Dark Mirror
This is a sequel to Chilli, which should be read first. There are some very important disclaimers at the bottom. This story is dedicated to my roommate, who requested it.
The sun was setting as the truck crunched into the snow-filled parking lot. A woman in a bright, new winter coat hopped out and looked around, her hands in her pockets. On the high ridge to the west of the research institute, the wind had scoured away the snow so that a brown crust of tundra poked through.
“It’s isolated,” the woman said to her driver, who had gotten out more slowly and was tugging on a quilted canvas jacket over a wool sweater.”
“Tomtor is just ten minutes away,” he replied shortly. He led her to the door and held it open for her. They passed the secretaries at the front desk, who were chatting over coffees and somewhat disconcerted by the woman’s sunny smile and wave.
“Dr. Obruchev asked to be told when you arrived,” the man said, opening the door to an office. “She’ll be here in a minute or two.”
Dr. Obruchev’s desk was piled with at least two laptop computers and multiple stacks of printed out journal articles, and the bookcases were full of standard genetics texts. There was no sign of photos, and indeed the only element in the room that didn’t scream academic was a shapeless pink dog’s bed in the corner. It was here that the woman’s eyes became transfixed as the door closed behind her, for the animal that hopped out of the bed and trotted over, wagging its tail, was no dog. It was tinier, with pointier features and thicker, softer fur: a fox, in fact, though in her urban upbringing the woman had never seen one. She knelt down, and it jumped into her arms, licking her face.
“Hello Susan! You and Tashi have met each other, I see.” The woman who entered wore jeans and a sweater, instead of a labcoat, but she was still clearly a scientist; there was something of the perpetual measuring stick in her gaze. “Sit down, if you like. He’s allowed on furniture if it’s on a human’s lap.”
Susan sat, and Tashi continued to nose in her pockets. “So, the new pets you’ve been developing are foxes?”
“Not exactly,” Dr. Obruchev said. “We’re interested in the genes behind the domestication phenotype-which is not just an affinity for humans, but a suite of other characters whose purpose is not well understood, including floppy ears and piebald coats. This year we’ve partnered with the Genomics Institute in Moscow.”
“It’s so friendly.” Susan scratched her fingers gently at the base of the animal’s neck. “I want one.”
“Well, it’s good to hear you say that, actually.”
Susan looked up.
“Female foxes produce litters of five to six kits. We select the friendliest ones to continue to the next stage of our breeding program. But there are always many more kits than we can use. In the past, the extras-well, we have sold the extras to local fur farmers.”
She looked stolidly down at her desk. A moment later, Susan realized the significance of this and blanched. “My God,” Susan said. “I couldn’t-how do you decide?” Tashi whined and licked her face.
“It’s unpleasant,” Dr. Obruchev said, recovering herself. “Which is why we’d like to get a permit to begin selling the foxes as pets. They’re all clean, vaccinated, good with children. But of course, the approval process is very long. If you were inclined to adopt one of our animals, the individual paperwork should be fairly simple. Then, your relatively high profile would popularize the idea, hopefully motivating the regulatory authorities to be more-well, expeditious, shall we say.”
“Is this little fellow available?” Susan asked. Tashi seemed to have spotted something interesting under the desk, and she was having much ado to keep him on her lap. Dr. Obruchev plucked him from her arms and gave him a firm look. It seemed to calm him, for he sat quietly on the scientist’s knee and let Susan pet him.
“Tashi’s a bit of a special case,” Dr. Obruchev said. “He has a rare genetic disorder-nothing that can’t be managed with vitamin supplements, but it makes him unsuitable for our program. However, he’s very popular with the staff. If there were a way he could go to a good home instead of a fur farm-well, you would be making a lot of people very happy.”
“I could do that,” Susan said fervently.
“Take your time. Since you’re here all afternoon, you can take Tashi into the field out back and play with him, or even look at the other foxes.”
Susan rubbed her nose against Tashi’s silky ear. “Do you like to play ball?” she murmured.
Tashi looked at her with shining black eyes, and then leaned up to lick her chin.
Tashi had been allowed to play with the humans for hours, and was still preening himself over it when he got back to the kennels.
“Then she had me chase a stick,” he told his kennelmate Mitya. “And then she had a ball. It was like, really bouncy, but not too much, you know? And while I was chasing it, I’m pretty sure I smelled a vole. How about that, Mitya?”
Mitya would be allowed out to play in the morning with the other foxes. He hoped the researcher on duty would pay attention to him. Most of the other foxes were brighter and cleverer at coming up with games to play with the humans, but Mitya always felt so overwhelmed with the need to be a good fox that he could barely manage to do more than huddle in the grass, not raising his nose past the level of the human’s feet. If he was lucky, and especially if it was the younger female researcher, she might notice and come over to him.
