by R. Z. Held
Sienna watched Gentiana’s knuckles tighten on the back of the copilot’s chair she was standing behind, then tighten further. Having had the undiluted cadence of Isachne’s memories in her own head briefly, she recognized it now.
And, when that cadence disappeared, she noticed that sharply too. “So we’ll fly in quietly, signal him, find a quiet spot to set down, and pick him up. No travel documents necessary,” Pen said breezily.
“Just that easy?” Sienna aimed a tight look at the general direction of the ceiling. “What do your memories of intelligence training say about that?”
“We’ll figure it out once we’re there to see the situation, won’t we?” Gentiana said staunchly. “We have to. Do the Idyllians know anything about Joy de Vive that they’ll share with you, Pen?”
Sienna yielded the pilot’s chair so the others could discuss, sinking into the silence of channels for efficiency. She thought about pacing the hallway again, but her tension was drawing her to stillness this time. She leaned a shoulder against the doorway, clasped her opposite elbows, and thought with everything she had. Who could travel without restrictions in LSF space? Could Gentiana pretend to be one of those people? A government official, maybe? But the amount of work needed to make that kind of cover stand up seemed insurmountable to her, the civilian artist—
Oh, universal mercy.
“I have to come,” she said, not loud, but Pen heard her.
“I appreciate that you’re worried about Cyperus, Sienna. But you have no training.”
“No more than Gentiana does. More, because my implant was used for that purpose for years before I got it. Sometimes it still tries to make me do a ridiculous acrobatic landing when I trip.” She was babbling, she knew it, but she couldn’t seem to stop. She clasped her elbows harder, digging in her fingertips. “Who do the LSF revere, Pen? Artists. The ones who create the propaganda murals they have on every wall. I don’t know if they’re allowed free travel, but if you’re suspicious of their papers, it’s so easy to check. Hand them a brush. Then you know they’re legitimate.”
Gentiana smiled at her, even as Sienna’s stomach shriveled into a tiny lump. “That’s perfect! I can be your assistant. We go in to paint a mural in the capital and then take Cyperus and Pen’s daughter with us when we leave.”
There wasn’t enough air in Sienna’s next breath, however deep it was, but she wasn’t going to let a panic attack take hold. She was here, now, with neutral sensations all around her. The polymer of the wall surface had more give than the structural material of the ship in the doorframe, when she shifted her fingers to dig into that instead of her own skin. With Gentiana sleeping here every night for months, the hall had the breath of sweat and body-scent that came from one person living in a small space at length. At home, her bedroom had lost that component of Cyperus by now.
“I have to,” she said, lifting her chin high. See, Pen? She’d had counseling, she had things under control. “Not just for your daughter, but for Cyperus too. If we don’t get him out, how long will ‘stuck’ last? How long will his cover hold up? If any of his Pax Romana friends would or could help him, I’m sure he would have asked them first. Or maybe he did ask already, and was told no.”
She pushed off from the doorway and planted her feet, trying to feel that balance emotionally as well. “I can do this.”
Part II
Nouvo Paris—this Nouvo Paris, or perhaps all of them were built from the same plans—felt oddly self-important to Sienna as she walked among the buildings in the balmy conditions that passed for local winter. Having secured enthusiastic permission from the Secretaire Detat for the planet to reconnoiter for a likely wall to host a mural by the great Seraphine Senlis herself, Sienna and Gentiana were working their way inward toward the grand plaza at the center of the city. Not that the architecture there needed decoration, but beyond were warehouses with great, blank expanses, set among buildings devoted to industry—and scientific research. As they approached the grand plaza, older buildings that were honest in their utilitarian plascrete gave way to those that were still plascrete, but patterned like brick or stone, with eerily two-dimensional “carved” ornamentation above windows and doors.
