by R. Z. Held
Her brother’s children were a study in contrasts—though they shared the same nose, the same caps of strawberry-blond curls, Will, the younger boy, had clearly been too young to remember the circumstances that made him an orphan. He would barely sit at his place long enough to eat two bites before he had bounced out of his chair, talking a blue streak to either or both of his fathers. He was shy around strangers, but had grown comfortable enough that he would talk near Genevieve or Carex, though rarely to them.
The older girl, Jaya, on the other hand, had the haunted eyes and stubborn silence of a war orphan who hadn’t learned how to feel safe again—if she ever would. Genevieve wished it for her, deeply, and found hope in the fact that she did speak, oddly enough often to Carex. Something in the quality of their silences over meals seemed to resonate for them, and this morning, between their empty plates, Jaya was patiently teaching Carex a few words of Idyllian, using her brother’s reading program. Rather than use the computer’s voice, she’d speak the written word, emblazoned over a cartoon farm picture, and wait for Carex to repeat her, correcting his pronunciation as many times as necessary without apology. Carex, for his part, approached the task with solemn effort, though she knew he could have spent the energy and quick-learned it in hours.
Then it was time for school, and Carex accepted the tablet from Jaya with murmured thanks. He even paged through a few more words as the children clattered out, herded by Michael’s husband. “Put together gatherer,” he muttered to himself in Lingua, as if personally affronted by its awkwardness.
Oh! His system was giving him a literal translation of combine harvester. “I’m not sure even I know what that would be in Lingua,” she offered. “Michael?”
But her brother was completely absorbed in reading the news. He hissed a syllable, looked up from his tablet to verify the kids were gone, then completed the word. “Shhh—it.”
Genevieve reached out to touch the tablet to transfer the headline directly to her own system. She caught Carex’s sardonic look and twitched back. She tried to minimize that kind of thing in front of her brother. The irony was, of course, that he appeared not to have noticed anything until her twitch. Even then, he merely rotated the tablet so she could read it normally.
BREAKING NEWS: PAX ROMANA BURN DELTA SPACEFIELD, hardly needed additional explanation, though Michael provided it distractedly, rotating the tablet back and reading disconnected phrases as he held himself up on braced elbows, fingers laced into his hair. “Early hours of the morning, suggested it was retaliation for the recent Resistance attack—you think? Fuck—no injuries, spread to shipping warehouses—” Something beyond that point catapulted Michael to his feet to pace.
Genevieve speared Carex with a glare lest he pass comment, and downloaded the rest of the article to her system directly so she could absorb it properly. Carex mocked her with the innocence of his expression, then took the tablet to read through it manually himself. There wasn’t much more than what Michael had excerpted, the usual chaos of messy events as told by rattled eyewitnesses. The shipping warehouses had been full of timber and grain ready to travel to market off-planet, staggering wealth gone in a fell swoop given the prices they’d fetch after transport. No wonder Michael couldn’t sit still.
Carex gave the tablet a negligent toss to spin it back approximately to Michael’s place at the table. “Someone’s young, scared, and finding the orders they’re dispensing up their ass where they’ve shoved their head.”
Michael rounded on Carex, then sidestepped back from him, braced like a barn cat puffed up but still determined to approach a new object. Genevieve wondered if, despite Carex’s appearance, Michael had stopped thinking of him as Pax Romana, with the differing perspective on the occupying force’s choices that implied. “That’s not standard procedure, then?”
“You’re talking to a conqueror, not an occupier—” He broke off to neatly dodge Genevieve’s kick at his shin under the table. He could make his point without playing scary bastard, a thought he could apparently read on her face, because he sneered at her before continuing. “You may be family, ‘Vieve,’ but I’m the fucking boogeyman and none of the rest of us have any illusions about that. And of course it’s not standard procedure. You think the empire eats planets to look at the pretty flowers? Those are resources that now will never reach core planets, and tax revenue that’s been turned into smoke because some scared kid didn’t think ahead to contain the fire they set.”
A knock interrupted them all before Michael had passed beyond silent absorption of Carex’s point. Michael strode out to answer the door, leaving Genevieve to sit with Carex in charged silence in front of the domesticity of the scene, abandoned plates and mugs with coffee dregs scattered across the cheerful tablecloth, sun prying at the blinds that hadn’t yet been opened for the day. She’d probably need to make herself scarce, but she waited to find out who it was at least, first.
