by R. Z. Held
That was one element in this plan that was almost comforting—she’d always known she’d only have a small window of a clear approach to the ship, whether Elantine knew about her or not.
Now was when she needed the implant to not fail her. At least it gave her no backchat, with Isachne’s personality gone. But, by the same token, she couldn’t always be sure it had received her directions properly. She stopped before the ship, and sent the signal for the cargo ramp to lower without any consultation with the ship’s central computer—and, indeed, without the computer knowing anything was happening at all. No one was here, and the door wasn’t opening for that no one. That was within an agent’s capabilities, apparently.
Sienna’s adrenaline, already hovering at the edge of all-over shakes, increased in steady, ticking increments as nothing happened. Had the implant sent the signal properly? Had the ramp received it? Had a warning popped up for the pilot, prompting them to override and call for security? There shouldn’t be anyone on board besides the pilot—the beacon had listed only two crew, she’d checked her implant’s read of that with Pen when the ship arrived in orbit. And the pilot had no reason to even unhook.
Please, open. Please.
And the ramp did. Sienna bounced to her toes. Faster, faster. Elantine or the supply-toting crew member could be starting back here at any second.
When it was about halfway down, at about chin-height for her, and only a modest uphill walk for anyone inside, footsteps thudded on the metal. “So she wasn’t just paranoid,” a woman said, the circles of a pilot’s data paths large at her temples. Her eyes narrowed as she completed the angle to catch Sienna with plain old eyesight, while she was still invisible to instruments.
Shit! Sienna didn’t know if it was her own instincts or the implant, below the level of thought, that launched her forward, but she grabbed for the edge of the ramp as it raised itself once more with similar glacial speed. If she could only get on board, wedge herself into a corner somewhere they couldn’t pry her out of without completely fucking up their schedule…
Up, her implant told her muscles. Pull yourself up with your arms. Easiest thing in the world. Roll onto the ramp, come up fighting—but Sienna was still hanging onto the edge of the ramp, whole body shuddering with the effort she was pouring into muscles that simply couldn’t lift her weight.
Sienna wanted to shriek, as if desperate frustration would boost her. What more was she supposed to have done, to get Isachne’s muscles in three weeks?
Agony smashed across the fingers of her left hand and she couldn’t hang on, it spasmed free and she was hanging by one hand. Fuck that pilot, fuck Elantine, fuck all Pax Romana and LSF both. And why not stomp both hands, and be done?
And why let her get this far, let the ramp open even slightly?
This time, it was all Sienna who let go, as the implant shoved at her mind, telling her to swing, get a hand up and grab the pilot’s ankle. She let go, let the implant snap abruptly over to taking her through the fall so she came down crouched, hands on the ground, rather than on her ass. Elantine not only knew Sienna was alive and had guessed she would try for the ship, she knew an attempt on the ship would put Sienna somewhere she could predict, within a narrow window of time.
She’d be waiting, inside the nearest door.
Waiting for Sienna to stroll into her trap. Well, Sienna didn’t feel like playing.
Toward the forest.
Leaves lashed her across the face, and harder branches buried within the green mass of underbrush scratched at her legs as she ran without direction, just away. The jacket turned away similar pain across her arms and abdomen, but Sienna had to stop and cling to a tree trunk, sobbing for breath, after the broken end of a stick stabbed itself into her thigh. The pain was such she wondered if she’d been impaled, but it hadn’t even broken the skin beneath the fabric of her pants. All right. Slower.
As clear thought filtered back in, as she picked her slow, dripping way between the brush, she realized that if Elantine wanted to send someone after her, she was leaving a hell of a trail. Then again, would Elantine want to involve anyone else, only to have the refugee—who, according to Cyperus, had rights—mysteriously die in custody? Far easier to leave her to die in the woods again and hope it took this time.
A particularly fat drop of water cast itself down the back of her neck, and Sienna jolted, pulling away too late. Idiot, why didn’t she have her hood up? She corrected the oversight now, but she could feel her braid leeching warmth from her skin in a damp line where it was curled over her shoulder.
In fact, the damp was stealing away her body heat on several fronts, all along her thighs and through her cheap boots. The implant popped up a polite, early-stage warning up about hypothermia. From nothing more than rain? Sienna wasn’t sure she believed it, but she kept moving anyway. If she circled generally around the building, she might discover a less overgrown route to return along once Elantine had to unlock the doors. For…some reason. Even if no one wanted to go outside, someone would notice and think it was strange eventually, wouldn’t they?