“Poor little Mitya,” she might say, scratching him under the chin. Then he would flop onto his back, all control over his body vanished, and she would rub his stomach and it was just bliss, bliss, bliss.
But sometimes even the nice researcher didn’t notice him, and he stayed, hunched and shivering, until it was time to go in again. None of the other foxes felt that way, which was another way Mitya knew that he wasn’t exactly normal.
“I’m going to tell Dacha about the ball,” Tashi exclaimed, bounding over to the side of their cage that they shared with their neighbours.
Tashi and Dacha came from the same litter, and when they talked to each other it was always so rapid and with so many in-jokes and secret codes that Mitya was quickly lost. He went into a corner and lay down, thinking it might be time for another nap.
tear out their throats and bite them and
Mitya jerked awake, twitching. On the other side of the cage, Tashi was letting Dacha sniff his paws and saying, “A vole! Seriously.” Other foxes on either side of them were sleeping or chewing sticks. Though Mitya strained his ears, there were only the normal evening noises.
He whined. I want to be a good fox. Leave me alone, that’s all I want. He tried to think about tomorrow morning, and whether he would be brave enough to chase the ball. But the voice started up again.
break out of here and kill things and run and run
This time Tashi heard and broke off talking to Dacha to raise his voice in a high yap. “Shut up over there! Quit your babbling!”
The voice stopped.
“Honestly,” Tashi said to Mitya. “I don’t know why they don’t give up. Or better yet, why the humans don’t put them down. They’re not even real foxes.”
Mitya nodded. He was shivering too hard to speak.”
“Hey, why don’t you go lie down?” Tashi said. “I could-” He shot an apologetic look at Dacha. “-I could snuggle up with you for a bit. I feel kind of tired too.”
Mitya had no littermates in the kennels to whom he could talk. He was lucky Tashi was his friend. And tomorrow he would chase the ball, and show everyone that he could be brave.
But even pressed against Tashi’s warm side, he knew it was going to take a long time before he could get to sleep.
Traveling with two pet carriers and a German Shepherd was no picnic, as Annalies Klassen was not slow to discover. By the time she set the carriers down on the hotel desk in Tomtor and began hunting for her printed reservation, she felt completely fried.
“Someone is thinking about his lunch,” the clerk said to her in Russian.
Annalies looked down and saw that the Shepherd was gazing intently at the carrier that contained the chinchilla. He had been doing that ever since the two of them had been reunited at the baggage claim in the metal shed that passed for an airport. Annalies had had some difficulty preventing him from nosing around the latch. She could only imagine the fallout if one of the Agency’s “field agents” ate another.
“He’s really very well-behaved,” she told the clerk, also speaking Russian.
“Ah, then it can’t have been him who did that,” he said, indicating her bandaged hand.
The bite on her hand had come from the chinchilla, which Annalies had apparently not picked up in exactly the right way. Cleaning and bandaging the injury had nearly made them late for the flight.
“That’s happened to all of us, don’t worry,” said the vet who had shown her the first aid kit. “Chilli just wants to be sure you know your place.”
Of all the animals Annalies had in her charge, the only one who hadn’t threatened her in any way had been the ferret. He refused to crawl up her sleeve the way she remembered the ferrets of one of her childhood friends doing, but his eyes, as they watched her, seemed bright and intelligent.
“I cut myself,” Annalies lied, waving her injured hand. She reminded herself that after this assignment she had been promised an embassy post. Something in a country with bizarre customs, restrictive taboos, virulent prejudices-she could, and had dealt with all of that and worse, just so long as the other operatives were human.
The clerk handed her her key-card. “You’ll want to be very careful walking him,” he said, gesturing toward the German Shepherd. “We’ve had beshenstvo in the area-rabies-the first time in ten years. A wild fox actually bit a child.”
There was a faint sound from the chinchilla’s pet carrier.
“Are they sure it was wild?” Annalies asked.
The clerk smiled knowingly at her. “Ah, you’re thinking of our Institute. It’s only to be expected that people, being ignorant, will blame them, but my sister is a technician there, very educated. All the animals are vaccinated, so it’s really not possible that they can carry the virus. There have always been wild foxes around Tomtor, no need to blame the tame ones.”
Annalies agreed, and asked for help getting the carriers and bags back to her room. She tipped the kid, whom she thought might be another one of the clerk’s relatives, then peeled off her coat and her winter boots and looked around.
