by R. Z. Held
“Okay.” Pyrus settled two of his hands over her one on the tablecloth. “What’s wrong?” He looked so concerned, so kind, because he was the kindest man she’d ever met and that’s why she loved him.
“So, there’s no good way to say this—and I should have said it before now, but I suppose I thought it would go away if I ignored it, but that’s stupid…” Genevieve clenched her teeth to break herself off. She needed to stop talking around it. “You already know that I got infected when Idyll was conquered. Michael and my family nursed me through the install process, but when I woke up, everyone considered me practically the enemy. It was strongly suggested I leave the planet.”
He was nodding. He did already know that, she’d told him long ago. No matter how she searched his face, she couldn’t see any inkling of where this was going, however. She couldn’t do this.
She had to do this.
“What I didn’t say is they dressed it up prettier than that, though. The Resistance gave me a ‘mission.’ They’d created a virus they hoped would shut down Installs’ nanites.”
There it was, the sharp intake of breath. She avoided looking at his face. His touch didn’t leave her skin, however. “And you dumped it, but now they think you finally succeeded.”
She hadn’t dumped it, but as she was finding the words to confess that as well, outside circumstances intervened. The door chimed and Michael answered, his voice perfectly audible to Install senses, even across the house. “I told you, I haven’t heard from my sister—”
“Don’t give me that nonsense,” a rough-voiced woman said. “Of course she’s here.” And her footsteps strode into the house.
Genevieve had one breath to shoot a worried glance at Pyrus. How Pax Romana did he look? His clothes were urban, but neutral enough, and he’d gotten rid of his beard on Michael’s recommendation. If the two of them were seen as connected, however, given that she’d been living among the Pax Romana for years, certain conclusions would be unavoidable. She drew her hands away and stood hurriedly, then strode for the hallway to intercept the visitor there.
The stranger leading her brother by several steps was a farmer, that was clear enough, with cropped white hair and skin seamed by the elements to give her a face like ten kilometers of bad road. Then the woman was slamming into Genevieve, embracing. “Ha! I knew you’d succeed! I knew it!”
Genevieve stood rigid until the woman released her, apparently unbothered by her reaction. “Come, sit down!” She herded Genevieve back into the dining room, like this wasn’t Michael’s house she was inviting someone else to make herself at home in. And of course there was Pyrus, still seated with his hands folded on the tabletop, watching them both with a neutral expression. The stranger’s brows slammed down, as if it wasn’t her own fault she’d been indiscreet without checking who was in the next room.
“She was able to rescue other infected civilians,” Michael commented, so mildly that he must have planned that excuse well ahead of time. Or at least well ahead of Genevieve, thank mercy.
“Ah!” The stranger’s face cleared. “Let’s all have coffee together, then.” Apparently that was an order to Michael. Genevieve shot him a look, but he just pulled a resigned face before slipping away to the kitchen. All right. If he didn’t want to make an issue of it, she wouldn’t either.
“I’m sorry, who are you?” she asked as the woman pulled up a chair at the table. Whatever the Resistance believed about her mission, this chummy nonsense was a little much. She declined to sit herself.
“Marta. Don’t you remember—?” The woman’s face cleared. “Of course, you weren’t at your best when we last talked. I brought you into the Resistance.”
Genevieve pressed fingertips beside her eyes, as if she could press the memories back into alignment. She had barely more than fever dreams from the time of her actual installation, but after she’d woken up—she’d thought she’d had more than that, but she wasn’t finding much. Who had given her the virus? She remembered seeing the seemingly innocent stud earring on her palm, but she couldn’t change perspective to pick up the face beyond it.
And she’d taken too long and lost her chance to object to that version of events. “Brought her into” indeed. Offered her a choice between becoming their tool or having no other real choice. “And you’ve succeeded beyond our wildest dreams!” Marta continued.
Pyrus’s patience gave a practically audible snap. He shoved to his feet, chair scraping loudly along the floorboards. “She didn’t do it for your dangerously misguided movement, she had no choice. And we’re going back to help figure out how to reverse the effects just as soon as we can.”
Genevieve closed her hands into fists, as if she could get a grip on this conversation as it spiraled away from her.
Marta broke in—or perhaps, given that their argument appeared silent to her, she merely picked up—with undiminished enthusiasm. Genevieve couldn’t tell if she couldn’t read their body language or simply didn’t care. “With you to rally everyone, Genevieve, we’ll have the Pax Romana off the planet inside of a month!”
“She’s not interested,” Pyrus growled, without even looking at her.
