Being Watched

The For Rent sign had been up for about a week, and Macey was torn between advertising a little more aggressively or taking it down. Sure, the money would be cool to have and it got a little lonely out here- and a week was not enough time to call something a failure- but she was getting cold feet, you know? A stranger moving into her basement might not be the best thing. There was only so much background checking she could do. Macey practiced every day with the punching bag and all but that wasn’t the same thing as fending off a creep who lived in her own house.

So she almost called the whole thing off- but then it was too late, because one day she got home and there was a small figure studying the sign, one wearing a comically large backpack.

Well, here we go, thought Macey with a nod of her head. She was the kind of person who leapt from ‘stranger studying For Rent sign’ to ‘stranger will totally rent the house’.

It was for the best, she thought. Mysteriously inherited giant houses didn’t pay to maintain themselves.

She headed closer, saying: “Hey, what’s up?” There was no reaction until she got close and repeated herself, and then the kid turned with eyes wide in panic.

“Careful with that,” she said in a hoarse, high, oddly commanding voice. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people, you know- something bad might happen, you see?”

Threats from a potential tenant. Sure, why not? “Sorry about that. I tried calling from back there.”

“Did you?” The stranger looked a little distraught at that. And now that Macey had a good look, she wasn’t a kid either- just a short lady.

“You didn’t hear me, I guess,” said Macey, trying to sound very friendly and polite- which she always did automatically anyway, but in this case she thought she’d better be extra polite.

“No- I didn’t. Very well, then- never mind it.” She turned away.

“You looking to rent?” Macey asked.

The stranger started fiddling with her hair. “Rent… rent what? It says not the whole house?”

“No, just the basement.”

“The basement would do… how much is it?”

Macey had not thought of that. She pondered her own For Rent sign, noting with pleasure the places where her pen strokes had been especially elegant.

The stranger fidgeted. She wore a too-large dusky red-and-brown plaid shirt over khaki shorts. The backpack she wore was heavy and loaded down. It belatedly occurred to Macey that skittish, tiny women did not turn up in the middle of nowhere and look for lodgings with strangers for no reason.

“Hey,” she said, “Tell you what. I’ll give you a two-week trial period for free-that make sense?”

“Yes,” said the woman, slowly, with obvious relief. “Yes, that would be perfect, because we might not want to- be in a business relationship, after you have- had the chance.” She had an unplaceable foreign accent. “Would I be able to stay there tonight?”

“Yeah, no one’s here now.”

“Good!” The odd woman looked suddenly ebullient.

“I’ll show you around the place, okay?”

The stranger was so small and slight that Macey had, without even realizing it, completely written her off as a threat. She had forgotten any ideas of a background check.

Her prospective renter was pleased with the basement, and especially pleased that most of it had no windows, and that Macey was okay with the idea of blocking up the windows it did have. The poor gal seemed to want to live in the closest thing possible to a bomb shelter.

She picked the tiny storage closet in the corner for a bedroom and started putting up a hammock right then and there.

“Seems like this is gonna work out,” said Macey, thinking maybe at this point she should go give her lodger some privacy. “I guess I’ll butt out, then.”

The woman turned and blinked at her. “Hm?”

“You know, jet. Peace out. Leave?”

“Leave. Yes, leaving is good. Thank you.”

Macey turned away, but then she remembered something kind of important. “Hey, what’s your name?”

“My what?”

“Your name.”

The woman had frozen in place with her shoulders bunched. “Ach, it’s… It is a question for later.”

“I’m gonna need some kind of name for the lease later.”

“There’s a record of this?” The woman turned, wide-eyed.

“Yeah,” said Macey. “I don’t have to give it to anyone, though.” Maybe the IRS. The IRS already had everyone’s name, though.

The tenant frowned. “Kila Ilo. K-I-L-A I-L-O.”

“Kila, huh? That’s a nice name.”

“It’s serviceable,” she said with a little shrug. “And what is yours, if you choose to give it?”

