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Haggard and weary, scarlet Quincy Grand crashes through the chopping ocean's surface, and sinks.
Quincy Issa's Grand Cher moves as easily through the water as she does the sky. There's something hypnotic about being able to slip so easily away from the maddening battle in the sky. Without the distractions, the noise, the pollution, the heated chaos of their war, her exhausted mind is free to simply dwell. She sinks in the briny deep where every sound is so different and the light moves slowly around her Grand Cher's outstretched fingers, Quincy feels her connections growing deeper.
These pure waters, the way everything is cast blue by the filtered light, it made the inside of her cockpit seem ethereal. The sunlight filtering down through the water hurt, pressing a heavy weight down on her shoulders and eyelids. Quincy Grand dims the view to the outside in response to the twitch of her eyes.
"Thank you," she mumbles, running a calloused hand over the left node on the inside wall of her Antibody's womb, "Grand."
Quincy Grand purrs her retort, low and rumbling, so deep that Quincy feels it in her ribs. This deep in the sea, even through her Antibody, her second skin, Quincy can feel the temperature of the water drop. It isn't like a winter chill, bringing a shiver to the skin, a more welcome coolness that soothes her sore bruises.
The battle just hadn't gone her way. A bad result is an understatement. The near-graze over her Grand Cher's left cheek, just below her visor, was the last that she was able to walk away with without scaring her. Novis Noa usually isn’t coordinated enough. She can handle them, but she can’t handle large numbers like that. It leaves her limp with exhaustion in Quincy Grand's womb, sinking into yielding wafers.
Salty pacific lysocline like the water of the womb, Quincy Issa was merely an activated antibody in a still-developing immune system. Orphan rises from the deep ocean trench to greet her, sweeping and vast like an undersea mountain range and glittering like a bed of jewels.
Her Grand Cher dives into the nearest Antibody bay and comes to a stop on her plate-platform, landing heavy and with uneven displacement on a pegged leg that she could not feel. Still dripping brine onto the platform, she drops to a knee, then folds her leg and prosthesis both under herself. A gentle whine and squeak of organic armor, the hiss as the cockpit slides open. Quincy reaches with a hand and heaves herself out from Quincy Grand's cockpit and to the floor.
She struck the floor of the Grand Cher hangar, and her knees buckled. Her legs screamed, her lungs burned, the taste of dust and desperation coated her tongue, and her hair and fluid suit stank of smoke. Men's voices shout her to the ground. Quincy Issa falls to her hands and knees and Orphan weeps her grief for her as cool mist that soothes her aching muscles like wounds unhealing. Her eyes climb to the American soldiers who rush to her side, at the striped piece of cloth hanging limp like banners at their backs.
It's just one piece of cloth, and it brought sullen Orphan to her knees. Just one piece of cloth, and all its proxies, evasive, persuasive, pervasive — impose war, sustain it. She was a woman surrounded by men who call too loud on freedom to cloak the tawdry rule of iron kings.
"Things have become this complicated," Quincy says to herself as she leaves them behind, brushing away concern with a raised hand.
Quincy sinks into the whiteness of the American desert that has become of the Grand Cher hangar. She is lost, drifting past these uniformed men, and only the sun will bleach their bones any whiter. They salute her as the leader of the Grand Cher corps, and all pretend they do not whisper their contempt of her at her back. Fifty years yesterday, the Americans would have put her family behind barbed wire marked with a rising sun, all with clipped wings like caged birds, and across the salty Pacific: two cumulus mushroom clouds make two-hundred thousand corpses or more lying on the parade ground like stone images of Jizo.
Today, they line Orphan's womb with cement to make a graveyard for her children. Quincy's furious thoughts run corrupt as poisonous mold. Should she lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire? Should she try to make power out of hatred, or keep trying to heal Orphan with kisses pressed to splintered wafers?
Her mouth splits into dry lips as she steps alone into the hallway that led to the residential sector. Could she rattle that Atlas chain enough to shatter it and send Orphan into the frozen black of forever, she would.
Orphan only needs her.
Orphan needs only her.
Her legs, leaden and aching, felt like they were anchored to the floor. Labyrinthine Orphan sighed, a sound like rustling silk, and the floor beneath Quincy's boots shifted, rearranging itself into a new pathway. Etched with carvings that seemed to breathe, seemed to lean in against her small body, whispering promises of rest. Like a child trying to help a wounded animal, Orphan's intentions were pure, but her understanding was limited. She called to Quincy with organic wires that twisted and threaded like spider-webbing veins.
She loved the way the corridors whispered secrets against her skin, the way the air thrummed with a strange, melancholic beauty. She loved the challenge, the puzzle, the desperate hope that flickered with all she had. She knew it, felt it in the way the wafer-walls part to guide her, the way the light, even in its perpetual twilight, seemed to strain to focus on her. Orphan showered her with small gifts: a single, perfect bloom that glowed and appeared overnight, a melody woven into the recycled air, a momentary respite.
Orphan has seen her, her jubilation and her despair. Orphan has celebrated every success with blossoming flowers and golden sunshine and she has cried out in pain like fault lines split for an agonized eternity for the lack of her. Orphan loved her in the way a predator loves its prey, desperate and cloying.
Her bones are young but already her body is old, she is too new and not new enough, she is Iiko's body but Quincy's mind. Time left Iiko behind, but Quincy will stay here for as long as Orphan needs her. Humans are creatures of habit, desperately clinging to permanence.
It's the Isamis who are to blame, the conductors of utero maintenance within Orphan. Quincy curses them and humanity, the species that birthed her, for producing a pair of orphans. Within her veins was the ambition of the parents that gave her flesh.
