by Simon Kewin
Myrced appeared to understand. She pulled Selene around in a half-circle in a move like a dance twirl, then pushed her gently down to sit on the edge of the bed. She began to remove Selene's clothes. Selene let her do it, moving her limbs to allow it to happen. When they were both naked, she stood, and they embraced, body to body, breasts and hips pressed against each other's. The night air across her skin was a delight, although the senses in the rebuilt half of her body were slightly muted by her artificial skin.
Myrced knelt to kiss her breasts. “I saw what happened to you, your injuries. You're fully better?”
“I am, but the skin on this side of me is temporary. A disguise like the masks.” Her nipples, a part of her mind noted, were responding in perfect synchrony.
Myrced kissed her more, tiny butterfly touches across her belly. “It's incredible. You wouldn't know.”
“The left side of my body is much stronger, but the temporary skin is less sensitive.”
Myrced's breath tickled Selene's skin as she spoke. “I'll be sure to keep that in mind.”
“On the positive side, my stamina is good.”
“Well, we'll see.”
Myrced climbed onto the bed and opened her arms, inviting Selene to join her. They explored each other, kissed each other. She'd thought of Myrced's skin as a rich olive brown, but in truth it was a variety of shades, each area she came to subtly different in hue or texture. Night-time birds of prey screeched from the trees and, distantly, the sounds of crackling fires and the lapping lake waters drifted through the night. The roar from the city was distant, muffled. Myrced was between her legs, her tongue flicking in and out of the delicate folds of Selene's body, when she suddenly stopped. She knelt up between Selene's legs to consider her.
“You need to let go, honey.”
Her words confused Selene. “Huh?”
“It's like you're there in the moment with me, but also not there. Like part of you is monitoring for threats. I can feel the tension in your muscles, as if you're held together with wires. It isn't going to work if you don't let yourself go.”
Was she doing that? Her augmentations were probably doing it automatically, assessing for possible dangers. They did so without her conscious thought. Or maybe it was her natural brain, still wary, her way of viewing the world marked by everything that had happened. There was another presence in her thoughts, too, another ghost. Falden. She was still alive, and he wasn't, and there was a heavy weight of guilt about that. With an effort, she set it aside. Falden had wanted her to live, too. The grief of their private parting had been one more open wound within her, but through his tears Falden had told her, just as her mother had told her, Live your life up there, Selene. I want you to live your life.
In her mind's eye, he looked at her for a moment, his brown eyes and the floppy hair she'd loved to comb her hand through while they embraced. Then he faded away, backwards into the mists. He would still be there in her mind, always, but now there was space for others as well.
Out loud, to Myrced, she said, “I'll try.”
Myrced shook her head, her ready smile returning to her lips. “No, don't try. Do the opposite of that. Just be, for a time at least.”
With a conscious effort, Selene instructed her environment assessment monitors to go into sleep mode. She wanted this. She would give herself up to these moments, this night. Concordance were out there, the Void Walkers and their agents on this planet, but she would forget them all for a time. She breathed in a lungful of air, then let it escape from her body.
She closed her eyes. “I'm all yours. I'll just be.”
They made love for an hour or more, occasionally drifting in and out of half-sleep before surfacing to stroke and caress each other once more. She was the happiest she'd been since her reconstruction. The happiest she could ever remember being. It was hard, now, to recall how it felt to be that angry, terrified young woman who didn't want to go on, who was so furious at Ondo for daring to return her to life. The anger was still there, smouldering rather than raging, but it no longer threatened to burn her to ashes. It was hers to control rather than it controlling her.
The chorus of insects had stopped singing when they finally fell into a satisfied slumber, Myrced lifting a light sheet over their entwined bodies to keep away the night's chill.
Something woke Selene. She'd been asleep, offline, for two hours, blind and oblivious. Anything could have happened. There were scuffing sounds from the flat roof above her head. She lay in the darkness for a moment, replaying the noises, trying to work out what they might be. Some nocturnal creature? She turned her head to see if Myrced had heard them, but she wasn't there, her half of the bed filled only by the crumpled sheet.
Selene rose, heart suddenly racing, all her threat-assessment and fight or flight responses activating. Her twin metabolisms, artificial and natural, meshed into gear. Through the window, over the lake, the city was a dark silhouette against the stars.
Her clothes lay in a crumpled heap by the foot of the bed. She found the blaster she'd had strapped to her ankle and activated it. It was still functioning. Had Myrced known it was there? She thought about bringing Ondo online, but decided against it. She slipped her clothes back on, ears turned to full gain for any more sounds from outside.
The upper floor of Myrced's house consisted of a short landing from which the bedroom, a bathroom and another room led off. There was a faint thermal trail on the floor, a line of footsteps, going towards the third room. Myrced had walked there twenty minutes or so earlier. Judging by the layout of the house, this room had to be smaller, a space for storage or for accommodating a guest, perhaps. Selene replayed her memories of the night before. The door to it had been shut.
Selene followed, walking on tiptoe, keeping to the side of the passageway to reduce the chances of a creaking floorboard giving her position away.
