She closed her eyes. “I'm all yours. I'll just be.”
They made love for an hour or more, occasionally drifting in and out of half-sleep before surfacing to stroke and caress each other once more. She was the happiest she'd been since her reconstruction. The happiest she could ever remember being. It was hard, now, to recall how it felt to be that angry, terrified young woman who didn't want to go on, who was so furious at Ondo for daring to return her to life. The anger was still there, smouldering rather than raging, but it no longer threatened to burn her to ashes. It was hers to control rather than it controlling her.
The chorus of insects had stopped singing when they finally fell into a satisfied slumber, Myrced lifting a light sheet over their entwined bodies to keep away the night's chill.
Something woke Selene. She'd been asleep, offline, for two hours, blind and oblivious. Anything could have happened. There were scuffing sounds from the flat roof above her head. She lay in the darkness for a moment, replaying the noises, trying to work out what they might be. Some nocturnal creature? She turned her head to see if Myrced had heard them, but she wasn't there, her half of the bed filled only by the crumpled sheet.
Selene rose, heart suddenly racing, all her threat-assessment and fight or flight responses activating. Her twin metabolisms, artificial and natural, meshed into gear. Through the window, over the lake, the city was a dark silhouette against the stars.
Her clothes lay in a crumpled heap by the foot of the bed. She found the blaster she'd had strapped to her ankle and activated it. It was still functioning. Had Myrced known it was there? She thought about bringing Ondo online, but decided against it. She slipped her clothes back on, ears turned to full gain for any more sounds from outside.
The upper floor of Myrced's house consisted of a short landing from which the bedroom, a bathroom and another room led off. There was a faint thermal trail on the floor, a line of footsteps, going towards the third room. Myrced had walked there twenty minutes or so earlier. Judging by the layout of the house, this room had to be smaller, a space for storage or for accommodating a guest, perhaps. Selene replayed her memories of the night before. The door to it had been shut.
Selene followed, walking on tiptoe, keeping to the side of the passageway to reduce the chances of a creaking floorboard giving her position away.
There was no keyhole in the door of the spare room, no way of knowing what was inside. She turned the handle and pushed the door open, hoping the hinges were well-enough oiled to stop any squealing.
She sent out a cone of light from her left eye so she could pick up detail. The room contained a desk rather than a bed, and the walls were lined with book shelves. A single, round window looked out across the lake. In one corner, a wooden ladder, rungs lashed together with twine, led up to a hatch in the roof. Myrced had gone that way. To meet someone? Selene was about to follow, blaster held in her teeth as she climbed, when she caught sight of a framed picture on the wall beside the desk. A posed portrait of a man, his gaze raised as if to stare heroically into unknown distances.
She stepped over to study it. There could be no doubt who it depicted. He was younger, his hair long, but it was Kane.
She considered it for a moment. She could leave through the front door, race away to the safety of the surrounding forests, pick up a train for the coast and instruct the lander to surface and pick her up. Something stopped her. She needed to make sense of the picture in front of her.
She turned back to the ladder and, warily, pushed the hatch open. Cold night air breathed down upon her face as she peered through the gap. The stars of the night sky, the blaze of the galaxy's central mass, lit up her eyes. A few yards away, a figure was hunched on the edge of the roof, little more than a crouched shape against the glow of the city and the round of one of Migdala's two moons rising beyond the lake.
Selene climbed to stand upon the roof. Myrced turned to greet her. “I didn't mean to wake you.”
“What are you doing up here?”
“I often come up here, to sit and think. I like it in the middle of the night. Everything is so peaceful. You got dressed to come up to the roof. Couldn't keep your survival instincts suppressed for ever, huh?”
“I wasn't sure what I might find. I saw your picture of Kane.”
“Ah, I see.”
“Why is it there?”
Myrced sighed. “Because, once, he was not the person you now know.”
“He's twisted, a fucking animal.”
“Now, yes, but once he was different. He was a good man, even a great man. He was also a friend. He was our leader, the resistance I mean. He gave us hope, showed us there was a path other than subservience and oppression. He taught us how the Temples were once benign places of refuge, but that they'd been twisted by Concordance. He taught us also we could fight back.”
Selene thought about the moment on the ice. The shining blade, the gleaming red of the blood on the white snow. “What happened to him?”
“What do you think? Concordance took him, changed him, turned him into the monster you've met. Do you think it was a coincidence he was there last night? That was Godel showing us the power she has over us. A man who was once our symbol of hope turned into that. There are those who talk about rescuing him, healing whatever it is they've done to him. I believe that's wishful-thinking. The old
