All Changed, Changed Utterly

Yan and Sid continued to attend various discussions with the Guild and the Olar government over the next few days. None of them felt like they went anywhere, and they were exhausting without being productive. The low level staff on Olar weren’t willing to make a move without Governor Cresas’s approval, and Cresas kept dragging things out, trying to change the Guild’s demands. It was clear that he did not want to submit to any sort of corruption investigation, and he would probably decide to go the route of letting First Sandreas dissolve the Olar government completely rather than comply. This delay grated on Sid, even though they physically could not leave the planet until First Sandreas arrived on the First Star .

“He knows that the more uncooperative he is, the more likely Sandreas will be to have him hauled up before a tribunal, right? Taking power away from the two of us by waiting for Sandreas to make the actual judgment call isn’t going to help him,” Sid complained one night after they returned to their hotel. He was stomping around the lounge and signing with a snappy harshness that Yan thought would make her own shoulders tired.

“He might have thought you were bluffing, and that you didn’t actually have the power to unseat the Olar government. And he’s making a bet that Sandreas won’t do that. I probably wouldn’t, if it were up to me.”

“I would, though.”

“I wouldn’t have made your ultimatum in the first place. I hope Sandreas isn’t mad about it.”

“It doesn’t matter if he’s mad. He’ll be more unhappy with Olar.”

That was probably true, but Yan wouldn’t be so quick to think that Sandreas would forgive Sid for his overstep so easily. “It will matter to you.”

Sid turned away without replying.

On the last day before Sandreas was set to arrive, the mood during discussions was fouler than usual. The Guild delegates were feeling antsy about spending so much time on a planet, and even though Olms kept them in line, their frustration was growing. There were constant barely-audible mutters between a couple of them about leaving Olar and allowing the planet to starve, but Olms was determined to at least wait until she had met with Sandreas. This may have just been pragmatism: her father’s ship, the Neutron Star had left the system to go perform a few small contract jobs for nearby planets— none of the Guild delegates would be able to leave until that ship was called back, anyway.

When Yan asked about this, Olms laughed. “Unfortunately, my father has gotten the worst of both worlds from having me as his daughter. He is occasionally forced to ferry me around, and yet I have none of Guildmaster Vaneik’s real power. If I had a ship of my own— well, I still wouldn’t want to lose millions of credits wasting time doing nothing, either.”

“Does Apprentice Thule’s family help him travel?” Yan asked.

A cloud passed over Olm’s face. “No,” she said, and that was that.

If the whole set of negotiations had ended up as something other than a game of waiting for Sandreas’s fury to descend on the planet, there might have been some sort of celebration the night before he was supposed to arrive. Even if it had just been a tense gathering with drinks to facilitate it, it would have been something to occupy Yan’s time. But instead, there was nothing. This left Yan sitting in the lounge of the hotel, again, trying and failing to compose a letter to Sylva. Again.

She was sitting near the tall windows, her computer in front of her. Although she kept typing a few words into the message box, she almost immediately deleted them every time, and then gazed out the window. It wasn’t snowing tonight— the air was crystal clear, and the lights from the hotel were glinting off the piles of snow that formed up in hard banks along the sides of the road.

She watched the usual set of people coming and going from the hotel, carrying in suitcases and hastily shuffling between the idling taxis and the warm hotel entrance. She wondered who they were, and what business they were coming to undertake here in City One. Probably most of them were businessmen, trying to find a way to deal with the impacts of the Guild’s trade blockade— find new places to store their finished products for shipment out, since the ports were backed up with goods that couldn’t move; negotiate ways to pay for the last remaining supplies of imported materials, since there would be no more coming in until the situation was resolved. But some might be in the city to visit family, and some might be waiting in hotels to try to take the first Guild ship that offered passenger service off the planet, once that passenger service started up again. Yan didn’t know for sure— there was no way to tell who anyone was from the way they were bundled up against the cold. But thinking about these people and their trials distracted her from her own.

