by R. Z. Held
Cyperus bent to the lock again, physically aiming effort at it even as he closed his eyes to focus on what he was doing electronically with his implant. Sienna gathered Valerie in beside her at the very bottom of the stairwell, pressed into the corner opposite Cyperus, against the road-dusty surface of the door. “I need whatever time I can get,” he said, heavily, the chatter of the guns punctuating his words. Sienna heard what was unsaid in his following silence. The time Gentiana had the ammo for wouldn’t be enough.
Someone needed to win them more time, then. Perhaps Securidad would find Vapid Girlfriend as believable as Henri had. “Stay,” she told Valerie, pressing the woman deeper into the corner, and climbed two stairs, crouching plenty low, but getting herself into position to yell. “Director Toulouse! Please, please, stop shooting and I’ll tell you where the AI is!”
Gentiana spat a curse under her breath. “Sienna, whatever you think you’re doing—”
And Securidad stopped firing.
“I’m stalling,” Sienna hissed at her. “To give Cyperus time!”
“You’d have me believe it’s not with you?” Ines’s voice lofted to her in the deepening silence, supremely arrogant.
“The other agent double-crossed us. He took it! Henri. Black hair, really pretty guy. He ducked into a building just down the street.” Sienna poured out a cascade of details—the style of his coat, the color of the door he’d entered. Sure, she was burning one of Cyperus’s former colleagues, but he’d sold them out first. “Please, Director. I’m not lying, you can find him on a camera somewhere, right? He’s the one you should be chasing. Can’t you just let us go? We don’t have what you want.”
No reply, which was…good? If Ines was consulting with Securidad, checking cameras, searching for someone of Henri’s description at the right time. Sienna tried to count her heartbeats as they waited, frozen, but those were too fast so she switched to her breaths. Ten. Fifteen.
“Universal mercy,” Cyperus breathed as a quiet prayer. He opened the door, making Valerie squeak when it bumped into her.
Sienna didn’t register most of the dark, footstep-echoing, generally hellish trip through that basement and then through some kind of connecting utility access passage to the next building with the truck. Pen started communicating with them about halfway through the journey, voice abruptly terrified, so apparently she’d caught up on their situation. Sienna decided to forgive her because she both found the utility passage and took care of the locks for them, so it was a straight shot through the garage for them at the end, limited only by Cyperus’s speed and Valerie’s lack of implant-enhanced darkvision. Pen announced she was standing by for liftoff as they arrived at the truck.
Cyperus opened the locks and gestured Gentiana to the driver’s seat.
Cyperus turned to Valerie, touched fingertips to one temple then saluted her with them, a gesture of respect, though his lips were twisted with irony at offering it in this situation. “Nowhere to tie you up, here. Would it help if I hit you?”
Valerie shook her head, a bit too fast. “Take me with you.”
Cyperus lifted the hand not on his cane wide and unthreatening. “We won’t touch you, if you don’t want.” He scuffed a toe on the dirty plascrete at their feet. “Roll around on this shit and you’ll look roughed up anyway.” He turned back to the truck.
Valerie took a step after him, seemed to think that might be misinterpreted, and subsided, hugging herself. “They would have shot me. For a piece of Pax Romana tech. Because I was fool enough to fall in love with a woman who kept holding me at arm’s length and universal mercy, now I know why, and also my government would shove an implant into someone that could have destroyed her mind—should have destroyed her mind—”
They didn’t have time for a crisis of loyalty either, but after all they’d done to her, Valerie deserved that time. Sienna took her elbow, feeling that shaking from the woman’s hands had traveled up that far. “Valerie and I can go in the back. If she leaves with us we can drop her on some nothing fuel stop of a planet where she’ll have time to—decide where she goes next, can’t we?”
Cyperus’s shoulders slumped for a single breath. “Yes,” he said. Thinking of his own experience of leaving home behind, perhaps. Then the intelligence agent was back in his manner and he strode, leaning on his cane, to the front of the truck, leaving the two of them to settle themselves in the back.
Sienna could have found a crate of her own to sit on once she’d pushed Valerie down, but sitting together would allow them to better brace themselves against the movement of the truck—that was her excuse and she was sticking to it. Valerie didn’t precisely cling to her, but Sienna could feel her still shaking. She was on the thin edge of falling right apart with relief herself, but they weren’t off the planet yet, so she reengaged the implant to make sure her breathing stayed even and her hands steady as the truck pulled away. She’d done her part, and it was up to the others now. She trusted Gentiana at the wheel, and she trusted Cyperus’s assessment that they’d have a clear path. Too soon to relax, but not too soon to trust.
And she’d helped them all get this far. Take that, anyone who’d doubted the civilian artist. She’d helped them win.
***
Pen’s ship was big enough to have two cabins, but the one with bunks was currently housing electronic storage instead, so while Gentiana piloted them away from the planet, the other three had to share the remaining sleeping space. Sienna told to Pen trigger the hidden layer of her mural then more or less collapsed with Cyperus on the bed. She had the best of intentions to help Valerie make up the mattress pad they’d found for her to use on the floor, but surrender to exhausted darkness proved to be all she could manage.
