by R. Z. Held
Liberty still held her hands out to the small people below her, but the small paint packs Sienna had sandwiched between layers had burst at Pen’s signal, dripping inexorably for the ground. Red paint, coating Liberty’s hands, oozing down to deface the figures immediately below her. Red paint, dripping in short lines as if coming from between the fingers of the upraised hands of those who worshipped at Liberty’s feet. A little like Valerie had looked not so long ago, a resonance that made Sienna shiver briefly, but there was much more painted blood than that, enough blood for each citizen to have had their tongue cut out.
“Universal mercy,” Valerie said, scarcely louder than a breath. “You certainly haven’t forgotten what they did, have you?”
“Nor will I.” Sienna let that vibrate with her rage, ever so briefly, then shook it off. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. They’ll have torn it down and painted over within the hour. Or already have done, by now?” She looked slightly up, addressing that to Pen.
“They have, but somehow footage of it is broadcasting to every planet I can reach,” Pen said, smug. “That’ll take considerably longer to root out.”
“Ha,” Cyperus said, pleased. He glanced at their empty plate and started gathering himself to stand to fill it again. Sienna wasn’t surprised—he hadn’t gotten much for himself around offering it to her.
“Sit,” she told him sternly. “I’ll get it. Next time, we should bring the powered assist along for your knee, in case you need it.”
“Next time, I won’t get into a situation where I need to do a fool thing like remove my maintenance nanites and I’ll be fine,” Cyperus grumped as she filled their plate.
Valerie huffed a laugh. “I should have known you two were married the moment I first saw you interact.”
“Oh, we’re not married yet. Now I’ve got the grass is greener bullshit out of my system, I need to look up Idyllian engagement customs,” Cyperus said with utter nonchalance.
Sienna froze on the way back to the table, reviewing his words to make sure she’d heard them right. Then he winked at her and the flutter that had begun at the bottom of her stomach exploded up into her chest. “Jeff can fill you in, maybe,” she said, pressing the waver excitement out of her voice to play along.
Gentiana shot Cyperus an exasperated look. “Was that you just asking without actually warrioring up to ask? That’s fucking cheating.”
“He loves grand gestures, she hates being kept in suspense, so if they pretend nothing just happened, they both get what they want. Don’t screw up their system.” Far from exasperated, Pen sounded even more smug now, as if she’d match-made them herself.
Sienna leaned in to kiss in Cyperus’s hair as she set down his plate, then returned to the kitchen to find herself a paring knife. She rolled up her sleeve and set a hip against the counter as she considered her approach to the LSF chip. “Don’t you dare,” Cyperus growled. “Wait for me, I’ll do it.”
At least he wasn’t demanding she wait all the way back to Idyll. Sienna returned to the table, set the knife down, and spun it so its handle pointed to Cyperus. “And then I’ll do yours if you’ll do mine,” Gentiana offered him, matter-of-fact.
“And mine?” Valerie said, snapping every head at the table to her.
Gentiana’s face crumpled. “We can drop you—”
Valerie gestured that away sharply. “On an outlying planet, I know. I’d have to start completely over there, if I don’t want to be imprisoned for the rest of my life. And if I have to start over there…why think so small?”
Sienna spun the knife, stopped it, spun it again, to give herself something else to look at. “You have useful skills. I’d stand surety for you on Idyll, if you wanted. Which doesn’t mean you can stay, but it means you have time to prove yourself.”
“Be prepared to be given the third-degree early and often.” Cyperus squeezed Sienna’s knee, perhaps to forestall any apology. “And be locked out of the majority of the most interesting projects, depending on your job. But it doesn’t last forever.”
Gentiana went back to not-looking at Valerie, her whole body tight with tension. “I suppose I don’t honestly know where Pen and I will end up, after we stop off at Idyll.”
Sienna suddenly viscerally understood Pen’s exasperation with her own romantic foibles, back when she’d first met Cyperus—all right, quite recently as well. “Well, I’m already standing surety for you, and the Director of Research would hide rotten fish in my walls if I didn’t at least try to convince Pen and Joy to stay, so there’s no reason to decide right now.”
Gentiana nodded jerkily, then stood. “Can I…talk to you, Sienna? About the details of that?” Her face looked as if, however awkward that had been in her head, it was infinitely more so now she heard it out loud. “Cyperus can fill Valerie in.” The addendum didn’t help, but Gentiana fled anyway.
Sienna caught up to her in the cabin, perched on the edge of the unmade bed as Gentiana paced a few steps before her path was blocked by Valerie’s mattress pad. “I know we’re not quite…friends.”
Sienna was trying to be empathetic, but there was just so between them, she couldn’t help but choke her way into a laugh. “We’d mercy-damned better round up to friends by now, Gentiana.”
Gentiana managed a breath of a laugh of her own at the pure absurdity of it. “Fair enough.” Another few paces. “It feels crass to have this conversation in front of Pen, but there’s nothing for it. I was supposed to be with her forever, I promised her that. And now I can’t, and I know she told me herself that was all right, but I can’t just…ride off into the sunset with another woman right in front of her, can I?”
