by R. Z. Held
Genevieve could see that in evoking those dark memories, Carex had Pyrus starting to crumble. The thought was written across his face: maybe the man she’d saved had been the one in a million. “Like she said, what’s the harm in trying?” He seemed to put all the hope he had remaining into the words, leaving his posture with none.
Carex stilled when his next circuit brought him before Pyrus. His voice softened, though not so much as to take it entirely out of the realm of “harsh.” Perhaps he had lost the skill of that somewhere along the way. “You really need me to tell you?”
Things unsaid congealed between the two men, the depth of their history becoming an almost visible presence in the room. Pyrus scoffed. “I can’t imagine what you think gives you the right to interfere, then or now.”
Carex met his scoff, raised it to a bark of laughter utterly without warmth. “The same thing that’s always given me the right, whether you’ve been avoiding speaking to me for nearly a year or not. I’m a man who cares about his brother in arms. When you failed last time, signing back on for an indefinite tour was suicide, Pyrus. Suicide by battle, but suicide nonetheless. An indefinite tour means you fight until you’re dead, you know that. I couldn’t let you do it.”
Pyrus crossed his arms, seemed to find some balance in the motion, even if it was a balance of his emotions tucked away deeper behind his eyes. “If you care about me as much as you profess to do, don’t deny me this now.”
“And when the rest of them die this time just as surely, and you’re worse off than before? What do you plan to do then, disappear into a chemical haze like Eriope?”
But Genevieve had proof Carex was wrong, if only she opened her mouth and said the words. She considered doing it over a private channel to Pyrus alone, but Carex could still order Pyrus away from the clinic if she didn’t convince him as well. She didn’t know what Carex would do to her, but there were eight lives she could save. “You know why that’s bullshit? I didn’t die.”
She stepped right up to Carex, edging him away from Pyrus. “I’m an Infected. I was a civilian, driving an ambulance, and I got it from one of our soldiers who got it from one of yours and you know why I didn’t die? Because I didn’t know I was supposed to. And I used that experience to guide that man who woke up through it. I could do it again.” She swept her hand to Pyrus. “As could he.”
Carex’s brows flew up, but then they tightened down to a glower deeper than any Genevieve had observed before and belated fear stole up into her stomach. “So you admit you lied to gain access to Tsuga Security?”
Genevieve ignored him and her fear both. “Pyrus, I think the key was in telling them to…” She’d meant to pour it all out, before Carex could stop her, but what she found in Pyrus’s face made her falter. His surprise was souring quickly into betrayal, and a desperate need to chase that look away yanked her off-track. “I needed the training and you’d never have taken me if I’d told the truth—”
Carex rolled right over her. “And immediately started amassing Pax Romana nanite secrets.”
“No more than what I already had in my damn body—”
This time it was Pyrus who spoke. “Not every fronti—non-citizen means harm.” He spoke as if to convince himself, though.
Carex waved that away. “That’s for the Board to discuss. Meanwhile, she should be contained.”
And Genevieve had run out of time. A coward to the end, that she’d cared more about Pyrus’s opinion of her than about the lives she could save. Carex’s system presented override codes, hers accepted, and her system started shutting down, channels gone first, then muscle control, and she folded up as her mind dissolved into sleep.
***
Genevieve reached first for channels when she woke up, to contact Eriope if no one else, but she was still locked out. Maybe it was a good sign for her assimilation that it was her first impulse, but assimilation was hardly going to be the goal now she was a prisoner.
Something she hadn’t encountered before in her system pinged for her attention, and after studying the alert for a second, she realized it was a message that had come in over a channel while she was asleep.
Pyrus’s voice. His tone was very bland. Civil. So civil she could have cried, though when it came to it, she discovered her tears had dried up once more.
Genevieve sat up. Her system clock told her she’d been out for a couple hours. How many of the Infecteds would die in those “few days” before they let her out of her room? She was glad she wasn’t going to be summarily executed, but what about them? She hadn’t been able to tell Pyrus nearly enough. Why the hell hadn’t she taken the time to explain before they’d approached Carex? Because she’d still been riding the high of success, she supposed, feeling like everything would be easy from there and she’d have plenty of time to explain in detail.
Another message arrived then, not live either, but apparently pre-recorded for delivery only after her system showed she was awake. Carex, this time.
He must be referring to how she’d revealed that she was from a frontier planet, that was the only thing that made sense. But did that mean he’d already guessed as much? And didn’t want to have to acknowledge it? He was the son of those who had fought to save a frontier planet, Eriope had told her that. And Eriope had also said he felt he needed to be twice as rigid, which was what Genevieve was feeling the brunt of now, she supposed.