“There’s sight-lines to consider,” she remarked to Gentiana once they’d passed through the plaza, gesturing widely to the building beside them as the side street they were following reached the end of the spoke-like pattern of the new streets around the plaza and crashed into the regular grid of the old city. She couldn’t say she enjoyed speaking LSF French, but the good thing about the implant was that she could set it to ensure she kept to that language no matter what, so she could relax into the cover more than she’d expected. So far, standing by to burble excitedly to local officials and then step back for Gentiana to arrange the logistics, she’d found the spy thing surprisingly exciting, instead of terrifying.
Gentiana readjusted Sienna’s easel more comfortably on her shoulder—it was light but bulky—and nodded down the street to a three-story warehouse. “You’ll want something at least that tall.” Pen was monitoring senses from both of them, passively—Sienna had finally granted her permission on the journey here—but couldn’t speak to them, and they couldn’t open a channel without touching data path to data path, or it might be detected. So their conversation had to be as banal as their covers.
Having studied photographs of the city taken from orbit, they both knew the path to the R&D facility practically down to the cracks in the sidewalk at each turning, and they’d picked a warehouse close enough to “run into” Cyperus, but not too close to seem like they were casing the joint. But they couldn’t make a beeline for it, so, accordingly, they wandered well into the afternoon.
Given that she was the free-energy artist, Sienna made an executive decision to “fall in love with” the correct building the moment they glimpsed it rather than fuck around further. Gentiana set down her easel and they walked up and down the block, considering it from different angles as Sienna gestured her grand plans. She would have started sketching, but a woman forestalled her by striding out of the entrance to the R&D facility, officiousness wound tightly into her gait.
Her black hair, drawn back into a short tail at the nape of her neck, was straight—did it dare to be anything else?—and heavily peppered with gray and the lighter ancestrally sunny shade of her skin had been weathered by exposure in her own lifetime. She crossed her arms disapprovingly before she even arrived. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“Seraphine Senlis.” Even with the implant enforcing the use of the correct name, the syllables tasted strange in her mouth, order of personal and family name flipped. And that absurd family name, dating back no more than a couple generations to when the newly formed LSF had christened themselves out of the same archives they’d gotten their language from. Though perhaps that was slightly hypocritical—Pax Romana and Idyllian family names were of much longer time scale, but most researchers acknowledged anyone’s ancestors’ relationship with any such places on Old Earth had probably been pure guesswork, once upon a time.
To finish off the polite greeting, Sienna lifted her sleeve and showed her inner wrist, a particular flick of movement—which her implant could also provide as if she’d been doing it her whole life, thank mercy—bringing up an LSF icon of light above her counterfeit subdermal citizen chip. That was something she hadn’t anticipated, but with the implant to provide local anesthetic, she could remove it with even a high-quality paring knife, so she’d resigned herself and thrown herself into designing the tattoo surrounding it. She’d studied others used by those on Joy de Vive—the tattoo might be seen as personal expression, but of course people followed trends—and had chosen a frame of lush vines and flowers with a stylized, st
ained-glass feel. “I’m here to do a mural.”
Gentiana followed suit in showing her wrist. “Jeanne Reims.” Her tattoo, also designed by Sienna, was a fairly pedestrian setting of the word “love” in different, entwined fonts.
The woman withdrew a hand-held screen from a hip pocket and only belatedly showed her wrist in their general direction, barely revealing the icon, never mind the tattoo. “Director Ines Toulouse.” Sienna assumed as her eyes flicked across the screen, reading, that she was perusing the biography and catalog of work Pen and Sienna, respectively, had mocked together to insert into off-planet database query results.
Rather than allay her suspicions, whatever Ines read on the screen seemed only to deepen them. “A mural directly across from where vitally important research is occurring? Bullshit.” She returned her screen to her pocket and edged into Sienna’s personal space, threatening. “Why are you really here?”
