You're not in trouble

The United States, European Union, and most Commonwealth republics and realms have, through explicit constitutional amendments, accepted birthright citizenship for extraterrestrials born within their territory and acceded limited autonomy to their governments by treaty. However, for much of the world, ETs remain "resident aliens," required to register their existence and keep passports on hand, given only very limited rights, protections, and civil liberties. For ETs, Earth remains largely hostile, and their legal status is always potentially in jeopardy.
—Anaïs Nineveh, The Exodus: A History, Chapter 2

A little blue light leaked out from beneath the bandage.

Mel was on the bed, Jordan spooning him, staring at the back of Rachel's neck. She had her arms wrapped around Jenny, and the sound of their breathing in the dark was slow and steady. He couldn't even see the brain slugs. Just the little blue light that limned the white package on the back of Rachel's neck.

His hand moved up on its own. Mel dared not breathe as thumb and forefinger found the corner of the bandage, which began to peel. Slowly, carefully, he peeled it away. The blue light grew brighter, and Mel had to close his dark-adjusted eyes to slits. When it got too bright to see, Mel's arm flailed, ripped off the bandage—

—and a chunk of Rachel's scalp.

She didn't wake. He stared at the strip of hair and skin hanging off the bandage in his hand, and then at Rache. The strip had gone up her neck to reveal a curving segment of her skull, the edges of the wound ragged and bloody. Yet the smooth, round thing itself wasn't bone. It was bluish-purple, nacreous, with a flashing vein of electric blue running through it, which gave off a steady light.

The gigantic pearl began to pulse, like the beat of a slow and gigantic heart, and Mel felt the warm, soft lips of Jordan on the back of his neck, the tips of her tongue just biting into the flesh.

"Merde!" Rachel swore as she bolted out of bed, waking them all from their dreams. The naked blonde clambered over bare legs and off the edge of the bed, grabbing for her panties.

"I'm late!" she said to Mel. He blinked and said the first thing that came to mind as he saw the blood on her thighs.

"I think Jordan and Jenny keep their tampons under the sink in the bathroom." She gave him a thumbs up and vanished into the bathroom. By which time, his roommates were awake, sitting up, blinking.

Exercises. Slow. Working the kinks out. The shower didn't really stop, with all four of them needing it, and by the time Mel ducked under the spray to scrub the menstrual blood off his fingers and run some soap through his hair, it was cold. He emerged to find Rachel gone, Jordan and Jenny dressed, and that they'd laid his clothes out for him on the couch.

That was how he found out Jenny was going back to work at the Cosmic Fill-Up after her long absence.

Mel wasn't unhappy at the company, but it did present a logistical problem: they couldn't all hold hands at the same time, not with the early-morning foot traffic on the sidewalks of Vancouver. They defaulted to Jordan and Jenny holding hands, sharing their sensorium through touch, brain slugs watching their back, and keeping Mel in view as he trailed behind them like a faithful hound. Jenny was back in Mel's hoodie, and he had to smile at that. He kind of doubted he was ever going to fully get that back.

Maybe next paycheck, I should just buy one for each of the girls. Then maybe I'll get to keep one, he thought.

Ha-Yoon was out of the office as the three of them shuffled in. She smiled, but there was a tightness to the smile that felt forced.

"Soong, welcome back! Carmichael, good to see you. Mel, we need to talk."

Mel paused and blinked as his brain processed that.

"Uh. Am I fired?" he asked, not sure why else she would be so nervous. This was a woman who would discuss the contours of her favorite dildo with a calculus function and achieve supreme enjoyment at the mathematical expression of her desire.

"No, no, you're not in trouble, it's nothing like that," Ha-Yoon assured him. "Just, ah. Something personal."

His girlfriends had already checked in and gotten their assigned tasks for the day. Tomie was behind the counter, and as Mel signed in, Ha-Yoon hovering behind him, he saw the three brain slug hosts join hands in a brief conference.

