#space queers

           The woman looks terrified; she is backing slowly toward a dead end lined with autodumpsters.  There are three men in dark coats closing in on the woman, their body language heavy with threat.  Irena’s mecheyes automatically highlight the sleek, metallic objects in their hands and flash a warning: military-grade plasma projectors.

           She slams the first man’s head against the plascrete siding of the alley’s wall before they even know she is there.  He goes down and does not move.  The other two turn, eyes wide in hard faces.  One of them brings up his projector, sighting in on her, but she takes the distance between them in a single, impossible leap. She lands on his chest, her long locs whipping forward to shroud her face.  He makes an unnatural crunching sound as he hits the pavement – armor beneath his coat, probably.  Irena punches him in the jaw, bouncing his skull against the ground, and he stops moving.

           The last man fires at the woman just as Irena springs at him and closes her hands around his wrist.  She throws his aim off, but the flashing burst of plasma hits the woman in the shoulder, spinning her around and dumping her in a heap in the loose pile of garbage strewn about the end of the alley.

           Irena wants to take her time beating him unconscious, but the woman needs her help.  So Irena sweeps his legs out from under him and kicks him in the face, hard.

           A moment later, Irena is crouched over the target of the erstwhile assailants.  The woman has short red hair, elfin features, pale white skin that suggests Amero-European heritage from back on Earth.  She wears a professional charcoal skirt suit cut in the latest Olympic fashion, hard geometric lines erasing any hint of human softness.  The illusion is shattered by the smoking wound in her shoulder, only partially cauterized by the heat of the plasma bolt.  Her eyes, startlingly blue, are open, but are unfocused.  Irena recognizes shock when she sees it.

           She looks back out at the street, about to tell her integrated comm to call emergency services, but then she catches sight of something: the closest man’s boots.  Steel-toed, vat-grown black leather – and very familiar, very distinctive blue-and-white-striped laces.

           She growls, moving over to him.  She opens his coat, unzips the ferroweave vest beneath, and rips open his shirt.  There it is: tattooed across his left pectoral muscle, a nineteen-digit identification number in dark blue ink.  If the boots weren’t enough, this confirms it.

           These men are cops.

           Two and a half hours later, Irena stands stiffly at attention in the spacious high-rise office of her employer.  Julian Thorne sits at his oversized mahogany desk, his wrinkled face scrunched up in an expression of irritation.  Irena keeps her gaze fixed slightly above and to the left of his head, which means she is looking out the panoramic window behind him. Olympic City stretches out below them, hundreds of silver spires glittering in the harsh rays of Martian sunlight, which are only slightly diffused by the diamond-lattice environment dome.  Rising above the dome and visible to Irena’s left, Olympus Mons cradles the city in its western slope, a vast expanse of reddish rock that goes higher than the window will allow her to see.

           “Just to be clear, Security Chief Mtukudzi,” Thorne says.  He only uses her title and last name when he is angry; those times tend to be rare, but memorable.  “You saw a woman being cornered by armed men.  I understand the desire to intervene.  But why did you not call the authorities and report the situation, instead of leaping into action and beating the shit out of the aforementioned armed men?”

           Irena takes a careful breath.  Thorne, as befits a man of his station, has a top-of-the-line social aug; if she lies to him, the mechanisms embedded in his head will pick up the slight increase in her heart rate, the minute excitation of body hair caused by rising blood pressure pushing cells toward the surface. Even she can’t control these autonomous reactions.

           But she certainly can massage the truth away from the blunt statement she wants to make, which is, because I wanted to.

           “Because,” Irena says, “if I had waited for the OCPD to arrive, the woman in question would be dead and her assailants might be trying to eliminate me as a witness.  I took decisive action to preserve her life and my own.  Afterward, it became apparent that if I had called them and she ended up in their custody, she might not have survived.”

           “Yes, of course.  Decisive action.  Indeed.” Thorne’s thin, dark lips twist in a grimace.  “Answer a question for me, please.  What, precisely, is the nature of your job at my company?”

           “I am responsible for the protection of all Thorne Co. assets, whether personnel or materiel, and –”

           “More basic.  Boil it down.  What do I pay you to do for me?”

           Irena purses her lips.  She knows the answer he wants, and she doesn’t really want to give it, but the best way through one of his quiet rages is forward, rather than lateral.  “You pay me to minimize risks and losses for your company.”

           “That’s right.  Did the actions you took last night do those things?”

           “Quite the opposite.”

           “So you can understand my frustration.”

           That doesn’t call for a response, so she doesn’t give one.  Thorne eyes her for a few more moments, letting the tense silence drag out.  “Do you think there were any cams?” he finally asks.  “Either in the alley, out in the street, or on the men you attacked?”

           “I swept the area as I was bringing the woman in for medical treatment and detected nothing of the sort.  I suspect the cops were not using any recording equipment, integrated or otherwise, because they knew better than to make any kind of record of a hit.”

           “Did any of them get a good look at you?”

           “One of them may have.  The other two I dispatched quickly enough that I doubt it. But I concussed him severely, it was dark, and my locs hid most of my face.”

           Thorne gives her a hard look.  “They’ll fix the concussion with nanosurgery in a matter of hours, Mtukudzi.  At which point, he will most definitely remember a dark-skinned killer cyborg with green mecheyes and dreadlocks beating the bejesus out of him and his friends. He won’t need to have seen your fucking face.”

           Breaking her at-attention stance, Irena tosses her head to the side, letting her locs settle over one shoulder, and crosses her arms. “For the record, I agree with you. But answer me this: When you go home tonight and tell your husband about what I did, will you say that I did a wrong thing, or a stupid thing?”

           Thorne leans back in his plush chair and rubs the bridge of his nose with a gnarled hand, thinking.  “Low blow,” he finally says.  “Bringing Stjepan into this.”

           Irena shrugs.  “He would agree with me.”

           “You will be the death of me one day, woman.” Thorne places his hands flat on the desk, a kind of weary finality in the gesture.  “Why did you do it, Irena?  I mean, really.  What were you hoping to get out of this situation?”

           Feeling the muscles in her jaw clench as she considers the question, Irena finally asks him, “Do you remember when you first approached me for a position with your company?  You offered me a very large sum of money to make unspecified problems go away for you.”

           “I did,” he acknowledges.

           “My counter-offer was what I do now.  I keep problems from happening, rather than going out and surgically removing them.  I don’t know if there’s a true moral difference – I have still killed a fair number of people for you, in my line of work – but I feel better knowing all of them fired first, when it would not have been like that if I were a ‘troubleshooter.’”