However, when a solitary person slipped out of the hotel side door dressed in a very conspicuous embroidered cloak and began to walk down the street a little ways to hail a taxi, Yan narrowed her eyes. Sid had said just a half hour before that he was planning to go to sleep, to be more refreshed for Sandreas’s arrival. The fact that he had lied, and the fact that neither his minder nor any of the security team had followed him out of the hotel, meant that he was up to something. Yan stood hastily, shoved her phone in her pocket, and began to leave the lounge.

“Going somewhere?” Iri asked, looking up from her own correspondence.

“Bathroom,” Yan mumbled.

Over the past few days of living in the hotel, Yan had developed a clear mental picture of all its entrances and exits, and where the security teams patrolled and monitored. She, too, took the side door out. As she left, she glanced up at the security cameras. Sid had covered them with fallen snow, making it look like a gust of wind had blown through incidentally.

Outside the hotel, the cold hit her with force, immediately pulling all feeling from her skin. Although she was at least wearing her warmer boots, she hadn’t had time to put on her winter cloak, and was just wearing her cassock. It was warm, but not warm enough. Wind whipped by her, picking up snow from the ground and crusting it along her body. She ignored this and ran towards Sid, sliding along the icy street, and arrived just as he was climbing into the passenger seat of a taxi. He glared at her, but made no move or sign to stop her, and Yan climbed in next to him.

Sid gave the driver an address that Yan didn’t know, and the car spun off.

“Now you’re going to get us both yelled at,” Sid signed. “I was planning to have that fun all for myself.”

“Where are we going?” Yan asked.

“Why did you follow me?” Sid replied, instead of answering the question.

“We both followed Kino, once.”

“I’m not Kino.”

“You’re easier to see.” Yan reached out and rapped on his shaved head. “You’re shiny.”

That made Sid smile— a more genuine expression than she had seen from him in a long time.

“Really— where are you going?” she asked.

“Some place your minder told me I didn’t have time to visit.”

Yan scoured her memory, and then remembered what Sid was talking about. “You want to embroider yourself?” She signed. The pun made Sid grin further. It almost felt like some of the misery of the last few weeks had finally receded— here in this taxi, where it was just her and Sid, anyway.

“I want to be less shiny,” he replied, and gestured to his own head.

Yan looked at him askance. “That will hurt.”

Sid huffed and looked away out the window. Yan poked his shoulder to get him to return his attention to her.

“What picture are you going to have embroidered?” she asked when he finally turned back to her.”

“None,” he replied. He held out his left hand and gestured for her to take it. Yan did, and he turned his palm up. She wondered what exactly he was trying to show her, when she felt his power move, and he pointed to the fleshy area between his thumb and index finger, where a small dot of ink had risen to the surface of his skin. The power moved again, and it vanished.

“How did you do that?” Yan asked when Sid pulled his hand back.

“If you mix different pigments, a dark one and a light one, you can move one over the other,” he replied. “It works well on a small scale.”

“And you’ll test the large scale on your head?”

“I won’t get a better chance. Not like I’ll ever come her again, and everybody here does have big tattoos— they have to know what they’re doing.”

“If you say so.”

Sid stuck out his tongue.

They hadn’t driven that far from the hotel, but it was at this point that Yan’s phone rang in her pocket. Iri had noticed that both of them were missing. It hadn’t taken long at all. Yan silenced the call, then typed a text message explaining that she and Sid had gone out and that everything was fine. “We don’t need to be supervised all the time,” she mumbled under her breath as she typed. Iri would probably send people to follow them, but they would at least try to be inconspicuous and not bother the two ofthem.

“You should have left that at the hotel,” Sid signed, very annoyed.

“I want to avoid a panic. Why didn’t you just tell your minder that you wanted to go out?”

“I didn’t need Hernan following me constantly,” Sid said. “It’s not like anything is going to happen to me on Olar, and it wouldn’t matter, anyway.”

“Don’t say that.”

Sid shrugged and looked out the window. He was still in a good mood, Yan thought, but the fatalism in his statement concerned her. Since he wasn’t looking at her, she brushed his hand with hers, a quick request for permission to speak with him through the power. In response, he flipped his hand palm up on the seat between them, letting Yan lay her hand across his— not quite holding hands, but almost.

