“And this is our Meritage blend, which has four kinds of grapes in it—Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Malbec, and Petit Verdot.” With practiced efficiency, the winery hostess filled six tasting glasses. Ted and Aurora stood at one end of her counter. Two cougarish women who constantly spoke in low, amused murmurs with one another kept looking at Ted in a way that suggested they’d be flirtier if Aurora didn’t terrify them a touch. A married retiree couple from Iowa occupied the other end of the counter; they acted nonplussed by the licentious liberalness of everything California, although the husband seemed decidedly more willing to give it a try than the wife.
Aurora swirled her wine around in the glass as instructed, took a sniff, then a careful sip. “It tastes…dark. A little sweetness like blackberries, I think they were?” She looked to Ted for confirmation.
He nodded. “Yeah, we’ve had blackberries.”
The hostess nodded, too. “And then more herbal, right? A bit earthy?”
“Yes. I think—I think more like pepper.”
“So sophisticated of you,” one of the women said, waving a hand. Ted couldn’t tell if she was being sincere or a little mocking. From the way Aurora’s ears tilted, the Dynamouse couldn’t, either.
“It tastes like red wine,” the Iowa wife muttered.
“I like it,” her husband ventured, and nodded toward Aurora. “I get the pepper, Miss Mouse.”
The wife scowled.
This was the third winery they’d been to, although only the second they’d been served at. The first one they tried got adamant about “no animals in the tasting room,” no matter that the “animal” in question stood a foot taller than the manager and could speak for herself. It was the fur, he maintained: the fur, he was sure, made her unsanitary compared to humans. Aurora had been so upset when they returned to the car that she was meek, nearly pleading, at the next one—but that winery had been so deserted, they’d probably have welcomed in a horror movie serial killer as long as he left the dripping machete at the door.
This third one had been even more crowded than the first, but Ted had his dander up uncharacteristically high at this point, marching in ahead of Aurora and all but daring the host to say anything when he took Aurora’s hand and announced, “Two for a wine tasting.”
All the host said, though, was, “Take the end of counter one, and Julie will be with you in a few minutes,” pointing off to his right.
That’s how they ended up with their temporary compatriots at the tasting. Most of the eyes in the room were on Aurora from the moment she entered, of course, and Ted hated that the crowd made her self-conscious about her appearance rather than pleased by it. Her nervousness as the tasting counter filled up made his heart ache, and the cougar who took the position directly to his right didn’t help matters by loudly exclaiming, “Good lord, what in the world are you supposed to be?”
Aurora opened her mouth, but didn’t say anything, just blinking down at her.
“Don’t stare, Allison,” her friend said, while openly staring.
“Aurora is a Dynamouse,” Ted said, forcing a smile as he reached up to pat the mouse’s shoulder.
“A what?”
The couple from Iowa had appeared as Ted was speaking, announcing their presence when the woman gasped sharply, staring up at Aurora.
“A ‘Dynamouse?’” the man said, eyes lighting up as he looked up at her, then at Ted. “I read about her in the paper, right?”
“You might have.”
“Hello,” Aurora said, quietly and stiffly.
Both of the cougars drew back slightly; the farm wife took a literal step back, making the sign of a cross.
“Oh, stop it, Ethel,” the retiree said, turning around to frown at her, then beamed a smile at Aurora this time. “Hi. I’m Jonathan. We’re out visiting here from Iowa.”
“You do look like a farmer,” one of the cougars said.
“And you look like a left coaster,” Ethel sniffed.
Fortunately, Julie appeared then, forestalling immediate continued attempts at small talk.
Ted’s impression was that Allison and her companion, Marilyn, weren’t interested in wine as much as just getting tipsy; Marilyn asked what the alcohol level of each of the wines were, and seemed disappointed the vineyard didn’t have a rosé. They both kept staring at Aurora, occasionally marveling aloud at her existence—how she dressed and talked like a human, held her glass so well. Had the scientists trained her to do that? Did Ted own her? He could charge money to show her off! Ted answered each question curtly; Aurora ignored them, although Ted could read the tension in her body language.
Jonathan and Ethel seemed to be there out of a vague sense that retirees had an obligation to travel, and if you traveled to Napa and Sonoma, you did wine tastings. When he learned Ted was “more or less a local,” he asked about how dangerous and dirty San Francisco was. What he’d heard was that normal, decent folks had to navigate around giant piles of garbage and “human doodoo” while avoiding the gangs of feral youths who owned the streets.
