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The next time Elys was paying attention to anything happening around her, she was in a warm place that smelled, and sounded, medicinal. Something liquid burbled nearby. The room was too small, but at least the lights were dim. She’d escaped from Krebs’s ship, hadn’t she? But she wasn’t wearing a pickup.
Something beeped. A person in a chair to Elys’s right snorted and startled as Elys forced her eyes open.
“Whoa, hi there!” Taia, the version without armor or a stranger’s face, leapt out of a chair beside Elys’s bed. The bed was so high off the floor that Elys’s and Taia’s elbows ended up at about the same height.
Bright lights flicked on overhead. Taia’s movement must’ve triggered a motion detector. “Do you know where you are?”
Elys blinked her dry eyes. “Not Krebs’s ship.”
“Correct.” Taia smiled. “You’re in Alyansa, Port District Hospital, level three floor. How do you feel?”
Now that Elys wasn’t panicking about her location, she still felt tired. Breathing was an effort. Even her lungs were exhausted.
Terrible stomach pain, or whatever had caused it, had made her black out in the last moments she remembered. She didn’t feel anything like that now. And Taia was with her.
“I’m alright,” Elys said. “How long have I been here?”
“Two days,” Taia said. “We cut a little time off the trip by pushing the safety limits, since we were all in armor and you were unconscious.”
A doctor knocked on the door and let themselves in without waiting for a response. Elys spent the next few minutes answering similar questions to Taia’s. She had, as Krebs told her, developed some strange cancerous growths throughout her body. “It’s nothing like the cancers we usually see here,” the doctor said severely, as if that discrepancy were Elys’s fault. “The CRU that brought you here mentioned leovostik omnipirin, but we don’t have any record of a substance by that name. Were you recently on a ship where the radiation shielding failed?”
“Everybody else on there was fine when I left,” Elys said.
“Not that ship.” Taia looked to the doctor for confirmation.
“I meant ever in your life, yes,” the doctor said.
“Would I have known if I was?” Elys asked. “I don’t think so. I haven’t taken many long trips.” There’d always been too much to do.
“Alright. Now, I am not a police.” The doctor paused for Elys’s surprised laugh. It was such a relief to be in a place where someone might be so ignorant of law enforcement bodies that they could make that grammatical mistake. “We don’t have any police on this station. If you tell me that leovostik omnipirin is a recreational substance that goes by some other names, the worst that will happen is that we’ll get you some help recovering from your experience with it. Do you have anything you’d like to tell me?”
“I told you everything I know about it,” Elys said. “And if I’d had a choice about taking it, I wouldn’t have.”
“She’s telling the truth,” said Taia. “If you’d seen her when we found her, you’d understand.”
“Then I apologize for the implications.” Republic doctors never apologized to patients. This had to be an Alyansan hospital. “We still have a lot of work ahead to stabilize the damaged organs...” The doctor listed other things they wanted to do. Elys zoned out and missed most of them, only refocusing when the doctor said, “The truth is, we’re never going to be able to trust your DNA the way we did before. The cancer will almost certainly come back, and we’ll treat it when it does. But within the next two weeks, I expect to transfer you to home care. You may even walk yourself to the car.”
Yesterday, or the last day Elys remembered at least, she’d been waiting to die. Two weeks or less in a hospital felt like no challenge at all. “My shoes are around here somewhere. I’ll be ready.”
“Your shoes are in that bag.” Taia pointed, her voice a little rough with feigned exasperation, or something else. She was smiling. That was the important thing.
Elys’s throat ached, and she bit her lip to stop the overwhelmed tears collecting in her eyes. She was in Alyansa. Taia was with her, projecting the same confident surety she did when she was two meters tall and covered in heavy armor.
“Well, that’s the update. I’ll leave you two alone.” The doctor left.
“So, I’ve missed some things,” Elys said.
Taia’s laughter galloped around the cramped hospital room. “Yes, a few things! Where do you want me to start?”
