Kanagen

  The more Haven saw of Parthenocissus station, the less it knocked her into an overawed state of being unable to join two thoughts together. She could look out the window of the train as it slipped silently along, fast enough that the foliage along the side of the magnetic track merged into a green blur. She could follow small towns as they went by, cities and mountains in the distance, forests and kes between them. Beyond it all, the horizon bent itself up into view, rising beyond the edge of the window. It had never given her vertigo — she'd grown up on an O'Neill cylinder, after all — but the scale of it was a lot to take in all at once, and she was only now starting to be able to do it.

  "We're coming up on our stop, flower," Anix said, gently tapping Haven's shoulder as she stood on the seat to peer out the window. "Go ahead and sit down, okay?"

  "Huh? Oh, right." Haven slowly lowered herself to the seat; she was getting better at moving the sarcotesta around, but she didn't want to gamble on her bance when the train began braking, as it did mere moments ter. It was a smooth as the acceleration had been, but nevertheless, she was pretty sure she'd have gone sideways. "Help down?"

  "Of course, little one," Anix said, smiling and slipping a handful of vines around Haven to give her a lift to the floor. She was getting better at heels, too — not that the heels she was wearing were very tall — and made it off the train without much trouble. "So! What sort of fvor would you like to celebrate your brand new shape and hormone constitution with, hm?"

  "Well, uhm, I dunno," Haven said. "Maybe a different fruit? Like strawberry, or-" She paused right at the threshold of the station, staring across the little park that served as a town square at the figure approaching. Their blonde fauxhawk was glossy and perfectly coiffed, and they wore a grey suit with a bright green necktie.

  Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.

  "Tara! What a coincidence!" Anix said cheerfully.

  "Hey, Ms. Anix," Tara said, striding up to the two of them, brimming with confidence. "And hey you," they added, grinning at Haven. "Loving this new look on you."

  "I-I-I..." It wasn't involuntary muscle contractions or a paralyzed diaphragm that kept Haven from talking — merely terror as her brain looped back on itself. Oh no. Oh no. She's going to hate me she's going to hate me she's going to—

  "I'm sure that Haven," Anix said, ying a gentle vine across her shoulders and giving her a gentle push forward, "feels the same way about that suit. Very charming."

  "Haven, huh?" Tara closed the distance between the two of them, and if Haven's heart wasn't biomedically locked to a steady rhythm she was sure it would have been pounding out of her chest. It was a perfectly tailored suit, now she saw it up close — it fit Tara's body perfectly, hugging their curves even as it smoothed them out into a perfect avatar of genderweird masculinity. Of course she pulls off suits better than I ever did, Haven thought, just as Tara's arms closed around her and pulled her into a tight hug. "I always had a feeling."

  "Wh-what?" Inside the sarcotesta, what little of Haven there was longed to cringe in on herself, to shrivel up and vanish.

  "You never, ever looked in mirrors. In fact, you avoided them. Noticeably. And the way you looked at women, hell, the way you looked at me, I could see the hurt. I wasn't totally sure, and I mean, I wasn't exactly gonna ask my boss, 'hey, are you a girl?' But I had a feeling." They gave Haven a gentle squeeze. "You are a girl, right? Listen, when you're out of that thing? I'll show you how to do your makeup."

  "But-" I don't deserve that, Haven thought, unable to think of anything she could say in a moment like this.

  "Shhh." They ughed and finally broke the hug, stepping back just a little. They were still so, so close. "I don't know how long they pn to keep you in that thing, but I guarantee if they've got you on the css-G, you're gonna see a big difference when it comes off."

  "Y-yeah, but-" The swirling emotions inside her showed no signs of slowing down, not even as she felt Anix's vines return to coil themselves around her, the thrumming cutting through the buzzing numbness of sheer terror. I don't deserve this I don't deserve this I don't deserve this.

  "Haven," Anix said, her voice kind but firm. "I believe it is safe to say that Tara is very happy for you. Isn't that right, Tara?"

  "Dead on, ma'am," Tara said. They gnced up at the affini. "Is she— it is she/her, right?" When Anix nodded, Tara continued. "Is she doing the thing where she cms up and squelches all her stress and doesn't think other people notice it?"

  fuck fuck fuck fuck fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck kill me kill me kill me

  "She is. Come here, petal." Anix scooped Haven up into her arms and turned her over, letting her rest on her back in a cradle of vines and looking down at her with her big, brilliant, polychromatic eyes. "Haven, I need you to calm down, please. Nothing bad is happening. You are safe. Tara is very happy to see you, and is in no way upset. Isn't that right, Tara?"

