Twenty-Seven #2
Dafyd pushed his annoyance away and smiled. Brun was his Tonner now. “Of course. What’s on your mind?”
He didn’t stop walking. If Brun wanted a meeting, he could have it on the go.
“I’m in charge of the workgroup now,” Brun said. “And, ah, I’ve been talking to the team. The whole team. Everyone’s pretty shook up about Tonner.”
“It was a shock,” Dafyd said.
Brun pointed a finger as if he was laying claim to the idea.
“It was. That’s exactly what it was. A shock.
And the thing is that people are still reacting to it, you know?
We have to keep the work going. All the work, not just the protein translation thing.
We’ve got all these babies that are getting on toward viability.
And the team, they’re stressed and they’re losing sleep.
There are, like, nightmares about what happened to Tonner. Everyone has them. Even me.”
“I have them too.”
“Good, so you understand why we need you to—” Brun swallowed visibly and looked back over his shoulder at the Rak-hund following in their wake.
He leaned in closer to Dafyd and spoke quietly.
“You understand why we need you to get rid of the aliens. They can’t be around anymore, or there’s going to be a work stoppage. ”
Dafyd first slowed, then halted. Brun stood with his arms at his sides, his face had taken on a grim cast, and Dafyd noticed for the first time how tall the thin man was. “Work stoppage?”
“Tonner was a good guy, but he was always management. He’d never been part of a labor union.
I was, sir. I organized. The team’s been putting up with things, and that’s got to change.
So yeah. We don’t want the big knife-dog fuckers around.
We don’t want a bunch of Soft Lothark in our business.
Our workspace is our workspace, and we have to be safe there, or else we’re not doing it. ”
Dafyd’s smile was disbelief and amazement.
Brun shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s not a joke.
We’ll keep the babies alive, but the grass translation stops.
And once the kids are decanted and breathing their own air, we stop that too.
Either we get our demands met, or we don’t work.
I know it seems extreme, but if we don’t stand up for this kind of thing, it’ll never change. ”
“The Carryx will kill us,” Dafyd said, slowly. “If they think we aren’t useful to them anymore, they’ll just wipe us out.”
“Sure, that’s what they say. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not.
But we are useful to ’em. And that usefulness means there’s leverage.
They want work from us? All right. Here’s what we want from them.
And—all respect, sir—from you. When these alien fuckers are gone, we’ll get back to the job. Not until.”
Brun’s misunderstanding of the situation was so profound it made Dafyd dizzy. Brun lifted his chin and straightened his shoulders, making sure Dafyd knew he meant business. The man had probably been a very good negotiator back in the days before every request was made at the edge of a knife.
“Don’t—” Dafyd started, then paused to swallow the shout he felt boiling up inside. “Don’t do anything right now. Let me talk to the librarian. Let me see what I can do.”
Brun made a soft affirmative sound in the back of his throat. “I’ll talk to the team about it, but I can’t promise how they’ll vote. Do what you can for us, sir. These are good people, but they’re not powerless.”
Brun walked away, head held high like he’d won a battle. Vote. He thought any of them had a vote that mattered. It would be adorably na?ve if it weren’t so dangerous and stupid. Dafyd mentally added work stoppage to his infinite list of potentially existential problems and pushed on.
At Jellit’s door, he motioned the Rak-hund to stand guard and knocked. He heard the sounds of movement on the other side, but Jellit’s voice didn’t come.
“Jellit? It’s me. Are you there? Are you all right?”
A moment of silence. Dafyd put his hand to the latch, unsure whether to push his way in or not. If something had gone wrong, he didn’t want his new guard to know it. But he couldn’t let the spy go without help either… The door opened inward, revealing the room—bed, shower, desk—but not the man.
Dafyd stepped inside, and Else Yannin closed the door behind him.
Her hair was wrong—darker than it had been—and there was something slightly off about her collarbones, but she was Else.
She stepped back, her arms crossed, and tried a smile.
One dimple in her left cheek. Two in her right.
The air in the room went thin as a mountaintop.
Dafyd gulped in great, deep breaths to keep his head from swimming.
“What did you do?” he managed.
“I knew you couldn’t see me. I understand why you couldn’t see me, so—” She gestured at her body, ankles to head and down again. “So I made it so you can. I’ve always been here, Dafyd. Just the same way I was before.”
