by David Bowles
I can live with this. I just wish I had more input. He could use my help, especially now that Jimi Andrade is concentrating his men on hitting our operations. But he’s the boss.
For now.
CHAPTER 14
In his dreams, Tenshi died.
Brando stood there and watched as the other yaks pounded her with gatfire, her body twisting and arching grotesquely as she called his name over and over until she was silenced by a final barrage.
He dragged his broken body to her side, took her ruined head in his hands.
Then her eyes opened. They were utterly black, with sparks swirling in their depths.
Her plum-dark lips opened, but it was not her voice that spoke.
“Bring her back. Prepare her. Or the end will come.”
Then the indistinct forms of her killers swiveled about, and from their rifles blackness spewed forth, hurtling toward him as it expanded to fill his field of vision. Time and again he was swallowed.
Finally, the black faded to green, then to blue, and finally to white.
“Brando?”
His eyes snapped open.
“Damn, lad, thought you’d never wake.”
It was Modupe. They were in a room, a hospital room. An expanse of white sheet stretched between Brando and the older professor. Wounded. He sat up slowly. A dull ache filled his head and seemed to spread down his right side. His arm was stiff and stubbornly resisted being bent.
“How long?”
“Three days. You were real messed up, but luckily it wasn’t too serious. They mended your bones, removed a clot from your cranium. Good as new, what say?”
“Oh, yeah. Feel real good, you bloody senile gerrie. Tell me: is Tenshi alright?”
“Yeah. She’s here too, gone to the cafeteria to eat some lunch. You hungry?”
Brando nodded and Modupe thumbed the comscreen near the door, ordering up some food and a nurse visit.
“Tell me about it, Modupe.”
The theology professor sighed, dragged a chair to the side of the bed, and wearily sank into it. “It was bad, Brando. Seventy-three dead, twenty-five wounded. A mess. But it would’ve been much worse if you and Tenshi hadn’t intervened.”
“The hell did I do? Just stood there till she almost got killed.”
“You saved her life, mate. She says so. Because of you, she was able to kill three more yegsters. The others left her alone. Rather, with a concussion, like you. Twin concussions. Adorable.”
“You’re hilarious, you macabre son of a bitch. But why didn’t they finish her off? That doesn’t make sense.”
Modupe shrugged. “Nobody knows. The killers just collected their dead and got out of there, so we don’t know anything about them really, though Tenshi says they were definitely yaks. Brotherhood, probably, from their Kaló accents. She’s given Security their descriptions, but it doesn’t look like they’ll be handling it.”
Furrows creased Brando‘s forehead.
“Why not?”
The door hissed open. Tenshi leaned in, saw that Brando was conscious, and hurried to his side to awkwardly embrace him.
“Thank the Eight that you’re okay, Brando.” Her eyes were shiny with relieved tears.
Before he could answer, the nurse came in and checked his vitals, leaving a tray of food and promising a visit from a doctor within the hour.
As she left, Modupe stood self-consciously.
“I’ve got to make some calls and grab some lunch. Excuse me, okay?”
Brando and Tenshi nodded without saying anything. It was hard for either of them to concentrate on anything other than each other.
The door cycled shut, and Brando reached for her hand.
“I thought they were going to kill you.”
“Shh. I know.”
“And I felt so helpless. I’m no fighter. Few laps in the pool, some soccer, push-ups and sit-ups every couple days, that’s the extent of my physical activity.”
“Brando, you don’t have to…” she began.
“No, I want you to understand this. I was frozen in place, impotent. There you were, risking your life, doing the impossible. Bearing down on those yaks like some AI soldier shell, not heeding the danger. And me, I just stood there. Then they saw you, and I knew you were dead. I couldn’t bear it. Losing you.”
