6.
In the end, lying in her bed and at last drifting off into exhausted sleep, I murmured, “How long have you wanted this?” into the space and the silence we’d built between us.
She absently ran a hand through my hair and down my neck, fingernails just barely scratching against my skin. “When we first met, you told me you needed to atone, and you met my challenge in kind. Since then.”
I nodded against her touch, and let myself sink into the softness of her body and her bed. I almost missed it, when she said, “And you?”
“When I first saw you change the world.”
I heard her draw breath and let it go, warm against my skin, before she pressed a kiss to my neck. “Sleep,” she told me, as she held me close. “There will be more time in the morning.”
I hummed agreement, felt her laughter buzz against my back, and let that sound carry me into dreams.
* * *
2.
As I grew more comfortable with the Beloved Dust, I spent time—more than I should, if I was being honest with myself—watching Tender in the mesh.
There was no way she didn’t know I was there, but that really wasn’t the point—I just wanted to see her moving in her own space, where she wasn’t restrained by the theoretical bounds of the world.
I was supposed to learn about her, to find a place and time she was vulnerable. The mission notes told me that this was her place of power, where she was most in control, but also where her anxieties could manifest. And I watched for those, but—
She made The Steady with a breath, when I knew it would take most meshworkers an hour at least to set up all the minute changes necessary to have it appear in differently anchored spots. She moved, and the mesh moved with her, the Mirage coiling behind her like a loving pet. It made her movements sing, almost; her joy and love for the space and what she could do with it were unparalleled by anything I had ever seen before.
Tender was confident and beautiful outside of the mesh, but inside it she was a goddess.
Sometimes, even, I forgot how to breathe.
* * *
4.
Tender Sky’s arms wrapped around me and all I could think was,
Oh.
Automatically, I raised my own arms and settled them around her body in return, but the feeling was different now: rough callused fingers catching on her silken clothes, instead of layered rings and bracelets of jeweled data catching in her hair.
“You’re awful,” Tender told me, words muffled by my shoulder, which was several inches higher than it had been the last time she’d hugged me like this. “You died.”
I winced. Sometimes, I wished I forgot that bit. It was usually quite unpleasant. In this case, it was just embarrassing. “...yes.”
“And now you’re... alive again. And you look very different.” She stepped back and gestured at me—at the whole of my body, coat and gun and stubble—as if I had offended her by the lack of input cords wrapped around my waist and strings of slowly shifting lights built into my clothes. Which, to be fair, I probably had. “I mean, I guess that’s not weird,” she continued. “But it’s harder to recognise you when you change like that.”
“I’m sorry?” I offered, spreading my hands in an attempt at conciliation. I looked over at ⸢Signet⸣, who, unsurprisingly, was a lot more self-contained. “Is there a good way to apologize for dying?”
⸢Signet⸣ raised one perfectly arched eyebrow and gently shook her head. The tiny crease at the corner of her mouth belied her reserve; she was also pleased to see my return, even if she wasn’t showing it.
That was a relief. It wouldn’t do to have one of my comrades not caring about me.
Tender grabbed my hands and started inspecting them, returning my attention to her. “I can’t believe you can do that.” Her tail flicked back and forth, fluffier than usual. Signaling upset, with how her ears kept pinning against her head. I’d learned cat body language because of her. “If you hadn’t told Cascara—”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, and gently squeezed her fingers. “I thought I’d told you. Death is impermanent. It was one of the... perks of a... previous job.” I smiled, bright and cheery and projecting unconcern while swallowing the amount I couldn’t explain. “Cascara appreciates skill in her agents.”
Claws pricked into my skin, so fast I barely realised before Tender released my hands. “Tell us these things, you idiot.” She shoved at my chest, and I rocked back, dazed by how much vivacity spread from her touch. “Anything else you’re hiding?”
I closed my mouth, and I looked at her, fangs half-snarled, tail puffed, and claws not-quite-catching on my leather coat. A vision that I’d dreamt of, blurred by the dissolution of memory but oh it was so easy to recall how much she mattered, with her hard edges so often hidden by her curls and the softness of her flesh.
Quietly, I placed one hand on hers. “I care for you.”
“Obviously.”
I could just barely see ⸢Signet⸣ roll her eyes in the periphery of my vision. I could also hear the quiet hiss of silk on metal as she left the hangar bay, and the buzzing whirr of the door closing behind her.
I swallowed. ⸢Signet⸣ deciding we needed privacy was not my intent with those words. “No, I mean—”
Her eyes met mine, hard and biting, and she grabbed my lapels and dragged me down until my face was a bare inch from hers. “I know what you mean.”
Faintly, I said, “Oh.”
* * *
3.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this, I thought as Tender grabbed my hand. Somewhere behind us, ⸢Signet⸣ was shouting about diplomacy and the potential for peaceful solutions to a room full of people who probably weren’t listening to her very well.
Supposedly we were here to “Diffuse tensions between Liaison Perigee and the community of unmeshed on Seiche”. In reality, a former Excerpt, a cutting-edge mesh creator, and someone who looked like they hacked the mesh for fun were... a less than optimal group for this mission.
We’d pointed this out to Cascara.
She’d told us that the Ivy were on another mission and we were “The only objective negotiators available at this time”, which I privately thought was a terrible end to come to.
So instead of a nice negotiation where everyone peacefully talked things out, ⸢Signet⸣ was left calming down the people who—unlike Tender and myself—hadn’t run out of the building when smoke bombs started going off in and around the place.
Sometimes I wondered how any of us survived.
