59 - You're Evil, Lover

Werfas tightened his arms around Kyrus.  “So… what’s bothering you now,” he said, into Kyrus’s hair.  The blew his lips out to clear his mouth.  “Sorry.  Don’t mean to spit on you.”

They lay in their assigned room, in the cliff face overlooking the river.  It was dark as the inside of a desert veil, tucked into a heavy shirt.  Everyone had gotten the notification from Two Hundred, through the lin, that the rains coming north were vicious and held a lot more water than anyone was used to.  So everyone had closed their homes, the city had even folded up as if to protect from an atmospheric strike, though all the rain channels on the outside stood to funnel every precious drop into the basin and the reservoirs in the butte.

The whole canyon was dark as people waited in anticipation of the rain.  It was strange that something so precious, so yearned for, was also so feared, at least in the first overwhelming smash of its arrival.

Kyrus didn’t answer and Werfas shook him slightly.  “You’re still feeling like a minor player aren’t you?”

“No!” Kyrus snapped, then buried his face into his love’s shoulder.  “Well…”

“Yes.” Werfas stroked his hair back off his face.  “Wingbrother.  Every soldier, every warrior, every Hive Lord and Ass of Lainz is necessary.  Every zardukar coder, sex worker, farmer… especially the farmers… are all necessary for us all to survive.  Zon Tamar has been writing me about this whole dynamic.  We’ve gone from tiny separate little countries to ‘all of us in this together’, descended from the various groups of survivors.”

“What good are warbirds going to be in this new world?” Kyrus muttered.  “Hara’s come up with all these creatures based on the FireDrake scales, that can fly and change shape and size.”

“And you and she haven’t even cuddled since before the attack on the city.  You and she aren’t madly in love with each other, now, are you?”

“Um…”

“Even you and I… though we are lovers and Wingbrothers… we’re young men who tend to try and have sex with anything that will say yes.”  Kyrus had to laugh. He rolled over on his back, his arm behind Werfas’s back.

“You Milar… I swear you want to kill us with embarrassment.  Yes.  And the Nadu are coders that make our zardukar sweat to keep up with them…”

“Do you realize that Archie is madly envious of you?  And… oh ancestors… Siwion Alissa has a crush on you?”

Kyrus rose up on his elbow, but in the dark he couldn’ see Werfas’s face at all.  “Don’t joke—“

“I’m not joking.  Deovar, you claw your way out of a trap built of cash, before the need for cash goes away… make your way all the way to a foreign country, force the man you thought killed your father to take you on as one of his people to get warrior training, find out that your father wasn’t dead, trek all the way back to Lainz after you find out that your bloodline is shinier than anybody thought, under attack the whole way by a distant relative Hive Lord, and defeat him in a sword and code battle while your da is being taken up by the Great Hive as the new Emperor?”

“But…”

“And then you and Hara and your newly married fathers completely change all our lives?  People aren’t starving for earthan foods?  We’re at war and just managed to get a machine and two people off the planet to the moon?  Your grandda lets the lin loose and makes everybody a reader and a watcher and all of a sudden there’s this buncha people on Xanadu who are just as ‘pressed as we were under yer Great-grandda?”

“Um…”

“An’ yer mom isn’t some frail, dying thing, she’s riding her new bird and could out fight and out fly and outcode most everyone else… who mines history code now that that bastard Nadian isn’t trying to kill her?  And YOU… have the job of trying to tame the old warbirds because the new birds are such hot pilots that they can catch you eighty percent of the time?”

“We’re going to need the warbirds as pilots… if this moves into an air war.” Kyrus said, slowly.  “FireDrakes are very, very good at what they do, but a warbird and a person, on a stick… have a lot more flexibility.”

“So why by all draculing ancestors do you feel set aside?”

Their bedroom was very, very quiet.  “Because I’m an idiot, I guess.”

Kyrus felt Werfas’s hand drift out of the dark and slide along his cheek.  “A loveable idiot.  A heroic idiot.  Someone who didn’t just kill the oyuk slime who tried to kill him when there were Basin gangs… You know all those gangs… are all working now?”

“Um… Da said there was a hundred new farming slots and we need every person, every breathing human or we might not survive this war…”

“So you need to deal with that fool who cut you years ago.”

“He’s… coming out to the bird pastures when the first rainstorms stop.”  Werfas started laughing.  “Stop… just stop…”

“You’re already trying to convert him, love… just as a proper ‘iliarch’ or you’d say ‘siwion’ would do.”

“Listen…” Kyrus raised his head.  “You can hear the rain coming…”

The rumble as the storms were channelled up the canyon shook the rock around them and the rains washed over them.  The rains, full of sand, full of thunder and electrical discharges.  Their door, built of local wood crackled and began to glow as the thunder rolled back and forth across the river that was beginning to rise abruptly.

Werfas pulled their blankets over them both.  “Sex now… we can take advantage of the electricity in the air!”

“Beast!”

“Realist.  This…” he paused as his words were swept under by the noise of the storm… “Perhaps day after tomorrow… we’ll welcome what’s his name and see what the old herd bull thinks of him.”

“You’re evil, lover,” Kyrus said.  “I like it.”