They base their understanding of Orphan on evolutionary explanations that are straightforwardly understood. Plus and minus, male and female, matter and antimatter. The biological process of pair production results from greater reproductive success. Contrary, their disdain for same-pair bonding relies on social mechanisms that stretch the intelligent imagination; if she had to hear Iiko's father say another word on antagonistic pleiotropy being to blame for deviant behavior, she'd deny Yuu the pleasure and kill Kensaku herself.
"Their social education has dictated which responses are appropriate out of deference for their cultural memes," she says aloud as if in conversation. A habit she'd developed from Orphan's antibody factor, and time spent in the Grand Cher. Orphan can hear her, voice and thoughts alike, and the wall-wafers nearest to her thrums.
She will never play that game with Orphan, her belly will never get big and full with a litter to bear and nurse. Is it not enough to dedicate herself to her, to protect, sustain, and provide for Orphan for as long as either lived? She was a queen, and Orphan was both her kingdom and princess, her cradle and coffin, if she had ever truly been born or if she could ever truly die.
The Isami family all fall for the Darwinian paradox; their common assumption that homosexual behavior is non-adaptive – that is, that it doesn’t help individuals have more offspring, or boost the survival chances of those they do have. Human behaviors should not be judged based on what animals do, nor can Orphan be judged by human measure. They misunderstand the organic element at play. Quincy loved Orphan, and Orphan loved her back just as much. Iiko knew only that Isami family, their moods, their chemical reactions, their bodies, in a hundred thousand combinations. She is their child and their genes and their inheritance.
Iiko was an antibody of the Isami family, but Orphan has carried Quincy for most of her life, and she has become bound to her, completely. It is a delicate, unalterable thing, to be Orphan's antibody. Orphan and she will be bound that way even as Orphan bares her throat to Quincy's lips with another parting of wafer-walls.She steps with sore feet into sections of Orphan that no human has ever seen; here she can be ever-changing in ways that she is not permitted to be where other humans tread. But Quincy is different, with all the privilege of a queen. All doors in this kingdom were unlocked for her as a matter of course, and her princess guided her gladly.
Quincy is deep inside of her; Orphan cannot keep secrets, but even so, she is more massive than Quincy can imagine, and her body reacts to stimuli that Quincy cannot access with her limited senses. She runs a hand along the wall nearest her, fingertips catching on each wafer. They're warm to the touch, and gently shift under her attention. The ceiling itself purrs.
"I know," Quincy drawls, "I hate them too. I hate all of them."
Orphan is a mirror to Quincy's sentiment, but she is gentle, and kind, too - she cannot bring herself to harm the humans that refuge inside of her. Her organic heart is heavy enough with the devastation her stirring has caused this planet. She wishes beyond her wishing that Orphan would tell her to kill them all, and she would. Without hesitation, and without challenge, Quincy and her Grand Cher would burn the sickness from Orphan. But Orphan's was a heart as red and open as her wounded hand.
Warm to the touch, solid but yielding; her fingertips drag along the organic material and pull away a thin sheet of skin-wafer, translucent and gummy. Orphan must be molting in this area, something that Quincy notes with a heart swelling with affection. How oddly cute, she thinks. Quincy sees her face reflected dimly through the translucent sheet, ocean-colored eyes shining, her hair cut on a rakish bias and dyed carmine.
The walls open to reveal an alcove, small and remote, some part of vast Orphan where human feet have never tread. Quincy relaxes into a raised section of wafers, which shift comfortably underneath her. Exhausted, her body relaxes to the thrum of Orphan's organic and beloved heart.
Quincy lays her head to sleep, and Orphan is dreaming.
Flower petals, sand, rays of sunlight; all rain incessantly like kindness. Fields of impossible flowers stretched as far as the eye could see, their petals a riot of shimmering color that pulsed with light. Cobalt blue mingled with incandescent orange, emerald green with amethyst purple, and the air hummed with a quiet, vibrant, organic energy.
Standing in the center of this otherworldly garden was Orphan. A black dress, simple and timeless, hung on her slender frame. Her hair, the color of a raven’s wing, framed her cherubic face.
She has chosen her body at age seven, all black eyes and sparrowy bones. She looked exactly as old as Quincy was when she first arrived inside of Orphan. It was one-thousand three-hundred and seventy-eight times that the Isamis experimented on her since then. Give or take a hundred in either direction when her memory started to fail, when she who was not yet named Quincy Issa split off from Isami Iiko. And it was even harder on her Grand Cher.
Quincy is a fool for her, ridiculous, the height of beauty in the eyes of a seven-year-old girl, so full of confidence and pride, a gentle wind tousling her carmine-colored hair like a caress.
Orphan rises and steps towards with with small and bare feet, falling weightlessly into Quincy's waiting arms. The sea called to her, hungry at her ankles, sung to her a melody that whispered, Show me this thing called love. What color is it? How does it smell?
Quincy dips and kisses her neck gently, and she sighs; her lips climb further, to her jaw. The sea called to her, the skies called to her, the earth and the fields of flowers and the faraway stars and the darkness, the sun she hadn't seen in years, called to her, called to her, I'm in love. So much it's frightening. So much it hurts.
Orphan's dress falls from her small body at the deft urging of Quincy's talented fingers, unformed breasts prickling with gooseflesh. The sea called, the skies and the earth too, the flowers and the stars beyond her reach, they speak to her, they cry: I love you. Trusting in you. Reaching out to you. I love you.