“It’s actually not that bad,” Ted said. Jonathan looked vaguely disappointed rather than relieved, while Ethel snorted.
By the fifth and last sample of wine, Julie was all but addressing her descriptions of the wines directly to Aurora, since the mouse was the only one treating it like a genuine learning experience. Ted had never developed his wine palate much past “dry to sweet” and “too much tannin”; he’d learned more in the last couple of hours than he’d picked up in all the previous years he’d been in California.
“You have such fancy tastes for a mouse,” Allison said to Aurora as they finished. Marilyn nodded, looking amused.
“Oh?” Aurora looked down. “How many other Dynamice have you met?”
Both of their smiles faltered. Jonathan laughed.
Ted’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, and raised his brow at the caller ID: Stan Hackett. “Excuse me.” He walked away from the group.
“Ted,” Hackett said without preamble. “Can you and Aurora swing by my place up in Woodside?”
“Uh, well, we’re in Sonoma right now doing some wine tasting.”
“Really. Good on you. What hotel are you staying at?”
“Um. Hang on.” He looked at his phone, flipping to the last-minute reservation he’d made on Hotel Tonight. “The Metro Hotel in Petaluma?”
“Petaluma. Got it. I’ll make dinner reservations at Central Market and meet you up there. Seven o’clock okay?”
Ted ran his free hand through his hair. “I…guess? What’s this about?”
“Lawsuits. See you then!”
That didn’t sound good. Well, there was that class action lawsuit Hackett had proposed, right? But Aurora had already signed the NDA with Nanolabs, and he was pretty sure there’d been an indemnity clause in there; she couldn’t be a part of it. Putting the phone away, he headed back toward the group.
“She’s a mouse, Ethel,” Jonathan was saying. “How is that dangerous?”
“Miss Allison just said she’d read something on the World Wide Web about Dynamice attacking people at laboratories.”
“I’d attack someone if they were trying to experiment on me,” Marilyn interjected, waving her wine glass for emphasis.
“It’s not right.” Ethel crossed her arms. “And she’s seven feet tall.”
Aurora looked over at Ted with a pleading expression. Either it was save me from these people or save these people from me because I’m about to lose it. He took the mouse’s arm. “I think we need to be on our way, dear.”
“Did you say ‘dear?’” Allison’s brows lifted, her expression filled with glee.
Ethel sucked in her breath.
“He doesn’t mean they’re a couple.” Marilyn waved the wine glass again, this time actually splashing it over the rim. “Be serious.”
“Yes. He does. We are.” Aurora leaned down toward them, accenting her height difference, and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “And we fuck.”
Marilyn dropped her wine glass, while Allison covered her mouth, barely stifling a delighted shriek. Ethel staggered back as if she were about to faint. Jonathan looked awestruck.
Ted coughed. “Nice to have met you all.” He hurried Aurora out of the room.
By the time they’d reached the car, Ted couldn’t keep a straight face anymore, and burst out laughing. “Aurora!”
“I’m sorry, Ted, I just—they were just—so—ugh!” She opened the car door. “I’m sorry if I upset you. I’m not sorry if I upset them.”
They both got in. “Honestly, I’m not, either. So, uh, we apparently have a dinner reservation in Petaluma with Stan Hackett.”
She tilted her head. “He lives in this area?”
“No. Whatever it is, it’s important enough he’s coming up here to meet us.”
“Is that…good?”
He pulled back out onto Sonoma Valley’s main “highway,” CA–12; north of town here—and out of tourist season—it was indistinguishable from any other two-lane country road, a stubborn anomaly he found quirkily charming about the area. “He said it was about lawsuits, which doesn’t sound good, but he sounded cheerful, so I have no idea.”
“Oh.” She let out a long breath. “So what do we do now?”
“Well, it’s late afternoon, so I figure we should probably get to the hotel. But we have enough time to take a twisty narrow mountain road just for the drive.”
“That sounds lovely.”
When they reached the Metro Hotel, on Petaluma’s main drag a half-mile south of downtown, it turned out to be an eccentric, European-themed inn, each room a little different from one another—or, in the case of two Airstream campers set up in the garden, a lot different. The young desk clerk peppered Aurora with questions about being a “giant beautiful mouse lady,” but was so friendly and enthusiastic about it that neither of them could hold it against him.
Once they were settled in, Ted looked up Central Market on his phone. “It looks like the restaurant is maybe a ten-minute walk from here. Are you up for that?”
