In the evening, when they were finished with their clients and cleaning up their stations for the day, Drew came at Terra with the questions she'd been expecting. At least they were alone this evening.
"What's troubling you?" Drew asked her while passing her the bottle of disinfectant.
Terra didn't answer him right away. She soaked a spot on her fresh cleaning rag, then scrubbed meticulously over every inch of her tattoo gun. As if that wasn't just going to make Drew more concerned. While she was used to speaking with care at social functions, she had always been quick to answer when speaking with him. Granted, most of what she'd told him about herself had been half-truths. Like the half-truth that had gotten her hired: that she had a special talent for pushing ink out of her skin. She hadn't told him that she could change the color of her skin, hair, and eyes as well. Or shift the shape and size of her body within normal human constraints. She'd only told him about the ink purging in the first place to prove she could practice on herself until she learned how to illustrate on people as well as she could on paper.
Today, she couldn't think of a suitable half-truth like that. She'd been working here too long for him to believe the weather bothered her in the least. She slowly stopped scrubbing. She could feel his gaze boring into her. She didn't dare look back at him until she found something to say.
"Some stuff Daisy was saying brought up bad memories I guess." She knew it was barely an answer, but it was the best she could offer without giving away more details than she dared to share. She hadn't always been careful enough with Drew. She knew he was sharp. If she gave too much away to him, he'd put the pieces together.
Terra liked Drew. She had seen him slip Ajax extra payments when the man's kids would go hungry and put himself between Lisa and the street gang she had gotten mixed up with. He might only watch out for his own, but he did so thoroughly. With ruthless efficiency. To the point where she was more than half-afraid, if he knew the truth, he'd turn her over to her parents himself. He'd do it for her own good of course. The low streets of New Port City weren't the safest place for a young woman with no family. Even with system bonded law enforcement, the worst of crime still occurred here, where the creds were spread too thin to buy their protection.
She hoped one of those grim fates was what Drew would fill in her reluctant gaps with in his mind, rather than reaching for the truth. It would be easier and more reasonable to assume Daisy's pheromones and talk of what she'd like to do with raunchy dancer girls had brought up old trauma than that the administration heir she'd been talking about before that had been listening to them blithely discussing a massive bounty hanging over her head. If he just assumed that she'd been through one of the horrible things that could happen on this side of town, she hoped he wouldn't ask for more details.
At first, she thought it had worked. The silence between them stretched on for a while. The only sounds were the soft swiping of disinfectant wipes and clinking of rearranging inks, backed by the muffled patter of rain.
She should have known it wouldn't be that easy.
"Do I need to worry about trouble following you here?" Drew asked without looking up from what he was cleaning.
Terra froze in the middle of putting away a clump of ink bottles. She looked over at him, slowly. He hadn't stopped cleaning ink off the outside of his bottles.
"What do you mean?" She asked cautiously.
Drew sighed heavily. He carefully set the freshly cleaned bottle into its place, neatly lined up with the other closed and clean inks. Then he stood and went to the front of the store to pull down the metal security fencing behind the glass. He locked it in place.
Terra hurried her own clean up, screwing on the last bottle lids that were still open. Normally he wouldn't have locked up until every bottle at his station was as clean and neatly lined up as if he'd never used them. Now, he had left a few on his work tray, closed, but not put away. One still had a red drop that had slid down its side. It was more organized than Terra ever left her station, but the hasty break from his normal routine unsettled her.
After Drew had secured the storefront, he motioned for Terra to follow him into the back.
Reluctantly, Terra left her own station in its half put-away state and trailed after him.
Once they were sheltered from any view possible from the street, Drew crossed his arms and asked outright: "You're Starmer's son, aren't you?"
The words were like a double punch to the gut. The worst hit wasn't that he'd figured it out, but that he'd called her that.
"I'm not a boy." She hissed, while failing to meet his eyes. She probably should have denied it, but her mind was racing in too many directions, then freezing up entirely. She was pretty sure Brains was the one stat she hadn't managed to improve since she was 12.
Drew sucked in a slow, long breath and pressed his fingers against his brows, then pulled them down over his eyes and cheeks. He was clearly asking the system for patience. Then he looked at her. Staring hard until she finally dragged her gaze up to meet his. The pity she saw hiding behind the unflinching sternness of his expression almost made her turn away again.
"How did you figure it out?" She asked instead, sullenly. With anyone else, she would have expected them to spout some sympathetic nonsense before they explained why they were going to send her back. With Drew, she expected he'd cut right to the chase that he was sorry but it had to be done if she didn't distract him with a question first. It didn't make her feel any better knowing he wouldn't be doing it for the money.