Darkness, before the nightmare crept in.
Sienna fought her way close enough to the surface to recognize something was amiss, but it refused to release her completely. She was back at the camp and arguing in French with Ines, she wasn’t even sure about what. It was absolutely vital that she win, but her voice got stuck in her throat. She coughed, choked, tried to dislodge whatever was blocking her airway, but now she couldn’t breathe at all. Ines—actually, it was Elantine, the undercover LSF agent who’d tried to kill her at the facility where she first met Cyperus—was laughing at her. “Shut up,” Elantine mocked. “Shut up, Sienna.”
“Are you all right? You’re having a nightmare,” someone said in French, leaning over her. It was Elantine, trying to kill her again, that’s why she couldn’t breathe. Sienna aimed her pure, voiceless rage into a punch and felt it connect along with a grunt of pain from Elantine.
Not Elantine. She was awake. She was on Pen’s ship. Currently alone in the bed, so Cyperus must have awakened before her. Valerie had stumbled back from the bed and was holding one hand up calmingly and clutching the other to her mouth, where blood was oozing down her chin. Shit!
“I’m sorry,” Sienna said—or planned to say, but she couldn’t make her lips shape any words in French right now. The breakdown she’d held back to get this far—apparently that was coming home to roost, right now. The panicked thunder of her heart, the clenching across her chest and throat, those had begun to gradually ease as her waking circumstances penetrated, but now they both snapped back to the redline.
She did manage an apology in Idyllian, hoping the t
one would buy her enough time to pull herself together. Deep breaths. Pet the nap of a lump of blanket under her hand. Look and listen around, anchor herself in Pen’s ship. After weeks in LSF housing, the clean lines of the furniture and walls in the cabin, tinged green in a shade that evoked the sea, were a relief.
Valerie tapped the earpiece she was still wearing with her clean fingertips. “Pen can translate for me,” she said, speaking thickly around her split lip. “I’m afraid I can’t speak anything else myself, though.”
“You need sealant.” That was straightforward, at least; finding it was a job to do. Sienna could focus on that. Wouldn’t want to drip blood on the floor, though the soft polymer should be easy-clean.
The problem, Sienna realized, was that she couldn’t get her thoughts to move straight enough to think where that sealant might be. Panic swallowed her in a new wave until it occurred to her Cyperus might know. She could find him. That was a much better focus. The wave ebbed once more.
Valerie trailed her to the compact living and dining area of the ship, where she found Cyperus heating food—breakfast by the smell, though she had no idea if that matched the clock—his cane leaning against the counter beside one hip. Her mental state must have been there to read in her face or to hear in her breathing, because he abandoned the cane to draw her to him with both arms. She tried to balance them to take some of his weight herself and then clung, pressing her cheek against his shoulder. “It’s just the crash,” he murmured into her hair. “It’ll pass.”
Then his chest hitched in surprise and his grip tightened. “What happened?” he demanded in French. Sienna turned to see Valerie rinsing some of the blood off her fingers and chin at the small sink next to the cooker. Cyperus edged them around, interposing his body between her and Valerie. “I punched her, Cyperus,” Sienna said around a watery laugh. “She should be the one demanding protection from me.” That’s what this was, she realized. Protectiveness on Cyperus’s part that had been thwarted while he needed to maintain his cover. Indulging in it in this situation was ridiculous—but it did wonders to help her heart slow.
“And what was she doing at the time?” Cyperus demanded.
He’d spoken in Idyllian, but with Pen’s translation, it was Valerie who answered, fingertips resuming pressure on her lip. “Don’t worry, I should have known better than to wake up someone with her background from a nightmare when speaking French.”
“I thought she was Elantine,” Sienna muttered into Cyperus’s chest. That still didn’t make it all right for her to punch—a hostage? An ally? Who knew.
Valerie frowned, but clearly didn’t dare ask who that was, what with native politeness and also Cyperus glaring at her. Sienna wasn’t sure she wanted to explain either.
Valerie leaned back against the nearest patch of counter, gaze going internal as she listened, and Cyperus pushed Sienna to a seat on one of the benches attached to the floor around the dining area’s small table. “She needs sealant,” Sienna protested vaguely.
“Pen will point her to it. Now. Eat.” Cyperus, collected his cane, dished up a plate of a scramble of eggs and vegetables from the pot in the cooker, and set it in front of her.
Sienna knew it would indeed make her feel better, but her stomach seemed to have been left back in the nightmare and she stared at the plate for a while, trying to summon motivation. Without another word, Cyperus plonked himself on the bench beside her, stole the plate for a few bites, then shoved it back in front of her. He was so ostentatious about the whole thing, she had to laugh, and take a few bites of her own.
