Grade nine.  Was she ever really that young?  That naïve?  You bet.  His name had been Doug.  Kensvale?  Kensdale?  Shameful she didn’t remember for sure, considering.  He’d been a year her senior.  Soccer player, swimmer.  She went for the type.  Still did.  They’d cozied up after Longnight that year, but she didn’t give herself away just like that.  He romanced her, showed her off to his friends.  She had those schoolgirl dreams of what their children would look like.  Adding his name to hers.  Foolishness like that.  One night in April she realized she was ready.  One night in May, her parents were out.  Only the brat asleep upstairs.  He never woke up, in spite of the noisy little celebration of life going on downstairs.  Doug had been good.  Really good.  It surprised her, now, at twenty-seven, that two inexperienced kids could do it so well, but it still gave her a little glow thinking about it.

Then Monday came, and by second period she was hearing the jokes.  The lunch room greeted her with “Dougy took a Chance!” that day.  Take a Chance, took a Chance, taking Chances.  She was sick of the joke the first time she heard it, and it went on for days.

Needless to say, it was the last “Chance” Doug ever got.

She smirked to herself at her desk, arms folded, spacing out for a minute.  She wasn’t so much disappointed that everyone knew they’d had sex – that was what kept the world going, after all; people did it everyday – as much as she was disappointed that he’d told.  So casually, so coolly, just to score points and get ahead with the guys.

How ironic, she mused, that she had wound up doing just that for a living.

Phones rung and co-workers clacked on keys.  On the walls hung black and white photos of a time when the magazine had been a tabloid, printed out of one dingy room by two gay lupines who loved to gossip.  It bore the same name from the start that it did to this day: Scuffers – slang for reporters, a reference to their “scuffed” feet as they dashed around, chasing down stories.  Before the war, before the Freelands itself, it had been a half-way respectable term.  After it while, though, thanks to movies, noir novels, and television, it had simply come to mean a tabloid gossip scribbler.  Now the term was beginning at last to enjoy a renaissance, due in part to the rise of the magazine itself.  Thanks to the fact that, in amongst the gossip and innuendo, the magazine had broken the news on several big stories, Scuffers now enjoyed a grudging half-respect from the establishment.  Now it was verging on cool to be a “scuffer” – a no-holds-barred reporter who went after the real story, no matter how dirty it got.

And Chance was a “Scuffer” – with a capital “S”.  And not just because she worked for a magazine with that name.

Her phone rang.

“Good afternoon, Scu—”

“Jackson, it’s me.”  It was the features editor.  Her editor.

“Wal,” she said.  “What’s up?”

“How close are you to filing Bruinstein’s obit?”

She leaned back, feet up on her desk.  She shot her toeclaws, examining them.  The paint needed touching up.  “Oh, I dunno.  An hour, say.  Why?”

“Finish it up, and meet me in my office.  I have a Longnight present for you.”

“Oh, yeah?” she smirked.  “Do I have to give you a present?”  Wally Sandruff had joked too often about getting in her pants for him to be entirely joking.  But he would never have used the job to get that.  That’s what gave him half a chance, if the right moment came.  Not that the plump little bunny needed to know that.

Wally caught the double-entendre and she could hear the smirk on his face through the phone.  “We’ll discuss it over breakfast.”

“Touche!”

“Just finish up what you’re doing and come knocking, okay?  And I guarantee, I’ll get at least a kiss out of you.”

“Right.”

“Bye.”  He hung up.

Now she was distracted.  It was hard to write about the death of a semi-famous orchestra conductor, no matter how suspicious, wondering what Sandruff had on his desk for her.  Not that Bruinstein’s death was uninteresting.  Well, if you read about it in the regular papers, it certainly was…  Death by misadventure, they said.  An overdose of his heart medicine.  Chance had learned, however, that the only thing that he’d overdosed on to strain his heart was one of his cellists, in his dressing room backstage.  It wasn’t uncommon knowledge, but most of the papers wanted to spare Mrs. Bruinstein the scandal.  Scuffers, of course, wasn’t most papers.

