Foxfire, Esq.

Early last week, I’d scheduled a time to visit Megan in her capacity as Staff Judge Advocate and discuss a few matters with her. Or at least, the emails we’d traded while scheduling the meeting said that. We’d been delightfully vague as to what our ‘discussion’ would be covering, ostensibly because it wasn’t the sort of thing that could be safely written down — while an attorney’s work product is usually immune to discovery, there are some exceptions. The biggest one, and the one at issue here, was the privacy aspect: if your attorney has a reasonable suspicion that they won’t be able to control access to something they put into writing, then it doesn’t get the protection of attorney-client privilege.

I’d sent an email to my sister-in-law, who happened to be the top military lawyer for DC’s National Guard. Any communication between herself and non-governmental entities was subject to countless scans and checks, and I knew from the outset that those emails weren’t private.

They weren’t meant to be private. We wanted somebody else to see them and know that I had a valid reason to be at the DC Joint Force Headquarters. But that valid reason to be there only came a few days after the appointment was on the books. Neither of us had expected Wayne “Pyre” McCain’s case to give us a real reason for such discussions. Prior to that revelation, the meeting itself had just been a pretext, a reason for me to be in the same place as the thing I needed without arousing suspicion, not… ugh, okay, fine. I’ll stop beating around the bush.

The meeting was an official thing on the books for the sole purpose of having Megan serve as an alibi.

To paraphrase an aphorism I’d read somewhere in an opinion, but whose origin I couldn’t recall: “Piracy is less a matter of means than it is a matter of access.” Essentially, if the only reasonable way to get something is illegal, then the people who need (or even just sufficiently want) that thing have no choice but to resort to illegal activity in order to get it.

That was exactly the case here: Lady Liberty had been told she couldn’t legally get the NMR to help her — or more specifically, that while they could handle something for Lady Liberty, their hands were tied with regards to helping Mariem Mouthlaki. So instead, she went off the record and asked a friend for help. That friend, SJA Megan Barnes, ran into exactly the same problem: the separation of superhero persona and secret identity may have been a legal fiction, but it still tied her hands in a very real way.

So she, too, went and asked somebody else for help: me. And in the process of giving Mariem that help, we wound up repeating the exact cycle over again. As a reminder — Mariem had a stalker, who apparently sent her things set to arrive on the second Monday of every third month. That almost painful regularity was something I could use to find the person responsible and take some kind of civilian legal action against. However, in order to do that, I needed the actual mailings — preferably with the envelope or packaging intact, because that would give me a barcode or other post office information to work off of.

I asked Mariem if she could get them for me; she told me that Lady Liberty didn’t have sufficient reason to request them, and Mariem Mouthlaki had no reason to even know about them. So I asked Megan if she could get them for me instead. Unfortunately, Megan’s own past inquiries regarding how much she was or wasn’t allowed to help Lady Liberty meant that her requesting those documents would prompt some uncomfortable questions from higher up, questions she couldn’t answer.

And obviously, the NMR wasn’t about to allow Foxfire anywhere near their personal henhouse. Not like I could blame them, but… ugh.

Legally speaking, none of the three of us could access the stalker’s mailings. So if we couldn’t get them legally, there was only one option left.

We had to steal them.

Unlike every other time I’d visited the Joint Force Headquarters, I didn’t have to sign in at the front and be escorted up to Megan’s office. Instead, she was there waiting for me, her piercing glare daring any of the troopers manning the building’s entrance to try and pull their usual “unknown Moonshot” spiel. That had gotten decidedly old after the fourth visit, and while Megan had just about managed to put a stop to it, she’d decided to just nip any chance of it in the bud.

“Only five minutes early,” she greeted as I stepped into the building and out of the early summer humidity. “Traffic?”

“Traffic,” I agreed, walking up to her. She turned and started walking with me as I approached, and stayed two steps ahead as she led me past the security door and to the elevators.

Neither of us said a word as we waited for the elevator. The silence persisted through the trip up, and only finally broke once we were securely in the Staff Judge Advocate’s office and the door was locked behind us.