           Thorne nods.  “Go on.”

           “When I saw this woman in that alley,” Irena says, “I saw a problem being removed by troubleshooters.  I realized it could easily have been me advancing on her with a drawn weapon.  It could also have been me in her place, and I know I don’t need to tell you why.  The only difference between those men and me is a job title and a vestigial conscience. And I didn’t like that.”  She takes a deep breath, preparing herself to say something embarrassing.  “I suppose I wanted, for once, to do something unambiguously heroic.”

           Thorne gives a carefully calculated half-shrug which says nothing in particular.  He rises from his seat and makes his way to an apparently blank wall.  He waves his hand in front of it and a seam opens, revealing an elevator.  “Well, what’s done is done and you have managed to weasel your way out of apologizing for it.  If we’re playing at altruism today, shall we go see the damsel in distress?”

           Much to her own surprise, Irena feels heat rising to her cheeks.  Thorne notices, of course – his social aug will be telling him it’s happening, even if he isn’t looking at her.  But he remains tactfully silent, awaiting her cue.

           “After you,” she says.

           The medcenter is blindingly, perfectly white. It is almost surprising to encounter actual human beings in such a sterile space.  The techs direct Irena and Thorne to the bio bed where the woman is currently resting.  Her retinas and prints apparently belong to one Madeleine Duvier.  No priors, no outstanding warrants, at least not in the systems Thorne has had Irena spend the time and money hacking into.

           As they approach, she opens her eyes.  She gives each of them a long look before saying, “I really am feeling better.  If you need me to go, I can.”  Her voice is of middling pitch, her words quiet.  Even lying relatively still, she exudes waves of nervous energy.

           Irena and Thorne exchange a glance.  “You are not going anywhere,” Thorne says.  “You are in need of help, young lady, and we are here to provide it.”

           Madeleine’s delicately sculpted brows wrinkle in an uncomprehending frown.  “Sorry? I’m afraid I don’t speak… whatever language that was.”

           They exchange another glance.  “I said you aren’t going anywhere because you need help and we can give it to you,” Thorne tells her.  Irena’s social aug flashes a notification in her visual field that he has switched to Martian English from his usual Old Russian.  Irena knows he only speaks that now-dead language because it pleases him, in a perverse, rebellious way.  His ancestors were neo-Soviet royalty, before nationalities and nobles became obsolete, and he likes to be reminded of it.  Too, anyone important enough for him to talk to will almost undoubtedly have a social aug for translation.

           “Was your social augmentation damaged during the attack?” Irena asks.

           “I don’t have a social aug,” Madeleine says. Even if Irena’s social aug were not informing her of Madeleine’s blush, subtly highlighting the changing color of the other woman’s cheeks, it would be extremely evident – Madeleine is both pale and dressed in a white medcenter gown.  “I’m… stock.”

           Thorne does not bother to hide his surprise. “Stock?  I truly did not think anybody in Olympic City was stock anymore, excepting newborns and Puritanicals.”

           “My parents were Puritanicals,” Madeleine confirms, sitting up in bed.  “I’m not, but since they didn’t have my genome sequenced and given the usual once-over for abnormalities, I have a violent hereditary rejection response to most glial bonding agents.  And I can’t afford the gene therapy to fix it.”

           “I see,” Throne says.  “Well.  I’m afraid I have been rude.  My apologies.  I am Mr. Julian Thorne, and at the moment I am your host.  I must confess I have you at a disadvantage, as my people have told me you are Madeleine Duvier.  What do you do for a living, Mx. Duvier?”

           “Ms. is fine,” Madeleine tells him.  “I’m an executive secretary for the Governor’s office, specifically for Vice-Governor Greene.  Or at least I was until yesterday.”

           “I sense a sad story,” Thorne says, sitting down beside the bed.  Irena remains standing.  “If you’d be willing to extend us your trust, I’d like to hear it.”

           Madeleine gives him an appraising look, then turns to Irena.  She has to crane her neck slightly to make eye contact; Irena is more than two meters tall, after all.  “Before all of that, I think I should thank you for what you did, Mx…?”

           Irena inclines her head.  “You’re welcome.  And I am Ms. Irena Mtukudzi.”

           “Thank you, Ms. Mtukudzi.” She returns her attention to Thorne.  “It might not be a surprise to you,” Madeleine says, “but being stock isn’t exactly a blessing in most lines of work.  I get by without augs, though.  Occasionally someone comes in speaking a language I don’t know, like you, and I just pull out my unintegrated comm for translation and say my social aug is on the fritz.

           “So, I was with the Governor’s office for two years, no issues.  Vice-Governor Greene seemed like a decent enough man, at least for a politician. But then it came out in a conversation with a coworker of mine that – well, that I’m stock.  And somehow this information reached his ears. Apparently…”  She trails off for a moment, jaw working.  Then she continues, her voice tight, “Vice-Governor Greene is – no, he has a… fixation.  On stock people.”

           Confused, Irena looks from her to Thorne.  She can see the light come on behind Thorne’s eyes a moment later, which is good, because she has no idea what Madeleine means. “He’s a stock fetishist,” Thorne says.

           “Yes,” Madeleine confirms.  “He started making advances.  Subtle ones at first, but they got increasingly brazen as I continued to find ways to misunderstand or ignore them.  It came to a head the day before yesterday, when he basically demanded I come into his office for a performance review and then tried to make me have sex with him on his desk.  That was when it became clear he was interested because he’d heard I’m stock.” She shudders.  “I told him to go to hell, and that I would be applying for a transfer to another office, and that if he ever spoke to me unprofessionally or touched me again I would go straight to the Olympic Times and tell them everything he’d done.”

           “Did he threaten you in return?” Thorne asks.

           “He started to.  Said I had no proof, that there was no way for me to have records of any of it because I’m stock.  I told him I did indeed have records, of all of it, because I may be stock but I’m not an idiot.  You remember that unintegrated comm I mentioned earlier?”

           “Of course,” Irena says.  “You kept records on that.  Did he offer money to keep you quiet?”

           “Yes, offers I turned down.  I don’t want hush money, I just want to work somewhere I’m not sexually harassed.  And especially where I’m not subjected to poor treatment because of a decision my fucking parents made for me before I was born.”

           Irena feels the familiar twisting sensation in her stomach.  Memories, ones she has tried her best to ignore, stir and thrust themselves to the foreground of her mind.  Cold glass, needles, destiny.  Running away.  Being caught. The dark.

           With an effort, she shoves it away.  She becomes aware that Thorne is looking at her. “I’m sorry,” she says.  “Did you say something?”

