Kanagen

  Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. The perfect emptiness of her face had been marred and now part of her was sticking out, evidence of the loathsome garbage that lurked within the innocent-seeming shell of the sarcotesta. She ran her fingers over it for the third time; soft, full, palest red.

  She had lips. She had a mouth. She had teeth behind it, and a tongue — she could feel it slipping back and forth, running itself along each tooth in turn, exploring its surroundings. It was not the same bite she remembered having. It felt weird.

  She was exposed. The protective wall of the sarcotesta had been breached. How was she supposed to pretend she didn't exist with this obvious sign of life right on her face?

  "I think it's a marvelous job, don't you?" Anix said, one of her vines gently poking Haven's cheek. "I bet you can't even see the seam."

  Haven shook her head. She couldn't. Her lips and the sarcotesta's surface seemed to flow perfectly into one another, unbroken. "Ah..." Her mouth fell open, her tongue flopping out for a second before she reeled it back in.

  "Still haven't got the hang of it? That's okay, flower, just talk without it." Her vines coiled tighter around Haven's shoulders. "After all, it's not as if your diaphragm is ready to do all that work of pushing air around anyway."

  She shut her mouth and nodded. "It's... weird," she said, using the sarcotesta, not trying to make her mouth fit the words they weren't saying, couldn't say.

  "It'll take some getting used to. Every step in this process will, I dare say. But this opens up so many new frontiers for you! We can start introducing soups and the like into your diet — though I think we'll want to hold off on the more solid varieties for at least a week. And just in case, your feeding port is still there. Open!" She tapped Haven's lips, and she let her mouth fall open again. Anix's vine slipped in, pushed its way under her tongue, and tugged at something that clicked as it slid into pce. "Right there. So in case you get a tummyache from any of our culinary adventures, we can go right back to the good old nutrient paste."

  "Right..." Haven didn't say anything more, didn't trust herself to. This was the other part of the surgery, which wasn't any more keen on. Before, she'd been able to feel with the sarcotesta, but it had been nothing more than tactile data, a sense of touch and nothing more. Now, when Anix touched her lips, she felt a tingle, which became a kind of warm buzzing when her vine slipped into her mouth. The buzzing sank lower and lower inside her, settling in just behind her belly button, like a warm coal had slipped down her throat.

  She was getting turned on by this. I'm such a creep, she thought, getting turned on when Anix is just trying to help. She felt the feeding port click back into pce — fuck fuck fuck that's so hot — before the vine, wet with her saliva, slid back out. It was all Haven could do not to whimper.

  "Now," Anix said as she withdrew her vine, "I wanted to do something very special for you for your first real meal, but given the limitations on what you can process, I had to do some real digging through the Office of Terran Cultural Practices' recipe database. How does a cssic vichyssoise sound to you?"

  "A vichyssoise?" It had been a while since she'd had one — over sixty years, in fact, she reminded herself — but it was precisely the sort of old haute cuisine that had showed up at dinner in the Hudds-Friday household regurly, the sort of thing she was intimately familiar with. "Yeah, a vichyssoise sounds nice," she said politely.

  "Perfect! Why don't you come along and watch? We do need to start getting you up to speed on cooking for yourself eventually, and what better way to start than a bit of passive education, hm?" With a vine at the small of her back, Anix guided Haven to her hab's kitchen, where she picked her up and sat her on the counter so she could see what was going on.

  Over the course of the next hour or so, Anix demonstrated the process, narrating it to Haven as she went along as if she were on some old Terran cooking show. First, she sliced the potatoes, leeks, and onion, mise-en-pcing (a new term for Haven) the carefully measured mixture of spices in little bowls, and setting up all the cookware she would need. First, the onions and leeks went in for a "sweat," whatever that meant, followed by the thin slices of potato yered on top shortly thereafter. In went the spices and the broth — while the soup cooked, Anix tidied up the kitchen and gave Haven a little lecture on the history of the vichyssoise, which was apparently French.

  That made Haven smile on the inside. Her father had always been extremely weird about Francophones. She wondered how many of his favorite foods were secretly French in origin.

  "Now, we're coming to the part where we have to make a choice — immersion blender, or food processor? Either works, but I think we're going to use the tter, because I want to serve this at a lower temperature, and taking it off the heat will let it begin the process of cooling while we finish construction! Cooking is all about the appropriate choices at the appropriate time."

  "Right," Haven mumbled. It was probably the sixteenth or seventeenth time she'd said it throughout the process — she understood almost nothing of what was going on. There's onions in vichyssoise? I thought it was just leek and potato. And you have to blend it? It doesn't just... do that?

