Idyllian (Amsterdam Institute) Read online

  And if anyone—anyone—higher up in Science Division, or the military, or even the empire, decided an uninstallation process wouldn’t be convenient, you could count on the fact that no Infected, no retired Install, would give a shit. They’d fight tooth and nail to make sure nothing was buried. Not that Genevieve attributed the current lack of solution to that cause—it would be too convenient the other way, for all the reasons Pyrus had listed. But you never knew how better motivation would drive research until you’d done that research.

  Lemna considered for a beat, two, clearly having no problem making all of them wait while she examined all the angles. Suddenly, she smiled, wider, but no less sharp. “When Malao contacted us, I told the others an Infected who made it this far wouldn’t be ordinary.” She turned away, gaze going distant as if she was diving into her system to send messages or make notes.

  In the doorway, she paused and looked back. “There’s no reason to keep this locked any longer, by the way. I’ve spoken to Malao. When I get back with those who need to be involved with getting this new program set up, I don’t want to bother with overrides.” And then she strode away.

  Genevieve choked something half a gasp, half a laugh, and then Eriope grabbed her and Pyrus both up into one hug, laughing properly. The scope of her possible failure had just expanded, but so had the scope of people she could help. And it was something else to throw herself into. Maybe she wouldn’t have to maintain quite so much momentum to avoid falling, now.

  ***

  Genevieve drifted to the surface from sleep, feeling warm and secure. Someone moved beside her, getting up to answer the knock she vaguely remembered, so it must have been what woke her. Pyrus getting up. Because she’d finally stayed over last night. Right. Dozing, it took some effort to put that all together, and she subsided afterward. This moment was nice, and she didn’t want to break it.

  Someone scoffed over by the door, low voiced. “Someone’s made herself at home.” Even now fully awake, it took Genevieve a full beat more to realize the weight over her shoulder and tucked against her jaw wasn’t the blanket, it was her wing. And she was sucking on the top edge of one of the carbon composite plates.

  She stopped that immediately, and folded her wing to the bed, though not furled into her back yet. She twisted to sit up, found Carex in the doorway, blocked by Pyrus’s arm across the opening. The muscles of Pyrus’s back, around his wing panel, weren’t as rigid as they might once have been in the presence of the other man, but he certainly wasn’t relaxed. “What do you want, Carex?”

  “Here’s a tip.” Carex shot Genevieve a sardonic, thin-lipped smile, then transferred his attention back to Pyrus. “If you think you’re going to keep something like this on the downlow in a place like this, don’t forget and leave yourself off the map in your own damn room. Her, sure, that’s sort of necessary, but not you.”

  Pyrus growled, then shot a look back to Genevieve like he was worried she’d bolt. Since she’d shifted to her knees, instincts urging her to do just that, she couldn’t really blame him. With an effort, she settled herself again. Now she was not only sleeping with Pyrus, she was staying the night, she supposed everyone would find out eventually, though Carex would never gossip. She wasn’t quite sure how she felt about people knowing, but she also supposed she might as well decide to be all right with it, lacking time travel to return to last night and slip back to her own room as she had all the times before.

  “You’re all heart. Now, if that was all—” Pyrus waited pointedly for Carex to move so he could shut the door.

  “I have to talk to Amsterdam. Privately.” Something passed between the men in looks Genevieve couldn’t see very well from her distance and angle, and probably couldn’t have translated even if she’d been standing beside them. The urge to bolt surged back up. Given that most of the Installs here seemed to prefer only casual hook-ups with each other, she’d been worried about people’s opinion of her relationship with Pyrus—strike that, she’d been worried people would form opinions of a “relationship” when she wasn’t sure herself if it was one, yet—but she could only imagine this was something about the nanite research. Talk to her privately? Why was that necessary?

  Pyrus told her over a private channel. He sighed and moved aside to let Carex in. “I’ll shower, then.” Within easy distance to intervene should she call on a channel, Genevieve interpreted from his tone.

  Well. If Pyrus was right, it was exactly as Genevieve had worried, other people having opinions about the two of them. Contrasted with her worry about the research, her frustration about that opinion softened a little, however.

  “Let me dress at least.” Genevieve circled a finger for Carex to turn his back. He shut the door and complied without any smart comments, even. Before she reached for her clothes she tried to angle the tip of her wing down and discreetly rub off the dried spit. Pyrus caught her at it as he passed, heading for the bathroom. He smiled, small but sweet. “Remind me to tell you sometime what Eriope did with her wings in her sleep the last time I was in a position to notice.”