           “I did,” Thorne replies, no hint of censure in his tone.  “As did Ms. Duvier.”

           “I just said that I thought that was the end of it,” Madeleine says.  “Until I was walking home yesterday and those three came out of nowhere.  And I was only out at that time of night because the Vice-Governor asked me to work late.  To ‘take care of a few things before my transfer.’”

           Irena grimaces.  “Then he is certainly complicit.”

           Madeleine shakes her head.  “I don’t understand how he could have arranged this, though.  He’s a glorified button-pusher.  The Governor has all the real power.”

           “You underestimate the abilities of hungry men with ambitions and connections, my dear,” Thorne says.  “The Vice Governor could be involved in any number of shady dealings, ones which might include officials in our less-than-sterling police force.  Such officials might be willing to send men to do an unpleasant job as a favor to the Vice-Governor.”

           “You mentioned your unintegrated comm, Ms. Duvier,” Irena adds.  “It was not in your possessions when our techs prepared you for nanosurgery on your wound.  Is it at your home?”

           “No.  It’s in a safety-deposit box at the Olympic First Bank off of Fifteenth and Baird, under the name of a friend of mine who left me their keycode when they moved offworld. I put it there as soon as I got out of the office the day before yesterday.  The box will only take my biometrics.  Nobody but me can open it.”

           “The solution to this difficulty seems obvious, then,” Thorne says.  “Retrieve the unintegrated comm, take it to the Olympic Times, and blow the whistle on the Vice-Governor.  It’s an election year, and even if Governor Shido is involved in these less-than-legal goings-on, he’ll want to act against Greene to preserve his image in the press if the Times comes forward with allegations and proof.  Irena, I want you to accompany Ms. Duvier.”

           That surprises her.  Irena whips her head around to stare at Thorne.  “Twenty minutes ago you were berating me for getting involved,” she says, not caring that the accusation will make him look bad in front of their guest.

           He crosses his arms.  “Yes, I was.  But you are involved now, and I trust you to see this through to the end.  Do you need additional resources from me?”

           “No.  In fact, it is best that I do this myself.  Plausible deniability.”

           Madeleine looks up at Irena.  “I can’t ask you to do this.”

           Irena gives her a thin smile.  “You don’t have to.  I’ll be back.”

           Irena leaves Madeleine to sleep for a few more hours. There are preparations to make before the other woman is ready to retrieve the comm, and there was already no sleep this night for her.

           First she scopes out the Olympic First Bank at Fifteenth and Baird.  There isn’t any OCPD presence she can detect, obvious or otherwise, just the bank’s own private security.  Next, she makes other arrangements – one with a friend of hers, for a little extra protection, and another by herself, to secure an alternate route in case the streets become unsafe.

           When she returns some five hours later, she has Madeleine discharged, and they head out into the streets of Olympic City. Irena wears her usual long duster, combat jumpsuit, and ass-kicking boots.  She could try to be less conspicuous, but even though she has no visible mechanized augmentations apart from her eyes – no metal limbs or brightly gleaming dermal plates, for instance – there is no way to minimize her presence in the street.  Tall, bristling with whipcord muscle, she has learned to lean into the first impression of danger she generates.  She requisitioned a similar outfit for Madeleine, wanting the woman to have a little more protection than a skirt suit in case things go south.

           “We are about forty minutes from the bank,” Irena tells her, casually doing a sweep of the area as they proceed down the pedway. Groundcars rumble past, the sound of their wheels scraping over the pavement louder than their lossless fusion engines.  It is late morning now, and the streets are beginning to become crowded again as people to go early lunches or start their shifts at work.

           “Do you want to hail a skycab?” Madeleine asks.

           “No.  Any vehicle we get into could be a trap.  We stay on foot, and if we’re engaged, we flee on foot.  We only use a vehicle as a last resort.”

           “Okay, got it.”  Madeleine looks nervous, but doesn’t argue.  They walk in silence for a few more minutes before she speaks again. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

           “Yes.  I may not answer, but go ahead.”

           Madeleine gestures expansively at her.  “You’re obviously highly augmented and genengineered. I’ve never seen anyone move like you. Not cops, not private security. Nobody.  I can’t imagine your mods are HERCA-legal.  Are you ex-military?”

           Irena purses her lips and considers her answer. She has already said she may not answer, so she can just tell Madeleine it is none of her business.  But she has learned quite a bit about Madeleine this morning, and part of her feels that there is a scale which needs balancing.  “Do you know what an ascension cult is?”

           “Radical transhumanist types, right?  Living outside the Coalition government? Illegal hive-minds, AI fusion, extreme genengineering, full-body cyborgification, that kind of thing?”

           “Yes. My parents belonged to the Church of St. Joan.  They were an ascension cult based off of Titan.  They rejected mechanical augmentation in favor of pure genetic engineering.  Their vision was of human reproduction unmoored from the vagaries of sexual congress, and children of incredible genetic potential as a result of that reproduction.  I was the First Child of the Church.”

           “You were a tubie?”

           “In a word, yes.  I have six different biological parents and my genes have been edited to the point that I am not strictly homo sapiens.  My estimated natural lifespan is three hundred years.  I am immune to ninety-five percent of known diseases.  I sleep only two hours a night and can turn my senses on and off at will, or choose specific stimuli to edit out of my perception.  I have perfect visual retention, superior strength, stamina, and speed…”  She shrugs.  “I even have a superior sense of smell.  I could go on, but suffice it to say I am the Church’s idea of the ultimate human being.”

           “So why are you here and not being worshipped on Titan?”

           “I disagreed with my parents’ plans for my future. I ran away.  And I would prefer not to discuss the details.”

           “Got it.  So you’re not HERCA-legal.”

           “No, I’m not.  But my family viewed the Human Evolution Restriction and Control Act as the greatest misstep of the last hundred years.  And existing with these modifications isn’t in itself illegal, just conspiring to make them.”

           “They still can’t have made your life easy in the Coalition.  Especially with the OCPD.”

           “No, they haven’t.  I’ve had many unpleasant interactions with the police.”  Irena looks at her companion.  “But then again, I don’t think any of what I’ve experienced quite ranks with an attempted assassination by undercover officers.”

           Madeleine manages to crack a weak smile.  “I guess that was pretty extreme.”

           “What about you?” Irena asks.  “You mentioned your parents were Puritanicals.  Old-world Catholic, Zoroastrian Neo-Buddhist, or secular?”

