headless space cucumber station must

[[skipped segment]]

“And what’s going to happen to me if I set foot outside that door?”

“Nothing at all. You’re free to leave at any time, if you so wish.” By doesn’t like the way Lotus says it, hearing the sardonic note beneath the boredom. He feels like he’s being laughed at. “Go right ahead.”

There’s nothing for him to do save take her at her word, so he does. He turns, and walks down the hall towards the door.

He’s still expecting some trick when he reaches it: for the door to be locked, or trip-wired, or possibly painted on. It isn’t. It’s a perfectly normal door, not even marked with dire warnings about Alarm will sound when door opened. (He’s not sure why he expects that; it’s not like he’s ever seen another fire exit before. He supposes it’s something like how he knows about what Beta Colony is, for all that he’s never heard of it, either.) The only signage on the door is a little placard reading, Caution: steps may be icy. Looking out through the narrow window over he can see a flight of concrete steps, with a handrail set into the wall and fluorescent strips glowing under each stair. Gray light shines down from somewhere above, and ice glints on some of the steps further up.

Heart hammering, By pushes open the door, and steps through.

And finds his foot coming down back inside the hallway, as if in the moment between lifting his foot and putting it down the entire universe has spun around. Disoriented, he freezes in place, then turns slowly around. The door is there, same as before.

What’s happening to me?

Maybe he’s having a psychotic break. That would explain a lot about this situation, wouldn’t it? People have all sorts of bizarre delusions. Like believing they’re trapped inside an office, or building hideous brutalist buildings, or.

He tries the door again.

And finds himself going through the same world-tilting farce of stepping out and in at the same time, with absolutely no interim that he can recall.

He’s too spooked to make the attempt a third time. He doesn’t understand what’s happening, but there’s no reason to think it would be any different, and he doesn’t like the way it feels, that momentary sensation of falling, everything in him skipping.

He walks back up the hallway to Lotus. “What,” he starts, then stops. His voice comes out shaky. “Why can’t I leave?” What did you do to me?

“Ah, but you did,” Lotus informs him, blandly. “Just now. You left, but you came back.”

“What?” The latent terror is starting to rise in him again; he feels a little like he might be about to start screaming. The psychotic break theory is looking better and better. “I didn’t. Every time I step outside, I’m stepping right back in.”

“Come with me,” Lotus says, cryptically, and leads him once more down the dead white fluorescent hall.

And then she shows him the video.

Lotus leads him into a room with a massive slab-like comconsole desk, and sits down behind it, pointing him into a chair across from her. By sits warily down on the edge of it, and she brings up a vid display in front of him, sitting back with her hands folded as the video starts.

A man By doesn’t recognize sits down in front of the camera. He has beautiful eyes, loosely curling dark hair, and a hint of an ironic smile, which vanishes as he looks over the cards he’s just been handed. He flicks through them once, his expression gone very neutral.

Then he goes back to the beginning of the stack, and begins to read them off.

“My name is By.” The voice hits By like a lightning bolt, riveting his attention. Even hearing it from outside himself, he has no trouble recognizing it as his own. “I’m making this video roughly two hours before it will be shown to me.” The version of him in the video pauses fractionally, then goes on. “I have, of my own free accord, elected to undergo the procedure known colloquially as severance. I give consent for my perceptual chronologies to be surgically split, separating my memories between my work life and my personal life.” By’s stomach sinks further, possibly into his shoes. “I acknowledge that, henceforth, my access to my memories will be spatially dictated. I will be unable to access outside recollections whilst on the basement level of Bharaputra Labs, nor retain work memories upon my ascent.” And then, making that pit of dread inside By tighten into a cold, terrible knot: “I am aware that this alteration is comprehensive and irreversible.

“I make these statements freely.”

The video comes to a stop.

By feels light-headed, cut off at the knees. He did this to himself? That can’t be true. He doesn’t want it to be true.

I give consent. Somewhere inside of himself, some part of him has started to wail. How can he have consented? He wasn’t there! He doesn’t remember existing until an hour ago.

Waveringly, he says, “I—I withdraw my consent.” Shouldn’t he be able to do that? Consent doesn’t mean consent in perpetuity, he’s pretty sure. He can still say “no.” I’m saying ‘no!’ “I want to leave.”

“As we’ve already established, you’re perfectly welcome to walk out of any fire exit on this floor.” Lotus checks her watch. “In fact, I’ll leave you to it. You can have this afternoon to adjust, since it’s your first day. Come back here when it’s time for you to clock out.” She names a time, and flicks up a holo-display over her wristcom, blurred and unreadable from By’s angle of view. “You’ll start work in earnest tomorrow morning, though you’re certainly welcome to begin your primary training sooner.” She gestures back at the empty console. “If you require assistance, press the button on the panel next to the keyboard. But I expect the automated training will suffice.”

And with that she vanishes through the sliding doors and into the elevator, leaving By standing alone in the bright emptiness of the room. The console beeps softly at him, waiting.

He turns, and manages to not quite run back to the emergency exit.

He’s still thinking about the man in the video. Himself, himself on the outside, with all of his memories and the ability to choose this, to trap By in here whether he likes it or not. That version of him had looked terrifyingly calm, signing By’s life away, but—hadn’t he hesitated? By wants to believe that he hesitated. Surely he’ll figure out what By wants if By keeps trying to leave.

But when he gets to the door he stops short, suddenly terrified of trying again. He doesn’t want to go through that dislocating lurch all over again, only to find that his other self still doesn’t get it. No. If his other self is too stupid to figure out what By wants on his own, then surely By just needs to communicate it to him more clearly. In plain language, isn’t that what it’s called?

Shakily, he searches his pockets, and turns up an ink pen. On the back of his hand, he scrawls, I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE! thinking as he does about how the version of him in the video had said comprehensive and irreversible, about how he doesn’t even remember the last two times he stepped outside, about how if he listens to himself this time he’ll be gone. If this is the only place he can exist, then he’s never going to wake up again—but he thinks, blurrily, that he doesn’t mind. His heartbeat is thudding in his own ears, and maybe By shouldn’t be making major life-ending decisions in the middle of having a nervous breakdown, but just now he can’t imagine anything being worse than being trapped for the rest of his life in these sterile hallways, with a hole in his mind and no hope of anything else. He’d rather be dead. He can still make that choice. DON’T GO BACK INSIDE, he writes. I RESIGN.

He shoves the pen back in his pocket, clutches convulsively at the door, and thrusts it open one final time.

+

The third time he winds up standing outside the side exit of Bharaputra’s lab, Byerly starts to get properly worried.

He’d realized the first time he found himself out on the landing that Bharaputra hadn’t been exaggerating about the efficacy of the process: severance really is total. He has no idea what he’s been doing inside that building for the several hours he’s spent there, and the version of him on the inside plainly has no memory of what he’s there for, because if he did he wouldn’t keep walking back out.

Actually, Byerly is pretty sure the version of him on the inside is freaking out, judging from the way his heart is racing as he plunges into the frigid air of the outside. He staggers across the landing at the foot of the stairwell, gasping, the cold burning inside his nose; Jackson’s Whole really is polar all the way around, though Rish claims there’s stretches at the equator that don’t have snow all the time.

God, he misses Vorbarr Sultana.

He grabs at the nearest handrail with his left hand, slipping on the first try from how sweaty his palms are, and sees the words scrawled across the back of his hand.

Well. That’s certainly unambiguous.

