Idyllian (Amsterdam Institute)

by R. Z. Held

  Sienna appreciated that Cyperus made the offer to her, rather than talking to Galax over her head, but she wasn’t—wasn’t sure she could trust him enough to—but what choice did she have? She flexed her uninjured hand in an attempt to break out of the feeling of being frozen. Whatever she chose, she’d still be putting herself in danger to accomplish something she didn’t even want to do in the first place.

  “No one can override my privacy codes if I engage them on my quarters,” Cyperus said. “Not even the commander.”

  Sienna drew breath to spit a curse at him, for patronizing her, but there was nothing of that in his voice, or his face. She could imagine the distinction he was making—he didn’t believe Elantine had tried to kill her, but be believed that her belief drove her. And exasperating as that was, didn’t it accomplish her safety just the same? She let the breath trickle back out as a sigh instead. “What would the supplement do to you if you took extra?”

  “Turn up to be rescued from the waste system, same as any you don’t use. As I understand it, the quantity isn’t exact.” Cyperus’s attention went to Galax then, clearly speaking over a private channel. Sienna couldn’t tell if they were continuing the argument about what to do about her, or if Galax had surrendered and was conveying a tutorial on overseeing the laying of data paths. She would have expected Galax to be the easier of the two to read, but his expression suggested he was sunk in the minutiae of quantities and timing.

  “Meet you there,” she said, and escaped before the second guessing could begin.

  Part III

  When Sienna arrived at Cyperus’s quarters, directed by Pen, he met her at the door wearing his assist once more. She’d waited as long as she could stand, as if that would really address the risk of a trap, and Cyperus’s expression had resettled, keeping its depths to itself, showing neither the flatness of acute pain nor the shine of pain recently removed. He’d changed into a shirt worn thin, and undoubtedly deliciously soft, with use. A knife of envy stabbed unexpectedly into Sienna’s gut, at the idea of owning not just a change of clothing, but items suited to formality or comfort, at need.

  The room was similarly lived in at first glance, hangings covering nearly all the walls, photographs of grand, natural vistas printed on fabric. Mountains, yes, but only ones softened by wildflower meadows. On second glance, she realized how small each one would fold and pack, instant personalization whether he actually lived in a space or was forced to stay there as surgeries failed. Besides the hangings, the only visible touch to the room to make it different than the bare ones was a trunk on end beside the bed, storage converted to shelves that held a sidearm and a reader as well as small charms gathered around a candle, each person’s call to universal mercy hardly universal.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he said. He lofted one arm in invitation to the bed, which was covered with an extra sheet, spotlessly clean. Sienna couldn’t tell if it was intended to protect her from the environment or the environment from her. She couldn’t imagine laying paths through skin was bloodless.

  “I wasn’t sure I would, either.” She needed to take conscious control of her muscles to manipulate them into each step to the bed, into bending to remove her boots and shucking her jacket, and into climbing up to sit in a tight ball, deeply aware of how he stood between her and the only exit.

  His own steps to join her, once he’d locked the door with his codes, were no less calculated and consciously balanced. Rather than burden him with her attention, she nodded to the bottle he brought with him. It had the same shimmer as the data paths, but a purple tone, not a red one. She’d have called it inorganic, but in this light it reminded her most of coal, the purest of carbon. “That looks disgusting.”

  “As I recall, the taste is—” Cyperus hesitated over his description, exhaled on a laugh as he found the word he wanted. “Inert. The texture is what’s disturbing. Don’t roll it on your tongue like a fine wine.” Seated, he tipped the bottle back and swallowed in one motion, then handed off it while he bent his attention to his assist.

  Indeed, the texture was viscous, worrisome not in the way it coated her mouth, but rather in the way it resisted doing so, liquid maintaining its integrity as it slid down her throat. She chugged it to the end, settled the empty bottle loosely into her lap, and waited for something to begin.

  She felt it first in how her heartrate, fear-driven, rose and rose, as her system ceased to damp it for her. The pain at first was no worse than a severe crick in her neck, muscles tightened down to taut wires. The sedative—yes, there was some aspect of that, she was sure, she wasn’t quite as worried now as she had been when the implant first backed away. It still hurt, but she wasn’t as anxious about that hurt. She’d breathe through it, it would end.

