Chapter Text
It finally felt like fall outside.
Callie had just a light jacket on, and that was still almost more than she needed, with the exercise of carrying bags home from the grocery store. They were in that weird time of year when it was comfortably warm during the day, and so cold that it caught them by surprise at night, so Callie had compromised. The sun could finish sliding down and the leaves could keep chattering in the gutters, and she would still be plenty warm.
She just wished it would hurry up now.
"Callie, wait up!" Sam scampered along behind her as they crossed the old viaduct bridge. "I didn't know it was a race."
"I like feeling the breeze," Callie said. "It smells good. You can tell it's going to get cold when it gets dark now."
"I guess." Sam's tail flicked. She was still dressed for summer, technically, in shorts and a sleeveless shirt. "That's why you brought the jacket?"
"Well, that and it looks good."
Sam was probably right that she didn't need it yet, but Callie wouldn't have traded places with her. It wasn't right, to not want a jacket this late in the year. It was as much a part of fall as thicker fur.
"What were you gawking at back there?"
"The valley." Sam tried to point with a bag-laden paw down to the wooded spread below them. "We've never gone down there."
Callie had never really looked at it, but then there wasn't much to see. It was old industrial park, busy getting reclaimed by the vines and moss that always sprung up this close to Rainforest.
"It's just a bunch of run-down buildings," she said. "Not much of a change of scenery."
"But we haven't gone for a hike in ages." Sam pouted. "Or even a walk. If you want to get out in the cold maybe we could do that."
"It's going to be late by then," Callie said. "Besides, we have company tonight."
"Where's your sense of adventure? You sound like Jules."
"Ouch." That made Callie smile. Sam was irrepressible. And she was right: They were stuck in a bit of a rut.
She wanted to blame that on the season, too. They went to work and came home from work, because most of the time it was still too warm to spend much time outside in the sorts of places they were comfortable in. Public pools were a little too public. They hadn't taken the time to learn about the forests to the west.
Tundratown would be refreshing, but it was a whole extra commute, and the only part of town they knew well was close to the old spa. Callie wasn't going to suggest going back there.
So they made do here, even if it meant waiting for the weather to turn. Callie had always preferred to call the neighborhood West Savanna Central, because it sounded better than East Happytown. And it was quiet enough, as long as you kept your ears down and your snout to yourself. Their grocery route was a known detour, so it was okay.
"We could go down to the med campus at the university," Sam floated. "It's cold enough that they have the harvest hearth all decked out, remember?"
"We're there every day, though."
"Yeah, for work. Going there to relax is different than just walking by."
"True."
Sam held the front door to their building for her and brightened. "I'll ask Jules about it, then."
They made it up the stairs without dropping anything out of their bags. Callie juggled them to get her key in the door.
Home was plenty warm and smelled amazing, and it wasn't because of the spa candles they tended to borrow. Dinner had been simmering in the crock pot since this morning - mushroom broth with all kinds of vegetables and spices, and now they had barley to add to it, too.
Jules was still cleaning the kitchen. She'd vacuumed and wiped everything down; now she was standing on tiptoe on the footstool and seemed to be organizing their pantry. There was a pile of boxes and jars on the counter.
She pointed her snout at them from across the room as they came in, and relaxed when she saw who it was.
"There you are. Did you get everything?"
"Think so." Callie put her bags down so Jules could pounce on them and turned to lock the door.
"Barley, carrots, potatoes..." Jules sorted through the bag. "Okay. Did you get my eggs?"
"No eggs in the soup!" Sam reminded her as she went by with a double armload of groceries. "It has to be for everyone."
"I'm not talking about the soup," she said, and scowled. "Would Judy even know, though? Once you cook it it might as well be tofu."
"That's mean."
"And that's why I'm not putting any in the soup, don't worry," Jules said. She plucked an egg out of the top carton and poked through the shell with an expert claw. "I left the finishing touches for you anyway. Make it the way you like it; I'm sure they'll love that."
Sam busied herself with the crock pot. When she took the lid off, a cloud of fragrant steam made Callie's mouth water. No, it wouldn't have eggs. But it was going to be delicious all the same.
She helped put everything back in the pantry, and nudged Jules where she was leaning on the counter and watching.
"Thanks for getting the place cleaned up."
Jules licked at her treat. "I left the laundry I knew was yours on the bed."
