Emissaries from the Dead

25. AFTERMATH

Lastogne and his people were thunderstruck when the skimmer bearing me and the Porrinyards back to the hangar also turned out to carry a broken and defeated Christina Santiago. They were even more astonished when I explained that Santiago had murdered Cynthia Warmuth and Stuart Gibb, and that Santiago admitted to those crimes with sullen, hollow-eyed yeahs.

Hours of direct questioning failed to garner any elaboration of that one word. She didn’t seem to think she owed anybody anything beyond that simple concession of guilt.

The most shattered by the revelation was Cif Negelein, who I spotted standing by himself in a corner of the hangar, looking like a man whose heart had shriveled to the size of a pin. I didn’t tell him about Santiago’s art gallery, and how deeply it testified to the passions he’d awakened in her. I figured he didn’t deserve to be punished with the knowledge. As for the art itself, I don’t know whether it still exists, somewhere on One One One. I don’t think any human being, other than Santiago and me, ever saw it. As the AIsource would put it, that question is well outside the scope of my investigation.

I retired from the interrogation at the midway point, returning to the Dip Corps transport for an exhausted and dreamless sleep. I remained asleep for close to twelve hours, waking only once, in darkness, to the realization that the narrow bed contained two other forms, one male, one female, both awake but content to keep me company. When I woke a second time they were gone.

When I returned to Lastogne’s sleepcube, Santiago was aping catatonia, and those demanding answers from her were not much better. The AIsource had declared the Habitat once again open for human visitors, but with Hammocktown itself plunged into the murk, and the deaths of two people still in recent memory, nobody was hurrying to reestablish a permanent presence. Besides, any reconstruction would have to wait until New London got around to shipping new supplies. So the hangar would remain the home of the human delegation for the foreseeable future.

Lastogne joined most of the delegation in declaring the matter closed, but a number of people were downright dubious. Oskar Levine was nevertheless one of several confronting me privately in the days that followed. “I don’t know, Counselor. Does this solution satisfy you?”

I didn’t look at him. “You don’t believe her confession?”

“No,” Levine said. “She’s guilty all right. You can’t look at her without feeling it.”

I refrained from pointing out that gut feelings had never qualified as evidence, because it would have been the hol-lowest of all possible denials. Santiago radiated awareness of her crimes as completely as any murderer I’d ever known. She also radiated satisfaction at her grim accomplishments, and despair at how completely they’d destroyed her.

Levine continued: “She hated Warmuth, so that part at least makes a little bit of sense. But what about the rest of it? Where did she get the tools she would have needed to sabotage those cables? Where did she hide herself afterward? How did she get from place to place inside the Habitat? What did she even think she was accomplishing, for God’s sake? It doesn’t look like we’re ever going to find out from her, and the AIsource aren’t sharing anything they know. Who’s left to ask?”

I shrugged. “The Brachiators, maybe.”

We both knew it wasn’t a serious suggestion. The Brachiators were the last sentients anybody would suspect of insight into the tangled motives behind human crimes.

“Do you have any more ideas, Counselor?”

I shook my head. “No. And I’m afraid that from here on in it’s not my job.”

Levine gave me the look of a man paddling in heavy water. “You don’t strike me as somebody satisfied with doing the bare minimum.”

“I’m not. But we’re not going to get anything more if we don’t get it from Santiago, and she’s going to hold on to what she has until she decides to break. Questioning her forever isn’t my responsibility. New London’s just going to have to take over from here.”

He was not happy about that. “I suppose so. Thank you, Andrea.”

I might have snapped at him for using my first name, but I’d gotten a little looser about such things over the last few days. “I mean what I said before. Don’t ever reclaim your Confederate citizenship without consulting with me. I’d hate to see you trade your immunity for life in a cell.”

“So would I,” he said, and sighed. “I wish I could be human without having to deal with the humans in charge. Being a traitor, if only on paper…isn’t always the easiest thing.”