The second part of Carex’s message, she dismissed. Where there was life, there was hope. She’d found her own purpose. Others could too.
She smoothed the blankets where she’d been lying. Someone had laid her down as pretty as a bespelled princess. Pyrus? Did some drop of his kindness remain, remembered even in the face of discovering she was one of the dirty frontis? Or had it been Carex, of all people?
She shoved to her feet. Whether she had Carex’s secret sympathies or not didn’t matter if he wasn’t going to lift a finger to help her. That was clear enough. There had to be something she could do for the Infecteds herself. Break down her door, or break into the channels and get word to someone else to help them. She tried to bring up the blocks on her system, but while she had gained enough skill to know what she was looking at now, she had no idea how to go about hacking them.
She kept trying for a while until frustration overwhelmed her and she went to kick at the door. The blow didn’t even make it vibrate.
Her back muscles were starting to hurt, responding to her tension, and she slammed open the door to the balcony and snapped out her wings. Whatever she ended up doing, a full charge couldn’t hurt. Maybe staring balefully at a reflection of the mountains, wings turned outward to the light, would knock an idea of what to do loose in her mind.
It was a glimpse of the ground that did that, though. The sheer poetic justice of it all made her bounce up onto her toes in excitement, clenching her hands on the rail. Carex hadn’t locked this door because he knew she couldn’t glide yet. All she had to do to get out of here was prove him wrong.
It was a hell of a long way down, but Genevieve could hardly choke now when she’d been willing to possibly risk her life when confessing to Carex. This was only gliding. Besides, if she hurt herself it would heal quickly enough—no, that wasn’t the way to think. Her nerve wavered. She’d glide down without any injuries. If there was anything she’d learned in all her training so far, it was that if you wanted to do something simple for the first time, you might as well let the automatic system take care o
f it. If she wanted to react to air currents with split-second decisions, she’d need manual control, but she was sure the nanites could take her down in a straight line.
If she let them.
“Hurry up, coward,” Genevieve said out loud. “Carex probably used the last couple hours to create his documentation trail and is down there right now dumping people out of pools.” She pulled up the glide program, and it prompted her to check the wind. She climbed over the rail and turned to balance with her heels on the edge of the balcony, hands on the rail behind her. Even so close to the side of the building, the wind plucked at her and her system sucked down readings hungrily, crunching the data at the edge of her perceptions. It prompted her for a target.
A lunchtime exercise and charging session was just breaking up, catching her attention as she scanned the lawn. People lowered limbs from the last group stretch and wings started to fold away. Genevieve had to bring up magnification of her vision to spot Eriope from this distance, but there she was, in the front row. Talking brightly to someone, of course. Good. She could aim for that vicinity, and then she’d be able to intercept Eriope before Carex noticed her. She hoped Eriope would at least carry a message for her, if for nothing else, for the sake of the memory of the friendship they’d formed, despite Genevieve’s best efforts.
A gust of wind buffeted her unexpectedly hard and Genevieve drew back so she could hold herself more securely with her elbows hooked over the rail, which she supposed was progress in the wrong direction. No, she wasn’t going to feel nauseated. She was going to do this. She was going to use the nanites because there was no getting rid of them so she might as well fucking embrace them and get something important done. And maybe some small part of her would like to fly—even if it was gliding—like the part that enjoyed never having another ache.
She dropped to the extent of her arms and let go.
The program, set to its target, co-opted her muscles, but Genevieve relaxed into it and it was barely different than giving into highly trained instincts. Wind slammed her face and chest, making it impossible to know how fast she was going, but when she closed her eyes against it, the targeting program objected strenuously to the loss of visual data on its target, making her head pound with the not-quite-sound of its alarm. She imagined she was riding along while someone else controlled trick stunts in an airplane and the urge to not see the ground diminished while the adrenaline-sharpness of excitement surged up to take its place.
Her system updated, updated again, skipping her targeted landing spot farther out to give her more time to flatten out and slow. As long as it wasn’t into the side of the mountain—
And then she was plowing into grass, tumbling ass over who knew what as Eriope had joked, but her wings flexed rather than broke and her next still impression of the world was of lying uncomfortably with her cheek in the grass, now plowed muddy, and a good portion of her wings bunched beneath her body to jabbing discomfort.
She took a little time to get herself oriented correctly, hands on the ground so she could push up. Her wings were too bent to fold away. Eriope, she reminded herself. She was the point of this little exercise. The target had been pushed away from her position, but when Genevieve looked up, Eriope was already there. With everyone else, standing in a rough semicircle and staring at her.
