Illustration of Anise with hands reaching for her head [https://64.media.tumblr.com/6472611d7536746cefa89d501a08945f/ad524fa02471880a-55/s640x960/d49d527a02ee18cf0e3507806b42ed3e20e5384f.webp]
SolCorp’s Kyiv Office. Venus Department.
Anise woke to a woozy feeling that was both light and heavy at once. As though her skull had been replaced by a balloon and her blood with lead. Opening her eyes, she saw she was in a hospital bed. The room was small and stark, with a large observation window out into the hall.
The Post Breathe.
With an effort, she could remember being wheeled into the procedure room. Mark seeing her off. Then nothing.
Weak but alive, she had dodged the worst-case scenario. Anise reached for her telepathy and felt a hitch in her chest and a fluttering of panic—she felt nothing.
A Venus agent walked in at a brisk pace. “Good morning,” he said in a neutral tone.
“Something’s wrong,” she croaked. If her knack was gone, what good could she be to Sol? To anyone?
The agent checked her vitals, hovering over her face. “You look good and stable to me.”
“My knack.”
“Oh,” he straightened. “It’s okay, you need to be kept in a dampener room for at least twenty-four hours after the procedure while you recover. No one has a knack inside this room.”
Anise went limp with relief then felt sick again. “I have to wait a day to see if it worked?”
“Well, you’ve been here for over twenty-four already. We’ve had this conversation a couple of times.”
“I don’t remember.” She tried to move her legs, but they felt like dead weight.
“It’s okay. You’re much more lucid this time. I’ll call Mr.—I’ll get Mark for you. He wanted to see you when you were up. I’ll send some people in to get you more comfortable.”
She nodded. “Thanks.” He left and she did her best to quell her anxiety. More agents came in and began to remove all the tubes from her body. Anise was too weak to help much, but their impersonal looks made her think they didn’t expect much from her. That “Mr.” fluttered in and out of her mind, but she was too tired to work through why it was bothering her. By the time Mark knocked on her window, they’d gotten her settled, sitting up in bed with only a saline IV in the back of her hand.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, coming to the side of her bed.
“I honestly don’t know. Did it work?”
“They’re confident it went exactly to plan, but we won’t know until you try.”
“When can I try it?”
He smiled. “You know, I asked that on my way in here because I know you. He said whenever you feel ready—so he obviously doesn’t know you.” She tried to laugh and he put a hand on the top of her head. “If you were going to have a rejection, it would have happened by now, so you’re in the clear for complications.”
She tried to sit up straighter. “So let’s do it.”
Mark shook his head and sat on the edge of the bed, angling to face her. “Not yet. I need you to understand that once you leave this room, everything is going to be different.”
“Wasn’t that the idea?”
“Yes, and you should be ready for it, but you may get overwhelmed.”
“Okay. I trust you.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “I’m pretty sure I told you not to do that.”
She cleared her throat. She didn’t want to seem as frail as she felt. “Tough.”
At that, he stood and unfolded the wheelchair propped up against the wall. She was struck by how careful he was not to tug on the IV line when he moved it to the hook that stuck up from the back of the chair. It was a little difficult to stay upright, but she fought. Unclicking the breaks, he rolled her to the open door.
He paused there. She could see the raised black bar across the floor that marked off the dampening tech. “I just want you to know,” he told her, “that I know it might be a lot but I’m not wheeling you back in here, even if you ask.”
The finality of that pricked her palms with sweat but she nodded. “I can handle it.”
He pushed her into the hall and a wall of sound slammed into her chest. It was less like passing through a barrier and more active, as though it were an animal that had been waiting at the doorway to ambush her. She was buried in the din. Too loud and too present on her skin in an innumerable jumble of textures and pressures and it was all too much to process. Too everything.
Anise squeezed her eyes shut against it. Her breathing was coming fast as she grappled with the realization that this is what she wanted, had been hoping for, had been pinning all her dreams on and it was excruciating. Terrible. Harrowing, was a better word. She felt physically harrowed. If this was her life from then on, she didn’t know how she could possibly cope; she knew she couldn’t.
The air was whooping past her teeth now, which she only knew because her lungs were beginning to ache. It should have made a sound but it was drowned out by the million tons of pressure from the sensations of her telepathy on her skin and echoing in her ears.
Mark’s mind was there, imposing and inaccessible. It overshadowed everything and pierced through her. For the first time, Anise felt how deeply he’d planted himself in her mind.
