by R. Z. Held
“—put out the word to sympathetic doctors in case they managed to hit any of the supposed Installs and they showed up somewhere… No, I’m not on their sympathetic list, but a couple who are know my interest. I turned around and came right back. We’re out of the way here, but I’m hoping information might come in over the hospital’s network. Apologize to the kids that I won’t be there for bedtime, all right?”
Eriope plastered herself to the wall and Pyrus and Carex tried to do the same into a doorway, but Genevieve couldn’t change direction that easily and tangled them. Hers were the stumbles that carried all too audibly, she was sure.
The voice went silent and a man turned into the hallway, in street clothes with an ID badge hooked to a hip pocket, just sliding his phone away. Mid-thirties, close-cropped hair but full beard. He couldn’t help but see them, in all their Pax Romana glory.
He stared; whatever he’d expected to find—someone stealing medications?—it had clearly not been this, despite his warning. He jerked to the side to slap a light switch with his free hand. “Who are you?”
Fuck, said her mind, at this newest complication, and “Son of a biscuit,” said her mouth without any sort of consultation whatsoever. She had to track the impulse back to her subconscious like grasping after a cat’s tail as the animal darted away under the couch. What—?
“I’m not ten anymore, Vieve. You can fucking swear around me.” And then the man was more than simply staring at her, he was frozen with his gaze riveted to her face, as was hers in return. “…Genevieve?”
Genevieve’s mouth was too dry to get the name out on the first try. “Michael.” He looked older. Of course he looked older; it had been nine years. And he’d grown out his beard—last she’d seen him, it had been fashionably sculpted with a tendril curling near his ear. But that kind of fashion had begun in the empire, perhaps it had fallen decidedly out of favor in the last few years.
Or didn’t say, rather, since channels were sort of a gray area as far as speaking. “Let’s not live down to the creepy Install image, guys.” Genevieve used Lingua, to include them all. Michael would understand it, even if his accent wasn’t the best on any reply.
Michael rocked a step forward, then subsided and eyed Eriope, who wasn’t the most militant of them all on first brush, but she was the currently unencumbered one. “Are you all right? Where are they taking you?” His Lingua was near perfect, in fact. Perhaps that was another thing Genevieve should have thought of: it might well be, after nine years of occupation.
“No,” Genevieve stumbled into speech so quickly, she found she didn’t have the right words. “They’re friends. Pyrus, he’s my—lover—partner—” That would have to do. Close enough. “Why are you here? In Delta? The farm—?”
“I moved to Delta after Dad—” Michael’s face finally crumbled out of blank shock into emotion. “Shit, Genevieve. You wouldn’t know. Mom went about six years back, Dad not that long after. But you’re not dead. You’re alive. You look just the same.” This time, he ignored Eriope to step past her and embrace Genevieve.
She reached for him in turn, but Pyrus refused to untangle her arm from his grip. “Hugs after the bleeding’s stopped. I need somewhere clean to work. Better I clean out the scar tissue now, rather than let it heal wrong a second time.”
Michael bristled a little at Pyrus, but backed up a step as his gaze grew unfocused with thought. “There’s an OR Emergency isn’t using, but I have to tell the system what I’m using it for or it won’t let me in, and I’m off-shift—”
“Give me an exam room and some decent instruments.” Pyrus brushed away possible objections with his free hand. “Risk of infection is greatly reduced with the nanites.”
Michael nodded, once, turned and led the way without another word. Genevieve had never had a chance to see him working, and it contented her to see him so centered, purposeful. She recognized the thought as symptomatic of the sort of odd, floating feeling that came with the pain blocks messing with her mental priorities, but allowed it to continue. At the moment, she could focus on reaching the exam room, climbing up on the table, and letting Pyrus nudge her into the prone position he needed.
Pyrus unzipped her jacket, laying it open, and Michael hissed even with only the bandage visible. He strode around to Genevieve’s head. “Did your…friends do that to you?”
“Not these ones.” Genevieve spared him a hand to squeeze his with as much reassurance as she could manage. “I rather think the ones who did it are regretting it at the moment.”
Then she would have let herself down from her elbows and pillowed her forehead on her arms, but Pyrus captured one and drew a tightly looped length of cable from his pocket. “Eriope, do you have any dregs of power? I’d give her mine, but I’ll be using my system to—”
Eriope waved away any further explanation. “I’ll be charging in a couple hours anyway.” Genevieve caught her watching Michael obliquely as they slotted the cable into their respective wrist connectors.
Genevieve wasn’t sure what reaction her friend might have been hoping for—or dreading—but Michael just frowned in more concentrated thought. “There’s no way to use household current?”
The others completely ignored the question, making Genevieve wish they wouldn’t shut him out that way. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t know an answer they considered obvious. “My system would have to convert it, and at some point, it’s a lot like drinking salt water in that I’d end up worse off.” Pyrus gently pushed her shoulders down and she yielded, setting her forehead on one arm to a view of the gray, padded surface of the table’s raised “pillow” portion.
