Edge of Dark (35 page)

The little robot that had come with them moved, startling her. She had forgotten that it was working out a kink in Jason's right knee, some bit of automata that had lost track of the signals from their brains.
Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to be in a different body, to be even less human.

Yi answered her.
We will discover it. I asked Jhailing once, and he said that it might take years, but that we can become as versatile as Jhailing. That our minds—our selves—are adapted to having four limbs that work the way human bodies do, or almost. He also said that the best way to prepare ourselves for more freedom is to practice, to push our bodies, to learn to do more than we once could.

Like teaching our subconscious?
Chrystal mused.

Jason grunted at something the robot did.
Too bad they left us pain.

No. It's a survival mechanism. We can die, after all.

Yi, being a minder. He'd always looked out for their safety. Katherine had been the freest, the most abandoned, the poet and the singer and the massage artist and the one who kept the plants alive. Chrystal kept the thought private; it would trigger pain in Jason.
You can turn physical pain down
, Chrystal suggested, and showed him how.

He looked relieved. Funny how they hadn't each learned the same things.

The robot finished with Jason and moved back. “Are you ready?” Yi asked.

“Yes.”

This time, Chrystal watched as Jason and Yi practiced braiding. They hadn't tried merging all three together yet. If they made a mistake, there was no one more experienced here to help.

Yi and Jason grimaced together, and then laughed, and then relaxed into a look that held no emotion at all. She knew it for a lie; the deepest part of braiding was all under the surface of the body, so deep that they didn't feel the external parts of themselves. For her, it was the most emotional part of their new lives, the most curious and exhilarating and slightly scary time.

Glancing at the hallway camera, she noticed a light flick on outside of Nona's room. She came out, fully dressed, and started toward command. She stopped outside of Charlie's door, hesitating. She looked pensive, draped in longing. Nona had always been a loner. Seeing her uncertain and in love felt sweet.

Chrystal vowed to spend time with Nona that afternoon, quiet time just chatting like they used to. It was difficult to focus on conversation that moved as slowly as a human mind, but it was a skill Chrystal needed to keep. This alone was almost surely the reason the Next had chosen to use fresh soulbots as part of their ambassadorial force.

She hummed loudly, warning Yi and Jason.

Yi and Jason ascended, faces going from slack to wonder.

Lights snapped on and it was time for coffee and loud conversation, and time to feel as much like her old self as possible.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

NONA

The robots had taken over the nearly-empty cargo area.

Nona sat on a couch in the staff lounge, sipping a cocktail and watching them on a multi-camera display that filled the wall in front of them. Charlie sat beside her, close enough that they touched elbows and shoulders. All three soulbots had stripped naked. They looked close to human, with musculature that moved like Nona's own might if she were in perfect shape. Their bellies rounded slightly down between their legs, as if they were all young women wearing invisible underwear, the only clear separation from humanity that Nona could spot at this scale.

Chrystal's hair had been caught back in a long braid, showing off her tattoo. Yi had no identifying marks of that type, but his slightly wild hair had been left free. Naked, his leanness was even more apparent, contrasting with Jason's broad shoulders and muscular thighs.

They performed low-g acrobatics, sailing across the vast open space, arms and legs outstretched. At the end of each long trajectory, they grabbed or touched or tucked and rolled into struts or walls or each other. Each stop was followed by a bend and a leap to gain new momentum. Sometimes they flew end over end, tumbling but controlled, moving so quickly their limbs blurred. Yi was the fastest by far. Jason moved the most gracefully, was the most aware of the others. He never missed a catch or a possible touch. Chrystal flowed as smooth as butter, as if she had been a gymnast once.

Which she hadn't.

Nona didn't remember Chrystal being particularly graceful on the dance floor. But now? Now she looked born for movement. “I could create a musical score to accompany the flight of the robots,” Nona mused.

Charlie hummed a few bars, almost matching at least three rounds of movement before he sped up at a moment when Yi slowed and pulled Chrystal to him. He stopped, laughing. “I must not quite have the rhythm right yet.”

“It looks like play,” Nona said.

Charlie sipped on his beer. “It is. We have cameras all over Lym, and sometimes we catch herd animals playing like that, wrestling and showing off.”

“Are you suggesting they're animals?”

Charlie raised an eyebrow. “We are.” He got up to get another beer, opening it so the slightly sour smell made Nona wrinkle her nose. “At home, the animals who play with the most abandon are the predators.”

“But surely prey are almost never safe enough to play,” she mused.

“Everything is prey to something, even if it's us. As far as I know, all mammals play. I've seen birds play with thermals.”

She turned and took his hand, speaking now of the soulbots. “They're playing. We're planning and worrying, even though we don't really have anything to do. I can't imagine any way to be more ready than we are.” In truth, they had worried every option to death, and had contingency plan upon contingency plan done. Now, they were simply flying in a direction that could intercept the Deep. She felt drenched in worry and jealous of the robots' play. Even Charlie appeared less worried than she was, although he spent long hours talking about Lym from time to time.