Winters in Truenorth were long and hard in general, but Steelborough seemed to have a particularly deep, dark, bad month right smack in the middle of the season.  Longnight was just that, in spades.  She never missed Undernia quite as much as she did at this time of year.  Looking out of the office into the harbour far below and south at Curtisburg and Gallorgate was a picture of the doom of the world by ice.  Chance wondered what the assignment would be, and if it would take her away from this long enough for spring to begin its northward sojourn.

Chance filed Bruinstein’s obituary, off-colour remarks and all, and got to her feet.  Little jolts of static electricity built up as she padded across the carpet; she could feel her fur lifting.  She knocked on Sandruff’s door, and brushed the back of her hand against the metal doorknob, feeling the shock pass from her through the relatively dull nerves there.  Life in Truenorth had many lessons, great and small.

“Yeah, come on in,” Wally called, and Chance did.  She shut the door and took a seat without being beckoned to.

Wally was staring out his corner-office windows at the harbour; the navy base and its ships and dry-docks smoking like an unborn volcano from the ground.  “Jackson, what’s the one thing you would do, if you could – right now?” he asked her, still gazing out the window.

Chance made a face at him, unseen.  Boy, there were a lot of answers to that one.  She regarded him.  A bit rumpled.  Early middle age setting in.  Lost chances and realizations that youth was gone and this was about as good as it was going to get; an apogee way shorter than he’d hoped for.  In that, he was the same as most people his age, she thought.  In fifteen years, she’d be thinking the same thoughts, probably.  Maybe sooner.  Wally was mostly lapine, a bit of lupine brushed in for colour.  His hairline was receding; the mane peeling back to reveal the short, stiff pelt hairs beneath.  At one point, he had been a scuffer himself, but had graduated, or perhaps been sentenced, to the post of features editor, where he had slowed down, broadened out, and become separated from a wife who had grown bored and found other interests.  Like Chance, Wally was a southern type – although not quite so southern.  He was from the Midlands – Savanarado, specifically, and he wore the accent with pride.  And again like her, the winters were hard on him, and tended to get him down.  He stared out his window almost mournfully, as if begging one of those seabound navy destroyers to stop and sail him south to his boyhood days.

What would I most like to do? she asked herself.  Marry rich?  Eat a nice steak?  Get nicely lit for Longnight and wake up with someone I don’t know?  Go home and soak with a good book?  But she knew he was speaking in regard to the assignment, whatever it was.  “I don’t know, Wal,” she said.  “What would I most like to do?”

“I would have thought, spend Longnight someplace warm, where there’s no snow to ball up between your toes,” Wally said, turning from the window to look at her.  In the pale light, he looked positively grey.

Chance looked up at the ceiling, imagining, and said, “Yeah, that’s high on the list, alright.”

“Well, good.  Merry Longnight, Happy New Year.”  He pushed a folder across his desk at her.  Chance picked it up, but didn’t look at it.  She wanted to hear this.

“It’s a little before your time,” Wally started, “but do you remember a pro boxer named Heavyweight Willie?”

“Sure I remember him.  My dad always wanted him to get killed.”

“People either loved him or hated him,” Wally nodded.  “I guess the ones who hated him got their wish.  He was up for the Freelands title twice, and finally made it.  Tried for the world championship three times, but… always a bridesmaid.”

Chance pulled a pawful of glossies out of the folder.  Heavyweight Willie Veldttrekker in his early days; alive, dashing, a powerful blend of leonine and ursine characteristics.  Powerful, but relatively slow, to punch, and to duck.  He took more than his share of abuse and the later photos eloquently demonstrated that.  “Not much of a bridesmaid,” Chance opined, dryly.

“No.  After things folded up under him he made a little money shilling.  But after a couple of years, no one wanted to know him.  Sports is like that.  It’s a lot harder after the game than during.”  Wally sighed.  Chance could tell this was hard on him.  He was getting older, and seeing other people fade wasn’t fun anymore.

“So what about him?” Chance asked, and began to paw through the folder.