Byerly spends a minute or two clinging to the railing, waiting for his pulse and his breathing to even out, leaving him with the dregs of an adrenaline response to an emotional impetus he doesn’t remember. Though he can guess; after everything Bharaputra told him this morning, his severed self’s thought process isn’t that hard to follow. From his perspective he’s trapped there, and doesn’t even remember why. The prospect of never being allowed to leave a single level of a single building is having exactly the same effect on him as it would have on By, because he is By.

Byerly detaches himself from the railing, wipes his sweaty hands on the seams of his trousers, and tucks them under his arms. Hunching against the cold, he stomps a few times around the landing, breath billowing visibly, thinking furiously about what to do.

He hadn’t really believed that the severance worked the way Bharaputra said, not before he’d arrived here in person this morning. After orientation he’d been much less sure, but by then it had been too late. If he’d backed out at the last minute he’d have lost his only chance to get inside, because once Bharaputra knew his face and his voice it was much too late for another approach.

And he needs to get inside, because: Baronette Stella Antonia Dolce Ginevra Lucia Arqua of House Cordonah has been missing for almost three weeks, and all of House Cordonah’s frantic efforts to find her suggest that she’s ended up here, at Vasa Luigi’s remote high-security R&D lab.

Shiv, naturally, had been perfectly willing to simply raze the place to the ground. Say what one might about Clan Arqua’s parenting skills, but Baron Cordonah wouldn’t hesitate to supply a fully-equipped commando strike to extract his eldest daughter from an enemy’s clutches. But Shiv isn’t stupid, even while angry, and By’s alarmed attempt to stay his hand had gained the unexpected support of Pidge—or maybe not so unexpected, considering that she and Star have spent the last year and a half vying for the position of true heir to House Cordonah. Though maybe that’s unfair to Pidge; her points about the risks of starting an all-out war with one of the most powerful Houses on the planet had been much the same ones By had had in mind himself.

Still, it isn’t hard to imagine that she might have more more than one set of pragmatic considerations in mind, some more ruthless than others.

In any event, in the absence of a ransom demand or a good negotiating position finding and extracting Star by stealth had been vastly preferable, and Shiv’s eye had settled decisively on his ImpSec liaison as the best candidate for the job. Byerly would be supplied with a suitable background to apply as an administrative employee at Bharaputra’s laboratory, and would attempt to locate Star from within. She could then be extracted, if not silently, then at least by precision strike. By—stuck between, as it were, the rock of Shiv Arqua and the hard place that was the Emperor’s expectation that he, Byerly Vorrutyer, maintain Barrayar’s secret accord with House Cordonah—had been obliged to agree.

Which was how he’d ended up with a microchip in his brain, sitting in front of a camera some three hours earlier to confirm his willingness to be severed.

After which he’d gone inside, and the other him, the version of him that hadn’t existed until that moment and now exists only inside the lab, had woken up.

Bharaputra’s managers had warned By beforehand that he might find himself outside the building at odd hours with no memory of how he’d come to be there. If that happened, they had advised, he was simply to turn right around and go back inside: no doubt it was due to a miscommunication. The problem usually went away after the first day.

Miscommunication, ha. People on the inside are panicking, and they want out.

All of which has left him with what’s starting to feel like an even more grisly moral dilemma than the sort he’s usually faced with—and, still more immediately, no way to finish the job, because as soon as he sets foot inside the building he forgets about Star, and loses all interest in getting deeper into the complex to find her. Which means he needs to tell himself what he’s there for, and convince him—his other self, his severed self, the who’s obviously scared out of his mind—to get it done.

Coms aren’t permitted inside, if course, and the door scanner would pick up a plastic flimsy, but his severed self has already provided him with the obvious way around that. Byerly pats his pockets, and finds the pen he’d left there that morning.

He grits his teeth against the cold, rucks up his left sleeve, and starts to write.

+

This time is no different. No sooner is By through the door than he’s stumbling back through it, with the strange dislocated feeling of having his heartbeat go from racing to steady to ratcheting right back up. He almost sobs in frustration, eyes stinging with acrid despair.

Except—something is different, this time, because he’s freezing. By gives a full-body shudder, and hunches in on himself, rubbing his upper arms. Was he outside for much longer, this time?

He pries his left hand off his own shoulder to check his chrono, and discovers that a) he’s apparently been outside for at least thirty minutes, and b) in that time he’s inexplicably unbuttoned his sleeve and left it that way, dangling loose.

Diverted from his pent-up panic, he rucks up the sleeve, and finds that someone’s penned an entire letter to him on his arm, in tiny cramped script. The handwriting is exactly the same as his own.

First of all, says the first line, DON’T PANIC.

Too late for that, By thinks glumly, but reads on:

I know Bharaputra told you me us that the process is irreversible, but I’m not sure that’s true. I know some people, and when I’m done here I’ll ask them to help.

By’s heart leaps with hope, despite himself—and crashes just as quickly, because how can anyone help him once they’re done here? He squeezes his eyes shut, inhaling sharply. Once he leaves here, that’s it, as he’s just proven to himself three separate times. The only reason to have hope for the future is if there is a possibility of something else, this obvious carrot on a stick. His other self is probably lying to him. What difference does it make to him if By stops existing? He won’t remember any of this.

Still. The possibility of escape without oblivion, a promise from himself to himself, feels like a spark lit somewhere inside. If there’s a chance, if, if . . .

He takes a deep breath, and opens his eyes to keep reading.

What you need to know right now is, you’re a spy. You’re inside Bharaputra’s lab to find and rescue somebody else. Her name is Star, though under the circumstances I don’t know if she’ll remember that. She’s taller than you, red-brown skin, black hair to her waist that she usually wears in a bun, eyes like green icicles, chiseled nose, sharp chin.

You have to find out where she is, and report back to me. Most likely Bharaputra’s keeping her somewhere deeper in the facility, requiring a higher level of clearance. You’ll need to find a way to get further inside, and see what you can find—or, better yet, convince someone else to do it for you. It’s imperative that you don’t get caught, because if you do neither of us is ever leaving that building.

Once you find her, we can work on getting you out of there. I’m counting on you.

By stares at his arm in growing consternation. A spy? Rescue? Get into somewhere that requires a higher level of clearance so he can—what, rifle through their filing cabinets—convince someone to do it for him? He doesn’t know how to do any of that. The version of him outside must be insane. Which he’d have to be, right, to have gotten them into this mess?

Of course, that version of him must actually be a spy, if that’s why he’s done this to himself. Which might mean that By could figure out how to do those things, too, but—it’s imperative that you don’t get caught. This isn’t the place for a trial run; if he screws up he won’t get another chance. And never leaving that building sounds much more sinister, somehow, than ceasing to exist when he steps out the door. He’s not sure why it should be any different, having it be Bharaputra’s choice instead of his, but it is.

No, that’s not true. He does know. If he could step out the door now and never wake up again he wouldn’t have to keep feeling trapped, and miserable, and scared. He’d be done with it, incapable of being afraid or alone, or anything else at all. Whereas if he actually tries to do what his other self is demanding he’ll be consigning himself to this ongoing uncertainty, to the endless sick feeling in the pit of his stomach and the prospect of worse things to come. He’ll have to keep being afraid, and keep going anyway.

By finds himself sagging back against the wall to sit down on the floor. He’s not sure he’s that brave. His other self might be, but By’s life so far is a total of three hours long, and he’s spent all of them terrified. The thought of feeling this way for the rest of his life is unbearable. I can’t. I don’t want to.

Maybe, if you pare his other self down to the heart of him—to this stupid empty thing By is now, with no history and no connections—a coward is all he is.

