The Seek (4 page)

‘Yeah, well, I don’t do performance art.’ She thought about all those people she had seen, melting together in passion and voyeurism; one last, long, desperate grab for life.

He was shirtless and had long ago lost his mask along with his vibro. His skin was very pale, and fine, long muscles cut perfectly symmetrical shapes across his chest. It was too dark back here to see properly, but she had been able to feel a few ridges criss-crossing the sweet canvass. This Avenger had seen more than one bloody battle in the service of New Earth. The thought thrilled her. She’d had some men, but always carefully, and never an Avenger. This one, he was more like her. More like her than the other lost souls she’d had, desperate and urgent, in bars and ports on strange planets and halfway stations.

She ran her fingers over one of the plastic ridges. ‘How’d you get it?’

He stiffened. ‘You want war stories?’

She heard it in his voice, fear of the bargain he thought they all wanted to strike in return for sex, all those groupies. Because of it all, because of the secrets, everyone wanted to know. What happened? What was it like? The voyeurism of the uninitiated.

‘Nah,’ she dismissed, as lightly as she could. ‘I just wondered. Don’t tell me.’

But the tension was still in his body, and there was an edge to his voice she’d heard many times in her own. She wanted to take it away.

She stood up and stepped out of her underwear, leaving the dress riding high on her chest and over her arms. Then she held her hands out to him and pulled him up, working hard not to let him feel the strength in her arms, the strength she could use to hurl him across the room if she needed to.

When he was vertical, she dropped slowly to her knees and unzipped his pants, feeling his gaze focus very closely on her, and his breathing still.
Now he’s paying attention
. She yanked the uniform down his legs, dragging her fingers along his skin as she did, feeling more slashes and ridges decorating his legs.

She thought it again:
more than one bloody battle
.

When he stepped out of his pants, she stood back up. He sighed. ‘Where?’ His voice was dark and ragged.

She pointed to the wall. ‘There.’

She took his hand and led him there, backing slowly against the wall. With one swift move he picked her up as if she weighed no more than that old ginger cat and settled her on his hips. He pushed her into the cold wall that backed onto the compression units and put his hands under her buttocks.

She wanted it. She had, ever since that dance back at the club Ever since she’d said to him ‘come.’ She couldn’t have done it there in the club; not there. But here in the dark, in the bowels of this floating Armageddon…this, she could do. She got this. And she was pretty sure, now, that he got it too. This wasn’t about attraction, or sex, and definitely not love. He was a boy, but he’d seen enough, and this was all about driving out demons. It was absolution, and connection. And she could feel, from the taut bunch of his muscles and the jagged edge to his voice when he’d said ‘do you want war stories?’ that he needed absolution too.

And maybe some connection.

And he was going to get it. Now. They both were.

She wasn’t going to waste one more second of this night, and the dancing and the Connect, worrying about whether or not this was the right thing to do. Whether he might find out, recognise her. Whether someone might know, or care. Tonight she was driving out the hell that always needled at the back of her brain; the darkness that haunted her sleep. Tonight was about reaching out for something lost.

‘Now,’ she said and he didn’t need to be told twice. He drove into her like she was the most desirable thing he had ever had, and her body opened to him joyously. It had been a long time since she had been close to anyone like this and her cells lit up at the sensation.

‘More,’ she commanded.

‘We’re getting there, honey,’ he assured her, that faint hint of a chuckle playing at the back of his drawl. His fingers dug hard into her buttocks as he pushed into her again. His mouth swooped down to hers, hot and sweet, like memories of maple syrup. The kiss was hard and good, a desperate tenderness lingering at the end of each searching assault.

And then she didn’t speak at all, because he was filling up all the places inside her that were capable of speech. And more. He was filling up the places usually filled with terror and aloneness and watchfulness. One long finger circled her from the outside while his hips bucked and thrust against her, hammering her into the wall. Her head banged against its metallic hardness and didn’t care. She wanted only more, more, more, as her insides built to a screaming rhythm.

But he was dancing to his own tune.

He pulled out of her, leaving her limp and irritated for a millisecond, sagged against the wall.

