Jirayu returns to me with a hollowed look, the first sign I’ve seen in so long that there are cracks in the steel of her, a hidden spot of rust that has bloomed until it reaches the surface. But it passes. It always does. When I put her in my lap, she lets me—her way of giving me permission. It’s rare our positions are reversed and she is the one in need of consoling.
Her silence goes on for a long time, as if she is sheltering within it. By the time Noor turns up, Jirayu has regained her composure, her control once more complete.
Ey does not pass remark on Jirayu’s choice of seat; nor does ey interrupt while Jirayu explains who and what I am, and the current situation in which we’ve found ourselves. Ey stands straight, eir hands clasped at eir back.
“So,” ey says when Jirayu is done, “the child soldier academy doesn’t exist—that’s a relief. This woman apparently being your wife who was wiped out by aliens and then somehow came back, that’s much less good.”
“Are you asking whether I’ve gone mad?” Jirayu speaks without self-consciousness, nestled as she is in my arms, as though she metes out orders every day in her bodyguard’s lap.
We’re in the abandoned factory that I chose as my hideout when I first arrived in Three Corolla. I’ve taken a seat on top of a dirty crate—it’s just as well that Jirayu is in my lap, the better to insulate herself from the filth—and overhead city pigeons have flown in to eavesdrop on us, their heads tilted and stretched toward us as though hopeful for bread crumbs. I’d have liked to bring some. Jirayu doesn’t quite get my instinct to feed wild animals, the pleasure I take in doing so. To me, they’re another sort of mirror.
“I’m not.” Noor makes a face. “What bothers me is that I don’t remember. Until a few days ago, I’d never seen her in my life. I’m very, very sure of that.”
And to Noor, memory is a sure thing, as absolute as mountains, more durable than architecture. Ey has some of the best I’ve ever known, and it is core to eir identity. To confront the fact that a part of your recollection has been stolen away by a quantum event is a difficult ask for anybody, and for em more so. “We were friends,” I say, “at least in my native timeline. I’d guess in this one too.”
Ey meets my eyes. “That doesn’t help, actually, but I can see you’re the sort of obnoxious I might have taken to. So—you met the boss while she was on a business trip in America, she took you in, and hired you. And now the aliens have declared the two of you soulmates.”
Our meeting was more than such a prosaic synopsis. I want to tell em that when I met Jirayu, I knew: she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. When I bore her down to the cracked asphalt to save her, I breathed in and she smelled right—the sense that she was home more than my native land had ever been. But this is an animal rubric, and in any case too private to toss out. (Creative license, too. I did not understand what I felt for Jirayu at first sight; it took much more work than that. Long after, once I was made aware of our cognate bond, I could no longer miss the gravitational pull. It is the awareness that a line runs straight from me to Jirayu, persisting across every branch. Indelible and impossible to sever, unless every instance of her has been erased, or every one of mine.)
“Something like that,” I concede. An inadequate answer. I should be apologizing to em for not letting their One Nucleus instance know where I disappeared to, but it wouldn’t make any sense to this Noor.
Jirayu glances at me. Her mouth twitches in amusement, almost imperceptibly. I breathe in her smell. A little soot on her, as if she’s been near a pyre. “And now I want to remove the Vector from our world altogether, or at least this version of our world.”
Noor looks from me to Jirayu. Ey perches emself atop a marginally cleaner crate. “You’re the one in charge of the payroll, but can I ask why?”
My wife shifts on my lap, her back pushing closer against my chest, as though she wants to burrow into my body like a blanket. It’s a satisfying thought and sensation. “Before Yvette returned, they promised they’d bring her back to me. They never did deliver. And she disappeared because of them to begin with.”
“Well,” ey says dryly, “you’ve had places carpet-bombed for less. Never took you for a romantic, though. You really did marry her?”
I adjust my hold on Jirayu so she’d be more comfortable. My legs will go numb eventually; more than worth it. “Twice, across two timelines,” I say.
“Damn. Congratulations to you both. I don’t know if you’re aware, Ms. Yvette, but the boss I know never dated anyone for long. You must’ve made the right impression in a big way.”