“‘A woman,’ not ‘another woman,’” Pen said, gently. By her standards. “I’m not a human, I’m an AI. Together has a different definition for me, once you take out the biology of sexual attraction. And then I have a different definition of forever, too. It’s easy for humans to promise that to each other, on their personal scales. It’s different for me. And Joy. And whoever else ends up last-jumped, eventually. We were going to end up at this point no matter what. So go find forever with that human. Or some other one. Just not with me.”
A seemingly endless pause, while Gentiana looked like someone had punched her in the stomach. Sienna rose to clasp her hands, give her that much of a foundation to cling to, at least. “Besides,” Pen said, returning to her more normal tone. “You called her a fox and she didn’t fucking punch you. It must be true love.”
Gentiana gave a wobbly laugh, then pulled Sienna into an embrace. “I told you, you have time to decide,” Sienna said. “Take it, okay?” Gentiana nodded against Sienna’s shoulder, and Sienna drew in a breath that reveled in the hope for the future filling her, for Gentiana and herself, both.
Epilogue
Sienna blanked the work surface of her small tablet and frowned as she used it to flip through the planetary archives instead. She knew there had to be a picture of the pre-space painting she was remembering here somewhere. “It’ll make more sense if I can find you the original of the historical style I’m imitating.” She and Valerie were seated on the audience bleachers of the Institute’s small track—very small bleachers, as the track was mostly used for Medical’s tests, not spectator sports. The weather was gray, but any day without drizzle was a win in the Institute’s region. Against a background of overly regimented evergreens, legacy of the Institute’s start as a timber farm, Cyperus jogged at a steady pace. He’d grown his beard back and cut his hair even shorter than it had started, perhaps to buzz away the feel of LSF the way she’d had her wrist tattoo removed the instant she returned home. Gentiana trailed him politely.
Sienna hummed in satisfaction as she found what she wanted, then held out the tablet to Valerie. “This.” Valerie frowned down at the painting of female spectators, parasols over their shoulders and skirts down to their ankles, looking on as their family and lovers engaged in displays of manly phy
sical prowess down by the park’s lake, all in the most picturesque sunshine. “Why are they divided by—” She stopped, got a prompt with the Lingua word she wanted over her earpiece, then continued. “Gender?”
“Well, it was the dark ages. Before electricity, even.” Sienna switched the tablet back to her own piece, drawing in a parasol on Valerie’s shoulder with her stylus. On the track, Gentiana shifted gears up to a flat-out run and lapped Cyperus once, again. The second time, she tossed some inaudible insult over her shoulder to him, and Sienna lowered her stylus to watch his reaction closely.
Valerie grumbled under her breath. “That was unnecessary, Gentiana.”
Cyperus lowered his head and kept on at his steady pace, exactly as the doctor had ordered. Sienna let her shoulders relax before she turned to Valerie with an apologetic grimace. “I asked her to. He’s been promising me and his physical therapist both that he absolutely will, under no circumstances, stop making up absurd what-ifs, Cyperus, push himself on that knee. Looks like he was telling the truth.”
“Well, then. I’ll just enjoy the view.” Valerie leered teasingly and reclined, holding an invisible parasol, and Sienna took the opportunity to snap a new background picture of her. Perfect!
Pen shouldn’t know anything about who was talking to security, but good luck getting her to keep her nose out of anything around the Institute. Technically, she and Joy were each settled in their own self-contained dorm building, but only Joy—she’d retained a certain amount of military law-abiding instincts from her memory mother—actually stayed here.
Sienna started to rise, then subsided. The time Galax needed to clear security would be enough for Cyperus to finish his laps, so she might as well have security escort him out here to meet them. She contacted security to arrange it—they didn’t even bother asking how she’d heard—and then cast a slight frown sideways at Valerie. “One of the Pax Romana guests has arrived early, do you want to make yourself scarce or do you feel up to dealing with him?”
Valerie straightened and rubbed at her unblemished inner wrist, chip scar healed and tattoo removed. “Might as well get it over with one at a time. He won’t be able to tell if I don’t talk, anyway.”
“Take your hair down,” Sienna suggested, in service of that, and then waved back in response to Cyperus’s triumphant gesture as he finished his last lap. She made her way down as he discussed with his doctor, then intercepted him as he ambled away from the track, toweling a light sheen of sweat from the back of his neck. “You,”—she pointed to him as she arrived—“have a very nice reward waiting for you back at the apartment, but I think there’s something else you’ll want to do first.”
“What could that possibly be?” Cyperus teased, joining a kiss, hands on her hips. Her back was to their approach, but she felt the moment when Cyperus spotted Galax arriving with his security escort in the hitch of his breath. She broke the kiss so he didn’t have to feel guilty for doing it.
Cyperus strode to meet his friend, laughing, and embraced the slightly shorter man. Sienna was too far to hear what they said, but Galax’s gesture to Cyperus’s path suggested he was complimenting the man on the smoothness of his gait. They resumed Galax’s original path with Cyperus’s arm slung over his friend’s shoulders, and Sienna was surprised by the hollowness of Galax’s face when she finally got a good look at him. Purple shadows had made what seemed a permanent home under his eyes and his cheekbones.
