by R. Z. Held
“Keep giving me lip, slave girl, and you’ll get what’s coming to you.” Pyrus jerked her hips around so she faced him, barely giving her time to sort her wings out so they weren’t smashed against the railing. The way he growled it, she could barely keep herself from arching, grinding into him immediately. But she wanted to draw the game out, enjoy it properly.
“Do you promise?” She laughed into the skin at the side of his neck, before nipping.
“Is this a private game, or can someone else join tonight?” Carex ambled up with his hands in his pockets. “Eriope says sometimes you invite guests.” Genevieve muddled through two reactions, first automatically hiding against Pyrus’s chest, then rolling back a little, chin high, repudiating the social convention of embarrassment since once more Carex was the one doing the interrupting. Only then did his actual words penetrate.
She checked Pyrus’s face. No, he hadn’t expected this, but neither did he look annoyed. Beyond that, she couldn’t tell, and didn’t want to make a wrong guess. “Just tonight?” she asked, more a stalling tactic while she pulled her thoughts together than anything. His phrasing already made it clear enough that this was about sex, not anything more serious. Her attraction aside, at Tsuga he’d been so damn discreet—though it was always a safe guess to assume anyone with biological drives and an attraction to her gender might go to Eriope to help get those drives met—she’d never even considered his own attraction in turn.
“Just tonight, unless we like it enough to do it again.” Carex made it to the porch, halted on the creaking boards some distance from them. His stance held a diffidence she’d rarely seen in him, but she’d been learning not to assume such things didn’t exist, somewhere deep below the surface. “As in, not a relationship. I don’t think I’m built for such things—I like being on my own—but that doesn’t mean I don’t like a chance to play now and then.”
“Being single means you can be an ass unopposed,” Pyrus contributed. Carex clicked his tongue and made a “you got it” gesture to him.
Genevieve checked Pyrus’s face again. This time he smiled, lopsidedly, and shrugged. “Up to you. I have no objections to sharing if you’d enjoy it.” He shifted, pressing more directly against her thigh so she could feel that he emphatically had none.
Well. Their particular game could certainly accommodate three as well as two, which made the heat between Genevieve’s legs shiver up to a new pitch, but there was one thing she still wanted to be sure of. She disentangled herself reluctantly from Pyrus to stand before Carex. “You’re not interested despite me, are you? If it’s Pyrus you want, and since we’re mostly exclusive, I’m the price you have to pay…”
“Genevieve.” There was a half-incredulous chuckle to Carex’s voice. “I like women. Pyrus knows, you can ask him.”
She didn’t need to, however, when she thought back properly to just what he’d said: share, if she’d enjoy it. He knew. And clearly didn’t mind being the despite.
What that meant for her made her blush, and Carex gently cupped her cheek and brushed his thumb along the line of heat. “Sure,” she said. “Come play tonight.”
Fair Exchange
Part I
After Prague Sienna’s captors dumped her, bound by paralyzers, in a patch of shade with her back propped against a broken wall, she struggled foggily to link disconnected facts into a linear series of events. They’d pulled her out of the general population at the POW camp—because of her illicit portraits, drawn with homemade charcoal on spare patches of wall?—no, Libertad Sans Frontiers liked art, or at least grand propaganda murals.
The implant. They’d pulled her out of general population, put someone else’s implant in her head, and now she was here. Where was here? Somewhere dusty, with punishing sun casting the jagged shadows beyond her feet. The next nearest structure is 50 meters away. The implant presented her with a three-dimensional model of the abandoned, crumbling buildings surrounding her, apparently gathered from her senses despite the fact she’d been barely conscious as she was carried out here. Already, the creepy thing was encroaching on her mind; Sienna couldn’t fight the feeling that soon it would be eating away at her self.
A distant rumble marked a shuttle taking off. So LSF was abandoning her here? Why? If they wanted her dead, they could have shot her outside the POW camp; if they wanted to drop the implant for someone, they could have left it in a box instead of her head.
At least that head was clearing, despite continued intrusions from the implant they’d stolen from the dead body of—Agent Lima Isachne—wasn’t there a way for Sienna to turn it off, or at least slow the flow of information? Apparently not.
Maybe she needed to think of this as an opportunity. To escape. They’d dressed her in a Pax Romana army jacket—universal mercy, she hoped that hadn’t belonged to the dead woman too—with the hood up and a built-in filtering mask pulled up to the bridge of her nose. That and the climate control in the jacket protected her from the worst of the heat and dust, at least. The main paralyzer was at the small of her back, supplemented by one across her wrists, and one at her throat. Because of course there was one on her throat—LSF liked quiet prisoners.
She prodded at the implant, trying to reach her original com implant beneath it, jury-rig some kind of outgoing distress signal, detect nearby signals, anything. But her connection remained stubbornly one-way, and the implant had apparently imparted all the wisdom it was going to at the moment. Fine, then.
Sienna tried to shove herself along the wall using her elbow and succeeded only in tipping herself over. She considered her next move for a few breaths, and felt and heard another shuttle-like rumble.