"I knew you could be a shifter. Only a shifter or a regenner could push ink from their skin the way you do. I had suspected for a while, but it didn't make sense that you would change so little about yourself. Your appearance, your name, staying in the same town? I kept telling myself it had to be a coincidence."
"That was the idea." Terra agreed. It would have been nice to be happy that her idea to change as little as possible had thrown him off, except that it hadn't. Not forever. Not long enough.
"I didn't think anyone would be that stupid. Why didn't you at least change the color of your hair or eyes?" Drew asked, as if getting her to go back in time and do a better job of hiding was a viable option.
Terra puffed up at that. She had been told all her life that she had to change how she looked. What was the point of taking her life in her own hands if she didn't live it the way she wanted to? "I like how I look. No one knew I could shift, so what was the point changing more than I have?"
"I'm not trying to pick a fight with you, Ter." Drew said in the same soothing tone he used when someone came in too drunk or high to make proper decisions, but was too stubborn to take no for an answer. As if she were being just as unreasonable as them and needed to be calmed before she was turned away. "I'm trying to make you think."
"Why bother? They don't want me to think for myself." She muttered bitterly. She should have known this wouldn't last. But she had wanted to believe it would.
"I'm not going to turn you in."
Terra stared at him. Her mouth hung open and worked wordlessly for a moment before she managed to think of something to say. "You're... not?"
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"It's not my decision to make. But I can't have you working here anymore."
"You're firing me? How am I supposed to find a new job with a bounty this high?" Terra asked, her voice pleading. Drew's parlor had felt like her first real home. He, Ajax, and Lisa were the only friends she'd ever had. This job was half of the life she had made for herself. The only work she had ever done that made her feel accomplished. She didn't want to let go of all that.
"By shifting to a better disguise." Drew answered simply. "I can't protect you here the way you are. Someone like me would figure it out. Faster too, because they'd want to believe it. And they won't be someone I can stop from taking you. They'd be the kind of person to burn the whole place down if I even tried."
That was a thought that hadn't occurred to Terra. She'd been so focused on what being found would mean for her, that she had never stopped to think what it would mean for those she'd have caught up in her mess. Her outrage crumbled away and she crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself. She took a deep breath. If it was a choice between giving up the people she cared about or letting them be hurt because of her, it wasn't really a choice at all. "Alright. Could I... No, I couldn't come back here even if I look different next time. I can change my face, but I can't change my style."
Drew didn't comfort her with an empty lie. Instead, he reached out and gave one of her tattooed shoulders a squeeze. It was the only comfort he could offer her.
Terra went back out into the work area and gathered the things that belonged to her, which wasn't much. Drew had taken her on as an apprentice two years before with no guarantee she'd be able to do the job and no gear or credits to her name to make it a cheap gamble. All he'd had to go off of was the promising work in her sketch book. Maybe he'd also seen the fierce determination she'd had to make a way for herself in the world. A drive to achieve what she set out to do. Even if all she set out to do was work hard enough to earn enough credits each week to keep a leaky roof over her head, food in her stomach, and a little extra to occasionally purchase one of the books she'd always had with her.
She ran her hand over the back of her tattoo gun that actually belonged to Drew. She would miss it, but she was proud of the work she had done with it.
A bundle of two novels, her current sketchbook, and a tattered old pencil pouch made up the entirety of what she had to take with her. She took the time necessary to pull out all the sketches that were commissions for clients. She left them in a stack on her station so Drew could still use them. She owed him that much at least. Probably more.
Drew hadn't come back out front to watch her pack. The faith he had in her to not take anything of value and run for the hills lifted her heart a little. She wasn't entirely sure it was trust she deserved, even if she never would have stolen from someone who had done so much for her.
When she shuffled into the back again with her books in her arms and her pencil case clipped to her belt, she intended to pass by Drew without another interaction. To rip the bandage off and leave his life before she could have a chance to really start regretting it. The same way she had abandoned her parents. Her parents who had never supported her in her strengths or forgiven her her weaknesses. Which Drew had.
At the last moment before she was going to pass him, Terra turned on her heels and pressed herself into his narrow chest, tucking her head against his shoulder since her arms were too occupied to give him a hug. "Thank you, Drew. For everything."
The tattooist patted her back awkwardly, but she could feel his throat tightening up at her temple.
"Take care of yourself, Terra." He ordered her in a voice that was just a little tight.
"Yeah." She rasped back, then stood straight and turned away quickly. She snatched her hoodie off the hook by the door and wrapped it around the books in her arms, then left before she could be pulled back to him again. It was harder to leave behind someone who cared about her. Even if it was to protect him and the others she cared for.
She was glad for the rain that dribbled down through her side swept bangs to run over her cheeks. As long as she kept her eyes open and focused, it didn't matter in this weather how many tears she cried. No lowlife waiting for easy prey would be able to tell them apart from the effects of the weather.