“How’s the city?”
The education initiative had used some of Elys’s suggestions to convince Alyansans that their demands for CRUs and movement between districts, all at once, had caused the city’s errors. Alyansans still wanted to move freely and live wherever they liked, so several show hosts had gotten together to organize a schedule that City Support thought the city could keep track of. Even Les Conlen had joined in on the project, once the city’s accidental evictions began to slow as a result.
It hadn’t been a frictionless transition. The city was refusing to store one show host’s material, a decision that two judges upheld. The angry host lost viewership, and his fans were upset about having to get episodes from Iskamaisanyi on a significant delay. But the new anomaly handling model in the city’s test environment confirmed that the short-term solution and the long-term rebalance would solve this problem too.
“And the invasion? Do we know any more about when the Republic’s coming?”
Taia glanced at one of the cameras in the wall. “Let’s see... This area is level three, so it’s just us talking, but it’s a hospital and they have their own protected archive. Records are for healthcare purposes only.”
Even Taia struggled to keep track of the privacy levels. Elys smiled. Alyansans had made a lifestyle that couldn’t exist without the city, as beautiful and inconvenient as that relationship could be.
“So,” Taia continued, “We sent everything we took from Krebs’s ship to the other independent stations. We’re all updating our defenses. When you’re out of here, though, they want to talk to you about that in Off-world Affairs. Physically. They wouldn’t say why.” Taia sounded annoyed about that.
Elys was falling asleep. The doctors almost certainly hadn’t added caffeine to any of the machines clicking and whirring near her. “So, they learned what a secret is.”
“We’ve known what secrets are.” Taia crossed her arms. “We just don’t think there are that many good reasons to have them. Off-world Affairs must have a good reason.”
“Is my pickup around somewhere?”
Taia got it from the bag on the floor that she claimed also held Elys’s shoes. When Elys put the pickup on, Nisse appeared on Elys’s stomach, purring and giving off illusory warmth, like it did when she was stressed but not focused on anything in particular. She checked the time and date, and smiled. “I’ll see another Eid after all.” It was only three days away.
Taia blinked. “I didn’t know you were religious.”
“I’m not. It’s just... A time for being with people you care about.” Elys’s eyes slid shut. Her relationship with her family and their religious holidays were too complicated to talk about when she was this tired. “How are Mighty and Troll?”
“Still not welcome in the Off-world Affairs offices.” Elys heard Taia’s smile in her words. “I could get Mighty approved, but Troll would break something culturally significant and start three wars just for fun. They hate it when I’m gone more than a night or two so when I came back...”
Elys dreamed about Troll running through the halls of Krebs’s ship, tongue flopping out the side of his doggy smile, while Republic soldiers lunged out of doors to grab him. They missed him every time.
––––––––
The Alyansan doctors changed their mind, at some point. Apparently, home care wouldn’t be enough to keep Elys alive after what leovostik omnipirin had done to her. Two weeks of in-patient care gave her time, if not energy, to update her confused personal feed followers about her newfound freedom, and to read.
Among other things she discovered in Krebs’s now-public data dump were evaluations of both attempts to kill Elys in prison. She’d always assumed that had been the RIS’s doing, but it was nice to see evidence that she’d been correct.
When she finished with Krebs’s documents, she switched to a text-based summary of the mediation process addressing the damage Krebs, and the Republic government, did to Alyansa. The separate proceedings’ complicated sections and subsections justified Alyansan lawyers. Off-world Affairs held the Republic responsible for the city’s difficulties, but investigative consensus held Krebs responsible for parts of it too, as well as what he did to Elys.
Elys appreciated that. At minimum, she wanted it to be as difficult as possible for Krebs to return to Alyansa. The mediation process, which the document kept calling it even though Krebs had made no attempts to participate, offered several approaches that mediators expected Elys to evaluate and weigh in on. She replied with her preference for the one most likely to keep Krebs out of Alyansa permanently.
