Chapter Text
“Good morning!” Leonie said, unreasonably cheerful. Lorenz squinted. He had just emerged from their shelter, but Leonie had apparently been up long enough to heat up food. She passed him a plate. He didn’t know what she had made, but it was delicious. He reflected yet again on how well he was being fed out here on this backwoods planet.
Leonie sat next to him as he ate, pulling a map up on her handheld display. He tried to focus on her words rather than his aimless thoughts.
“… or possibly mid-afternoon,” she said, drawing a circle around their destination on the screen. Lorenz blinked.
They would arrive in the town by mid-afternoon. There was a local transport hub there, with a route to a city with a spaceport. There would be shops, and he could buy a replacement interface. He’d have access to the local network and planetary feed, and he could connect to the inter-system network and signal the company. If he didn’t want to take a public flight, he could have the company send a shuttle to him.
He could get back to his old life, and the last couple of days would become a brief interlude, perhaps a source of diverting tales.
“…or even see if you can hire someone to help with your shuttle, if you really want to. What do you think?”
“Come back to the Rim with me,” Lorenz blurted. “Please.” The expression that shuttled across her face was too fast for him to decipher, but as she lowered the handheld display, her expression was sad.
“I already told you, I can’t. I—”
“It doesn’t have to be TranRollinHyfa. It doesn’t have to be anywhere in that quadrant.” Gloucester Goods had company branches all over CR space, even a few on the edge where the Non-Corporate Jurisdiction began. He could work at any of them. He wouldn’t even have to request a transfer; he could authorize it himself. “Please.”
“Lorenz.” She put the display down and faced him, wrapping her hands around his wrists, then sliding down until she was holding his hands in hers. They were warm, the heat almost shocking without gloves or mittens in the way. “Even if I wanted to go back, I can’t.”
“Why?” he needed to know. Perhaps she had debts. That was nothing, he could help— She closed her eyes, then opened them again.
“I… may or may not be in a delicate legal position within Corporation space. I haven’t broken any laws, exactly, but if I ever went back…” She shook her head and squeezed his hands. “Never.”
“I can help. My family’s lawyers—” Lorenz began. Leonie laughed humorlessly.
“No, Lorenz.” The way she said it was almost gentle. Almost sorry. Lorenz turned his face away but made no move to pull out of her grasp. The silence stretched between them. She squeezed his hands again, then let go. “Come on,” she said softly, “We still need to get you back.” She shifted to stand up, but he grabbed her hand. Frantically, he leaned in and kissed her.
She stiffened. He thought she was going to push him away. Instead, she… stayed. When she softened into the kiss, relief flooded through him. The feeling was so strong, it turned his muscles to jelly, and he felt himself wobble. Leonie brought her hand up to his cheek, the other to rest on his shoulder.
When they drifted apart, Lorenz took a shaking breath. A word tried to form on his lips—please—but before he could speak again, she leaned close, pressed their mouths together once more.
She was warm. The hand on his cheek, especially, made him feel like he could melt. He tried to get closer to her, putting one hand on her upper arm and letting his free hand caress the angle of her jaw before sliding to rest on the back of her neck—
She pulled away from him then, eyes growing wide, but not quickly enough. Low on her neck, hidden by the collar of her shirts, she had… Lorenz told himself it could be an augment. It would be strange for someone augmented to choose to live in the middle of nowhere, away from the feed, but—
Even as Leonie scrambled to her feet, one hand pressed to the back of her neck—even as he followed suit, reaching for her, almost stepping on her handheld display, now abandoned—he knew it wasn’t the case. No standard augments were placed there, low on the back of the neck. The only such installations he knew were construct dataports.
He moved without thinking, stepping forward, reaching for her—
She flinched. She didn’t put her hands up, didn’t back away, but that small motion was enough. Lorenz froze. She did too. They stared at each other.
So. SecUnits and CombatUnits had dataports on the backs of their necks, but they also had inbuilt energy weapons in their forearms. Leonie had rolled up her sleeves on more than one occasion, and Lorenz hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.
That back-of-the-neck dataport style was also found on ComfortUnits.
Lorenz was still standing with his hands out. Carefully, he lowered them. Leonie didn’t relax, exactly, but she didn’t run either.
“Ah,” she said unexpectedly, and then she was shifting, her body language casual. She rubbed the back of her neck with one hand, propped her other hand loosely on her hip. “That’s my augment. The skin there is sensitive. I should have warned you.” Her eyes had been lowered, as if she were chagrined, but now she raised them just enough to meet his. Her expression was rueful with a touch of amusement at herself.
