Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  Petra tried not to whimper. At whatever sound did come out of her, the hand shifted, and a long, cool sensation wended down Petra’s throat and into her stomach, settling it.

  “Love?” Ilen asked.

  Petra groped for her hand. Her body felt disconnected at the joints; all the muscles felt like water. Her coordination was shot. Ilen found her hand for her and pushed a sense of stability into her bones.

  “Come on,” Ilen said, and got an arm around her shoulders. “Come on, Pet. Sit up. Ground.”

  Vertiginous motion. The whole world went tilt-a-whirl and Petra collapsed against Ilen, swinging her feet out of the infirmary cubbybed, pressing bare soles into the floor.

  “Ground,” Ilen said again, and Petra fumbled for the energy in her mind. Everything was out of whack. The walls were cacophonous. The storm outside was too much, too close.

  She took the energy in her body and the energy in the air and pushed it down into the channels beneath the floor of the habitat that would carry it to its repositories. She could feel them, distant and bright: new ones, as well, likely put into place by the Su Makers, who wouldn’t have been incapacitated as she was.

  All of her ached. The colony ached. The new channels stood out like lines of cold metal grafted into living flesh.

  Then she could feel Ilen’s fingers on her temples, Ilen’s presence trying to clear up the mess of her mind.

  “Pet,” Ilen said. “If you can think, you need to deal with Nash. They’re going to kill him.”

  Rage tingled at Petra’s fingertips. Ilen must have felt it, must have felt the balance of her body’s energies shift, because she moved her hands, palms against Petra’s cheeks, tilting her head so Petra’s choices were to look at her or close her eyes.

  “Petra,” Ilen said. “You almost killed him.”

  “Fuck,” Petra breathed, and it sure as hell felt like the sky was falling in on her. She cast an arm out, seeing Ilen’s shoulders, and Ilen got herself under it and pulled her up.

  “All right?” Ilen asked, and Petra made herself nod. Then they were off; Petra was stumbling, her weight on Ilen, back through the halls to the juris-dictor.

  There was a different Sudaeg there this time, her carapace paler, her stature taller—some older generation, then. Petra’s stomach roiled, and not all of it was vertigo.

  “Sulai Tabov,” the Su said, and gestured respect and consideration. “Your health benefits the colony. You experience adequate recovery?”

  “I request Suva Ilen’s continued attention,” Petra said. Beside her, Ilen made a perfunctory, granting gesture—as eager to dispense with the pleasantries as Petra was to not deal with any of this. “I also request aberrant Nash Carder’s status.”

  “He is to be excised,” the Su said. “Has there been a confusion?”

  Petra nearly laughed. From what she could tell, a collection tower had been blown up. Of course there had been a confusion. But that wasn’t what the Su worker meant. “He should not be excised.”

  “You yourself partially excised him,” the Su observed. No wounded here; no you hurt him, Petra, what were you thinking. She hadn’t been thinking. “Do you not wish this interpreted as your intention?”

  Petra closed her eyes. Most of the Su didn’t bother learning human expression; humans could speak or gesture what they needed understood. “His excision is not my intention.”

  “And yet, with knowledge of the effects of lightning energy on human physiology, you discharged a great deal through his body. Sulai Tabov,” the Su said. “Are you admitting violent actions not in accordance with your intention?”

  That was the question.

  So far as Petra knew, the Su didn’t understand self-control. They didn’t understand that an emotional urge to do one thing could conflict with an intellectual desire to do another. If Petra wanted Nash hurting, the Su would understand it as wanting him dead. If they understood Petra hurting Nash and not wanting him dead, they would understand that as a dangerous aberration in Petra’s own mind. A disease that, because it was violent, might warrant excision.

  The leftover energy twisted around her gut, and bile attempted the back of her throat. But Ilen drew herself up.

  “Sudaeg,” she said, and the Su made a gesture of deep respect. “Sulai Petra is human. You are aware that human Makers of the early generations can experience cognitive overload in high-energy environments? Interpret the situation in that light.”

