Admissions Act 1: One Evening on Europa

by DiscreteQuanta

Summary:

Privileged, polyamorous trans ingenue Emile Devigne is just starting at Europa University when he meets Cylus Keene, a young man with a shadowed past trying to secure a better future for himself and his twin.

---

"Imagine you are a cloud in the Jovian atmosphere, surrounded by ceaseless storms and shifting pressures..." Cylus wove slow-building words through the soft, rhythmic clicks of the tacglass knife as it folded and unfolded. His other hand gripped Emile's shoulder, warm against his palm. "Spiraling... swirling... twisting and turning... at the mercy of the winds around you." His blade sped faster; a whirlwind of glass to cover rising panic. Why had he chosen this analogy? Everything he knew about Jupiter's atmosphere he'd learned less than 48 hours ago. But he was in it now; nothing for it but to keep voice and blade in motion. "Cyclones, jet streams, ceaseless circulation..."

Emile's body relaxed. A glance at the rest of his audience found their eyes wide; falling, finally, under his spell.

In an alchemic instant, Cylie's panic transmuted into confidence: the unshakeable certainty that had bluffed him out from gunpoint more than once.

He had this. He had everything he needed right here.

Chapter 1: At the Mercy of the Winds (Cylus)

"I'm not saying we can't do this, Cylie. I'm saying you should have asked me."

Cynthia sprawled flat on one of the two narrow hotel beds, eyes closed and one pale hand picking at the corner of the white bedspread. She could have been mistaken for half-asleep. But to Cylus, the hurt and anger between her uninflected words could not have been louder if she'd shouted them.

He wished she would. Wished she'd fight him, like she was always ready to fight anyone who threatened them. But she wouldn't even spar with him when they were quarreling, and he knew better than to try and bait her.

So Cylus paced, looking away from his twin to stare through the window. The view should have been unexceptional, a straight look at the building across the street below. But even the simplest of Europa City's spires were polished to an icy sheen, and so he stared into a hall of urban mirrors: that building reflecting this one and back again, and again, and again.

Which was how it felt trying to talk to Cynthia sometimes. "You said you didn't care where we went next. I thought you wanted to see Europa." She'd actually been excited when he'd told her their next destination.

Before, of course, he'd shared his reasons for coming here.

"I want a lot of things. A cat. A permanent address. Some decent tea." Behind him, an abrupt rustle of fabric suggested Cynthia's restlessness. "You could get me some, instead of telling me I agreed to something I didn't."

"I'm not—" Cylus gritted his teeth, turning back towards her. She'd rolled away from him, too-thin shoulders hunched beneath the disarray of her platinum hair. Guilt lanced through him; she never showed her back to anyone but him. "You could at least read the packets, just to see—" he gestured towards the table under the window where he'd set out the University's materials for prospective students, even as he realized she couldn't see him.

"It's Windfall, Cylie." Her voice could have been a wall. "I don't care how fancy their university is."

"That's why—" He paused. Breathed. "That's the point, Cyn. These IDs are the best we've ever had, and they're completely fresh. We have a chance to get inside them, and build a real history that no one will question. We can have lives, not just a series of jobs and shows. We can have somewhere to stay! And when we're ready, we can finally hit them back, from the inside—"

Cynthia sat up, a quick, fluid motion that left her facing him, legs folded under her as she claimed his gaze. "If the IDs are so good, we could go anywhere." Her fists balled in her lap, voice finally rising. "Getting into Windfall's special school won't change anything that matters. All it does is put us in danger."

"I wish you would just think—" He regretted the words as soon as he said them.

"Thinking's your job." Her eyes bored into him, bright periwinkle that matched his own. "Isn't it? That's why you brought us here without telling me why. You know I'll follow your lead, so you decided for both of us. And you're right." Her voice wavered. She turned away again, back ramrod straight as she clutched the bedspread. "So go figure out the next step of your grand plan."

"Cynthia—"

"I need a nap." With a precise kick, she levered herself under the covers, pulling them up with a snap and muffling her next words beneath synthetic down. "Leave me alone."

---

The city was beautiful, in a remote way. The materials he'd read on the passenger ship said the buildings' design was inspired by some of the first missions to Europa, which had found fields of glittering ice spikes. When Windfall took ownership of the world hundreds of years later—as part of their "charitable oceanic conservation mission", a naked public relations move that had won exorbitant but publicly unacknowledged trade concessions from Earth—they had modeled their city on those same striking vistas, reflected onto a much grander scale.

So as he walked along heated stone sidewalks, he was surrounded by tapering towers that could have been made of ice themselves. In reality they were some kind of flexible glass, able to withstand the tidal pull of Jupiter and its many other satellites without disruption. The low Europan gravity allowed for the buildings to reach dizzying heights; though the ground and interiors were kept at Earth-standard grav, just like any other civilized place in the Terran systems.

A group of what had to be university students stumbled past him, laughing and drunk. Rich, well dressed, carefree; like he and Cynthia should have been at this time in their lives, if the world had any justice in it. He could have picked any of their pockets without even making an effort. But the streetlamps all bore the visible eyes of cameras between fluted light fixtures, and the absence of visible security staff was its own statement. Wealthy people, in his experience, preferred their police forces unseen unless needed—but that didn't mean they weren't close to hand, ready to pounce on any perceived disturbance to their pristine streets.

And he wasn't here for that kind of theft. He'd brought them to Europa for exactly one thing, so they never had to steal or busk or beg ever again.

He turned, following a flash of dark greenery down a side street. Rich people also liked parks, and so did Cylus; chances were he could find somewhere to tuck mostly out of view of cameras and collect himself. Then he would find Cynthia some tea and pastries, and maybe by the time he got back she would have at least started to forgive him.

The park was small but pleasant. A steaming fountain radiated warmth from its center, surrounded by unfamiliar vegetation in well-maintained planters. After a short walk around the fountain to assess the likeliest sightlines for security cameras, he chose a bench set back beneath a scaly green bush. It wouldn't have been a safe place to sleep: European security must periodically patrol public places like this. But he could sit here undisturbed for a moment and try to center himself, get his bearings again.

Overhead, lightly obscured by the sheltering foliage, Jupiter loomed above the forest of towers, half-full and smaller than he'd expected from its prominence in the shipboard brochures. He'd thought it might fill half the sky, but he could block it from view by holding his fist a small distance from his face.

It was nevertheless dramatic, a hemisphere of swirling clouds mesmerizing enough that he resolved to remember them next time he was doing a hypnotic induction. They'd make a good visualization, especially here; he couldn't imagine living on Europa for any length of time without getting lost in them. The famous red spot was nowhere to be seen, but smaller vortices curled between bands of rust-orange and milky white. Sol was a distant spotlight low in the sky, beaming cool brilliance that cast long, wan shadows. Some other moon hung between it and Jupiter, a small silvery segment.

The dome between the city and the blackness beyond was a barely visible shimmer, protecting them from a bombardment of radiation and debris that Europa's thin atmosphere would do little to deflect. Or so the brochures had said. Cylus had read them over and over as Cynthia slept through the journey, distracting himself from dreading the exact conversation he'd just had.

He should have just told her. But he'd known she'd hate the idea, had thought that if they just made it here first, then maybe... His hands, unthinking, sought familiar shapes in his pockets and began to fidget, soothed by familiar motions and sounds.

He just needed a little more intel. The fake IDs they'd bought—years of carefully hoarded savings while they performed and pilfered and slept in cargo containers and unsanctioned ship-hull hideaways and portside squats—would be enough to apply to Windfall's elite university. They even came with academic histories and letters of recommendation and records of accomplishments appropriate to the privileged youths they would become. But he needed to know more about the application and interview process: not just what Windfall shared online, but what the experience was like from someone who'd been through it. It was there that his whole plan could founder. The wrong attitude, the wrong reference, the wrong word could ruin everything, and send them back on the run, their precious new identities misspent and worthless.

"Hey, what're you doing?"

Cylie's breath caught as he looked down to his hands. They were occupied, by pure, anxious habit, with two tactical-glass butterfly knives, halfway through a pattern of intricate folding and unfolding. Eyes darting up, he assessed his unexpected watchers. Another group of students, he guessed, half a dozen boys as drunk as the ones he'd passed earlier. The apparent leader, a tall white fellow with dim blond hair and new-looking clothes, had fixed him with an expression of suspicious interest.

There was no way these knives were street-legal here. He'd only gotten them through the layers of ship and port security with the benefit of long practice and their unusual materials. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Cynthia would never have made this kind of mistake.

He closed the knives with a snap, smiling broadly. "Why, just practicing some tricks! I'm a performer, you see."

"What, like the Masked Parade?" The tall boy moved closer, several others near behind him.

Cylus did not wince; no need to discuss his own history with the Parade. Most everyone knew of the traveling fleet of entertainers, which made it a convenient point of reference. "Yes, exactly."

"Huh. Show us something, then."

"Of course!" Stand back, he almost said; but that would be tantamount to admitting his weapons were real, and that seemed like a dangerous idea. So instead he opened his knives and did a quick, casual helix while remaining seated on the bench. Maybe a bit of nonchalant flash would convince them and put them off, though he wouldn't have placed a bet on it.

Most of the others looked at least a bit impressed; one, a short, soft-looking brown youth with sea-green hair, displayed open fascination, stepping closer even as the rest shifted back.

The leader didn't give ground either way, affecting boredom. "That all you've got?"

Cylie's thoughts raced, seizing and discarding ideas as he summoned his performer's smile. "Certainly not. Why, I've got some fantastic new tricks I've been meaning to try out with an audience member, actually. Would one of you like to volunteer?"

The short brown person stepped forward again. A boy, though Cylus would have guessed otherwise from his build alone. His gendermark earring had the same shape as Cylie's, an upward-pointed triangle with a circle encompassing the topmost point. But where Cylie's mark was a simple silver stud in the customary left lobe, this boy wore a dangling golden triangle crowned with a circular green gem. His eyes were the same bright color, wide and eager beneath a pair of fine golden spectacles. "I will!"

The leader rolled his eyes. "Yeah, you do that, Emile," he sneered, not bothering to disguise the disdain in his voice.

Anger smoldered. Cylus couldn't be angry with Cynthia; but he could feel whatever he wanted towards this smug young man. The sudden desire to see fear in his eyes sparked a dangerous hunger in Cylus' stomach.

He turned his attention to the soft youth—Emile—as the boy moved closer with a nervous smile. "Hi," he said, his voice a gentle alto. "How can I help?"

A little more intel... Cylus pushed extraneous thoughts away. Double checking for nearby cameras, he stood and met Emile's smile with his own, turning up the wattage until Emile's cheeks darkened with a blush. "All you have to do..." Cylus tucked one knife away and placed his empty hand on Emile's shoulder, positioning him between Cylie and the other boys. "Is stay very, very still..." Cylus unfolded his other knife with a weighty click, holding the point a careful distance in front of Emile's face. "And keep your eyes on this." The flush on Emile's cheeks spread down his neck; Cylus suppressed a sudden urge to press closer, to place his lips next to the boy's pierced ear and make his earring flutter. "Can you do that for me, Emile?"

"Yes," Emile exhaled. Several of the boys snickered. Emile remained unmoving, only the softest sigh suggesting that he'd heard them.

Cylie began to trick, rolling the knife open and closed, open and closed, around and above his hand, short tosses into the air; all a safe distance from Emile, but near enough that the other boys behind the blond-haired leader started exchanging glances.

"Now imagine, if you will," Cylus said, pulling from one of those inflight brochures, "That you are a cloud in the Jovian atmosphere. You are surrounded by ceaseless storms and shifting pressures, pushing and pulling you this way and that, this way and that..." He wove a slow-building cadence of words through the soft, rhythmic clicks of the tacglass knife as it folded and unfolded. His other hand gripped firm on Emile's shoulder, feeling its warmth against his palm. "Spiraling... swirling... ebbing and flowing... twisting and turning... at the mercy of the winds around you." His blade sped faster, ever faster; a whirlwind of glass to cover his rising panic. Why had he chosen this analogy? Everything he knew about Jupiter's atmosphere he'd learned less than forty-eight hours ago. But he was in it now; nothing for it but to keep his voice and blade in motion. "Cyclones, jet streams, ceaseless circulation..."

Emile's body relaxed under Cylus' hand on his shoulder. A glance at the rest of his audience found their eyes wide; falling, finally, under his spell. Even the leader was quiet, eyes fixed on the movement of Cylie's knife.

In an alchemic instant, Cylie's panic transmuted into confidence, the unshakeable certainty that had bluffed him through countless performances, and out from gunpoint more than once.

He had this. He had everything he needed right here.

"You find yourself pulled inward, into an oncoming storm. You are spun, swept, stretched, swallowed. You fall inward, ever inward, unable to resist." Faster. Faster. He usually used his knife trainers when working this fast. A single wrong motion and he'd lose a finger, along with everything else he was fighting for in this makeshift performance.

But he wasn't afraid. Exhilaration flooded him, adrenaline beating through his veins. He surrendered to his earlier impulse, shifting closer to Emile, the easier to keep him steady. Or to feel him. The boy's back pressed against his chest; a perfect fit. "And then, at the center of the storm, for a single instant, you are..." He leaned in, close enough to inhale Emile's scent: an understated botanical perfume whose elements he didn't recognize.

Brushing the shell of Emile's ear with his lips, he laced his whisper with command: "Still..."

Emile's breath stopped, his body perfectly motionless.

"Until—" Cylie's blade slashed.

Red erupted.

The group of boys staggered back, gasping and cursing, the blond boy nearly tripping over one of his fellows.

"You are lifted anew!" Cylie concluded with a showman's finality, using a flick of his knife-hand to swirl the red silk scarf he'd conjured during his false strike. "And the dance begins again!"

He'd intended to step out into a flourish, but Emile had slumped back against him, trembling. So instead he shifted sideways, sliding his empty hand from Emile's shoulder down to his waist, suddenly aware of soft curves beneath fine cloth. Bracing Emile's back, he guided the lad into bowing alongside him.

When Cylus straightened, Emile stayed bent.

Well, that was fine. Cylie dropped the red scarf across the back of the lad's neck, ends trailing long to either side, tracking the other boys' eyes as he reinforced the frightful illusion he'd evoked. "So! Who wants to volunteer for my next trick?" He beamed, locking gazes with the leader of the little pack.

"Nobody," the boy spat with unconvincing derision, still backing away. "We've got better things to do than humor some random Parade knock-off." As they retreated, Cylie's triumph and relief were soured by irritation: at the boy's jibe, but far more at his own receptiveness to it.

He clamped down on the knot of emotion. For all he knew, they might be off to report him to the nearest security officer, and he didn't want to have to stash his knives to avoid confiscation. It was time to be elsewhere.

His eyes flickered to Emile; still bowed and scarf-draped, knees trembling. "You can stand up now, you know," Cylus said, tucking his knife back up a sleeve. "And your friends left in a quite a rush. You might want to hurry if you're going to catch up."

"Oh," the boy said, straightening at last, cheeks still flushed dark. His speech was slow, still half-entranced. "They're not my friends. l mean, I don't think they are. I only just got here a couple days ago, we're all starting at the University, and my sister said I ought to make some friends. So I asked if I could go with them after convocation. But they weren't... Very nice."

Cylus reached out to reclaim his scarf, studying Emile's face as red silk slid free. The trace of melancholy that had marred Emile's dreamy expression smoothed, and a shiver passed through his body.

Interesting.

Cylie murmured something conciliatory and reached out, making to adjust Emile's outfit as though the scarf had tugged something awry. There wasn't much to straighten; just a small pair of lapels crowning a tight-buttoned vest that flared at the waist, panels angling down to his knees, over a billowy, cream-white shirt—real silk, judging by the feel.

Emile relaxed into the gesture, and Cylie took advantage of the opportunity to examine him more closely, fussing performatively with the rest of the outfit. The waves of his soft, sea green hair were shot through with deeper blues, expensively dyed or permacolored. His gold-and-emerald mark hung from a lobe still swollen, perhaps with recent piercing. His outfit complimented his hair, featuring similar blues and greens. Soft trousers with damask panels of green vines embroidered up the outsides were cuffed mid-calf to reveal tight, cream-colored stockings and tooled leather shoes. Besides the notable earring, he wore a wide bracelet studded with stones that Cylus recognized with a start as sapphires.

It was unlike any clothing he'd seen on Europa so far; or ever, really. It was archaic, and flamboyant, and it screamed of wealth and a sheltered upbringing.

There might be something more to gain here. He wished now that he'd changed into something besides his plain gray travel clothes; but Emile's expression held only guileless interest.

"Well, what a coincidence!" Cylus refreshed his smile, noting Emile's deepening flush with satisfaction and no little pleasure. "I'm looking to make some friends myself. Emile, was it? I'm Cylus, but my friends call me Cylie. Do you happen to know any good places where I could get a bite to eat?"

Chapter 2: A Pattern In Your Rash Decisions (Emile)

Summary:

A normal date between two trans lads at a sexy wine cafe on Europa, no secrets whatsoever between them.

---

"You're beautiful. Anything would look good on you." Cylus' plain garments did not diminish the force of his appearance: delicate features, soft-swept hair, and slender-fingered hands, which had moved with such precise confidence. His skin looked untouched by sunlight, almost worryingly pale. But paired with his platinum hair and striking amethyst eyes, Emile found the full effect eeriely lovely.

Cylus snickered, breaking Emile from another momentary reverie. "Really thought you were about to drop a line, there." When Emile blinked, confused, Cylus leaned forward, lowering his voice. "You know, 'anything would look great, nothing would look even better'?"

Emile flushed, shifting with sudden awareness of how wet he was. "I mean, I'm certain that's true, but I, um, didn't think of it and also I wouldn't want to be impolite..."

"Don't worry." Cylus smiled over the rim of his glass, licking a trace of red off his lips. "You've been very polite. Lucky for you..." Pressure ghosted against his calf. Emile nearly jumped from the padded booth seat. "...I'm not."

Once again, Emile realized as Cylus told the waiter their order, he'd allowed himself to be swept along by a beautiful smile with a suggestion of hunger behind it.

As Cylus turned the full force of that periwinkle-purple gaze back onto him, Emile tried to remember why he shouldn't immediately surrender to it.

I cannot help but observe a pattern in your rash decisions, Emile, Mother had written, three nights ago. He'd sent the family a selfie taken with someone he'd thought a new friend, both of them lifting handfuls of genuine Old Earth dirt and sporting fresh piercings and gendermark earrings that identified them unambiguously as young men. While I congratulate you for committing to the course you have long considered, I am displeased to inform you that we received this news prior to your message. Here she'd screenshotted a Now post from a popular tabloid, led by a selfie similar to his. But this one was taken from the other side, at a much higher angle, showing off Emile's cleavage beneath his partially unbuttoned shirt and highlighting a saucy gleam in both boys' eyes. Below, a headline read: Rowdy Reterra Reveals Dilettante Devigne Daughter As Surprisingly Sexy Son?!

His wrist comm buzzed a message notification, drawing his eyes down with dread. Valerie, again. A guilty relief: better her than anyone else except Father, who'd already sent cheerful, oblivious congratulations to his original message. But even Val's correspondence held ominous possibilities right now, given her family responsibilities.

