Carnival

She makes no sound. She doesn’t show pain or even squeak; the Governors are programmed to be humane. But one moment she is whole and alive and letting out a held breath and taking in another one to speak to him, and the next she pitches forward, boneless, her central nervous system disassembled. Within moments, the thing that was Angel’s Mama is a crumbling dune in the middle of a broad white empty floor, and the man who is holding him, too late, thinks to step back and turn Angel’s face away.

He already knows not to cry out loud. He couldn’t, anyway, because his breath won’t move.

The adult holding him soothes him, strokes him, but hesitates when he seems to feel no emotion.

He wasn’t too worried, the adult Kusanagi-Jones understands. The boy was too young to understand what he’d seen, most likely. And everywhere, there are families that want children and are not permitted to have them.

Someone will take him in.

Angelo’s breathing awoke Vincent in the darkness. It was not slow and deep, but a staccato rhythm that Vincent had almost forgotten in the intervening years, and now remembered as if it were merely hours since the last time he lay down beside Michelangelo.

Angelo was a lucid dreamer. He had learned the trick in self-defense, with Vincent’s assistance, decades before. Angelo could control his dreams as easily as he controlled his emotions. Just more irony that it turned out not to help the problem.

Because it didn’t stop the nightmares.

Vincent had hoped, half-consciously, they might have eased over the passing years. But judging from Angelo’s rigid form in the bed, his fists clenched against his chest, his frozen silhouette and panting as if he bit back panicked sobs—

—they were worse.

“Angelo,” he said, and felt the bed rock as Angelo shuddered, caught halfway between REM atonia—the inhibition of movement caused by the shutdown of monoamines in the brain—and waking. “Angelo,”Vincent snapped, bouncing the bed in preference to the dangerous activity of shaking his partner.

Angelo’s eyelids popped open, dark irises gleaming with reflected colors. He gasped and pushed his head back against the pillow, sucking air as if he’d been dreaming of being strangled.

He might have been. All Vincent knew about the nightmares was that they were of things that had happened, or might have happened, and between them they had enough unpleasant memories for a year’s worth of bad dreams.

Vincent put his hand on Angelo’s shoulder; when he breathed out again he seemed calm. “Thank you,” he said. He closed his eyes and swallowed.

“Think nothing of it,” Vincent answered, and put his head down on the pillow again.

Lesa sat cross-legged on the bed, a cup of tea steaming in her hands, her breakfast untouched on the tray beside her, and watched the Coalition diplomats disentangle themselves from the sheets. She had a parser-translator running on their coded conversation of the night before, but it hadn’t been able to identify the language. It hadtossed out some possibles, based on cognates, but its inability to provide a complete translation was frustrating. It could put together a word here, a word there—Katherinessen, laughing, calling Kusanagi-Jones a son-of-a-bitchin plain Ozglish, not even com-pat—and she got a sense that they were talking about personal history, some old hurt or illness that was tied to the hesitations in their sex.

Just the sort of thing you’d expect recently reunited long-term lovers to discuss when they were safe under the covers, warm in each other’s arms. But something tugged her attention, something she couldn’t quite call an irregularity, but an…eccentricity. They were together, but strained—by history, she thought, secrets, and maybe the mission itself.

She smiled, watching Katherinessen unwind himself from the bed and pad across the carpetplant to the window, where some delicate tool rested in the sun, dripping tiny solar panels like the black leaves of an unlikely orchid.

Secrets. Of course, Katherinessen waskeeping secrets.