by R. Z. Held
“And installing a better one wouldn’t have attracted exactly the wrong kind of attention?” Cyperus countered smoothly. He centered himself, both hands resting on the head of his cane as if it was a stage prop, not a necessary aid.
“Who the fuck is he?” Gentiana demanded with apparently equal anger directed at the stranger and now Cyperus.
“Henri is the local agent from our side. The only one on the planet, in fact, which rather makes me wonder if no one else could stand working with him either.” Cyperus’s voice stayed even, but the resentment Sienna heard rumbling in his chest put Valerie’s toward Ines to shame.
Henri touched fingertips to his lips and flicked them away, a minimalist mocking blown kiss. “You stir up shit in my territory, you follow my rules. Which, at the moment, means informing me when playacting civilians show up on-planet.” He stood and prowled over to Sienna. She knew an inspection when she was subjected to one, and she sneered right back and presented her wrist so he could see her LSF citizen icon.
“So this is the artist girlfriend.” He rolled the final word, giving it a cast that skipped past free-energy and probably ended somewhere around vapid waste of space. He shot Cyperus a look over his shoulder, mockingly incredulous. “And when she showed up, you just couldn’t stop yourself from running to her to dry her tears.”
Cyperus went dangerously still, while Sienna froze simply to keep herself from folding up completely. That was exactly what Cyperus had done, and how had Henri guessed that? Was it written on her face that she was a pathetic civilian who fell apart at the first obstacle? “Seraphine was the one who offered me a solution to the problem of—” Cyperus began.
“That reflects more on you than it does on her, you realize that, right?” Inspection finished, Henri rocked his weight smoothly back and paced over to Cyperus.
And, oh, Sienna saw that connect. Not like a sword that wounded, but a lever that, when jammed beneath Cyperus’s pride, moved him wherever this agent wanted him to go. “Come on,” Henri said, and snapped his head toward the hall and the front door.
Even given her earlier thought, Sienna hadn’t expected Henri’s goals to be so literal. Neither had Cyperus, apparently. He made no move to follow, which gave her at least a little hope. “What?” Cyperus demanded.
Henri sighed and turned back in the doorway. “Break off all contact with your girlfriend or I’ll break off all support of your unofficial little mission. Simple enough for everyone here to understand?”
“And what support is that?” Gentiana snapped, surprising Sienna a little. She hadn’t expected any defense from that quarter—or maybe it wasn’t defense of her, it was simply defense of her ability to make the dummy cube to save Pen’s daughter.
“He gave me the personal reference that got me the job in R&D,” Cyperus said, reluctantly. He still wasn’t following, but Sienna could see him shifting his weight. Talking himself out of it? Or into it? Damned if Sienna was going to cling to his elbow beseechingly or any mercy-abandoned thing Henri might be expecting of her, though. She crossed her arms tightly. She wouldn’t even touch him.
Gentiana lifted her shocker, glanced at it as if she was still weighing the merits of using it, then finally powered it off. “And what’s your motives here, Henri? And those of the empire? We fail and get ourselves caught, what do you lose? An Idyllian, an AWOL soldier, and an agent forcibly retired because he was infected by an LSF weapon and no one would believe he could be cured?”
Henri snapped off a sneer especially for her alone. “No names, no matter what equipment you think you have set up.” Sienna reviewed the conversation hurriedly—hadn’t Cyperus said—but of course he hadn’t. “Our side,” he’d said. At least Gentiana was with her in not knowing that bit of agent protocol.
Henri pushed his way into Gentiana’s personal space, though he only had maybe five centimeters on her and her soldier’s confidence meant she knew how to stand to take advantage of all of her height. “I know who you are. You want a particular piece of tech, and if you fuck up the retrieval, no one is going to be able to get anywhere near it. My bosses don’t have any particular wish for the LSF to have control of that piece of tech, even in deactivated form. So. You can have your chance, if I think your failure won’t fuck things up too badly. Got it?”
“You all should have thought of that before you let it get…lost, in the first place. Or maybe back when you made it without consent,” Gentiana muttered, not that any of them believed it wasn’t intended to be overheard.
“Come on,” Henri said once more, and strode out.
And Cyperus followed. And Sienna didn’t try to stop him.
