Nadie sprang away and tore off her clothes in a series of economical motions. She was an anatomical drawing – the body Iceweasel had glimpsed in the taxi, with its strange rivers and arroyos of scar tissue stretched over lean muscle. Panting, reaching for her, some part of Iceweasel’s brain noticed she had a slightly crooked left forearm, an old break that hadn’t healed right.
Nadie dodged her grasp, settled on her haunches, staring frankly with cool, glittering eyes. She reached for the champagne and took another slug. She cocked her head expectantly. Iceweasel understood, skinned out of her clothes. Gooseflesh as she bared herself to that gaze. She reached again and Nadie shook her head minutely and dodged back, continuing to stare.
Nadie’s eyes roamed over her body. Iceweasel’s breath came in short pants. She could feel the gaze. Nadie could tear her to pieces, force her to submit. Every nerve and hair follicle came to electric, tingling life. Nadie’s eyes narrowed. She smiled lazily, traced one of her own nipples, large and pale pink, with a callused fingertip. The sound of skin on skin was loud, the only other sound Iceweasel’s breath. She reached for her own breast, touched it as Nadie was touching hers.
It didn’t feel like her own finger. It felt like Nadie’s. Matching her movement for movement, it was as though her nervous system lost track of its own boundaries.
Nadie nodded and licked a fingertip, brought it back to her nipple. Mesmerized, Iceweasel did the same. The feeling of being touched by a stranger wasn’t so strong, but as she fell into Nadie’s cool eyes, it grew. When, in her peripheral vision, she saw Nadie’s finger slide lower and followed suit, she gasped. She hadn’t masturbated in months, not since she’d been taken, not for some time before. That part of her switched off when she was kidnapped, but it had waited and it saw its chance. Their hands moved faster, blurring, soft wet sounds and breathing growing in pitch. When she arched her back and gasped, Nadie dived across the bed and bore her to her back, burying her face between her legs, tongue flickering quickly and remorselessly, hands on her hips refusing to give as she bucked. She buried her fingers in Nadie’s short hair, shouted words without meaning, rode it, not caring who heard, not caring what Nadie felt, burning away self-consciousness in a moment that went on and on.
When she was done, she gingerly released Nadie, felt her tongue on the inside of her thighs, felt the juices and saliva cooling under her ass. Nadie ascended like a serpent, all muscle and sinew. She smelled and tasted herself on Nadie’s face as her thigh slid between Nadie’s legs and Nadie pressed it, all that strength coiled atop her. Iceweasel was lightheaded from hyperventilation, champagne and bone-shattering orgasm, but she was still full of animal horniness. She rolled Nadie, aware that Nadie allowed herself to be rolled, but knowing this was what Nadie wanted, as she grabbed the woman’s wrists and pressed them over her head, burying her face in the tuft in her armpit before nipping at her breast, biting harder, listening carefully to the answering gasps, straining to hold the wrists. Nadie pushed against her and she reared up and pushed back and looked into Nadie’s eyes. They were unfocused, her breath in sharp pants.
“Do you want this?” she whispered. Her hand drifted lower. Continuous consent was a walkaway thing. She was used to asking this question and having it asked of her, but it was exotic for Nadie. Nadie’s eyes focused on hers for a moment, and she bit her lip and whimpered. “Yes.”
On impulse, Iceweasel said, “What’s that?”
“Yes,” Nadie said. “Yes, please. Please?”
The submission from this woman, who could kill a hundred ways with her bare hands, electrified the room.
Slowly, teasingly, she moved her hand and went to work. Nadie’s hips worked and bucked, and she stopped, pulled away, looked in her eyes. “Do you want this?”
“Please,” Nadie said. “Please, please.”
More kissing movement. Nadie’s hips writhed. She stopped again.
“Do you want this?”
“I want it. Please. Yes. Please Iceweasel, please. Please don’t stop.”
They locked eyes again. Iceweasel held her gaze, fingers dug into those incredible ass-muscles, and she waited. Nadie chewed her lip and her eyes shone. Her skin shone, sheened with sweat.
“Please, oh please, don’t stop. Please?”
Slowly, she lowered her face. This time, she didn’t stop, rode the bucking of Nadie’s hips, used her whole body to follow as Nadie reared up, shuddered, screaming and tearing at the sheets with clawed hands.
When she was done, Iceweasel daintily licked her fingers and flopped beside Nadie, whose chest heaved like a bellows. Her skin was clammy with drying sweat, and Iceweasel flung a leg and an arm across her and nipped at a scar on her collarbone, at the base of her throat.
“Mmmm,” Nadie purred. “Very nice. Quite a going-away present. I didn’t get you anything.”
“You said something about directions to my friends?”
“That’s hardly a favor. They’re not in good shape, even if they think they are. Your ‘default’ world gets less stable every day. The existence of walkaways is seen as a prime cause, destabilizing influence beyond all others. Don’t imagine just because you can run away once or twice they won’t decide to take you all again, someday.”
“We can rebuild. Look at Akron.”
The new Akron, built on the site of the leveled buildings, refused to be a graveyard. The people who’d flocked to it to rebuild after the army and the mercs and the guardsmen had joined returning locals to build new kinds of buildings, advanced refugee housing straight out of the UNHCR playbook, designed to use energy merrily when the wind blew or the sun shone, to hibernate the rest of the time. The multi-story housing interleaved greenhouses and hydroponic market-gardens with homes, capturing human waste for fertilizer and waste-water for irrigation, capturing human CO2 and giving back oxygen. They were practically space-colonies, inhabited by some of the poorest people in the world, who adapted and improved systems so many other poor people had improved over the disasters the human race had weathered. The hexayurt suburbs acted as a kind of transition-zone between default and the new kind of permanent walkaway settlement, places where people came and went, if they decided that Akron wasn’t for them.
Akron wasn’t the first city like this – there was Lódź; Cape Town, Monrovia. It was the first American city, the first explicitly borne of the crackdown on walkaways. It put the State Department in the awkward position of condemning a settlement that was functionally equivalent to many it had praised elsewhere.
“I hear a lot about Akron. Once is a fluke. It’s only months old. It could fall down tomorrow. I was in Lódź when it happened there. Lódź wasn’t the first city where it was tried. It failed in Kraków, badly. There were deaths, many. A terrible sickness, fevers in the water, no one could make the dispensaries print the right medicine. You have heard about the successes of these cities, but there are so many failures.”
“People walk away because the world doesn’t want them. We’re a liability. I’ve heard my father talk about it: the people who want to come to Canada, people who want to have children, people who dream of having their children learn all they need to get by in the world, dream of health care and old age without misery. As far as he’s concerned, those people are redundant, except when they represent a chance to win a government contract to feed them as cheaply as possible, or house them in prison camps. Do you know how much money my father makes from his share of the Redwater private prisons? He calls it his gulag wealth fund.”
Nadie chuckled and smacked her thigh. “I forgot how funny your old man was. You don’t have to worry, little girl, you don’t have that blood on your hands.”