“Would’ve been better if we didn’t have to multitask,” Megan muttered as she walked over to her desk, then sat down with a sigh. I pulled out one of the chairs in front of her desk and sat down, watching as she opened one of her desk’s drawers and leaned down to grab something. A moment later a plain folder slid across the desk towards me, and I flipped it open to find several pages’ worth of floorplans.

“Needs must, unfortunately,” I said back while looking at the printouts. Each of them had a number corresponding to the floor, B2 through 3. Megan had helpfully marked the location of her office on the third-floor printout, but worryingly, I saw another pair of markings on both the B1 and B2 printouts. That… might complicate things. “Did you get my follow-up regarding Pyre’s team?”

“I did, and—” Megan cut herself off and unplugged the phone at her desk, then turned off her computer and did the same for it. “There. Can’t be too careful.”

My ears went limp with concern, and it must’ve shown on my face too, because Megan tried to shoot me her best reassuring smile. It didn’t work, not really.

“I… uh.” I swallowed, my throat suddenly feeling dry. “You’re sure, you’re absolutely sure that there’s not something else you could do here instead? Some favor you can cash in, a bureaucratic maze you could use to hide a request, just, something that isn’t—”

“No,” she interrupted. “I came to you in the first place because I already had tried every other ‘something else’ that I knew of. You understand that, right? Can you see how this makes me just as uncomfortable as it does you?”

“Megan, we’re—ugh!” I cut myself off, a sudden thought strangling the rest of what I wanted to say. Instead, I reached into my bag and pulled out a pencil, which I put in my bag specifically for today, flipped over one of the sheets of paper Megan had given me, and wrote a quick message on the back.

bug check? y/n

Megan leaned over the desk, read my message… and then gave me the single worst look of derision I’d ever seen on her. And yes, that was including our rather disastrous first meeting, the one where she still believed the insane bullshit my brother Eli said about me.

“Naomi, I was an MP for longer than you’ve been a lawyer. Do you really think I would’ve forgotten to sweep for listening devices?” She waved her hand at her desk. “The phone and computer are unplugged, our phones are fully powered off, the door is locked, and I’ve put my men under strict orders not to disturb me for the next two hours barring a true emergency. Now, I get your concerns, but we’re on a timer, so stop stalling and call the damn fox already!”

Megan’s voice fell into an impatient hiss at the end there, which had my fur standing on end. I’d seen her catty, I’d seen her angry, I’d seen her annoyed… this wasn’t that. This was raw, unfiltered stress. Now that I was able to hear it, instead of having to look for the signs, I could tell quite clearly that Megan wasn’t handling this situation any better than I was.

She just had more practice at not letting it show.

Part of me still tried to think of anything else we might do that was still legal. But I was grasping at straws, and I knew it. So, I finally gave in.

I closed my eyes, cast my focus down to my foxfire soul, and lightly tugged on the connection that Gorou and I shared. A moment later, azure foxfire bloomed to life in Megan’s office, then faded away to reveal a silver-furred fox, all four tails curled about his paws.

“Good, you’re here,” Megan said, sliding the printouts of the floorplan over to Gorou before he even had a chance to offer her a greeting. “We are here,” she pointed at the spot for her office, “and what you need is either here, or here. I’m not sure which floor it’s on, but we’d prefer the higher one. Lower down means more security, and I’m not sure you’ll be able to get out without leaving a trace.”

I swallowed, feeling a sudden frisson of fear at the thought of leaving evidence of our little illicit conspiracy behind, and almost jumped out of my skin when I felt a tail wind itself around my own and give a little reassuring squeeze. I reached over and buried my hand deep in my four-legged greatest-grandfather’s fur, as if that would ease the nerves.

It didn’t. But it was still better than nothing.

“Hmm…” Gorou stood up on his hind legs, his front paws supporting him as he looked at the floor plan printouts. “What might I need to negotiate?”

“Locked filing cabinets on B1, but those all use a standard key.” Megan reached into her desk drawer and pulled the key out, which swiftly disappeared into the fur of one of Gorou’s free tails. “God, that’s still freaky to see,” my sister-in-law murmured before shaking her head and refocusing on the fox in front of her. “If it’s on B2, then each of the evidence lockers down there uses a unique key, which has to get signed out prior to entering, so you’ll need to improvise.”

