Admissions 1.3: Cylus
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The distant sun had set by the time they emerged from the café. Jupiter had brightened, however, a slightly gibbous slice of swirling clouds overhead. Stars scattered the rest of the sky, sparkling through the dome high above.
With a tap on the fine sapphire bracelet Cylus had noticed earlier, Emile called up a holographic display and began swiping through it, wandering into the middle of the street without so much as glancing up.
So that was his comm. Cylus tried not to think of how much he might have fenced that jeweled band for even without that capability. Instead he placed a hand on Emile's shoulder, steering him around groups of businesspeople, students, and tourists as they walked. At least this street—like most of the others Cylus had traveled that day—was for pedestrians and unenclosed personal transports only.
After navigating through a message interface—quick enough that Cylie didn't catch any of the content—Emile pulled up a map: hand-annotated, scrawled with notes and depictions of various waymarks instead of street names. "Oh!" He exclaimed as he looked up, apparently just realizing that Cylie had been guiding him. "Thanks for keeping me from running into anyone. I'm not... used to, um. Cities."
That's very obvious, Cylus didn't say. "I'm not either," he went with instead, substituting sympathetic half-truth. "I've spent a lot of time on ships and stations, and not so much on planets and moons." He intended to release Emile's shoulder. But having swallowed one impulse, another led him to stroke down Emile's arm, where he found a hand open and waiting. It only seemed polite to accept it. "Speaking of which, I'm used to 'days' being down to lighting and social convention. I know Europa City operates that way, on the Terran 24-hour cycle, but how does that track to Jupiter and Sol?" Whether clocks accounted for them or not, nearby celestial bodies influenced patterns of activity; not to mention how easy it was to go unseen.
And maybe thinking about something practical would distract him from the warmth of Emile's hand in the cool air, or the unexpected calluses on his fingers that Cylie had first noticed when they held hands in the café.
"Well, one lunar rotation—or revolution, since they're the same here—takes 86 hours, which is just over three-and-a-half City days." Emile glanced over at Cylus as he led them around a corner and down a much quieter side street. "Does that... help?"
Cylus swallowed a surge of self consciousness. Emile had presumably learned orbital mechanics at whatever fancy schools he'd attended while growing up. Or maybe his family was rich enough to hire private tutors. Since losing their home, Cylus and Cynthia had taught themselves and each other when they had time and energy, using whatever educational materials were freely available on any given comm network.
These often contradicted each other, though more about history and politics than the movements of planets and moons. Still, he fought to keep his tone light, praying he wouldn't damage Emile's impression of him by sounding ignorant. "I... can't say I fully understand what that means for how the sky looks, day to day."
Emile paused in his stride, looking up to the planet waxing above them. "Well... ignore the City clock for a minute, actually. It's easier to understand how Sol, Jupiter, and Europa cycle without overlaying an unrelated time system. So..." Emile gestured in the direction Sol had fallen. "The sun just set, right? And Jupiter—which stays directly overhead—is waxing, getting brighter. In around twenty hours, Jupiter will be full, when Europa's between it and Sol. That's 'midnight' where we are, though it's actually quite bright with Jupiter all lit up." Emile's voice softened with wonder. "That's how it was when I was arriving, and the Great Red Spot was turned right towards us. It was gorgeous." Cylie's body softened too, warmed by Emile's earnestness, and he squeezed the boy's hand.
Emile tore his eyes from the sky to check the map, starting them forward again. "After that, Jupiter wanes. Another twenty-odd hours later, when it's half-full, the sun rises. Jupiter's visible area gets narrower, and Sol gets higher, until another twentyish hours after that, when Sol goes behind Jupiter for a few hours, and the sky’s as dark as it gets. An eclipse at 'noon' every local day!" Emile laughed with delight. "I'd never seen one before." He paused, as if he'd given something away, though plenty of worlds lacked regular noteworthy eclipses.
He'd been cagey about his homeworld earlier, too. Cylus decided not to press, instead taking his best guess at what came next in the cycle. "So then Sol comes back out from behind Jupiter, and Jupiter starts to wax again?"
"Yes, exactly!" Emile beamed, relaxing. "And another twentyish hours later, the sun sets, Jupiter's half full, and we're about back where we are now!"
"So the 24-hour City days... just layer sort of randomly over all that, right? They're not tied together at all?"
"That's right!" Emile nodded.
Cylus let his end of the conversation lapse as Emile focused on the map once more. Useful information, especially that the sky was never truly dark save a few eclipsed hours. More concerns stirred in his mind. Would patrols start at some point? This felt like a city that would have night patrols, and a bright planet overhead surely made their jobs easier. His fake ID should be fine, but he hadn't intended to test it while drunkenly following a boy he'd just met...
