Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two (26 page)

I was feeling pretty under the gun at that point, honestly. I knew my window was closing, if it hadn’t closed already. There was a really good chance the girls had already been taken out of the country, given that it was coming on a week. They might be gone already. Poof.

Gantry told me I might still have some time...but probably not much.
 

He said a lot of smuggling operations would hole the girls up somewhere until the hottest part of the police investigation died down...especially for wealthy kids from the suburbs They’d keep them somewhere off the beaten path for a few weeks, auctioning them off online in some cases. Then, when things quieted down a bit, they’d smuggle them out of the country through an alternate airport. Which––again according to Gantry––was part of the reason Seattle was a popular target area for this kind of thing.

After all, Canada wasn’t so far away.
 

Gantry said a lot of Americans got taken out of Vancouver, BC. According to him, Toronto served a similar purpose for the eastern states, and some of the border towns in Mexico were used for a similar purpose for other parts of the U.S.

Of course, the girls might also be dead. But personally, I wasn’t ready to go there yet, either.

More than anything, I really wanted to check out Jo’s tip.

I thought about all that, even as I scanned personnel files, looking for some kind of connection. Clarice hung around the door like she always did, peering in at me every so often and grinning at me with a barely suppressed excitement.

Each and every day I’d shown up here, Clarice looked bizarrely excited to see me. Today was no exception, despite my black jeans and loose-hanging band t-shirt and motorcycle boots. I couldn’t help noticing that Clarice had switched up her own look again, too.
 

Then again, she’d done that every day I’d been here.

Some of her costumes were so extreme I barely recognized her until she smiled at me. There’d been a metallic, space-suit dress one day, with knee-high patent leather boots and steel gray eye shadow. She wore a bright orange, velvet pantsuit the day after that, and a Twiggy-sixties micro-mini thing covered in earth tone swirls the day following. Then there’d been the day where it looked like she was wearing glitter-covered trash bags arranged artistically around her body in sparkly waves...and, of course, the
Blade Runner
attire and weirdly plastic hairstyle from the 1940s she’d worn the first day I met her.

Today, she reminded me of Jessica Rabbit.
 

She even had the shocking red hair. It must have been a wig (but looked incredibly real) and flowed in soft curls around her mostly-bare and powdered white shoulders. A low-cut, red satin dress clung to her hips, breasts and tiny waist. The material fell in an asymmetrical line from above her knees in front down to about mid-calf in the back, and was close to backless, despite the low-cut and draping front. Sparkly red, six-inch heels completed the outfit, along with black, fishnet stockings and blood red lipstick.

It was serious
va-voom
wear, as far as most men would be concerned, but I was beginning to think she was gay, honestly. The whole week, she’d batted her eyes at me a heck of a lot more than she ever had at Jake. I wasn’t sure if I should just let it go and be flattered, or if I should be seriously reassessing the relative butchy-ness of my own clothing.

I hadn’t told Nik where I was going that day, either.

Then again, I hadn’t told him all week.

He’d been pretty busy with Gantry, so I doubted he even noticed. Nik had been giving me more of a wide berth than usual, anyway, presumably because of our little chat that night before Irene burst in to tell us about her peeper.

Still, even knowing
why
Nik was avoiding me...it bothered me.

I tried to pretend like it didn’t, which is maybe why I hadn’t been checking in as much as usual, but yeah, it bothered me.

I only got the bare basics on what Nik and Gantry had been up to, which probably made all that worse.
 

Searching for Razmun, mostly, from what I could gather...and using Nik to scout that complex near Mount Ranier. I knew Gantry was probably trying to decide how to approach a group of shape-shifting morph, anyway––from a military perspective, that is––so maybe all the recon was as much to buy him thinking time as anything.

For now, Nik, Gantry and his team seemed to be in a bit of a holding pattern, collecting intelligence versus step-by-step planning of a full-blown op.

Gantry told me he still had a guy on Michael Evers, too.

I also knew––again from Gantry, not from Nik––that the two of them were trying to figure out some way to track the morph’s signatures when they transformed. Nik apparently shared that humans from his home dimension had a way to do that, and Gantry had been trying to replicate that process ever since.

Nik wanted to wait before they moved on Razmun, too, according to Gantry. Apparently, Nik wanted a better idea of what Razmun was planning. I had to assume he was referring to the terrorist bombing and fingering me and whatever else, but knowing Nik, it could be a dozen other things, too, including things connected to the inter-dimensional gate.

Gantry also muttered something about “morph boy” knowing a little too much about science to make Gantry strictly comfortable.

I had to assume Gantry meant Nik by that, not Razmun.

Gantry also grudgingly conceded that Nik was smart. Of course, in doing so, he implied that Nik was maybe a little too smart for Gantry’s liking, given what he was.

I had to wonder if it was weird for Nik, to be siding with humans against his own kind. I knew that wasn’t the full story, of course, but I still wondered if it bothered him. Whatever his reasons, Nik was teaching a human how to track his people. He was teaching a human––one with intensive military training and connections, no less––some pretty sensitive stuff about his people’s anatomy and weaknesses, too.