“Understood,” Gorou said, then unwound his tail from mine and sat back on his haunches. “Naomi.”

“Okay.” I closed my eyes once more, leaned back in my chair, and gripped both armrests tightly before casting my awareness down to the kernel of foxfire at the core of my being once more. This time, though, I didn’t tug at the connection I shared with Gorou, that thread of azure and amethyst soulstuff flowing between us. Instead, I let my awareness travel along it, until I was knocking on the metaphorical door of Gorou’s soul. A second passed, two, three.

And then I was seeing the world through Gorou’s eyes, while my own glowed a brilliant purple behind closed eyelids.

“W-we’re all set,” I said, grimacing as the conflicting sensory information of Gorou turning our shared vision away didn’t line up with what my inner ear was telling me. “Go, quick.”

Gorou didn’t nod, thankfully. Instead, he disappeared into flame, passing into the weird space between thought and reality through which my essence traveled when I took an incendiary vacation from my body. But unlike the way I almost immediately came back out on the other side, Gorou didn’t.

He simply remained in that state, a bodiless being of pure thoughtstuff, seemingly none the worse for wear.

Did you know this story is from NovelFire? Read the official version for free and support the author.

I have tried many, many times to describe what it feels like when I teleport, to translate it into terms that make some sort of sense for other people. To this day, I think the only person who’d ever understood my explanation was Ambrose, which told me that I probably needed to workshop it further, but… well, here goes:

When I fall apart into flame, I don’t just lose all awareness of the world around me. No, I don’t have eyes, ears, or anything else during that brief instant between “my body turned into purple fire before disappearing” and “purple fire appeared before turning into my body”. And yes, there is a time delay — it isn’t much, but it still takes about a tenth of a second for my foxfire to disappear from Location A and appear in Location B. And I can extend the delay between disappearing and reappearing, but there’s this horrid, gnawing discomfort to it, like somebody is actively brushing every single strand of fur on my tail the wrong way, and that wrongness is felt across every single speck of my being, and if you’ve never felt anything like that then count your lucky stars because it is horrible and—!

… and I’m getting off track. Sorry.

Anyway. When I’m in that weird space between, I can still see, hear, smell, taste, and feel. It’s just all… tinted purple. When Mariem brought up synesthesia to describe her own sensory power, I’d immediately known what it was because I’d done the same research, in part to try and understand what I was processing. And while I still didn’t understand it, that lack of understanding didn’t cause me any discomfort or make me feel weird. So yes, I know what a purple tint tastes like.

Now, why was any of this important?

Well… because when Gorou left his body behind, his senses took on a blue tint. And because I was currently riding shotgun on his vision, everything I saw took on that same blue tint… and spread out from there to the rest of my senses.

By the way, a blue tint tastes sort of the way ozone smells in the air. In case you were curious.

Regardless — Gorou, now just a wandering spirit without a body, passed through the wall of Megan’s office and out into the hallway, then meandered on down until he had to pass through another door to reach the elevators. I grimaced as he got closer to the wall, and closer, and closer, and had to take a deep breath to study myself as I got a close-up look at the cross-section of a wall, with part of it cutting through the perspective. Ugh, yeah, never getting used to that…

“Your eyes are, um… are you okay?”

I flicked an ear towards Megan as she started speaking, but squeezed my eyelids more tightly shut as Gorou passed into the elevator shaft and began his descent.

“I know they glow when Gorou and I do this,” I bit out through gritted teeth, holding my back and head as rigid as possible to try and get my inner ear to stop freaking out. Half of my senses said I was moving, while the other half said I was sitting still — and before you try telling me that this was the same as watching a movie, no it is not because of the mental separation of the action being on a screen. “And before I forget, he can currently hear through my ears, so mind what you say.”

“... huh,” Megan murmured. “That wasn’t in any of your files.”

“It’s not in them anymore,” I corrected.

“That… hm. I’ll just take your word for it,” she said with a sigh. “Okay. Are you able to multitask?”

“Would be preferable,” I grimaced. “Hearing and talking will help prevent vertigo.”

“Okay. Um…”

“I don’t need your trash can as a puke bucket.”