Genevieve stepped right up into him. “You don’t speak for me!” She wasn’t interested in helping the Resistance, she wanted to run a thousand kilometers from anything to do with them, but he didn’t get to say things like that.
And she didn’t run after. Pyrus processed things best alone, she knew that, however much the sheer effort of holding her muscles still so she didn’t move felt like it was making her bleed inside. And now Marta was opening her mouth again—
Genevieve leaned over and slammed her hands flat on the table. Marta jumped, and Michael, arriving from the kitchen, slopped coffee from the two mugs he was carrying over his wrists. He cursed, but with annoyance rather than real pain, so Genevieve concentrated on the woman in front of her. The gall. “Understand this. I am not doing a thing for you. You—the Resistance—couldn’t get rid of me fast enough! I was half dead and in pain and you shoved me on a shuttle with some paper-thin excuse of a mission—which, I might add, probably would have failed. It wasn’t that virus I used. And you did it because I’d become one of the enemy, but now I’m good enough for you again? I suit your purposes, do I?”
It took Marta a breath or two to find a conciliating smile. She reached out to pat Genevieve’s hand, seemed to read that Genevieve might well break that hand, and withdrew it. “But you could do so much, in the effort to free Idyll. Don’t you want your family to live free?”
“The Pax Romana might well be leaving on their own fast enough. They’re stretched too thin, and it’s just a matter of how much chaos it takes before they admit it.” Genevieve waved away the mug her brother offered her. She might throw it in Marta’s face otherwise. Marta accepted her own mug calmly. “Honestly, you’d be better off keeping out of that chaos. Under this much stress, local commanders will be that much more likely to overreact.”
Marta seemed to hear not a word.
Instead, she leaned back in her chair, assessing. “You’d make an inspiring figure, I think. Looking not a day older than you left. Younger, even. One of Idyll’s daughters, having struck a blow for freedom across the empire.”
“Inspiring? With these?” Genevieve snapped out her wings, hoping the sight might break Marta out of her smug certainty, even just a little. Far from being intimidating at the moment, she thought they looked like those of a dead bat, as chewed on by a dog and left to decompose for a while. The ribs were mostly in place, but the carbon composite plates were taking their sweet time about growing and arranging themselves into something glide-worthy.
Marta made the smallest moue of disgust, but then her armored smile was back. “We can work around it.” She sipped her coffee, as if everything was settled now.
“No.” Genevieve stood, keeping her movements slow and deliberate. She didn’t want an emotional outburst to make it seem like she could be talked around later, when calm. She was perfectly calm at the moment, calmly shaking with fury. “I will do nothing for you, or the Resistance. Get out, or I will throw you out.”
Marta, standing, matched her stance and almost her height, but even her wiry strength paled before Genevieve’s anger. She opened her mouth, and Genevieve readied herself for the threat portion of this little scene: with us or against us; another Pax Romana to be thrown off the planet. But then Marta backed down, and dipped her head. “We can talk again when you’ve had more time to heal.” And she was out of the room, heading for the front door before Genevieve could react. Genevieve considered shouting some variation on the theme of “will never happen!” after her, but it wouldn’t help, and she didn’t want to seem petulant.
That left Genevieve with Michael, who was staring at her open-mouthed. She furled her wings quickly, but she realized a beat later he must be reacting to the barely constrained violence of her. With an effort, she pulled that in too, hunching her shoulders until he relaxed fractionally. “We already needed to find somewhere rural to hide, so I guess I’ll add the Resistance to the list of people we’re hiding from, if they continue refusing to take no for an answer.”
Michael still had her unwanted mug in his hands, and he rotated it to cup them around it, probably more for the emotional comfort of the warmth than the literal truth of it. “Is what you said really—the mission really had so little chance of success? If we’d known—”
The coffee was in the way of a hug, but Genevieve crossed over in one stride to cup his elbows. “Even bad no-choice-really choices are still choices we’ve made. I made it, I survived, maybe did some good despite it. Found the man I love—” But somewhere in all of this, she’d forgotten about that, and incipient tears fogged her eyes. That would work out, wouldn’t it? He’d be back in a few hours? She wanted to beg her brother to tell her he would, but how would he know?
