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THE RUMBLE OF A DEEP, rough voice woke Bryant from his exhausted sleep. Outside, a setting sun was poking pink rays through the tangle of flowery vines that formed their dome. They had slept the whole day around, Campos anaesthetized, and himself just very very tired from all that flying and from the repair to his fractured skull before. But now Campos was also waking, face creasing in confusion at the sound of his own voice.
It must have been cold in the night. Bryant found he was spreadeagled over Campos' new body and had drawn the emergency blanket about them both. When he had closed his eyes, his companion had still been a woman, suggestions of softness about her frame, a certain sleekness, a roundedness that had felt welcoming even in slumber.
"What the?" Campos said, and Bryant scrambled up and away at the new wakeful horror in that subterranean voice. He put as much distance between himself and the Captain as he could without tumbling out of hiding.
He'd done good work though, he thought, as Campos traced the outlines of her man's face with her masculine fingertips, amber eyes flaring wide. Aurora's looks were more obviously handsome on a man's heavier face, and her stocky, powerful build suited the male body much better. She was still troll-like, but on a man it was an intimidating look, and Bryant licked his lips nervously as he waited for the inevitable explosion.
He didn't even register the lunge. One moment Campos was sitting up slowly, examining her new hands, in the next those hands were knotted in Bryant's jacket, and he was lifted bodily off his feet and slammed into the trunk of the tree with enough force to drive all the breath out of him.
He had sense enough not to fight back, just to hang there, defenseless and unthreatening, trying to whoop back enough air to fill his lungs without making too much of a noise.
"Cacete! What did you do?"
She'd been scary enough as a woman, as a man she was a terrifying motherfucker. Even the faintly feminine outrage in her eyes was frightening because it looked so out of place on features turned craggy and invulnerable.
"They're looking for you," Bryant wheezed. "They're looking for Aurora Campos. If you march in there looking like a woman, they're going to—"
"So you just thought you'd change my sex without asking me?" Campos shook him hard, whipping his neck back and forth, bashing the back of his head against the lowest branches. Bryant still didn't struggle, partly because he believed Campos wouldn't continue to hurt someone who wasn't fighting back, and partly because he knew he didn't stand a chance.
"It's an easy process. It's very safe."
"That's not the point! I don't even—" She dropped him and stalked stiffly over to her bike, moving as though she didn't quite know how to pilot this thing. That was undoubtedly true; her center of balance would have shifted and she'd be dealing with...
The look of discomforted disgust on her face would have been hilarious if it wasn't accompanied by anger. "Ew. I mean..." she squirmed as if her whole body was an ill fitting coat, shifting her shoulders and spreading her legs wider. Bryant made sure not to smile when she looked back, her eyes wild and distressed and still faintly innocent. "Ew."
"It's only temporary," Bryant reassured. "It's a really easy procedure to reverse."
He got a hand around his throat for his trouble, not squeezing, just resting there so that he could fully appreciate the knuckles against his jaw and the wide, rough span of it, and how easily it could choke the breath out of him.
"You did this with bots."
Bryant's gaze slid away from the face he had been admiring and onto the leaf littered ground. "Yes," he admitted, and was about to add something soothing, when the hand clenched around his airway and stopped the words in his throat.
"You promised you wouldn't give me bots."
His throat lengthened as Campos lifted, pulling Bryant up until he dangled from Campos's rock steady grasp, with his toes grazing the ground. When Campos shook him again he thought he could feel all the little vertebrae in there go click click click.
"I..." Getting both his hands around Campos's fist, he used them to raise himself up on his arms so his full weight was not bearing down on his throat. This posture was beginning to become a habit he'd be glad to break.
He coughed a little, pathetically. "I also promised to help you. This was the only way I could think of. You're faster, stronger and they won't recognize you. I did it to help."
"You promised me."
Bryant's humility was beginning to give out. He had honestly tried to do something good and this was how he was repaid? "Well, this may not have occurred to you, but sometimes when men want something from you, they don't always mean what they say."
Campos sneered and tossed him onto the ground, where he just barely managed to bounce from his tucked shoulder instead of the crown of his head. "No kidding. And you thought 'I know, I want to be in that select company too. I found out some bastard let her down and I thought 'well, that's a great example to follow. Let's see how I can top that.'"
She turned her back on him, bent over and leaned her forearms on the swoop, breathing long, timed breaths as if in a deliberate attempt to calm down. It gave him a good chance to appreciate her new sturdier legs and trim arse, outlined by trousers that were now that little bit too tight.
Bryant still didn't see what the fuss was about. "On my world, there were people who came to me to switch for an occasional weekend, or a holiday. You know? It wasn't all tragedy. Some people are flexible enough to enjoy having a bit of a change. You fall in love with someone who doesn't like your sex, you change it..." he shrugged. "It's only until we're out of here, and then I'll change you back. I promise."
"You promise," Campos scoffed, still leaning on the bike as if it was the only thing holding her up. "And we know how much your promise is worth."
Why exactly had Bryant half fallen for such a humorless, self-righteous bitch in the first place? "Fuck you! I'm trying to protect us both. How could you think it was a good idea to try to infiltrate an all male penal colony looking like a woman? This way you're scary enough so they won't try to fuck you, and hopefully - if you're protecting me - they'll think twice about trying to fuck me too. I needed someone to protect me. Did you give that any thought?"