She leaned her face close to his. “Listen close to me, Brando D’Angelo. I said you could do anything if you only believed in something strong enough, remember? Guess you do, because know what? You saved my life. I would’ve died. I was oblivious to danger, I was going to kill them all, no matter what. I couldn’t see anything else but them: all the rest seemed a sea of rising red. My people’s blood. Spilled at my fair. But you saw, and despite what you say, you did move. Like the wind you ran and flew. You saved me. Of course, you broke my damn clavicle, too, while you were at it!”
They laughed, and he brought her hand weakly to his lips to kiss it. “But my hammer throw?”
She was obviously trying not to laugh. “Well, it distracted them. Guess the difference in gravity really threw off your aim.”
“At least I got them to shoot at me, eh?” Brando’s smile dissolved into a more serious expression. “Modupe says Civil Security isn’t handling the investigation. That means…”
The happiness radiating from Tenshi’s face was wiped away in an angry wave.
“Santo got what he wanted. ATS, they’re called. Anti-Terrorism Squads. Under his command, though he and the Archon are promising full disclosure to the deputies and saying they’ll gradually turn them over to the Chamber. Pure shite, of course.”
“So you definitely think Santo set these massacres up? He’s that evil?”
“Little too convenient otherwise, no? The Chamber’s looking into him, a full investigation of com records, comings and goings: they’re going scour his data. If they get the votes, that is.”
“And he says?”
Tenshi shrugged. “Insists he’s got nothing to hide. That we can look all we want. But even if we find nothing, it won’t mean he isn’t behind the attacks.”
“Bit hard to stop him without evidence.”
“I don’t know about that. Direct action will be off the table. But we can play his game. Turn these people against him.”
“How do you propose to do that?”
She tousled his hair, a smile creeping back onto her face.
“Show them what they’re missing out on. Want to help?”
After a week, Brando was discharged. rather than going back to Modupe’s flat, he accepted Tenshi’s offer to stay with her until he’d fully recuperated. She lavished attention on him for the entire month that the university gave him for personal leave.
“You’re going to spoil me,” he told her one morning after finishing breakfast in bed.
“Maybe,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “But I’m between projects. I have the time and need the distraction from politics. Besides, you saved my life. If I can make yours a little more comfortable, then I damn sure will. Not another word about it, yes?”
Brando raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, yoyote mikkereru.”
“You bet your arse it’s whatever I want,” she said, kissing him on the forehead and picking up the empty tray.
“However,” Brando began, smiling at her annoyed frown, “I’d like to repay your hospitality. Let’s go out for dinner. Somewhere nice in Station City.”
Tenshi feigned innocence. “Kyosu-chan, are you asking me on a date?”
“Y-yes?”
“And you can afford my tastes?” she teased.
“Well … maybe?”
Flicking her locs, she turned and starting walking away. “Okay, then. I hope you have a tux hanging in Modupe’s guest closet. We’re going to the fanciest restaurant on the planet.”
Brando ended up ordering a nice gray linen suit and white silk shirt, delivered that afternoon. As evening shadows snaked their way along the broad streets of Station City, he shower
ed and wrapped the elegant clothes around his bruised body, taking his time and wincing often.
He was checking messages on his data pad when Tenshi stepped out of her bedroom in a clingy black dress and silver choker. Stunning. He couldn’t help but bite his lip.
“Query,” she called, activating her home automation system as she approached Brando and put her arm through his. “Take a series of photos of the professor and me. Multiple angles. Burst beginning now.”
Brando gave his best relaxed smile as sensor strips on the walls recorded the two of them, standing together. His guts were in knots.
She’s the most beautiful woman I have ever met. And she might be mine. If I live up to her expectations. If I don’t screw up.
“Query: display last image.”
At Tenshi’s command, a snapshot of the couple hovered in the air before them. Her flats and his dress boots made them the same height.
Infotainment stars at award ceremonies can’t compare, Brando thought. There’s a spark here that they always lack.
He cleared his throat. “We look good together, don’t we?”
“Yeah,” she answered, her voice a little raspy, “we do. Come on. It’s not far.”
