things you pick up
by starhawk
He hadn't expected to find Summer outside that night, on the side of the street under Corinth's hazy moon, but in retrospect maybe he should have. Her motorcycle had been in the garage when he pulled out, alongside Scott's car and the monster Flynn drove, and maybe he'd gotten too used to being the only one awake in the small hours of the morning. Their days were long and the schedule grueling--he expected to be alone during those few hours when the base was silent and the screens had gone dark.
He spotted her right away, though. Leaning up against a light post, right where the folding sidewalk sign had stood during the day, her gaze swung toward him as his car idled into the space. The Jungle Karma Pizza sign was still and unlit above the entrance behind her.
Dillon didn't ask. He just opened the door and got out, coming to stand beside her. His eyes slid past the sign to the stars, or what they could see of them through the dome and the ruined atmosphere beyond: a fuzzy blur of light unfocused by more than distance, dimmed by pollution long before it reached the city's self-contained microclimate.
He felt the air whisper as Summer glanced at him again. "You wore your morpher?" she said, her voice hushed but skeptical on the quiet street. "Didn't anyone tell you Dr. K can track those?"
He raised his eyebrows. "Isn't the point of those tracking things that she wants to?"
"You wore your tracking bug?" Summer sounded more amused than incredulous this time. "Why? Because she told you to?"
Dillon leaned against the other side of the light post, staring up at the dome again. "Maybe you should clarify the chain of command for me."
"Scott," Summer said.
Dillon scoffed, and she heard him.
"In the field," she emphasized. "When we're not taking fire, we all get a vote. Scott's vote, your vote, they're the same. When we are under fire, we need one person making the decisions. That's Scott. It's what he was trained to do."
"Trained by Dr. K," Dillon said.
"He was military before Dr. K recruited him," Summer told him. "He knows what he's doing, Dillon."
Like he cared. Scott's issues were Scott's issues, and Dillon was just as happy to keep them that way. Happier, in fact. If she hadn't made fun of him for listening to Dr. K, he wouldn't have asked at all.
Except.
No. It didn't matter. It wasn't any of his business.
But he couldn't forget Scott drawing the line this afternoon. We're not mocking Dr. K, he'd said. When Dillon questioned her loyalty, Scott was the one who confronted him. He'd defended Dr. K when she was just a letter and a voice, and his behavior, out of all of theirs, hadn't changed since they'd met her.
No matter what Summer said, Dr. K was in charge of "Project Ranger." Clearly, though, Scott's attitude made her job easier. Dillon hadn't realized how much it mattered until just then: Summer was in this for Scott and Corinth itself, not for a scientist she barely knew.
He wondered briefly about Flynn before reminding himself that he didn't care.
"It's locked," Summer said a few minutes later. "If you're curious."
He stopped staring at the stars long enough to glance at her, making sure she was still looking where he thought she was looking. She was. "After hours," he said, raking his gaze over the door to the pizza shop. "Should have expected that."
"Oh, I don't know." Summer sounded deliberately casual. "You wouldn't think interdimensional portals could be closed."
Dillon shifted. He knew that tone: she was going to break in. He was trying to decide whether he wanted to help or not when she added, "Flynn thinks it's earlier where they are. Time zones, if nothing else."
Three hours wasn't anywhere near enough to get them into regular business hours, but he couldn't resist asking, "He off on the other side of the city, then? At Storm Chargers while his tracking bug says he's at the garage?"
Summer only shrugged. "I wouldn't know," she said. "He got the part he went for, so probably not."
"Yeah," Dillon said, "and you're standing out here in the middle of the night because you want a piece of pizza."
She didn't answer right away, but when she did the flippant tone was gone from her voice. "You just got here, Dillon. Some of us haven't been outside this dome in a year. And you know what it's like: this may be tame and artificial, but it's better than standing under a sun with no ozone, breathing chemicals and soaking up radiation.
"A sky like that?" she added quietly, nodding at the JKP sign. "We've forgotten what it looks like."
"Yeah, I saw it," he muttered. "No guarantees it'll work, though. I went into Ziggy's flower shop twice and nothing happened."
"Hey, I had to wait ten minutes for Flynn to finish bonding with Lion Guy 'cause I couldn't get into his place," Summer said. "Maybe different portals are keyed to different people."
Just like that, it clicked. Something Ziggy had said earlier, something that had been bothering him ever since: a coincidence that couldn't be. "Lion Guy?" he repeated.
"Apparently there was a stuffed lion on the counter next to the register," Summer said. "Flynn makes a joke, some guy thinks it's funny, and the next thing you know they're best friends. I finally went in looking for him."
"But it didn't work," Dillon said. "You didn't find him. Just like Ziggy's been in and out of this place a hundred times and never noticed anything strange."