Mediators weren’t the only people who wanted Elys’s opinions. Throughout her hospital stay, Volontaire district residents kept proposing changes to neighborhood policies. A couple proposals affected station-wide policies too. For once, Elys read them. Having a say in how her neighborhood handled things made her feel safer.
The hospital let Elys out closer to three weeks after she arrived than two. Under Alyansa’s brilliant blue-purple sky, her escape from the Republic felt more like part of her past than her ongoing present. She sanitized the hospital smell off herself in her apartment before she and Taia went to meet with Off-world Affairs.
Taia was attending in her official capacity, armor and all. Elys assembled another copy of the multi-pocketed clothes she’d selected during her first days in Alyansa, in brighter shades of yellow and blue this time. Alyansan colors.
Nisse appeared, of its own volition, to lead Elys to the meeting room. She’d been avoiding it, still bracing to see that faceless puddle of shadow where her helpful little assistant used to be. Now, in Alyansa, Nisse opened its eyes about halfway in a feline display of affection. “They’re waiting for you this way,” its alto growl said. Elys followed it through the building, smiling so widely that her cheeks ached.
The diplomats in the room Nisse took Elys and Taia were all smiling back. The lawyer from Elys’s first visit to Off-world Affairs’ headquarters wasn’t present this time, but Guliyev was staring attentively at something digital in front of him, aided by the gentle focus dream permeating the room. When Elys joined the group’s conversation, a very wide and well-dressed person appeared in the back third of the room, introduced by their profile as a delegate from the nearest independent stations on Iskamaisanyi.
“Alright!” said someone who sat too far away for Elys to read their profile. “Nothing urgent, first of all. We just wanted to discuss some sensitive subjects in person, since you’ve done so much to make these developments possible.”
“Well, that’s good, I guess,” said Elys.
“It’s good, yes,” said Guliyev. “Some of the documents you gave us allowed us to match Republic military and intelligence project names to activities supporting a Republic invasion of Alyansa. Our sources in the Republic indicate that all of those projects are now low priority. The most frequently cited reason was cost. Now that we’re aware of the threat and preparing for it, we’ve become too expensive to invade. Thank you very much for that, Mx. Kundakçı.”
“I’d say of course,” Elys had heard other Alyansans respond to thanks that way often enough, “but I really don’t want to do that again.”
“We’re focusing on bridging gaps between us and City Support. We should have an operative certified for basic city support capabilities ready the next time the need arises,” somebody farther down the table said. That the diplomats weren’t even pretending that the Republic was finished meddling in Alyansan affairs was one of the more comforting things someone had said to Elys since she returned.
“In any event,” said Guliyev, “we’re seeing less aggressive Republic interest throughout the independent station-states. We’ll tell them, and we’ll remember, who we have to thank for that.” The other stations’ representatives echoed the pronouncement.
“Ah... Good. Thanks.” When Elys did what she wanted to with MCAIs, people focused their praise on the MCAIs’ abilities and left her out of it.
What had she just thanked them for? An uncorrectable medical condition? New nightmares?
But she’d volunteered for those, more or less, and it wasn’t the diplomats’ fault that Krebs was a terrible person. Speaking of whom... “Have you heard anything about what happened to Krebs?”
“He’s been recalled to Earth, which is almost always a punitive measure in the RIS,” a diplomat said. “Per your recommendations and those of the station representative, we’re in the process of declaring him officially unwelcome here. That should be finalized by the end of the week. He’s caused a huge amount of harm here, and caused us to expend significant resources correcting what he did. Unless he commits to a proportional amount of service to Alyansans, which we find very unlikely, he won’t be welcome in any Alyansan territory.”
“Alright,” Elys said slowly as she parsed that explanation. “Good.”
