Sylvie

Time passes. I lie there, sobbing, sick of myself. Lena doesn't leave. Nene doesn't leave. They don't ask me for anything.

I'm not sure when I stop crying for good. There are times when I think I feel okay, and then I think of her smiling face, and the way her hardsuit was covered in her blood from a wound I gave her, the way she begged me to live for my own sake, and I can't even say her name. And then I think of how I'll never see her again and I cry some more.

But at some point guilt and fear overtake that grief. At some point all I can do is look up at the angled ceiling of Celia's penthouse and think of how absolutely screwed I am.

I mean, Celia's not going to forgive me for this. I'm going to have to go through the rest of my probably short life fighting with no clear end in mind beyond what she tells me to do. A slave of my own free making, to a degree. All very necessary in her eyes, I imagine.

Only, did I mean what I said? I did, didn't I? She didn't trust me. Even if she was loyal to me, she wanted me to be that sweet, innocent girl that I told myself I was once I broke free from Anchorpoint. As if she could bury what I did when I piloted the Nosferatu. As if everything could be the same. I see this now.

But I went along with it, didn't I? I wanted to be that pretty thing she could hold onto.

Well, some awful little part of me says, mocking itself, I'm free now. And look what it's brought me. I'm trapped here, in a way. I can't go back and apologize to Priss. I can't forgive her and she won't forgive me. I'm sure of it.

My eyes trace patterns along the ceiling. I try to see things that aren't there, but it's no good. I have no escape –

At least, until Nene leans over me, smiling.

She's dressed in the cutest pajamas I've ever seen, covered with funny little abstract designs that fit loosely over her frame. A part of me wants to wear things like that. Things that are sexless but still desirable.

"Hey," she says.

"Hey," I mutter. "Shouldn't you be off having sex with Mackie?"

"Ohhhhhh," she giggles. "It's a little hard to get in the mood right now, you know? In the middle of a crisis like this… you know how it is."

"Well, I'm real sorry I ruined-"

"Besides," she says in a softer voice, "I'm not going to leave you."

"Why?"

"Selfish reasons, I guess," she shrugs. "I would feel bad if I hurt you by doing that."

"How is that selfish? That's…" I can't quite meet her gaze. "Isn't that altruistic or something?"

"I guess it is," Nene sighs. "I guess I hoped you wouldn't be mad at me if I had a selfish reason. You know, a lot of people think altruism is like that. That everything people do is fundamentally selfish even if they tell themselves otherwise." She sighs. "And then those people usually follow it up by saying that the evil humans do proves the moral necessity of surrender to God."

"God…" I mutter. Nene sits beside me, on the free part of the couch. "I've never thought about God. Or gods, or whatever."

"Yeah," Nene laughs. "Okay, when I say a lot of people I'm really thinking of Papa. He got really into Orthodox stuff when we moved to Megatokyo, mostly 'cause he couldn't get a job for those first few years and Mama was making all the money." She waves a hand. "But you know what, that doesn't really matter. Forget I said anything."

Strange. What a strange thought. I know God. I know who made me, and they were disgusting people. Real humans associate creation with an absolute, unquestionable benevolence… I want to talk with Nene about this, later, when my life makes more sense.

"Nene?" I say.

"Yeah?"

"Can I rest my head on your lap? The way you're sitting, things are kind of cramped over on my end of the couch."

Nene giggles again. "Sure, sure. Do whatever feels comfortable for you."

I do that. Nene has remarkably soft thighs. I know she's not a very muscular girl but even then it comes as a surprise the way, even through the thick fabric, I feel warm in her lap.

Lena walks in silently, still wearing that expensive-looking sweater she was wearing at dinner, with tea. Puts it down on the coffee table in front of us. Sits down cross-legged on the floor.

Nene leans forward, or tries to anyway. "What kind?" she asks.

"Chamomile," Lena says. "I thought about breaking into Celia's ultra-black Darjeeling stash but it's too late for anything caffeinated."

Nene rubs my head. It's strangely pleasant. "You just need to stop prioritizing normie sleep cycles over everything else, Lena," she huffs. "Pretty sure you're the only one of us who actually tries to be in bed before midnight."

