by R. Z. Held
Sienna’s willpower gave out and she caught Cyperus’s eyes then, a spark of desperate longing leaping between them, though whether it was only hers being acknowledged or a meeting of both of theirs, she couldn’t tell. “I’d like that,” he said, and started off at his slow pace, gesturing for her to follow. Valerie gave them a cheery wave and set off in her own direction.
Well, they were committed now. Might as well try to really sell it, right? Sienna avoided looking at Gentiana and fell into step with him.
***
Sienna didn’t attempt conversation on the way to their rooms, though Cyperus staved off total awkwardness with some banal comments about the quality of a coffeehouse or crush of commuting crowds in the morning. When they’d found the suite assigned to them, Gentiana gestured rudely for Sienna’s silence the moment they’d closed the door. Sienna pressed her lips together and bit down on them from the inside for good measure. She was aware that they need to keep up their covers until Gentiana had set up Pen’s equipment and Pen gave them the all-clear.
She relieved Gentiana of the easel and ended up clasping it against her chest as a barrier against her lunging for Cyperus. “Sit,” she urged him, seeing him doing his unsuccessful weight shift once more as he hovered in the entryway. Clearly he wasn’t simply playing up his old injury for the sake of his cover. Walking beside him on the way here, she hadn’t really believed that, but perhaps some part of her had held out a little hope.
Where should he sit, though, that was the question. The shelf to store shoes after they were removed was hardly comfortable long-term, and the only other thing in the foyer was their trunks, dropped off by grav-pad while they were out. In her socks, since slippers weren’t provided, she followed in Gentiana’s wake, peeking into doors. Three bedrooms, which was more generous than she’d expected—she’d be able to set up a proper studio and avoid edging past her easel in the living area to get coffee every morning. Inside the rooms, the decorating scheme was rather tasteless in the flatness of its ornamentation, to her eyes. Everything was plain polymer covered by decals of—what did LSF artists call it? She’d researched this—tromp doil of optical illusions to make it seem if the furniture was intricately carved wood or elegant forged metal or even both, gilded wood, but without any wood, gold, or other decorative metal at all.
In the living-area-slash-kitchen, she perched on a dining chair and Cyperus lowered himself carefully to the couch. Then they waited, silence curdling further with every moment. She couldn’t read his thoughts on his face. What was taking Gentiana so long? She knew she’d fucked up, she knew the Ines woman was probably looking for a way to get rid of them this very minute. She knew that she’d effectively tainted Cyperus’s cover with that suspicion, maybe destroyed their best chance of saving Pen’s daughter. She just wanted to hear it out loud, so they could make the next plan. She shoved back to her feet to pace.
“Oh, I’m glad we’re thinking about security.” Gentiana strode into the room, dusting her hands off on the sides of her hips. “As opposed to, I don’t know, maybe throwing ourselves at our ally the moment we see them, in case anyone might not have assumed we were connected.”
“I’m sorry.” Sienna clasped her fingers tightly together. “I hadn’t expected it to be so intense, in the moment.”
Gentiana stepped right into her. “Which is why you shouldn’t have come at all, if you’re going to destroy our chance to save Pen’s daughter and get us all executed in the bargain—”
“Gentiana,” Cyperus protested, and started the long process of getting back to his feet.
Though she’d had exactly the same thoughts in the privacy of her own head, hearing them out loud made Sienna recognize the hyperbole. “We’re not imprisoned yet, are we? Things can’t be that bad. I know we’re all on edge—”
Gentiana sneered at her. “Speak for yourself—”
This argument was spiraling out of control. They needed to stop, take a breath. “Shut up, Jeanne!” And that came out in LSF French, because this whole conversation had been in French, courtesy of the implant’s behavioral controls, and she hadn’t even noticed. But now she noticed. Shut up! snapped the guards at the camp. “Shut up, shut up…” Who was she talking to? Herself? She wasn’t sure, but it was still in French. And she couldn’t breathe because the panic was taking over her body, starting with her chest and throat, shivering its way into her stomach next. Couldn’t talk, couldn’t breathe, because LSF took the prisoners’ voices—
“Sienna. Sienna.” Cyperus, repeating her name over and over. He was taking deep belly breaths. She was supposed to follow him. He’d needed to help her this way before, more than once, though not for months before he left. “Can you take off the behavioral controls? Pen, can you help her do that?” He was speaking in Idyllian. She wasn’t at the camp. This was a panic attack, and panic attacks ended.
“Sienna, you did good.” Cyperus set his cane aside, leaning against her abandoned chair, and cupped her face. “You did great. You did more in ten minutes to win over Valerie with your art and your genuineness than I’ve managed in three months as her assistant, projecting polished, trained trustworthiness while she has me work solely on unclassified projects. I had no idea she had those impulses, but you’ve filled her match-making heart with glee. You know what she said to me? ‘She thought to ask whether to draw your cane. If you are at all interested, don’t let this one get away.’ She doesn’t suspect us for interacting, she’s pushing us together herself.”