He sits on the floor until his legs start to go stiff, then climbs to his feet and goes to the employee washroom. There he spends another half hour scrubbing the ink off his hand and his arm, feeling twitchy, the need to answer himself an itch in the back of his mind. He keeps having to remind himself that he doesn’t actually need to hurry; it’s not like his other self is out there waiting for him, cooling his heels in the stairwell while By gets around to writing back. Both of them are standing right here.

He scrubs the back of his hand until it’s achingly red, with no sign of the words—letting Lotus see that he’s been talking to someone outside the lab would doubtless qualify as getting caught—and reduces the letter on his arm to a faint illegible smear, scrubbing it dry with paper towels. Then he goes back to the side exit, takes out the pen, and spends another long while dawdling, running through the possible answers. Wanting so badly to write I’m not a spy, YOU’RE a spy, and I can’t and won’t help you, to prove to his other self that he has a choice; wanting to write please, leave and never come back, proving to them both that he’s not the one who gets to make choices.

Almost as badly he wants to demand that his other self tell him more about who he is, what he’s like, whether he’s really capable of doing all those things that his other self wrote. Would any of it mean anything to him, if he knew? The emptiness inside him gnaws at him.

What would his other self say if By wrote back, Am I supposed to be brave?

He stands in the hall a long time.

In the end, he writes: I’m going to need your help.

+

[[skipped scenes]]

Byerly ends up asking the Arquas for a better solution for passing notes, and is provided with one by—somewhat unexpectedly—Shiv and Moira, Shiv suggesting the necessary alterations to Byerly’s suit jacket to accommodate the secret compartment for papers and Moira whipping up a material that will be functionally invisible to the Bharaputra scanners in her laboratory, albeit with a sniff that clearly indicates that such low-level work is beneath her.

In any event, Byerly finds himself supplied with the means to smuggle actual correspondence in and out of the severed floor, so they no longer have to risk the lo-fi method of writing to each other on their own arm, which was bound to land them in trouble and wasn’t much good for longer communication. He scrawls a note above his wrist telling his severed self how to open the hidden compartment inside his lapel, and from that point onward they can—provided his severed self is careful about surveillance—write actual letters, rather than relying on awkward short-form notes.

It becomes quite thoroughly impossible to think of himself inside Bharaputra Labs as anything other than—somebody else, after that.

His severed self describes the work they’re having him do, which sounds baffling at first but which Byerly eventually decides must be supply acquisition for the lab’s project—projects?—albeit with a layer of encoding: rather than knowing what he’s looking at, his other self is restocking everything by serial number, ensuring everything the lab needs stays in the black.

[[incomplete scene]]

+

He tells Rish the gist of it when he finally sees her in person, meeting up in a tiny hostel room on the Consortium-run transfer station in orbit some two weeks later. Visiting Cordonah Station in person is out of the question, of course, but the transfer station is so lousy with commercial traffic that even if Bharaputra is watching him they won’t find anything noteworthy about the visit: for houseless employees like him, coming up here is the easiest way to buy off-world goods.

Most of his explaining happens in pieces, of course, on account of the other reason for their meeting. As does her return offering of the latest news from clan Arqua; the moment the door slides shut behind them Byerly goes to his knees, and is thoroughly pleased with himself for how effectively he manages to distract them both for the next ten minutes.

He does manage to share his most important intel eventually, sometime after their first breathless round against the wall and the subsequent longer session in the tiny hostel bed, which leaves him a sated puddle amid the sheets. He manages to rouse enough to describe to her the handful of people he’s managed to identify so far, and Rish listens attentively, brows drawing together.

“If Lotus Durona is overseeing this project herself, this must be big. Make or break the House big.” She frowns thoughtfully. “And if it involves Star . . .”

“Something to do with her unique genetics? That’s Bharaputra’s main work, after all.”

“Bharaputra doesn’t care about curiosities. If it can’t be mass-produced for a profit . . . I suppose they must have absorbed some of House Ryoval’s clientele, after that mess a decade back, but to them that’s a side-hustle, at most. Bharaputra works at scale.”

“Mm. So we’re back to the odd confluence of Star—who surely holds no commercial interest to Vasa Luigi—and Lotus, who wouldn’t be involved for anything less. Not very helpful yet, I’m afraid.” Byerly grimaces. “And, of course, the fact that all of this is so secret it’s happening at Bharaputra’s only severed facility.”

“Does it feel very strange? The severance.”

“It doesn’t feel like anything. Not even like being asleep, because there’s no sense of time passing. More akin to anesthesia, perhaps.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“If you’re the one on the outside, certainly.” Byerly’s pleasant afterglow is definitely starting to fade. “From the inside, you never sleep, and you don’t remember anything outside the lab, and you can’t leave.”

“But you don’t remember that. I thought that was the whole idea, how Bharaputra reels in grubbers to work there, promising them they won’t have to work a day in their lives.”

[[skipped segment]]

Later, after they’ve both showered—separately and entirely without romance, on account of the hostel room having only a tiny sonic—they order dinner delivered from one of the station cafes, and eat dinner at the little table, Rish wrinkling her nose at the fare. After that they climb back into bed, and go again, slow and leisurely, this time, and afterward stretch out side by side.

[[skipped segment]]

“On a scale of one to ten,” he asks Rish, “how insane is it to think of myself when I’m in Bharaputra Labs as a separate person?”

She opens her eyes to look over at him. “Seven. You’re still you, aren’t you? Even if you don’t remember.” A quirk of her blue brows. “You wouldn’t say a cryo-amnesiac is a whole separate person from who they were before.”

“No, but . . . even the worst cryo-amnesiac cases get flashes of their lives, so I’m told. They have a sense of having existed before, and they’re living with the assumption that eventually they will have a cascade, and remember.” He sits up against the pillows, frowning, arms crossed. “Besides, they have continuity. Nobody’s turning them off for two-thirds of every sidereal day.”

“I guess.” Rish rolls over onto her elbow, propping her head up to look at him. “But it’s still your brain, at the end of the day. He’s literally you.”

“We’re pretty substantially made up of our experiences, I’d say. If he doesn’t remember spending the last twenty years as a spy, how can he be a spy? Or anything that I am.”

“You remind me of the old argument I was always having with Tej. Anytime she’d say something was a case of nurture, I’d argue for nature. It’s pretty hard to deny genetics-as-destiny when you’ve seen the Baronne play that game.” A wave of her fingers indicates herself, briefly diverting By’s gaze to rove appreciatively down the gold-shot electric blue length of her. He has a keen appreciation for the gifts bestowed by the Baronne, certainly. “Or take Amiri, for example. The whole reason he’s such a good scientist is because the Baronne made him that way. She wanted a trustworthy assistant.”

“And look where that assistant’s taken himself off to, hmm? Her plan seems to have rather backfired, by making him bright enough to be able to work with the Duronas.”

“Right.” Rish sighs. “And of course clones aren’t identical to their progenitors, either. So, sure, some of it is nurture. Except what that really means is that each brain develops differently due to different external stimuli, and his brain”—a nod indicates By’s alternate personality—“is your brain. He hasn’t just got all your DNA, he’s got all of your neutral pathways, too. Even if he doesn’t have access to the conscious memory part.”

“Does that make him me-in-potentia, then?” Byerly tips his head back. “He has all the grooves that being an ImpSec informant wore in my brain, he just doesn’t know how how to use them?”

“Are you worried he won’t be able to do the job?”

“No. That is, yes, that’s one of the things I’m worried about. But mostly I keep worrying about him. Which seems rather on the far side of ‘sane,’ right about now.” He lets out a sigh. “Isn’t it a known affliction, that some people get dangerously obsessed with their clones? I sincerely hope that’s not the form the family madness has decided to take in me.”