" Normie is healthy ," Lena says. "At the rate you're going, Nene, always hooked up to the noosphere and hooked on fad diets, you'll die before you even clear sixty."

I'm not looking at Nene, but right now is the time she rolls her eyes. "What- ever ," she says. "We have bigger things to worry about. Namely-"

"I know I fucked up," I hiss. "But I can't undo what happened. If you're just going to drown me in your pity party I want nothing to do with it. I'm through being manipulated."

Nene jerks back a little. "Uh."

"Uh what?"

"Oh, man, it's like… I don't want to say 'I'm sorry you feel that way' because that implies I don't really agree with your feelings and I don't want to make you feel worse but-"

I'm this close to sitting up and walking out. "It was my responsibility. Don't take that away from me."

Lena buries her head in her hands. Runs them down her face. "God and Buddha," she moans. "You're worse than Celia."

I blink. I almost say 'how dare you', but I can't bring myself to do it. There's a glint in Lena's eye, exasperation stretching her oval-shaped face out just a smidge. She… "What do you mean by that?"

"I mean," she sighs, "Celia's up in her pool swimming like that's all she was made to do, but when the time comes she'll make a decision. She'll let Priss go one way or another, or she'll find a way to force her back into the fold. I know she'll do this because she's ranted to me about the necessity of no one leaving the group before. But you? I mean, what the fuck, you're just going to let what happened happen? You're going to do nothing? Is that what a free person does? Just give up?"

She looks at me again. "You love Priss, don't you? So why are you letting her go?"

"You don't want to know."

Her hands are on her knees. "I kind of do , Sylvie. I can't stand cowards, you see. I can't stand good things being destroyed because of human stupidity. And watching someone who could stand against something like Largo without letting her fear come to the surface be more afraid of herself ? Maybe it makes sense to you, but it doesn't make sense to me." She blinks. "Are you trying to punish yourself?"

"What? No! I don't believe in that sort of thing!" I stop. Hesitate. "I think."

"So what is it, then? Why abandon her? What do you stand to gain from it?"

"My freedom. I hurt her, but I had to. I had to, Lena. You saw what she was doing. But I'm, I'm… I think I'm more free now."

"What good is freedom if you don't have someone to share it with? What good is freedom if it just means absolute solitude?"

"That's not what freedom is, Lena. You know that."

She smirks. "Humor me, then. I don't think I think about freedom, this cute little two-kanji word, the way you do. So I want to know what freedom means to you."

I don't have an answer. At least not right away. All I can think about is Priss. When I first met her, still trying to pay the bills for my one-room with Anri — when I stumbled into that nightclub after riding alongside her — that was what I thought freedom looked like.

A bold streak of peroxide-blond lighting up the stage. Blood red and graphene-black and creamy skin moving like a whirlwind — a hurricane, in her own words. Music thudding, pumping, roaring, sound with no beginning and no end, marked only by her words. The anger in her words. The joy in them. The refusal to surrender to a city that I felt was starting to eat even me alive. The jokes, the lewdness, the need to create a universe that wasn't the megacity outside of that club. I was swept up in it.

I came up to her, a goofy giggling fangirl, and she smiled at me the way no one real , not just my sisters, ever had. And when I gushed to her about how powerful her music was, how it had changed my life even just in an hour. Because even if I didn't know what freedom was, I knew what it felt like now, intuitively. It felt like love and punk and rock n' roll, as she put it.

She didn't take it well. She sighed. Muttered something about how the band wanted her to tone the references to ziggurats and killer pyramids down, because GENOM was always watching things like that on the noosphere. "No one in this city is really free, you know," she said. "We struggle and writhe and moan but it doesn't matter, because we're useless to them. 'Cause of the Boomers. Humans are, they're, like, superfluous. Yeah. That's the word."

I sigh. I needed that memory, even with its poisoned barb at the end. It's easy enough to remember why I fell in love, but dammit, did that answer the question of what freedom is? Lena's just sitting there seiza, as if she could wait hours for my answer.

But I can't wait hours to figure myself out. And I can't just let myself embody freedom in someone else.

