Interlude Lucy - School Days Part Three

  She was here thanks to Cat.

  At the moment, with a knot of stress forming in her stomach, she wasn't sure if she was pleased about that or not.

  No, she couldn't think that way. Her beloved might not usually be able to think more than a few days ahead, but Cat did always think about Lucy.

  Lucy... knew that their relationship wasn't the healthiest. She knew herself. She knew that she wasn't the perfect woman for Cat, that part of her had fallen in love with Catherine because she needed help, and Cat would give it to her in exchange for the kind of love that they both desperately needed as an anchor.

  She'd never admit it to anyone, least of all to Cat herself, but she felt a little bit of guilt about it. Not that she didn't truly, genuinely, love Cat. Not that she didn't want to be an old crone with Cat by her side. Not that she didn't want to raise an even bigger family with Cat.

  But Lucy had this burning thing in her that would never be satisfied by good food, or late-morning cuddles.

  Catherine would be a satisfied woman just to have someone to hold and cherish and who loved her. She'd be happy with enough food to get by, a roof that didn't leak too much, and a thin morsel of hope to keep her going.

  Lucy wouldn't be satisfied until she had the entire world in the palm of her hand.

  There was a conflict there, most of all because she knew that Cat would give her the world on a whim if she just asked, and that kind of stupid, loving trust made Lucy burn with love and twisted guilt.

  She'd never claimed to be a good person. She did claim, at least to herself, that she did all of this for their family, for their love, for their city, and not just because Lucy herself had spent far too long suffering at the mercy of people and things more powerful than her and out of her control, to the point where she yearned for that control herself like a man in the deep desert yearned for water.

  They were two ships, filled with holes, and for a long time the only thing that stopped either of them from sinking was shoving fingers into each other's holes.

  "Heh," she said. Cat would like that analogy.

  "Miss Leblanc?" someone asked next to her, and she smoothly refocused on the moment.

  "Sorry, was just thinking of something, ah, Micheal," she replied as she glanced over to the young man who'd addressed her.

  She, as well as a dozen helpful... stooges (she didn't know if they were goons or henchpeople, exactly) were backstage behind the closed curtain of a presentation hall. It wasn't a theater, and it wasn't a stage, not exactly. Instead it was one of those large speaking rooms that the school used whenever there was someone important who came around to host a panel of some sort. This room was the breakroom just behind that, where they could get in without being accosted.

  Myalis had helped her in a few small, subtle ways, on top of the bigger, more obvious ones. One of those bits of help was getting her software up to spec.

  Not new cyberware, though Cat had gotten Lucy some very nice augs that would make most of the richy-rich students of CIAL green with envy, but pure software.

  One of these was a facial recognition system designed for top-end corporate secretaries.

  It created a database of faces, obviously, as well as names and a small section allowed her to input notes that would come up on looking at someone. Date of birth, important information about allegiances and family and gangs and so on.

  It seemed so mundane, but she saw the way Micheal stood up a little straighter at being addressed by name.

  People were so simple, sometimes.

  "How's the crowd looking?" she asked.

  "Packed," he replied. "Here, look at this, I took a pic."

  He sent her an unfiltered, unencrypted picture. It was taken from his point of view, literally, there was an off-focus smudge to one side that had to be the bridge of his nose.

  The room she was going to speak in was tiered, so that each set of seats could see over the one before time. There wasn't a seat that wasn't packed. Some had two people squeezed into the same spot.

  The back of the room was filled with more people, all of them standing. "Well, well, aren't I popular tonight," she muttered.

  "Just normal, did you see the Rama Corp thing?" he asked.

  She hadn't, and something twigged her that it was important. A few moments looking into the news later, and she smiled. Ah, Cat. Probably Gomorrah too, actually. Cat did like her big explosions but the fire was all Gomorrah.

