Perilous Waif (Alice Long Book 1) Read online

  “P-please, Ulin!” Dika begged.

  “You’re asking a lot from us,” Kovy said. “I’d go that far for a friend, maybe, but you said you didn’t want to be one of my friends. Maybe you’ve reconsidered?”

  “I… it’s not you, Kovy. I just don’t like girls that way.”

  “What are you talking about, Dika?”

  Kovy sounded genuinely puzzled at that. I guess even a finely tuned social predator like her wasn’t immune to Adjustment.

  “I bet she just wants us to talk her into it,” Ulin said. “She’s so shy, I’m not sure she’s ever played with anyone. Or maybe she’s afraid of the freak finding out.”

  I gritted my teeth. A freak, was I? She’d better watch her step, or I might show her just how freakish I was. But no, the matrons were death on anything that even hinted of violence. Dika was always better than me with words. It was probably better to let her handle this.

  “Aw, is that it? Don’t worry, Dika. If she’s giving you trouble I can get Matron Gisel to deal with her. But if it’s the other thing, well, that can be fun sometimes. Ulin?”

  There was a surprised squeak, and the thump of a chair being knocked over.

  “Ulin!” Dika shouted. “Let me ga ha hooo…”

  That was weird. I frowned, leaning over the side of the branch to try to hear what was happening.

  “Ssshhh, pet,” Kovy crooned softly. “Isn’t this nice? Yes, you can struggle if you like, but no shouting.”

  “S-stop it,” Dika whimpered. “Oh! Oh, goddess. Please. Please please please…”

  “What’s that, Dika? Please turn it up? Well, if you insist.”

  I’d heard enough. A growl burst from my throat, and I pitched myself off the branch.

  The wind rushed past my face as I fell towards the ground, sixty meters below. This was going to hurt if I messed up. One second. Two.

  My hand snapped out to grip the window sill in passing. For a normal girl that would have been a hopeless gesture, but my fingers latched onto the thick mass of living wood with a burst of inhuman strength. I jerked to a stop, the force rattling the bones in my arm. They were just diamond whiskers embedded in a growth matrix, way more fragile than they’d be when I was fully grown. But even so, stopping my puny thirty-eight kilos was barely a strain.

  I flung myself up through the window, tucking into a ball momentarily to clear the narrow opening, and landed on my feet in the middle of the room.

  “Leave her alone!”

  The scene I found was exactly what I’d been afraid of. Ulin was standing behind Dika, effortlessly holding her arms pinning behind her back. Dika squirmed uselessly in her grip, unable to consider using her claws as the weapons they were meant to be. And Kovy…

  Kovy had neurostims in her fingers. One of her hands rested lightly on the side on Dika’s head, projecting a finely tuned field that scrambled my roommate’s thoughts and did who knew what to her feelings. The other was on Dika’s thigh, teasingly working its way up towards her panties.

  I saw red.

  The next thing I knew Ulin was on the floor, crying and babbling apologies while I held her arm twisted behind her with just slightly less pressure than it would take to break it. Kovy was huddled in the corner screaming hysterically, and there were hurried footsteps coming up the stairs.

  “Hands off my roommate, bitches,” I growled. “She’s not interested in pushy suckups.”

  “Oh Gaia, mercy, please don’t kill me Alice,” Ulin sobbed.

  The door flew open. I looked up to find Matron Wensa staring at me in horror, and had a split second to remember the blood on my face.

  “Security!” She screamed. “Emergency response, now!”

  Oops.

  Letting the security bots capture me was probably the hardest thing I’d ever done. All my instincts screamed at me to fight, struggle, run away, do anything other than passively stand there and let them take me. But that would just make things worse. Fighting another orphan was bad enough. Resisting a matron would be a thousand times worse.

  All I could do was surrender, and hope for the best.

  That sounded like a smart idea right up until the first bot sprayed me with capture web, and then it was too late to change my mind. But I had a horrible, sinking feeling. I’d never seen the bots use capture web before. What did they think I was going to do, go crazy and kill everyone?

