Chedeline placed a hand lightly on Xiv's arm. "You can't blame me for not wanting to go back in there guns blazing. I know Ankh is important to you, but it's a machine. It had to have known that eventually it would be turned off."
"Turned off?" Xiv asked. His own voice sounded far away and the words hardly made sense. "Of course he knew. He knew it like you and I know that one day we'll be turned off."
"He," she said, accepting this as evenly and easily as she accepted everything. "Dying isn't the same thing as being shut off."
Xiv took one deep breath after another, trying to tether himself to the moment. "How is it not?"
"Because he can come back," Romm said, suddenly interested in the conversation. She closed the panel on her calf and slid the disembodied limb off her lap onto the table to rest next to her thigh. "All we need is to find his brain, wherever they're keeping it. Then we can put him back in his body and turn him back on!"
Xiv looked from Romm to Chedeline.
"No," Chedeline said, before he even had a chance to ask. "I already told you I’m not going and you shouldn't go either. Xiv, you're going to die for real. We can't bring you back."
Xiv pulled his arm out from under her hand and turned on the sofa so he was facing Romm. "So we find his brain, put it back in his body, and just let him walk out with us?"
Romm shook her head. "It would take too long to reboot a lifetime of consciousness to get to what matters. No, someone will have to walk his body out while someone else goes to another part of the compound to find his brain."
"And use him as his own distraction?" Xiv's heart thumped heavy in his chest. It sounded plausible when Romm said it in her matter of fact tone.
"Right. We'll just need to break off a small functional part of one of our spirits to put in him."
There was a shuffling sound and then Peleon appeared in the doorway of the library, sleight and pale against the large dark hallway behind him. He leaned against the frame. "I'll do it."
Peleon looked like a man in mourning. His eyes were distant, pupils blown huge and black so that they swallowed the usually bright irises, and his lids were red around the edges. His ginger hair was curling at the tips and tangling away from his head like a lopsided crown over the jagged red gash across his temple. He was wearing the white undershirt and black trousers he'd been wearing when he was shot and there was still blood spattered across his clothing and neck. The peacocks in his half sleeve faring leaned against each other, uncharacteristically somber, and flickered in and out of focus.
He was a man in mourning, Xiv realized. He'd been so thrown off by Peleon's vicious outburst after the failed rescue attempt that he’d written him off as being willfully difficult and not taken any of the other facts into account. Not even after Romm had told him about the damaged neural receptor.
Peleon had been willfully difficult in the time that Xiv had known him, but that wasn't what this was. This was a man who had spent almost half his life digitally self-medicating, who trusted the steadiness of being numb over the incalculable deviance of emotion, who had built a life for himself with a creature who cared for him. And now, for the first time in ten years, he was feeling all of it, and with the rest came this loss too: Ankh was gone.
Xiv felt like the Peleon leaning against the door frame had been swapped out for one he'd built just then in his mind. Probably neither was wholly the truth.
"No," Romm said. "I will. I'm constantly caching myself. It won't be any trouble to divert one piece. Besides, we'll need you for brute force."
Peleon looked up from the carpet, though his eyes didn't quite seem to meet Romm. He tightened his jaw. "I don't want-- You're not-- I can't let a strange person into Ankh's body. He wouldn’t trust you. I don't trust you. How do I know you won't just walk off with the face of the most valuable artist in the country?"
"Faces are easy to come by," Romm said. "Talent is not." She spread her hands to indicate her intentions were just as empty as the air between them.
"I want it to be me."
"You don't have a copy," Xiv said.
"Getting one would take hours." Chedeline stood and put one curled finger to her chin. "We need to hit them before they have time to recoup. If I know Martine he's already working to get all the pieces of Ankh shipped off."
"Shut up," Peleon said. His voice cracked. "You don't belong here. You don’t know anything about who Ankh is or what he wants. And you," he pivoted so he could jab his finger angrily in Xiv's direction. "You should know better than to think he would want all these outsiders involved. He trusted you."
The 'I trusted you' was left implied. Xiv felt it just as surely as if it had been said.
"And I trust them," Xiv said.
Romm stared at Peleon, her irises whirring and spinning the way his did when he was working on a difficult problem. "Suicidal," she said.
The word was heavy. It seemed to suck all of the air out of the room.
"Fuck you," Peleon said. "It's my body. I'll do what I want with it."
"Yes," Romm said. "You've made that abundantly clear with your mix and match upgrades. Your hodge podge being. Stamp collector." The s stained the rest of the phrase, Romm hit it so hard in accusation. "Figure out what you want and then come back to tell me how valuable a body is or isn't."
Peleon shifted away from the door and stood unsteadily on his own. "Fuck you," he said again, but the fury had gone out of it. "You're just as handy with a gun as I am and you know things about them that we don't."
"Things I'm going to teach you," Romm said.
"We'll get him back." Xiv believed this like he believed the sun would rise in the morning. It was impossible to imagine the emptiness of a life without either.
