They landed on the Andra-Media satellite with little fanfare. Ellipse was not sure how she felt about seeing it again. The ornate, art-deco inlays were all at once familiar and gaudily foreign, and while muscle memory told her feet which way to go before she even thought of the room she had stayed in onboard, her brain told her that the bed would feel uncomfortable. It would be like sleeping in a stranger’s house.
She followed Crane and Shell down the ramp from the Ink’s hold, arms pulled close around her chest. Tejal and Focci sat on the floor behind her, and Ellipse felt their forlorn gazes on her back. She turned around for a brief second to give herself one last look at them, and then tried to keep her expression determination-free. She was supposed to be a captive, not a free-willed returnee.
Curling further in on herself, Ellipse glanced at the party meeting them. A line of private guards decked in full black and kevlar stood by the double doors, and a prim woman in a white and gold sundress stood in the center. She tilted her head as Ellipse and the gato approached.
“Welcome,” she said. The lady sounded exactly as she always had, airy and seductive and just a little bit nasal. Ellipse knew from recordings that she tended to sound similar, but somehow the lady had always had that twinge of a threat hidden in her words. “I see you’ve found our little thief. I have a card with the two million loaded onto it right here.” With a flourish, she presented a small debit card to Crane, who took it silently with his tails.
The lady opened her palm towards Ellipse. “Elliott. Malli kan ni shir nett. I see you have gained weight.”
Biting back a ‘nice to see you again too,’ Ellipse stepped towards her. She focused her gaze on the floor and tried not to anticipate everything that was about to come.
“Thank you, Crane, Shell.” The lady turned and placed a hand on Ellipse’s back. “Your assistance was quite helpful.”
Ellipse allowed herself to be led from the docking bay. The dull thrum of footsteps followed in her wake, and her eyes traced across the pearl and polished bronze inlays that wove through the floor. Everything about the Andra-Media satellite was so opulent. Ellipse was not sure how she had ever adjusted to it before.
“Now then,” started the lady, switching back to Titan, “I know we pressed charges against you for stealing intellectual property, but those allegations will be dropped now that you have been returned to us.”
Right. There had been charges. The lady let out a quiet hum. “As silent as you always were, I see. Good to know your time away did not change you too much, at least not in personality. Surely with all the outside contact your linguistic and musical capabilities have only improved, even.” She paused for an evaluating glance. “Your figure leaves some things to be desired though. You will be put on a diet.”
Ellipse had been on a diet before she left, too; she just had not known it. She would survive.
“Now then, Andra will be called down to you soon. You can have your little reunion, and then we will go through some reintegration processes. Tomorrow it is back to business as usual. The sound room is reserved for you at eight o’clock space standard. A guard will be here to escort you and provide a light meal.” The woman turned Ellipse ninety degrees and pushed her through a sliding door.
Stumbling through, Ellipse looked back to face the woman.
“Welcome back, Elliott.” Then she tapped the wall, and the door closed silently.
That was that. Slowly, Ellipse took in her old room. It looked just like it had the day she left, the stainless steel walls blank and bedding plush, pristine, and white. A web of fairy lights hung from the ceiling over the bed, and the desk on the other side of the room was piled with biology textbooks. The dresser next to it was still cracked open.
Ellipse checked her clothes and decided she liked her own clothes better than whatever crisp, clean outfits were still in that dresser. Sure, the jacket was a Tejal hand-me-down, and the soles of her combat boots had worn thin, but she had chosen these things. She wondered how much longer she would get to wear her own clothes.
A knock rang out, and Ellipse moved to sit on the bed, frowning at how far she sank into the mattress. “Come in,” she called.
When the door opened, Andra stood in the hall, bent over, breathing hard. It was a dangly earring day, and Andra’s cat earrings glittered under the station’s clean, white light. “Ellie! Oh my god, what are you doing here?” She rushed into the room and right to Ellipse, and her eyes scrunched in worry. “I thought you were just going to stay in hiding! I mean, I know it takes a bit for messages to get from earth to here, but Ms. Park said-
“I know what you were trying to do.” Ellipse pinned her sister with a glare. “And I get it. I really get it. Now that I have gotten a taste of freedom, I cannot even imagine what it will be like living here again.”
Andra took a step back, and her worried frown deepened into confusion. “Then why come back? You could have stayed out there.”
“Andra, you understand that manipulation and underhandedness are not the right way to get us out of here, right?”
“What?!” Andra’s face twisted into disbelief, and her nose wrinkled in a way that actually managed to look unflattering. Hopefully she never made faces like that in public; the agents would be furious. “What else do you expect me to do? You know what the higher-ups would do if I spoke out. I couldn’t risk us getting hurt.”
“And yet I got hurt,” Ellipse said. She stood from the bed and marched right up to her sister. “I worried for over a year that if I got caught that you wouldn’t love me anymore! You could have consulted me about the plan! It is fine for you to soften blows for me, but you chose to keep me out entirely, and in the end, it was not Andra-Media that hurt me. It was you.”
The white lights cast harsh shadows across Andra’s face and glittered in her widening eyes. She slumped over and averted her gaze, and Ellipse noted the telltale flush of shame that spread across her sister’s cheeks. Andra had always been paler, more easily read. Her expressiveness was part of her charm on screen.
But then she steeled herself, returning to the same grim, worried expression she had worn when she walked in. “You think I had any choices about what to do?” she hissed, lowering her voice until it was barely audible. “There are not a lot of ways to topple a media giant.”
“You could have done exactly what you did anyway and just included me in the discussion,” Ellipse fired back. “But what is done is done. I have a different way to get us out of here.”
“Oh?” Ellipse could not decide if Andra’s uptick in pitch was from incredulity or insult. “And that is?”
Ellipse shrugged, trying to pretend it was all casual. “I found a way to circumvent inter-system viral delay.”
That got Andra’s attention. She jerked towards Ellipse, eyebrows raised and mouth agape. “What? How?”
“An experimental technology. I already know it works. I am just waiting for it to be implemented for this purpose, and then I can raise a fuss without going through Andra-Media or the Titan colony servers.”
“You are not talking about a virus, are you?” Andra asked. “Because if you are, we are absolutely not going with your-
“It is not a virus. I am not stupid enough to put entire global networks in jeopardy,” Ellipse said. She wrinkled her nose and added under her breath, “though you seem perfectly happy making economies go haywire. This is not the early 2000s. Regular people own stock too now.”
For one long moment, Andra’s face crumpled into a snarl, but then she backed off. “Do things your way then,” she said, voice low. She headed for the door and paused in the opening. “I am going to continue with the original plan. We will see how things turn out.”
“Fine,” Ellipse replied. She watched as Andra disappeared through the door, and then spared a glance at her watch. Tomorrow would be a trying day; sleep sounded like a good idea.
Points: 24185
Reviews: 299
Donate