The holding cell is well-used, but clean. Made for the native Tyulti population rather than the Earth-born, everything is wrong-sized for the group of human women that have arrived over the last few hours. Linda closes her eyes for a moment. Her stomach cramps again. The feeling subsides, and she checks out the cell. Most of the other five women are silent, but their sideways glances speak of suspicion and fear.
Linda guesses them to be a range of nationalities and languages. Two older German speakers occupy the lone, sheetless bunk bed and hold a rapid-fire conversation in low voices. Before she can reach any conclusions about the others, she feels tears welling up. She closes her eyes again and forces herself to think of something else. She calculates whether her worst student has any chance of passing her English class. Maybe. The tears subside.
Linda wishes she had stayed on Earth. She’d swap this cell for an Earth police station cell. Or even a hospital. At least then she’d know why she was here.
The dingy passageway is muted now. Earlier, a constant stream of Tyulti enforcers passed through on their way to other holding cells. The stream became a dribble, then a drip, then no one for a long time. Hours passed. How many? She replays the last few days from memory as she waits.
“Earth-born people play games to learn how to obey rules.” Linda pursed her lips, red pen wavering over the homework assignment she was grading but moved on. “Sokker is a good game for learning rules.” This time a circle. “Earth-born people learn when to bent rules,” at this Linda’s pen darted in to change the ‘t’ into a ‘d,’ “by the use of fowls.” Another mark.
A knock on her apartment door startled her. Who could it be so long after sunset? Sitting at her dining table grading essays on her students’ favorite Earth sports, the knock could have been a relief. It could have been her neighbor, or even the building manager, but it wasn’t.
The monitor attached to the door frame illuminated as she approached, and Linda sucked in a tense breath: three Tyulti in Enforcement garb. Near-human except for coats of fur that blended into the grey-black of their uniforms, two of them stood at relative ease with rifle-sized diasho cradled in their arms. The shortest one, still much taller than Linda, was empty-handed.
She considered ignoring the visitors. But Steve Masser had ignored a visit from the enforcers last year. Mr. Enio, the Tyulti who had recruited them all from Earth, had told the teachers that he’d been repatriated because of a family emergency. No one had ever heard from him again.
Linda opened the door.
“Aaahhhhh,” said the tallest, best-groomed member of the group. “Hello, you speak Tyult?” He blinked. Linda also blinked politely, failing to read the situation.
“No, sorry. Can I help you?”
The official spoke in short, Tyult syllables to both of his junior staff, who answered in the negative with regretful head tilts.
“Passport? Passport? See?” the officer asked with a smile.
“Oh, sure”, Linda said, holding up her first finger. “Wait one minute, please.”
The officer nodded. “One minute, yes.”
Linda grabbed her Earth passport, bringing it back to the door.
After inspecting the document page by page, the officer asked, “Visa? University Visa?”
Linda frowned. “It’s in process; I don’t have it yet.”
The officer at the door asked again, with bared teeth—a Tyult frown.
Linda held up her finger again. She scrambled to grab her handheld, a thin plastic oblong that lit up as she lifted it from the tabletop. Returning to the door, she pulled up the contact details for Mr. Enio, the recruiter of all alien faculty.
“Ahh,” the Enforcer said with relief. With a sharp word, one of the younger males produced a smaller handheld. The young officer tapped it against Linda’s device, the diasho dangling in his other hand.
“Thank you, that is all,” the officer said, and the trio strode back to the apartment building’s elevator while Linda looked at their retreating forms, perplexed.
She closed the door and leaned against it, only then noticing the sweat rolling down her back. She texted Mr. Enio, “Hi. Enforcers came to my home asking about visa status, please advise?”
Wracking her brain, Linda tried to remember what Steve had said in his last appearances in the teacher’s room. Something about regulations? Interpretations of what’s true? As hard as she tried, she couldn’t quite remember. Steve complained a lot.
No reply from Mr. Enio. She sat back down to her students’ assignments but couldn’t focus. At midnight, she went to bed, spending the night with restless dreams.
The Next Day
“Did you get the fuzzbutts at your door?” Ron asked, his Spanish accent nearly unnoticeable. All the Earth-born instructors were around the long, trestle-style table occupying the middle of the Teacher’s Room. A couple of Tyult professors, their fur variegated with patches of silver hair suggesting age, were at smaller desks on the sides of the room pecking at computers, creating student worksheets in various Earth languages.