Sent on a general Pax Romana military channel, the implant told her. Useful information for once. They must have noticed LSF touching down and come to investigate what their enemies were up to. Lucky for her! The Pax Romana generally honored their treaty with Idyll, so if she could convince them to release her to the Idyllian consulate, she could get home. She tried to reply to them and nothing happened.
You actually going to look at her for that response, dumbasses? the implant…said? Sienna realized she’d internalized the implant’s “voice” as female all along, but this had the color of personality brushed onto that voice. Universal mercy, was Isachne actually in her head, stored on the implant somehow? But after the caustic comment, the implant receded from her conscious thoughts again, and sense shouldered back in. A full person wouldn’t fit on an implant. This must be…scraps, somehow.
And all that had distracted her, so the male soldier had a hand on Sienna’s shoulder, pushing her up straight, when she whistled, as loud as she could behind the mask. She couldn’t use the code the prisoners had worked out to use when the guards left their throat paralyzers activated for days at a time, as punishment, but at least she could get the soldiers’ attention. Looking for a throat paralyzer should be an obvious conclusion at that point, right? The implant gave Sienna the soldiers’ names, which she forgot immediately.
Sienna mapped t
he implications of his words in desperate, frustrated silence as the female soldier leaned her forward to get access to the paralyzer on her back, touch clinical rather than kind. A prisoner exchange. The Pax Romana thought they were getting their agent back. She jerked, earning only a firmer hand on her back, pressing her down. There would undoubtedly be hell to pay once they found out, but if she couldn’t explain—
The man made a thoughtful noise.
So. Trapped, still, by silence. Sienna wanted to scream, wanted to scream and not stop until her throat bled. But at least the soldiers were moving her in the direction of that silence ending, so she limply allowed herself to be carried off between them. She was an Idyllian civilian, held by LSF under false pretenses, so surely under the treaty they’d have to at least treat her humanely while they contacted her government. They’d have to let her talk.
The shuttle ride was short and smooth enough, curled on the floor with the female soldier crouched beside her, steadying hand on her shoulder. The implant remarked on the shuttle specs, then those of the ship as the soldiers carried her out, setting her down on her side on plastic shock matting at the side of the bay, which was at least better than bare metal plates.
The man shoved back her hood back and smoothed the mask down to below the local paralyzer on her throat, leaving it exposed for the medic’s access. The stink of hair dye, washed out but not cleaned since, filled Sienna’s next breath, and by craning her neck, she got a tendril to slide down her shoulder into her range of view. Shimmering, unnatural black instead of the dull brown it should have been. They must have done it while she was still unconscious after the implant installation.
“That’s not her!” Boots filled Sienna’s vision first, then the new woman crouched at the same time Sienna got herself up on one elbow. “That’s not my wife!” This time, when Sienna sought eye contact to try to convey apology, convey that if only they would remove the paralyzer, she’d explain, intensity scorched her from the other side instead. Pure, unadulterated rage.
Manila Gentiana, the implant informed her.
Gentiana ducked her head over her wine glass, for a moment her fine, sharp features making her look like an ancient statue of a saint, but then she looked up to reveal a flash of delightful humor. “You speak six languages, don’t you? So I should be able to call you a cunning—”
Then the memory was gone, leaving Sienna gasping. Time had jumped, a new man was before her instead of Gentiana, but Sienna could hear the rise and fall of the anger she’d seen, poured forth into ranting beyond the range of her vision. The new man was presumably the medic, but not a particularly experienced member of the profession, as his touch on the throat paralyzer was slow. “There, it’s turned off,” he said.
“I’m Idyllian! Prague Sienna. Student visa Prague-one-six-two.” Dust and disuse put cracks in her voice, but Sienna forged desperately on. She could tell she wouldn’t have much time. “I was taken with others from a civilian transport LSF claimed harbored undercover agents, so they sent us to the POW camp. If you let me contact the nearest Idyllian consulate—”
“As if LSF would have let an Idyllian live.” Gentiana’s boots came into range again, and she wrenched Sienna’s shoulder so Sienna was facing up, into the heat of her rage. “Tell a better lie, you fucking fox.” Fox, a mispronunciation of faux-French, as false as everything French about Libertad Sans Frontiers after the dead language had been “updated” based on, irony of ironies, Lingua, the language of the Pax Romana and their greatest enemy.
“I pretended to be Pax Romana.” Shouldn’t that be understandable? Idyll was neutral, siding with neither the aging empire nor the violent rebels—much less scrappy and sympathetic now they controlled just as many systems—but the Pax Romana ignored Idyll and generally kept to their treaty when it was convenient. LSF, on the other hand, hated Idyll for declining to share the internal-technology advances that kept them well defended from both sides of the conflict. “But now I’m here, the treaty—”
But her time for speech had run out. Gentiana’s toe slammed into Sienna’s gut. Sienna curled around it, enduring until her breath came back. “You think you can come in as an LSF plant, fool us with some phony implant—” Someone drew breath to speak, no more, but that seemed to be all the push off the cliff Gentiana needed to draw the conclusion on her own. “Is it her implant? Is she dead?” Her voice rose to a scream. “Is Isachne dead?”
