There's a huge crowd of civilians in a holding square on Deck J, milling around in confusion and fear. Two of us are pulling people out of the crowd through a door, telling them it's for outbound processing. Some of them don't want to go, but arguing with tankies in full armor is futile, and they end up coming to us whether they want to or not, contusions and broken limbs the only difference it makes to their eventual fate. We take them through the inner set of doors that don't open until the outer ones are closed. Then all of them get reluctant, when they see Loral and me waiting on the other side of the inner door, with the assault gate and our swords and the pile of discards.
We take it in turns, alternating, because it's hard, stressful work. I grab a struggling victim, maybe a plump female orthohuman or a scrawny guy who really needs a new body—some of them have been living feral, refusing to go through the A-gates for fear of CuriousYellow, until they actually grow old —and I pinion the victims and lay them down on the slimy blood-slick floor of the room. They usually scream, and in many cases they piss themselves as Loral brings his Vorpal sword down on the back of their neck between the C7 and T1 vertebrae. A twitch on the power button and there's more blood squirting and splashing everywhere than you could imagine, and they stop screaming. Loral pulls her sword out and I get off the body and chase the head, which is usually soaking wet, the eyelids twitching with postamputation shock. I throw the head into the A-gate, low and fast as I can, and the gate swallows it and processes the skull and hopefully gets them logged before permanent depolarization and osmotically induced apoptosis can set in. Then Loral grabs the discarded body and slings it onto the heap in the corner, which one of our fellow special action troops carts away on a pallet loader every so often, while I flail at the floor with a broom in a losing battle to stop the blood puddling around our feet.
It's a disgusting and unpleasant job, and even though we've gotten into the swing of it and are working as fast as we can, we're only averaging one civilian every fifty seconds. We've been working for a hundred kiloseconds now, one of eight teams on the job—processing maybe sixteen thousand people a diurn between us. And it's just my bitter bad luck that when the doors open and the guys on the other side fling the next body at us, kicking and screaming at the top of their lungs, it's my turn to use the sword and Loral's to hold them down and I'm already raising the blade when I look at the terrified face and depending on which variation of the nightmare this is I see that it's my own, or worse—
—Kay's —
—and I'm sitting up swallowing a scream and someone is cradling me in his arms and I'm covered in chilly sweat and shuddering uncontrollably. I slowly realize I'm in bed, and I've just kicked off the comforter. There's moonlight outside the window, and I'm in YFH-Polity and no matter how bad things are by day, they can't hold a candle to how bad things get in my dreams, and I whimper softly in the back of my throat.
"It's all right now, you're awake, they can't hurt you." Sam strokes my shoulders. I lean against him and manage to turn the whimper into a sigh. My heart is pounding like one of the jackhammers they use to repair the roads, and my skin is clammy. His arm tightens around me. "Would you like to talk about it?" he murmurs.
"It's"—awful —"a recurring dream. Memories"—inadequately redacted, I think—"from an earlier life. What I wanted to be rid of, coming back to haunt me." I speak haltingly because my mouth feels musty, and I'm not entirely awake, just frightened out of sleep by the shadows of my own past. What's he doing in here?
"You were thrashing around, moaning and muttering in your sleep," he says. "I was worried you were having a seizure."
It's not unheard of, even in this age. I push myself up on one arm but don't pull away from him—instead I pull my right arm out from under the bedding and hold him tight.
"I lost a lot in surgery," I say slowly. "If this is part of it, I wish it would stay lost."
"It's gone now." He speaks soothingly, and I wrap my other arm round him and hold on tight. He's big, he's stable, he's serious, and he's solid. Serious Sam. I lean my face into the depression at the base of his throat and inhale deeply, once, twice. His arm around me feels good, secure. Security Sam. My ribs shake as I swallow a nervy chuckle. "What's that?" he asks.
"Nothing," I tell his throat. I'm awake enough now to realize that I'm not the only one in this house who sleeps naked. But I find that I don't care—I trust Sam not to try and overpower me, not to do anything I don't want. Sam has somehow stepped across the threshold from being a mistrusted stranger into a friend, and I never noticed it happening. And now I don't want to be left alone here, and it's the most natural thing in the universe to hold on to him and to run my hand up and down his spine and stick my face into the base of his throat and inhale his natural scent. "Do you mind staying? I don't want to be alone."
He tenses slightly, but then I feel his hand running down my back, caressing my spine. I lean into his embrace. He feels so alive , the antithesis of everything in my blood-drenched memory dream. I've been sleeping alone and not really touching anyone, much less fucking, for at least a month now, and therefore it doesn't surprise me in the slightest to find that I'm becoming aroused, sensual, needing more skin contact and more touch and more smell. I lick the base of his throat and move one hand between his legs, and what I find there is no surprise, because he's been living the same life of self-denial too.
"Don't—" he mutters, but I'm not listening. Instead, I'm running my face down his chest, kissing him as I fondle what's down below, giving the lie to his disinterest.
Sam's been holding back because of a lover stranded in the real world without him, and I've been holding back because of pride and the greedy eyes watching my social score. We'll probably regret this in the morning, but right now I'm drunk on touch. I rub my cheek against his thigh and lick him hungrily, feeling his hands in my hair—
"No." He sounds hesitant. I take him in my mouth as far as I can, and he sounds as if he's strangling. "No, Reeve, please don't—" I carry on sucking and licking and he draws breath to say something and instead gasps a little, and I finish him off with a sense of anticlimax. That was too fast, wasn't it? Then he's standing on the other side of the bed, his back turned and his shoulders hunched. "I asked you to stop," he says sullenly.
It's a while before I can talk. "I needed—" I stop. My mouth is acrid with the aftertaste. "I want you to be happy." If I'm going to give in and humiliate myself in front of the score whores, the least I can do is throw it back in their faces.
"Well, that's not the right way to do it." He's tense and defensive, as if I've hurt him. "I thought we had an understanding." He sidles around the bed and out the door before I can think of anything to say, refusing to meet my eyes, and a minute or so later I hear the shower come on.
I'm completely awake by now, so I pull on my bathrobe to go downstairs and make a mug of coffee by way of a substitute for mouthwash, because there's no way I'm going to go into the bathroom while Sam's busy trying to rinse my saliva away. I've got some pride left, and right now I don't think I could look at him without yelling, What about your self-control, eh? He moons incessantly over this amazing lover he met outside the polity, but he's not too proud to let me fellate him—until afterward, when suddenly I'm an un-person. I could really hate him for that. But instead I sit in the kitchen with my cooling coffee, and I wait for the noise of the shower to cease and the light upstairs to go out. Then I tiptoe back to my bed and lie brooding until near dawn, wondering what possessed me. In the end, I resolve not offer him any intimacies ever again, until I've had a chance to spit in his imaginary lover's face in front of him. Finally, I sleep.