pinch.
“Come on,” Domi said, taking his hand in hers. They moved a little more slowly now, letting Lakesh regain his wind as they followed a narrow trail that wound to the mouth of a cave.
“Welcome to my version of an archive,” Domi announced.
Lakesh’s eyes tried to adapt to the dimmer illumination inside the cavern when a growl filled the air. The Cerberus scientist whirled at the sound, wishing he’d brought a firearm for himself when a small gray bolt of fur lunged at him.
“Moe! No!” Domi shouted. She intercepted the flying little fur ball inches from Lakesh’s face. “Bad Moe! That’s the man you’re named after. Be nice.”
She held up a small creature with the familiar bandit mask of a raccoon in front of Lakesh’s face. A pointed, little brown nose wrinkled. “Sniff him. He’s friendly. He’s our friend.”
Lakesh’s eyes finally adjusted and he could see the little gray-and-black creature, far less menacing in appearance than in growl. Blue eyes met blue eyes as Moe touched noses with Lakesh. A moment later, a tiny pink tongue began lapping at Lakesh’s cheeks.
“Hold him for a moment,” Domi said, handing the animal to Lakesh. The raccoon continued to sniff and nuzzle Lakesh as the albino girl walked to where she’d stored a small battery-operated lantern. She clicked it on, and Lakesh looked around the cave, seeing plastic storage shelves and containers, each laden with all forms of odd knickknacks and faded though once garish periodicals and paperbacks. Moe crawled up onto Lakesh’s shoulders, but aside from the odd feeling of tiny hands in his graying hair and the softness of fur on his nape, the little beast hadn’t so much as scratched him.
Lakesh’s eyes danced across cracked old figurines, timeworn stuffed animals and bald plastic dolls sitting at eye level on several shelves. “This looks like a teenage girl’s room.”
Domi nodded, as if doing mental math. “Maybe. That’s the first stuff I collected. I might have been a teenager back then.”
“You come here all the time?” Lakesh asked. His fingertips ran over a plastic crate filled with a mix of ancient comic books and ratty old magazines.
“Sometimes,” Domi said. She pulled a black cartoon mouse off one shelf, inspecting it. She pushed the stuffed animal’s eye back into its face, kissed its furred forehead and put it back on the shelf.
“A lot of old toys,” Lakesh noted. “The things that would be at a garage sale. Old puzzles, picture books, even old LPs and tapes.”
Lakesh wiped dust off an album cover, then his eyes widened. “The Blue Oyster Cult? Oh, that takes me way back.”
Domi grinned broadly.
“We have a lot of this in the computer archives. You don’t need to hunt all this down. Why?” Lakesh asked.
“At first, before I met Grant, I’d always wanted a room of my own. Full of stuff that I owned,” Domi explained. She picked up a doll that Lakesh had thought was bald, but it was just white skinned and white haired, dressed in what appeared to be a hand-sewn version of a shadow suit. Lakesh could see where Domi had trimmed its hair, arms and legs in proportion to foot-tall doll representations of Kane, Grant, Brigid Baptiste and even himself. “In the Outlands I didn’t own nothing more than the clothes I wore.”
“Own anything,” Lakesh unconsciously corrected. He walked to the familiar-looking dolls set on a rocky shelf. “What…what are these?”
“My family portrait,” Domi said. “The people I love.”
Lakesh felt his throat tighten for a moment. Domi was a fiery young woman, quick to anger and voracious as a lover, and Lakesh realized the depth of caring she possessed was evident in the loving detail applied to each of the tiny totems standing together. Each had been carefully sculpted and repainted and painstakingly dressed to be a perfect miniature doppelgänger.
Taking a step back, he felt the corner of a container scratch his calf. Lakesh looked down at the box. In large letters on top of the crate, the word Read was scrawled in marker. More boxes were beside it, but unmarked, except one with a strip of tape marked To Brigid.
“Those are ones I know she hasn’t read yet,” Domi said. “She gave me a list. When the box gets full, I bring ’em down for her.”
Domi put her miniature self back with the rest of its family. Lakesh saw two versions of himself, the old, withered self before Enlil-as-Sam had bestowed the gift of rejuvenation upon him, and one that more closely matched his appearance now. Lakesh admitted, though, that the hook-nosed little doll seemed to be considerably more handsome than he currently felt.
“Quite a library,” Lakesh said, fighting his narcissism over the miniature doppelgänger. “But why not use the archives?”
Domi shrugged. “Those aren’t my books. This is where I am. This is me and mine here. My people. The things I’ve learned. The shit I think is cute. And Moe.”
Lakesh scratched the butt of the fur ball on his shoulder. “Called Moe because he’s so smart?”
Domi’s eyes widened, lips parting for a moment as she was caught off guard. “Uh, yeah. Smart. Right.”
Lakesh mentally flashed back to all of the times that Domi had sat in his lap, his fingers giving her shoulder a squeeze, or scratching her back. He could easily imagine the situation reversed for Domi and the raccoon, the young albino sitting on the floor of the cavern, Moe curled in her lap as her fingertips absently scratched its back, mirroring her pose whenever Lakesh read to her, teaching her how to read. Domi winced as she noted the mental gears turning in her lover’s eyes as he figured out the equation.
Lakesh leaned in close to Domi and kissed her tenderly. He never had felt more in love with the feral girl who had grown so much since he’d first met her. “You are truly the sweetest, best thing ever to come into my life, precious, darlingest Domi.”
Her cheeks turned almost cartoonishly bright red at the statement.
With an inevitability that both Lakesh and Domi had grown used to, their Commtacts—subdermal transmitters that had been surgically embedded into their mastoid bones—buzzed to life.
Bry’s familiar twang sounded in their ears. “Lakesh, Domi, where are you?”
With a resigned sigh, Lakesh answered, the vibrations of his speech carrying along his jawbone to be transformed into an outgoing signal by the cybernetic implant. “We’re about a two hours’ hike from the redoubt.”
“Two hours at your speed? Or Domi’s?” the sarcastic technical wizard asked.
Lakesh rolled his eyes, eliciting a smirk from his companion and a chittering chuckle from Moe the raccoon. “What’s wrong, Bry?”
“I picked up something on satellite imagery from over the Mediterranean. The remains of Greece to be exact,” Bry responded. “Atmospheric disturbance indicative of—”
“Annunaki dropships,” Lakesh finished, worry tingeing his words. His mood soured instantly, and even resting his arm across Domi’s suddenly taut shoulders did little to help him. He looked down at the girl who was listening on her own bionic Commtact.
“Send