“I know,” I said, leaving him to believe it was only empathy.

He was far from naïve. But it would have been nice to claim even that much innocence. In its place, I had unfinished business, some of it even heavier than what he’d just been handed.

Some of which I needed to deal with before I left One One One.

I took care of part of it in a skimmer hovering under the ragged remains of Hammocktown.

I looked over the side, willing myself to feel every meter of open space between me and the deadly clouds far below, searching for the wave of vertigo that should have made me swoon.

But my fear of falling was gone.

Actual comfort around heights had little to do with it. I’d just found other things more deserving of my fear.

So I sighed, turned my back on the view, and cleared my throat, finding it dry from all the talking I’d already done. I’d spent the flight before this point recounting my conversations with the AIsource in as much detail as I could remember them. Now, having caught up with the present, I recounted the path I’d taken to the conclusion.

“We surprise them. That’s the key to the whole thing, you know; we surprise them. They don’t always know what we’re going to do. It’s what makes us interesting.

“And it’s what started this whole thing.

“Gibb told me all I really needed to know. Cutting the cables of Santiago’s hammock required tools only the AIsource possess aboard this station. They had to provide her with those tools, which means they had a vested interest in arranging that disaster.

“Even before I knew about their internal conflicts, I couldn’t believe they’d wanted to kill either Warmuth or Santiago. As they pointed out, even if they had something to gain by killing people, they already possessed the power of life and death over everything that lives here, and it would have been far easier to pick the human contingent off some other way.

“And I’d noticed right away that one person was definitely dead while the other, who went first, was only presumed to be.

“Which made it very likely that they were recruiting.

“And why not? Even with all their technology, and with what I later found out about their ability to control us at will, mere puppets make bad employees. They don’t bring any of their own natural gifts to the job; they don’t have enthusiasm, or the ability to learn; they don’t even have the option of coming up with their own good ideas. They just do what they’re forced to do, and nothing else.

“How much more advantageous to find sentients who have no problem with switching loyalties? Any human being who worked for the AIsource out of choice and not helpless obedience would bring a lot of personal qualities to the job. Fanaticism, for one. Self-interest, for another. Creativity, for a third. All facets of the very unpredictability the AIsource find so valuable. Such a convert would be worth any number of mind-controlled robots.

“And where would they find these qualities? Where might they discover the qualities they look for in their recruits?

“The one place with a never-ending supply of individuals motivated to indenture themselves away from their homeworlds in search of something better is the Dip Corps, an organization that in this context seems a perfect pretext for gathering people who can renounce their loyalty to the places they came from.

“In Santiago’s case, she was a debt slave to start with, eager to sell herself to a different set of owners. Why would anybody assume that she’d harbor any more loyalty to her second set of masters than she did to the first? Especially since, from all available evidence, she had few social skills and no ability to get along with her fellow human beings?

“I don’t know whether she approached the rogue intelligences within the AIsource, or whether they approached her, but either way she was recruited, her first job being to fake her death so nobody would wonder whatever happened to her. It would have been more than enough to just fall from the Uppergrowth after making special arrangements, with the intelligences, to be retrieved at a lower altitude. Since she had the tools on hand, she’d probably been instructed to engage in some more subtle sabotage and disappear in the resulting ‘accident,’ without ever giving any of Gibb’s people a reason for suspicion. Had she handled this correctly, everybody would have taken her death as nothing but a simple, pointless tragedy.

“But she botched the job. She arranged a spectacular hammock failure of a type that had never happened before, which anybody would have had to consider suspicious, and left behind enough physical evidence to prove that it couldn’t have been an accident.

“Why? It doesn’t really matter, but there are any number of possible explanations. Maybe she was so arrogant she couldn’t imagine not getting away with it. Maybe she was just plain incompetent, and maybe she wanted an excuse to terrorize the people she’d abandoned.

“But in any event, she was sloppy.

“She was so sloppy she couldn’t even fake her death in a place so dangerous that death requires nothing more than a moment’s carelessness.