Callie wandered over. The bed was made up, for once, and Jules had put at least one of the blankets on. They probably weren't going to need it yet, but for now she left it alone and sorted through the pile of clean clothes. Most of it was hers, but the leg warmers were Sam's, and she wasn't quite sure who the shirt with the green buttons belonged to, because they all had one like that.
She put it in the communal drawer and paced around the edge of the apartment on her way back to the kitchen, to check that everything was tidied. Having company on the way for dinner was a good thing, she decided. It got them to sit down and clean up.
Sam was ignoring that Nick and Judy would be here tonight, though, and peppering Jules with her half-formed plan to go somewhere this weekend.
"-But Callie didn't want to. So we figured we could go to the harvest hearth down at the university for drinks."
"Callie's right, getting lost down in the old industrial district sounds like the opposite of fun," Jules said. She rolled her eyes, when Sam stuck her tongue out and dumped a bag of frozen green beans in the pot. "But I like the hearth. We could get tea."
"You're getting ahead of tonight," Callie reminded them. "We cleaned up, the soup will be ready-" she waited for Sam's confirming nod. "Anything else? Do we have drinks?"
"Judy said she was bringing something," Jules said.
"Right." She hoped Nick had passed on their preferences. None of them were big fans of alcohol these days.
"And put the eggs away before she gets here," Sam said. Those preferences went the other way, too.
"Okay, okay. Eggs away." Jules pulled the fridge open. "Go get dressed."
---
Judy had only been here a couple of times, and never for anything as involved as a sit-down meal. Callie had worried it would be awkward from the start, with her being the only prey species.
But she bounced through the door and up into Sam's welcome hug without missing a beat, and her enthusiasm was making all of them loosen up and crack grins already.
Nick got the door behind her, and he was clearly tired. It wasn't the worst Callie had ever seen him, but he and Judy definitely got different things out of the changing season. He looked fuzzy and comfortable, like he might curl up and sleep at any time.
"Hi, Nick." She took his coat with a knowing look. "Long day?"
"We patrolled on the Sahara side," he said. He had a big thermos in his paws - enough to share. "I'm glad the sun's finally down."
"Oh, no."
"It's not alcoholic." Judy pressed a bottle of her own into Sam's paws. "We have work tomorrow, too, so we thought we'd play it safe."
Good old Nick. Callie caught his wink as she turned to put his coat on the rack.
"Hi, Judy," Jules laughed when it was her turn. "Are you guys hungry?"
"Famished! And it smells amazing."
Sam was already pulling the others ahead to show off her soup. It gave Callie time to hug Nick hello.
"Thanks for the intervention," she murmured.
"I had almost nothing to do with it." He held his free paw away from his chest. "Judy knows a lot about the old days herself now." He lingered, to watch her slide the deadbolts. "You guys doing okay?"
"Never better." She dipped her snout at him again, to make sure he knew she was telling the truth. "We're going a bit stir crazy with the weather, just like you, but that's the worst of it. Promise."
Three arctic foxes could share a mid-scale apartment without things ever getting cramped, and even with company it was just perfectly cozy. They had exactly enough room at the table at the end of the kitchen that served as their dining room - and exactly enough mismatched chairs - to fit five. Callie helped Sam with the salad plates and the crispy bread, and they clustered around for a first course and caught each other up on their lives.
Nick and Judy always had fascinating stories. If they weren't busting up fraud rings they were chasing down street racers, or just helping kits get their kites out of trees. Callie didn't think a trio of massage therapists did the same interesting work - certainly not after they'd left the bathhouses of Tundratown behind. But Nick was genuinely happy to see them happy, and Judy sat back with her glass and the same wide-eyed enthusiasm she got for just about anything that was new to her. The university's physical therapy teaching program seemed to qualify.
When it came time for the main course Judy proclaimed the soup an unmitigated success, which pleased Sam to no end and made Jules laugh.
"Don't give her too much credit. Step two to crock pot soup, after put everything in the pot, is ignore it for a while."
"Maybe I'm just really good at putting things in pots." Sam looked to be considering poking her with her spoon. "I'm sorry the veggies aren't fresh, Judy."
"Don't be, Sam." Judy shook her head. "I want your recipe. This would be perfect for those nights when we're stuck late at work, ask Nick."
The foxes turned their heads as one. Nick flattened his ears.
"It's awful," he said. "Never volunteer to collate traffic reports for all of Otterdam at once."
Jules screwed up her muzzle. "Oh, no."