In her tiny office, Ha-Yoon sat down hard. Mel noticed the sobriety chip was still there on the desk. Nor were there any beer cans in the little trash can next to her desk. His palms felt itchy, nervous in a way he hadn't felt naked in a room full of brain slugs. His boss chewed her lip for a second and then sighed.

"Remember how we were talking about family last week?" Ha-Yoon said. She grabbed her sobriety chip and began to flip it over and over through her fingers.

"Yes," Mel said. His stomach seemed to be pre-emptively tensing for a gut punch.

"And you remember how you said you looked for family and you didn't have any?" Ha-Yoon's smile looked painful now. As if her face hurt, but she couldn't stop.

"Yes," Mel said. "Both of my parents were only children; their parents were also only children, and dead. I'd have to go back to my great-grandparents, third cousins or something."

"So, I, uh, submitted a sample of your DNA to a testing service online," she said. "They found a 24.1% match."

Mel opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Words didn't want to come out. Too many thoughts jammed through his brain at once. Finally, he settled on a single word:

"How?"

He hadn't meant it to come out loud, but Ha-Yoon flinched.

"Um. That time you came in with a shoe full of blood, and I helped clean it? I bagged some of the blood and mailed it in. And, uh, as your boss, I have access to a lot of personal identifiable information. Full name, date and place of birth, tax identification number. I know you said you looked, but that was years ago, right? And people are adding new data all the time, and you probably couldn't have paid for a quick DNA test anyway. It's not a full ancestry scan, just a paternity test, but—" She had begun talking rapidly, her face flushing a little with a mixture of excitement and chagrin. "—but there was a hit. 24.1% match, indicating a shared parent. You have a half-sister, Mel. Here. In Seacouver. She wants to meet you."

Mel stood rooted in place. It would have been a good and dramatic moment for the room to begin to spin and for him to pass out, or swear angrily, or do something. Yet reality stayed stubbornly in place, his brain refused to shut down, and he couldn't muster anger. He wasn't sure what he was feeling. He wanted to say that she was wrong, that it was impossible, the DNA got corrupted, why the hell would she . . .

A terrible suspicion fought its way to the front and out of his mouth.

"Tell me you didn't do this just so you could find a cousin or half-sister for me to fuck," he managed.

Her too-tight smile twitched at the corners.

"It totally, mostly, almost completely wasn't about that," Ha-Yoon said. "I just get these . . . urges to do deep dives into things. I know this is a lot to take in. And I owe you an apology. I went way beyond what I'm legally allowed to do, and it was technically a violation of your privacy—"

"You think?" Mel said, heard his voice rise, and forced himself to calm down. His heart hammered in his chest, a sudden twinge of pain. He took a deep breath through his nose, held it for a count of ten, and let it out slowly. Ha-Yoon was sweating, little wet beads running down her face, dark circles of it soaking through her shirt under her armpits.

Of course. She was probably in deep shit if anybody found out about this. He wasn't sure what corporate did about this sort of thing, but somebody would whisper lawsuit, and they'd both be fired, and maybe the cops would get involved. None of which Mel wanted. This was just supposed to be a job. Menial labor. Sweep the floors, clean the toilets, and replace the receipt paper. Not . . . whatever this was.

"What's her name?" he said at last.

"I, uh, don't know yet. The online service is meant for discretion. We can both see the match, and she reached out through a direct message, saying she wants to meet," Ha-Yoon said. "That was last night. I haven't responded yet."

Mel gnawed on the inside of his cheek. A half-sister. Maybe. If the DNA sample was any good. If the analysis was right. If this wasn't some scammer looking to squeeze money out of him, somehow. If, if, if. He stared at his feet and then up at the tiled ceiling. There were no answers there. Nothing to tell him what to do.

"See if you can set up a meeting," Mel said quietly. "Here. Or maybe on the Seacouver Community College campus when I'm there for the ASL class on Thursday. You can give her my name. Okay?"

"Okay," Ha-Yoon said. The sobriety coin stopped spinning. "Are you mad at me?"

Mel's jaw worked. Not sure how to define his current emotional state. Yet getting mad and yelling at his boss wasn't really an option. He needed this job.

