by Holly Lisle
“You’re going to quit now, when Lithra is here? When you have earned the right to be with her?”
Kagen stood there, unable to find a word to say. What she’d just told him started to sink in, and his knees got wobbly. There was a lot he wanted to know, but only one thing that really mattered.
“Lithra is here?”
Shay took two steps back, leaned out the doorway, and said, “He hasn’t completely lost his mind.”
And there she was, in the doorway. Lithra. His Lithra.
“You’re here,” he whispered.
She stepped into his arm, and rested her head against his chest. “And so are you. Please don’t give up, Kagen. Please.”
“I won’t. But I... failed. I fought so hard. And after everything, Suzee Delight is still dead.”
Behind him, Shay said, “Yes she is. And so is Charlie. And you need to help make damn sure they stay that way, because your campaign to save Suzee got bigger than anything I ever imagined. Suzee Delight made some terrifying enemies in her last few hours, enemies who would rip space apart to get at her if they ever got even a hint that she might still be alive.”
He stood in the room with Lithra in his arms, and felt his heart skip a beat. He frowned, studying Shay’s face, puzzling over her words.
“I...didn’t fail?”
“Suzee Delight is dead. And Charlie is dead. But then, the man who was We-B93Y back on a hellish PHTF world is dead, too.” She smiled at him. “And so is the woman who kissed him. And you have quite a few dead neighbors, dead guy.”
He considered that, and nodded.
“There’s so much you’re not saying. I always knew the Longview was different. And I thought we were better. Not like other Death Circuses. So...what’s going on?”
Shay smiled. “Nothing that concerns you today. You’ve earned your citizenship, you’ve won your love. Now you have your own life to live, your own happiness to build. Focus on that.”
“But...the owner—he’s doing something really good, isn’t he?” Kagen said. “He’s a great man, with a great vision, whose mission is to help people who cannot help themselves.”
Her smile died.
“No.”
“No?”
“He’s a monster,” she said quietly, “with hands covered in blood. He is a worse creature than anything that crawled screaming out of any nightmare you ever had. And he is doing terrible things. He’s simply doing those things to people who earned them.”
Suzee Delight, One Last Time
I WAKE UP AND STARE UP into the face of a stranger who is smiling down at me like she invented me.
“I’m so thrilled to meet you, Suzee Delight. I’ve wanted for years to thank you personally for Birds Flying. It’s the best music for stimulating thought that I’ve ever found. By the way, I’m Berramyn Chase—I invented the Modix—it was the patch Shay put on your neck that delivered the neural adapter into your... you’re staring at me... you have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
I sit up. I’m on a stretcher in a room. Both are white—the stark, cold white of snow. The woman standing by my bed, Berramyn Chase, wears the same white, but her skin is the rich, deep red-gold of mahogany, and her eyes are a warm and wonderful brown. Her hair is thick, glossy blue-black. It falls in wild curls to her shoulders, and halos around her head.
“Charlie took me off a space station, put me into a monitored transport box, and I slept from there to the coliseum. I remember the coliseum. I thought I was going to die. I—I think I remember dying...”
“Shay didn’t tell you the Deathmasters were not going to be able to kill you...” Berramyn frowned. “I supposed she had her reasons, but that must have been hell for you.”
“Hell...”
I remember pain. People everywhere, the noise, the smell of the grass, and the heat, and then the stink of my own blood drying on my clothes. And Charlie—”
In the last memory I can pull up of Charlie, she is staring at me. She looks broken, and then I see grim determination come into her eyes. Suddenly, I’m afraid for her.
“Where’s Charlie?”
Berramyn said, “So the two of you hadn’t planned that she would kill herself? I thought that was a brilliant touch, but—”
“Charlie’s dead?”
“Of course not. The Longview shuttle crew dragged her off the field and put her in one of the transport Medixes on the shuttle. She was inside and hooked up well before the four minute mark for brain death.”
“Where is she?”
“She doesn’t know you’re alive yet. We had a—a little problem with you. The Modix worked, but until Shay could get you here to me, we didn’t know that it had worked. You see, I don’t actually have the Modix finished yet, but Shay talked me into giving her one of my test patches. They haven’t been through human trials yet, and my simulation testing has been... imperfect. So we didn’t have any signs of life on you, and you were in that wooden box. In the finished Modix, the adapted regenerating neural pathways will reconnect in mere seconds, stop bleeding, start reversing damage, and keep core systems operating under most conditions. Your system and your Modix reacted... differently.”
Her expression suggests that things went very wrong. “Anyway... Shay got you to me, and I got everything working correctly. I think.”
“You think?”
“You’re inside the test, Suzee. You’re going to have to tell me.” Berramyn said, “Stand up and walk.”
I stand. My muscles ache as if they’ve been beaten, but I’m alive, so pain does not distress me. I report it, and then I walk, and discover that I’m wobbly, and my balance is awful.
“It may take some more adaptation of the Modix, and another couple of Medix treatments to get everything working at their peak. Let’s walk a little farther.”