"Nene," I stage-whisper, "what do you think freedom is?"

That gets a laugh out of her and a scowl out of Lena. "Really hitting it with the outsourcing, huh, Sylvie?" she giggles.

"So you won't help me?"

She sighs. "I don't think I could. I think our definitions of freedom would be tooootally different. Me taking most of my cues from post-scarcity anarchists, worrying more 'bout the freedom of specific information and stuff than, like, worrying about body-freedoms. Which is more you, right? Because of Kaufmann and all that stuff?"

Well… she is right. I never wanted to think about being his ever again, especially after beating the shit out of him in a dreamstate, but I can't just forget, can I?

"What did freedom mean to you before you met Priss?" Nene says.

"It meant… being with my kin. But not being with him." I'm this close to crying again, remembering the chest wound that Doberman left on Meg, the way it drove its claws into her and then stretched her entire torso apart — how Lou tried to rise from her leg wound and got smacked into the raging ocean because of that —

The last words Nam ever said to me: "You have to get freedom, okay? Freedom enough for all of us!"

And I fired that scramjet off past Anchorpoint and swore I would do that. What would she think of me now?

Damn it. Lena's right, too. I've fought bigger monsters than this. I blew Largo's guts out with a thirty-millimeter cannon from two kilometers off, Celia's VTOL screaming into Tower airspace to save her .

"Love is impossible without freedom," I say to myself, barely aware that I'm speaking, barely aware that I'm figuring something important out. "The whole point of freedom is being able to want things, want connections with other people, and to not be afraid of changing them. To run away from evil men – to change the very nature of the way you live – to be able to define how you connect with others – that's freedom. A slave has none of that, they don't exist to other people, they're not real , they have no friends or lovers or any of that that they can choose for themselves and that's why we weren't free ."

I blink. "Freedom would mean going back with Priss and setting things right. It would mean being honest with her, and getting her to be honest with me, and then…"

I stop. Lena's smiling, but I'm not.

You have her, don't you? Haven't you already won?

That was what Priss said just an hour ago, and it… sounded off. Like Priss was afraid Celia wanted me? That would make no sense.

Celia. Celia Celia Celia. What was it she said to me when we watched Priss's chest rise and fall and her body not do much else?

"I have done so much for her and none of it mattered. I told her to come back to us and she couldn't do that."

It's so obvious. The friction between them. The way they snipe at each other like a mother and child, how sad it is, how I got caught in the quiet battle between them.

I can't just save myself.

I spring up from the couch, on my feet in seconds. Nene eeps behind me. Lena rises to meet me.

"And then, Sylvie?…"

"I need to go do something," I rush out. "It's… it's painfully obvious. I can fix this. I can fix this entire mess, and I want to fix this, and so I'm going to."

"What mess?" Lena says, her eyes narrowed. "Don't play the pronoun game with me, I'm old enough to see through stuff like that-"

I tell her.

A moment passes. I look back to see Nene, nodding furiously before finally giving me two thumbs up.

"Well," Lena says, "It's not really your responsibility to fix other people's stuff…"

"If I don't, none of this will change," I hiss. "Please. Let me do this."

Lena sighs, stretches, then hugs me.

I'm ready for it. I hug her back. Nene pads up behind us and tries to hug us both, only she's a little too small for that.

"You really are something, aren't you, Sylvie?" Lena says. "I thought I'd have to hold you like a baby for as long as I could, but here you are turning around and doing things I could never do."

We let go of each other. I nod.

"Do it," Lena says. "But that's my best friend's heart you're making whole. If you don't know what you're doing-"

"I know what I'm doing."

I nod.

"I'm freeing them."

Celia

I like to swim at night with the shutters closed over the rooftop. The water is cool and refreshing and I can swim in it for hours upon hours, sometimes till morning if I have a thought I need to turn over in my head a few times. To live in another medium, even an artificial facsimile of what the ocean or a lake is really like, is quite pleasant.

Water is just water, after all. Water doesn't have opinions, or thoughts, or judgements. It doesn't grow to resent you no matter what you do. It doesn't take your desire to save it and shove it back in your face. Water is just water. As meaningless as air.