Okay, so she was going to lie to him. Well, that was… worrying, actually.
It was generally known that constructs were prevented from lying by their governor modules, but Lorenz knew it was more complicated than that. Constructs who had been given orders to fulfill a specific task—espionage especially—were allowed to lie as long as it supported their mission.
“What?” Lorenz managed, voice coming out rather higher than usual.
“Yeah, I had a neural disorder as a kid, and the docs needed some pretty gnarly access to my brainstem, so I—”
“Stop,” Lorenz said. He meant it to sound firm. He hadn’t wanted his voice to shake. “Leonie, just—stop.”
She did, falling silent, and Lorenz covered his face with his hands. His— Leonie was— The person he was starting to— She’d kissed him back.
She’d kissed him back, and he thought that meant she felt something for him, that his feelings were returned. But if not kissing him ran counter to her assignment, then her governor module would—she wouldn’t have a choice. He felt sick.
He staggered away from her, almost tripping as his foot caught on something. She reached towards him, and he stumbled farther away.
“No. It’s okay. It’s—you don’t have to—” He wrapped his arms around himself, aware all over again of how frigid it was here. He was shivering despite his layers of borrowed clothing.
Oh. The layers. No wonder she always wore her hooded sweaters, her high-collared vests. He’d heard that ComfortUnits had a much more human-looking standard configuration, lacking the obvious inorganic parts that marked SecUnits and CombatUnits for what they were. He’d even seen her eat, though not often and not much. He wondered involuntarily why ComfortUnits might be designed to ingest substances. He felt sick.
“Are you safe? Have I endangered you?” he asked, unable to look at her.
“What? I’m fine, Lorenz, but you—”
“Leonie, please. I know—I know, okay? I’ve been around constructs most of my life. I know that isn’t just an augment.” He said it before realizing that acknowledging what she was might be incompatible with her assignment, might trigger punishment from her governor module. He made himself look at her then, searched for the minute signs she was being electrocuted by a device embedded in her body. It would be obvious in a human, but constructs were forced by terrible necessity to learn to hide it. ComfortUnits would probably be especially adept at masking their true thoughts and feelings.
He couldn’t tell. She just looked like Leonie.
“I won’t say anything else. I won’t tell anyone,” he promised.
“Won’t tell anyone what?” she had the gall to say.
“Anything.” Whatever her assignment was, it clearly required her to hide her status as a construct. He couldn’t imagine why, but—unless it was about him? Some sort of corporate espionage thing? No, it was absurd that someone might sabotage his ship to almost kill him so he could be taken in by their agent and… what? Develop feelings for her? Lorenz, growing up in Gloucester, was no stranger to mind games, but he honestly could not imagine a plot convoluted enough to make putting Leonie in his path profitable. The assassination attempt had been real, and he’d accidentally stumbled into… whatever Leonie was involved with.
She gave him an assessing look, then finally set her hands on her hips and shook her head.
“I don’t know what’s going on in that head of yours,” she said, “But it’s not getting us any closer to the city. Let’s strike camp and we’ll go.”
Leonie picked the media serial for them to listen to. Lorenz only half-heard it, an energetic story that reveled in its genre conventions. A mysterious old wizard delivered a cryptic prophecy to a callow country lad, whose first order of business was to acquire a wisecracking animal companion. It was the kind of thing that one could follow with less than half of one’s attention.
Outside the window of the truck, trees and snowfields alike drifted by. Clouds spread out in unseen winds and eventually dissipated.
Lorenz couldn’t figure out what Leonie’s assignment was. Come to that, he had no notion of who owned her contract. That was… highly irregular.
In addition to delivering painful electrical shocks to a disobedient construct, the governor module was also programmed to kill any construct that got too far from its contracted client. Leonie lived in the middle of nowhere, and now they were undertaking a journey of significant distance from her home base. Other than Leonie, he hadn’t seen another soul since arriving here. So where was her contract holder?
It was possible, he knew, to assign a SecUnit to perform security in an isolated location. Instead of being tethered to a client, the SecUnit would be limited to a radius around, say, a mining location. Thus, security could be provided without having to worry about rival intrusion (and without paying for humans to live on some forsaken asteroid, possibly going mad and attempting to murder each other). It was possible that Leonie’s assignment was also location-based… and that she had been given a large enough radius that she could drop everything to take him to the city?
There was another possibility: she could be a rogue unit.
The thought should have made Lorenz’s blood run cold. In the media, rogue constructs (free constructs) responded to their newfound freedom by going on a murderous rampage. Indeed, there were documented cases where constructs with malfunctioning governor modules did exactly that.
