Jackie the alien roach and Fran the Earth jackal figure out what to do and where to go after their Cleaning job on the rock planet. Orchid and Ghost's investigation continues on the water and ice planet, where they make a big breakthrough! We learn more about Fran's chosen family.

“You’re as cold as ice...” (Cold As Ice, Foreigner)

“I could give you some of mine, if you want.” Fran’s best friend had had a bad history with meds messing her up worse than she’d started out as, and she didn’t trust them or the therapists who’d abused her trust enough to go through that gauntlet again for anything. “Share, share alike, right?” For the jackal’s roommate, leaving home without her meds had been like leaving home without a part of her body that gave her back to herself, and having to go for a week without seeing her therapist had been like having to hold her breath for too long.
“Really, you’d do that?” She wasn’t supposed to, but then they weren’t supposed to do a lot of the things they did around there either.
“Sure, why not?” If one of them had had easier access to HRT than the other, why not just level the playing field a bit, after all? “As long as you don’t tell anyone.” If communists couldn’t share, who could?
“Who am I gonna tell?” Fran’s roommate had handed her best friend a syringe.
“Hey Fran, you want some?” The jackal, while tempted, had held up her hand timidly. “Oh right, the needle thing.”
***
"As it is, we have about three options in front of us right now." Jackie had to figure out what to do with the coyote's research, unclaimed by the coyote's partner, and what to get for the Cleaning work they’d done. "We can give it to Byte to settle the coyote’s debt, my debt, even make her owe us a bit for what it is.” The coyote had owed a lot to her more fortunate rival Byte, they’d learned. A lot of people did. “We wouldn’t have to work for pills for a while so we could go to the water planet, it’s more temperate than desert and ice for sure but,” she added, “Byte would keep it for good. She’s been trying to get her hands on it for a while, it turns out. The coyote would probably never see it again, and there’s no telling what Byte would use it for.”
There was always a tradeoff. “What else did you have in mind?” Fran asked her.
“Another thing we could do is, we could take her research as payment to keep it ourselves. We could sell it back to the coyote or to another scientist eventually, depending on whether we find another buyer or not. I’d have no idea what to do with it myself, but Byte wouldn’t get it. We’d have to go work on the desert planet, not the water planet, and it’d have to be for a bit longer, though. We could get some pills but we’d run out faster. You’d probably have to take at least some solute to make up for the pills that we wouldn’t be able to get sooner.”
“And our last option?” the jackal tilted her head.
“We could give the coyote back her research right now, and have her owe us something to be determined at a later time, when she’d be able to pay us back. Byte wouldn’t get it either, but we’d have to work on the ice planet. We would get no pills at all on the ice planet so you’d have to bite the bullet and go full solute as soon as we’d run out of the pills we have right now.” Fran liked being warm better than being cold, and especially liked the idea of pills better than solute. She also liked the coyote a lot better than Byte already, which did count for something.
“What is her research, anyway?”
“Anti-grav with a neural interface.”
“Do you think she’d let us use it later if we gave it back to her now?”
“Maybe after she runs it through a few more tests,” the roach said understatedly.
***
"Do you think you need to have done something to know whether you'd like it or not?" Fran's best friend had been aro, but not ace.
"People say don't knock it til you've tried it, but then I don't need to stick my fingers in a car door to know I wouldn't like that either, you know?" The jackal had been ace and aro.
"There is that." It wasn't something they'd have talked about with just anyone.
"So you've never thought about it?" Fran's best friend had asked.
"I don't know," Fran had shrugged. "It just seems like another one of those things I wouldn't be good at, like driving or cooking or furniture or machines. I'd find a way to trip and fall or something," she'd chuckled.
"I never want people I'm with to see me when I’m not at my best," the jackal's best friend had explained. “I can be at my best for maybe a couple of dates a year... not every day."
"You could always… bring people back here to sleep, if you want. We wouldn't mind."
"Oh God no! I mean, thank you! But no." Fran had looked at her askance. "I don't want those people in my house!" She'd gestured at dirty dishes in the sink. "I don't want them to see how I live." The jackal had laughed.
***
The waves came. That much was always for sure. The waves always came. That's what the wave power generators were for.
"Actually, Officer, I haven't had an Enforcer for quite some time now," the ichthyosaur told her. "I haven't been a Renegade for a while." Orchid could've fought well enough in the water, if she'd had to - she was part plant, after all - but still found the wide expanse of water around them vaguely unsettling somehow. The suspect would definitely have been more maneuverable in it - and she did have those jaws. "I learned my lesson," the ichthyosaur chuckled. Her last Enforcer had been particularly unpleasant.
"What lesson was that?" The ichthyosaur gave the mantis a look.
