s estate.

Diana sighs, turning off the computer. She has no reason to think Moira and company have this information, but she thinks she’d better assume that they do. Which means they’re going to be at that next test, probably trying to stop it.

Which means she needs to be there. And she has two weeks to figure out whose side she’ll be on.