[Content Warning: stressed people in incredibly stressful situations; assume that this applies to every chapter from here on out]
I couldn’t pick out any particular details of note about our drive from the Joint Force Headquarters to Mariem’s home. The up-armored black Cadillac SUV’s sirens were on the entire way, which was an absolute hell of noise even with the moderate soundproofing that comes with bulletproofing. But on top of that was the way Megan alternated between yelling at people on the phone and barking orders to the uniformed grunt she had working a laptop from the passenger seat.
So forgive me for not being able to share what all was going on. I spent almost the entire time with my eyes closed and my hands holding my ears flat against my head in a vain effort to block out the cacophony. I know somebody plopped a hat down atop my head and hands at some point, which helped provide another layer of stuff to muffle the sound, but the whole thing was a frustrating exercise in controlling my breathing and marshaling my thoughts.
Part of me felt that I shouldn’t have been in this vehicle, purely due to the perceived impropriety of it. But Megan had been insistent.
“It’s not exactly under the table anymore,” she’d said while all-but shoving me into the car and sweeping my tail out of the way of the door, “and Mariem’s gonna really need someone she can trust in her corner right now.”
I didn’t have any argument against that. Not that I’d have tried in the first place, though. Megan was right.
And there wasn’t a goddamn chance I would bow out now. Not after this.
The car pulling to a halt and the sirens shutting off jolted me out of my attempt at a meditative haze, and I opened my eyes to see we’d made it to our destination — and that we weren’t alone, which had my ears pinning back and fur standing on end in displeasure. The SUV had driven across the lawns in the cul-de-sac to get to its destination because every goddamn inch of street was taken up by news vans — somehow, despite this abhorrent invasion of privacy barely having been out for an hour or so, it seemed as though each individual news agency in the DMV area had sent their crews out to go harass a woman and her family. At their home.
Seeing all these people milling around, hoping to catch a glimpse of a woman just trying to live her life, uncaring of the sheer damage they were causing… it reminded me of my childhood, of being paraded around for executives and shareholders by my parents, of having every little action examined for how it would ‘reflect’.
It made me sick.
I got out of the car and circled around it to join Megan. The pair of us stood flanked by the driver and the grunt from the passenger seat, and the two of them had their hands resting lightly on their sidearms as we approached. The media was so caught in its frenzy that the arrival of law enforcement personnel accompanied by a highly obvious Moonshot somehow wasn’t enough to draw any attention, and every step we took without being noticed only pulled my scowl deeper.
“Willing to engage in some government-sanctioned destruction of property?” Megan whispered.
“With pleasure.”
“Good. Wait here.”
Megan dropped me off at one end of the line of media crews and camera equipment, giving me a very convenient straight shot from one end of the cul-de-sac to the other, and motioned for one of her retinue to stick with me. The other followed her as she marched in front of the assembled mass media in full Judge Advocate livery, marks of rank and accolades proudly displayed upon her shoulder and coat. She must have been absolutely dying in the early summer heat, but she didn’t let it show. Instead, she plastered on the cruelest, most demeaning expression in her ex-drill-instructor’s arsenal, followed by a twitch of her head as a signal for the soldier next to her to bring one hand up to his mouth and let out a shrill, piercing whistle.
The teeming throng of vultures fell silent as eyes and cameras refocused to center Megan in their sights. She stood there, back straight, chin up, false smile dripping with condescension, and stared right back.
“Members of the Associated Press and other media organizations!” she declared, sweeping her gaze from one end to the other. “You and yours were made aware at oh-nine-fifty-seven hours that your presence at this location would not be tolerated. Let me be clear: if you have not turned off and begun stowing your equipment within the next fifteen seconds, followed by demonstrably working to return to your vehicles and depart, you will be arrested and charged with the full force of the law. Your time starts now.”
