16
A molten ache flared between my legs as Fásach pressed his hips to mine and I pushed his coveralls off his shoulders. He fisted my silk, and I did the same, grabbing his hackles with an iron grip, keeping his mouth on my neck.
Dios mio, what a mouth.
As hard as my heart pounded though, I couldn’t let go of that one fist in his wiry racerback and surrender control. Because something deeply unsettling wouldn’t leave my mind. A question I couldn’t answer.
[Inquiry] Did it feel right for his weight to bear down on my pussy because I wanted him?
Or because that’s what I was built for?
Venandi, hjarna, and shilpakaari preferences were hardwired into me. Their instinctive favorites were ingrained into my system like Monarch butterflies migrating south for the winter. I knew that a venandi would want to see my neck if they dominated me because it made me more vulnerable. And a hjarna would want me to stick my tongue out if they came on my face because they pollinated their partners through absorption.
“Wait, I—”
Fás paused, his hot breath on my neck, waiting, his hips undulating as if he couldn’t help it. Just the tiniest rock back and forth, stoking the fire.
“Roz…” he urged, needing an answer I didn’t have.
I had no protocols for yiwreni pleasure. I’d learned a lot on the Mummer, but none of it was programmed into me like my expected client species. It made me anxious that I didn’t know what Fás would expect from me or instinctively enjoy the most. Is this what learning was like for other humans? A guessing game without concrete paths to follow? I had no set list of tasks, and my coding wasn’t prepared—
[WARNI–] A thunderous static crashed through my LMem and my systems seizured.
The digital noise raced towards us like a freight train, a boom so big I could see it pressing against my sensors. They strained under the power, my optics warped, and each nerve node embedded in my skin overheated like I was being scorched by the sun.
A boom rattled the cave and Fásach’s demanding hands turned into a guard. He covered my body entirely with his, holding my head against his neck with a yell of surprise. But I could only feel him, his fur like hot needles against my skin, and me without a voice. Without control at all. My vision was white with a surge of electricity so powerful it triggered my emergency protective protocols, safeguarding my electrical boards, ports, and wiring by isolating every switch. I was as stiff as a board, and in agonizing sensory overload.
“Roz!” Fásach panted. He lifted his weight off me, and my spine bowed off the ground, eyes rolling back. Lightning coursed through my veins and wiring. Something trickled from my nose. Oil? Blood? I had no vitals feedback. My parumauxi were offline. My LMem unraveled until I was nothing—
And then suddenly the white light was a void of fizzling black. I wasn’t lying on the ground anymore, but wrapped up in tight, shaking arms. Fásach was crouched on his heels, his face buried in my neck, whimpering with panic. I stared up at the ceiling of our cave with a dry mouth and teeth that tasted like aluminum.
“Fás…” I croaked without the soft purr of a human voice. This version of me was all machine, a digital monotone because my voice had gone offline with everything else. I clamped my mouth shut, trying to swallow the staticky wheeze of panic.
Fás gasped, framing my face with his thick palms. He looked relieved rather than disgusted and something oily thick in my gut dissipated. When he spoke, his voice shook.
“It’s okay, Roz. Take your time.”
[Restart] I slumped against his chest as my motor functions rebooted slowly. First my fingers and toes, then my eyelids and eyebrows. My face cycled through a variety of slow brow movements, nose scrunches, and eye rolls as it performed systems checks. My fingers opened and closed individually, my wrists rotated, my abdomen tightened and bulged…
“I’ll be right back. I need to check outside.”
Fás carefully set me on the bedroll so that my muscles could twitch and stretch, running his claws through the stray ringlets at the base of my neck where it felt best, before the loss of his body heat prickled in a chill gust of wind.
“Systems clear,” I said automatically, my voice returning though without any inflection. Non-essential functions were still calibrating. I remained laying down but turned my head towards the vital pods.
[Priority] Safia… Misila…
They were both still floating, buoyed against the cave wall like canoes adrift. They’d locked down their data hard in the surge–no echoes of any kind. Though their lights were still even, I couldn’t shake the overwhelming need to make sure.
“Dios te salve, Maria…”Words that weren’t my own and that I didn’t understand poured out of my mouth as Rosy took over some part of me, her hands clasped as a child in a room with clay walls and white curtains as the wind raged outside and debris battered the roof. She’d gone through those motions every time there was a storm—whether it was a tempest of the sea or the mind—and felt better for the compulsion of saying words her mother had taught her but she no longer believed.
I swallowed the words in my throat as my parumauxi swarm clumped back together in a sluggish way, trying to focus. They gathered around my spine, checking for singed circuits and damaged tissue. I needed them to do something else though. Something I’d never used them for.
I rolled onto my stomach and shoved myself off the bedroll. I had difficulty controlling my elbows and wrists as I drunkenly pushed myself across the cave, crushing shells and old tin rations.
“Sorry,” I said with a wince to the dead shilpakaar.
I reached the vital pods panting for breath, then stuck my finger into Misila’s charging port and closed my eyes. I coaxed my parumauxi away from their task, forced them into my racing blood stream, and they collected in my hand.
I wasn’t a biognostic. I couldn’t interface directly with tech and speak to it. But technically, my parumauxi could. My brow creased as I pressed them against the ridges of my fingerprint, causing my finger to thump with my pulse as if I were wearing a bandage that was too tight.
