Although parkour is often done to move swiftly through an area of obstacles, Jack seems bent on having the most fun possible up in the canopy. As a result, his route is indirect, allowing me to easily keep pace with him as I follow the trail at a walk. I sometimes lose sight of him (particularly as I am being careful not to trip again) but I can clearly hear him when he asks, “So why’s your name on the memorial wall? You don’t seem very dead. You don’t seem very on Earth.” He doesn’t exactly sound adversarial, but there is a note of challenge in his voice.
The question startles a laugh out of me, simply from how it is posed. I’m not surprised he’s heard of me—Dr. Citali can’t be the only one Deirdre told about me. I don’t look very dead? Well, Jack didn’t see me three days ago. Jack strikes me as the independent sort, pursuing whatever interests him in the moment, so I lean on that in my response. “I’m not on Earth because I didn’t want to stay on Earth. I stowed away on the ship.”
Jack drops down in front of me and holds up his fist for a bump. I oblige. “Nice job! That had to be a high security place to get into. How did you find a cryopod?”
“I worked for the company,” I explain. “I knew the layout.”
Jack grins. “Inside job. Smooth. Smooth!” He jumps back up into the foliage and resumes his fun while peppering me with questions about how I made it work. Did anyone else know? Was I always planning it? The way he poses some quite specific ones indicates he has some similar personal experience. It’s like I’m talking to a human shimmerfly. He’s distractible, his movements are hard to track, and he can get into and out of places he’s not supposed to. Like Xiao’s office, for example, which Jack admits to. “Yeah, sometimes when he’s not there I move things around just to mess with him a little bit.” I wonder if he rearranges the reception desk, too, given what Steve said about Jack.
“It wasn’t that kind of job,” I tell him, after sharing some of my youthful indiscretions in order to build rapport. “Less B&E, more con. I waltzed on there like I belonged.”
“Ooooh. Sometimes that’s whatcha gotta do, but I’m not as good at that,” Jack says. “Easier to just not be seen… although I’m not great at that, either. Easier to find a way in where no one’s looking!” Jack pauses up to my left, his face brightening with a sudden realization. “Oh! That’s how you knew my mom, isn’t it? Were you a scientist too?”
“No, we met in the lunchroom.”
“Right, right. You’re that sales guy.”
With a self-deprecating chuckle, I acknowledge, “I am ‘that nice boy from sales.’” Now that we’ve gotten to know each other a bit, I begin to pry. I feel that the safest topic to start with is the rangers. “Maybe you know Marina Citali a little bit? She’s my doctor, and she mentioned that you were in the rangers. Can you tell me anything about that?”
Jack vanishes behind a tree on the left, and then suddenly his voice comes from my right. “Yeah, that didn’t really work out for me.” I turn and see him over there. That relocation was exceptionally fast and silent. And seems impossible. “I thought that, you know, being separate from everyone else’s demands would be good, but…” He breathes in deeply and then lets out a sigh. “It turns out they’ve got their own internal structure. You can’t really be free to be yourself there. You have to be a ranger, or the ranger, or whatever.”
“It’s a twenty-four hour job?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s a good way to put it. And you just don’t get to be yourself. It’s more than a job, it’s a calling,” he says, echoing words I’ve heard from Marina. Only this time, with some criticism of their loftiness. “They do some good things,” he adds, giving the rangers some credit. “I went out to explore the inland a couple times, which was interesting. And I finished the training, but it didn’t really work for me. Picked up a few tricks, though.”
“So was that a trick?” I point at where he was a moment ago and where he is now. “Or were you just really quiet?”
Jack shrugs and says mischievously, “I mean… figuring out the right way to be really quiet is a little bit of a trick, isn’t it?” I raise an eyebrow at him, and he admits, “That’s a special ranger technique for moving sight unseen in native wildlife, though it seems like some kind of optical illusion.”
Is something chironic going on here? Would I be able to do that? “How does it work?” I ask Jack. He indicated he has some knowledge of Progenitor technology, so I get more specific. “Are you doing anything with resonance energies?”
“You know, I never thought about it that way, but I guess that could be true.”
¡Vaya! Other people can do resonance “tricks,” too! I don’t feel threatened by this; while I love the wondrous connection I have with Chiron, I don’t want the special status that goes with it. Particularly not after these past few days. And if anyone were going to demonstrate such abilities, it makes sense for it to be someone like Jack who was born on this planet and has spent a lot of time outdoors surrounded by the plants, fungus, and atmosphere.
I ask Jack to repeat the trick while I’m actively watching him, and he expresses some hesitance at first, unsure if it will work with an attentive audience. He agrees to try, though, and between one blink and the next, he’s gone, and I feel my hair disturbed, as though someone has ruffled my curls. That causes a spike of adrenaline to shoot through me with a sudden feeling of vulnerability that a threat could get that close without me noticing. But then I hear a rustle from the left side of the trail again, this time accompanied by Jack muttering about getting caught in vines, and my heart rate slows.
“It’s a lot harder when you’re being watched that closely,” he says with a small laugh as he steps back out onto the trail, shaking off a tendril. “When you’re not in a chaotic situation you can take advantage of.”
I run a hand through my hair, fixing my curls. “You play pranks like that on your mom?” I ask. What exactly is the nature of the difficulty between him and Deirdre? Is this the age-old issue of a parent grumpy that their kid won’t get a job? I haven’t seen or heard anything yet to suggest he’s caused Deirdre the kinds of problems I caused my mom. I’m not even sure a person could cause that kind of trouble here. Over in the Morgan domes, certainly, but not in the Garden of Chiron. Is this just about independence and separation? Or him being an annoying trickster? If there’s an issue that needs to be brokered, perhaps I, an old friend, can help—a young, old friend that both sides can relate to on some level. These family troubles are probably the hardest nut to crack of everything associated with Jack, and I’d like to get that out of the way before I deal with the cult. That has the potential to get out of hand if I don’t manage it carefully. Sal has no idea how ill-equipped I am to address their concerns here.
Although he hems and haws, Jack does open up to me eventually. “Mom wants me to, you know, settle down, find something productive to do—but not with the cult. Like, she thought I would do well in the rangers, but that’s not really my thing,” he says with a shrug. “Desk job… also not me.” Okay, so this does sound like typical parent-child squabbling, perhaps made worse by Deirdre having such a stressful job and Jack not yet finding a career to settle into. Not much I can do about that except maybe talk to Deirdre about letting Jack live his own life, a lesson many a parent has to learn.
Jack looks off into the distance, mulling things over. “I don’t know, maybe there is something to this cult. Things with that could work out.” He does not sound anywhere near as zealous as Sal or any of the other cultists I’ve talked to. Jack turns back to face me again. “Are you really this Child of Chiron?” It’s a vaguely curious question, not an intense one.
“Oh, that’s gotten around, has it?” I guess Sal wasn’t able to keep a lid on it, after all. Not with all the witnesses of the briar beast scuffle. “Are you really into this cult?”
“I dunno,” Jack says again, in his laid-back, noncommittal way, “the cult’s saying a lot of good stuff about protecting the environment. And Sal—they’re the Prophet of Chiron—they predicted a monsoon last year.”
“And what do you know, it rained,” I say wryly. But I note that Jack’s still just talking about the cult in general. This is no Takuto and Arx situation. When Jack mentions Sal, it’s explanatory, not emotional; there’s no pining coming from this direction.
As we come upon an intersection in the trail, a quiet beeping noise from off down one side disturbs the natural setting. Then, as if summoned by the thought of relationships, Marina interrupts our productive conversation with her arrival.