“Someone should help her hold the pain blocks while I work, I’ll be concentrating on blood flow,” Pyrus said, beside her shoulder.
“Or you could do both while I cut out the scar tissue,” Michael challenged, from her opposite side. “I am a physician—”
“And you know what about Installs?” Pyrus’s tone had an edge he seldom indulged in. Genevieve could only imagine the unseen stress piled up behind it, but she couldn’t let this start escalating.
“Only as much as he learned keeping me alive during installation,” she snapped, then weakened it immediately as her next fuzzy-headed thought popped up. “I think. I don’t remember—that was you, wasn’t it, Michael?”
“That was me.” Michael’s voice had gone very quiet, and he took her hand carefully around the cable and held on like he’d never let go again.
That seemed to have sorted that out, and Genevieve lost track of any conversation abruptly as Pyrus started washing out her wound. Carex’s rather heavy-handed presence rendered her entirely numb below the neck, but perhaps that was for the best. She gave in to it, though she couldn’t keep track of Michael’s touch, and endured.
***
Having her up and walking was an asset when it came to making it to Michael’s car but Genevieve gave up on the effort after that. There was something about reclaiming the duffels from the stolen truck and ditching it, and she dozed off waiting for that to be taken care of, cheek printed against the window, and woke up in yet another new bed.
Her heart went from zero to jackhammer in no time at all, catapulting her up to her hands, but her gaze found no locked door, no nearby guard. Having taken that in, more of the rest of the room reached her. Light wood, in the bookshelves and bed, an inoffensively floral quilt she recognized from the guest room at her parents’ house hung on the wall. In fact, the whole room harkened back to that guest room, not merely in the blandness, but Genevieve thought she recognized one of the end tables and the bookshelf seemed familiar enough to have come from a set.
&n
bsp; But all that was Idyllian bland, and not really bland at all to her now. Still propped on one hand, she reached to pet the grain on the headboard. That was too much as far as her back muscles were concerned, however, as they twisted up into a spasm that left her gasping but overjoyed at the same time. She knew that feeling: whole muscles, twisting around growing wings. She sat up and felt with delicate fingertips and found unbroken skin and the panel her wings furled beneath, though no indication of how much was grown inside. Even without Pyrus to chastise her, she refrained from flexing the wings themselves yet.
Genevieve ran her hand through her hair, grimaced when she found it most definitely in need of a wash. She didn’t remember when her last shower had been and didn’t feel like calculating. Perhaps now was a moment to breathe and think about such things, however. Showers. Long-lost brothers. Permanently lost parents.
As circumstances proved, said long-lost brother was the one who entered first, bearing a tray with several plates piled high, one with stir-fry, one with rice. Carex followed at his heels and helped himself to a wonton as Michael set the tray down on the blankets by Genevieve’s hip.
“She needs the calories,” Michael said with a very thin patience. Genevieve wondered if the others had been rolling over him, making his mood flatter and flatter as she slept.
“So does he. They just cut up his back more cleanly.” Genevieve started shoveling stuff into her mouth. It undoubtedly deserved to be tasted properly—it smelled delicious—but she’d save that for later meals when she wasn’t growing wings. Carex pointedly seated himself on a cushioned bench-trunk under the window. She caught him unconsciously petting the wood grain in the lip under the cushion with his fingers, and smiled between bites.
Implications webbed out from her initial awareness of her situation as she ate, and by the time she was scraping the plate, she’d worked her way to real concern. “Michael…is it all right that we’re staying here? The Pax Romana will be looking for us soon enough, and I also can’t imagine any of your Idyllian neighbors would want us around…”
Michael gathered up the tray, hesitated at her question, then placed it to the side outside of the doorway and returned to fill its place on her blankets with himself. She did hug him this time, and they stayed that way for as long as his chest shivered with tears she didn’t otherwise hear. He laughed raggedly as they separated and he scrubbed at his face. “Now you feel like my big sister again.”
Instead of looking possibly younger than him. Those implications, Genevieve pushed aside, though she was sure they’d continue to grow on her as time went on, in a way they hadn’t among other Installs.
“Anyway. This is the best place for you, while you recover—especially since that won’t take long. I explained about you to my husband, and he took the kids to his parents’ house. They’ll love it for a few days, and will come home with the younger one trying to convince me they had ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” Prompted by Genevieve’s listening noise, Michael expanded. “We adopted a pair of war orphans, brother and sister. They’re six and eight now.”
“You married Sam?” Genevieve said, as he’d run down again. Then she winced. Hell. Way to put her foot in it. “No. He died in battle. I’m sorry. I remember that. Not long after Alicia, wasn’t it?” She couldn’t bear to have silence to hear the ring of Michael’s hurt, so she hurried on with unnecessary explanation to Carex. “That’s our older sister. The one I was telling you about.”
“It’s all right. We’re alive,” Michael said, when she’d cut herself off. He didn’t look hurt, just exhausted, and he even summoned a smile. “So you’re not married to—Pyrus?”