Rish’s hand settles over where he’s started to drum the fingers of his right hand against his left elbow. “I think,” she says lightly, “that you worry about anyone near you who’s in distress. It’s in those neural pathways of yours.”

“A dreadful failing on this planet, I know.”

Rish sniffs, and tugs at him, urging him nearer. It’s a distraction, but By is willing to be distracted: he unfolds from his crossed-arms pose, and rolls willingly over into her arms. They share a kiss, and after that he shimmies down between her legs. She’s still wet from the last round, and the sight and smell of it blankets him with desire, a deep biding pleasure at having this again after two weeks apart.

He lays his cheek against her inner thigh, savoring the moment of anticipation, and she threads her fingers carefully through his hair, combing it gently behind his ear. Not gentle by nature, is Lapis Lazuli—Rish is all sharp edges and sharp tongue and more muscle than he’s got, in that compact flexible body—but she’s got a softness inside her all the same, and he’s the one who gets to see it, to have her touch him like he’s some precious thing. It goes to his head, every time.

Quietly, she says, “I don’t know if you’re right that you should worry for him. But I like that you do.”

“Ah.” He hides a smile against her thigh. “How very un-Jacksonian of you, my dear.”

“The cultural exchange can’t all run one-way.” The hand in his hair presses down, just a bit.

“No, indeed,” murmurs Byerly, and allows himself to be directed, applying himself to the best kind of cultural exchange there is.

+

If I’d known what was going to happen that night, maybe I wouldn’t have gone up to Kaiba’s office.

Or maybe I would have, just to have it over with. Like ripping off a band-aid, right?

We’d been working together for a little over a year, then. I was three years out from high school, one year into developing Spherium. I didn’t work for KaibaCorp—technically, our legal arrangement was co-development, a partnership between the entity Otogi had helped me set up and KaibaCorp for full production development, distribution, and eventual service support—but we still saw each other a lot. The contracts were very clear that I had ownership of the IP, but Kaiba was the kind of boss who liked to keep a close eye on major product decisions. A little micro-managerial, maybe, but really I think he just liked getting to work on something, seeing a game come to life.

Maybe he didn’t need to be involved in the nitty-gritty, but anytime I went up there to walk him through my team’s latest direction—a new feature, some new approach we were thinking about that would need a unique adaptation of Solid Vision—he had practical ideas, real solutions to our problems. Insights, that corporate shill word that usually comes paired with KPIs, but with Kaiba that’s what they were. I’d tell him about a snag we’d hit with some aspect of the development, and he’d look at what I’d given him and pierce right to the heart of the problem, something I’d felt itching at my attention but hadn’t quite managed to articulate to myself. And of course he knew Solid Vision better than anyone, but anyone, else; he’d invented it, and he wasn’t exactly hands-off about the ongoing development, either.

So we saw each other often enough for work, sometimes as much as once or twice a week if we were close to a development milestone. The further we got, the more nervous and excited I was about how the project was going. It was thrilling, but terrifying, you know? Seeing something that had once existed only in my imagination, coming together in the real world through the efforts of a hundred-dev team—it was still a little hard to believe. Spherium was my dream, and KaibaCorp was making it happen, readying to put that dream into the hands of real players, to be loved or hated or anything in between. Would they like it? Would it matter that I’d put so much love and effort into making it good, or would it vanish into the long list of B-list games with barely a gurgle, like so many new releases did?

Fears like that kept me up at night, but Kaiba was confident the game would succeed. That was another good thing about working with him: when Kaiba was sure about something he radiated that assurance so strongly you couldn’t help but absorb some of it for yourself. And it was never just empty assurance; if he believed in something he had logical reasons lined up for why he did, and could argue them from first principles. If he didn’t think that my game would fail it was because he understood what we were doing and how it would feel to the player, and when his flat rebuttals poked holes in my inflated anxieties I could even believe him.

I know it sounds like I’m focusing on talking about our work to avoid the real subject, but that isn’t it. It’s just that our working relationship was our relationship, and I want to be clear that it was a good relationship. Sure, Kaiba could be overbearing when he thought he was right, but he also knew a good idea when he heard one, and at the end of the day there’s a reason the contracts Otogi’s lawyer drew up stipulated my creative control. I couldn’t have asked for a better co-developer than KaibaCorp, and I couldn’t have asked for a better development partner than Kaiba, without whom Spherium would’ve been a totally different game.

Of course, it was always a little strange to step back and see ourselves working together. After everything that had happened between us I don’t think either of us had expected to wind up interacting for something so normal, seeing each other week after week with no world-shattering stakes or evil magic at all. He’d been my classmate, my rival, had hurt my friends and saved them, and I’d done those same things to him. Kaiba was no longer so angry; I was alone in my head. We weren’t the people we’d been, and for both of us there was a big empty space in our lives where another person had been.

It’s funny, really. We never talked about Atem, but his absence defined us, anyway. That gap was like an invisible tether between us, tying us together in silent knowledge. He was here, and now he is not.

I say “never,” but that’s not exactly true. We never spoke about him once we started working together, but I met Kaiba once before that, not long after the whole mess with Diva. There’d been a minor headline in the news saying Kaiba had been hospitalized, and I’d seen it and thought—

Well. You can probably guess what I thought, considering how Kaiba had been the last time I’d seen him. I called Mokuba before I could think better of it, feeling sick to my stomach.

Mokuba set me straight, his tone cold, affect flat. What had happened, he said, was that his brother had built a dimension cannon, untested and experimental; he’d used it, successfully; and now he was back, and the circumstances of his return necessitated an inpatient stay at a private hospital.

Mokuba gave me the address, and hung up.

I went to see him. Of course I did; knowing what Kaiba had done, knowing what we all wished we could do—wouldn’t you have? I would’ve gone even if I hadn’t been worried about him, and I was. Despite what Mokuba had said, I couldn’t help thinking that what Kaiba had done wasn’t so different from what I’d imagined when I’d first seen that headline. Had he really planned to come back?

I didn’t need to ask him that question, when I saw him at the hospital. Just seeing him was enough.

What I did ask him about was Atem, and that question he answered.

Yes, he’d seen him. Yes, Atem was well.

And:

“I almost stayed,” Kaiba had said, his voice distant, his eyes fixed on some vague point outside the room’s window, where the springtime trees were in full bloom. I was standing at the foot of his bed. “Mokuba was here, but I almost stayed.”

He hadn’t sounded guilty. Hadn’t sounded any way at all, just—stating a fact. Colorless, uninflected.

It stuck with me, seeing him like that. Kaiba—thunderous, forward-looking Kaiba—looking almost as hollow as the last time I’d seen him in hospital? You can bet I wasn’t about to forget it. But I didn’t see him again after that, not until Germany, when he found me at the reception for the game design competition I won with Spherium.

I was surprised to see him, though given that KaibaCorp was one of the competition’s sponsors I really shouldn’t have been. He was dressed less ostentatiously than I remembered, enough that I didn’t spot him until he was right next to me: no belts, no flared coat, just a sleek suit and a blue tie with a matching triangle in the front pocket, topped off with a silver tie pin shaped like a blue-eyes white dragon (what else?). But he looked well, far better than the last time I’d seen him. Quieter than he used to be, sure, but when he asked if I had a co-developer lined up for Spherium the light was there in his eyes, where before the spark had been extinguished. I was relieved—and, okay, a little flattered. I’d always known Kaiba was smart, really smart, even when he was just my classmate, and I knew he was a real master of games. I’d just won a competition on Spherium’s merits, but it still meant something to me to hear that Kaiba thought it worth investing millions.

