Page 27

B unker landing on my feet startles me awake. Chalk scrambles into a defensive ball, grabbing Mix by the nape of his neck with her mouth and tucking him under her dewlap.

“Fuck, Bunker,” I growl. Guess it was just a temporary retreat.

I reach down and scratch Chalk behind the ears so she knows it’s okay. Yawn. Stretch and feel the smooth play of muscle down my right side. That feels much too fucking good for having been an open hole less than ten minutes ago.

“I’m gettin’ up, Chalk,” I tell her. Not because I think the rabbit understands what I’m saying, although they do know some words.

No , in particular, they understand perfectly; not that they pay one fucking bit of attention.

They go off tone-of-voice more. Mine’s soothing, and Chalk begins to relax.

Enough that I can slide out from under her and Mix.

I pull aside the drape, put one leg and then the other over the side of the cradle and climb out.

Standing, I can inspect my hip. I’ve got a pale swath of newskin about ten centimeters long from my waist to upper thigh. I walk my fingertips down over it. Testing the seal and the muscle underneath. Both feel reassuringly solid.

“C’mon, bunnies, let’s get dressed.” I scoop up Chalk and Mix, put them on the floor.

I don’t want Mix trying to jump down from the float-bed.

And he would if I left him to it. I’ve had to install a ramp at the end of Kez’s bed so the babies didn’t break their legs trying to leap to the floor.

Something I’ve never understood about baby animals: how is it they get themselves up into places they can’t get down from?

Pondering that universal mystery, I walk out of the control center and down the hallway to Kez’s bedroom.

It’s not a long walk, but it feels like it.

My hip might be solid, but it’s very fucking stiff.

My head swims; I’m unsteady. I trail my hand along the wall for balance.

The rabbits notice, and keep a little distance, when they normally crowd my feet.

There are more bunnies in Kez’s room. Tigger, the king bunny and genetic progenitor of Bunker’s jumping prowess, is in his usual position: sprawled across Kez’s bed.

One of Chalk’s red-eyed babies is with him, consciously imitating its grandfather’s posture.

Watching the babies learn from their elders how to be rabbits has been an education in itself.

I make my way to the cubby I’ve installed on one wall. Rifle carefully through the clothes until I find a suspicious lump and extricate Mingle from between two folded shirts. I hold her up at eye-level. “Hey, baby.”

She kicks her fluffy back feet at me. The rabbits don’t like being held off the ground.

Except Ronnie, who wouldn’t kick if he was suspended at ten thousand meters, so long as he was tucked under a human’s arm.

I put Mingle back in the cubby while I draw on skivvies, fatigues, a tank, and a vest with a breast-pocket.

Leave my feet bare because the center of Kez’s house is a greenhouse, and I like walking on the grass barefoot.

Once I’m dressed, I pop the baby bunny in my vest pocket, where she sits like a giant sausage, one ear sticking out.

She’s a helicopter-bunny at the moment. Only one ear has dropped.

Kez says the other ear will drop in a week or two.

In the meanwhile, I could twirl her ears and I swear she’d do a vertical lift-off.

I put my hand on the top of the cubby, on a black strip of genSkin with ten pockets sewn into it.

The sewing’s uneven. I made it long before I met Kez and her fabricator.

But it serves its purpose. It houses my knives when I’m not carrying them.

I tap my fingers against the tough skin, considering.

I’m behind our walls. Should be safe. But I always feel better when I have a knife.

I realize I’ve made the wrong noise when the bunny in my pocket noses up so she can look at me, and there are two very firm nudges against my calves. “Sorry,” I tell the rabbits.

I compromise, and only take one knife, so I can support the bunny in my pocket with my free hand.

Gig and Sylvie are still giggling in the kitchen when I cross the greenhouse, enjoying the grass between my toes.

I feel like I’ve worn boots my whole life.

Walked on permacrete and asphalt and stone and cracked, dusty dirt.

I’m sure there have been places where I could have walked on grass, but I don’t remember them.

Being with Kez is the first time I’ve had the freedom to go barefoot.

“Snow, you want anything?” Gig calls when he sees me.

“Tea.”

“Comin’ right up. Hey, take a look at Vizzion! Level forty-three, man.”

Vizzion’s the VR war-game he’s got me playing. And if he broke level forty-two while I was out of commission, that’s really going to piss me off.

The lounge is empty, walls dark. I don’t bother to tap them on as I settle onto my favorite couch.