As the sun went down, Sienna completely believed the hypothermia warning. She wasn’t actively shivering, but chill seemed to have settled down into the very marrow of her bones, radiating outward steadily, or in bursts when a step jarred the unseen bruises across her legs or the steadily purpling ones across her left hand.
When the rain began to increase from pattering to splatting across the leaves above her, and onto her hood, she finally gave up on her circle and used wobbly legs to lower herself to the base of a tree.
But Sienna was exhausted and she ached in every cell and the breather, cheek against the hard ripples of an evergreen’s bark, was doing nothing to help that. No wonder she wasn’t thinking clearly.
Accordingly, she questioned her first impulse to open her jacket and tuck her knees against her chest to widen the area shielded against the damp. At the moment, her shirt was dry, and that would change if she curled in her legs. She left her jacket closed, and curled in tighter and tighter as the rain stole in to fill the places exertion had warmed. “I’m not entirely sure why I’m trying so hard to get back inside,” she said to the air, and then realized that, at least, Pen’s audio pickups would not reach. She repeated herself over the channel.
Pen’s words were low-voiced.
Of course Pen would. Worse, her mind was formed from someone who hadn’t laid down, who hadn’t stopped trying, but had died anyway. Maybe that was Sienna’s future too.
Even given her time in the camp, Sienna had never learned the trick of sleeping anywhere, immediately. Much as she had longed for it on nights filled with the nightmares of other prisoners around her. What she had learned, however, was to hunker down, cast her thoughts adrift, and endure. Sometimes that brought sleep, sometimes it simply brought a reprieve from the crawling of time, until the situation changed.
Now, wet, chilled, and hunched tightly against the rough, hard bark of the tree, she endured.
And in time, the situation changed. The sun rose again, as it always did. Sienna thought perhaps she might have slept, but her thoughts were still gummy when she stumbled to her feet as the clouded light grew brighter but not less cloudy. She filled her hands and then her mouth with rainwater from a trickle that had gathered itself together on leaves in the canopy above.
Sienna stuttered a step in the wrong direction at first, her interface with the implant’s map slow to get up and running in the morning as well. But then her directional sense slotted into alignment with what it was offering her, and she was running. Branches whipped at her once more, but she let them.
There was the building, looming up out of the trees unexpectedly given there was no clear line of sight, possibly on the entire continent. And there was the bay door, still three-quarters open. So, too, was the ground in front of the door far too open for her comfort, clearance for the flyers leaving her exposed to anyone watching an external camera. Sienna considered making one last arc, angling to come at the door from the side with less open space to cover, but if someone was watching, she doubted a few more seconds of cover would help.
With the last gram of strength available in her body and powered by great, sawing breaths, she sprinted and was in, into dry air and comparative darkness. The bay lights had powered down, unneeded, and it gave the space a comforting familiarity. Sienna didn’t pause to breathe until she found the nearest entrance to the sealed section, this time to another, smaller bay, unheated and even more dark.
A shiver twisted down from her shoulders until it caught at her whole body. She could shower in a room, clean her clothes, but what she longed for was blankets and towels, to dry off and swathe herself in. Sweat brought on by the sprint, added to yesterday’s rain, stuck a mass of her hair to the back of her neck, and Sienna jerked back her hood, abruptly hating the sensation of the stuff. With her low-light enhanced vision, she spotted a pair of scissors left behind among other tools for unpackaging arriving supplies, and snagged them on her way past.
In the room, more or less identical to the last, Sienna didn’t even look in the mirror when she used the scissors to chew through the dyed rope of her braid at about the level of her shoulders. She rescued the elastic, dumped the shorn braid in waste, and only then looked at herself. Still black, and straggling rather unevenly now. But when she gathered it back into a tight tail, all you could see was her face, not the mess the color contrast made of her skin tone. Not good, but better.
As was her situation, she supposed. Not good, but no worse. Still alive.
Still able to fight to find her way home.
***
Somewhere between warming up and recapturing a little of her lost sleep, Sienna admitted to herself that her next step needed to be seeing what help she could coax out of Cyperus. She didn’t trust him not to follow Elantine’s orders, if they appeared innocent, but she did trust him not to actively attempt or aid any explicit attempt to kill her. So she’d approach him and see what he offered her, what she could do with it.
Cyperus came promptly after receiving the message, bringing along his usual dinner tray—and Galax to carry it. Frowning at them through a camera feed, perched on yet another anonymous bed, Sienna wavered, stomach clenching at the sight of the food. Galax had definitely been against killing her. And what more could he tell Elantine? That Sienna was alive, in the sealed section somewhere? Elantine knew that.
