Chapter 13

A photo on my chest, a bottle of sleeping pills on my crotch, and a mean ache in my cortex were the friends that greeted me in the morning. They weren’t the best companions could hope for, admittedly, but they were nothing if not reliable. I shucked the bottle away and let the photo slip to the floor. I dug my thumbs into the divots of my temples and mumbled to myself nothing in particular—I just wanted to grumble at something. It was times like this that I regretted not stocking any liquor in the pantry.

I cracked open the bedroom door and peeked out the hall and to the kitchen. Basil was sitting on the table and filling his mouth with a carton of eggs as if they were about to expire. I could hear him purr as he crunched down on his mouthfuls. I crept out but froze when he saw me. He waved and chirped.

“Good morning, Ly-lee!” he called out.

I waited, expecting him rage out and argue something, but he just smiled and went back to his eggs. “Morning Basil,” I finally said. “You look good today. Everything’s all right?”

“Oh sure! Everything’s fine. Nice and fine. It’s a good day and I have a bunch of good eggs and no one else to steal them away from me. It’s perfect.”

“Ah, that’s good.”

No one else to steal them away from me? I glanced around the kitchen. Nothing out of the ordinary. I went to the living room and found everything undisturbed since last night. I thumped the couch cushions and looked behind it, but nothing jumped out in surprise. I rushed back to the kitchen.

“Basil, where’s Tia?”

“What do mean?”

“I mean I can’t find her anywhere. Where is she?”

He stuffed in a couple more eggs and said, with a packed mouth, “Well of course she isn’t here. She ran away last night, remember? Isn’t it great? Now I can eat breakfast without her taking it away from me.”

Great? The only thing that was great was the bile crawling up to my throat. Basil yelped when I grabbed his tail.

“We have to go find her, Basil. We have to find her and get her back!”

He pulled his tail out of my hand and shook his head. “Why? She obviously didn’t want to be here, so why should we go find and bring her back?”

“Because something might have happened to her! Didn’t you say that she’d be back in a few hours last night? Maybe she’s out there, hurt or injured or worse. We can’t just ignore it and leave her out there by herself!”

“Ly-lee, you know what your problem is? Sometimes you worry about others too much,” he said, patting my arm with his tail. “Tia never wants to admit when she’s wrong, especially with me. Always thinking she’s so smart and so right and knowing what ascorbic acid is and stuff. I bet she’s at Summit right now, trying to pretend she really lives there or something. She’s fine, trust me.”

“Ah… you think so?”

“Sure do. I know her. We’ll find her there, she’ll figure out how wrong she is, and then we can put this whole dumb thing behind us.”

“Okay,” I said plaintively. Sigh. He was probably right; it’s not like there was anywhere else she could have gone. Let’s not get worked up over nothing, Lyle.

I waited for him to finish his eggs. He dumped the last few from the carton into his mouth, and after he gulped down the final bits, he hopped off the table and grasped my hand.

“Well, let’s go to now,” he said. “It’s a good day ahead!”

He hummed and led to the station, pausing occasionally to skip over a pothole or a puddle. Leashed to him, I paced behind in quiet obedience. We saw the hot dog vendor, still sleeping underneath the shade of his cart’s umbrella and snoring, when we arrived.

“I wonder why they make hot dogs.” Basil said as we went up the stairs. “They should do hot cats. That would be delicious.”

The crowded yielded and allowed us to cut in front of a line to the train. Basil took a seat near the windows and contented himself by humming and poking at the graphics that gushed on the windows. I noticed the passenger that had settled in front of us. He spent a good chunk of the trip trying to stuff the filling back into his seat, which was falling out from pair of gashes in the cushion. He eventually sighed and gave up. I tried not to make eye contact with him when we got off at Summit. At the edge of the station, Basil paused, placed a claw on my shoulder, and pointed into the courtyard.

“That’s where she is,” he said.

“You think so?”

“Yep. She’s in that tree. Come and I’ll show you.”

Right, the tree. Of course.

