Before Cal could suggest that they pack everything up and leave in short order, Sever gave her a severe hug.

  ‘Thank you, Calendar,’ she muttered into Cal’s shoulder. ‘I thought… I… I didn’t actually want to go with them.’

  Cal hugged her back. ‘It’s no problem. It… was my job.’

  They stayed like that for a minute, Sever clinging to Cal and Cal rubbing her back.

  ‘Was your job?’ Sever asked, loosening her grip.

  ‘Was,’ Cal nodded. ‘I’m happy to go first. But we should also pack everything into the cart and get ready to leave, right? Get ahead of anyone coming back for revenge or another attempt, right?’

  Sever took a deep breath and let go of Cal. ‘Alright. You’re probably right.’

  Cal nodded, gave Sever another pat on the back, and turned to the seven dead men. She patted them all down and took whatever she found. Seven pistols very similar but not identical to the one she was already holding. Seven knives of much better make than the two Cal had made. Two spare magazines, no loose bullets. A wallet. A chain with a cross dangling from it.

  Cal left the cross, unloaded all the guns, dumped everything into a corner of the cart, and started emptying the house.

  ‘Dunno if it happened when I was born, or just while I was too young to remember,’ Cal started. ‘But my parents dumped me on the admin as a baby. According to records I had access to at some point, they’re both still alive, but… I decided I didn’t care about that. Either way, I grew up in a children’s home in Malatna.’

  Cal looked at Sever to see if she’d need to add more detail.

  Sever paused where she packing leather into a crate to think of something to say. ‘Never heard of it,’ Sever said. ‘Sucks about your parents.’

  Cal shrugged. ‘It’s near Dorogen, other side of the planet. I didn’t know them, they didn’t want to know me, such is life. Anyway, grew up in a children’s home run by the Interplanetary Administration Service, so it’s fair to say I was pretty convinced by the time I turned eighteen. So I decided to join the security corps.’

  Sever blanched, which was the reaction a lot of people, especially from anywhere independent, had to hearing that. ‘Must have been pretty convinced, yeah.’

  Cal tried to resist the urge to defend herself and failed. ‘I… There’s some stuff that the security corps does that’s useful, I think. But I’m definitely aware that a lot of it would be unnecessary if the whole admin operated differently. There’s… it doesn’t matter. So yeah, security corps.

  ‘Did training and testing for the first year, like anyone else,’ Cal continued. ‘I wanted to do frontier service, which always has a shortage for pretty obvious reasons. So as soon as I finished training, I got transferred there.’

  ‘What’s frontier service?’ Sever asked.

  ‘Good bet that’s who you’re thinking of when you think of the security corps in the first place,’ Cal said. ‘We were the ones who went out to independent farms and towns and tried to talk them into joining the admin officially.’

  Sever blanched again.

  ‘Yeah, but I didn’t know that at the time,’ Cal said. ‘And I was pretty convinced of the need for the admin. So, you know, I thought I was doing people a favour coming and talking to them about the benefits of joining up. I was nineteen, raised in a children’s home, I hadn’t given any thought to why people might not have joined already in the hundred and twenty years since the admin arrived.

  ‘And it wasn’t as bad as all that, usually. For one thing, there weren’t that many independent settlements around so we spent a lot of time researching and learning the history as well as we could before we actually went anywhere.’ Cal shrugged. ‘And a lot of time training, of course. Just in case we had an incident.’

  ‘I bet you had an incident,’ Sever said. ‘And came to your senses.’

  Cal smiled. ‘No and yes.’ She shrugged again. ‘First incident was about eight months in. Someone shot me on approach, before we’d even arrived to talk to them. Protocol was just to defend ourselves, right? So we retreated and hid. I patched myself up, it wasn’t a serious wound. Someone got out a megaphone and just shouted at them like “we just want to talk, please hold your fire or we’ll be forced to retaliate”. And they did.

  ‘Of the negotiations I was part of, that one had to be the hardest, and longest,’ Cal continued. ‘We were in and out for nearly five months before we settled on terms. And they were smart about it, for sure. Drift is… you know about drift?’

