by R. Z. Held
His data path to hers, it was a strange, shivery sensation that felt like the buzz at the start of microphone feedback sounded. Sienna closed her eyes, letting the sensation expand through her as her mind tried to classify it, make it into something she understood. Not so different from the shiver of a caress one place sending a jolt lower.
Which gave her an idea. “Keep doing that,” she said, drawing back just enough to speak along Cyperus’s jaw. He laughed, a stir of warm breath along her neck, and complied. She touched herself in the same rhythm, fingertip strokes to teach her nerves that those shivers, they went together. Now. She took her hands away, braced herself with palm spread flat on his bare chest, and let his touch, path to path, build.
Build fast. A few breaths later, Sienna arched, shoving her shoulder hard into his hand then she was over the top and gasping with it. She had to laugh at herself, collapsing to set her forehead against his. “I didn’t expect it to be quite that effective.”
Cyperus’s eyes were wide, impressed. He settled his hands to her sides, riding the upper curve of her hips, as if she planned to escape and he wanted desperately to keep her there. “Whatever that was, you have to teach me the secret.”
Sienna sat back enough to run the sides of her thumbs along his neck—but it wasn’t skin to path, it was path to path. She switched to first and middle fingertips, both sides, and fumbled her way through an explanation of what she’d done instinctively with the implant.
She felt it the moment he was successful, the involuntary jolt of his hips beneath her. He caught her hands, held them away from his skin as his laugh came out entirely breathless. “Universal mercy, save it a while. I don’t want this to be over so soon.”
Sienna grinned, then leaned back down into a kiss once more.
***
“Took you long enough to entice her back here. What, were you doing your fucking in the vents?” A woman’s voice, caustic, jerking Sienna out of sleep.
Elantine’s voice.
And Cyperus—Cyperus was still. Sienna gathered herself up to run, blessing the instincts that had made her dress after they’d cleaned up last night. She jerked on her boots—she could leave her jacket behind—but Elantine was filling the entire doorway, sidearm trained on Sienna.
Panic spun up in her chest until she couldn’t breathe, but Elantine didn’t fire. Why wasn’t she firing? Sienna couldn’t run, but perhaps she could wake Cyperus, though she knew he wasn’t actually sleeping. She jerked his arm, dug her fingernails into his skin savagely, and he continued to be still, eyes open but breathing calmly in his sleeping position on his side.
Elantine snorted. “That’s not going to work, so can we skip to the part where you acknowledge that and we get this over with?”
Get her death over with. Sienna would have spat in Elantine’s face, if she’d been close enough. Could Penstemon do anything to help her? Even if she could only connect her to Galax, if he arrived to see a gun in Elantine’s hand—
Nothing. The old, dead silence she’d finally begun to trust wouldn’t meet her when she tried to communicate. Elantine upgraded her snort to a sneering grimace. “Yes, I’m also blocking your channels. I’m not stupid.”
Sienna lunged across Cyperus’s chest, came up with his gun from the trunk-nightstand, which rocked a scattering of charms from near the edge to pitter onto the floor. She fired without hardly aiming, trying to give herself a split second of reaction from Elantine in which to aim the next shot. Or that was the idea, but the trigger didn’t move, and her system’s flashed warnings finally penetrated. Permission needed to key weapon to this system. Because of course Cyperus’s weapon was keyed to his system alone. Sienna didn’t even need the edge of Elantine’s smile to turn the word back on her: stupid.
She dropped the gun on the blanket beside her hip, still crouched to burst into a sprint that could take her nowhere. Elantine hadn’t fired yet; it seemed all she had left to do was try to understand why, to extend that stay of execution. “You can’t shoot me or it’ll wake him up, though.” Which might make Elantine’s next move—what? To drag Sienna bodily out to the hall to do it?
Elantine gestured with her free hand, “come here,” as if Sienna would ever follow such a direction. “I can do whatever the hell I want to you, Genevieve. I’d rather avoid the hassle of managing the clean-up of memories pertaining to the bloodstain on his bed, that’s all. But don’t think I won’t, if you force me to.”
Clean-up of memories. In people, not just Pen. Universal mercy, what was LSF doing here?
That brought one last, desperate idea blazing into Sienna’s mind. Elantine might have blocked her channels, but she could still speak out loud to Pen… “Pen, wake up Cyperus.”
“Penstemon, you are following no one’s orders but my own, is that correct?” Elantine rocked a step forward, as if to flush Sienna out of cover, settled again when Sienna didn’t move.
“That is correct.” Cheerful. Sienna had forgotten that aspect of the Near-AI voice, the pleasant note in the face of the most dire situations. It made her teeth ache now.
“But she could wake him up, though. Couldn’t she? If she wanted to?” Sienna begged Pen silently in her mind, to want to. Elantine hadn’t ordered her not to wake him up, after all. She’d ordered her not to listen to Sienna’s order, which wasn’t the same thing at all.
“Wanted to?” Elantine repeated the words on a scoff.