Gentiana crouched, caught at the collar of the jacket LSF had shrouded Sienna in, and shook as if some other truth could break free. Something in the movement jostled the paralyzer into engaging, and Sienna could only gurgle.
Not that she could have offered any answer that would have helped.
Punches now, falling into her face and jaw, and ragged bits of phrases. “—killed her! Killed her!”
“This is it, I’m afraid. My last message, recorded in the clear. Gentiana, I love you. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it back to you. We thought LSF understood that the implant ensures I can’t be broken. But they’re determined to try—”
The pain, it couldn’t have been meant to be part of the message, Sienna didn’t know if it was hers or Isachne’s, or maybe Sienna was dying now herself. She thought there were voices—“Manila, she’s a prisoner, you can’t treat her like that.” “We won’t sink to their level—” But there was also the implant—Broken nose. Zygomatic fracture. Extensive bruising throughout—
***
Maintaining vitals as if still unconscious, the implant informed Sienna as she rose through what would normally have been heart-pounding disorientation. With that artificially muted, she felt hazy and sticky instead as she assembled her situation. She was in an internal-technology treatment position, half on her side, half on her stomach, right arm and right leg bent to prop her there. A cautious slit of her eyes revealed the molded plastic edge of a diagnostic couch, but voices made her close them again.
“There was nothing bad enough for a gel bed, but I gave her a dose of healing nanites for the surface injuries and dehydration. Those have finished and flushed.” A man’s voice, and a gentle touch at the back of her neck, the implant installation site. “But I can tell you right now, any surgery to attempt to remove the implant would kill her. As far as I can tell, they kept the original owner in a vegetative state to briefly fool the implant into not self-destructing, then slammed it into this woman. Since it thought it was still in a living host, the implant attempted repair and seems to have taken over an Idyllian communications implant in the process. It has recreated perhaps forty percent of its connections, but that’s more than enough to kill her if we try to sever them.”
“You’re certain?” A woman’s voice. Sienna couldn’t tell if the tone was faintly chilling or if the content was what made it sound that way. “Wouldn’t it be better to get in there and see what the physical connections actually are? This has never happened before, has it?”
“No, because it never should have implanted again in the first place! I can only guess that the fact she didn’t die has something to do with the Idyllian int-tech.” The touch on her neck withdrew, and Sienna realized she hadn’t felt even the residual soreness she’d had from the LSF installation. They’d used top-quality healing nanites on her, at least. She recognized the high-gravity weight of the exhaustion they’d left in their wake. “I’m sorry, Commander Constantinople, surgery is impossible. It would be lethal.”
The woman—Constantinople Elantine, said the implant, but offered no memories—gave a bark of laughter. Once more, was it unkind, or was Sienna unkindly disposed against this stranger and her insistence on cutting her open? “Just our luck, a regular Amsterdam Genevieve.” Which must be the only Idyllian, a century dead as she was, most Pax Romana had heard of. One of Idyll’s heroes, one of the Pax Romana’s traitors. “I’ll capture her vitals and such for my report—if she wakes, I’ll call you,” she
said. The man made no protest against that dismissal, and his footsteps receded.
In the ensuing silence, Elantine sighed, moved off a little. Sienna wasn’t entirely sure what instinct had kept her quiet and listening as they spoke over her, but she knew it was still driving her, holding her to stillness. Like it or not, however, any application for asylum would undoubtedly have to go through the highest-ranking person around, and that would likely be the commander. Sienna should “awaken” and present her case—
“Why the fuck couldn’t they have set a timed trigger so you died in transport?” Elantine muttered.
In LSF French.
Then there was a hand on her shoulder, fingers digging deep, and a soft mass of a pillow against her face. Still, the implant said, in the “voice” of Isachne. Still, still. Save my breath, surprise her with it. Sienna’s instincts slammed against implant control, and the last of her held breath gave her a stretching moment of clarity—the implant was designed for such a situation, her instincts were not. If she was not to die, thrashing uselessly against superior strength and leverage, she needed to listen.
And then that stretching moment snapped, and she had only rising terror in her chest, battering her to death against iron motionlessness. She needs to roll me, to ensure the seal. “Me,” Sienna noted in the implant’s words, with a pointlessness born of hysteria. Not “you” or even “us.” Elantine did shift her position then, jerking Sienna to her back, pillow still tight to her face.
But not as tight.
The implant rolled Sienna with the motion, kept her going, wrenching out from under Elantine’s grip. Her eyes spasmed open as she gasped in air and rolled right off the side of the couch. Not so far to fall, but far enough to slam spikes of pain up through her knees and heels of her hands, driving the breath right back out again. The implant jerked at muscles that, even with all the will in the world, couldn’t respond with the speed and force it demanded. She sprawled, losing height down to her forearms along the floor, and the connection with the implant snapped.