Campos stood up slowly and squirmed inside her skin again, grimacing. "Why can't you just bulk yourself up?"
But she sounded a little calmer, more resigned. Bryant took the chance to dig some breakfast out of the panniers and hand it to her. She tore into it with a very familiar voraciousness. While it was true that the remodeling had not been complicated - based on her own unexploited genotype as it was - it had certainly been energy intensive. More so this way around than it would be when she fined down again.
"I have such a suite of enhancements already that integrating another change would be much more complicated for me. Every new enhancement alters the coding of everything else. Eventually you reach saturation. But you're a blank page," he smiled in a sort of wonder, because he'd never had a subject before with whom nobody else had ever interfered. He could make her so elegant inside it would make programmers and mathematicians weep. "I can write whatever I want."
"Can you stop me if I try to throttle you?"
It didn't sound like a rhetorical question. He understood it as a chance to be honest, to regain some small measure of trust. "I don't know," he said truthfully. "It takes a certain amount of time to get a stranglehold on the mind, and you're fast. I think you could probably kill me before I overpowered your will. But you don't want to do that."
"No?" Campos asked, her expression still faintly distressed. Her meaty fists clenched, as if everything itched inside and she wanted to get her fingers under the skin to scratch. "Because right now it's looking like a very attractive proposition."
"No," Bryant insisted. "Because I'm the only one who can change you back. If you kill me now, you're going to have to stay like that for the rest of your life. And imagine how well that will go down with the press. You think they'd take you back to command a ship as an ‘abomination’? Call it insurance, if you like, but you're not leaving here without me. I had to make sure of that."
Campos twitched her broad shoulders, looking like ants were marching up and down her spine. Her eyes were cold but maybe just a hint amused. "You're too clever for your own good, Jones. I wasn't going to leave you behind. You could have trusted me - you could have let me trust you. I'm sorry you haven't got it in your heart to do either."
Oh and now he felt like a heel again. What was it with her, constantly trying to map her limited black and white moral palate onto his grayshade world? She made everything look bad.
She'd thank him when she wasn't getting raped, he thought, but then decided it was a little tasteless to say so. "You must have wondered how much easier your life would be if you were a man," he said instead, making it flippant, trying to draw out the horror so it stopped poisoning them both. "Now's your chance to find out. And, um... you make a fine looking man, in case you wondered."
"Yeah?" Campos had relaxed enough to scoff, amused at that thought.
"Oh yes. Very, um. Very rugged." He smiled, half deliberately flirtatious, half genuine. "I'm going to be proud to be your boy."
Campos side-eyed him as though she believed the entire speech had been bullshit. She was now hugging herself, arms wrapped around her thick waist, fingers arched as she pressed her polished nails into her flanks, as if she was either unconsciously trying to peel off this new skin, or to scratch the infesting nanites out as though they were fleas. She looked capable and dangerous and untouchable, like a creature carved out of rocks, until you looked in her eyes, and then she just looked uncomfortable as hell, and a little frightened.
And actually Bryant had done so many sex change modifications it hadn't occurred to him until now that he'd never done one this way around. He'd never taken someone who was as perfectly attuned with and as lazily confident about their body as Aurora, and deliberately put them in one that didn't fit right instead.
"It's only temporary?" she asked, sounding like she was ready to let go of the last of her anger, like she really wanted to believe it was going to be no big deal, but she couldn't, not quite.
"Of course. As soon as we're safely on board ship, I'll turn you back."
"Because I feel like," she shifted stance again, maybe trying to find a way to stand that would make it easier for her to ignore the existence of her new genitals. "This is awful. I feel so... vile and, dear God the way I sound! And... I just want to kill something. I want to break every damn thing in my path and kick the hell out of the pieces."
Bryant couldn't help a little chuckle at that. "Well, I'm guessing you have a lot of anger left over from how you've been treated this last year."
"Is that what it is?"
Campos would have to stop looking at him like that - with Aurora's naivety and that very masculine passion - because it was giving him much more interesting ideas for what they could do with the morning than striding into a jailbreak.
He swayed forward to put a hand on Campos' newly flat chest, feeling the curve of pectoral muscles under his palm. Warmth rushed over him. He licked his lips. Yes, he could think of many better ways to spend a day, and they all involved inspecting his handiwork as close as possible.
Of course, if he did suggest it, Campos wouldn't go for it, negotiating as she was for the role of virgin mother. She'd probably—
A big hand raised his chin, and then Campos was kissing him, clumsy and demanding and insistent. Kind of unpracticed, intensely sweet. The sexual tension he'd been repressing since they first landed drove him up to meet it, he got his arms around that broad back, wound himself around Campos tight, felt her arms tighten around his ribcage until he couldn't breathe, and that set off a whole mardi gras of fireworks down his spine and behind his eyes.
It ended before he was ready, and he was set on his feet, swaying, with his eyes closed and his heart thundering, hot with delight from head to toe. He opened his eyes reluctantly, to see Campos had recovered her small, cynical smile. It looked even more world-weary on that rugged face, but it was a lot better than despair.
"What was—?" Bryant tried.
"For good luck."
So they were really going to do this- going to walk into a prison compound which at the last count had held over five thousand men, and free a half dozen prisoners and somehow take the place back under the rule of law. Good luck? She'd bloody need it.
He didn't say so of course. What he said was, "You're Aurora Campos. You make your own."