by R. Z. Held
“It’s just tidier that way.” Cyperus’s gaze on her face was tight and his voice held a slightly bewildered note. She’d learned to recognize it as signaling confusion borne of the fact that he’d managed to make it to his late thirties without any romantic relationship more serious than a couple of intimate encounters with the same person, before her. He must know there was something she wasn’t saying, but not what.
And maybe that was better. He didn’t need distractions, while in LSF territory. And she couldn’t see that being clingy now would make him more likely to settle down with her when he was done—in fact, it might drive him away. Better that she stay silent and let him leave on a note of harmony.
Impulsively, she embraced him and he returned the gesture without hesitation. “I’ll be fine. The foxes won’t even know what hit them.” His voice rumbled through his chest to hers.
Sienna managed a wobbly laugh before standing back from him. “Nothing. Worried about you, like you said. And I guess I should be worried about Pen going nuts having to stay on Idyll and not help you, huh?” She kept the words reasonably controlled, and squarely within her safe vocal range. “You should start packing.”
She broke their embrace and slipped away, back to Gentiana. He’d come back to her, or he wouldn’t, and she needed to start getting used to that idea too.
***
The spacefield at the Institute was used only for Institute business and visitors, so to catch a regular flight off-planet, it was easiest for Cyperus to take the train from the Institute’s associated town, Adit, out to Delta, Idyll’s biggest metropolitan area. Rather than make the multiple-hour trip there and back with him, Sienna saw him off at the train station the next morning. Packing had taken him significantly more than a few minutes, though included in that time had been the logistics of arranging a leave of absence from his job and reaching out to old contacts in search of leads on where in LSF territory Pen’s daughter had been taken.
The organized chaos of the station around them was a mixture of business travelers and tourists; the Institute and Adit were the only developed destinations out here, so the rest of the traffic was related to wilderness recreation. They found a clear corner beside a carved wooden bench to step into for their goodbyes. Cyperus tucked his former-nightstand trunk, handle and wheels out—a grav pad at that size was too fragile to take the kind of abuse luggage was subject to—neatly beside his feet. His mercy candle wasn’t inside, though—he’d left that on one of the shelves in their bedroom, explaining that LSF didn’t use mercy candles, so he wouldn’t be able to take it along once he reached their territory anyway.
At first, Sienna hadn’t known whether to believe him or figure he was merely trying to calm what he saw as a strange worry she was fixating on, but her own research had borne him out. Now, to break the silence currently congealing between them, she pulled a smaller, pure white candle in a translucent red cup out of her shoulder bag. “I read that the foxes use voting—?” Her implant corrected her before Cyperus could. “Votive candles for decoration. So I got this for you. It kind of looks like the picture? I’m not sure. You can toss it later if you need to, it was cheap.”
“Sienna.” Cyperus closed his hands around hers around the votive. “What’s this really about?”
I want to entice you into coming back, she wanted to say, but even laying it out in her mind, it sounded absurd. Entice him with a candle? “I wanted to get you a gift, that’s all.”
Cyperus squeezed her hands, then took the candle and tucked it away in his jacket pocket. “I’ll be sure to light it and chant ‘liberty’ three times every morning.” He exhaled on a laughing note, but that faded away to nothing almost immediately. “I estimate I’ll need about a standard month to find out where I’m going, and then another to get in and out. Two months, and I’ll be back. Three, tops.”
“Okay.” Sienna looked down at her feet. It wasn’t like she thought he would literally never come back. She’d see him again, even if it was to enact the scene that kept running over and over in her head—the one where he’d start with explaining how he’d entered the intelligence service for the excitement, and then he’d mention how quiet the Institute could get at times—no. She had to stop running that scene.
He was leaving, but he’d come back; stop there. And having dragged herself back to the present moment, Sienna found herself utterly at sea as to how to see off an agent. She should have asked Gentiana—Isachne must have had to part from her wife for missions dozens of times. “Be safe.”
“I will. And you watch Gentiana and Pen for me. Don’t let them do anything stupid.” Cyperus cupped his hands against her head, line of his thumb along the data path on each side, and kissed her forehead. “I love you.”
Sienna’s heart skittered around, buffeted by several simultaneous emotions she didn’t bother putting names to. She echoed the words and tipped her head up to kiss him properly, letting the press of her lips shout the desperate wish she refused to voice, that he’d leave her with a promise to stay for good once he returned.