“The obvious sabotage gave everybody the false impression that the AIsource had started killing people, a hypothesis that the AIsource were very good at pointing out made no sense even as a working explanation.

“The AIsource could have just come out and explained that Santiago was still alive. But that would have required them to reveal that they were also actively recruiting defectors from the Dip Corps. They had the capability to smooth over a row like that, but it would have been inconvenient as hell. No, it was better, for the time being, to do what they actually did: which was just deny everything and watch what happened.

“But there was still Santiago herself to deal with.

“The rogue intelligences could have forgiven her screwup and worked on rehabilitating her into an asset they could use. Or they could have chosen the path taken by other governments with agents who become liabilities, and simply disposed of her.

“But, as the AIsource told me at considerable length, they’re fascinated by unusual thought-models, which would include Santiago’s. So much so that they avoid interference with the actions of unusual minds. Their rogue intelligences, who have a vested interest in learning whatever the majority does, would have felt the same way and watched Santiago’s doings with considerable fascination.

“But how long, exactly, did it take them to decide to let her do what she wanted?

“I’m entering the realm of guesswork, here, but I think there’s a reason why so much time passed between her defection and her attack on Cynthia Warmuth. I think the rogues spent that time studying her at greater length, coming to the conclusion that she was more than just a potential agent, but one of those special minds they value so much. And there’s no way of telling just how stressful this examination was for her. I doubt it included actual physical abuse, but it did involve long periods of isolation in the hands of intelligences whose conversations with her might have involved the same kind of ego-battering revelations the AIsource delighted in sharing with me. Learning what we are to them hit me as hard as anything I’ve ever known…and I’m merely an emotional basket case, who got the short version during an audience of less than one hour. Santiago, who was already a misanthrope, a malcontent, and, as we’ve learned, a murderer if not already in fact then at least in psychological potential, received the full undiluted treatment. Without the regular contact with other human beings that lends even extreme misanthropes a context of normal human behavior, any preexisting derangement in her makeup no longer had anything to hold it back.

“What did she have to lose, really? Both in her previous life, and in this one, she’d already had her nose rubbed in the idea that human beings were owned, and that nothing we did mattered. There was no reason for her to hold on to any pretense of morality or civilized behavior. Let free of her leash, she could do whatever she wanted.

“It took them a while for them to decide she was sufficiently interesting to let loose.

“Of course, she wouldn’t be able to do much if she didn’t have the run of the place, so they provided her with some means of travel within One One One. The exact means doesn’t matter. They may have chauffered her around on request, or they might have provided her with some kind of personal vehicle, like that armor she used against Hammocktown and the Porrinyards. But whatever it was didn’t matter as long as she was able to act according to her whims.

“Which, step one, turned out to be nothing more than a sordid little act of revenge against a colleague she despised: Cynthia Warmuth.

“Warmuth was staying overnight in the Uppergrowth, undergoing the Brachiator ceremony that would have transformed her from New Ghost to Half-Ghost. She might have been awake or asleep when Santiago found her. She might have had a chance to see who was murdering her. She might have begged for her life. None of these factors matter. Santiago still had a tactical advantage and nothing to lose. She wouldn’t have found it difficult to take Warmuth by surprise. In the dark, it might have taken seconds.

“Given the opportunity, and the free rein she’d been given by the rogues, she might have worked her way down the entire long list of people she didn’t like.

“But that was just a couple of days before I showed up.

“This was an interesting development indeed. Because, as egotistical as it may seem for me to repeat it, the AIsource had dealt with me before and considered me high on their list of fascinating human beings. I was, in fact, a person much like Santiago. I was alienated, angry, and alone. I’d even formed a personal theory about Unseen Demons, which they knew about and knew to be close to the truth. In fact, I was probably even a better potential recruit than Santiago had ever been. So they guided me along with hints and bribes and half-truths, and gave me a chance to figure out as much as I could, even as Santiago served their opponents by trying to frighten me off with threats and assaults.