  "Once again, dead on, ma'am," Tara said. They reached up, just able to take Haven's hand as it dangled loose below her, and held it, tightly. "I am so, so happy I get to know the real you, Haven. No bullshit. Okay?"

  "Okay," Haven murmured, Anix's presence enough to settle the worst of the spiraling thoughts but not the confusion and the worry. I don't get it, I lied to her the entire time I've known her and she's just okay with it? This has to be some kind of setup for a rug-pull. Good things don't happen to me, and I wouldn't deserve them even if they did.

  "Hmmm. Still a bit emotionally off-kilter, I see," Anix said, frowning. "Perhaps a css-E would be appropriate, though I worry about the dosage given the state of your actual tissue..." She sighed, and knelt down on the ground next to Tara, once again letting them loom over Haven. "Haven, petal, look at Tara. Does she look in any way upset at you?"

  "It's okay, Ms. Anix," Tara said, patting the affini on the shoulder. "This is hard stuff to deal with. The first couple of times I tried to talk about it with people back home... yeesh. There's a reason I learned Standard English and got a job in the Anglosphere. I don't mean to make light of growing up around your dad, Haven, but Archangelsk wasn't exactly friendly either." Still holding onto Haven's hand, they gave it a squeeze and smiled. "I guess what I'm trying to say is... I get it. It's scary, and you feel like everyone you know is going to reject you over it. But that's not gonna happen, okay?"

  Haven wasn't completely convinced, but nodded anyway. Anix slowly turned her upright and gently set her feet back on the ground, and Tara immediately gave her another hug. "Well...her numbers are improving," Anix said, "but we're still going to have to work on this, Haven."

  "Sorry." It was all she could think of to say.

  "Hey, it's okay, hon," Tara said, letting go and backing off from the hug just enough to look Haven in the ck of eyes. She still reflexively gnced away. "We're here for you. Alright?"

  Haven nodded, one hand nervously clutching at her skirt. They can both do so much better than me. "I, uhm... I like your suit."

  Tara grinned. "Yeah?"

  "You look way better in it than I ever did in one."

  "You know, I wasn't going to put it that way," they said, "but I bet I feel a lot more comfortable in this than you did. You know they've got tailors here? Really good ones, too, I mean, look at this." They turned a slow circle, showing off the immacute work that had gone into the suit.

  "It's really nice, yeah." It was, too; Haven had seen enough suits that cost enough to feed a small family for months to know that the suit Tara was wearing was extremely high-quality. "Did you get it just to wear, or...?"

  "Oh, this is for work. I mean, when they make you VP of Product Development, you gotta dress the part, you know? Actually, I'm gonna need to catch the next train through here, I've got orientation and then a meeting for our IPO, so I'll have to prepare for that, otherwise we'll flop the minute we hit the market."

  "Uh-" Wait, I thought—

  Anix preempted Haven's confused thoughts with a question: "Tara, flower, what in the name of the Everbloom are you talking about? Because it sounds an awful lot like you're trying to do capitalism."

  Tara snrked, and waved the concern away with one hand. "No no no, nothing like that. Well, like that, sure, but— it's a LARP. I met some folks from it yesterday, it sounded like fun, and hell, I've got the skill-set for it, might as well use it to make friends, right?"

  "Ohhhh," Anix said, her mood immediately brightening. "Now that you mention it, I think I know just the group you mean! Finance & Friendship?"

  "Yup, that's them. It's an improv game about office culture," they added in an aside to Haven. "There isn't any actual work, they said, just fake money in a fake economy that's basically just there to be a fun little math game to serve as a background for rolepying being in an office and doing co-worker stuff together. Getting lunch together, going drinking after work, that kind of thing."

  "All carefully watched over by proctors to ensure there isn't any actual capitalism going on," Anix added, patting Haven gently on the head, "so there's no need to be concerned about that, petal, I promise."

  Haven struggled to integrate what she was hearing. "They made a game...out of going to work?"

  "It's based on an old Affini game, if memory serves," Anix said, "Sections & Signatures, in which you create a fictitious branch of the bureaucracy, the appropriate forms to go with it, and so on. I haven't pyed it for a few blooms, but it's great fun! Perhaps I should try to get a local group together..."