“The hell you think you’re tryin’ to do here, lady!?” one exceedingly brave or foolish soul cried out from the crowd. “Ain’t you heard of the fucking First Amendment? Freedom o’ goddamn speech!”
“You appear to be laboring under a misconception of what is and isn’t protected speech under the Constitution,” Megan answered smoothly, not even bothering to turn her head towards the speaker. “So let me be very clear: freedom of speech does not apply when that speech unreasonably endangers the public, such as when it compromises the security of a strategic asset — and that principle applies here. Now,” she checked her watch, “I do believe the deadline to stop recording and start leaving has passed, which means that you are all officially trespassing. Would you care to do the honors, Foxfire?”
“Gladly.”
Amethyst foxfire danced along my fingertips, and with a casual, almost dismissive flick, I sent a lance of flame across the lenses and bodies of every camera that crossed onto Mariem’s property line. The vultures’ yelps of fright and dismay were music to my ears, and helped me ignore the absolutely horrid stench of melted plastic and scorched circuitry that my little bout of permitted vandalism had produced. Unfortunately, some souls seemed not to have gotten the message, and swiftly began retrieving cell phones from their pockets to keep recording. To which I said… no.
Where before my casual gesture had sent the bare minimum surging forth, I now let a veritable fountain of foxfire pour from my hands along the curve of the cul-de-sac. It stole the tripods and microphones and other equipment that these pests hadn’t managed to pull back after my initial outburst, and curtained off Mariem’s home from prying eyes in a way that they couldn’t hope to see past.
“Y-you can’t do this!” another one of the vultures cried, shaky bravado not enough to hide the frisson of fear in his words. “We’re gonna sue!”
“You’ll try,” I answered, keeping my tone so level as to sound bored. “Now, you may want to leave. After all,” I flicked one ear off to the side, and slowly panned it further back as though tracking something, “I hear sirens. And I bet they have more than enough handcuffs for each and every one of you.”
That seemed to do the trick for most of them, and for the few that clearly hadn’t been spooked badly enough, raising my curtain of foxfire higher changed the equation from risk to feasibility. Still, we stood there watching them leave for a good five minutes, and while police did show up partway through that time, there wasn’t much for them to do but watch the idiots leave.
Finally, we were alone.
“Keep watch on the premises,” Megan ordered the two men she’d brought with. “One in front, one in back. I won’t put it past these fucks to try and sneak in from the main road. Naomi?” She nodded towards the house.
I knew an invitation when I saw it, and fell in step with her.
Megan approached the house, and rather than ring the doorbell, she knocked out an odd pattern that I didn’t recognize — two heavier knocks, a pause, a light knock, a pause, then two heavier knocks before a light one. A beat passed, two, three.
Then the door opened just enough for a person to slip inside, and an olive-skinned hand reached out, closed around Megan’s wrist, and gently tugged her inside.
I slipped in behind Megan and turned to close and lock the front door behind me, only then letting an ear swivel towards the other people present in the entry hall. Mariem was expected, of course, but what caught me somewhat by surprise was that she’d pulled Megan into a hug, the ragged grip her fingers had on tight handfuls of Megan’s JAG blazer belying the sheer control she must be using not to tear it to shreds. More important, though, were the softly murmured words passing between the two: Mariem’s were clear, while Megan’s speech was halting and cautious, each word sounding both hesitant and meticulously picked out at the same time. And more importantly, it wasn’t English.
It was Arabic.
“They are close, yes,” the other person inside the room spoke, drawing my attention to him as he looked to meet my eyes. “And she will blame herself for this, as she has before. But she should not. And neither should you.”
The speaker was a tall, reedy man, his skin tone a shade darker than Mariem’s own. He was slim of build, looking for all the world like Mariem’s strength should have snapped him in half long ago, and he had a carefully-trimmed beard framing warm eyes and a kind smile. Callouses on his fingers and small scars along his hands and forearms spoke to any number of things, but given some of the furniture and decorations I’d seen on my prior visits, along with the family having apparently built an outdoor shelter for Zara the fox without much difficulty, I was going to bet on ‘woodworking’.