"The sooner it gets done," Judy reminded him, "The sooner we can go on harvest patrol." She slurped with gusto. "This is saving us time."
"True."
When they'd eaten, Callie and Jules stacked the dinner dishes in the sink and they broke out the one complete deck of cards they could find.
The thermos, as it turned out, was full of sweet cider, a family recipe that Judy had spiced with ginger from her and Nick's garden. It was delicious, and seemed to heat them up all the better now that the night wind was rattling the bay windows. Even Jules, who drank nothing but Earl Grey, looked like she might sample it.
Talk turned to gossip about co-workers and massage clients, to transit repairs that were screwing up commutes, to plans for the holiday.
"We'll be in this part of town tomorrow for rotation, too," Nick said. "Right when it gets cold."
"Oh, yeah," Judy said. She settled deeper in her chair. "We drew Grass route this year."
"Wait a minute," Sam said. She frowned over her cards. "Grass route? The dead end? That's just three blocks from here. You could come say hello."
"Rhinowicz said it was a hotspot last year, and the year before." Judy rubbed her nose. "We got a lot of calls. But I bet we could make some time at the end."
"Yeah, I think we walk past there a couple times a week when we get groceries." Callie tapped her claws against the laminate of her cards. She could see the sidewalks they'd taken that evening in her mind's eye. "You're talking about the old road under the viaduct?"
"That's the place." Nick said. He had a solemn look for his partner. "They used to make us check it out when we ran our midnight shifts during orientation. Something about breaking in the rookies."
"Wait, why?" Sam was catching on, too. Callie caught the excited flick to her ears. She remembered the place, too. "It's not- dangerous, is it?"
"Now? No, not these days," Judy said.
Nick was nodding slowly. "At the end of Grass Route, there's a factory."
"It's an old steel mill that got shut down after a bad accident," Judy said. "Decades ago, at least."
All this time, they never would have guessed that was why the place was shuttered. Callie couldn't help but feel a trickle of unease.
Their cards were all but forgotten for the moment. Sam was paying rapt attention now, too, and even Jules had put her mug down so she could listen up. She tilted her head. "Did mammals die?"
"Yes." Judy grimaced. "There was a problem with the big conveyor."
"Remember, this was years ago. But they say the big chains caught on one of the buckets they keep the molten metal in and dragged it all the way down the line, right over the mammals working there," Nick said. He scratched under his shirtcollar. "And then it fell through into the basement for good measure."
"There were some mice working in the rafters, but-" Judy swallowed. "They were so small that they couldn't get to the nearest emergency stop in time. All they could do was watch."
Nick looked to Judy for confirmation. "If you believe the stories, that's the reason all the heavy machinery the city runs has so many cutoff switches now: So if a trolley gets loose, or if one of the climate wall airlocks breaks, anyone can find a button to stop it, no matter how small they are."
Sam curled her tail around her legs, where she'd drawn them up on the chair. "How do you know all this?"
"They tell you about it at the Academy, so you learn to take safety requirements seriously," Judy said. "And ZPD gets sent down there a lot, especially at Harvest. It's not just a practical joke."
"Clawhauser reckons the place is haunted," Nick said.
"He does not."
"He does too!" Nick sat forward to put his cards down and stacked his arms on either side of his steaming mug. "He said so himself. And he might be onto something. Every call we've ever chased through there has come up empty. Every single one."
"But they keep coming in," Judy said. "So ZPD had the surveillance department stake it out one night a few years ago, just to be sure. They set up cameras and everything." She frowned, as if remembering something. "But the tapes were blank."
"Of course, the stake team still swore up and down they heard stuff the wind shouldn't be able to do." Nick eyed Sam's hanging on to every word. "And every vagrant and lost tourist we pull out of there still talks about being watched from up high. Like someone wants them to stay away."
Next to her, Callie saw Jules' wary expression go wry instead as she rolled her eyes.
Nick lowered his muzzle closer to the table. He was fighting a smile of his own. "Did I oversell it?"
"Maybe a little," Callie said, right as Jules shook her head yes and Sam shook her head no. "That's a good ghost story, though. Much more inventive than a haunted jail or something."
"You did not," Sam said. You wouldn't just make that up."
"And I didn't," Nick said. "I don't know if you want to take the ramblings of some of the mammals we help out at face value, but I'm just telling you what they told us." His smile was showing now, but Callie saw how he had his tail wrapped close, too. "Every word of that is true."