“She’d be Ms. Vihokratana,” Jirayu corrects, which thrills me unbelievably. “But just call her Yvette. You calling her anything else is giving me goosebumps, it’s unnatural.”
“All right,” Noor says. “As long as you don’t make me report to her because she’s your woman.”
I smile—I can’t help it; that is nearly word for word what ey said in One Nucleus: Congratulations on finally finding a long-term date, Jirayu, but she’s not my boss too just because she’s your woman now. I’m still her senior. No offense meant, Yvette. Everything feels right, not just being with Jirayu but having Noor’s regard once more, fractioned as it is by translation, by the effects of em being made to forget. Some things can be rebuilt.
Jirayu brings out the compass Gamayun gave her, larger than what I have: it has the same purpose as mine—calibrating for translation, ensuring she’ll snap back to this timeline at my side—-but comes with an additional, unusual utility. On activation it hums, at a frequency only cognates can hear perhaps, and emanates. Light unspools from it, brachiating upward in little radiant capillaries. Fragile and golden, a trembling web of sun in this discarded place. No warmth, though, not that I require any when I have Jirayu’s and she has mine.
“This is a map,” she says. “Follow it and we find the places where the Vector’s hold on this branch is the most tenuous. Then we plant a seed—infect it, apparently like a computer virus—with this tool. The Bulwark will pull a trigger and set them off once all are in place.”
There are spots on the map where the light blazes or dims, but Noor speaks for me when ey says, “Got to admit, boss, but I can’t make head or tail of it.”
Jirayu blinks at em, then at me. “You’re not seeing it? This is superimposed on a layout of Krungthep. The metropolitan area, anyway.”
“I’m only seeing the light,” I say.
“Gamayun did tell me this is attuned to me specifically.” Her mouth twists. “Inconvenient, but fine. First, we’re checking in to a hotel; I’m not sleeping here. Noor, did you bring the cash?”
“I wanted to bring it in a suitcase.” Ey sighs, wistful for TV melodrama, for the cliches of crime thrillers. “Turns out billfolds were more practical. I got you a prepaid card too, in case you don’t want to stuff a mountain of bills under your mattress. Two burner phones and forged IDs for both of you. The usual.”
The hotel we get to is of little distinction, located far from any train station and surrounded by heritage houses—a three-star accommodation, far below my wife’s usual standards. Our false IDs pass scrutiny without issue. Noor takes a list of locations jotted down by Jirayu and promises to survey them, though I anticipate ey won’t find anything extraterrestrial without the guidance of Bulwark tech. Which I cannot lend em even if I had spares; if Gamayun is to be believed, these things are keyed to cognate use exclusively.
Once Noor’s gone and we’re left to the generic room, Jirayu starts stripping. To see this is always a privilege, fabric pulled away and unbuttoned and unzipped, the rolling planes of her curves emerging. I love the small of her back; I love her shoulder blades and the space they bracket, the suggestion of the ophidian spine beneath skin. Each time she disrobes—or I disrobe her—I want to take her whole, I want to palm every part of her and somehow sheathe her within myself. I’d become a suit of armor, thin membrane on the inside for her comfort, impenetrable cobalt chrome on the outside. I want her to walk through the world with every centimeter protected by me. This impulse and fantasy are stronger than lust; it is mightier than any biological imperative.
“I was expecting,” she is saying, “to be much filthier.”
“From the factory?” But I know that is not what she means; I know that she translated, and it was to nowhere good.
“I shot someone while I was away.” That is a typical enough occurrence, violence being no more remarkable in her hands than a paintbrush in an artist’s: it does not signify. “Point-blank. I felt it too, the splatter and the heat, but the actual substance of it didn’t stick. It faded away when I translated back here. Clean as anything, not one stain on me. I can’t even smell it anymore.”
“Let me join you in the shower.”
“If it’s big enough for two.” Her teeth show, a little, between her lips. “And you’re not small.”
“Like you’d have married me if I was a slip of a woman?”