  The xenodrugs were, blessedly, starting to wear off. Trish normally steered clear of the things, but she'd been through wardships before and she'd learned well what a css-E xenodrug felt like. Even after sixty years, those "side effects" they kept ciming would be figured out someday were still there. Now, when she moved, she didn't feel as if her body was an echo, just a little bit behind where it should be; she could sit up without the world swimming around her, she could eat the meals the hospital staff provided her (none of which, they assured Trish, had come from a compiler), and most importantly she could feel the frustration simmering deep inside herself.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. This was how they got you. It only took one mistake, and letting a bunch of florets wind her up until her aging ticker threw a rod definitely counted as a mistake. She took a deep breath and forced herself to stay calm about it. She'd been here before. She'd gotten out of it before. This was dangerous, sure, but she knew what she was doing.

  But she didn't have Koer to back her up anymore. And her all-important survival manual, Freedom's Ember, was a known quantity that the Affini, per Koer themself, weren't exactly concerned about. Hell, they'd practically used the damn thing as a honeypot — Koer hadn't said it outright, but she'd sure implied it. That really got under her skin, the idea that she might have been sending people to the brain-butchers without even knowing it the whole time. Assuming, of course, that it wasn't just all some kind of psychological tactic to undermine her confidence. You couldn't take anything an Affini said purely at face value.

  She closed her eyes and leaned back against the bed. Sitting up was still a little tiring, and there wasn't much else to do in the hospital besides browse on a tablet carefully curated for floret-like tastes — she'd rest, for now. She needed it.

  Somewhere in the twilight between sleep and wakefulness, after thought had fallen away but before dreams had made their customary intrusion, a voice spoke. "Trisha Serrano." A melodious, affini voice.

  Trisha's eyes flew up and she jerked upright in a way that made her back politely remind her that she was, in fact, no longer a young woman. At the foot of the bed stood an affini, its form quite humanlike, tightly wound vines arrayed so closely and so perfectly that it was difficult to pick out one from the other. In lieu of hair she wore a crown of artfully arrayed birchbark, the peeling giving the impression of barely controlled curls. A single pair of eyes regarded her with cool tones of blue struck through with fkes of violet here and there — but these, Trish was careful not to stare into for further detail.

  "Void take it, don't startle a woman like that," she muttered. "Who are you?"

  "Scoparia Cryptantha, Fourth Bloom, she/her," the affini said. Humanlike though her form was, apart from her mouth her face remained quite still as she spoke — either she wasn't as good at expressions as she was at shaping herself, or she had a poker face to beat all poker faces. "Koer left me a memo that said she informed you that I was taking over your case. Is that correct?"

  Shit. "Yeah, she mentioned you," Trish said. She grinned, and added, "Called you a youngbloom."

  "Did she?" If the remark had gotten to Scoparia, she made no show of it. "Well, there are worse things to be, and if I am a youngbloom, what precisely does that make you, hm?" She arched an eyebrow, and allowed herself the slightest of smiles.

  That answered that question. Shit.

  "You're surprisingly difficult to chase down, you know?" Scoparia continued. "I came looking for you in Beacon, but you had already left. 'Very well,' I thought, 'I'll wait for her in Grimke, so I won't be dropping in quite so suddenly.' Imagine my surprise to learn that not only did a pack of florets do just that, but that as a consequence you wound up here." She sighed and shook her head. "Quite the little run-around."

  "Never a dull day around here," Trish said. "What can I do for you?"

  "Well, as it happens, it's more in the line of what I can do for you, flower," Scoparia said. She produced — seemingly from nowhere — an envelope, human-sized, and offered it to Trish. "I thought hand-delivering your mail might be a nice way of breaking the ice. As, this may have ended up somewhat deying its arrival, thanks to the aforementioned run-around."

  Trish leaned forward and took the letter, her gut already uneasily certain about what she'd find. Indeed, she saw the same familiar script, the same "Lay Sequi, First Floret" in the corner. Unlike the others, this one had an additional "Important!" scratched onto it, and underlined for good measure. Well. That expins that. "You know," she said, "if this is what I think it is, it would have been awfully nice to have gotten it on schedule. If I'd known they were going to drop in on me, I might not be here."

  True, Trish would never have read the letter anyway, but Scoparia didn't have to know that.

  "And my apologies for that," Scoparia said. "But it may have been a blessing in disguise. After all, if we hadn't caught this early warning sign, something far more troublesome might have been the ultimate revetion."

  "It's just tachycardia," Trish said. "I'm getting old. It happens. Not even Affini veterinary science is going to keep me up and running forever. I've already lived longer than I ever thought I would before you lot showed up, you know? Every day is gravy, as far as I'm concerned."