"Everything alright?" Cylus asked, one pale eyebrow lifting with curiosity.

"How rude of me!" Emile exclaimed, silencing his comm's notifications with a quick, embarrassed gesture. "I apologize."

Cylus shook his head with a smile. "You're fine. You just look a bit like a prisoner waiting for sentencing."

"It's just my eldest sister. I... haven't written her back for a couple days, and normally we message all the time. She's the one who told me about this place, actually!" Before he'd left home, Valerie had compiled a detailed list of her favorite spots in the City. He'd never guessed her recommendations would come in handy so soon. But Callisto's Café was perfect. The decor was spacious yet intimate: open areas partitioned by curtains of translucent, patterned fabric that evoked seaweed, punctuated with softly illuminated hanging glass art in abstract, vaguely aquatic shapes. Tables and booths were numerous, ranging from capacious to cozy enough for two, like the sheltered nook he and Cylie had found near the back. He even spotted several Devigne vintages on the high shelves behind the massive bar.

"You're at the University, right?" Cylus poured them each a glass from the carafe of ice water the waiter had left when taking their order. "I imagine that's keeping you busy."

"Well... yes, but it's not just that. I... ruffled some family feathers recently." Your choice of timing, location, and company for this transition demonstrate a concerning lack of forethought, a deviation from our previous discussions on this matter, and a violation of the Devigne family rules of conduct. I have attached them for you to review prior to your matriculation, Mother's message had continued. Do not forget to update your commcards with your chosen name. True to her word, Lyonesse Devigne had linked the document she and Valerie co-managed on family protocols for online and offline behavior, highlighting the portion about publicizing major life changes. It covered several pages, including security concerns and mitigations, press release review processes, and approved media channels. She'd also included the address of a commcard printer in Europa City, not that Emile had made it there yet.

Cylus studied him with amused interest. "You seem like a proper young man. Hard to imagine you doing too much ruffling. What got you in trouble?"

"An... indiscretion. During my Reterra last week." Emile stalled with a deep drink of water, wincing as frigid cubes threatened to tumble out onto his face. He much preferred his family's practice of chilling beverages prior to serving them. "Have, ah, you ever been?"

"To Old Earth? Haven't had the pleasure. What's it like?"

A smiling server arrived with their wine, leaving Emile time to consider. His eyes lingered on the cascade of red liquid into their glasses, a sight familiar as home, as his memory ranged over the two weeks he'd spent being ferried about Old Earth with a collection of other well-off visitors from across the galaxy.

As the server retreated, leaving two generous pours and the bottle behind, Emile spoke again. "It was beautiful, what I saw of it. They flew us over all the most famous preserves, mountains and forests and grasslands and deserts... like nothing I've ever seen. But they don't take you down into them, which makes sense given the regulations, but I felt so... removed." They'd flown over some of the old ruined cities, too: drowned, or burned, or starved, in the long, bleak era when Terra's population had dropped from billions to its remaining few, heavily regulated millions. The others on the tour had regarded the ruins with the same mild excitement they'd shown for any of the natural wonders, which had left Emile feeling quietly uncomfortable. He sipped the wine to distract himself from the complicated knot of feelings in his chest; it tasted good, mellow and warm with an undercurrent of spice. "But the ocean!" His heart soared and twisted at the memory. "We spent three days on a boat around these remote islands, which was amazing. Have you ever heard of snorkeling?"

Cylus hadn't. Before Emile realized it, he'd finished his glass, waxing rhapsodic about the experience. He'd been one of few on the trip who knew how to swim, and never more grateful for it than when stroking through rock arches and exploring strange stony landscapes below the waves.

But then he paused, sorrow surging through him. "It's so sad, though," he said, voice sinking to a whisper. "It used to all be alive, you know? You can see the echoes of it; shells and skeletons and dead reefs. I've seen vids of how it used to be, before the last mass marine extinction and the resulting... conservation efforts. Now, at least where we were, it was so... empty." Even some of the fallen cities had looked more alive, green with plants reclaiming spaces humans had been forced to abandon.

Silence fell between them for a moment, Cylus studying him over a half-empty glass. "Anyway," Emile continued, a wave of self-consciousness rushing him forward, "We ended up in New Singapore, which is where Brenn and I..." He hadn't meant to mention Brenn. But the experience felt tangled inside him, and he ached to talk about it to someone who wasn't a member of his family. For all he knew, Cylie and everyone else at the University had seen the post already, like the leader of the boys he'd fallen in with after convocation had. Maybe all his prevarication was for nothing. "We... connected, and then got gendermarks together. Then a picture of us got posted on Now, and went... a little viral. And that's how my family found out."

"Ahh," Cylie nodded, refilling Emile's glass without evidence of recognition. "Are they strict about that kind of thing?"

"Not about gendermarks or anything weird like that. My eldest sister got one younger than me. And my third-sib..." Emile recalled Dion's reply to Lyonesse's stern message, perfectly calculated to draw their mother's ire. Dion had taken a series of pictures at a club, surrounded by scantily clad celebrants with left ears pierced but empty. All their gendermark earrings hung from the ornate tunnel plug stretching Dion's left lobe: an assortment of triangles, diamonds, and circles overlapping in various orientations. Dion's note had read: Congrats, little brother! I wanted to follow your example but couldn't decide which gender this time. Think I should hold a public poll??? "Well, they change marks often. It's that my family is..." Once again, he teetered on the brink of dropping his surname; once again, he swallowed it. "...kind of private."

Obfuscation always felt awkward in his mouth. He hadn't thought twice before sharing his family name with the other members of his Reterra tour group. But he'd discovered how the very presence of that name drew conversations into inexorable orbit around the world Emile had spent his whole life deciding, with great reluctance, to leave. And then Brenn, who'd seemed more interested in him than his name, had... Well. Mother seemed sure Brenn had sold the image to the outlet that published it, but maybe someone had harvested it from a more private gallery. After all, Emile hadn't told him to keep it secret or anything.

"Does that mean I shouldn't ask anything more about them? I confess I'm terribly curious now, but I wouldn't want to get you in more trouble."

Cylus' teasing tone made Emile want to keep talking, despite everything. "Well, I'm the youngest of seven..."

Another member of the waitstaff appeared as if sent to spare Emile from his own incipient folly, carrying a plate of the flaky pastries that were the café's specialty. "What about you, though?" Emile asked as he cut one of them open, salivating at the scent from within. The first bite, chased with a sip of wine, sent his eyes rolling back in his head for a moment before he collected himself. A spring-harvest white from home would have been Emile's choice to accompany fish, but the red Cylus had chosen earlier matched better than Emile had expected with the vivid seasonings, creamy sauce, and finely chopped celery and lotus root rounding out the fish pastries. He swallowed, cheeks warming to notice Cylie watching him, and remembered to finish his question. "What's your family like?"

Cylus had a twin sister, it turned out; they were traveling performers, which sounded terribly romantic to Emile. He'd always wanted to see the Masked Parade in person, and Cylus said that he and Cynthia had even traveled with them for a time. Before he could ask more about that, though, Cylus shared that they were visiting to decide if they wanted to go to the University too. When Emile volunteered that he was only just starting there himself, Cylus had leaned forward with obvious interest, veering their conversation into the minutiae of the application and admissions process.

By the time Cylus seemed satisfied with that topic, they'd finished the bottle of wine and half a dozen of the buttery, spicy fish rolls. Emile had grown up sipping at his parents' table and had body mass to handle his drink, but by now even he was starting to feel altered.

Though he had enough self awareness left to attribute some of that feeling to how Cylus' eyes kept lingering on his.

"So, Emile," Cylus asked as he refilled Emile's glass from a freshly arrived bottle, "What made you decide to go to Europa University?"

Emile couldn't help thinking back to convocation that afternoon, and the dean's opening address. Yours are the minds that will guide the future of this system, and perhaps this galaxy. And we at Windfall's Europa University will be with you every step of the way.

Emile hadn't come to Europa to guide the future of the galaxy. Right now he was struggling to guide his own eyes, which kept wandering along the curve of pale hair at the edge of Cylus' jaw. "Well... my sister Valerie... she went here. Did really well. She's amazing. She helped convince my parents it might... I don't know, awaken something in me? Not like that​," he groaned when Cylus snickered. "My mother literally just..." He'd almost said sent me of our family rules of conduct, the sort of comment almost as bad as dropping his family name. "... Reminded me to behave, after the whole... gendermark incident."

"What kind of misbehavior is she worried about? That kind of 'incident' doesn't seem like it'd come up too often, except maybe for someone like your third-sib." Cylus' tone was light, but his gaze held a sharp edge of interest.

That edge sent pleasant shivers through him; words spilled before he thought better of them. "They... don't love either of my longer term sweethearts." Xiomara, too threatening; Marc, from the wrong class. "And on top of that, our family... entertains a lot of guests, and I was supposed to help out. But I kept... Entangling with the guests. Sometimes more than one... on the same night. At the same time."

"Sounds like a perk more than a problem, if you ask me." The warm lack of surprise in Cylus' smile filled Emile's body with champagne bubbles, as did his lack of dismay at Emile's mention of other lovers.

"It wasn't always sex, even!" Emile continued, buoyed by that lightness. He really ought to ask if Cylus was making an advance. "I like... talking with people." Despite what his array of sexual encounters might suggest, Emile had often been told that he was flirting when he hadn't intended to, and equally often his own attempts at flirtation passed unnoticed. He was worse still at recognizing when people were flirting with him. It all ran together in his mind, a blurry continuum of interaction that seemed to have clear demarcations for everyone else. "But Mother's always telling me to think more about others' judgments. How they might harm me, or the family. She's been in PR for a long time, since before any of us were born. I guess it's hard for her not to think about it. But I'm not good at living that way. I just want to..."

The world seemed to contract around the two of them, a bubble of warm stillness.

"I just want to connect," Emile said softly, meeting Cylie's eyes for an instant before averting his gaze into the depths of his wineglass. "With people, and with the world."

Memories swept through him. Home: the tannic taste of first-harvest grapes, seeds slick against his tongue; the warmth of an apple tree trunk against his back as he tinkered with a damaged drone harvester; the scent of crushed green as his father culled unwelcome evidence of their planet's lingering wildness. Xiomara's firm touches; Marc's gentle, enveloping embrace. And more recently, the weightlessness of water; the dance of sunlight on stone; the feeling of earth between his fingers and the sting in his earlobe and the weight of Brenn's arm slung around his shoulders.

His hand fell away from his wine glass, palm upward on the table between them. "So I... I'd really like to know whatever you'd like to share about yourself," Emile finished, self consciousness creeping in again. "Because I also like to talk about myself, apparently. Far too much."

The touch of Cylus' fingers on his hand brought his eyes back up with a jolt. Something in Cylus' expression seemed... open, in a way it hadn't before. "Alright, then. Do you want to hear about the time my sister and I performed on the promenade of Vega Station?"

Emile, savoring the warmth of Cylie's hand against his, wanted nothing more.

The conversation flowed from there, melting into an easy exchange of stories and reflections. All of Emile's were from home: enough interesting people came to Devigne's Paradise that, without naming names, he managed to at least keep up with Cylie's array of far-flung adventures: from an asteroid colony in a distant system, to the crowded streets of Titan, to a harrowing visit to a volcanic planet on the verge of reclamation. As Emile listened, he remembered how Cylus' hand had closed on his shoulder, earlier; the way those fingers had curled against his waist while he was doing tricks with his knives. How fast those transparent blades had spun, how close, while Cylus wove words into the most beautiful shapes...

Across the table, Cylus' mellifluous voice paused.

Emile jolted, realizing he'd practically fallen into a trance; lost in the rhythm of words to the point he'd stopped absorbing their content. "Oh my goodness, I'm so sorry," he gushed, searching for Cylus' expression in the dim cafe light. He needed to clean his glasses; pulling his hand back and retrieving a cloth from his breast pocket, he did so frantically. "I, I drifted away, there! You have such a wonderful voice." No, that was too forward for having just utterly lost the thread of conversation. "I, uh, please, would you be so kind as to repeat the last bit of your story?"

Fumbling spectacles back onto his face, he blinked to find Cylus laughing softly, something new in his eyes.

Something warm, and wicked.

"You're sweet." Cylus drained scarlet dregs from his wineglass without releasing Emile's gaze. "Being flustered looks good on you."

Without thinking, Emile picked up the wine bottle, angling it above Cylus' glass in unspoken offer. Cylus' smile widened, head inclining approval. Emile's next words spilled from his lips as inexorably as the pouring wine. "You're beautiful. Anything would look good on you." Only the truth. Cylus' dress was plain, the same flat gray trousers-and-shirt that Emile had noticed on a number of people in both the Terran and Europan spaceports. Perhaps some widely available matter-printer pattern? Regardless, those plain garments did nothing to diminish the force of his appearance: delicate features, soft-swept hair, and those slender-fingered hands, which had moved with such precise confidence. His skin looked untouched by sunlight in a way that Emile had never seen before leaving home, almost worryingly pale. But paired with his platinum hair and those striking amethyst eyes, Emile found the full effect eerily lovely.

Cylus snickered, breaking Emile from another momentary reverie. "Really thought you were about to drop a line, there." When Emile blinked, confused, Cylus leaned forward, lowering his voice. "You know, 'anything would look great, nothing would look even better'?"

Emile flushed, shifting with sudden awareness of how wet he was. "I mean, I'm certain that's true, but I, um, didn't think of it and also I wouldn't want to be impolite..."

"Don't worry." Cylus smiled over the rim of his glass, licking a trace of red off his lips. "You've been very polite. Lucky for you..." Pressure ghosted against his calf. Emile nearly jumped from the padded booth seat. "...I'm not." The contact firmed, sliding upward: Cylus' foot, teasing the inside of Emile's knee.

Emile's breath sped.

Cylus' foot stilled, maintaining a light contact that felt like it was drawing all of Emile's blood down towards it. "Now, if I promise I won't consider it rude," Cylus swirled his glass, scarlet liquid dancing in lazy circles, "Would you like to try your line again? If you really want to be proper," Cylus' long lashes lowered, periwinkle shadowing into indigo, "You can work in a please."

"Please," Emile breathed without further thought. "Would you..." The touch against his knee intensified, pressing outward. He let it move his leg apart from its opposite, cheeks burning hot. Cylus' eyes seemed to swallow the world as that pressure shifted to Emile's inner thigh.

Emile let the first words that reached his tongue come tumbling out. "Please would you show me how those knives work?"

Cylus' touch on his leg froze.

Between heartbeats, Emile lived and died a hundred lifetimes. Why that question? Why not the line Cylus had offered him? Everything had been going so wonderfully...

This time, Cylus' laughter was no soft, seductive thing, but a burst of amusement that shocked Emile's heart into beating again. "You..." Cylus just managed to set his wine down without spilling it, bending over the table and muffling a delightfully undignified series of snorts and gasps with one hand. The touch on Emile's thigh vanished, and his whole body lamented its departure. But Cylus' overflowing mirth replaced its command of his attention.

Emile's face split into a grin so wide it hurt. In that moment, he would have said or done anything in his power, if it meant he would hear Cylus laugh like this again.

As Cylus regained control of his breath, Emile seized the wave of exhilaration and rode it through his next few words: "And also please tell me we're flirting and I'm not imagining it because I also would love to see you in anything you want, including nothing. If that's something you'd like too. P-please."

That set Cylus laughing again, which felt so good that Emile found himself able to sit comfortably with the near-agonizing fact that Cylus hadn't actually answered him yet.

"Oh," Cylus managed at last, wiping his eyes with the same red silk scarf he'd conjured earlier. "People underestimate you, don't they, Emile?"

"Sometimes," Emile admitted, suddenly shy. "You too?"

Cylus smiled and slid out of the booth in one graceful motion, standing and extending a hand towards Emile. "Well, I can't do either of those fascinating things you requested here, can I? I don't suppose you know anywhere that's good for a more... private conversation?"

It was only after he'd paid and followed Cylus out the door that he realized Cylus had deflected his last question with two others.

That counted, Emile told himself—hand exquisitely enfolded by Cylus' warm, dexterous fingers, the street air cool against his flushed face—as the best kind of answer: the kind that trusts the listener to figure it out themself.

Chapter 3: Amateur Behavior (Cylus)

Summary:

In which Emile has a super normal response to Cylie’s request to go “somewhere private".

---

"Is this a... typical night out for you?" Cylus asked, trying to keep his tone light.

"Oh gracious, I'm sorry!" Emile's head whipped around as if he'd forgotten anyone else was there, green eyes wide. Wringing his hands, he scurried back from the hatch so fast that Cylie worried he might trip over himself. "You're right, this is incredibly irregular, dragging you somewhere so out of the way... I just got excited when you asked about a private place because Val told me this was her one of her favorite secrets and I've been wondering about it for weeks, but, I'll come back later! Oh, that was thoughtless of me! Where would you like to go? What would be—"

Without tracking his own trajectory, Cylie closed the distance between them, crowding Emile up against the nearest wall. The way he gasped, eyes dilating, ran through Cylus with the heat of all the best things in life: a clean cut, a shot of good liquor, a successful trick before an audience.

"You're so sweet," Cylus murmured, lips millimeters from Emile's neck, watching the pulse jump beneath smooth brown skin. "Go on. Show me your secret place."

The distant sun had set by the time they emerged from the café. Jupiter had brightened, however, a slightly gibbous slice of swirling clouds overhead. Stars scattered the rest of the sky, sparkling through the dome high above.

With a tap on the fine sapphire bracelet Cylus had noticed earlier, Emile called up a holographic display and began swiping through it, wandering into the middle of the street without so much as glancing up.

So that was his comm. Cylus tried not to think of how much he might have fenced that jeweled band for even without that capability. Instead he placed a hand on Emile's shoulder, steering him around groups of businesspeople, students, and tourists as they walked. At least this street—like most of the others Cylus had traveled that day—was for pedestrians and unenclosed personal transports only.

After navigating through a message interface—quick enough that Cylie didn't catch any of the content—Emile pulled up a map: hand-annotated, scrawled with notes and depictions of various waymarks instead of street names. "Oh!" He exclaimed as he looked up, apparently just realizing that Cylie had been guiding him. "Thanks for keeping me from running into anyone. I'm not... used to, um. Cities."

That's very obvious, Cylus didn't say. "I'm not either," he went with instead, substituting sympathetic half-truth. "I've spent a lot of time on ships and stations, and not so much on planets and moons." He intended to release Emile's shoulder. But having swallowed one impulse, another led him to stroke down Emile's arm, where he found a hand open and waiting. It only seemed polite to accept it. "Speaking of which, I'm used to 'days' being down to lighting and social convention. I know Europa City operates that way, on the Terran 24-hour cycle, but how does that track to Jupiter and Sol?" Whether clocks accounted for them or not, nearby celestial bodies influenced patterns of activity; not to mention how easy it was to go unseen.

And maybe thinking about something practical would distract him from the warmth of Emile's hand in the cool air, or the unexpected calluses on his fingers that Cylie had first noticed when they held hands in the café.

