Mountain High Enough

Ano and Becken tend to find themselves in peril, especially when they get trapped in the mind of a mentally disturbed client who’s virtual world is eroding around them. As the team struggles to escape the rapidly disintegrating reality they’re stuck in, the two senior team members take an accidental detour. (Excerpt from Corrupting Paradise, the first story in the series for these characters.)

-

Ano’s head whipped up from the book she’d been attempting to code back into coherency with a velocity that made her neck crick. “Did you hear that?”

Becken was already standing on a nearby couch, his dark eyes piercing the acres of gloomy shelves in the direction they’d walked from. “That really loud crashing noise? It was kind of hard to miss.”

She rolled her eyes a little and activated her earpiece. “Tri? Jenny?”

It took Tri several moments to answer, and when he did it was with a groan. “Yeah, Boss?”

“What happened?”

“We nearly got killed by boiling magma is what happened!” Jenny said. “We rematerialized ten feet above the ground in here right when we should have been dying painful, burning deaths.”

Becken and Ano traded uneasy glances. “Do we want to know?”

“You guys didn’t get stuck in the tropical volcano?” Tri demanded incredulously.

That earned a raised eyebrow from Becken. “Not last I checked,” Ano answered. Ignoring the dark muttering coming from Tri’s end of the line, she got back to her original question. “What was that noise?”

“The dying gasps of the table that broke our fall. Which I will of course be recoding later,” he hastened to add at Ano’s disapproving silence.

Before Ano had the chance to respond, the bookcase nearest to them toppled over, driven by a hurricane-force wind that whipped her hair around and slammed her into Becken’s solid bulk. His arms came around her to hold her in place and she shut her eyes tightly against the stinging wind. As suddenly as the gale started, it ceased. Ano opened her eyes warily.

They weren’t in the library any more. They stood on the apex of a mountain so high Ano couldn’t see any details of the ground below them. Close enough to brush Becken’s head, the bottom of a cloud bank misted cold rain onto them, the liquid sparkling in the blinding sunlight. Far, far below them, a gray-green ocean crashed against the foot of the mountain. Just looking at the sight gave her vertigo. Considering her hover pad experience, that was more than slightly worrying.

She blinked. “Becken?”

“Yes,” he affirmed her silent question. “We are.” He reluctantly let her go, keeping close by her side as he let his protective nature take over. When Ano strayed towards the edge to look down again, he grabbed her firmly by the arm and pulled her back to him, activating his earpiece in the same motion. “Anyone there?”

The only response was static. The big man cursed softly, ignoring Ano’s disapproving look.

Becken was trying very hard not to look down. He hated heights, especially when they were forced upon him unexpectedly. Ano took pity on him and sighed, looking around to find something to distract him with. “Well, it could be worse.”

Naturally, that was the exact moment the hurricane-force gale started up again. Grabbing Ano’s smaller frame to his, Becken planted his feet in an attempt to keep them both anchored to the mountaintop. But the wind was relentless, pushing and pulling at them so forcefully that he felt his feet slip, inch by fighting inch, towards the edge of their small pinnacle of rock, the rain seeking to force them off and into infinity.

She was so intent on staying upright that Ano realized a second too late that she was closer to the edge than he was. She felt her foot slip, and his arms tightened around her in a vain attempt to keep her on solid ground. They swayed, toppled, and then she was floating backwards. Becken grabbed her arm and she jerked to a stop, held up by her hand in his. Her shoulder wrenched and she winced.

Ano had to yell to make herself heard over the roaring wind. “Let me go!”

“You’re insane!” He shouted back, resolutely clinging to her even as he felt her start to fall. His footing wasn’t much better than hers, and he scrambled for purchase as her weight dragged him towards the edge. In a moment of ironic clarity, Ano found it appropriate that they were about to die because he followed her over the edge of a cliff.  Then he lost his footing, Ano fell backwards and the two of them catapulted off the mountain and into bottomless space.

…Only to fall about ten feet before meeting the library’s cold stone floor. Somewhere in those ten feet Becken managed to twist them so when they hit the ground, Ano was on top. For a moment they lay there, breathing heavily, cheeks still smarting from the cold wind that had been tearing at them only moments before.

Ano rolled off of him and gave him a hand up, dusting a stray piece of gravel from his shirt. “Don’t do that.”

“What, keep you from falling off mountains?”

