Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  Inside, people were making ready for war. The System buildings were all occupied; people came in and out of them with busy regularity. The edifice in the center of the square had clearly been converted to an armory; anyone who came in or came out brought with him or her some form of small arms. The open space of the intersection of the roads had been filled almost completely with tents and lean-tos and other forms of temporary residence, and people wove their way familiarly through them, or sat inside or around them, speaking quietly. Not far from the entrance to the camp was an open space with targets set up; a small group of men and women stood facing them and, at an order from their instructor, fired. The gunshots echoed off the high walls, amplified. The targets, dressed in System gray, jerked.

  “Welcome to Aquilon,” said Tuatha.

  “You,” Mattie said, “are not just a rebel.”

  “ ’Course I am.”

  “Just how high up are you with the Conmacs?”

  “In the Aquilon camp? The leader,” she said. She pulled off her cap, and out tumbled a startling amount of gleaming dark hair. “We need to get you a place to stay. Niels—”

  “If you’re the leader, what were you doing out in Mara without backup?”

  “I had an important retrieval to make,” said Tuatha, “but it was only important to me.”

  “Your brother,” Mattie guessed. Niels was standing huddled deep in his jacket, watching his sister with a strange, sad expression.

  “Niels,” Tuatha confirmed. “We’d arranged to meet in Mara, but that was before Mara got bombed by those System pieces-of-shit. So I went back in to get him.”

  “You both would’ve gotten shot down if you hadn’t bumped into me,” Mattie pointed out.

  “Eh,” Tuatha said. “Or I would’ve tossed one of the grenades I had on my belt and blown him up, and we would’ve been fine.”

  “You haven’t got any grenades on your belt.”

  She made a show of checking. “I don’t. Didn’t know you were paying that much attention to my hips.”

  Niels coughed. Mattie found himself briefly without words. It had been a long time since anyone had been so badly mistaken regarding his sexuality.

  Tuatha rolled her eyes and let it drop. “We got a bunch of System medals when we took over their governor’s house. We could probably engrave one of them with your name if you really wanted.”

  “I want a ship,” said Mattie.

  She laughed like she thought he was joking.

  “My friend is coming to meet me here,” Mattie said. “When he gets here, we’ll need a ship. We have to get off Europa as soon as we can.”

  “The ships in our shipyard aren’t ours,” said Tuatha. “They’re the Huntress’s. You must’ve seen the space battle a few hours ago. She’ll need every ship she can get to replace what was lost.”

  “We don’t need a large one or a powerful one. Any ship—”

  “—you can’t have,” said Tuatha. “When the Mallt-y-Nos gets here, you can ask her for one and see what she says.”

  If he waited until Constance got there, he would get a ship, but it would be too late: Ivan would not leave. They would be just as trapped here as before, with Ananke coming closer with every icy second. He would have to face Constance again.

  It was on the tip of his tongue to tell Tuatha the truth—a part of it, at least. That he was Matthew Gale, the foster brother of the Mallt-y-Nos herself, whose hands had personally destroyed the Earth. Constance would give him a ship when she arrived, would want a ship given to him if he asked, and Tuatha would find greater favor with the Huntress if she treated Mattie well.

  But he recalled Anji’s people on the Badh and the Macha, and how his and Ivan’s names had saved them at first and then made them prisoners.

  Mattie would have to find a different way to get them a ship.

  BACKWARD

  Mattie returned to the Annwn sometime well after System Standard time would mark the Terran midnight. He eased open the hull door and checked himself quickly to be sure nothing overly incriminating was showing. Ivan had an eye like—what was that character he’d told Mattie about? Holmes, he remembered, or something—and so Mattie took great care rumpling his shirt and pinching the skin of his neck with the aim of leading Ivan to entirely the wrong conclusion.

  Then he sauntered into the ship and shut the door behind himself as if he were trying to be quiet but not quite able to do it. He started climbing up the sideways hall in much the same way.