“My tastes range wider than you think. Maybe I do have it in my heart to enjoy a waifish girl built like an apsara.” Her strides bring her to me, and she starts taking off my clothes too. “But you’re the best that the world’s ever offered up, so as it happens I’m not looking for a supplement.”
The shower stall, all frosted glass, turns out insufficient—very modern but very narrow—and so we draw a bath instead, the tub just enough to accommodate. I lower myself into it first, the water very hot but to me decently comfortable. It rises around my mass, and when she climbs in too it spills, splashing onto the linoleum.
Jirayu pulls up her knees, cradled both by water’s buoyancy and by my limbs, bare back against my bare breasts. “You are quite cool,” she says. “Another cyborg modification?”
“Probably heat management. Do you like it?”
“A whole new definition for temperature play.”
I run my fingers through her long hair, teasing apart the drifting cloud of it in the water. In America she stood out so much because I’d never met anyone of her ethnicity, but even in Krungthep she is extraordinary. It is in her physicality, yes, the angle of her cheekbones and the symmetry of her lips. But it is more than that. She is limned in her own light, her every gesture and movement illuminated, and I want to bask in it—she entered my world like a beacon of salvation. I knew who she was, of course, I saw in her a path out. It was mercenary calculation. I just didn’t account for her light sinking into me, finding purchase like thorns, and myself opening to it: glad to be pierced and held.
“I want you to make me a promise,” says Jirayu.
“Anything.”
“Hear it out first.” Her fist opens and closes in the water; bubbles froth upward. “I want you to promise you won’t sacrifice yourself to save me.”
All of me turns stiff, cold despite the water’s heat. “No. I can’t promise that. You hired me to be your bodyguard.”
“And then I married you. We’re not together because I’m paying you, Yvette, and that means your job description doesn’t dictate the terms of our—”
“No,” I repeat. One of the few times I’ve said that to her. The water sloshes as I tuck her closer against me. “The owner’s supposed to outlive the dog.”
She begins to laugh—little humor in it—and to say, “Not always, sometimes the owner gets shot dead and—”
I bite into the crook of her neck. Instantly she goes rigid and silent. Usually it is she who uses teeth in our lovemaking; usually the Doberman does not lay a fang on the mistress. But I’m not going to give her the promise she asks for, and I need a way to end the argument before it can take root. Her life comes before mine, and as she possesses me as a tool and weapon, so I possess her as an object to defend and serve.
She pushes against me, one hand sliding along my thigh, the other finding purchase on a knee. “Yvette,” she says, guttural.
I don’t answer; simply I cup one breast then the other, pressing on the tub’s stopper with my toes to let the water drain. My hands chart the course of Jirayu, between her breasts and down her stomach. She was the first woman I slept with, and remains my only. I didn’t get everything right the first time I serviced her, or even the second or the third, but there’s an elemental pull to her body that guided me from the start. Pleasuring her, finding where to touch and lick, is instinctive the same way that eating or breathing is, or turning my face toward the sun’s warmth.
Her nails dig into my knees as I roll her clit between my fingers, kissing her nape as I do, using tongue and teeth both. The tub’s breadth constricts her movements and she grinds against me as I part her with my fingers, slip in one then another, treading the familiar but no less enticing path of her libido. She props her calves on the bathtub’s edge, the better to give me access, raising her hips for the perfect angle.
I draw the scent of her deep into my lungs, and thrust my fingers deep between her thighs. I flick and rub against the spot inside that makes her clench around my hand, makes her claw at my legs. I’m going to pay the price—there will be livid marks on my shins—but I don’t relent as I bring her to the brink, suspend her there, on the edge of climax’s cliff. She thrashes against my fingers, pushing toward the finish line; I use my entire body to prevent, to immobilize. For once I control the crescendo and the fall.
Her words turn profane; she muffles them against my shoulder as she draws closer, a little closer, nearly there. One of her hands is gripping my wrist hard enough to bruise, trying to push me in deeper, faster. I move my thumb just so across the clitoral nub.
She comes all over my hand, bucking against the porcelain tub. Her breathing is loud against the last of the water gurgling as it recedes. Falling back against me, she says, “I should let you take charge in bed more often.”
