by R. Z. Held
That piece of good news gave Sienna a little burst of energy, and she dragged more of Cyperus’s weight down onto her shoulder as she got them going again.
There was the door they needed, and Sienna’s vision narrowed down with that target as she dragged him each step onward.
Slam. Someone had arrived at the door behind them, smashed a fist into it when it wouldn’t open to anyone’s codes now. Sienna started so violently Cyperus lost his hold on her shoulder and fell onto her. She only avoided collapse by falling onto the nearest wall in turn.
Cyperus had been more right than she’d originally realized. From here, before, she had been crawling in the walls. What now? It wouldn’t be long before someone managed to override the door or even returned power to the whole section.
Sienna propped Cyperus against the wall—here was the rest he needed, that was like a silver lining, right?—and strode a few steps away through the darkness. There were no more noises from the other side of the door, that was almost worse. Physical violence meant frustration, meant whatever strategy they were trying wasn’t working.
They had to move, but Cyperus couldn’t, and she couldn’t hardly breathe once more. “Go,” he said behind her, low. “How can I call myself a real agent if I haven’t been arrested by my own side at least once?”
Slam. She flinched.
The bay. Yes. A slim hope, but hope. No time remaining to pretend like Pen was still “near” anything, though. She opened a channel to both of them again.
“Universal mercy, Sienna, what have you been doing to the Near-AI?” Cyperus waved the question away the moment he finished, reached out for her. “It’ll be a fucking kludge if I have to do it while moving,” and in pain, that was unsaid but Sienna heard it anyway, “but I don’t see we have any choice.” He found something like a smile, offered it to her. “Better than any ideas I had, though. Good job.”
The door made a grinding, squealing noise, electronic locking mechanism slowly yielding to physical force. Sienna dragged them down the hall, Cyperus acting nearly blind, having gone off somewhere in his mind to get the program ready. Blood was soaking through the bandage on his knee, she noticed. He was doing his body more damage, the realization was a wound ripped in her own gut, but she didn’t see a way for him to do anything else. She couldn’t carry him.
She was dripping with sweat herself now, drops sliding faster down the paths the rave lines made for it from her forehead. There, the bay door. She pressed to open it manually with her free hand, then turned away, pushing for the smaller bay where she’d liberated the scissors and met with Cyperus and Galax. That was next door, only a little farther.
Just such a little distance farther, but running footsteps were thudding up behind them.
They made it around the intervening corner in the corridor, but were still far short of their goal when the footsteps reached the open bay door. Sienna stopped them against the wall, pressed her face into Cyperus’s shoulder to muffle her sawing breaths. He was fully focused in his mind, it seemed, making no noise besides his own breathing.
Please. It was dark. They were out of sight. The door was wide open and inviting. Please.
Against the wall beside her hip, she drew her rooftop and mountain symbols, unseen. Shouts inside the bay, and then—yes—the sound of a flyer lifting off. Cyperus gave a choked groan, then collapsed against her in truth. She could only lower them both to seats on the floor, against the wall.
Another moment of danger, if their pursuers turned back the way they’d come—but no, she heard a second flyer. Silence settled around them like a comforting blanket this time, and Sienna drew on the floor an ephemeral version of the knot from the painting of Cyperus’s back while she waited for him to wake up.
***
Pen kept Sienna updated on the flyer chase over half the continent as Cyperus groaned his way back to consciousness. When Pen had enough attention to spare to power a room and hide the drain, as before, she guided Sienna to it. It proved to be a small meeting room, rather than a bedroom, for reasons Sienna couldn’t fathom until they arrived, weight awkwardly balanced as ever, in the lit doorway.
Gentiana turned from where she’d been watching the room’s primary door, a war between concern and suspicion making her features even sharper, especially with her black hair back in a tight tail. “Well, I’m here, and alone.” She gestured to the earpiece she was wearing, though she wasn’t otherwise in uniform, clearly referencing a message she’d received on it. “I hear you’ve been attacking people. So if you don’t want me calling in backup, start explaining, fast.”
Pen’s voice was apologetic.
Sienna braced herself, but she had no running left in her. She hardly had the energy to keep standing.
“You can trust her.” Penstemon’s words sounded teeth-clenched. It took a moment for Sienna to realize that not only had that last come from Pen’s external speakers, but the channel before had been a local-area one, not
a personal one. Pen had opened it, and Sienna had answered on the same one without thinking. It would have gone to Gentiana’s earpiece as well.
The others were staring at her, Gentiana blank with shock, Cyperus with gears cranking behind his eyes, but—if Sienna was honest with herself—not any less shocked. “You…did do something to the Near-AI,” he said.
All right. No more stalling.
Pen made the sound of a snort. “Affected. That’s an understatement.”
Gentiana stepped away from Sienna, from them all, hands curling up where she clutched them against her chest. She made a soft keening sound. “Isachne…?”
A sigh. “No, love. Pen. I know I probably sound just like her at times, but that will lessen with time as I become more myself. That self simply knows some things she knew. And feels—” Pen cut herself off, the last word coming out strangled. Sienna suspected Pen didn’t know quite what she felt.
Cyperus gently hit his forehead on a fist set upright on the tabletop, straightened on a breathless laugh. “You fucking last-jumped a Near-AI? By accident? Do you know how long Pax Romana scientists have been trying…”
Sienna hugged her arms over her stomach, holding in a hysterical laugh of her own. The joke was on the Pax Romana, as she couldn’t see how they’d replicate the circumstances. “We can worry about that after we do something about Elantine.”