  He made it as far as the den before he found Ivan. It probably gave him away as completely sober that he noticed Ivan immediately, but it was hard not to notice Ivan on the best of days, even more so when Mattie’s skin was pricking with vague guilt.

  Ivan said, “Where have you been?”

  “Out,” said Mattie, and tried for insouciance, or at least a just-got-laid grin.

  It was wasted; Ivan wasn’t looking at him. “Out where?”

  “My business.”

  Ivan looked down at his hand, at the slow and patient curl and uncurl of his fingers that Mattie knew from long acquaintance meant he was replacing some more revealing motion. Ivan said, “You were at somebody’s house.”

  “I was,” Mattie said, because it was the complete truth.

  “Let me see if I can guess his name.” Ivan leaned forward suddenly, elbows to knees. He looked at Mattie the way a knife digs open an oyster. “Was it Lester Apollon?”

  Mattie’s smile faded. “The governor of Puck?”

  Ivan nodded once.

  “Why would I sleep with a System governor?” If he raised his voice like that, his pricking anxiety sounded a lot like outrage.

  “Because you weren’t sleeping with him. You were doing something for Constance.”

  For a moment Mattie entertained the idea of maintaining his innocence. The inclination collapsed almost immediately.

  “She didn’t want me to tell you,” he said.

  “You didn’t. I figured it out. You can tell her that.”

  Mattie sighed. “I don’t know why you won’t—”

  “What did you do?” Ivan sounded for all the world like he was nothing more than mildly curious. “Is he alive?”

  “Of course he’s fucking alive.”

  “Forgive me for wondering.” Ivan’s tone was as dry as bared bones. “What did you do to him?”

  “I just left a piece of paper with his things. Cameras were off and everything; System never even knew I was there.”

  “But they’ll come to investigate the camera outage immediately.”

  “Probably.”

  “And whatever they’ll find there will make them very angry with Governor Apollon.”

  Mattie shrugged.

  “What did the paper say, Mattie?” Ivan asked.

  “Does it fucking matter?”

  Ivan sat there, not looking at Mattie, his fingers clasped beneath his nose. Mattie’s skin itched with his displeasure, and for a minute Mattie hated him for it, and he hated Constance for putting him in this situation.

  Ivan said, “You know they’re going to kill him, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Governor Apollon,” Ivan said. “That’s why Constance didn’t tell me about it. Whatever you left in his house, the System is going to find it, and they’re going to be furious. It’s treason, probably. Maybe instructions for how to subvert System surveillance, maybe something more. In any case, the System will recall him from his post here and replace him. Maybe the person they replace him with will be weaker, or stupider, or more sympathetic to the people on this moon. That’s what Con is hoping, I imagine. Of course, maybe the replacement will be worse.” Ivan did look up then, and it was worse, the weight of his displeasure. “And as for ex-Governor Apollon, he’ll go back to Earth, and in a couple of weeks—maybe a few months—he’ll just go away. They did that all the time back on Earth.”

  “They do that all the time here,” said Mattie. Ivan never seemed to understand that it was so muc
h worse here than it ever had been on Terra. “You think I want to do this?”

  “Do what?”

  “Stand in the middle of you and my sister!”

  “When you first met me,” said Ivan, a dangerous change of subject, “years ago—”

  “What about it?” Mattie snapped.

  “It wasn’t an accident,” said Ivan, and the consonants fell as sharply as shattered glass from his accent. “Too much of a coincidence for the brother of a revolutionary to just stumble across the son of Connor Ivanov in some random bar.”

  Mattie went very still.

  “I wondered if you thought I was too stupid to figure it out,” Ivan said, “but now I’ve realized that you just didn’t want to deal with what might happen when I did.”

  Mattie’s mouth was dry.

  “From the beginning,” Ivan said, “you found me because of Constance Harper.”

  Maybe then, Mattie would have said, but never since then. But he could not bring those words to his mouth.

  “I know where your loyalties lie,” said Ivan, with his brilliant eyes and his glittering accent. “But—”

  “But what?”

