Sweet, tangy. It hit bottom in my stomach, first nauseating and then, suddenly, soothing. I felt better.
She’d . . . not a virus. Not a physical concussion. An EM pulse? That must be it. She’d somehow, with her parasite or with an implant of some kind, generated a powerful magnetic field, and she’d blasted it through my head.
There was a bulb in my hand, and I realized I was thirsty. It was about two-thirds full of greenish electrolyte drink. I put it in my mouth and drank.
I couldn’t remember exactly what had happened. She’d put her hand to my face, like a caress. And then the pain.
I’d fallen down.
There were things . . . I reached for my fox, to try to tune some of the pain and nausea out. Nothing; not even the crackle of static. I remembered blood on my hands. I remembered the pain of loss. I remembered what it felt like to have your heart peeled out of your body and handed to you by somebody you’d loved and allowed yourself to be vulnerable to.
I didn’t want to remember those things, but for some reason I didn’t seem to be able to stop remembering.
I remembered that you couldn’t trust anyone.
There was a bulb in my hand. “Drink,” Farweather said, and I finished the little bit of fluid left in the bottom.
“Good girl,” she said, and took it away from me.
My stomach churned. My head rang, vision doubling. I closed my eyes. I felt nauseated for some reason. Had I been drinking?
I tried to bump, to bring the pain down. For some reason, my fox didn’t seem to be responding.
I slept.
? ? ?
“You have to wake up,” Farweather said softly. “Both of us are going to need calories before long, and I can’t reach the rest of the supplies.”
I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to open my eyes. My head was splitting, and all I wanted to do was lie down and hide. For some reason, though I kept trying to bump to kill the headache, it kept not improving.
“Dammit,” she said. “They told me neuronal death was going to be minimal.”
I cracked an eye. “What did you do to me?”
“EMP,” she said. “Don’t worry; I just wiped your fox. The OS is toast, and the memory, but there shouldn’t be a lot of organic damage.”
“You wiped my memory?”
“Machine memory,” she said. “You have backups, I’m sure.”
Not of most of what I’d seen and learned since Singer was killed. Since this woman helped kill Singer. In that time, I had just a few things that I’d squirreled away.
I closed my eyes again, then opened them, because I didn’t have the energy to sit up and punch her in the nose.
She said, “You’ll be fine, but you need some more hydration and calories.”
“Easy for you to say,” I said.
I slept again.
? ? ?
I dreamed, and they were the terrible dreams that I had been tuning out for twenty ans.
? ? ?
The bottle is heavy. An antique. An art object, some kind of collectible. Possibly even gray-market valuable. I haven’t asked where it came from, but I wonder how it made its way to space. What its history is.
None of that really matters now.
Now it is becoming a weapon in my hands.
I fill it meticulously, careful of the funnel. The glass is good because it’s unlikely to strike a spark. It takes a screw-top, and I’ve constructed a reinforced one. I wipe the threads very carefully before I screw it on.
I set the bottle aside as she appears in the doorway. “Done?”
I look at the row a little sadly. Four, two for her and two for me. Tomorrow, I won’t have to worry about not being real anymore.
Tomorrow I’ll have served a purpose that isn’t the one that was planned out for me since birth. Tomorrow, I’ll die with my love.
“Done,” I say.
She comes over and carefully touches a wall brace to discharge any sparks before she ruffles my hair. “Go home and clean up,” she suggests. “We ought to celebrate. I’ll pick you up in an hour?”
“Celebrate.” The word feels weird as I roll it around my tongue. “But these—”
“Aren’t going anywhere. I’ll lock them in.” She scritches my scalp luxuriously with her nails.
I stretch and purr.
She laughs and says, “If it makes you feel better, we can go to the same place as tomorrow. There. Now it’s reconnaissance, and you can’t say no.”
? ? ?
I didn’t jerk awake, because I woke so suddenly I was still paralyzed from the dream. The paralysis felt like a memory, too. Like running through glue when I heard the explosion. Knowing exactly what had happened. Knowing that Niyara had tricked me.
That I was going to have to live with what we’d done.
How would Niyara, of all people, ever have constructed a bomb? No, she needed me for that.
She needed an engineer.
And I needed somebody to help me take revenge for the way I was raised.
Because I couldn’t move, and because my head was still fogged and sore, eventually I slept again.
? ? ?
“Haimey, wake up,” she said. “You need to get up. You need to eat, and you need to bring me calories.”
Niyara, leave me alone.
I rolled over and tried to keep sleeping. The rolling over went better than previous attempts at movement, and I risked opening my eyes. My head hurt, still, but it wasn’t the sickening pain of before. Not Niyara.
Farweather.
“What did you do to me?” I whined.
She sighed. “EM pulse, as I have told you approximately seventy-five times. I wiped your fox.”
“You fried my white matter,” I said. I blinked. The world seemed less tunnely and dark at the edges than the last time I’d tried this.
“There’s not supposed to be any permanent damage,” she said. “But right now you need to eat, and so do I.”
I tried to sit up, very slowly. I felt like I’d lost a lot of blood, and I wondered how I knew what losing that much blood felt like. “What happened to me?” I said.
“Haimey,” Farweather said, with infinite patience. “Go over there and get the pack with the empanadas in it, would you? And a couple more bulbs of electrolyte drink.”
I tried to stand up. It didn’t work; I made it to a crouch and fell over. I lay there for a little while until Farweather made me get up on my hands and knees.
“Go over there and get two empanadas, and two bulbs of electrolyte drink.”
I made it to the packs. She waited behind me, rattling her chain impatiently like a ghost of old guilt issues. I couldn’t find the pack with the food in it. Eventually she guided me there, and after a couple of false starts I made it back to her and brought her a cold stuffed dumpling in a sterile, shelf-stable vacpac and a bulb of electrolytes, sugar, and water. Apparently I had been supposed to get one for myself, as well, and she woke me up and made me go back over.
Because she kept waking me up, I managed to get the food and the hydration inside me. Then I went back to sleep, because I was no better at maintaining a train of thought than any drunk person, and besides my head still hurt abominably.
? ? ?
I guess it was probably a couple of diar before I started being able to hold a conversation again, and by then I really didn’t want to. Because I was starting to remember things when I was awake, not just when I was asleep—and not just which pack the empanadas were kept in.
Neural pathways are pretty well established, and I’d been wearing a fox since before puberty: external rig until my brain reached adult size, and then they’d done the transcranial surgery. They start us younger in the clades: not so much time to develop ideas of our own that way. Ideas of our own, such as might lead to discontent and unhappiness.
It would be terrible to be unhappy.
So I kept reaching reflexively for my machine capabilities—memory, processing, math, tuning—and finding nothing there. No response. In addition, my symptoms included cognitive and attention issues. I couldn’t hold a thought. I couldn’t accomplish a task without being distracted. And I couldn’t keep my temper at all.
I was utterly deregulated, in other words.
If Farweather was telling me the truth, I had been fuzzily conscious for about three standard hours. Then I’d slept a lot, which—honestly—I continued to do as I slowly recovered. I don’t think she’d expected my body’s response to her gadget to be so extreme. But if they’d tested it—or modeled it, which I figured was more likely—they hadn’t tested or modeled it on people who had grown up in a clade, or had significant Judicial Recon.
I think I’d actually worried her. At least, she’d acted concerned. Which was either a glimpse of a softer side of her, or a symptom that the Stockholmification was working. Or maybe just recognition that she couldn’t reach the food without me.
Please tell me I’ve got some kind of a chance to get out of this.
There was no answering banter.