Like I said: he had a way of making you believe in what he believed.

And maybe seeing him spoke to something else in me, too.

Because I’d shared a body with Atem for over two years, and the thing about that is: he wasn’t only there for the card games. And everyone who knew about Atem knows that, in theory—but they don’t get what it means. Nobody does, except maybe Ryou, and this definitely isn’t something I’m going to ask him about, not when the other Bakura was the way he was. Though Ryou kept putting the Ring on despite that, so maybe I have my answer.

What I’m trying to say is, once Atem and I connected—when we started being able to hear each other, feel each other, after Death-T—I really wasn’t alone in my head. Even when he was silent inside me, his emotions bled into me, and vice versa. The more strongly he felt something the more likely it was to spill over into me, and we only had one nervous system between us. If he had a reaction to something—to someone—again and again, the one who was left with the physical memory of that reflex was me.

So, yes: every time our heart beat faster for Kaiba—every time Atem felt adrenaline and excitement at a chance to face him—I felt it, too. And my body didn’t forget.

Perverse, I know. But I wanted to explain that part, because it matters to what happened between us, and I don’t want you to think it was all Kaiba’s fault. I screwed up, too.

Really, out of the two of us, I’m the one to blame.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The point is: Atem was gone, but the way Atem felt about Kaiba was still there inside me, floating around in my peripheral nervous system. Which was weird, because my conscious feelings about Kaiba weren’t like that. I felt for him, and once we started working together I realized I even liked him, in the quiet, burgeoning way that comes with getting a glimpse under someone’s spiky exterior. He was my friend—a real friend, after so long pacing the edges of that possibility—and I cared for him as a friend. The undercurrent of something else left over from Atem didn’t fit into that, but I couldn’t ignore it, either. It was part of me, and it blended into what I felt about Kaiba, whether I liked it or not.

So maybe that was why I ended up drawn to him. Just—as context. For everything.

Anyway, obviously we started working together. I got to know Kaiba as a colleague, but we’d known each other too long for it to stay that surface-level; of course I got to know him as a person, too. And I hadn’t been wrong, in thinking that although he looked better he still wasn’t quite himself, or at least not quite himself as he had been.

I saw—in pieces, in glimpses across the table during our meetings, which started to run later and later into the evening as we got deeper into development, and began to sidetrack into other games—that he was deeply sad, and deeply lonely. There was a hole in his heart just like there was in mine, made by the same person, and if mine was filled by the friends I loved then Kaiba’s was always half-empty, the fire inside him leaking out through it. Leaving him a little colder, always, than he had been.

And if the heat that sometimes flushed through me at being near him belonged to Atem, then the way I sometimes caught him looking me left no question whom he was seeing, either.

Neither of us said a word about it. But we didn’t avoid the pull we felt. Atem or no Atem, he was my friend, and I was his. The sense that we were both being haunted made my heart ache, but it didn’t stop me from loving my friend.

Or falling for him.

Predictable, right? Yeah, I fell for him. And even now I couldn’t tell you how much of that was me, myself, Yugi Mutou of the twenty-first century, and how much was all those left-over ghost feelings from Atem, who—no, he hadn’t loved Kaiba, not then, he hadn’t gotten that far. But who could have, so easily, if only he’d been here, loved Kaiba back.

Because of course Kaiba loved him. There was no question of that.

But I really am dragging my feet, aren’t I? I was going to tell you what happened. Okay. I can do that. I can.

So: we were having another late-evening meeting. Spherium was approaching the point of being ready for alpha testing, but I was starting to get cold feet about some of the latest additional features—were we suffering scope creep? I wanted my game to be perfect, and while working with a big dev team was great, it also meant there were a lot of ideas that weren’t my own. I’d been neck-deep in it all for so long that I felt like I was losing perspective, and I wanted Kaiba’s eyes on the more recent changes, to do that piercing-through-the-bullshit thing he was so good at.

Which he did, and afterward we got takeout and played gin rummy, and then worked some more—barely. Kaiba produced a bottle of wine to go with dinner, and we both had a glass or two.

Not that I was drunk. Don’t think I’m trying to pass this all off on being sloshed.

No, I was still sober when I looked over at him—we were both on the couch by then, laptops and tablets spread out around us—and made my decision. He was languid beside me, saying something about what he thought I should do based on what kind of feedback we got during the alpha; I was sitting next to him on my knees, laptop balanced across them, putting me at equal height. I had been listening, even agreeing, but somewhere in the middle of Kaiba talking something inside me slipped loose, and then I wasn’t listening anymore. I was paying attention to how close we were, and how warm I was from the wine, and how it felt like the two of us had been circling each other for months. Like a binary system, Kaiba might have said; tethered to a common center of mass, but never able to touch.

Except we weren’t just dumb collections of matter, unable to act upon our own motion. That was what Kaiba believed. No fate, no predestination. What you gave was what you got. I, too, could by my own power move.

So I set my laptop aside, and then I leaned over and kissed him, turning his face towards myself with one hand.

He cut off mid-sentence, and went very still. His lips had been parted around his argument, so I didn’t need to be satisfied with a chaste press of lips:

[skipped section]

“Wait.” Kaiba’s voice came out hoarse. I pulled quickly back, but he wasn’t pushing me away. He pulled up a holographic display over one of his bracers—I recognized the experimental Solid Vision interface he’d been working on, for the moment only available to himself—and tapped through to a menu with controls for his office.

His hands were shaking. “Kaiba-kun,” I said. “Do you want to stop?”

I got a dirty look for that. The lock on the door engaged with an audible thunk, and Kaiba dissipated the virtual overlay before hooking his fingers into the front of my shirt and reeling me in.

I allowed myself to be reeled, climbing over his lap. We found ourselves once again face to face, close enough to feel each other’s breath, and kneeling around his hips I was taller than he was, a rare change in perspective. I curled my hands around the back of his neck, tipped his face up, and kissed him. His hands slid warm up my back.

For a while we descended into sweet tentative exploration, fascinated by the press of lips and tongue. Kaiba was a fast learner, as always: soon he was mapping my soft palate, his tongue sliding over mine as I sank against him, wrapping my arms around his shoulders. I pulled him closer, pressed our bodies together, and let him kiss me.

The only sound in the room was the soft slick noise of our mouths coming together, punctuated by an occasional sigh. His hands roamed my waist, my back, and I lost track of time, caught up in finally getting to touch and taste and have. All the desire I’d inherited from Atem had blossomed into my own, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d enjoyed just kissing someone so much, savoring Kaiba’s every soft exhalation, the dazed look in his eyes. His eyelashes were long and dark when they dipped against his face. Why had we waited so long?

Somewhere in all of this we shifted so that his thigh was between my legs, my knee between his, and it didn’t take long before I was worked up enough to roll my hips into him, wanting. His breath stuttered, and he said, “Yugi—Yugi, let me touch you,” the words very rough.

Who was I to refuse a request like that? I pulled back enough for him to fit a hand between us, and while I bent forward to kiss him again he unfastened my pants, taking me out. I huffed into his mouth as he took me in his hand, feeling the curl of his fingers. A firm stroke of his hand, another, in time with my suddenly urgent kisses, and then I drew back enough to look down, wanting to see him touching me.

A sweet spasm of heat sank right through me. The sight of myself in his hand—

It wasn’t just my body’s reflexes that remembered Atem’s attraction to Kaiba. My brain remembered it just fine, too. Somehow during his duels we always ended up watching Kaiba’s hands, my eyes following every elegant draw and flip of a card, the dramatic flair of each gesture. Atem had more than appreciated that aspect of Kaiba’s gameplay, and on one occasion—during our first night aboard the blimp during Battle City, when we’d been lying awake in bed, thinking back over his tag-team duel with Kaiba—the memory of Kaiba’s hands had elicited in him a surge of eroticism so intense that I’d found myself hard, for all that I was then nominally in control of our body.

