Vines twist and brush against her in bursts of pure, chemical pleasure. Base joy, the simple tingling sensation of kneaded muscles, the wonderful roughness of a comb through her scalp. Something prods at her chin and she scowls, batting it away. 

More pleasure. More sensation. She didn’t know it could be more — things drip into her and prickle beneath her skin and slip into her lungs with every desperate mouthful of thick, warm air — but it can be better, it dares to be better, she frowns because there is more even though she couldn’t possibly think of anything better than this. Surely it doesn’t get stronger? Surely that’s — well, that’s just not fair. She knows the world is unfair and hurts, she learned that lesson when she first realized that there were little girls with living horses and little boys with foods that have color…

But this is unfair and it doesn’t hurt. That’s not fair, either. That’s even less fair than the more, more, more she knows is coming for her. The world hurts and isn’t fair, if you take away the hurt then shouldn’t it be fairer? 

Monica is made of calluses over calluses over a core of cooled down, righteous fury. Monica Parolles is a creature of humanity who loves being human almost as much as she loves being old, being alive, being a survivor. Monica Parolles lives to live and suffers to suffer and the world isn’t fair and the world doesn’t feel this good.

Cinnabari. “Leave,” Monica mouths, low and rasping. There’s a croak to her voice, an ache to her heaving sides, a pain from clenched jaws and white-knuckled fists. “Get out…of there. That’s not for you. Get out!”

Monica wakes up and swallows down a scream like reflex. Fist shoved into her mouth, teeth dug into the long-wrinkled flesh of her palm, body convulsing with tremors of something that could or could not have been real or more—

“Cinnabari, you mystical brat,” she spits. “Don’t — don’t do that to me. Can’t…can’t have them, not my dreams, not now.” Too much of her is already thinking, thinking, thinking about that and them and this. “You’ll give me a heart attack.”

Monica doesn’t do much that day. The days draw long, thick as honey and slow as molasses. The time drips by, drop by empty drop, and she finds herself sleeping as much as she can.

Hunger wakes her up. She’s used to the hunger of before, when she had no food, no water, just the stories her grandmother used to tell and the stories that she used to tell, before the Rapture came and tree-angels saved the slums. God, that’s a stupid sentence. If she heard it said out loud, she’d thwap someone upside the head for it. Or snort at them. Really, it depends on whether she likes them or not…

“Mashed up potatoes,” Monica demands. She’d asked for the affini to take out or mute that awful, insipid little robot living in her walls. She doesn’t trust robots and she especially doesn’t trust robots who live inside her house with control over her appliances. Household robots were spies for the company, everyone knew that, and she’s heard of some down-on-their-luck folk who accepted a free offer just to have one collecting all their data and listening in on their traitorous unionizing talk. 

Idiots. She scraped the vocal traitor out of her own children while encouraging that traitorous little wretch that thrives on the inside of all humans. A little bit of anarchy is good, not too much but just enough to know they’ve been fucked over without actually starting anything. 

No one lived for long when they started shit. People barely lived past thirty even when they weren’t starting shit. You had to balance the docile worker angle while keeping up a strong, inner flame full of spite and hatred. Monica Parolles has been running off of malice alone for decades and she taught her relatives how to do the same and fostering a family full of silent, vengeful rage against the upper class was one of her key achievements in life. 

Her second greatest achievement was living long enough to eat mashed potatoes. Real mashed potatoes, instead of the potato flavored synth-powder the company provided at half-price on Wednesdays. 

She misses that. Every sale was a holiday, a real life holiday, even if it lacked the whole ‘workless’ element her grandmother used to ramble on about. Every routine sale was memorized, every sporadic sale was preceded by desperate predictions, and by the time a sale actually came in everyone involved had silently agreed on who, exactly, would end up with food discreetly deposited at their doorstep. 

The world is unfair. The Accord is made of selfish, sinful animals. People are bad. Companies are bad. The world is made of pain and people are made of pain and the only thing anyone can possibly do is tough it out.  

Humans, though, can be good on occasion. Monica has seen humans be good. She doesn’t give a shit about Terrans but humans…

Well, she’s never belonged quite as thoroughly as she did on a cold night, surrounded by warm bodies in a bed too small for them. That’s human. That’s humanity. 

“Wait,” Monica says. “…add some gravy to the mash.”

There’s a distinct click and whirr to her atomic compiler, along with a short delay to her orders. This isn’t an automatic feature — it’s something she had altered because she doesn’t trust magic compiling devices that can talk and have zero delays. This is still unbelievably convenient but at least it feels correct.

“Thank you,” Monica says, because she’s fairly sure that all this robot business will lead to a robot apocalypse and she’s smart enough to head that off. She won’t die in the uprising! No, she will not. 

The mashed potatoes are good and the gravy is good and it sits in her stomach like something bloated, beautiful,breathtaking. She is full and warm and relaxed in a way she never got to be. Not even as a child. 

Am I going to grow fat? she thinks with delirious joy. Old and fat. Two things I never thought I’d get to be.