You feeling better? Yan asked.

Sid took a second to respond. Different, he said.

In what way?

We’re getting out of here, finally. I won’t have any more responsibilities, and…

What?

I’ve made up my mind about some things.

Such as?

It’s not important.

Yan’s thoughts flitted back to Sylva, and the letter she had been failing to write. Well, I wish I could figure out whatever you have.

I’m sure you already have.

This was mysterious, and Yan furrowed her eyebrows, but Sid felt reluctant to say anything else, and Yan didn’t want to pry. She just left her hand resting on his, and changed the subject. Why’d you let me come with you, if you didn’t want your minder to come?

I couldn’t have stopped you. This was only partially true, and Sid continued after Yan’s half mental objection. You understand it all, he said. And I like your company.

Yan felt a rush of warmth at that, but in lieu of letting the feeling spread through the power down through her hand and into Sid, she just curled her fingers to squeeze his hand.

I’ll miss you when we leave Olar, Sid said.

Yan almost objected again— she and Sid were headed to the same place, after all— but she understood. When it wasn’t just the two of them anymore, something about this experience would become trapped in amber: a bad memory frozen in time that they could only return to by looking at through a distant lens. The closeness that they had now because of it, that would change as well. It should have been good to leave the horror of the Sky Boat in the past, to think about her and Sid being able to move on to something else, but it still felt strange, and she couldn’t help but feel guilty, too. Why did she deserve to press forward with her life, consign those moments to the past, never to return to them? The people on board the pirate ship, the family of the people that she had killed, she didn’t know if they would be able to do the same.

She felt strange, and she felt guilty, but they were going to leave Olar, ready or not. She squeezed Sid’s hand.

Are you still taking the vena ? she asked.

Sid hesitated before answering. Some . She got a mental feeling of distress, and a half-formed explanation of trying to wean himself off it and failing, but she was reassured by the fact that he had been taking less of it than he had the first nights on board the Sky Boat .

Will you quit when you run out?

I’ll ask Kino to get me more , he said, but it was a bitter feeling joke, with no weight in it. I think I’ll save the rest in case I really need it. Since he had been splitting the pills into small pieces, he probably still had a few left. It would have lasted him back to Emerri, but Yan got the sense that he was going to save them for some specific event in the future, one that she could feel looming in his mental horizon, but could get no clues from. If they had been meditating together instead of merely conversing, she would have been able to discern its shape, but she got the sense that Sid wouldn’t have wanted to meditate with her just now. If this was something he wanted to talk about, he would have.

The taxi pulled up in front of a square full of market tents, the same square that held the tattoo parlor that Sid had been investigating that day on Olar. The market itself was mostly closed now— the storefronts remained open, but the tents had been emptied out. Foot traffic was too low at this time of night to be worth remaining out in the cold for the scant few visitors that came through. The warm yellow string lights still decorated and lit each stall, somehow making the scene feel emptier than if it was just the distant streetlights above— the decorations called attention to the emptiness of the tents. She and Sid wandered through it, looking for the tattoo parlor.

It was still open, and its door was propped open, bright light and music coming out, and a wave of warmth melting the snow out front. The door was open because one of the staff of the parlor was sweeping the floor, pushing dirt out through the door with a big industrial broom. When Sid stuck his head in the door, she stopped what she was doing and leaned on the broom handle.

“I have to admit,” she said, “I did not think that you would be back here, even though you did message me.”

“May we come in?” Sid asked. Yan noticed that the sign in the window that listed the hours said that the parlor was closed.

“Door’s open,” she said.

Sid walked in quickly, and Yan followed behind, looking around with wide eyes at the artwork on display on the walls, and the clean but strangely colorful furniture that filled the waiting area. This first area of the parlor only held waiting seats, a few tables for people to sit around, and a desk with the register on it, but there was a door that led further back, presumably to where the tattoos were done. Yan’s scan of the room included the woman holding the broom, presumably the proprietor of the business, and she captured Yan’s attention fully when her eyes landed on her.