           “Secular,” Madeleine replies.  “A pair of high-minded academics who taught at Olympic University and thought augmentation was stagnating human interaction.  Nobody can lie to anybody anymore, or at least they aren’t supposed to be able to without being caught, and that just didn’t sit right with Mom and Dad.  Sure, the polite thing to do is to leave your aug’s truthtell off when you’re with your friends and family, but the bottom line, according to them, was that even having the option to know distorts communication.  They always thought that the mutability of truth was essential to the human condition. Or some such nonsense.”

           “You don’t seem to agree with their views.”

           “No, I don’t.  All their views amounted to was that, at the end of the day, I can’t lie to anyone, and everyone can still lie to me if they figure out that I don’t have a social aug.  Being stock is… not great.”

           Irena has no idea how to reply to that, so she lets the conversation lapse.  They wend their way through the labyrinthine streets of Olympic City in tense silence for about twenty minutes.  The sun is dimmed by the massive plumes of helium rising from the mining operations within the depths of Olympus Mons; the gas is runoff from the process of extracting the bountiful harvest of rare metals that first brought people to settle here two hundred and fifty years ago.  They arrive at the halfway checkpoint – a spot Irena picked out during her rounds this morning as she plotted their approach to the bank.  It is a small Sino-Martian restaurant whose owner, Zizhuang, owes her a favor.

           They are ushered into the kitchen and from there into a back room where Zizhuang runs illegal, cash-based card games.  He gives Irena a toothy grin, nods at an inconspicuous-looking spot on the wall, and sees himself out.

           Irena taps the wall seven times in a particular rhythm.  She swings open the hidden door which unlocked at her gesture, reaches into the wall safe – the one she bought for Zizhuang – and withdraws a pair of snub-nosed, chrome-plated hand pistols with matching shoulder holsters.  She doffs her duster, puts the holster on, and then tucks her pistol safely away in it.  Once her coat is back on, the weapon is impossible to see.

           She helps Madeleine get into her own holster, then holds out the other pistol for her to take.  She frowns when the other woman just stares at it.  “Is there a problem?”

           “I have never held a gun before in my life,” Madeleine replies.  “I don’t even know what kind this is.”

           “Gauss pistol,” Irena tells her.  “Very simple.  Point it at someone, turn the safety off, and push the trigger.”

           Madeleine swallows.  “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

           “You won’t.  These are loaded with Cripplers.  Unless you put it in someone’s eye, the worst you’ll do is – well. They’re called Cripplers.”

           “How did you get these?  Guns are illegal in Olympic City.”

           “Yes, and these in particular are extremely illegal.  But Zizhuang is a good friend with black market connections.”

           Gingerly taking the gun, Madeleine looks it over. “How does it work?”

           “A magnetized slug is propelled down a miniaturized rail by a series of solenoid coils,” Irena begins, then realizes the question is not an academic one, but practical.  “Oh.  You hold it like this.”  She adjusts Madeleine’s grip on the gun, ignoring the feeling of smooth skin under her fingers – not a sensation she is used to, and it is not the time to get distracted.  “Good.  Flip this switch, and – you see the depression on the back?  Use your thumb.”

           Madeleine lets out an involuntary shriek as she accidentally gives Zizhuang’s back room a new hole in the drywall.  The pistol makes a slight buzzing noise; the impact of the round against the wall is far louder.

           Irena smiles.  “Only use it if I’m taken out and can’t help you.  You really have never fired a gun before?  Never gone to one of the equatorial colonies and rented one at a shooting range?”

           “Some people have never been offworld,” Madeleine says, her tone a bit frosty.  “Some people have never had sex.  I, until today, have never fired a gun.  Would you give someone a hard time for one of those other things?”

           “No,” Irena says, trying and failing to hide her sudden feeling of awkwardness.  “I wouldn’t.”

           Madeleine looks more closely at her.  “Oh.  Oh.  You said – about your parents.  The whole asexual-reproduction thing.  I’m sorry.”

           Attempting to seem cavalier, Irena waves the observation away.  “You had no idea.  Holster that and let’s get moving.”

           They head out the emergency exit, which should trigger an alarm but naturally fails to.  The silence between them is tense as they reemerge onto the broad pedways of Olympic City’s main thoroughfares, Irena’s chosen route for the protection offered by the crowds.  Finally, Madeleine speaks up.  “Look, I am sorry.  I just was flustered and wasn’t thinking.”

           “It’s fine.”  Irena sweeps her gaze over the crowd, still not seeing any telltale lingering stares or obvious tails.

           “Can I ask you another personal question?”

           Irena sighs.  “If I say no, will you ask anyway?”

           “No, I won’t.  I’d respect your choice.”

           “Well, ask.  Again, I can always choose not to answer.”

           Madeleine hesitates, then opens her mouth to speak.

           In that moment, Irena – glancing over her shoulder at Madeleine – sees the glint of metal in the crowd behind her.  Her mecheyes highlight the object, just as they did last night: a military-grade plasma projector.

           Irena shoves Madeleine out of the way of the first burst, narrowly avoiding it herself.  She whips her gauss pistol out of its holster and returns fire, putting a Crippler in the right arm and leg of the grim-faced man who just tried to shoot her – charge? friend? – in the back.  He screams and crumples to the ground, plasma projector skittering along the ’crete.  Five other dark-clothed, grim-looking men within the crowd begin moving in much faster. Irena swears.  If she hadn’t been flustered by the conversation, maybe she would have noticed them earlier –

           “Run,” she says, and gives Madeleine a sharp push into motion.  Fortunately, Madeleine doesn’t ask questions; she just flees in the direction Irena indicated.  Plasma bolts begin howling after them as the pedestrians, realizing that they are in the middle of a shootout, begin to scatter.

           Irena drops two more of their pursuers with shots to the arms and legs.  A plasma bolt slams into her chest, lifts her off her feet, and sends her flying to land hard on her back two meters away.  Her combat jumpsuit absorbs and diffuses most of the thermal energy of the bolt, but it still feels like someone struck her in the sternum with a heavy ball of white-hot metal.  Irena rolls backward up onto her feet, dodges two more bolts, and shoots the third man in the gut, folding him up and leaving him writhing on the pavement.

           The remaining two exchange a glance, then stop their pursuit, fading back.  Madeleine rounds a sharp corner, gasping, and leans hard on the wall until Irena catches up with her.  “Holy shit!” she says, looking at the still-smoldering scorch mark in the center of Irena’s chest.  “Are you okay?”

           “I’ll live,” Irena says shortly.  “They are probably calling for backup.  We need to get to the bank, now.”