“But Isachne would have considered it in hers?” Cyperus countered, dry.
Gentiana had been twisting her fingers together, awkward, and she finally broke in. “Sienna—what was that?” Guilt twisted her tone tight by the same measure.
“I get panic attacks sometimes. Thinking about—the camp. And things like that.” Sienna rolled her shoulders, just as awkward. She was past the point where she needed to purge the memories, and now she preferred not to dwell. But that was one of the odd, unexpected benefits of a long-term partner. She layered her hands over his. “Cyperus can fill you in on when they tend to happen, if you’re worried about me screwing up the rescue.”
“No—I’m sorry.” Gentiana addressed that mostly to the floor. Like the first time she’d apologized to Sienna, a little after they first met, it was clearly sincere enough, but Sienna would have vastly preferred more awareness so as to avoid the harm in the first place.
She felt Cyperus gather himself to speak, and distracted him by disengaging and nudging him back to his seat. “I can do my own assholing, as necessary,” she murmured, which was enough to make him swallow whatever cutting thing he’d been thinking of saying to Gentiana on her behalf. “So you found Pen’s daughter?”
Cyperus tugged her down beside him. “I did.” He tipped his head, sending a picture taken with an implant to the screen on the wall. It was zoomed to maximum, through a narrow crack left in a door, and showed an anonymous-looking blackly metallic cube, about the size of two fists. “The only one allowed in that workshop is Valerie herself—which, before you comment, Pen, is because of Ines, not me. There was some kind of power play before I arrived. Ines got frustrated with Valerie’s lack of progress with waking up the supposedly last-jumped AI, and took it upon herself to connect the cube to a live network. That’s when the signal Pen received must have been sent. Valerie objected, they duked it out, and Valerie got to take it back under her exclusive—and fully shielded—control.”
He frowned at the cube for a few sil
ent beats, then blew out a frustrated breath. “Object retrieval is in my wheelhouse, and I hate that I don’t see any more elegant solution than a grab and run. Security’s beyond my individual hacks, but Valerie does leave that door unlocked when she’s in the room. So that leaves us with me walking in, picking it up, and carrying it out before she can stop me. Aided, of course, by whatever we can come up with to distract her and extend the time before she sounds the alarm as long as possible.”
Gentiana speared Cyperus with a dubious glance. “And then you run? On that knee?”
“What happened to it?” Sienna broke in.
Cyperus rubbed it, expression dark. “Before I left Pax Romana space, I had a doctor drop my levels of maintenance nanites way down, in case I ended up getting scanned. R&D engineers would know enough to recognize they weren’t LSF. But, turns out, they were doing a lot more maintaining than I realized. It deteriorated rapidly after I arrived, but it’s stable now.” His shoulders tightened. “Once I get my levels back up, I’ll be fine.” Then he rolled his shoulders down, forcing a relaxed pose. “Besides, once I have the cube, it’s not going to be some kind of literal footrace down the street. Stop thinking like infantry, Gentiana.”
Gentiana crossed her arms. “Uh-huh. An intelligence agent’s implant lets him fucking teleport and no one told me? Or does it just give him delusions of grandeur to think he’s going to limp away with anything at all?”
Sienna pushed to her feet and ignored them in favor of examining the photograph from closer up as the other two grew progressively more insulting. Cyperus didn’t need to be an asshole on his own behalf in this situation either, but she knew when to pick her battles. Her new position didn’t resolve the pixilation from the zoom, but closing the distance gave her more of a feeling of connection with the Near-AI cube.
“Why not print a copy and swap it?” She turned away from the photo to find the others both frowning at her. She hurried to present her case before they started picking it apart. “I mean, you’d need somewhere to carry it, but it’s not that big—under a jacket over his arm, maybe.” She gestured over the crook of her own. “If you did it at quitting time, she wouldn’t notice until the next morning when it wouldn’t turn on, and we’d be long gone by then.”
“If I pick it up to scan it for a print-pattern, she’ll be on her guard after that. I figure I’ll only have one chance to touch it.” Cyperus managed to sound not too patronizing.
Sienna shook her head, excitement finally seeping into her chest, displacing the last vestiges of panic. “Take photos from various angles and I’ll generate the print-pattern myself. I’m a little rusty with three dimensions, but not that bad. It won’t have a bottom and the weight will be off, but you wouldn’t notice either of those until you tried to turn it on anyway. If Valerie leaves the door unlocked, I assume you can go in and chat?” A laugh bubbled up. “Go ask her for romantic advice.”
“Universal mercy, I think that might work.” Cyperus rose enough to capture her wrist, then tugged her, tumbling, down onto his lap. “Guess I’m glad you’re here for all kinds of reasons.”
Sienna grinned and closed a kiss, doing plenty of wiggling to get her weight balanced so she wouldn’t fall off again.