Now Wally came to life.  He leaned forward, fingers steepled.  “Heavyweight Willie is currently touring Ardensa.  His leonine heritage makes him a crowd pleaser with the natives.  Local warlords like to have him breeze through, saying nice things about the state of things, about pan-Ardensanism – that kind of stuff.  We’re talking tribal level here.  Practically autonomous from national governments.  They pay well for the platitudes.”

“And?”

“We have it from a fairly reliable source that Willie’s just the front for a semi-annual haul of top hat into the Freelands.”

“Through one of the Ardensan states?”

“No, ironically.  A slow boat to the Happenstance Islands.  About a billion coves where smugglers can meet up, divide the loot, and pump it into the national bloodstream through every orifice.”

Chance whistled.  Top hat was pretty new, at least to most Freelanders.  Named for the shape of the blossom, it was highly addictive and highly illegal, and a little went a long way.  A bit more put you in your grave, which was part of the problem.  People were spending a fortune on the stuff, and half of them were overdosing the second or third time out.  “Okay, who’s my contact?”

“Let’s just say he’ll find you.”

Chance frowned at Wally.  It wasn’t like him to play games.  “Where?”

“Just across from a town called Fairport in the west end of the archipelago, there’s a neat little resort called WaterWings.  It’s mid-range.  Not a dump, and not a palace.  We’ve booked you there for at least two months, to start.”

“Two months?”

“Willie’s ‘tour’ ends the minute they’ve got the stuff together.  It’s very ad hoc.  Could be tomorrow, could be in March.  No one knows.  No one.  But most likely, within the month.”

“A mid-range resort will be full of middle aged, middle class couples.  Don’t you think I might stand out?”

“A mid-range resort is also where singles go to hook up with other singles.  And, let’s face it, so do a lot of couples.  It’s the tropics.”  Wally smiled a lascivious little smile; Chance just knew his balls were tingling at the thought.

“I’m surprised you’re not coming with me,” she muttered, only half joking.

“Don’t think I wouldn’t if I could,” he chuckled, and then, slightly more seriously, “…and if you let me.”

There was a brief silence where neither of them said anything, and without any awkwardness at all, Wally said, “Food and lodging are taken care of.  You have a two thousand dollar expense account.”

Chance’s jaw dropped.  “Two thousand dollars?  Over at least two months?  That’s it?”

“Probably it won’t even be a month,” Wally said.

“You don’t know that, you just finished saying that!  Even if it’s just a month, God and Goddess… palms don’t grease for under a C-note anymore.  You know that!  A few nights out, a couple dinners in town, a few payoffs and I’m broke.”

“You won’t have to spend money for every tipoff, you know.”

Chance sat back, frowning, arms folded.  “Oh, I see.  I’m supposed to float around the islands ‘on my back’, as it were.  A wink and a nod and a wag of my tail, is that it?”

Wally sighed; Chance could see he was playing devil’s advocate, not because he wanted to.  “Getting pooched is part of the game, Jackson.  Don’t tell me that’s news to you at this point.”

“Of course it’s not.  But I’d like to be an option, not an obligation.  There are a lot of characters out there who, knowledgeable though they may be, I would rather ply with my money than my body.”  Chance dropped her hands into her lap, and put on an expression that was both stern and vulnerable – which had worked on Wally before.  “If I’m going to do this, Wally, and the thing is open-ended, then I want an unlimited voucher.”

Wally stared off to the side at the floor.  He rubbed his chin, set his lip firm under those buck teeth and shook his head.  “No, Jackson.  I can’t do it.  The accounting department would say I’m thinking with my dick.”

“Oh, and the assignment editors aren’t?  Let’s wave the flies off the pooh-pooh here.  Why did they pick me?  Because of my impending Hurgleman’s Prize for Journalism?  No.  Because I’m a young single woman, in reasonably good shape, who’ll be off in the tropics flashing her tits around.  And who, let’s dream stratospheric here – if she does happen to bump into Heavyweight Willie, might get him to open his mouth by opening her legs, and then they get the whole story, fair dinkum.  So it’s not asking too much if I’m going to put all that on the line that I be backed up with the money it takes to reel a story like that in.”

Wally glared at her.  She glared back.  “You finished?” he said.

“Yeah, probably.”

“I’m just telling you what they told me.”