She was of average height, shorter than Sid by a few inches, with pale skin crossed by wide bands of black tattoos. They started as circles on the pointy tips of her shoulders and elbows, and radiated out across her body in concentric circles until they began to overlap, or disappeared beneath her loose grey tank top. Looking at the tattoos closely, the thick stripes resolved into tiny, detailed geometric patterns. Her fine dark hair was cut close to her head, enough that it fuzzed out rather than having enough length to lay flat, and she wore dangling earrings that glittered under the lights. She was, Yan decided, very attractive. And she noticed Yan looking her over, and gave a crooked smile. Yan quickly averted her eyes to look back at Sid.

“Why didn’t you think I’d come?” Sid asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Figured you’d be busy. Introduce me to your companion.”

“Emmy Ames, Apprentice Yan BarCarran,” Sid said, bored already and wandering over to look at the posters on the walls.

Emmy shook Yan’s hand. “You looking for a tattoo too, Ms. Yan?”

“Er, no,” Yan said. “Just here for moral support.”

“Pity,” Emmy said. “You’d be fun to poke.”

Yan’s face heated up, and she gave a little laugh.

“Stop flirting,” Sid said, rolling his eyes.

“Right, my paying customer.” Emmy gestured for Sid to sit down at one of the tables in the back of the room, and they all did. “So, what is it that you’re looking for, exactly?”

Sid described what he wanted—starting first with the mixture of inks and then tracing around his skull where he wanted full coverage, an oval that went from the nape of his neck to his forehead, approximately where hair would be if he didn’t keep himself perfectly shaved, but inhumanly smooth in its contour. Emmy listened patiently.

“So, why is it that you need that specific ink mixture?” she asked.

“Here,” Sid said, and held out his hand to demonstrate his homemade tattoo test.

Emmy leaned back and folded her arms over her chest. “Now that, I’m of half a mind to refuse,” she said.

“What? Why?” Yan asked.

“The point of a tattoo is its permanence.” She shook her head. “Being able to change it at will—I don’t like indecisive people. People who can’t commit.”

Sid’s face reddened. Yan remembered what Sid had shown her of his apprenticeship interview, and Sid was clearly thinking of that now.

Yan came to Sid’s defense. “It’s not really my business,” Yan said, “but in my opinion, Sid is very much capable of committing to things.” She thought about their meeting with the governor—and even if Sid had only been making threats for her sake, he was still making choices that he was perfectly prepared to live with. “It’s not like he’s getting a tattoo for the sake of hiding it. And even if he wanted to hide it, he would just grow his hair out again.”

“Whatever,” Sid said. “If you don’t want to do it, I’ll do it myself, or find someone else to do it for me.” He tried to stand to go, but Yan caught his arm.

Emmy looked at him for a long moment as he tried to pull his wrist out of Yan’s grasp. “I’ll do it,” she said. “You understand that it does hurt, right?”

Sid gave her a dark look, one which Yan interpreted to understand that Sid considered the experience to be at least part of the point.

Emmy laughed. “Alright,” she said. “Gonna clean you up and get started. This’ll take a good few hours, even with my biggest needles, and I don’t want to be here until the sun comes up again. Usually I’d do something that big in multiple sittings, but I know you said you don’t have time.”

Emmy brought them back into the rooms through the back door, which were set up for the artist to work on a reclining body. Yan sat on a stool in the corner as Emmy bustled around and prepared everything, humming and focusing too much on her task to make small talk that consisted of more than verbally walking through what items she was gathering and the ink she was mixing. Sid paid attention for a while, but as soon as Emmy put on her gloves and started turning his head this way and that to mark the edges of the tattoo out with a marker, he took off his glasses, handed them to Yan, and then closed his eyes.

When Emmy asked Sid a question about something, it took a moment for Yan to process Emmy’s confusion at Sid’s lack of response. She had been half in a trance, watching her bustle around the room and move Sid’s head delicately this way and that.

“He’s deaf,” Yan said. “He can’t hear you.”

Emmy raised an eyebrow, then tapped Sid’s forehead. He cracked his eyes open, and looked across the room at Yan, who signed, “She wants to know if you’re ready to start.”