Tonight, start with a backstroke, ears below water, kicking slowly, the shutters passing by above. Then, at the moment before I hit the wall, I flip around into a butterfly, water rushing by me as I go down and up and down and up and down and up and down again. Then a breaststroke, those carefully timed inhales and exhales as my legs paddle and my arms plunge beneath the surface and drive me forward.

Faster. Faster! Wonderful, isn't it? Let's do it again, quickly, quickly, just like I did in the Thames, in Oxford, back when I was still Bruce Wayne-ing around the world, making ready for my revenge – Father's revenge. Wonderful, isn't it? The water is cool and refreshing.

Do you know, when I was a child, months after Father first put the neuralware inside me – I must have just turned nine, Mackie hadn't been born yet – I remember we went up to Lake Towada, in Aomori, and I tried to swim in it, just like how I'd been taught in elementary school. The lake was massive, I could barely see the other side, and even if I had no intention of swimming to the other side, I wanted to step off the dock and feel the water, every part of it.

Only, my body was still rewriting itself. Still learning how to learn at the accelerated pace Father wanted.

And I slipped, and the water was deeper than I thought, and my limbs betrayed me, and I sunk sunk sunk. Death is watery and green, I saw then. The feeling of air leaving my lungs and the lake, icy cold, swallowing me whole.

Father wasn't watching me at the time. Mother was. She dove down there even though she hadn't swum like that for nearly a decade, and she pulled me up.

After that, I slept for the rest of the trip, in and out of understanding. I was so cold all the time and Mother was afraid I was going to die. Father wasn't, though. He said I was stronger than that.

They didn't fight directly, the way Priss says her parents did. They loved each other too much. But Mother looked at me, in those strange years as I mutated into something more than human, and I could tell. She was wondering where the girl she'd fished up out of Lake Towada had gone – had a kappa stolen my soul and left something else in its place? Who was this girl who never watched the television, never played with the other girls, who always wanted to see what Father was doing?

She told me once, thinking I wouldn't understand, that she'd given up the secrets of molecular manufacturing to Uizu Labs for his sake. Chose, as a woman must, to raise her daughter. But Father had taken even that daughter from her so he could build barely-organic artificial cell structures, machines that lived and didn't live at the same time.

I found out, the night she left, that Father hadn't consulted Mother when he put everything in my head. He and Brian's father were close friends, you see. They'd been through the war together, and had resolved to change the world together. And Frederick J. Mason had told Father that their angel investor, an ancient seed capital god-king by the name of Masada Quincy, had heard of Father's theories about how to more efficiently map the brain to create better facsimiles of it. He got so excited, Mother said, at the promise of becoming a great man. And look what it did to you, my little ghost girl. He stole you away from the world.

The water, then. It's clear and it's well lit and it's cool and it's refreshing. I could get lost in it. I want to get lost in it so badly.

It worked for Father, showing people what they didn't see. What was before them the whole time. A future unlike anything they could ever imagine. Abundance, not austerity, was Father's motto. It wasn't Quincy's, or Mason's, but he didn't find that out until it was too late.

Why can't I do what he did? Or outmatch him, even. I hurt Sylvie without meaning to, but the Riastrad works! It works, and the water is cool and refreshing and it works ! Why doesn't Priss hear me when I say this? What words do I need to say? Why don't those words come to me? Why did everything I say seem built to hurt her?

Because she wouldn't listen to me. She never does, except when it's her damn life on the line.

And now she goes and does this. Again. If she commits to leaving the organization – well, best not to think about that. Think about how cold and refreshing the pool is, Celia. You can do that, can't you?

I'm close to the wall now. I raise my head up to kick off…

Sylvie looms over me.

I pull back, drift up to the wall, put my arms on the edge. Try to sound normal. "Is there something you want, Sylvie? I'm busy."

She sighs. Squats down, then brings her legs out next to my arms, dipping into the somewhat warm, somewhat chlorinated water of the pool. She isn't wearing a swimsuit. She's going to get her nice clothes, clothes I got for her, all wet. Even if you roll up the pant legs, Sylvie, that's still troublesome.