"I'm upset," he said finally. "This is a lot to take in. You should have asked first. I'm gonna go work now."

Jordan and Jenny both saw him come out of the manager's office and stalk toward the supply closet for the swifter. Somebody had spilled coffee in the eating area already. Jordan came down and laid a hand on his arm, looked him in the eyes. Questioning. Listening. Mel wished he were further along in his ASL lessons. That he could actually have a conversation about this. At the same time, he wasn't sure he was willing to talk about this with anyone. Not yet. After all, this might be nothing. A bad sample. Misanalyzed. Scammer.

"Weird news," he said, finally. "I'll tell you about it later. Maybe at lunch. It's okay. Nothing bad. Just . . . upsetting. Need to process."

Jordan blinked twice, then nodded. She brought up her left hand and made a crude jerky motion, her tongue poking out her cheek. That definitely wasn't an ASL sign, but it brought a smile to Mel's face.

"Not right now, okay? Not unless it's an emergency," he said. "I just need to work and let the weird brain chemicals metabolize."

The morning was otherwise fairly quiet. Customers came and went. Someone had a bad day in the men's room, and it became Mel's problem. An older teen, a young woman with a shaven head, tried to lift a copy of Slug Fucker Monthly and bumped into Tomie on her way out. The girl had dropped the magazine and booked it. The wrinkled magazine couldn't be put back on the rack for sale; Mel had to tear the covers off and throw it away. A part of him wished the young woman had gotten away with it. Throwing it away felt like a waste.

Half-sister. So, one full parent. Mel knew only the basics about his parents. James Arkwright, born 2018, died 2040. Sinead Tilley Arkwright, born 2019, died 2040. Married 2036. Mel was born in 2037, barely ten months later. So who was it? Did she have a baby before, give it away? Or did he have an affair, or get someone pregnant in a previous relationship? His jaw clenched as he thought about all the girls a few years older than him who passed through the orphanage system. Any one of them could have . . . but no, he didn't want to think about that. He had no way to know what had really happened. Nothing to go on except Ha-Yoon's word that he even had a half-sister.

Mel grabbed two burritos for lunch and did not, at that moment, feel like he was taking advantage of his employee privileges in the least. Jenny and Jordan sat on either side of him, Tomie was across the table. They didn't say anything. They never said anything. Yet their eyes watched him as he ate. Mel wasn't sure he wanted to say this in front of Tomie, but figured she was likely to pick up on it through the Great Brain Slug Grapevine, or whatever the World Soul was, anyway.

"Ha-Yoon took a sample of my blood, the night I came in after Antonio stabbed me in the foot," he said quietly. "Without my knowledge, she sent it in to a DNA testing place to see if she could locate any family. They found a hit. I may have a half-sister. I don't know how to handle that yet, but according to Ha-Yoon, she wants to meet, and I want to meet her."

Jordan and Jenny reached out and gave his hands a squeeze. He smiled. He wasn't sure whether brain slugs had a concept for lost family, though he figured they must. Some intrepid brain slug that wandered away, got a host, but became separated from the hive mind by circumstance and distance. Maybe making a new hive mind of its own. Members of the two groups might meet later, maybe at some distant starport. He wondered what had happened then. Did they go to war? Did the hive minds merge? Was it like two drops of mercury forming a single puddle, or would they be too different, after years or centuries apart?

Mel was thinking that when a familiar voice came from above him.

"Mr. Arkwright," Detective Macelroy said. "Welcome back. A moment of your time?"

Jenny and Jordan were already policing up his burrito wrappers and used napkins.

"Thanks," he told them as he stood up. Macelroy had a different turban on today, a dark blue. It matched her suit, which was of blue and black pinstripes; a neat, thin tie, red as fresh blood, ran down from her throat.

"Court this morning," Macelroy said. "Officers often need to testify when things go to trial."

He followed her outside for another circumambulation of the Cosmic Fill-Up. People waited in their cars as hydrogen was pumped, and batteries were recharged.