Then he placed big hands on her shoulders and spun her around to face the wall. He linked his fingers through hers and dragged her hands up above her head, pinning her in place. He secured them there with one hand while he traced the outline of her back with the other. Then his hand slipped lower, kneading her buttocks with a rough seduction that made her gasp.

He pushed one finger, then another, inside her, where he’d been a moment before.

‘How does it feel?’ His voice was rough and low.

‘Your fingers?’

‘The wall,’ he said, pushing her against its coldness so it bit into the soft skin of her belly and breasts.

She concentrated on the sensation so she could get it right. ‘Hard,’ she said, turning the palms captured in his to better feel it. ‘Cold.’ She paused. ‘Solid.’

‘What else?’

There was a note of pleading in the question, and Kyn turned it over in her mind as best she could with the sensations hammering at her from so many directions.

‘It feels familiar,’ she said. ‘And a bit…cruel.’

But she didn’t say: I’m not frightened of cruelty. She wanted to say it, but she didn’t want to sound like a nut job. So many things were frightening. But not this. Not this wall, and not this guy. Not talking to him in that strange club, not bringing him here, not screwing him against this wall.

He grunted, pulling his fingers out of her and then filling her up with himself again. ‘Tell me,’ he rasped, his breath harsh and uneven. ‘Do you…is it sometimes hard to feel? To feel anything?’

She got it; she knew what he meant. It was the battle. The time in between seemed surreal, a child’s game. There was only the moment of almost-death. Everything else was play, a simple, infantile half-life that didn’t know the real world.

‘Sometimes,’ she whispered, turning her head so he could feel her breath against his face. She knew now that he needed it. That he was doing this for the same reasons she was. Maybe the same reasons they were all doing it, all the Avengers in that club. ‘But not right now. Right now I can feel perfectly. I can feel your skin, and your body, and your breath. And…’

‘And?’ He pushed harder into her, and it was sweet and hard and scary and comforting. She could feel the humanness of her body, feel it react like such human bodies always had, down through time, to the touch of a man and the thrill of a moment like this.

She sighed into him. ‘And right now, I know I’m real.’

He grunted low in his throat and released her hands from where he’d held them captured over her head. He wrapped his arms around her waist as he lost control inside her. ‘Me too,’ he said, as light and energy shot through her. ‘I’m real too.’

‘You are,’ she agreed. ‘I swear to you that you are.’

***

‘So tell me,’ he drawled into her ear. ‘Was that better than Disneyland?’

Kyn stiffened. ‘When did you know?’

He uncurled a little from around her. They were lying on the hard, cold granitium floor, their clothes discarded around them. Soft green lights from the compression units outlined his lopsided mouth and high cheekbones. He nuzzled her, breathing deeply. Even in this sanitized cavern, the air reeked of sex and sweat. ‘I saw something,’ he said. ‘At the club, how you moved.’ He hesitated. ‘Do you know what they call you?’

She could only imagine. She shot for a guess. ‘The Bitch?’

He laughed. ‘The Dancer.’

Her stomach went into free-fall and she squeezed her eyes shut, despite the semi-darkness, as the memory of that night pressed in. The dancing, then the lights. Don’t think about it.

‘When I saw you there, something kept trying to connect, but the wig…’ He trailed off, as though annoyed with himself. ‘And the dress, the voice. It’s not how I’m used to seeing you.’

She cleared her throat, worried she might sound girly and breathy. She was glad she hadn’t known that he recognised her when she came apart, screaming, with him inside her.

It would have really killed the buzz.

‘So, not then. When?’

‘Back here, the dress.’ He chuckled. ‘That damned dress, why wouldn’t you take it off? Something clicked.’ He nuzzled closer again, and slid an arm under her, dragging her on top of him.

She studied the sweet boy, as he tried to pull her closer. Alarm bells screeched in her head. ‘Do we need to have
the talk
?’

‘Nah,’ he said, grinning up at her. ‘I’m not gonna try to pin you down, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

It was.

‘Phew,’ she said, surprised at the relief that washed across her in the semi-darkness. ‘And — ’

But he was one step ahead of her, again. ‘And I’m not much of a one for kiss and tell.’

‘Now that’s just plain good sense,’ she said, planting a tiny kiss on the end of his nose.