           They run, Irena not bothering to conceal her pistol, Madeleine not bothering to draw hers.  For five tense, silent minutes, they bolt through back alleys and side streets, abandoning the now-dubious protection of the thoroughfares for the relative anonymity of paths less traveled.  In the distance, sirens begin to wail, their volume rapidly increasing as they draw nearer.

           “Will the OCPD help us?” Madeleine gasps between panting breaths.  “Can they all be on Greene’s payroll?”

           “I’m not risking it,” Irena tells her, skidding around one last turn and arriving at their destination.  “Come on.”

           They are in an apparent dead-end alley, much like the one from which Irena rescued Madeleine only hours ago.  This one, however, has an access hatch for sewage maintenance tunnels embedded in the pavement.  It opens at Irena’s command; she spent an hour earlier today hacking it, in case they needed an alternate route to the bank.

           The maintenance tunnels are made from plascrete.  Clean, well-lit, and odorless, unlike the sewage lines for which it provides access, this particular tunnel also happens to run in a nearly straight shot to the public park right behind the Olympic First Bank that is their destination.

           “Are we almost there?” Madeleine asks, gasping.

           “The hatch ahead leads out into a park near the bank,” Irena tells her.  “I’ve already rigged it up.  All we need to do is hit this button, and –”

           She presses the RELEASE button on the wall-mounted keypad below the egress hatch.  Nothing happens.

           For a moment she just stares at it, frowning, until she notices something odd: a fingernail-sized black spot on the wall next to it.  It is a bead transceiver, a device capable of receiving and sending messages.

           A smooth, male voice emanates from it even as she looks at it.  “I don’t really know who you are, or why you’re helping Duvier,” the voice says. “You’re good, but you’re too easy to track.  I watched you prepare this backup route for yourself and knew you’d just need a push to want to take it and get off the street.”

           Irena feels an unaccustomed quiver of fear crawl through her guts.  “What do you want?”

           “Duvier,” the man on the other end says.  “Send her up, alone and unarmed, and there’s no problem. Fail to do that, and we have a big problem.”

           “Go to hell,” Irena says before Madeleine can say something, noble or otherwise.

           She can almost hear the man’s shrug.  “Suits me just fine.  I don’t get paid unless I bring Duvier in myself, so I’m not telling the OCPD goons where you are.  I’m just going to keep you bottled in there until you’re in a compliant mood.  Just say ‘please, sir’ to turn this back on. I’ll be looking forward to your call.”

           The transceiver switches off.

           And then, so do the lights.  She is back in the dark.

           There is a voice coming from far away.  Irena cannot understand what it is saying.  She is nine years old again, trapped in her room, and her parents have taken away her eyes.

           She flails, blindly, with her hands, trying to find the familiar landmarks – a bedpost, a nightstand, her body-contouring morphchair.  They have taken everything away.  There is nothing but cold walls.  They have taken her animal friends, her puzzles, her flatscreen terminal.  There is nothing.

           No, there is still something.  A small, rectangular object, many fine leaves of paper enclosed in a thick, hard covering.  The paper is covered in bumps and ridges.  Later, when she asks Father Makoto what it is, he tells her it is the Blue Protestant Reformation Bible – the holy book of the Church of St. Joan, a text she has read and been forced to read many times, a text she cannot help but know by heart – in a kind of writing system called Braille.  Father Makoto tells her she will learn to read again, with this book, and she will not be allowed to leave her room or have any of her things returned until she does so.

           And what happens when I do it? she asks. Will I get my eyes back?

           No, Father Makoto says.  Your eyes are gone.  You forfeited the gift of vision when you set your sights on heresy.

           And she wants to cry, but she cannot.  The tears do not come.  Not anymore.

           She is alone in the dark.

           How long she stays gone, Irena has no idea.  The faint voice from before seems to get closer and closer, slowly but steadily. Finally it begins to be accompanied by a physical sensation – a warm hand on her shoulder, gently shaking her. The dim noises of the voice resolve into words she can understand.

           “Irena?”

           Madeleine, it is Madeleine.  They are doing something, somewhere.  Irena has difficulty remembering what and where. She just remembers seeing Madeleine in trouble and wanting to help.  Feeling that she needed to help.

           “Irena, can you hear me?”

           It is so hard to respond, so very hard, but Irena forces herself to.  “Yes,” she says, the word coming out as a slurred croak, barely recognizable.

           “Irena, it’s Madeleine.  Do you know where you are?  Do you know who you are?”

           “Yes.”  The word is stronger this time, though producing it is still a monumental undertaking.

           Madeleine levers her into a sitting position – no easy feat, given that Irena is ninety kilograms of muscle and subdermal augmentations.  “What happened?  The lights went out, you shrieked, and you went fetal.  I’ve been trying to talk to you for what feels like hours.”

           How can she even begin to explain?  How can she make this woman, this stranger, understand?

           “The dark,” Irena finally forces out.

           “What about the dark?  Are you nyctophobic?”

           Irena manages a shake of her head, her locs making soft bumping sounds as they brush against the plascrete wall behind her. Then she remembers that, in the pitch black, Madeleine will not see the movement.  “No,” she says.  “My eyes. They took my eyes!”  She hears her voice rising in panic and can do nothing to arrest it.

           “Your eyes are fine.  I can see them right now, they’re the only light source in here.”

           Forcing herself to focus, to push through the buzzing noises and mounting terror in her head, Irena realizes she has unconsciously closed off her sensorium to input from her mecheyes.  She had done that before, to block the pain and phantom images.

           When she lets that sense click back on, she sees Madeleine’s face, extremely close to her own, illuminated faintly by the light from Irena’s mecheyes.  The soft green glow barely extends beyond that, but instantly Irena can breathe a little easier.  She can see. Her eyes are fine.  She is not alone in the dark again.

           “Hey,” Madeleine says, obviously recognizing the eye contact.  Irena swallows as she becomes aware of other sensations she had been blocking out – the warmth of Madeleine’s breath on her lips, the feel of Madeleine’s hands on her shoulder and knee.  “Glad you’re back.”

           “Yes,” Irena says, fighting the instinctive urge to try to draw farther away.  It would be both rude and useless, given that there is a plascrete wall up against her back.

           Besides, she cannot deny the closeness is helping her. “I am.”

           “What happened?” Madeleine asks again.

           “The lights went out and I was not ready for it,” Irena tells her.  “It caused a dissociative episode.  I have post-traumatic stress disorder relating to my childhood, and darkness is a trigger for it.”

           “I see.”  Madeleine’s lips quirk in a sympathetic grimace and she gives Irena’s shoulder a squeeze.  She shifts her weight off her feet – she had been crouching in front of Irena – and collapses into a sitting position next to her.  “How long have we been down here?”