“Macey Wray. M-A-C-E-Y W-R-A-Y.”

“Vray,” she said, and flinched.

“Yep,” said Macey, thinking it would just embarrass Kila more to try to say it was fine if she mispronounced it. Macey seriously did not care, for real, but no one ever believed that.

“Okay. Well, you were butting out, I think.”

“Yep, sure was. Good night.”

Kila turned back to her work. She had odd, jerky movements, like a bird. Also, Macey had noticed that her tongue was bright blue, but you couldn’t just ask a person ‘why is your tongue blue’, so Macey didn’t comment.

Kila was a pretty good tenant. She stayed out of sight and, once Macey started charging her rent, she paid on time every time, in cash. She didn’t make any noise when she left the house or returned to it- a good thing, as she tended to come and go at night- and she never brought anybody home with her. There were definitely no parties.

There was the crow, though. One day Macey walked in to find her dissecting it.

Kila didn’t hear her come in and didn’t hear the first time Macey called her by name, so Macey got right up to her and saw what she was doing before she could do anything about it.

When Kila did see her finally she jumped, and looked a little shamefaced, as if she’d been walked in on when changing or had been caught with a messy room (actually there was a pile of garbage in the corner, too, but Mace had already talked to her about that kind of stuff, and that was normal stuff). She stepped in front of the table, which didn’t hide anything because Macey could see over her head.

It wasn’t as weird as it could’ve been because there was a tidy dissecting tray and a set of well-organized tools. It was exactly the same stuff that had been laid out in Macey’s Zoology 101 lab when they took apart the innocent formaldehyded flatworms.

“Sorry, am I interrupting?” asked Macey.

“Yes. But there must be some reason?”

“Yeah, I just wanted to let you know I’m going to have to turn off the electricity for a little while later.”

“I see. And why is that?” she asked lightly. “If you choose to tell me?”

“Um, you know. A project. I’m kind of an inventor. Looks like you’re also doing a project, huh?”

Kila had relaxed and stepped aside at the word ‘inventor’, no longer attempting to hide what she was doing. Macey wondered if in her mind she had heard ‘another mad scientist’. “Yes. It’s helpful to know about the wings. Do you want to look?”

Macey was entirely without the kind of knee-jerk ‘no’ impulse that most people had. She felt bad for the crow, but not looking at it wouldn’t make it any less dead and she had enough interest in this stuff to have taken Zo 101 back when. “Sure.”

“Don’t touch nothing,” Kila said, stepping aside a little more and beckoning. Macey leaned over to look from a respectful distance. The crow had been neatly laid out with its wings spread. The muscles of the breast and wings had been exposed, but everywhere else the glossy black feathers were intact. It was neatly done. Looked like it could’ve been a picture from a textbook.

“So are you a scientist?” Macey asked. She’d been avoided asking Kila where she worked, or how she worked, or if she worked, because she’d thought she was on the run from something or somebody and that might’ve meant abruptly not having a job anymore.

“I was a surgeon,” Kila answered with a distant note of regret. So Macey’s first guess had been right.

“Well, okay. That’s really cool.” She’d never been accused of being the brightest crayon in the box or the sharpest bulb in the pack but she knew better than to ask ‘Oh what happened??’ or anything like that. Instead she asked: “So like, where’d you get a crow?”

“There are many of them about so I took one.”

Macey thought she saw a char mark on the bird, but it was in the feathers, which were black anyway, so she couldn’t be sure. Maybe the poor thing had gotten itself zapped by power lines somehow. She couldn’t see any other signs of injury. “Did you kill it?”

There was a pause. “No.”

“I see. Well that’s cool. Thanks for giving me a look.”

“As the landlord you are entitled to it, I suppose.” She startled a little, as if something important had occurred to her. “Would you want to eat it? Do you eat meat? Not everyone does.”

“I do. Um. Is it still good to eat, though?”

Kila gave the animal a desperate glance. “Is it?”