“Bit late for that one,” I murmured, my ears falling low and tail limp even as I extended a hand to this new person. “Naomi Ziegler. Would that we had met under better circumstances.”
“Waqas Mouthlaki,” the man answered. “Thank you for your kindness towards my wife and daughter.”
“… speaking of your daughter.”
“Hounaida and Kalid are at day camp,” Waqas responded, eyes flicking towards the door. “Mariem’s father had just been about to drop them off when this… debacle began. He remains with them now. And my daughter has Zara with her.” His eyes turned towards me with a question. “That fox has changed. Scent mellowed. Calmed. Grown protective. Would you know why, madam Foxfire?”
“If I knew for certain, I’d tell you,” I shrugged. “It wasn’t me though, I can tell you that much.”
“Regardless,” Waqas continued, the slight Arabic accent making the word sound almost musical, “the children are safe and accompanied, for the moment at least. Now we work to keep things that way.”
“And on that note…”
I turned towards Megan and Mariem, who were still mid-embrace and murmuring something to one another, though I couldn’t understand a single word that passed between them. Neither of the two’s body language spoke of calm, though; if anything, they were winding each other up, which was about the worst possible thing they could be doing at a time like this.
So with that in mind, I took a deep breath, pursed my lips, and whistled as loudly as I could.
Mariem and Megan jerked away from each other, their heads snapping up and towards me. Megan’s brow was creased in anger and frustration, though it faded when her eyes flicked to Mariem’s husband beside me.
“Okay!” I exclaimed, clapping my hands for effect and suppressing the wince at how sharp the sound was in this entryway. “We have a very limited amount of time to do anything before what few lids are on this dumpster fire get blown off and someone gets to write the narrative again, so let’s make sure it’s us! Mariem, Waqas; did anything happen this past week to suggest something might be amiss? Phone calls from an unknown number, an unfamiliar person at the end of the road, something that looked like scam mail? Anything like that?”
“No, nothing,” Mariem said, picking at the loose cloth of her hijab. “But I also wasn’t even here for half of the weekend; I was helping with disaster recovery after that big tornado outside Kansas City.”
“Waqas?” I asked her husband, to which he shook his head.
“Children curious about Zara and asking to pet her, but nothing aside from that.”
“Damn,” I murmured, tail lashing behind as I thought this over. “That doesn’t give us much to work off of, and with that just happened…”
“Are you thinking…?” Megan caught my eye before nodding behind her at the other, connected house, then tilted her head towards the street.
I nodded, which had Megan sighing. But she straightened her back and put her chin up, then cleared her throat lightly to get Mariem’s and Waqas’ attention.
“Ask the rest of the family what they’d need for a few nights away and get them packed,” she said. “Mariem, my people will have your parents and Yusra’s family set up in a hotel for the next few days at least.”
“What about us?” she asked.
“Near as we can tell, your stalker escalated like this because we cut off his access to you,” Megan explained. “There’s a lot of guesswork here given how off the mark we were up to now, but this bears all the hallmarks of the ways stalkers and abusers ‘punish’ their targets for behaviors or actions they dislike. And given the most common escalations are stripping away safe spaces and attempting to further isolate their victims…”
“You think this harami would attempt to harm our family?” Waqas asked, suddenly voice tight with restrained fury.
“I think we can’t take the risk,” she said.
“Then what about us?” Mariem asked, gesturing between herself and her husband. “We are to stay put, then? Appease this man?”
“Not for long,” I assured her. “Currently all of our proof of his identity is stuff the men in charge can’t actually use, which wasn’t a problem before, but it is now. That being said, I know where we can get the hard-and-fast paper trail needed to actually nail him to the wall, and I’ll be going there afterwards.”