Atem—simply the Other Me to me, then—had been embarrassed, stiffly apologetic. But I hadn’t minded. What did it matter whose feeling it was, so long as it made us feel good? I’d put my hand beneath my waistband, and let myself feel it, let Atem feel it. We lay there, and together we thought about Kaiba’s hands: those long slender fingers, their nimble precision, how they might feel touching us in place of our own. I’d had to bite my pillow to keep from making a sound, desperately wound up from the intensity of our mutual focus on that shared vision. I had come wrenchingly hard, Atem’s moan on my lips.

So you can imagine how I felt about what was happening now.

[skipped section]

I’d done this a few times, years ago when I was fooling around with Otogi. I was newly glad for the experience; at least I wouldn’t make a total fool of myself.

I nudged Kaiba’s shoulder back, making him lie back on his elbows, and took him out of his clothes. He exhaled harshly, his eyes on me very dark, and I held his gaze as I bent over him to take him into my mouth.

[skipped section]

Kaiba’s breath hitched, and I felt the warning tightening of his inner thighs. I shuddered with him, and had the fleeting thought that I still needed to be able to walk out of here past the security guard, and couldn’t risk stains on my clothes. I didn’t pull off.

Above me Kaiba made a broken sound like ah, ah!—and came, his back bowing up.

And that was when he said it.

I heard him clearly. Even if I hadn’t, I would have known that my ears weren’t mistaken by the way he went rigid beneath me, locking up even before he finished spilling into my mouth. He’d heard himself say it, and he knew that I’d heard him, and it left both of us frozen, petrified by the reality that when we moved it would be in a universe where that had happened.

Atem. Barely more than a gasp.

It hurt.

Of course it hurt. I wanted him, and just for a moment I’d allowed myself to believe that he wanted me. Me, not the dead man with my face—my partner, the other half of my soul.

Time unfroze; we sprang apart. Kaiba recoiled hard, and I blinked against the sudden sting in my eyes, furious with him and Atem and myself, hating that I’d landed us here. Just for a moment I wanted to swing at Kaiba, to scream in his face: Remember Duelist Kingdom? I saved your life! Me! He was going to have you step right off that ledge!

Which was true, and still it was Atem he wanted. Of course. Who would ever choose me, between the two of us?

Stupid, stupid, stupid. How embarrassing, how humiliating, to have let myself believe anything else. My throat was tight, the inside of my nose burning with impending tears. I couldn’t look at Kaiba. I didn’t want him to see me cry, didn’t want him to read what I’d been thinking in my face and laugh, pressing on the bruise the way only he knew how. Just like he used to, with a sneer and the blue in his eyes turned ice cold.

Kaiba wasn’t laughing. When I finally managed to raise my eyes he looked stricken, all the blood drained from his face, his whole body flinched back and curling in on itself with shame. One hand was clutched against his sternum; the other was fisted against the couch.

No, he hadn’t meant to say it. This wasn’t a practical joke, or a ploy to humiliate me. I knew that. I’d known it the moment the thought had crossed my mind.

It would have been easier, if it had been. Then maybe I could hate him, instead of both of us sitting here as if we’d accidentally grabbed the wrong end of a knife. Both of us, cut to the quick.

Kaiba’s throat moved. My eyes followed the bob of his Adam’s apple. “Yugi,” he croaked, and stopped. He seemed to have run out of words.

Reasonable enough. What was there to say?

My anger drained away as quickly as it had come, leaving only a dull ache in my chest. I sat back on my heels, and sniffed hard, pressing the back of my wrist under my nose. Damply, I said, “Okay,” my voice wavering. “Okay. I guess I should have known.” I had known, and I’d let myself cross the line anyway. I had only myself to blame.

I gave another sniff, and looked up at him, forcing a watery smile. “He wanted you too, Kaiba-kun. I felt it, when he was with me.”

The words seemed to knock Kaiba out of his stupor, anger flashing in his eyes. “Fuck off,” he snarled, and lurched suddenly into motion, scrambling to put himself away and zip up, clattering with his belt buckle. “If you started this so you could laugh at me—”

Is that the first thing you think of, too? What did it say about us, that our minds ran along the same tracks? “It’s the truth. You think I’d lie about something like that?”

“Shut up.” Kaiba’s hands clenched into fists at his sides, his angular shoulders hunching. “What do you know, you—”

“We shared a body for two and a half years. I knew.” I wiped my nose, looked away. “I can still . . . I have all these leftover feelings from him, you know? I wanted to kiss you, but—he did, too.”

“Shut up!” This time it was a savage snarl, Kaiba’s teeth bared. His eyes blazed, meeting mine. “If he’d wanted me, I wouldn’t be here.”

I stared at him, stunned. “But you . . .”

The words turned to ash in my mouth.

I’d never asked him what had happened there, in Aaru. I hadn’t asked him what he’d hoped to get out of that trip, either, though I could guess: he’d wanted to find Atem and bring him back, and when that hadn’t worked I assumed he’d come back of his own volition, tethered by Mokuba and KaibaCorp and whatever else.

But if Atem had turned him away—

How much had it hurt Atem, to push Kaiba back into the world of the living? I knew how Atem had felt. I even knew, courtesy of running around in Atem’s memories, who Kaiba was, who he was to Atem: that priest with the arch voice and the cold eyes, whose memories Atem said Kaiba had. And I’d seen the stone at the museum, read the plaque with the translated inscription, that elegy for a dearly departed friend which the priest—which Kaiba, if Atem was right—had etched into stone three thousand years prior.

I said, in a small voice: “He sent you back?”

Kaiba had gone from white to red, scarlet with fury and shame. Dead level, he said, “Get out of my office.”

They’ve been driving in rain-muffled silence for some fifteen minutes, late-evening city lights flicking past Monet’s passenger-side window, when the tension emanating from Law finally becomes too much to bear. Monet looks over at him—takes in the tightness of his hands around the wheel, the painful hunch of his shoulders—props her chin on her fist against the car door, and says, “What’s eating you?”

Law—flinches. “Nothing,” he says, and doesn’t meet her eyes.

Monet raises her eyebrows. “You’ve been scowling at our coffee maker every morning for the past week like it’s your personal enemy, love. Something is bothering you.”

There’s a long pause, almost long enough that she relents, but then Law seems to deflate over the steering wheel. “There’s . . . this guy,” he squeezes out.

Monet blinks. “This guy?” she prompts.

“At work.” They stop at a red light, and Law takes a deep breath, as though he’s steeling himself for something difficult. “I think I—like him.” Very quietly: “A lot.”

Understanding dawns. “Are you telling me you have a crush?”

Law glowers at the wheel. She thinks he just about chokes on the next word: “Yes.”

She almost laughs, catching herself just in time—it’s clear from his demeanor that he doesn’t think it’s a laughing matter. Instead she says, “Tell me about him?” And, longing to disabuse him of the notion that she might be displeased, “I don’t mind, you know.”

He does glance over at her, then, his expression startled, before fixing his gaze back on the road as the light turns green. “He’s a patient. Came in several times about his broken arm.”

“What’s he like?”

“Loud,” Law says, at once. Then: “Energetic. He’s got this way of—” he cuts himself off, and she wonders what it is he doesn’t say. “He works for the Peace Corps.”