There was no keyhole in the door of the spare room, no way of knowing what was inside. She turned the handle and pushed the door open, hoping the hinges were well-enough oiled to stop any squealing.
She sent out a cone of light from her left eye so she could pick up detail. The room contained a desk rather than a bed, and the walls were lined with book shelves. A single, round window looked out across the lake. In one corner, a wooden ladder, rungs lashed together with twine, led up to a hatch in the roof. Myrced had gone that way. To meet someone? Selene was about to follow, blaster held in her teeth as she climbed, when she caught sight of a framed picture on the wall beside the desk. A posed portrait of a man, his gaze raised as if to stare heroically into unknown distances.
She stepped over to study it. There could be no doubt who it depicted. He was younger, his hair long, but it was Kane.
She considered it for a moment. She could leave through the front door, race away to the safety of the surrounding forests, pick up a train for the coast and instruct the lander to surface and pick her up. Something stopped her. She needed to make sense of the picture in front of her.
She turned back to the ladder and, warily, pushed the hatch open. Cold night air breathed down upon her face as she peered through the gap. The stars of the night sky, the blaze of the galaxy's central mass, lit up her eyes. A few yards away, a figure was hunched on the edge of the roof, little more than a crouched shape against the glow of the city and the round of one of Migdala's two moons rising beyond the lake.
Selene climbed to stand upon the roof. Myrced turned to greet her. “I didn't mean to wake you.”
“What are you doing up here?”
“I often come up here, to sit and think. I like it in the middle of the night. Everything is so peaceful. You got dressed to come up to the roof. Couldn't keep your survival instincts suppressed for ever, huh?”
“I wasn't sure what I might find. I saw your picture of Kane.”
“Ah, I see.”
“Why is it there?”
Myrced sighed. “Because, once, he was not the person you now know.”
“He's twist
ed, a fucking animal.”
“Now, yes, but once he was different. He was a good man, even a great man. He was also a friend. He was our leader, the resistance I mean. He gave us hope, showed us there was a path other than subservience and oppression. He taught us how the Temples were once benign places of refuge, but that they'd been twisted by Concordance. He taught us also we could fight back.”
Selene thought about the moment on the ice. The shining blade, the gleaming red of the blood on the white snow. “What happened to him?”
“What do you think? Concordance took him, changed him, turned him into the monster you've met. Do you think it was a coincidence he was there last night? That was Godel showing us the power she has over us. A man who was once our symbol of hope turned into that. There are those who talk about rescuing him, healing whatever it is they've done to him. I believe that's wishful-thinking. The old Kane is gone, and I would also kill the new one if I could. But I like to remember him as he was.”
“And Godel?”
“She's not from Migdala, of course. She's a name and a face, nothing more. So far as I know, she has no redeeming features whatsoever, no one who believes she is, or once was, a good person.”
“Understanding Kane's history doesn't alter my opinions of him.”
“No,” whispered Myrced, “I know. Has anything you've seen made sense of what happened to you?”
“I thought seeing the world that produced him might help.”
“But it hasn't.”
“No. There are good people and bad people and people who are a bit of both here. Same as anywhere, I guess.”
Myrced had a blanket bundled around her shoulders, which she opened to Selene to share the warmth. She was naked underneath it. “Come and sit. You won't need that blaster.”
“Sorry.”
“It's okay. You did well to switch off for so long.”
They sat together, legs dangling over the side of the building, breathing the air. Some nocturnal hunter flitted through the night, its echolocation chirps audible to Selene's left ear.
“What were you thinking about?” she asked.
“I was looking up at the stars and thinking how they never change. Whatever happens down here, whoever dies, whatever horrors take place, the stars simply continue shining, indifferent to it all. I was feeling small, unimportant, powerless. And then I thought of you and I thought I'd ask you to stay, join with us, fight Concordance on the ground. Look at it all, the galaxy is too large to be saved. I think we need you. I think maybe I need you.”
Selene lay her head on Myrced's shoulder. Should she stay? Could she? There were worse worlds, worse places to be. She and Ondo could alter her appearance permanently, and she could make Migdala her home. There was a fight to be fought here.
Instead she said, “They do move. The stars I mean. We just don't see it because the galaxy turns so slowly. And the stars are not the only things up there.”
A trio of lights, a little triangle, moved rapidly down the night sky, sinking into the west. The three orbiting Cathedral ships. She thought about the Refuge, and the Depository with its impossible blue star, and the mysteries of Omn somewhere out there in the heart of the galaxy.
“Concordance,” said Myrced.
“I can't stay, as much as I'd like to,” said Selene. “There are bigger battles to fight out there, among the stars. But you could come with me. We could leave together, leave now.”
“Come and live on Ondo Lagan's mysterious Refuge?”
“You know about that?”
“The name only. The rumour of it. Is it a ship? The Refuge is something of a myth, like a fabulous place in the sky where all dangers and evils are banished.”
That amused her. “Well, it's no paradise, but there'd be room for the two of us. Will you come?”
Myrced didn't reply for a moment.
“Myrced?”
The answer took some effort. “I can't, Selene, tempting as it is. I have friends here, a life. I've made promises. I need to stay and finish what I've started.”