“Oh thank goodness,” she rushed out, followed by a slightly strangled squawk as she apparently realized what she’d said. “Ah, I didn’t—”

“It’s fine,” I interrupted, watching as Gorou wound his way through another hallway, this time lit with cheap fluorescent lighting. When the government didn’t need to spend the money on ‘aesthetically-pleasing’ lighting in public-accessible areas, it went straight for fluorescent light bars. Cheap and bright, but ugly as sin, and don’t even get me started on how they make you look in the mirror. On the plus side, it meant Gorou didn’t need to conjure foxfire to let him see.

“I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, your email mentioned something that you needed to discuss with me in person?” Megan prompted.

“Ah… that.” I sighed, then suppressed another shiver of discomfort as Gorou passed through the door leading to B1’s archives. “My meeting with Pyre to discuss his case brought up some concerning news. Before I say anything more, prior to his passing, did Wassenberg try to make any inroads with the NMR beyond just the normal requests for information you would’ve expected to see?”

“No, none.” Megan audibly shifted in her chair, something which I knew her to do when trying to push down some discomfort. “I have a feeling I’m going to regret asking this, but why?”

“He revealed some information to me that isn’t in any of the other materials I received from the court,” I continued, watching as Gorou checked the labels on the front of various filing cabinets for the one we needed. “I have his explicit permission to reveal anything needed to get the ball rolling on this, even if it risks violating privilege.”

“Get the ball rolling on what?” she pressed.

“... put a pin in that for a moment?” I requested, flicking an ear as the blue tint faded from my sensorium. “Gorou found the filing cabinet on B1.”

Gorou was almost terrifyingly dextrous with his tails, and he scarcely landed on the ground before producing the key that he’d stashed in his tail fur. There was definitely some magic involved there, because he managed to hold the key between strands of fur, inserting and turning the key as easily as though he’d had hands, and when he pulled his tail away, the key went with him. Then another tail pulled a chair over to the filing cabinet, which he hopped atop (ooh that was not fun to watch…) before opening the drawer and paging through it with another tail, starting at the back.

“The drawer is marked for ‘L/M/N’, but would it have been stored under Lady Liberty or under her civilian name?”

“Can’t be under civilian name,” Megan responded, at which point Gorou flipped from starting at the back to going from the front.

Sure enough, there it was, three tabs back — a great big collection of envelopes, barely contained within a pair of large manila folders.

“He’s got it,” I said as Gorou reached in with another tail to grab the documents out. “Just on B1. Didn’t have to go to B2.”

“That’s… good?” she murmured. I lowered my ears in question, not wanting to move my head and make my inner ear even angrier with me. “It’s just… that it was moved to DC makes sense, this building serves as NMR headquarters for every jurisdiction in the DMV area, but B1 is the lower security archive. Anything physical that’s relevant to you is on B2, so why were these on B1?”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” I murmured, watching Gorou close up the filing cabinet and retrieve the key, at which point I felt him nudge my awareness back into just my own body. “Oh, incoming.”

I opened my eyes, blinking a few times to get my head back about me, and almost completely missing the flare of blue that heralded Gorou’s return. When I looked over, I saw that he had the folders he’d retrieved from the filing cabinet held in two curled tails, and while one of his free tails drifted under my fingers, the other dropped the filing cabinet key back onto Megan’s desk.

“I shall take my leave,” the fox said, then showed us a nice, toothy yawn before turning to me. “Please pick up Chinese on your way home.” Gorou disappeared with one more flash of foxfire. And with that, it was official.

We’d just committed a crime.

“Oh, I hope we can get those back before anybody notices,” I murmured, feeling more sick to my stomach from the reality of what we’d just done than any of the motion sickness that came with watching through Gorou’s eyes.

“I’ll keep an eye out,” Megan said, though her voice was as shaky as mine. “I’ve set things up so any request for records on specific Moonshot has to go through me first. On paper, it’s just to make sure nothing gets handed out that we’re being told to keep close at hand. But in practice…” she trailed off, shaking her head. “Anyway. You were trying to tell me something?”

“Oh, um… shoot, right, ah. That.” I fidgeted a little in my seat, taking my tail in both hands while my ears folded low. “I’m very sorry to be the bearer of bad news here, but um… you’ve got a neo-Nazi problem.”