Right. Water for the dog. Annalies got a bowl out of her suitcase, filled it at the bathroom sink, and set it on the floor. She had to jump back as he rushed for it, but he didn’t seem to notice.
A rattling sound came from the chinchilla’s carrier, which sat on the desk. The special keypad that Annalies was supposed to use to talk to the “field agents” was still in her carry-on, but she bet that noise either meant the chinchilla was thirsty too, or wanted out.
“Aren’t you afraid he’ll eat you?” Annalies said aloud.
The Shepherd growled, a sound so menacing that Annalies backed up another two steps, but the chinchilla rattled its cage again, more insistently. Annalies took out her keys and unlocked the small padlock. She still kept her body between the carrier and the Shepherd, though he had walked ostentatiously to the farthest corner of the room and sat down there.
The chinchilla hopped out, shook itself, and leaped across to the bed, a distance of perhaps two metres. It stopped in front of the ferret’s carrier.
“Yes, yes,” Annalies said, unlocking that padlock too. The ferret didn’t come out immediately, but there was some slight movement within, and the chinchilla’s whiskers twitched.
Annalies really hoped that none of the animals would make a mess on that duvet, since there was no other bed for her to sleep in.
“Here,” she said, rummaging through her carry-on to find the keypad. She set it on the bed. “I guess we should talk, huh?”
The chinchilla gave a twitch that was most expressive, and hopped down onto the floor. It began to head towards the bathroom, and the German Shepherd followed, fortunately with no signs of biting, lunging or other preliminaries to eating. A moment later a dark shape flowed out of the ferret’s carrier, down the leg of the bed and across the carpet. Annalies went over and saw the chinchilla sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, the Shepherd and the ferret looking up attentively from the bathmat in front of it. The Shepherd turned his head and growled. Annalies backed away, her palms spread.
“Okay, okay. I’ll give you guys a moment.”
After a bit of useless unpacking, she pushed aside the carrier and keypad and lay down on the bed.
What a stupid assignment.
I could go to one of those countries where you have to eat insects or wear a chador, she thought. I could infiltrate pirates in the Indian Ocean. Anything would be better than this pet-sitting job.
Now she had to pee.
Annalies got out her tourist guide to Siberia and Yakutsk, and, keeping an ear open for sounds of crunching or chewing from the bathroom, started to read.
“I don’t like her,” Griff said.
Chilli knew he suspected the other human “handlers” of telling Annalies stories about him, and he was probably right. But, the woman had managed to get them through Customs, which was ninety percent of what humans were good for anyway.
“I’ve had much worse,” Chilli said.
The ferret volunteered no opinion. He was sitting more still than Chilli had ever seen a ferret sit in her life, and his black eyes seemed fixed on an invisible point in the space in front of him. Chilli realized that she was going to have to take the initiative for the next part of the briefing.
“F132, are you comfortable with your assignment?” she asked. Because I’m definitely not.
The ferret silently indicated affirmative.
“I’ll be going into the Institute tomorrow, and Griff will be standing by for my extraction. That leaves you here alone. You’ll get the human to verify all your-hardware, but that still leaves you a lot of dead time. I don’t want you leaving the hotel room unless procedure demands it, is that clear?”
The ferret turned his head to look at Chilli. “Perfectly.” His voice was a little rough, as if it had been a long time since he had last spoken.
I don’t know half of what your assignment is, she realized. I don’t even know whether there’s a code for the rest of us to get clear before you start sowing death and destruction.
Chilli, used to always playing two moves ahead, knew she’d fallen into a deeper game than she could safely handle. But she’d had her chance to say no and she'd jumped in anyway, so there was no use complaining.
“Griff and I need to rehearse bits of the extraction,” she said, needing to get rid of him so she could think. “You don’t have to stay.”
The ferret looked back and forth between her and Griff, then eeled around on the mat and flowed out of the door.
After a moment, Griff said, “I think Recruitment must be looking through abandoned cemeteries and ancient crypts to get some of these field agents.”
Chilli was beginning to feel silly up on the toilet lid, so she jumped down. “He’s like the rest of us,” she said. “I mean, he’s what humans have made him to be.”
“Nurture over nature, huh?”
“It only makes sense.”
Griff stretched out as much as the space allowed on the bathmat, his body language casual. “Some animals are born bad, Chilli.”
She got the impression he wasn’t talking about Field Agent F132 anymore. But just because she was a secret agent didn’t mean she had to put up with subtlety. She looked straight at Griff and said, “It probably seems that way to people who don’t know what the animal has-overcome.”
They’d had this conversation before, and although given the choice they’d both probably choose to have their teeth pulled out, they would no doubt have the conversation again. But this time, Griff looked away.