  It didn’t end. The world seemed hazy, as if her harsh panting was steam clouding around her, a barrier between perception and thought, and thought and action. Through the haze, Cyperus lifted his bad leg to the bed, then hissed a curse. “You couldn’t wait half a minute?” He confiscated the empty bottle and eased her to her back, touch gentle but urgent. “You were so quiet, I didn’t even notice.”

  Burning. Acid, laid in a line along her shoulders, such that she should have smelled the sizzle. He took her hand and Sienna let him. She wasn’t dying, though. It was nowhere the torture Isachne had gone through—that asshole, still showing Sienna up. She tried to cling to that anger but that burned away too.

  “Come on.” Cyperus’s voice thinned. “Crush my hand. Cuss out the fucking dick of a Pax Romana. Whatever you need to do.” A pause, for realization, perhaps— “No one can hear you.” There was pain of his own in the words, sympathy for whatever he’d constructed in his mind about the camp, perhaps.

  And it worked once more. Sienna couldn’t let the misapprehension stand. “Not…punishment.” He’d have to interpolate a few words, but she figured that was within his capabilities. “Too…crowded. Everyone’s…pain, nightmares…if we had to hear all of them…too much to bear…”

  “I can bear it.” His grip tightened down, as if to teach her how. Absurd. She growled her frustration with him, and the burning and such anger: the foxes, the Pax Romana, agents of either or both. She was sobbing with it and then screaming it to the universe that wasn’t listening at the moment either as she dug her fingers in, not to crush but to be points of pain he didn’t deserve but if he demanded them she’d give them to him.

  Some small century later, he pried his hand free, but only to settle a clasp on her arm just above the elbow. “Just the hands left to do now. Almost there.”

  “Liar,” Sienna told him, between the low whine she’d settled into, to show him and the universe she wouldn’t be silent, but not taking the breath she otherwise needed. “Are patient.”

  “I save it up for the deserving.” Cyperus’s smile was hidden deep in the corners of his eyes.

  Exhaustion was fighting with the pain now, carrying her to the edge of sleep, hovering there, waiting. If the pain would just ease, she could drop away—

  ***

  Sienna woke ready. Ready to—to run, to dance, to laugh, to something, energy brimming up and spilling over, far more than the absence of fatigue. She sat up, spread her hands wide, examining backs and then palms. Her rave lines were somewhat stylish, if one chose to think of them that way. She stretched her fingertips up and up to the ceiling, and did laugh then. Universal mercy, she felt amazing.

  Cyperus stirred beside her, though at the farthest distance the size of the bed allowed him. She thought perhaps he’d dozed, not slept, as he was quite contained, not sprawling into her space. She appreciated the consideration, and didn’t blame him for declining to use either the assist or crutch to laboriously shift his position to somewhere else in the room once she no longer needed him sitting with her.

  Seeing him in repose—though he could not precisely be called relaxed—brought an appreciation of his whole body quite viscerally to the forefront of her attention. Sitting and standing both,
pain must have drawn his muscles tight, as now he seemed taller, living to the edge of his skin. She wished she could touch that skin, feel the shiver of the intensity of his personality beneath it. Wished he’d touch her, maybe trace the new rave lines, help settle them into her skin and self-conception.

  He propped himself up on one elbow. “We call it the mandated-leave high.” Amusement snuck into the corner of his mouth.

  “What?” Sienna tore her gaze away from him, smoothed the sheet she was sitting on. A few brown smears, here and there, undoubtedly a few more on the inside of her shirt. They could join the general yellow tinge the cleaner couldn’t quite banish. But she didn’t care, she felt so good.

  “You’re flushed. I suspect it’s what all of us agents get when they cut off most of our external access for mandated leave. You don’t realize how much energy was going to your implant running background processes—monitoring surveillance, for example—until they give you no choice but to relax for a while, and it all comes flooding back. And you end up…flushed.” His smile turned wicked.