  It did not just do that. With exacting care, Anix poured off the soup into some kind of squat blender device, pced the lid on, and blended the hell out of the soup. By the time she stopped and removed the lid, there was nothing solid to speak of left in the mix. "And now, we pour this into a bowl," she said, doing just that, "and stir in the heavy cream. Then, we garnish. I think a bit of chives, and some basil oil piped in a nice little pattern will do the trick!" Haven watched as Anix oh-so-delicately created a pattern of vines in a circle around the edges of the soup bowl, then went back and added little leaves and flowerbuds. It was beautiful, easily the equal of anything her father's chefs had ever produced for her, and the sarcotesta happily reported that it smelled absolutely wonderful.

  "And now, we pop it in the stasis box. That'll keep it at its current temperature and freshness until Tara gets here!"

  Haven froze. "Tara's coming?"

  "Of course!" Anix said, smiling and patting Haven on the head before helping her down from the counter. "We're celebrating you having a mouth. Why wouldn't I invite your little datefriend?"

  She thinks Tara and I are dating? The thought curdled in Haven's stomach. She was absolutely not girlfriend material and sooner or ter that realization would hit Anix, and who knew what she'd do then? The way she was taking advantage of Tara was completely unconscionable and it made Haven sick to think about it, but she just couldn't help herself — whenever Tara was around, all she could feel were the butterflies fluttering around inside her, and how good it felt to do what she was told, to do all of Tara's scutwork at the office, to get pushed up against a wall or lifted onto a desk and ravished as much as she could be in the sarcotesta.

  When Tara arrived, wearing scks, open-toe sandals, and a lightweight shirt just a hair shy of translucent that they'd left half-unbuttoned to show off their cleavage, the very first thing they said was, "Wow." Their eyes immediately locked on to Haven's lips, with a hungry look that Haven was getting to be quite familiar with. I don't know how they can stand to look at me was the thought running through Haven's head as Tara lifted a finger to her lips and rested it gently against them. "Stars," they whispered, "they're so soft."

  "Our xenoveterinary surgical team has indeed outdone themselves," Anix said, as Haven squirmed and valiantly held back a whimper.

  "Well, I was going to take my time, but-" Their finger slid away as Tara cupped Haven's chin between thumb and forefinger before leaning in to press their lips together, and the fireworks began immediately. It had been one thing to feel Tara's lips with the sarcotesta's facepte, but to feel them with the tender, pliant flesh of her own lips was something else entirely. The kiss was gentle, if not chaste — Tara's need was palpable in the way they pressed against Haven, the way the kiss faltered momentarily as their tongue darted out to test her lower lip with a quick tap before pressing the attack again.

  The way Haven had ensnared Tara was completely unforgivable — she actually had them believing she was desirable in any way. Yet even with the wave of disgust and anger at herself, she couldn't help but feel the simple joy of being held, of being kissed. Her first proper kiss, that she could simply rex into, allow Tara to take the lead, to feel small and soft against her. The warm, almost electric buzzing began to trickle down her spine again, tying itself in a slowly-growing knot between her hips.

  She knew she should stop. But she couldn't.

  It was a beautiful day. It was always a beautiful fucking day on an Affini ship, or station, or whatever the hell they considered this monstrosity called Parthenocissus. It was no different here on the third ring than it had been on the first. Trish would take a hundred rainy winter days on Solstice, with false oak spores scunging up every pool of water and stinking even worse than usual, over this perfectly engineered Potemkin climate. "So how long do I have to spend at this?" Trish grumbled.

  "Oh, long enough to have some fun," Scoparia said amicably, giving her a pat on the back with a vine. "A few hours at the very least."

  "I don't know how much more pinly I can say it that she and I have nothing in common," Trish said. "You might as well ask me to make friends with a total stranger."

  "Well, as I understand it, that's what terrans are particurly good at it," Scoparia mused. "So you're well-equipped for it! Besides, Lay's such a charming little thing. So clever, so polite. Really, you could learn a lot from her."

  "I did, before she was domesticated. Anything I learn from her at this point is just going to be something that an affini put there."

  "Well, you could stand to learn that, too. Ah, I believe this is the one." The garden path they were walking down had branched several times, and had finally brought them to a hab surrounded by tall conifer-analogues. The hab and the trees alike were draped with long hanging vines flowering in every imaginable color and shape, and the ground cover was no less a riot of hues and shades. Like everything else the Affini did, it was so aggressively tamed that it wrapped back around from natural to unnatural at least twice over.

  When the overbroad and absurdly tall double doors opened, they suddenly seemed much less overbuilt. "Ah, Scoparia, hello." Ice raced up Trish's spine as she stared up at the monster that had broken humanity's best hope. Was it possible that it had grown even taller since the st time she'd id eyes on it? It was four meters tall at least, maybe more, its bark skin holding back vines bristling with thick needles.