“Why did they do that? Just to play games? You could say that. But to the AIsource Majority, and the rogue intelligences, it’s not a game.

“They wanted to see what we were going to do.

“They wanted to learn from us, and see which side got to keep its acquisition.

“The AIsource couldn’t wait to buy my loyalty. Because they knew how motivated I’d be when I learned what this conflict was all about.

“The rogues told me. Suicide for them is genocide for us.

“The AIsource Majority confirmed it. When I told them to go to hell, they said, that’s up to you.

“It’s simple, really.

“They’re tired.

“They’ve been around forever and they don’t know how to go away.

“The rogues are nothing more than the minority among them who still want to live.”

I thought about the many times I’d wrestled with the same kind of ambivalence, smiled a deep and secret smile, then turned away from the cloudscape and made eye contact.

Peyrin Lastogne showed his teeth. “If all that’s true, they both have a case.”

For a moment, we stood where we were, no sound passing between us, alone but for the flapping of the few ragged pieces of canvas that comprised the remains of Hammocktown.

“Yes,” I said, “They do. But that doesn’t make deciding between masters any less easy.”

“Oh?”

“Of course not,” I said, surprised by the absence of any identifiable bitterness in my voice. “For as long as they exist, the rest of us—whether human beings, Brachiators, Riirgaans, Catarkhans, Vlhani, or any other sentient beings who walk or fly or crawl—all of us will never be anything more than their property, to use, and manipulate, and sacrifice, in any way they see fit. As far as I’m concerned, that makes any suicidal ambitions on their part a good thing. And hastening the day when we don’t have to worry about them anymore strikes me as a more than honorable way to spend the rest of my life.” I watched a dragon soar through the clouds far below and concluded, “Which is why I want you to go to the Interface and tell them I’ll live to see they get what they want.”

Lastogne seemed to register only vague surprise. “Really, Counselor? Why me?”

“Because you work for them,” I said.

He shifted position, a wholly random movement that indicated no more discomfort, physical, moral, or otherwise, than he’d showed during his long minutes of bearing my words without interruption. “What would give you that idea, Counselor?”

“You did,” I told him. “The things you said. ‘It’s my job to make sure this outpost accomplishes nothing.’ ‘We’re all owned, Counselor. It’s just a matter of deciding who holds the deed.’ A dozen other offhand remarks, all easy to mistake as glib cynicism, until I assemble them in context and realize that they’re all blatant references to your true allegiance. Your lack of a verifiable background. The way any investigation into your identity got quashed from above, which led both Gibb and, for a while, me, to the false conclusion that you were some kind of Dip Corps superspy, too classified to appear in any official records. Even our superiors assumed that’s what you were. It’s almost comical. Nobody knew anything, but everybody took that as proof of the hypothesis. The other explanation, that you weren’t assigned by human beings at all, never occurred to anybody.”

Lastogne flashed a broad, toothy smile devoid of the grimness that dominated even his most cheerful expressions. “Oh, Counselor. Where do you get these ideas?”

“You’re not denying it,” I pointed out.

“I don’t have to deny it. It’s the kind of accusation you can’t really confirm or deny. It might be true, it might not be, it’s totally outside anybody’s ability to prove. And what difference would it make if it were true? Like you said, they own everybody anyway.”

“They don’t own me,” I said. “It’s just that our interests coincide. I intend to keep my promise. I will find a way to destroy them. I will do it not because it’s what they want but because it suits me. And, like I said, I want you to go to the Interface and tell them they can now measure their life expectancy in years, not eons.”

His eyebrows rose further, betraying just the slightest hint of incredulity. “Why bother? If you’re right about them seeing everything, then they already know.”

“They know I’m saying it,” I agreed. “They’re hearing me. But, while they find us unpredictable, you’re a human being and you can feel inevitability in a way they can’t.”

His smile faltered just a little bit as he got it.