I tire when we reach the door, but she opens it. “A little farther.”
And Charlie right in front of me. She’s talking to a woman I vaguely recognize. She looks so sad.
Berramyn clears her throat, and both Charlie and the woman I don’t quite know look over.
Charlie’s eyes go wide, and her jaw drops, and she stands like someone who’s never stood before, like she’ll fall over at any minute, like she’s just discovering the concept of knees.
“You’re...alive.”
I would run to her if I could. She would run to me if she could. As it is, we totter together and almost fall over and manage to right ourselves and each other before we crash, and then we are kissing, hugging, holding each other alive alive alive alive...
Charlie and I both have questions, and once we have assured each other that we are both really there, that we are both mostly fine, that we will be together, we ask them.
Shay, the owner’s representative from the Longview, is the stranger I almost recognized. She is also the woman who, with Charlie’s help, orchestrated my purchase for the Longview Death Circus. And she is the woman who, behind the scenes and unknown to anyone but herself, the Longview owner, and Berramyn Chase, made sure I survived my own execution.
“Why?” I ask her.
“The owner knew you,” she says. “Loved you. He knew that because of... of his condition... he could never be with you, that you would never be able to love him. But since he first met you, he has used every resource at his disposal to find out your true story. He collected the private pieces of your life, and the more he found out about you, the more he wanted you to win your freedom. For you to find love and happiness. He located Charlie, pulled strings, and got her assigned to the Longview. He told you that if ever you needed him, he would come for you. And then he waited.”
“And I took the chance that he meant what he said...”
“Yes. Everything depended on you. He could not buy you and he could not steal you, but he could legally take you to your execution—and he could make sure that no one would ever come looking for you again. Not your enemies. Not your clients. Not the countless hoards of people who knew you throug
h Sensos. He was in a position to give you your freedom.”
Charlie says, “But if he loves her, why did he bring me into this? She would have been so grateful to him for saving her, she would have stayed with him if he’d asked her.”
Shay says, “She loves you, Charlie. And Mado Keyr knows that he cannot be loved—that he is not worthy of love. He can only maintain the pretense that he is a good and decent human being for a while, until his illness overcomes him and he turns terrible.” In Shay’s eyes, I see tears. “He loves Suzee, so he wants her to be happy. And he knows that she could never be happy with him.”
“You love him,” I say to Shay.
And her smile is sad. “I hate him. He is right to think himself undeserving of love. But sometimes I do pity him. And I am willing to help him pay his penance for being what he is. It allows me to meet people like you, Suzee, and you, Charlie—and people like Berramyn Chase, and the other Furies. It allows me to be a citizen here, even if I cannot yet stay here. Someday he’ll die, and on that day I’ll celebrate, and move here for good. But this is not that day.”
I consider the gaunt, wizened, damaged man I remember well from the few times he visited me. He can only be outside his protective suit for moments at a time, and the slightest touch hurts him. Inside his suit he can move, and the suit makes him very strong. But he doesn’t like seeing the pain of others the way so many broken men do, and he never hurt me. Instead, he likes laughter.
He wanted me to sit beside him, to talk to him, to sing for him. He liked to watch me undress, but he also liked to watch me cook. To eat. To walk around my fine quarters. He loved watching me paint, and once I put a brush in his gloved hand, and told him I would show him how to paint if he liked—and he said that painting was something he remembered from before he became ill. And he painted me an amazing picture of how he saw me. He made me radiant, laughing, a dancing naked muse floating in the sunlight above a stormy sky. He gave me the painting, though I tried to encourage him to keep it. Courtesans were not permitted to keep gifts from clients.
And in private, he had been gathering up all the secret holos my... the holos my owners had been keeping of every move I made and every action I took.
“Why did so many people come to my defense?” I ask.
Shay says, “A promising Longview crewman ended up in this city, and discovered that the people here were incensed about your upcoming execution. He knew vaguely who you were, but it was their outrage that you were to be executed that fascinated him. He created a campaign of their interviews, and released them at no charge through the datastreams. People found them, and discovered that they only thought they knew who you were.”
I consider this. I had not seen any of the interviews from people who had come to my defense—my keepers would never have permitted me to have access to such things while I was in my cell. I knew when I looked up into the crowd in the coliseum that something had to have happened to bring them there, but I couldn’t imagine what that something might have been.
I shake my head and look Shay in the eyes. “Why would the people here care whether I was sentenced to death or not? I killed the men I said I’d killed. Who was I to them?”
Shay smiles. “First, every person in this city escaped from a Pact World to get here. Including Mado Keyr, and including me. Almost every one of the citizens here was under a death sentence. Many of them still are. They know what the Pact Worlds are, they have people they care about still trapped on them—and because of this, they are already sympathetic to people facing the Pact Worlds’ brand of justice.
“Second, the instant Mado Keyr got notice that you had killed five Administrators, he acquired and sent me the recording of the plans the five Administrators were making. He’d already tapped into that system some years ago, and the tap still worked, so he actually knew what had happened before the news reached the surviving Administrators.