He took off ahead and ran to the maple. I didn’t make an effort to tail close to him because, though Basil himself may have been a chipper—if smug—bastard today, his sister gave no such guarantees. And frankly, I didn’t care for another front-row encore of yesterday’s performance. I gave the Basil a couple meters of berth as he whistled at the tree. The tree ignored him. After he pattered a dozen more calls with no answer, he sat down and frowned.

“Something wrong?” I called out.

He scratched his chin and said, “Hmm. Hold on.”

He rose his tail up to the side of the tree and, after a preparatory waggle, slammed it into the maple. A meaty thud crashed from the trunk, and pieces of bark exploded like shrapnel. I shielded my eyes from the blast, only for falling branches and leaves to conk my head. The injured maple shivered for a few seconds and reclaimed its arboreal dignity.

Basil clicked his tongue sharply. “She’s not up there.”

I brushed away the debris from my head and clothes. “I could see that. Where else could she be?”

“She’s probably inside now. I mean, she can’t just stay here all day. It’s time for work and everything.” He chirped and clapped his hands. “She’s in the labs. We’ll find here there, I’m sure!”

Right, in the labs. That’s where she must be.

He took off into the Spire and left me to trail behind him again. I milled around the lobby a bit and went to socialize with Aimee, but she only acknowledged me with a nod since she was already tending to guests. Undeterred, I went to the water fountain and admired the dancing water. I fished in my pocket for some change to toss in, but only pulled out lint. I balled it up and threw it into the pool. I considered talking to some random person in the lobby, but no one seemed to appreciate such solicitation.

Eventually, I ran out of things to do and wandered to SE-2. I saw Basil atop the holo platform scratching his head. He pried around the device, circling it, peeking underneath, and thumping it with his hands, and then sauntered up to my station. On his way up, he glanced behind every few steps to ensure he didn’t miss anything.

“She’s not here either,” he said to me.

I whispered, “Are you sure? Did you look everywhere here?”

“Yeah, she’s not in the labs,” he said, ignoring my motions imploring him to keep his voice down. “I don’t smell her either.”

“Basil, I think we might have a problem here.”

“What? There’s no problem. You know, I bet she’s in Sigma right now. She’s not using this lab because she knows we’d be here. That’s it! I’ll go check there right now.”

Right, in Sigma. That must be it.

Again, he ran off without me. I attempted to follow him, but an arm shot out and blocked me at the exit. Mark was staring accusingly at me.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Just going to Sigma, that’s all. Nothing important.”

“Eh? What business could you possibly have there?”

“We just have to find something. You know… a part. We need a part from there.”

He shook his head and grabbed my shoulders. “Nope, not going to happen. The bastards have guns there. You won’t make it past the first fuckin’ checkpoint.” He pulled me back to my station and plopped me onto the chair. “Besides, you got some damned work to do, Mr. I-Just-Took-A-One-Week-Vacation. Fucking management is getting spooked with Kanid, and you gotta start earning your keep just like the rest of us. I don’t want to have to fire a bunch of poor bastards again.”

Mark patted my shoulder and left when I nodded. Just as well, I suppose. Sigma, with its hardened security, would be capable of containing the twins should they decide to explode. This was something I could sit out and let the grunts tackle. I deserved to have a little vacation, goddammit.

But a gadfly rumored me that maybe Tia wasn’t at Sigma at all. What if she really wasn’t? No, that wasn’t right, where else could she be? I checked the doors periodically—they remained sealed. Basil hadn’t come back in failure, which meant he surely found his sister. They were probably reconciling or screaming at each other as we speak. After all, there’s no reason for him stay there for so long by himself. Ah, there was nothing to be worried about. Everything’s all right!

I played hooky and shaved a few minutes off for lunch so I could be first in the cafeteria. I slid three trays end-to-end across the counter-top and filled them with as much morsels that the attendants let me get away with. It was grab-bag day, where all the days’ cuisine melted together into an unnatural orgy of food. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday, all crammed into together on the trays, one right after another. The cashier shot a look at me like I was some fat-ass loon, but fuck him. I recruited a couple of other patrons to help carry the trays to a table, and then waited. My lunch-mates should be here any time now.

