by R. Z. Held
With the noon sun beating down on them all to the point of real heat on the track to the backyard shed where the extra vehicle had been stored, Pyrus had taken the opportunity to bring out his wings to charge them both, cord linking their wrists between their bodies and the truck, minimized. They hadn’t spoken or even otherwise touched since he’d inspected her healed wound and released her to finish throwing her possessions into her bag.
“You should be good to go, except for there not being anything to eat.” Michael trailed into rough humor, brightened when Carex appeared with a crate, an old coat folded on top. “This should be enough to get you started, though.” He retrieved the coat from the crate, gestured for Carex to load it, and approached Pyrus. “Thought you might want to blend in a little outside of the city. Your clothes are far too nice. This is my husband’s, I think it should be reasonable on you. We don’t have anything that will fit Carex, unfortunately.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to roll around in some mud at the earliest opportunity. Think I should grow out a mountain man beard as well?” Carex returned, load deposited, to their side of the truck and stroked his jaw sardonically.
“That or stay clean shaved,” Michael answered seriously, then frowned, clearly not able to tell if Carex was giving him shit or not. Genevieve couldn’t honestly guess herself.
Carex gave him a wave as if to suggest Michael relax as he headed back for the house. For another load? “How much food are you giving us?” she said, turning to her brother in concern. “I don’t need to steal it off your kids’ plates.”
Michael smiled lopsidedly and stepped up to her, hands out. Pyrus’s gentle touch at her wrist withdrew the cable so she had her hands free to catch her brother’s, to embrace him. He spoke into her shoulder, holding tight. “We have plenty to spare. There’s little enough I can do for you, Vieve.”
“You saved my life, don’t forget about that,” she said, low. She hadn’t thought this goodbye would be so hard. It wasn’t really a goodbye this time, she had to hold on to that.
Michael gave her a last squeeze, stepped back. “And now I’m hoping I can help you find your way of being happy.” He kissed her cheek, turned quickly to disappear back inside the house, leaving Genevieve knuckling her eyes and feeling the silence between her and Pyrus sour into something awkward.
After a few beats, he folded his wings and tried on the donated coat. It wouldn’t zip across his chest, but at least it spanned his shoulders. It didn’t transform him into an Idyllian farmer either, but the worn-in dirt would deflect casual attention, she judged.
Carex returned with the next crate, took in their awkward stances and snorted. “If you’re wanting to blend in, you’ll have to control your showboating urges. I thought you’d gotten those out of your system first tour.”
Completely lost, Genevieve made a wordless “?” sort of noise which made Carex snort again when Pyrus didn’t step in with a reply to either of them.
“The jump, at the base. Looks impressive, leaves you vulnerable on the way down and immediately on landing, and wastes energy healing the damage to your knees,” Carex glossed.
“But it works.” A brush of tight humor wove through Pyrus’s words, though his expression was twisted—with self-recriminations, Genevieve would have guessed, based on the man she’d once known.
Silence returned as Carex turned back for another load. “The view’s probably better from behind, if you’re looking for the maximum enjoyment of standing by watching me work,” he sniped as he passed, and they both shook themselves.
“How many more are there?” Genevieve asked, taking a step to cut across the lawn for the house.
Carex jogged a few steps to catch up to her, grasped her shoulders, and bodily reoriented her toward Pyrus. “No, I’m carrying shit, you two are talking to each other. You’ll find it quite easy—instead of staring at each other, you use your mouths to say words. Or send them over coms, that works too.”
And then they were alone together, the two of them and an old farm truck, leggy weeds colonizing the wheel ruts at their feet. Words, Genevieve, admonished herself. Carex wasn’t wrong about using those, but fear strangled all of hers. “Are you—are we—?” Are we even still a “we”?