Finally, when Pen told her she next needed to move, she gave in and asked Pen for a guide to the bay instead. Cyperus had arranged the two of them sitting side by side on a long crate, tray beside his hip on his other side, both their backs to the door she was entering from. Cyperus’s back straightened when she entered, but Galax remained oblivious. The bay was utilitarian in the extreme, walls bare beyond unhidden conduits, but now she was seeing it properly lit, it had a friendlier cast, without the harshness she’d expected. The warmer tones of the light bars matched the wood floors.
“So this is by way of, what, a picnic? Enjoyed your trip to the beach in the rain this morning, thought a change of scenery might improve your appetite?” Adding to the impression given by his teasing, Galax’s tone had an ease that suggested he considered himself to be speaking to a friend.
Then Sienna processed his words, belatedly. Gone out to the beach. In a flyer, presumably. This morning?
Could she trust Cyperus more than she realized? Like hell was his timing a coincidence, she could say that for sure. But she couldn’t be sure of his motives. To offer her a path to safety, or to entice her back to a location she could be more easily captured from?
Cyperus twisted to give her a nod of greeting. “Sienna? I got your message. Come have something to eat.” He took a quick bite of a starchy rice dish on the tray, then nudged it farther along the crate. Sienna prowled up, made her decision, and sat down to take the tray on her lap and start stuffing her face.
“This is my friend Galax.” Cyperus settled back with studied relaxation. “Our resident int-tech expert.” Awkward silence curdled the air among them, but Sienna kept eating rather than break it. He clearly had a goal here, so it was up to him to justify it. “I was hoping you’d let him take a look at your implant—right here, you don’t have to go anywhere. Just to make sure it’s healing properly.” Cyperus smiled, a slash of an expression, cutting edge turned inward. Mostly. “I assure you, he’s not actively a butcher.”
In that moment, he sounded eerily like a guy Sienna had dated in college. His humorous insults had always seemed slightly misaligned, pushing people away rather than binding them together. “I thought he was your friend. Don’t be a dick.” Without her intending it, the last sentence came out in Idyllian, an echo of her words to that ex. Cyperus must have quick-learned some kind of language package, because his expression first smoothed, possibly in surprise, and then he laughed.
Galax eyed first one and then the other. “What?” Cyperus provided a literal translation, tone still wavering on the end of his laughter, which only increased Galax’s confusion. “Where do genitals come into it?”
“Asshole,” Cyperus glossed, and Sienna nodded in agreement. “Which I deserved, I’ll admit it. I’m not ‘shit at human assets’ because I can’t read people, I am because I have no patience with them.”
Both men did the stillness thing she’d only seen Cyperus do before, so she supposed she wasn’t imagining it after all. Or maybe she was, more comprehensively. Especially because Pen never noticed it either. Sienna ignored them and kept eating.
The only thing remaining
now was the dessert, an uneven rectangle of cake that had no fork marks, so Sienna nudged the tray peremptorily against Cyperus’s hip when his attention re-engaged. He dug in as he circled back to coaxing. “If he could just check your implant over…”
Well. She wanted Cyperus’s help, and here he was offering at least one form of it. If she accepted this, maybe she could talk him into a bigger step once Galax was gone. And it would be good to know for sure the implant was no longer a danger to her mind, even if it felt stable now, but— “What checking could he even do without his equipment?”
“Nothing of the implant directly, but plenty of your general health.” Cyperus had been steadily demolishing the cake, and now he scraped up a last berry from the escaped filling. It didn’t surprise Sienna—he was the one with the sweet tooth, not her.
In her peripheral vision, she caught Galax noting the cake’s disappearance and punctuating his own surprise with a look shot across at her. She hoped he didn’t assume she’d done it on purpose—though had she? She wasn’t sure herself.
As for the examination—fine. On receiving confirmation from Pen that Elantine was on the map and no one else was nearing this bay, Sienna rose and stepped over to stand in front of Galax and hold her hands wide in sardonic invitation. Her bruised fingers shouted their objections to even so mild a flexing, and she tried to tuck them away in her pocket, but Galax’s focus snapped to both the wince and the swelling. He stood as well and delicately took her one hand in both of his, data paths shimmering over the first two tendons. “How did this happen?”
Sienna didn’t answer. She didn’t see how that mattered. Her implant said nothing was broken, and even helped with the pain if she told it to.