[Override] The swarm continued to push, becoming more and more frenetic. My cuticles stung around the nail bed, and I took a deep breath and pushed again. My finger felt hot and covered in papercuts. Rosy had hated those. I remembered sucking on my finger in a college library. The scent of paper, the sounds of turning pages and coughing. Shuffling shoes on short carpet…
Then a wealth of warm, calm data flooded my LMem. My parumauxi had broken through my cuticle, linking them directly with Misila’s vital pod. It stung, and the little bots were frustrated that I wouldn’t let them repair the damage, but Misila was fine. Her heart was steady. Safia’s too. I smiled, blinking wet eyes open.
The incessant little swarm repaired my finger, then I dropped my hand to my thigh and leaned back against the wall. Fásach crawled into the low cave on all fours, his coveralls still around his waist, flat nose flexing in the air.
“Over here,” I said, more myself than machine, than Rosy.
He shuffled to us, and I nodded with an exhausted smile.
“They’re okay.”
He blinked, and panic dilated his horizontal pupils, eyes as chilled as the snow outside. “They’re okay? What, why? What happened?”
“Electrical surge. No one was hurt,” I assured him without telling him just how close I’d come to blowing my core. He lowered his forehead to Misila’s vital pod with a shudder. “Did you see anything outside?”
He nodded, still hunched over his daughters. “Yeah,” he rasped. “Powerlines. Couldn’t see them in the whiteout before.”
I lolled my head towards the entrance to the cave and noticed for the first time that halos now flirted with the edge of the snow. I read them as they dissipated, fluttery little winter butterfly wings. “The relay station… They shocked the lines to dislodge the ice.”
“That’s what happened? I thought—” His jaw ticked and he squeezed my hand, pressing his cheek against Misila’s viewing port, staring at me with timid eyes so different from the feral man with his hands in my clothes. “You good? Hurt?”
“I’m good.”
“I can carry you, but we shouldn’t stay.”
“Just let me rest while you pack up. Then I’ll be fine.”
He gathered our things while I worked through the itchy, hot ends of the pain. The ringing in my ears quieted, making room for me to think.
Making room for me to fixate.
[Priority] The halos outside of the cave were whispering.
I stared at them as they licked in and out of the dim green light of night like little hands tempting me their way. They pulled on me until I was latching up my coveralls and crawling towards the blizzard.
“I put most of your stuff in my pack,” Fásach said over his shoulder. “Can you carry the rest?”
I mumbled in response, unblinking as I got closer to the echoes of voices. More and more of them. Old, young, mostly shilpakaari. Secure comms, newsfeeds, music... But there was something else underneath, a voice just for me.
I shimmied out of the cave.
New snow tumbled away from me in thick drifts as I pushed it back with bare hands. The cold bit into my palms as I stood, my face to the sky.
Not the sky.
The cables.
Cables thicker than my forearm climbed the mountain pass like massive black pythons wound together. Metal rings bolted straight into the stone kept them climbing into the whiteout of the storm. Up and up and up…
If I climbed up there, I’d be able to hear the voice calling me.
“Roz?”
I walked right up to the cliff face and clutched an icy handhold with red fingers, my eyes on the prize. Up.
[Warning] “Roz, come on. We need t– What are you doing?”
“It’s up there.” I pulled myself up another few feet.
I could sacrifice my fingers, right?
If I used my mechanical strength rather than the tension limitations in my coding that protected my flesh from too much force, I’d be able to climb much faster and more reliably without slipping.
“What’s up there?”
Snowflakes flew into my eyes, but the sting was minimal. I needed to keep that echo close until I clutched it in my LMem. I turned off my blinking timer and force regulator so I could climb more quickly without losing sight of the prize.
[Warning] A firm hand pulled me back down and spun me away. I resisted at first, but then Fásach’s bright blue eyes were engulfing mine, and I blinked instinctively, reengaging the failsafes I’d shut down. His brow was creased with concern, and he rubbed my hands, stuffing them inside the gloves attached to the cuffs of my coveralls.
“Roz, you okay? There’s nothing up there.”
“I—” I paused, staring down at his hands as he buttoned me up. My upper lip tickled, and I brushed at it, a smear of black oil staining my sleeve. The echo faded away, and I shook off the foreboding sensation. Fás lifted my sleeve to his nose and took a whiff, his ear twitching.
“Lubricant. You’re sure you’re okay?”
I swallowed hard. Was I? My stomach felt like it was swooping around a loop on a roller coaster, on the brink of motion sickness even though I was standing still. I rubbed at the roiling anxiety eating away my guts and nodded.
“Yeah, just… I thought I heard an important echo.”
Fásach’s ears drew back, and he fell into silence as the gusts of icy air battered us and he hooked our little caravan back together. He glanced down the path, following the cables into the distance as far as visibility would allow.
“Trav said we should avoid the relay station, but I think we have to go,” he explained. “They’ll have diagnostic tools, and I’m worried about that nosebleed.”
[Calculation] Thinking of the relay station with a real shelter and extra supplies eased the knot of impending something in my chest. I exhaled slowly to calm my nerves. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”
“Just take it slow. Got it?”
I nodded again as he pulled my visor off my belt and handed it to me. I clipped it in place with shaky fingers, shielding my face from the brutal weather. Marching towards the front of the line, I made sure the vital pods weren’t tangled, then trudged through the fresh snow.