“Please,” Pyrus begged, and then he was hanging onto her and she was hanging onto him. His own words seemed to have burst through their own metaphorical dam. “Every day, I missed you like—like wings, but I kept listening to my pride, letting it tell me that I wasn’t missing the real you, the you who’d accept a mission like that and return to the Resistance. And then I saw you, in the compound, throwing yourself body and soul at what you knew was right, so quintessentially Genevieve, and I couldn’t fool myself any longer. Of course I knew the real you. Of course that was the woman I loved, and I’d walked away from her when she needed me most—”
Genevieve’s hands were tight around his waist so she scrubbed her damp eyes against the shoulder of his jacket and probably painted dirt across her cheekbone. “I should have told you sooner. And bodily thrown Marta out of the house.”
“I—” Pyrus cleared his throat, dislodging a final chunk of awkward. “Don’t know if I’d have been ready to hear it. What you said in the compound, about loyalty, I think that’s exactly what I needed to hear at that moment, but mercy knows Carex has said the same thing to me before—more than once—and I wasn’t ready then.”
Carex arrived with a third crate and Pyrus caught and held his gaze, forging a connection heavy with the weight of their shared decades of violence and pain. “And there will come the day.”
“There will come the day,” Carex echoed, as if sealing a bond.
Then he broke the moment with a smirk as he placed the crate in the truck. “I’m not even mad it was her who finally convinced you. I’m sure having slept with her lends her a trustworthy air. Not to mention you presumably wish to do so again.”
Genevieve turned in Pyrus’s arms, laughing helplessly even as she tried to glower at Carex. “It’s not an accident, is it? Carex likes being an asshole for its own sake.”
“Carex lives to be an asshole as much as humanly possible,” Pyrus said. Carex shot him a sardonic salute, then vaulted up into the truck’s bed to unfurl the tarp that had been crumpled at the back and hook it down so the load was tightly covered.
They’d be leaving soon, but Genevieve wasn’t sure they were quite done saying everything that needed to be said yet. “At the compound…” Having started, she wasn’t sure of the right phrasing, so she took a moment to make sure she felt comfortable in her choice. “That wasn’t a side of you I’d seen before. I mean, obviously, you were a soldier, but picturing you as a medic—”
“I wasn’t ever a medic,” Pyrus said heavily. “Not until I’d retired, and it became clear someone was needed in the role at Tsuga. They only used Installs for very particular roles. What you saw wasn’t…atypical for much of my career. I’ve killed a lot of people. Too many people.” He shifted his weight onto his heels, away from her. It took Genevieve a full breath to realize it was fear she was seeing in his face. Fear of her reaction.
Perhaps she should have been glad now he knew how it felt, but empathy only made her hurry the faster to reassure him. “All of that—it’s not all of you, not by a long shot, but it’s a part of you. So I’m glad you trusted me with it.”
Carex thumped a fist lightly on the top of the cab, capturing their attention. “Now, flip the speakers on those last two lines, deliver them, and we’ll be on our way.”
That took longer than it should have for Genevieve to parse. Killed too many people—it’s a part of you, I’m glad you trusted me with it—but having absorbed that, holding tightly to Pyrus, she agreed with Carex.
Time to be on their way.
***
By the time there was leisure for such activities at the farm, the weather was really far too cold for the sunbathing Pyrus and Genevieve were currently doing. But today was crystal clear, utterly without clouds
, so they’d spread a blanket on the south lawn where the tree shadows would not impinge on them for several hours at least, and spread themselves and wings atop it. Genevieve wasted a little power on upping her core body temperature, and dozed in the comfort of denial. There was still plenty to worry about, even if it had been long enough they’d begun to hope they were going to evade Pax Romana detection for good, but today, today she was basking.
Pyrus’s head was up, chin on one forearm, watching the trees, unable to shut off his interest in the unfamiliar environment, she suspected. “Still looks like a forest to me,” he murmured, picking up a joke they’d been batting back and forth intermittently since they arrived.
“It’s still a timber farm, whatever uneducated urban associations certain people have with farms. Soil wouldn’t be any good for the kind of crops you’re thinking of. Trust me, I’m a soil scientist.” She folded in her half-grown wings, flipped to her back to stare up at the blue of the sky above them. Perhaps she was worse at basking than she’d hoped, because a worry snuck free. “I don’t think I’m cut out to be a farmer, long-term, though.”