She opened her eyes, hoping to get her bearings. Mark had moved around in front of her and was kneeling down, watching her. There was something deadly about the way he looked at her. His expression was devoid of affect, his eyes keen and hard. It made her think that if she was drowning, he wouldn’t reach out his hand—if she couldn’t save herself, she wasn’t worth the effort.
Digging her nails into the armrests with trembling muscles, she fought to translate the howl that was assaulting her. She thought back to the lessons she’d had with him and further back to the exercises she’d learned in their core telepathy classes on how to tame this type of overwhelm. They were exercises she’d studied, but she never truly thought she’d ever need them. She used them now, with the fierceness Mark had taught her.
Slowly, so slowly, Anise began to be able to stifle the thrashing animal enough that she could translate it. She sat in a daze, dredging up more half-forgotten exercises meant to distill meaning from a group of minds. It was like digesting a city and her eyes felt hot with the threat of tears. There was too much and so much of it was staggering that she felt her breath start to hitch again. When the panic began to take over, he was there, pressing down, soothing her thoughts, and a sense of calm welled up.
The thoughts moved over her and she let them tell their stories. Eventually, she was able to gather the flow of thoughts and lay them around her feet, like a foundation that her body was stuck into as though it was a live wire.
“Anise,” he said, getting her attention. Her eyes had been open, but it had been a long time since she really saw anything. “What did you want to ask me the other night when I showed you the Phage—when you asked about LA instead?”
She tried to steel herself and didn’t think she was very successful. “I was going to ask how Entropy fits into all this.”
“Why didn't you ask me?” A measure of humanity had wound back into his expression, but she wouldn’t have called his face kind.
“I was scared.”
“Do you need me to answer the question now?”
Anise shook her head.
“And why’s that?”
“Because I can hear that everyone around here knows that you hate being called ‘Mark.’”
“But I’ve told them to. Why?”
“Because it wouldn’t be very wise for anyone to call you—” She thought it instead. Marcus Adler. “Psychometrists are rare, but not that rare. So they can’t call you anything else in this building.”
He nodded, stood up, and went behind her. "They're rare because that's how we wanted it. It was the only way this would work." She craned her head to watch him as he pushed her into the empty patient room across from her dampener room. The vibrating hum of the constellation of minds shifted as she moved, and she marveled at the detailed map her brain could hold. He parked her bedside and he sat on the foot of the bed.
She shook her head to bring herself back into the moment. “Who knows?”
“To start, everyone in Kyiv except for the students.”
“You’re kidding. The entire office?” She tugged at her hospital gown, suddenly self-conscious and began to shiver. “Are they all, did you bring them in, or—”
“Most of the people in this building are Sol agents who believe that changes need to be made and were willing to listen to someone who would push back against how things have always been done.” He pulled the blanket off the bed and draped it over the front of her. “This program, this system of living the life you want and coming in when you’re needed, is how I’ve been running things with mid-tier agents forever. It works.”
“Mid-tier?”
“Lower end aren’t independent enough and need supervision. And upper ranks are obviously full-time.” He cocked his head at her expression. “What is it?”
“I just never thought about there being tiers.” She'd always thought Entropy was built on chaos.
He gave her an unimpressed look. “I know what they teach, and I’m not going to say it’s all false, but if you think we don’t benefit from you all thinking we’re unorganized and rudderless, you’re crazy.”
“Why are you doing all this?”
“A lot of reasons. I wasn't lying that night. Despite Sol cranking out people like a factory, we're outnumbered and if we don't present a unified front with a realistic plan to control how and when we come out, the humans will try to wipe out each and every one of us."
An image of a bloody world war wracked with firebombing and swathes of knacked people rotting alive with radiation sickness flashed through her mind. "Could they?"
"No, but it'll be an impossible PR battle to win over half the world's population after we've killed the first half in self defense."
Despite the blanket, she still felt a chill in her bones that she couldn't shake. Her education on Entropy had been minimal but she remembered hearing about Sol agents being targeted, horribly disfigured, and killed. "And everyone there is okay with an alliance with Sol?”
"As a Saturn agent, you can appreciate the benefits of people only knowing what they need to know. But you'll know everything."
"Me?"
"I thought you wanted to go places."
"I do."
"Then you're well on your way. But for now, you should rest."
---
Somewhere in Central Europe.
They spent the first forty-eight hours or more on trains. When Alex had first asked Misha where they were going and he’d answered, “Nowhere,” Alex figured he was just being a dick, and hadn’t had the energy to push it further. The second time he saw the Zurich train station, Alex started to understand. He just didn’t care.