If there was one thing I learned I could rely on, it was the consistency of the Isian appetite—I could plan my crops around it. Sure enough, one of them arrived soon after. It was Basil, who was carrying a tablet. The device occupied his eyes, so he navigated through the crowd with flickering ears. He perked his attention from the tablet and scampered over when I called out to him. I tried to find the other twin but came up empty. Basil sat down on the table and started nosing into the food.

“Where’s Tia?” I asked him. “She’s coming to eat, right?”

“Nope. She’s not here.”

“What? I thought you said she’d be in Sigma. What were you doing all this time?”

“Well, Sigma’s big and has lots of places and stuff to hide in. I had to make sure. Turns out she wasn’t there at all. Oh, are those Wednesday Wieners? I love those!”

A familiar groaning boiled from my stomach. It started digesting before I had even swallowed any food.

“You didn’t find her at all? You mean to tell me she really ran away somewhere? Oh, God!”

Basil nudged into one of the trays with his snout to indulge his nose. He licked his lips and straightened up in his seat. Not seeming to understand—or care about—the circumstances, he scooped up a globule of food and let it slide into his mouth from above.

I straightened my voice louder. “Basil? Are you listening to me? Tia’s missing! She’s gone! What are we going to do now?”

He swallowed and shook his head. “I said that she wasn’t here. I didn’t say that I didn’t find her.”

“What?”

He turned his tablet and showed me a set of tabulated data that seemed familiar. “Well, after I spent a couple of hours trying to find her the regular way, I remembered your idea. I could just that tracking module in her collar, right? It’s so simple! All I had to do plug back into it and,” he pointed to an overhead map on the screen, “find her right there. See? There she is, no surprises. Isn’t technology great, Ly-lee?”

The red blip underneath his finger pulsed for attention atop the cryptic map. I couldn’t make out what it begged me to notice as the myriad of intersecting lines, entwining and choking the map like a spider’s web, did nothing but confuse me. Basil noticed my puzzlement and tapped excitedly on the display.

“She’s back home! She probably waited for us to leave before going back because she was too ashamed to see us. But she’s there right now, just waiting and probably thinking how wrong she is. Look at that. Her vitals seem kinda off too, maybe because she’s actually sick now from being out in the cold for so long. Ha! That’s funny.”

Right, she was back home, obviously! I sat back and sighed, in relief or exhaustion, I don’t know. Basil chirped and waved his soiled hands at me.

“Anyway, we probably shouldn’t keep her waiting and all that. Maybe we should go and see her?”

“Let’s finish the rest of the day, first. There’s lots of work to do after the vacation and all, and we have to be responsible.”

Responsible nothing—this was fucking Secondary. I just wanted to give Tia the maximum amount of time to cool off.

“Besides,” I said, “we have lunch to eat.”

“Oh sure! That’s right. Say, what’s this other tray for, anyway?”

“That was for Tia. But I guess it’s no one’s now.”

He thought about it a moment and then dumped the contents of Tia’s tray into his own. “Since she isn’t here,” he said, “I guess it’s my job to eat her food for her too. You know, to be responsible.”


The local grocer had received a new shipment of expired produce that day, which was a good fortune for us. I decided to make a stop there after work, mostly as a reward for Basil’s temperament. It must have been a treat for him to revel in that heap of weeks-old cantaloupe peaking over his head in fleshy wonder. He stared, dazed, with his mouth parted and tongue hanging and then turned to me with a look of longing. He dove straight into the pile after receiving a nod to go ahead. Next to the cantaloupes, I paid my attention to the honeydew selection. I prepared a mental list of excuses in case the staff badgered me about the Isian currently plunging his head into the cantaloupe pile, but all I encountered was a kid with a broom who glared at me for daring to come in and making him re-sweep the aisles. I palmed and massaged the honeydew melons and managed to find a couple of decent size that weren’t hemorrhaging nectar from sores. I bagged them and waited for Basil to find his ambrosia.

The honeydews were peace offerings, or to be more precise, insurance. One thing the Isians taught me about the fairer sex: the best way to a woman’s heart was through her stomach. A full Isian is a happy Isian, and a happy Isian is much less likely to hurt you. A sound premise.

