Just a Rogue

Theo

I am really enjoying getting to know our new Luna. Every time that I try to be properly deferential, such as bowing my head to her or addressing her as Luna, she rolls her eyes and laughs.

“Janine,” she reminds me again. “Please. I can’t get used to all this ‘Luna’ stuff!” She puts air quotes around the word Luna.

After she sends Amelia and the guys out to use the drones around the cave area, we start watching screens. The only one tracking anything at the moment is the laptop open to the app showing the little devices that are apparently in Corinne’s shoes. The map shows two little marks, side by side, steadily making their way north of Arcata, at a fast walking pace. This girl is apparently tirelessly committed to this project.

Luna Darlene is here for a while too, but then she has something else to take care of so she goes back out.

We keep the other screens open, one for each of the devices that Corinne should be setting up, the apps waiting blankly. Janine already registered the devices and tested them on the app, so as soon as they power on at the cave, their signal should immediately start coming through.

There isn’t much to do until that happens, though, so we start chatting. She has so much knowledge about all the tech, it’s super impressive. I’ve always prided myself on being a bit of a tech geek, but she’s got me beat. She’s explaining something to me about the different options on the webcams that she decided would have been too complex to explain to Corinne, and I interrupt her to say, “Holy cow, Luna, I think you could operate the Tardis!”

Her eyes light up. “What? You’re a Doctor Who fan too?”

I laugh. “Well, I am now, I guess. On Christmas Eve Dom and Evan had us all here watching one of the episodes, and it looks pretty interesting.”

She gets ridiculously excited. “Oh my god! I’m so happy to have Whovians to talk with! Which Doctor was it?” she asks eagerly.

There’s more than one? “Um, the tall one, wearing a red fez.”

“Ah! He was so great. Took a while to get used to him, but I really grew to love his Doctor.”

“You know that Dom showed up Christmas morning wearing a fez? I guess Amelia gave it to him as a Christmas present.”

She laughs. “No wonder they’re mates. Dom is a bigger Who fan than I am!”

She starts animatedly describing all the different versions of the Doctor, when I hear a familiar voice at the doorway say “Nerd!”

We both spin around, and see Alpha Kanen standing there, leaning against the door jamb, with his arms crossed and grinning at her, looking like Thor in a good mood.

She leaps up and rushes over to get a huge hug and smooch, while I focus very intently on the monitor showing the rogue’s progress towards the cave. I try to pay no attention to everyone’s hands going everywhere.

While I stare at the screen I hear her tell him, “I’m your nerd.”

“Yeah you are,” he responds, such a tone of love and fondness in his voice that it is almost shocking. Who knew Kanen could ever be this happy?

There’s some more snogging that I try to ignore, then he tells her, “Come get dinner, Little Nerd.”

I look up to see him taking her hand and pulling her away. She pulls back for a moment to tell me, “I’ll have some dinner sent in for you Theo, all right? Someone needs to stay in here.”

“Sure,” I say. I wouldn’t want to crutch over to the cafeteria and try to wield a tray this way anyway. I glance back down at the screen, lean in to take a closer look, then add, “Oh!”

They’ve just gotten out the door, but she pauses and looks back in. “What?”

“I, uh, I think Corinne has arrived at the cave.”

She lets go of the Alpha and rushes back over, and he follows behind her with an amused look on his face. They both stand behind me looking over my shoulder at the monitor. I point. “See? That’s the location we have marked for the cave, and her signal hasn’t moved from there in five minutes. I think she’s there.”

Janine moves around the table, checking all the monitors, apparently having completely forgotten about dinner. I glance at Alpha, thinking he’ll be annoyed, but no, he looks both interested and indulgent. Man, that mating business must be great - it’s like he’s gotten a personality transplant. He glances at me, about to say something, then his eyes move to the crutches leaning against the table. I guess he was about to ask me to do something then realized how useless I am at the moment. C’est la vie, not much I can do about that.

He leaves the room for a moment, and I hear him call out to someone, “Hey, have some dinner sent in here, okay? For three people.”