“We aren’t in bed.” I laugh and swipe my tongue across her shoulder, sipping the sweat there like ambrosia.
“Then carry me to it.”
I have gone through tests of my cybernetic strength—Gamayun didn’t let me translate until I’d demonstrated control of it—and so when I lift Jirayu out of the tub, dripping, it is effortless. Managing her weight is more a matter of balance and gravity center than it is the actual mass. I towel us off, wrap her in the hotel bathrobe, and bear her to the bed like a new-wed bride. When I ease her down, she says, “You really are much stronger. Must be the strongest person in the world, practically.”
“All for you.” I kneel. “My lady.”
Her hair is still dewed and there are still droplets collected in her collarbones, in the nook of her belly. When her hand cradles my face, I receive that touch like a benediction. But her intent is not saintly. She grasps my hand and brings it to her dark wiry curls, to the secrets hidden below.
I kiss her stomach. Her inner thighs are sticky, as if they’ve been anointed in nectar, and she guides my fingers back into the salt-heat of her with surety. For all that the fresh orgasm must have made her engorged and sensitive, she uses and rides me as though she means to rut herself raw and insensate. Soon she finds what she wants and slumps over me, her grin tigerish, the balance between us restored to its proper place.
We climb in bed together—she laments that she had no time to pack toys—and I bury my face in her hair, rubbing my nose in the damp softness.
“When we first met,” she says, voice warm with humor, “if you’d told me you were raised by wolves, I’d have believed you.”
“Who says I wasn’t? Did I tell you about that time I had to catch and eat squirrels?”
Her laugh laps at my senses, a sea’s balm. “Go on.”
I hesitate. During the years we’ve known each other, I’ve yielded next to nothing about my childhood. My history is stitched from moments of barbarism and monstrosity, and she might have thought less of me for it. But she has shared hers, that single event of maiming grief, that single event that formed her core—or broke it, but made of her a consummate survivor.
My turn, then. “When I was seven or eight, I wasn’t growing very well; small for my age, and not a lot of food to go around. The place . . . well, abortion had gotten outlawed years ago and there were too many children. Another kid pushed me into the lake nearby—maybe he wanted my share of the bread and cheese, I don’t know—and instead I pulled him in and held him under. He drowned; I didn’t. One less mouth to feed, just like he wanted. It didn’t sit right with most adults, self-defense or not, so I was sent to my father’s town across the state line with the idea nobody there would know. Nice place, really. More food, fewer children. Less scenic; no lake. I liked it better than where I was born.”
“Didn’t miss your parents?” Her hand glides up and down my spine, gentle, soothing. It’s funny: at first sight I thought her a woman of razorblades and bullets, who would use me up and discard me, not someone who would become my greatest sanctuary.
“Don’t remember them, not really. I had a lot of siblings, so none of us ever got much attention apiece. At the new town, I was taken in by an aunt—she was a spinster, so she had time for me. I had a good life for . . . two, three years?” Again I nuzzle her hair, briefly thinking of neurochemical pathways, of how they can be overwritten in so short a time. Open up my brain, doctor, and you’ll find in the fatty curls and electrical impulses Jirayu’s fingerprints. “Until some warlord came through and annexed us. Say what you will about that one, but he liked his equal opportunity. All children aged ten and upward, whatever the gender, were conscripted into this little army he was building. He thought training us from a young age would make us exceptionally loyal. Child soldiers were dime a dozen in America, but his were some of the more formalized ones. We had ranks and everything. Got training, too.”
“Your aunt,” she says, curiosity piqued, anticipatory of an incident, a tragedy. Jirayu has a nose for that, or perhaps it’s my tone, the cadence of my narration.
“The warlord didn’t shoot her or anything; left most people alone, as long as they gave up their kids. I even thought the training was fun—didn’t go into combat until I was twelve.” I try to recall my aunt’s face, her laugh, the pitch of her voice. They’re long gone: dewdrops in the searing sun of my decades since, the desert horizon before which all things corrode. “She died when I was . . . fourteen? During a raid. I was on patrol elsewhere, came back to a mountain of corpses. I trained harder, then, got pretty good with guns and fists both. I started developing the thought that I needed to be able to protect someone; I needed a person to defend, one who’d outlive me no matter what.”