Nik would know why Gantry asked to know those things. He’d be perfectly aware that a good chunk of that reason would be in case Gantry had to kill Nik’s people, assuming things between the two species went wrong.

Nik would also know that Gantry wanted to know how to kill Nik himself, in case he became a threat at some point in the future. A threat to Gantry, perhaps...or to his ops team. To me. To America. Hell, to the human race.
 

Given how things turned out for Nik’s race in his last dimension, I knew he had to have some pretty mixed feelings about all that.

If he did, he didn’t share those feelings with me, however.

I also knew, whatever he might be telling Gantry, that Nik probably had his own ideas on how to handle Razmun.

Again, however, Nik didn’t tell me any of that himself.

Gantry told me that the two of them had been back to the golf course, though, presumably so Nik could assess the stability and location of the gate. Nik had been back a few times on his own, too...and he’d taken Irene with him once, as well.

I tried really hard not to react to that last bit of information, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t pull it off. Not well, anyway. I could tell Gantry picked up on my bristle, although he didn’t comment on it, at least not to my face.

Nik did mention the night before, when all of us were sitting in Irene’s living room, eating pizza, that he’d discussed some of the particulars of gate-stabilization with Gantry. He implied the conversation had been both frustrating and illuminating, in that he’d learned a lot more about how things worked here, meaning on Earth and in the United States, including how humans tended to view the land and buildings they owned.
 

He also learned some of the real-world barriers to doing anything on private property that might be noticed by that property’s legal owners.

Following that discussion, both Nik and Gantry agreed that real, practical problems existed around trying to put any kind of gate-stabilization system in place.

Meaning, people were going to notice if Nik built a fifty-foot stone arch in the middle of a private golf course. Especially an expensive, exclusive golf course like the one attached to the Seattle Country Club near Lake Washington.
 

Nik said that for the gate stabilization process to work, they would need to build something of significant mass and weight to hold the gate in place, even before he worked on the intricacies of “snaring” the gate there in the first place.
 

He didn’t explain what that latter part consisted of, or even what it meant.

He did say that the larger and more volatile the gate, the larger and heavier that gate-stabilization structure needed to be. Nik also said that he believed the gate in Seattle to be a big one...possibly bigger than any of the three he’d encountered on his home world. He explained some of the factors that led him to believe that, and what it might mean, in terms of the types of worlds that the Seattle gate might access, how dangerous it might be, and what might be done on this end to mitigate some of those risks.

And yeah, a lot of that explanation went over my head.

It also went over Gantry’s. And Irene’s.

I got the gist, however. Basically, any of the various configurations Nik might use to try and stabilize the gate would be too conspicuous here, and he would likely need to experiment with those configurations to truly stabilize the gate, which could take weeks, if not months or years. According to Nik, they would definitely be noticed before they could be successfully completed. Erecting a gate stabilizer was something that generally took time, experimentation and planning, even for morph...not, say, a night, where we could be in and out before anyone figured out what we were doing.
 

The stone gate itself was only part of the problem, according to Nik.
 

That gate’s mass could be used to draw and then hold the gate for short periods, but there were a lot of other elements and processes that would need to be tested and put in place before Nik could lock a full-blown gate down for real.

Nik muttered that he might even need a few other morph to help him.

He also mentioned something about the kind of stone he would need, and confessed he wasn’t positive that stone even existed on Earth, since everything had different names. Irene planned to hook Nik up with some geologist pal of hers from Arizona so Nik could investigate that end of things more thoroughly, which is why he dragged her down to the gate area in the first place. But yeah, there were...well,
barriers,
as Nik put it.

Probably insurmountable ones, if I were being honest.

The biggie was the location of the gate, of course.

How we’d manage to get that arch built smack dab in the middle of an exclusive country club was a mystery. I knew the only way that would happen would be if we somehow managed to convince the golf course to let us do it...which probably wasn’t going to happen unless Gantry got the government involved. None of us were ready to go the government route, though, not even Gantry himself. Me, least of all.

Knowing the risks to Nik, I seriously doubted I ever would be okay with that.

Which meant stabilizing the gate might be a total no-go.

On the other hand, Nik seemed to think that didn’t preclude using the gate
altogether
...or convincing Razmun to use it to leave Earth.

It just...complicated things...as he put it.

I really needed to drag Nik somewhere private, though, and talk to him in a real way. He’d been avoiding me, like I said, and not just about personal things...although personal things were a big part of it, yeah. He’d been sleeping on the floor since that night, too, presumably to avoid sleeping next to me. He’d even avoided sitting next to me on the couch, preferring to sit by Gantry or Irene instead, or on the floor.

We seriously needed to clear the air.

Maybe more importantly, I didn’t feel comfortable knowing he probably had his own plans brewing on the side of whatever he had going with Gantry.

But yeah, Nik had been giving me a lot of space.

I knew he didn’t want us to have sex until I told him I was committing to this thing with him. I also knew he was keeping his distance from me until he knew for sure where I stood in relation to him and Gantry and whoever else. I hadn’t tried to talk to him about how ridiculous that was since that one night...at least, ridiculous from an Earth perspective...but I knew I needed to. I knew it might be a lost cause, if only because I knew how stubborn Nik could be.