The rogue units that appeared in the news bursts in showers of blood were always SecUnits or CombatUnits. If a ComfortUnit escaped, would it even make the news feeds? They didn’t have weapons and weren’t associated with violence (well, not as perpetrators of violence). Without sensational gore, the newsfeeds would pay little attention.
If Leonie was rogue… She’d had plenty of opportunities to bathe in his blood already. Instead she’d clothed him, fed him, given him a safe place to sleep, and was currently going out of her way to help him get home. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t feel any fear, only confusion and an aching, hollow sorrow. She shifted, her eyes meeting his. He looked away hurriedly, cheeks heating. And that. He also felt …that, though guilt tainted any memory of desire his body yet held.
Lorenz stared unseeingly as the landscape drifted past the window.
Hours later, when the audio story had come to its conclusion, Leonie broke the silence between them.
“The station sucked,” she said. She still sounded like herself, just Leonie, casual and easy to be around and easy to listen to. Lorenz rested his face against the side of the truck’s cabin. “Isolated hub for a few mining facilities and even fewer manufacturers. Contract labor as far as the eye could see, fifteen-orbital-cycle contracts minimum. Everyone was miserable, and a lot of them were mean with it. And there I was, for station morale. Then one day… a security team strolls in. They think they’re hot shit—contract security always does—and they’re there for some blip of a company that wants to establish a mine. One of their regular guys got sick, and they have a temp guy they hired off the feed.
“Job goes sideways. There’s fighting on the station. Six-way brawl between Jeralt’s mercs, the rival security team, three of the other corporate residents, and Station Security. Property damage sets a local record, and in the middle noise and confusion… Jeralt’s new guy asks if I want to jump station, get the fuck out of there. Says he can—help me escape my contract. Obviously I say yes.
“New guy convinces Jeralt to smuggle me out. I was on contract with that shithole until the day I was too broken to work and there was no profit left to wring out of me. Instead, there I was, with the whole of space ahead of me.
“What did I do? I ran. As far and as fast as I could. Changed my name, changed my identity, appearance, everything I could, over and over again. No one from the station would ever recognize me. And then, sooner than you’d think, there I was on the edge of the CR. And wouldn’t you know it, I was just one hop away from the station Jeralt and his mercs logged as their permanent address.” She sighed, an audible release of tension. Lorenz, who had barely breathed since Leonie started talking, felt his lungs fill. She shook her head slowly and looked at him out of the corner of her eye.
“New guy dipped after that one job. Never heard from him again. But Jeralt has a kid, and she lived on the station with him. I was curious, I dunno. Not sure what to do next. Felt like there wasn’t a lot of space left to run, so I was just…. Watching them, trying to figure out my next move. She catches me watching them. Instead of freaking out, she asks me, have I ever been on a planet before?
“You know, in all that time, I hadn’t. Never set foot on one. She says it’s great, she and her dad are on their way for a visit, would I like to come? Sure, what the fuck. Nothing else to do.” She took in a deep breath, let the air run out of her lungs slowly.
“It’s so quiet down here, even before you get into the woods. Every station is basically the same ‘cause they all share a function. They all kind of remind me of TranRollinHyfa. But down here… Everything is different. It’s a different world. It’s old, but it’s new.” Her voice was so soft and warm that he thought she was done speaking. But then she tilted her head and added, “Beats me why you want to go back.”
Of course Lorenz had to go back. He had duties. He had his career. He had Gloucester, his property, his holdings.
He opened his mouth to point this out, and… stopped. He’d been a member of the corporate elite with everything he wanted at his fingertips. She had been, in the eyes of the law, property. And he’d begged her to come back to the Corporation Rim with him. No wonder she said no.
He let the question of why he wanted to go back remain unanswered.
Well, that was that. Leonie knew that it was more important for her to focus on damage control now than anything else (like, for example, feelings anyone may or may not be experiencing).
Lorenz knew she was a construct. More than likely, he knew she was a ComfortUnit. Even more pressing, he knew she was rogue.
That was a problem. Her existence—rogue construct, off the grid, pretending to be a human person—was illegal in every jurisdiction in the Corporate Rim and probably every jurisdiction outside it. Generally speaking, it was illegal for a human to even know about her without reporting it.
And yet, what had he said to her? Stop. It’s okay. You don’t have to. Are you safe? I won’t tell anyone. And then he’d looked like he was going to throw up, or possibly cry. Crying while throwing up was also a possibility. He’d blinked back tears a few times already—her hearing was more acute than a standard human’s, and she had an array of auxiliary receptors as well—but mostly he’d hunched away from her and looked sad. His behavior was not standard for someone about to rat her out to her corporate overlords so she could be tortured, disassembled, and possibly returned to service (AKA tortured some more). But he wouldn’t be the first human who looked sad before letting her get fucked anyway.
