Wonder What It Was Like

They had been walking for hours. The wails had thinned out — the wind had shifted, or the damned had finally got bored of them, take your pick. Kira was a few paces ahead, picking the safest line through stones the colour of old teeth.

Lian's hand kept going to his pocket without his permission.

He had picked the paper up again at first light. Could not bring himself to leave it. Could not tell himself why. The cyan glyph on his forearm had stayed dark since he'd slapped Jason quiet. That was a small mercy in a day with few.

Kira stopped. Turned. “You're fidgeting.”

“I'm not.”

“Your hand has been in that pocket for an hour and you're walking like there's a wasp in there.”

“I said I'm not.”

She held out her own hand. Palm up. Patient, the way Kira got when she had decided something — which was almost always more or less correctly. Lian hated this about her. He pulled the paper out and slapped it into her palm and said, “It's nothing. Some old —”

Kira had already gone quiet.

She wasn't reading the lines. He could tell. Her eyes weren't tracking the words. She was holding the paper the way some people held an animal that was injured but not yet dead, and her face was doing the thing it did when she was hearing something Lian couldn't.

He waited. He had learned to wait, with Kira.

“Lian.” Her voice was wrong. Soft. Like she'd been somewhere else for a moment and was coming back slowly. “Where did you find this?”

“Last night. Under a stone. After —”

“After Nemo.”

He couldn't answer that.

She turned the page over in her hand. The damp had nearly dried out of it. She put a fingertip lightly to one of the underlined lines and closed her eyes.

“It's loud,” she said.

“It's nothing. It's just —”

“No, listen to me. It's loud. Not the words. Underneath.” She tapped the paper twice, eyes still closed. “Whoever wrote this — whoever underlined it — they were afraid.But not for themselves. They were afraid for somebody who wasn't going to listen. Like — like watching someone you love stand in the road.”

Lian had no language for any of this. He scratched his neck.

“How can you tell that off a piece of paper.”

“Same way I can tell off your face,” she said, and opened her eyes, and looked at him. “Same way I told off Nemo's hands what he was about to do to that rabbit before he did it.”

He flinched.

Kira softened her voice. She did that, sometimes, when she remembered to. “I'm sorry. I don't mean — I mean it just ison the paper. It's still in there. Like a smell.”

She looked at the words again. Cyberpunk was meant as a warning, not a blueprint. Manufactured cognition. Citadel structures. She made a small sound — half a laugh, no humour in it.

“Wonder what it was like,” she said. “Before.”

“Before what.”

“Before this. Before — when whoever wrote this could still — could still feel angry about it. Could still write it down.Like it might matter.”

She handed the paper back. He took it. Folded it once. Put it back in his pocket without thinking, the way she had handed it back without thinking.

They started walking again.

“Lian.”

“What.”

“They were trying to tell us, weren't they.”

“Tell who.”

She didn't answer that. She didn't need to. The wind had picked up again and the wails were back, far off, where the damned had remembered they had a job to do.

Lian's hand stayed on the paper in his pocket the rest of the morning.