48 Think of Me When You Hear Birdsong #2
Then Spie’s arms were around her, steadying her, Spie’s scent filling her nostrils. Sweat and petrol and saffron. She held Temmi against her chest with heart-rending gentleness. Her sultry voice soft in Temmi’s ear: “Hey, hey, it’s okay. Here, let’s sit.”
Spie guided her back to the cot and sat beside her. Temmi’s right thigh pressed firmly against Spie’s left. She became acutely aware of the warmth leeching through the starchy material of her medical gown.
“What are you doing here?” Temmi looked sidelong at the princess.
Spie raised her right hand and brushed her fingers along Temmi’s hair, tucking a few strands behind her ear.
Her touch lightly grazed the bruise on Temmi’s cheek, trailed down her jaw, her throat, glanced off her collarbone, carefully skirted the cloth of her sling, and rested on the bandage wrapped around her right palm, where Corbin had mutilated her to destroy her barcode brand.
Spie was gentle, assessing. “Does it hurt?”
“Yes.” Temmi’s lungs ached from not being able to breathe. And from not wanting to. If she held her breath, perhaps she could freeze time. Stretch this single moment into forever.
“Tell me who did this, and I’ll kill them, I swear. There’s nothing I hate more than unnecessary cruelty.”
“To be fair, I was kind of an asshole to them.”
“You’re an asshole to everyone.” Spie laughed, short and quick.
“I know I should’ve visited you—I wanted to.
Every day. Every hour. But I couldn’t visit you without risking putting you in a worse position.
So, I thought that if I asked you to marry me on the live broadcast, I’d be able to stall the execution.
I—I didn’t know another way to save you.
Not without— He’s my brother, Artemis. I couldn’t—”
The princess of the Expan Empire, a woman who had been taught to conceal her pain behind a steel wall, blinked back tears.
“I know.” Temmi swallowed. With her good hand, she found Spie’s, interlacing their fingers.
Her anger and hate were evaporating into a pool of deep longing.
She’d been hurt more by Spie’s absence than anything else.
She’d known there was nothing Spie could do.
Not truly. Not without incriminating her brother.
No matter what, Nix would always stand between them.
What was she thinking? There had never been a them to stand between. And there never would be.
“No, you don’t. You don’t know.” Spie used her free hand—Temmi noticed she wasn’t wearing her CB—to wipe away the moisture flecking her eyelashes.
They were long and dark and curling. Heavy and sad.
“There’s so much I want to explain, but I don’t have enough time.
Arbora came to me before the ceremony. This Freedom Collective is her.
..Well, she’s a part of it. And I’m..
.I don’t know how I feel about them yet.
I would be wary, though. Don’t trust them.
I have my own plans—I’m going to try and earn my place back as my mother’s heir, and when I do, I’m going to change things, change the empire, change.
..I don’t know yet, but Arbora told me—if I married her—her group would get you out. And they did.”
So, Arbora was the reason Temmi was alive. The far more important people than me that Corbin had mentioned.
Justine—Jacks—and I are part of a collective . . . Arbora had failed to mention her collective was powerful enough to attack the emperor in broad daylight. Not that Temmi had any qualms with that.
Spie wiped at her eyes. Temmi wanted to kiss her tears away.
For once, she wanted to be the one wrapping Spie in her arms (instead of Spie holding her) and siphon the pain from her heart, the burden from her shoulders.
But how could Temmi offer Spie anything?
Who was she, compared to the heir of seven star systems?
What did she understand of the weight Spie carried?
“Gods and nebulas, Spie. I’m sorry. I was a jackass.
I didn’t realize— I want to understand. I want to know everything you’ve gone through, everything you’re worried about, everything you’ve sacrificed.
I want to— I’ve never...” Temmi’s throat clogged with a thick, cottony sensation. “Thank you for saving my life.”
“I thought you ‘fucking’ hated me?” A shadow of humor warmed the princess’s gaze. The left side of her mouth quirked up. Lips that full should be a crime.
“Oh, I do.” Butterflies alighted in Temmi’s stomach, flapping up into her chest cavity. How could any person feel this much? It was unsustainable. “You’re the absolute worst.”
“Go on.” Spie was fully smiling now. Not her cocky grin or practiced publicity mask. A wide, real, goofy smile. It was infectious. Delicious. Intimate.
“Well, in that case, I hate how smug you are. I hate how your hair is always perfect.” Temmi leaned closer as she spoke, her mouth needing to taste Spie’s skin.
“I hate how unafraid you are, how the world seems to vibrate just a little more when you’re in the room, like you lend life to life.
But mostly”—Temmi’s lips hovered so close to Spie’s mouth that she could feel the other woman’s breath flutter against her skin—“I hate the way you look at me like I’m someone worth looking at.
And I hate how you make me feel. The way I’m quite certain you could ask me to do anything, and I’d do it.
The way I ache for you like I’ve never ached for anyone.
The way life without you could never possibly mean as much.
The way every moment without you in it feels like a loss. ”
She closed her eyes, brushed her lips softly, faintly, against Spie’s. Pulled back. “And I hate that you’ve shown me something I can never actually have.”
“Artemis,” Spie breathed, half-moan, full plea.
Temmi’s name in Spie’s mouth was longing incarnate. It matched the ache in Temmi’s own chest, the one that said kissing Spie was the medicine she needed but also the drug she would never be able to kick.