  Ivan said, “You killed someone tonight, Mattie.”

  Mattie’s hands were trembling. He stuck them into his pockets. “Like it’s the first time for you or me,” he said, and left.

  FORWARD

  In the end, Ivan wasn’t surprised when Alyssa stopped and turned her gun on him.

  “Who are you?” Beyond the barrel of her gun, her eyes were wide and gray, too large for her narrow face.

  Ivan was not afraid. He was too cold to be afraid, he thought, or else more frightening women had held him at gunpoint than gray and fearful Alyssa.

  “My name is Ivan,” he said.

  “You’re not System,” she accused.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “All System agents were called on active duty after the Mallt-y-Nos attacked Earth. If you weren’t on active duty, then you weren’t a System agent. So who are you?”

  “Nobody important.”

  “So why did you lie?”

  “Because,” Ivan said, “I was concerned you might shoot me.”

  This would be a way to end. His body would never be found. Maybe it would mummify in the slow way of bodies left out in the open cold. Maybe the volcanic fluctuations of the ice would open a crack or melt the surface just enough to swallow him up, and he would be suspended forever in the blue beneath.

  “Who are you working for?” Alyssa asked, sighting him down the barrel of her gun.

  “I don’t work for anyone.”

  “Don’t lie. Who are you working for? Who do you follow?”

  This whole conversation was familiar, Ivan thought with distant indifference. The freezing wind was finding the seams in his stolen clothes and chilling the skin beneath.

  “I used to follow the Mallt-y-Nos,” he admitted. “But right now, I’m just looking for my friend.”

  “The Mallt-y-Nos?” Alyssa surged up, then steadied herself, the gun held so precisely targeted on him that he could see the nose of it trembling with tension. “Where is she now? What is she planning?”

  Ivan laughed. It echoed weirdly, and Alyssa took a step back, unnerved. She said, “Where is she?”

  “What would you even do, if I told you?”

  Ida Stays would have smiled her charming little smile and said, That’s for me to know, Ivan. Or perhaps she would have said, Well, I’m going to kill her, Ivan.

  Or perhaps Ida wouldn’t have killed her. It was hard to say what Ida would have done with the fetters of the System lifted from her. She might have said she would kill Constance even if she’d had no intention of ever doing so. Said it, then shot Ivan and left him to die in the snow.

  Alyssa said, “Just tell me where she is!”

  “I don’t know.” Ivan imagined Ida Stays at Alyssa’s back, smiling dark-lipped, running one frigid white hand down Alyssa’s arm, stretching out to place her finger over Alyssa’s on the trigger. “I’m looking for her. Or I was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean if I knew where she was, I would be with her now. And as for what she’s planning, I imagine it hasn’t changed: kill the System.”

  “Like you were planning on killing me?” said Alyssa, shivering in the wind, wan and thin and frightened, pointing the gun at him like it was the only thing that could keep the wolf at bay.

  “No,” Ivan said. “I never had any plans of killing you.”

  “But you would if you had the chance.”

  Ivan took a step forward. She jolted the gun up fiercely, and her finger quivered on the trigger, but she did not fire. He said to her, “Even if the Mallt-y-Nos herself were here and she told me to kill you, I wouldn’t do it.”

  She hesitated. The gun lowered a little beneath those gray eyes, exposing the fearful bent of her mouth.

  “I saved your life. I lied to you so that you wouldn’t kill me, because I promised my friend I would meet him in Aquilon. So shoot me or not. I can’t stop you either way.”

  For a moment Alyssa was still, as if the ice had enclosed her, wrapping its pale arms about her and freezing her and her gun in place. The wind stroked Ivan’s cheeks and ran its fingers over his lips.

  Then Alyssa lowered her gun.

  She did not say another word to him, but when she turned around and slowly walked on, her back bent like a tree beneath the weight of snow, he followed her.

  BACKWARD

  “Honestly,” Ivan said, watching Constance chop the carrot into efficient little cylinders, “this is not how I have ever pictured you.”