She stopped to think about it. “…Well, no. Not when you put it that way.” He grinned smugly, and she turned away and activated her earpiece again. “Anyone there?”

The Book

This rather long excerpt comes from the beginning of Collapsing Paradise, which is the most  recent addition to the currently four-story-long Paradise series. In this scene, the Paradise staff wakes up to find a book–a real, rare, mysterious book–sitting on the desk in their main office. The book becomes mightily important later. In the mean time, I just like this scene for its interactions between the main characters.

-

Elim had meant to go and boot up his screens for the day, but…well, it was a book. A real one, with a deep blue cover and yellowed pages, still edged in what looked like real gold and bound together with ancient glue. Heavy gold and silver thread twined across the spine and cover to form an elaborate flowing pattern of reaching vines and fruit-bearing branches that encircled an archaic symbol in the middle that might have been a representation of a planet. There was no title, at least not on the cover. He hadn’t dared touch the thing, let alone open it.

It was very, very old, and probably invaluable on any number of financial and cultural levels. Finding this just sitting here was like finding a bar of platinum under your pillow, only more surprising. Elim tilted his head from side to side to see the light shimmer off the gold and silver thread. He was so absorbed that he completely failed to notice when someone else entered the room through the main entrance directly behind him.

The figure padded silently across the thick cream-colored carpet, navigated around the semi-circles of dark blue couches in the middle of the circular room, and came to a stop directly behind Elim, all without making a sound.

And then it spoke. “Having fun?”

The Operator startled guiltily and turned to see who’d snuck up on him. Unsurprisingly, he was greeted by the sight of Triyankast, his human coworker and friend, who was grinning mischievously. The expression was a very familiar one to Elim.

Triyankast was handsome in that cliché, flawless, utterly charming kind of way that rarely existed outside of advertisements. The gleaming brown eyes, perfect brown hair and slightly tanned skin, along with a dazzling smile, had the ability to stop a passing female at thirty yards if Tri focused his attention. It was a deceptive trait that he used to his advantage. Those who knew the young man well agreed that his natural mischief and penchant for trouble (not to mention the fact that he’d spent most of his early life as an accomplished thief and conman) far outweighed his physical attractiveness and charisma.

He also had a bad habit of sneaking up on people—especially Elim, whose mercurial eyes still turned magenta when he was unpleasantly surprised, no matter how hard he tried to control the reaction.

“Stop doing that,” the Almarian reprimanded, his eyes already fading to something more like blue. He ruffled his mess of black hair in a gesture that did nothing to cover his embarrassment; the silver streaks amidst his dark curls caught the light like the threads on the book behind him.

“Magenta’s a good color on you,” Tri replied without apology as he joined Elim, leaning on the back of the couch facing the desk. “What are we looking at?”

All annoyance was instantly forgotten. “It’s a book,” Elim breathed reverently, his accent giving the word a cultured kind of weight. “A real one.”

Tri gave a low whistle of appreciation. The former conman merely shrugged in response to his friend’s mockingly raised eyebrow. “Hey, I may not read much, but even I have to respect something worth more than I am in solid gold.”

Elim conceded that with a nod. They both stood silent for a moment, heads turning this way and that in identical postures to the one Tri had found Elim in a moment before. “See the way it shimmers?” Elim murmured.

The other man’s thoughts were on a different track. “It would be impossible to sell illegally,” Tri said absently. Elim turned to stare at him. “What?” he said defensively. “It’s true! Something that unique is impossible to fence off unless you have someone ready to buy it on the other end. Who’s it for?”

Elim narrowed his eyes in a way that said he’d seen right through the other man’s abrupt subject change, but he answered anyway. “It’s for the Boss.” He nodded towards the note resting next to the book. It was just a square of heavy paper, and written on it in loopy letters with thick blue ink was their employer’s name: Ano. Just the one word. No explanation, not even a sign-for receipt.

“Mysterious,” Tri whispered in the voice reserved for secrets and ghost stories. “Secret admirer, I’ll bet you anything.”

“Who has a secret admirer?”

The two men turned to see Jenny enter the lobby from her office. The wall to the right of the main entrance was a smooth curve of glass divided by five evenly spaced glass doors, each leading to the office of a Paradise team member, and farther back into their own small set of rooms. Jenny’s was the second to last, between Becken’s dark office space on one side and Tri’s on the other at the end of the row, nearly opposite the main entrance.

