They jumped between the trees, squeezing and plucking. Javier took longer leaps than Amy; she tended to look longer and examine the trees before jumping.
“Are you afraid of hurting them?” he asked.
“Who?”
“The trees.”
She gestured at the greenery surrounding them. “Well, they are fairly fragile,” she said. “Besides, it’s your work. I don’t want to ruin your work.”
“You’re not going to ruin anything,” he said, swinging between branches. They bent and swayed under his grip, but they didn’t snap and he didn’t slip. “See? They’re tough. Flexible.”
She smiled down at him. “You’re a good gardener.”
“Well thank you kindly, ma’am.”
“No, really. You’ve done so much here, in so little time. It’s really impressive.”
He let his momentum rock him gently on the bough. He was going to ask about the cats in the Veldt. Really, he was. Just not right now. Now he had other things on his mind. “Are you trying to get in my pants? Because that can be arranged.”
Amy shook her head. “Do you think about sex all the time?”
“The longer you hold out, the more I think about it.”
He levered himself up, catching the bough with his feet and rising to stand when its bounce calmed some. He proceeded along the length of it, one foot in front of the other. He caught her staring at his feet and smiled. Maybe Amy was a foot person. How delightfully human of her. He jumped for her, pinning her against her own tree – a kallu, the liquor of which fermented in the lifespan of a mayfly – by slipping his arms and legs around it and her.
“So,” he said. “Where were we?”
Amy shut her eyes. She always got so embarrassed. It was charming, in its own way. “I’m sorry about this morning. I didn’t mean to yell at you.”
“You didn’t yell. I’ve heard yelling, and that was not yelling.”
“You know what I mean.” Her eyes opened. “I’m sorry I’m not more like… what you want.”
“You’re exactly what I want. That’s what I keep trying to tell you.”
Amy shook her head. “You’ve been with a lot of humans. They had sex with you all the time.”
“You don’t take that as a ringing endorsement of my skills?”
She pressed back against the tree. Shadows glanced across her skin. “I just know you must miss it. And I’m not sure I could even keep up.”
Javier made a show of looking her up and down. “You could keep up.”
“But would you even enjoy it?”
He gave his best smile. She didn’t know how it worked, really. She didn’t know that his own enjoyment was comfortably algorithmic, that it relied entirely on external inputs from the other person’s affect. Indrawn breath. Blushing. Moaning. His orgasms were one big Voight-Kampff test.
“It’s not a contest. You just have to focus on nailing me, not nailing it.”
Amy stuck her tongue out at him. Javier wasted no time. He darted and kissed her.
When they first started out, she’d kissed like the women she’d watched on dramas in her old life: all demure stillness, letting him lead. Now she kissed more like herself: direct, to the point, sucking his lower lip like his designers had sculpted it specifically for her use. That was the real Amy, not the nervous girl trying to spare him from something she’d never understood. He smiled and moved to her neck.
“This tree is incredibly uncomfortable,” he said, between kisses. “Let’s go home.”
She said nothing. She’d gone completely still.
“Come on, the shipment can–”
Amy reached up and covered his mouth with her fingers. Her eyes had defocused. “It’s not the shipment.”
She slid off the bough, skidded down the tree, and pressed one hand to the ground. Her hand sank beneath the island’s surface. Then her forearm, up to her elbow. She grimaced. It looked as though she were freeing a clog in the island’s plumbing.
He joined her. “What is it?”
Her expression rippled into surprise and delight. “It’s a submarine.” She withdrew her hand. Streams of black oil coursed down her fingers and rejoined the earth. “The chimps are trying to look up my skirt.”
Together, they closed the distance between his garden and the nearest arterial in a single leap. They didn’t even bother running. They bounded. Three feet, five feet, until the dark trees became one black blur. As they ran, the trees grew. Javier heard their leaves rustle as they expanded, thinning, creating cover. They jumped, and Javier saw the diamond tree straight ahead, far at the other end of the thoroughfare. They were running straight for home. All over the island, a mist began to rise.
“Hey, is this shit explosive, too?”
Amy didn’t answer. She pounded down the thoroughfare, running faster and faster, her hands like blades, her knees at a perfect right angle to her hips. She tucked them into her stomach as they sailed over the heads of the other vN. As they cleared the canopy of mist, two other figures joined them.
“Go back to your treehouse, Xavier,” Amy said.