“Born ready,” Sid mumbled. “Don’t bother asking. Just go.”

“Hope you’re serious when you say that. If you need to tap out, kick your feet, okay?”

Yan translated this into sign for Sid, who said, “Fine,” and closed his eyes again as Emmy nudged him to lay back in the chair. If Yan couldn’t see his breathing, he might have looked like a corpse.

“It is very weird that he’s just going to lay there. Most people like to talk to me,” Emmy said as she started her machine, adjusting herself to get the best angle on Sid’s head. She looked over at Yan. “He will be alright?”

“Can I hold his hand?”

“Please,” Emmy said. Yan scraped her stool over towards Sid and picked up his hand. She got the sensation of him rolling his closed eyes, but he didn’t actually object. Yan was glad she had come over, because as Emmy leaned over and brought the tattoo gun to his skin, Sid tensed and Yan squeezed his fingers. He deliberately relaxed, breathing evenly, and the machine buzzed along.

Sid didn’t send any messages through the power, and was careful to keep even the tingle of pain out of his light connection to Yan. She was curious about it, but not enough to try to share it with him. Just curious enough to watch Emmy’s hands, and wonder what it would feel like to have her gloved fingers press her cheek sideways to turn her head, or brace the side of her palm on her forehead to get a better angle, or—

It did not help that every time Emmy had to lift her tattoo gun from Sid’s head to fiddle with some part of it, she would look into Yan’s eyes and smile, and that she kept up a wholly too friendly conversation with her the entire time, talking about her life on Olar, and her family, and telling Yan all about how tattoos had become such a staple of Olar fashion, and anything else that she could think to talk about. It was all so mundane, it would have taken Yan away from her troubles completely, had she not felt squirming and guilty about the experience. It would have been nice to let Emmy flirt with her, and be able to flirt back, but her thoughts kept returning to Sylva. Even though it was true that Yan had no real obligation to Sylva, she felt one, and watching Emmy mainly made Yan miss her.

Emmy was working in a broad spiral around Sid’s head, starting at the outer boundary of the tattoo and circling his head like a tonsure before continuing in to the center of the design. As she approached the center of the circle, after several long hours, she asked Yan, “Are you sure you don’t want one too? Not even something little?”

Yan was tempted to say yes, even having spent hours watching Sid alternate between sweating and shivering on the chair before her, but shook her head. “I couldn’t,” she said. “I always have to think about things for way too long.”

“You could do one like his,” Emmy pointed out. “It could disappear as soon as you didn’t want to see it anymore.”

“But I would know it was there,” Yan said.

Emmy laughed. “Well, it’s a pity that I’m losing my chance to leave a mark on the future leader of the Empire. Good to know she’s an honest girl, anyway.”

“Well, you’ve at least got Sid,” Yan said.

“Not quite the same.” But she laughed again, no hard feelings in it.

The last section of the tattoo went quickly, and when she was finished, Sid lay still for a long minute more, completely unmoving. Emmy was concerned, but Yan reassured her that Sid was fine. He eventually stirred and pulled his hand from Yan’s, then sat up, looking pale and woozy. He reached for his glasses, and Yan handed them over, though he winced when they rested on the sensitive area behind his ears, oozing and raw.

“You look like shit, my friend,” Emmy said, and handed him a mirror so that he could examine her work. “Do not fuck with that until it is all healed.” She also gave him a booklet of care instructions, which he glanced at but just stuffed blearily into his pocket. A very sugary can of soda and some peanut butter crackers were the next things pressed into Sid’s hands, and he shoveled them into his mouth so quickly that Yan was concerned that he might choke.

After he was alert enough to pay and walk, he thanked Emmy for her work, and they said goodbye at the door. Emmy was yawning and stretching, though Yan discovered that some of it was a performance, at least the part where she flexed and let her tank top ride up to reveal her stomach and the top of her hips peeking out of her low-seated pants, because she winked at Yan after she did it.

“If you’re ever back on Olar,” she said, “give me a call.”

Yan said something totally incoherent in response, and made a vague gesture pointing out the door, indicating that she had to leave to chase Sid, who was again summoning a taxi.