Gentiana snorted. “I’m going to go scare up dinner. Take the modeling session to the spare bedroom before I’m back.”
Sienna stilled and changed her point of contact with Cyperus to forehead to forehead until they’d heard Gentiana leave.
But she did remember herself enough to disengage briefly to tug him up and go find privacy. His progress with the cane was slow, but she was practiced at folding that into the game, heightening the anticipation. “Got your charcoals?” he said with a grin, as they slipped into the bedroom she’d noted had the best light, to be her studio. “You can get yourself a picture out of this.”
Sienna did step back to retrieve the box, but the longer she spent away from his touch, the more her stomach sank. Five months apart or not, arousal, painted over the still slightly sparking debris of her earlier fear, was proving maddeningly hard to sustain. “To maintain our covers?” Her voice thinned out, though she was in her safe pitch range. “I don’t want to be Seraphine and Simon.” He’d taken a seat on the bed, but she hovered in the doorway, box clasped hard enough to dig the plastic edges into her palms.
“No!” Cyperus often lacked the vocabulary for his feelings about their relationship, and the frustration of that showed starkly on his face now, after the initial outburst. He gestured that she should discard the box—toss it into the wall, even—then beckoned her to join him. She set the box on top of a dresser, and accepted his double hand clasp and reangling of his body so they could each sit sideways on the bed, facing each other. “I want you, Sienna. Fast, slow, after a marathon hours-long drawing session, in the other room without a paintbrush in sight, whatever you want.”
“Fast.” Sienna caught his hands, brought them up to her neck, the camouflaged rave lines there. She’d discovered something of a cross-wiring hack that allowed her to connect the sensation of his data paths on hers to arousal, once she turned it on. She often didn’t turn it on until the end, as it could be a bit hard-edged and utilitarian, thirty seconds to climax. But she needed that glow now, to surround her and keep her firmly in the mood for anything else.
Cyperus caressed the circles of data path on the pads of his first two fingers down from the sides of her jaw to the implant site at the base of the back of her neck in a steadily increasing rhythm. Both sides, twice as fast, and she clenched up throughout her whole body with the sheer gasp of it as the climax burst. “Fuck, yes.” Idyllian, not French and not Lingua either. She seized him to kiss him properly, fingers in the loose waves of hair falling forward around his face.
“Fast or slow?” she asked in the same language, leaning back to tease at him, nipping at his lower lip.
“Slow,” he murmured back, his lips nearly against hers, word barely more than breath between them. “Make me wait.”
While she finished a painting, was usually how that game went. With the glow pooling in her limbs, making them heavier, that was no longer such an anxious thought, but Sienna suddenly had an even better idea. She slipped off the bed, walking slow and sensually as she collected her box of charcoals, selected one as he watched her with hungry curiosity. She rolled it between her fingers as she returned, slow and hip-rolling.
“Now,” she said, kneeling on the bed straddling his lap. “Where might you forget to wash up tomorrow morning, before you go into work, wearing the same clothes? For a real didn’t-go-home entrance…” She kneaded her fingers into the muscles at the back of his neck, just above the collar of his shirt. When he would have joined a kiss, she dodged him to consider the effect of her artful black smears from one angle, another, and then added a few more. He laughed, a wicked, hungry sound that coiled into her belly. Yes
.
***
“Tell me who the fuck you are before I call Securidad!” Getiana’s voice from somewhere down the hallway jerked Sienna from a light doze tucked against Cyperus. She was speaking in French. Sienna needed to put her behavioral controls back on now, and somewhere in the fumbling with that, Cyperus had sorted himself out and sat up to calmly dress.
He reached out to squeeze her wrist. “I’m pretty sure I know who it is. Don’t give that dick the satisfaction of rushing out there.” Shirtless, he grabbed his cane and went to the doorway. “Henri, is that you?”
“You’re lucky it’s only me, not someone who means you harm, Simon, my dear.” The slightly raised volume needed to cross the space, even with implant-enhanced hearing, diminished the smarm of the unknown man’s tone not at all.
All right, Sienna wouldn’t rush, but she wasn’t going to hang around either. She wasn’t any better off than Cyperus, pulling on yesterday’s clothes as he finished dressing. All her other stuff was packed and no doubt still in the hallway, unless Gentiana had dropped Sienna’s luggage off in the room she hadn’t chosen for herself. She and Cyperus had more or less collapsed into the bed in the art studio bedroom, last night.
The two of them arrived at the living area to find Gentiana standing, puffed up as any threatened cat, the personal shocker that was the best weapon an LSF citizen was allowed held low and ready by her hip. Every muscle of her body screamed that she wished it was a gun. “I came out for breakfast and he was just sitting there.”
The stranger was lounging with his chair turned outward from the table so he could lean his weight on one elbow on the surface. He flicked his fingers. “The lock on your front door was absurd. What did you expect?” If Sienna had been illustrating sins, she would have used him, with his golden skin and perfect, perfect smile, for hubris.