Megan didn’t say anything immediately. Her eyes briefly went wide and her lips parted in surprise, but she marshaled her expression almost immediately, brows furrowing.

“Explain.”

“Let me preface by saying that I don’t know if it’s widespread or isolated,” I began, “but it explains too many other things to be completely false. First, Pyre mentioned that the seven charges of obstruction he faces are excessive, and entirely predicated on one man’s testimony. Second, that same man is the one who led law enforcement to Pyre after he allegedly assisted seven neo-Nazis with evading arrest. It’s a he-said-she-said scenario, one that was only overlooked because there was a crime, Pyre did resist arrest, and survivors placed more people at the scene than were taken into custody. But it’s the third reason that matters the most here.”

“And that is?” Megan prompted. Her expression had darkened as I went, and when I swiveled one ear to focus more clearly in her direction, I could hear her teeth grinding.

“Two people, not seven. Those two are the seventeen-year-old sons of two Arlington police officers, who are also white supremacists. And as for the boys…” I sighed. “A2 Moonshot. Both of them.”

Megan slammed her hand down on her desk and bit out a curse, then closed her eyes and exhaled harshly. A few seconds, she looked up at me, a deep, furious frown on her face.

“Name,” she commanded. “Give me. His name.”

“Not until you assure me you aren’t going after him quite yet,” I warned. “He already had Pyre shipped down to Chesapeake to try and keep him away, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was behind Wassenberg’s death. Remember: there was no autopsy. We all just assumed it to be cirrhosis because the man had a reputation for being a wino. If you go too hard on this guy before getting safeties in place, odds are he’s going to cause more problems than his arrest solves.”

“I’m not an idiot, Naomi, but this fucker has been collecting a military paycheck while cavorting with Nazis!” Megan all but yelled at me. “So fine, sure, I won’t go charging in guns blazing, but I need! His name!”

“... okay,” I said. “I’m trusting you to work with me on this.” Megan answered with a glare and a raised eyebrow, to which I could only sigh, my ears drooping. “It’s Pyre’s handler. Master Sergeant Jefferson Gillespie. I checked Pyre’s activity over the last two decades — nothing in Virginia or West Virginia.”

“Let me guess, the bastard was having Pyre cut rival groups’ recruitment out at the knees,” Megan murmured, even as she practically tore her desk drawer off its rails in her haste to pull out a pad of paper and write down the man’s name.

“That was his guess too,” I agreed. “More importantly than his handler being a bastard, though? He got the two kids to safety.”

Megan looked up from her notepad so swiftly that her neck practically popped, and her pen tore through the page.

“The next words out of your mouth had better be—”

“I know where they are,” I finished for her. “And before Wassenberg died, he was figuring out how to legally get their testimony, given they were minors who would be testifying both in Pyre’s defense and against their parents. I don’t think he had any way to use the pair being Moonshot as a possible lever.”

“Oh. Is that all?” Megan finished writing the Master Sergeant’s name on her notepad and leaned back in her chair, a conspiratorial grin spreading across her lips as she tapped the pen against her hand. “That can be arranged. Just give me a date and time.”

“This Saturday. Meet me at the U Street metro station at nine-thirty, and try to keep an open mind.”

“I’ll be there,” she promised. “The NMR will be able to protect those boys, I promise.”

“... I’ll hold you to that,” I murmured, standing from my chair. “That was all I had. Anything else you need from me, or can I try and get going on my ill-gotten goods so you can slip them back in place sooner rather than later?”

“That’s it,” she said, plugging her phone and computer back in. “Best you leave me be, anyway. This is going to take a lot of paperwork and plate-spinning.”

“Good luck,” I offered my sister-in-law. And with that, I left.

I should’ve headed home, to look through those mailings. I could’ve finished out the day by working remote. But I didn’t. I went back to the office, because at least there, I didn’t have to look at proof of my own criminal activity. The ends justified the means, at least in this instance, and it was about as victimless as a crime could be. But rationalizing it away as a bitter necessity of the situation didn’t help. I’d committed a crime — willfully, purposefully broken the law.

And there was no going back from that.