Kara had long ago learned to compartmentalise her emotions. No room for fuzzy sentiment on a battlefield. Now she deliberately filed Sex With Greenaway under "Pending". It would stay there until there was time, and a safe place, to consider what it meant, if anything.
That was the sensible, the professional thing to do.
It didn’t work.
Kara thought that perhaps Anson was falling in love. Once, that would have signified the end. Love meant vulnerability and a lack of freedom. Love meant a man sacrificing himself to save Kara on the battlefield. Love meant guilt. Now she knew a slight amusement, of the giggly kind, and a flutter of excitement. Even as she was about to go Up, while Death watched with interest.
Kara had never allowed sexual affection to grow into love. And so had no way to recognise the symptoms.
Last night, in bed, he’d asked her why she’d been so quiet as they walked back from the riverbank to the house.
“You mean what was I thinking?”
“Aside from possession by an entity and wild sex, yes.”
“You really want to know?”
“It’s why I asked.”
“I was wondering how soon before you could go again.” Which had been true, if not the whole truth. And Greenaway had taken it as a compliment. Yet it was also what she usually wondered after very good sex.
But she’d also exulted in her power over him, with or without an entity to help matters along. And how wonderfully fulfilling he’d felt inside her, so yes, also enjoying her own submission because it was her choice whereas Anson Greenaway was hooked.
So no, it didn’t matter if he was falling in love because she was still in control and anyway about to leave Earth. Comforting to think of a lonely figure waiting for her return... and she gasped, turning it into a cough, as the lurking terror rose up before she forced it back deep into her subconscious. What if I die? With no one to mark my death? No one to know what happened? Missing In Action, still the saddest, bleakest epitaph of them all. Good to know one person would mourn and never forget her, maybe still be waiting when he died.
* * *
The front door was leaning half off its hinges, looking as if it was caught somewhere between two different states of being and wasn’t sure which way to go. The table that Marc had talked about, the one he used to live beneath as a child and pretend was a fort, a ship, an SUT, was on its side, with black stains on the rough surface. Kara thought the stains were probably dried blood and hoped that Uncle Jeff had died quickly, before he saw what they’d done to his home.
She led the search through the house, remaining for a moment in the empty bedroom Marc had used. Could she feel a faint sense of his presence, still there, recorded somehow in the old stone blocks of the walls? Or maybe just an echo of his own personal sweat, the scent of his pheromones and his personal bacterial microbiome? A vague impression of his personality, still alive, linked to this room by years of emotion, memory and experience.
Or maybe wishful thinking.
“What are we looking for?” Greenaway asked. “Or even what?”
“I don’t know,” Kara admitted. “Only that we must.”
And with that Greenaway had to be satisfied.
* * *
An hour later he called a pause.
“Sure you’ve never been here before? You know your way around.”
“Never.” She knew that she sounded guilty, and tried to inject a note of confidence into her voice. “Marc described it.”
They were exploring the woods around the house. Signs of pointless violence: a sapling twisted to death; the blackened remains of a fire built around a large pine, intended to destroy it. And two bodies that seemed to have been turned inside out.
“Something got angry,” Greenaway said as they walked away. “The carrion crows and furry creatures will enjoy. Any ideas?”
“The birds.”
“Noisy.” All the birds in the area were screaming out their songs.
“Only here. Nowhere else we’ve been. Only silence.”
He thought for a moment. “You’re right. I’d assumed they were frightened away. But obviously not.”
“Maybe it’s a celebration. Or they’re warning us to stay away.”
“Birds didn’t kill those two. What did?”
“Marc’s entity?”
“You know so much about Marc...”
She ignored the invitation to confess. “Maybe it liked Jeff...”
“Now, why would you think that?” He stopped walking and looked at her. “Did Marc tell you?”
< He’s guessed. He knows.
> Shut up.
< He can’t hear us, you know? And neither can his AI.
Greenaway leaned against a small oak. “I’m guessing a data dump of Marc’s memories. AI to AI, just before he went to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.” He’d been seized by an unprofessional need to comfort her. Quoting crap poetry covered up the weakness. He hoped.
Kara shrugged. “I’m not going to deny it.”
< We’re going to prison for this. And other stuff. It’s all your fault.
“Did Marc know?” he asked shrewdly.
“Marc was just about to walk naked into netherspace. His AI was okay with it.” She remembered her tears. “It was only his last few months. Something to remember in case he never came home.” And then, with an it’s-done shrug: “No, Marc didn’t know. I copied his mind.”
All city states had laws against stealing another person’s memories. Of more relevance to Kara, people she respected considered it dishonourable. Taking memories without consent was one of the few taboos in an anything-goes world.
“I think his AI wanted to be remembered,” she added. “Just in case.”
“You’ve a psychic connection, right? Aside from the simulity training?”
Kara nodded, aware of what Greenaway was doing and grateful for it.
“Would Marc mind if he knew?” The assumption that