If Leonie were smart, she’d change course. Turn the truck away from the town and its feed-shadow. He couldn’t report her if he didn’t have feed access. But she didn’t want to kill him, and she didn’t know what else to do with him. She could only think of two people who might help her figure out what to do next, and only one of them was on-planet—Jeralt, of course. Lorenz’s feed-augment had been destroyed in the crash, and she could control the feed-connection on the handhold interface she’d loaned him. She had a little time.
She didn’t sigh, she didn’t take a deep breath, and she didn’t close her eyes to gather herself. She need any of that. Like any ComfortUnit-turned-whatever-she-was, she could keep her composure so well it didn’t show at all. But she was disappointed nonetheless. She wasn’t surprised when he kissed her, but she was shocked to her soles that she’d wanted him to keep doing it.
They couldn’t spend the whole day sitting in fraught silence—okay, they could. Certainly, Lorenz had spent many a voyage with his father doing exactly that. But Leonie put on an audio serial that was a sequel to one they’d listened the day before, and little by little, she and Lorenz relaxed. When Leonie laughed at something particularly droll the protagonist said, Lorenz felt so relieved it rendered him momentarily boneless.
“You hungry?” she asked after the next episode. Lorenz blinked. He’d been trying to immerse himself in the world of Trish and the Trial of Thorns to avoid chasing his thoughts in circles.
“Ah, I could eat. What about you?” he asked, one of those automatic niceties that required no input from his brain.
“No. Thanks.”
Lorenz stared out the forward display of the truck, cheeks heating.
“… Do… uh, that is to say, I know that SecUnits don’t… They can ingest food, but they don’t have a digestive system, so I believe the food is merely sequestered for later removal… Do, uh, do Comf—?”
“Never had much to do with SecUnits,” Leonie said blandly. “Anyway, I’ll just find a place to land so you can get a bite to eat, and we can stretch our legs. Sounds good?”
“… I thank you.”
That evening, Lorenz helped Leonie set up their small campsite. It was not that he enjoyed manual labor, but the movement itself was welcome after so many hours in transit. “Pitching” the “tent” proved to be more complicated than he had previously appreciated, but the process gave him a greater appreciation for the small—but warm—shelter. She also showed him how the cooker was operated and once again entrusted him with the task of heating his own supper. This time when Leonie declined to eat, he didn’t ask the question on the tip of his tongue.
Before night was fully fallen, Lorenz found himself strolling around the perimeter of their campsite. The temperature was falling quickly, but for now Lorenz was full of food and pleasantly warm. As he wove idly between the trees, he tugged off his mitten and let his hand trail across their bark.
The bark was rough and cold under his fingers, but he discovered that the different trees had different patterns of fissures. This tree was almost smooth, save for horizontal lines of small bumps. This tree had very deep crevices in an almost-regular pattern. The next tree… Lorenz paused, his fingers tracing the plus sign that had been carved into the bark. Hardly making a sound, he rushed to the other side of the trunk. His fingers found the circle with the spot that was carved there.
They would arrive in the town tomorrow morning. He would be able to hail for help, to return to Gloucester… But tonight, among the cryptic silhouettes of the trees, he traced the newly-familiar shape and felt—not lost, exactly, but not quite found either.
After the emotional upheaval of the day, Lorenz hoped to fall asleep quickly. Tiredness tugged at his bones, granting him unusual awareness of gravity holding him to the planet. The night outside was quiet again, and he could hear Leonie breathing softly.
He couldn’t stop the thought from arising: it was nice. He wished it wasn’t. They would be in the town by tomorrow, and he would be able to hail for rescue. He could be back in the bosom of the Gloucester corporate empire by tomorrow evening, already on his way to the company’s headquarters. His life had been forced into a holding pattern when his ship had crashed, and it could finally resume.
But here and now, he couldn’t help but think that it was nice to lie here and listen to Leonie’s breathing. When he was back in Corporation Space, his time, including leisure and rest periods, would be mapped out in five-minute intervals.
On that uninspiring thought, he slipped into restless sleep. His dreams were filled with lists and notifications that couldn’t be dismissed and crowds of figures at once smiling and faceless. His thoughts were crowded and airless.
Half asleep, he shifted until his back was resting against a warm surface. Only then was he able to escape into deep, slow dreams.