She was lucky that Sid only had the energy to tease her a little bit on the way back to the hotel. She shook her head at his few taunts, and he let it go. She wanted to ask him what he had been thinking about during the long hours under the tattoo gun, with his eyes closed and only the feeling of the needle on his head, but she figured that it might be too personal, and if he had wanted to talk about it, he would have.

It was very, very late when they arrived back at the hotel, although Yan was tired, she had been filled with a new energy, one that wasn’t even tamped down by Iri’s disapproving frown when she met the two of them at the door.

“First Sandreas is going to murder you,” Iri said to Sid. “You look horrible.”

“He’ll have to get in line behind my mother,” Sid said, and brushed past her to go to his room.

“I’m annoyed that you enabled this,” Iri said to Yan as Sid stalked away.

“I wouldn’t have been able to stop him. I just wanted to make sure he was okay.”

“Is he?”

Yan shrugged.

“Well,” Iri said, “get some sleep. The First Star will be here in the morning, and First Sandreas will want to see the two of you as soon as he lands. I doubt he’ll bother with the elevator.”

Yan nodded, but when she went into her hotel room, she didn’t get into bed. Instead, she opened her computer, and began composing a new message to Sylva. It might just have been the second wind that she was feeling, or the relief at finally going home and the knowledge that this was the last chance she had to write a letter, but the words came easily. It almost scared her, how easy it was.

Dear Sylva , she began, and then launched into an apology for not having written sooner, a garbled outpouring explanation of what had happened on board the Sky Boat and her feelings after that had prevented her from writing to anyone, even her family. Even if it was barely coherent, it was still something coming out of her, in one long rush. She trusted that Sylva would be able to understand what she was trying to say.

And Sylva— all I’ve been able to think about this whole trip, after everything that happened, was how much I wanted to go home. I don’t mean the Iron Dreams , and I told my uncle that I couldn’t go back there. And I don’t mean Emerri, really.

When I thought about going home, I was always just thinking about our dorm at the Academy. I know I can’t go back there— and it’s not like I have any reason to want to go back there except that it was the past, and I knew where I was, back then.

Everything has changed so much, and I don’t know where I am anymore. And I want to go back to this home that doesn’t exist anymore, that really was just a dorm room and nothing more than that— so maybe I shouldn’t feel like that was my home. But I did, I guess because it had you in it.

I’m sorry for not writing or calling you over the ansible. I should have, and I know I should have. I just couldn’t make myself, for whatever reason. I didn’t want to think about anything, and I know that’s something I should apologize for, too.

What I’m trying to say is that when I think about going home, when I think about wanting to go back to the past where I understood the world, I’m really just thinking about you. That’s not all of it, but the rest of it is gone forever, and you’re still here. At least I hope you are.

And on some level that scares me, because I don’t want to come back and have to figure out all the ways things are different. I know nothing’s ever going to be like it was again. It’s all gone.

Part of me doesn’t want to drag you down with me. I feel like— for what I did with the Sky Boat — if it wasn’t abandoning ship, it has to be killing the pirates— everyone should hate me for some part of that. And I know you won’t— I don’t think you’ll care about that at all. It feels wrong— like no one should be able to forgive me, because then I might forgive myself and let it all fade into the past.

First Sandreas said to me in my apprenticeship interview that I would see things and do things that I couldn’t unsee or undo, and I knew he was right at the time, but what if, on the other side of this, I somehow do forget it all? What does that mean for me? If I put it away and don’t look at it anymore, because I’m looking at you instead.

And I don’t want to look at you and feel that I’m staining you by letting you forgive me, because I don’t deserve it. But I know that’s a stupid way to think about anything— Iri and Sid would tell me as much if I bothered to ask them, and you probably will too. It’s not that you forgive me, it’s that you care about me. I don’t know if that makes it better or worse, but it gives me something to hold on to, something that I can understand.

It’s all a mess, Sylva. But I’m coming home, and I want to come home— or at least I want to see you again, regardless of anything else.

That’s all.

Yours,

Yan