  By the time the bots had carried me up to the Discipline Office I was wondering if I’d made the right choice. Matron Gisel’s lecture didn’t help.

  “In all my years at this institution I’ve never seen such a barbaric display,” she fumed. “Violence! Actual, physical violence, in my orphanage. What were you thinking?”

  I opened my mouth.

  “Not you!” She snapped. “I want you to sit quietly, and think about what you’ve done.”

  Well, I certainly wasn’t going anywhere. The security bots had wrapped me in enough capture web to hold a dozen adults, and the sticky strands were firmly attached to the hard wooden bench I sat on.

  There were two of the benches facing the desk in Matron Gisel’s discipline office. Dika was perched next to me, free of restraints and being careful not to touch me. Ulin and Kovy cowered on the other bench, looking ready to bolt out the door if I so much as looked at them funny.

  It was hard to suppress a smirk at that. Whatever happened here, they weren’t going to bother Dika again anytime soon.

  There wasn’t much to look at in the office. It was just a medium-sized room growing out of the trunk of one of the housetrees that made up the orphanage. The walls were bare, as was the huge desk of dark wood that grew from the floor. The windows along the wall to my left looked out onto a solid mass of foliage, admitting light without providing much of a view.

  Matron Gisel was pacing in front of the window, instead of sitting behind the desk like she usually would. That was probably a bad sign.

  The matron was a typical dryad, barely ten cems taller than me and with no muscle tone to speak of. Physically, I had nothing to fear from her. The simple green dress she wore matched her hair, but was worthless as armor. She didn’t carry a weapon, and I doubt she could have brought herself to use one if she did. The settlers who had colonized Felicity a hundred years ago had done their best to engineer away the human capacity for violence, after all.

  But there are worse things than direct violence. As head matron she had ultimate control of all the orphanage systems, including the security bots. She could order me confined to sensory isolation in the ‘Quiet Room’, or have me sent for Adjustment, and the bots would carry out the sentence. I wasn’t sure what else she could do to me, but I had a sinking feeling I was going to find out.

  “Kovy, what were you doing in Dika and Alice’s room?”

  Kovy glanced at me, and swallowed nervously.

  “We were just trying to talk Dika into a little friendly petting, ma’am,” she said earnestly. “She never lets anyone touch her, and that can’t be healthy.”

  Matron Gisel frowned. “Is that true, Dika?”

  Dika sniffed. “Yes, ma’am. I just… I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make anyone feel rejected. I just haven’t felt anything like that yet. But ma’am, I was trying to tell them no and they wouldn’t listen. Ulin was holding me down before Alice made them let me go.”

  “Come on, cutie, don’t you know it can be fun to play that way?” Ulin said.

  “We were just testing you,” Kovy insisted. “I thought you might be looking for someone who knows how to be pushy. We would have let you go if I didn’t get a reaction.”

  “You have neurostim projectors in your fingers!” Dika objected. “Anyone would react to that.”

  “If it feels that good, then what do you have to complain about?” Kovy replied, sounding smug.

  Matron Gisel put her hands on her hips, and frowned at the girl. “Kovy, we’ve talked about this before. You can’t just go around using your enhancements on anyone who catches your eye. You’ll
end up leaving a trail of broken hearts behind you, and that isn’t kind.”

  Kovy’s eyes fell. “Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am. I really was trying to help her.”

  “Forcing me to feel the way you want me to isn’t helping, Kovy,” Dika said harshly. “Please don’t do that to me again.”

  Kovy hung her head, and did her best to sound contrite. “I’m sorry, Dika. I promise, I won’t.”

  “That’s more like it, girls. We’re a community here. Do try to act like it. Ulin? Do you have something to say to Dika?”

  Ulin was silent for a long moment. From her expression I couldn’t tell if she was thinking, or just sulking.

  “We caught Dika climbing in through her window,” she finally said.

  “The window? My word. But you’re in the upper dorms. Is this true, Dika?”

  Dika winced. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What in Gaia’s name were you doing out there? Something to do with Alice, I suppose.”

