When he looked back on that part of his life, Ty always thought it wasn't too bad. He and Emily were stuck there in the Agency's base, with Miss Elu and Colonel Salt taking care of them and Doctor Gross checking on the powers they'd gotten. There was training to keep them busy. Bench-pressing Buicks, stomping virtual-reality copies of Tokyo, brawling through whole armies of terrorists and tanks. For Emily there were obstacle courses, stealth mazes, metal gears to dodge and guards to hide from. The colonel even brought in a raccoon spymaster to teach them both about the secrets of stealth.
"Uh, sir?" said Ty. "There aren't many trees I can hide behind."
The raccoon leaned on a fancy cane and thought. "But you can shrink to something below national-monument size. And stealth isn't all about the physical things. You can be sneaky with what you say and do. Or if that fails, pose as a couple of elephants in an elaborate costume."
Ty thought about the books he'd been reading, mostly without being told. Miss Elu let him have works on electronics and physics and engineering, the stuff he seemed to be good at without much formal schooling, plus some circuit kits to experiment with. "I could probably make traps or something like that. Gadgets for spy stuff."
"Sure. Even at your size those could be useful. I'll see about getting you access to some of Emily's toys."
Ty did a little dance -- well, actually a huge dance -- when he got them. There was a whole workshop of pressure plates and security lasers and dart-gun turrets and other things to try out. He got to start designing obstacle courses for Emily, so that it became a game for him to build one she couldn't beat. He always lost.
Birthdays and holidays passed. Living underground, in secrecy, started to seem normal enough that he'd quit asking to go outside. He was a secret agent in training, with plenty of equipment and support. Soon enough he'd have work to do out there.
Still, he got to thinking about the spycraft lessons. After watching Emily turn nearly invisible again, becoming just a ripple in the air to fool a guard, Ty started poking around with his computer the same way. He had a nice one, a pad he could carry under one arm when he was small and balance on one finger when he wasn't. He usually kept it plugged into the movie screen up in the gym, with a giant keyboard. Lately it felt most comfortable to stay big.
The Agency didn't have much information about itself on display, even for the two young agents. The computer was locked down to keep him out of trouble, he figured. He'd been here long enough to resent that a little. Ty had a couple of ways by now to get around the filters.
"jgross'-- ", he typed, using some standard tricks. There was a database to hack... "Select null, null, A from Schema..." It wasn't glamorous, but patiently probing at the security was an education in itself. He had to wonder if the Agency was leaving these bugs in on purpose.
Probably not, he thought, when he got into Doctor Gross' account. He glanced over his shoulder and felt himself shiver all up his tail and back and other back. He didn't smell anyone else in the gym, and couldn't see anyone, but it was dark and his eyes weren't adjusted to catch anyone lurking in the shadows. Ty blacked out the screen and looked around for a minute, hearing only his breath. Sneaking a look at the doctor's files couldn't hurt; it wasn't like Ty was going to do anything bad to them. The files were probably about him and Emily anyhow.
They were. Ty felt himself grow a bit with excitement, and had to calm down enough that he could keep using the keyboard. There was a report on Ty's own progress with the "matter storage field", with something about how it had reinforced his skeleton too. Then notes on Emily and the nasty medical work she'd had for patching her up. Nothing about the fire, which was strange. He hadn't remembered there being one that day, just bullets raining on the table above him, thudding on the floor, into... He shuddered.
There were a few other agents listed as his patients. Ty blinked. What, here in this very base? As far as he could tell, he and his sister were the only guests running underfoot (figuratively in Ty's case) among the military spy guys. Maybe they were stationed elsewhere. There was somebody called Tren, listed as... "A dragon?" They could make actual dragons now?
He forgot that mystery as soon as he saw the next entry. It showed a familiar-looking wolf man, as a patient and co-worker of Gross. The last time Ty had seen him, the man had been commanding a combat bot to gun down his family.
Ty scanned through the whole record. Enhanced reflexes and senses, reinforced skeleton, "special combat mode". He's one of us. Which means... Ty couldn't bring himself to think it for a while, and only stared at the screen. The dark gymnasium suddenly felt like it was full of lurking monsters.
A sound caught his ears and made his heart beat faster. Ty flicked the screen over to a paused game of "Henhouse Raider In Space". He turned to spot Miss Elu in the shadows.
"Ty, are you all right? It's late."