"That trying to kill an Arbitrator is a bad idea," she answered understatedly.
"I'm looking for someone who hasn't learned this lesson quite yet," the Tracker euphemized.
"Someone took down Amber?" Even if the ichthyosaur hadn't been the culprit, something in her tone suggested she wouldn't be mourning the deinonychus anytime soon, if she had been.
"Why would you think that?" Amber had died before, but not often.
"If it's not Amber, why ask me?" When the ichthyosaur had tried to eat the deinonychus with her maw, Amber had eaten her with her eyes. They were black holes.
"I thought you might help me understand her motivation." Or sell her out if you do happen to know who did, but of course Orchid wasn't about to say that. She didn't have to, not really. "Why kill an Arbitrator at all, knowing she'd be brought back?" The mantis wasn't so sure that Kacey would be brought back by that point herself, but still.
"Leverage." The wave-capturing rig under them tilted from side to side as the ichthyosaur spoke.
"Leverage?" The Tracker's antenna drooped as she tilted her head, almost in time with the platform.
"To some Citizens, it seems like Arbitrators have a lot of sway over how we live," the rig swayed on as the ichthyosaur spoke, "while we have none over them at all."
The wind blew Orchid's antenna in front of her faceted eye. "And this fixes that?" She moved her antenna back to where it went.
"People kill Arbitrators because they'll come back, Officer. It's supposed to be a deterrent. They want to create an experience so unpleasant for that Arbitrator that they'll change the whole way they arbitrate just so it'll never happen to them again. They're hoping to use the means they have to make Arbitrators more fair."
"That's what you tried to do, isn't it?" the mantis asked.
"For all the good it did me," the ichthyosaur chuckled. "I tried to rock the boat and saw what it got me. Now I don't make waves anymore, I just…" she gestured at their surroundings, "wait for the waves to come to me," she grinned toothily.
"Do you know anyone who thought Kacey could've used being made more 'fair'?"
"No." No hesitation. "Everyone liked Kacey, as much as it's possible to like an Arbitrator, I mean," she tempered. "She was fair." Interesting.
"Have you seen Sawtooth?"
"Who?"
***
[FLICK!]
[-emists associated sublimation with the Libra, the scales of justice that measure our actions. In physics, sublimation is when water molecules get so cold that they evaporate into thin air. For psychologists, sublimation is when we want something but, since we can't get quite the way we want, we end up settling for the next best thing instead. On some religious orders, the practice of celibacy meant to repurpose-]
[FLICK!]
"People think I'm cold. You ever get that?"
"All the time. It's the oldest trick in the book, innit? If you want someone to do something they'd rather not, you tell them there's something wrong with them for not wanting to. You don't want something wrong with you, do you?"
"I'm a warm person, aren't I?"
She'd put her hand on her forehead.
"You're about 98 degrees."
***
The ice planet took some getting used to.
Fran's job on the ice planet became to shovel snow around an ozone plant where it turned out that Jackie had died of ozone poisoning a long, long time ago. It wasn't possible for most people to go where they needed to get to without having to go through the obstacle that going outside represented on its surface. They had to be able to come and go from their ships, whether as part of their work or between their shifts, depending on the situation. Furthermore, if the snow and ice had been allowed to accumulate unchecked on the roof, it would have eventually been irreparably damaged by its mass. The snow fell constantly, relentless in its onslaught. The jackal quickly learned never to leave her icepick too far from her shovel either.
Again, it was definitely work-that-went-away, not work-that-stayed. Her first footsteps in the snow from when she'd start shoveling in the morning were already covered with snow by the time she'd be done with her shoveling in the evening, as surely as if she'd never been there at all. If anything, it was not so different from what shoveling her mom's driveway or scraping ice off her best friend's car and her roommate's car during winter had been like back on Earth, just a lot more intensive for much longer than that. For some reason the way that Fran had felt about being out in the cold had done a complete 180 sometime in her late teens or early adulthood.
She'd never been able to figure out if it had been a metabolic thing, a psychological thing or some admixture of the two, but it had been a thing she'd had to deal with, that had been a fact. As a child, she'd often chosen to go out in wintertime dressed much more lightly than everyone around her, despite her mother's concerns that so much cold without enough warm clothes might not have been good for her. At worst the young jackal hadn't felt the cold as much as others seemed to and, at best, she'd enjoyed it, the way she'd enjoyed walking in rainfall. She had no real sense of death, and the cold had felt like something refreshing that would, at worst, preserve her like a relic from the stone age that could be thawed later like in the movies.
She imagined that being frozen must have been like being turned into a great big piece of ice cream.