  Genevieve dispensed with underwear for speed, and settled back sitting on the bed when she was done. The sound of running water eased between them from the next room. “All right.”

  Carex turned back and led with a question that was practically mild. For him.

  Genevieve shrugged.

  Carex considered her for several moments, silent on channels. Then, rather than launch into any kind of speech, shotgun or otherwise, he tossed a small object at her, underhand and clearly meant to be caught. Genevieve duly caught and examined it. A little box, made of…wood? No, cardboard, with a veneer of pasted paper. The ink granted enough difference in texture she could at least try to trace one whorl.

  Carex jammed his hands into his pockets and strolled up to the precise edge of the space where she’d have had to make an issue of it if he pushed any closer.

  Carex: nominally on her side, but still an absolute dickhead. Genevieve swallowed any comment about where he could shove his box, and swung the cardboard top up. Inside were two post earrings. They looked like diamond, cheap mass-produced trash since they were shaped wrong for industrial cutting.

  The bottom fell out of Genevieve’s stomach, letting in panic to fill her whole body. Surely he couldn’t have guessed—she’d meant to drop the earrings she was currently wearing, crystal and data storage made to look like crystal, in the waste, but hadn’t quite gotten around to it yet.

  Carex held out his hand.

  Genevieve glanced to the bathroom, but the water was still running and Pyrus couldn’t hear them on the private channel in any case.

  Carex gestured near his own ear.

  Genevieve clutched the half-open box with the new earrings against her belly. Whatever Carex’s guesses, she didn’t mean to tamely hand over the virus to confirm them without a fight.

  Carex gave a bark of laughter, out loud.

  Genevieve set the b
ox on her lap and switched the dummy earring, to stall.

  Carex curled the fingertips of his waiting hand peremptorily.

  Genevieve held herself still for a good breath more, another, and then made her decision and removed the second earring. She slammed the cardboard box, earrings rattling loose inside, into Carex’s hand hard enough to crumple in one side.

  Carex met her eyes, unreadable depths wavering into sight briefly beneath the dickishness, then disappearing again.

  Carex scanned the room, then stepped to a side table. He dumped the box out and hefted the empty wine bottle left there from last night consideringly. Apparently it suited his purposes, as he brought it down with a heavy thud, too low to be heard over the shower. Genevieve didn’t try to stop him. He must have calculated the angle carefully, because when he lifted it, one earring was shatter and flattened metal. Another blow did the same for the second earring, then he used a lighter, rolling motion to render them both into dust. Dust got scraped into the box, and then the box disappeared back into his pocket.

  At least it was done. Genevieve pushed off the bed and turned for the bathroom in pointed dismissal.

  Carex smiled thinly when she whirled on him, actually held up his hands in something like surrender.

  It had been easy to think she was all right with never telling him, before. Before one person figured it out, which meant someone else could, sooner or later. Before she let herself trust enough to stay the night, before Pyrus thought the shotgun speech might be pertinent.

  Another laugh. Carex seemed quite pleased by her shock. Carex spread his hand, like he was being perfectly reasonable.

  Genevieve stepped up to Carex, holding her wings wide to increase her size.

  Carex shrugged. He turned away, let himself out, pausing in the doorway for a last salvo. And he was gone.

  Pyrus came back in not long after, while she was still thinking hard, caught among bad choices. He drew the side of his thumb along his beard, a sign of conflicted thought, but his tone was light. “Did he manage to scare you off?”

  “Nope.” Genevieve looked up. “Though I can’t honestly tell you if he was trying to.” Which was strange. Carex could have just as easily tried to blackmail her into leaving Pyrus alone, but he hadn’t.

  She was damn tired of trying to fathom Carex’s motives, Genevieve decided. Time for a change of subject. She undressed to use the shower herself, as Pyrus did the opposite. “My wings—they were furled when I went to sleep.” She flexed them. “So that’s a thing?”

  “When you’re very comfortable. I wouldn’t play poker for a while.” Pyrus pulled his shirt over his head and winked at her when she could see him again. “There’s a stage when they broadcast your every emotion before you learn to control them, same as any other aspect of your body language.”

  Genevieve stretched her wings, then put them away as she headed to the bathroom. She supposed she was getting more comfortable with all of this, now. Slowly but surely.

  Pyrus drifted into the doorway, caught her eyes in the mirror before she turned on the water. “You think you’re going to want to uninstall, if—when—we get that far?”