‘Yes Ma’am,’ he said, one hand stroking the skin of her back. ‘I’ve seen what you do to guys who piss you off.’

Four loud metallic peals interrupted his chuckling, and she was up, rolling off him and onto her feet.

‘Four bells,’ she said. ‘I’m on.’

She left without looking back, and barely heard him call out. ‘Later, Captain.’

***

Three days later

It was a routine thing, as much as these things ever were. A vientium run in Sector Seven. Not Tyver, not for Class 68. Not yet. It was their first run. Avengers didn’t give much quarter, didn’t coddle their virgins. Only the very first time.

‘Pick it up, sunshine,’ she barked at the lanky black kid she knew to be tough as nails, as he strolled onto the pod.

‘Pardon me for not rushing into getting my head sliced off by a Hydrentian Guardian,’ the boy joked, nevertheless picking up speed as he ascended the ramp.

‘Your head’s too ugly,’ she assured him. ‘It’d make a crap trophy.’ But as she joked, she reflected that this was one thing humans had learned in the last seventeen years. Something they hadn’t managed to learn in the previous several millennia. War sucks. It is not noble, nor joyous, nor some messed-up coming-of-age thing. Seventeen years, facing a whole universe of things that want to kill you, will really take the gung-ho from your Boys Own Adventure.

Once they were all in, packed into the little transport circle, facing each other like contestants in some gladiatorial trial, she stood in the middle of them, and nodded to the Primo. ‘So,’ she began. ‘There is only one rule. Listen to Yentir.’

Pyten, the boy who had been sure she wouldn’t kill them, back in the ice chamber, spoke up. He was green under his transit visor, buckled into his seat in the circle. ‘Why aren’t you coming?’

She pressed her fingernails into her palms. ‘We’ve discussed this. Magisters train, Primos lead. But everything I’ve taught you, everything we’ve talked about, comes from my time as an Avenger. And a Primo.’

As always, she was surprised when no-one said,
but you’re not old enough to know anything useful
. Avengers didn’t live very long. She was old enough. And to them, she was ancient.

Kendis, the boy with the attitude, spat under his breath, ‘We’re lucky she’s not coming. She’d probably feed our heads to the fuckin’ Hydrentians.’

‘Silence,’ Yentir the Primo snapped. ‘If I can promise you one thing out of your first mission, it is this.’ The Primo was a huge Mongolian, and his impassive face was unreadable. ‘When you get back, you will never feel the same about anything again. Including your Magister.’ He nodded at Kyntura. ‘Especially your Magister.’

Kyn nodded back at the Mongolian, and then at the twelve young men circling her.

‘Do not die,’ she said, turning on her heel.

She heard Kendis’ muttered expletive as she buzzed herself out of the pod. ‘Some fuckin’ pep talk.’

***

Jedro motioned to the seat beside him in the Great Hall. ‘Will you watch?’

It was always a tension for Kyn. To watch was to walk over broken glass for as long as the mission took. To stay away was impossible. She tried, she always tried. She had gone back to her quarters, and worked on the entry program for the next virgins.

But here she was, three hours to the minute since the pod departed. The exact moment her boys would enter the valley.

She could watch the footage later, once the outcome was known, to help with future training; to identify problems and highlight areas for drills. It would be less anxious. But it would feel like desertion.

‘You don’t need to,’ the older man assured her. ‘The mission is Yentir’s now.’

‘I know,’ she snapped. ‘Pass me the buds.’

The picture was dark, but otherwise perfect.

‘Your tenth class,’ Jedro said, settling buds in his ears under his bald head and motioning to the tech beside him to start the relay.

‘Shut the fuck up, General,’ she said, fixing her own buds with shaking hands. ‘You’re making me feel old.’

‘Nah.’ He laughed. ‘We’re just pumping them through faster and faster.’

Kyn closed her eyes. She didn’t want to think about why they were doing that.

When she opened them, she could see the boys. Yentir had them in infiltration formation, and their timing and movements were tight and perfect. Kyn’s heart swelled watching the twelve young men who hated her moving forward with precision towards the target. The sound was acoustically perfect, and she could hear that they were as silent as they were synchronised.

Good, good. So far, so good.