“Only with Jellit too.”
“Yes. He’s here. The change takes longer than I thought it would, and the energy requirements are… Well, I’ll need to eat second servings for a while. But it can happen.”
“Did anyone see you?” he asked, sinking to sit on the edge of the bed. “You didn’t leave this room, did you?”
“No, not yet. But I thought it through. We can make this work. We just say that the Carryx took me when I looked dead, and reviving me was part of a test they assigned to a different species. They brought me back.”
“From the dead?”
She shrugged. “I wasn’t entirely dead. Or the patterns in my brain hadn’t broken down yet.
I wasn’t rotting, so why not? It’s not true, but it’s not that much stranger than the things that are going on here.
And I’ll be here . Anyone who knows me can ask me anything, and I’ll answer.
If I’m here and there’s a story that explains how I got here, why not? ”
“What about the Carryx?”
“They don’t care,” she said, and stepped toward him.
“We’re a herd of animals, and you’re the one who keeps track for them.
One more or less won’t raise any notice unless you raise it.
And we can say Jellit is working on something in a different part of the world.
I can answer questions for him. And if he needs to make an appearance, all I need is a few days’ warning.
” She put her hand on Dafyd’s shoulder. “We can make this work. It’s not what it was, not quite, but it’s what we can have. ”
Dafyd drew her down to sit by him. The spy reached out to put her arm around him, but he took her wrist and guided it back down to her side. The storm in his mind, never peaceful, was howling. Pulling him in a dozen directions at once. It took time to find the words.
“You do not understand,” he said.
“Tell me,” the thing almost wearing Else’s skin replied with a smile.
“The reason I wouldn’t fuck you isn’t because you looked like Jellit,” he said, keeping the rage out of his voice. “It isn’t even that you didn’t tell me the whole story earlier. I don’t care what you tell me, or what the body you’re wearing looks like.”
The swarm frowned at him, Else’s little crease between its brows, her beautiful mouth curving down. “What, then?”
“The reason this is never going to happen again is that now I know you murdered my friends.”
“Dafyd—”
“We need each other. I know that. But if this wasn’t a war with a common enemy—if I doubted at all that I need you to win this fight—I would be finding a way to burn you down for what you’ve done.”
“They aren’t dead,” she said. “Else isn’t dead. I’m right here. Ask. Ask me anything. It’s me.”
“You aren’t Else. You’re the spy.”
Else lifted her hands in exasperation, just the way she used to do.
It was eerie seeing the gesture again. Recognizing it.
He could smell her, and she smelled like Else.
Her hair tumbled across her shoulders the way it always had, even though the color of the hair and the shape of the collarbones were subtly wrong.
He felt his body responding to her in spite of his revulsion at the idea.
“The swarm doesn’t have a self,” she said. “It isn’t alive . It’s a bunch of machines. It’s a technique. Techniques don’t have selves. Everything I am, everything inside me, is them .”
“And yet you call yourself I .”
Else scowled. “Language isn’t set up for this situation. That’s not my fault.” When he laughed, her expression softened a little. “I don’t know how to show you this any more clearly.”
“You’re not them. Jellit. Else. The other girl.”
“Ameer.”
“Ameer. They weren’t like this. You took something from them. But you aren’t them. They aren’t here. It’s just you.”
“There is no me. There’s only them. I thought you would understand.” She wiped her eyes with the back of one hand, angrily. “I could have taken you too. I could have left Jellit behind and been in your body. I can do that.”
“You won’t.”
“Because I love you.”
“Because you need to stay hidden, and I’m the hardest place to do that,” Dafyd said. He stood up and when the spy reached for his hand, it took everything he had to shove it away.
“Dafyd.”
“Find me when this is fixed,” he said, waving his hand at her new body. “Some things have happened, and we have work to do.”
The swarm sits. It can feel the subtle vibrations of his footsteps as he walks away down the corridor until the cacophony of the Rak-hund’s steps drowns them out.
The pheromone cloud it had filled the room with smells like a party banner ruined by rain.
It breathes in, reclaiming the complex molecules, as it cries.
Stupid , Jellit says . That was so fucking dumb. You should have known that wasn’t going to work. I don’t know which one of us you got the stupid from, but you’re nailing it.