Drum Up the Dawn Read online

  DRUM UP THE DAWN

  Galaxy Girl - Book One

  by Kate Christie

  Copyright 2020 by Kate Christie. Second Growth Books, Seattle, WA.

  All rights reserved. This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be resold or given away to other people. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual organizations, persons (living or dead), events, or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Acknowledgments

  I owe thanks to my early readers, Kris and Charley, whose willingness to read unedited drafts was so appreciated. Another thanks goes to Margaret Burris, who is always ready and willing to copyedit—even at the last moment. Thank you, team! Any errors in the following pages are solely mine.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  About the Author

  Patreon Supporters

  Chapter One

  If not for the nightmare, Kenzie Shepherd would have been nowhere near her favorite coffee shop the moment the tweaker decided to hold it up. Instead, she would have been at work on the fifth floor of Emerald City Media listening to Aaron Mulvaney, her department head, drone on about budget cuts and click-through rates, falling subscription numbers and how they were lucky to even be employed in an industry struggling to stay afloat in the new media reality. But sometime during the previous night, she’d awakened in her dark studio, pulse pounding in her ears, eyes seeking out the flames still flickering against her eyelids.

  It had taken long minutes to calm her mind, to convince herself that she was safe, that it had just been a dream. The same dream, in fact, that had haunted her for years, recurring at odd times without warning. For an indeterminate space of time, she’d struggled to get back to sleep, only to succumb at last to a slumber so deep she’d missed her alarm. She’d only awakened when the text alert she’d set for her sister went off: “Danger, Will Robinson. Danger.”

  The text hadn’t been an actual emergency (unless a funny dog video was an emergency). After rushing around her condo, Kenzie had tugged on her raincoat and run for the bus, automatically checking her speed so that she wouldn’t attract attention. Normally, she liked to walk the mile and a half to work even on rainy spring mornings like this one, but today she didn’t have the luxury. Caffeine, on the other hand, was not a luxury. It was a necessity. She’d barely hesitated before joining the short line at Cloudtastic Coffee. She was already ridiculously late; what difference could another five minutes make?

  At first, she wasn’t sure the kid in the Nike balaclava leaning over the front counter was actually trying to rob the coffee shop. Then she caught the eye of the barista at the cash register—Courtney, a pierced twenty-something Kenzie had gotten to know in the three years she’d worked in Belltown. The look on Courtney’s face wasn’t wild or fearful but rather resigned, as if she could fully believe that this was, in fact, happening.

  Kenzie didn’t stop to consider consequences. She didn’t hear her sister’s voice in her head, warning her to stay hidden. She didn’t think about xenophobes or terrorist splinter groups. She simply acted. Time seemed to slow, individual seconds drawing themselves out as if she had pressed a giant pause button hovering above the planet. The people around her froze, and even sound and light waves decelerated. In the space between moments that only she seemed able to navigate, she relieved the would-be thief of his mask and gun in one swift swoop. Before a single second could slip past, she was out of the coffee shop and down the street, ducking into a narrow alley a block and a half away. There, behind a rusting green dumpster, she removed the bullets from the handgun and used her inhuman strength to bend the barrel into a pretzel. Satisfied it was inoperable, she stuffed the gun in the bottom of her messenger bag, tossed the balaclava in the trash bin, and rejoined the foot traffic on the busy city sidewalk, ducking her head so that the brim on her raincoat’s hood blocked her face from view.

  Almost immediately a police car careened past on the wet street, siren wailing. That was fast. But then police cars weren’t exactly few and far between in downtown Seattle. Nor were video cameras, she realized, freezing momentarily. A pedestrian ducked past her, muttering under his breath, and she unfroze. The coffee shop had at least one security camera, which meant her actions had likely been captured on film. Even if they hadn’t, Courtney knew her name and where she worked. She had looked Kenzie in the eye just before she’d “blurred,” as Kenzie’s sister called it. Courtney would tell the police what she’d seen, wouldn’t she? Who she’d seen? They might not believe her, and the video might be too grainy in the dimly lit interior on a dark Seattle morning to show much. But the report could find its way to the eyes and ears of a Sentinel agent.

  The historic brick building that housed the Emerald City Media company loomed just ahead, and Kenzie’s pulse pounded erratically for the second time that morning as she followed a man in a business suit inside. What had she just done? A decade of hiding from Panopticon, possibly blown in an instant.

  The elevator to the ECM floor was faster than taking the stairs at a normal pace. Kenzie distracted herself from her dislike of small spaces by rehearsing the inevitable argument with her sister: She’d had to act; she couldn’t just stand there and let Courtney get threatened by a meth head with a gun. Besides, it was over. No way to go back and change the past now. If she’d had that particular superpower, a botched hold-up of a coffee shop wasn’t the scene she would choose to revisit.

  Aaron gave her a frown when she slid into an empty chair in the conference room, but he didn’t comment. He was from the Midwest and relied heavily on non-verbal communication, Kenzie had noticed in her two years of reporting to him.