The stink of the streets was dulled by the sweet, dusty scent of the downfall hitting pavement. The drip of awnings and splash of puddles as vehicles passed joined the monotonous hum of neon signs, just switching on for the low town's infamous night scenes. Bar doors hung open, wafting the bitter scent of booze and warm, dry air out invitingly onto the sidewalk. Interface cafés glowed brightly, the rows of system taps inside switched over as she passed from the practical daytime selection of activities to more risqué evening offerings. The deeper into the entertainment district Terra walked, the more such establishments gave way to the kind of dives Daisy frequented. The men she passed gave her less mind as she passed these places. There were more approachable women inside where it wasn't miserably damp.
The overcast skies meant that Terra was walking through darkness instead of the last rays of dusk when she finally passed out of the entertainment district into the narrow cubby of what passed for residential lots in her neighborhood.
Security was a funny thing in downtown New Port City. One either had system assisted security that cost them almost all their disposable creds along with a virtual bank they'd keep their spare money in if they had any, or they holed up somewhere as isolated and convoluted to enter as possible and hoped all their savings, kept in physical form to avoid fees from the banks, weren't stolen away.
Terra's solution to the problem was the latter, out of necessity. Opening an account with the banks meant interacting with the system. So like most fugitives, Terra only handled physical credits. She didn't have to worry much about being stolen from, though. She never kept more on hand than what could buy her a meal and a book. She'd figured out pretty early on, when her apartment was broken into a few times, that the thieves didn't see a lot of value in books or art. After a few months, word seemed to have gotten around that her place wasn't worth hitting unless the raid was on her kitchenette cabinets.
Her apartment complex was one of a series converted from an old office building, presumably for the administrative tasks associated with one of the nearby entertainment facilities before the neighborhood had soured. The structure had been broken up into smaller properties by bricking off hallways inside and converting old fire exits to official entry points for the inner halls. Getting into the section of the building that contained her unit involved going in through the side alley, climbing the narrow stepped stairs that were barely an upgrade from the old emergency escape ladders, and entering through a heavy, rusty door.
When Terra entered the alley, she spotted something moving in the shadows. She slowed, wary of what could be lurking. It was too small to be a person, but that didn't mean it couldn't be one of any number of nasty devices meant to catch the careless off guard. Something to knock someone out or tie them up long enough for another person to snatch them away. Someone like a bounty hunter that had somehow tracked her down.
The shape shifted in the shadows again. It staggered forward, seeking refuge from the endless rain by collapsing under the converted fire escape.
It was no device or trap. Just a stray black cat, scraggly and soaked.
"Well, you're a pitiful sight." Terra said to the cat.
The cat rotated its ears towards her, but did not open its eyes or move.
Terra had pretty much no experience with animals. She'd never been allowed a pet growing up and they weren't the sort of thing people brought to a tattoo parlor. Even so, she was pretty sure it wasn't good for the weak looking thing to lay there, practically in a puddle, not opening its eyes.
"Hey, psst, psst, kitty. That's not a good place to rest. You'd be better off under a dumpster or something." She said, as if the creature would understand her.
The cat responded with a whimpering sort of mewl.
Rather than stand in the rain talking to a cat that was too weak to take care of itself, Terra knew she should go inside to dry off. Preferably, before the inescapable moisture in the air could seep through her jacket to get at the paper of her books.
Instead, she moved around the ladder like steps and crouched down next to the cat. She reached out to and tapped the ground between the cat and the dumpster, hoping she could get it to look that way and realized there was a dry spot beneath it.
Rather than open its eyes, the creature tried to get to its paws. When it did, one of the back ones seemed to curl unnaturally and wouldn't hold its weight. It fell back to the ground with a soft splash, then began to shiver.
"Oh for the love of..." Terra muttered, pushing her forehead against the side of the steps. The day she was fired and had her bounty quadrupled was not the day she needed to be taking in an injured animal she had no idea how to care for. She tried to tell herself that she absolutely couldn't take it in with her, but it was no good.
"Alright, then. I guess you're coming with me." She said. She tucked her bundled up hoodie tight under her left arm, then reached out to scoop the cat up in her right.
As soon as her hand brushed over the cat, she felt an electric jolt surge between the creature and her fingers. It wasn't just a shock of static. It was too strong and there was a distinctly familiar feeling to the shock. Not far removed from the pressure she had felt when Daisy used her pheromones or what it had felt like to be analyzed by her father's system when she had turned 12.
"You!" Was all she managed to splutter out as electric green eyes flaked with yellow and blue opened triumphantly in the cat's black face.
The voice that entered her head was definitely synthesized, but in a sophisticated manner that allowed it to sound both masculine and obnoxiously smug.
[Got you.]