Death by fire had seemed a lot more final to Fran than dying of cold had seemed. She could have imagined zombies more easily than she could have imagined ghosts. A body that had been buried in the ground had given her that vague impression that it could still rise up somehow, but a body that had been cremated had seemed just gone, irretrievable. In this way, the jackal had perversely understood the motivations of the pharaohs who had insisted on being mummified so that their bodies would be preserved until they could be resurrected. Though she did not believe it to be true, the psychology behind it made sense to her. Something intact could at least come back in theory. It was always more expensive to come back from being vaporized.
And being remembered the way you were always made you exist for just a little longer.
In her late teens or early adulthood, she had finally internalized that death by fire or death by cold had still been death, something that people only came back from in the movies but not in real life regardless of the way they died. Around the same time, Fran had, paradoxically, progressively developed a heightened sensitivity to the cold compared to most people around her. She had wondered if there could've been a psychosomatic element to it, but she'd also known that she'd been in the right age range to have developed Seasonal Affective Disorder. She'd dressed with more and more layers on top of each other each winter, her only armor against the encroaching enemy. Jackals were desert creatures, not tundra dwellers.
The cold did something to your body, like a preview of what rigor mortis must’ve felt like. It was like the wind becoming a maw to bite with, seizing you like a vise. It was like a thousand needles forcing their way through your skin at the same time, injecting their paralysis. The body grew cold when you died, so we huddled for warmth, to cling to life.
She'd begun to dread winter's arrival earlier and earlier each year, and she'd spent it looking forward to summer's return more and more as well. When she'd been in her early teens, she'd often used to get up in the middle of the night to start shoveling the snow out of her mom's driveway just because she hadn't been able to sleep anyway, so she'd figured she may as well get something done. Fran had always wanted to stay in bed longer in the morning and to stay up longer in the evening. It had been as though she'd always been out of phase with everyone around her. Delayed sleep phase syndrome was a thing, and night shifts became easier for her.
While the ice planet did remind the jackal of what she'd imagined that the Arctic and the Antarctic must have been like back on Earth, there were also notable differences between them. For instance, while on Earth the poles would have had just one very long day for half the year and one very long night for the other half. She couldn't begin to imagine what it could've been like to try to adapt to something like that. On the ice planet, the day/night cycle was the same as it was on every other planet in the System. It was just as cold all year round, without seasons to speak of.
The roach fell back on her knitting needles and yarn so she could use the clothes she'd make as currency. Headbands, hats, scarves, gloves, socks, and coats were valuable commodities that wore out quick when you had to use them often. When you often had to be careful not to slip on ice and to climb over snowbanks, your whole day could turn into an obstacle course, and the wear and tear could take its toll on them.
She also sewed up a few people's winter clothes that had been damaged but that they didn't want to replace outright. Fran's physical exertion as she shoveled kept her a bit warmer than if she'd stood still for what it was worth, but the prolonged exposure to the cold would also put a strain on her joints. One night, Jackie offered the jackal an option that might help loosen up Fran's stiff articulations.
"A firefly I used to work with showed me the way here one night when I used to work here on the ice planet a long time ago," the roach explained as the two of them sat facing each other in the secret hot springs that she'd taken the jackal to.
"That was nice of her." You'd have thought it'd have been too cold to get undressed at all in the midst of the frozen environment, but the area they were in was shielded enough from the wind by its location that the ambient heat from the bubbling surface around them predominated still.
“You know, I guess it was.” An aurora borealis shimmered overhead like a curtain hiding them from the rest of the world. “You want to be careful with this place because we don’t get time off to come here, you know?” They had both had to accept to give up a few hours of sleep to be able to indulge in the hot springs. Another tradeoff. “So if you get hooked on coming here too many nights, you end up sleepwalking through your job as surely as I did back at that dam I was telling you about that time, you know?”
Fran had hesitated to get disrobed briefly. “I see what you mean.” Even though there were no nudity taboos in the System as such, she’d become used to worrying what people would think of her body, especially before her little trip under Beaker’s knife had made it more her own. “It was nice of you to take me here, too.” It occurred to her that no one had ever seen anything like what she’d been like before then in the System before she’d shown up, though.
“Don’t mention it.” As far as Jackie was concerned, every jackal must’ve looked like what Fran looked like. What other point of reference would she have had?
“Oh man!” The jackal wriggled her toes, stretched out in the water as her muscles released much of the tension they’d accumulated over the past few days. “That’s so nice.”
“What’s a man?” A geyser chose that moment to erupt somewhere nearby, evocatively, one might have said.
“A miserable pile of secrets.”
"What?"
***
"What makes something a relationship to you?" Fran's roommate had been ace, but not aro.
"Without the obvious, you mean?"