  Her best friend, Matt Greene, leaned forward from two seats down to mouth at her, “Dude, you’re late!”

  “Dude, I know,” she responded in similar fashion.

  Her phone buzzed, and she checked it surreptitiously. Antonio Santos, her “other best friend,” as he had christened himself, had sent her a gif of a basketball player missing a basket. She watched it twice, but she had no idea what meaning she was supposed to derive from the image. Still, she glanced down the conference table to where Antonio was sitting surrounded by his “writer buds”—mostly sports journalists like him—and gave him the amused smile she hoped he was waiting for. Then she turned her gaze toward the PowerPoint projection at the front of the room that contained website user data related to the number of characters in email newsletter subject lines, headlines, and story snips.

  Sure enough, she’d arrived in time for yet another depressing meeting on the declining popularity of traditional news media.

  Her sister’s comment when she’d declared her major at the University of Washington half a decade earlier came back to her now, as it often did: Are you sure you want to join a sinking ship? But she hadn’t listened, and now here she was wondering daily if her job would exist in a week, month, year. At least she was multi-talented, with skills in writing, photography, and video production. The U-Dub journalism department encouraged their graduates to be versatile—wisely, in Kenzie’s opinion.

  While Aaron droned on, she held her phone under the edge of the notebook she was never without, scrolling through Twit
ter for any Seattle news and crime hashtags that might reference the coffee shop assault. But there was nothing—yet.

  “Kenzie,” Aaron said, his voice edged with something she couldn’t quite read, “I’d like to talk to you. Everyone else, get back to work. Thanks, team.”

  Antonio gave her a surreptitious thumbs-up on his way out, while Matt brushed past and murmured teasingly, “Oooh, someone’s in trouble.”

  “Zip it,” she muttered, elbowing him perhaps a tad too hard, judging from his sharp intake of breath. Whoops.

  The edge in her boss’s voice, she soon learned, was eagerness, something she didn’t often associate with him. Irritation and general all-around curmudgeonry, yes. Fangirl levels of agitation? Not so much.

  “Are you still working on the trade show write-up?” he asked, hand smoothing back one of the few patches of buzzed hair that still remained on his mostly bald head.

  “Yes. I should have it in time for the afternoon deadline,” she said, though it would take a Herculean effort to complete the piece. She was fully capable of such effort, if a tad unwilling, so it wasn’t a genuine falsehood, was it?

  “Scrap it for now. I have another assignment for you,” he said, and waved her along with him as he left the conference room. “You’re familiar with Ava Westbrook?”

  Kenzie blinked as she accompanied him through the newsroom to his office with its rectangular window that looked out over Belltown, Elliott Bay gray and gloomy in the distance. Of course she knew who Ava Westbrook was. As the daughter of General Alexander Westbrook, founder of Panopticon—the US government’s alien identification and regulation bureau—Ava was definitely on Kenzie’s radar. As an innovative engineer who had recently moved to Seattle to take over as chief operations officer at her family’s company, Hyperion Tech, she was doubly of interest.

  “Not, like, personally,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean personally.” Aaron’s voice was impatient as he slid into his chair and typed in the password to his sleek desktop computer. “She’s basically been a recluse since her brother’s trial, but today that changes. Todd Warren is going to interview her at her office this afternoon, and I want you along to take photographs. It’s just the kind of exclusive we need to lift our numbers.”

  Kenzie’s eyes narrowed slightly. Todd Warren was a veteran war reporter who didn’t normally cover the tech industry. That was Kenzie’s beat, along with Matt and a handful of other staff. Then again, the arrest and imprisonment of Ava Westbrook’s older brother, Nicholas, the previous year wasn’t traditional tech news, either, and yet, here they were.

  “Of course,” she said neutrally, already planning her phone call to her sister.

  “I trust you can get up to speed on the Westbrooks on your own?” Aaron asked, his eyes fixed on one of his two massive screens.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Good. Then get to it.”

  She got to it, ignoring Matt’s questioning look as she made a beeline through the newsroom, headed for the women’s restroom with her phone in the pocket of her khakis. There were two women already there, and she had to smile politely through a conversation about morning beverages before, at last, she was alone. This room was the only one on her floor that she could guarantee was free of surveillance equipment. She leaned against the door to the hall, punched a shortcut key on her phone, and waited for her sister to pick up.

  “Kenzie? Are you okay?” Sloane sounded concerned. But then, she often sounded concerned. It was understandable, given the current cultural climate around alien-human relations. While a decent number of people knew that Kenzie had been adopted by the Shepherd-Hendersons when she was twelve, only a handful were aware that she hadn’t been born on Earth.

  “I’m fine,” she assured her sister, and then paused. Should she tell her about the coffee shop? But no, as long as social media stayed quiet, she should be fine. Ava Westbrook, on the other hand, was a more pressing concern.

  “You can’t go there,” Sloane declared before Kenzie had even finished describing her assignment. “That’d be like walking into the lion’s den willingly.”