  “I’ll make sure to enjoy it while it lasts,” Sienna said, and pushed herself off the bed before she could get any very bad ideas. She should leave now, in fact, back to safety, but she didn’t want to. Perhaps that was the worst idea of all, but she felt capable of dealing with whatever trouble arrived, for once. “I’m going to borrow your shower.”

  Sienna wanted to linger forever in the hedonistic pleasure she found in the simple rhythm of water against her skin, but she was so viscerally aware of Cyperus’s presence, she didn’t last long. As she dried off and wrapped the towel around herself, a glimpse of herself in the mirror finally redirected her attention. She’d expected the rave lines to make her look sharper, like Gentiana, or harder, like Cyperus, but instead it was like seeing an edgier, more fashionable version of herself. Even her light brown roots and uneven cut seemed almost purposeful. Ready for a club, maybe.

  The cleaner was back in the main room, so Sienna gathered up her clothes and padded out of the bathroom. “I suppose I look like a real Pax Romana agent now,” she told Cyperus, putting the clothes in the cleaner.

  He’d gotten as far as sitting upright, legs over the edge of the bed, but no farther. “Nothing like Isachne, certainly.”

  “Oh, I already knew that.” Sienna anchored her hands over the tuck holding up her towel, lifted her chin. “I assume about the only thing we share is our height. All the candidates they pulled were the same height.” In memory, she merged those faces, trying to find some average among them, as if that would yield Isachne. She could have looked up a picture long since, she supposed, but that would have been unnecessarily cruel. And what if she did share some quirk of her features with Isachne? She didn’t want to know that.

  “Candidates?”

  Sienna’s breath hitched as she expanded that memory, out to the confines of the mess hall, packed and dingy, no way to clean off the grime of thousands of boots, thousands of hands. “It was over dinner. They came through, pulling women from here and there, then lined us up in the hall. All the same height, you could see that looking up and down the line. I was—worried, I guess, but not overly so. I figured they’d gotten their hands on a vague physical description of whatever undercover agent they were chasing. If they’d found out I was Idyllian, they would have come right to me. They came down the line, staring—maybe features, maybe build—about five or six of us got pulled out, taken down the hall…”

  Sienna freed a hand, clenched it into a ball beside her hip, a physical sign of the way she was choking off the memory. “But I’m losing my high.” She let her eyes caress his chest, the way the soft fabric of his shirt got to touch his skin, even if she didn’t. “Does it usually include a surge in libido?” She hadn’t touched herself since they’d put the implant in her head, she realized, but it hadn’t really been libido driving her to do so before then, either. In the camp, it had been something of a necessity, to help with sleep, or calm, or simply as something to fill the hours.

  Cyperus’s brows rose, and his laugh, when it burst free, was even more startled. “Depends on the baseline, I suspect.”

  Sienna paced a step closer, not sure if caution or a wish to deepen anticipation kept her steps slow. “As I recall, you invited me to have motives, no need to make them ulterior. How about showing me what the rave lines look like across the back now, then?”

  The wicked smile was back, and Cyperus smoothly pulled off his shirt by way of answer. He was muscled, but muscles were cheap these days; what really grabbed and hooked her in by way of her diaphragm, making breathing harder for a second, was the grace in how he moved those muscles, showing he’d earned them, not had them built by nanites.

  He turned, tipped his head down, though his dark hair wasn’t long enough to obscure even the nape of his neck. The rave lines curved along his shoulders, then shadowed the ridgelines of neck muscles as they did tendons on the back of the hand, to end joined at the depression at the nape. “I got the extra path to run the assist,” he explained, picking it up even with his armpit to trace it down to the start of his hip, where it had a small circle to connect.

  “It’s so…functional,” Sienna said, and the surge of creativity that washed up into her chest was just as strong or stronger than her arousal. “Do you have a tablet I can borrow? I want to sketch something before I lose the idea. Sketch you, if that’s all right.”