  The Su made a gesture of apology, and turned to Petra again. “Sulai Tabov,” she said. “Was it your intention to excise the aberrant, or did you damage him as an indirect result of the destruction of the lightning tower?”

  I damaged him because I was angry and in pain and I resented the hell out of him and still do, Petra couldn’t say. “The discharge which injured him was an indirect result of the attack on the tower.” Please don’t kill him. Please don’t kill me.

  “Is it your intention that he return to your custody?”

  Can you be trusted? seemed to be the undercurrent of that, and Petra could have spit fire or bile there. Could she. Like maybe she should recuse herself for Nash’s own safety, never mind that it was his people who’d done this to her.

  “That,” she said, “is the intention”—the option—“I have.”

  The Sudaeg put up her foreclaws, and gestured a series of commands into the jurisdictor module. “Then I release him into your custody,” she said. “You are free to return him for excision at any time.”

  “I am keenly aware of that fact,” Petra said, and pushed on toward the cells.

  The moment they got to the cell and the membrane lensed open, Petra shoved away from Ilen’s support. The Su didn’t bother putting chairs or other furniture in their cells; creature comforts were too human a concept, comfort for the condemned even more so. She let herself collapse to the ground in a messy tangle of limbs, tipped against the wall.

  “Is Amad part of this?” she hissed at Nash. Amad, whose friend had just faced excision. Amad, who’d had to beg someone in the Su power structure for his friend’s life.

  Amad, who’d hated the Su for years, and might take a chance at striking back at them if he could.

  Amad, who’d practically adopted Nash, and who Nash would protect. Nash could be stupidly loyal, from time to time. It was just that none of that loyalty had been directed toward Petra, when it came down to it, in the end.

  Nash raised his head, and there was actual terror in his eyes. There were lines under his jaw, spidering up his neck—discoloration from an electrical burn.

  Petra drew back. A hand touched her shoulder and Ilen settled down next to her, a warm solid presence, twining the fingers of her own hand around Petra’s.

  Petra took in a breath, and tried not to feel how jealous she was of Ilen’s steadiness, that ability to move past it all, to smile and forgive if it was the useful thing, the healthy thing, to do. Petra’s head was a lightning storm. In a way it always had been, even when the atmosphere was quiet outside.

  There was pain on Nash’s face, as he gathered up his resolve to speak. After this, he might well believe that Petra planned on excising him, the moment he got too far out of line. Between that and the injury she’d inflicted, even accidentally, it almost made Petra feel like they were on equal ground.

  “Do you really think the Su want what’s best for us?” Nash asked.

  For some reason, she hadn’t been expecting that. She didn’t know what she had been expecting—groveling apology, maybe, or some arrogant parroting of the party line. But Nash waved his hands to the soft cell walls—walls that were as eager as anything Su to close in and dissolve him.

  Dissolve both of them, given a chance. The cell was much smaller, this time. It had already begun to close in, Petra thought, when Ilen had come to wake her.

  They were far too close.

  “I think the Su created this colony,” she said. “And they’ve been adapting it to human use. They provide for us as well as they know how to, an
d—”

  “As well as they know,” Nash pressed. “But they have a different biology— they’re from a different environment. They don’t understand us—”

  “And blowing up a lightning tower is supposed to help?”

  Nash gestured helplessly. “I didn’t know—it’s not that I want—I can understand it, Petra, even if I don’t agree. If we don’t have the Su to rely on—” he began.

  “Then we could all be exiles,” Petra said. “And most of us like it here.” Then, before he could retort, she asked, “What the hell did you do, Nash? Why did the Su want your execution?”

  Did you come in here to tear us all down?

  Nash looked away. “What the hell does it matter?” he asked. “The Su thought it was a crime. Isn’t that all you care about?”

  Petra shook off Ilen’s hand, and reached out and grabbed Nash by the throat.