“What about you, then?” he said. “Chinchillas should be taking sand-baths and nibbling hay-treats, not bossing German Shepherds in the wilds of Siberia. Your original owner must have freaked out the first time you brought out Kamikaze Chilli.”
For a moment she was silent. Then coming to a decision, she said “I was never a household pet.”
“Really?” Griff rolled quickly on his front. “You’re feral?” The term was occasionally derogatory, but Chilli could hear nothing but awe in his voice.
“Not feral. I was in a circus. I had skills.”
Griff looked puzzled.
Chilli smiled. “Oh come on, Griff. I don’t get picked for assignments for being the bossiest. Otherwise they’d get one of the border collies out here. I get picked because I’m the master of the quick escape, the vanishing act. The in and out.”
“So, your act-”
“Oh, you know, shut me in a biscuit tin, wrap it in a chain and throw it into a tank of water.”
Griff didn’t look amused.
“I was good,” Chilli offered. “I mean, I didn’t drown, right?”
“It should be illegal,” Griff growled.
“It is. They had some black-market vet who gave me pain-killers when I broke something. It was my first day off the drugs, after a fractured tailbone, that I had a moment of clarity. I decided I was sick of the life. The escape skills that my owners had taught me-I used them to sneak onto a bus, and then an airplane. In fact, I got as far as Canada Customs before anyone stopped me, and I’m still convinced that our own Agency had a hand in that. Apparently they’d had their eye on me for a while.”
“Choosing their moment, were they?” Griff said.
“They’re an intelligence agency,” Chilli said sharply. “Not the SPCA. We animals have to look after ourselves.”
After a moment Griff lay down again, but he moved his cheek to press against Chilli’s furry flank.
“We take care of ourselves,” Chilli repeated. “If I didn’t believe that, I’d be ordering you to stay in the hotel room too. It sounds as if they’ve had some troubles with wild animals here.”
“Says the chinchilla who is infiltrating a building full of predators who specialize in small mammals,” Griff said. He curled his lip, knowing the gesture would amuse her. “If I meet a fox, rabid or not, I’m not the one who’s going to get bitten.”
Griff hadn’t yet grasped all the implications of this mission, or of F132’s presence with them. For the moment, Chilli decided she’d rather not enlighten him. “Just take care,” she said. “And remember, I’m going to need you alive to help get me out again.”
And then, because she really was a small mammal, and she’d spent so much time pretending she wasn’t afraid, she let herself be quiet for a few minutes, close to Griff’s warmth and strength, in this bright, safe bathroom.
“The timing is bad,” Dr. Obruchev said to the technician, standing at the entrance of the kennels. Two long rows of wooden structures faced with chicken wire were separated by a solid brick wall that prevented the foxes from looking across at the inhabitants of the cages opposite. The wall had been a hassle to build, but since the animals became agitated and unmanageable without it, Dr. Obruchev considered it to have been well worthwhile.
“The bitten child in Tomtor,” she said. “Susan Fleming’s decision to extend her visit.”
“You encouraged her,” the tech pointed out. “And she’s not even a real celebrity, just a politician’s wife.”
“We still need her. It’s just, on the eve of Mr. Baldrich’s visit…” She knelt beside one of the cages and scratched a fox’s chin through the chicken wire. Most of the foxes were resting in the warm straw, but this one was standing at the alert, nose and ears fixed forward on something the humans couldn’t see in the darkness. Maybe a rat had got in somehow.
“I just can’t help being anxious,” Dr. Obruchev concluded as she turned to leave.
For once, Mitya barely noticed the human who had caressed him. His ears, his nostrils, his brain, seemed full of the voice, which carried across the brick wall and into his cage.
Vengeance, vengeance for our degradation, bite their throats, scratch out their eyes
Mitya was scared that listening to the voice would make him not be a good fox anymore, but he couldn’t seem to stop. It was like a pressure, building and building.
every human and their children and babies
He couldn’t stand it anymore. “Who are you?” he yapped. “Why can’t you just shut up?”
“Mitya?” Tashi said in a sleepy voice from deep within the straw. “What are you doing?”
Silence everywhere. Then the voice came back, softer this time.
Mitya? Is that you?
He cowered.
Mitya?
There was nowhere to go.
Mitya, it’s your sister.
Next: The Plot Thickens
Disclaimer: There really is a research institute that studies the domestication of foxes in Novosibirsk, Siberia (thank you, National Geographic). However, I have done absolutely zero research into the research institute, and have arbitrarily moved the location of this story to Tomtor, Yakutsk, a place about which I once read a Wikipedia article, but otherwise know nothing about. It is also somewhat doubtful whether ferrets are able to talk; however, everything else is of the highest accuracy :)
The sun was setting as the truck crunched into the snow-filled parking lot. A woman in a bright, new winter coat hopped out and looked around, her hands in her pockets. On the high ridge to the west of the research institute, the wind had scoured away the snow so that a brown crust of tundra poked through.