Now. If Pen wanted to. If she could circumvent the orders in that way. If she could turn off the nanites LSF had infected him with—which, if Sienna was honest with herself, seemed the most unlikely of all those steps. But if Pen succeeded even partially, Sienna needed to make an attempt to get information to Cyperus. She squeezed her fingernails into his arm once more, among the blankets where it should hopefully be hidden from Elantine’s angle.
Then she had a better thought and aligned the fingertip dots of her data path to the one on his arm. The shiver she felt was nowhere near arousal now, not in her current state, and he’d have turned his own arousal off again in any case. But surely it was a strong sensation, one that might make it through whatever blocks were currently twisting up Cyperus’s mind? “So that’s what you’re developing here? The nanites to…sort of turn Pax Romana soldiers off?”
“I don’t know why you’re fishing, it’s not like you’re going to get back to tell anyone.” Elantine crossed to her in three strides, enough time for Sienna to jerk to her feet before Elantine’s gun pressed into her forehead. Movements smooth and efficient, Elantine used her free hand to draw something out of her pocket. The paralyzers. Or the throat and wrist bindings, at least. Sienna opened herself to her implant, hoping for some combination of strike and twist away that would leave her alive and Elantine incapacitated, but it had nothing to offer her, except the suggestion that she wait for a better moment, in transit.
So Sienna waited, while the line of the paralyzer, heavy only in the burden of panic it conjured in her mind, settled on her throat. Elantine’s grip on her gun didn’t waver as she bound Sienna’s wrists behind her.
Silence, then, as they left Cyperus’s quarters. Sienna twisted back in Elantine’s hold on her elbow, gun more or less out of sight between their bodies, desperate for a last glimpse. She could find no sign of consciousness from Cyperus. Silence continued as panic drove her heartrate up and up, striving against the implant’s attempts to keep her adrenaline within a range that would allow her to think, not just shake, robbed of anything to immediately react to.
They were at the treatment room before those thoughts ground into motion. Elantine didn’t want clean-up, so if Sienna could thrash around, break something—
Someone might notice, once she was already dead.
No. Pen would wake Cyperus up, and he’d be arriving with backup, any moment. She had to think that way, she had to, or she’d be lying down to die. She dragged her feet to catch at table legs and scuff along low cupboards as Elantine prodded her toward one of the diagnostic couches, w
alking the line between making a mark and prompting Elantine to shoot her. Bloodstain clean-up would be much less of a concern here, Sienna would guess. A scanner clattered to the floor, making Elantine hiss in poisonous annoyance, but it looked unharmed.
She shoved Sienna down onto the couch, cheek smashed into the padding. The binding lifted from her wrists, only long enough for Elantine to wrench her arm into a wickedly effective hold and lean her weight down, pinning Sienna. A pause, for rummaging in her pocket with her free hand, Sienna interpreted a moment later, when something brushed against the back of her neck. The third paralyzer.
But Elantine couldn’t seat it, not with the vocal cord one already in place. Another hiss, and that paralyzer ripped away from Sienna’s skin with a flicker of burning discomfort, no worse than that from a bandage adhesive. But if you didn’t turn a paralyzer off properly—
Please, she formed with her lips, formed with her soul, but heard only another saw of her own breath.
Elantine smoothed the new paralyzer down, but they weren’t swappable that way. The one designed for the back was meant for the base of the spine, and Sienna could feel that potential, not for strength or speed just yet, but movement in her limbs as Elantine relaxed her hold. A chance. A small chance, but a chance.
“Step away from her.” Cyperus’s voice. Sienna twisted her head to see the doorway, beyond her feet, as much movement as she dared without revealing the paralyzer wasn’t completely effective. The haze of her relief painted him soft-focus, the most beautiful thing she’d seen in her life, so calm and confident with his assist on and gun in hand, leveled on Elantine.
Elantine did move, along the side of the couch into Sienna’s range of sight. It gave her a perfect view as Elantine extended her own gun and shot Cyperus in the knee. The good knee.
Cyperus keened, gun wavering down to his side as he tried to keep his balance, then going to the ground as he caught himself only just short of a full collapse. He knelt on the side with the assist, head down, curled around the new injury.
“Guess we’ve got some bugs to work out,” Elantine murmured. “How’d you wake up, Tehran? You’re not going to enjoy the mess I have to make excising these memories, you know.”
Now. While Elantine was distracted. Sienna would never have another moment like this, so she poured everything she had left into movement calculated by the system. Sit up, an easy simple movement that required little coordination around the paralyzer.
And slam her fist into Elantine’s jaw with everything she had, every calculation of angle and leverage her implant could provide.
Elantine wasn’t knocked out, but she was stunned enough to waver and start to fall. Sienna shoved up and more or less fell with her, on top of her. She slammed the back of the woman’s head into the floor. She wanted to do it again, and again, but she also didn’t want to kill her. Sienna flung a hand to send the gun skittering away and sat on Elantine for a panting, heart-hammering moment that stretched so long her teeth ached with the clenching, but Elantine didn’t move.