It was a good twenty-four hours of following Misha on and off grubby train cars before the idea of interacting with another human didn’t make him nauseous. Hannah could clearly sense this and sat silently nearby in the darkened freight car. Her only other option was conversation with Misha, which she had zero interest in. For his part, Misha seemed completely content in their silence, speaking only sparsely when they’d sneak off during stops for food and bathroom trips at the station, or to switch trains.
It seemed like everything had passed the point of no return. Alex felt like he was generally pretty good at rolling with those moments in his life. The second you leap into a swimming hole before you’ve hit the water. The moment after you swallow a pill and know that whatever happens next, you’re in it until it’s over. Those irrevocable choices that put you in a free fall. The last few days were full of them, shit that couldn’t be put back how it was. It made him think less of diving into water and more like shooting a gun. You have this tentative control over a bullet right up until the moment you fire. Everything that happens in the split second between the barrel and where the bullet comes to rest is out of your hands but entirely your responsibility. And a lot could happen in that small space of time.
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Needless to say, Alex moped for the majority of their trip, head limp, temple resting listlessly against the hard wall, staring out a gap in the door and watching the countryside slide by.
They were going in circles, doubling back, taking odd detours, and returning to the same stations over and over. Eventually, the pressure buzzing in Alex’s head couldn’t be placated by tapping his foot or getting into imaginary arguments and rewriting conversations.
“I take it we’re doing this to lose our tail and not because you're stalling while you figure out a plan?” he asked into the silence.
Misha didn’t look up. “Do I seem like someone who stalls?”
“How much longer do we have to do this?”
Misha frowned, thinking. “Less than a day.”
Hannah groaned and Misha gave her a sour look.
“Where are we ending up?”
“I’m taking you to see the twins at a permanent Sanctuary in Italy.”
“Permanent? I didn’t think that was a thing,” Hannah commented, sitting up straighter.
“Sometimes, Children who have medical training live at a permanent Sanctuary so other Children know that if you’re injured and can’t find help, as a last resort, you can travel to whatever city you know has one of these. They are very few. It’s not a great system, but the twins keep a Sanctuary in Bologna.”
“Twin doctors?” Alex asked.
“One of them is. The other, I think, has just lived with a doctor for a very long time.” The sound of the train changed. “We’re stopping. Pack up. We’re changing.”
They groaned and Alex and Hannah made eye contact that lingered for the first time since they’d set out. She looked worried and dead tired, but also alert. She flicked her eyes in Misha’s direction and briefly rolled them back in her head. Alex gave a silent laugh and didn’t feel so alone anymore.
They got off at the central station in Bologna, Italy. The brick and orange-painted stone buildings gave the city a warm cast in the afternoon light. They took a crowded bus to a domed arena parking lot and stood on the side of the street.
“We’re walking from here,” Misha told them, adjusting the straps on his packs.
“Is it far?” Hannah asked.
Misha cocked his head at her. “Would it matter?”
“What?”
“If I say, ‘yes, it’s very far,’ are you going to get back on the bus or something?”
She squinted at him, her mouth open. “Oh my god,” she said, “you suck at any kind of human conversation.”
Alex cocked an eyebrow, watching them. It was nice to almost laugh, though.
Misha shook his head. “Let’s go. It’s not that far.”
Hannah bugged her eyes out at Alex and he took her hand and tugged her along to fall in line behind Misha. The roads narrowed quickly as soon as they turned off that strip. Dense, top-heavy trees bent to form arches over narrow streets and short, dark, wrought iron fences surrounded single family homes. Cars were lined up, parked bumper to bumper along one side of the road.
“So why here?” Alex asked.
“Do trains make you both full of stupid questions?”
Alex ignored him. It would take more than that and Alex had a lot of practice. “I mean, do you need a doctor or something?”
“Nyet.”
“Yet,” Hannah muttered.
Misha sighed. “It’s a larger Sanctuary, so groups don’t stand out. No one will bat an eye if we stay there for a while, and it won’t seem strange if I’m not pulling jobs to make us money or get us weapons, since that’s my role. But I can’t do that right now, because you idiots are incapable of not making enemies with fucking everyone.”
Alex gave Hannah a look, but they stayed quiet the rest of the walk.
They stopped in front of a three-story house with butter yellow walls and dark green shutters covering the windows. The roof was flat with a tall spindly antenna reaching up into the sky. Misha unhitched the metal gate and they followed him onto the short, curved driveway that led to a short garage sitting beside the house.