Jitsu’s small moon—Arehanja—was nearly full in the sky above Brando and Tenshi as they moved arm-in-arm down the slidewalk to the red stone façade of Ozarano Eti, a five-star restaurant specializing in Martian haute cuisine.
Brando glanced at the candles floating near the high ceilings, nervous, as they were shown to their table in a hushed recess of the cavernous space. On a nearby balcony, a traditional Martian quartet of erhu, oud, dizi and tabla spun delicated melodies into the air.
After a quick review of the menu, Brando decided on kabrito meifrisa stew; Tenshi ordered a vegetarian dish, bissara i-nopar. They had just selected a sweet majhul wine when a snarl of Spanish broke the seductive spell of the moment.
“Hijo de la gran puta.”
Brando jerked his head up. Ambarina Lopes stood about a meter away, a beautiful older woman on her arm.
“Captain Lopes,” he said, keeping his tone polite but cold.
“I mean, I saw the reports and the video,” she said, pulling her date with her as she closed on their table, “and heard the rumors. But to see this with my own eyes. Bastard, I told you I was staying here for the woman I was dating, the one behind the fair.”
Tenshi sighed. “We haven’t been dating for almost seven months, Ambar. We’ve had this conversation.”
“This isn’t about you and me,” Ambar snapped. “It’s about this fucking interloper. After all the courtesy I extended you on my ship, Brando. You backstabbing prick. Me cago en tu puta madre.”
“Te juro que no sabía,” Brando said, lifting a hand. “Didn’t put two and two together until later. But you heard Tenshi. Whatever yall had, it’s over. Let’s not make a scene.”
“Ambar,” the captain’s date said softly, pulling on her arm. “Our table.”
With a disgusted shudder, Lopes pointed at the couple. “Enjoy each other while the sex is novel, fucking traitors. You two have nothing else in common. It won’t last.”
Then, before an approaching pair of shocked waiters could confront her, Ambarina led the other woman deeper into the restaurant, muttering in Spanish as she went.
Brando and Tenshi stared at each other for a tense moment.
Then, at the same instant, they began to laugh.
“She’s …” Brando gasped between giggles, “so mothergod scary. I thought … she was going to take me outside and … beat my arse into the ground.”
Tenshi wiped tears of hilarity from her eyes. “Oh, shit, that poor woman she brought with her! She’s got some rough revenge sex in her near future.”
Getting a hold of himself, Brando tried to be serious. “She was really in love with you, huh?”
Tenshi rolled her eyes. “That’s not love. That’s obsession. If she’d loved me, she wouldn’t have cheated on me.”
“Did you love her?” Brando’s pulse quickened as he asked.
She looked at him for a moment, took a sip of her wine. “No, Brando. I cared about her, but it wasn’t love.”
“I wonder if she’s right,” he mused. “About us. Can we last?”
Tenshi reached across the table and took his hand in hers. “We’re the ones who decide that, Kyosu-chan. If we want this relationship to endure, we’ll put in the work. Everything good in life requires effort, struggle, planning.”
“And along the way,” Brando said, trying not to start giggling again, “we can ‘enjoy each other while the sex is novel,’ yeah?”
Tenshi arced an eyebrow. “Oh, yes. That we can.”
Once their meal was done, they slipped out into the deepening night for a walk. Tenshi led him to Anakwa Park, its paths lined by plum and sandpaper trees that showered blossoms like snowflakes. Holding hands, the couple made their way to the lake at the heart of the park. The moon was reflected there as if it had slipped from the sky to bathe in those clear waters.
“Breathtaking,” Brando muttered, looking at Tenshi. “Just like you.”
She turned to face him, a ready smile crinkling the edges of her eyes.
“Are you happy?” she asked him.