It’s a deep, oxblood Kubus. Heavily padded.

It’s usually comfortable because it supports my back.

Right now, it’s comfortable because the padding cushions all of my aching parts. And there are a lot of them.

I sink back into the couch, extricate the bunny from my pocket and pop her down next to me on the seat.

Although most of the rabbits like to cuddle, they don’t like to be held in a human lap.

It’s a scent thing again. Human laps are smelly.

Because Kez and me fuck a lot, my lap is especially smelly.

The rabbits like to have a sniff, but they don’t want to sit on me.

I wait until Mingle goes into the babies’ version of the pet-me posture.

Their heads are so big, they end up in the pet-me posture a lot, not always deliberately.

The babies’ pet-me position is a little different and involves flattening their ears as well as lowering their little faces.

Mingle’s helicopter ear sticks up, but the other one goes flat, so I start petting her and am rewarded with the mumbling noise the rabbits make.

Kez calls it tooth purring , and they evidently do it by grinding their teeth together.

I haven’t investigated too closely, since rabbit teeth don’t interest me. I just enjoy the effect.

I’m contemplating turning on the viewie and watching the day’s flash, when Mingle’s head lifts under my fingers. Her sticky-up ear pricks, and she swings her little bulldog face south-east, towards the front door.

“Who d’you think that could be?” I ask her, not expecting a reply. I don’t get one; I don’t need one. I know who’s coming, and the tension I’ve been carrying since I woke up alone finally drains away.

“... what I don’t understand is how you could lose one of my shoes, Nev. How did you lose one and not the other? Were you only wearing the one?”

That’s Kez’s voice. She sounds annoyed, which she often is with Nev, her fuck-up friend.

Nev must have been home the whole time, which doesn’t surprise me because she doesn’t have a job and at seven months pregnant, doesn’t go out much.

It also doesn’t surprise me that she didn’t come to greet me.

Nev’s not my favorite person and I haven’t made any secret about it.

She tried with me, at the beginning. But Nev’s got only one mode with men, and I didn’t appreciate the constant come-on.

So I avoided her until she got the message and started returning the favor.

I hear them come through the greenhouse.

Three women, by the footsteps. Light. Two with a shorter stride and one with a longer one.

The longer stride is Kez. I’d know her walk anywhere.

The others are probably Nev and Chiara. One of them’s wearing heels, which I can hear cutting into the turf.

Probably Chiara. Kez almost never wears heels.

Her footsteps are soft, so I’m guessing she’s wearing running peds.

I hear them pause in the kitchen, the beginnings of an introduction to Sylvie. Then Kez’s long stride, coming closer.

I turn on the couch. Shift the rabbit out of the way.

Kez comes straight to me, climbs into my lap and puts her arms around my neck. She doesn’t say anything. Neither do I. I just slide my arms around her, tuck my face down against hers and breathe in the sweet soap scent of her hair.

“Um, Kez?” Chiara says. I lift my head and look at Chi. Not hard, not ugly, but Chiara gets the message. She backs out of the lounge, back towards the kitchen. “I’ll, uh, give you two a minute.”

“Make it ten,” I say, before burying my head back in our warm, safe embrace.

Kez turns her head so she can whisper into my ear, “I’m so fucking sorry I wasn’t there when you woke up. We were only supposed to be gone for a half-hour. Goddamn holo-drops. I swear, I’m going to kill Chiara long before her fucking Crackle.”

I chuckle. “It’s okay, kitten.”

“Oh, you sound so much better.” Kez kisses me.

Keeps kissing me like she’s never going to stop.

I let her. I missed her, even though we were only apart for a few hours.

I missed this. This instant intimacy. The melting of the boundaries which keep us separate individuals.

Finally, when my lips feel like they’re glued to hers and all I can taste is the sweet spearmint of her mouth, she breaks the kiss and comes up for air.

Presses our foreheads together. “I missed the sound of your voice. ”

I run my fingers through her hair, along her cheek. “Me, too, kitten.”

She grins. “I missed hearing you call me that.”

“Yeah? What’d I miss? Fill me in.”

“Well, you were in surgery for six hours. That looked like fun. Then they put you in a medibed. You were all still.” She waves her hand, which I guess means I was still messed up. “They wouldn’t let me sleep with you. That’s the first night?—”

“We haven’t been together.” I cup her face. “Won’t happen again.”