"Well, one lunar rotation—or revolution, since they're the same here—takes 86 hours, which is just over three-and-a-half City days." Emile glanced over at Cylus as he led them around a corner and down a much quieter side street. "Does that... help?"

Cylus swallowed a surge of self consciousness. Emile had presumably learned orbital mechanics at whatever fancy schools he'd attended while growing up. Or maybe his family was rich enough to hire private tutors. Since losing their home, Cylus and Cynthia had taught themselves and each other when they had time and energy, using whatever educational materials were freely available on any given comm network.

These often contradicted each other, though more about history and politics than the movements of planets and moons. Still, he fought to keep his tone light, praying he wouldn't damage Emile's impression of him by sounding ignorant. "I... can't say I fully understand what that means for how the sky looks, day to day."

Emile paused in his stride, looking up to the planet waxing above them. "Well... ignore the City clock for a minute, actually. It's easier to understand how Sol, Jupiter, and Europa cycle without overlaying an unrelated time system. So..." Emile gestured in the direction Sol had fallen. "The sun just set, right? And Jupiter—which stays directly overhead—is waxing, getting brighter. In around twenty hours, Jupiter will be full, when Europa's between it and Sol. That's 'midnight' where we are, though it's actually quite bright with Jupiter all lit up." Emile's voice softened with wonder. "That's how it was when I was arriving, and the Great Red Spot was turned right towards us. It was gorgeous." Cylie's body softened too, warmed by Emile's earnestness, and he squeezed the boy's hand.

Emile tore his eyes from the sky to check the map, starting them forward again. "After that, Jupiter wanes. Another twenty-odd hours later, when it's half-full, the sun rises. Jupiter's visible area gets narrower, and Sol gets higher, until another twentyish hours after that, when Sol goes behind Jupiter for a few hours, and the sky’s as dark as it gets. An eclipse at 'noon' every local day!" Emile laughed with delight. "I'd never seen one before." He paused, as if he'd given something away, though plenty of worlds lacked regular noteworthy eclipses.

He'd been cagey about his homeworld earlier, too. Cylus decided not to press, instead taking his best guess at what came next in the cycle. "So then Sol comes back out from behind Jupiter, and Jupiter starts to wax again?"

"Yes, exactly!" Emile beamed, relaxing. "And another twentyish hours later, the sun sets, Jupiter's half full, and we're about back where we are now!"

"So the 24-hour City days... just layer sort of randomly over all that, right? They're not tied together at all?"

"That's right!" Emile nodded.

Cylus let his end of the conversation lapse as Emile focused on the map once more. Useful information, especially that the sky was never truly dark save a few eclipsed hours. More concerns stirred in his mind. Would patrols start at some point? This felt like a city that would have night patrols, and a bright planet overhead surely made their jobs easier. His fake ID should be fine, but he hadn't intended to test it while drunkenly following a boy he'd just met...

...What was he doing? He'd gotten the exact intel he'd gone out seeking, in far better detail than he'd hoped. As soon as he'd done so, he should have made excuses and gone back to the hotel with a pile of fish rolls and a to-go cup of tea for Cynthia.

Instead, Cylus had stayed at the café for... another hour? Two? He'd let Emile's wide-eyed interest tempt him into telling tales, weaving old cover stories into a fresh semi-fictionalized history casting him and Cynthia as traveling performers. A woefully incomplete characterization of their last decade, outside the months they'd spent with the Masked Parade's eclectic fleet, but that experience had made it easier to frame many of his other anecdotes. And he'd done enough actual performing—sleight-of-hand tricks, hypnosis routines, showy knife-work—over the years to supply plenty of mostly-safe stories, only minor embellishment needed.

Except he'd started letting more and more truth into his tales. He'd made it halfway into recounting the time he'd performed knife tricks for rival warlords on a condemned planet before realizing that such a setting mismatched with any conceivable narrative of a life with established identity credentials, much less a clean criminal record. Only Emile's descent into inebriated reverie—which had looked a lot like trance, and wasn't that appealing—had prevented Cylus from revealing far more than he'd intended.

Amateur behavior, Cynthia would have called it. Correctly.

At least Emile's adorably clumsy obfuscations about his own background gave him another out; any time Emile inquired about something Cylie didn't have a ready answer for, he could deflect by asking Emile a question that would make him squirm.

Yet here he still was, holding Emile's hand and following him down untrafficked streets, each less well lit than the last. Not that vehicles seemed common here, even on the streets that allowed them. But they also hadn't passed any of the signed lifts down to the City's underground transit network in the last ten minutes, suggesting they'd left areas where ordinary people were expected to be. And Emile had reversed their course twice since their earlier exchange, muttering the first sentiments even resembling annoyance that Cylus had yet seen from him.

"I'm really sorry," Emile sighed as he redirected them again. "My sister gives directions differently than how I think about following them, and it was fine for that commercial zone where the landmarks are places with signs, but I keep misjudging it..." Emile waved his holo-lit hand at the empty, unlabeled street they were on now: eeriely clean, clearly more vehicle-oriented, lined with doors and garages that looked like utility or cargo accesses, "Here. But I think we're—Oh! That's what she meant by—" he groaned. "Anyway, I'm pretty sure that... yes!" He squeezed Cylus' hand before releasing it and approaching a formidable-looking circular hatch set into the ground.

Sweeping aside a panel of his long, ornate vest, Emile reached into a trouser pocket and produced a multi-tool, like the ones Cylie was used to seeing in the hands of grimy repair techs. "Let's see," he murmured, crouching down and touching the side of his spectacles. A pair of small, bright lights flicked on at the outer corners of the frames, illuminating the surface of the hatch as images Cylie didn't understand danced across the lenses.

Stepping closer, Cylus leaned over Emile's shoulder to watch as he unscrewed something in the hatch's surface, flipped open a panel, swapped his tool into a pair of pliers, and fiddled inside until a crank popped up from the hatch's edge with a satisfying mechanical chunk. As if he'd done nothing out of the ordinary, Emile put the panel back together, tucked his tool away, tapped his glasses off, and began cranking the hatch open, revealing darkness beneath.

Cylus glanced around with nervous excitement that grew once he confirmed no cameras were pointed at them. On the one hand, crawling into a mysterious, locked hatch with someone he'd just met was the sort of thing his twin would be livid with him for even considering. On the other, he found this breathtakingly casual attitude towards breaking and entering deeply attractive.

Like his charming little glasses, Emile had more to him than a first glance might suggest.

"Is this a... typical night out for you?" Cylus asked, trying to keep his tone light and unruffled.

"Oh gracious, I'm so sorry!" Emile's head whipped around as if he'd forgotten anyone else was there, green eyes wide. He stood, wringing his hands and scurrying back from the hatch so fast that Cylie half-worried he might trip over himself. "You're right, this is incredibly irregular, dragging you somewhere so out of the way, with no explanation... I just got excited when you asked about a private place because Val told me this was one of her favorite secrets and I've been wondering about it for weeks, but, I'll come back later by myself! Oh, that was thoughtless of me! Where would you like to go? What would be more comf—"

Without tracking his own trajectory, Cylie closed the distance between them, crowding Emile up against the nearest wall. The way he gasped, eyes dilating, ran through Cylus with the heat of all the best things in life: a clean cut, a shot of good liquor, a successful trick before an audience.

"You're so sweet," Cylus murmured, lips millimeters from Emile's neck, watching the pulse jump beneath smooth brown skin. "Go on. Show me your secret place."

Stepping back, he watched to make sure Emile didn't stumble. After a long, steadying breath, Emile nodded, eyes still glassy, and crouched to resume cranking the hatch open.

It revealed a ladder, which deposited them into a corridor, dim lights flickering to life as they entered. It was unadorned save a single sign. MARINE BIOSECURITY AREA. NO ENTRY WITH PROHIBITED MATERIALS, it proclaimed, followed by a list that included food, beverages, plants, animals, and numerous chemicals and other terms Cylie didn't recognize. Emile ignored it, so Cylie did too, praying that Emile knew what he was doing.

The hall ended at a simple, circular metal platform with a waist-high metal railing framing all sides but the one facing them.

"I think there's a protective field that'll turn on?" Emile mused, examining it. "Val said the elevator was a whole... experience, but worth it, for what's at the end." A shy sideways glance, eyes reflecting the low light. "Is this still okay with you?"

In truth, a fresh flutter of nerves had awoken beneath Cylus' horny, reckless intoxication. In years surviving between the margins of space-faring society with Cynthia, they'd encountered more than a few defunct facilities in varying levels of disrepair, narrowly avoiding injury more than once. It said something about how locked down entry to Europa itself was that no one else had broken into this space to shelter here. Though, the brochures had mentioned a small, subsurface Europan population, adapted to the environment below through some kind of genetic engineering...

"Does this go to somewhere that... people live?" Cylie ventured.

"Oh, you mean the Europans? No, no, though I can't wait to visit their habitats! But I'd never just break in..." Emile paused, as if realizing only now what he'd done, "W-well, not into someone's home. Val wouldn't send me somewhere I'd be intruding."

On a pragmatic level, this could be a good bolt hole, if he and Cynthia ever needed one. Provided he could repeat whatever trick Emile had just pulled. And in truth, Cylus wanted to follow Emile wherever he was going. He'd met rich boys before; they made for lucrative marks, when he and Cynthia could nest somewhere well-off people also passed through. But he'd never encountered one like Emile. It would be easy to classify him as simply naive; he clearly was. But Cylie couldn't shake memories of Emile catching him off guard: asking to see his knives, or breaking them in here, for that matter.

Or the way he'd met Cylie's eyes in the shy, naked instant he said, I just want to connect. Like he was praying, with a devotion Cylie had only ever seen from men clinging for meaning near the edge of death.

He wanted to watch those earnest eyes go vacant. He wanted to hear that sweet voice lift in pleasure, and in pain. He wanted to feel the pulse in Emile's throat as Cylie mapped his body with fingers and nails, tongue and teeth.

So he let desire transmute his doubts into a sultry tease. "Are you trying to get me alone in an elevator with you, Emile?"

Emile answered Cylus' mock-accusation with an embarrassed little sound that completed the submersion of Cylie's worries. "J-just to get where we're going—"

Cylie stopped Emile's words with a finger across the lips. "You're so easy. Let's go down."

Once they'd moved within the partial circle of the railing, Emile paused beside the controls, one finger poised over them. His other hand sought Cylus' again and clutched tight. "Here goes," he breathed, and pressed.

With a low hum, the perimeter of the elevator platform lit, a glowing amber circle around where they stood. An instant later, shimmering energy surrounded them, delineating a translucent cylinder that encompassed the platform and extended well above their heads.

Then they dropped.

Both of them exclaimed, clinging to each other in shock as the platform plummeted beneath them. The elevator room receded above in an instant, leaving them surrounded by reflective walls that cast the platform's low light back with a rippling, rapidly shifting sheen. Their bodies floated, feet losing contact with the metal below. They hung together above the platform, suspended in weightless free fall.

Cylus felt electrified. Either he was about to die—don't think about Cynthia, alone, wondering what happened—or his night was about to get much more interesting. What kind of person was this older sister, anyway?

And Emile's warm proximity was just enough to transmute his terror at their plummeting descent into the most intense arousal he'd ever felt.

Cylus sought Emile's mouth, claiming soft lips with his own.

Emile opened for him instantly. His tongue was gentle but eager, inviting Cylie into a haven of wetness and warmth. After a delicious interval of exploration, Cylus followed a hunch, sucking Emile's lower lip between his teeth. The answering whimper hit him like a punch to the gut.

Tightening his embrace, Cylus experimented with digging his nails into Emile's back through layers of fabric. Emile moaned into his mouth and nestled closer, the soft swell of his chest pressing against Cylie's. If Cylus could have banished his binder—banished all his clothing, and Emile's, placing them skin to skin—he would have done it. But such a trick was beyond even his means, and he didn't want to let go to do it the ordinary way.

Instead he lowered his mouth to Emile's neck. Chasing reactions, Cylus licked, then sucked, then bit, dragging teeth across hot skin as Emile threw his head back, pleading wordlessly.

Their bodies hung together, spinning in a descent that seemed to go on forever.

Chapter 4: In The Absence Of Gravity (Emile / Cylus)

Summary:

In which Emile and Cylus venture deeper into Europa and one another, and Cylie struggles to navigate his very normal response to their physical intimacy.

---

Cylus murmured against his skin; Emile's mind struggled to process the sounds into words. "How do you feel about marks?"

"R-really ghaaahhh—" Having recalled the existence of speech, Emile nearly choked on his assent as Cylie's teeth returned to the side of his neck.

Cylus reclaimed soft flesh, sucking until Emile's gasps lifted into a cry. Releasing with a mean rake of teeth, he regarded the dark imprint he'd created, joining a constellation of shadows in the shifting light of their descent. "Good. I left a couple before I remembered to ask."

He felt his words sink in, Emile's body melting against his.

A dispassionate voice from another life echoed in his ear: never fail to leverage your opponent's weakness.

When Emile had imagined going under the ice on Europa, he'd always thought it would be blue.

But the elevator's glow encompassed them in amber as they plummeted, irregularities in the frozen surface blurring into an undulating shimmer of reflected gold. Their bodies rotated together, suspended within the elevator's inertial dampening field. The exquisite heat of Cylus' mouth on his throat, Cylus' hands clutching his back, Cylus' knee pressing between his thighs, left him gasping, head thrown back. He stared up, eyes drawn to the circle of perfect darkness above.

He burned: a star in the void, a spark dropped into an infinite well.

Cylus murmured against his skin; Emile's mind struggled to process the sounds into words. "How do you feel about marks?"

"R-really ghaaahhh—" Having recalled the existence of speech, Emile nearly choked on his assent as Cylie's teeth returned to the side of his neck.

Cylus reclaimed soft flesh, sucking until Emile's gasps lifted into a cry. Releasing with a mean rake of teeth, he regarded the dark imprint he'd created, joining a constellation of shadows in the shifting light of their descent. "Good. I left a couple before I remembered to ask."

He felt his words sink in, Emile's body melting against his.

A dispassionate voice from another life echoed in his ear: never fail to leverage your opponent's weakness.

Cylus reacted with instincts he and Cynthia had spent the last ten years honing. In the absence of gravity, it took no effort to spin Emile around. With his chest flush against Emile’s back, he sought joint locks and submission holds, creating a geometry of limbs where escape became a biomechanical impossibility.

And Emile just let it happen: legs parting as Cylus' snaked between and around his, baring his throat to Cylie's forearm, allowing his elbow and wrist to fold according to Cylie's twisting grasp. Cylie held the power to break his body and steal his breath, and Emile was swooning into it, eyes rolling back in his head, glasses askew on his nose and threatening to drift free.

This boy was a door left not just unlocked but open; a treasure unguarded, a victim-in-waiting. Leaving him free to walk through the world felt... reckless. Cylie pictured one of the hanging glass artpieces he’d admired in the café: one moment of cruelty away from a brilliant, irreversible shattering.

Emile had been restrained before, Xiomara binding him with ropes and cuffs and the power of her commands. But Cylie had just bound Emile with nothing but his own body. The tension in Emile’s limbs and joints hovered on the edge of pain, threatening injury if he were to move.

The predicament thrilled and frightened him in equal measure. Fresh warm heat bloomed between his legs as a desperate sound fled his throat.

Cylie loosened his holds all at once, and Emile's pleading whimper softened into a sigh of relief... and just a little disappointment.

For a moment, they stilled, their bodies a charged hairsbreadth apart. Distantly, Emile noticed his glasses lifting away from his face.

Cylie’s arm, still draped across his neck, shifted. Emile blinked, watching pale, elegant fingers capture his spectacles and settle them back in place.

As he steadied Emile’s glasses—and himself—Cylus watched the tiny movements of Emile’s sea-green hair. He ached to see Emile’s expression, but feared what hungers Emile might read in his own eyes.

Had he followed his impulses too far, too quickly? Why did it feel so... good?

“More?” he whispered, lips millimeters from Emile’s ear.

The immediate answering nod bounced off his cheek and nose.

That motion and Cylie’s answering flinch sent the pair of them tipping backwards into a slow spin. “Oh! Sorry! Are you—” Emile’s apology melted into a moan as Cylus recovered his dignity enough to stroke down the side of Emile’s neck, pressing a fingertip into the last bruise he'd left there.

It had darkened even over the short time since its creation. Leaning close, Cylus drank in the deepening colors of it as their bodies rotated together in weightlessness. He traced a fingernail over its structure, delighting in Emile’s answering shiver as he outlined the stamp of his teeth and the shape of his mouth. Like lacework, those larger patterns were crafted of smaller ones, broken capillaries staining the interior of Emile's skin with blood.

He imagined a single scarlet pearl, freed to fall beside them.

His knives hung heavy in their hidden sheathes.

He’d already acted on one reckless, violent impulse tonight. What would Emile do if he tried to push further?

He forced himself away from bloody desire with a shuddering exhalation against Emile's bruised neck. What was wrong with him tonight?

"How long do you think we'll fall for?" He asked, searching his mind for safer appetites. His hands slid over Emile’s shoulders, savoring the smoothness of the silk shirt as he explored.

Thinking had become... difficult. Cylus' touch made him want to keep... stop... keep not doing think. No thinking.

But Cylus had also asked a question.

Emile rallied his reluctant brain, reaching for the engines of calculation despite ongoing, exquisite distraction. "If, uh... W-well. If we're actually in freefall, a-and assuming we’re going to the ocean’s surface—"

"I want to pinch your nipples," Cylus interrupted, hands drifting over the curves of Emile's breasts. "Keep talking if you like that idea."

"Y-yeah, so, the ice... the ice sheet averages between fifteen to twenty-five kilometers in thickness, annnf!—"  Cylus' fingers found the swell of his nipples through his clothes and closed down hard.

"Keep going." Cylie's grip tightened, then twisted. "I want to hear that clever mind shake apart."

Numbers scattered inside Emile's brain, distances and local gravitational constants and rates of acceleration swirling into sparkling senselessness.

To his credit, Emile kept trying. Barely connected words broke into beautiful babble each time Cylie tightened his grip, feeling only thin, slick fabric beneath vest and shirt. He wanted to feel Emile freeze against him as Cylie commanded him to stillness; wanted to cut through those layers of cloth, then tease exposed flesh with a careful point—

Cylie wrenched his mind away from his knives, again, contenting himself with digging fingernails through fabric instead.

Emile's latest attempts at speech—something about the absence of apparent air resistance—faltered into an intoxicating gasp. Enraptured, Cylie pressed deeper until Emile's breathing grew quick and ragged, words finally dissolving into pleading nonsense. Emile's back arched, pressing his chest forward, driving himself harder against Cylus' fingers.

"You want more?" Cylie rasped, an idea coalescing as he bathed Emile's unpierced ear with a swipe of tongue. Emile cried a wordless answer, hips bucking. "I want to fuck something into that pretty mind we've emptied out. Remember our little performance in the park? Did you like that?"