  “I woke up, and she wasn’t in our room,” Dika explained.

  “So you immediately decided to climb out the window? Somehow, I suspect there’s more to it than that. Ulin, why didn’t you call a matron then?”

  “I was going to,” she claimed. “But Kovy and I had been talking about how to get through to Dika, so I was already thinking about that. I, um, kind of made her think I might not tell on her if she cooperated.”

  “That’s hardly proper behavior for a good girl, Ulin. Were you really going to let her get away with improper behavior? Or were you offering an agreement you didn’t intend to keep? Neither option reflects well on you.”

  “I, um, didn’t really think it through, ma’am.”

  Matron Gisel wasn’t impressed. “Lack of foresight is also a fault, young lady. Is there anything else you need to tell me?”

  “I think Alice messed up my arm, ma’am. It hurts pretty bad right now.”

  “Yes, and now we get to the heart of the matter. Alice, where were you this morning?”

  Well, there was no point in lying. She’d just send the security bots to do a forensic sweep if she wasn’t satisfied with my explanation, and I certainly hadn’t covered my tracks well enough to fool them.

  “I was in the upper branches watching the sunrise, ma’am.”

  “Breaking curfew,” she noted. “And endangering yourself.”

  “I can’t really be hurt by falls, ma’am,” I disagreed. “Even if I land wrong, the worst I could get is a few bruises.”

  “A bruise is still an injury,” she noted. “Also arguing with a matron, and setting a dangerous example for your peers. Go on. Why were you up there? Did you just have an irrepressible urge to see the sunrise?”

  “I was hunting, ma’am,” I admitted.

  “I see. Is that why you have blood on your face?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I caught a zango.”

  She shook her head sadly. “You caught and ate a wild animal. Have you no respect for the goddesses’ creatures?”

  “The logo said it was a Callisto Creations creature, ma’am.”

  Her lips pressed together so hard they went pale. Oops. I probably shouldn’t have said that.

  “We are all Gaia’s creatures, young lady. So Dika climbed up to see what you were doing?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And when she returned to her room, like a girl with at least some faint shred of common sense, you then overheard her conversation with Ulin and Kovy?”

  I nodded.

  “Then would you please explain, Alice, exactly what possessed you to attack two members of our community?”

  Why had I done it? It seemed a little over the top, after Kovy’s explanation. I could have just glared at them, and they would have backed off. But I hadn’t seen two overly enthusiastic schoolgirls being a little pushy. I’d seen… something there wasn’t a word for in Standard Newspeak. The closest that could get was ‘ravish’, which meant something like ‘to be delightfully pleasured by a forceful partner despite your insincere protests’.

  Had I been wrong?

  No. I knew better than to believe anything Kovy said. She was a social predator, and she was fighting to protect herself now.

  I lapsed into the Classic English that I’d been born knowing. “Ma’am, I came through the window to find these two practically raping my roommate.”

  Ulin and Kovy didn’t speak English, but Dika and Matron Gisel did. Dika gasped, and turned to stare at me.

  “We speak Standard on Felicity, Alice,” the matron snapped.

  “Is there a word for ‘rape’ in Standard, ma’am?” I replied, still in English. “Ulin was keeping her pinned so Kovy could scramble her brain until she stopped struggling, ma’am. I took one look and my combat instincts activated. I almost killed them both. But then I remembered that we’re supposed to be a community, and community members don’t hurt each other. So I held myself back, and stopped them without doing any real damage. So you could decide what to do. Only you aren’t even going to punish them, are you? You’re actually buying that load of self-serving nonsense Kovy made up.”

  Matron Gisel went pale. “Enough! Speak Standard, or don’t speak at all. I won’t have you poisoning these innocent girls with your outlandish foreign nonsense. How do you even remember things like that? The Adjustment when you came here should have taken care of it all.”

  I remained silent.

  “Well, I’ve had enough of this foolishness from you. The path of least intervention is all well and good as a general rule, but not when it harms the community. Security, put a call in for a medical team to review Alice Long’s case. I don’t care how cleverly that computer in her head is hidden, there has to be a way to take it out.”