She kissed her anyway. Slow and deep and long. A communion of bodies from different solar systems, universes apart, trying to find something unattainable in each other. Something that soothed the ache of a broken world, a breaking heart. Something that felt like home.
The kiss held the bittersweet taste of goodbye.
Temmi couldn’t say who ended it first or if they both parted at the same time to lean their foreheads together. Let their breath mingle for a moment, become one organism.
“I have to go,” Spie whispered. “I have to marry Arbora. I have to appease my mother long enough to succeed her—or usurp her. I don’t think—”
“I’m never going to see you again, am I?” Tears pricked at Temmi’s eyes, blurred her vision, distorted Spie’s perfect features.
“Not if you want to live.” Spie pulled back and gently placed both her palms along the sides of Temmi’s face.
Held her there. “And I want you to live. I need you to live. But there’s something else—it’s about Ollie.
Right after your arrest, I asked my accountant to transfer two million credits into his account, but it came back with an error.
I don’t know why—I can’t go through my regular channels to check.
It’s too dangerous for me to seem like I care.
And my less-conventional contacts don’t have any reach in the X-er System.
“I’ll keep looking as well as I can, but—you should be aware.
You deserve to get your family out, to take them somewhere with birds.
I’m hoping Arbora’s collective can help you—I’ll donate whatever funds they need to that end.
Wash the money through Arbora as an engagement gift.
And once you’re safe, go invent a thousand contraptions that better humanity.
Meet someone else. Fall in love. But mostly, live. ”
Temmi closed her eyes. Swallowed against the anvil in her throat. Of course her family was in danger. Of fucking course.
Could she never just rest?
“I’m going to get my family to safety,” Temmi said—vowed—then lowered her voice to a whisper. “But what if I don’t want a future without you in it?”
Spie’s lips pressed against Temmi’s once more. The kiss was sticky with their mingled tears, their joined breath, their bruised hearts.
“I think I might love you, Artemis Ialan.”
And Temmi, who didn’t believe in love, believed her.
When she opened her eyes, Spie was pulling back, standing up.
“Don’t go. Spie, please. Come with me. We can get my family together. We can see the birds together.”
Spie paused before the hanging curtain. Looked at Temmi with a sadness so heavy, it could’ve felled a mountain.
“It’s time I stopped running away. You’ll never be safe with me around.
And your family will be better served with me on the inside.
But I do hope you’ll remember me whenever you hear birdsong.
” She slid the curtain open and started walking away.
Temmi closed her eyes again, unable to watch Spie leave. The click-clack of her heels grew fainter. The door beyond Temmi’s cubicle croaked open. Arbora said, “Right on time, I was just about to barge in there. Hood on; we need to go.”
The door banged closed.
Wait. No. Temmi stumbled to her feet. “Spie!” she called out, and ran haltingly, barefoot and in an ugly, knee-length gown, across the sterile medical room. But when she reached the door and threw it open to what was a dimly lit tunnel through sweating rock, Spie was already gone.
“I didn’t tell her,” Temmi said, the words tumbling out of her. She leaned against the doorjamb, panting.
Corbin appeared to her right. “Didn’t tell her what?”
Temmi hadn’t even realized he was there. She looked up at him. That I think I might love her too. But aloud, she said, only, “Nothing.”
She’d always believed love wasn’t real. Not in a world of haves and have-nots. Where people like her were marginalized and systemic inequity made equality impossible. But she’d been wrong. Love was still real.
It just wasn’t possible to hold on to.
Temmi slumped to the cement floor. She was crying openly in front of Corbin but found she didn’t care. An excruciating pain excavated her chest, worse than the pain of her mangled arm.
Corbin helped her back to her cot, where she rolled into a ball and continued to weep. She ate a bland dinner of freeze-dried meat and potatoes. Drank sour mineral water. Her tox screen came back clean.
“You ready to meet the boss?” Corbin asked the next morning, handing her a pair of plain grey sweats and a matching sweatshirt. “The whole Cell wants to say hi.”
Temmi wasn’t sure what her future held. What this Freedom Collective wanted from her. Her body hurt and her heart hurt, and her mind was a continuous fog from the painkillers she’d finally been given.
She missed Ollie. Missed her mother. Even missed X72. And she was bone-tired.
But she was a wanted fugitive; she could never go home. Somehow, she’d have to convince the Collective to bring her family to her. Save them before they, too, became victims of the empire.
Carefully, she donned her new clothes, letting the large sweatshirt conceal her bound and slung arm. She asked for Corbin’s help to tie her hair into a manageable queue. His large hands were surprisingly dexterous and gentle.
As he walked her down dark, damp tunnels smelling of brimstone and shot through with veins of quartz, she thought about how far she’d come. Who she’d become.
The most wanted woman in the empire. The poster child for an anti-humanist rebel. A woman who believed in love.
The game she’d spent the past two months playing was over. She hadn’t won. Winning had been impossible. It was time for a new game. One that existed outside the empire’s rules.
A blank steel door appeared before them. Behind it were the people Temmi needed to convince to save her family. There wasn’t anything she wasn’t willing to do, wasn’t willing to burn, to sacrifice, to get Ollie and her mom to safety. To change this world into something better.
“You ready?” Corbin asked, fist raised to knock.
Above them, an incandescent light flickered. Shitty but still sputtering.
“I’m ready,” Temmi answered. A lie and a truth.