“Shhhh! Don’t say fuzzbutts. You can’t say that,” Linda said.
“Why not,” Ron said, “Clement does.” Down the table, one of the Mandarin professors sat, reading a book. He turned his head at the mention of his name and grinned.
“Clement is not a nice person,” said Raia, just above a whisper.
“I’m right here,” Clement didn’t turn from his book as he spoke.
The group fell silent.
“So? You all had visitors too?” Ron sat back, stretching in his chair.
Clement looked at Ron and rolled his eyes before speaking again, this time directed at a female Tyult on a computer facing the wall opposite him. “Ms. Chirgaa, we all had enforcers visit us last night to check our papers; do you think we’re in trouble?”
Ms. Chirgaa twisted around, considering us with an unreadable expression. “Phe skagaan Tyulti.”
Everyone knew what this meant. This is Tyulti.
Ms. Chirgaa narrowed her eyes. “Did you remember to blink?”
Everyone blinked in reply.
“Are you all carrying your Earth passports more importantly? You must always obey the laws here.” The deep voice from the far side of the office surprised everyone, including Ms. Chirgaa. Professor Emeritus Katkop was a mountain of well-groomed fur and manners, but he rarely engaged in conversation with the rest of the department. We stopped blinking, and we shifted in our chairs without speaking.
“Not so good,” Professor Katkop said.
Footsteps and muffled Tyult voices approach. Linda looks up. A giant, dark-furred, enforcer approaches the cell with Raia, a Bulgarian teacher from Linda’s university. The enforcer opens the cell door and pushes Raia into the space. The women in the cell slink away from the guards. Linda raises a hand, catching Raia’s attention, and, with a quick nod of greeting, her friend moves to Linda’s side. The shadow-colored enforcer stands near the open cell door, waiting as a pair of smaller male Tyult’s push a hovering grav cart laden with small blocks wrapped in something white in front of the open cell door. Next to the stack are a silver thermos and paper cups.
The furred duo positions the cart across the entrance, and the taller enforcer gestures at Linda and another woman.
Dismayed at being singled out, Linda feels her stomach tighten again. One of the furred guards taps, impatient, on the metal thermos, and, as if in response, her stomach growls. She and the other prisoner step up and blink several times. The guards give one cursory blink in return and the taller Tyult oversees them as they dole out food and drink to their cellmates.
Linda conceals a shudder as she passes Raia a cup of lukewarm tea with a sandwich wrapped in what feels like toilet paper.
“Are you okay?” she mutters as Raia takes the food. The sound of people chewing, and the muted conversation of the German women continue in the background.
“Yeah, I’m fine. You?”
Linda tries on a brief smile as they unwrap their sandwiches. The bitter stink of local tea permeates the cell. Raia sets the cup on the ground, untasted, and takes a bite of her sandwich. Not really a sandwich—a thick salty protein paste between two layers of spongy vegetable slices—but both of them devour their portions.
Raia wipes her mouth with the paper wrapper and asks, “Has anyone questioned you yet?”
Linda swallows the last bite of her sandwich. “No, what do you mean? Like, they took you somewhere and asked you questions about—I don’t even know— what did they ask?”
“It all seemed pointless.” She brushes crumbs into the sandwich wrapper. “But if they haven’t formally arrested us, that means they want something. Answers.”
“They can’t round us up like animals, put us in a pen, and ask us questions.”
“You think you have the same rights here as on Earth,” Raia says. “That’s very naïve of you.”
Linda spends the next half hour thinking about Raia’s words and listening to her cellmates complain softly in German. Eventually, Linda notices the rhythm of the German ladies’ speech changing. She watches them laying cards on the bare mattress. Raia and one of the other cellmates watch over their shoulders. Linda can’t recognize the game they’re playing, but drifts over and joins Raia behind a woman whose white hair is pulled into an untidy ponytail.
The ponytailed player cranes her neck around to look at Linda with glittering eyes. “You know why they don’t play games on Tyult?” she says. “They don’t play games here because they don’t understand bluffing, and they don’t do well with ambiguity. Here, everything is all rules.” She stares at her hand and places a card on top of the small pile between the players.