"Yeah," Summer said. "Like I said. Different portals for different people."
He thought she was joking. His animal theory didn't make any more sense, though, so he kept it to himself. He straightened up, sliding his hands into his pockets as he turned away from the building. "I'm gonna go. You want a ride?"
"I think I feel like walking," she said. "Thanks."
Dillon shook his head. "Call me if you need bail money."
He could hear the smile in her voice when she said, "Sure you don't want to come?"
He wasn't sure he knew the answer to that, so he settled for the obvious. "Tracking bug," he reminded her. "She'll see it as soon as it falls off the grid."
He thought if Summer was going to call him on it, she'd point out that he could just leave it here. It wouldn't do any harm, say, stuck to the light post. Instead she remarked, "Even Dr. K has to sleep sometime."
Dillon blinked. The thought had literally never occurred to him. "You think?"
She laughed like he'd made a joke. "You couldn't prove it by me," Summer said. "But we're not supposed to ask questions when the screens are off unless it's an emergency. And believe me, doom on he who disobeys."
No one had ever shared that rule with him. Although, like the "no posting things in the conference room" rule, there seemed to be plenty of things that he and Ziggy were just supposed to pick up. "Right," he said aloud. "I'll keep that in mind."
He had his hand on the driver's side door when she called his name.
"What did you mean," Summer asked, when he paused. "Earlier, about the air?"
He'd mentioned air five times today. "When?"
"Where did you think we were?" she pressed. "The first time we went through the portal, and I thought we were back in time? You said something about the air."
"That it was drier," Dillon said.
"No." He could hear her frowning. "That it was good. You said, where else is the air this good. And I said maybe we were back in time. Then we got distracted."
You got distracted, he wanted to say. But he had meant for her to be distracted at the time, and he wasn't thrilled that she'd remembered now. So he just stared down at the top of the car and wondered where Dr. K slept.
"Dillon." She was definitely onto him. "You thought the strange thing about us possibly being outside the dome was how good the air was. Not how many people there were."
He wasn't having this conversation, but he couldn't let it go. Couldn't just drive away. "Not everyone gives up just because they don't have a magical city to hide behind," he muttered, pulling open the door. He got in before she could begin, gunned the engine before he could hear her reply.
The city streets were quieter at night. He'd lost the mood for cruising, though, and he found himself following the ever-more familiar route back to the garage. He'd closed the big doors behind him when he left, knowing there wasn't anyone up to keep an eye out in his absence.
He'd assumed there wasn't, anyway. With Dr. K working and everyone else sleeping... except that Summer wasn't sleeping. And apparently, Dr. K might not be working. Where was she, then? She didn't have a room off the garage. He'd been in the training room late at night, too; she didn't sleep in there.
She couldn't sleep in the control room, could she?
Dillon wasn't big on sleeping himself, but he was pretty sure that no one as consistently thorough as Dr. K would take a half-assed approach to anything. She didn't make do. Making do was for survivors. Dr. K was a creator.
So, not the control room. Not the training room, not the garage, and not any of their rooms. She must sleep on the base. Therefore, she slept somewhere he hadn't seen. His first guess would have been the hydroponics loft--if he'd never met Dr. K. Unified biofield or not, she wasn't the outdoorsy type. If he figured she wasn't sentimental about windows, either, there were two options: auxiliary zord control, or the mystery space behind the back wall of the garage.
He left his car out front and strolled casually around the corner of the building. The inside back wall didn't meet the outside back wall, and it wasn't lost on him that the space would share a third wall with the control room. He'd assumed it was for storage... but it did have an exterior door. A second fire exit. One that couldn't be opened from the outside.
Dillon paused outside the blank door, the one with no handle or knob, and considered the probable latch mechanism based on a quick mental inventory of garage technology. There was a light high on the corner nearby, but he didn't need it. He pulled his ID off over his head, calculated approximate height, and slid it into the crack between door and frame.
He heard something click, felt it give. He was probably one of the few people in Corinth who could apply the appropriate force with their fingers, and he took advantage of it. Coaxing the door carefully out of place, he got his hand around it and eased it open.
Starlight greeted his eyes. He blinked. No vertigo, just a sudden sense of reorientation in the darkened space. Shadows stretched, oddly gentle as they shrouded the walls and high ceilings, but the floor was full of simulated stars. They were the only light in a room that easily accounted for all the missing space at the back of the garage.
It wasn't filled with equipment.
Dillon let the door close again just as carefully, holding the latch open with his ID until it was back in place to keep it from clicking. She didn't look like a light sleeper. Still. She didn't look like a lot of the things she'd turned out to be.
He walked carefully back to the front of the garage and sat in his car for a while, staring out at the night.