  "...you eat gravy every day?" Given how much control she'd dispyed over her face, the shocked expression Scoparia now wore was certainly intentional.

  "What? No, not literally. You must be new," she added, ughing, "it's been years since I've mixed up an affini with a turn of phrase." That was it: easy humor. Show her you're not on edge around her. Show her you're fine. "I get your concern, I really do, but I'm well past my — oh, what did Cass call it? My threescore-and-ten?"

  Scoparia pursed her artificial lips. "If memory serves, a 'score' is an archaic terran measurement equivalent to twenty. You mean to say that because you've lived more than seventy years, you're content to be cavalier about threats to your health and well-being?"

  Tenacious, this one. "No," Trish said, "merely that I've already gotten more than I expected out of life. Look, I thought I was gonna die on a prison pnet, okay? And then I thought I was gonna die in a bloody revolution, and then I thought I was going to either freeze or starve to death. Now I live in a nice, insuted mobile hab, I have plenty to eat, and I'm pushing a hundred years old. I am quite happy to take what life has given me at the pace it comes, and enjoy the time I have left without worrying too much about it. Things are better now." And the worst part was, things were better now. The Affini kept the promises they made — they just demanded your soul in payment.

  Souls. I really have turned into Cass, haven't I?

  "I see." Scoparia crossed her arms, drumming the fingers of one hand on the opposite forearm. For someone new to humans, she'd certainly mastered body nguage. "I expect you intend to return to the surface and continue your lifestyle as practiced up until this point?"

  "That would be the general idea, yes," Trish said. "The minute they'll let me out of here, in fact."

  "Mmm. And therein, I think, lies the problem." She did her pull-something-from-nowhere trick again — and why the hell would an affini learn prestidigitation? — this time producing a very familiar book. "Because life as usual includes this."

  Trish stared at the copy of Freedom's Ember in front of her. This, at least, she'd been practicing for since Koer had given her the warning. "Yes, and? You've been aware of that for decades and it never bothered you before. That's the collective you, obviously."

  "Obviously." Melodic though her voice was, it was hard to shake the very strong impression of deadpan ftness in Scoparia's response. "I would of course point out that I was not a participant in those conversations. Had I been, the outcome would likely have been quite different."

  "Well, as I understand it, even if Freedom's Ember is feralist — and that's a big if — it's the kind of feralist that, I'm told, that the collective you really don't care about."

  "You're referring to the practice of maintaining captive branches of feralist thought to serve as off-ramps from more dangerous varieties into harmonious assimition into the Compact," Scoparia said, "a practice that is not only controversial but that I firmly disagree with. Not only is it less efficient than simply identifying and domesticating the feralists in question, but it permits sophonts to live unpleasant, unhappy lives filled with all kinds of feral delusions."

  Trish shrugged. "I don't know what to tell you. I'm not the one who made the policy — I'm just printing a book that a very dear friend of mine wrote, and I give them out to others because books are meant to be read. I've spent sixty years doing this, and not once have I been told that it's wrong to do so, until this very moment. I feel like, if you know something is happening for sixty years and don't say anything, that's on you. And sure, you weren't involved, but at this point it's the status quo, and it's working fine for everyone."

  "It is clearly not working fine for you," Scoparia countered, leaning in and staring down at Trish. "You are in a veterinary hospital due to health concerns exacerbated by contact with florets. This is, I think, a sign of a deeply unhealthy and quite feralist worldview — but even were it not, I would be recommending wardship for you simply on the basis that I do not believe you are leading a healthy lifestyle for your age."

  "A healthy lifestyle?" Trish raised an eyebrow. "You want to throw me into an elder care wardship? Look, I may not up for running a marathon, but I'm still perfectly capable of taking care of myself. If you want to ding me for the supposedly feralist—" She made airquotes with her fingers. "—content of a book literally no one but you has ever compined about, fine, go right ahead. This is not my first rodeo. But please don't insult me by trying to dress it up as the kind of wardship I doubt I'll need for another thirty years, minimum, the way I'm holding up."

  Scoparia arched an eyebrow once again. "Not your first... roady-oh?"

  Trish let out an aggrieved sigh, and followed it with a chuckle. "You have got to read one of those manuals on terran metaphors, hon."

  "Clearly. How fortunate that I should have plenty of time while I'm evaluating you."

  Trish did her best not to let her anxiety show. You've done this three times, she told herself. Now show this newbie how we do things on Solstice.