Her opponent, younger, but still mature in age, checks the card on the mattress, then her own hand. Her face drops as she lays her own hand down in defeat.
The older woman turns to Linda again.
“You can bend the rules here, but in parameters that make little sense to Earth-borns. And bluffing? We Earth-born use it to win back home, but perhaps here not so much. We still don’t understand the rules of the game on Tyult do we?”
The sound of the rusty lock on the cell door interrupts the German. A female Tyulti officer, her somber uniform accented by her deer-brown fur, peers at the prisoners from outside the cage.
“Linda Nash?” The guard says.
Linda raises her hand. The officer issues orders in tumbling syllables of Tyult while motioning for Linda to exit the cage. After a short walk, her escort deposits her in a small windowless room with a metal table and two chairs, all bolted to the floor. The door is closed and locked behind her. Linda surveys the room then sits down in the cold metal chair facing the door. The seat warms underneath her as she waits. She waits and waits. She shifts in the chair as parts of her rear end go numb. Has she been forgotten? She considers getting up to bang on the door, then it swings open. A dignified Tyult female with dark, lush fur, enters and greets Linda in near-unaccented English.
“I’m very sorry to have displaced your day, Miss Linda.” Displaced? “Let’s try to get you released sooner rather than later, heh? I am Captain Roxgra, and I am here to sort things out.” As she sits across the table from Linda, she smooths her perfectly tidy uniform jacket.
Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all—but why lock everyone up to begin with? Linda remembers to use her courteous blinks. The captain gives one blink in reply.
“This is more than an administrative mistake, or an inconvenience—” Linda says, but the captain grimaces and she falters.
“Some disturbing intelligence has come to light over the course of the last few days. The Ministry of the Interior is determined to find out if there is a threat to the Tyulti Republic. Unfortunately, the rumor suggests the involvement of foreign educators in private universities. We have to determine the truth of this intelligence.”
Linda scrambles to recall anything about political instability and university educators but draws a blank.
“So… your most logical response was to detain all Earth-borns who teach? All of us?”
Unbelievable.
“Yes, of course, let’s get right to the point: have you heard anything that might apply to our investigations?”
Linda bites off a sarcastic reply and stops to consider the captain’s question.
“No, not at all. University adjuncts are not really people with agendas. We’re simple people who want to make a living and see the galaxy.”
“Sure, sure,” says Captain Roxgra. “How about your work permit? Why don’t you have one?”
Linda wrinkles her eyebrows. “Mr. Enio from personnel told me that’s a visa processing issue. The Enforcement Bureau manages work and residence permits. My papers have been in process for months; I wouldn’t mind if you looked into that for me.”
“Why are you working without a permit?”
Linda’s heart begins pounding. Has the school screwed this up?
“Because that’s how I was told it’s done.” She wipes her palms on her trousers.
“You know you could be prosecuted for working without a permit,”
What? Is this Tyulti trying to game me into working for her as an informant? Maybe that German woman didn’t know what she was talking about.
“What about the school?” Linda said.
“Of course, the school could be fined as well, but you should have gone back to your planet of origin to wait for your visa approval to come through.”
Linda feels her blood pressure, the pressure in her entire body, seeking release. It’s hard to keep from shouting, so she speaks with deliberate slowness. “Every single language teacher I have met here has done the same thing that I have. Are you suggesting that you are going to arrest every Earth-born teacher on the planet and jail them when it’s your higher education system that is at fault?”
The captain remains silent for a moment and as Linda’s body unclenches, Captain Roxgra says, “Remind me why you have chosen to work without a work permit again?”
“They said this is how everyone does it. Everyone I’ve met is doing the same thing. ‘Phe skagaan Tyulti,’ even I know that one, ‘This is Tyulti.’”
“It seems to me that you have misplaced your trust,” Roxgra says. “You are innocently working for an institution that may have intentions that are less than honest.”
“And what about the other people you’ve locked up?” says Linda, gesturing over her shoulder.
“Don’t worry about them. Worry about you.” Captain Roxgra pulls a business card from her breast pocket, along with Linda’s passport. “Let’s see how we can fix everything. I’ll hold on to this.” She waves the passport, then slides it back into her pocket. With her other hand, she passes over the business card. “And you can hold on to this.”
Linda takes the card with both hands, staring at it as if it’s just introduced itself.