Chance pulled a face.  “So what if I say no?”

“You could.  A younger scuffer will snap at it, and when the next choice piece comes up, guess who’ll they’ll toss it to?  You know how this works.”

“Merry fucking Longnight alright.”

“Jackson – Chance.  Listen to me.  How about this?  You go out there, officially with a two grand budget… but… I’m features editor and it’s coming through me.  Let’s just say that, within reason, no vouchers above and beyond the two thousand dollars will be turned down… at least till accounting really figures out what’s going on, by which time it should all be on our front page and you’ll be back with your toes in the Steelborough slush.  Okay?  Can we meet me half way on this?”

She regarded him.  “You won’t leave me out on the limb?”

“You know I won’t.”

Yeah, she did.  “Okay, Wally.  Fill me in on the details.”

Scrubbed clean.  She did her hair up differently.  A bit curly at the ends.  She’d gone for a grooming session as well, an all-over treatment.  A lot of girls lost their virginity in grooming salons, since the bathing and body trimming were by nature rather intimate affairs.  Gerald, her groomist, was a “mostly-gay” buffed doberman who mostly liked to gossip and clip when he got into the whirlpool bath with his “ladies”.  But he had a thing for spotted chicks and so he usually groomed Chance for next to nothing, or sometimes nothing, since she was quite willing to oblige him.  It generally made for a couple of sensuous hours after which she came out looking and feeling great.  Gerald was actually married to a female ocelot who didn’t mind his male dating but had green eyes for anyone like Chance, so appointments tended to be rather spur-of-the-moment things.  Given the nature of her work, Chance kind of liked running things that way.

At home that night she surveyed herself and Gerald’s handywork in the mirror.  She wasn’t likely to be a model.  Leopardesses with lemony pelts got the work.  Her pelt was six-points cream: her muzzle, each paw, and her tail all tipped in off-white, as well as her belly and crotch – and her fur then ranged into almost an ochre along her spine.  Too dark for the archetypal leopard.  She had a nice range of spots, a long, soft, lustrous mane, and her glasses made her look brainy, so she tended to do alright when she really wanted to put the moves on.  She curled her paws along her curves and cupped her breasts, wondering if they’d come in handy (no pun intended, she thought to herself) during the assignment.  Tropics.  Warmth.  Half-naked people.  Long nights and beach fires and…

Why didn’t that make her happy?  It should.  Suddenly it was just one more assignment with nice weather.

At four a.m. the phone rang, just as she was sitting on her suitcase and squeezing the latches shut.  Fear like icicles pierced her heart and timidly she picked up the receiver.  Thoughts of her parents, her siblings…  “Hello?”

“I didn’t wake you up, did I?” asked the voice.  Southern Midlands accent.  Wally.

“No, you just scared the shit out of me, that’s all.”

“Did I?  Why?  Oh, I’m sorry.  Sure.  Well, I knew you’d be packing up about now.  Your flight’s at nine, right?”

“Yeah.  Is there something you forgot to tell me?”

“No, I was just wondering if you could use a lift to the airport.”

“No, that’s fine, Wal.  I’ve got a cab on call for five-thirty.”

“Are you sure?  It’s no trouble.  I was up anyway with a story.  Kind of bugging me.  You know how it is.  And I thought of you.  A drive would be a nice break.”

“It’s a kind offer, Wal, but don’t go to the trouble.  Get some sleep.”

“Okay, Jackson.  You, uh, take it easy.  And be careful, okay?  It can get pretty wild in the islands, so watch your pre—your tail.”

“I always watch my tail, Wal.  And so do you.”  She teased him.  He chuckled, and he hung up, not stretching it out any further.

Chance put the phone down and looked around her bedroom for what would probably be the last time in weeks, or more.  The sun was a long way from rising, with its soothing soft glow that gave any scene a redeeming golden indulgence.  But her room was lit by a computer screen, a few dim, yet harsh bulbs, and the eerie green glow of her LED clock, all of which cast in sharp relief the broad bed in which she slept, rumpled on only the one side.  It was as though her bed had had some kind of stroke.

She jerked her suitcases off of it and turned her back on it.