  "Tsuga. Thank you so much for agreeing to host this little pydate. Trish desperately needs to get out into the world more. She's such a homebody if you let her be."

  "Oh, it's my pleasure," the monster said, kneeling down and still towering over Trish. It had changed its face — its mockery of human expression was much higher-fidelity now. "It's been quite a while, little wildflower. It's good to see you well, especially after hearing about your little heart scare."

  Trish said nothing. She held herself still, and concentrated on keeping her breathing steady.

  The monster looked her over, an expression of puzzlement crossing its face. "You're afraid, aren't you?"

  Trish shook her head. "It's not fear." It was; Trish was terrified, but she wasn't going to give the thing the satisfaction of admitting it, and there was another feeling that she was clinging to with all her will.

  "Well, Gordian Knot or no, we'll get that properly untangled. Come in, little one, Lay's waiting." One of the monster's bristly vines touched the small of her back, and Trish leapt forward less out of obedience than out of sheer revulsion. There was a brief exchange in Affini between it and Scoparia before the door closed, locking Trish in.

  She had never been inside the thing's habitat before. It was even more colorful on the inside than it was on the outside, a carpet of flowers covering a false forest floor beneath a false sky with clouds zily drifting above the forest's canopy. Even the trees were covered in flowering vines — practically every surface was blooming somehow. The monster led Trish through the entryway to the common room, an Affini parody of domesticity, and there on the floral sofa y Cass, lifting her head and blearily blinking her eyes. "Oh... Trish... hi," she said, lifting a hand and giving a nguid wave before pausing and staring at her own hand. "Oh wow."

  She's three sheets to the wind. "Overindulged a bit, did we?"

  Cass ughed. "Noooo. Mistress got me extra high for your visit," she said, rolling over and making a valiant effort to sit up. "I was worrying too much." Her eyes fixed on the monster and a look of utter, rapturous joy came over her face, and she said something another nguage — not Affini, but a Terran nguage Trish didn't know. Arabic, maybe; it sounded like Arabic.

  And the monster responded in that very nguage without missing a beat, reaching out with a vine to caress Cass's head. "But let's stick to English for Trish's benefit, my little flower, shall we?"

  "Ohhh, right," Cass mumbled, turning her attention back to Trish and extending a hand. "Come and sit, I'm not entirely sure I can stand up."

  "I'm not surprised, as high as y- hey!" Without any warning, those thick, bristly vines had wrapped around her torso and lifted her clear off the floor, depositing her on the enormous expanse of the sofa without so much as the slightest warning. "Ask, maybe!" she growled at the monster.

  "Whatever for? You were getting up there anyway," the monster said, smiling warmly and taking a seat on the sofa, neatly trapping Trish between it and Cass — if she wanted to avoid it, she had to get close to the broken remnants of one of her oldest friends.

  Or she would have, had Cass not managed to roll over and lean up against her, neatly cutting off that avenue of escape. "Heyyy," she mumbled zily, wrapping her arms around Trish and hugging her tightly. "I missed you."

  "I miss you too," Trish said under her breath.

  "Don't the two of you look precious together?" The monster smiled, cracked its chest open, pulled out a tablet, and took a picture of the two of them before Trish could so much as protest. "Polyphyl will shed half her petals from sheer cuteness overload when I send her that."

  "Leah's at the vet for a checkup," Cass whispered to Trish. "So it's just you, me, and Mistress."

  "Lovely," Trish grumbled. She was doing her best not to look at the monster — the st thing she needed was for the thing to ensnare her — but she didn't exactly want to look at Cass, either.

  "Just the three of us, indeed," the monster said, reaching out with a vine and booping Lay on the nose before cupping her chin and lifting her gaze skyward. "Now, pet, listen to me very carefully. Breathe in. Gather up all those little thoughts you're still having, bottle them up nice and tight." Cass obeyed without hesitation, sucking in a deep breath and holding it. "Now, breathe out, and let all those thoughts rush out." Cass exhaled, her breath broken by a giggle. "Now, lovely girl, what's two plus two?"

  "Huh?" Cass blinked, trying to sit up. "Uhm, four."

  "Good girl," the monster said, stroking her head. "Again, big breath in. All those leftover little thoughts, every st little one, gather them all up, and breathe them all out. New question, Lay: what's two plus two?"

  "Uh..." Cass screwed up her face and gnawed on her lip. "F-four?"

  "Good girl!" Another ruffle, and a joyous ugh fell out of the drugged up woman.

  "What the hell are you d-" Trish turned to look up at the monster, purely as a reflex, but even as she realized what she was doing, the monster grabbed her and turned her gaze aside.

  "This isn't for you, Trish. Stay still and watch. Lay, take another deep breath, dig deep, and find every st little thought you still have, and breathe them all out. What's two plus two?"