The young woman joined them leaning against the couch. She leaned easily against Tri’s side as his arm went comfortably around her waist. Her brown hair was brushed back into a simple ponytail, and her pale skin was still flushed pink with the remnants of sleep. “Is that a book?”

“Looks like,” Elim confirmed.

They let her have her moment of awe. Eventually she shook herself. “Who’s it for?”

“Ano,” the other two answered in unison.

“We don’t know who dropped it off,” Tri continued, his eyebrows raised dramatically.

Jenny’s blue eyes sparkled mischievously. “Has anyone opened it?”

Tri snorted disbelievingly at the same time Elim replied, “You first!”

She pouted, a little crestfallen, and tilted her head to look up at her boyfriend with pleading eyes. It was something she’d never try with Ano in the room, but with the Boss gone for the moment, it seemed that all was fair in love and books.

“Oh no,” Tri responded instantly, jostling her to disentangle their arms so he could take a step away from her, the counter and the temptation of the book. “No way am I opening that thing without an engraved invitation from a literary deity! Or the Boss.”

“What about me?”

All three junior employees froze guiltily, even though none of them had technically done anything wrong yet. They watched Ano come in through the door of her office, clearly just out of the sonishower in her quarters. She ruffled her short blue hair with her fingers, leaving it fluffed to dry. Her green eyes narrowed as she took in their expressions. Unsurprisingly, she immediately zeroed in on Tri. “What did you do?”

“Nothing!” he held his hands up again and backed up so he stood in the middle of the room, out of touching range of anything. “I have not so much as laid a finger on the priceless object! I have witnesses!”

Ano grinned a little at that, which told them all right away that she wasn’t remotely upset with any of them. “You’re getting rusty,” she told Tri with a sly smile. “That denial was much more convincing the first time I heard it.”

That startled a full-bodied laugh out of Tri, and surprised glances from Elim and Jenny. Getting Ano to talk about the past—or getting Tri or Becken to discuss it either, for that matter—had until this point been an exercise in futility. Laughing at Tri’s former criminal ways was unprecedented. A lot of things had changed since Ano had nearly died last month. Still, the new, sharing-friendly office atmosphere was going to take some getting used to.

Elim felt his shoulders relax considerably as Ano wandered over to the desk. She touched his shoulder as she passed in her normal greeting, and he had to fight to keep the blush off his cheeks, even though she’d done it every day for the last four Cycles.

Ano gave a low whistle of appreciation as she came to the book. The other three instantly gathered round her, looking for information like sharks scouted for unsuspecting fish. Her hand drifted towards the heavy cover seemingly of its volition before she redirected it at the last moment to pick up the note instead. She read it, then turned it over curiously, looking for indicators on the paper. “Who dropped it off?”

“The door doesn’t have a record,” Elim answered. He watched her face carefully as he said it—this wouldn’t be the first time that Ano had managed to get something delivered without telling any of them what it was, or who was responsible for procuring it. The three dozen bronze-plated ND manifolds that had miraculously appeared on the docks three months ago just when Elim had run out of them came to mind.

But today, Ano’s eyebrows raised in surprise at Elim’s news. “No record at all? Becken is going to have a fit.” She caught his eyes and said seriously, “Figure out how they managed to get past the protocols. Regardless of who they were, I don’t like people walking in unannounced.”

He nodded in understanding, and glanced at Tri and Jenny. They were both staring at the book again. For a few moments, they were all quiet, lost in their own personal studies.

Ano looked up from her own intent scrutiny to see the others still grouped around her. “Don’t you all have work to do?” The pitifully curious looks she received at that were enough to soften the hardest resolve. She shook her head in resignation. “This is why I need Becken here.”

“Where is Mr. I-have-to-work, anyway?” Tri wondered. Jenny elbowed him in the side rather indiscreetly. He shrugged unapologetically. “What? I haven’t even seen him in three days. I think he inspected all the 200-level pods completely on his own.”

Ano sighed and ran a hand through her hair. “He’s sleeping. Finally.”

Elim raised his eyebrows. “How did you manage that?” he asked before he realized he probably didn’t want to know.

“Threats of physical violence,” came her deadpan reply. “After this little stunt, I’ll likely never listen to him again when he complains about me not getting enough rest.”

“He was worried about you,” Jenny said softly. “We all were. We kind of…let things go, for a while.”

Ano’s gaze gentled as she gave Jenny a small smile of thanks.