"I want to talk to you," she says.

"About?"

"About Priss."

"I don't think there's anything to talk about."

"That's a lie and you know it."

Damn. I wasn't ready for this. I had planned to go out hunting for Priss in the morning, but what time is it now? Half an hour to midnight, my holofeed tells me. I don't sleep much, I don't really need to, but maybe I ought to go to bed early, get up early, and be ready for her.

Or… "What do you want to do, Sylvie?"

"I want you to go and apologize to her. With me."

Oh.

Oh.

Oh dear.

I pull myself up out of the pool. "Because you can't bear to do it yourself."

"I can. And honestly, I think you can, too."

Well, that's interesting. "You're proposing we both try to make up with her. Assuming she's willing to make up with either you or me. Somehow I doubt she's ready for any of that."

"Well, if you let her go now, are you willing to live with yourself? I don't know if I am."

I sit next to her, water lapping at my legs. Outside, the view of the city, underneath several inches of antiballistic glass, is that of rainbow-colored torches, light light light pouring up into heaven as if to ask the gods themselves for a world so close to ending to not end just yet.

I think. And think. And finally something comes to me.

"I thought I could convince her that what we're doing is worthwhile through you. It was well-intentioned, but yet again, I ignored the advice I gave you about necessary evil, as though it didn't apply to me. I pressured you into doing something you didn't have to do, and because of that she hurt you and you hurt her in turn. I'm sorry."

"Oh." She looks at me, surprised. "That rant, the one about necessary evil. When we first met outside of armor. I keep thinking about it…"

"Necessary evil is still evil, and more often than not it's not even necessary," I say, for that was the line.

She nods. "It becomes more evil because good people are convinced it's necessary." She pauses. "You can be really good with words when you want to be. When you tell the truth." Pauses again. "I don't know, though. One part of me says that being free is the ability to run away from things you don't like. The other part wants to never let her go ever again so she never lies to me like that."

"She didn't lie to you."

"Yes she did."

"She withheld the truth from you because she withheld it from herself, too. That what happened to Kaori – well, it just happened. There wasn't much of a rationale behind it beyond a particular breed of free-market sadism."

"Alright. Alright." She nods. "So, then… am I allowed to be mad at her? Or do I just let her go?"

I laugh. "What?"

"You're correct," I say, "But you're not right . Freedom is about movement and disobedience. But we, too, must be free to speak without reservation."

"Unless it hurts other people."

"Even if it hurts other people."

"That is literally the thing she grilled you about, Celia," she snaps at me. "Do you just – Both of you seem to have this idea of what kind of person I am and I don't think I'm innocent, I don't think I'm useful, I don't – I don't know who I am."

"You just want to be free."

"Yeah. That old line." She pulls her legs up. "See, there you go again. I'm not sure if you're going to open with something manipulative or not after a line like that. But now my back's up against the wall."

Something clicks. It makes an annoying amount of sense. "You feel as though I don't speak honestly. The same way Priss feels."

"Well – yeah."

"Tell me, does that come from listening to Priss? Or does it come from listening to me? Because Priss is wrong. She sees an authority figure, even one with her best interests at heart-"

" That's total bullshit," Sylvie says. "That's what you keep telling yourself to justify the gap between you two, that you've never done anything wrong with her. But you have."

The world shakes…

"Because, Celia Stingray, I wasn't certain before, but I'm certain of it now."

And is turned upside down…

"You're in love with Priss Asagiri."

And rights itself again.

I suddenly want nothing more than to slip into that warm, chlorinated, non-refreshing water. Or perhaps down to the lab to finalize adjustments to the new armor's molecular layering. Or to my bedroom to go over this year's Stingray designs. Anything but this.

"Goodness, what are you talking about? Priss is the most psychologically unstable of any of the Sabers. Lena trusts me as an old friend, Nene wants to save the world in earnest, but Priss just wants to burn everything down regardless of the fallout. Most of my interactions with her are maternal in a bad way. Keeping her in line so the team is coordinated and effective hardly leaves room for feelings like that ."

