Two weeks pass: long enough for Katya to think this is all over, not long enough for her to get the taste out of her mouth. All attempts at a palate cleanser have failed and failed miserably; when she finally did pull, she couldn’t get that stupid fucking pilot out of her head for long enough to finish. And, yes, obviously it’s good that she didn’t have her, obviously this is idiotic, self-annihilating, pure thanatos shit. The sucking gravitational pull of a point of no return.
Doe was good with her tongue, so good she could contract the world down to a single white-hot point. Would Rook have been good like that, too?
Thoughts of this kind squirm in the basement of her brain as she walks to the tram stop nearest her office. Quiet winter dark, the falling snow gentling the city’s lines and edges, giving her fidgeting attention nothing to hook itself into.
When she gets to her stop, Rook is there.
She stands unseen for a while, a few yards down the street, watching Rook’s breath haze in the cold light, the snow settling on the shoulders of her beat-up tanker jacket. Her left hand, the one with the carbide fingers, is folded deep into her pocket; Katya remembers something she heard once, about neural-throughput prosthetics aching in winter. A million openers spill unbidden through her brain, most of them off-the-rack, all of them dead wrong. Buy me a drink? Small world. Did you tell anyone what we did? I’m sorry. Do you come here often?
“Hey,” is what she goes with in the end, as she mounts the platform’s steps with a rock in her stomach. “I know things didn’t… I mean, hi. You look good.”
Staring down the barrel of a cold and silent nothing.
“Listen, sweetheart,” Jesus fuck, girl, say something, “I think we got off on the wrong foot last time, why don’t we…” A hateful note of desperation in her voice, no matter how hard she tamps down on it. “... There’s a nice place a few blocks from here, I could buy you a drink. Start things fresh. You know?”
“Don’t know you,” Rook says, and turns away.
Snow continues to fall.
Rook, someone is saying. A woman on a bench a little way along the platform, a woman you could see anywhere. Mousy brown hair and eyes that are probably green, and Rook, standing by her shoulder, is looking down at her like the most important thing in the world. Words in soft voices, muted by the snow.
Was that a friend of yours?
No. A mixup.
Oh. The tram-
And Katya just has to stand there, while this presumably very nice lady gives her an apologetic smile, and boards the tramcar with Rook, and leaves her on the platform alone.
And then, months later, impossibly, she comes back.
It’s the end of another work week - which is to say that it’s Thursday fucking evening - and Katya is getting drunk in a tolerable little place, just off the street that used to be called Empire Avenue and is now called something else. (This four-days-on-three-days off thing, by the way, is the worst of the myriad ways in which the Reds are reinventing the wheel. What the fuck is a reasonable adult supposed to do with a three-day weekend every week?)
Rook comes down the stairs around seven, boots loud on the concrete, sees Katya as Katya sees her. Their gazes meet across the room, just for a second, and the need in the pits of her eyes is not entirely human. Katya knows that hunger, the secret names the bureaucrats gave it, what it takes to grind it so deep into the meat of a human brain that it never washes out. And yet it still feels wrong to see it here, in a well-lit room full of real people.
She’s closer now, weaving between the tables at a pace that is, in Katya’s ex-pro opinion, a pointed agony of self control. A man who’s been drinking here since mid-afternoon fails to get out of the way; she walks through him, spills him against the bar. Noise, clamour; what the fuck, man? - Aw, you’re fine. Leave it. Nothing registers. Halfway across the room. Katya makes herself look somewhere else. Photograph tacked above the bar (details illegible from here; Polaroid blur in white square, a faint suggestion of faces). Bartender, young, shaking head and doing nothing. Dog-eared poster for a nobody band. Rook is at her table now.
If she thinks Katya is going to make this easy for her after that little performance at the tram stop, she’s got another thing coming. Katya keeps her eyes front and doesn’t say a damn thing. Makes Rook stand there, empty-handed, for as long as it takes.
“I’ve been looking for you,” is all Rook has to say for herself, in the end. Katya takes a mouthful of her drink, just to make her endure silence for the maximum possible number of seconds. (Sweet and red, and not a third as strong as she’d like now.) Then, looking up at last, with all the lilting bile that pushing-fifty years of frigid dyke may draw:
“Is - that - so. Because, Rook, I really got the impression that you never wanted to see me again.”
Pain passes somewhere beneath the surface of the ex-pilot’s face. No bruises this time, and Katya was right, she does look worse without them. She leans in, puts her palm on the table with the nervous air of a conspirator. Glances back at the stairs as she does it. Still scared of being caught, Katya thinks. The fear Katya shared with her in the half-light of the apartment walkway seems contemptible to her now, early in the evening, among the tolerant people.
Involuntarily, like a spasm, she thinks about slapping her. The way the bruise would bloom over her cheekbone, purple-black and so very earned.
