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Summer in Radham was like any other season in the city, only a little brighter and a little more pungent. Yesterday's rain sluiced down the gutters and into umber mud. The stench of discarded stitched pervaded every corner of the Academy town, big clouds of gas. Presently one of these puffed through Lillian’s window. She lay on her little bed, and a card from her parents lay beside her, and she scrunched her nose, and she tried to keep from crying. Crying was something from many years ago—she was a soldier now, well, a combat medic, anyway, and it was therefore irresponsible to let petty little things like “parental condescension” cloud her mind. There were ratios to memorize, projects to plan, and—she started to bawl.
Now, of course, just her luck, here Sylvester came to see her in this state. He crept in over the window ledge in what you’d have to call a rodential kind of way, and he took one look at her and smirked. His hair was wet at the tips. His wild emerald eyes glinted in the dusky summer sun. He had such delicate features, too, she thought, still teary-eyed but beginning, because of the shock, if nothing else, to wipe them away and get ahold of herself. That sensation she always felt in Sylvester’s presence, the strange denuded feeling, dissolved in an instant the fear and humiliation of a moment ago.
He hopped into bed with her. He pushed his head into her shoulder, sort of a signature move since he had started coming up here for some loneliness-relief.
“Bad news?” he said, and gestured at the letter, already knowing.
“I’m not gonna tell you because you’re gonna tease me about it,” Lillian said.
“Tease you about it? Me?” Sy said, and doubled down. “When have I ever done anything like that?”
Lillian scowled.
“I’m serious!” Sy went on. “Okay, maybe a few times in the past—”
“A few? ”
“Okay, okay—but not anymore. Well, not today, anyway. Today, no teasing. You’re getting nice Sy exclusively. C’mon, whatever you want, we’ll do it.”
“And no teasing?”
“Absolutely not. Today is a Lillian day. Anything you want, it’s on me.”
Lillian turned away for a moment, feeling her face heat up a little. There was something irresistible in Sy’s gallantry, though she knew, somewhere deep inside herself, that it was only some kind of trick. That said, there was still time to push it—
“Okay, Sylvester. It’s a ‘Lillian day,’ and that means you can’t turn down any request?”
Sylvester nodded, still with his disarming smirk.
“Then, to start . . . you have to say something nice about me,” Lillian said, still not daring to face him. She didn’t need to face him, though—the resulting silence was enough to paint a picture in her mind of little fine-boned Sy made, at last, totally speechless.
“Something . . . nice about you?” Sy said.
“Mhm,” Lillian responded, and turned to face him: he was maybe half a shade paler, maybe even—it couldn’t be, could it?—half a shade pinker. “And no joking, no ironic compliments. You have to mean it.”
“Er—ahem—Lillian . . . I think you are . . . very good at what you do.”
“Keep going.”
“And . . . good looking.”
“Good looking?” she said skeptically.
“Pretty, even.”
Well, that was more than what she’d hoped for, though of course she couldn’t let on. “Okay,” she said. “Good enough. Now what. . . . Hmm—I know. Now I want you to buy me some ice cream.”
“Ice cream?” Sy said. “What are you—”
Lillian gave him a look.
“I mean, where am I going to get ice cream? Not to mention, I’m not exactly rolling in it right now, Lil.”
“Surely the Academy’s most promising superweapon can secure a cold treat on a warm day. And I’ve told you a thousand times, stop calling me ‘Lil.’ ”
Sylvester thought for a moment. Lillian imagined his green eyes turning inward, scanning and reshaping the hypertrophied gray—or perhaps green—matter. “Of course I can get you some ice cream, Lillian,” Sy said, and his grin had moved somewhat closer to being overtly devious. “Let’s go.” He grabbed her by the wrist and tugged her up. He led her wordlessly down some stairs, between towers, out across the campus. Warbeast musk stung Lillian’s nose. She felt flustered and giddy. The sun was high and she saw Sylvester start to sweat.
Soon they were out in the city, strolling through broad streets. Shopkeepers attempted to keep stitched corpses from commingling with their meager stocks. Lillian felt sheepish (so to speak) about her distaste for the city’s smells and inhabitants and the weight of its collective filth: Sylvester, as she knew well, loved it. This was his home—not hers.
Here, for example, came some kids—some of Sy’s favorite mice, in fact—and they stopped him, whispered some kind of code in his ear, giggled a little, all three, and turned to look at Lillian, whereupon their giggles intensified till they ran off back into the crowd. “What were they saying?” Lillian asked, and Sy brushed her off, grabbed her hand, and led her deeper into Radham’s anonymous inner walls. This was an illicit thrill, like sneaking some new study-drug. Indeed something about Sylvester always felt a little illicit.
What would her parents think if they knew how close she was to a superweapon?
Hayle was always saying things like this to her, re Sy’s basic “inhumanity.” Sylvester is dangerous, he would say, speaking in that paternal-yet-clinical timbre he saved for their most secret meetings. He’s not like you and I. He doesn’t think like us. Yes, she wanted to tell him. That’s, um, kind of the point, isn’t it, Professor?