Basil came out with a pair of fruit in his arms (likely the largest he could find). He continued cradling them on our way home, seeming like the happiest lizard in the world. This was the same bastard that almost killed my landlord just yesterday. Joy is infectious, but my inoculations from last night’s virulence still held strong.

“You like those cantaloupes?” I asked to test his mood.

“Sure, yes, sure! They’re great. Thanks a lot, Ly-lee!”

“You’re welcome. You know, I was a little worried that you’d still be angry.”

“Eh? Why would I be angry?”

“I was afraid that you might still be upset from the fight last night.”

“No, no, no, no.” He shook his head insistently. “That wasn’t a fight, that wasn’t a fight at all. We were arguing, not fighting. There wasn’t any blood or broken bones or anything like that. We didn’t fight.”

“Well, your argument then. I was just worried that there might be still some hurt feelings still.”

“The only one that should be hurt is Tia for being so stubborn all the time. We wouldn’t have to argue if she stop lying and going to see weird guys all the time. Hey, could you hold this for me, Ly-lee?”

He handed me one of his cantaloupes.

“You really hate Brian, don’t you?” I asked.

“I don’t hate him. I just hate him going near my sister. He has no business with her, that’s all.”

“Ah.”

He wrapped his tail around his body so he could grasp its tip with a free hand while he held the cantaloupe in the other. He rubbed the underside of the tail on the surface of the melon as if he were polishing a bowling ball. Every so often, he would pause to sniff the cantaloupe and then continue rubbing it.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m putting my scent on it.”

“From your tail?”

“Of course, silly. That’s where my scent glands are. There’s no other way to do it. This way, Tia knows it’s mine and won’t eat it.”

“She doesn’t even like cantaloupes.”

“She probably didn’t eat all day. If she’s hungry enough, she’ll eat it, and then she’ll say she didn’t know it was mine or something. Now, she can’t make that excuse.” He sniffed the melon. “Oh yeah, this one really smells like me now. Okay, can you give me the other one?”

We traded cantaloupes and he started odorizing the other fruit. I sniffed the one he gave me. It smelled faintly of ammonia. I wasn’t sure if it was Basil or the industrial pesticides. He retook the melon with a thanks and a chirp when he finished.

“So Basil,” I started, hesitating a bit before bringing forth the effort and asking, “do you guys argue a lot about her seeing other guys?”

“Kinda. Sometimes? Not a lot. But it sometimes happens. I think the last time was with Omy. That’s before we came to Summit, though.”

“Omy? Someone from Wyvern?”

“Yeah, one of my brothers. Well, used-to-be brother. I didn’t get along with him that well. Neither did Kappa. Or Zeta. Or Nu. Or… actually, he didn’t get along with any of us, really.”

“So she was interested in him and you guys fou—, I mean, argued?”

“Sorta, but the other way around. Omicron really liked Tia. Really, really liked. And she didn’t seem to mind it either. That’s the problem. She kept on lying about how she didn’t do anything, but still went with him all the time in secret. Omy then went around bragging about how he had Sis and how she was going to be his mate and all that. He always sang to her every day. I didn’t like it and I got into an argument with Tia about it. But she didn’t listen. She never does. You’ve seen it, right? How she just lies to me and you whenever she sees someone she thinks is pretty.”

“Yeah.”

“It got pretty bad. Ushi saw it and was going to separate all three of us into different parts of Wyvern if we didn’t make up with each other. Tia was going to, obviously, but Omy didn’t. I didn’t either. So then, he started following me around and calling me names and saying how she was going to mate with Tia and how I couldn’t anything about it. Oh, I was this close to beating him up. But my brothers stopped me from doing it. I always wish that I did, though.”

“You did a good thing, Basil. You were being the bigger person. You settle your differences with words, no violence.”

“Yeah, that’s what everyone says. What they don’t tell you is that words don’t always make you feel any better. So I just had to try to ignore him for weeks while he kept on picking on me. Tia didn’t do anything to stop him. Maybe she never knew, I never told her about it.”

“What happened between them?”

“Well, I guess he got bored with Tia and tried to go after Kidna. After that, we never saw him again.”

“What happened?”

He shrugged. “Dunno. No one ever talks about it.”