Eriope shook her head jerkily, like she hadn’t really heard. “Don’t do that. Don’t glide from that high with the kind of air currents we get around here! They could have smashed you right back into the building. Nanite healing has its limits, you know.” She finally paused for breath and pulled Genevieve to her feet to try in vain to wipe off some of the mud. “What possessed you?”
“Carex locked me in.” And he hadn’t bothered with the balcony door because he knew it was too dangerous, she realized now. Genevieve cranked her panicked focus wide enough to take in the other Installs’ expressions. Their surprise, though muted, didn’t look like Carex had told them anything yet. “I saved one of the Infecteds and he thinks trying to save any more would be—” A cruelty. “—a waste of effort.”
Eriope muttered a curse. “Of course he does.” She clasped Genevieve’s arms encouragingly, while her attention went elsewhere. Checking whether Carex was on the map, perhaps.
“I need your help.” Genevieve returned her focus to Eriope alone, as the others drifted off, giving them privacy. “To get a message to Pyrus. Carex shut me down too fast—anyway, it doesn’t matter.” No, she was doing this too fast and in the wrong order. “I think I know how to save the others.” In the intensity of her effort to convince Eriope, formality slipped back in. “Perhaps they are not citizens, but to preserve any life—”
“Hurry up, Carex will be here soon enough because of channel chatter,” Eriope said. She flashed Genevieve a smile when Genevieve must have looked anxious. “I’m sure Pyrus will be even happier to have your help in person. And we need to get you to the clinic anyway, to fix your wings.” She was already moving, without even waiting for Genevieve to agree.
Genevieve jogged to catch up. For a moment euphoria, brought to the surface by the glide, however dangerous, expanded in her belly. Then reality reasserted itself. Carex could contact Eriope on a private channel at any time, and then she might change from helping to restraining Genevieve.
Better to find out Eriope’s reaction now, while Genevieve could still try to evade her if it proved necessary. She spoke over the private channel she’d kept open to Eriope.
Eriope was quiet for a while.
“Pyrus…” No, Genevieve had no time for hesitation. She spoke the rest in a rush. “Whatever you think of me, I can help save these people, if you’d just let me.”
Heavy, sprinting footsteps gave Genevieve barely a breath of warning before Carex arrived down the corridor from the elevator. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Rather than deploy his override once more, however, Carex slowed, came to a stop to glower at her.
Glowering, Genevieve realized even more viscerally now she’d heard his message, wasn’t stopping her, however. She matched him stare for stare and dared to voice the desperate plan that popped into her head. “What would you do if we locked ourselves in?” If the lock could be overridden, they could break it. But Carex could lunge for her now, if he wanted. Or have any of the Installs here help him cut his way in once the door was closed.
Carex’s expression wiped down to something hard, not completely concealing the conflict beneath. When he spoke, he sounded as immovable as one of the mountains outside. “I’d have to make d
amn sure you stayed here, until someone above my pay grade arrived to deal with you.”
Genevieve wasn’t going to wait for him to send her an engraved invitation. She lunged into the clinic, dragging Eriope with her.
“Wait, I don’t—” Eriope was too off-balance from surprise to catch herself before the door closed behind them both. “Fuck.” She brushed herself off with jerky, exaggerated motions. “Just like Carex, I suppose, to step back and tattle to the higher-ups.”
Pyrus tipped his chin to the door, perhaps as a physical sign of sending something, as it gave a flat, unhappy beep. “Whatever Carex was thinking, he can’t override my medic codes now. But you realize that we probably only have enough food for a couple days in here?”
Before Genevieve could respond—which was fortunate, she had no idea what to say—Pyrus and Eriope winced in tandem as if at someone shouting in their ears.
“Guess I’m committed now. That was the public announcement about how the three of us are in trou-ble,” Eriope explained, sing-song, at Genevieve’s confused look. A glittering look of forced cheer settled into her eyes. “And there go non-emergency channels. I guess we’ll just have to wear our vocal cords out with flapping.”
“In the announcement, did Carex say—when the higher-ups arrive, I suppose I’ll be imprisoned?” That was selfish, to worry about at a time like this. But if she could escape, after all of these Infecteds were recovered—or dead, she should admit that to herself—she wanted to try. “Are there even facilities for that, with Installs?”
“There are.” Pyrus avoided her gaze as he said it, though his tone was strictly factual, not accusatory. She had no doubt he could weaponize his neutrality if he wanted, so she decided to accept the assumption he realized as well as she did they were on the same side in this endeavor, and proceed accordingly.