But Sylvie doesn't nod, or agree, or back off. Instead she continues.

"Exactly. She needs you in a way Nene and Lena don't, even in a way Mackie doesn't. And that's what you've wanted more than anything, isn't it? To be able to save someone like that. To guide them, even when you tell yourself you're just helping humanity discover their own potential."

"You–" For once I don't have a quick retort. "That's ridiculous. I have made a point of not playing God with anyone, even though I am more than capable of it. If I did that I would be no better than Quincy and his ilk." I say this, and try to believe it. But I know what's coming left, I know I have no answer for it.

"What's the pseudocortex, then? The more I thought about it, the way Priss resisted it, the way you said it yourself, that you tried to use me to get to her – I get it's important, I get we need it for whatever comes next, but that's the thing, isn't it? Priss is terrified of the future, and you thought you could soothe her with that thing."

"That thing, I've decided, we'll call the Riastrad. Just for the record."

Sylvie cocks her head to the side. "I didn't ask. Nice name, though."

"It's Irish."

"I didn't ask. Am I wrong, though? About you and Priss? Because I don't think I am."

Goodness, what a nuisance. I can only assume she's just had Lena and Nene and maybe Mackie chew her out, in order to get her excited to go to war with me. I'm going to have to have a chat with one or all of them later.

Ah. But that's the thing. What was I thinking with Priss? It wasn't that I didn't know she would react badly. And it wasn't as though I didn't take into account that seeing it work in Sylvie might make it more acceptable to her. And certainly, that was manipulative in a way that both women chafed at. But to say that I wanted to soothe her? What a strange word. A word that one could turn over in one's head for hours. Perhaps I ought to start swimming again.

"You saw her after Largo. She was ashamed she couldn't protect you or Anri. Maybe-"

"Maybe the way you show love to people is by trying to save them? And maybe that's something that isn't going to work with Priss?"

She says this with such force I move back just a smidge. "What would you propose I do? Go to her, as the woman who saved her life, and just tell her, oh, Priss, I know that this is terrible and wrong but I'm hopelessly in love with you?"

"YES!" She cups her face in her hands, runs those same hands through her silvery hair. "Because you don't have to save the world right now, you don't have to show her that you're right all the time, you don't have to do any of that. You just have to be with us. Be with her."

I don't have an answer to that. Is she aware I'm enhanced, like her? To lead and not to follow?

No. No. I never believed in that. Sylvie's shown me she doesn't think like a slave. Is showing me now. I can respect that. And as for leading… It was necessary, but the trick has always been to lead without controlling. To listen to others, then decide what will work to advance the mission. That's how I operate, and it served me very well right up until Sylvie came into the picture.

Kaori was more of an informal thing, she babysat the child, and I warned her that getting close was unwise, but she didn't listen until it was too late. Mason bleeding down my hardsuit didn't change that. Leaving the boy at the orphanage was her idea, though, thank goodness.

But Sylvie – she listened to Sylvie. She gushed over how incredible she was, how quickly she learned everything Priss wanted to show her. I warned her not to get close, and she didn't listen. She never does. She could do so much for herself, be so much stronger, if she would just – oh.

Oh dear. Did I just think the way Sylvie anticipated I'd think? How troublesome. How annoyingly true.

"Maybe," I say. "Maybe you're right about my odd little martyr complex. But you have to understand, Father – put things in me, the way GENOM put things in you. Enhancements to build a truly superhuman mind. And then, when he passed, drives and desires to ensure I wouldn't deviate from what had to be done."

She nods. "I expected more shock from you," I say.

"Yeah, well…" She shrugs. "You always were hard to read. Like there were all these things you weren't feeling. I figured something was off, and now I know for real, so… yeah."

"But you understand, now, don't you? I can't have those sorts of impulses. It simply isn't practical. I might desire to control Priss, or at least just to shape her into something less self-destructive, but… It wouldn't work, you understand? Even if I came to her as an equal, she wouldn't listen to me."

"What makes you so certain of that?"

"It… it just would happen that way." It wouldn't, wouldn't it? "If I honestly came to her and told her I loved her and I just wanted to make her strong so no one could ever hurt her again but she doesn't want that from me… she would have to know my nature… and she'd never forgive me for lying to her, and for being something like that."

