She called herself Missioncreep, a name assigned by Nadie. She did chores around the factory, took long walks in the blighted woods, taking care to scrub her hands and shoes when she returned, again before eating or touching her mucous membranes. She read books, walkaway classics, Bakunin and Illich and Luxemburg, old dead anarchists. She’d read Homage to Catalonia and felt she finally understood Orwell – the seeds of Nineteen Eighty-Four were in the betrayals and the manipulation. Just as she warmed to old George, she remembered with a bolt that he had sent a list of names of his friends and comrades to a secret policewoman he’d fallen in love with, betraying them. She realized she didn’t understand Orwell at all.
Being a walkaway was supposedly about refusing to kid yourself about your special snowflakeness, recognizing even though different people could do different things, that all people were worthy and no one was worth more than any other. Everyone else was a person with the same infinite life inside them you had.
In the isolation of the squatted factory – which turned out hundreds of pieces of furniture every day, free for anyone – she experienced people as obstacles. She waited until the commissary was likely to be empty before descending from her aerie to grab furtive meals, avoiding eye contact, making the least conversation without being hostile. It was the worst walkaway behavior, treating communal resources like a homeless shelter, not being a part of the world. She’d seen people advised to leave the B&B for less. But Nadie must have spun some yarn about her traumatic past, because people looked on with sympathy and never called out her behavior.
Reading alone, playing the stupid telepathy game where she pretended that she knew what people thought just because she read words that supposedly bridged the thoughts of one person to the mind of another, she was overcome by a feeling she had traded the indefinite detention of her father’s panic room for an enforced, fugitive isolation.
She went through that feeling, came out the other side: numb acceptance that this was life. Living as Missioncreep, speaking to no one, making as little mark on the world as possible. Nadie was her role model; the merc and her bizarre vigilance that demanded you be both attentive and absent. The more she practiced, the more natural it felt, except for panicky flashes when she wondered if she was losing herself in this persona. Those were so unpleasant that she was glad when they receded and were walled away behind the sentry’s wooden façade.
Now, sitting there, rarely seen morning sun on her skin, looking at Nadie’s shit-eating grin. She struggled to come to grips with this new reality.
She guzzled her champagne, a flavor she’d never liked, liked even less with the taste of walkaway country on her tongue: public toothpaste formula and gummy, scummy of morning breath. But as bubbles and sweet, cold tartness washed her tongue and a burp forced its way out her nose with a burning, CO2 tingle, reality sharpened. She recalled, in fast shuffle, the times she’d drunk ostentatiously proffered champagne at family events, then the taste of corn-mash white lightning she and Seth and Hubert, Etcetera sipped as they slipped away from her father’s house, the beers and vodkas they’d made at the B&B, and then –
“I’m free?”
“Darling, you are free as anyone can be in this world.”
Missioncreep – no, Iceweasel – realized Nadie was drunk, had been drinking something else while she went to whatever hidey-hole she’d kept the champagne in. She had never seen Nadie in this state. She was almost... sloppy. Not to say she didn’t exude the air of sudden death, but it was a jovial, even sexy kind of sudden death.
“Congratulations.” She set down her champagne and scrubbed her eyes, the scratchy contacts’ familiar itch suddenly vivid. She impulsively plucked them out and rolled them like boogers and flicked them away, blinking tears from her eyes until her vision cleared. The contacts were supposed to be optically neutral, but there was an unmistakable difference. She looked at her funny, dark brown skin, the blotches in the creases of her palms and the crook of her elbow. She, too, was smiling.
“So, does this mean I can use the net again? I can call my friends?”
“You can join your friends, chickie – I even know where you can find them.”
“I don’t know what to say, I mean—”
“Fucking wonderful! Birthday and Christmas and your Bat-Mitzvah, rolled into one!” She slugged another long draught of champagne, passed the bottle.
Iceweasel looked around her cell-like room, her meager things, the normcore clothing Nadie brought, generic interface surfaces that she’d avoided personalizing lest she inadvertently create a fingerprintable element. Their local storage held the books she’d read, but she could replace those easily enough. She wanted to walk away from all of it. Even when she realized their encrypted storage contained the notes she’d made during the long solitude, she didn’t give a shit. Those were Missioncreep’s notes, made by a stranger receding in her rearview.
She drank from the bottle. Champagne didn’t taste sweet and sickly this time. It tasted wonderful. This must be what other people felt when they drank champagne – power and freedom, the sense of being beholden to none save those of your choosing. That was why it tasted bad before – it symbolized her captivity to Redwaterness. Now it was the opposite. She’d probably never taste it again, she hoped she’d never taste it again. She guzzled more, let it run sticky over her chin and down her throat.
Nadie sat on the end of her bed, small white teeth, square face, ice-blue eyes, the cords of her neck and the sinews of her muscled arms standing out, cheeks flushed, wildness in her eyes. On impulse, Iceweasel reached out and Nadie took her hand. Her palm was hard with callus, strong as teak. Iceweasel felt her pulse throb. She thought of Gretyl. Thinking of Gretyl should make her want to go, to resist the impulse that had hold of her, but thinking of Gretyl made her want to –
She leaned in. Nadie leaned in too, her hand tightening on Iceweasel’s almost to the point of pain. Iceweasel knew Nadie chose to take her to the point between pain and pleasure. She was the mistress of that point and could land on it like a commando pilot setting down a bird on an aircraft carrier, kissing it with control that made it look easy.
When they kissed, those small, square teeth nipped at her lips. She groaned before realizing she was making any sound. A dam inside her broke, pent-up emotion of the months in one kind of captivity or another, times she’d missed Gretyl with a longing that blotted out rational thought. She squeezed Nadie’s hand, heedless of how hard, feeling Nadie was indestructible.
Nadie’s free arm went around her. She was crushed to the woman. She realized that for all of Nadie’s strength, there wasn’t much to her – she was tiny. The body pressing to hers couldn’t have been more different from Gretyl’s. Her feelings for Nadie and Gretyl were polar opposites. No matter that Nadie had terrorized her, hurt her, kidnapped her – she had rescued her. She was there, so alive, in the way that no person had been for her for a long time.
She wrestled her hand free and reached for Nadie’s ass, compact as a tennis ball, slid her hand down the waistband of her leggings, feeling skin/skin contact whose feeling she’d worked so hard to forget. Her mouth flooded with saliva. Her fingers curled, found the matted, wet hair, slippery folds, her fingertips slipping inside. Nadie’s teeth nipped harder at her lip, making her pull back. Nadie followed, not letting her go. It hurt. It felt good. She panted.