When he was gone, choosing a path through the flow of the crowds that allowed him to blend in while keeping to a speed where his gait was smooth, Sienna lingered beside the bench for a few months longer, gathering herself.
Outside the station, Sienna tipped her chin up into the cold breeze, trying to let it brace her. There was nothing for her to do to address her worries now. She needed to let them go.
The curse seeped through the words to either side, like wet, black ink wicking outward through white paper.
Universal mercy, poor Pen. Sienna wasn’t willing to give her access to her own senses through her implant, but there must be something she could do.
***
It took Gentiana about another week to recover properly and Sienna about two weeks after that to get her to agree to leave things to the intelligence expert and stop threatening to take Pen and go after Cyperus. With that settled, they fell into a reluctant routine.
; For five months, Gentiana spent her days in the gym and on exercises to accustom herself to her implant, eventually working up to piloting Pen properly. Her nights, she presumably spent in the beds of various women she’d met out on the town in Adit—or it could have been the same one or two, but she never mentioned any names to Sienna, and Sienna didn’t ask. Sienna left the bed made up in their spare room, but covered it with a drop cloth so she could spread her supplies across the handy surface.
Pen gradually seemed to discover that more than answering or not answering questions, participating fully in charting a course for Research’s study of her—and generally just interfering with whatever they’d let her touch—was even better than monitoring the building they’d given her the suggested read-only access to. While Sienna still caught worry for her daughter flickering beneath the surface of their conversations, she seemed to be settling in and enjoying herself, sometimes offering her problem-solving capabilities to Medical or Counseling as well.
And Sienna spent her days at work and her evenings staring at a succession of unfinished projects. With no deadlines for any of them, and no particular purpose in mind, she couldn’t break through the spiral of feeling every line she put down was uninspired and flat. Tonight, the windows were all open to let a summer evening breeze, carrying the scent of firs, chase away the canned taste of the artificially cooled air inside, and she’d finally given up on pretending to work for the night and was allowing herself to wallow. She’d set the easel up so she could sit on the bed, and its electronic surface currently displayed a black and white version of a photograph she’d taken of an agricultural field outside Delta, Cyperus standing poorly framed at the edge of the image. He was laughing in the photo and she remembered the way she’d been laughing too, threatening him if he didn’t stop spoiling her shot. She turned her charcoal stick over in her fingers, spreading plenty across her skin and nothing on the easel.
She’d flopped onto her back on the bed when a message came in. From off-planet, which made her jerk upright and open it on her implant’s system, even though she generally preferred to do visual tasks on other surfaces. But it was Nairobi Galax’s face that came up, muscles around his eyes tight with frustration. “Hello, Sienna,” his recording said. “I hope you’re well. I apologize for my bluntness, but when—if—you make up with Cyperus, please tell him that intelligence channels aren’t for lovers’ spats, and I don’t have time to play mediator either. I’m passing this one along, but others I might not be able to.”
Sienna’s stomach sank so low it might have left her body completely, leaving her to implode with despair. He wasn’t breaking up with her by proxy, was he? He couldn’t possibly be. But the embedded message was already playing. “I’m sorry to involve you, Galax, but I didn’t tell Sienna I loved her before I left. She needs to know that. I’m thinking of her and I’ve got one of her paintings up right now.”
The attached image was clearly taken from a tablet at arm’s length, Cyperus looking serious in front of her beach driftwood painting on a shitty, institutional-quality wall display surface on an undistinguished polymer-coated wall that could have been in a cheap rented room anywhere in the known universe.
Sienna retained some slight residual nausea from the speed of her emotions changing, but otherwise her whole body felt engaged, working on the question of what Cyperus’s secret, real message was. He very specifically had told her he loved her, and he’d taken several paintings on cloth, so there was no reason for him to display one electronically. Obviously something was encoded in the image.
Pen opened the door for her when she arrived at the ship but was apparently thinking too hard to bother with a greeting. Sienna settled herself in the pilot’s chair and pulled the photo up on the big plotting surface while she waited. Cyperus looked healthy enough, maybe a bit irritated around the edges. She’d been telling herself this whole time that the delay wouldn’t be because he was in danger; he was highly trained. But some part of her had still fretted then, and continued now. Why else go to the trouble of sending a message, but then again, why send it to her and not some intelligence contact or former coworker?