           Irena checks her social aug’s internal clock. “Two and a half hours.  I am so sorry.”

           “I’m the one who’s sorry.  You’re only here because you tried to help me.”  Madeline shakes her head, anger twisting her expression. “We should just say that galling phrase the guy told us to use and I’ll go up.  At least that way you won’t be stuck in here any longer.”

           “No,” Irena tells her.  “I can counter whatever he’s done to the computer system controlling this maintenance tunnel.  I just – I needed to be in my right mind to do it.”  She tries to get to her feet and fails, for the first time in as long as she can remember.  Her muscles betray her and she slumps back down into a half-sitting, half-supine position, her arms and legs a quivering, spasming mess.  She swears in a language she doubts Madeleine knows.  “And I need to be able to give battle when the door opens and our captor puts up a fight.”

           “Are you all right?” Madeleine asks.

           “These dissociative episodes can cause desynchronization with the augmented portion of my nervous system,” Irena tells her.  “My brain patterns go so far off of normal that the system registers it as a seizure and shuts itself off to prevent me from hurting myself or others.  Turning it back on is supposed to be done with the assistance of a trained lab crew, an input terminal, and an AI.”

           Madeleine cringes.  “So… we’re fucked?”

           “No.”  Irena begins to concentrate, directing electrical impulses within her own body, something she hasn’t done consciously in years.  “But I do need a few hours to do it myself.”

           Gawking at her, Madeleine doesn’t bother to conceal her shock.  “You can reconnect your nervous system?  Don’t we have literally millions of neurons?”

           “About a hundred billion, actually, with thousands of connections each,” Irena says dryly.  “It’s not that my nervous system is disconnected, but it’s conditioned to operate with the augmented portion active, and that augmented portion is waiting for the proper electrical signals to reactivate it, connection by connection. There are about nine hundred thousand of those.”

           “And you can fix it in a few hours?”

           “I’ve already reactivated about seven thousand of them since you asked me if we were fucked.  I just need time and concentration.”

           Madeleine nods slowly, a smile spreading across her face. “You think we’re going to be okay?”

           “I think our friend upstairs is going to be in for quite a surprise,” Irena tells her.  “He doesn’t know who he’s dealing with.”

           There is little to do while Irena works.  Until her nerves are completely resynchronized, she doesn’t want to try to move, and Madeleine is silent, letting her concentrate. About two hours in, however, she speaks up, so softly Irena almost thinks she’s talking to herself.

           “I did want to say sorry,” Madeleine says. “About what I said before.”

           Trying to ignore the pins and needles in her arms and legs as the process of manual resynchronization continues, Irena asks, “What would that be?”

           “Comparing never firing a gun to never having had sex. I know the whole concept of virginity is ridiculous and old-fashioned, but it was the first thing that came to my mind.  It clearly made you uncomfortable, and I’m sorry for that.”

           Irena cracks a smile.  “We’re trapped in a maintenance tunnel by a mystery man who is going to be doing his best to kill us in about an hour, and this is what’s on your mind?”

           “Of course it is.  Don’t you obsessively replay every social interaction where you’ve committed a faux pas over and over, torturing yourself with it?  I’ve been sitting here with nothing to do for two hours, and eventually you get bored of worrying about death and start worrying if you’ve offended your friend.”

           Irena feels her smile broaden.  “So we’re friends, then?”

           “I would hope so.  At least.”

           “At least?”

           Madeleine is quiet for a long, telling moment. Then, “You’ve never met the right person?”

           Irena feels her heart rate begin to pick up. “No, I haven’t.  I find men uninteresting, and most women think I’m intimidating.”

           She hears Madeleine give a soft laugh.  “Most women are idiots.”

           Sparing the concentration to turn her head, Irena gazes at her in the glow of her own mecheyes.  The soft green light casts Madeleine’s elfin features into stark relief. Her skin, already pale, seems almost translucent.  Irena can see the beat of the other woman’s pulse beneath the flesh of her throat. “Most women?”

           “Look, I get that this is quite literally the worst possible time to be talking about this kind of thing,” Madeleine tells her. “But knowing you’re probably going to die in an hour or less kind of reshuffles priorities, doesn’t it?”

           “I have to confess I’m used to it,” Irena says, trying to sound nonchalant and knowing she’s failing.  “But I can understand how being in this situation for the first time might be an enlightening experience.”

           “Very.  I’ve never been a damsel in distress before.  Apart from being shot, threatened, and about to die, I have to say it’s got its perks.”  Her eyes flit up and down Irena’s body, a lightning glance that begins and ends at her face, and she gives a surprisingly coquettish smile.  “Beautiful, dangerous rescuers, for one.”

           Irena feels the traitorous blush again, so strong that she is irrationally convinced Madeleine can see it through the near-blackness.  “You have me at a disadvantage,” she says, trying desperately to remember what people in these circumstances are supposed to say.  Witty, charming things, mostly, she thinks.  “I’m not used to being flattered.  I don’t know how to respond to it.”

           In her estimation, she thinks she falls short of that particular benchmark, but Madeleine chuckles, a low, pleasant sound. Irena feels goosebumps rise up and down her arms, goosebumps which have nothing to do with her resynchronizing nerves. “I don’t have a social aug, you know,” Madeleine teases her.  “If that was a lie, it was a pretty good one, because I couldn’t tell you one way or the other.”

           “I don’t like to lie,” Irena replies.  “I was only caught lying twice as a child, but the consequences were memorable.”

           She realizes, as soon as she’s said it, that it was precisely the wrong thing to say.  The mood dims as Madeleine’s smile fades.  “I’m sorry for whatever happened to you.  For what it’s worth, I wish I could have helped.  No idea how, just…”  She shrugs, listlessly.  “I just wish.”

           “Thank you.”

           A long silence passes.  Irena reactivates more of her augmented nervous system. Finally, Madeleine speaks again. “What did happen to you?”

           The shock is severe enough that Irena miscalculates one of the nerve impulses and shocks herself.  Her left pinky finger begins to twitch, the flesh on the back of the digit crawling in an unnatural pattern.  She instantly compensates and gets control back, hiding the brief flash of pain from Madeleine.  “It’s not something I talk about,” she says.  “With anyone.”

           “I’m not just ‘anyone,’ am I?”