Emile groaned and shuddered, nodding frantic assent, only to gasp disappointment as Cylus' hands released him. "Shh, shh," Cylie soothed even as sensation returned, a light touch across the back of his neck. Silk feathered against his face, and he opened his eyes to find the world framed in soft-lit scarlet.

The scarf, the one Cylie had conjured his illusion with. The one he'd draped over Emile at the end; long, light tails of red that had kept Emile bowed while Cylie banished the bullies Emile had briefly fallen in with.

As the fabric drifted in their weightless fall, Emile realized that they'd fully inverted. His and Cylie's heads now pointed downward, the elevator platform lights an amber halo above them.

He wondered distantly if they should... do something about that? How long did they have here? He’d failed to answer Cylie’s question of timing...

Then Cylie reached one arm across Emile's chest, seizing the scarf and using it to spin Emile around to face him. Gripping the red fabric to either side of Emile's face, Cylie drew it tight against the back of Emile's neck, thumbs cradling his jaw, rubbing soft circles through the silk and driving every other thought from his mind.

Perfect.

Emile was more than just suggestible now, green eyes vague and lips parted. He was malleable, mind loosened by alcohol and arousal and exhilaration, emptied by his attempts to meet Cylie's mathematical demands, ready to be focused and shaped. Setting a suggestive anchor would be so easy. He was controlling so many impulses already that it was simple to convince himself that this one, surely, wouldn't do any harm.

"This trick's different from the one before." Cylie touched his forehead to Emile's, locking eyes one-to-one, only Emile's lenses between them. "This one stays with you, inside your mind. A little gift, for later. All you have to do is take it in. This tension." A tug of the scarf. "This texture." A silk-wrapped stroke. "My tone." A smoldering heat. "And be still. Breathe it. Feel it. Remember it. Remember falling together, while I hold you just like this."

Still. Breathe. Feel. Remember.

Emile drowned in Cylie's eyes and took it all in. Cylus, his beautiful voice low and rhythmic, repeated the words until they lost meaning, becoming shapes like the floating red fabric outlining his world.

Still. Breathe. Feel. Remember.

Silk pressed tight against the back of his neck, brushed soft against his face, underscored by Cylie's voice, by images of Jovian storms and swirling clouds and shifting winds. He felt himself become an eye of peace at the center of it all.

Still. Breathe. Feel. Remember.

A small, thoughtful part of him perceived his future, where even tying on an ascot would take him back to this moment, this perfect place where all he wanted was more of what he had with him, forever.

As Cylie ceased his recitation, drinking in his obvious success, he realized that Emile's mouth was slightly open.

Before thought had a chance to form, he'd slid one hand down the scarf and brought the other to meet it, gathering the ends together in one fist. Careful not to draw it dangerously tight, he lifted his newly freed hand to caress Emile's lips.

They opened for him, tongue greeting his finger with willing warmth. A groan escaped Cylie's throat as Emile sucked him in, the temptation to delve deeper overriding all else.

He slid inward, pressing down on Emile's welcoming tongue. That muscle, too, submitted; and Cylus shuddered as Emile drew him in to the third knuckle without a flicker of hesitation.

Greed flared inside his chest, wracking him with dysphoric longing. He'd wager Emile could accomplish plenty between his legs as he was; but in that moment he ached for a cock that could go past where even his fingers reached. He wanted to feel Emile's throat massage his length; wanted to ride this sweet mouth until he peaked; wanted to drive deep and hold Emile on him with the scarlet scarf while he came. He imagined Emile swallowing around him, taking Cylie's spend into his body—

Rapacious resolve crystallized into starving certainty. Windfall's own University health care would finally afford him the body he'd yearned for, and then he would use it to ruin this boy.

If living well was the best form of revenge, he was on the right path at last.

Chapter 5: An Expert At Standing (Emile)

Summary:

Within which Emile calmly and smoothly explains where the heck he and Cylus have ended up in their quest for “privacy”.

---

He spun back towards Cylus to gesture his use of air quotes, because even if Mother had tied their fortunes to Windfall through Uncle Adaire, Emile and Papa had always agreed that the very concept of a failed world made no sense—

What started as a dramatic turn continued into an involuntary spin as his feet left the walkway, angular momentum carrying him onward. Throwing out a hand to stop himself, Emile slapped something firm, bringing his rotation to an awkward halt.

Light flickered outward from where his palm had struck, dials and meters and a series of holographic displays flickering to life across one of the platform's consoles. Instinctively averse to triggering anything else, Emile pushed himself off the panel, only belatedly realizing that its angle had set his trajectory on a vector pointing further up than he'd intended—

—something warm and firm collided with his back, and for an instant Emile knew the shock of an unsuspecting bird being pounced from the air.

An instant after Emile resolved to beg Cylus to fuck him, but before he could disengage his mouth from Cylus' fingers to do so, the world opened around them.

They’d entered an ice-walled cavern, kilometers wide. The surface—of the ocean, he realized, giddy—was faintly lit by long, occasionally intersecting lines of glowing blue-green. The water and ice caught that illumination and threw it out and up, bathing the great space in low, lambent brilliance.

Except for the rapidly expanding square of darkness directly below them.

They both froze: still upside down, limbs entangled and clothing disarrayed, Cylie's scarf still draped around his neck. The elevator slowed quickly, but the field cushioned them, giving them ample time to adjust and avoid a head-first landing. They touched down softly as snowflakes; even once the field blinked out, his and Cylus' bodies rested lightly on each other.

The gravity. The City was kept at Earth-standard, but this was clearly not the City. Europa's native grav held them gently; Emile felt that if either of them kicked off, they might soar away together.

They'd landed in the center of a broad platform, standing above the surrounding waters. Red lights flickered to life around them, highlighting walkways and consoles.

Out in the soft-lit waters beyond, something stirred, sending out ripples without revealing itself.

Cylus' slender body tensed, fingers withdrawing from Emile's mouth. "What... is this place?"

Hearing a faint quaver beneath those words, Emile's arms tightened, holding the slighter man protectively. "Please, don't worry," he assured, though his own heart was racing at the unexpected scope of their surroundings. But nervousness was transmuting back into excitement as he understood where Val had led him, at least in broad terms. "Do you know much about the history of Europa?"

Cylus' tension eased fractionally. Emile let go, not wanting his new friend to feel trapped... any more than he might already, anyway. As they found their feet and smoothed their clothes, Cylus turned, surveying their surroundings. Emile wished the low red light didn't make it so hard to read his expression. "A little. This was the first place humanity searched for alien life, right?"

"Yes! For hundreds of years." Emile took a deep breath; this venture had been his idea, his suggestion, so it was his responsibility to lead. He stepped through the gap in the elevator rail. Walking slowly, reminding himself of his own intoxication, Emile adjusted his steps to the low gravity, just as he would in the vineyards outside his family's grav-controlled estate grounds. With just as much care, he swallowed the urge to infodump, doing his best to summarize. "Eventually, though, scientific consensus was reached. Europa had the chemical and geophysical prerequisites for life, but the spark hadn't caught. Some people argued we should leave, or maintain a modest long-term population to observe, in case a unique ecosystem might still emerge here. Others argued that even if something did arise, we'd never know it wasn't due to our contamination. And...”

“And then Terra nearly destroyed itself and needed somewhere to put all its fish,” Cylie interjected, bitterness edging his tone.

“Right. The Blooming hit the oceans hard.” Emile’s emotions flared inside him, buoyed by wine. “So Windfall, which at the time was still establishing its Planetary Reclamation Program by ‘maximizing yields’ from terraformed worlds that ‘failed’—"

He spun back towards Cylus to gesture his use of air quotes, because even if Mother had tied their fortunes to Windfall through Uncle Adaire, Emile and Papa had always agreed that the very concept of a failed world made no sense—

What started as a dramatic turn continued into an involuntary spin as his feet left the walkway, angular momentum carrying him onward. Throwing out a hand to stop himself, Emile slapped something firm, bringing his rotation to an awkward halt.

Light flickered outward from where his palm had struck, dials and meters and a series of holographic displays flickering to life across one of the platform's consoles. Instinctively averse to triggering anything else, Emile pushed himself off the panel, only belatedly realizing that its angle had set his trajectory on a vector pointing further up than he'd intended—

—something warm and firm collided with his back, and for an instant Emile knew the shock of an unsuspecting bird being pounced from the air. Arms wrapped around him, cinching just below his breasts and clasping tight. His feet struck the walkway again as lithe thighs tensed beneath his ass, dissipating their momentum and stabilizing them both.

"Still," Cylus crooned into his ear, one hand tugging the ends of the scarf around his throat. "Breathe."

Still. Breathe. Feel. Remember. The words Cylus had poured into his ear as they fell, now softening his body into compliance.

Emile let the rise and fall of Cylus' firm chest guide his breath. His heart slowed, from the prey's instinctive drumbeat to the placid acceptance of... Whatever was asked of him next.

"It doesn't look like that kicked off anything immediately dangerous," Cylus observed, loosening his hold on Emile. "But... what do you think?”

Right, right, standing. Emile was an expert at standing. And explaining. He was proving it right now, finding his feet and turning to face Cylus again despite wanting nothing more than to throw himself back into the other boy's arms. But he needed to focus. Needed to make sure they were safe, and finish what he’d been talking about, and then—

Stop thinking about his mouth, and his hands, and his knives—

Emile wrestled his attention onto the console he'd collided with: data displays, screens and projections of graphs and charts and numerical readouts. Repeated among them in various forms were small, three-dimensional maps, and the rest appeared to be environmental readouts. The sight woke a strange and specific nostalgia in him, as Val must have known it would. She, too, had accompanied Papa on trips to the distributed terraforming stations studded across their homeworld, and these displays bore more than a passing resemblance to theirs.

“I think this is some kind of observation station. This all looks like monitoring and measurement...” His eyes jumped between displays. “Nothing indicating changes to airflow, or the local temp and chem balances...”

“It smells weird.” Tension threaded Cylie’s voice as he regarded the space around them uneasily. “And it feels like there’s irregularity in the airflow...”

Emile breathed deep, earlier excitement rekindling as he took in the scent of salt, underlaid by traces of unfamiliar life. “I think that’s... how oceans are. It smelled kind of like this on Terra, too.” Awe crept into his tone. “Except it’s so much more alive.”

Like the lake just outside the estate, almost. Even if it smelled nothing like lake-lilies, the air kissed his face the same way.

“Oh.” Cylus cleared his throat. “Well. Anyway, you were saying, about Windfall?”

Emile blinked away the memory of home. He was here, on a living ocean at last, and with someone he never would have met if he’d stayed. "So Windfall... Right, yeah. They got charged with relocating as much of Earth's ocean life to Europa as possible, with massive support from the entire Terran Consortium. Terra fired up the shipyards from the first Ark Fleet while Windfall bored the Ocean Gate, and descendants of the original research colonists collaborated on designing and upgrading the sub-marine infrastructure—that's when they started gene-modding, the ones who stayed, and became today's Europans...”

None of whom were here, as he’d assured Cylus earlier. And yet, someone must monitor all these... monitors. The notion of an unseen watcher, with vision perhaps quite different from his own, raised the hairs on his arms, and not in an entirely unpleasant way.

The stroke of a finger over his shoulder snapped him back into his body with a start. “The Europans, huh?” Cylie had moved close enough that Emile could make out a teasing edge in his smile, even in the dim light.

Emile blushed, hastening to reach his actual point. "Yes, ah, so, among the changes the Europans helped with, was the expansion and reconfiguration of the existing under-ice caves into a moon-wide network of sustainable, self-oxygenating environments, big enough for marine mammals to surface. And that! Is where we are now," he managed to finish as Cylie’s finger traced down his arm. Words slid on his tongue like warm butter. "I hope... That's... Okay."

The pressure of Cylus’ touch grew—no, Emile was slumping into him, body melting now that he’d finally finished his explanation. Before he could right himself, Cylie swept him into what Emile had always, romantically, thought of as a princess carry, slinging him through the low gravity with fluid ease.

Emile blinked up at him, heart in his throat. The red lights cast Cylus' eyes in gorgeously ominous crimson. "So what you're telling me, Emile, is that the place you brought me so I could show you my knives—" Cylie's voice did something much better than air quotes—"Is a secret ocean ice cave where Old Earth monsters go to breathe—to which you gained us entry via, at best, extralegal means?"

"...Yes? Not that they're monsters, really..."

"Well, then let's go." Cylus kicked off with shocking ease, carrying Emile through a graceful jump that landed them on what looked, as Emile took it in, like a viewing platform. It extended out over the water, its railing punctuated by the silhouettes of unfamiliar instruments.

Cylus tossed him in a low arc; Emile landed gently on his side, about three meters away. He looked down through dark metal grating to see water, ocean water, stirred by gentle waves.

A layer of mesh was strung under the platform, lit from beneath by one of the thick, glowing lines—a cable? covered in some kind of bioluminescent... algae?—running directly beneath them. Irregular patches of darkness mottled the luminous blue-green surface, which was fringed with mysterious shapes that danced with the shifting currents.

Further down, he could make out more lines, intersecting and branching. His mind reeled, suddenly realizing the scale of what he was looking at. This was another piece of the infrastructure he’d talked about earlier: the webwork that spanned Europa’s entire ocean, countless threads dwindling as they faded into fathomless depths—

A sharp series of snk-clicks drew his attention back up in an instant, eyes snapping to where Cylie had withdrawn his blades. They whirled, glass catching and refracting dim red and bioluminescent blue-green.

"Now," Cylie closed both blades with a heavy ch-chk, "I believe I said I'd show you how these work..."

Chapter 6: In the Vicinity of Vulnerable Flesh (Cylus)

Summary:

Within which Cylus finally gives that knife demo, and Emile stays on the ground where Cylie put him like a good boy.

---

"It's hard to gauge the exact distance of a sharp weapon when it's moving edge-on relative to you. So if you target your movements at the right height, and then suggest the dreaded but anticipated arrival of blood—how can you fail to imagine it, when a knife moves in the vicinity of vulnerable flesh?—it's effortless for the mind to see it where it's not."

Cylie whipped both blades out dramatically at the visual level of his own throat, pleased by Emile’s answering flinch.

Over the subsequent moments of silence, though, a wave of embarrassment swallowed that pleasure, the words he’d just spoken playing back in his head. That last bit had been... a little much, even for his showman's patter. He'd sounded like a villain in an entertainment. Was Emile going to laugh? No, he was too polite for that.

He tried to read Emile’s expression in the dim light. Was he surprised at Cylie’s dramatic choice of words? Or worse, truly afraid, perhaps sensing the cruel yearnings seething in Cylie's stomach even now?

"Thank you, Cylus," Emile murmured. "No more questions now."

Emile laid on the platform right where he’d been thrown, eyes wide.

Cylus considered the scene he’d staged, and what those eyes would see: himself, cast in crimson by the dim walkway lights behind Emile. Looking down at his hands, curled lightly around his closed blades, he savored the contrast of that ominous hue with the blue-green emanating from the water below.

This was a show, after all. If Emile had brought him to a very unusual stage, Cylus had played on worse, for far less friendly audiences.

"Now, first," he said in a voice meant to command both attention and behavior, "A rule. You will stay right where you are while I have these knives open, unless I say otherwise. Because I may not have mentioned this during our impromptu performance earlier," Cylie began rolling through a slow series of openings and closings, "But these are live blades. They're meant to intimidate, and thereby avoid bloodshed," both knives closed, then opened again, "But they’re more than capable of causing it, when that can't be avoided. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Cylus," Emile breathed, worshipful.

Cylie inhaled through his nose, steadying himself with cold, salty air. "Repeat the rule as you understand it."

"I don’t come any closer than this while your blades are open, unless you say otherwise."

"Do you have any questions?"

"Yes, Cylus."

"Ask."

"What would have happened if I'd moved earlier? During the trick, in front of the others?"

Cylus channeled the dark hunger bubbling under his skin, baring his teeth in a wicked grin. "I knew you wouldn't move." After a delicious hesitation, long enough that he could practically smell Emile marinating in his own juices, he added, "And I kept the knife away from you while constraining your range of motion. It's hard to gauge the exact distance of a sharp weapon when it's moving edge-on relative to you.

"So if you target your movements at the right height, and then suggest the dreaded but anticipated arrival of blood—how can you fail to imagine it, when a knife moves in the vicinity of vulnerable flesh?—it's effortless for the mind to see it where it's not."

Cylie whipped both blades out dramatically at the visual level of his own throat, pleased by Emile’s answering flinch.

Over the subsequent moments of silence, though, a wave of embarrassment swallowed that pleasure, the words he’d just spoken playing back in his head. That last bit had been... a little much, even for his showman's patter. He'd sounded more like a villain in an entertainment. Was Emile going to laugh? No, he was too polite for that.

He tried to read Emile’s expression in the dim light. Was he surprised at Cylie’s dramatic choice of words? Or worse, truly afraid, perhaps sensing the cruel yearnings seething in Cylie's stomach even now?

"Thank you, Cylus," Emile murmured. "No more questions now."

Putting him on the ground had been an unnecessary indulgence. The sight of him—a wriggle away from groveling, Cylie's silk dark at his throat, accepting Cylie's authority with submissive grace—was a drug far more potent than the alcohol in his veins.

Marshaling his willpower, he tucked one knife away and raised the other, enjoying the play of multi-colored light in the transparent tacglass. Holding the unlatched weapon parallel to the ground, he let one side drop: creating a right angle of the two handles, revealing the naked blade between. “So the spine of the knife,” he traced the blade’s back, “is the side that won’t cut you. The grip facing the spine,” He tapped the horizontal handle with the index finger of the hand holding it, “Is the safe handle, the one you can hold without worrying about injuring yourself. The one on the edge side,” He trailed a finger of the opposite hand down it, “Is called the bite handle.” Smirking, he tapped the blade with the back of a fingernail. “You can imagine why, can’t you?”

Emile’s swallow was audible, a soft, breathy click in his throat. “Yes, Cylus. Q-question?”

Beating back fantasies of teasing that edge along Emile’s skin, Cylus nodded. “Yes?”

“Is that little... thingie... on the end of the bite handle some kind of... latch?”

Fortune, he’s quick. “Good eye.” He let his tone warm with praise. “Yes, there’s a matching notch on the safe handle...”

They fell into an easy back and forth, then; Cylus demonstrating and explaining, Emile asking questions. "Are you satisfied?" Cylus asked after finishing a breakdown of openings, closures, and quick draws. "Obviously that’s only the basics, but I think it qualifies as 'showing you how they work'."

"Yes, Cylus. Thank you." Emile had remained on the ground, right where Cylus had thrown him. Admittedly the low gravity made that less onerous than it might otherwise be, but Cylus allowed himself to appreciate the sight a last time.

With a final flick, he closed and stashed the knife he’d been using, conjuring a tone of casual insouciance to mask the desire that his demonstration had failed to abate.

"Come here, then, if you want me to touch you again."

Emile crawled towards him, peering shyly up through hair still mussed from their descent, when Cylus left the bruises that must still be ripening on his neck.

Cylus felt unsteady, like there was no gravity at all. "Stop," he commanded when Emile was near enough to reach out and touch his knee. "Show me your face." And your throat.