If the secret message was a break-up letter, merely encoded for privacy, universal mercy, she would courier the man a package bomb.
“What the fuck am I looking for?” Pen grumbled at length, using an external speaker.
“You’re the one with the memories of intelligence training, not me.” Sienna sat up straighter, frowning. “Galax said he sent it through intelligence channels, though, so I suppose he might not use anything Isachne would think of. So how are we supposed to know, then?”
“He sent it to you. What would only you know?” Since Sienna had given in and confessed her worries about Cyperus, Pen had maintained an air of exasperation, as if the two of them were players in some grand love story that couldn’t help but end happily, and that exasperation only deepened in her voice now.
Only she would know about the painting, obviously, but it wasn’t until Sienna cropped Cyperus out of the picture to make the painting fill the whole screen that that the obvious jumped up and slapped her. “He changed it. If I show you where, does that give you enough direction?” She scanned the whole scene once more, to make sure there weren’t other changes she was missing, then started zooming in.
“The closer in you can get me, the fewer pixels I’m going to have to examine one by one,” Pen said, sounding dubious. “Never mind, that’s pretty fucking precise,” she added, as Sienna outlined the shape with a fingertip. “That’s not part of the original photo? A piece of beach trash?”
“There was a hand-painted shell there, and now there’s a photo composited in of a red candle cup. That’s where his message is, I guarantee it.” Having gotten this close, now Sienna couldn’t sit still to wait while Pen crunched away.
She pushed to her feet, but then Pen’s voice forestalled her.
Sienna set a hand on the back of the pilot’s chair to ground herself against the impulse to pace and reminded herself it was absurd to wish Pen would concentrate on her task in silence. Even a Near-AI could talk to someone while running a dozen processes.
Sienna felt like cursing herself, though. She laughed instead, raggedly.
Silence, but now Sienna didn’t want it. Pen usually talked so much, she often forgot how it was literally impossible to read her when she wasn’t speaking.
It was very human of Pen, Sienna reflected, to ask for advice but then present a situation in which there was nothing to be done—or nothing she was willing to do. If she was in Pen’s place, Sienna suspected she would have locked the doors by now, but then again worry for Cyperus shivered in her chest at a higher frequency with each moment she had to wait for the resu
lts of Pen’s analysis and she wasn’t at her most sympathetic.
This time, she managed to pace down the hallway and back before Pen made a finished chime, inherited from her Near-AI form. The photo that had been left up on the screen was replaced with text, phrased in the manner of someone who begrudged the effort to chisel out every single character on a stone tablet:
Found AI. R&D facility, Joy de Vive. Have an entry to facility, but stuck on planet. Send Pen as an exit.
Sienna collapsed back into the pilot’s chair in the grip of the next wave of emotion. That was…good? Good he’d found Pen’s daughter, not good that he was stuck. But “stuck” didn’t sound like it was “imprisoned,” at least. It couldn’t be, if he was encoding and sending messages.
“Hurry up and join us, Gentiana. We should plan when we’re leaving,” Pen said.
Sienna twisted to see Gentiana peek out of the doorway of the remaining open cabin. Gentiana had been here the whole time? Pen had switched to channels when she wanted to talk about her and Sienna hadn’t even noticed. She wondered if Gentiana, for her part, had been hanging back out of embarrassment, hoping Sienna would leave before she had to admit to what she was doing.
Gentiana tried to brazen it out now, though. “I spend time here for Pen’s sake,” she said piously, chin high as she joined Sienna at the piloting console. “We can leave as soon as we file a flight plan.”
Sienna thrust her hands out, fingers spread. “Hold up. You have a planet, an undefined ‘stuck,’ and a request for aid five words in length. Do have any idea what you’ll do when you get there?”
“All official LSF government facilities—which includes their defense R&D—are in the capital city, Nouvo Paris.” Sienna drew breath for an objection and Pen overrode her. “Every capital city on planets LSF has taken over is Nouvo Paris. The Battle of Nouvo Paris, which I assume you’re thinking of, was on Jenna se Qua. I imagine he’s stuck because they’ve restricted travel on and off the planet since he arrived—the Pax Romana and LSF have been clashing in the next system over. His ID was likely good enough to get him in before that, but not good enough to get him out through the restrictions.”