“This is it,” Misha said, walking to the door. “Try to not be terrible, huh?”
Alex shifted his feet as they waited after Misha’s loud knock. He was on edge, muscles tight, half expecting Neptune agents to open the door.
The woman who did open the door smiled as she recognized Misha and opened the door wide. She was tall and slender with short, dark brown hair. She bent and greeted him with a kiss on both cheeks. He saw Misha return a genuine smile and vaguely gestured at the two of them.
“I’m bringing some friends. They are in training.”
“Of course,” she said, guiding Misha inside so they could follow. “I’m Helena,” smiled, dipping to kiss the air beside both of Alex’s cheeks. He hoped he’d returned it correctly.
“Alex,” he got out and cracked the best smile he could manage. Hannah seemed to handle the whole greeting thing with a bit more grace than he did.
“Have you been long traveling?” Helena asked with an amused lilt as they filed in the door. She was English, he could hear now.
“Is it that obvious?” Misha laughed.
This Sanctuary was much different than he’d had expected. It was larger and much cleaner for starters, though the stale smell of tobacco smoke still hung in the air. The dark tile floors looked freshly mopped and the white walls led up wooden beam ceilings. Having two people who lived there permanently must have made a huge difference in how okay you were with a stack of cruddy cots taking over half a room or duct tape over holes in the walls. Standard, soft white lighting was a welcome change, but he could see there were blackout drapes on every window and several unlit lamps with red bulbs.
“There’s a bath down here and another upstairs,” she called back to them. “There’s three bedrooms upstairs free and no one’s using the attic.”
Alex let Hannah shower first. The house buzzed with Story and he wasn’t ready to climb into a common tub just yet. He found the narrow winding stair up to the attic, where the memories were quieter, and dropped his bags on the floor. The ceilings were low and slanted, but there was a short bed, a dresser, and a lamp. The luxury of privacy made it a four-star hotel as far as he was concerned. He was really beginning to appreciate the Church’s culture of, ‘Hey it’s nice to meet you—here are my showers, you’ve probably been sleeping with rats,’ before anyone was expected to socialize.
When he had showered, he stuck his head in Hannah’s room, but she was asleep, face down on the bed. He headed downstairs, where he could hear movement in the kitchen. Helena was there, setting out food—actual, not from a street vendor, food. Sudden hunger seized every inch of his body.
“Where’s Misha?” Alex asked as he took a seat at a stool in front of the kitchen island and began eating. He was too tired for etiquette and Helena didn't seem to react at all.
“Sleeping,” she said, getting him a glass of water. “Feeling better?”
“Much,” he sighed. “Thank you.”
Helena waved him off. “Do you need anything looked at?”
Alex froze, brow furrowed.
“I’m a doctor,” she continued.
“Right,” Alex exclaimed, shaking his head. “No, I think we’re good. Just tired and sore.”
“Good,” she smiled, leaning on the counter. “Misha explained a little bit about why you’re here.”
“Oh,” Alex said before he could catch himself and cringed inwardly. He really wished he knew exactly how much of what that meant. “Sorry, I just—”
“It’s fine,” she interrupted. “We’re meant as a place for people to lay low for a bit and heal.”
Alex nodded and gulped a little too much water. He felt like he was coming off as a real downer and he hated that. He tried to put on a lopsided grin. “Hey,” he asked, “are you and your sister identical twins? Do you have the same knack?” He caught himself and quickly stuttered, “ Sorry—gift?”
Helena chuckled deep in her throat. “You’re from Sol, right?”
His head jerked back involuntarily. He hesitated. “Yeah.”
“No, it’s fine,” she repeated. “Emma isn’t my sister and I don’t have a gift. Well, she does. We’ve been together for seven years now.”
Alex’s eyes widened. “And you have to pretend to be sisters?”
“No,” she laughed. “She’s Italian and I’m from Britain so that wouldn’t really work, now would it?” Helena sighed and rolled her eyes. “It’s just the nickname we’ve been given. I think it makes it easier to swallow for the more conservative ones.”
“Wait, you don’t have a gift?”
“Emma was already in the Church when I met her.” She shrugged. “People do crazy things for love.”
Alex was silent for a little too long and suddenly realized it. “That’s some bullshit,” he said quickly. “That you have to put up with the sister thing, I mean.”