“More than I have ever been,” he admitted. Then, because the myriad stars were chiming in his heart, because he couldn’t contain his feelings one second more, he stepped closer to her and whispered, “I … I think I love you, Tenshi Koroma. I know it’s too soon to be saying such things, but …”
Putting her hands on his cheeks, she silenced him with a kiss that said more than any words she could have uttered.
When they realized they couldn’t stop themselves, couldn’t keep their hands from seeking the heat of the other’s skin, they hurried back to Tenshi’s place and sated their lingering hunger.
After that date, they made love often. Gingerly at first, so as not to aggravate mending muscles and newly fused bone, but eventually with the hunger of the truly in-love, a passion that seeks to please and learn not to simply sate itself, one that has as its goal an intimacy of emotions as well as of flesh.
Then they would lie in bed till the wee hours of the morning, talking about themselves, sharing their pasts. Tenshi explained her years on the clean-up crews, the mind-numbing joy of brutal physical work, the inexplicable thrill of staring at a restored landscape and realizing it is your work, not that of some god or of nature alone. She hesitantly talked about her lovers and what she’d learned from them, pleased at Brando’s ease with the topic.
Late one night, recounting her love of the southern dunes, she revealed her heart’s greatest desire. “I want to build a home at the edge of the desert near Kinguyama, my hometown. Something majestic, an extension of my incipient soul, a mirror of everything on Jitsu that I keep alive within me.”
Her eyes scrutinized his face, expectant or worried.
“I think that is a beautiful idea,” he told her, his heart quickening at her joyous smile. “And I’m a little jealous. One day I hope to have such a dream, a project that echoes what’s in my heart.”
In the depths of those breathless nights together, Brando also opened himself to her, exposing his inability to counter his family’s insults and manipulations, their branding of him as antiquated and obsolete, a romantic infidel who embarrassed them more than they could express. Weeping, he spoke of his father’s abandonment, of the lake, of his desire to commit suicide and the revelation of his own insignificance that had ironically made him burn with a will to live.
And he told her of Ayanna, the model and artist his mother had hand-picked for him.
“She wanted to mold me into a good Wiccan Catholic. Her mother’s a cardinal, hence Mamma’s insistence I date the girl: it was good for the family, for her career in the Church. But no. I’m done with that religion. With my family, too. My leaving worked out for everyone in the end, though. Ayanna’s now engaged to my brother Edoardo. He’s a slimy fucker. Real scu
m.”
Tenshi scoffed. “She should be happy, then. Slime and scum are easily moldable.”
They shared a good laugh at the image.
“It’s not that I mind being molded,” Brando said in a sudden bout of seriousness. “I just want the right sculptor, one who understands what I need to become.”
He took her hands and pressed them to his chest.
“I think I’ve found my architect.”
CHAPTER 15
Tenshi couldn’t quite say the words. Was it love? Perhaps. She thought about Isabella, the way their lives had entwined for those few years, the way they’d lived and breathed each other.
Brando was different. Sweet in a way that Isabella had never been. Not irresistible. Not overwhelming. Instead, calming. Inviting. Intriguing.
Of course, Tenshi was different now. A satorijin, not a wild rebel child lashing her raw emotions against the world. Maybe she couldn’t recognize her feelings as love because she’d grown so much in the past eight years.
Brando’s emotional accessibility was a welcome change from the selfish detatchment of Pathwalkers she had dated and from Ambar’s frivoulous, superficial debauchery. But was he the one? Could she face the future with him at her side? Was their physical connection and growing friendship a sign of something deeper?
I’ll know whether it’s love, she realized, when I see how he reacts to the other things I love. People. Places. Ideas.
As the month drew to a close, it became clear Brando wouldn’t be leaving when his sick leave was up. So Tenshi sat him down and told him what she needed.
“Two trips. First, we visit my hometown. Not so much to meet my parents,” she said, stopping him before he jumped to conclusions, “but to meet my community. Then we head to the Southern Continent, so you can understand what put me on my present path. L'idea ti pare buona?”