“Katya, that–” Another twitchy checkup on the door, another inch closer. Trouble with one-exit rooms, is it? “That was my – therapist.” She hears the way the word hangs on Rook’s tongue, like it’s not the one that person is filed under internally. An insane stab of jealousy, low in her gut. The woman who was with her on the tram platform, barely printed upon Katya’s memory, a smear of brown hair and greenish eyes. Would have paid a little more attention if she’d known what she was. “You told me nobody could know. It was an order.”
So the order took, then, went in deep and stuck there. That’s good. That’s really good, actually, and the best thing to do now would be to walk out of here and never talk to her again. All that fantasising about Rook’s head between her thighs that was just that: fantasy, an understimulated psyche playing with annihilatory dreams like a schoolgirl writing letters to an axe killer.
Hell, she could even make Rook pay her tab for her on the way out. That’d be fun. Instead, she says: “If you wanted to see me so goddamn bad, why didn’t you go to my house?”
Rook licks her lips. “Because I didn’t want you going to mine.”
“The pound?” Katya snorts. “Idiot. As if they’d let me.”
Silence, the ambient clink and murmur of the bar, into which Katya says nothing. It’s Rook’s move again; she’s the one wants this, needs this. Not Katya. Lesk is a big city; there are other women. Other transsexuals too, for that matter. You see a lot more of them around these days, and they go for an older lesbian the same as they ever did. Perhaps that uptick in frequency takes the edge off the fun a little, dulls the feathery thrill of a rare find, but you can’t say it isn’t convenient.
Besides, she has something to lose now. She’s safe, the knowledge of that abortive hookup sealed airtight between Rook and herself by the pilot’s damaged brain. If she does something to Rook, lets Rook talk her into doing something to her, that might change.
“I’ll-” Rook tries to stop talking, it seems like, but it’s only a moment before something inside her gives. The plea forces itself out, barely above a whisper. “I’ll beg, Katya. If that’s what you want. I know I made it - difficult, for you, that night. I was upset, that’s all, it can be easier-”
“Fuck me,” Katya hisses, leaning back in her seat, disgust coiling hot in her abdomen - yes, only disgust, only ever disgust. It was just a job, for God’s sake; just a thing someone told her to start doing, one day at base, and she clicked her heels and said yes, sir because it meant a nicer salary and better leave and she hadn’t read the fine print. “You actually would, wouldn’t you. Is that a threat, Rook? Going to throw yourself on your knees and kiss my shoes, something like that? Make everybody in this room think I’m sick the way you’re sick?”
She thinks to herself, as a good person would would, as a sensible person would: Shouldn’t I get to stop? Even the other sinners in the programme, the ones too unlucky, too proud, too slow to worm out from between the teeth of the tribunals, the ones they lined up against the wall - they got to fucking stop.
This is what she tells herself now, in the moment. Later, in memory, the fact that she sat there in all her burning disgust and did not leave will weigh like a headstone.
Rook gives a long, shuddering breath, as if finally realising the depth of the pit she’s hanging over. When she speaks again, it is low, urgent. Last stop, and she knows it.
“Look. Katya. I know you’re angry.” For a second, the shape of the phrase makes Katya think Rook is trying to propitiate her, make it all okay in some fawning, facile, idiotic way. But the hunger pushes through, a feverish pulse: “Angry at me. Angry at a lot of things. The Reds, the world they took from you, the way everybody’s come around on all the shit you hate. Your life - the life you had, the one you wanted - you were comfortable, right? You were doing okay, you were making something of yourself, nice house and a nice car and a retirement fund, and now that life is dead. Casualty of revolution. Right?”
“I’m getting the impression that, back on the program, they didn’t hit you as often as they should have.” A blind jab, tossed out in search of tender flesh. She doesn’t find it, Rook doesn’t stop, faster and faster, pushing ahead like she’s closing in on something.
“This, all of this - it isn’t working for you. I know, I saw the room where you live, where you sleep - it was dead too, a dead place. It doesn’t work for you any better than it works for me, no place for things like us in the clean bright world they’re building–”
Katya rears to her feet, spitting through her teeth, “We are not the same, hound-”
Rook holds her gaze, takes the fury and does not flinch, though the thing behind her eyes with all the twelve-syllable neurochemical names cowers from it like an animal.
“Yes, we are. Handler.”
For a moment, neither of them moves. People are looking - of course people are looking, they’re making a scene. How loud did their voices get, towards the end there? How many heard the incriminating words? Another black pin in the map of places Katya can never go again.
Somehow, that seems to be what tips her over the edge, the final drop that bursts the river: that this is a tolerable place to get drunk, and Rook has spoiled it for her.
“First, you’re going to pay my tab,” Katya says, as she shrugs into her coat. “Then we’re going back to my place; you can pay for the cab, too, while you’re at it.”
Rook’s throat works. “And then?” she says, knowing, needing to hear it.
“Then, Rook,” Katya answers, “You’re going to get what you fucking deserve.”