  Sever nodded. ‘Not heaps around here, but yeah.’

  Cal nodded back. ‘It’s generally more common in independent towns, for a few reasons. Short version is that the admin has therapies they’ll give people, or, as it turns out, force them to take, that reduce the impact and make it way less likely to be passed down at all. Admin approved patches almost never turn into drift at all, apparently. But it’s very much one of the places where the admin sucks, when it comes to independent towns.

  ‘This one, it was called Bivora, they spent those five months working out what I’m pretty sure was an ironclad agreement so that they could officially join without any chance of the therapies being forced on anyone,’ Cal said. ‘And to get everyone registered regardless of what was up with their genes and drift at time of registration. I thought it turned out really well. I hadn’t been that badly injured, just a scrape really, and I was around for the whole thing so I got why they’d shot at us in the first place.’

  ‘But you didn’t come to your senses?’ Sever asked, hefting a crate into the back of the cart and going back for another one.

  ‘Not yet, though I like to think I’d started to,’ Cal said. ‘After that one, I was way more passionate, if anything. I’d seen how well it could go for everyone involved. I won’t get into all the details, but… would have been about a year later we had a real severe incident. Had to get reinforcements in, had to siege the town. Almost everyone killed, including maybe thirty of us. Real dispiriting stuff.

  ‘Few more minor incidents, a couple of refusals, and about another year passes,’ Cal continued. ‘We’re headed for another big town, way far from Bivora or Malatna. I would say that this town, which I think was just called Town, was much more treacherous than anything I’d run into so far.’

  ‘Treacherous?’ Sever frowned at her.

  ‘I stand by it. They didn’t fire on us as we were arriving. Invited us in, seemed happy to talk, and then turned on us and opened fire during a meal.’

  Sever nodded. ‘Treacherous. I know the type.’

  ‘I’ll hurry up then, so I can hear about it,’ Cal smiled. ‘Didn’t kill me, obviously, but I got really fucked up by a large number of bullets. And then they stuck me in a basement with minimal care. Got infected so bad my insides started rotting. Eventually reinforcements arrived and got me and one other out. Two out of sixteen who’d arrived in the first place. Got patched up, lots of meds, lots of surgery, and forced retirement at my twenty-second birthday party.’

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  Sever gave Cal another hug. Cal hadn’t realised she needed another hug, but she did.

  ‘But you didn’t recover completely?’ Sever surmised.

  ‘And I never would have,’ Cal said. ‘That’s the… central contradiction of the admin that I only realised as I was retiring and trying to get medical help, right? They have this supposed ethos of not interfering too much, keeping things… balanced, light-handed, whatever. And what that means, within the admin, is that you can’t get the sort of gene patches and organ replacements I needed to go back to a normal life. But they’ve got meds that’ll keep me alive and disabled as long as I want.’

  Sever hugged her tighter.

  ‘And they’ll take people’s stuff and even kill them if they don’t want to live that sort of unobtrusive life, right?’ Cal continued. ‘And I only realised that had been my job after I was kicked out for getting disabled doing my job. But, ultimately, I was really lucky.’

  ‘You met some people with a ship willing to do illegal surgery on you.’

  ‘More or less,’ Cal shrugged and squeezed Sever back. ‘I’d actually decided to stop taking my meds and just die. Hence people started calling me Calendar, cause I could tell them the exact date I was going to die of multiple organ failure. An old comrade of mine, Ebon, was the one who found the surgeons and talked them down to a price I could afford.

  ‘About two months ago, I got on the ship, got most of my organs replaced, and then got dropped in the middle of nowhere. And you know the rest.’

  Sever gave her another squeeze and pressed her ear to Cal’s breastbone. ‘Your organs sound normal.’

  Cal snorted. ‘They feel normal, but I’m sure they’re not. Or I’d have died like a couple of days after we met.’

  Sever nodded a few times against Cal’s chest. ‘Way more interesting than my story,’ she said.

  ‘I just want to know who that was, you don’t have to tell me the whole thing if you don’t want to,’ Cal said.