  She lifted a brow but did not look up from the cutting board. “Cooking?”

  The knife flashed in her hand.

  “Being good at it,” Ivan said.

  “I cooked for Mattie for years.” She dumped the carrots in the pot, deftly balancing the knife between her fingers. She was focused and calm, steady and sure, as well balanced as the knife she held. She did not set his heart to pounding like this, with thin strands of her brown hair escaping from their braid, but he admired her, the certainty of her hands, her poised-blade balance.

  Behind him, the door to the bar swung open with a creak.

  “Mattie does not have a discerning palate,” said Ivan, knowing full well that Mattie was at that very moment walking in from the bar.

  “I have a very good palate,” Mattie said. “Also: go fuck yourself.”

  “Hand me the salt, Mattie,” said Constance, unperturbed.

  “Should’ve stayed in the bar.” Mattie walked over to a cabinet indistinguishable from all the rest, opened it, and pulled out the salt with an immediacy born of long familiarity. He did it without spilling a drop of his drink or losing his grip on the two other drinks he had brought in with himself, long fingers wrapped around the necks of the bottles. Constance stuck out a hand without looking when he came near her, and he placed the salt into her hand. She shook it into the pot, put it aside, and held out a hand again; this time Mattie placed one of the bottles into her grip. Ivan watched the ballet of familiarity and felt some muscle he hadn’t known he’d possessed tighten in his chest.

  Constance took a swig while Mattie ambled around her to hand the second bottle to Ivan. She made a face.

  “What?” Mattie said.

  “It’s sweet.”

  “It’s good,” said Mattie. “It’s made from apples. Terran fruit.” He didn’t meet Ivan’s eyes as he pressed the bottle into his hand, as if he might be able to distance himself from the gesture.

  Constance squinted at the bottle suspiciously, but didn’t protest again. Instead she said, “How close is the storm?”

  Settling himself against the counter on Ivan’s other side, his shoulder a welcome warmth against Ivan’s, Mattie said, “I could hear it howling from the bar.”

  “Then it must be—”

  Mattie took an idle drink from the bottle and very casually swung his ankle b
ack at the switch hidden beneath the sink.

  “—nearly on top of us,” Constance finished as the lights went down. “There we go.”

  Mattie pushed himself off the counter. “I’ll get the candles.”

  Ivan studied the System camera embedded in the ceiling—the camera that, like all the others, was no longer transmitting to the System. “You two make a good team.” Somehow the remark did not come out as wry as he meant it to be.

  Constance was still stirring the pot. The blue flames of the stovetop were the only light in the room. They traced her shape out palely, as if, should Ivan reach out to touch her, his fingers would pass right through her skin.

  “We all do,” she said.

  Mattie had gone back out to the bar for Constance’s stash of candles. Ivan could hear him moving boxes around even through the shut door. In his absence, Ivan said, “As nice as this dinner is, does this mean you’re going to tell us what you want now?”

  “I thought we would enjoy one another’s company for a little longer,” said Constance, with some asperity.

  “It’s hard for me to enjoy someone’s company when I know they want something from me,” said Ivan, in precisely the same tone.

  Her lips tightened, and the light was so dim that Ivan could tell himself that it was exasperation and not hurt that flashed over her face. But Constance was not a woman to flinch from a confrontation. He admired her for that, helplessly. He wanted both to be furious at her for calling them here to use them and to possess in himself just the slightest splinter of her incorruptible self-assurance.

  She said, “I need you to steal some ammunition for me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m running low,” she said.

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “What do you think?”

  “No.”

  Her sharp glance up lanced at him, but he didn’t flinch. She could look at him that way, but she could not make him change his mind. A rush went through him at the look. If he touched her now, she would hit him.

  The door to the bar had opened, admitting Mattie. The warm yellow light of the candle he carried could only barely reach Ivan where he stood, and it battled weakly against the icy blue glow of the flames that lit Constance.