Free Being Alien by Rebecca Ore Page A

female Barcon began making funny noises, huwh, huwh, deep in her throat. Her mate pushed his knuckles down on her spine.
    “Who are you?" The guy with his hand hidden in his pocket asked Marianne.
    She ignored him. “We ought to try down the street. Better bar for our discussion.”
    “Why?” Alex said.
    She said very loudly, “I met you with John Amber, didn’t I? Was he pimping the black girl or were they lovers?”
    Alex paled along his skull where the bone crest had been. “I’ll come,” Carstairs said, still amused “I like black bars, too.”
    “Holler if you need us,” the man who had the cue stick said. He looked at Reeann as if thinking How did this little bitch get my cue stick away?
    She put it back in his hands and walked toward me, hissed in my ear, “Racists,” her hand on my shoulder.
    “Carstairs wanted to take tissue samples,” I said to Reeann as we walked to the cars, adrenaline still zinging at my fingertips, my gut cramped. “I should have let him.”
    She patted my cheek almost like a cat, violence padded behind the fingertips. Or sex? Then she said, “Was John Amber a DNA recombinant experiment?”
    “Carstairs was a weapons designer. Alex is crazy.” I told the others, “I’ll ride with her.”
    “I took the bus,” she said.
    “In the car with us, then,” the female Barcon who’d been scared in the bar said. “We want to thank you.”
    “I know it’s tough on blacks in parts of Oakland.” The Barcon put her hands on either side of her nose, trying to hide the wiggle, nearly hysterical for a Barcon.
    Reeann looked carefully at them as she got in the car, then looked at me, at Alex getting in his car with the other pair of Barcons, and tucked her chin down, her tongue making little wet sounds inside her mouth as though she wanted to be talking.
    She knows now, just like Carstairs. She almost put her hand on my leg, but the hand rocked in the air.
    “Miss, are you Tom’s friend?” the male Barcon asked almost casually.
    “We just met,” she said, eyes focused on the door handles, then twitching up to the locks.
    “Which bar?” I said.
    “Go back down Telegraph. It’s on the left.”
    “Noisy, but I know why you chose it,” the male said, sounding non-human. Marianne looked away from the locks and door handles and stared at him, breath hissing in against her teeth as she raised her head.
    “Why did Alex want to avoid you?” she asked.
    “He has problems,” the female said. “And we’re his therapists, right, Tom. He fears something, yet courts the disclosure of what he fears.”
    “Right,” I said, pushing my shoulders back against the seat and arching my spine. The adrenaline had stiffened my muscles, and I wasn’t sure what was coming next.
    “Crazy?” Reeann asked, touching the door lock button.
    “Tempts public ridicule and jail,” the male Barcon said. “Tom, you must tell Alex about jail.”
    Reeann stiffened as though now she disapproved.
    Wounded recombinant experiments okay, jailbirds no. I felt like I was reliving my first day out of prison, and realized what she thought mattered to me. “Marianne, it was over drugs, in Virginia.” I hated my voice when I said that, a draggy whine, con voice deep in hustled cigarettes.
    “Can I…” she began to say, then stopped. “I always wondered where John Amber and Rhoda came from, but I didn’t want to get them in trouble. I have no real loyalty to things as they are.”
    The Barcons shifted in the front seat, looked at each other. “Tom does come from Virginia,” the male said, looking back at us through the rearview mirror, utterly alien, inspecting a potential human breeding pair. He stopped talking when the female touched one of his odd jaw angles with her fingertips.
    “Virginia was wasting him, his talent,” the female said. “He…” she broke off to speak in Barcon to the male.
    Reeann listened hard to them, then pulled away from me, body arched away from me, rigid. “So what