"Let me find a social infiltrator, please," Virid Hessh says wearily. "That, at least," and Ion Twelve Horizon, collapsed now into perpetual silence, gives her a curt nod.
It takes a week, and navigation between five different planets' ports, to fulfil Virid Hessh's criteria, which she does not see fit to share. Ion Twelve Horizon asks nothing.
"Here," she says finally, coming back from hours ashore, smelling like cheap bars. A few paces behind her follows a round woman, face cherubic, in a tailored silk gown. Jade-capped ropes of twisted gold wire snake up her arms; this season's angular style of makeup, in burnt red and gold leaf, accentuates her eyes.
"This is your friend?" Ion Twelve Horizon says, her first words in days.
"Oh, sweetness, honey, you tongue-delighting morsel," the woman says, and laughs loud and liquid. "She'd sooner airlock me in deep space than even hear you ask that. No. No, no. She trusts me to do my job."
Ion Twelve Horizon looks at Virid Hessh, who shrugs.
"I would quite enjoy spacing her," she says. "You need excellence, Song Aloft; I'm not petty enough to deny that's what she supplies."
"That's the very nicest thing you've ever said about me," the woman says, batting her eyelashes at Virid Hessh. "I'm Byla Olma."
"That's a cheaply constructed alias," Virid Hessh says matter-of-factly. "But so's any other name she gives you."
"It's an alias," Byla Olma concedes easily. "Not that cheap, Virid Hessh."
Virid Hessh makes a noise of neutral acknowledgement accompanied by a very pointed smile, and turns her attention to Ion Twelve Horizon. "Is this acceptable?" she asks.
Ion Twelve Horizon nods and turns away from them both.
"Splendid!" Byla Olma says with sweet and apparently sincere delight, then spends the next three days scornfully and vehemently criticising everything Virid Hessh attempts to plan.
One can pass as perfectly meant to be in many places, Heavy Snow decides, if one simply looks very tired.
With her skills and the mask's capabilities, a wealth of systems are vulnerable to her intrusion. Provided she does not develop excessive ambition, there are many places she can go, and many things she can do.
There is, of course, no question where she will go. Parahandrar has become the only place in her universe; everywhere else simply liminal.
When Ion Twelve Horizon Yafa Song Aloft first stood in her office, Heavy Snow needed no permission to help her. When Ion Twelve Horizon lay in a hospital bed and violent men threatened to take her newborn, Heavy Snow did not ask to become her decoy for long enough for the Apparat to flee. When Ion Twelve Horizon set out to reclaim her life from her torturer, there was no question of necessity or risk; Heavy Snow was an inevitability.
She is hurt, of course she is. But Ion Twelve Horizon was kept captive, powerless, within the finely-wrought prison of her own hollowed-out life for years. It is healthy that she begins to assert control, now, over its direction, even if that control is to banish Heavy Snow from it. It's simply that, being of high Apparat stock, even in her brutalised state, she assumes her whim to have binding power over the smaller people of the world, and in this, Heavy Snow has determined, she is mistaken.
Heavy Snow can be told to leave; she cannot be told not to help. She set herself on that when she first laid eyes on Ion Twelve Horizon, and then set herself to throw away her life for it. She expected nothing for it; she expected, in the end, only to die in agony.
If the Ink-Coloured Mouse thinks that sending her away after rescuing her and sweeping her away to the stars somehow puts an end to Heavy Snow's earlier decisions; perhaps as a high Apparat, rich and surrounded by people servile to her money, she has simply never known anyone indifferent to her attempted commands. Someone with purpose.
Heavy Snow knows purpose; how else did she make herself the Spider in the White Steel Palace? Carve herself a secure place amidst the petty treacheries of the street, and thrive there? And now her purpose is not simply her own survival. Now her purpose encompasses the Ink-Coloured Mouse's tiny, desperate, fledgeling family unit.
Parahandrar is an autonomous monolith; but it is haloed with lesser businesses, industries that Ion Twelve Horizon scorns as parasites. And where there are businesses, there are employees; and where businesses employ, there is a hierarchy of exploitation, at the base of which there is inevitably room for the invisible, the dubious.
Ion Twelve Horizon has a grand and ambitious plan, as she should. The Spider in the White Steel Palace, street criminal, has a simple, gutter-level one: to be ingested by a system of exploitation, as a small and exploitable thing. Parahandrar is vast; its halo of dependent industries constantly hungry. It is simple to find herself aboard a ship bound there, with credentials whose triviality to forge is surpassed only by corporate indifference to their reality. She is a disposable source of labour, to have it squeezed out until there is nothing left in her and she can be discarded; why look closer at her paperwork than an automatic stamp that says she shows no criminal record which indicates she might exploit her new employer more successfully than it wishes to exploit her?
Heavy Snow ships to Parahandrar's orbit in three days, as a textile hand-finishing worker for a custom shipbroker whose 'handcrafting artisans' are a selling point. She steps onto the orbital station, in a flicker of data, as a recruit for a different company, a conversational conditioning expert whose trade is an accelerated course of social acclimatisation for newly-created mechselves — and is conducted, not in orbit, but at a facility on the surface of Parahandrar itself.
She unpacks her meagre effects — aside from her mask, interred from casual glimpse within her duffel — in a tiny company-provided room, connects from her insystem to its employee monitoring systems, and quietly modifies them to constantly report her behaviours as only outside company standards by a normal human margin. The bar is inhumanly high so that sufficient ammunition constantly exists for any employee, or any number of employees, to be summarily dismissed; it will actually be personally monitored only to the extent of identifying outliers for specific scrutiny. Her behaviours, if left for the company's surveillance to actually see, would no doubt ultimately qualify.
She has no idea how long she will be here; best to remain inconspicuous, and inconspicuous will mean performing her assigned tasks. She rapidly researches, in the company's training and records archives, the expected methods, timescale, and outcome of mechself social conditioning. It amounts, she thinks, to little more than talking to them to encouraging the conversational fluency of those mechselves who begin reticent; and attempting to convince them to adopt the placatory and servile tones that might be expected of them by pretentious pretenders to the high Apparat.
Confident in her ability to simulate her supposed profession, she arranges herself in her new bunk, and attempts to fall asleep without the now-familiar sounds of a ship around her. Without the two-hourly interruption of a feeding baby. Without Virid Hessh's grumbles, or the Ink-Coloured Mouse's stoic presence, her breathing.
It would be easier if she dared take out her mask and hide within it; but not here. Not yet.