“It is what it is,” she said with a smile. “At this point, it’s funny to me. We just have to be careful,” she said looking at him with her eyebrows high, a slight emphasis on the word, “we.” She turned away and started to clean up.
“This is going to sound weird,” Alex blurted. He felt flushed, so he scrunched up his face to try to hide it. “But other than someone on the team that raised me, which is really complicated right now, I haven’t really ever met someone else who’s gay. Or, at least that I’ve gotten to talk to much.”
She whipped around, her forehead pinched. Her tense shoulders dropped and her face softened. “I’ll put on some coffee.”
Alex looked around to see if anyone else was wandering in, suddenly nervous.
Helena smiled warmly and said, “It’s okay. We can hush up if we have to, but right now, it’s just us.” Alex watched as she filled and turned on the coffee pot.
Alex sighed. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be dodgy about it. I hate this bullshit homophobic crap.”
“Don’t I know it, kid,” Helena laughed. “But we make do with what we’ve got.”
The sound of the coffee beginning to percolate was comforting. Alex said, “I don’t even really know what to ask. Or say. It feels good to not be the only one, though. The guy I mentioned, the complicated one—he’s not really the type to talk about sex and stuff. So even before it got complicated, it’s not like I had a lot of conversations or verbal support, you know? I mean, don’t get me wrong—they were all always accepting, never once gave me shit about it. But the other two… well, Hannah is ace and gets squicked out, and the other guy is hella straight and kind of like a dad, so I don’t exactly want to shoot the shit with him about it, you know?”
“I thought all you Sol types were at least a little gay,” Helena laughed, which made Alex laugh with her.
“I wouldn’t really know. I think so? That’s the culture, or so I hear. But it’s not like I ever got to spend time with many other people. We lived in this super tiny desert town, I was home-schooled, and then we ran before I could even join a team of my own. And I didn’t join Sol until I was fourteen.” He paused as Helena moved to pour them both steaming mugs of coffee. “Sounds pretty great though, doesn’t it? A whole company of bisexual beasts.”
That made Helena laugh again, so surprised and hard that she nearly spilled hot coffee all over herself.
“Whoa, careful!” Alex shouted, moving to help, but she had already course-corrected.
Helena said, “That is quite a picture.” She set the mug down in front of Alex and took a sip from her own.
Alex said, “So how do you manage it here?” He gestured towards the empty room, to the Church in general. “It’s not exactly pride parade central.”
“We have our ways. It’s a little different for Emma and I. We’ve been together for a long time, so we don’t have to play the games anymore.”
“Games?”
“Sure,” Helena said. “There’s a whole sort of, well, kind of a cruising or flagging culture in the Church, I suppose. It takes some getting used to, but we’re here and we find our way around it. You just have to keep it quiet, not so much because people would hurt you or anything—no one would kick you out or do you harm, and there’s no real rule against it. But people can sometimes preach or be jerks about it. There are some unspoken rules—see no evil, hear no evil, only instead of evil it’s just gay sex.”
Alex’s face flushed.
Helena laughed again, lightly. “It’s okay—nothing to be embarrassed about.”
Alex asked, “So, um, what do you look for then? If you’re flagging or whatever, I mean.”
“Well, first and foremost, train your gaydar well so you can pick up on subtle cues, because around here, subtle is usually the way.” She looked him up and down, a good-humored glint in her eye. “I’m surprised you haven’t run into more lectures, honestly. But then again, people don’t always love talking to Icarus, which might be your saving grace right now.”
“Are you telling me to act less gay? Because that’s so not gonna happen.”
“I would never!”
Alex laughed. “So, other than gaydar, what else do I look for? That can’t be all of it, right?”
Helena shook her head. “No, that’s not all of it. Mostly, it’s code words you’re looking for. If you think you’ve found someone you’re interested in, or if you’re just feeling particularly.. hmm, wound up? Find a shared bed space. If someone asks you how much space you need, that’s your cue. Or you could do the asking, doesn’t matter. If you ask and they say, ‘not much at all,’ you’re getting laid. If they say they need their space, it’s a don’t-ask-don’t-tell, no one has to talk about what transpired kind of situation, and you just go to sleep like nothing happened. That can be awkward, but usually people just let it go. Occasionally, you’ll ask the wrong person and get an earful, or they’ll find a different bed to sleep in, but usually it’s not too bad.”
Alex nodded, brows creased and thoughtful. “But how do you manage to… you know. Without people hearing you or noticing? It’s not exactly private.”