Emile obeyed, head tilting upward. The scarf shifted, ends wafting apart and exposing the bruises: a series of dark impressions below the soft curve of his jaw, more striking than Cylie had even hoped. He wanted to mark the other side of his neck to match. Or better yet...

His mind ran wild, darker and deeper than before. He imagined tilting Emile's chin up with a knife-tip, ghosting along his jawline before making a precise, shallow cut. Not deep enough to harm; just enough to admit a thin trickle of scarlet. A little rivulet winding down the column of Emile's soft brown throat, highlighting the hollow between his collarbones, finding its way between his breasts, staining the creamy silk of his shirt...

No. No, no, no. He gritted his teeth. Tonight wasn't the first time he'd fantasized about using his knives outside the necessity of self defense. Such thoughts left him deeply uncomfortable with himself; he'd never shared them, even with Cynthia. But only once before had so many of those thoughts assailed him at once, and that...

He swallowed sudden sourness. That time had been nothing like this.

“Cylus?”

Emile’s sweet voice called him back from the threat of unwelcome memories, bringing his attention back to the beautiful boy at his feet.

He sank to his knees, placing their heads at the same level. All he could see in Emile's eyes were dim blue-green reflections. He felt agonizingly aware of his body: the tightness of his binder; the metal grating against his shins, admitting light and air from below; chill humidity threatening to condense on flushed skin; the soft sound of lapping water; salt-tang and that strange cocktail of organic smells he couldn't begin to identity.

The lingering taste of wine, and Emile, on his tongue.

"Fuck," he groaned, the rough syllable forcing free from his lips. They were too drunk for this; any of this, much less all of it. But he couldn't bring himself to try and break whatever spell was over them. "I..." One hand lifted, stroking Emile's cheek with shaking fingers as his other found the long ends of the scarf.

Before he realized what was happening, he was pulling Emile in, their breath mixing in the cool air, one heartbeat away from the kind of kiss that would shatter the fragile façade of his remaining self-control. Recoiling internally, he managed to bring Emile’s head to rest against his chest instead. Stroking Emile’s hair, he forced himself to pause, and think.

His and Cynthia's performances occasionally attracted potential patrons, offering the possibility of money and other forms of protection. They avoided cultivating those who expected sex; one brief, disastrous experiment had proven that particular exchange didn’t... suit him. Cynthia, whose self-knowledge generally exceeded his own, had avoided it altogether. But a handful of times, he’d attracted a patron who only wanted to be hurt or ordered around by a pretty person far younger than they. Such arrangements had proved more sustainable, even briefly enjoyable, though none had lasted long.

So Emile’s obvious masochistic and submissive desires weren't unfamiliar to him. During the first time he’d fallen into such a dynamic, he and Cynthia had been on good terms with a small guild of sex workers. At Cynthia's urging, he'd asked pointers from an older domme who he’d befriended over cards.

You’re creating a fantasy where you're leading them, she’d told him, but you can make them tell you where they want to be led.

"...What do you want?" Cylus managed to keep his voice from shaking. "Tell me what you want."

"I want you to cut my clothes off, and touch me wherever you want to." Emile's voice wobbled but didn't break, half-muffled against Cylie’s shirt. "B-but I also want you to be comfortable, and to feel good too, and that's, that's a weird thing to request, it's okay if—"

An anguished sound ripped from Cylus' throat. The other half of his old teacher's advice asserted itself: just don't get talked into going somewhere you don't know how to get back from.

Guiding Emile down to lie flat on his back, Cylus clambered atop him, acutely aware of where his crotch pressed against Emile's lower stomach. His cheap, matter-printed pants did not feel thick enough; he wondered if Emile could tell how wet he was.

"Close your eyes," he hissed. "And stay still."

Notes:

Butterfly knives are also known as balisongs, and are Filipino in origin, with a rich and interesting past! But Cylie doesn't know that, and Emile sure as heck doesn't either, so I pass this information on directly instead.

Chapter 7: A Cool Touch (Emile)

Summary:

Within which Emile gets (some of) what he asked for, and maybe more than he’s ready for.

---

A cool touch kissed the skin of his neck.

Emile inhaled, all his focus turned towards that single point of contact, and did not move.

"Good." Cylus' voice pitched low. The touch withdrew. An instant later, Emile felt a sudden release of tension over his chest. Something rolled, clinked. "Nice buttons." Another abrupt loosening, further down. "I hope you have extras." Another.

Blood roared in Emile's ears. One of the prettiest, most captivating people he'd ever met was cutting his clothes off. Like he'd asked. Like he'd asked. Like he'd fantasized about, since reading a similar scene in a particularly graphic romance, pilfered after a guest abandoned an anonymized tablet reader packed with erotic stories in the tasting room.

But now it was happening for real.

Still. Breathe. Feel. Remember.

Cylie's words, echoing through his mind. Like he was as vast and empty a space as the shining cavern encompassing them.

Emile closed his eyes, and stayed still.

The grating of the platform would have been uncomfortable beneath his back at standard grav, especially with Cylus atop him. But everything felt so light, and his heart was beating so fast, and—

A cool touch kissed the skin of his neck.

Emile inhaled, all his focus turned towards that single point of contact, and did not move.

"Good." Cylus' voice pitched low. The touch withdrew. An instant later, Emile felt a sudden release of tension over his chest. Something rolled, clinked. "Such pretty buttons." Another abrupt loosening, further down. "I hope you have extras." Another.

Blood roared in Emile's ears. One of the prettiest, most captivating people he'd ever met was cutting his clothes off. Like he'd asked. Like he'd fantasized about, since reading a similar scene in a particularly graphic romance, pilfered after a guest abandoned an anonymized tablet reader packed with erotic stories in the tasting room.

But now it was happening for real. Another button gave way, ever closer to the heated place where Cylus sat atop him, legs clamped tight to his sides.

Emile moaned, and kept still, though he longed to rub his thighs together, to touch himself or beg Cylie to touch him, or do anything at all to ease the needy ache building within him.

Instead he tried to memorize every second of sensation, unsure whether to bless or curse himself for wearing a vest with so many buttons.

He lost himself in the soft snap of thread yielding; the metallic chime as each button tumbled through the grating beneath them; and the weight of Cylus atop him as each release left him more and more exposed.

At last, the final closure gave way, the vest falling open. With a rough tug, Cylus pulled Emile's silk shirt up, baring him to the chill air. "This bra really flatters you," he teased. "Such a lovely pattern, and it looks custom-fit. Are you sure you want it ruined?" That cool touch again; brushing between his breasts.

Emile reached for words; found only whimpers.

The cool touch withdrew. An instant later both of Cylus' hands were on him, groping through smooth fabric. Fingers found his nipples; pinched until he gasped. Cylus swore again, playful tone gone. "You liked it when I played with these before. What about now?" His fingers tightened; tugged; twisted. Emile thrashed his head and cried out; but he kept the rest of himself still even as the echoes of his voice rang out into the vast space surrounding them.

"Y-yes!" Emile managed to gasp.

"Open your eyes." As Emile obeyed, Cylus shoved the bra upward, freeing Emile's breasts as he bowed closer. His slender chest pressed against Emile’s abdomen, thin shirt sliding against some dense garment beneath with a textured sigh. Cylie’s palms pressed hot against Emile’s sides as he sucked one nipple into his mouth. His eyes were dark mirrors, fixing Emile as he bared his teeth, stained red by the platform's dim light.

He bit down.

Hard.

Pain pushed Emile from obedience into unthinking struggle as his voice lifted and broke. His body bucked, violently enough to set them bouncing in the low grav. For an instant, Cylie’s fingers dug tighter into his ribs, the hot gust of his breath radiating from where his teeth still clamped around Emile’s sensitive flesh.

But as Emile inhaled, breath fracturing into whimpering shudders, Cylus' bite eased all at once. Arms snaked out to steady them both in place, for Emile's thrashing had moved them a slight distance across the platform.

For a moment they remained still: wound together, breathing hard. A wave of dizziness swept through him. This was... This was...

Everything he wanted. Things he'd dreamed of, ever since his body had begun to waken to its own possibilities.

And it was so much. The vast, dim space spun around him, wheeling around Cylus' shadowed face. He felt abruptly aware of the chill in the air, in the metal beneath them, and a shiver passed through him with a chatter of teeth.

"Are... Are you okay?" Cylus released him, hands gentle as he shifted back. His voice was small, earlier confidence vanished. "That... That was too much, I let, I, I got—I'm sorry—"

"No, nonono!" Emile's words tripped over one another. "You're good. So, so good. I. I really, really, really liked everything you were doing. I just got..." Emile trailed off, searching for the right word.

Relief announced itself in the slackening of Cylus' body. After a moment passed, Cylus offered a soft, "...Overwhelmed?"

Emile realized he hadn't finished his sentence. "Overwhelmed, yes! That's so, exactly, right. I, I've done..."

His memory flitted like a butterfly: Marc’s soft brown eyes turning hard and playful as he relented, pushing Emile hard against the stable wall and driving deep with a single thrust; Xiomara’s ropes digging with calculated cruelty as she used them to pull him closer, one hand tangling in his hair and guiding him between her legs; the three of them in the forest, playing out a kidnapping scene they’d spent hours imagining together.

"Plenty of things... before," he finished lamely.

Cylie made a small noise that could have been either skeptical or encouraging.

"I mean, I guess I’ve never done anything like this with... as you said, a ‘live blade’..."

"Ah. Well, you... still haven't, actually." Cylus sounded shaken, and more than a little embarrassed. "I...” Sitting back atop him, Cylie produced a small object: a short grip ending in an asymmetric metal prong, with a sharp point on one side and a blunted nub on the other.

Emile blinked. He’d seen something like that before... when one of the household staff had asked him for help with a sewing machine repair. “I-is that...”

“A seam ripper.” Cylus’ tone was abashed as he tucked the instrument away again. “I thought... It'd give you the illusion, for effect, without being unforgivably rash."

"Oh." Emile blushed anew. "Well, that was clever, but now I feel even more silly... Are, are you okay?"

"Yes, of course," Cylus answered, too quickly. He shifted, clearly about to climb off Emile.

The prospect drove a sharp and sudden spike of longing into Emile’s abdomen. Before he could stop himself, he clutched Cylie’s shirt, its fabric light and slightly slick within his shaking fingers.

Both of them froze.

Agonizingly self-conscious, Emile let go, sweat cold on his palms. “S-sorry, I...”

A tremendous rushing noise sounded from beyond the platform. They both twisted to look, scrambling back in an untidy tangle of bodies and limbs.

A huge, dark curve of flesh surfaced. A geyser of air and water vapor erupted, peaking far above their heads. A triangular protrusion—a fin, Emile realized dizzily—sliced the surface.

Then sank, leaving churning whorls of turbulence in its wake.

Fine droplets misted down over them. Waves radiated out into ripples from where the great shape had vanished.

Emile blinked lashes suddenly heavy with water, the tops of his still-bare breasts now damp and frigid.

Cylus' voice wavered through still-misty air. "That was... large..." A pause. "Emile, could we..."

"Go somewhere less likely to get sprayed by... I’m pretty sure that was a whale?" Emile untangled himself from Cylie just enough to pull his bra and shirt back down, shivering with cold and self consciousness.

Cylus nodded, silent.

The air felt changed, tremulous, as they followed the red-lit walkway back through the rows of consoles, all gone dark as when they'd first arrived. Cylus was quiet beside him, and Emile's mind raced, wishing he hadn’t grabbed at Cylie when he’d tried to get up. The distance between them felt both narrow and vast: a chasm of silence that Emile’s mind filled with all the reasons Cylie might be regretting the choice to follow him down here.

Stepping back into the open circle of the elevator, he faced Cylie, stomach fluttering. "Sorry," he started.

"For what?" Cylus sounded surprised.

"For..." Emile fumbled for words, "For grabbing at you, and taking you somewhere so weird, and being so... sensitive, when you were just doing what I wanted..."

Cylie's hands found the scarf, which had ended up draped over one of Emile’s shoulders, and coaxed it around the back of Emile’s neck again. Taking hold of the ends, he used them to tug Emile closer, bringing them chest to chest. His voice was thick and strange. "You..." Their foreheads touched, and Cylie's breath warmed his face, the silken tether firm between them.

After a long, charged moment, Cylie took a step forwards; Emile instinctively mirrored him, falling back as the other advanced. "You still want me to touch you?” A note of disbelief softened the seductive heat in Cylie's voice. “Anywhere I want, like you said?" Another step.

"Please," Emile begged as they stepped once more.

His ass hit the rail next to the elevator's control panel.

Cylie groaned, gripping the rail to either side of Emile. "Well, then. I want to hear what sounds you make when I touch you under your clothes," he rasped into Emile's ear, body pressing all along his. "We've got the whole elevator ride back up. Would you like that?"

Emile's body convulsed. "Yes," he whispered.

"You sure?" Cylie's lips drifted across his. "Even if I want to touch you... here?" Releasing the rail, one hand palmed the breast he'd bitten earlier. Emile shuddered, arching into the contact. "Or here?" Cylie's hand tugged the waistband of his trousers, then teased lower.

"Yes, please, ahh!" Assent rose into a cry as Cylie cupped between his legs and squeezed.

"Let's go, then," Cylie murmured,

Grateful for the simplicity of the elevator controls, Emile reached over and hit the button that would send them upward. Golden light ringed them once more, and the platform started rising; far more slowly than they'd descended, though Emile felt acceleration build even through the protective field.

Still, he had a last moment to take in the grandeur of the cavern around him, as Cylie's other hand worked up under his shirt. The blue-green shimmer of algae-lit cables, reflecting from ice and water, dazzled him anew as they ascended. His imagination drifted after the beast that had surfaced earlier, following it down where the cables vanished below: wondering what it looked like, how it lived, what it saw as it swam...

Then fingers found his nipple, still sensitive with the imprint of Cylie's teeth, and Emile's exclamation rang out into the vast space like a bell before they were swallowed by the tunnel upward.

Chapter 8: Anywhere Is Good (Emile / Cylus)

Summary:

It’s time for some elevator sex.

---

Emile turned around, placed his hands on the rail, and set his feet wide. He closed his eyes as Cylus pressed close against his back: like he had done during the trick in the park, knife whirling before Emile's eyes while he spoke a storm around them both.

But this time Cylus plunged one hand down the front of Emile's trousers, found the band of his underclothes, and wriggled inside.

Fortune's favor, Emile was wet. As his fingers tangled in the soft, slick hair on Emile's mons, Cylie allowed himself a mean little tug, just enough to lift Emile's groan into a gasp.

Cylus believed that Emile meant what he'd said: anywhere is good. But his old teacher's advice—make them tell you where they want to be led—rang louder in his mind. "Beg," he murmured, setting Emile's gendermark earring aflutter with his breath. "Be specific."

This time their bodies remained grounded on the elevator platform. The artificial gravity of Europa City above was partially recreated by the acceleration of their ascent, softened to bearability by the protective field. Still, the weight of it, after the lightness of their descent and of the cavern below, made Emile‘s breath labor.

That, and the pressure of Cylie’s hands: one between his legs, one on his chest, both firm enough to keep his lower back against the rail. Those touches, paired with the golden shimmer of the ice racing past, were almost enough to cast him back into the dreamlike state he’d fallen into on their way down.

"Still. Breathe." Cylie held Emile's eyes, working his breast with slow, exploratory touches. "Remember the rest?"

Emile's froze, obeying the command but yearning to answer the question. Cylus laughed soft and knowing against his neck. "Say it if you can, clever boy."

Emile’s exhale shuddered out of him, the rest of his body as still as his muscles could manage. "Feel. Remember."

"You're so good." Cylus sounded almost reverent; then his voice lowered, teasing. "Now relax. Let your body move how it wants to while I make you feel good. What sort of touch do you like here?" The hand between his legs squeezed.

Emile whimpered, body sagging against the rail as he rocked his hips forward to meet Cylie’s touch.

Emile's pleasure was almost as sweet to Cylie's ears as his pain. Not that any doubts remained about whether Emile was a masochist; the way he pressed his bitten breast into Cylie's hand made it clear that Cylie's earlier overstep had, if anything, inflamed his desire.

But that opinion might change once his sobriety returned. This was Cylus' chance to make up for that mistake, and drown any lingering hesitations in more unambiguously pleasant memories. "Use words," he murmured as Emile writhed and whimpered. "I know you can, and I want to hear you."

"I like... Firm touch..." Emile answered haltingly. "P-pinches, scratching, pulling, even... Slaps, or... "

Cylie swallowed, desire knife-sharp inside his chest. How was he supposed to stop hurting Emile when he said things like that? "Anywhere you don't like having touched?" Though he enjoyed many types of sex quite well, Cylus would sooner cut someone's hand off than let them penetrate the opening he wished he didn't have.

But when it came to the bodies of others, Cylus appreciated a variety of configurations, and a selfish part of him hoped that Emile's openness to touch was greater than his own.

Emile's whole body felt butter-soft, melting into Cylie's hands: one teasing his aching nipple, one cupping between his legs. His voice sounded dreamy to his own ears. "Anywhere is good."

Cylus released his grip on Emile. "Turn around and put your hands on the rail." The rippling golden reflections of the elevator light off the ice cast his face in ever-shifting radiance. His eyes were open wide, shamelessly bright with the hunger Emile had scented from the instant they'd met: a ravenous potentiality with a gravity even more irresistible than that pressing their feet to the floor.

Emile turned around, placed his hands on the rail, and set his feet wide. He closed his eyes as Cylus pressed close against his back: like he had done during the trick in the park, knife whirling before Emile's eyes while he spoke a storm around them both.

But this time Cylus plunged one hand down the front of Emile's trousers, found the band of his underclothes, and wriggled inside.

Fortune's favor, Emile was wet. As his fingers tangled in the soft, slick hair on Emile's mons, Cylie allowed himself a mean little tug, just enough to lift Emile's groan into a gasp.

Cylus believed that Emile meant what he'd said: anywhere is good. But his old teacher's advice—make them tell you where they want to be led—rang louder in his mind. "Beg," he murmured, setting Emile's gendermark earring aflutter with his breath. "Be specific."

"Please, Cylus." Emile's hands gripped the railing. No pretension, no shame, only artless, alluring desire. "Please touch my c-clit, or my—" Cylie lifted his free hand to Emile's cheek, enjoying its heat as he tested the cleft of Emile's vulva below. The lad pressed forward with only a brief falter even as his breath caught, "M-my pussy, or my ass, anything, everything, please, I just want to feel you—"

Cylie interrupted by parting Emile's lower lips in a swift swipe, seeking sensitive flesh between. Useful, knowing how Emile spoke of his own parts; Cylus preferred different words for himself, but that didn't matter right now. What mattered was the slick, swollen bud he found, and the way Emile's body jolted when he began to toy with it.

"Firm touch, you said?" Cylie stroked over the hood, then gathered flesh between his fingers and squeezed until Emile cried out. Nuzzling his face into Emile's neck and licking where the pulse beat beneath bruised skin, he began to work Emile's clit. "Even here?"