Taia’s armored hand, three times the size of her real one, found Elys’s under the conference table. The finger joints hissed along each other as Taia’s hand gripped Elys’s. “If Elys isn’t going to ask, I will. What’s the status of getting the reward for her arrest lowered? I gave the hunters who helped us a lot of money, right?” She glanced at Elys, who nodded. “But that was just two of them. There are more. And now Elys has drawn more RIS attention to herself, like the man who died in Certitude district. What can you do to help us CRUs protect her?”
“We’re working on that.” The diplomat’s tone conveyed their lack of progress. “These things take time. We’ll tell you just as soon as we’ve gotten a helpful response.”
They said goodbyes all around, and Elys accepted more congratulations than was warranted. On the way out, Taia caught Elys’s upper arm in a gentle grip. “I promise they’re doing the best they can for you, just like they would for any other Alyansan.”
“Yeah,” Elys said. “Sorry if I’m making that face again.”
Taia laughed. “It’s your face. It’s okay.”
“I just wish...” The car Elys had called arrived. Taia eased her armored suit into it, glancing at Elys every few seconds but not interrupting her. “What I’d like to do — what I’ve been imagining doing when the medication’s keeping me up at night — I mean, I could do a lot of damage, with the RIS MCAI. It still recognizes me.”
“You’re not making the diplomats’ job any easier, saying that where it will be publicly archived.” Taia was still shifting one armored leg from one position to another, none of which looked comfortable, to get both legs into the car. Two other people already in the vehicle pressed themselves against the doors on the opposite side.
“The RIS would’ve found that out on their own, after we left Krebs’s ship.” Maybe Elys should’ve tried to kill him. But SHRIKE wasn’t a killer, not really, and neither was she.
Taia got all her limbs into the vehicle. Once Elys got in, it sped off toward Volontaire district. “So, you still want to stick it to Krebs, whatever ‘it’ is in that saying,” Taia said.
“Yeah, I do. I mean, it wasn’t just the poisoning. He was awful. He’s always been awful. And he’s going to do more awful things in the Republic, even if he never hurts anyone on Alyansa again.”
“Hurting Krebs wouldn’t make up for the things he did before.”
Elys sighed again. “No, it wouldn’t.”
––––––––
By the time Taia got Mighty to use her actual canine mouth to say “Hehhh-ROW” through Elys’s apartment door, twice, Elys had an idea of how she might make Krebs regret what he’d done to her. While Taia took off her shoes and the dogs inspected Elys’s living room, Elys said, “What if I tell one of the popular shows what Krebs did? The city got into his ship, didn’t it? Does it have some simulative recordings it could share?”
Taia frowned. “That ship was Republic territory, even while it was in Mayari orbit. We’d have to ask for something specific, like, if it had a simulative record of Krebs handing you poisoned water.”
“Or a record of me losing my mind from boredom. It’s worse than it sounds.”
“I bet a host would be interested, even if the city couldn’t release any records of what happened. Ooh, they could do a dramatic reenactment! Sorry,” Taia said immediately. “It’s you, so that makes it less fun, but it’s always the best parts of the reality-based stories. When it’s not you. I’m really sorry.”
“As long as they don’t make me do the reenacting, I guess it would be fine.”
“They’ll ask, but you can say no.”
The first host who agreed to talk on Elys’s terms was Talexi Reyes, host of Taia’s mother’s favorite newsertainment show, “News of the Universe.” Talexi’s implacable recording rig captured Elys’s account of happened on Krebs’s ship. The recording experience was less terrible than Elys had imagined it would be.
Talexi turned the interview into miniseries. All four episodes included Alyansan music and actors. Elys liked the dramatic music. The episode content was too accurate to watch.
Once the city accepted the episodes and Talexi told her fans, Elys posted the episodes in the most populous parts of the MCAI community. It was all well and good for Alyansa and the Republic to know what Krebs had done to her, from his initial bungling that’d allowed SHRIKE to order thousands of deaths and arrests to what he’d done when he caught Elys in Mayari orbit. What she really wanted was for MCAI engineers who cared enough to keep up with the industry to stay far away from Krebs and Republic government work. The RIS didn’t just mistreat their MCAI contractors, they betrayed them.