“It’s isolated,” the woman said to her driver, who had gotten out more slowly and was tugging on a quilted canvas jacket over a wool sweater.”
“Tomtor is just ten minutes away,” he replied shortly. He led her to the door and held it open for her. They passed the secretaries at the front desk, who were chatting over coffees and somewhat disconcerted by the woman’s sunny smile and wave.
“Dr. Obruchev asked to be told when you arrived,” the man said, opening the door to an office. “She’ll be here in a minute or two.”
Dr. Obruchev’s desk was piled with at least two laptop computers and multiple stacks of printed out journal articles, and the bookcases were full of standard genetics texts. There was no sign of photos, and indeed the only element in the room that didn’t scream academic was a shapeless pink dog’s bed in the corner. It was here that the woman’s eyes became transfixed as the door closed behind her, for the animal that hopped out of the bed and trotted over, wagging its tail, was no dog. It was tinier, with pointier features and thicker, softer fur: a fox, in fact, though in her urban upbringing the woman had never seen one. She knelt down, and it jumped into her arms, licking her face.
“Hello Susan! You and Tashi have met each other, I see.” The woman who entered wore jeans and a sweater, instead of a labcoat, but she was still clearly a scientist; there was something of the perpetual measuring stick in her gaze. “Sit down, if you like. He’s allowed on furniture if it’s on a human’s lap.”
Susan sat, and Tashi continued to nose in her pockets. “So, the new pets you’ve been developing are foxes?”
“Not exactly,” Dr. Obruchev said. “We’re interested in the genes behind the domestication phenotype-which is not just an affinity for humans, but a suite of other characters whose purpose is not well understood, including floppy ears and piebald coats. This year we’ve partnered with the Genomics Institute in Moscow.”
“It’s so friendly.” Susan scratched her fingers gently at the base of the animal’s neck. “I want one.”
“Well, it’s good to hear you say that, actually.”
Susan looked up.
“Female foxes produce litters of five to six kits. We select the friendliest ones to continue to the next stage of our breeding program. But there are always many more kits than we can use. In the past, the extras-well, we have sold the extras to local fur farmers.”
She looked stolidly down at her desk. A moment later, Susan realized the significance of this and blanched. “My God,” Susan said. “I couldn’t-how do you decide?” Tashi whined and licked her face.
“It’s unpleasant,” Dr. Obruchev said, recovering herself. “Which is why we’d like to get a permit to begin selling the foxes as pets. They’re all clean, vaccinated, good with children. But of course, the approval process is very long. If you were inclined to adopt one of our animals, the individual paperwork should be fairly simple. Then, your relatively high profile would popularize the idea, hopefully motivating the regulatory authorities to be more-well, expeditious, shall we say.”
“Is this little fellow available?” Susan asked. Tashi seemed to have spotted something interesting under the desk, and she was having much ado to keep him on her lap. Dr. Obruchev plucked him from her arms and gave him a firm look. It seemed to calm him, for he sat quietly on the scientist’s knee and let Susan pet him.
“Tashi’s a bit of a special case,” Dr. Obruchev said. “He has a rare genetic disorder-nothing that can’t be managed with vitamin supplements, but it makes him unsuitable for our program. However, he’s very popular with the staff. If there were a way he could go to a good home instead of a fur farm-well, you would be making a lot of people very happy.”
“I could do that,” Susan said fervently.
“Take your time. Since you’re here all afternoon, you can take Tashi into the field out back and play with him, or even look at the other foxes.”
Susan rubbed her nose against Tashi’s silky ear. “Do you like to play ball?” she murmured.
Tashi looked at her with shining black eyes, and then leaned up to lick her chin.
Tashi had been allowed to play with the humans for hours, and was still preening himself over it when he got back to the kennels.
“Then she had me chase a stick,” he told his kennelmate Mitya. “And then she had a ball. It was like, really bouncy, but not too much, you know? And while I was chasing it, I’m pretty sure I smelled a vole. How about that, Mitya?”
Mitya would be allowed out to play in the morning with the other foxes. He hoped the researcher on duty would pay attention to him. Most of the other foxes were brighter and cleverer at coming up with games to play with the humans, but Mitya always felt so overwhelmed with the need to be a good fox that he could barely manage to do more than huddle in the grass, not raising his nose past the level of the human’s feet. If he was lucky, and especially if it was the younger female researcher, she might notice and come over to him.