  Through her phone’s speaker, Kenzie could hear the click of shoes against concrete and pictured her big sister pacing the central floor of Seattle’s Panopticon office, the blue, red, and black circular seal painted over much of its surface. At the top of the circle were the words, “PANOPTICON: AN EYE ON HUMANITY” while the bottom of the circle read, “United States of America.” At the center was an image of a tower with a spotlight that reminded Kenzie of a lighthouse. Matt said it looked more like “some creepy-ass Sauron tower shit” out of Lord of the Rings. To be honest, he had a point.

  “There’s no evidence linking Ava Westbrook to Sentinel,” Kenzie argued, keeping an ear out for approaching footsteps. “Unless you have information I don’t know about?”

  This was a sore point between them. Her sister often withheld information on the basis of the oath of confidentiality she had sworn the day she joined Panopticon. Which was fair, but still.

  “Oh, little sister, there is so much you don’t know about,” Sloane predictably replied. “But no, there’s nothing to connect Ava Westbrook to Sentinel. Other than the fact HER FATHER FUNDED IT AND HER BROTHER RAN IT.”

  If she’d been human, Kenzie would have winced at her sister’s elevated tone. As it was, she merely rolled her eyes. “Obviously. That’s why I called you.”

  “So we’re agreed, then? You’re not going on this little interview?”

  Kenzie took a calming breath, reminding herself that her sister meant well with her bullying tactics. “Except I am.”

  “But—”

  “Sloane. I do not tell you how to do your job, do I?”

  “That’s because I am a trained government agent, while you are…”

  “Invulnerable? Is that the word you’re looking for?”

  Sloane sputtered, and Kenzie momentarily felt bad for lording her alien advantages (as their parents had delicately referred to the powers exhibited by natives of Zattalia, her home planet) over her sister. But sometimes such gloating was necessary.

  “Fine,” her sister said grouchily. “But I want to have eyes and ears on that office, got it?”

  “Maybe. If it’s convenient. Otherwise, I’ll text you when I’m done.”

  “Kenzie Min Zat Shepherd—” her sister started.

  “Gotta go,” Kenzie interrupted cheerily. “Love you, sis. Bye-ee!”

  As an unregistered alien, it was useful having a sister high up in the local Panopticon office, but knowing when to cut and run, as the idiom went, was also a good thing.

  Back at her desk, Kenzie pulled up Nexis and typed in “Nicholas Westbrook.” As the results poured in—oh my god, she thought, eyes wide as she stared at the sheer number of relevant headlines—she noticed Matt waving at her from above the top of her monitor. Their desks were separated only by a low cubicle wall, a situation that sometimes reduced her work efficiency. But they had spent countless hours studying together in the Gothic reading room at U-Dub’s library—eerily reminiscent, they’d agreed, of the Great Hall at Hogwarts—and they’d both managed to graduate with honors. When it mattered, they worked well together.

  “What’s up, bub?” she asked, barely glancing up from her screen. She clicked on a link to a news story near the top of the results: “Marine Captain Nicholas Westbrook indicted on charges of alien intimidation, harassment, kidnapping, and murder.” Sounded about right.

  “So what did Vaney say?” Matt asked, invoking their private nickname for the boss.

  “Warren and I are interviewing Ava Westbrook this afternoon.”

  Matt actually—and unsurprisingly to everyone who worked near him—squealed. He could be as excitable as Kenzie, which was probably what had drawn them together their first year of college. “You are not!”

  “No, really, I am.”

  “Are you going to
ask her about Sentinel?”

  Kenzie glanced around quickly, but no one nearby appeared to be listening. “Of course not. And lower your voice.”

  “Sorry.” At least he had the grace to look abashed. He’d known about her other worldly identity for almost as long as they’d been friends, and he wasn’t always the best at being inconspicuous, a fact that drove her sister crazy. “But seriously, what a sweet assignment. I mean, I know she’s related to alien-hating warmongers, but Ava Westbrook is hot and nerdy.”

  Definitely not Kenzie’s favorite type of woman. Except she was—warmongering family members aside, of course. Kenzie had never shared the tiny fact of her bisexuality with Matt, though. Actually, she’d never shared it with anyone, not even her sister. She’d always figured it would come up if and when there was a reason—like a girlfriend or at least an impending date. So far, neither situation had arisen.

  She cleared her throat pointedly. “I have to do a bunch of research, okay?”

  “Oh, okay. I see you. Have fun with your ‘research,’” he said.

  She ignored his air quotes to focus on her screen again. Matt was right about one thing—the Westbrooks were literal warmongers. The General, the architect behind Panopticon, had created the US government agency to keep an eye not on humanity, as its motto claimed, but squarely on non-humans. Rumor had it the original name was supposed to be Bureau of Alien Affairs, but the acronym didn’t work so an alternative had been chosen. General Westbrook had died a number of years earlier in a grisly murder-suicide carried out by a distraught alien who’d claimed Panopticon killed his family, an allegation that had never been adequately confirmed or denied, in Kenzie’s opinion.