“Maybe.” Aurora looked at the clock. “But that is still two hours away.”
“What do you want to do until then?”
She leaned toward him, touching her muzzle lightly against his ear. “Let’s make Ethel faint again.”
• • •
The sun was well on its way to setting when they set out for Central Market, but the day remained lovely, and Aurora decided on the walk. They were both conscious of the occasional stare from passing drivers, but Aurora didn’t start to look self-conscious until they crossed into downtown proper and the pedestrian traffic picked up.
“Sometimes I wish I’d decided to be five and a half feet tall,” Aurora muttered.
“At this point, me looking down at you would feel almost unsettling.”
“It would for me, too. But all the other humans clearly feel unsettled by looking up at me.”
“Maybe you just have to think of us as naturally smaller.”
She grinned. “Oh, I do.”
Ted snorted.
Inside the restaurant, Aurora attracted the same level of attention she’d been getting elsewhere recently: mostly polite stares, some open gawking, and a measure or two more nervous glances and conspiratorial whispering, as if word was getting around that the new artificial mouse people—of which Aurora was still likely the only one recognizable to anyone outside Nanolabs and their client base—were actively dangerous.
The woman at the host stand was, for a moment, one of the open gawkers. It wasn’t clear she was even listening when Ted said, “We’re here for a reservation for a party of four. Under the name Hackett, I think?”
Tearing her gaze away from Aurora, she looked down at her touch screen and fell back into professional mode. “Ah, yes. The rest of your party’s already seated. Follow me?” She grabbed two menus and headed into the dining room.
Hackett waved from a booth table against one of the side walls. He was sitting with Finley, the junior lawyer. (That’s what Ted guessed he was, at least; he’d never asked. He’d started to think of him more as Hammer’s fixer.)
“You like oysters?” Hackett said as they sat down. “I ordered some for the table.”
“Sure.” Ted had only had raw oysters once before and didn’t see what the fuss was. He glanced at the menu. Yikes. Especially at that price.
“So.” Hackett took a sip of his wine—that’s when Ted finally noticed there were four glasses of white wine on the table, already filled, with more in the bottle—and leaned back. “We’re getting that class action lawsuit together on behalf of all the Dynamice, and we want Aurora to be the lead plaintiff, the class representative.”
“By ‘want,’” Finley added, “we mean ‘need.’”
Ted looked up at Aurora, then back at Finley. “But she signed an NDA and a waiver and god knows what else. How do you get around that?”
“Yeah, about that.” Hackett grinned. “Nanolab’s defense has to rest on the idea that the mice don’t have legal personhood, right?”
“Right.”
The waitress came by and set down the plate of oysters. “Wow,” she said, staring at Aurora.
The mouse smiled nervously. “Hello.”
“Wow!” she repeated, then laughed self-consciously. “Sorry. Excuse me. Just, wow.” She cleared her throat. “Are you all ready to order entrées, or do you need a few more minutes?”
“A few more minutes, please,” Aurora said. “I haven’t looked at the menu yet, and I don’t know how to eat whatever these are.”
“Oh, these are oysters.” The waitress indicated one with her finger. “You pick up the shell and tip it into your mouth.”
“And swallow it whole,” Hackett said.
“Well, you can. But you should try at least one more slowly, chew, get all the flavors. They’re sweeter that way.” She indicated the lemon wedges in the center of the tray, surrounding a cup of cocktail sauce. “Some people like to use that sauce, or the lemons, or both. Personally, I just like a squeeze of lemon.”
“Okay.” Aurora nodded, studying the plate curiously.
“I’ll come back in a few minutes.”
“So,” Hackett said, picking up an oyster. “The thing is, if you, Aurora, do have legal personhood, which is what we’re basically going to argue, Nanolab loses. They don’t want you or Ted to be able to testify because they know you’ll sink their defense.” He ate the oyster, ignoring the waitress’s advice.
“Yes.” She nodded, picking up an oyster herself, and carefully squeezing some lemon juice onto it.
“But, either way, you’re not a legal person now.”
“Which means,” Finley said, “you’re not allowed to sign legal contracts.”
Ted furrowed his brow. “That’s…oh.”
“So,” Aurora said slowly, “whatever I signed is not legally binding.”
Hackett grinned. “Bingo.” Finley nodded his assent.
Aurora remained still a few seconds, then giggled, tipping the oyster back into her mouth.