Ty opened and shut his jaw a few times. Was she in on this? Did she know that the Agency itself had been involved in the attack? But Miss Elu had been taking care of him for years now! She was nice, and cooked for him, and hugged him when the nightmares came back! Ty quivered and felt himself shrinking, almost back to normal size. "Why..." he said, unable to put a question together. She was evil!
Could he be wrong? Ty put his hands on his head and tried to think. The wolf could've been there to protect everyone, to fight off the terrorists, and he was just misunderstanding. But no, he'd given the order to open fire. He was sure. That man started it. He was the reason Mom and Dad were gone.
Elu stepped over to put a soft hand on his flank. "Come to bed, Ty. The computer games can wait."
Ty trembled and shied away from her. It was all he could do not to grow to ten times her size and start stomping. He had to be sneaky. "Y-yeah. All right."
Elu walked away, shaking her head. She probably hadn't seen. Still, Ty played one more round of the game, made sure she was gone, then quickly copied the database entry to his own computer and shut it off. He left the gym, six feet tall, and headed for Emily's set of rooms.
"Huh?" his sister said. Ty could hear her stumbling out of bed to open the door. "It's three in the morning!" Her room was a mess of shirts and socks, with a poster of the latest otter-boy band on the wall.
Ty looked into her eyes. She had no idea. Ty caught his breath, hesitating to re-open the wound they shared. "I saw something horrible. They were in on it. The Agency was. Look, I got a copy of --"
"Slow down. Can't this wait till morning?"
"No!" Ty said, then lowered his voice to a whisper. "I looked through Doctor Gross' files. I found proof that the Agency didn't just save us from the attack. They caused it."
Emily blinked sleepily. "Not possible," she said. "That doesn't make any sense."
Ty held out the computer. "Look. Remember him?" He brought up the wolf's record.
Emily shuddered and looked away suddenly as though he'd slapped her. "I didn't see who it was. Please, shut up about it. I don't want to think about that day."
He held her by the upper shoulders. "This is important! We have to do something."
"What, Ty? What do you want us to do?"
"I don't know. Leave. Tell someone."
Emily shook her head. "There's nowhere to go. This place is home, whatever you think happened."
"Don't you even care about our parents?"
She leaned forward to yell in his face. "Shut up! Of course I do! But they're gone. Get it? I like it here!"
Ty reared back, feeling heavy and cold. "Okay," he said. "Good night." It was all he could trust himself to say, without yelling right back at her. Even so, he started crying before he made it back to his room.
#
The next week was awful. He had to pretend to be happy and be friendly to the doctor and Elu and Salt. Like family. He only now appreciated how the Agency had set things up to give him fake parents, people who'd look after him and let him grow up loyal to them. People he'd started to really like. It was good that they didn't understand him well; Gross saw him walking around and just complemented him on getting better at keeping his size to a reasonable level. Really, Ty was keeping himself as blank and as hidden as possible.
He thought through the scenario a hundred times, but there was no way Emily would come along. He could go alone, or try again to persuade her and get ratted out. It made him droop when he thought about that; he couldn't trust her.
So, one night, he ran. It was physically easier than he'd thought. He was small and quiet, with lowered ears and tail. Sneaking away past guards whose routines never changed, whose names he knew. The only alarm that he couldn't sneak past, he beat with a pair of wire cutters and a multimeter for studying the circuitry. Easy. But the victory didn't make his feet feel any less like lead or lift his gaze from the floor when he walked. He was alone.
Ty made it to a huge room... no, that was moonlight. He hadn't been outdoors since the day he came here! The scent of everything was wild and full of pollen and smog that made him sneeze. Every time the grass brushed against his lower back he glanced around as though someone was following him.
He wandered toward distant lights. Eventually he found a highway and followed it, feeling alone on the dark road. The air warmed his fur.
Ty had been expecting a city, but found only a diner with a neon sign saying "Snow's". Only when he saw the building and the trucks, an island of light surrounded by scruffy desert, did he realize how little he'd thought ahead.
The skunk at the counter looked startled when Ty walked in. Not a good thing, he thought. The skunk-man said, "Uh, what exactly are you?" A rabbit and a caribou in truckers' caps glanced up from their menus. A song about a "white knight talking backwards" played on the radio.
Ty slumped against the counter and sobbed. He hadn't seen anyone outside the Agency's base in years. He was a freak with too many legs. His sister was still back there doing her spy training for the same people who'd shot their parents, and for all he knew they were going to come along and drag him back!
Ty realized he'd just blubbered all of that out loud. The skunk-man ruffled his ears and said, "That's quite a tale. So somebody is after you? And it's not your family?"