“Let’s arrange a chat every Tenth Day afternoon, shall we?” Roxgra says. “Once you are done with work. Go home, relax for an hour. After that—call me. I’d like to know more about the opinions of the faculty in your department. In particular, I’d like to know if they express any political sentiments, on or off duty. I want to know what kind of phone conversations you overhear them having, and who comes to visit them. Listen to the students, and what they say about their teachers. Do you have questions?”
“Yes, at least fifty,” Linda says. Captain Roxgra gives her a sharp look and pats the passport in her pocket. “What about my fellow Earth colleagues? Will they be reporting on me? What about Tyulti staff?”
“Don’t worry about your colleagues, worry about you. I suggest you start paying attention. I’ll be happy to hear about emotions, expressions, body language, anything you can share until you learn more. Effort means a lot to me.”
“What about Raia? She’s—” The captain holds up a hand, and Linda stops speaking.
“Good evening, Linda. Don’t worry, I’ll be watching you.” The captain stands and knocks on the door.
Another uniformed Tyult deposits Linda outside the main gates of the Civil Enforcement Offices. It’s the middle of the night. A self-driving emyst beeps in the whirling traffic, and Linda raises her hand to flag it down. It stops dead and reverses in her direction. Other cars veer around it, honking. Linda’s trembling slows as she gets in and directs the vehicle to take her home.
Despite the sunny, clear weather, Linda stays inside all weekend. The hours of the day melt into irrelevance. Everything is unreal, unreliable, including the sun in the sky. She paces. She stops. She sits and stares. Several times she reaches for her handheld to call her fellow teachers, Ron, or Raia, then sets it back down. None of her colleagues reach out to her.
“I’m an alienated alien trapped on an alien world,” Linda thinks, but she can’t bring herself to laugh. She can’t grade papers or write lesson plans. She doesn’t book the trip with Ron that she’d been planning for the midterm holiday to the Irium waterfalls. She exists paralyzed, pinned down like a moth on a board, under a Tyult gaze.
Monday morning, when she arrives at the teacher’s room, most of her colleagues are bent over laptops or papers, oblivious to her arrival. Raia isn’t there. Linda drops her briefcase on the conference table in the middle of the room with a thud. The other faculty raise their heads, but then return their gazes to their paper and computers.
“So,” Linda asks, elongating the “o” with a casualness that is anything but casual. “What did everyone get up to Friday night?”
Ron looks at her with a pained expression but says nothing. Everyone else ignores her. The discomfort in Ron’s reaction makes Linda chest clench. Something breaks inside her.
“Where’s Raia?”
“She was here, but she left an hour ago,” says Ron. “She left with Clement.”
“Right,” Linda says to the air. She seats herself at a battered communal wall tablet, taps a stylus on the screen, and waits for it to complete its start sequence. Once the tablet comes to life, she types in a search for the address of the Earth consulate, copies it onto a sheet of scratch paper, repacks her belongings, and leaves. In her peripheral vision, she catches a few of her former colleagues lifting their heads to watch her departure.
An emyst drops her off in a neighborhood of suburban apartments with paint peeling from jumbled boxes cluttered with pastel-colored balconies. The consulate itself is a large cement bunker, several stories tall, surrounded by an imposing wall. Along the wall, a disorganized line of Tyulti hold papers. The line moves in fits and starts; each group takes anxious steps toward the gate. On the other side of the road, a series of office supply shops offering passport-style photos are interspersed with seedy-looking peppermilk houses with open fronts. The vendors of the traditional hot, spicy Tyult beverage are swamped with people watching the line from crowded wooden tables. Some of the customers juggle glasses of peppermilk and their papers. Two Tyulti take photos of the people in the queue from their seats, and a few ignore the show, tapping on their handhelds.
Linda ignores the line and strides up to the Tyulti enforcers at the gate. She ignores a low muttering from the people at the front of the line.
“Appointment paper?” asks an official in heavily-accented English.
“No, no, I’m an Earth citizen,” Linda says. “I need to speak to someone immediately.”
“No appointment, no enter,” says the official and he turns back to the line to reach for a young Tyulti woman’s extended papers.
“No, no, it’s an emergency.”
The Enforcer pauses with his hands full of documents and squints at Linda. “Passport?”