...What was he doing? He'd gotten the exact intel he'd gone out seeking, in far better detail than he'd hoped. As soon as he'd done so, he should have made excuses and gone back to the hotel with a pile of fish rolls and a to-go cup of tea for Cynthia.
Instead, Cylus had stayed at the café for... another hour? Two? He'd let Emile's wide-eyed interest tempt him into telling tales, weaving old cover stories into a fresh semi-fictionalized history casting him and Cynthia as traveling performers. A woefully incomplete characterization of their last decade, outside the months they'd spent with the Masked Parade's eclectic fleet, but that experience had made it easier to frame many of his other anecdotes. And he'd done enough actual performing—sleight-of-hand tricks, hypnosis routines, showy knife-work—over the years to supply plenty of mostly-safe stories, only minor embellishment needed.
Except he'd started letting more and more truth into his tales. He'd made it halfway into recounting the time he'd performed knife tricks for rival warlords on a condemned planet before realizing that such a setting mismatched with any conceivable narrative of a life with established identity credentials, much less a clean criminal record. Only Emile's descent into inebriated reverie—which had looked a lot like trance, and wasn't that appealing—had prevented Cylus from revealing far more than he'd intended.
Amateur behavior, Cynthia would have called it. Correctly.
At least Emile's adorably clumsy obfuscations about his own background gave him another out; any time Emile inquired about something Cylie didn't have a ready answer for, he could deflect by asking Emile a question that would make him squirm.
Yet here he still was, holding Emile's hand and following him down untrafficked streets, each less well lit than the last. Not that vehicles seemed common here, even on the streets that allowed them. But they also hadn't passed any of the signed lifts down to the City's underground transit network in the last ten minutes, suggesting they'd left areas where ordinary people were expected to be. And Emile had reversed their course twice since their earlier exchange, muttering the first sentiments even resembling annoyance that Cylus had yet seen from him.
"I'm really sorry," Emile sighed as he redirected them again. "My sister gives directions differently than how I think about following them, and it was fine for that commercial zone where the landmarks are places with signs, but I keep misjudging it..." Emile waved his holo-lit hand at the empty, unlabeled street they were on now: eeriely clean, clearly more vehicle-oriented, lined with doors and garages that looked like utility or cargo accesses, "Here. But I think we're—Oh! That's what she meant by—" he groaned. "Anyway, I'm pretty sure that... yes!" He squeezed Cylus' hand before releasing it and approaching a formidable-looking circular hatch set into the ground.
Sweeping aside a panel of his long, ornate vest, Emile reached into a trouser pocket and produced a multi-tool, like the ones Cylie was used to seeing in the hands of grimy repair techs. "Let's see," he murmured, crouching down and touching the side of his spectacles. A pair of small, bright lights flicked on at the outer corners of the frames, illuminating the surface of the hatch as images Cylie didn't understand danced across the lenses.
Stepping closer, Cylus leaned over Emile's shoulder to watch as he unscrewed something in the hatch's surface, flipped open a panel, swapped his tool into a pair of pliers, and fiddled inside until a crank popped up from the hatch's edge with a satisfying mechanical chunk. As if he'd done nothing out of the ordinary, Emile put the panel back together, tucked his tool away, tapped his glasses off, and began cranking the hatch open, revealing darkness beneath.
Cylus glanced around with nervous excitement that grew once he confirmed no cameras were pointed at them. On the one hand, crawling into a mysterious, locked hatch with someone he'd just met was the sort of thing his twin would be livid with him for even considering. On the other, he found this breathtakingly casual attitude towards breaking and entering deeply attractive.
Like his charming little glasses, Emile had more to him than a first glance might suggest.
"Is this a... typical night out for you?" Cylus asked, trying to keep his tone light and unruffled.
"Oh gracious, I'm so sorry!" Emile's head whipped around as if he'd forgotten anyone else was there, green eyes wide. He stood, wringing his hands and scurrying back from the hatch so fast that Cylie half-worried he might trip over himself. "You're right, this is incredibly irregular, dragging you somewhere so out of the way, with no explanation... I just got excited when you asked about a private place because Val told me this was one of her favorite secrets and I've been wondering about it for weeks, but, I'll come back later by myself! Oh, that was thoughtless of me! Where would you like to go? What would be more comf—"
Without tracking his own trajectory, Cylie closed the distance between them, crowding Emile up against the nearest wall. The way he gasped, eyes dilating, ran through Cylus with the heat of all the best things in life: a clean cut, a shot of good liquor, a successful trick before an audience.
"You're so sweet," Cylus murmured, lips millimeters from Emile's neck, watching the pulse jump beneath smooth brown skin. "Go on. Show me your secret place."
Stepping back, he watched to make sure Emile didn't stumble. After a long, steadying breath, Emile nodded, eyes still glassy, and crouched to resume cranking the hatch open.
