“Signed and witnessed, what choice would I have? Fetch as many of our neighbors as you like and I’ll sign the transfer in front of them.”
“But then what would you do for your own children?”
Tamara said, “I’d find a widower with an entitlement of his own. But I know, there’s no guarantee of that. So I’d have to be ready to go the way of men.”
She could see him thinking it over. That in itself gave her hope: if he’d had no way to release her, what point would there have been in weighing up the pros and cons?
“You know I’m prepared to risk death,” she said. “If you didn’t believe that, we would never have ended up in this standoff.”
Her words seemed to push him toward a decision, but not in the direction she’d been hoping. “Why should I take the entitlement away from my own family?” Tamaro demanded angrily. “Even if you deny me the chance to be the father of your children, they’ll still be my own mother’s flesh.”
Oh, the mother thing again. If only Erminia had had the foresight to leave a few written instructions for her mama-smitten son.
Tamara was tired. She bent down and picked up one of the loaves. “All right, then. I’ll give you an easier decision. It’s better that I stay hungry, but I can only hold out if we finish this now.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m sick of fighting you,” she said wearily. “This isn’t what I wanted, but I have no other choice left.”
Tamaro stood motionless, confused. “You’re serious? You’re ready right now?”
“My body’s been ready for days,” she declared. “I keep waking in the night, thinking you’re beside me.” She gazed at him imploringly. “Can’t we make peace, for this? Can’t you show some mercy and let me feel loved at the end?”
Tamaro lowered his gaze, ashamed. “I’m sorry I’ve been so hard on you,” he said. “I never wanted it to be like that.”
When he looked up again Tamara buzzed happily. She threw the loaf away and gestured to him to approach.
She forced herself to wait until he was a little closer than arm’s reach, lest he slip away and lead her on a chase she might be too famished to win. But before he could embrace her, she grabbed him by the neck and forced his body around. Then she kicked his legs from under him, and knelt forward, pinning him face-down on the ground.
His rear eyes stared up at her angrily. She put a hand over them and sprouted two more arms; he’d already extruded an extra pair himself in the hope of struggling free, but they were short and feeble, of little more than nuisance value.
“Where’s the key?” she asked him softly. Tamaro didn’t answer. “Wherever it is, I’m going to find it.” She ran her new hands over his body, starting just below his tympanum, keeping her fingertips sharp and sensitive as she searched for the tell-tale crease of a pocket.
Touching his skin made the scent of his body stronger than she’d known it for years, forcing her back to memories of the two of them wrestling as children. She’d never hesitated to take advantage of her size to overpower him then, though when she’d done it in anger and hurt him it had always left her ashamed. But she couldn’t afford to be sentimental now. He wasn’t her co any more, he was just her jailer, with a secret she needed if she wanted to live.
Tamara searched every scant of him; he had no pockets. “Where is it?” she demanded. He wouldn’t have buried it in any of the store-holes she knew about, and it would take her a year to dig up the whole farm.
He said, “I told you: Erminio has the only key.”
“Open your mouth,” she suggested, twisting him onto his side.
“Get off me!”
Tamara gripped his lower jaw tightly and pulled it down. Tamaro sharpened his own fingertips and began stabbing at her hand, but she hardened the skin and persisted. She was dizzy from hunger now, and doubted she was thinking clearly, but her strength hadn’t deserted her.
She managed to get his mouth open, wide enough to see inside. She stretched out two fingers on either side, braced them against his cheekbones, and ossified their joints so she wouldn’t have to struggle to keep them from bending. Then she extruded a fifth limb from her chest, long and narrow with a circle of small fingers reaching out on all sides, like the petals of a flower.
She checked the roof of his mouth first, then forced his tongue aside and felt beneath it.
“You’re going to give birth here,” he proclaimed gleefully. “It doesn’t matter what you do. And I’m going to love the children as if they were my own. They’ll never even know that I’m not their father.”
Tamara pushed her new hand down into his esophagus and spread her fingers, fighting her revulsion and the contractions of the muscular tubules branching out from the main passage. She rummaged through the chewed food and digestive resin, waiting to strike something unyielding. The key wasn’t small, so there was a limit to how far it could have penetrated these side channels. But there was no real limit to how deep it might be.
Tamaro was humming, so softly she could barely feel his tympanum moving, unwillingly revealing his distress. Did she honestly believe he would have swallowed the key, or was she just trying to humiliate him? What did she do next—force a limb into his anus? Cut him open from end to end?
She pulled her hand out of his throat and resorbed the soiled arm, leaving the mush that had adhered to it sliding down her chest.
“Take the entitlement,” she begged him. “That’s all I can give you.”
“Why should I compromise?” Tamaro replied.
“This is my life,” she said. “What is it you don’t understand about that?”
Tamaro said nothing. Even if she took him by the legs and bashed his skull against the ground, he’d die without conceding any parallel between their fates. And what would that gain her? The opportunity to search the farm for the key, with nobody to interfere, or to move it.
It would be easy enough. She could make it quick. She would mourn and wail afterward, for sure, but the satisfaction of the act itself would be incomparable.
She kept the glorious vision spinning in her head, promising herself the giddy dance of retribution even as she forced her grip to weaken. Tamaro broke free and crawled across the ground, spitting up traces of loose food. Then he rose to his feet and jogged away down the path.
Tamara closed her eyes. If she’d had no other hope, she might have done anything. But Erminio’s lies would catch up with him, and someone would come looking for her.
18
Carla waited quietly at the entrance to Assunto’s office until he looked up from his work and gestured for her to enter. “There’s good news and there’s bad news,” she announced as she dragged herself toward his desk. “But best of all, there’s a chance to make the bad news good.”
Assunto managed a weary buzz. “Why can’t things ever be simple with you?”
“I make them as simple as possible,” Carla replied. “But no simpler.”
“So tell me the good news.”
Carla took a sheet of paper from her pocket and handed it to him.
“This is what happens when you take a luxagen with access to just two energy levels and hit it with a beam of light at a frequency tuned to the difference between those levels.”
Assunto stopped her. “What does that mean? ‘Tuned to the difference’?”
“Ah.” Carla realized that it had become second nature to her to think of energies and frequencies as interchangeable. She had to make a conscious effort now to unpack the details behind the instinctive translation. “If
