Chris Moriarty - Spin State

But nothing changes. Everything men touch changes.

And in the margin, Sharifi’s scribbled words—words Li didn’t read to Bella:

But you still gave them the maps, didn’t you?

Li raised her eyes from the page to find Bella staring at her. She closed the book, started to speak. Bella put a finger to her lips.

“Hush,” she murmured, leaning into Li, ducking her head so that her hair brushed Li’s mouth and tickled her nose.

“How I can help you, Bella? Tell me. What can I do?”

“Just hold me.”

So Li held her, her pulse racing at the smell and the feel of her, her stomach curling with shame at what she couldn’t help wanting.

They sat that way for so long that Li began to think Bella was asleep when she finally spoke again.

“How strong are you?” Bella asked.

Li frowned, caught off guard. “Strong.”

“Stronger than a man?” A warm hand slipped under Li’s T-shirt, slid over her flanks and stomach.

“A lot stronger,” Li said.

The hand paused in its exploration. Bella looked up at her intently. “Have you ever killed anyone?”

Li started. She thought of Korchow of all people, half-expecting a joke or an accusation. “Of course I have,” she whispered.

“What’s it like?”

“Not nice.”

“Do you ever feel guilty about it?”

“Sometimes.” She saw Gilead’s brilliant sunrise, its snowcapped mountains rushing up at her in the split second before her auxiliary chute popped open. “Some of them.”

“But then you jump to a new star, a new planet, and you forget all about it. That’s a gift. To be able to leave a place behind forever. To forget the person you became there. Some people would give anything for that.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Li protested, but Bella wasn’t listening anymore.

“Kiss me,” she said.

Li swallowed.

“Don’t you want to?”

“Listen,” Li began—but whatever she’d been about to say caught on an indrawn breath as Bella’s fingers circled her nipple.

“You look at me like you want to,” Bella whispered into her ear, a whisper that was itself a caress.

“Looking isn’t doing,” Li said with the last rational part of her brain. But those were just words, and Bella knew it as well as she did.

Instead of answering, she dropped to her knees in front of Li and kissed her stomach, her waist, the point of one hip.

The book fell to the floor and lay there unnoticed. I can stop in a minute , Li told herself as she drew Bella to her. If I want to. I can stop anytime I want to .

Then she pressed her mouth to Bella’s pale face and buried her hands in the dark torrent of hair and found the lips that were searching for hers.

Bella cried afterward and talked about Sharifi.

Li asked herself what else she’d expected when Bella showed up on her doorstep, what she’d imagined Bella saw in her besides the echo of the other woman. Neither the questions nor their too-obvious answers made her feel any better.

“Hannah was a construct herself,” Bella said. “Not part construct, like you. All construct.”

Li nodded, wondering if Bella knew enough about UN politics to feel the weight of the difference between the two things, to know what mandatory registration meant and what went with the red slash across Sharifi’s passport cover.

“She was the first person who talked to me, who understood what it was like to be here, alone. To have no one. She went through all that to get where she was. Gave up her sisters, her friends, her world. Everything. You can’t imagine how hard that is.”

Li said nothing, just lay stroking Bella’s hair, trying to get over feeling ashamed of herself. As she listened to Bella’s memories of Sharifi, she saw that she’d been fooling herself all along. All Bella remembered were the small ordinary things that lovers always remember. And none of that mattered now. Not to Nguyen or Korchow. Not to Li herself. Bella was the only one of them for whom Sharifi was still alive—maybe the only one for whom Sharifi had ever been alive. And in that strangest of moments, Li thought of Cohen and felt even worse.

“It’s not knowing that’s so hard,” Bella said in a voice that still threatened tears. “If I knew what happened to her. If I knew why. That it was politics. Or money. Or anything.”

“What does it matter why?”

“Because,” Bella said, suddenly wracked with sobs, “because I don’t want her to have died trying to help me.”

After that, there was no more talking. Bella cried herself to sleep. Li lay awake far into the night, holding her frail shoulders, listening to her call out the dead woman’s name in her dreams.

“Hello, Catherine.”

Li jerked awake to find Bella sitting across the room in her only chair, fully dressed, legs crossed, smoke from one of Li’s cigarettes curling lazily around her head.

“Forgive the familiarity, Major, but I feel I know you too well for titles. You don’t mind my calling you Catherine, do you? Or would you prefer Caitlyn?”

The voice had none of Bella’s nervous edge, and the hand holding the cigarette moved with a slightly jerky quality, as if it were being pulled by strings. Bella was wired for a shunt, and someone was along for the ride. A bodysnatcher.

Li shouldn’t have been as rattled by it as she was. Of course Bella was wired. Probably more subtly and pervasively than Li herself. Still, it wasn’t quite the morning-after breakfast-in-bed scene she’d imagined. She sat up and groped for her clothes, lost somewhere in the tangle at the foot of the bed. Whoever or whatever had gotten hold of Bella, Li wanted to be dressed before she talked to it.

“Nice tattoo,” the snatcher said while she pulled her shirt over her head.

“Fuck off.”

But Bella’s voice kept talking to her. “You ought to be more careful. You can catch things in tattoo parlors.”

“Is that a threat?”

“But then you don’t worry much about catching things, do you?”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Only that it’s always nice to see a XenoGen construct. I feel a certain familial affection for you. Bella’s geneset, for instance”—Bella’s hand gestured at her own body—“is at least 40 percent prebreakaway. Without you she would never have been possible. So unfortunate that the UN lacked the vision to carry that work to its logical conclusion.”

Li stared at Bella’s face, looked for some clue beneath it to confirm her sudden suspicion. “Korchow?”

He smiled a cold smile that had nothing of Bella in it at all. “Clever girl.”

“Leave Bella out of this, Korchow. She has nothing to do with it.”

“She has everything to do with it. The choices you make here affect the patrimony of every construct in UN space and beyond it. If you honor what you are—and I very much hope you will—it all changes. If you turn aside and pass by, nothing changes.”

“Stop talking in riddles, Korchow. What do you want?”

“Don’t you know?” Bella’s eyes widened in amusement. “Don’t you even suspect?”

“I can’t give you Sharifi’s dataset,” Li said through clenched teeth. “I don’t even have the thing. As far as I know, she ripped it up and flushed it into orbit.”

“It’s not about the dataset, Major. It’s gone beyond that.” Bella’s lips stretched into a narrow smile. “Nguyen really doesn’t tell you anything, does she? Is it you she doubts? Or the AI? I wonder. Well. What I want is simple. I want to run Sharifi’s experiment again. Or rather, I want you to run it for me.”

Li stared at him.