“You'll get yourself killed, most likely.”
“I know that, but that's true out there as well, isn't it? There's no peaceful, quiet life anywhere unless you accept the control of Concordance. In other days, I would jump at the chance to come with you, but I don't think I can right now. I'm sorry.”
“I get it.”
Myrced smiled. “Perhaps one day.”
“Perhaps.” They both knew the chances of that were small. These were the things you said to each other to make farewells easier.
“You're leaving now?”
“Maybe not immediately,” said Selene. “Concordance will be distracted for a few more days as the celebrations build to a climax. I can lie low here for a while. That is, if you'll have me.”
Myrced sounded amused. “Oh, I'll have you. Come on, it's getting cold. Let's go back to bed.”
They saw no one else for the best part of three days, save when Myrced slipped out for supplies of food and drink. They ate and they made love and they drank and they slept. It was a welcome hiatus, a shutting out of the world and the galaxy, and everything beyond themselves.
They also read: Myrced had a collection of forbidden books on the shelves of her little room, paper volumes she'd collected over the years to keep them from Concordance's fires.
“Why do they ban them?” Selene asked one sunlit afternoon, dappled shade filtering through the shutters. “Most of them are fiction, just stories of other worlds and adventures in space.”
“Because of that, precisely. They're heretical, they give people dreams of other possibilities. And some are factual, too.” She also had a collection of dusty, dog-eared historical tomes, all very old. One, in particular, was her prized possession: a history of Migdala that documented how life had been before the arrival of Concordance and the twisting of the Revelation Temples into their current form. An Age of Angels: a Brief History of Migdala, it was called. Despite its title, it was a weighty brick of a book, over a thousand pages long. Selene loved to flick through it, thinking about all the other people who had done the same over the centuries. It described at length the cultural and economic links Migdala had once shared with other star-faring cultures. Myrced had explained it was a story that had been buried, that she wasn't allowed to teach the children in school. They just got to hear about military threats from other worlds, threats that Concordance protected Migdala from. It was clear why Concordance would want such books destroyed.
Each evening, the celebrations continued in the city centre across the lake, and from the screams and detonations it was clear that there were also more flashpoints between the rebels and the forces of Concordance. Selene and Myrced stayed away, nursing their wounds. It was a moment of respite, of simple pleasures and joys stolen from the horror. At times, it seemed like she'd been living in the little square house with Myrced all her life, and would do so for the rest of it – but she also knew it would have to come to an end. On the third evening after their escape, Selene told Myrced it was time to leave.
“Will it be dangerous?” Myrced asked. They sat on her roof again, the sun setting in a blaze of honey light across the water.
“A little. Once I reach my ship, I'll be safer. They can't follow me through metaspace.”
“And is it really as Kane used to tell us before they took him? That transluminal travel is completely safe, that it used to be normal?”
“Yes. I've done it many times.”
“You can go anywhere?”
“Anywhere in this galaxy, so long as I avoid Concordance. The offer still stands. You can come with me.”
“I'm tempted, truly, but no. Oh, I bought you a parting gift.” She held out An Age of Angels. “I thought Ondo Lagan might like it.”
“I can't take that.”
“I think you should. It isn't really safe here, and Ondo might be able to find something useful in it, some clue about the fall of the galaxy. And I would like you to have it.”
Selene took it from her. “I have little to give you in return.”
Myrced kissed her one more time. “You've given me plenty.”
Selene thought for a moment, then unclipped a nanosensor held within a glass ampoule from the magazine she carried on her belt. “There's this. I brought some with me to plant in hard-to-reach places.”
Myrced held the tiny glass tube between thumb and finger and held it up to the light. “I can talk to you through this?”
“Not really, our communications network is far too slow and unreliable for that. Messages can literally take weeks if they get through at all. But if you wish me to hear something, speak into this, and the message will be relayed through our atmospheric and orbital sensors and eventually reach me. Probably. Assuming I'm still there.”
“Will it endanger you if I get in touch?”
“No.”
Myrced took the ampoule and placed it in her ornately-decorated jewellery box.
“Travel safely, Selene Ada.”
“I will. Stay safe, Myrced Iles.”
Selene didn't look back as she slipped out of the back of the little house. It felt like she was shrugging a heavy uniform on as she reactivated her enhanced senses and threat-detection algorithms. She needed to get far away so that no one would associate her with Myrced. She would cut across country, pick up one of the ground transportation lines and be back at the lonely beach where the lander waited for her within six hours. Then it would be a matter of retracing her careful steps away from the planet and dodging Concordance scans before she was far enough away from the stellar mass to escape into the void. There was a possibility Concordance would now be looking for her after events at the Temple, but there'd been no house-to-house searches in the days since their escape. It appeared the chaos surrounding the carnival had covered her tracks.
She reached the Dragon without incident or pursuit. She fled the system at maximum acceleration before any ship could scramble to intercept. As she powered away from Migdala, Selene sat looking back at the planet via a nanosensor relay. The sun was setting on the wide blue ocean, the land mass upon which Senefore lay little more than a smudge of green and red.