Emile shuddered. "Sometimes," he managed, hips rocking forward. Cylus tightened his fingers until Emile moaned, the sound seeming to fill the icy tunnel.

Emile’s voice resonating around them sparked a hungry impulse in Cylie’s mind. "Your sounds are so sexy," he murmured, rolling Emile's clit as he continued to vocalize. "But it's even hotter when you're trying to speak. So talk to me about something. What's on that pretty mind of yours?” He heated his voice, pleased with how Emile arched into him in response. “Besides me, that is.”

Emile's thoughts whirled as the ice blurred past. “W-well, going under the ice... It makes me wonder, about the people who live down there—” Fingers flicked, driving a grunt from his lungs.

"Have you seen any of them yet?” Cylie asked conversationally, tracing a nail of his other hand along Emile's jaw and down the side of his throat. “Can they really breathe underwater?"

"I, I haven’t yet, but, yes, that's my understandin—nnng!" Another flick, sending stars across his vision, dancing over the ice they flew past. "They did mod gills, though they can still breathe air, too."

"Fascinating." Cylus gathered one of Emile's inner lips between two fingers and tugged. "It's been a couple hundred years since they started gene modding, right? I wonder what else they changed. Surely something the brochures don't talk about."

The suggestive tease in Cylie's voice flipped Emile's stomach. He'd tried not to think about it, but... "I... Can't say it's never crossed mmm—my mind." Cylus' fingers curled and stroked, combing through soft slickness and teasing his entrance. "But it seems... Rude, to f-fantasize..."

"My, my, Emile." Cylus nestled closer, fingers dipping inside as he rocked his hips against Emile’s ass. "Fantasizing? I didn’t say anything about that. Where’s your mind going?"

"I just!" Emile exclaimed, bending sharply over the rail, head nearing but not touching the protective field. His generous ass squashed against Cylie's pelvis in a way that made him long for a strap. "I watch too much weird porn and I can't stop wondering—!"

Cylie snuggled closer, cupping his hand tighter and luxuriating in plush wetness. "Wondering about what?"

"Different sorts of dicks," Emile confessed, adorably woeful. "And pussies! And whatever? What if they decided to experiment? I would!"

Cylie buried his face in Emile's shoulder. Laughter freed itself from his chest, uncontrollable as a leaping flame; just like it had earlier, when Emile asked for a knife demonstration instead of sex. It fed the dangerous warmth growing inside him. "Of course. What would you want?"

"Everything!" Emile declared, then sighed happily as Cylie's fingers began to move again. "If I could just swap, or add, just, try out all the different ways creatures copulate... wouldn't that be fascinating?"

"You're fascinating." Cylus nuzzled Emile's hair, breath warm against his scalp. Cylie’s upper hand found the silk scarf he’d draped around Emile’s neck again earlier, gathering it just tight enough to spark a full-body shudder: his breathing unimpeded but his imagination running wild. “But I keep distracting you, don’t I? Now I want to see you drop again. Let all those thoughts I just asked you to think go.”

As those words melted into his body, Cylus found his clit once more. “Don’t worry about what your body does.” Cylie’s touch adapted to Emile's reactions, and Emile recognized Cylie calibrating, adjusting, pursuing his pleasure as surely as Emile might tune a machine. “Just let your mind go still.”

Breathe. Feel. Remember.

Time stretched around them, Cylie’s words echoing inside his mind. The world contracted to where Cylus' body touched his. Alternating between mean pinches that made him moan and small, precise strokes that coiled into a building pressure in his core, Cylie worked him higher and higher.

His mind grew soft. He rocked mindlessly into Cylie’s touch, flushed and shaking as Cylie teased and stroked his throat with silk-covered fingers.

He keened, voice ringing up and down around them—

And then, at exactly the wrong time, the elevator slowed.

Gradual deceleration became an unignorable force. For a last moment, lightness returned; and then the full, false weight of Terran gravity settled onto them both.

Chapter 9: Forever Changed (Cylus)

Summary:

In which Emile and Cylus’ first date concludes with an exchange of gifts: a new fetish for Emile and unexpected emotional leverage for Cylie.

---

Cylus turned around as he reached the ladder, waiting for Emile to approach. He raised his hands: the dry one to stroke red silk, and the still-damp hand—fortune, it smelled good—to brush Emile's face, dragging the pad of his thumb across Emile's lips.

Which parted, of course.

The words Cylus had been shaping fell completely out of his mind. Their eyes locked as Emile sucked him clean, tongue soft and wet and warm against the sensitive pad of his thumb.

Cylus could have screamed.

He'd had him. He'd felt it, rippling through Emile's body, a shivering buildup bare instants from climax. All he wanted to do was push Emile out of the elevator and up against the corridor wall so they could try again; or to put him on his knees and fuck his mouth after all—

He withdrew his hand from Emile's pants and stepped back, closing his eyes and breathing hard. His heart raced as though he'd run a mile in high grav. He clenched the hand still wet with Emile's slick, resisting the urge to inhale the smell of it, or lick it clean himself, because...

Because something about Emile made him want to go much, much too far, much too fast. Fortune, he'd been half a second away from actually pulling his knives out down there. If he didn't keep his more innocuous thieving tools stored so close to his blades, the trick with the seam ripper might not have occurred to him, saving them both from a much more dangerous dalliance. Cylus trusted the steadiness of his own hands, even intoxicated; but if that leviathan had surprised him while he was slicing through Emile's expensive underclothes...

"Are you okay?"

Cylus' eyes shot open to find Emile gorgeously disarrayed in the corridor's dim lights: sea-green hair thoroughly mussed, glasses askew, throat covered in marks and framed by Cylie's red scarf, shirt untucked beneath his now buttonless vest, pants riding low under the soft swell of his belly, one sock slumped down to the shoe. But his soft-edged face was all guileless concern.

"Yes, yes!" Cylus summoned his wickedest smile, affecting the tone he hoped Emile still wanted to hear. "Just thinking about all the things I still want to do to you."

That sent Emile into a flustered wriggle that forced him to acknowledge that he'd been partially speaking the truth.

"Tragically," Cylus forced himself to continue, widening the distance between them as he approached the ladder back to the street, "I really ought to get back to my sister. It's late, and she's got to be wondering where I've been." Hopefully Emile wouldn't ask any sensible questions, like why Cylie hadn't just sent her a quick message hours ago. They'd brought a pair of Windfall-compatible comms, but he'd not wanted to activate them—and link them to their dear-bought identities—until he was sure of their course. "Is there anywhere you know of that serves tea and food at this hour? I ought to bring her back something in case she's waited up."

"The same place we were earlier, actually! It's open quite late!" Emile's voice was bright, but a thread of brittleness crept into his tone as he trailed Cylie back down the corridor. "Do... do you want me to lead you back? Or, I can just give you the coords, if you need to be off in a hurry... Or, directions, if you don't have the local map data yet!"

Shit. The lad thought Cylie was giving him the brush off, and he was offering an out; awkward, but obviously genuine.

But Cylus, no matter how foolish it was to draw this out, didn't want to go. Didn't want to leave this strange, sweet, achingly sincere young man thinking that Cylus had just used him for a bit of fun and was now just going to disappear... no matter how close to the truth that might be.

Then again... if he and Cynthia moved forward with his plan, Emile could be a more lasting asset.

If his wager paid off, they'd be students at the same institution. How could it be anything but useful to have someone there who already knew him, and held him in positive regard?

Relief bathed him. Yes. He'd already been thinking about this, albeit primarily in the context of wanting more of... whatever they'd just had. But it made sense. This was the right plan. And that meant...

He turned around as he reached the ladder, waiting for Emile to approach. He raised his hands: the dry one to stroke red silk, and the still-damp hand—fortune, it smelled good—to brush Emile's face, dragging the pad of his thumb across Emile's lips.

Which parted, of course. The words Cylus had been shaping fell completely out of his mind. Their eyes locked as Emile sucked him clean, tongue soft and wet and warm against the sensitive pad of his thumb.

No sense in not doing the rest, Cylie thought dizzily, as Emile happily took his other fingers one at a time. He finished by licking Cylie's palm and knuckles, eyes half-lidded behind still-crooked glasses.

Different words fell free, buoyed by greed, absent all forethought. "Next time, I'm going to make you come so hard you forget your own name. So wait." He stepped forward, placing them chest-to-chest again as he cupped a hand over the scarf covering the back of Emile's neck. "Hold onto this for me until the next time we meet," he pressed through the silk, "And wait until then. Think of me, while you're waiting. Touch yourself if you want. But save that final pleasure for me."

The look in Emile's eyes as he nodded drove any nascent doubts from Cylie's mind. "Yes, Cylus," he whispered.

---

They stood together outside Callisto's, Cylie laden with a bag of pastries and a beverage holder with two cups of tea for Cynthia to choose between. Emile had paid for it all unasked, and Cylus hadn't argued.

They'd tidied each other up before leaving the tunnel, though there was only so much to be done with no buttons on Emile's vest. Still, Cylie had improvised a loose knot with the red silk scarf to evoke a casual cravat, trying to make it look as though their disarray were at least somewhat intentional.

The scarf’s color looked beautiful on him. His brown skin was almost luminous under the streetlights and the waxing light of Jupiter above.

"Thanks for spending this evening with me," Emile said earnestly.

"You too," Cylie answered, frightened at the honesty in his own voice.

Emile's expression settled into resolve. "And if you meant what you said earlier, I'd be delighted to share more." Fishing inside a pocket of the now-buttonless vest, he removed a pale sea-green rectangle and extended it towards Cylie.

A commcard, just like the ones rich people handed each other in entertainments. It looked like nothing but expensive paper—itself a rarity—but Cylus knew that an array of wafer-thin electronics resided within, holding a variety of contact codes compatible with major comm network platforms.

He accepted it, examining the calligraphic script stamped into the surface, limned with dark golden ink:

██████ Devigne

Devigne Wineries and Holdings

And below in smaller text:

a Windfall Company

That first name... Emile’s old name, presumably. But more importantly...

"Devigne." He breathed in soft shock. "Like..."

"Like the wine. And the planet. Yes." Emile fiddled with dangling threads on his vest, eyes cast down. "Sorry I didn't say earlier, I was just..."

Afraid to see how Cylus' opinion of him would be forever changed. As it inevitably must be.

But Emile wanted so badly for that not to be true. It was written across every inch of his body; head bowed, posture tense, waiting to become a means to an end rather than a person.

Devigne’s Paradise was a planet that celebrities went to get married on, or celebrate the majority of their firstborn. Reality entertainments were set there; the kind about attractive people misbehaving in socially acceptable ways. The enigmatic Devigne family never appeared in those shows; their names were rarely mentioned in mainstream media.

Once in a while a tabloid would run a story about a Devigne. One of them was slightly famous as a scandalously enjoyable party guest, rarely appearing as the same gender more than once in a row—

My third-sib... changes often—

Fateless fortune. This was happening. He'd just committed crimes in front of—with—then fucked a boy whose family was notoriously secretive, incomprehensibly rich, and deeply tied to the very organization Cylie had come to Europa with the hope of infiltrating.

And now that boy had all but handed Cylus his heart and an effortless means to break it.

He didn't want to.

After all, it served Cylie more than ever to give Emile what he wanted; how better to preserve the perception of a unique bond between them?

Putting his shock and his opportunity assessment aside, Cylus found it effortless to lie, the three words he knew Emile most wanted to hear tumbling from his lips without hesitation:

"It doesn't matter.” Emile's relieved smile broke like a new dawn as Cylie continued. "I just want to see you again."

"Then let's.” Emile, still beaming, sketched a bow: long vest flaring open, traces of cut threads fluttering down the center; Cylie's red scarf brilliant at his throat, highlighting the bruises on his neck.

Cylus inclined his head in answer, hands too full of food and drink to follow his desire to reach out and touch Emile's lips again. "It'll be my pleasure,” he said as he turned to go." Goodnight, Emile."

"Goodnight, Cylie," answered Emile's sweet, soft voice, and it took all of Cylus' remaining willpower not to look back.

Chapter 10: Enough for Now (Cynthia)

Summary:

In which we see what Cynthia has been up to while her twin brother's been off having his adventurous date.

---

As she practiced, her mind wandered back to previous fights.

Not fights for survival. Those replayed themselves when they saw fit. All Cynthia could do was try to breathe through, when memories came on like enemies in ambush.

Other fights, ones she chose, helped. Gave her different memories to tie to her muscles. Gave her mind practice and padding against real blows, when they came. That was why she loved the tether-ring.

But even beyond the risks of participating in extralegal underground fights while living long-term in a Windfall-controlled city, how would she possibly explain the prize money—and the bruises—to Cylie when they were supposed to be going to school?

Before, depending on the ratio of cash to bruises, she’d told him they were from warehouse burglaries, or day labor, or freelance enforcement contracts. He always believed her. Cynthia was good at those kinds of things, and she never lied to him.

Except about this.

The nap had been good.

Everything since, less so.

Cynthia hadn't been surprised to find Cylie still gone when she woke. He liked new places, new people. Novelty in general. Cynthia liked those things less, even if she'd gotten used to dealing with them.

Not knowing where Cylie was, in unfamiliar and potentially hostile territory, made her uneasy, even if she’d been the one who told him to go away.

She'd scouted the hotel right after they'd arrived in the local "afternoon", taking a brisk walk through the building and comparing the actual layout to the emergency maps posted in every hall. Those showed the exits local security wanted people to use in case of emergency. She needed to find the other exits. Threats might arrive through them unchecked; more likely, local security would be the threat, and she and Cylie would need a way out.

She'd returned from her survey to find the room full of brochures, and Cylie full of surprises.

The nap had refreshed her from the exhaustion of travel, at least. Being in a packed passenger ship harrowed Cynthia. If it had been an illicit transport like they usually rode, she'd at least have found them a spot against a wall, backs pressed to the grav-paneling. But ships like that didn't dock at Europa City. They'd flown the connection from the Kuiper Gate on a passenger ship, where everyone had an assigned seat with a sheaf of brochure-readers in the pocket in front of them. They hadn't traveled that way in over a decade, since before she'd learned real fear.

She'd spent the whole trip trying not to let Cylie see how close she was to bolting. A futile impulse; she and everyone on that ship were trapped in every way that mattered, hard vacuum their captor. There was no safety possible, when they could neither run nor hide.

(Not that they had not escaped even those conditions, once. If it were up to Cynthia, they would never repeat the feat.)

The awareness of someone sitting right behind her, close enough to lean forward and grab her shoulder, made her want to scream.

But she'd made it through the flight. Made it through Europa's customs with her new ident, giving the officer nothing to wonder at in her facial expression or body language. Just a tired girl.

She'd made it through cold streets and the hotel and that awful conversation with Cylus. She'd slept.

Now her body needed to move.

The hotel had a gym. She'd seen it, on her initial foray. Could be there in a few minutes. Leave Cylie a note, so he could find her when he got back. Like they'd done countless times before.

(A memory: the interior of an abandoned storage bay, their first night on Vega Station. Cylus staggering back, bloody, commless. Fainting when he saw her. If she hadn't decided to stay put that night, he might have died. If she'd been with him, he'd never have been injured, but she'd lost that argument years before.)

Cynthia turned on the wall-holo.

Everything on it would be Windfall-selected, of course. She hadn’t been on Windnet before, having spent the last decade specifically avoiding Windfall-managed space. But on a quick browse, it resembled most comm networks: Windnet’s version of news, entertainment, education, and sales channels; the same inter-network SolSys programming that other nets with Terran ties carried; a handful of local streams from Europa and other nearby moons.

She settled on a rote Luna-based action show she half-recognized, keeping the volume low so she'd hear any nearby disturbances. She wished she had a way to access her pindrive of bootleg anime and martial arts flicks, but neither her unactivated comm nor the wallo had the right port.

She worked through several episodes worth of stretches and body-weight exercises. If she hadn't been wondering where Cylie was, it would have taken the edge off. As it was, it left her feeling energized but still restless.

Also, hungry.

She'd already decided to stay put. She could call room service, the hotel was nice enough. But that kind of expense felt excessive even when they were flush with cash. They were not flush right now. They'd spent nearly their entire savings on their false idents and their passage here.

The coffee machine on the tiny desk by the door had packets of sweetener, little containers of creamer. She downed two of each and drank deep from the bathroom sink. Enough for now.

Now was all she could deal with.

She changed the holo—which had shifted over to some hospital show—until she found a zero-g racquet-ball tourney. Then she moved into the series of drills she'd first learned over a decade ago, stances and strikes and kicks in stripped-down sequences. She'd iterated on them over the years, adding patterns of movement that had served her when things went bad. They were better to run with a partner, though.

She wished Cylie were here. Not that she'd practice with him right now.

She kept on anyway, until the tourney ended and the holo moved onto something else. Paused, breathing hard.

Walking over to the window, she mopped her face on her sleeve and looked down at the brochure-readers. Her eyes stung. Wiping her hands, she made herself swipe through one, then another. She stared at the words, at pictures that animated when touched to show short scenes of collegiate life. Trying to understand what Cylie was thinking.

It didn't help. Her body was still buzzing and not in a good way. She knew all the words but right now they didn't mean anything. The people in those images were their age, but to Cynthia they felt like actors in an entertainment. Nothing real. Nothing to do with the world they'd lived in for the last ten years.

Throwing down the brochures, she examined the room's furniture. She longed for a proper fighting dummy, or even the improvised one she’d built out of scrap back on Dushara. Proper equipment was a rare luxury. Practicing strikes against anything in here was a risk; they couldn’t afford to replace broken furniture.

But all her exercises hadn’t relieved the terrible tension in her body. She needed contact; to play out the patterns of combat against something with mass and resistance.

The armchair in the corner might do; four short legs supporting a lightly padded bulk. Low center of gravity; reasonably sturdy looking. She'd shadow-sparred off worse objects. She would simply... be careful.

She could be careful.

She pulled the table with its stupid brochures to the other side of the room, leaving it in front of the door. Out of her way for now, and it blocked anyone trying to come in. When Cylie got back, he could knock.

If he was injured... the table was small enough to move quickly.

Dragging the chair out of the corner, she positioned it between the window and the nearer bed. Giving it a last once-over, she began to circle it, imagining angles and movements as she practiced strikes and kicks, carefully moderating her power.

As she practiced, her mind wandered back to previous fights.

Not fights for survival. Those replayed themselves when they saw fit. All Cynthia could do was try to breathe through, when memories came on like enemies in ambush.

Other fights, ones she chose, helped. Gave her different memories to tie to her muscles. Gave her mind practice and padding against real blows, when they came. That was why she loved the tether-ring.

Of course, she couldn’t tell Cylie that that was part of why she was so upset about all this. Not that she couldn’t play tether-ring here on Europa, her beacon let her find fellow players wherever they went. But even beyond the risks of participating in extralegal underground fights while living long-term in a Windfall-controlled city, how would she possibly explain the prize money—and the bruises—to Cylie when they were supposed to be going to school?

Before, depending on the ratio of cash to bruises, she’d told him they were from warehouse burglaries, or day labor, or freelance enforcement contracts. He always believed her. Cynthia was good at those kinds of things, and she never lied to him.

Except about this.