She’s shocked by how much she wants that. She’s old and wrinkled and more than a little bit scruffy, her body made entirely of angles, her cheekbones more starved than elegant. She’s nothing pretty and she never was pretty, even when she was young, even when she had cared about things like that.  

She wants to be fat and happy and live so long that she gets to see what humans become, years from now. Even as so many things change and keep changing.

Robots are evil and so is Cinnabari. This, at least, she can keep. She can’t…the anger is slipping. Faded. Her fury is bright-white flame that dimmed only to flare up at the slightest offer of something to be mad at. Her fury is a dying candlelight taking its last, flickering breaths. 

Cinnabari tried to own her. Turn her into a thing again. Cinnabari wants to control her, to take her, to have her so utterly that Monica is turned from a person to an animal, a creature, a possession. And it feels natural. Of course Dracaena should have her — why wouldn’t she have her? Of course Dracaena should keep her — who else would even want her? 

She has been a tool. A worker. A small, miniscule cog in the grand, illustrious Terran machine. A gear grinding away until it's been discarded, too old to be of use. She has been an object her entire life, why is she so eager to dash herself against this particular cliffside? 

Cinnabari wants her. Is older, than her. Is so terribly inhuman. Is a brat and an angel and a pushy immortal tree. Is…is…

So not-human. So not-Accord. So much, it’s so much, everything is so much without them. 

She wants a small world and she’s always a small world. But she doesn’t want to be blind again, trapped beneath the weight of everything that is the Accord and her duty as a woman or a family member. She wants to see things, know things, watch things, and keep them all for herself. She wants to go out and find all those beautiful, ugly truths the world is hiding, find out what the Aaspan are doing, find out what a beeple is—

She is so scared. Her entire life has been defined by fear. It’s nice to have another word for it but she’s too old to be lying to herself, too smart to bother with all that nonsense, but too stubborn to really let go of it. Her suffering wasn’t noble or good, it was just suffering. Better people have met worse fates and worse people have met better fates. It’s just how life is. Things happen, the world moves on, people mourn and weave that mourning into themselves and everything just goes on. 

The Affini looked at the world. So painful, so unfair. And they decided they wanted nothing to do with its laws, before uprooting her entire life. She is grateful to them on a level she didn’t know was possible — a kind of expansive, deep well of appreciation with nowhere to pour into and no one to hold accountable. Just…all Affini. They’ve helped her. She’s better. She knows for a fact that her children are cared for, wherever they are, or at least that they died in comfort. And that’s more than she thought she’d ever get.

And yet Cinnabari. She could’ve chased after any old plant, could’ve met with a nicer nymph. She could have chosen to do anything else with her time but she didn’t and she can’t and she won’t. 

She doesn’t regret it. Not a single second. She wants to go back, talk like nothing has happened, walk in there like a dog with its tail tucked low, blushing like a kid with a crush instead of a grown woman facing down her…her… 

Friend? Enemy? No, not that, never that. 

Her Cinnabari. Just…her Miss Cinnamon. Old, bratty, wilted thing that they are. There is no word for what they are, no good word for how she feels for them. 

“My Cinnabari,” she mutters, to no one at all. And isn’t that a luxury? To have space and time all her own. To have control and comfort. “My bitter, bratty Cinnabari. My…” she hesitates. “My friend Dracaena Cinnabari. My…partnerDracaena Cinnabari. My lover? My, my—”

Parolles, Miss Cinnamon had said to her. Parolles. No one here ever called her that. They knew her as the old lady wandering aimlessly for shelter, if they knew her at all. Monica, maybe, if they ever asked for a name. Ma’am, usually. There’s always been an unspoken rule here — that you take in anyone who comes up to your door when you have room, welcome them in house and home and heart, while never asking for a name or reason why. 

Monica’s let in so many strangers. And then she was the stranger being let in, the pitiful stray plucked out of the streets, and her existence was always a struggle but there was a special kind of love there. The love of stranger to stranger. The love of humanity. The small, precious kindness they fostered here. Monica liked to tend to her spite more than her softness but even she has to admit…there’s kindness in the rules here. Someone kind lived here, once, and the rules they made saved so many people. Someone kind lived here, once upon a time, and she can’t help but think it’s unfair they won’t be remembered.

It matters. The big, grand kindness of the Affini — she owes her life to that. The tiny, thriving kindness of Humanity — she owes her survival to that. Small kindnesses matter just as much. Hellos and goodbyes and how are yous shared between friends, family, strangers. 

That was kindness, when people let her into their homes, the night cold and the blankets thin and the bodies’ underneath them so wonderfully, terribly warm. But she misses the sound of her last name. She misses the company of an equal. She misses seeing people older than she is, people who survived and keep surviving. 

She misses the kind of company Cinnabari provides and no amount of scary leaf dreams or terrifying violations of free will can change that.

She misses Cinnabari so strongly and sharply that it’s making her sentimental. She wants them and it’s tearing her to pieces. She wants, she wants, she’s been stripped bare and naked and weak — now all she is is a cloying, unfulfilled wanting.

It’s been one day without Cinnabari and she’s losing her mind. 

This is, Monica Parolles thinks, not a good sign.