“I sent that planning session of theirs to a friend of mine here who owns a recording and datastreaming company, and she immediately streamed it to every citizen in the Furies. She kept it from indigents and non-citizens, of course, because if they failed citizenship, they would have taken with them the knowledge that we had this information before anyone else. Information like that would be dangerous to every citizen here.”
I’m trying to put all of this together in my head. I ask Shay, “So Mado Keyr decided if he ever got the chance, he would free me. When I killed five terrible men based on his promise to protect me, he had you send the recording of them plotting—and I assume, of me killing them just moments later—here. They saw what I saw, and...”
“And we were furious,” Berramyn says. “We wanted to do something to save you, but we had no idea what. Then Kagen—who wasn’t even a citizen—went to Anja with her datastreaming company with his idea for a protest—and Shay passed on to her the request from Mado Keyr that citizens not mention the damning holo of the five Administrators, or let it leak out into the rest of Settled Space. Each of us was briefed before meeting with Kagen, or—later—with his helpers.”
At this, I cannot keep silent any longer. “Why?”
“Because we wanted both of you here, and Settled Space would have demanded—and got—your acquittal and return to your life as a courtesan if anyone saw that holo too soon. You would have been locked back in the same cage you’d just escaped.”
I consider this. “Everyone had to see me die for me to be free.”
“Yes.”
Charlie says, “You said you wanted me here, too?”
“We weren’t sure about you. Shay told us everything you did to help Suzee. Everything. Including your acquisition of a nanoviral bomb that would have let the two of you walk away from the coliseum untouched, leaving nothing but corpses behind you. Character, though, isn’t just what people do. It’s what they can do, but choose not to. Before the coliseum, we only knew what you could do. After, we knew what you wouldn’t. And refusing to buy your happiness with the deaths of innocents made you different than those who rule the worlds you’ve now escaped.”
“So all along, Shay and Mado Keyr were on Suzee’s side... and mine,” Charlie murmurs.
“Thank you for my life—for both our lives,” I tell Berramyn. “Dying was... There is no word.”
“There’s a word. Horrible,” Charlie says. “Dying was horrible.”
“Well, now you’re reborn—and as new citizens, you’ll need to come up with new names. You can’t meet anyone here—ever—as your old selves.”
I nod. “When I thought I might go to GenDaring, I’d picked out the name Tikka Hale for myself,” I say.
Charlie says, “I always liked the name Bob.” She gives me a sidelong look. “Or Bobby? So maybe—Roberta Hale?”
She looks at me, eyebrow arching upward.
“I love that,” I tell her. And ask Shay, “Can we have the same last name?”
Shay laughs out loud. “If you want, you can both have identical bodies. Of course you can have the same last name.”
“And about bodies,” Berramyn says, “You both have to change your appearance before anyone but the two of us sees you. I have a U-Dezine Bodymod station in my apartment—you’ll be able to change your appearance before you leave. Shay will set you up with your citizen idents.”
Shay nods. “Local requirement is three names, no numbers. We’ll do the citizen cards after you have your new appearances. You’ll need them for work. We have offers for both of you already, by the way. Suzee, GenDaring has a satellite research branch here, and the three folks working there now are very excited to have you as a new trainee. Charlie, Dromedan Kourso is a ship designer here who would be willing to bring you in as an apprentice if you’re still serious about designing planet-hoppers.
We both nod. I squeeze Charlie’s hand. “We’re alive. We’re together. We get to keep each other. We’re here,” I whisper, and wrap my arm around Charlie’s waist. And then I stop, realizing that to me, here means together with Charlie, but that
I have no actual place to attach to that concept. “Where is here, exactly?”
Berramyn laughs. “I’ll show you. This building has a wonderful view of the city.”
We step outside her door into a public corridor that terminates in gravdrop. We step in and float upward, to an outdoor observation platform at the top.
Above me the sky is a blue so rich and clear it shocks me, the air so sharp and cold and clean it takes my breath away.
The real magic, though, comes when I look down. Below me lies a little city of impossible beauty. It gleams gold and red and blue and green, purple and silver and shimmering white in the sun. Traffic races below us in floating streams, with different streams layered over and under each other in always-crossing, never-slowing lines, as if they’re weaving the world together. Farther below, the dots that are other people hurry from point to point, their movements as steady as the traffic.
The city sings with energy, and I think, I get to work at GenDaring after all. I find myself grinning, and though I cannot explain it, I’m suddenly laughing. Then the woman I love and I are hugging each other, and the two of us fold Shay and Berramyn into our embrace.
Shay, who is helping a strange, broken man find absolution.
And Berramyn Chase—who was once just another smart fish in the fish tank—and who won her way to freedom to become the woman who has figured out to make a human body reverse its own death.
“You called the people here Furies,” I tell Berramyn.
She nods.
I don’t dare to hope, but I suddenly suspect a myth I have dismissed all my life as too good to be true is about to be proven real. I want it to be true. “This is the city that gives people who were forbidden to be alive their chance to live.” I whisper my hoped-for truth. “Is this the City of Furies?”