“I don’t have it. I have my driver’s license, birth certificate, and social security card.”
The police officer moves all the paper into his right hand and extracts a slip of paper from a plastic sleeve nailed to the concrete wall next to him. “Call number for emergency appointment.”
Linda plucks the paper from his hands. She strides across the street to the nearest, busiest peppermilk shop and raises her voice. “Does anyone speak English? I’ll pay 100 refedi to use someone’s handheld for a few minutes.”
A young female with long fur responds. “Please use mine. You don’t need to give me any money.”
Linda thanks her and takes the device, which is in English. She moves to a corner of the cafe, covering the receiver and her mouth with her hand as it rings through. She looks around, unsure if any of the Tyulti watching the line have turned their attention to her.
“Hello, hello? Oh, hi, look I need help. I am outside the consulate now. Something terrible has happened, and—no, no. I have literally walked away from my whole life. I was detained by the Enforcers, something about political unrest. I need to see someone. No, I don’t have access to the Network right now. I am across the road from you at one of the peppermilk vendors. Can someone come out and get me? I swear to God, just help me please. It really is an emergency. Hasn’t anyone else shown up like this? Ok—ok—yes. Alright, my name is Linda Nash. Yes, N-A-S-H. I can be there in 30 seconds. Oh, ok, I’ll wait a minute then. Ok, thank you, goodbye.” Linda pushes the disconnect button on the handheld, handing it back to its owner with a strained but grateful smile. “Thank you.”
“Upgo ke I was able to help you,” the young woman replies.
“Thank you…. Are you sure I can’t give you some money in return?”
The stranger smiles. “No. Perhaps we will encounter each other on Earth one day. If we do, you can buy me a drink. Now, if you will excuse me, it is almost my appointment time.”
“Good luck.”
They step out of the café together into the gray, watery light of the street. The Tyulti woman veers right to join the queue, while Linda crosses the street toward the entrance to the consulate.
The sentry’s handheld bursts into static laden Tyulti as she gets closer. After a brief conversation, he meets her gaze and says, “Name?”
“Linda Nash.”
The officer grunts and gestures her into the secure area inside the gate. Linda passes through several stages of security, fields questions about the purpose of her visit, then enters the body scanner. She deposits her belongings, except for her wallet and papers, into a locker, and receives a key with stern instructions not to lose it. Her wallet and papers are hand-inspected before being run through another scanning machine. Afterwards, the Tyult security officers herd her and a cluster of strangers into an elevator. A human United Nations marine escorts them up one floor and guides them along a breezeway to the consulate fifty meters away. At the entrance, the visitors produce their documents for another Marine, and again explain their purpose for visiting. A brunette Earth-born woman in a gray pantsuit meets Linda.
“Are you Linda Nash?”
Linda nods.
“Please come with me.”
The official turns down a corridor to the left., then opens the last door to lead her through a busy office into a glass cubicle with the blinds drawn shut. A sandy-haired Earth-born man in his early forties rises from behind his desk.
“John Scanlon, nice to meet you.”
“Linda Nash, thanks for seeing me so quickly.”
After a firm handshake with no blinking, they settle into two guest chairs.
“Linda, I think we already have an idea what’s happened and why you are here, but would you mind telling me your entire story? Would it be alright if I recorded it?”
“Sure.” Linda explains the events of the last few days.
“Well, I should tell you first off that you’re the third person today that has shown up under the same circumstances.” He taps his fingers on his knee. “I’m required to ask what you want from us.”
“I want out. I want to go home. I don’t know what’s going on.” She waves her hands in front of her. “And I don’t want to find out.” John nods. “I didn’t sign up for this; I just came here for the job and to see the galaxy. Can you get me out of here?”
“Let me explain how this works. When an Earth-born has a personal emergency, we can arrange an emergency travel document. It will get you through immigration formalities so you can get back home. We can even get you on a flight home if you need it. However, you’ll have to repay the costs to the United Nations, and you won’t be able to get a new passport or leave Earth again until you repay those expenses.”
“Not a problem.”
John raises a hand. “The issue that’s less routine is that this is a fairly unstable political situation. We aren’t sure what’s happening, and getting you to the spaceport itself, as well as through passport control, may be an issue. Residents of this world need an exit permit to leave, and you won’t have one. You’ll be depending on the good grace of the border agent to let you out. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.”