Jirayu is quiet a moment. “I know what you’re doing, Yvette.”
“It’s a true story.”
“I am not doubting that.” Her exhalation tickles my clavicle. “What if I don’t want to be the one who outlives?”
The way she has outlived her mother. “Normally I don’t say no to you. You know that. But this isn’t something I’m going to compromise on. As long as I draw breath, I’m not letting harm come to you.”
Jirayu closes her hand around my throat: the air seems to hum, and the intent of our embrace changes. My pulse percusses. It is not a matter of physical strength—I can dislodge her; I can even pin her down without hurting her. It is a matter of everything else, of how she bends the soft viscera of me and commands my limbic responses. “You’re my hound,” she whispers as she climbs on top of me. “Remember your place.”
Oxytocin beats in my skull, pushing me toward yes, toward agreeing to anything. The world simplifies in her presence, my choices slimming down to obedience. But I say, “Not on this specific question. Even if you throw me away over this, I’d still make sure you don’t die. Hell, I’ll make sure nobody ever gets close enough to break your nail.”
She looks down at me; her robe has fallen open and water trickles between her breasts. On instinct I want to catch it with my mouth. When she speaks again there’s a splinter in her voice. “Throw you away? You think I can throw you away? When you’re my only—” She exhales. “Everything?”
I freeze. I have never heard her like this, or saying these words, or . . . For a protracted second I think she’s going to cry, and I don’t know what I would do then. The thought of her falling apart is tantamount to the thought of my entire world falling apart, of the sun going out and the moon dissolving into dead tides.
Jirayu doesn’t cry. She dams the river of herself and she grips my throat harder, pressure on the windpipe that verges on discomfort, though not yet sufficient to distend airflow. “We’re not done talking about this. But we’re discussing it another time.” Her tone has returned to business crispness.
“Yes. All right.” For now, the territory is ceded. I have come out ahead by a hairsbreadth.
She plans our next move. Her eyes flick to the windowpane as she does, though we’re too low to see the Vector ship that hovers above Krungthep. “I have a theory,” she says as she pats her hair with a towel. “We’ve been having it too easy.”
A snort pulls free of my throat. “I wouldn’t call it that.”
“The Vector is powerful. They should be bugging our places. They should be wiretapping our calls. They don’t do any of that; they’ve let us run around nearly freely.” She folds her hands on her knee. “So either they’re allowing us to do that for some reason—I doubt it—or they’ve got an impediment that’s not obvious to us. You’ve said they don’t use our tech, even though it’d be trivial to, and no surveillance devices of their own that you know of.”
“In some timelines they do.” I pause, considering. “The ones where they’ve been there for a long time, according to Gamayun, where they ‘arrived’ a century or two ago and completely transformed human civilization.”
“Yes. That takes time, time they haven’t had here. My hypothesis is this. The Vector, and possibly the Bulwark, is tracking thousands or millions of pairs—it can’t be just the two of us, and each pair would have nearly countless permutations across the branches. Each alien is the same being across timelines, isn’t that right, that’s what they keep trying to tell us. There’s only so much they can monitor at a time; they must be spread thin or they wouldn’t need to rely on human agents like you or Ingvild.”
“Gamayun’s watching us, though. Sometimes.”
“It’s possible they track just a handful of cognates—the ones they need to take away from the Vector.” Her fingers drum. “Or else the Bulwark possesses better computers or better algorithms. But if the first part of my theory’s right, I’d bet almost anything on the Bulwark having to monitor much fewer variables. The advantage of being the aggressor; you have to succeed just once, while the defenders have to never, ever fail.”
She’s the one for wargaming, for thinking about combat beyond the most immediate tactics on the ground, the calculation that races ahead of mortality’s reach. “You have a better head for that than I do. Do we try the first site on Gamayun’s map, then?”
“Yes. It might be a tricky one to evacuate from if anything goes wrong.” Jirayu touches her forehead to my cheek. “I trust you to keep me safe.”