For years, it had been her one secret. The one thing she'd kept for herself, the one thing that helped her stay in her skin when Cylie was off without her.

It’d started almost by accident, after they'd just come off being "passengers" aboard a smuggling ship. She and Cylus had surprised the woman running security, Wu, by being assets instead of liabilities when they were boarded by another ship. But during the violence, Cynthia had lost herself. She didn't like to think about it, even now.

Even Cylie had looked a little afraid of her, after.

Wu had asked if she had any outlet beyond training. She didn't. So after the ship docked, the older woman looped her in, staking her own beacon and rep to bring Cynthia to a tether-ring match. At first she'd just watched, hiding under a borrowed balaclava and hat. But another youth showed up, around her size.

One thing led to another.

She'd come back to their squat with a black eye from a stray elbow, a jammed finger from not having wrapped her hands well enough, and assorted aches and bruises that lingered for days. But she’d also felt more at peace than she had since they'd left home.

Until she realized she had no good way to explain her injuries. Only beacon-holders were allowed to talk about tether-ring to someone outside; she’d promised Wu not to tell Cylie. Which she hadn’t considered when going in the ring.

He’d been distraught; then furious, when she wouldn’t answer any of his questions. He’d yelled at her. Like he‘d never come home hurt and unwilling to talk.

The next time, she had a story ready, afterwards.

She could have looped Cylie in once she earned her beacon, a few months later. But she’d gotten used to keeping it secret. Had found she liked having something all her own. She’d even made her own costume and mask; simple, because she was nowhere as good at sewing as Cylie. But she was proud of the ears on the hood, suiting the ring-name she'd chosen: ghostcat.

Childish, maybe. She'd been sixteen when she picked it. But that identity, and the beacon that marked her as a player, meant more to her than anything else in the world but Cylie.

Yet as she worked her way around and around the chair, tension and anger finally starting to ease in her body, she had to admit to herself that it might not be a bad time for a break from the scene. Because after her last time in the ring, in an underground gym on Prox-B the night before they'd left for Sol System and Europa, something... strange had happened.

The fight itself had been good; a money-match, which she’d won. After the tethers came down, while other players mingled, she'd collected her winnings and ducked into a corner like usual, avoiding the crowd. A normal mix of attendees: other beacon-bearers and would-bes, looped-in spectators and bettors, and a handful of vetted gray and black market recruiters. She'd shrugged a hoodie on over her sweaty costume and made ready to slip away, quick and quiet as her fighting namesake.

Only this time, someone waited for her by the door: a young woman, close to Cynthia's age, with dark hair and light brown skin. A trace of violet had glowed through the stretchy shirt covering her ample chest.

A fan, she'd said. Of ghostcat.

ghostcat wasn’t supposed to have fans. Tether-ring was built on discretion and anonymity, and she liked it that way. Players sometimes swapped match recordings with each other, but leaking those to outsiders was a beacon-breaking offense. Yet this girl had been waiting for her, dark eyes wide like Cynthia was some vid-channel star.

While the “fan” talked up a storm and Cynthia tried to decide which way to bolt, the back of her neck had prickled. Glancing behind, she’d scanned emptying stands to find a lounging, angular silhouette, shrouded in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

In that moment, she’d felt certain of what it hid: a hard woman, with a detached, predatory gaze that burned in her memory, ten years since she’d last met it.

Their instructor. Perhaps, their betrayer.

But, she’d told herself a hundred times since, it couldn’t have been—

“Cyn? Did you block the door?”

Cynthia’s body, just unspiraling into a takedown, accelerated as she whirled. Even as she processed the words and voice as Cylie's, her foot finished the sweep, sending the chair toppling backward.

It hit the floor with a dull, splintering thud.

---

"Well," Cylie said as he stepped back from the chair, "I don't think anyone will notice. Not until we're long gone, at least."

She'd broken a back post. They'd had to cut through the upholstery to coax the cheap, semi-synthetic "wood" back together; fortunately, multi-purpose adhesive was part of their kit. While Cynthia could still perceive the damage she'd done, she suspected her brother was right.

As he often was, annoyingly.

"These are good," Cynthia admitted grudgingly, pulling out a second fish roll and taking another sip from the insulated to-go teacup. Cylie had encouraged her to eat while he stitched the chair back together and told her about his distressingly adventurous evening. "And this blend is nice." Layers of subtle flavor held warm stone and flowers and just a little bit of smoke.

She hadn't tasted anything so pleasant in a long time.

"Emile recommended them." His voice was cautious. He'd relayed his story with his usual theatrical bravado while he sewed, but now his nervousness was showing. Moreso even than usual after they'd fought.

"This new contact of yours." She glanced at the commcard he'd set on the bedside table. "Aren't the Devignes the ones who turned one of Windfall's reclaimed worlds into a rich people's play version of an ag-planet?" Cynthia didn't bother to hide her skepticism. "The one they use in a bunch of their PR materials?"

"Yes." Cylie had clearly been rehearsing on his way back. "Which is even better! He belongs here. Who better to help us do the same?"

"Even if you're right, and he's sympathetic, do you really think it's a good idea to cozy up to one of Windfall's prize lapdogs?"

"He's..." For an instant, his face was earnest with an obvious urge to defend. She felt a pang watching him swallow the emotion and switch tacks, just as she might change angles in a fight. "Look, of course there's a risk. You were right earlier; this whole plan is risky. But you and I both know that sometimes the best place to hide is in full view. Who would expect a pair of identless nobodies to take up with someone like this? An associate like Emile could keep us from the kind of scrutiny we might face otherwise."

"And how do those bruises on your neck fit in?" There were several; though knowing Cylie, probably far fewer than he'd left on the other boy. "I know you're more comfortable trading touch than I am." An elision that hid different kinds of bruises. "But I never want you to feel like you have to do that, Cylie."

"I know." Cylus sighed, a faint blush creeping across his face. "I got these... Very voluntarily."

"You're horny for him."

"Yes," Cylus flopped back on his bed. "Fine. I'm also attracted to him. He's..." Closing his eyes, Cylie let through some of the sincerity he'd bit back earlier. "He's not like you'd think. He really seemed... Sweet. And not in a boring way. I... I like him, Cyn. I know it's stupid."

Cynthia's heart twisted inside her chest. "It's not stupid, Cylie. I saw how you were after we left Dushara. You liked that boy from the flower shop too, didn't you?"

Cylus' hands sought purchase in the bedspread. "Maybe."

All the confusion she'd felt looking at the brochures earlier was shifting, unfolding into comprehension. Cynthia modulated her voice into a near-perfect imitation of Cylie's, reflecting back his words from before. " 'We can have lives. We can have somewhere to stay!' " Her tone flattened back to its normal register, but the world kept tilting, realigning, truth becoming clear as she spoke it. "That's... what you want, isn't it? Not just because you think it's what we deserve, or should have been given, or what would be good for me. Because you want a chance to belong somewhere, to be part of... Of a community. Instead of it always being just the two of us, always on the move—"

He sat up, facing her with sudden earnestness that went through her like a knife. "Cyn, no. You're the most important person in the universe to me—"

"You too, Cylie." Tears stung her eyes, and her own truth poured out with them. "I really want you to be happy, but you're so good at not admitting what you really want, even to yourself, that I can't tell what would actually make you happy." She sniffed, rubbing a sleeve across her face. Crying was annoying, but this was important, and she couldn't say it without letting out the feelings behind. "Which, I get it. We haven't had options that might lead towards happiness, for... so long. But," Her voice cracked, "I'm so scared you'll hollow yourself out with hunger and I won't even know because I can't always tell when you're lying. Do you want to go to this school? Because if doing this will let you be happy, then maybe I can relax long enough to figure out what I want too."

He was crying too, she realized. "I'm sorry, Cyn—"

"Don't be sorry!" She interrupted. "Just answer me: do you, Cylus, want to go to the school?"

"Yes," he conceded in a whisper.

Cynthia flopped back on the bed, heedless of the crumbs from her half-eaten fish roll as relief flooded her body. "Great. I agree. Let's do it. Tell me you want the thing first next time, you idiot. Was that so hard?"

Cylie echoed the gesture, groaning as they both sniffled. "It was, actually."

"Maybe you can practice with this new boy." She took another bite of the fish roll. It really was good. "Doing what you want, I mean."

Cylie's laugh was choked, just managing to escape. "I... Yeah. Maybe I will."

Chapter 11: Her Finger on the Pulse (Valerie)

Summary:

In which we meet Valerie, Emile's older sister.

---

The lights in the garden blurred and sparkled before her eyes. Valerie blinked rapidly, staring out through the darkness cast by her presence, white wine warming in her glass as she imagined Emile, alone in the city she’d once loved.

Perhaps being preyed upon again.

She could hack into other corp or state system databases that would allow her to corroborate the details of the Keenes’ history, if she took time to plan her strategy. But she’d have to work to avoid detection, and any associated risk of blowback on the family.

There was another option.

"Counsel." She spoke into the empty room, voice flat. "Attend."

A deep violet indicator light turned on beside her terminal monitor; she watched its reflection blink to life in the window. "Present." Its voice matched her lack of inflection, otherwise resembling a human being of unguessable age and gender. She'd commanded it to stop feigning vocal tone when it spoke with her, because Adaire's pet AI annoyed her.

Unfortunately, it also had its uses.

To: "Valerie Devigne" [email protected]

From: "Emile Devigne" [email protected]

Val!! I'm so sorry I haven't checked in for days, it's been really busy! I hope you and everyone (and your fish!) are doing well!

Europa City is beautiful and all your recs are so perfect and ALSO. I met someone amazing last night, can't wait to tell you about him. Talk this weekend?? (also thank you for updating my email address <3)

Love, Emile

Valerie paced.

Outside, it was long past dark. Her office windows admitted soft golden illumination: glowing from fountains and along garden pathways, limning the branches of the nearest terraforming module in the distance.

Brighter were the shifting, multi-colored reflections from her aquarium and the half-dozen massive holo-panels above her desk.

Two were dedicated to dashboards displaying the live status of her chosen security metrics: one for the Devigne family's digital presence and assets, including immediate family accounts and feeds; the other for what she categorized mentally as Windfall shit.

Adaire had his own security department, of course, as did Devigne Wineries and Holdings. Valerie had built that team herself. But when it came to family, she preferred to keep her finger on the pulse. And when it came to Adaire's pet projects... well. Power and privilege had a price, as Mother always said.

She would know.

Another monitor was reserved for visual distraction or entertainment. Right now she had it set to a video Emile had taken while snorkeling on Terra, sunlight lancing through sea-blue. On the next display over, a stream of media alerts scrolled past at a measured pace, flagged at differing levels of priority and awaiting her review. It was there she'd first seen Emile's smiling face next to that idiot boy Brenn, who'd decided to trade her brother's affection for money and clout.

The last two monitors held her main workspace: one a busy terminal screen, the other thick with overlapping windows. Foremost among them were Brenn's Now feed, Windchat profile and recent gusts, and his "private" mailbox; all hosted on Windnet servers, and therefore as accessible to her as the garden outside.

She'd watched Brenn, in the wake of his moment of viral fame. Watched him bask in the attention on his feed, making coy little allusions, answering questions from the curious and the cruel. Sending gusts to his friends and sharing stories that, knowing Emile, just might be true, but which burned her blood to see bandied with derisive casualness. Watched him receive overtures from other gossip-hungry tabloids, watched him respond and schedule and haggle.

Now she watched his feed languish unattended as his outbox filled with his pleas for help. Unfortunately for him, Windfall’s rules regarding the privacy of key company staff were no less stringent for being rarely enforced.

And Emile had been born “key company staff”, just all the Devigne children, thanks to Lyonesse’s long-ago deal with Adaire.

Valerie had drafted the notice that went to Brenn herself, honing it to razor-sharpness with Counsel’s encyclopedic knowledge of Windfall’s corporate codes before passing it on to official channels. She only wished she could have seen Brenn’s face when he received it from WindSec. Wished she could watch him sending out another despairing message, this time to some family friend with a background in intra-corporate law, asking how any of this was possible. Wished she could watch him open the next message in his inbox: from the college he'd been about to start, rescinding their offer of admission due to his violation of their code of conduct.

Which Valerie, of course, had helpfully made them aware of.

And now Emile had met someone amazing. That he couldn't wait to tell her about. Except that he could, because it was Tuesday and he wasn't going to call her until the weekend. And that should have been fine, except that in the three weeks since he'd left home, he'd already been taken advantage of by some venal little shit who'd looked into his gentle eyes and seen only a chance for fame and fortune.

Valerie paused beside the cooling cabinet tucked under the small bar beside the door, crouching down to look through the glass. Right in front stood a bottle of last year's spring harvest white.

She took it out and uncorked it. Left the opener on the counter. Pulled a glass from the half-dozen hanging above the bar, poured it three-quarters full, and drank.

It tastes like leaves and sunshine. Emile on his twelfth birthday, with a fancy little glass of spring harvest white, green eyes wide in delight at this first taste of the family business.

The little lush. It still made her smile. She drank again.

They'd shared this same wine together the day before his eighteenth birthday, which felt like yesterday but was more than two years past, somehow.

On the border between the woods—the few dozen acres of the planet's old wilderness that Father had talked Lyonesse into letting him keep—and the main estate lay a small lake, its bottom mucky and its shores thick with lake lilies. A small dock extended into it, with a little rowboat that one of the estate staff made sure stayed clean and in repair.

Emile loved it there.

They'd sat on the dock together, drinking his favorite wine and eating cold fish with fresh bread and rice wrapped in grape leaves, and Emile had told her he wanted to leave home, and be a boy.

He'd known she'd understand.

Dion would have too, if xe were ever around anymore.

But even at eighteen, Emile had been presenting boyishly for a couple of years already, in his endearingly foppish little way, and seemed fairly content. So when he asked her advice, Valerie said that if he wanted to get off-world anyway, that he should wait until then to declare and get his mark. And when he turned to her and asked, with not a trace of accusation in his voice, when that might be, she'd promised to persuade Lyonesse.

Which she had. Though Val had thought he'd do his change as part of his University intake, instead of impulsively in the middle of his Reterra.

Still, he at least wasn't here to deal with Mother sorting out her feelings about her youngest child confirming his deferred decision to be a son. When Valerie had transitioned, she’d done so for herself alone; but Lyonesse had accepted it, in part, as a declaration of allegiance. Which was why Valerie had not been surprised to see her take it hard when Emile had made the opposite choice, even if she'd known it might be coming.

This was your idea, Lyonesse had said to Valerie at dinner earlier tonight. Keep an eye on him, and make sure he doesn't get hurt again.

Valerie turned to her monitors, sank into the mesh-backed chair she'd tuned to fit her body better than her own bed, took another drink of wine, and pulled up her little brother's messages.

It took no time at all to find what she was looking for; the timestamps were from earlier today.

Subject: Pleasure to make your acquaintance

To: [email protected]

From: "Cylus Keene" cylus.keene.96#[email protected]

Dear Emile,

First, I must thank you again; I have rarely spent a night so memorably occupied. Cynthia said to pass on her appreciation for the café recommendation; we are both now fans, especially of the fish rolls.

Secondly: Our conversation has convinced me to go ahead and apply to Europa University. I cannot imagine a better endorsement for an academy than to have a person like you for a student! I understand that the current round of admissions is for the next study-cycle, so it will be some time before I can join you as a classmate, even if all goes well. But Cynthia and I intend to apply for temporary residency and work permits, in hopes of contributing to and getting to know Europa City before becoming students here. May fortune flow our way!

Thirdly: While we undertake these next steps, we are staying at the Hospitality Suites near the starport, and as you can see, I've activated my comm on the local net. If your no-doubt busy schedule at the University allows you any extra time, and you'd enjoy sharing another evening together, you now know where to find me.

Cylie

—

Subject: RE: Pleasure to make your acquaintance

To: "Cylus Keene" cylus.keene.96#[email protected]

From: "Emile Devigne" [email protected]

Cylus! I'm so delighted you wrote! I had such a wonderful time with you and it would be my absolute delight to see you again !I wanted to reply sooner but today I have been to, a lot of events anyway I would be happy to come to meet you anywhere near your lodgings! I am obliged to attend a ceremonial dinner for new students this evening (ha ha I'm late actually but it will be fine, please forgive any spelling mistakes I'm walki in g and inputting) afterwards there is some kind of student mixer that I'm told may run quite late.

Tomorrow I am also over-occupied with mandatory obligations though I could possibly slip away for a couple of hours early in the mornign? But Thurs I should be free after 20:00! One possibility if you are interested in seeing another of my sister's recommendations is her favorite restaurant for eating the local seafood raw (apparently it's very good that way!) also she said it was a "great date spot", if that sounds appealing to you. Alternately we could revisit Callisto's Café and share some more fish rolls if you'd rather somewhere more casual! Or I'm open to anything else you'd like too, and if that time doesn't work I'll find another, please just please let me know!

Warmest wishes,

Emile

"Cylus Keene," she muttered, swirling the wine in her glass. "And who in Fortune's fuck are you?"

---

Valerie pulled a fresh bottle from the wine cooler and refilled her glass, seething.

This didn't make any sense.

Lyonesse had taught her how to discern fake idents when she was younger than Emile was now. She was the first to help Mother process the rapidly growing number of entry applications from would-be visitors to their planet. The skill paired well with Valerie's natural tendencies towards finding the flaws in systems; tendencies that had made Valerie a natural choice as the first digital defender of Devigne's Paradise, even if that mantle was no longer hers alone.

Yet the documents Cylus—and Cynthia—Keene had used to enter Europa bore none of the usual hallmarks of the fraudulent idents Valerie had originally practiced spotting. The digital watermarks were all present. The crypto-signed stamps of entry and exit matched with the ports they claimed to have traveled through. Their associated academic records showed two believable but exceptional students, with several letters of recommendation that appeared to have been written by actual human beings. And since the twins—given their birthdates—had purportedly spent their entire lives in non-Windfall jurisdictions, there was no easy way for her to fact check any of it.

Just two ordinary youths who happened to be visiting a Windfall world for the first time, specifically to check out the fabled University there. Nothing so unusual about that. The port hadn't flagged them; Europa Uni wouldn't either, if they applied, nor would the Europa residency permitting office. Hells, her own staff wouldn't have flagged them, if they'd been among a crowd of would-be visitors. As long as they'd had the credits.

That was one notable thing. The Keene twins were much less financially well off than their background suggested. They'd registered their idents at a Windfall bank branch just today, cashing cross-network creds into local ones and setting up modest lines of credit. But their starting deposits had been very low; not two weeks worth of living expenses. If they found decent jobs, lived modestly for the next year, and signed up for Windfall's deferred work-trade program, they'd be able to afford the University's expenses; but they'd have to commit for at least a decade.

Something just... didn't feel right.

She paced back to the windows again, her own shadow blocking the reflections behind her. Several small drones moved through the gardens below, little green lights visible as they... watered, or pruned, or maybe applied compost made from the estate's biowaste? Valerie knew what kinds of things the gardrones did, she just wasn't sure what the ones outside right now were currently doing.