Sienna supposed it was a good thing she couldn’t reply, because she had no idea what that reply might have been. He hadn’t even stopped to gather his things—not that he had any things here—
Except his coat. Shit! It wasn’t cold enough to need one, to any of them, but she imagined neither he nor Henri would want him to stand out among the locals that way. She darted back to the room they’d slept in and rescued it from where it had fallen on the floor off the back of a chair. Then she hovered in the entryway, waiting for him to return. He’d turn back when he got outside, she assumed. And what would she say to him then?
But there was no knock. The silence dragged out and grew sour until Gentiana sighed and came to wrest the coat away from her. “I’ll take it to him. That fucker said no contact with you, not me.”
The coat leaving Sienna’s hands seemed to jar something loose in her mind as well, and her thoughts started moving again. “No, wait, and then drop it off with Valerie if you can. It’s going to be obvious he spent the night, and if we don’t give her some kind of story, she’ll keep throwing him at me. You can drop a word in her ear that we—um—” Her creativity ran out, strangled by tears.
Sienna managed a watery laugh, and trailed Gentiana back to the living area in a rather weak-willed fashion of her own. Everything she’d feared about her long-term relationship with Cyperus been distilled down into a single choice, between her, and his pride. And he’d chosen his pride.
No, she told herself sternly. He’d made the choice he had to, to save Pen’s daughter. It wasn’t about her at all; she was selfish to frame it that way. To keep framing it that way, over and over. But each time, her ability to see it in any other manner was being carved away.
To hell with him, then. While she waited for those photographs she was going to paint a fucking masterpiece of a mural.
Part III
As it turned out, it wasn’t the photographs they had to wait for, it was a chance to hand over the completed dummy. Gentiana and Pen wrangled at length about the delay, finally coming to the conclusion that because Cyperus didn’t dare be caught with the dummy, he had to not only seize or create a moment to accomplish the swap, but predict with some accuracy when that moment might occur ahead of time. Pen was of the opinion that they should trust him and give him as much time as they could, and with Isachne’s experience behind her, she carried the day.
So Sienna painted. She’d worried there wouldn’t be enough for Gentiana to do, but once she’d created the general sweep of han
d-designed figures on photographs, someone needed to arrange for the huge design to be printed on sections of decal for the wall. And then help her do the initial hanging of each section, as the workers couldn’t be trusted to line them up precisely enough. By the time, weeks later, Sienna reached the point of the last hand-painted layers, they had a certain rhythm, Gentiana readying her colors or making a recalcitrant grav-pad in the scaffolding work properly.
So Sienna painted until she couldn’t see straight and then collapsed into bed. And Gentiana collapsed into a bed somewhere else most nights. On Pen, Sienna assumed, which was rich, given all the fuss about Sienna’s own suspicious behavior at the beginning. What artist’s assistant snuck in and out of a parked ship every night? But Securidad didn’t show up to knock on their door, and Sienna was not going to lecture an adult about getting over grief in the midst of the stress of an undercover mission.
And now the mural was nearly complete, even the quiet secret she’d worked into the final layer. Gentiana had left for the apartment with the first load of her paint and brushes, so Sienna was more or less alone in the easing light—winters were warm and the evening light was generous in Nouvo Paris—to consider her work. She cast a quick glance back of her shoulder to check for Ines, then crossed the street to give herself the full sweep of the view. Ines never missed an opportunity to shoot Sienna a drive-by glare when arriving or leaving, and Sienna made it a policy to be up on the scaffolding and out of reach when she did.
Maybe it was absurd, to have pride in a grand monument to a people she hated, to a government who’d tortured her, but something in her couldn’t help but be proud of the scope of her work. At the peak of the wall, a beneficent figure held her hands open to hundreds of comparatively tiny figures below. She wore the stylized jagged gold tiara that marked her as the personified virtue of Liberty herself—Libertad Sans Frontiers—but her hair was the same color and length as that of the current Secretaire Detat, in the finest tradition of artists with patrons throughout human history, Sienna figured. Behind Liberty was a composite landscape of photo and paint capturing the natural beauty of the planet and others under LSF control.
And below, among the tiny figures—at human scale to anyone standing on the street—was Cyperus’s face, as well as Valerie’s. She hoped the latter would enjoy finding herself, if the mural wasn’t stripped down the moment they ran. Though maybe she wouldn’t recognize herself anyway—the style of the figures only gave them a few bold lines to sketch in eyes and nose, and each had their hands pressed together, raised in praise or supplication, hiding their mouths.