  Nash’s whole body went rigid, and an angry, twisting thrill wound through Petra’s gut. This was a problem, this was something she’d have to think about, have to talk to Ilen about, but it felt good to feel that fear under her fingers. To know that on some fucking axis, at least, what she thought and felt mattered to Nash. In a way that it apparently hadn’t, back when it was just her trust and her friendship on the line, and not the looming threat of excision.

  “I could have been excised, out in that other room,” she said, running over the intake of breath from her side, over the screaming in her head that she was going too far, or not far enough. “Because I wasn’t trying to kill you when I almost killed you. Because if Ilen hadn’t had the rank of a Su Father and if she didn’t still care about both of us and fuck if I know why she does, they would have stamped me out because I was this close to seizures because of what Amad’s friends did. You think I’m above all this? I’ve got mine? I live and die by the same sudamn rules. Do you fucking live by any? Do you just dream of not living by any?”

  She could feel Nash’s heartbeat racing under her fingers; feel him swallow, feel him breathe. Might have meant something if she was Ilen; as it was, it was just proof that he, like her, was a haphazard collection of blood and muscle and bone. Bodies didn’t tell her much.

  Beside her, Ilen breathed, “Oh, Pet.”

  Petra shuddered. Ilen’s voice was soft, like she’d just realized something, but if Ilen didn’t know Petra was a walking disaster by this point, she just hadn’t been paying attention. And that’d be all right, then. They could just blast all the illusions to pieces today.

  Ilen reached out—slowly, carefully—and put her hand on Petra’s wrist, disentangling her fingers from Nash’s throat, and then drawing her in, Petra’s head under her chin.

  It wasn’t until she had Ilen’s arms around her that Petra realized just how badly she was shaking.

  She turned into Ilen’s chest and screwed her eyes shut, because even if she couldn’t stop Nash from seeing this, she could stop herself from seeing the look in his eyes. She didn’t want to fall apart—sick and shaking and blasted half to hell, ready to pave the rest of the way with her own Maker’s hands. She didn’t want him to see that this was how twisted-on-hooks she got. Didn’t want him to know that he’d won.

  Even if this had never been about winning, for him. But for all the power she had over him, he had this over her, and wasn’t that just something?

  She could feel, in the movement against the crown of her head, that Ilen had turned to look at Nash. She could feel a tilt of Ilen’s head, and then Nash stood up and his unsteady footsteps left the cell. Leaving us in it, Petra thought. And isn’t that the story of all of us.

  There would have been a long silence, if not for the thrumming of blood and the hard drag of breath and Ilen making soothing noises, soothing motions of hands and power and influence. And Petra leaned into it despite herself.

  “Come back to live with me,” Ilen said, in time. “You can Make yourself an office in my quarters. You’re not protecting me by staying away, Pet, you know that. And I don’t want to see you on your own.”

  A laugh echoed up from somewhere in Petra, but it was a largely hollow thing. “Clearly not alone any more, am I?”

  “No,” Ilen said, but it didn’t sound like agreement. “But you’re more locked in your head than you’ve ever been. And, Pet, I know what your head’s like, in the storms.”

  Petra could have said the storms aren’t the half of it, but Ilen being Ilen, she would know that. Ilen being Ilen, Petra thought she meant any storms, not just the ones in the atmosphere. Nash was a sudamn storm of his own.

  “I’m still here,” she repeated.

  “Is that the only thing that matters?”

  Why not? Petra thought, and Ilen drew her hand back through Petra’s hair.

  “Just which one of you did you want me to file the grievance over?” Ilen asked. “Trusting someone isn’t a crime, Pet, and you can stop punishing yourself for it any time now. Maybe you could even try again.”

  Petra laughed, though it wasn’t much like laughter.

  “You and Nash both saw the best potentials in people,” Ilen said. “The only difference is that Nash still does.”

  “Do you even know why we’re in here?” Petra asked. As far as she was concerned, there was more support for her point of view in the air than for Ilen’s. Or Nash’s, if that didn’t go without saying.

  “Four parts stubbornness and three parts enemy action,” Ilen said. “Pet.”