“Oh,” Michael said on opening the door, in recognition. “I’m afraid she’s not home, Marta—” He raised his voice on that last, clearly not realizing she could turn up her hearing to catch his words perfectly without it. The extra volume was probably what gave him away—the next noise was a scuffle as one person pushed past another, accompanying a muttered “bullshit.” Marta’s manners were as good as ever. Genevieve shoved to her feet, but to get to the side door, she’d have to cross one room closer to Marta as she entered, and there was no time left for that. Carex, utterly without apology, retrieved Jaya’s tablet and shut himself into the pantry.
Marta dispensed with all greetings. “We’re going to hit them back. We need you.”
Genevieve had to unclench her jaw to get words out. “Please don’t escalate this any further—”
“With you or without you,” Marta snapped, weathered face hard. Genevieve’s thoughts, mired in mud since Pyrus walked out, sped up to something like normal speed as Marta turned to leave. Someone needed to talk these fools down, and she needed a direction to pour her energy. The conclusion was inescapable, and she pounded after Marta scarcely a breath later.
If people got hurt, she was determined it should not be from lack of her trying to protect them.
***
By the time a smug Marta arrived, strutting as if she’d coaxed Genevieve solely with her silver tongue, the energy of the gathered Idyllians was already far beyond what Genevieve could hold back. A mass of protestors screamed at the gates of the Pax Romana compound, an entity working itself up to mob-hood as Marta and key lieutenants crouched in the back, assembling Molotov cocktails to pass around. It had a certain symmetry, Genevieve supposed: you burn our livelihood, we burn yours, as if the Pax Romana would ever allow that to happen.
The massed anger was such a force, she and her words broke against it time and time again, as the morning wore on and the shouting intensified. If the Pax Romana were smart, they’d leave their gates shut and stamp out any bottles lofted over the top if anyone’s arm was that strong. But Genevieve agreed with Carex’s read of the situation; she couldn’t count on that kind of intelligence.
The autumn day was sharp enough for its beauty to cut, even when the frost edge warmed off the air. On her parents’ farm, she’d have hiked out to the lake, stood on the shore in a black coat and let the sun warm down into her core. Or now, she supposed, she’d have her wings out to catch it. Instead, in the scrum of noise and panting rage, she shoved her way to the front of the crowd, courting recognition wherever she could find it now. Yes, she was Amsterdam Genevieve, who became one of them. Genevieve, who had slain all the Installs. The latter turned her stomach, but she couldn’t have the former without it, and she couldn’t make them listen without the former.
Couldn’t make them listen with it either. At the front, her back against the metal mesh of the gate, she shouted back, any and all words she could cobble together. Do not do this. They will pull out soon enough. You’ll only push them into violence—
And the gate opened behind her. Genevieve had one ba
re second to close her eyes, to think no! and then the mass shoved her through before them. She had no idea who shouted it first, but suddenly the cry was everywhere: “Amsterdam! She opened it for us!”
The compound’s plascrete buildings huddled around a central area for vehicle parking, the perfect place to trap a bunch of protestors while the soldiers with guns held positions behind every window. Knowing she had not opened anything, Genevieve assumed those soldiers without wasting time searching for them. A truck gave her at least something of a platform, and she vaulted up into the bed.
“IT IS A TRAP,” she screamed at the Idyllians, using every trick of muscle, diaphragm, and voice her system could give her to project to boom off the surrounding walls. “I opened nothing. They’re letting you in to slaughter you! Leave!”
She tried to find movement, a sign of comprehension in any face turned up to her. At least she had something approximating silence overlying a muttering foundation. At the back, she picked out Carex, lounging out of a line of sight to any of the windows.
“You stopped their Installs for us! Why are you taking their side?” A male voice, Genevieve couldn’t pick him out.
“I am on no fucking side!” Sheer projection bought her their attention again, but she sensed she wouldn’t have it for long. Genevieve jumped to the top of the truck’s cab. “Because both are looking only for people to use. Tools to wield until they break. The Pax Romana send their citizens to court death from failed nanite installation so they can better court death on the battlefield.”
Genevieve couldn’t pick out Marta, but she stabbed a finger to the crowd. “And the Resistance, you send people out on suicide missions, herd them into suicide situations like this one en masse, as if that will win you this struggle. The Pax Romana have far more bodies to waste, I assure you. I did not stop their Installs for Idyllian resistance, I made the coward’s choice to defend myself at the cost of strangers’ lives.
“Neither side holds my loyalty, because neither has proved themselves worthy of it!”
The crowd rippled forward again, pushed by one of the firebrands at the back, and disgorged a Molotov cocktail to shatter beside Genevieve’s feet. She stamped it out immediately, but the message could not have been clearer to her or the crowd.
