If You Take My Meaning - Charlie Jane Anders Page 0,3
fancy coffee place, the Illyrian Parlour. Ginger hair, fair skin, nervous hands, soft voice. He’d been in the Gelet city a while already, maybe a few turns of the Xiosphanti shutters, but they hadn’t done anything to alter him yet. “I can show you around, though I don’t know the city very well, because large areas of it are totally dark.” He sounded as though he must be smiling.
“Thanks,” Alyssa said. “Appreciate any and all local knowledge.”
Jeremy kept dropping information about himself, as if he didn’t care at all about covering his tracks. He’d been part of the ruling elite in Xiosphant, studying at one of those fancy schools, until he’d fallen in love with a person of the wrong gender. Fucking homophobic Xiosphanti.
So he’d gone underground, slinging coffee to stressed-out working people, and that had been his first real encounter with anyone whose feet actually touched the ground, instead of walking on a fluffy cloud of privilege.
The Gelet had cleared a room, somewhere in the bowels of their unseeable city, for human visitors, with meager lighting, and some packs of food that had come straight from the Mothership. Alyssa and Jeremy opened three food packs and traded back and forth, sharing the weird foods of their distant ancestors: candies, jerky, sandwiches, some kind of sweet viscous liquid.
They bonded over sharing ancient foods, saying things like: “Try this one, it’s kind of amazing.”
Or: “I’m not sure this stuff has any nutritional value, but at least the aftertaste is better than the taste.”
Alyssa chewed in silence and half-darkness for a while, then the pieces fell into place. “Oh,” she said to Jeremy. “I just figured out who you are. You’re the guy who tried to get Sophie to use her new abilities as a propaganda tool against the Vice Regent. She told us about you.”
“I know who you are, too.” Jeremy leaned forward, so his face took on more substance. “You’re one of the foreign interlopers who helped the Vice Regent to take power in Xiosphant. You stood at Bianca’s right hand, until she had one of her paranoid episodes. We have you to thank for our latest misery.”
Alyssa couldn’t believe she’d shared food with this man, just a short time ago.
“I’m going to go for a walk.” Once she’d said this out loud, Alyssa was committed, even though it meant getting to her feet and walking out into a dark maze that included the occasional nearly bottomless ravine. At least the Gelet would keep an eye on her.
Probably.
Alyssa tried to walk as if she knew where she was going, as if she felt totally confident that the next step wouldn’t take her into a wall or off the edge. She swung her arms and strode forward and tried not to revisit the whole ugly history of regime change in Xiosphant, and her part in it. She had trusted the wrong person, that was all.
What was Alyssa even doing here? All she wanted was to bury her past deeper than the lowest level of this city, but soon she would have the ability to share all her memories with random strangers. And she knew from talking to Sophie that it was easy to share way more than you bargained for—especially at first.
Alyssa might just reach out to someone for an innocent conversation, and end up unloading the pristine memory of the moment when she’d pledged her loyalty to a sociopath. The moment when Alyssa had believed that she’d found the thing she’d searched for since the Chancers fell apart, and that she would never feel hopeless again. Or Alyssa might share an image of the aftermath: herself wading through fresh blood, inside the glitzy walls of the Xiosphanti Palace.
“This was a mistake,” Alyssa said to the darkness. “I need to go home. Sophie will understand. Mouth will be relieved. I should never have come here. When they offer to change me, I’ll just say no, I’ll make them understand. And then they’ll have to send me home.”
She almost expected Jeremy to answer, but he was nowhere near. She’d wandered a long way from their quarters, and there was no sound but the grumbling of old machines, and the scritching of the Gelet’s forelegs as they moved around her.
* * *
“I’m not sure I can go through with this,” Alyssa told Jeremy, when she’d somehow groped her way back to the living quarters. “I can’t stand the idea of inflicting my past on anyone else.”
“I’m definitely going ahead with it,” Jeremy replied