Between the News of the Universe episodes and the strategically placed posts, she got a lot of messages of support. If Nisse had its way, she only would’ve seen those. However, when she asked it to, it dutifully collected claims that Elys was lying, or deserved what she’d gotten, and let her see those when she felt argumentative.
Somebody sent her an anonymized record of Republic documents that disappeared while they were being removed to a remote storage location. Several of the documents were identified only with the RIS’s numbering system.
New records of the same size replaced them. The new ones all contained the @ symbol of l’Assemblée Tordue. Beneath it, in a formal font, they’d added on behalf of Elys Kundakçı.
The message she’d especially hoped to see arrived too, from an old alias. The sender had been on Elys’s development team while they’d worked on SHRIKE. A voice without a visualized image said, “We believe you. People who joined the Service after all that are getting out. They say Krebs isn’t allowed to leave Solar anymore. Thank you for telling everyone the truth.”
When Elys showed Taia the message, Taia said, “Look at that! You did that,” and kissed her. Nisse had to turn Taia’s voice up when she started talking again, because Elys was only thinking about the ghost of Taia’s lips on hers. “...going to trust the RIS after this, right?”
“I don’t think anyone ever trusted the RIS, per say.” Elys caught one of Taia’s hands in hers. “But yeah, I think they’re about to lose all their best MCAI people. The private sector has always paid better.”
Taia said a word Elys missed, which Nisse translated as clumsily injured (derogatory) in text beside her. “...and their obsession with privacy.”
“Alyansans think about it a lot more than most... What did you call us?”
“The exosuits the Republic soldiers wear make them hunch over like they hurt themselves doing something unwise, as compared to the CRUs’ big boots. It’s nicer than some of the nicknames I’ve been hearing,” Taia said, as apologetic as if she’d thought the others up herself.
Elys tugged on Taia’s hand to turn her to face Elys. “I appreciate you staying beside me through all of this. It wasn’t easy.”
“Worthwhile things usually aren’t.” Taia smiled mischievously. “Alyansans make time to do them right.”
“Yeah,” Elys agreed, pulling Taia closer. “We do.”
The message she hadn’t expected at all, which Nisse alerted her about as soon as it arrived, was from Vatirah. “What Krebs did to you was absolute unjustified shit. Rumor is the reward on bringing you back to the Republic is about to drop through the floor. Thank Taia for making sure I got paid anyhow!” Off-world Affairs was much more cautious about their progresses when they told Elys the same thing the next day.
That was the day Zahra Wirth weighed in on the situation too. “Loved those News of the Universe episodes you made,” she said. “Hard to watch, but we needed to, you know?”
“Thanks,” said Elys.
“Since I know Off-world Affairs is sticking to their rules about how they go about helping you, I might know a way to make new Republic personnel records that look like they’re forty years old. Would you like to be an heiress from an old family on Earth? You can pick from forty-nine of them. One has a flag with a dragon on it.”
Elys glanced down at her loose Alyansan clothes, full of pockets and devoid of anything resembling Solar fashion. “Are you saying I could travel around the universe as a Republic heiress if I wanted to?”
“Yeah,” said Zahra. “Aren’t you homesick?”
Mighty came over and looked up at Elys with concerned brown eyes. According to Nisse’s text translation, her body language and quiet whine meant, You just got sad. Can I help?
Elys stroked Mighty’s smooth head and let her fingers sink into the thick fur on the dog’s neck. “Can’t be sick for a place I’m already in.”
Zahra laughed. “Oh yeah, you’re a citizen now. Good choice. So, you don’t want the new Republic record?”
“I appreciate the offer,” Elys said. At the other end of the couch, Taia was carrying on a conversation with a relative and signing for emphasis over Troll’s head on her lap. “But I’m who and where I want to be.”