Collaborator. Enemy.
Fool that she was, she’d forgotten utterly about others who would consider her an enemy. The crack of a gun reached her, damped only belatedly by her system. One of her legs collapsed under her, a searing line of pain through the meat of her thigh. She rolled with the fall, taking herself down into the truck’s bed with a clanging thump that flashed pain across her leading hip, though that was healed easily enough by her system.
Screaming, the chaotic noise of a stampede out of the kill zone, and more shots. Genevieve only wanted to curl up, arms over her head, but that wouldn’t help anyone, so she forced herself to sit up, look over the edge of the bed, shivering with the fear and perhaps some shock though her system had already stopped the bleeding. Entry and exit wound, no need to dig out a bullet.
A shot pinged off the body of the truck, missing by a mile, and another followed hard on the heels of the sound. But the gurgling cry of it hitting someone came from a window.
Another pair of shots and Genevieve’s system popped up icons of the shooters. Several, scattered around the buildings, shooting down. One, in a particular window, shooting across.
The unalts must not quite have figured out what was going on, because troops poured out into the parking area, searching for the shooter among the rapidly fleeing crowd and not finding them. Genevieve couldn’t really blame them for being slow on the uptake, she didn’t get it herself until Pyrus climbed out on the windowsill and jumped three floors down.
His wings, wide-spread, slowed him to land neatly on his feet, gun up and aimed scarcely a second later. Eyes dark and hard behind the carbon shield that Installs grew for protection while shooting, he was every inch the avenging warrior. He was wearing body armor he must have gotten from this very base, but the way they stared at him, you’d have thought he’d grown that too, like chitin from his own skin.
Genevieve was staring herself, she supposed. She’d never seen the soldier in him before now, not really, the emotionless lethality in every muscle. She saw no hint of his kindness, no hint of a place it could have hidden.
“Who gave the order to start shooting at civilians? Where’s the commander?” he asked, with a softness that projected even better than Genevieve’s shouts had. One man was revealed by dint of everyone else around him stepping away, if he’d had any thought of trying to hide. “You’re pulling out,” Pyrus said.
“You’re insane,” the man snapped. Pyrus’s shot caught him right between the eyes and he crumpled into that clear space.
“Who’s in command now?” Pyrus asked, so calmly.
This time, a young woman did step forward in truth, righteous in her anger. “What the hell are you doing? We can’t just leave. We’ll lose the planet! Why are you working for them?”
She jerked, self-preservation operative but not sufficient, and the first shot took her in the shoulder. She staggered, and Pyrus simply stepped into her, kicked out a knee, and aimed down into her head.
Genevieve remembered that pose, that negligent angle of aim, as he pulled the trigger. The shaking took her, blanked her out for a few seconds and by then there was another unalt before Pyrus, babbling, her hands up. “Pull out, yes. As soon as we can load the ships. We’ve been cut off from communications for weeks anyway, it’s only sense…” She trailed off into ragged panting as Pyrus turned away.
Three strides and he was at the truck, unlatching the tailgate. Genevieve only stared at him stupidly from her position crammed at the back of the bed. She didn’t know this Pyrus, didn’t know what he might want from her.
“Hurry,” he said, and then strode away. She could walk with her leg still healing, but not fast, so when Carex met her outside the gates and pulled her against him, she accepted the support gratefully.
Support wasn’t entirely what he had in mind, however.
He held her rigidly away from his body, and Genevieve wished he would have just punched her in the stomach and had done with it. It might have hurt less.
Pyrus snapped straighter, though that hardly seemed possible.
Pyrus bristled.
In the silence, as Pyrus got her moving again, something shifted between them. It was too fragile for Genevieve to even name it, dare to call it “forgiveness,” but she did admit that what was blocking her throat was hope. she told Carex.
***
Permission to move out to her parents’ old farm, mothballed since Michael moved to Delta, was the work of a moment, such was his enthusiasm for the idea. Their parents’ junker of a farm pickup took hardly longer to pack with their few duffels, but now Michael was repeating his rambling directions about the farm’s aging solar power system, working himself up to actually saying goodbye. Genevieve leaned her hip against the dusty, dented once-white driver’s side door and admitted to herself she wasn’t sure how to say goodbye either, for all that she was only going to be a six-hour drive away.
“You’ll want to check the well—we replaced the pump not so long ago, and there will be plenty of power for it, but I think we left it turned off.” Michael gestured a position on an invisible breaker panel, and Genevieve recorded the image in her system, should she need it later.