"I'm sorry about the blue pearl," Macelroy said when they rounded the corner. "The whispers of the World Soul are not always easy to read. I did not mean to get your hopes up."

"Shit happens," Mel said, with forced nonchalance. "Other than that, the integration went fine. The new host is in my building, downstairs, 402. Probably I'll see her again sometime."

"Yes, I imagine that's very likely," the detective said. "And you saw the Ancient?"

"Big eight-limbed, eight-eyed being in a pool in the center of the room? Yeah," Mel said.

"She likes you. The Hive Mind likes you," Macelroy said. "Tell me, please. What happened?"

Mel chewed the inside of his cheeks again. A sudden reticence filled him. It wasn't that he didn't trust Macelroy—she had been wrong, but had not, as far as he was aware, deliberately lied to him—but because he realized that what had happened was so personal. The hurt in his heart was too raw. What he and Rachel had done on the bus—

"Part of what happened is personal," Mel said. "So you'll forgive me if I don't go into explicit details about the sex."

"Of course," the brain bat said.

So he gave a lightly edited version of events. It took three loops around the Cosmic Fill-Up to tell it, his brain digging up details he had noticed but maybe not thought about in the moment. Macelroy kept questions brief. How many brain slug hosts? What non-human species? Had Mel recognized any clues to the identity of the new host? Mel answered as best he could. He wondered if brain-bats, being predators, were good at detective work. If they had the instinct for it.

". . . and then we all filed onto buses and drove home," he said. "We stopped for breakfast, got home after sunup."

The turbaned head nodded. No surprise. No evidence that she didn't believe him. No pressing for additional details about the ride home. Maybe she even believed him. As they approached the back of the Cosmic Fill-Up for the fourth time, she stopped and looked at him.

"I have an odd favor to ask of you," she said. "One that might be in both of our interests."

"What's that?" Mel asked.

She pulled a small plastic vial from her pocket and showed it to him.

"I'd like a sperm sample. For analysis. I will share the results," she said. "Don't tell your paramours."

Mel frowned. He didn't immediately take the vial.

"Why do you want my sperm?" he asked. "And why do you want me to keep it a secret from my girlfriends?"

The shades hid Macelroy's eyes, but the turban shifted, as if the brain bat was swelling.

"I want to find out why the brain slugs are so attracted to you, Mr. Arkwright. I'm curious if there's anything in your genetic makeup that might explain why they've gone to such considerable trouble to include you in their integration rite. Convenience, perhaps, but they could have sucked you dry in the apartment and taken your sperm, but left you behind. They've done that before, with other integrations. Your presence for contribution was, as far as I'm aware . . . unique. They included you in a way they never have before. The hive mind is evolving new behaviors. I'd like to know why."

Mel frowned at that. "I have a high sperm count. They sent my sperm to a lab once already. Do you really think this will tell you anything different?"

"Yes," Detective Macelroy said. "This is a different sort of lab. Different sort of test. Don't you want to know what's in your own DNA? To know why they seem to be so eager to keep you?"

His jaw worked. Everything seemed to center on his damn DNA today. Mel thought about what Ha-Yoon had done. If she could do what she said she had with a sample of his DNA, what else could they find out? What else did he not know about himself?

He sighed and held out his hand to take the vial. "Give me a day to think about it."

"Of course," she said, as she pressed the vial into his hand. They parted ways at the central door, and Mel went back in.

The afternoon was quieter than the morning. Not even a teen trying to steal beer. As he checked out, Ha-Yoon stepped out of her office. Not smiling, this time.

"Her name is Molly," the manager said. "She wants to meet you on Thursday, at the Campus Cafe, after your class lets out. Wear your Cosmic Fill-Up hoodie so she'll recognize you."

Mel had been punched in the gut. This was like the moment just after, when muscles that hadn't been prepared for it suddenly tighten, tensing for a blow that's already come.

"Thanks," he said, as Jordan and Jenny waited for him.

On the walk home, Jordan locked her arm in his, and Jenny followed behind.