           Irena opens her mouth to issue a flat denial, but the words stick in her throat.  True, she has only known Madeleine for less than a day, but she isn’t wrong.  She is no longer just anyone.  No one, not Julian Thorne, not the few coworkers and subordinates she trusts enough to consider friends, no one has seen her brought so low by a simple change in the lights.  And yet, instead of thinking that she’s pathetic, or useless, Madeleine has been – sympathetic.  Understanding.  Irena realizes the exigency of the situation has, against all odds, not diminished Madeleine’s opinion of her.

           “The truth,” she says, slowly and carefully, “is that talking about it may upset me enough that I miss a crucial nerve connection or make a cascading miscalculation.  I need my focus if we’re going to get out of here alive.  So I will make you a promise: after this is over, if we’re still both standing, I will tell you.”

           “Okay,” Madeleine says, equally grave.  “I’ll hold you to that.”

           With renewed focus, Irena finishes reactivating her augmented nervous system in record time.  She climbs to her feet, tests her dexterity with some stretches, some simple katas from a few of the many martial arts she has learned since striking out on her own.  She turns to Madeleine, nods.  But before she can speak, Madeleine makes a shushing gesture, grabs her hand, and drags her over to the opposite side of the tunnel, where they first entered.

           “What?” Irena asks.

           “I have a plan,” Madeleine says.

           Eight minutes later, Irena watches the distaste on Madeleine’s face as she says, “Please, sir,” to the transceiver.

           The smooth, male voice returns.  “Took you long enough.  Starting to get thirsty?  Maybe needing to use the ladies’ room?”

           “I’m coming up,” Madeleine says.  “Open the hatch.”

           “Right,” their captor laughs.  “Unarmed, just you, your friend stays down there and finds her own way out?”

           “That’s the deal.”

           “I warn you that if you try anything stupid you’ll regret it.  There might be a way for you to come out of this alive, but not if you fuck with me.”

           “I hear you,” Madeleine says.  “Open the damn hatch.”  She looks at Irena, nods, and winks.

           The hatch hisses open, and Madeleine slowly climbs out.

           Irena sprints.  She runs faster than she ever has in her life.

           The plan is quite simple, if multi-layered. They spent the time at the other end of the tunnel productively, Irena hacking the hatch there to open on the same signal as the park exit.  It was the only way to avoid the watchdog AI their enemy had set up around the programming of the park hatch, and the only way for Irena to also gain her freedom from the maintenance tunnel.

           She erupts back out into the alley, a single augmented leap taking her three meters straight up out of her dark prison.  The renewed sunlight would dazzle any other person, but her mecheyes adjust automatically, apertures retreating in a fraction of a second.

           Irena tears out of the alley, back along the pedways, heading full-tilt for the direction of the bank.  The fastest she has ever clocked herself was forty-five kilometers an hour.  She hits fifty as she half-runs, half-leaps down the pedway, plascrete cracking with the force of each of her footfalls.  She clears the two hundred and eighty-nine meters of complicated city travel from the alley to the park in less than twenty-one seconds.  Her eyes scan the surroundings as she slows to a manageable speed: evergreens and grasses genengineered to grow in Martial soil, pedestrians picnicking or out for a stroll – there.

           Madeleine is fifteen meters away, being roughly escorted by a heavily-modified, male-presenting cyborg.  All of his limbs are obvious chrome, and his eyes are hidden behind a reflective polymer visor built into the front of his skull.  There is a strange blurriness to his features – some kind of distortion field, perhaps.

           He hears Irena coming, of course.  She can see his lips distort in a swear, the casual, brutal ease of the way he throws Madeleine to the ground as he turns to confront Irena.  But she has fought men like this and won, many times.  The gauss pistol is already in her hand.  She snaps it up and fires –

           He disappears.  One moment he is standing there, and the next he is gone, as though he were jump-cut out of existence.  Irena gapes as her Cripplers sail through the spot he occupied only a second ago, embedding themselves in the trunk of a tree in a spray of pulped wood.

           Something slams into her hand, sending the gauss pistol flying.  Something else crashes into Irena’s chest, right where she was struck by the plasma bolt. She feels a rib give way under the impact.  The force of the strike slams her onto her side, legs spilling up out of the access hatch. She tries to roll with the impact, scrambling back to her feet, and is just in time to see a nigh-invisible blur rush at her.

           The next attack, her opponent still invisible, cracks against the side of her head.  Frantically, she switches her mecheyes from the normal human-visible spectrum to infrared, then ultraviolet, then even x-ray, but their enemy is wearing a wraithshroud, the tech more bleeding-edge than anything Irena has ever seen.  His emissions are almost perfectly masked, all but undetectable in every spectrum. For a hired gun to have access to this kind of technology, Vice-Governor Greene must have some serious connections.

           She takes another punch to the chest and feels the breath explode from her lungs.  As she tries to suck in enough air to keep herself going, to retaliate, the faint blur seems to levitate a meter into the air.  She realizes her opponent is leaping up into a spinning kick when the toe of his boot makes contact with her skull, just behind her left ear.

           Everything goes pitch black.

           It seems that she is there, alone, in the dark, for ages.  But it must have only been a few seconds, because Irena hears Madeleine’s voice again. “Wherever you are, just – shoot me, take me, do whatever you want.  Just leave her.  She’s nobody, I just hired her to get me here.  Just let her go and I’ll cooperate.”

           For a long, terrible instant, Irena is tempted to stay in the dark, to let Madeleine go.  The words hurt, after all.  But then she comes to her senses.  Madeleine is trying to play for time.  The woman who helped her through the dark down in that tunnel would not abandon her now.

           Irena Matsuo Mtukudzi gets to her feet.  She does not open her eyes.  The dark is still all around her, but Madeleine’s voice, her presence, has cut through it.  She has reminded Irena that the dark is weak.  She has conquered it once before.

           And she will do it again.

           “I’m not done yet,” Irena says.  “And –” she takes a gamble, based on this man’s insulting, patronizing egotism – “maybe this time you can try not to hit like a girl.”

           The crunch of boots in grass stops short. There is a distinctive scrape, the sound of someone turning without lifting their feet.  Irena keeps her eyes closed and moves in.

           She phases out the distant wail of sirens, the shocked outcries of pedestrians, the barking of the dogs.  All she hears is the whisper of air being cut by scything limbs, the ragged, human sounds of breathing, the telltale rustling of grass and dirt underfoot.  Angry, pride injured, her opponent overextends, tries for a wild haymaker to her jaw.  She fades to one side, catches his arm between her own.  Through the thin nanofiber of the wraithshroud, which rasps against her skin like cold, liquid silk, she can feel the hard, inhuman lines of one of his full-replacement bionic arm.