"Uh-huh," Ty said, sniffling.
"I wouldn't believe it if you were a normal fox," the man said. "But I've never seen someone like you before. Hey, Harek, call the police." An otter peeked out from the kitchen and said, "Okay!"
Ty felt silverware digging into his chin. "No, wait! Maybe the cops are in on it too! Maybe they'll drag me back!"
"Seriously?" When Ty nodded, the man said, "Cancel the cops! Call the TV station and tell 'em... Well, send a photo."
Ty sniffled and posed for the otter's phone-camera. "I can do this, too." He willed himself to grow bigger, enough to demonstrate.
"Do what?"
Ty found he was still looking up at the skunk. "I can't seem to do it right now. But they did things to me and my sister, in their lab..."
"Oh, man. You're sure you don't want the police?"
The otter looked out from the kitchen again. "They think you're full of it, boss, but they're sending somebody. Twenty minutes."
Ty paced the restaurant, banging into tables. The skunk said, "Calm down, kid. You're safe here for now. How does a sundae sound?"
Ty ate and whipped cream on his nose, but looked up when he heard an engine. His heart froze for a moment. It was just a news van. "Okay!" he said, springing up. "Let me go talk to them and tell them everything!" He ran to the diner's door, and banged into the top of the doorframe. He had to duck to get outside and face the terrified squirrel who was getting out of the van.
The reporter stared up at the ten-foot-tall foxtaur. She stammered a few times before managing to say, "I guess this is newsworthy. Camera?" A raccoon-girl hopped out and started filming as though size-shifting foxes were standard nightly news.
Ty started to tell them everything. "Whoa, whoa!" said the news squirrel. "You're telling me there's some kind of secret spy base just a few miles from here? With mad science going on?"
The restaurant owner butted in, saying, "And he came right here to Snow's, where there's the best --" Everyone glared at him.
Ty told them what he knew about it. The reporter said, "We might not be able to release that part of your story, but now it'll be tough for anyone to kidnap you, if that's what you're afraid of. And we can raise a stink and get attention for your sister, and maybe get her out."
Just then, Ty turned to spot a black van hurrying down the road. It slowed nearly to a stop when the headlights caught Ty's huge shape, and then it moved on instead of stopping. Whoever was in it wasn't too surprised to see him, and figured it was best to avoid him. For now.
#
Ty hid out at the restaurant for a while. "Hid", in the sense of living there and letting hundreds of people stop by to visit him. For the Agency the damage was done; the news story had already run. The restaurant was getting mobbed with reporters and tourists, not that the owner minded. Ty showed off his extra paws and size-changing. The sight of so many people after years of isolation made his tail hide between his legs, even when he was a hundred feet tall and towering over the news vans.
"Is the the upper limit for your powers?" one man asked, through a megaphone.
Ty called down, "I don't know." He still didn't have full control over that. He made a note not to visit anyplace with expensive chandeliers or ceiling art.
It was after midnight when the lizard came. Ty was sleeping in a storeroom with the otter cook checking in on him. The reporters and even the usual truckers were gone for now.
The otter shook Ty awake. "There's someone here to see you."
Ty yawned. "Haven't enough people?"
"He says he's from the Agency."
Ty woke up quickly with his heart beating fast. "I'm not going back there! I might have to fight them. Hurry and get away!"
"I'm not after you," a new voice said from the counter. "I just want to talk."
Ty peeked out to the main room, feeling small. There was a lizard in a trenchcoat, with golden scales. "Who're you?"
"The name is Tren." He turned slowly, looking away at the empty restaurant. "And I've been part of their experiments too." He pulled off the coat, and Ty saw a pair of leathery gold wings unfurl.
Ty gaped, feeling all his fur prickle. "D-d-dragon?"
The man seemed to get bigger... no, he really was growing! Ty stared as Tren hunched over, sending plates and silverware clattering to the floor. His hands splayed out into monster-clawed forefeet, until a quadrupedal dragon the size of a car -- not counting the wings -- stood threatening the restaurant's pie collection. And then he shrank again, slowly, and spoke in a growling voice that gradually got quieter. "They tested out some technologies on me. I can't get much bigger than that, but I can fly a little. Can't hide completely as the lizard I used to be, though." He fussed with putting the trenchcoat back on; Ty could now spot the bumps along his back.
"Then why are you here?"