“It’s been at room temperature a while.”

“It has. And that makes it… inedible.” She looked puzzled.

“Yeah, it does.”

“Right.”

“So-“ Macey stuck her hands in her pockets. “I can wait for you to be done with this before I turn off the power.”

“Why?”

“Well, don’t you need to see?”

Kila was bemused. “I don’t need electricity to see.”

“Isn’t it dark down here without the lights on?”

“Yes. It’s not ideal, but-” She stopped suddenly.

“You can’t see in the dark, right?”

“…No. But I have a flashlight.”

“Right. I’m going back upstairs. Are you going to be, um, okay?”

“Yes.”

She turned and watched Macey go with a sharp, catlike stare.

After that Macey started noticing a few other little things, like- Kila sure did go out at night an awful lot and she didn’t act or dress like she was going off to party. She sure did pay in cash every single month, and gosh she vanished into the woods a lot and what were those noises from the basement, and what were those smells, and why was the light always off in the basement when Macey came in, and why were there weird power surges, and what was going on?

And also, Macey was pretty sure that she’d seen Kila tucking a handgun into her waistband at least once. Concealed carry was legal and all, and Macey had never said anything about not wanting guns when she set up the lease (she hadn’t thought of it). Macey had no interest in guns herself, but she wasn’t bothered by other people having them if they knew what they were doing. She could understand the appeal of a pistol to someone only four feet tall. But on top of all the other weird things, it was kind of a red flag.

Macey was a ‘live and let live’ sort, but she wasn’t going to get her life ruined because someone she was renting to was up to something illegal. And so she followed Kila into the woods one day to see what she was doing.

The other woman was so much smaller that she could duck under and around things Macey couldn’t. It was pretty rough, and Macey felt like she was making enough noise to spook a corpse, but luckily for her Kila’s hearing was bad enough that she didn’t catch on. They ended up in a clearing, and in the clearing was something about the size of five dumpsters side by side, with a big dirty tarp over it and lots of branches and crap on top of the tarp. Macey started picturing all kinds of things that could be under there. So many things the cops wouldn’t like could fit under that tarp.

Kila stopped and looked around, her shoulders twitching with fitful breaths. She didn’t see Macey, who had gone a little far, maybe, by wearing camo and putting the commando gunk on her face, but it felt like it was worth it now. (She was extra glad she’d stuffed all of her bright red hair under a beanie, because if that stuff was let free in these woods, half of it would have been claimed by tree branches on the way here.)

Kila fiddled with something on her wrist. Her outline blurred, blinked and vanished. Her clothes stayed in place, but her head and hands had turned gray. She had a gray tail. It was thick at the base and tapered to a point, and reached to mid-calf length or so. Her hair had turned gray, too, Macey thought for a moment, but then she realized it had turned into big rabbit ears, attached about where human ears were, and angled down and back.

Most people would maybe have begun to question whether this was a hallucination of some sort. And maybe that would have been the most reasonable thing to do. Macey didn’t bother, though. She decided it was real right away. She did think for a moment that it might be a real costume, but she dropped that fast. Why would a human person hide a costume under a fake human hologram? Also, the tail was twitching, and the ears were moving a little. It looked pretty real. She wasn’t sure what, exactly, ‘it’ was, but it was real. Was Kila an escaped lab experiment? A human-bunny hybrid? Macey had always thought her front teeth were big, but she’d just thought she was being judgmental.

Kila lifted the tarp. Her hands had always looked narrow, and it was apparently because she had only four fingers. Under the tarp was gleaming metal. Kila stroked it briefly with one finger as if sliding something around on a phone screen, and the metal slid open to reveal a dark interior. Kila ducked into it and the metal closed behind her.

Was she dangerous? Macey wondered.