Never again did I want to try and see through Gorou’s eyes while I sat in a moving car, but it had been worth the sudden bout of nausea to get some reassurance that at least a couple media entities hadn’t thrown in with the other hyenas.
That being said… CSPAN and NPR I understood, but I just knew Ambrose and Gorou were to blame for the recriminations put out by BBC News and NHK News, respectively.
“There is one issue,” Waqas broke in, a vicious frown tugging at his face. “I am able to defend myself well enough, and Mariem’s abilities speak for themselves — but what of Hounaida? What protection does my daughter have?”
“You or Mariem,” I told him frankly. “Maybe Zara could’ve protected her a few years from now, but right now, that’s not something I’m willing to bet on.” That response got me some odd looks, to which I flicked an ear in dismissal.
“Whatever Naomi did to the fox aside—”
“Gorou, not me,” I interrupted Megan, drawing her powerful stink-eye and an impatient huff.
“Whatever someone did to the fox aside!” she corrected, raising her voice as if to forestall any further interruption from me. “Do what you can to keep things as unchanged as possible. And most importantly, Mariem? You need to keep going out as Lady Liberty.”
“What!?” Mariem gasped, eyes wide in shock and apparent betrayal at Megan’s statement. “How? How can you expect me to, to just go back out there as though nothing has happened!? As though my home is still unknown, as though my family is still safe!?”
“Mariem—”
“Because you don’t get a choice in the matter,” I broke in, stepping forward to meet Mariem. “Because as much as this is about you, it’s also about more than that. Because if this were all it took to stop Lady Liberty from going out and being a superhero, people would make the connection in a heartbeat. And that would be disastrous for every Moonshot, not just you.”
“And you know this, how?” Mariem snapped, glaring at me. “You never had a secret identity to protect!”
“But I still have a life,” I told her, keeping my voice calm and soft. “I still have my privacy. I can still step away from the humdrum and know I won’t have paparazzi in dogged pursuit, but only because I made it clear that Foxfire’s affairs were separate from those of Naomi Ziegler’s.” I gently laid one hand on the outside of her arm as a steady, reassuring touch. “Your identity may no longer be a secret, but your life can still be private. You just need to give the gawkers and shutterbugs something to look at that isn’t your home.”
Mariem didn’t reply. Her mouth pressed tightly into a fine line as she scanned over my face for any sign of deception, but whatever she was trying to spot with that sensory power of hers, she wasn’t finding it. Instead she turned away with a frustrated exhale and left the ground, floating up the stairs and deeper into the home.
“I… apologize for her,” Waqas said, his tone somewhat between exasperation and exhaustion. “She has had nightmares of this exact thing happening since we married, and the fear only grew after Hounaida’s birth. For you to tell her that she must simply press on regardless, it…”
“It was unkind,” Megan admonished lightly as she glanced my way, “but no less true for it.”
“I understand,” Waqas nodded. “I shall speak with my wife. You two…”
Waqas brought his hands together in prayer and bowed, shallow, but recognizable for what it was.
“Please. Find this man who would threaten our safety, and end the terror he represents.”
“We will,” Megan said, while I just nodded. “Come on, Naomi.”
With that, Waqas let us out of the house and locked up behind us. Megan gestured to the man she’d left in front and walked to the car, where both of them met us moments later.
“Where to now?” she asked me once we’d gotten inside and strapped ourselves in.
“Japanese embassy, and British after if that’s a bust,” I told her. “Gorou will meet us there. NHK and BBC sat on the info; maybe we’ll get some actionable proof if we look at the source.”
“You heard the woman!” Megan half-yelled at the man in the driver’s seat, who started up the car and got us on the road. “We want the sirens for this?”
“Please don’t.”
That was enough for the sirens to stay off, which was good. It may have been largely out of our control, but we could at least not bring any more undue attention upon Mariem by our actions. And after we had to intercept those fucking vultures in the media and stop them from recording her home…
I wanted to burn something.
I wanted to burn something so very, painfully badly.