“Poor little Mitya,” she might say, scratching him under the chin. Then he would flop onto his back, all control over his body vanished, and she would rub his stomach and it was just bliss, bliss, bliss.
But sometimes even the nice researcher didn’t notice him, and he stayed, hunched and shivering, until it was time to go in again. None of the other foxes felt that way, which was another way Mitya knew that he wasn’t exactly normal.
“I’m going to tell Dacha about the ball,” Tashi exclaimed, bounding over to the side of their cage that they shared with their neighbours.
Tashi and Dacha came from the same litter, and when they talked to each other it was always so rapid and with so many in-jokes and secret codes that Mitya was quickly lost. He went into a corner and lay down, thinking it might be time for another nap.
tear out their throats and bite them and
Mitya jerked awake, twitching. On the other side of the cage, Tashi was letting Dacha sniff his paws and saying, “A vole! Seriously.” Other foxes on either side of them were sleeping or chewing sticks. Though Mitya strained his ears, there were only the normal evening noises.
He whined. I want to be a good fox. Leave me alone, that’s all I want. He tried to think about tomorrow morning, and whether he would be brave enough to chase the ball. But the voice started up again.
break out of here and kill things and run and run
This time Tashi heard and broke off talking to Dacha to raise his voice in a high yap. “Shut up over there! Quit your babbling!”
The voice stopped.
“Honestly,” Tashi said to Mitya. “I don’t know why they don’t give up. Or better yet, why the humans don’t put them down. They’re not even real foxes.”
Mitya nodded. He was shivering too hard to speak.”
“Hey, why don’t you go lie down?” Tashi said. “I could-” He shot an apologetic look at Dacha. “-I could snuggle up with you for a bit. I feel kind of tired too.”
Mitya had no littermates in the kennels to whom he could talk. He was lucky Tashi was his friend. And tomorrow he would chase the ball, and show everyone that he could be brave.
But even pressed against Tashi’s warm side, he knew it was going to take a long time before he could get to sleep.
Traveling with two pet carriers and a German Shepherd was no picnic, as Annalies Klassen was not slow to discover. By the time she set the carriers down on the hotel desk in Tomtor and began hunting for her printed reservation, she felt completely fried.
“Someone is thinking about his lunch,” the clerk said to her in Russian.
Annalies looked down and saw that the Shepherd was gazing intently at the carrier that contained the chinchilla. He had been doing that ever since the two of them had been reunited at the baggage claim in the metal shed that passed for an airport. Annalies had had some difficulty preventing him from nosing around the latch. She could only imagine the fallout if one of the Agency’s “field agents” ate another.
“He’s really very well-behaved,” she told the clerk, also speaking Russian.
“Ah, then it can’t have been him who did that,” he said, indicating her bandaged hand.
The bite on her hand had come from the chinchilla, which Annalies had apparently not picked up in exactly the right way. Cleaning and bandaging the injury had nearly made them late for the flight.
“That’s happened to all of us, don’t worry,” said the vet who had shown her the first aid kit. “Chilli just wants to be sure you know your place.”
Of all the animals Annalies had in her charge, the only one who hadn’t threatened her in any way had been the ferret. He refused to crawl up her sleeve the way she remembered the ferrets of one of her childhood friends doing, but his eyes, as they watched her, seemed bright and intelligent.
“I cut myself,” Annalies lied, waving her injured hand. She reminded herself that after this assignment she had been promised an embassy post. Something in a country with bizarre customs, restrictive taboos, virulent prejudices-she could, and had dealt with all of that and worse, just so long as the other operatives were human.
The clerk handed her her key-card. “You’ll want to be very careful walking him,” he said, gesturing toward the German Shepherd. “We’ve had beshenstvo in the area-rabies-the first time in ten years. A wild fox actually bit a child.”
There was a faint sound from the chinchilla’s pet carrier.
“Are they sure it was wild?” Annalies asked.
The clerk smiled knowingly at her. “Ah, you’re thinking of our Institute. It’s only to be expected that people, being ignorant, will blame them, but my sister is a technician there, very educated. All the animals are vaccinated, so it’s really not possible that they can carry the virus. There have always been wild foxes around Tomtor, no need to blame the tame ones.”
Annalies agreed, and asked for help getting the carriers and bags back to her room. She tipped the kid, whom she thought might be another one of the clerk’s relatives, then peeled off her coat and her winter boots and looked around.
Right. Water for the dog. Annalies got a bowl out of her suitcase, filled it at the bathroom sink, and set it on the floor. She had to jump back as he rushed for it, but he didn’t seem to notice.