Instead, she mumbled some sort of reassurance and took the mug from him so he could head off to visit his husband and kids. She started, standing over the sink, at hearing the door, even though she knew it was only him leaving. She needed—a direction—
But maybe Carex would know how long Pyrus might be gone, or what she should say, to apologize properly. She jogged to the stairs to find Carex already coming down, a duffel over one shoulder, scowl etched into his expression. “Apparently I’m taking Pyrus his stuff. Don’t know where the dumbass imagines he’s going to stay…”
That was worse than Genevieve had feared, and anxiety choked off all her words, leaving her standing stupidly in the middle of the hall with her throat thick with tears. She expected to Carex to simply brush past her, but he tipped his head to invite her into conversation to one side, scowl taking on a flavor of exasperated impatience. “So you told him,” he said. “And then reportedly joined the local resistance on the spot to betray him that much more comprehensively?”
How could you be so stupid? said Genevieve’s mind, on Carex’s asshole behalf, and she launched herself at him. She got in a couple good punches before the shock wore off and then the unevenness of their weight class and her training ended with her back slamming against the wall, his forearm across her throat to pin her there. “Calm down,” he snapped. “Tell me when you’re ready to listen again.”
She kept struggling for a few more shallow breaths, determined to make him work for it, but his muscles were like rock as he leaned in harder and she finally slumped against his hold.
Carex let her go, stepped back, stance still braced and ready in case she rushed him again. “Hold off on the pity party for a few days. He might think himself around. When loyalty finally snaps, it hurts.”
Genevieve sneered at him. If he was trying to be reassuring, he was doing a bad job. “Not everything has to be about how you guys feel about the fucking empire.” What about what the two of them felt about each other?
Carex snorted. “They’ve ensured everything in our lives is about the fucking empire, and don’t you forget it.” He turned, another person leaving tonight. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a friend to go listen to rant and rail about the faithlessness of lovers.” And then he was gone too.
“Shit, my timing,” Eriope said from behind her, and Genevieve hadn’t even registered the sound of her entering from the back yard. She started to search her system to see if that had recorded it, but that was power intensive and it didn’t really matter. Eriope was smart enough to fill in what she hadn’t overheard.
Eriope folded her into a hug and then the tears broke free. “You want to leave the planet,” Genevieve prompted when her breathing had smoothed out, because while that still hurt a little, the fact that she’d seen it coming from a thousand kilometers off helped blunt the effect.
“The civilian field’s finally back in Pax Romana control, so I can use my rich asshole ID and cover story and stroll up to reclaim my ship and set out for greener pastures. That way, for anyone who’s looking for us, I’ll be laying trails all over the place. And I can see about freeing up more of our funds…” Eriope’s rhythm suggested she had at least three more logical reasons but she’d just realized Genevieve didn’t actually appear to need convincing.
“And you’re feeling trapped.” Genevieve took one more deep breath with her forehead against her friend’s shoulder, then pushed back and started trying to see what repair of her face she could do with her sleeve. “Maybe you should ask Pyrus if he wants to go with you—”
Eriope seized her upper arms, squeezed hard. “Absolutely not. He’ll only want to return two days later, and what kind of trail is that to lay?” She pulled Genevieve back into one last hug. “He’ll be back. He’d never be so big a fool as to give you up.”
“Universal mercy grant.” Then Genevieve was letting Eriope go too, upstairs to pack at the moment, but soon enough she’d be leaving as well. She made herself fresh coffee and hid out in the kitchen, not drinking it, to wait.
Eriope sent a brief message when she’d successfully gained access to the ship and permission to lift off, voice staticy with distance, and then Genevieve was alone for an indeterminate period until Carex contacted her.
Genevieve’s hands spasmed too hard and she broke her mug.
Genevieve froze in the act of piling the ceramic shards together, then picked the largest back up and snapped it again, between her two hands.
reath.
No. Pity party indeed. She was stronger than this.
He didn’t answer, which was answer enough.
Part IV
Three days, four, stretched to a week. Michael’s husband and kids returned and settled back into their daily lives, and Genevieve helped with chores as much as she could, wings tucked away. Carex spent much of the day away from the house on business of his own—he didn’t volunteer any information, Genevieve didn’t ask—and returned at night to eat dinner and pass out on the air mattress on the guest room floor. She knew they needed to leave, needed to hide better from the Pax Romana who would be looking for them, needed to get out of reach of the Resistance who knew where she was. But she couldn’t make herself feel the urgency of those threats when Pyrus was stuck at the base. They should leave him behind and she couldn’t leave him behind. She needed to apologize to him, beg his forgiveness on her knees, and he needed to apologize to her and beg hers.
Day to day, her wings gave an excuse for her drifting during their slow healing process. She turned options over in her mind, getting nowhere—again—the morning of the eighth day at the breakfast table, letting the bustle of family life distract her in the end—again.
