Юн Ли - Raven Stratagem

“I’m tired,” Mikodez said without meaning to, and was additionally horrified by how blurry his voice sounded. He’d better visit Medical again. They were always fiddling with the cocktail he had to take, but the meds hadn’t failed him this badly in a while.

“Sleep, then,” Spirel said with the brisk practicality he liked about her. “Scoot over.”

He did, even though it was taking an increasing amount of effort to get his muscles to respond. Spirel climbed in next to him and pulled the blankets over them both. Her heat radiated from her like a living thing in its own right, and she smelled of mint and citrus and an odd twist of lavender. She burrowed against him until he let her pillow her head on his shoulder. Great, was the last thought he had before falling asleep, I’m going to wake up with no circulation in that arm.

When he woke, though, his arm wasn’t numb at all. Spirel had already gotten up and was sketching at the window that opened up onto a view of one of the Citadel’s gardens. She liked drawing dragonflies. This particular garden had an abundance of them.

“Good afternoon,” Mikodez said. “Where’s Istra?”

“Right here,” Istradez said, emerging from the bathroom. He was still toweling himself off. He grimaced at the hexarch’s uniform that Spirel had laid out for him, then shook his head and stomped off to the closet. “No, no, no, no—hmm. I haven’t worn that one in a while.”

“You mean you haven’t worn that one ever,” said Spirel, who had nearly infallible skills of observation when it came to clothing and jewelry.

“How would you know?” Istradez demanded.

“Because I bought it for you two weeks ago, remember?”

Mikodez translated that into fourteen days. Spirel insisted on using the seven-day week even though it was, if not technically illegal, considered unlucky through most of the hexarchate. It came from her people’s traditions. She had remarked once that she had no idea what the rest of their old calendar had looked like before her people looked around and decided to join the hexarchate before getting wiped out as heretics. Mikodez had asked her why she had chosen this particular bit of calendrical minutiae to preserve, and she had shrugged.

Istradez changed his mind yet again and put on a set of robes in pink and yellow, a deliberately attenuated variation on Shuos colors. He was swearing as he tried to put on jewelry that went with it, rose quartz and heliotrope and the startling, contrasting pale flashes of aquamarine in glittering facets. Spirel pulled a face at Mikodez behind Istradez’s back and matter-of-factly went to help Istradez with the clasps.

“Thank you,” Istradez said.

“I could have sworn I paid you enough to afford real gems and not synthetics,” Mikodez said. He knew everything Istradez kept in his collection, all the careless strands of rose gold, the music boxes, the emergency hairpins. Mikodez and Istradez both wore their hair short in back, despite the long forelock, but Spirel was forever losing her hairpins.

Istradez shrugged with one shoulder. “Not like I wear these anywhere that anyone is going to find out and care.”

Mikodez hoisted himself off the couch and strode across the room to grab Istradez by the shoulders and force him to face him. “You are the vainest person I know,” he said, snatching up a comb and some mousse from the nearby dresser and beginning to fix Istradez’s hair. “Honestly, one of these days the details will get you.”

“ Excuse me,” Spirel said. “Are you saying that he’s vainer than I am on account of a few bits of glitter? I’m clearly not trying hard enough.” She had laid her charcoal down. Her hands and sleeves were smudged black all over.

Istradez’s pupils had grown large, swallowing the amber-brown irises. “I like shiny things, all right? It’s not a crime to like shiny things. At least I don’t assassinate children with them.”

Spirel made a frantic shushing motion.

“All right,” Mikodez said, remembering what he’d jotted down in the notes to his own procedures for dealing with aggravated employees—except Istradez was also family. Deescalate. “What did I do this time?”

“Nothing,” Istradez said.

“No one ever says ‘nothing’ and means it.” Mikodez set down the comb before Istradez grabbed it and stuck it in his eye. Istradez had always had a bit of a temper. “Are you ever going to debrief me on that damn meeting?”

Istradez growled low in his throat, then leaned forward and kissed him, nipping his lower lip. “Leaned” wasn’t entirely the word for it. Istradez was pressing his full body into Mikodez’s. We’re not twins, Mikodez thought ironically, clothes aside. Istradez’s cock was hard where his was only half-roused, for reasons that had nothing to do with sex.

“Brother-sweet,” Mikodez said, unemotional, “you know you only have ever to ask.”

“That’s what I tried to tell him,” Spirel remarked with a distinct lack of sympathy, over the splashing of water. She had gone to the bathroom to wash the charcoal dust from her fingers, an endeavor that never went well. She often wore gloves to hide the dust beneath her fingernails.

Istradez raised a hand to slap his brother. Mikodez caught it and brought it to his mouth, kissed the knuckles above the cheap rings. A sob choked its way out of Istradez’s throat. “It’s easy for you ,” he said. “Good, bad, right, wrong, you don’t care . It’s only ever about efficiency for you.”

“I do my job,” Mikodez said, “because after all the trouble I went to get it, it would be irresponsible not to.” He continued kissing as he bore Istradez toward the couch and pushed him down. Istradez was resisting very little.

Mikodez knelt before the couch and laid his hand on the inside of Istradez’s thigh. Yes: that got a reaction. “I will always do my job. I am the will of the Shuos. But don’t ever, ever doubt that I love you.”

Spirel came out of the bathroom then, and he nodded at her. She smiled at him, a little sadly, before taking his hand and helping him up so he could drape himself over Istradez. For her part, she sat on the floor, as curled and comfortable as a cat, and kissed her way up the side of Istradez’s neck. With one hand she reached up to massage Mikodez’s back, unnecessary but welcome. He wondered if she had gotten all the charcoal out. Istradez’s eyes were wide and glazed, and he said something in a half-gasp, half-moan.

“Shh,” Mikodez said. “Shh.” And he set himself to the task of pleasing Istradez, making a note in the back of his head to check Istradez’s most recent evaluations.

BREZAN HAD NO reason to expect anything to change when he heard footsteps beyond the door to the cell’s antechamber. Hunger was a familiar sharp ache, and his mouth was always dry. The past weeks, which he had lost count of after his captors disabled his augment, had been predictable. Too bad there was singularly little pleasure, under the circumstances, to be had from telling himself ‘I told you so.’

All he remembered about his transfer from the Shuos to the Kel was a blur of untalkative people in the faction’s garish red-and-gold uniforms. What had become of the two irritating medics he would never find out, which was just as well. As for Sfenni and his tasseled minion, he imagined that they were doing just fine.

The Kel had lost no time in verifying his identity. Then they put him in this cell. After two interminable days, during which he resisted the urge to shout at the walls, a colonel showed up. “Kel Brezan,” she had said, “you are excused from standing, given your condition. Do you understand me?”