  "Mmmf..." Cass squirmed up against Trish, but was completely unable to take her eyes away from the monster — it held her as tightly as it held Trish, but with only its voice, its gaze, its presence. "Misssss, stop asking such hard questions!"

  "Soon, petal, soon. Now, breathe in, and track down every st thought that's still in that empty little head of yours. Every st one. Hold that breath and hold those thoughts, little Lay, because when you let it all go, you're going to be so wonderfully thoughtless, so beautifully emptyheaded, so blissfully unaware. Are you ready, flower? Are you just bursting with all those thoughts you don't need?" Cass squirmed, her cheeks beginning to turn red, and Trish felt a rumble run through the monster's form.

  "Breathe them all out."

  Cass exhaled, a vacant look on her face that stood unmoving for long seconds before the monster waved a vine in front of her. Her eyes lit up and she giggled, and followed the vine as it wandered off to the corner of the couch, where she batted at it gently, ughing to herself and cpping her hands.

  "There," the monster said, its grip on Trish rexing. "That should give us a bit of privacy."

  "What the hell did you do to her?!" Trish growled, finally turning to look up at the monster's smug, self-satisfied face.

  "It's just a preconditioned response I've loaded into her for when she needs to stop overthinking things. A bit of gentle intelligence reduction goes a long way. At this point, even if I hadn't given her a microdose of xenodrugs to confuse her nguage center, I doubt she could process a word we're saying, and she's certainly in no position to form any concrete memories of it. Which leaves you and me free to have a conversation we've needed to have for about sixty years now."

  Trish's blood ran cold. She was here, alone, in the house of this eldritch thing that had crushed the spirit of one of humanity's greatest revolutionaries. There was no one to come to her rescue, no one to stop it from doing the same thing to her. Scoparia had delivered her here knowing what would happen, no doubt. This had been her pn all along. "I have nothing to say to you," she hissed.

  "Well, I have a great deal to say to you," it said, "so I suggest you listen. I gave you wide titude at Lay's request for those first few years. I was in a very poor mental state at the time, and far too permissive, and this was the end result — you, isoted, unhappy, alone, and unwilling to maintain a connection to her. I bear some of the responsibility for that, but so do you." It leaned in close, seeming to grow rger as it did so, almost as if it might fill the whole of the enormous fake forest. "You never once replied to a single one of her letters. That was very cruel, Trish, and I am extremely disappointed in you."

  "I had nothing to say to her." Trish's hands had long since curled into fists, her fingernails biting into her palms. "Because she isn't there anymore. Look at her!"

  "Yes. Look at her. She is happy. She is fulfilled. She is safe. Would you have her remain as she was? Hurting? Isoted? Starving? Or have you forgotten how miserable you all were, after a mere six decades of the Compact sheltering you?"

  Trish forced herself to turn away, looking back over her shoulder at Cass, who was still ughing and pying with the vine the monster was distracting her with. "I would rather she still be herself instead of this mockery of the woman she was. You carved out everything that made her her and you filled it in with yourself. If I believed there was anything left of her in there, maybe I'd have kept in touch with her. But there's no point. Cass is gone. All that's left is the parasite you put in her brain."

  She was a dead woman. She'd known that for a while, but this was the proper gallows walk now, and why not speak truth to power while she still could?

  The monster, for its part, remained silent for a long moment before it reached out and forcibly turned Trish back to face it. "How can you believe that after sixty years in the Compact?"

  "It's not hard," Trish whispered. "I see your handiwork almost every day. People hollowed out and repced with smiling, doped up copies of themselves, their minds scrubbed of anything you don't like, anything that might let them resist-"

  "You misunderstand," the monster interrupted. Its fingers tightened around her head — not painfully, but there was no question of escape — as its eyes began to swirl through a dozen colors, bleeding from one to the next with perfect fluidity. "How can you believe that after sixty years in the Compact?"

  "I-" Her words caught in her throat. Something was jamming the gears in her mind. There was just enough of her to know that she shouldn't be staring into those eyes, those enormous eyes that seemed to grow, to fill more and more of the space around her as the rest of the world fell away. Don't look, she told herself, as she stared right into them, unable to break away. Don't look. Don't try to see.

  "Hush, little one," the monster said. "I may not be an expert, but I have learned a thing or two from Polyphyl. I'm just going to take a quick look."

  Don't look. Don't try to see.

  "So breathe for me, Trish. Breathe in. Do you feel yourself resisting me? Hold onto that. Hold onto it oh so tightly, because when you let go, it's all going to come rushing out of you. Now..."

  She felt her lungs slowly filling, felt them catch, felt the pressure building inside her.

  Don't look. Don't try to see.

  "Breathe out."