“Restless already?” Pyrus flopped an arm over the general region of her chest. “Sorry, you don’t get to leave this blanket yet. You’ll just have to stay here until the sun goes down.”
“Sounds rather cold to me.” Genevieve’s laughter dislodged his arm, dragging it across her breasts and sparking unexpected arousal. So hurt, so exhausted—and then that exhaustion had continued in an emotional form at the farm, cleaning, refinishing, and mixing furniture from room to room so she no longer felt like she had to choose between sleeping in Michael’s or her child self’s room or her dead sibling’s or parents’ one. It had been long enough, she realized now, that she’d lost track of the fact that anything was missing.
And Pyrus hadn’t given the faintest breath of a hint that he missed it either, bless him. “What are you going to do with me, now you’ve captured me, you dastardly soldier?”
Pyrus was abruptly kneeling, straddling her hips, wings mantled up and high. No doubt of interest there, then. He leaned down teasingly, hands beside her shoulders, jerked back when she braced up on her elbows to try to close a kiss. “Keep you busy until the sun goes down, obviously.”
“Where the hell are you two?” Carex’s voice preceded his footsteps, both overloud and a little hesitating. “Oh. Interrupting.” Genevieve had to twist to see him as he was coming up behind her head, and he visibly swayed as he came to a stop a few meters away. He winced. “No, but I can guess ‘how long it’s been.’ It’s not like I’ve had any opportunities of my own on this planet. But look, I’m leaving now!” Pyrus must have sent some cursing over a private channel.
Carex turned, tripped over the air, and did a full faceplant. On the ground, he rolled onto his back, laughing. Pyrus let Genevieve up and they exchanged a glance of consternation. The mood slipped away into confusion for her quickly, as it had for Pyrus too, Genevieve suspected. “Carex…are you all right?” she asked.
By the time she reached his side to offer a hand up, he’d made it to his knees, and just grinned up at her, ignoring the offer. “Found some bottles of mysterious liquid in the basement.”
“So mysterious you decided you just had to put it in your mouth?” Pyrus remained where he was, seated and watching his friend narrow-eyed, probably counting the seconds until the alcohol would start wearing off. An Install could manage to get drunk, but only for a few minutes at a time. If Carex had tanked up at the house, he should be coming out of it soon enough.
But that didn’t make sense. “As I recall, my aunt and uncles didn’t abandon the moonshine down there because it was too strong, but because it tasted like it was made to strip corrosion off industrial equipment.” Genevieve seized Carex’s unresisting hands and hauled him up bodily. “Unless you’re faking right now…”
“Strip corrosion—” Carex dissolved into laughter. “Funny and beautiful.” His next sway tipped him into her a little, and for a minute she imagined he might kiss her. With him so relaxed, and laughing, she could abruptly see the attraction of that idea, with the solid span of muscle in his chest and shoulders, and the strength in the grip of his hands.
She opened the distance between them immediately, and the moment passed as quickly as it had come. Just her imagination. Really looking at him had brought something more to her attention, however. “You’re going gray,” she breathed. Just a dusting, light strands leavening the short, black waves of his hair. Installs didn’t go gray. Ever. They retained the color, if they had started to do so when they underwent installation, but that arrested the process.
Going gray, managing to get and stay drunk…
“Carex, have your wings grown back at all? You’ve been eating enough for it,” Genevieve kept hold of his hands, even when Pyrus rose and came up behind her shoulder. She could almost hear his frown warping the air around them, but he was still back at confusion, she suspected. She’d jumped forward, to one particular conclusion.
“Used the energy on fast-learning for the damn language. Gotta talk like the natives.” He did indeed switch to passable Idyllian for the latter sentence. “No wings.” He would have turned to illustrate, but she didn’t let him go, so he settled for rolling his shoulder muscles without effect.
“No wonder you’re getting drunk. I’ll have to lend you some charge,” Pyrus said, and turned back to fold up their blanket.