A rattling sound came from the chinchilla’s carrier, which sat on the desk. The special keypad that Annalies was supposed to use to talk to the “field agents” was still in her carry-on, but she bet that noise either meant the chinchilla was thirsty too, or wanted out.
“Aren’t you afraid he’ll eat you?” Annalies said aloud.
The Shepherd growled, a sound so menacing that Annalies backed up another two steps, but the chinchilla rattled its cage again, more insistently. Annalies took out her keys and unlocked the small padlock. She still kept her body between the carrier and the Shepherd, though he had walked ostentatiously to the farthest corner of the room and sat down there.
The chinchilla hopped out, shook itself, and leaped across to the bed, a distance of perhaps two metres. It stopped in front of the ferret’s carrier.
“Yes, yes,” Annalies said, unlocking that padlock too. The ferret didn’t come out immediately, but there was some slight movement within, and the chinchilla’s whiskers twitched.
Annalies really hoped that none of the animals would make a mess on that duvet, since there was no other bed for her to sleep in.
“Here,” she said, rummaging through her carry-on to find the keypad. She set it on the bed. “I guess we should talk, huh?”
The chinchilla gave a twitch that was most expressive, and hopped down onto the floor. It began to head towards the bathroom, and the German Shepherd followed, fortunately with no signs of biting, lunging or other preliminaries to eating. A moment later a dark shape flowed out of the ferret’s carrier, down the leg of the bed and across the carpet. Annalies went over and saw the chinchilla sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, the Shepherd and the ferret looking up attentively from the bathmat in front of it. The Shepherd turned his head and growled. Annalies backed away, her palms spread.
“Okay, okay. I’ll give you guys a moment.”
After a bit of useless unpacking, she pushed aside the carrier and keypad and lay down on the bed.
What a stupid assignment.
I could go to one of those countries where you have to eat insects or wear a chador, she thought. I could infiltrate pirates in the Indian Ocean. Anything would be better than this pet-sitting job.
Now she had to pee.
Annalies got out her tourist guide to Siberia and Yakutsk, and, keeping an ear open for sounds of crunching or chewing from the bathroom, started to read.
“I don’t like her,” Griff said.
Chilli knew he suspected the other human “handlers” of telling Annalies stories about him, and he was probably right. But, the woman had managed to get them through Customs, which was ninety percent of what humans were good for anyway.
“I’ve had much worse,” Chilli said.
The ferret volunteered no opinion. He was sitting more still than Chilli had ever seen a ferret sit in her life, and his black eyes seemed fixed on an invisible point in the space in front of him. Chilli realized that she was going to have to take the initiative for the next part of the briefing.
“F132, are you comfortable with your assignment?” she asked. Because I’m definitely not.
The ferret silently indicated affirmative.
“I’ll be going into the Institute tomorrow, and Griff will be standing by for my extraction. That leaves you here alone. You’ll get the human to verify all your-hardware, but that still leaves you a lot of dead time. I don’t want you leaving the hotel room unless procedure demands it, is that clear?”
The ferret turned his head to look at Chilli. “Perfectly.” His voice was a little rough, as if it had been a long time since he had last spoken.
I don’t know half of what your assignment is, she realized. I don’t even know whether there’s a code for the rest of us to get clear before you start sowing death and destruction.
Chilli, used to always playing two moves ahead, knew she’d fallen into a deeper game than she could safely handle. But she’d had her chance to say no and she'd jumped in anyway, so there was no use complaining.
“Griff and I need to rehearse bits of the extraction,” she said, needing to get rid of him so she could think. “You don’t have to stay.”
The ferret looked back and forth between her and Griff, then eeled around on the mat and flowed out of the door.
After a moment, Griff said, “I think Recruitment must be looking through abandoned cemeteries and ancient crypts to get some of these field agents.”
Chilli was beginning to feel silly up on the toilet lid, so she jumped down. “He’s like the rest of us,” she said. “I mean, he’s what humans have made him to be.”
“Nurture over nature, huh?”
“It only makes sense.”
Griff stretched out as much as the space allowed on the bathmat, his body language casual. “Some animals are born bad, Chilli.”
She got the impression he wasn’t talking about Field Agent F132 anymore. But just because she was a secret agent didn’t mean she had to put up with subtlety. She looked straight at Griff and said, “It probably seems that way to people who don’t know what the animal has-overcome.”
They’d had this conversation before, and although given the choice they’d both probably choose to have their teeth pulled out, they would no doubt have the conversation again. But this time, Griff looked away.