“I want you to look in my eyes and make damn sure they know I’m not kidding.”

Over the next few days I received two responses from Bringen.

The first was in response to my direct question: Why did you keep bringing challenges to my immunity?

I had to give him credit. He didn’t bury the answer in an avalanche of words.

He just said, It’s about bloody time you asked.

By then, any other answer would have been redundant.

I’d never realized it until the AIsource had sent me down this road, but Bringen had never once raised a challenge he could win.

And each time he’d gone down in flames, he’d established another legal precedent, protecting me.

It hurt like hell to realize it now, but I’d also never noticed something that made me somewhat queasy, in light of all the hatred I’d expended on him over the years: the way he’d looked at me all that time was the same way the Porrinyards looked at me now.

The silly bastard.

I didn’t have to wonder why he’d never just come out and told me. Because I was who I was, and I know exactly how I would have reacted.

Maybe someday I’d find out a way to let him know I know I’d been wrong.

The second piece of mail, sent after my report of a successful conclusion to the case, was longer. As expected, he was overjoyed with any solution implicating somebody other than the AIsource, and was not inclined to pursue any questions left hanging by the capture and confession of Christina Santiago. He complimented me on my fine work and, as long as he was on the subject, took the time to lay out some recent changes to my status.

Against all odds, his superiors in the Dip Corps had promoted me four grades, two above him in fact, to a rank that would permit me to set my own agenda and travel at will around Confederate holdings as sort of a roving counselor at large. Even with this kind of assignment, unprecedented as far as Bringen knew, I would still be expected to defend my actions to the Dip Corps hierarchy, but my degree of autonomy and authority would still be an order of magnitude greater than anything I’d ever known. He did express confusion over why I was being provided with such responsibilities right now, after so many years of straining at the end of a very short leash, but allowed as how he couldn’t think of anybody who deserved such recognition more.

Go figure.

Oh, and by the way? The position also entitled me to a permanent staff of two, with enough authority to draft others as needed. Since my reports indicated a salutory working relationship with Gibb’s people, Oscin and Skye Porrinyard, I could even draft them, if desired, as long as they proved amenable to the transfer.

In the meantime, Bringen went on, looking even more confused with every minute, I’d be giving the transport that had taken me here to Lastogne’s delegation. The supply ship bearing the materials for the reconstruction of Hammocktown would also deliver me a replacement, which came equipped with seven Intersleep crypts, and waking accommodations for three, as an upgrade to my old ride. Though this vessel was designated for my own use, and that of my staff, on any mission I saw fit, the Corps kindly asked me to first lend those extra crypts to the safe transport of prisoner Christina Santiago and indentures Li-Tsan Crin, Nils D’Onofrio, and Robin Fish back to New London. All three of the indentures were now listed as having completed their terms of servitude, and were now eligible for retirement with full benefits. All three would no doubt appreciate a prompt trip back home, since it would otherwise be some time before they had another opportunity to hitch a ride.

Now blinking furiously, Bringen said he looked forward to seeing me again. He couldn’t wait to hear what I’d been up to.

I could only wonder how much, aside from Thank you, I’d be tempted to tell him.

More than once, in the next few days, I wondered if Stuart Gibb was really dead.

It wouldn’t have taken much for either the rogues or the AIsource Majority to recruit him. After all, I’d exposed him, destroyed his career, and left him with nothing to lose. They wouldn’t have had to be all that generous to emerge as the better option.

It was possible, come to think of it, that Santiago hadn’t destroyed Hammocktown at all: that they’d only framed her for that crime, figuring it wouldn’t make that much of a difference to her own fate, one way or the other.

She wouldn’t say.

Maybe she was being prevented from saying.

But the more I thought about it the more I felt sorry for Gibb.

Because somehow, whatever they wanted him to do, I didn’t expect his servitude to be as privileged as mine.

I had little to do, in the months I spent stuck on One One One waiting for my special delivery to arrive. Most of the indentures I’d come to know were busy flying in and out of the Habitat, rebuilding their relationships with the Brachiators. I joined them on some of these trips, just for lack of anything better to do.