And universal mercy, but Sienna froze. Gentiana couldn’t feed her anything over channels. And her implant couldn’t tell her what to say, or even what tone to use, it could only make sure it came out in French, perhaps give it a few turns of phrase from local slang. Sienna’s mind was swamped by a memory of the tone used by Elantine, the LSF undercover agent who’d tried to kill her repeatedly. Elantine was imprisoned, being tried by the Pax Romana even now, and this woman looked nothing like her, but that officiousness…
“Did you want to see her paint something?” Gentiana, thank mercy, was completely unaffected. She retrieved the easel and set it up invitingly before Sienna. “Charcoal?”
“Charcoal isn’t paint.” Ines recrossed her arms and turned up her glower.
“Oh, it’s a whole process.” Well, there was the babbling at least. Sienna lifted the top layer of the easel, trying to explain about the physical and electronic layers as Gentiana pulled her charcoals out of her shoulder bag. “I use charcoals for my portraits. I could do you?” No, of course Ines wouldn’t want to be drawn, that was a stupid question.
Another woman strode for them from the R&D building, looking a decade younger, though no less settled in her confidence and experience. In her late forties, perhaps. Her hair was a deeply undistinguished brown, though her skin was more the light shade that LSF preferred in their art to distinguish them from the Pax Romana, whatever their actual citizens looked like. She lifted her voice to reach them ahead of her steps, which were directed like she’d already known the group was there. Observed them through a window, perhaps? She was still settling the collar of her coat she arrived, as if she’d hurried the process of pulling it on. “Ines, you might want to clean the dead puppy scraps from between your teeth before you talk to passersby.” She gave Ines a sharp, empty smile as she arrived. “Or was it a kitten, today?”
“Valerie,” Ines said warningly.
The woman ignored her completely and turned to Sienna and Gentiana to show her wrist. “Valerie Bordeaux.” Her tattoo evoked a circuit diagram. “You’re an artist?”
Sienna started her explanation over again, finally finding her rhythm as Valerie reflected her enthusiasm back to her, redoubled with a grin. “I’ll need models for the mural,” Sienna said, as she wrapped up. “If you’re interested? I could take your picture and work from that, or combine it with other photographic elements, but I really prefer drawing people when they’re interacting with me. It would only take a few moments.” And it would be perfectly evident that she wasn’t a spy who’d picked up a charcoal stick for the first time a few weeks ago, as apparently Ines suspected.
Valerie fairly beamed. “Yes!” Showing the same impulse many people did, even those trapped with Sienna in the POW camp, when she’d had to beg charcoals from the guards and draw on the walls, Valerie released her hair from the tail at the nape of her neck. She spent a couple seconds attempting to make it fall just so along her shoulder, then gave up and struck a Brave Citizen Scientist sort of pose, chin high.
“They are setting up right across from—” Ines protested, expression darkening even further. Valerie must be some kind of specialist, not in Ines’s direct hierarchy, or else she would undoubtedly have ordered the other woman back inside by now.
“Ines.” Valerie waited a beat to see if her cutting off had taken, then continued. “That’s a warehouse. It’s butt-ugly. Is that really what you want to throw down with the Secretaire Detat over?”
“This doesn’t have to involve—”
Sienna fumbled to pull out her own pocket screen; Gentiana was faster, pulling up the message giving them their permission to choose their mural site; and Valerie beat both of them. “Citizens, what was the first thing you did when you arrived at Joy de Vive?”
Gentiana settled her hand with the screen back against her hip, since proof wasn’t needed. “We contacted the Secretaire Detat.” Her smile was completely innocent, but a spark of humor leaped between her and Valerie.
Sienna wanted to catch that spark, so she sketched quickly, capturing the lines around Valerie’s eyes first. Then she transferred the charcoal lines down, rolled up the physical layer, and used her finger pressure to smudge some of the electronic cloned lines. The style she planned for the mural would have dozens of figures, all regular curves and sharp angles forming bold, confident heroes of the citizenry.
Valerie’s attention shifted away from her, back to the R&D building. “Simon! You’re not rushing off to anywhere tonight, are you? We’re getting a mural, come meet the artist.”