           So she plants her feet, locks her arms around his limb, and tears it out of his shoulder socket with one violent, twisting wrench.

           He screams.  She opens her eyes, sees him staggering away from her.  His entire body, from head to feet, is covered in what looks like a thin coat of plastic – the wraithshroud, its camouflage shorted out. That explains the visual distortion she detected earlier.  Where Irena tore his arm from his shoulder, sparks fly, and thick, dark lubricant seeps.  The wraithshroud has been torn in a jagged line.

           Irena readies herself to go another round with the man.  She is bleeding internally, even her hyper-specialized body not immune to the simple realities of ruptured organs from blows with metal fists.  If he gets in another good hit, he may well kill her.

           But Madeleine, who is standing behind him, now totally forgotten by him, has other ideas.  Executing her part of the plan, she pulls out the gauss pistol hidden at the small of her back, takes aim at his back, and pumps twelve Cripplers into his torso.  

           He staggers.  Even that doesn’t put him down completely – Irena estimates there is less than twenty-five percent of his actual, human body left.  But he collapses to one knee, gasping, and cranes his neck around to stare at Madeleine.  “You,” he rasps, “were supposed to be unarmed.”

           “We certainly said we were going to send me up unarmed, didn’t we?” Madeleine asks.  “We said it quite loudly, right next to that transceiver that you’d supposedly turned off.  Didn’t we, Irena?”

           “Yes we did, Madeleine,” Irena replies, enjoying the look of dawning realization on her opponent’s face.  “Someone isn’t as clever as they think they are.”

           He snarls up at her.  “You fucking b-”

           Irena grasps his severed limb firmly by the wrist and hits him over the head with the other end.

           He drops, unconscious, to the grass.

           Eighteen whirlwind hours later, for the second time in as many days, Irena finds herself in Julian Thorne’s office.  Her chest is encased in a pressure bandage to keep her three broken ribs from shifting while they heal, and there is a cortical monitor affixed to her left temple to track the nanosurgical correction of her concussion. But she is on some good painkillers and is flush with a feeling of accomplishment, so in the final analysis she decides things are not too bad.

           She glances to her right, at where Madeleine sits, and thinks that things might, perhaps, even be said to be good.

           “Well,” Thorne says, looking up from the datafeed embedded in the surface of his desk.  “Vice-Governor Greene has been arrested by Coalition authorities.  So have a number of OCPD officers in his unofficial employ, as well as a one-armed, extremely angry cyborg mercenary wanted on six planets for murder, grand larceny, and dozens of other charges.  Apparently the DA has been sitting on a mountain of circumstantial evidence about Greene’s less-than-reputable business dealings and has just been waiting for a charge to pin on him.  Conspiracy to commit murder is certainly a juicy one.  They brought an entire assault ship of Praetorian Guards in from Earth just for him and his co-conspirators.”

           Irena feels her eyes widen slightly in shock. “They don’t do that for just anyone.”

           “No, they do not.  He has been, to put it mildly, a very bad boy.  Governor Shido is cooperating fully with the Praetorians’ investigation.  I expect he’s hoping to dodge any Senate hearings back on Earth by making his innocence clear.”  Thorne turns to Madeleine.  “I expect, Ms. Duvier, that you were targeted for death because you threatened to tell the press ‘everything he’d done.’  You only meant the harassment, but…”  He shrugs eloquently.  “Crime makes men paranoid.”

           “Fuck,” Madeleine murmurs with a small shake of her head.

           Thorne leans back, steepling his fingers.  “This is going to dominate the news cycle.  If it’s all the same to you, Irena, I’d prefer you to decline any interview requests.”

           Irena nods.  “A good chief of security should be invisible.  I never will be, but I can at least keep a low profile.”

           “Thank you.”  Thorne makes a show of checking his ridiculous antique watch.  “Well, I believe I have a meeting with the board. Feel free to sit a spell and talk, if you like.  Just see yourselves out when you’re done.  And Ms. Duvier, I will expect your resume on my desk by noon tomorrow.  If we’re going to find you a job here, I’ll need to know what you can do.”  He grins. “Apart from being very clever and shooting a man in the back.”

           Madeleine blushes fiercely, but nods.  Thorne gives her an exaggerated wink and ambles out of his office.

           “I wanted to thank you,” Irena says, before Madeleine can speak.

           “Oh?”

           “Yes.  You helped me through the dark, and didn’t leave.  I – I do not have the words to express how grateful I am for that.”

           “And I don’t have the words to tell you how grateful I am.  For my life.”  Madeleine tentatively reaches out and takes Irena’s hand in her own.  “Why did you help, anyway?  It wasn’t just because Mr. Thorne told you to.  You made a decision when you saw me in the alley.  What was it?”

           Irena takes a moment to find the proper words. “I think I can explain by keeping my earlier promise to you.”

           “Telling me about your childhood?”

           “Yes.  I told you before about the Church, that I ran away.  That is true.  What I did not tell you is that they caught me, during my first attempt.  And in order to ensure I did not escape a second time, they burned out my eyes.  They blinded me.  I was nine years old.”

           Madeleine swears, softly, and squeezes Irena’s hand. “That’s horrible.  I am so sorry.”            “Thank you.  I did escape, though, on my second attempt.  And yesterday, when I saw you in the alley, I saw myself.  Alone, in the dark, surrounded by people who were going to hurt me.  I suppose I thought that if I could save you…”  Irena shrugs, trailing off.  

           “I think I understand,” Madeleine says.

           Irena looks down at Madeleine’s small, soft hand, almost half the size of her own, and clears her throat.  “So.  Would you like me to arrange a car to take you back to your apartment?”

           “Only,” Madeleine says, “if you’re in the car with me.”

           The traitorous blush starts rising in Irena’s cheeks again.  “I –”

           “You said that most women find you intimidating. I said most women are idiots.  I wasn’t just making small talk.” Madeleine gets to her feet.  “I just survived a crooked politician trying to have me murdered, so I’ll be damned if I let myself get cold feet about this.  I’ve already said I think you’re beautiful, and I have since the second I woke up and saw you standing at the side of my bed.  You’re also my hero, and deserve a little worship.  Come home with me, I’ll make you some herbal tea for your aches, and we’ll see if we can find a movie we both like.  How does that sound?”

           Irena swallows.  It is utterly absurd, but at this moment she is more petrified than she was when staring death in the face.

           She remembers Madeleine’s voice, cutting through the dark.  She remembers her face, illuminated in the light of her eyes.  And, just now – you’re also my hero.

           “That sounds lovely,” Irena says.  Still holdings hands, they leave the office together.