Helena shrugged. “You just stay very, very quiet.”
“I… don’t know how to feel about that,” Alex said. “What if you get caught?”
“No one really talks about it,” Helena said. “I mean, again, you might get a lecture or some passive-aggressive preaching trying to save your soul, but it’s up to you what you want to do about that. Some people listen politely, say they’ll take it into consideration, and then let it drop. Others push back and argue their side. Mostly, it stays civil because we have more to worry about with our mission than what people do to each other’s junk.” Alex sputtered into his coffee and Helena chuckled. “Sorry,” she said. “When Emma’s around, I try to bite it back a bit. She prefers the polite route, so that’s the high road I take too. Left to my own devices?” She shrugged. “We each find our own ways to be proud.”
Alex nodded. “I feel like I’ve been spending all my time trying to keep the peace, or at least keep my head down, especially because my team are largely huge fucking embarrassments who can’t sit down and leave well enough alone.” He laughed. “But that might be a story for another day. I guess what I mean to say is, I don’t think I know how I’d really handle it if someone tried to save my soul or whatever. I don’t think I could just politely take it, but I also feel like I’m on thin ice all the time.”
“It’s tough to acclimate. Probably in some ways, even more so for you than it was for me. I didn’t have as much un-learning to do.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, sighing.
Helena gave him a pitying look. “It’s alright. You’ll figure it out when it comes up. And it will come up, eventually. But you seem like you’ve got a good head on your shoulders.”
That made Alex perk up and Helena’s eyes warmed to see it. Alex said, “Thanks. I don’t usually feel like it these days.”
“You just have to have a little faith,” Helena said. “You’ll settle in. To the Church, to your sexuality, the whole thing. It takes time, but that’s okay. One thing I will say for us queers is this—you’ve got family no matter where you are. The Church is a family, yes. But your queer family is there too, so we’ve got double the love. Sometimes the more pious of us in the Church are like your shite uncle who complains too much and talks with his mouth full at the family reunion, but he’s there for you in the end. But your queer family is solid. You’ll learn to sniff us out and we’ll always be there to catch you. And one day, you’ll be there to catch someone yourself.”
“I like the thought of that,” Alex said.
They sipped their coffee in silence for a moment longer before Helena patted the counter and said, “Now then. This food is getting cold, so I’m going to go find out where everyone disappeared to. Help yourself to whatever else you like while you’ve got first pick.”
The house woke up as the sun went down. Helena had him latch all the wooden shutters and seal the curtains against light. He sat in the front room by the staircase as his eyes began to readjust to the warm red lights, listening to traffic outside, the shuffle of feet overhead, and water moving through the pipes. A shorter woman with cropped hair appeared in the kitchen to help Helena cook and he tried not to listen to their quiet murmuring. He had a feeling like a cold stone pressing down on his lungs.
Misha was the first to come downstairs. “You didn’t sleep?” he asked, looking around.
Alex shook his head.
“That was stupid.”
Alex gave a shrug aimed less at the comment and more at Misha himself, and belatedly realized that Misha probably couldn’t parse the difference. “We don’t have to go out tonight, do we?”
“Not you.” He lit a cigarette. “You two aren’t leaving this house.”
“Should you be going out?”
Misha wandered away from him suddenly to stop in front of an ashtray on the counter. “What part of ‘sacred calling’ don’t you people get?”
“I mean, but—”
“I know, I know. Sol didn’t exactly foster faith, even though it could be your greatest weapon right now. Ever wonder why that might be, huh?”
Alex stared at him, face contorted.
Misha shook his head. “I’ll stop the side work that makes money, but this isn’t Icarus shelter for me.”
They were interrupted by a voice from the kitchen, shouting, “I hear Misha’s here!”
Misha returned with an ornery, “Emma.”
Emma walked over, one arm out to embrace him. Her eyes seemed to follow him just fine, but she still asked, “Is that you?” Her English was good, but accented.
“Da, it’s me. Good to see you, sister.” He gave her a quick one-armed hug and turned her. “This is Alex.”
“I heard about an Alex.” She turned to him and smiled before glancing him up and down. He smiled back a little awkwardly.
“For fuck’s sake, the boy thinks you’re hitting on him.”
“Sorry, it’s my gift,” she laughed, gesticulating. “I can only see infrared. I see body temperatures, so I was studying your patterns to recognize you later.”
“Wow, that’s—”
“Weird?”
“No, just sounds complicated.”
“It’s beautiful,” she smiled.
***