Linda breathes deep. “What if I had a family emergency?”
“A government representative would never tell you to claim something like this, but I can see that this would be an easy answer. People use it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The Tyult people are sticklers for the rules, although our culture is so messy to them that sometimes they make allowances for us. You’d have to take your chances. Are you still game?” John’s face is neutral, but his head is bobbing slightly, as if his subconscious is telling Linda to take this chance.
“Get me out of here. Please. As soon I as possibly can.”
“It’s going to take a few hours to sort out your travel document and draw up the promissory letter for you to sign. I suggest you stay here on the consulate grounds until everything is ready. If you’re okay with that, I’ll ask you to leave your proof of identity with me. I’ll set you up in a room with the other folks that have made it in here. How’s that?”
“Yes, this sounds great.”
John takes the papers she holds out. “We’re hoping that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. With luck. you’ll be able to waltz right out.”
“Phe skagaan Tyulti. This is Tyulti, as they keep telling me here.”
“Exactly, and what it really means is that we’ll never quite understand what’s going on.”
John leads Linda out of his office into another glassed area with blinds, a long meeting table, and uncomfortable looking chairs holding two other Earth-born. Linda is surprised to find Raia and Clement looking back at her. Relief seeps into her chest.
“Well look who else made it,” Raia says. “Would you like something to drink? They said we could help ourselves.”
Linda dashes around the table and embraces her colleague. Some of the tension melts out of her shoulders. Raia rolls her eyes, but pats Linda on the shoulder in return.
“Drink?”
“Uh, maybe later?” says Linda, nonplussed.
Linda raises a hand to greet Clement and he nods in reply.
“What happened to you, Linda?” he says. “When you didn’t come in to work, I thought the Tyultis kept you in custody.”
“I was late, I haven’t slept all weekend. I thought—I assumed—” Linda tries to stop tears from welling up. She sniffs. “You heard about Steve last year, right?”
“I heard he had a family emergency. He didn’t even say goodbye,” Clement says.
“Aha,” Raia says. “The old family emergency excuse. I heard someone bluffed their way out of their job contract last year by having a family emergency so she wouldn’t get stuck paying penalties for breaking the contract.”
“I always wondered why no one stays more than a year or two,” says Clement. “They wanted me to become an informer, and they took my passport. I had to agree at the time, but I spoke to Raia in the office this morning and we decided to come here.”
“And you trust Clement?” Linda said to Raia.
“I’m right here,” says Clement, with a ghost of a smile.
Raia shrugs. “That’s what you get for not learning to blink; you’re labeled.”
“Yeah, yeah, bad expat, whatever.”
“What happened to you?” Linda asks Clement.
He grins at her question. “They didn’t have my name spelled right in their records, so they couldn’t hold me. Those are the rules. I was probably back home before you even arrived.”
“Well done, Clement,” Raia says. “You’re a quick thinker.”
“Not so much that. The same thing happened to me back on Earth in Lanzhou.”
“This has happened to you before?” Linda asks.
“Less fur, same issues.” Clement shrugs.
“I’m surprised to see you here, Linda,” Raia says. “Either you’re braver than I thought, or you’re here as a spy.” The bottom falls out of Linda’s stomach.
Raia laughs. “You should see your face. Calm down, I’m just kidding.”
Clement chuckles.
“I’m looking forward to getting off Tyult,” Raia says. “How about you guys?”
“Definitely. Do you two understand what’s happening?”
“Look, paranoia against us aliens is par for the course,” Clement says. “I’m not sure why teachers keep getting brought in when they don’t really want us on this planet.”
The door to the meeting room opens and Mr. Scanlon steps in, holding several sheaves of papers. He passes each packet out.
“We’ve hired an emyst with a Tyulti driver for the three of you. We’ve paid him cash in advance to take you to Off-world Departures at the spaceport.” Linda shuffles through the stack of documents as he continues speaking. “This is what we can offer for now, without really having a full understanding of what is going on with the Tyulti government. Thanks for your patience, I wish you all the best on your way home.”