Sy tugged on her hand to get her to stop, halfway through some foul-smelling alley, and gestured that he wanted her to peek around the corner. She spied a scene wherein a kind of well-to-do-seeming fellow—he was tall, very blonde, very obviously “enhanced”—flanked by even taller personal protection stitched, was shouting at a frail young woman wearing very few clothes (she looked a little like a “failed” version of Helen, Lillian thought) while she cowered in the mud. “Stay here,” Sy said. He jumped out into the thick of things, managing somehow to inject some small swagger into his diminutive movements. Lillian leaned forward and squeaked just a bit. If she had to fix him up out here, well, that wouldn’t be such a great start to a supposed “Lillian Day,” would it, Sylvester. She watched him start to reason with this nameless aristocrat, pat him on the back, give him that signature Sylvester grin, like nothing in the world could go wrong if only they listened to him, let him work his viridescent magic.
The tension began to leave the situation. The scantily clad girl rose to her feet. The aristocrat backed off, returning to a normal color. Even the muscle bound stitched let their shoulders relax. Sy’s smile broadened, and just as everything returned to normal, he jabbed his fingers into the aristocrat’s back pocket and pulled out a few coins, which flashed in the dying light. He slipped a couple to the girl and stashed the rest in his trousers as the aristocrat and his voltaic entourage turned their backs and ambled back into the stream of people.
Lillian couldn’t help but let loose a couple chirps of amusement when Sy rushed back to her side. “Wow, Sy, what a show.”
“It’s nothing, really,” Sy said in a treacly tone.
“What was going on? What did you say?”
“Well, I’ll keep all the sordid big city stuff to myself—a lady like you shouldn’t have to hear that.” (Lillian rolled her eyes.) “But basically, the rich guy felt as though the girl had cheated him out of some money—he was threatening to do all sorts of nasty things to her. All I did was point out to him that, just maybe, he didn’t want to let the whole city of Radham know the intimate details of this, ahem, very private business agreement.” Lillian giggled, praying she wouldn’t blush. “Not to mention,” Sy went on, “if word got out that he was, you know, associating with a stitched, that could have some harmful effects on his reputation.”
“Was she really? That girl, I mean, I couldn’t tell at all.”
“Really a stitched? I’m almost positive. Up close I could see some of the signatures of the Academy in her construction. Maybe one of Ibbot’s side projects.” They both laughed. “Anyway, I saved the day, like always, and now I have enough for that ice cream you’re so desperate for.” And he flashed the aristocrat’s cash.
They strolled down a side street, back into the commercial district. Lillian was beginning to develop a feeling like she was in a kind of elaborate roleplay, like she was inhabiting someone else’s body, someone who had no connection to the Academy whatsoever, only a normal girl buying groceries with her guy. But then she felt strange—why didn’t she find that more exciting?
They made it to a square alive with the smell of street food. Carts smoked and streamed. “I know a guy,” Sy said, and jerked his head at a fat man bent over a big trunk of foodstuffs. “Sylvester,” the man said in a gravelly voice, smiling wide. “It’s always trouble when you come around.”
“Me?” Sylvester said. “What do you mean by that? I’m just an honest customer.” And he threw his new coins down on the counter. “I’ll take five scoops, in fact.”
“ That’s what I mean,” the man said, gesturing at the money. “Where’d you get that kind of cash?”
“Aw, c’mon, don’t give me a hard time today, Hector. It’s for my lady-friend.”
Hector rolled his eyes and said, “What flavors?”
“Ooh, I’ll have the strawberry and my friend here will have . . . hey, Lillian, what’s your favorite flavor?”
“Pistachio,” she squeaked out.
“Four pistachio scoops for my friend,” Sylvester said.
Sylvester collected the little cups in his spindly arms and led them to a kind of stoop away from the chaos of the crowd. He placed the pale green scoops in each of her hands and gestured that she should eat. “It’s very good,” she said. (And it really was: subtle and refreshing, and just sweet enough.) “I don’t know if I can eat that much, though.”
“I’ll give whatever you don’t eat to the mice,” he said, and dug in.
“This has been really nice,” she admitted. “I really didn’t think you had it in you.”
“Of course I have it in me to pull off a Lillian day. What’s all this been for if I can’t do that?”
“My parents don’t think I should be around you and the Lambs as much. That’s what their letter is about. Well, they don’t know all the details, but that’s basically what they were saying. They want me to keep my head down, basically.”
“You’re way too smart to keep your head down.”
Well, all the blushing she’d repressed the past couple hours came out now. Sylvester held his strawberry scoop up to her face and laughed: “Same color.”
“Thanks, Sy.”
“And I’m not just saying it because it’s a Lillian day. I really mean it. Your parents don’t know what you’re capable of. Hayle doesn’t either. And neither do I.”
“You know me pretty well.”
“Well, I know what you want, on a day to day level, I guess.”
“And what do I want right now?”
They paused their slurping and looked at each other. “You want a cool treat on a warm day,” he said. He brought his finger through his half-melted strawberry scoop and then, before she could react, swiped Lillian across the cheek with it. She shrieked from the shocking cold, but then Sy sprang up to kiss the cold spot, just for a moment. Then Lillian retaliated, and this cycle continued for a while, well after the sun had gone down and the lights of the city had switched on.