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"A pool?" Brianna's jaw dropped. Boy, was she jealous. The lake was okay. As long as you didn't imagine what was in that green, murky water everything was just dandy, and she liked swimming too much to let such a thing as an imagination stop her. "We should!" Now why had they never gone to the sea before? Oh, that's right. Quinton hated wat-

A sudden thought struck her. "Mariel, you can't be a cat!" she exclaimed. "Cats hate water! Unless - what if you're a swimming cat?"

It made perfect sense. Mariel's kind of catlike ears, her tail, her fur, her love of water - all the signs pointed towards "swimming cat". Now they just had to go to the beach. She'd bet anything that you could find swimming cats there, sunning themselves on the sand.

"If you had pillows on your feet they'd only get soggy." Brianna agreed sagely. Her child's imagination was already running with the idea - or, more accurately, it had hijacked a truck and was roaring down the highway with it. Swimming cats! "They'd probably be all kinds of colors. I seen pictures! There'd be black ones and white ones and spotted ones and stripey ones...and brown ones, like you."

The orca girl got to her feet, still swaying a bit from the fall, but was quickly balanced out by her tail. Quinton had left both the files and his wallet on one of the chairs. She rummaged through the latter, tossing out credit cards, an outdated driver's license, coupons, before coming across what she was looking for.

It was a family photo. Brianna held it out for Mariel's inspection. Not all of her guardian's family was tabby. She plunked a finger on a cousin, who was as plain brown as Mariel. "See? Mariel, we just gotta go to the beach. You could meet other swimming cats!" And of course they could run around in the sand and play in the water and sit under a stripey beach umbrella. There were many benefits to this plan.

Mariel could be right - maybe some of the cats in the picture were swimming cats too! Brianna held out the photo at arm's length and squinted down at it. It was too bad pictures didn't move. Then she could be like, "Show me your feet!" and then they would. At the moment she found it impossible to tell.

She blew a strand of hair out of her face and tossed the picture over one shoulder. "You could tell your mommy right now. She's gotta be almost done, right?" At Mariel's question, she clapped her hands together and gave the other girl a grin. "He's scareda water, but Uncle Oscar isn't! Don't worry, we'll both get there. It's gonna be great!"

How big were swimming cats, anyways? Sandcastle sized? Maybe they'd get to the beach and find all the little cats needed a house, and then they'd have no choice but to stay aaall day making a HUGE sandcastle. Uh oh, but what if they were actually really big? Bree's eyes glazed over briefly at the thought of a cat the size of an orca. Talk about scary.

"How big d'you think they are?" she decided to ask. Maybe Mariel knew somewhere in the deep recesses of her mind.

Brianna chewed on her bottom lip, secretly worried about the prospect of several more Mariels. What if they were bigger than her? And nasty, not shy and quiet like Mariel?

But then her sense of bravado kicked in to save the day. If they were, then she'd just kick them in their behinds! Or get Uncle Oscar to do it. But if they didn't convince Luna, then they would never know just how big or nasty the fishing cats were. First things first. "Okay, c'mon!" She ran over to the counter, the thudding of her clunky pink shoes bouncing off the walls in the normally quiet reception room.

Were they speaking in code, or something? Brianna couldn't quite remember where she'd learned about spies from, but it was probably on Uncle Oscar's old black-and-white television, which seemed to be stuck permanently on the Old and Boring Channel. She did remember that spies used secret codes to talk to each other so nobody knew what they were saying. This did not sit well with her at all.

Brianna was silent as Mariel introduced her to Luna, and only gave a little smile to show she'd heard at all. She was too busy staring at Luna. She didn't look much like a spy. They were supposed to wear suits.

Well, she'd get to the bottom of this. "Mariel," she whispered urgently to her new friend, "why're you talkin like that? Why's she talkin like that? It's weird!"

Meanwhile, Quinton was hanging over a sink in the men's bathroom, feeling distinctly ill and looking distinctly pale under the fur. He'd meant to return ASAP, really he had...until the headache showed up.

'I'll go out in a minute.' he thought, forehead pressed against the blessedly cool porcelain. 'Just a minute.' The very thought of the drive home was making him nauseous.

Mariel was speaking English now, but for all the sense she made she could have been saying it in Spanish. Brianna's forehead wrinkled in puzzlement. Her upbringing was woefully incomplete, for all Quinton's hobnobbing with the revolutionary world, and the concept of different languages was a baffling one. "So she's sayin normal stuff...but with different words?" The big question was Why?. Maybe it was like spies - so people couldn't understand what you were saying, or something.

For a moment Bree was very much in awe of Mariel and her mommy. Imagine having to learn two ways of speaking, instead of one! She'd have to ask someone about this later; she didn't want to look too stupid in front of Mariel.

Quinton would never tell Luna this (she was very imposing!), but it wouldn't bother him too much if the lab techs decided to take Brianna back. He had no worries about the exact nature of D-Corp, unlike Luna, since the truth - genetic experiments involving animals, children and dragons - was shifty enough.

Alas, society frowned upon leaving children in public waiting rooms. He splashed one last handful of cold water on his aching head and started towards the door, staggering only slightly.

The secret didn't seem like a big one to her, but it sounded important to Mariel, so Brianna nodded seriously and offered Mariel her pinky finger. "Promise." The pinky promise was a most sacred vow, after all. If you broke it (said Quinton's sister), your hand would fall off.

Uh oh. Now she'd done it! Brianna could hardly stand to learn her ABCs, let alone a whole 'nother language. Then again, learning stuff with Mariel and her mom had to be way more fun than doing it with Quinton. Besides, it would be so cool if they had their own secret code. Bree bounced up and down on her toes, starting to get excited about the idea too. "Okay! Let's do it! When can we start?" Her bouncing and babbling inevitably ended with a mouthful of hair - she impatiently brushed her bangs back, but the interruption had slowed her down a little. "What's a 'amiga'? You said that before." She finally settled on a simple question, not aiming it at one of them in particular.

Quinton warily poked his head around the door, gritting his teeth against a hiss of pain. Why did they make it so damn bright in here? He was relieved to see that his charge hadn't disappeared - again, society frowned when such things happened - and was in fact still talking to the other little girl, looking much more animated than usual. Oh, gracious. He hoped she wasn't bugging that fearsome foreign woman...

Just in case, he stealthily made his way to an empty seat, one that was shaded by a potted plant. Blessed darkness.

It wasn't that he meant to be a bad parent, he just hadn't asked for it. The blackmail certaintly didn't sweeten the situation any. And why him? Couldn't they find someone, anyone else? Someone who actually wanted to take care of a kid? What a mess.