  ‘He is a piece of shit dickhead idiot, is who he is,’ Sever said, letting go of Cal to pick up another crate. ‘I… it’s fine. I’ll tell you. It’s not very interesting.’

  Cal picked up the last crate and loaded it into the cart. ‘Can’t be too boring, surely.’

  Sever shrugged. ‘I was born, about fifteen years ago, William Rengel. Two parents, two older brothers, independent farming town. Pretty good life working on the farm. When I was like eight or nine, I realised or decided I was, in fact, a girl.’ Sever shrugged a couple more times. ‘Parents took a little while to get used to it, but they were good about it. Even went and did their own research and everything.

  ‘Changed my name to Willamette Rengel, so we could all keep calling me Will, and that was fine. I didn’t mind really,’ Sever continued. ‘And when I was eleven, parents even took me to get patched so I’d do puberty like any other girl, with one exception that I’m already regretting mentioning.’

  ‘Didn’t mention anything,’ Cal said. ‘No thoughts are crossing my mind.’

  Sever snorted. ‘Whatever. So I’m thirteen, things are going well. Hasn’t really made a difference, I don’t think. Still working on the farm, still wearing pants like mum, still doing all the normal stuff. Fuckhead moves to town. He invites everyone over as like a “getting to know each other” kind of party, and he seems fine. Even if calling himself Brother Calvin Preacher is real suspicious.’

  ‘Deeply suspicious,’ Cal agreed. They picked up the handles of the cart and started away from Sever’s mud house and lovely garden.

  ‘Deeply.’ Sever nodded a few times. ‘I didn’t go to his events much, right? Didn’t really care to. But for some reason my mum took a bit of a shine to him. So my parents would go listen to him talk. They’d drag me to other events he held for the whole town and like… it was actually kind of good? It wasn’t like none of us in town were friends, but we’d never spent much time with people who weren’t our neighbours.

  ‘Treacherous, obviously,’ Sever scowled. ‘Started small. Mum starts wearing dresses, which is not that weird, but it’s a bit weird. She spends more time inside doing like cleaning and cooking and sewing and the like, which is not that weird, but again, bit of a change. Her and dad used to share most of that pretty evenly with Jerry, my oldest brother. But mum starts doing most of it, and much less outside work.

  ‘Maybe a year’s passed, gets a bit worse. Mum and dad decide I should do the same thing.’ Sever gave Cal a knowing side-eye. ‘Less field work, more inside work. I don’t really want to, but I’m not that bothered at first. It kinda escalates. I get dresses rather than pants, get called in to do more and more of the inside work. And like… comparatively it’s not that bad.’

  ‘Compared to a middle-aged man shouting the wrong name at you in the woods?’

  ‘Exactly. I’m guessing that my parents just hadn’t told him up until like… eight months ago now? For them, the change is slow, from a lot of everyone else, it’s practically overnight. Everyone’s calling me William again, as if Will isn’t also short for William, you know? Coulda just kept calling me Will, but… not the point of it, I guess.

  ‘Then the parents start asking me about regretting that patch, right? And no, I don’t regret it. And even they know that if I do ever regret it, it’s real simple to reverse and doesn’t have any real impact on anything except that I’ll kinda have to do puberty again.’ Sever scowled. ‘But still, they start on me. Trying to convince me that I do regret it and… well I kinda went along. I didn’t exactly agree, but I couldn’t be bothered disagreeing with them every time. So…’

  Sever shrugged a few times, coughed and rubbed her eyes.

  Cal put an arm around her shoulders and they stopped pulling the cart to hug.

  ‘Fucking… Jerry decides to piss off rather than do anything. So I’m stuck with the three of them who are all sold on fuckhead’s bullshit. Eventually, like six months back, my dad floats going back to the gene therapist. So I bailed.’ Sever sniffed loudly. ‘They found me a couple of times in the first month and a half, so I bailed harder. Honestly thought I’d gotten away when I hadn’t seen any of them for like five months. But I guess not.’

  Sever sniffed a few more times and buried her head in Cal’s shoulder.

  ‘Sucks about your parents,’ Cal said.

  Sever snorted. ‘Yeah.’