Carnival

“I’m scared stiff.” He made it into a confidence, leaning forward over his folded arms. “And I do want to help. Your mother, and Robert. And my partner.”

She bit her lip. He crossed his ankles and waited, insouciant though it was everything he could do not to jitter against the table edge.

“Whatever they told you, there will be bloodshed,” he said.

“Claude’s going to sell us out to you. To the Coalition.”

“Claude’s your best hope of keeping the Coalition out,” he said. All Kii’s confidence aside, Vincent wasn’t certain that the Dragons could handle the combined might of the Governors and the OECC. “Claude, or your grandmother. If the people you’re working for succeed in overthrowing the government, who do you think will be here to pick up the pieces? A civil war is exactly what they would want.”

“What you would want, you mean. I don’t think so.” She still wasn’t thinking well. It was evident in her squint, in the pauses between her words. “If the Coalition wanted a, a change of government, you wouldn’t be arguing against it.”

He sighed and straightened, came to her, and smoothed her filthy hair again. “Sweetheart, I don’t work for the Coalition.”

Her eyes were closed. She was listening.

“I work with your mother,” he continued. “And I agree with you, things have got to change on New Amazonia. But wiping each other out for the convenience of the Governors is not the way. Trust me on this, as one born on a repatriated world.”

She pressed her face into his wardrobe.

“Get me a map,” she said. “And a pot of coffee.”

Vincent craved a shower, long and hot and decadent and New Amazonian. Anything to wash the deceit off his skin. Instead, he bent down and kissed her on top of the head. Agnes was already on the way in with a datapad in her hand when, silently, her shoulders shaking, Katya started to cry.

When Kusanagi‑Jones found Lesa, he judged by the drag marks that she had hauled herself at least fifty meters after disentangling herself from the thorns. The sun was high, the air breathless and heavy under the great arched trees, but the afternoon had not yet dimmed with the clouds that might bring rain, and Kusanagi‑Jones had not heard thunder. Lesa lay curled among the arched roots of some smooth‑boled, gray‑ski

Kusanagi‑Jones could smell the blood from two meters off. He couldn’t see her breathing. And he was panting hard enough that he couldn’t have heard her.

His knees ached, his calves were shaking, his heart pounding hard enough that he saw its rhythm in his trembling hands. His feet were chafed raw and blistered in the boots, the borrowed socks soaked to uselessness with sweat and serosanguinous fluid. He’d run the fifteen kilometers.

He wasn’t as young as he had been.

Time to get out of the field,he thought, and considered for a moment the serious possibility that he might be suffering a myocardial infarction. But the hammering pulse, the stabbing pain across his chest, and the dark edges around his vision faded rather than worsening, and he managed to stumble close enough to go down on one knee beside Lesa, even as he didn’t quite manage to avoid thinking of her as the body.

And now, finally, he heard thunder and a distant pattering like dry rice shaken in a container that might be the sound of leaves brushed aside by rain. The jungle was big and disorienting, full of things to trip over and ground too soft to run on without twisting your ankle, the trees teeming with flickering animals, black birds with feathered hind‑limbs that they used like a second pair of wings and screaming green‑feathered lemurs with bright, blinking eyes.

Too late,he told himself as he gathered himself to touch her, bracing for disappointment, taking in the seeping, swollen lumps of her feet, the glossiness of the infected scratches on her hands. He could kill without hesitation, but it took him seconds to gather the courage to reach out and push her matted hair away from her face.

Warm.

Of course, she would be. The air was hotter than his skin. She didn’t stir, and he reached to brush her hair back, to afford her whatever privacy in death he could.

But something caught his attention and held it, and he heard himself bringing in a slow, thoughtful breath, full of the scents of blood and infection and the warm sweet yeasty smell of the moss and the fermenting earth.

Her eyes were closed. Closed all the way, closed softly and completely, the way a dead woman’s eyes would not be.

He grabbed her wrists and dragged her huddled body out from under the curve of the root, laying her flat on her back as rain began to patter on the leaves overhead, not penetrating the canopy at first but then pounding down, splashing his face, soaking a dead man’s shirt, washing the grime and sap and blood off the deep angry scratches on Lesa’s face.

Kusanagi‑Jones leaned back on his heels, gathered Lesa up in his arms so the water wouldn’t pound up her nose, and tilted his own face to the warm rain, mouth open, feeling her heart beat slowly against his chest.

She awoke fifteen minutes later, while he was dragging her into a hastily constructed shelter, rain still smacking their heads. The first thing she did when she blinked fevered eyes and saw him bent over, half carrying and half‑shoving her under a badly thatched lean‑to, was start to laugh.

“One thing I never understood,” Lesa said, rainwater dripping down the back of her neck. “Why the Coalition is so set against gentle males–”

“What’s not to understand?” Michelangelo might seem brusque and hardhanded, sarcastic and cold, but he touched her damaged skin with exquisite care. He’d gotten a medical kit somewhere, and a shirt he was tearing into bandages. Whatever he was doing made her feet hurt less. Which wasn’t surprising; her ankles looked like the trunks of unhealthy trees, and could hardly have hurt more.

He had started at the soles of her feet, mummifying her from toes to ankles, and was now dabbing the red, swollen bites on her calves.

“It’s not like you contribute to population growth,” she said, frowning. He pressed the sides of a bite, clear fluid seeping between his fingertips. “Ow!”

“Sorry.” He smeared that wound, too, glossy leaves dimpling and catching under his knees as his weight shifted. The motion tumbled another scatter of rain down Lesa’s neck, and a few jeweled drops made minute lenses on his close‑cropped cap of hair. “No, it’s not. Not by accident, anyway.”

“But?”

“You’re operating on spurious assumptions, so your conclusions are flawed.”

“How–Ow! How so?”

“One, that sexual preferences have anything to do with reproduction. Doesn’t matter who you fuck. Only way to have an unauthorized baby on Earth is to plan it.” His hands shook as he tucked in a stray end of bandage, and she thought, startled, that he wasn’t lying to her now.

“Two?” she pressed, when he’d been silent a little longer.

“Human societies aren’t logical. Yours isn’t. Mine isn’t. Vincent–” He coughed, or laughed, and shook dripping water out of his hair. “–well, his is at least humane in its illogicality.”

“So why?”

“You want my theory? Worth what you pay for it.”

She nodded. He looked away.

“Cultural hegemony is based on conformity,” he said, after a pause long enough that she had expected to go unanswered. “Siege mentality. Look at oppressed philosophies, religions–or religions that cast themselves as oppressed to encourage that kind of defensiveness. Logic has no pull. What the lizard brain wants, the monkey brain justifies, and when things are scary, anything different is the enemy. Can come up with a hundred pseudological reasons why, but they all boil down to one thing: if you aren’t one of us, you’re one of them.” He shrugged roughly into her silence. “I’m one of them.”