She’d never seemed hostile. The gun hadn’t bothered Macey because she was afraid of getting held up, or anything. She had thought it might be a sign that Kila knew dangerous people who might not be bros enough to leave the landlord out of their business. Kila had only ever been friendly in her own weird way. And she paid the rent on time. In cash. People were starting to look at Macey funny for always using paper money, instead of a chunk of plastic that moved around digital numbers, like a normal person.

Now Macey knew her secret, though. Well, dummy, she told herself, get on home before she comes back out and she won’t find out you know her secret!

So she did.

Macey wasn’t a complete idiot. She knew there was not a lot she could do about suspecting her tenant was not human. Like, she could post about it online, and people would have a lot of fun with it and think she was writing a tepid experimental novel. She could tell the police, and they would think she was either joking or in need of the kind of help nobody wanted to get.

She also knew stuff about computers. She set up a thing to monitor for phone calls or radio signals coming in and out of the basement.

She had started to think ‘alien’. She hadn’t seen much of what was under that tarp but it had had a spaceshippy feel. She would have liked to go back and get a better look at it, but, again, she was not a complete idiot, and she knew that even normal gas stations on Earth had security cameras, so how did she think she was going to get away with messing with a spaceship without being recorded, zapped, or melted?

So, how to suss out an alien on Earth without making her or her spaceship angry? Particularly keeping in mind that Kila owned a gun. Well, Macey would find out if she sent any messages off to space. Of course human beings could and did send stuff to space too- but it would at least be a hint. It wasn’t crazy to think that if your tenant was sending messages to space and was secretly a weird rabbit thing, then she was an alien. And also, maybe that would give her a hint about why Kila was here and whether she was dangerous.

It didn’t take long before she got a signal. And here was another weird thing about Kila, especially if she really was some kind of advanced alien. She was a total Luddite and couldn’t even figure out the TV set. She didn’t have any kind of security on her space radio. Macey didn’t just pick up that there had been a signal, she was able to listen in on it.

“Ilo, pick up.”

And in English, too.

“Yes? In English, is it?” Kila asked right away.

“Why not? You speak it, don’t you?” said Kao.

“Yes, I’m doing it now.”

“I thought it would be appropriate, especially since you’re so worried about industrial espionage.”

“There is nothing industrial about-“

“What are these supplies you bought?”

“Can you not see what they are?” Kila asked sharply. “You have them in hand, don’t you?”

“I can see what the items are, but I don’t know why you wanted them.”

“Ach! When you asked I thought they were lost.”

“No, I have them, but why do you want them?

“I wanted them for projects of my own, Dr. Kao.”

“Which ones?” Kao asked.

“Is the payment not enough? You have already money, and you are- enthusiastic about Earth. So I sent something from Earth.”

“The payment’s great. So this is a human appendix?”

Macey leaned closer in to her radio even though she was wearing headphones.

“Yes, but also no,” said Kila hastily. “It’s very much diseased. That’s why it’s been removed. So don’t show it to your colleagues and tell them ‘This is a human appendix’ and act like all humans walk around with them. If it’s normal, it’s perhaps a tenth of that size.”

“But it’s an appendix?”

“Yes, a diseased appendix.”

“From someone who’s dead?”

“No. Ah- I was- I took it out. There’s no sense in wasting it.”

“You took out someone’s appendix?”

“She didn’t wake up.” There was a brief pause, then Kila said in a rush: “She woke up after the surgery. After, but not during. She is alive. She- it is normally very small, the appendix, and no one seems to use it. She won’t notice it’s gone. She’ll think she had food poisoning.”

“Why did you take out someone’s appendix?” Kao asked. Macey wanted to know the same thing.

“It was diseased. It’s a dangerous thing. I had my first aid kit. You carry one as well, I think, though you would have fewer ways to use it.”

There was a pause.

“Dr. Kao,” said Kila with some alarm, “you do carry one, don’t you?”

“Of course. But why not let a human doctor take care of… this thing?”

“I can do a better job in less time and I was not in a hurry to go anywhere. It took five minutes or so. Why should I let a human doctor take care of it? They don’t have the technology to make it tidy. She would have maybe not gotten attention in time and they would have made big scar.”