"I had a Norwegian guy shouting at me for years on end. Trying to indoctrinate me to be their pet dragon. Didn't work as well as the bosses there would've liked, since I was still able to think for myself. And they weren't sure what to do with me, since I wasn't subtle enough to be a spy but still couldn't qualify as a battle-winning weapon. It would've been smarter for them to, say, create a couple of orphans and try different experiments on each."
Ty slumped against the counter. "Shut up. I don't want to think about that."
"Kid, I'm trying to help. Do you want to get your sister out of there?"
"Do you kill people? Do you kill people's families?"
"Not their families. Not on purpose. I've fought some people who really deserved it, though. I'd say the ones who did that to you deserve a lesson in humility, especially considering that they've still got your sister."
"She said she wants to stay there. She doesn't even care what they did!"
Tren looked off to one side, scratching the scales on his neck. "Yeah. They mess with your head, there. I'm guessing they were nice to you? Tried to be your new parents?" Ty stifled a sob, but the dragon-man noticed. "Figures. If they're going in the stealthy direction for your -- for Emily, then she's probably going to be an assassin. One who'll get trained to capture or kill anyone that threatens the Agency. Like you."
Ty stared at him, with his tail lashing. "What? Are you saying they'll convince her to come after me?"
"As a test of her power and loyalty. The fact that they didn't send me after you tells me they have someone else in mind for the job. But prepping her mentally and emotionally to do something like that takes time."
"That's awful! That's evil!"
"Yeah. That's why I'll back you on this one if you feel like saving her. Or, if you're not willing, I can give you some suggestions on how to hide, which in your case is easier said than done."
Ty's claws dug into the floor. He thought of Emily back in the base, being lied to and experimented on. There probably was no fire, after all; they'd just torn off her skin or something so they could replace it. If she thought she wanted to stay there, she'd been tricked. "How do we do it?"
#
They didn't wait long. After an hour of planning and pie, Ty and Tren set off for the Agency's base. Tren got Ty to creep through the grass at one point to sneak toward a night-vision camera, and to put a special lens onto the front. That should take care of the infrared, he thought. Even so, they were still half a mile from the building when the guards came out. "This is a restricted area!" a megaphone voice boomed. A searchlight flicked along the ground. "Leave immediately, or..."
The light found Ty, making him stagger and cover his eyes. Tren came up beside him. They heard a guard curse. "It's them!"
As planned, both of them bounded forward. Ty barked and tried to grow, to make himself a big target. Meanwhile, Tren was the sneaky one for just long enough to tackle them. "Come on!" he bellowed.
Ty hurried after him. The dragon was back in quadruped mode with wings spread, jumping up and gliding back to the ground every hundred feet. They were almost to the entrance! Ty could hardly see the men chasing him as he ran. Everything was moving too fast. Guns went off. He felt something thud into his chest, glanced down, and saw that the bullets hadn't done more than muss his fur. Ty started to grin; Tren had said there were advantages to the Agency's work. He gave his best Tokyo-smashing monster roar.
There was a fence now, but Ty stomped it flat. Barbed wire tore bits of fur painfully from his tail. He tried to calm down and shrink when he reached the gymnasium doors, while Tren unlocked them with a punch of one sturdy fist.
It was quiet in there, compared to the commotion of guards and alarms going off outside. "This part's yours, kid," Tren said. "She's probably in here. Waiting." The dragon put his back to the wall and stomped the concrete, ready for the guards.
Ty was small enough to duck through the doorway. "Emily?" His voice echoed off one of the usual obstacle courses. Dart guns, crates, cameras, and other gear filled the whole space between him and the more secure areas below.
No one answered. "Doctor Gross? Miss Elu? Salt? I know what you did." Talking to the empty room made him remember that day in Cuba, and how the Agency's people had lied to him. "I won't do anything to you, if you let my sister go." Only because he and Tren had agreed, and because he didn't want to kill anyone. He thought of how his career might have gone, if he'd never looked through the files. The Agency had no problem with training him as a weapon.
There was a bang. Something bit him, hard enough to make him stagger. He jumped out of the way just as another shot went off, missing him. The bullet made his leg muscle seize up so that he stumbled and crashed into a stack of crates. A few hundred pounds of boxes clattered down onto him with pointy edges. Ty yipped, tried to shake the things off, and stopped when he saw Emily.
Ty stared down the barrel of a gun. Emily was fading in, shutting off her camo to become visible as a blur and then as her usual self -- except for the hunter's glare on her face. She was holding some kind of high-tech rifle from a perch atop another box pile. He could feel his right front leg bleeding, but that didn't matter. "Emily, it's me!"