“What about you, then?” he said. “Chinchillas should be taking sand-baths and nibbling hay-treats, not bossing German Shepherds in the wilds of Siberia. Your original owner must have freaked out the first time you brought out Kamikaze Chilli.”
For a moment she was silent. Then coming to a decision, she said “I was never a household pet.”
“Really?” Griff rolled quickly on his front. “You’re feral?” The term was occasionally derogatory, but Chilli could hear nothing but awe in his voice.
“Not feral. I was in a circus. I had skills.”
Griff looked puzzled.
Chilli smiled. “Oh come on, Griff. I don’t get picked for assignments for being the bossiest. Otherwise they’d get one of the border collies out here. I get picked because I’m the master of the quick escape, the vanishing act. The in and out.”
“So, your act-”
“Oh, you know, shut me in a biscuit tin, wrap it in a chain and throw it into a tank of water.”
Griff didn’t look amused.
“I was good,” Chilli offered. “I mean, I didn’t drown, right?”
“It should be illegal,” Griff growled.
“It is. They had some black-market vet who gave me pain-killers when I broke something. It was my first day off the drugs, after a fractured tailbone, that I had a moment of clarity. I decided I was sick of the life. The escape skills that my owners had taught me-I used them to sneak onto a bus, and then an airplane. In fact, I got as far as Canada Customs before anyone stopped me, and I’m still convinced that our own Agency had a hand in that. Apparently they’d had their eye on me for a while.”
“Choosing their moment, were they?” Griff said.
“They’re an intelligence agency,” Chilli said sharply. “Not the SPCA. We animals have to look after ourselves.”
After a moment Griff lay down again, but he moved his cheek to press against Chilli’s furry flank.
“We take care of ourselves,” Chilli repeated. “If I didn’t believe that, I’d be ordering you to stay in the hotel room too. It sounds as if they’ve had some troubles with wild animals here.”
“Says the chinchilla who is infiltrating a building full of predators who specialize in small mammals,” Griff said. He curled his lip, knowing the gesture would amuse her. “If I meet a fox, rabid or not, I’m not the one who’s going to get bitten.”
Griff hadn’t yet grasped all the implications of this mission, or of F132’s presence with them. For the moment, Chilli decided she’d rather not enlighten him. “Just take care,” she said. “And remember, I’m going to need you alive to help get me out again.”
And then, because she really was a small mammal, and she’d spent so much time pretending she wasn’t afraid, she let herself be quiet for a few minutes, close to Griff’s warmth and strength, in this bright, safe bathroom.
“The timing is bad,” Dr. Obruchev said to the technician, standing at the entrance of the kennels. Two long rows of wooden structures faced with chicken wire were separated by a solid brick wall that prevented the foxes from looking across at the inhabitants of the cages opposite. The wall had been a hassle to build, but since the animals became agitated and unmanageable without it, Dr. Obruchev considered it to have been well worthwhile.
“The bitten child in Tomtor,” she said. “Susan Fleming’s decision to extend her visit.”
“You encouraged her,” the tech pointed out. “And she’s not even a real celebrity, just a politician’s wife.”
“We still need her. It’s just, on the eve of Mr. Baldrich’s visit…” She knelt beside one of the cages and scratched a fox’s chin through the chicken wire. Most of the foxes were resting in the warm straw, but this one was standing at the alert, nose and ears fixed forward on something the humans couldn’t see in the darkness. Maybe a rat had got in somehow.
“I just can’t help being anxious,” Dr. Obruchev concluded as she turned to leave.
For once, Mitya barely noticed the human who had caressed him. His ears, his nostrils, his brain, seemed full of the voice, which carried across the brick wall and into his cage.
Vengeance, vengeance for our degradation, bite their throats, scratch out their eyes
Mitya was scared that listening to the voice would make him not be a good fox anymore, but he couldn’t seem to stop. It was like a pressure, building and building.
every human and their children and babies
He couldn’t stand it anymore. “Who are you?” he yapped. “Why can’t you just shut up?”
“Mitya?” Tashi said in a sleepy voice from deep within the straw. “What are you doing?”
Silence everywhere. Then the voice came back, softer this time.
Mitya? Is that you?
He cowered.
Mitya?
There was nowhere to go.
Mitya, it’s your sister.
Next: The Plot Thickens
Disclaimer: There really is a research institute that studies the domestication of foxes in Novosibirsk, Siberia (thank you, National Geographic). However, I have done absolutely zero research into the research institute, and have arbitrarily moved the location of this story to Tomtor, Yakutsk, a place about which I once read a Wikipedia article, but otherwise know nothing about. It is also somewhat doubtful whether ferrets are able to talk; however, everything else is of the highest accuracy :)