“So what’s he doing here, getting his arm broken?” She reclines against the door, watching him, and struggles to tamp down the smile that keeps threatening to escape. She’d never imagined it could be so charming, seeing him moony-eyed over someone else. She likes it, the tension aside; if she could just persuade him to let go of that . . .

“Their assignments are for two years at a time, so he’s home in between.” Law’s next words aren’t quite a sigh. “He came in last month about the arm, then two times after that.”

“And one of those times was today,” Monet guesses.

“Yes. And I think,” Law starts, and pauses. It’s a long pause, filled only with the sound of the windshield wipers whacking back and forth across the glass, road and sidewalks running neon-reflective beyond. Finally he says, with a palpable effort, “I think he asked me out.”

“You think,” she says, raising an eyebrow. “Do you want to go?”

“No,” he says, automatically. Then, “I don’t—I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” Another red.

“It does matter.” She does not, in the confines of the car, reach out to touch him, but she pitches her voice to be as reassuring as she can, her earlier glee fading into the concern that he might deny himself this for fear of doing wrong by her. “If you want to—I think you should go.”

He stares at her, utterly distracted from the road. “What?”

“I think you should go on a date. With this person, who’s clearly got you smitten. You’re not chained to me. If going out with someone else would make you happy, I certainly don’t mind.”

Law, apparently stunned clear through disbelief and into practicality, says, “What on earth would I tell him?”

“That you’ve got a very cool girlfriend,” Monet says, and then, because she’s the kind of cool girlfriend who remembers to watch the road, “green.”

Which makes him emit a strangled laugh, and also step on the gas, returning his eyes to the road. “I can’t—you think I should go. Go, and tell him that I’ve got a girlfriend, and she’s—she’s—”

“Fine with it,” Monet finishes for him, with a smile, “yes.” Softly, she adds, “I want you to be happy. It’s not a condition that all of that happiness source from me.”

“You don’t even know who he is.”

“So let me meet him, later.” She shrugs. “I’d like to, but—I don’t own you. I don’t own your secrets, either.”

[incomplete scene]

+

[skipped scenes]

+

Luffy’s hands slide under his jacket.

“Wait,” Law gasps, pulling back from the kiss. Luffy withdraws his hands, his expression alarmed; Law kicks himself for being the cause, and chokes out, “I have to—call my girlfriend.”

Which certainly wins the title for most awkward thing he’s ever said in response to being kissed, thus far in his life, and also—probably—for the rest of it.

But Luffy only says, “Okay,” and takes a step back, eyebrows raised. He’s breathing hard—so is Law—and Law doesn’t meet his eyes as he sidles out from between him and the wall, fumbling for his phone and scrambling into the stairwell. He nearly drops his phone twice, and winces when the door slams heavily shut behind him.

Then he leans against it, and punches up Monet’s contact, heart hammering wildly in his chest.

When she picks up he says, without preamble: “Can I sleep with him,” still breathless, still caught up in the memory of the kiss, of Luffy’s touch. He wants, desperately, to go back inside, to dive into Luffy’s arms, to allow himself to be taken apart—but if she says no then he won’t, will find some agonizing means of extricating himself from the situation, no matter how badly he wants. “Do you—”

“Darling,” Monet interrupts, in a tone of great patience. “Are you calling to ask me whether you can fuck your boyfriend?”

“I—” Law flushes. Opens his mouth, and closes it again, and says, “Yes? Yes. I can’t—I need to know if you—” He squeezes his eyes shut, and tips his head back against the door, trying to even his breathing. It doesn’t quite work. “What I do, what we do . . . damn it, I don’t want it to hurt you.” His hand curls anxiously around the phone.

A beat of silence, and for a moment he fears he’s said the wrong thing—but the sound that spills suddenly over on the other end of the line is laughter, and Law’s heart eases, just for the familiar sound. “What,” he says.

“Of all the things you could possibly do,” Monet informs him, “having wild hot sex with the guy you’re head-over-heels for”—Law makes a faint sound of indignation, steadfastly ignored—“isn’t one that will hurt me. Get off the phone with me and go get him, my god.”

“Thank you,” Law says, and means it. He wants, in the moment, nothing so much as to kiss her. “I, um—I might not be back until late.”

“Have fun,” Monet tells him, voice warm, and, “I’m hanging up now.”

There’s a click of the receiver, and Law takes his phone away from his ear. He takes a deep breath of the cool evening air, thinking about how unbelievably lucky he is.

Then he pushes off from the door, and goes back inside to get Luffy.

+

Monet wakes at the sound of the bedroom door closing—a barely-there noise, Law treading softly, but still enough to rouse her when she’s sleeping alone. Half-awake, her thoughts fuzzy with sleep, she listens to him move around the room in the dark: shedding his clothes, setting his phone on the nightstand, bending to fish a clean t-shirt out of an unsorted pile of laundry.

After a while, the bed dips, and he climbs in beside her. He smells like he’s taken a shower, and underneath that still of sex, of another’s touch on his skin; and she is strangely aware, even without seeing his expression, that he is happy, giddy with a secret joy.

It makes her smile, hidden against her pillow, and after a moment of sleepy deliberation she props herself up on one elbow, looking down at him in the dark. Says, a little hazily, “Hey,” and, “did you have a good time?”

Law breathes a laugh. “Yes,” he says, his tone light, and something like unbelieving. His arm is over his eyes, half-hiding his expression, but she sees he’s smiling so broad that he has to bite his lip in an effort to keep it down, grinning helplessly at the ceiling. “Yes.”

Fondness unfolds in her chest. She can’t help her own grin in response, doesn’t even try to keep the mischief out of her voice: “Wow. That good, huh.”

“Yes.” Law is breathless, saying it, still not looking at her, still with that foolish, perfect smile on his face. “He was—beautiful. Funny. Kind. Everything. I—”

He sighs, then, wistful pleasure, as starkly honest as the words, and she is certain he’d never be so open in the daytime, nor anytime outside the afterglow high. She reaches to brush her fingers along the edge of his smile, and says, genuine, “I’m so glad. I thought he’d make you happy.”

He lifts his arm from his face, then, looking at her in the dark. “Thank you. For letting me . . .”

She presses a finger to his lips, and he trails off, blinking at her in surprise. “I told you,” she says, “loving someone—doing something that makes you happy—that’s not something for which you need my permission.”

His eyes stay on her, and when she takes her hand away he says softly, “Most people would disagree.”

“Well, then.” She grins at him. “Most people are wrong.”

He stares at her for a moment longer, and then—pushes himself onto one elbow, and leans to kiss her, tender. She kisses back, and for a while time goes away; there’s just them, in this moment, and nothing else besides.

“You know what they say, don’t you,” Big Mouth goes on, “if you want to become a Warlord, the fastest way is to let an admiral bend you over.”

The last word is lost under the scrape of a chair over the barroom floor, Shachi standing with such force that the ale in Monet’s tankard sloshes over the edge. His fists are clenched, his face red with anger, and Monet—feeling, in that moment, a deeply kindred spike of rage—sees him reach for his knife.

“Shachi,” Law says, “sit down.”

When she twists to look at him he’s got Shachi pinned with a stare, himself unmoved, still tipping his empty glass with a finger pressed against the rim. Shachi hesitates—his hand pauses over the hilt if his blade—hisses, “Captain.”

“Sit down,” Law repeats, and there’s a dangerous edge in his voice, then, a reminder that he’s given an order, and doesn’t care for being made to give it twice.