  “Compliance,” the bot behind me said.

  “Good. Dika, I’m sorry we had to put you with such a troublesome roommate. I’ll see what we can do to fix that, and provide you with a healthier environment in the future. But you still should have known better. I’m going to have to give you a time out in the Quiet Room, so you can think about how to do better in the future.”

  “But, matron, Alice is my friend,” Dika protested.

  “Not any more, child. Now wait here, and a proctor will be along for you shortly. Ulin, Kovy, come with me. You’re both going to serve detentions for your part in this mess, but I want the docbot to have a look at you first.”

  She was halfway to the door when the security bot spoke.

  “Matron Gisel, Doctor Yarik of the Spinsel Medical Grove has accepted your request. She offers to send an orderly to retrieve Alice Long for a preliminary exam this afternoon.”

  “Good. Warn her that the patient is antisocial, and she’ll need to be restrained.”

  “Compliance.”

  Gisel nodded. “Come along, girls.”

  She led them out of the room. Kovy gave me a smug look behind her back, just a momentary flicker of expression before she went back to playing innocent. Ulin was less restrained. She actually sneered at me, and waved goodbye.

  I really wished I’d broken her arm. Maybe her neck, too. The docbot would have fixed it, but at least she’d have suffered a little first.

  “I’m sorry,” Dika said miserably. “I didn’t mean to get you caught. Crash, I should have just given them what they wanted.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said sharply. “I’m the one who messed up here, Dika. I could have stopped them without scaring them so much, and then I’d just be getting another Adjustment that won’t do anything.”

  We sat in silence for a moment.

  “Are you going to be okay?” She asked. “I know you’ll lose a lot if they take out your implant computer.”

  I sighed. “I don’t think they can do that without killing me, Dika. You know how I’ve got a clock in my head? I can watch the milliseconds go by one by one if I want to.”

  “Oh.” She bit her lip, and gave me a concerned look. “You never told me that. But what does it mean? Organic brains don’t run tha
t fast, but you can’t be an infomorph. There’s no way they would have missed it.”

  According to the Church of Gaia sapient AIs are practically demons, and uploaded humans aren’t much better. But she was right about it being weird. There was a pretty normal-looking human brain in my skull, and no one had noticed anything odd about it the few times I’d been given medical checkups. Or when I’d been Adjusted, for that matter, and you’d think a brainwashing machine would watch its victim’s brain pretty closely.

  “I don’t know what it means, Dika,” I admitted. “But I’m scared of what they might find, if they look at me too closely. I don’t know what they’ll do with me if it turns out I’m… not what I look like. Matron Gisel thinks I’m dangerous now. What if they decide there’s no way to make me safe?”

  We both knew the answer to that. Felicity is supposed to be a safe little bubble of perfect conformity, where no one ever has to think about anything unpleasant. If they decided there was no way to make me fit in, well, then for the good of the community Alice Long would have to quietly disappear.

  “Dika, I think you can guess what I have to do now.”

  The security bot was still listening, so I couldn’t just come out and say I was going to escape. Fortunately bots aren’t very smart, especially the cheap ones the orphanage used for security. It wasn’t going to figure out what I meant unless I actually came out and said it.

  Dika gave the capture web a dubious look, and glanced back at the security bot floating silently behind us. “Are you sure, Alice? There’s no other way?”

  The last thing I wanted was to make her worry. So I mustered up my best cocky grin.

  “Don’t worry about me, roomie. I’ve got a plan. I’ll make it, and someday I’ll come back to check on you. Maybe give you a rescue, if you need it.”

  She managed a hesitant smile. “That’s so you. Alright, but don’t think I’m going to be some helpless victim here. I’ve always been better at blending in. I bet I’ll end up being the one to rescue you.”

  “Sounds like a bet to me.”

  “Good idea. In three years I’ll be an adult, and at the rate you’re growing up you will be too. So whichever of us is better off then gets to swoop in and rescue the other. The loser owes the winner… um…”