Linda and her companions return their locker keys downstairs at security to collect their belongings. Linda keeps swallowing in an attempt to control the nausea that’s been slowly rising from her gut. A Tyult staff member escorts them to the emyst waiting at a side gate, labeled “STAFF EXIT.” The gate rumbles open and deposits Linda, Raia, and Clement on the sidewalk, where a grumpy driver with patchy fur waits for them. Raia jumps in the front, while Clement and Linda slide into the back seats. Linda cracks her window a fraction, trying to breathe. She didn’t know she could feel panic at the same time as relief.
Almost there, almost there, she repeats to herself all the way to the airport. In the stack of papers on her lap is the thin booklet serving as her emergency passport and her original identity documents. Tucked inside the travel document is a printout for the next Earth departure—a ticket to Beijing, departing four hours later. Linda jams all the papers into her satchel. Her fingers tremble with nothing to hold on to.
At the Spaceport, the check-in procedure is a noisy blur. A buzzing fills her ears. She imitates Clement and Raia going through the document checks. Nausea surges as she receives a boarding pass from the customer service agent. Clenching her teeth and breathing in through her nose, she approaches a sign with an arrow showing in Tyulti script and several other languages “PASSPORT CONTROL.” Clement and Raia stop next to her. They exchange worried glances.
It’s going to be fine. I can do this. We’ll all be fine. We wouldn’t have gotten this far if it weren’t fine.
The nausea fades, and Linda takes one step forward.
“Let me go first,” she says. “If anything goes wrong, pretend you need the toilet or something.” Raia gestures her ahead with a flourish. Linda joins the line ahead of them, ignoring the stomach cramps which have returned like a punch to her gut.
Let me be done with this, let me be done with this, let me be done with this.
With her emergency passport and boarding pass in hand, she approaches the next empty booth and sets her documents on the counter. She draws in a breath, prepared to spin a story about her sister, her only surviving relative, in hospital, alone, and penniless.
She catches a movement out of the corner of her eye. Someone is at her left shoulder. It’s Captain Roxgra. Linda’s breath catches. The captain moves around the kiosk to stand next to the agent, speaking to her in Tyulti. The woman replies while entering a series of keystrokes on her terminal. Linda’s hope fades, and she wonders what will happen if she vomits on a government official.
“Don’t worry,” the captain says and meets Linda’s eyes without blinking. “I told her to grant you an exit visa under my authority. Of course, we don’t want trouble with the Earth authorities. Very clever of you to bend the rules with new documents.” She picks up the thin booklet and waves it at Linda, then sets it back in front of the agent, who continues typing. “This is the second-best solution for us—if you foreigners leave and don’t come back. Please remember—” Captain Roxgra pauses. “Don’t. Come. Back.” She pulls Linda’s open passport in front of her and, removing a pen from a utility pocket on her shoulder, she scribbles on one of the pages before handing it back to the passport official, who examines the markings, then stamps them. The thunk vibrates down in the pit of nausea, but a kernel of hope soothes Linda’s stomach.
The agent slides Linda’s documents back across the ledge, and Linda picks them up.
“Have a pleasant flight,” Captain Roxgra says.
The officer crosses to the next booth, where Raia stands, and Linda sees Raia freeze with her mouth open as Roxgra speaks quietly. Linda glances at Clement, in line behind Raia, then back at the open passage to the airside section of the spaceport.
Linda takes one last deep breath as she passes through the lane to the space-side of the terminal. It takes her some time to walk to her destination at the end of the terminal and she checks her boarding pass. She is hours early, the first passenger to arrive at gate eighteen under the sign reading “Earth: Beijing.”
She opens her passport with trembling hands. Still alone at the gate, there are no witnesses. The Earth consulate would never know if she disappeared here. Was that what happened to Steve?
She doesn’t notice the airport security officers approaching as she leafs through the pages. It’s only when she is thrown down on the floor and cuffed, her face inches from the single stamped page, that she can read the captain’s note. Underneath her exit stamp, she discerns the following words, written in English:
“I was bluffing.”
S.L. Johnson grew up in Toledo, Ohio but emigrated to Turkey in the nineties. After several years in South Africa, she is now based in Sydney Australia, where she writes poetry and speculative fiction. She is a graduate of the 2023 Wayward Wormhole Workshop and her work has been featured in AntipodeanSF, Authora Australis, force/fields, and other publications. Stephanie is an editor at Novel Slices and was a 2022 judge for NYC Midnight.