Genevieve shook her head emphatically, but didn’t waste time with a verbal negative. “We have a species of blackberry vine around here. Specially bred not to crowd out other species—the original stock was infamous for that. So obviously—”
“It crowds like a motherfucker.” Carex smirked.
“Conquers and pillages, more like.” Genevieve allowed herself a snort of humor. “There are only two ways to get rid of it, without tilling up every other innocent plant in that patch of ground as well. One is to snip each vine, and paint the cut ends with herbicide so the roots die. The other is to cut off the vines, and then do it again when they resprout, and again, over and over until you’ve starved the roots and they have nothing left to sprout with. If they can’t get leaves open long enough to collect energy…”
“Genevieve…” Pyrus’s voice had gone soft with the sheer intensity of his realization, and the gathered blanket slid a corner out of his unresisting hands.
“Just when I think you’ve reached peak folksy with your damn metaphors.” Carex finally got his hands away from her, and promptly almost fell again. “What the hell are we talking about, again?”
“Uninstallation.” Pyrus was the one to answer, slow, then getting faster as he probably laid it out in his own mind. “Remove the wings, and then keep drawing off energy so the nanites spend it elsewhere rather than regrowing the wings…if it happened over a long enough period they might start shutting down a few at a time, painlessly. If it happened gradually enough, the change might not be the kind of shock to people’s psyches that would drive them to suicide…”
He dropped the blanket and crossed to Carex at the same time Genevieve did. “Do you feel all right emotionally, Carex? No warrior bullshit.”
He only laughed, spreading his arms wide. “I’m feeling great.”
“I think that’s a question we’ll have to revisit when he’s not drunk. But if he is still balanced—as balanced as any of us are—” The possibilities webbed out in Genevieve’s mind like a forking branch of lightning. “He’s still got channels, maybe it would even be possible for people to keep some functions, while being able to age again.”
Carex batted both their hands away when they reached for him, but then his currently impaired thinking seemed to catch up to what had been said a few steps back. “Uninstallation.” He speared first her with an intense stare, then Pyrus. “You’re not shitting me?”
“We can’t be sure until you let us look, but that seems like a reasonable conclusion at the moment,” Pyrus said.
“Ha!” Care
x shouted it, exultant, to the sky. In that moment, Genevieve felt rather like singing her own exultation, having seen the variegated violence or rage or despair on the face of every retired Install trapped into a life they couldn’t escape, sterile, unaging, and never permitted out of the military’s control, lest they someday turn on the empire that trapped them there. “I knew you’d find it. I knew you were fucking hope.”
“I had help—” Genevieve turned to expand the credit to Pyrus at least, since the rest of her research team were far away at the moment, but he shook his head, with a small, delighted smile of his own, and let it be Genevieve Carex caught up in a tight embrace as his laughter walked a line close to sobs.
***
Funds were a problem. Lingering over post-breakfast coffee, Genevieve studied a tablet—sometimes manipulating data with her fingertips helped her think—split between Carex’s charted nanite counts opposite a projection of what they’d need to make from harvesting the farm’s timber, if they wanted to be able to offer the process to anyone else. Of course, if they could get the word out far enough, other ex-military Installs might be able to bring along some funds of their own, but that wouldn’t be enough alone. And the farm could be quite profitable, but not immediately, especially with the ownership tangle of inheritance to deal with—it should be Genevieve’s, but she’d been missing but not declared dead at the time of their parents’ deaths, so some things were in her brother’s name—and so on. Not impossible to sort out, but annoying as all get out.
Outside the kitchen window, a light drizzle was pissing down, that and tossing tree limbs in the accompanying icy wind providing an overabundance of white noise. At least, that’s what she told herself in hindsight. If her unconscious caught the footsteps, it dismissed them just as quickly, as Pyrus and Carex were both around, generally, though they’d set out with the plan of surveying the timber at the far edges of her parents’ property earlier. And Genevieve was facing the window, back to the bulk of the house, because she never had been, never would be military, to think that way.