Her thumb roved his palm, a slightly forward move that made her breath catch in her throat. They had been working slowly closer for days now, but a gap remained between them.

He put his free hand over hers, stopping the movement. “We should rest.”

She turned her face away, biting at her lower lip. “I'd like to do more than that.” She knew what bothered him. “I'm not your boss out here or your captain or anything. We're just people.”

“You own the ship.”

“I'd give you half.”

Now he laughed, his voice husky. “I don't want half of your ship.”

“I know that. We're in the middle of something bigger than the fact that I was born to more money than you were.” She stared at the screen, watching Yi approaching on one of the cameras, catching a look of absolute serenity on his face. “We're not separated by nearly as much as we're both separate from them.”

“I thought they'd be
less
like us.” Charlie rested his chin on her shoulder, an intimate point of heat. “I can tell they came from us. I can tell what kind of people they were, even imagine what they might have done as humans. But they're not us.”

“Chrystal used to be so much more—alive. She could never do that—never fly across a cargo bay perfectly—but she was warmer. Now there's a part of her that I can't touch. A cold part. Not mean. I might even describe it as distracted, although that's not quite right either.”

He kissed the back of her head. “And you're warm and real.”

“I need to remember the best part of not being like them,” she whispered. The image in front of her showed all three of them landing together in the same place and taking each other's hands, leaning back with wide smiles on their faces.

Charlie traced the tattoo on Nona's neck with his hand, trailing his heat down to the place where her neck met the top of her collarbone and back up, touching the underpart of her chin and coming up so that her lips nibbled traces of fruit and beer from his fingers, chased with the slight salt-sweat of him. “Do you ever wish you were like them?” he asked. “That you had their grace?”

“No.”

“No hesitation.”

“None.”

“So then come to bed and prove you're flesh and blood.”

Something that had been tense inside of her shattered. “And bone and sinew.”

He lifted her and turned her, as fluid as anything the robots were doing in the cargo bay, and as he pulled her to him, the movement stole her breath.

He carried her from the room and into her own bedroom, setting her down so softly that she barely noticed the presence of the bed against her back before he was kissing her.

Perhaps a thing she had refused herself for so long had to come out with force. She had lost herself so deeply in him she was almost ashamed of herself. Almost. Even now, hours later and lying loosely by his side, her breath came in tiny gasps and unexpected shudders ran from scalp to toe. Her foot roamed his calf, eliciting small moans of pleasure.

This was being human. Melding, loving. Sweating together, stinking of each other's secret juices.

A part of her still floated.

She was used to men from the Deep, who were almost all far older than she was, and more controlled than Charlie. Perhaps that had drawn her out as well, some wildness in him that went with the planet he loved.

Authentic.

“I wanted you a long time before that happened,” she said.

“Me too.” His hand roamed her hip and traced a line of banked fire on top of her thigh.

She closed her eyes, certain that she and Charlie rested together in the center of a storm, midway between emergencies and for once in a long time, not alone.

Marcelle would probably approve.

The stray thought about her mother made her smile.

The incoming communications buzzer jolted her from such a deep, safe place that for a moment she couldn't orient. The walls and the room were wrong, not familiar.

Beside her, Charlie startled, his hand coming up and slapping her lightly, accidentally, across the chin.

They were both knees and elbows as they sorted themselves into standing and looked at each other, eyes wide. “Who is it?” Nona asked the
Ghost
.

“The
Sultry Savior
, hailing you.”

A momentary flash of guilt flared through her, followed by anger. They dared?

Curiosity and the idea of her command and her ship and the way they had done the one worst thing ever and abandoned their superior officer—abandoned her—tumbled in, and she felt jerked by flood after flood of emotion.

Surely it was just a reaction to having been so much a part of another human being that she was no longer truly in her own self. Not yet, anyway.

Charlie watched her, waiting for her to choose their reaction.

“I'll take the call from the command room in twenty minutes. Please order stim and breakfast and ask the others to meet me in there.”

Charlie whispered. “Should I come with you?”

Nona detangled herself from the bedclothes enough to stand up. He shouldn't even be asking. “Of course.”

They handed each other articles of clothing, although she rejected the shirt she'd been wearing for a cleaner one from her closet. When she stood in front of him, both of them fully dressed, she felt the distance coming back like a cool breeze. She stepped into him and lifted her face for a kiss, falling away from the coming separation for one more long minute before she turned and left the room.

Chrystal had beaten her there. Even though there was a good chance the cargo-bay acrobatics had gone on without stopping, she didn't look winded or worn out in any way. She did look worried. “What do you need? What's happened?”

“It's my old ship.”

Charlie came in. “Don't you own them both?”

“Technically.” She glanced at Chrystal. “They deserted me. With a little help from Gunnar.”

Chrystal frowned.

“He may not be our friend.”

“That's sad. I remember him bringing us lemonade in his gardens, by the lilies and honeysuckle.” Her face hardened. “We should stay on the
Ghost
. The
Savior
will almost certainly have been compromised by now.”