It had seemed better for the jackal to ask than to assume. "Well, it's probably a bit different for everyone, right?" Where did love end and friendship begin?
"I guess so!" Fran's roommate had granted. "Some of us cuddle but some of us don’t. For some of us who live together, it means if one moved away, the other would move with them, but then, some of us are in long distance relationships, though. For some of us it's the one person more important to you than everybody else - but some of us are poly too, though. For some of us it’s someone with who ‘my money’ becomes ‘our money’, someone whose survival becomes tied to yours. For some of us, it’s someone you’d try to help out of anything even if they couldn’t help you back.”
"And for you?" the jackal asked.
"Someone whose survival is more important to you than yours. Someone you've forgotten how to live without. Someone you'd follow to the ends of the Earth."
***
"Hey, Ghost!" The firefly appeared on Ghost's communicator viewscreen. "Uh, Officer, I mean." People kept forgetting to call her that.
"Dobson! What's up?" the mantis asked.
"You…" The breadth of what she had to say made her pause. "You better get down here." Dobson's words flowed easily, under most circumstances.
"What happened?" The Tracker was on the move.
"There was an avalanche." The firefly's body flickered nervously.
"Did someone die?"
Dobson shook her head. "That's the thing, Ghost." She was too shaken to correct herself that time. "She should be, but she's not. I've never seen anything like it." When she did talk, she talked fast. "I don't know how to even put it, it might be easier to just show you." There was a remote possibility it could've been a trap, but Ghost was trained to deal with that. "You better get down here."
"I'm on my way," the mantis assured her, a cig dangling from her mandibles as she tightened her scarf and trenchcoat around her on her way. The avalanche had unearthed something, it turned out, revealing the way through a snowy mountainside into a secret ice cavern hidden inside of it. The body's silhouette was blurry through the surface of the ice in which it had been frozen solid but, if you knew what you were looking for, it was still unmistakable.
It was Sawtooth.
***
Fran's heart had raced as though it had been trying to escape from her chest.
The bus had been packed to standing only, pressed on every side by strangers as far as the eye could see. Every hair on her body had been standing on end. In her mind she'd known she could breathe in theory, but her body had stopped doing so on its own, forcing her to think about taking every breath she took, as if it could've been her last. The jackal had felt a tension in her chest, like a knot she couldn't untangle squeezing her heart as surely as her body had been being squeezed by the people around her. If anyone in the mass of people everywhere had wanted to rob, grope or hurt her, she hadn't been altogether sure she'd have been in a situation to do anything about it. It had a way of gripping the mind.
Her anxiety, claustrophobia, and touch aversion had been spiking through the roof, bouncing around their pressure cooker with no way out. Fran had been torn between wishing people would see how badly she'd been doing so someone would let her sit down, and afraid that someone would notice to take advantage of her moment of weakness. It hadn't been until she'd heard a baby start crying up front that she'd realized she'd gone from holding her breath to hyperventilating without noticing. There had been so many of them against only one of her, hardly a fair fight. The jackal had striven to remember her mother’s advice, slow, deep breaths, in through the nose, how did the rest of it go again?
'If only I'd never existed, I wouldn't be getting in the way like this.'
It had been when she'd felt those invisible spikes in her shoulders, face and chest, like so many syringes shooting more adrenalin into her bloodstream than she could handle, that she'd known she'd been having a full-on panic attack. She'd lost all sense of time. Fran had always been on this bus. She would always be on this bus. Somehow, she'd finally reached her stop and staggered off the bus to shamble home in shame.
The jackal's pets had rushed to her side the second she'd stepped through the door, running across the room for their emergency rescue. They'd almost run right into her and into each other on their way in their haste to be near her. On the bus she'd been one in a hundred and may as well not have existed but, to them, she'd been the one that mattered, and it was all the others who may as well not have existed. Fran had almost broken down in tears, not just shaken by what had happened to her, but moved by their devotion. They'd come to her as though it'd been her touch that would save them from something even though, to her, it'd really been their touch which had been saving her.
Her touch aversion had always been worse before she'd gotten pets. The jackal had always felt like someone had been trying to get something from her without anything in return, without being able to do anything about it. With their help, she'd become able to push her way past it sometimes, with people she'd liked, when the situation had called for it. When they'd licked her, rubbed their faces on her, pressed against her, put their paws up on her side or climbed in her lap, her body had felt as thought she'd been swimming in a warm bath of endorphins, washing the world clean off of her. It had taken them to teach her that touch could heal, without any ulterior motive, a simple expression of affection.
Here Fran had no longer been a piece of meat on a conveyor belt but felt restored to a truer, nobler purpose. They'd kept her alive as surely as she'd kept them alive. What purer expression of love could there be?