Gentiana cleared her throat, tears audible in the roughness of the sound, but not detectable anywhere else. “What is it that the commander’s done? Everyone’s saying you attacked her,” she nodded to Cyperus, “because of some wild story she convinced you of.” Sienna’s turn for a nod.
Maybe in laying it all out, Sienna could make Elantine’s motives a little clearer in her own mind as well.
“If it’s infectious, I’m patient zero. Elantine’s had enough time to set it up while I was in surgery—” Cyperus’s voice wavered, soured like he was fighting back nausea. “That’s why they were all unsuccessful. Fuck.” He slammed a hand on the table, more curses tearing themselves free.
Gentiana’s gaze dropped to Cyperus’s knees, though the one not cradled by the assist looked much worse at the moment. “So she’s trying to kill Sienna because she noticed the signs of this weapon?”
Sienna shook her head.
“It’s too big a risk just for that.” Cyperus’s tone had grown focused, and Sienna raised her head to find his gaze had gone sharper, more internal, as well. They were squarely within his area of expertise, she supposed. “What happened between when they chose you in the camp and when you arrived here? You said you were using an assumed Pax Romana identity at the camp?”
“Penstemon? Do you have anything in storage connected to that visa number?” Cyperus rattled it off without a pause, like he’d had it stored locally on his system. “If someone put in a cross-planet search request—”
“I might have a copy from after it arrived but before I transmitted it to her personal storage—she’s undoubtedly deleted that. One moment please.” Pen fell back into Near-AI speech patterns for the last sentence. “Ha!”
A written record popped up on the section of screen on the tabletop before Cyperus. Sienna leaned to read over his shoulder, but he was already scrolling, scanning for something in particular rather than actually reading. He fell back into his seat. “The fucking Amsterdam Institute in your work history? How many surprises do you have left, Sienna?”
Sienna licked her lips. Was that—was that seriously why—?
“But you have connections. If you ever made it home, mentioned to some former coworker what you’d seen—or worse, got infected before you left. LSF would have all but gift-wrapped their weapon and delivered it, begging the Institute to get to work on creating the counter.” Cyperus blew out a long breath. “They picked the wrong fucking victim at the camp. Universal mercy.”
Gentiana had stiffened at the first mention of the Institute, and now she eyed Sienna. “And she’d be handing over Pax Romana int-tech to the Idyllians as well.”
Cyperus made his scoff a slap in Gentiana’s face. “As an infantry grunt, you wouldn’t be aware, but I can tell you Idyllian int-tech is so far beyond Pax Romana they’ve lapped us.” He circled his finger. “Possibly twice.”
Gentiana bristled, but Pen made a throat clearing noise. “He’s right, I’m afraid. Also he needs not to be an asshole.”
Enough. Their pursuers weren’t going to chase an empty flyer forever.
“We’ll have to tell everyone, get them to remove Elantine from command until we can get an official ruling from off-planet.” Cyperus sounded confident, Gentiana less so as they went back and forth for a few moments, exchange dense with details of chain of command and Pax Romana military regs that Sienna couldn’t follow and didn’t try.
She tuned back in when Gentiana grimaced, then nodded. “I’ll pass the word. You’d better plead your case yourself.” She tipped her head for them to follow.
Which was all very well, but reminded Sienna they hadn’t actually addressed the trusting Gentiana issue.
Gentiana’s lips thinned. “Even if you wanted to make the Near-AI sound like my dead wife—but really, why?—I don’t see how you could. So if I believe that part, I don’t see any of the rest of it is particularly impossible by comparison.”
“And I vouch for her.” Pen’s voice was heavy with finality.
Sienna didn’t like it, particularly, but she also didn’t like being in danger of being killed, in danger of being silent for the rest of her life—no. She couldn’t afford to even begin that thought. She turned to Cyperus, but seeing the way he was slumped in his chair, one hand clamped over his bandaged knee as if to hide the seeping red stain, she couldn’t imagine asking him to not only stand once more, but walk across the complex again.
Cyperus’s head jerked up, and he clenched his hands on the arm of his chair instead. “No.”
Gentiana turned back to examine him from the doorway, shook her head. “She’s right. You can’t walk anywhere.
Besides, your voice isn’t going to particularly help the cause. Everyone already assumes you’re just thinking with your dick.”
Cyperus drew breath, undoubtedly for a blistering rebuttal, but Pen cut him off. “That has never been Tehran’s problem. If anything, it’s been the opposite.”
Gentiana must have found that as purely Isachne as Sienna did, because she flinched. “We’re burning daylight,” she said, and walked out.
Sienna threw Cyperus a quick look of apology, then followed.
Worrying about encountering Elantine made the silent walk through the complex seem impossibly long, while the ability to walk normally, without Cyperus’s weight, made it seem impossibly short. Before Sienna had even half of how she’d argue her case laid out in her mind, they were approaching the main door to the mess. “I haven’t told everyone what I want to talk about, but ‘bitch about how the higher-ups are mishandling the refugee chase’ is the logical assumption I’m sure they’re making,” Gentiana said.
Sienna hung back, one hand against the wall. She wished there was some ridge there to get a grip on.
Gentiana threw her a sideways frown, but she did wait. “Why are you still on coms? A few of the others have implants, but most of the rest aren’t going to be wearing their earpieces.”