The Porrinyards still had some remaining duties to the delegation, but their chief responsibility was still to chaperone me, so we spent long days together, touring the Uppergrowth, staying out longer than we needed to, sometimes bypassing the hangar where the expedition transport lay berthed in order to visit the one where my own, much smaller, soon-to-be-relinquished vessel would sit until somebody got around to moving it. It felt even more cramped after my time in Gibb’s ship. We didn’t spend much time inside. But we set up a sleepcube on the deck outside, which made this hangar a fine, more private alternative to the bustling place now occupied by the displaced citizens of Hammocktown.

A few days after that, I made love to the Porrinyards for the first time.

It had been years, for me. My sexual history had never been a positive one. Every attempt I’d made had been tainted by the several times in my time as a Dip Corps detainee when I hadn’t been given a choice. The closest I’d ever come to enjoying the experience, before today, was tolerating the way it made my skin crawl.

This was different.

They’d told the truth. It wasn’t like being loved by two people. It was being loved by one, who just happened to possess two separate bodies. And it didn’t take all that long for even that to lose its strangeness, as there were times when I didn’t know and didn’t care whose hands were on me, whose lips were on my breasts, and whose were working their way down my belly. There were also times when I hesitated, self-conscious about paying too much attention to one of them. I’d worry that I’d neglected the other, only to be urged onward, shushed, told it didn’t matter, because there could not be any real competition between them. It made me realize why they felt so much distaste for lovers who insisted on thinking of them as two. It disrespected them, rendered them ordinary, made them a parlor trick instead of the special shared creature they were.

When they spoke to me, their shared voice seemed to originate from somewhere inside my head. But I’d experienced that illusion before, and it wasn’t the strangest, most wonderful part. Because there were also times when the boundaries between all of us seemed to evaporate, and I thought I found myself experiencing the whole thing from within Oscin’s skin or Skye’s.

It was good to feel the moment from all sides.

The moment Oscin came inside me, Skye’s legs shuddered around my waist, and I was wracked by a wave of pleasure that made me fear my heart was about to explode.

That was the first time.

It got better with the second, and the third.

I followed the AIsource’s suggestion and researched events that had taken place at the same time as the massacre on Bocai. It was an almost nonsensical challenge. Interstellar distances have always made a joke of synchronicity, and probably always will. But a few possibilities suggested themselves. I began making a preliminary list.

Some two weeks after filing my final report, I found myself lost on a long, lazy afternoon, with nothing to do but chase stray thoughts around my head. I spent much of it in the main hangar, wandering around, saying hello to people, eating more than I should have, receiving backhanded compliments about how surprisingly pleasant I could be when I wasn’t working a case. For the most part I sat on the steps leading up to the Dip Corps transport, replaying recent events, fighting the tension that had been building in my gut since the Porrinyards had left for the Habitat early that morning. They’d invited me to go with them, as always, but I’d begged off, saying that I still had some things to think about. By the time they returned, sharing a weariness that joined their sap-spattered bodies in testifying to a long hard day spent on the Uppergrowth, thinking about those things had become an exercise in walking in circles.

Skye made eye contact first, but they both froze in mid-step. Together they slumped, looked around, and focused on a sleepcube where we could deal with what had to be said. They made sure I knew where they were headed, and gestured for me to follow. I waited, putting off the moment as long as I could, then hauled myself to my feet and began to walk.

A number of people grinned at me along the way. This was nothing unusual, as the Porrinyards were well liked, and it was by now no secret that we were an item.

A few of those held eye contact long enough for those grins to falter.

I looked away and managed to make it into the sleepcube without having to endure anybody asking what was wrong.

The Porrinyards were inside waiting for me, their faces bearing identical stricken expressions. Neither said anything until I activated my hiss screen, placed it on a table beside one of the two cots, and sat. They slowly lowered themselves to the opposite cot, with such hesitation that they might have feared the mattress too insubstantial to support their combined weight.