“I think I see a familiar face,” Henri murmured from beside her shoulder, startling Sienna into a skitter down the sidewalk a few steps. He pointed, checked for traffic, and crossed to touch Cyperus’s face unerringly. Damn him.
Sienna trailed after. “I used all kinds of people as models.” She hadn’t been within fifty meters of Cyperus since he’d walked out of the apartment and Henri knew it. She wasn’t going to let him smarm her into feeling guilty for nonexistent crimes.
“I don’t blame you, you know.” That conversational non sequitur that still somehow aligned directly with Sienna’s thoughts startled her so much she allowed it when Henri reached out to touch the back of her hand, closing a reasonably safe private connection between their data paths.
Sienna’s thoughts connected like an electric shock to a fingertip on a cold day. She’d been too upset to think about it at the time, but why did the Pax Romana suddenly want a non-sentient AI they’d tossed aside into some warehouse, anyway? LSF hadn’t been having any more luck last-jumping it than the Pax Romana scientists had.
But if this wasn’t about the AI, it was about the highly trained agent, then things started to make a little bit of sense. Not completely, but—
Sienna would bet it was only because he’d so thoroughly dismissed her, that his shock was unexpected enough that it showed in a flicker of his expression.
“I will think about it,” Sienna promised. Think about how best to show Cyperus how his government was trying to manipulate him, after they’d cast him aside. Henri took himself off, lifting a hand in a show of friendly farewell before he turned a corner down the next street.
Cyperus should be getting off work soon, in fact. She fidgeted in front of the mural, pacing a few steps before leaning in to pretend to inspect one element or another. When she spotted Cyperus making his slow way down the street away from the R&D building, it was all she could do not to sprint to him. Instead, she charted an intercept course and strolled up in time to watch his lips tighten with frustration. He couldn’t avoid her if she really pushed this and they both knew it. “Seraphine,” he said, repressively.
She fell into step beside him and casually reached down to touch her fingertip data path points to the back of his hand, as Henri had to her.
Cyperus’s steps stuttered.
Cyperus tried to reply again, but she didn’t give him the chance this time.
***
“You were right,” Cyperus told the apartment in general when Gentiana opened the door to him. When Sienna peeked around the doorframe of the living room, heart pounding with the pressure of hope in her chest, he lifted a carrier bag of takeout. “Want to eat, and then I’ll tell you why?”
“Okay.” Sienna dodged Gentiana’s suspicious look on her way to take the bag from him, and the banality of sorting out the boxed dinners and utensils calmed her heartbeat in gradual stages. She could make a guess at which box was hers and which was his by the contents, so she de-lidded those and slid Gentiana’s over to the opposite side of the table. Cyperus settled himself to a seat with his hip pressed as much against hers as the individual chairs allowed as she stacked her box’s fruit pastry neatly on top of his, then started moving his
pickled vegetables over to hers.
Cyperus nibbled a corner of a pierogi-like savory pie and made a face. “Too much ginger.” He held it out and Sienna accepted it eagerly. He could sort out the rest of the box apportionment.
Gentiana paused after removing her own box’s lid to eye them both. “You don’t have to just grab a premade box from the shelf, you know. You can pick each element individually.”
“I know?” Apportionment complete, Cyperus dug into his own box.
“That’s why the desserts are both things he likes,” Sienna teased, tapping a gentle elbow into his side.
It was a way of saying they loved each other. Sienna had never put in quite those terms in her mind before, but now the thought drew tears up to the corners of her eyes. A couple fell as Cyperus paused eating to clasp her hand, lifted it to kiss the palm. “Universal mercy, I’ve missed you, and Henri can go fuck himself, and—dammit, I had it laid out on the walk here, and it’s all tangled again.” His own laugh was a bit watery.
He took a deep breath, then tried again. “You know I’ve never had anyone—serious, before, and I was utterly unprepared for how much it hurts to be without you. I suppose that’s why Henri tried a different tack with me privately: how I was being selfish, encouraging you to maintain a connection with me that put you in danger. I suppose the hard sell to get me back into the game would have started once he’d chased you off.”
He caught up both her hands now. “And you were right that I was paying attention to what was going on in Pax Romana intelligence. I suppose I thought I might be missing that life purely because it wasn’t really a choice I’d made, to leave it. Circumstances intervened. But here I am, and I do have the choice, and now I know what I’m choosing. I’m too old for this bullshit anymore. It’s exhausting, and lonely, and there are plenty of places to get excitement in daily life on Idyll, with you.”