Genevieve saw an opening for a lighter tone and grasped after it with both hands, giving her brother a mock smack on the shoulder. “You want Carex to think we’re prudes out here? Of course we’re not married, I’m not a citizen, even though they allowed me to work in the empire. Even if we wanted the line in a database, who would we have registered it with?”
Michael’s smile turned lopsided, thin at the edge. “I liked to imagine sometimes you decided to abandon the mission and go settle down somewhere. You could have had kids of your own by now.”
Mission. Genevieve’s attention snapped automatically to Carex, but then he already knew about the virus she’d been given by Idyllian Resistance to take down the Installs, once upon a time.
But Pyrus didn’t.
And far from “sometime later” at a time that kept receding, she’d better tell him that now. Looking back, as if at a separate person, she couldn’t conceive of how she hadn’t thought of that in all the time since they’d decided to come to Idyll. Whether she coached Michael not to mention it or not, people here knew, and she needed to be the one to tell Pyrus. It didn’t matter that it scared her almost as much as sitting in the Pax Romana prison cell, wondering what they would do to her. The empire could hurt her physically, but her happiness rested in part on a foundation of her love with Pyrus and if he wanted to break that—
But Carex was speaking to Michael, expression mocking and hard. She had to hurry to catch up before she missed the conversation. “You realize all Installs are sterile? Useful byproduct or purposeful addition to the installation, it amounts to the same thing. Balances out the functional immortality.”
Genevieve breathed a curse under her breath. That had been aimed to wound, she was sure of it. She supposed Carex’s misery wanted company. “Carex, you don’t need to say it like that—”
“No, I do, since you’re not going to. It saves time if every Install warriors up and says it in so many words to their relatives.” He turned his sardonic look back to Michael. “How old do you think I am?”
Genevieve couldn’t answer that herself, since she knew Pyrus’s age and knew Carex wasn’t far away, but trying to set aside her biases, perhaps he looked like he was in his late thirties. Even if Michael came to the same conclusion, he frowned a beat longer and visibly revised his answer given the fact that Carex was being such an ass about asking. “Late forties, standard years? Fifty?”
“Sixty-one,” Carex said, then tipped his head to Genevieve. “Her boyfriend’s fifty-nine.”
Michael tossed her a look souring into dubiousness—about the romantic age gap, she presumed—and Genevieve directed her glare to Carex’s address instead. “Partner,” she corrected. “Tell me, Carex, last time you said that in so many words to a relative of your own, how did that work out for you?” When Carex dropped his gaze, shoulders tightening with unvoiced rage layered over pain, that was answer enough. “That’s what I thought.”
She caught up Michael’s hand. “We’re a deeply fucked up crowd, all of us, it’s true.” He laughed, awkwardly, and she spoke over him when he would have demurred out of sibling loyalty. “But I was working a way to uninstall…” And what now? Evade the Pax Romana for long enough, and they could make a new life. “Suppose I’ll pick that back up again. When and if I can.” Pyrus’s idea that they should take their research back to the empire was absurd, but she read that simply as an adjustment period. He’d get used to the idea of leaving the empire behind soon enough. And maybe they could offer their research to Installs individually.
But that was getting ahead of herself. First: evade the Pax Romana.
***
If felt oddly like a miniature occupation of Michael’s kitchen, to eat dinner with three Pax Romana around his table, more light wood
but swathed in a kid-mess-guarding tablecloth. She didn’t know which side she counted for, but he was roundly outnumbered either way. Eriope was visibly fraying at the edges, so she excused herself to go out in the yard the moment her plate was empty. It would have been better if she could go out on the town, but who knew what Pax Romana ID check she might get caught up in. The moment one of their false IDs got into the system, it started a countdown to when the ID wouldn’t be found in any external databases. That might take as long as days, but still. Carex, never chatty, followed soon after, and headed upstairs. Probably to nap, in his case. His wings had stubbornly resisted all of Pyrus’s efforts to kickstart them, so he was running only on power borrowed from Pyrus and Eriope and shared with Genevieve, since her own wings weren’t fully formed yet.
Michael accepted Genevieve’s plate to stack it with his own, but didn’t rise yet. Tension tightened his shoulders. “Vieve, you should know that the Resistance contacted me, asking about you.”
Genevieve froze. “Asking about me? Why?” They couldn’t imagine—
“Having Installs spotted arriving on the planet so soon after someone took out nearly all the others made them draw a few conclusions.” Michael grimaced. “I denied all knowledge of you, but I don’t know how long that will hold them off.”
“Thanks,” Genevieve told the table. She dared a glance at Pyrus who was frowning mildly in confusion, perhaps at the giant leap the Resistance had apparently made to reach those conclusions, if you didn’t know what they’d sent her away from home with. He still rose to help Michael with the rest of the plates, but she caught his wrist. “I need to talk to you.” She tried to make it light, tried with all her might, but maybe there was no way to say those words lightly. Michael disappeared into the kitchen, leaving just them and the deepening orange of the light through the blinds, flickered by leaf shadows in the wind.