  Cyperus twisted back to gift her with a bemused look, but he murmured his permission and gestured to his trunk-nightstand. She found the stylus she needed there as well, and knelt up on the bed with him. She pushed him prone and opened a channel to Pen. After receiving agreement, no less bemused, she dived into the tablet’s default drafting program.

  She’d been painting long enough to know that pure, blazing inspiration was ephemeral, perhaps to be courted but never to be waited for. But she also knew that when it arrived, it should be seized. Perhaps a year of it had built up, waiting impatiently for her to open the floodgates. She photographed Cyperus’s back and layered color in stylus and fingertip brushstrokes over it, then filmed the smear of her thumb across one of his shoulder blades and then the other, got Pen to help her teach the program to lay color across the photograph where she touched in life. Back and forth, electronic layers and texture, laid using the sensation of how muscle fibers moved beneath her fingers, how the light changed as she shifted her gaze.

  She sat back when she reached the point when raw inspiration would give way to polishing. This piece needed that raw, wild energy, she decided. She told the software to stop accepting input after she added the final smear of her signature in the corner and used the stylus to scratch away white in the shape of her name, in the center of the particular orange shade.

  “I didn’t know you were an artist,” Cyperus said, when she’d let the tablet fall to her knees. He been watching her the whole time, head turned with his cheek on his crossed arms, but only now did she notice the weight of his regard.

  Sienna dropped her head. “Not as a career. Yet. The spot in the university program, it was very competitive, if I’d been able to finish…” She shook her head, scrubbed at her flushed cheek with the heel of a hand. “I’m sorry. That was a real bait and switch. Offering you sex, then—”

  “Sex is cheap.” Cyperus went up on his elbows, voice firm. “Happiness is priceless. They’re not correlated as often as people wish they would be.” Sienna was reminded of Isachne’s conversation with him, relayed through Pen—no wonder he tended toward solitude, if he was one to seek a deep connection instead of merely physical exercise. “I never knew before now, what you looked like, happy.”

  “Well, I hadn’t seen what you looked like relaxed, so we’re even.” Sienna delivered the reply with what smoothness she could muster, while inside she curled around the words like the first full belly she’d had since arriving here.

  “May I see?”

  Sienna looked
down at the tablet, trying to see with disassociated eyes. Yes. She was satisfied enough to allow it out of her control. She handed it over as Cyperus sat up. He set it down on the sheet to take it all in at once. She’d taken his existing rave lines to their reddest shade, given them twists and curlings and at the center of his back, between his shoulder blades, three-dimensionality. There, two cords met and gathered themselves into a knot of a general good-luck pattern before settling back down as if drawn on the skin once more, twining down to become one in a point at the small of his back.

  Cyperus was silent for a long time. Long enough Sienna reached out to take the tablet back, disrupt the moment before he felt the need to soothe her with false politeness. “No,” he murmured, drawing the tablet closer. “That’s amazing.”

  That note in his voice, that was another thing to curl around, keep close so it could warm her. “You can have a copy, if you want. Penstemon, transfer one to his storage?” Sienna circled her fingers over the image. “There were half a dozen others, in my cohort alone, doing various versions of the same idea, combining digital and conventional methods of painting. But it’s nice to know I am actually kind of okay at arting.” Lingua vocabulary in Idyllian structure, that was, very basic compared to some of the cross-language jokes people passed around at home, where practically everyone in the cities was bilingual.

  “I think,” Cyperus said, amusement sparking through his tone, “you’ll find the correct grammar is ‘making arts’.” And that, delightfully, was the opposite—Idyllian vocabulary, Lingua structure. Penstemon made one of her Near-AI “task finished” chimes, and he set the tablet aside.

  Nothing left to come between them when Sienna leaned in to kiss him. She pushed, he settled back and drew her with him, until she could straddle his hips as he reclined against the pillows. She spared a hand to keep the towel at least loosely clasped over her chest, because she wanted to sink into each step, each touch, like savoring a burst of vinegar flavor after being sunk in blandness. He kissed so thoroughly, so deeply and responsively, matching her pressure for pressure. She was the first to nip at his lower lip, and that was when he brought up a hand, stroked fingertips along her rave line from neck onto shoulder.