Carnival

“I can counterfeit anything,” he said, and waited for the realization to settle in. He knew it would, although it took longer than he expected. But he felt it take hold, felt Vincent understand what he meant, felt his grief turn to disbelief.

“You’re amazing,” Vincent said, quiet voice vibrating with excitement, suppressed laughter, his breath both warming and cooling Michelangelo’s skin. “A therapy team. A cursed therapy team. You beat reeducation. You son of a bitch.”

“S’what I do. Not just you who’s good at his job.”

Vincent shook his head. “I see why you would be mad at me.”

“It’s done.” And it was. Gone and past mending, but maybe leaving room. If Michelangelo decided Vincent was worth more than his ethics.

Michelangelo drew one knee up and pressed his palm into the coarse, rich nap of Vincent’s braids, urging silently. And Vincent, after a thoughtful pause, acquiesced.

Later, he slid over Michelangelo, lithe body warm as he straddled his hips, fumbling their bodies into co

It was good.

But it wasn’t what it had been. It couldn’t be; there was too much moving under the surface now, and Kusanagi‑Jones couldn’t set it aside. Vincent was a professional, but he wasn’t a Liar, and he was keeping back something. Once, Kusanagi‑Jones wouldn’t have minded. Once he would have known it was orders, and Vincent would tell him when he should.

But that had been before Kusanagi‑Jones learned just how badly he’d screw Vincent over, when it came down to orders. And not even official orders.

No. Orders on behalf of Free Earth, in opposition to the Cabinet.

Angel walks beside giants. The nearest is warm and smells sour, sweat and fear, but under the scent is the warmth and the familiar spices of home. Mama holds his hand to keep him close, but it isn’t needed; you couldn’t pry him from her side.

Her palm is cold and wet, and her hand is shaking. She calls him On‑hel,like she did, a pretty nickname. She shushes him. They come into a bright room and she picks him up, swings him off his feet and holds him close. Not balanced on her hip, but pressed to her chest, as if she can hide him in the folds of her wardrobe.

Someone says big words, words he doesn’t understand. They boom, amplified. They hurt his ears, and he hides his head in Mama’s breast. She cups a big palm against the back of his head, covering his ears, making the hurt go away. He knows not to cry out loud. He curls up tight.

Mama argues. Her arm around him is tight. But then someone else speaks. He says they won’t take the boy,and Mama staggers, as if someone has struck her a blow, and when he looks up she’s swaying with her eyes closed. “The boy is not to blame,” the man says, the man Angel’s never seen before. “The Governors say, let the punishment fit the crime.”

Then someone pulls Angel away from her, and she lets him go as if her arm has numbed. She turns away, her round brown face contracted. She seems caught midflinch.

He cries her name and reaches for her, but somebody has him, big arms and a confused moment of struggling against strength. He kicks. He’d bite, but whoever has him is wise to that trick. He’s held tight.

“Close your eyes, Angel,” Mama says, but he doesn’t listen. She’s not looking at him. He dreams his name the way she said it again, the fond short form nobody else has ever called him.

Whoever’s holding him says something, some words, but he’s screaming too loud to hear them, and then Mama takes a deep breath and nods, and there’s a pause, long enough that she opens her eyes and turns as if to see why what she was anticipating has not come to pass–

–and she falls apart.

She makes no sound. She doesn’t show pain or even squeak; the Governors are programmed to be humane. But one moment she is whole and alive and letting out a held breath and taking in another one to speak to him, and the next she pitches forward, boneless, her central nervous system disassembled. Within moments, the thing that was Angel’s Mama is a crumbling dune in the middle of a broad white empty floor, and the man who is holding him, too late, thinks to step back and turn Angel’s face away.

He already knows not to cry out loud. He couldn’t, anyway, because his breath won’t move.

The adult holding him soothes him, strokes him, but hesitates when he seems to feel no emotion.

He wasn’t too worried, the adult Kusanagi‑Jones understands. The boy was too young to understand what he’d seen, most likely. And everywhere, there are families that want children and are not permitted to have them.

Someone will take him in.

Angelo’s breathing awoke Vincent in the darkness. It was not slow and deep, but a staccato rhythm that Vincent had almost forgotten in the intervening years, and now remembered as if it were merely hours since the last time he lay down beside Michelangelo.

Angelo was a lucid dreamer. He had learned the trick in self‑defense, with Vincent’s assistance, decades before. Angelo could control his dreams as easily as he controlled his emotions. Just more irony that it turned out not to help the problem.

Because it didn’t stop the nightmares.

Vincent had hoped, half‑consciously, they might have eased over the passing years. But judging from Angelo’s rigid form in the bed, his fists clenched against his chest, his frozen silhouette and panting as if he bit back panicked sobs–

–they were worse.

“Angelo,” he said, and felt the bed rock as Angelo shuddered, caught halfway between REM atonia–the inhibition of movement caused by the shutdown of monoamines in the brain–and waking. “Angelo,”Vincent snapped, bouncing the bed in preference to the dangerous activity of shaking his partner.

Angelo’s eyelids popped open, dark irises gleaming with reflected colors. He gasped and pushed his head back against the pillow, sucking air as if he’d been dreaming of being strangled.

He might have been. All Vincent knew about the nightmares was that they were of things that had happened, or might have happened, and between them they had enough unpleasant memories for a year’s worth of bad dreams.

Vincent put his hand on Angelo’s shoulder; when he breathed out again he seemed calm. “Thank you,” he said. He closed his eyes and swallowed.

“Think nothing of it,” Vincent answered, and put his head down on the pillow again.

Lesa sat cross‑legged on the bed, a cup of tea steaming in her hands, her breakfast untouched on the tray beside her, and watched the Coalition diplomats disentangle themselves from the sheets. She had a parser‑translator ru

Just the sort of thing you’d expect recently reunited long‑term lovers to discuss when they were safe under the covers, warm in each other’s arms. But something tugged her attention, something she couldn’t quite call an irregularity, but an…eccentricity. They were together, but strained–by history, she thought, secrets, and maybe the mission itself.