Tender pulled me to the side, dodging around people she sensed somehow, and I swore because this was exactly the kind of opportunity that I had been paid to find or create and then use. Chaos, lack of visibility, no good sensor records of what happened—it would be so easy. I could hear enough shouts of pain and confusion to know there would be some injured after this; one death could seem an accident easily enough.
My free hand fell to the lethal little knife at my side. I flipped the little catch that released it, letting it slide into my fingers. I held tight to it and to Tender’s hand, making sure she didn’t lose me with those enhanced legs of hers.
My eyes were, in fact, so fixed upon her that when she took a stride slightly too long, over a set of loose tools, I tripped.
In perhaps the most inglorious way I could recall dying, I tripped, and I fell, and my own blade, designed to quiet life quickly and without pain, pierced through my lungs.
Tender’s hand slipped from mine.
The last thing I recall, through the fog both literal and metaphorical, was her eyes widening at the sight of my blood, and the Mirage glowing around her like she could stop life from fluttering out of my body through sheer force of will.
“I’m sorry,” I said, or tried to say, or thought.
* * *
5.
She—
didn’t kiss me.
I felt Tender’s breath on my lips, warm, smell-tasting of mint (she’d been cracking candies in her teeth as I flew in after contacting Cascara, she told me hours later, to help drown the tumult of feelings inside her) and altogether closer than I had ever expected.
(Not closer than I had dreamed. I couldn’t remember— The curse, the downside of my survival was data loss, and the data I had lost about her ate away at me, but it was nothing I could retrieve, simply something to wonder about and wish for; something to create something new around and regrow into something brighter and better and more lasting.)
She said, “How many times have you done this?” and I felt her lips brush against mine, her fingers still latched against my lapels. “Not told me, or whoever, you cared. How many times have you died?”
I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against hers. She didn’t pull away. I’d half-expected her to. I felt her twitch, her hands spasm loose and tight, but she didn’t back away. My hand atop hers tensed as I said, “I don’t remember, Tender. I— I can’t even say I wish I did. I do not like remembering what it is like to die.”
“How do you come back?” she asked, almost plaintive but with too much scientific fascination for me to really feel like that could ever be the entire answer.
“I—” I swallowed, slowly slid closer, giving her time and space to stop me as I wrapped myself around her, clinging to an anchor as I told her a truth she was owed, one that was almost, but not quite, entire. “I’m in the Mirage. I do not know how. I die. I come back. I forget some things. My body changes. It— This has its uses to many people, not just Cascara and the Beloved. You are not the first to have found this skill of mine.”
“You are ours now,” she said, and the way her hands dug into my back, the way she pulled her face away until I looked into her eyes, I heard behind it You are mine now and had to press my face into the curls of her hair to keep myself from shaking apart. “You have a place here, and it is yours for as long as you want it.”
“I know,” I told her, as my voice broke and left me with naught but a whisper with which to say, “Thank you.”
She kissed me then, pulled back and pressed her lips to my forehead as I knelt and curled, trembling, into her arms on the hard metal floor.
Whatever else I’d lost, I’d found this.
It was enough.
It was good.
And, in a whisper, I thought, I could be good here too, as Tender let me crack myself open and slowly, gently, filled in the holes I’d left with soft words and harsh hands.
* * *
1.
The first time I really met Tender Sky was in a bar.
(The first time I technically met her didn’t count; that was when Cascara introduced me to my team, and ⸢Signet⸣ had graciously nodded and taken my hand, and Tender had grinned and welcomed me to the team and invited me here, so— not too different, in the end.)
This was not, in fact, surprising, considering that it was her bar and she was serving me a drink “On the house” as the newest member of the Beloved Dust.
I looked around The Steady, getting a sense of its proprietor. My teammate. My target.
It was hard to tell which of those designations was the most appropriate right now.
Tender Sky served me a drink a brighter purple than her hair, almost glowing from within. She nodded at the lights dotting my bodysuit like stars, rigged to match the Mirage’s color around whatever ship I was in. “You’ll fit in here.”
“Why’s that?” I picked up the drink, took a sip. It tasted like almond and lavender, and fizzed against my tongue for a moment, leaving behind a subtle aftertaste of hazelnut. “This is good.”
“Thought you’d like it. Subtlety is sometimes wasted, but you seem like you’d appreciate it.” She smiled, and leaned over the bar. She closed her eyes for the briefest moment, and the music quieted around us, leaving more space for words. Her eyes opened and fixed on me, and I was strongly reminded of how cats were ambush predators. “You’ll fit in because you’re someone else who’s on the outside, looking in on something you used to be part of.”
I flinched away from her gaze, fixing my eyes instead on the slow bubbles of my drink. Jazz progressions continued drifting in from the public room. “What was I a part of?” I asked, instead of what I really wanted to know: How she’d seen that there really was something for me to hide.
“Does it matter?” she said, more flippant than she’d been mere seconds before. “Cascara knows what you did, or didn’t do, or ran away from the consequences of. She knows what you’re capable of, and you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t good, but you also wouldn’t be here if you had somewhere else to be.”
I laughed briefly. When I looked up, she hadn’t moved. Her eyes were still fixed on mine, even as her posture had relaxed. “I’ve forgotten some things.” I shrugged, sending the data-filled gems on my necklace chiming. “There are acts I regret, and acts I do not want to enact again. Some of them, I should repent for. That’s what we’re all doing, isn’t it?”
This time, Tender looked away first.
Quietly, she said, “I suppose it is.”