Shachi looks like he wants to argue further—looks like he’s the verge of eruption—but just as Monet thinks he’s going to choose mutiny over allowing the insult to slide he sits again, hard, slams his fist down on the table. His breath leaves him in a single, furious exhale, and when he looks up at Law again he’s shaking, the anger vivid in his eyes. “How can you just let him—Captain, you heard what he just said!”

“I am not,” Law growls, “having the lot of you get into it with—a lowball rookie brat,” he could be speaking of something found smeared on the underside of his boot, “over a slur against my fucking character.” His gaze rakes the crew. “Nor do I mean to give him the satisfaction of seeing my crew injured over childish insults. Sit and drink your beer.”

It’s almost enough. His glower undercuts that murderous tension, and Monet sees half a dozen Hearts sink back into their seats, lower their eyes to their drinks.

A moment more, and they might have been defused altogether. But:

Big Mouth’s voice rings out through the bar. “You see that, lads? He won’t even let his mates stand up to us, ’cause then they’d be defending his honor over something that’s true. Everyone’s heard how he likes to keep the heat off his crew, and it’s so easy to keep the admiralty happy . . .”

She knows, with perfect clarity, the exact filthy gesture the man’s hands will make even before he brings his meaty fingers to his mouth and mimes. The insult of it like a slap: anger flashes hot up to her head, her thoughts swallowed by a pounding red, and her talons dig deep into the wood.

It’s too much, too much by far, for the crew.

He sinks to his knees before the old woman, and says, too fast, too harsh, his chest too tight, “That language—that language you were speaking. I heard you, just now, you said—” and he stumbles, then, can’t get out the words he’d heard, not when his tongue has long since forgotten the inflection. Sticks instead to the tradesman’s common, trying again, “Something about—snow. About gifts,” and opens his hands towards her, palm-up, grasping for the half-forgotten wisps of his comprehension.

She looks up at him, and in that moment he knows, knows that he’d been right: for as she takes in his face her cloudy eyes widen, and horrified recognition flares in her face.

It’s the look of one who’s seen the Amber Lead before, and knows all that it can do. Of one who can’t rightly believe the sight of someone like Law bearing its trace, still alive, still breathing, so many years since his city fell.

Her right hand rises—reaches, trembling, for his face—and Law manages not to flinch away, not to pull back, himself too overcome to move or speak.

———

Byerly bid Dono and Ivan farewell as they exited onto the steps of the Residence, ostensibly to make his own way to his next engagement, and doubled back inside. He retraced his steps, and—with a slightly irritable acknowledging wave from Gregor’s majordomo—went back inside the chambers they had just left.

Gregor was sprawled back on the couch, head tipped back. He raised it as By entered, and said, “ ‘A personal matter,’ By, really?”

By grimaced, and came around to drop into the same chair he’d occupied earlier. “Donna had me give my word I wouldn’t tell another soul. I wasn’t about to break it.” Even to you, hung unspoken.

“No, I suppose not.” Gregor gave him a bland look; he knew full well how By felt about personal loyalty in circumstances where he could actually give it, rather than being obliged by a higher oath to the Imperium to lie and cheat. By tried not to squirm at the sensation of being transparent. “And how did your cousin come to be prodded into this visit by Ivan, exactly? You must have known I’d want to know about this.”

“If I told Dono that I could get him in to see the Emperor, I’d be kissing my informant career goodbye. His visit here will generate gossip—imagine how it would look without nice, broad-shouldered Ivan for me to hide behind.”

“And your choice of smokescreen had nothing to do with how amusing you’d find it to watch Ivan writhe, I’m sure.”

“Mm, let us say, it was a secondary consideration. Ivan was convenient.” By smirked. “But you should have seen how he lit up at the notion of meeting Donna at the shuttleport. Watching him discover his error was most motivational.”

Gregor snorted. “I can just imagine how he must have taken it.”

“Oh, he was bereft. I hold out hope that I might have the opportunity to console him, as the next-best Vorrutyer available.”

“If you actually manage to lure Ivan into your bed, I don’t want to know about it,” Gregor said, dryly. “Really, By, your taste in men.”

“What, you don’t find him handsome? I know you’re not so stone-cold as all that.” By dipped his eyelashes at him.

Gregor looked vaguely croggled. “I suppose.” His brows drew briefly together, as if he was trying to reevaluate Ivan from a different perspective in his mind’s eye and failing. “He’s just too much my kid cousin, I think. But I’ll wish you luck in your pursuit, if you like.” His gaze sharpened, refocusing on By. “And with your cousin’s bid for the countship, of course. You’re certain your association won’t interfere with your current assignment?”

“I wouldn’t have taken it on, if I didn’t think I’d be able to do it.” By sniffed. He crossed his legs, folding his hands around his knee, and straightened his shoulders. “I couldn’t have told you about Dono, but I don’t lie to you. Sire.”

Gregor looked pained at the formality. “Don’t start,” he said, and By gave way a little, shoulders slumping. “You know perfectly well that this is a sensitive political moment. I—We,” this time it was By who almost winced at the inflection, “need the pipeline you give Us into the Conservatives. If you choose to feed what you learn back to your cousin as well as to me, I won’t stop you. But it would be exceedingly inconvenient if you were to lose Vormoncrief’s tolerance of you.”

“Give me some credit. I’m hardly going to go around announcing my allegiance. As you so kindly point out, blowing my cover would be just as damaging to my efforts to help Dono.”

An opening of Gregor’s hand acknowledged the point. “An additional vote for the Progressives would certainly be very welcome, if he truly manages to pull this off. Also”—Gregor’s mouth quirked up, a little sadly—“it occurs to me that it would give me an excuse to have you at the wedding, if Dono brought you along.”

By became absorbed in flicking a piece of invisible lint off his sleeve. He knew, of course, that Gregor would have liked to be able to invite him properly, placing him in the first circle of witnesses where he belonged. The notion of being so exposed was sufficiently abhorrent that By didn’t feel wistful about missing out on the honor, but … it warmed him, knowing that Gregor wanted him there.

He glanced up at Gregor, and sought refuge in converting the smile trying to escape onto his face into a smirk. “Oh, I’ll look forward to it. I promise to get tastefully drunk in your honor. Though I trust you won’t be around to see it, on account of making your escape to your honeymoon suite.” He raised a curious eyebrow. “Have you slept with her yet? I sincerely hope your wedding night won’t be the first time you take her to bed.”

Gregor shook his head. “You know, I think you’re one of about three people on this planet who’d actually dare to ask me that to my face.” And, when By continued to affect interested silence, “Of course I’ve—of course we have. You don’t really imagine I’d pull a woman into this life without at least making sure that we’re—compatible.”

“In that case, my dear, I hope you’re taking every opportunity to relieve the stress of this sensitive political moment.” By smiled at him, and pushed himself up from his armchair. “And I’d best be getting out of your hair, before your next appointment arrives and ruins my cover for good. I’ll keep you appraised, should Boriz or his cronies drop anything interesting in my ear.”

“Yes, of course.” Gregor rose, too. He escorted By to the door, and added quietly, “Be careful, By.”

By appreciated the polite omission of I hope you know what you’re doing, if only aloud. The look Gregor gave him rather conveyed that part of the message all on its own. “You know I am.”

And what Gregor didn’t know about his intentions wouldn’t hurt him, By trusted. He really couldn’t tell Gregor that he meant to do whatever it took to keep Richars out of the Vorrutyer seat, even if that meant playing dirty. If he did there was a very real chance that Gregor would order him not to, and By couldn’t risk being kneecapped from the outset. Far better to ask forgiveness instead of permission, in this—after Dono was count.

And if Byerly pulled it off smoothly enough, nobody need ever find out about it at all, whatever it ended up being.