  Lucky Franny was going to have a busy night! She resisted the urge to giggle, or send the poor girl a suggestive text.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Ah, later. For now, she had a show to put on. Turning to Gabrielle, a girl taking a set of fashion courses that were making her miserable but who was also a fantastic makeup artist, she smiled and asked the obvious. "How do I look?"

  "Gorgeous," Gabrielle replied. "Go out there and break a leg, boss!"

  Ah, her minions were so supportive!

  There were tricks to getting people to cooperate. Being assertive but encouraging, listening a little but leaving before the person had finished saying all they wanted to, pairing people with contradictory approaches together if it meant that they'd get things done.

  The school had lessons on this kind of stuff, and she'd been cherry picking from them as best as she could. Mostly, she had grown accustomed to working with children, and that was like manipulating adults on hard mode.

  "Alright, let's do this," she said before reaching up and fussing with her hair a little. She glanced at herself in a passing mirror and made sure the lapel with Cat's logo on it was visible. It was the symbol the Kittens had settled on, in a way, and was immediately recognizable. Then she tugged her shirt slightly out of her skirt's hem. Being too prim and proper would throw people off.

  Stepping out from behind a curtain, she glanced at the crowd dismissively, then moved to the centre of the floor. Her augs connected to the room's sound system, and when she cleared her throat, it was heard across the room.

  People settled down.

  "Hi!" she said, chirpy and upbeat. "I'm Lucy, and I'm not gonna waste your time because it's getting warm enough here to hit heatstroke levels, and some of you are really living up to the stereotypes about students and body odour, I swear."

  That got a few chuckles and some self-conscious shuffling.

  "I was born in New Montreal. I'm from here. It's in my blood, and my parents', and probably theirs too, though the city ran by a different name then and there probably weren't as many aliens around. Point is, I know this city. I've lived on its streets. I've seen shit. It's been bad, it's been better. Right now, it's bad, but I don't think it's to the point where we can't do anything."

  She had their attention, but that was a given, they were here to listen.

  "How many of you have been to a protest? Raise of hands."

  There were a lot of them raised, and she nodded, smiling. These were students, of course they had.

  "Then all of you have wasted time. I've never been to one. Saw them, saw how little they did. Never much cared for wasting what time I had when I expected not to have very much. How many of you, show of hands, think they've made a difference? Have saved lives and have made things better?"

  She raised her hand.

  She wasn't the only one, but there were maybe only a dozen across the room.

  Her smile gained teeth. "Do you want to change that? I'm not going to ask you to stand around with posters screaming cute slogans at mid-level corpo workers. I'm going to ask you to make a difference. Some of that is community outreach. Some of the nicest, best, objectively good-est people I've met have been volunteers and people who put actions before words. That's what I want to do more of. That's what we managed to do in Burlington. We armed civilians, trained, moved food around and fed people. We broke a lot of laws and made a lot of lives better in a time where that's what people needed most."

  This bunch were... nice kids, mostly, but they were all silver-spoons. Not really, they weren't that rich. A few of them, sure, but most were just upper-middle class and didn't know how bad things really got except for in the abstract.

  If they knew, they wouldn't have shown up here. But hey, they were gullible, and wanted to help, and she wanted that help.

  "That's where we come in. The Kittens. Cute name, right? We've got claws." A few people chuckled. Some didn't. Good. She wanted the split. Could use it.

  "We don't play nice. We don't beg. We act. We protect our own. We take care of our streets. We hand out meals, sure. We show up when the cops don't. We fix things no one else will. When needed, we hit back."

  She let that last bit settle.

  "I'm not going to lie to you. This isn't some safe little afterschool club. It's not a brand, or a lifestyle, or a cute pin you put on your uniform. This is real. This is action. This is dangerous. But if you're sick of sitting back while other people make your future worse, if you want to build something that'll last, if you want to be part of something that matters, then you're already halfway one of us."

  Bunch of normal people that wanted somewhere to belong, and she'd give them that. They could belong in her pocket.

  ***