When no one else spoke, Elim cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Still, the rest of us managed to find the time to sleep since you’ve been back.”

“And intelligence like that is why I hired you to begin with,” Ano said brightly. Elim noticed that she was deliberately avoiding giving the impression that she cared about the book at all. Somewhere in the back of his head, warning bells began to sound faintly. Still, he listened when she prodded them, “Now come on, we have work to do. Get moving!”

With a few last curious looks, they finally did as they were told.

First Appearances

An excerpt from my story Corrupting Paradise , in which the Paradise team has to enter the mind of a mentally unsound client in order to keep his virtual world from collapsing.

The first things Tri noticed were the books. This was for the sole reason that there were a lot of them. The endless rows of bookshelves filled the entirety of the massive cathedral-style stone building they inhabited. Triyankast had to squint to see past a few hundred yards because the lighting was so dim. He’d never understood the people who wanted this type of world.

Tri was always the first one to materialize. They’d never been able to figure out why it worked that way, though Elim had made a few comments along the lines that since Tri’s mind was never really wholly on one thing anyway, jumping consciousnesses was a piece of cake. Maybe he was right. In any case, the young man had a moment to look around before the others appeared.

It was raining outside. Not just light, sprinkling rain. This was a downpour of heavy, cold drops that exploded against the windowpanes that made up the top half of the gray stone walls and stretched from floor to ceiling in the curves of massive bay windows farther back. If not for the giant fires that burned eternally in the massive stone hearths every five or six yards along the walls, this place would have been damp and gloomy.

Tri would take a hot beach with plenty of pretty, shallow people on it any day.

With a quiet pop, Becken appeared on his left. A moment later, Jenny materialized on his right with a soft shh that sounded like wind blowing through leaves.

Ano’s voice came from behind him. “Shall we?”

Ano always appeared last; they’d never been able to figure that out either. Tri was relatively sure she could beat even him to get here first if she tried, but she always materialized after everyone else. She was the only one of them that never made a sound as she blinked into someone’s head. Ano moved silently from mind to mind, treading on the quiet feet of someone who had learned to move without leaving any trace of her existence. Tri had seen enough of that on the streets where she had found him to recognize that his boss had learned early on how to make herself disappear.

Becken cast a jaded eye around the shelves. “Not where I’d want to spend forever.”

Jenny shuddered in agreement, her fair skin glowing golden in the firelight. “Does it ever get sunny?”

Ano shook her head. “Never. He was very explicit in his directions that rain be the only sound he hear besides the flipping of dusty tomes.”

“What kind of literature did you stock him with?” Tri did a full turn, taking in the seemingly endless shelves. “At least half the history section.”

“All of it, actually,” she replied easily. “Everything we had in the library.” That earned her a few incredulous looks. She shrugged, nonplussed by their attention. “He paid a lot of money.” She tapped her earpiece into place and the others mimicked her.

Elim’s voice crackled over the channel, barely audible. Tri traded a worried look with Becken at the distortion. The building structure had to be severely strained to interfere with the team’s signal.

“Structure–ting—wor–” the Operator garbled.

It took a moment for Ano to figure out what he meant. “The building structure is collapsing.”

“What–aid!” Elim said indignantly.

“You’re breaking up, Op,” Tri informed him. “We can barely hear you.”

“—ed to—repr—str-re–”

Not even Ano caught that one. Her forehead creased in concentration. “Say again, Elim?”
Only static greeted her request.

The four looked at each other uneasily. There had never been a program so badly damaged that it completely disrupted their line of communication with the outside world. Tri caught Jenny’s hand in his and gave it an encouraging squeeze. There was nothing for it now but to get the place fixed so they could leave.

Ano seemed to come to the same conclusion. “Spread out, teams of two. Jenny, Tri, I want you to find Mr. Zebbanaca. If this really is a programming issue, we may have to remove him and I’d like you there to explain it. Becken and I will do some maintenance. Check-ins every half hour, please. We’ll keep trying to reach Elim.” She paused a moment to make sure everyone was clear. “Right. Move out.”

They did.

Still

Triyankast was never completely sure whether Ano and Becken set him up the day he met them or if some insane coincidence worked it out so that he just happened to get caught pick pocketing from the one being in the twelve galaxies who had the ability to change his life forever. He liked to think it was the first one, because the second one was just too scary to really consider for long without getting a headache.

In any case, it happened. Right in the middle of a crowded, noisy street in Lukka, the second-largest city in the Colona Galaxy, as a matter of fact.