It revealed a ladder, which deposited them into a corridor, dim lights flickering to life as they entered. It was unadorned save a single sign. MARINE BIOSECURITY AREA. NO ENTRY WITH PROHIBITED MATERIALS, it proclaimed, followed by a list that included food, beverages, plants, animals, and numerous chemicals and other terms Cylie didn't recognize. Emile ignored it, so Cylie did too, praying that Emile knew what he was doing.
The hall ended at a simple, circular metal platform with a waist-high metal railing framing all sides but the one facing them.
"I think there's a protective field that'll turn on?" Emile mused, examining it. "Val said the elevator was a whole... experience, but worth it, for what's at the end." A shy sideways glance, eyes reflecting the low light. "Is this still okay with you?"
In truth, a fresh flutter of nerves had awoken beneath Cylus' horny, reckless intoxication. In years surviving between the margins of space-faring society with Cynthia, they'd encountered more than a few defunct facilities in varying levels of disrepair, narrowly avoiding injury more than once. It said something about how locked down entry to Europa itself was that no one else had broken into this space to shelter here. Though, the brochures had mentioned a small, subsurface Europan population, adapted to the environment below through some kind of genetic engineering...
"Does this go to somewhere that... people live?" Cylie ventured.
"Oh, you mean the Europans? No, no, though I can't wait to visit their habitats! But I'd never just break in..." Emile paused, as if realizing only now what he'd done, "W-well, not into someone's home. Val wouldn't send me somewhere I'd be intruding."
On a pragmatic level, this could be a good bolt hole, if he and Cynthia ever needed one. Provided he could repeat whatever trick Emile had just pulled. And in truth, Cylus wanted to follow Emile wherever he was going. He'd met rich boys before; they made for lucrative marks, when he and Cynthia could nest somewhere well-off people also passed through. But he'd never encountered one like Emile. It would be easy to classify him as simply naive; he clearly was. But Cylie couldn't shake memories of Emile catching him off guard: asking to see his knives, or breaking them in here, for that matter.
Or the way he'd met Cylie's eyes in the shy, naked instant he said, I just want to connect. Like he was praying, with a devotion Cylie had only ever seen from men clinging for meaning near the edge of death.
He wanted to watch those earnest eyes go vacant. He wanted to hear that sweet voice lift in pleasure, and in pain. He wanted to feel the pulse in Emile's throat as Cylie mapped his body with fingers and nails, tongue and teeth.
So he let desire transmute his doubts into a sultry tease. "Are you trying to get me alone in an elevator with you, Emile?"
Emile answered Cylus' mock-accusation with an embarrassed little sound that completed the submersion of Cylie's worries. "J-just to get where we're going—"
Cylie stopped Emile's words with a finger across the lips. "You're so easy. Let's go down."
Once they'd moved within the partial circle of the railing, Emile paused beside the controls, one finger poised over them. His other hand sought Cylus' again and clutched tight. "Here goes," he breathed, and pressed.
With a low hum, the perimeter of the elevator platform lit, a glowing amber circle around where they stood. An instant later, shimmering energy surrounded them, delineating a translucent cylinder that encompassed the platform and extended well above their heads.
Then they dropped.
Both of them exclaimed, clinging to each other in shock as the platform plummeted beneath them. The elevator room receded above in an instant, leaving them surrounded by reflective walls that cast the platform's low light back with a rippling, rapidly shifting sheen. Their bodies floated, feet losing contact with the metal below. They hung together above the platform, suspended in weightless free fall.
Cylus felt electrified. Either he was about to die—don't think about Cynthia, alone, wondering what happened—or his night was about to get much more interesting. What kind of person was this older sister, anyway?
And Emile's warm proximity was just enough to transmute his terror at their plummeting descent into the most intense arousal he'd ever felt.
Cylus sought Emile's mouth, claiming soft lips with his own.
Emile opened for him instantly. His tongue was gentle but eager, inviting Cylie into a haven of wetness and warmth. After a delicious interval of exploration, Cylus followed a hunch, sucking Emile's lower lip between his teeth. The answering whimper hit him like a punch to the gut.
Tightening his embrace, Cylus experimented with digging his nails into Emile's back through layers of fabric. Emile moaned into his mouth and nestled closer, the soft swell of his chest pressing against Cylie's. If Cylus could have banished his binder—banished all his clothing, and Emile's, placing them skin to skin—he would have done it. But such a trick was beyond even his means, and he didn't want to let go to do it the ordinary way.
Instead he lowered his mouth to Emile's neck. Chasing reactions, Cylus licked, then sucked, then bit, dragging teeth across hot skin as Emile threw his head back, pleading wordlessly.
Their bodies hung together, spinning in a descent that seemed to go on forever.
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