Ah.

When he comes back in, Janine is leaning over one of the computers, and he moves over behind her, putting his arms around her torso. She lets out a breath of air, and I think it must be in reaction to him, and they’re probably about to start pawing each other again, but she says, “Look!”

She points to the screen, and I crane my head over to see. A green light has started blinking. She adjusts the volume on the laptop, and a rustling sound starts coming through. “It’s the first microphone in the cave,” she says, an almost disbelieving tone in her voice, as though she hadn’t really believed that this was going to happen. I’m not sure any of us truly did.

The sounds of movement come through clearly, as Corinne apparently moves around within the cave, presumably setting up the other microphones. And sure enough, in a few minutes another monitor blinks to life, and then a third. Each of them appears to be functioning properly. Then, from three different laptops, comes her voice, “Testing, testing.”

We have no way to tell her that we are receiving. We couldn’t have any technology that would allow sounds or lights of any kind to be detected, so the microphones are one-way only.

The food is brought in, and Kanen starts eating, holding something in his hand and standing behind Janine as she watches all the screens, but she and I are riveted to the task. We’ll eat later. Well maybe she’ll eat now, a little, as I see that he is breaking off bits of the hamburger he is holding and popping them into her mouth for her, like she is a beloved baby bird.

The sounds from the cave stop, and we realize that Corinne must have gone outside. “Webcams next,” Janine murmurs, and we wait breathlessly to see what will happen.

Several minutes later, a fourth laptop comes to life, and Janine reaches over to spin it so that I can see it too from where I am sitting. Sure enough, it is a view of a wooded area, what looks like a thicket of spruce trees behind some closer dense scrub and oaks. The sun appears to be shining from behind the camera, the light glowing golden across the tree branches, casting long shadows.

And suddenly, there she is. Corinne peers into the camera, her face taking up the entire screen, as she checks the webcam. “She’s there,” Janine whispers the obvious, but it seems so significant to see her, our little rogue spy, getting everything all set up for us.

Kanen grunts, “Hm,” but has nothing else to add.

Corinne apparently moves away from the webcam, but then in another couple of minutes we can see her walking past on the screen, and moving back towards the spruce forest. We lose sight of her in the dense growth, but keep watching, hoping to catch sight of her again.

And sure enough, she appears. “There,” Kanen says, leaning over Janine and pointing at the screen, and we see movement there. It is Corinne, shimmying up the tree like a deft little monkey. Ha! She’s quite a girl, isn’t she? The little spy that could.

She disappears again into the branches, and we eagerly start watching the next laptop, to see if the feed starts coming through. In several more minutes, there it is. The screen blinks on of a west-facing view, the rays of the setting sun gleaming colorfully upwards through low cloud cover. It is quite beautiful. The top of the screen shows an overhanging pine branch. At the bottom of the screen is a rockface, a small hill surrounded by brush. We briefly see a hand pass across the view, then nothing more. I wonder if she is climbing down the tree now.

Suddenly, something moves across the screen, and I realize it is one of our drones. Ha! They’re tracking her as well! It hovers there for a minute, right in front of the webcam, then it moves briefly to one side, and then the other. Dom or Evan must realize she’s watching, and they’re trying to send her a little signal. How cute. Then it rises and disappears from view.

We continue watching as the sun sets and the light begins to fade, then suddenly we see her again. She is standing in front of the rockface looking around herself, then she drops to the ground and rolls under the bushes there, and doesn’t come out again.

“So that’s the cave entrance?” Kanen asks.

“Apparently,” Janine responds. The interior microphones start picking up the sounds of Corinne moving about the cave again. No images in there, since the way Corinne described it the cave would be too dark for a camera to be of much use. But at least the sound quality of the microphones is quite high, it seems that the equipment is very sensitive. Janine picked out high-end stuff.

“That’s gonna be difficult to attack,” Kanen points out, “if the entrance is so low, at the bottom of the rock under bushes like that.”

I nod. Yeah it is.