  “I’ll find a way through this,” Petra said. It was easy to say if she didn’t think about how much she was lying when she said it.

  “I’m here for you,” Ilen said.

  Petra let out a breath and sagged closer to her. “Ilen,” she said. “It was always supposed to be the other way.”

  There came a time when Petra could stand again, and take her leave. And she did, and she walked back to her quarters and went inside, and there was Nash stripped to his trousers, a Su biomat healing agent extruded from the wall and creeping across his skin.

  Petra hadn’t thought to give him access to the medical stations, but apparently someone had—Ilen, maybe, or Amad had come in and done whatever he could do to muck with the systems. But when Petra walked in the door Nash pulled himself away, the biomat suctioning off his bare shoulders, and went to one knee, head bowed. He touched his forehead, drawing his hand down in a line toward the ground. Gestured abasement.

  “I didn’t,” he said, “want any of this to happen.”

  Petra stood rigid, watching him. There were still traces of discoloration on his skin, dark trees standing out like lash marks where lightning had coursed through him, gathering around his neck under the Su collar. A disconnected part of her thought she should check his collar; make sure she hadn’t flooded the thing, make sure some control was still in place. Nash kept his eyes down.

  “I want to fucking fix this,” he said. “But there isn’t a way, is there? What do I do, Petra?” Then, after a moment—not a long enough pause into which to speak—he said, “Amad wants to steal me back from you.”

  Petra’s hands curled. “Of course you’ve been in contact with him.”

  “Of course he’s been in contact with me,” Nash said. “He cares. We both cared about you, believe it or not. But we told the wrong people the wrong things and then everything went to hell so fast that saving our own skins was all we could do. Would it have helped you or Ilen for us to get thrown into excision chambers then?”

  Yes, part of her said, but it was the same part that would have watched Nash die in the first place. Small and miserable. I could have saved you then. Would have meant something, then, that you faced what you did wrong.

  “I never thanked you,” Nash said.

  Petra’s stomach turned.

  “I showed up trying to spread separatist sentiment, and you didn’t agree with me, but you made a space for me anyway,” Nash said, and Petra’s train of thought jolted. This wasn’t about saving him from excision; it was about that time, years ago, when they’d worked a
nd eaten and laughed together. When the word friend didn’t have to stretch thin to cover them. “Got me into resource allocation. You know, there actually were times where I thought I was doing some good?”

  “You were doing good,” Petra said. “Doing good work is hard and slow. It’s not flashy bright results like blowing up a tower.”

  Pain flickered under the muscles of Nash’s face. Petra looked away.

  Good work was the slow, generation-by-generation change of Su attitudes. It was the vanished practice of culling human elders. The dwindling practice of culling dissidents—though that probably didn’t look dwindling to Nash. It was Petra, standing in the miasma of seasons-long headaches and knowing that the next generation of human Makers would benefit from what the Su Fathers had learned from her; that the next generation would call the lightning with more ease and less pain than she had.

  Good work meant enduring the things that weren’t perfect, because the people who solved things by burning them to the ground weren’t people Petra would trust to build good infrastructure.

  But that was Petra’s thought on the matter. Amad had different ideas. The separatists, too. And as for Nash, well, who the hell knew where he stood, but him?

  “Maybe,” Nash said, and Petra could hear the separatist sentiment lingering around his tone. Words like unendurable, like insurmountable difficulties. One of Nash’s great-great-grands had been an original colonist, excised for reasons Petra had never looked up. Amad’s own parents had been excised— they’d been separatists of the violent strain. Petra had no such painful history. Maybe it’s easy for you to say, the old saw went, “wait and see. ”

  Maybe, Petra thought, there just were no good options, but she’d stand by hers as the best of the imperfect ones.

  “I was informing on you from the beginning,” Nash said. “I didn’t think of it that way. I guess Amad and the others did.”

  And she, like an idiot, had taken him in and showed him the gardens in First Cluster and introduced him to her wife and talked politics and plans for the future. How they must have drunk that up, back where Nash came from. They must have thanked him.