“Glad to see you looking well,” he told her with a wry smile and opened his arms diffidently. He’d given her good medical treatment at a very difficult time in her life, and she was happy to embrace him in turn. “You’re collecting a menagerie out here in the wilderness?” When Sienna stepped back, she turned to see his attention was on Gentiana, pointedly clasping Valerie’s hand.
The question might be prompting her to expand about Valerie’s identity and her role in Gentiana’s decision to stay on Idyll, but Sienna was content to push that off for later. “They followed me home, there was nothing I could do,” she dodged with light humor.
“And you,”—Cyperus clapped a hand on his friend’s shoulder—“are very early! Not that I mind, but you are going to have to put up with me for that whole time.”
The shadows expanded across Galax’s face, or perhaps bubbled up from behind his eyes. “With the war going the way it is, when you manage to find a place on a transport, you take it, no matter when it is.” He faced Cyperus, solemn. “Cyperus, we need you. You don’t understand how badly. You’re free of the LSF weapon now, if you would come back, you could even bring Sienna…”
“No.” Cyperus spoke before Sienna’s anxiety could even poke its poisonous head out from under the rock she’d chased it under. His tone was light, but utterly immovable. “It’s no longer my war. Killing more LSF regular folk sooner, better, like that will somehow prevent them from doing their damnedest to kill more Pax Romana regular folk sooner, better, isn’t moving a single step closer to universal mercy.”
Galax’s frowned at the ground, perhaps choosing among a variety of arguments he’d been prepped with, or perhaps struggling with whether to use his knowledge of his friend against him.
“If you’re thinking of trying a ‘look at what the foxes did to your partner’ tack, don’t.” Sienna slowly curled her fingers into a fist. “I will punch you.” Valerie huffed a laugh like she would have spoken up to corroborate that, if not for her French accent.
Galax shot her a slightly worried look that indicated that he completely believed her. “You’re so good at it,” he said, finally. “Don’t you miss it?”
“No.” Cyperus echoed the immovability of his tone with his body this time, standing slightly braced. “Security system consulting takes me all over the planet, and Sienna can come with me—and any kids can, when they’re old enough—and that gives her a chance to do all kinds of photography for her paintings. Her art career is really taking off, by the way. Hell, she designed this for me as an engagement present. Look.”
“Oh, any excuse,” Sienna said, not entirely under her breath, and not bothering to hide that actually, she was entirely pleased every time he showed the tattoo off. Cyperus shrugged off his shirt, made his rave lines visible, and turned to show Galax his back. The red lines of the tattoo began at the rave lines and then diverged from them, their curling, knotted shapes forming furled wings that reached to the small of his back. Like the wings worn by the Pax Romana man who’d helped found the Amsterdam Institute.
She took Galax’s arm in a conversational lull and half-teasingly, half-seriously steered him back to the main Institute buildings. “You have a whole month to work on Cyperus, just be aware that means we have a whole month to work on you, hm? Come on, there’s someone I want you to meet.”
Galax groaned. “I’m not interested in being set up with anyone, thank you.” He cast a glance at Gentiana and Valerie, who were diverging to their own destination now. Sienna really would have to tell him the whole story at some point, just to prove that it wasn’t another case of “for the love of an Idyllian woman.”
“Of course not,” Cyperus said, taking his other elbow. “You really should see the new int-tech lab they’re setting up here, though. You’ll die of envy, and then they’ll offer you one of your own.”
Galax shot Cyperus an incredulous—yet hungry—look, and Sienna laughed with him,
firmly steering Galax on his way. There were plenty of reasons to stay here, and even if they weren’t enough for Galax, they were enough for Cyperus. Nothing in her doubted that now.
Acknowledgments
I started writing Clean Install sometime in 2016 on a whim. At that time, I was writing exclusively urban fantasy, but feeling increasingly constrained by it without quite knowing what I should do instead. A novella was low risk—without wasting a ton of time, I could still write an idea that I found fun and compelling, but that was probably secretly “too.” Too overdramatic. Too silly. Too ungrounded in hard science principles.
“Too,” it turned out, was exactly what I needed to make something that had plenty of what readers loved.
In 2019, I started putting plans in motion: get covers made, finish up Books 3 and 4, and publish four novella ebooks in 2020. And I did, despite circumstances that I need not specify—though I do dream of this book enduring to a time when simply saying the year no longer evokes a shiver of ongoing or remembered grief. Following the steps of my plan for the series kept me going when it came to my writing career, but it was friends and family who let me hold the rest of my life together. This isn’t the place to name them all, not least because my gratitude is to deep to fit on the page.
Foremost among those who are owed thanks for these books in particular are my writing group: Kate Alice Marshall, Corry L. Lee, Erin M. Evans, Susan J. Morris, and Shanna Germain. Every book is better for their specific suggestions and general writing wisdom. My agent, Cameron McClure, offered excellent notes on the first book, as did Casey Blair and no doubt others who have been pushed from my mind by the Plague Year. Apologies to any I have left out!