Near the entrance to the apartments, in the distance and just below the landlord’s balcony of terror, a pair was in the middle of what seemed like a heated argument. I groaned when I saw the sight, awash with a feeling of dread, and the familiar blaring of my manager from halfway across the block proved my intuition correct. He drilled onto a newbie I wasn’t familiar with. The poor sap leaned back into the railings with nowhere else to go as the manager spat and screamed at him. The guy saw me and looked on with an eyes-wide S.O.S., but all I could do was mouth a silent, “Sorry buddy.” Not caring to witness the rest of the hazing, I tried to slip into the building unnoticed, but something grabbed my arms and jerked me back out. My landlord stared me down like a hyena in the middle of bloodlust.

“You! This ain’t your fuckin’ business! Ya wanna get your skull broke in, is that it?”

I was about to blurt out a random item from my long list of excuses, but then his eyes popped open and he jerked backwards until his girth slammed against the railing alongside the newbie. With the manager shaken off his perch, the other tenant took advantage of the opening and ran inside. I brushed off my arm and waited, conditioned to expect another of his outbursts, but he just shuddered and stared off to my side. I glanced down and noticed Basil, who cocked his head in curiosity. He chirped at the manager.

“Hi!” he said.

The manager shrieked and smashed through the doors, which squeaked and swayed but refused to close shut again. Basil gave me questioning look and asked, “What’s with him? Did I say something wrong?”

“That’s just his way of saying hello. He’s weird like that, so don’t worry about it too much.”

The closer we got to my apartment room, the further Basil’s tongue hung out from his mouth, streaming out a growing river of saliva. By the time we came our room, he had the melons pressed up to the sides of his open muzzle so he could scrape his teeth at the rind, the closest he could get short of eating the thing. Once inside, he settled on the couch and hugged his melons like he was making out with a lover. I settled the bag of honeydew on the coffee table and called out for Tia. No reply came, so I called out again. Nothing. Curious.

I looked at Basil for help, but he didn’t seem any more informed. I went through the apartment, the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom, and rummaged underneath every nook and cranny I can remember, all the while calling out her name. I came out with nothing except confusion. Back in the living room, Basil was staring out the window with his melons.

“I thought you said she was home,” I said. “I looked everywhere but can’t find her.”

He clacked his teeth together and mumbled, “I could’ve have sworn she was. Hmm?” He turned around and held his melons out for me to take. “Ly-lee, could you hold on to these for me for a little bit?”

“What’s going on?”

He crawled outside after opening the window and poked his head back in to say, “I’m sure she’s around here, and I’m going to try to find her. The tracking beacon doesn’t lie. Wait here, be back soon.” He shut the window and rattled down the fire escape.

I united Basil’s cantaloupes with the honeydews and slouched onto the couch. Waiting was easy enough, I supposed. Surely, the tracker wouldn’t lie. It couldn’t lie. If you can’t trust technology that Uncle Sam overpays for, then what can you? All there was to do was wait for Basil to hunt down his prodigal sibling, and this whole chapter of life would end, perhaps with a fancy one-liner from Twain or Wilde. Maybe sometime along, for the abridged version, we can just condense the whole thing into a footnote. No one ever reads those things.

Right, just wait for it. She’s just a silly Isian lizard indulging in damned silliness. Hormones are a goddamned thing—I know, been there, done that. But you grow out of it, and we were all adults here, apes and reptiles and all. After this, no more wingless Indonesian dragons, no more zookeepers, and certainly no more inappropriate cross-species infatuations. I took the honeydew melons and nestled them in my lap so they wouldn’t bruised sitting on the table. I dozed off.

Maybe half an hour later, the grating of the windows roused me back up. An Isian was climbing through the window, and, reflexively, I stood up and called out, “Tia?” The lizard turned and looked at me with a perturbed face. Not her.

“So you found her, right?” I asked Basil.

He held up a black band looped around one of his talons.

“I found it around a cat on the roof,” he said. “It didn’t taste very good.”

I sat, trying to process his words. The meaning was evident, but I refused to accept the conclusion. I hugged melons, and for the life of me, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Basil, in a calm that flouted against his Isian nature, finally said:

“Ly-lee, I think we have a problem.”