Emile would have recognized each drone from the patterns of their lights. He'd known their schedules of activity, and what their most recent repair had been, and whether they were due maintenance soon. Even if he might forget to do that maintenance without his delicately balanced system of alarms to remind him.

He’d named the gardrones after different flowers: Daffodil, Bluebell, Hyacinth, and so on. He named the ag-drones that worked the estate vineyards and orchards, too; after grape varietals, or types of apple or pear or quince or whatever fruit they happened to specialize in.

The lights in the garden blurred and sparkled before her eyes. Valerie blinked rapidly, staring out through the darkness cast by her presence, white wine warming in her glass as she imagined Emile, alone in the city she’d once loved.

Perhaps being preyed upon again.

She could hack into other corp or state system databases that would allow her to corroborate the details of the Keenes’ history, if she took time to plan her strategy. But she’d have to work to avoid detection, and any associated risk of blowback on the family.

There was another option.

"Counsel." She spoke into the empty room, voice flat. "Attend."

A deep violet indicator light turned on beside her terminal monitor; she watched its reflection blink to life in the window. "Present." Its voice matched her lack of inflection, otherwise resembling a human being of unguessable age and gender. She'd commanded it to stop feigning vocal tone when it spoke with her, because Adaire's pet AI annoyed her.

Unfortunately, it also had its uses.

"I have two idents up on my system right now. Review them, and search all Windfall records for traces of either individual."

"Confirmed. Estimated query time: three minutes."

The power of it ran up her spine, a frisson of discomfort and pleasure. Counsel had access to every system on Windnet, albeit through a firewall that acted like a biohazard suit. If the point of the suit was to contain the entity inside.

But the network it reached across from within its very flexible confinement extended across several dozen planetary systems. Hundreds of planets and moons, holding the new-farthest flung children of humanity: those on the worlds that had been, were being, or would be utterly transformed.

And it was her father's work that had enabled Windfall's last thirty-five years of staggering growth: the terraforming technology he'd perfected on their Paradise and which Lyonesse had licensed to Windfall through a steel trap of a contract. She’d made Valerie study it; had shown her every word she'd chosen and why, how key clauses either left a helpful ambiguity or closed a dangerous loophole. It was information security, the same art Valerie had learned and practiced: only the technology was law rather than software. Your Uncle Adaire and I designed this contract together, she'd said, with warmth she rarely shared with her children. Adaire wasn't Valerie’s uncle, any more than her mother's girlfriend Sveta was her aunt. But they could have been; Lyonesse's powerful friend, and her intimidating lover, who had both been part of Valerie's life since her birth.

And now here she was, starting her second—or was it her third?—bottle of wine, alone, missing her littlest brother pathetically, using the power of Uncle Adaire's chained digital intelligence to stalk said sibling's new crush.

Self loathing bloomed in her stomach. The wine in her mouth soured on her tongue.

She needed to force herself to swallow, and then call off the fucking AI, and go cry in her bed like the thirty-five-year old woman she was supposed to be.

Valerie's throat worked; her body genuinely did not want to swallow the wine. Dizziness enfolded her, and she bent her knees, seeking stability as the ground beneath her swayed. She forced the liquid down, and opened her mouth.

"Four meta-matches found,” It said before she could speak, “excluding Europa spaceport intake data and data generated after idents were first engaged with Windfall systems."

The world rotated around Valerie, awareness of her own intoxication vanishing beneath an all-consuming swell of vindication. Those idents said these two had spent their entire lives outside of Windfall space. They shouldn't have a single match. And if they were going to have any matches, they would typically have thousands; Windfall‘s monitoring practices were thorough. The number of matches since the Keenes had registered their idents earlier today was probably in the dozens, simply because they were being logged as new visitors to Windfall-controlled Europa.

Except... the Keenes hadn't registered their idents until today, but plainly Cylus had gone around with Emile last night... Terran time?... Valerie shook her head, regretting the motion immediately. Not a conversion she had to do. That's what the machine was for.

Also, she should sit down.

"Counsel, calculate the difference between current timestamp and original timestamp for each meta-match and prepare a file type and content summary." Valerie flopped into her office chair, sending it rolling across the hardwood; sourced from the Paradise's own forests. "Read list, ordered by date, ascending."

"Ten years, three months, fourteen days. Images, with attached metadata across four revisions and addendum flagged for WindSec-S clearance only. Two children, approximately ten years of age, being evacuated from GJ 1002 b in conjunction with Windfall planetary reclamation efforts. High confidence facial match with both subjects.

"Four years, five months, six days. WindSec apprehension and incarceration records, including images. Subject is adolescent; WindSec-C override required to unseal and summarize contents.

"One year, two months, twenty five days. Request for assistance from compromised Windfall administrative clerk level I, with attached video. Contains description of a blackmail endeavor perpetrated by a young person who is a high-confidence facial match for Cylus Keene. Video includes sexual content.

"Twenty hours, thirteen minutes. Series of videos over a four hour and fifty six minute period. Europa City security camera footage, showing Cylus Keene's activity. Ninety one percent of the footage also includes Emile Devigne."

Valerie spun in her chair, slowly. Her feet touched the ground in feathery taps, keeping up momentum; but the chair's bearing was lovingly maintained and spun effortlessly.

Had been lovingly maintained. The new household engineer was... fine. But she'd snapped at him earlier today anyway, because he was not her little brother, to whom she had never once raised her voice.

"WindSec-C override authorized, on my credentials. Summarize the second item."

"File covering an identless young person who is a high-confidence facial match to Cylus Keene. Apprehended by WindSec in the act of breaking and entering to Vega Station local Windfall liaison's office. Individual responded to inquiries with statements later confirmed to be false. Prior to follow-up interview, individual escaped WindSec custody. Subsequent investigation in partnership with Vega Station did not succeed in recovering the individual."

Interesting. Not good enough to avoid getting caught, but good enough to get in, and more impressively, get out. WindSec had its share of weak links, as Lyonesse asserted all physical security organizations did. But a teenager getting out of their custody was... unusual.

"Play sample of short clips from fourth item, upper limit five minutes of footage. Prioritize footage that includes Emile Devigne, movement patterns not frequently repeated in other footage, and activity outside of direct camera view." Illicit sorts practiced watching for and staying out of cameras, which often was enough to hide their tracks. But Counsel wasn't some third-rate vid-scraper. Reflections might show what someone had taken pains to hide.

Watching the resulting clips, Valerie rolled back over to the bar and refilled her glass, not looking away from the monitor that had previously been showing looped snorkeling footage.

When a polished metal garage door caught the reflection of Cylus crowding Emile up against a wall, her fingers tightened around the stem of the wine glass.

After the clips finished, looping back to the moment where Emile had wobbled out from behind a bush with an unfamiliar red scarf around his neck, she sat in silence for several minutes. Kicking herself back into rotation, she watched the clips replay, alternating between watching the monitor and its reflection in the window.

"Windsec-S override, my credentials. Summarize addendum to first file." She didn't recognize her own voice.

"Encrypted message exchange, Windsec-S clearance level, between Svetlana Glazastova and—"

Valerie stopped hearing, ears ringing. The chair slowed, the world around her tilting out of true, the wine in her stomach—why had she drunk so much of it?—abruptly threatening to evacuate the way it had entered. She breathed, deep, just-controlled gulps of air, shuddering as they came and went.

Of all the people in the galaxy, what were Aunt Sveta’s fingerprints doing all over this mystery boy who had apparently been arrested for infiltrating a Windfall office, escaped confinement, then two years later blackmailed a Windfall employee—successfully, at least for some duration—and now had attached himself to her babe-in-the-woods little brother?

...the blackmail. Sveta’s very involvement was enough to move Valerie to action, but she might as well stoke the fire of her righteous fury with whatever petty sextortion scheme this young criminal had concocted. “Play video attached to third result.”

The looping clips of Cylus and Emile were replaced by Cylus alone, dressed in a purple, black, and white outfit quite at odds with his and Cynthia’s current, apparent poverty. He was sprawled on a bed, loose-limbed and small. He looked dazed, and...

Afraid.

A cut in the footage. Someone was touching him. Cylus was... fighting, pushing against those hands with his own, tears streaking down his face as he cried out—

The wine rose in her again. She turned away, but his voice—she hadn’t wanted to hear his voice, she realized, especially not like this, protesting, pleading, begging—followed her. In the window, she saw his reflection contort. Heard threads rip, buttons clatter to the floor—

“Stop playback,” she snapped, clamping her eyes shut. Trying to breathe, though her lungs felt tight and closed.

Behind her eyelids, she saw Auspice, as she’d found him curled up in her dorm room after the one night he’d gone out into Europa City without her. Barely older than this boy, even if they couldn’t look any more different from one another.

Opening her eyes, she rolled over to her aquarium. Her unsteady breath fogged the glass as she watched the fish dance and dart.

Across the years, she could still hear Auspice’s voice, raw and weeping. Could see dim pinpricks of magenta light flickering around his eyes and mouth in time to his sobs as his photosuppressants wore off.

She wished that’d been the only time she’d heard him in pain. Or the only time she’d felt certain that his pain was her fault.

Her anger cracked and bled, something else stirring in its wake.

"Counsel,” she managed after a long period of silence. “Take message dictation."

Chapter 12: Out of Reach (Cylus)

Summary:

In which Cylie prepares for a second date, remembers an encounter from his past, and receives an unexpected message.

---

After taking their measurements and interviewing them about their preferences, requirements, and performance routines, the tailor had tried to shoo them off. But Cylus had convinced the older man to let him stay and observe. So Prisma had set him to work on simple repairs alongside several other sewing assistants, perched around the next worktable over while the couturier constructed their costumes.

And so Cylus had watched with growing awe as the costumer worked a magic far more lasting than any of his own illusions, notes and sketches transforming into garments finer than anything he’d worn since leaving home.

Now, he dug down to the very bottom of his bag, pulling out one piece at a time. His hands hardly shook at all as he spread them out on the bed, concentrating on the memory of seeing himself in them for the first time.

Alone in the hotel room, Cylus hefted his travel bag onto the bed: preparing, for the first time in a year and a half, to confront the one truly fine outfit he owned.

Cylus and Cynthia had improvised many costumes and disguises over the years, scavenging and thrifting and occasionally stealing, altering and recombining to the best of Cylie’s ability. But the Masked Parade had standards; while their performing skills had met them, the patched-together costumes they’d worn onto the circus fleet had not. Instead, the Parade Mistress had sent them to visit Costume-Master Prisma.

After taking their measurements and interviewing them about their preferences, requirements, and performance routines, the tailor had tried to shoo them off. But Cylus had convinced the older man to let him stay and observe. So Prisma had set him to work on simple repairs alongside several other sewing assistants, perched around the next worktable over while the couturier constructed their costumes.

And so Cylus had watched with growing awe as the costumer worked a magic far more lasting than any of his own illusions, notes and sketches transforming into garments finer than anything he’d worn since leaving home.

Now, he dug down to the very bottom of his bag, pulling out one piece at a time. His hands hardly shook at all as he spread them out on the bed, concentrating on the memory of seeing himself in them for the first time.

A tight-fitted black vest, lined and accented with purple satin, two sweeping tails in the back. Worn beneath, a shoulder-baring button-up shirt, white with thin scarlet stripes. Detached sleeves that gathered at bicep and wrist, structured to accommodate forearm sheathes and other useful trickery. Convertible black pants with purple and red trim, made from a fancy synthetic that allowed the legs to detach in response to an EM pulse, leaving behind tight shorts suitable for more acrobatic maneuvers... or more daring outfits, depending on what else he paired them with. Under it all, a breathable nanomesh leotard with a built in binder, adjustable using the same electronic pulse as the pants.

He’d thrown the leotard away after the last night he’d worn this outfit.

Stupid. Even if the crotch had been ruined, he might have salvaged the binder portion; it had fit far better than anything he’d worn since.

As for the rest... he drew a steadying breath, forcing himself to assess the damage.

All the buttons on the vest and shirt were gone, only threads left behind—

Did you want to rip my clothes off, Christopher? The intrusive memory of his own voice: harsh, almost unrecognizable.

He grimaced, conjuring instead the memory of Emile’s vest, willingly ravaged by his seam ripper. The next time he saw that boy, he would not be dressed like he’d been last night, in the sort of clothing he’d learned to tolerate for the sake of affordability and anonymity.

Matter-printed trash.

His hands stroked over the sleeveless shirt; horribly wrinkled from too long spent wadded at the very bottom of his bag, but undamaged save its missing buttons. The vest, unfortunately, had torn where the tails split—

Stop, please, don’t— The memory of his knees sliding on the bedspread as he reached behind himself, fingernails digging into the backs of Christopher’s hands, feeling them twitch weakly as he repositioned them for the benefit of the camera—

A shudder ran through his body. Gritting his teeth, he forced his focus back down to the hotel bed.

The tails had ripped along a seam. Easy enough to fix. He’d have to alter both parts of the top, though. Even if he’d had a decent binder, he’d grown since he’d last worn them. Not entirely in ways he preferred, but it was what it was.

He’d correct that soon enough.

The detached pants-legs were fine. He hadn’t included them the last time he’d worn these clothes, layering the shorts over fishnets and thigh-highs that he’d discarded along with the leotard.

For Emile, he’d wear the pants with the legs attached, at least while they went out to that fancy fish restaurant. He could always wear something scandalous beneath, a little surprise for later...

He wanted to message Emile back right now. His eyes lifted away from the bed, seeking the cheap hand-comm he’d enabled earlier that day, laying on the bedside table.

He had to make the boy sweat a little longer before he responded, though.

What are you waiting for? Cynthia had asked. She’d caught him rereading Emile’s reply before she’d left for the hotel gym half an hour ago. He’d waved her off, citing the importance of letting the mark stew, assuring her he just wanted to make sure he’d absorbed all the salient details.

Not that he hadn’t read it a dozen times in the few hours since he’d received it.

It had been a pleasant distraction during a very long day, getting set up to operate locally and much more legitimately than either of them was used to. They’d gotten their comms and idents connected, exchanged their remaining cross-net creds for Windfall ones, opened a credit line under their false credentials, and submitted their residency and work permit applications.

After that, Cylie had shown his twin around the parts of Europa City he'd followed Emile through last night. She’d given him a look when he obliquely pointed out the hatch Emile had led them down, but mercifully not commented further. They'd even scoped out the edge of the University campus, though they hadn't actually gone in yet. The skyscrapers and spires of Europa City's commercial district were arguably more impressive, but something about the glassy columns and plant-wrapped façades of the University's campus intimidated him more.

Every time he’d felt exhaustion coming on, taking a moment to reread Emile’s response had bolstered his energy. But he’d be a fool to write back so soon. Whatever approach he took with Emile as they moved into this next phase of courtship, desperation wasn’t going to be part of it.

After all, Emile was clearly willing to be the desperate one.

Cylie wondered if Emile had touched himself since last night. And if he had, whether he’d kept his promise to save his ‘final pleasure’ until they met again.

He would‘ve wagered on it.

Cylus forced his eyes away from the comm, back down to the clothes on the bed. No sense scheduling a second date until he had something appealing to wear.

The shorts portion of the pants was... remarkably intact, actually, their stretchy fabric undamaged. But the zipper was separated, several teeth bent. He tested it, moving the slider to see if it caught—

No, no, no, no— He remembered, abrupt and unwilling, how his voice had scraped inside his throat, how he’d maneuvered Christopher’s hands to either side of that zipper before forcing them apart—

Cylus turned and walked to the window. He stared out at the building across the street, at the mirrored reflections between it and their hotel. Leaning his forehead against the cool glass, he tried to slow his racing heart.

Why was he thinking about all this? Nothing had really happened the night he’d last worn these clothes.

Nothing he himself hadn’t orchestrated.

Closing his eyes, he met the memory of Christopher’s face, slackening from smug self-satisfaction into fear as the drugged liquor he’d intended for Cylie dragged him under instead.

The memory of gin burning on his tongue; of the world tilting from just the small sip he’d taken to confirm his suspicions before switching their glasses. The echo of his own weeping—

False tears. To sell the theatre he’d recorded on Chris’s comm and backed up to his own: the perfect blackmail material. All he’d had to do was pretend to fall into the poorly laid trap, then playact a series of scenes suggesting the depredations that Chris would have visited on a more innocent victim.

And if, after the performance was done, when he’d held his knife to Christopher’s unconscious throat—a single motion away from spilling his lifeblood, soaking the sheets with red, negating the value of all that carefully crafted artifice—the world had flooded with unbidden tears...

Well. He hadn’t recorded that. It didn’t matter.

Cold pressed against his shoulder.

His eyes fluttered open. He’d slumped to the ground, leaning against the chill glass of the hotel window.

A long, ragged exhalation fogged the world outside.

He needed... his sewing kit. Start by repairing the vest. No extra fabric needed for that. Just pin it together and... stitch.

Levering himself to his feet, he started towards the bed.

His comm pinged, the small sound startling in the silence.

It had to be Emile. It had to. Stealing time between all his commitments, perhaps?

Relief suffused Cylus’ body. A few stumbling steps carried him to the table and the comm.

Unread message. Unknown sender.

Subject line: Europa University, Emile Devigne, and You.

An icy pit opened deep in his stomach.

To: "Cylus Keene" cylus.keene.96#[email protected]

From: Unavailable

Cylus,

I will ensure the success of your upcoming application to Europa University, as well as the application of your sister Cynthia.

You will provide me with all material related to your current, false identity credentials. With my alterations, they will be of sufficient quality for the Europa University Admissions Department. I will also expedite your recently-filed Europan residency and work permit applications.

The conditions of this assistance:

• You—and any entities or organizations affiliated with you—will have no further correspondence of any kind with Emile Devigne.
• The same shall make every reasonable attempt to avoid further physical or digital contact with him and anyone acting on his behalf.

If you fail to comply for any reason, I will ensure that "Cylus and Cynthia Keene" are discovered to be fraudulent identities, assumed by a pair of extra-network identless for motives unknown. This will result in, at best, your permanent deportation from Europa.

If you find yourself skeptical of my ability to enact either the promise or the threat, I cordially invite you to leave Europa now, or else to try me, and find out.

My conditional regards,

V

Cylus’ body froze, breath hollow in his lungs.

For an instant, he was ten years old again: surrounded by strangers on a windowless ship, unable to even watch as everything he’d ever loved besides Cynthia fell away behind him, out of reach forever.

Alone in a hotel room, in a city ruled by the corporation that had stolen his home, he curled in on himself and wept.

Notes:

This marks the end of Act 1 of Europa University: Admissions; we'll return with Act 2 starting in August!

Thank you so much for reading this far! If you enjoyed, and want to make sure you catch the next act as it begins, please subscribe to the work! You can also find me on Bluesky by the name Cori Catchthorne, where I'll be chatting more about characters and story in the meantime. :)

Notes:

Thanks for reading :) New chapters will posted every other week (except the first 4, which will come close together) I also post early excerpts, notice of updates, and various other chatter on Bluesky and Tumblr.

Also like many authors, comments on my fic convert at a very favorable exchange rate into: the wind beneath my wings; the air within my lungs; the fire within my heart.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of Europa University