“You’ve heard?”
Instead of answering, thie undresses me gently, careful around my bandages. I close my eyes and do not resist, feeling the layers fall away from me piece by piece.
When I’m naked, I tilt my head up and thie kisses me, thir tubular tongue warm and salty in my mouth. I place my arms around thim, feeling on the back of thir head the long scar whose history I do not know and do not seek.
Then thie wraps thir primary arms around my head, pulling my face against thir soft, fuzzy chest. Thir tertiary arms, strong and supple, wrap around my waist. The nimble and sensitive tips of thir secondary arms lightly caress my shoulders for a moment before they find my Tawnin port and gently pry the skin apart and push in.
I gasp the moment the connection is made and I feel my limbs grow rigid and then loose as I let go, allowing Kai’s strong arms to support my weight. I close my eyes so I can enjoy the way my body appears through Kai’s senses: the way warm blood coursing through my vessels creates a glowing map of pulsing red and gold currents against the cooler, bluish skin on my back and buttocks, the way my short hair pricks the sensitive skin of thir primary hands, the way my chaotic thoughts are gradually soothed and rendered intelligible by thir gentle, guiding nudges. We’re now connected in the most intimate way that two minds, two bodies can be.
That’s what it’s like, I think.
Don’t be annoyed by their ignorance, thie thinks.
I replay the afternoon: the arrogant and careless manner in which I carried out my duty, the surprise of the explosion, the guilt and regret as I watched the Reborn and the Tawnin die. The helpless rage.
You’ll find them, thie thinks.
I will.
Then I feel thir body moving against me, all of thir six arms and two legs probing, caressing, grasping, squeezing, penetrating. And I echo thir movements, my hands, lips, feet roaming against thir cool, soft skin the way I have come to learn thie likes, thir pleasure as clear and present as my own.
Thought seems as unnecessary as speech.
The interrogation room in the basement of the Federal Courthouse is tiny and claustrophobic, a cage.
I close the door behind me and hang up my jacket. I’m not afraid to turn my back to the suspect. Adam Woods sits with his face buried between his hands, elbows on the stainless steel table. There’s no fight left in him.
“I’m Special Agent Joshua Rennon, Tawnin Protection Bureau.” I wave my badge at him out of habit.
He looks up at me, his eyes bloodshot and dull.
“Your old life is over, as I’m sure you already know.” I don’t read him his rights or tell him that he can have a lawyer, the rituals of a less civilized age. There’s no more need for lawyers—no more trials, no more police tricks.
He stares at me, his eyes full of hatred.
“What’s it like?” he asks, his voice a low whisper. “Being fucked by one of them every night?”
I pause. I can’t imagine he noticed the black dot on my badge in such a quick look. Then I realize that it was because I had turned my back to him. He could see the outline of the Tawnin port through my shirt. He knew I had been Reborn, and it was a lucky—but reasonable—guess that someone whose port was kept open was bonded to a Tawnin.
I don’t take the bait. I’m used to the kind of xenophobia that drives men like him to kill.
“You’ll be probed after the surgery. But if you confess now and give useful information about your co-conspirators, after your Rebirth you’ll be given a good job and a good life, and you’ll get to keep the memories of most of your friends and family. But if you lie or say nothing, we’ll learn everything we need anyway and you’ll be sent to California for fallout clean-up duty with a blank slate of a mind. And anyone who cared about you will forget you, completely. Your choice.”
“How do you know I have any co-conspirators?”
“I saw you when the explosion happened. You were expecting it. I believe your role was to try to kill more Tawnin in the chaos after the explosion.”
He continues to stare at me, his hatred unrelenting. Then, abruptly, he seems to think of something. “You’ve been Reborn more than once, haven’t you?”
I stiffen. “How did you know?”
He smiles. “Just a hunch. You stand and sit too straight. What did you do the last time?”
I should be prepared for the question, but I’m not. Two months after my Rebirth, I’m still raw, off my game. “You know I can’t answer that.”
“You remember nothing?”
“That was a rotten part of me that was cut out,” I tell him. “Just like it will be cut out of you. The Josh Rennon who committed whatever crime he did no longer exists, and it is only right that the crime be forgotten. The Tawnin are a compassionate and merciful people. They only remove those parts of me and you that are truly responsible for the crime—the mens rea, the evil will.”
“A compassionate and merciful people,” he repeats. And I see something new in his eyes: pity.
A sudden rage seizes me. He is the one to be pitied, not me. Before he has a chance to put up his hands I lunge at him and punch him in the face, once, twice, three times, hard.
Blood flows from his nose as his hands waver before him. He doesn’t make any noise, but continues to look at me with his calm, pity-filled eyes.
“They killed my father in front of me,” he says. He wipes the blood from his lips and shakes his hand to get rid of it. Droplets of blood hit my shirt, the scarlet beads bright against its white fabric. “I was thirteen, and hiding in the backyard shed. Through a slit in the doors I saw him take a swing at one of them with a baseball bat. The thing blocked it with one arm and seized his head with another pair of arms and just ripped it off. Then they burned my mother. I’ll never forget the smell of cooked flesh.”
I try to bring my breathing under control. I try to see the man before me as the Tawnin do: divided. There’s a frightened child who can still be rescued, and an angry, bitter man who cannot.
“That was more than twenty years ago,” I say. “It was a darker time, a terrible, twisted time. The world has moved on. The Tawnin have apologized and tried to make amends. You should have gone to counseling. They should have ported you and excised those memories. You could have had a life free of these ghosts.”
“I don’t want to be free of these ghosts. Did you ever consider that? I don’t want to forget. I lied and told them that I saw nothing. I didn’t want them to reach into my mind and steal my memories. I want revenge.”
“You can’t have revenge. The Tawnin who did those things are all gone. They’ve been punished, consigned to oblivion.”
He laughs. “‘Punished,’ you say. The Tawnin who did those things are the exact same Tawnin who parade around today, preaching universal love and a future in which the Tawnin and humans live in harmony. Just because they can conveniently forget what they did doesn’t mean we should.”
“The Tawnin do not have a unified consciousness—”
“You speak like you lost no one in the Conquest.” His voice rises as pity turns into something darker. “You speak like a collaborator.” He spits at me, and I feel the blood on my face, between my lips—warm, sweet, the taste of rust. “You don’t even know what they’ve taken from you.”
I leave the room and close the door behind me, shutting off his stream of curses.
Outside the courthouse, Claire from Tech Investigations meets me. Her people had already scanned and recorded the crime scene last night, but we walk around the crater doing an old-fashioned visual inspection anyway, in the unlikely event that her machines missed something.