Sienna looked up when Valerie joined them at the greatest distance the table would allow her—which wasn’t far—with a sealed lip and plate of her own, but she didn’t appear to even bat an eye at them eating in turns off the same plate. “I just—I want to apologize too. In the nightmare, you sounded like you were choking. I couldn’t stand by and listen to that. I wanted to help.” Valerie looked up to direct an apologetic grimace at her directly. “I still want to help.”
Sienna chewed longer than necessary while she tried to figure out how to respond—or even how she felt about that. “Why?” she settled on, finally. Turnabout as fair play perhaps, for Valerie’s “why?” asked of her, for how an artist came to be undercover.
Valerie’s turn to hesitate. “Because of everything that…happened to you.” Sienna appreciated that she didn’t say “was done to you,” even though it hung in the air around them like throat-burning smoke. “I don’t understand how you possibly could have chosen to get within lightyears of LSF space even to save a life, but I respect it, and want to demonstrate that respect, I guess? Hell, I don’t know how you’re sane right now.”
“Luck when it comes to my friends. Lots of therapy,” Sienna said, trying to keep it light.
“Strength of character,” Cyperus said with a tinge of pride that was also ridiculous. He settled the plate in front of Sienna with finality. She gave in and finished the rest. “And good luck finding help she’ll accept. I still can’t do that consistently.”
“Says the man who can’t follow a doctor’s order about how far he’s supposed to walk on his knee to save his life,” Sienna grumbled, to hide that she was probably flushed. He…wasn’t wrong. She’d admit that to herself, at least. She squeezed the knee against her own, under the table, which happened to be the good one. “I had to come out here to save this one from the mess he’d gotten himself into, anyway.”
She fully expected Cyperus’s pride to volley that right back to her, but instead he smoothed a hand down the back of her hair, coming to rest, protective, against the back of her neck. “And I’m damn lucky that she did, too.”
The swell of love that surged in her chest was too much for Sienna’s rebuilt equilibrium and she leaned into Cyperus to hide her tears from Valerie.
He touched her chin, kissed her, one side of his mouth ticking up at the taste of the salt there, maybe.
He returned the words and seemed about to expand on them when Gentiana entered from the control room, rubbing the data path circles currently showing at her temples. She and Valerie avoided each other’s gazes painfully, while Gentiana loaded a plate for herself. There wasn’t room at the table for her to not sit next to Valerie, but Gentiana solved that by eating with one hip hitched against the counter. “I think I’m about maxxed out for the moment, so you should pilot the next burst, if we’re going to bother continuing to do that to hide our trail,” she told Cyperus in Lingua.
Cyperus grimaced. “Probably safer that way. Give me time to finish making Sienna eat.”
“I’m not sure I understood that stuff about piloting even with the translation,” Valerie said, lightly, fuzzing around the edges due to her injured lip.
“What—who did that to you?” Gentiana abandoned her plate on the counter to slide in next to Valerie. She angled the woman’s head to see the injury better with a gentle touch against her jaw. Valerie started an apologetic explanation about nightmares, but Gentiana cut her off once she got the gist of it. “Sienna!”
“Can we call a moratorium on protectiveness on the part of those not involved in the incident, please? Besides, you might recall, Gentiana, that you tried
to kick my face in when we first met.” Sincere guilt made Sienna sharper than she’d intended in her defense.
“I’m not—” Gentiana began, heatedly. Being protective, Sienna assumed she’d intended to end that sentence, but instead she looked slightly up toward the ceiling as if thinking of a watching Pen.
“I certainly hope you are,” Pen said, caustic, and sounding fully herself in a way she’d managed only intermittently since she’d arrived on a too-small ship. “It’s the least you can do for her, if she hasn’t dumped your Pax Romana ass by now.”
Valerie choked on her surprise, and Sienna on an inappropriate laugh. “Valerie, meet Pen when she’s not holding back. Swearing is only the tip of the iceberg,” she said low, dipping into French. She returned to Lingua, lifting her voice for the general audience. “Sounds like you’re feeling better, how’s your daughter?”
“Call me Joy,” a new voice said. It didn’t sound precisely young, but certainly hesitant, and the pitch wasn’t precisely in Gentiana’s register, but it was certainly more of an edged soprano than the calming, alto tones Pen had inherited from the Near-AI she had been. She’d taken her name from the planet, as Pen had from the Penstemon facility, Sienna guessed. “I don’t really want to talk much until I feel more like…myself.”
And until she felt more separate from Gentiana as well, Sienna would guess. “Nice to meet you,” Sienna murmured. Valerie looked like she was gathering herself to launch into a spate of questions anyway, oblivious to how queasy Gentiana looked at hearing someone who was her-not-her, so Sienna hurried to forestall Valerie. “By the way, Pen, were you able to trigger the mural before we left?”
“Hah. And how. You’ll enjoy this.” Pen brought up news drone footage on the wall and they all twisted to view it. At first, it focused on the consternation of a small crowd standing by, the evening shift whispering to each other, then it zoomed back to take in whole mural itself.