“Do you do surgery on people often?”

“Only when they need it.” Her tone was defensive.

“I hope so,” said Kao. “Is that why you asked for medical supplies?”

“Yes- it’s something like that, or very close to it. In any case, I paid you for those, so you’ll send them, yes?”

“Sure. Do you go around looking for people to operate on?”

“No,” Kila said shortly.

“I mean, I know you’re very good at it-“

“Emergencies happen more often around me than you may expect. Emergencies I do not cause as well as those I do. Is that all you wanted?”

They both sounded to Macey like people who’d known each other a long time and were comfortable snapping at each other.

“Is this why you want so many medical supplies?” Kao asked.

“Are you sending them or not?”

“Yes.” Kao was beginning to sound a bit sulky. “I just thought you might want to keep me informed.”

“There are people here who need them. I don’t need to tell you more…”

“Do you still think people listen in on the phone?”

Kila made a flustered hushing sound.

“My systems would absolutely pick up any bugs on my end,” said Kao, “and no one on Earth is going to figure out how to put them on yours.”

“Supposing we pretend.”

“It’s a pretty darned inconvenient game of make believe.”

Kila sighed and abruptly hung up her end. She must have decided this conversation wasn’t going to be steered where she wanted it to go.

So was she helping people or doing experiments on them?

Macey wasn’t a complete idiot but the key word was ‘complete’. She decided to do an experiment of her own.

Kila’s voice came through the door to her section of the house, indignantly ranting in a foreign language. She was talking to herself.

Macey knocked on the door louder and louder until it finally opened.

“Yes,” said Kila. “What is it?” She was in a bathrobe and looked disheveled. She’d been hanging out in the dark. Could she really see in the dark or was she hiding in it in case Macey walked in on her without her disguise?

“Um,” said Macey. “Sorry to bother you, but… I kind of tweaked my knee really bad and it’s freaking me out. Could you… I don’t know, take a look at it? Because you’re the only other one here.”

Kila gave her a sharp, suspicious look.

“You told me you were a surgeon,” said Macey. “I mean, I know it’s kind of like asking a plumber to fix your toilet for free, but…”

Kila drew back and frowned at her. “No,” she said, “it is nothing like this. I will look at your knee, Ms. Wray, but it’s unlikely to need surgery.” She glanced at the steep stairs Macey had just used. “Come inside and sit down.”

She had Macey come inside and sit down on a milk crate. It wasn’t too comfy.

Kila felt over her knee with soft, warm little hands. Whatever she was using to cloak herself didn’t have a texture. That was definitely fur, not skin.

“There isn’t any injury,” said Kila. “You have pain in it?”

“Um, yes. Hey, what kind of surgeon were you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Your knee is in good condition, so if it hurts maybe that is from a change in air pressure or something like that. Have you injured it before?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of injury?”

“Well, I’ve skinned it before.”

“I see. It doesn’t need any surgery. I wouldn’t be able to fix it. Because it’s not broken. You see? You could try taking pain medicine, resting it, or putting something cold on it if it’s very bad. If it begins to swell or something like that I can look again. I can go up the stairs to you.”

“Okay,” said Macey. “Thanks. That’s real nice of you.”

“Mm. It’s my job,” said Kila. “But I probably won’t be able to help if nothing needs to be cut or removed or put back on.”

“Sure. Uh, I’ll let you know if I need any of that.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, I guess I’ll leave you alone.”

“Very well.”

She watched solemnly as Macey went up the stairs. She was focused on her “bad” knee, watching to see if Macey stumbled at all.

Macey couldn’t hand her over to the government to be killed and dissected or put in a gulag or whatever the government would do to an alien. Not unless she turned out to be doing something wrong. Really wrong. Serial killer, destroy-the-planet type of wrong. So far, the worst thing Kila had done was have bad social skills.

For now Macey would just keep an eye on her.