Tri had been leaning casually against a fruit stand as he took his time to find the perfect mark. He needed money for food and a ticket to anywhere but where he currently was, and it took a practiced eye to find just the right person to pinch it from.

The instant she stepped out of the store, he saw her; it only took him a second to choose the woman with the blue hair as his mark, if for no other reason than she’d be easy to spot in the surrounding throng.

She looked nervous and lost, craning her head around like she was trying to find someone. (Looking back on it, Tri knew that it had to be a setup just because of that. He’d never once seen Ano lost or nervous since.)

One of her hands was loosely hovering by her left pocket, which was obviously where her valuables were stored. From her state of dress (classy but not flashy) and the rings on her fingers (understated but rather expensive), Tri figured that those valuables were probably pretty significant. She looked like an easy target.

The accomplished thief pocketed a piece of fruit for later and joined the mass of sentience, putting his head down and blending in with practiced ease. At the nearest corner he stopped and waited until his mark came abreast of him. A bump, a grab, and a seemingly sincere “Sorry!” later, Tri palmed her platinum credit disc and turned, smiling widely, to spend it somewhere.

For almost an entire second, he thought he’d gotten away with it. Then a massive black hand fell on his shoulder and spun him around to reveal an equally massive black man who stared down at him with threatening dark eyes. “Very smooth,” the man rumbled with a voice that matched his stature.

Triyankast’s brain went blank for possibly the first time in his life. His mouth opened and closed a few times before he finally gave up on excuses and smiled winningly. “I thought so. Feel like rewarding me for my prowess?”

The man plucked the stolen credit disc from Tri’s hand and held it out to his side between two fingers. The blue-haired woman who owned it reached out to take it and pocket it again, sidling up to stand next to her rescuer. It was only as the two exchanged an amused look that Tri realized they knew each other.

The young thief figured he had nothing left to lose and so he smiled brightly at his former victim. “Hi there!” Then he saw her green eyes and made the connection to the blue hair and the money and realized that he’d just tried to rob one of the last Almarians in existence. This was a seriously bad day, even for him.

She cocked her head at him and those bright eyes fixed on him, like she was seeing past his smile into his brain. It struck Tri quite suddenly that she was the only being on the street that looked comfortable standing completely still. She was also one of the only people he’d ever met who looked right at him instead of past him. He found, to his surprise, that he respected that.

She had savvy. Instinctively, Tri knew something about Ano that no one else would ever suspect: she’d been out on the streets, and however she’d managed to live through it, she must have been good at it to end up this confident and to have this massive man follow at her heels.

Suddenly she moved again, her head righting itself and her eyes sparkling like they’d just had an entire conversation and she was pleased with the results. “What’s your name?” Her accent was unusual, and highly cultured.

A hundred phony identities danced across his mind and he almost used every one of them. But for some reason he would never be able to fully explain, Tri looked her square in the eye and told the truth. “Triyankast. Tri, for people who get sick of yelling the entire thing.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “I’m Ano, and this is Becken. We have a proposition for you.”

This was not at all the day he’d expected to be having. “What kind of proposition are we talking about?”

Ano smiled at him again, and it was the kind of smile that said she already knew exactly what was going to happen and she was just humoring him by filling him in. “You’re going to come with us, and I’m going to buy you lunch.”

Tri was downright curious now, but he wasn’t stupid. “Am I going to end up in prison right after that?”

“I wasn’t planning on it, no.”

Becken’s mouth opened, Ano glared at him and he snapped it shut again. She gave Tri a look that was disturbingly sincere.

For some reason he actually believed her. “I can’t argue with that. What’s the catch?”

The Almarian traded a long glance with Becken and then her green gaze shifted back to this new arrival. “I’m going to offer you a job. And you’re going to take it.”

And of course that’s exactly what happened, for reasons Tri still didn’t understand. All he knew was that because of that day, his life changed totally and completely. He never learned to like Becken–mostly because the threatening look in the man’s dark eyes never really went away. He did, however, learn to like Ano straight away. And from the first time he called the Almarian “Boss” Tri realized that he’d follow her to the end of the galaxies and back if she asked him to.

Meeting Jenny a Cycle later certainly didn’t hurt, of course.

But still, from that moment in Lukka onward, whenever he was with Ano, Triyankast would always get the unnerving feeling that he was standing still while the rest of the galaxy rushed past him.