Still alive. Universal mercy. Sienna peeled at the paralyzer on the back of her neck herself, and it sloughed off into her hands once she freed the first corner. The jump of returning fine motor control hit her like a jolt of adrenaline. She laughed silently with it and clambered off Elantine to drag her unconscious body prone and apply the paralyzer to her back, very precisely placed.
“Sienna? Are you all right?” Cyperus was sobbing for breath, but he’d made it upright using his assist and the nearest table. He looked near her, but not at her, as if the pain hadn’t yet ebbed to a level that allowed him to focus.
Sienna automatically answered him out loud and when nothing came out, panic made it rather hard for her to see as well. She hadn’t had time yet for the realization of what Elantine had done to her vocal cords to penetrate.
Cyperus made a rather strangled noise of agreement, and by the time Galax arrived, she’d assisted him to a couch and dragged Elantine none too gently into a side room where she could shut the door. Overkill, and yet Sienna still couldn’t manage to feel safe.
Blood oozed around Cyperus’s clamped fingers, and when Galax appeared in the doorway, his face blanked with the strength of his surprise. “What happened?”
“Galax too? Universal mercy. Sienna’s leaving out the part where the shit-stain shut me down just now so she’d be able to kill Sienna unopposed.” Cyperus spat the words out like they were literal excrement on his tongue.
“I—” Galax shook his head, words seeming not to breach the walls of his confusion. He abandoned the effort and scooped up supplies to cut away Cyperus’s pants and clean the wound.
Sienna clenched her fingers around the edge of the diagnostic couch, near Cyperus’s shoulder, while Galax worked. She could ask him to look at her neck next. Why would he refuse her? Cyperus’s knee was the priority, of course, but she could say something as simple as “When you’re done…” But she didn’t want to break his concentration, she supposed.
Galax looked slightly up, frowning into middle distance as if speaking on channels. To Cyperus, Sienna assumed. Then Galax huffed a breath, and set about bandaging. “You’ll need a full course of healing nanites, so there’s no point doing more than this before then. Is the commander—?”
He reached out but stopped short of her throat, fingers smeared with blood, now drying. “Sienna, you’re not talking…?”
She answered him over a channel this time—or tried to. It was blocked again.
Sienna didn’t feel surprise, or panic—she’d known, somewhere in her core, that she wasn’t safe, couldn’t ever be safe in this place. Instead, the moment turned crystalline, as if a bottle had broken in her hands and she knew the shards were cutting her even now, but she couldn’t feel it yet. She needed to get out of here, and Cyperus needed to come with her.
And in silence, she had no possible way to convince him of that.
She whistled, to grab his attention. Please, she begged. Maybe he could read the single word on her lips. She pulled at him, to get him up and moving, arm across her shoulders to support him between her and the assist. He resisted at first, just as she’d feared, just as she’d expected. Did she leave him? Elantine wouldn’t kill him at least, right?
Then he glanced to where Galax had disappeared. “Who to believe, the refugee or the commander…is that why my channels are down?” He kept his voice hardly above a breath, impossible to overhear from even a few meters away. “I suppose if you’re already heading that direction, it’s not a stretch to dismiss me as compromised by soft-hearted sympathy and willing to believe whatever story the refugee tells me.” He leaned into h
er then, and they were moving to the door. Glacially, but he was fully committed and she could feel him sweating through his shirt and hers, from the pain and effort.
Each step was as much effort as climbing up a scree slope, placing and feeling out and then committing, dragging his weight along until it was time for the next step. “Thought…Galax knew me…better…” he muttered to himself with the very little breath he had to spare. Sienna wished she could tell him to save it. Everyone stopped listening to you eventually, it was simply a matter of how soon.
How long did they have? It was impossible for them to go any faster, and Elantine must be in no shape to go chasing after them herself until her concussion had been treated, but others would be arriving soon enough, given her wide broadcast. Even if Cyperus’s sidearm hadn’t been left back in the treatment room he was in no shape to hit the broad side of a barn, as she’d say in Idyllian, even if that barn wasn’t one of his own people, misled.
Cyperus’s face was growing nearer to literal gray with every step, and he’d finally stopped speaking. Halfway down one corridor, he refused to take the next step, making Sienna stutter-step to rebalance them. “Have to rest,” he ground out.
One turn more and they’d be at the shuttered section. If he could just make that far, then they could rest. Sienna mouthed words at him, urgent, exaggerated, but saw no sign of recognition. She gestured onward, begged him with her eyes instead.
“We’re…going where you hide, I assume. How far?” Cyperus dropped his head, saving even that bit of effort for the moment. Sienna lowered her hand to flash fingers in his frame of view. Five. She whistled the number in short bursts as well. Five minutes, the units should be clear from context, shouldn’t they? He shook his head, though. Unclear in response to which part of it. “Fuck. Well, if we keep going we should at least get out from under the block—it has to be the commander herself, not the Near-AI, the safety protocols wouldn’t allow that. And she won’t be able to keep its area very large.”