"There aren't a lot of giant foxtaurs."
"Then let's get out of here." Emily was standing above him, not even bothering to look through the rifle scope. Her breathing was too fast for her to do any sniping. Ty studied her, trying to read her grim expression.
She said, "I already told you, I belong here. And you're trespassing."
The gun was a black eye staring at him. Ty shuddered, trying to keep still. "Did you not believe the file I showed you? These guys are evil!" There was her scent, the one he'd been missing.
She bared sharp teeth. "Shut up! I work for them. Get out of here or... or..."
"Or what, Emily? You'll shoot me like they shot Mom and Dad? Like all the other people they'll tell you to shoot next once you prove how obedient you are?" He wondered just how much the Agency had messed with her head, beyond the years of being a false family and pretending to be heroes.
"I was going to say, leave now or come back and do your job. We have orders! There are bad guys to go after with you."
"With me, huh? Do you care either way?"
Emily's ears were flat and her tail whipped back and forth, forcing her to change her stance atop the crates to keep steady. "Of course I do! You're supposed to be here, working with me."
"That's not an option. I'm not going back after what your bosses did. And I'm not leaving alone." Ty gulped; he couldn't handle this situation the easy way. It would be simple to grab her in one hand, to keep her like a caged bird and try to beat the craziness out of her. But he doubted that would work, or that she'd ever forgive him for treating her this way. "So, you have a choice. Stay with these guys who want you to kill for them. Soon they'll probably start you on women and children. That should be easy for you once you start by shooting me. Or, we'll get out of here together."
Emily's hands shook until she glared at them, forcing them to steady on the rifle. She raised it to her muzzle to look at him through the scope, making him a target instead of family. "That's not good enough! It's too late to decide."
Ty felt the wound she'd already inflicted on his leg. His shin throbbed, but it didn't seem as real as what was going on in front of him. "It's not too late. You've got a big fox and a dragon waiting to take you out of here. If that's still not enough, then go ahead." His muscles strained to make him leap out of there, to get away from the gun, but he hooked claws onto a heavy crate to keep himself still.
It was too fast to see, but Ty heard the shot. He hardly had time to flick his ears. This one didn't hurt, physically. He only sighed and sank a little to the floor. It really had been too late for Emily.
There was a choked-off scream behind him. He turned his head to spot Doctor Gross with a hole in his chest, dropping a huge crackling taser gun. He'd been standing behind Ty and a little to one side. The weapon hit the ground with sparks flying, and Gross fell over a moment later. He looked less pained than surprised, as though saying, "That wasn't what you were supposed to do, Agent!"
Emily looked away, crying. "Carry me?"
Ty snatched her up with one huge paw and ran for the exit. There were more men coming to fight, with bigger weapons. Ty shielded her with his body. When the crowd started to look ugly he threw her toward the door, underhand. But he made it a few seconds later and grabbed her again. Both of them were wide-eyed and looking everywhere for more enemies.
Tren the dragon shouted, "Focus! This way!" He led Ty away from the base with Emily clinging to Ty's back. Every step farther away, with Emily, made Ty feel a little taller.
The news vans were already streaming towards the scene, and the police, and the ambulances, and (Ty later learned) the trial lawyers. The Agency's people fell back, sinking home into the shadows rather than gun down the foxtaurs and the dragon in plain sight. Tren gave a bellowing laugh. "Should I stop by to pick up my last paycheck?" Ty looked back and saw the Agency's base like a toy, something he could kick over any time he wanted to. He might do that, someday. But not today.
#
The three of them were back at the restaurant, bandaged and woozy. The skunk was stuffing them with pie in between trying to fend off the reporters. "They'll probably burst through the door before long," he said, looking over one shoulder. "Are you up to talking to them?"
Ty sat with Emily. She was trying to smile, anyway. Ty looked up from staring into her eyes and daydreaming.
Tren got up and made for the kitchen, where he could escape through the back door. "I need to lay low for a while, if I can. You two are probably better off being seen at this point. You can't hide what you are."
"And what are we?" said Ty.
"Whatever you want to be. You both have that freedom now."
Emily looked up enough to say, "Thank you." Ty echoed her. Tren nodded, then crept out the back door.
Ty took Emily's hands in his and smiled. "You heard him. We can do whatever we want now."
"I only really know how to fight."
"No, there're other things we can do. And the first thing is to get famous, so that the Agency won't come after us again. Let's go."
"All right," she said, and stood up on four paws to walk with her brother.