"She forgave me, didn't she?" Sylvie leans over. "It wasn't just because I'm pretty or nice. You know her thing against Boomers is a very specific hate."

"I suppose so." I try to imagine: What is Priss doing now? Has she already left the city? Taken recreational substances of who-knows-what-type and then crashed her bike into a highway barrier. The idea of confronting her seemed so appealing. But if I were to tell her all these things…

"...do you think she'd love me back? After all, she has you."

Oh dear, I sound like a child. Like the girl Mother fished out of the lake, wondering if she was enough for her or Father. I know that isn't all that's gotten me through life, but sometimes it feels like it has. But it's true, isn't it? Priss has a type, and I don't think I'm her type, on a fundamental level. It's as simple as that.

Yes, it's as simple as that. I'll bring her back, but I'll bring her back on my terms, I'll scold her until I'm red in the face, and then everything will be-

I don't get that far through my thought, because at that moment Sylvie sidles over and kisses me.

I had experimented with boys and girls alike in Oxford, from all over the world. I'd never really enjoyed it much, it felt more like an obligation.

This feels different. I don't know how to describe it, but suddenly I can barely breathe because Sylvie's tongue is soft and warm and her spit tastes almost fruity it's so sweet, and her lips, a bee-stung pout of hydrogel-enhanced flesh, are flush against my own mouth, sealing them, overtaking them.

For an infinite moment, I'm rigid. I can barely move, and some part of my brain can sense her chemistry flowing into me and is torn between pulling away or taking in more. The latter impulse wins out, and I wrap my arms around her, pull her closer, until I can feel her breasts against mine. I pull back, get a better angle, try to redefine the relationship between our mouths.

It's no good, of course. She has both skill and talent at this sort of thing, and she lets me think I have control over what's going for barely a second before moaning into my mouth, her tongue dancing around mine in the most delightful way, as she gets closer, closer, till all I can see are those flax-golden eyes…

And then she pulls back.

I wipe my mouth. It's incredibly hot in here, or, no, that's probably just me, my God that was incredible. She's smiling at me, this subtle little thing. Sighs.

"I'm willing to share," she husks at last, and I can feel my eyes go wide. "With you."

"Oh. Um. Yes. That – Priss –"

"Taught me how to kiss like that."

Oh. Oh. Oh .

I can't help laughing. Giggling like a schoolgirl, then my usual chortle, then full on laughter. Why not? It's hilarious! Priss, of all people, teaching a sex demigod something about lovemaking! Oh, hell, what an absurd thing! I'm slapping my knee, I really am! Not a gram of sarcasm in me at this point, my goodness!

Sylvie nods. "So. How about it? Ready to go confess your true feelings to the girl you like?"

It is like a school drama, isn't it! Look at us, all playing around pretending to be mature well-rounded adults! Look at me , for fuck's sake! Kissing by the pool in the middle of the night! What a bizarre moment this is!

No. I can't deny it anymore. I'm terrible at love. Possession is easier for me.

But I'm ready to change that.

I stand up, move to towel myself off, motion to Sylvie.

"We'll take the Benz," I say. "If she tries to ride off, I can keep up in that."

"Oh?" She says. "I should call ahead, right? Not you?"

"Yes-yes-yes. She probably won't pick up, but" –here I check her transponder, ping for her location– "absent her ripping her mastimike out with surgical shears and taking a good chunk of her jaw out in the process, she's still in her trailer. So there's nothing to worry about on that front."

"Oh. Good." Sylvie nods, rises. "I need to get changed there, anyway. Got my nice pants all wet.

I nod. "They were real denim, real cotton. One certainly shouldn't chlorinate such stuff."

And so we go, making small talk, back down to the penthouse, back for me to get changed, put on something nice, then down to the garage.

And as I hit the start button to spin up the electric-hydrogen-turbine-hybrid replica 300SL, even more powerful than the original, I feel – confident? Giddy? Like I'm about to discover something new.

Like, well, like I'm about to fall in love all over again.