  Genevieve stilled. In the mirror at this moment, she didn’t look at all like an Install, with her wings away. Another good question. Until quite recently, the answer would have been obvious. Now that question met and mingled with the one troubling her after Carex’s visit, and somehow left her with a decision. Fuck Carex, she’d tell Pyrus about the virus after they had the uninstallation process finished. Then they could go their separate ways, if necessary. If they were even still together by then.

  “I don’t know. I can’t pick up at home, not after they kicked me out.” She turned back to catch Pyrus’s eyes directly. “I’ll see how I feel when we get there. Fair?”

  “Fair,” he agreed.

  Dirty Burnout

  Part I

  The longer Amsterdam Genevieve waited after hearing the head of the Pax Romana military’s Science Division had arrived at the lab facility used by Genevieve’s research group, the tighter her nerves wound themselves. She’d told the other members of her misfit band of nanite Installs—that strange mixture of retired military and infected enemy civilians—to take an early lunch, leaving her in the lab alone, staring into space as she had her system overlay endless permutations of plots of nanite survival rates over her vision. In every one, the research group’s lack of progress in their quest to find a way to uninstall the nanites was stark.

  And Genevieve couldn’t do a thing about it, because of what that supposed lack of progress was hiding.

  And now Abidjan Lemna was late. The Head of Science Division liked to throw everyone as off-balance as possible, so on any other visit she’d have been inside the lab by now, looking over people’s shoulders and asking pointed questions.

  Genevieve banished the data plots and pushed to her feet to go in search of Lemna, then she thought better of it and hovered, fingers of one hand digging into the polymer surface of the lab counter she’d been seated at. Maybe instead of a surprise inspection of the lab, Lemna instead had her sights trained on the security company that was the original front for this facility. Tsuga Security did guard shipments through this planet’s only port, but that job was the merest bone thrown to the sanity of all the retired Installs who’d been dumped here. The empire’s super-soldiers were too dangerous to let wander around, so if they weren’t on active duty, they were here. Genevieve’s research group had been grafted on to give them not only something else to do with their time, but also a hope of ever leaving: if their nanites could be uninstalled, perhaps they could build a normal life.

  Genevieve paced a couple restless steps, the polymer of the floor eating the sound of her footsteps. If that was Lemna’s purpose, she was Malao Carex’s problem, as he was the CFO of the front company and the highest on-planet authority, most of the time. She’d honestly be happy to hide in the lab and let the two of them be dicks to each other to their hearts’ content, but she didn’t trust that Lemna wouldn’t stop by on her way out. And if Genevieve allowed herself to relax now only to let something slip by mistake when Lemna finally arrived—

  She had her system smooth out her heartrate. This was getting ridiculous. She’d founded the research group nine years ago, and it had taken them the first six years to succeed in creating a replacement nanite line that wouldn’t infect civilians who touched dead Installs—or touched someone who had, as she’d done. Finding an uninstallation process was arguably an even more difficult task, so the three years they’d spent so far was nothing, really. Lemna and the military brass above her wouldn’t be expecting anything near success just yet.

  What Genevieve had to hide was that they had found a way to uninstal
l the nanites; the problem was that burnout worked by putting the Install through unimaginable pain. Of their two ex-military volunteers, one had died during burnout. The second had taken two more of Genevieve’s researchers down with her—she’d been too traumatized to speak, and the people who’d opened channels to her had immediately begun burnout themselves.

  The burnout process was a lot like the original nanites, in that way—under certain circumstances, it loved to spread.

  The worst part was, the actual burnout process hadn’t killed those three Installs. They committed suicide, unable to take the shock of being without nanites after the pain. The decision to go back to the drawing board had been unanimous, as had been the one to keep it from military leadership, lest they convince themselves a “risk” of suicide was acceptable in the face of the slowly but steadily accumulating Installs who couldn’t be allowed to go back to a normal life after retiring from active service.

  That military leadership had decided a 50% survival rate among soldiers undergoing purposeful installation was acceptable, after all. It might have climbed as high as 60% by now. That military leadership had also been perfectly happy to infect enemy civilians—until Genevieve, 100% of those had conveniently died. Those were not the hands she wanted control of burnout to be in.

  Pyrus, the facility’s unofficial medic and her partner, spoke over a private channel, though private was debatable at the moment, given that Lemna had the codes to eavesdrop on whichever of their channels she damn well pleased. Thus his formality, she imagined.