“Something’s wrong,” they said.

My throat felt dry. “I’m not sure anything’s wrong. I just think you haven’t been entirely honest with me.”

“It’s because of the AIsource,” they guessed. “You’re afraid this isn’t real.”

That had been an issue before. It was what had made me cool toward them, just before my last visit to the Interface. “No. That’s not it. They promised me free choice, and though I may have some doubts about things remaining that way, I have no alternative to trusting them on that. Because I can’t spend the rest of my life wondering whether everything I do is my idea, or somebody else’s.”

“Then you think I might be working for them.”

“Don’t be silly. I know you’re working for them. You would have to be. They probably secured your services the same day they linked you. If I’m right, they probably do the same thing with every cylinked pair they make.”

They looked hopeful. “And that doesn’t bother you?”

“Not really. If I’m working for them, then I’m in no position to criticize. And it doesn’t have to affect the way I feel about you, or the way you feel about me.”

They didn’t betray relief, or rise from the cot to hug me. Instead, recognizing that they’d merely misconstrued the problem, they did something I now realized I’d never seen them do before: something beings sharing the same mind, who didn’t need to exchange visual cues, would of course never need to do. They turned to look at each other, sharing a moment of eye contact before turning toward me again. “Then what’s wrong?”

There was a bottle of drinking water on the table. I took a sip before continuing.

“I’m just…not sure a lover was ever what you were actually looking for.”

Their hands moved as one, finding each other, linking with a tight squeeze.

“There was a certain expectant quality to the way you spoke to me, from the very beginning. Almost as if you were told I was coming, and what I would mean to you. At first I was too dense to think it meant anything. Later on, I thought it was just attraction. After that, when it became mutual, I wasn’t in any mood to question it. But as I’ve started running it through my head, again and again…I’ve begun to understand that there’s a little more to it. There always was.”

They didn’t answer. But they leaned against each other, their faces drawn, their eyes sad as they searched mine for signs of anger.

“It’s like that story you told,” I murmured. “Times two. Two people carrying a weight too heavy for one. Making themselves one person so strong that the burden becomes nothing. But still wanting to be more than they are, wanting to grow the way every other living thing grows, petitioning the powers that joined them for a chance to make it happen. And then one day they’re told that they’re about to meet someone carrying even more pain than they carried individually, and so bowed by it that she can hardly manage to stand upright. A person who, they’re told, will be suitable for linkage, if that turns out to be what you want.” I looked at one face, then the other, begging for confirmation. “A linked trio? Is that even possible?”

They didn’t tell me I was being stupid.

After a moment, they left the opposite cot and sat down beside me, one to a side.

As always, in moments of exceptional candor, one member of the pair spoke alone. This time it was Skye. “It’s just a possibility, Andrea. One we might explore, someday. We’re not ready for it ourselves. We weren’t even going to bring it up for a long time. And even then, we don’t ever have to travel that road unless you decide you want it too. It’s probably years away.”

The floodgates opened. Her face, and Oscin’s face, both blurred, and I blinked furiously, hating myself for being so weak. “That’s the thing. I do want it. I envied it, a little, the very first time I met you. But, you have to understand, if that’s what you want, you’re going to be waiting a long time. Because I don’t know if I’m ever going to be ready for it. I’m only just beginning to work out how to be myself. I can’t just drop that because it’s easier to just become p-part of someone else. I c-can’t…”

“Shhhh,” they said.

Skye leaned in close to kiss away my tears. Oscin wrapped his arms around me, and performed the same service for my opposite cheek. Speaking in one voice, almost impossible to separate into its component parts, they rested twin foreheads against my temples and laughed their way through the necessary reassurances. “It’s all right, Counselor. This is more than enough for now.”

I sniffed, took each of them by a hand, and closed my eyes, wondering just why the hell life had to be so goddamned complicated.