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15. chasable
[Spam for Zane]
[Mira has had insomnia, off and on, for her entire stay on the barge. It's improved a bit since the mirror barge, but it is not at all strange to see her roaming the ship at odd hours. She avoids the patrols, creeps silently as a matter of habit. She peers at the stars and takes the occasional apple from the dining hall. Mostly, though, she winds her way up and down the stairs. Every murder so far has been in a stairwell. It makes sense - confined space, tight angles, good for concealment and sudden strikes. There is no tension of fear in her shoulders, no glancing back. She has her staser in her boot, but that, too, is not unusual.
It's not a trap, because her goal is not to stop whoever it is; her goal is not to survive or conquer. Only to see. The rest she leaves to skill and chance. And to that end, pins holding her unruly hair in place have been modified to carry some of Barbara's tiny bugs, hacked and modded with less skill but more advanced tech, transmitting to a screen where Mickey broods and watches and waits, and to Mira's neural Direct Interface. The culprit attacks from behind; but now Mira has eyes in the back of her head.]
[Mira has had insomnia, off and on, for her entire stay on the barge. It's improved a bit since the mirror barge, but it is not at all strange to see her roaming the ship at odd hours. She avoids the patrols, creeps silently as a matter of habit. She peers at the stars and takes the occasional apple from the dining hall. Mostly, though, she winds her way up and down the stairs. Every murder so far has been in a stairwell. It makes sense - confined space, tight angles, good for concealment and sudden strikes. There is no tension of fear in her shoulders, no glancing back. She has her staser in her boot, but that, too, is not unusual.
It's not a trap, because her goal is not to stop whoever it is; her goal is not to survive or conquer. Only to see. The rest she leaves to skill and chance. And to that end, pins holding her unruly hair in place have been modified to carry some of Barbara's tiny bugs, hacked and modded with less skill but more advanced tech, transmitting to a screen where Mickey broods and watches and waits, and to Mira's neural Direct Interface. The culprit attacks from behind; but now Mira has eyes in the back of her head.]
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Well, good for you. What are you going to do with him, in this state?
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And I promised someone else time to try dealing with it their own way.
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[Not that she anticipates Mira caring much about how she feels. It's just one of those things she feels compelled to say.]
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Oh. I'm sorry, then.
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[Promptly. This is why she cares, this is the foundation of whatever there is between them. You can't hold someone's life in your hands and then be indifferent to them - or at least Mira can't.
And wardening is a little like that, she thinks, maybe, poking at it like a puzzle, like a password she's trying to guess, like the way a mechanism fits together.]
And...I'm yours? Your inmate.
[Even in her uncertain voice, it does not just mean responsibility. It is personal, in a way she only has one word for, which is the one she used.]
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I'm charged to protect you. To keep you from harm, if I can manage it. It feels a bit like I've died. And I don't want you to suffer.
[It's about as close to expressing empathy as she gets, and it clearly makes her uncomfortable; she juts her chin up defiantly, as if daring Mira to say something derisive.]
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[She sounds contrite, squirms a tiny bit; it's an offering, rather than a protest.]
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[This, in turn, isn't chastising. It's full of warmth, of good humor; of love, really, because she does love Mira in her distant and cold way. It's a predator's love, but no less real for that.]
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[The simple answer, the easy answer. Which does not make it not true. She has always been a masochist, and always been hungry, needy for the intimacy she has discovered can be found on either side of murder. But as an answer, it is - incomplete.]
I had fun...hunting. And fighting for my life. And dying. It was all very - real.
[Raw, visceral, bright, substantive, sustenance. If not for the dying, the hard absolute possibility of it, the enjoyment of the rest would have been - not stolen, but bleached, thinned, contained. Parachutes and safewords.]
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[It makes an oblique sort of sense. Mal rubs the side of her face, not in consternation but in thought. There is no good fix for this, for the desire to take risks; she feels it herself. For the desire to die; she has never felt that, but thinks she understands it. It's akin to her instinct for survival in its origins, in its strength.]
I don't want you to live an empty life. If that's what graduating means for you - that you must not be real, or feel real things - then I don't want it for you.
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[Nobody has said this to her. And it occurs to her in a bright, grinding moment, that she has both been worried and not worried at all, because she has only felt more alive, the long she's been here, in slow gradual almost-invisible droplets like mist settling into dew. But part of her held back, because no one said it.]
Someone has to.
But. People can always die, can't they?
[That's the essence of life, why someone as long-lived as Iris still finds it so precious: because it's fragile even when it seems like it isn't. And because it's robust when it seems fragile, too.]
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People can always die. Some more easily than others, but: always.
You didn't see that before. Did you. [Not really a question, but she uses question words to frame it, because that seems easier than declaring a wide swathe of Mira's previous ignorance.]
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No.
I always - I moved on so quickly. And the memories faded together. I didn't really think about what happened after to anyone I left alive. I didn't think about people who weren't my targets when I was there, mostly, except for how they related to the mission.
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This place . . . it gives you time to feel things more deeply.
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Not just other people. Me, too.
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What have you remembered?
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Most people, I think. They remember being children?
[Tentative; it still requires deliberation from her, applying the theory of mind to others. But she can. She has scraps of the girl who drowned, but there's never been enough to really connect that person to her.]
Most people are used to knowing they could change. They don't even...
[Realize it's an assumption.]
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Most people have very different experiences than you've had, and advantages you've never had that they don't actually realize are advantages. People take memory for advantage.