Sienna turned—why wouldn’t she?—and there was Cyperus coming toward them, wearing a coat like he was a local and was cold. Walking with a cane. Universal mercy. Was he all right? She tracked the hesitance in his step, but it was no worse than it got sometimes when he’d pushed himself too hard one day and woken up stiff the next morning. Only it was evening now, and apparently he was getting off work. In the R&D facility itself. That was a hell of an “entry” to get access to Pen’s daughter.
He was clean-shaved now, the hair in his version of the gender-neutral tail at the nape of the neck barely long enough to hold. Even as Sienna watched one of the black waves escaped to hang up behind one ear. Her hair, which she’d had to bleach before going back to something approaching her unaltered color, was a bit short for the style as well, but the roughness from the bleaching made it stay better when fastened back.
And she was staring at him, someone she’d supposedly never met before, with her lips slightly parted and the silence was getting awkward. Gentiana was going to stab her the next time they got a moment alone. “I’m Seraphine,” she told him, fumbling at her sleeve. It took her two tries to raise it for the greeting. With the way her cheeks felt, she imagined she was flushed with her frustration at her lack of spycraft, too.
“Simon Montpellier.” His tattoo was a square of angled red lines, reminiscent of circuitry too, or perhaps instead evoking a knot in red cord, like she’d drawn on his back in the first painting she’d ever done for him.
“Draw him!” Valerie, far from joining Ines in her suspicions, beamed and switched places with Cyperus, leaving him no choice in the matter, apparently. That put her at an angle to see what Sienna had done so far, and her eyes went wide. “That’s amazing,” she said in a low, reverent tone. At least Sienna had done that much right, in playing her part.
Sienna sent the beginning of Valerie’s portrait to storage, then blanked the electronic surface. She’d use a stylus on that directly, to save pausing to clean off the physical layer. Maybe if she didn’t look at him, she wouldn’t freeze up again. Universal mercy, she wanted to throw herself into his arms and sob or laugh or threaten him until he assured her that his knee was all right. “I’ll be quick, you won’t have to stand there long.”
Of course, she had to look at him to draw him, though. She flicked her eyes only up to chest height. If she didn’t look at his face, she wouldn’t know if he was disgusted with her as well—though he was probably too well trained to show that. So maybe she was afraid of finding blankness instead. “Do you w
ant me to include the cane or remove it?” Cyperus would want it removed, but she shouldn’t assume anything about his cover identity, so she asked, as she would have with a stranger.
Cyperus’s hands tightened around the head of the cane, then he pasted on an “aw, shucks” kind of expression. “Artist’s choice.”
Ines made a noise of dramatic disgust. “When they suborn your assistant to steal your data, don’t come crying to me.” She swept off. Valerie didn’t grant her the satisfaction of watching her go, but Sienna, from her angle, could track a flickered expression of frustration. Championing the random artist was just one front on an ongoing battle between the women, perhaps.
Cyperus shifted his weight, off his good leg, then immediately back again as if the bad one couldn’t take even that. She supposed he’d probably been proudly refusing to sit for conversations all damn day. She tucked her stylus back in her pocket and sent the drawing to storage. “Don’t worry, I won’t make you stand there any longer.” They were supposed to be making contact, they’d done that, but the idea of wishing him well and walking off in the opposite direction was abruptly beyond her. “If you ever want me to draw you properly—my assistant and I are staying in the administrative visitor housing on—” She looked to Gentiana for the address and got a death glare in return. Shit. “I mean, you’re a great model for the mural, with your strong bone structure—” She gestured around her face and Valerie tittered. Across the languages, Sienna had no idea where the innuendo had even been. Shit!
“Admin housing isn’t hard to find,” Valerie said, eyes continuing to laugh. She stepped over to speak low into Cyperus’s ear as Gentiana folded up the easel with tight, economical movements. Then Valerie clapped him on the shoulder and gestured down the street. “In fact, why doesn’t Simon show you?”