Curious in spite of herself: “But you didn’t ship me off.”
“Not yet. Natalie, hard as you might find this to believe, I respect you in addition to loving you as your father. I would like the part of you that makes you you to survive this adventure. I don’t want an automaton with a superficial resemblance to my daughter. I want you to realize all this pissing around with radical politics and campouts with dropouts is not a long-term strategy. I understand you feel guilty about having so much when everyone else has so little, but what good do you think it does to turn your back on reality? You can’t wish inequality away. In my ideal world, you’d run the family foundation, oversee our good works. There’s a lot of poor people out there who owe their vaccinations, water, and education to the Redwater Foundation. Take some of that energy you put into anarchy and channel it into something productive. You could even set aside a little brownfield for experimental communities based on walkaway principles.”
She just stared at him. She knew if she’d really been in solitary all that time, this would have sounded like a hell of an offer. If not for Dis, she’d beg for this. She knew how susceptible she was to isolation. It wasn’t just being alone. It was being alone with herself. Did this mean Dis wasn’t working for her father? Or was this a subtle, super-Machiavellian Jacob Redwater deal that made him the stuff of legend, even in zotta circles?
“When are Mom and Cordelia going to visit?”
He shook his head. It was so patronizing. “Your mother isn’t going to bail you out. She’s more upset than I am. Cordelia, well, she’s afraid of you. Wants to put you on anti-psychotics. Thinks you’re going to attack her.”
“When are they coming for a visit?”
“Do you want to see them?”
She stared him down. He’d tilted her bed up to a forty-five-degree angle, so she could look at him over the rumpled white hill-scape of her sheet-draped body.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
When he was gone, Dis whooped loudly enough that she winced.
“Jesus, keep it down!”
“This place is so shockproof you could use it to print holograms,” Dis said.
“My head isn’t shockproof.”
“Sorry. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but your dad is a colossal asshole.”
“I’d apologize for him, but fuck that.”
“Yeah.”
“If it matters, I’m more convinced you’re not working for him.”
“What a relief.”
“That voice sim is getting better at sarcasm.”
“I’ve been sneaking updates to my local copy. The voice synth people are good—merging normalized speech recordings from MMOs and voice-response systems, getting incredible stuff out of it. I’ve been playing around with some of the possibilities.” The last sentence came out in a growl of predatory menace so scary Natalie jerked in her bonds.
“Jesus.”
“I know, right? I cheated, though. Used sub-sonics. It’s pretty amazing what I can do. You should hear my sexy ingénue.”
“No thanks. I can’t remember ever feeling less interested in sex—”
“They’re coming.”
The door clunked and clunked again and gasped open, and in came Natalie’s mother, in her pearl gray, like a monochrome Jackie O, smaller than Natalie remembered, but no older. She took a small step inside, her nose wrinkled at a smell Natalie had lost all awareness of. She stared at Natalie. Cordelia slipped in behind her, round face a china-doll mask. Natalie felt a pang of weird sympathy for her, being with their mother on her own, the sole focus of Mother’s attention.
“Hi, Mom.”
Her mom circled the bed, walking around three sides before coming to the wall, retracing her steps, coming to rest beside Natalie.
“Jacob,” she called. Jacob stepped into the room, looking pained.
“Yes, Frances?”
“Remove these restraints.”
“Mom—” Cordelia began, but her mother held up a shaking hand.
“Jacob. Now.”
They locked eyes. She remembered this from childhood, their wars of silent gazes. As she’d grown, she’d realized these were a game of chicken where each gave the other longer to contemplate the ways retribution could come, until one looked away. As usual, Jacob broke contact first.
“I’ll be back.”
Natalie assumed he’d gone to get the med-tech or whatever he was, but a moment later, he was back with the merc. She nodded a little at Natalie, a degree of acknowledgment that was practically a full-body hug given their previous interactions. Maybe Natalie had impressed her with her “spunk.” Or maybe she’d been given permission—or orders—to lighten up.
“Frances, Cordelia, please stand back.”
Mom looked like she was going to argue, but Cordelia dragged her arm. “Come on, Mom.”
Once they had a few meters’ distance between them and the bed, the merc stepped forward and locked eyes with Natalie.
“No trouble,” she said, and clipped a bracelet around Natalie’s wrist. Natalie lifted her head and strained to see it. It was evil blue metal. She didn’t want to even guess what it did, though she couldn’t stop her subconscious from gaming it out: not shock, because she could grab hold of Mom or Dad or Cordelia and the shock would go through them, too. Maybe something in her nerves, like pain, or seizures, or—
“No trouble,” she agreed. The merc impersonally lifted the sheet, removed her catheter, let it retract into the bed. The sensation made her gasp with humiliation. The merc wiped her hands with a disposable and dropped it into the bed’s hopper before offering her hand. Natalie took it, because after days—weeks?—supine, she was weak and dizzy and her stomach muscles refused to help swing her huge, numb legs over the bed’s edge. Tears sprang into her eyes, because when she’d been a walkaway, she’d been so strong—they all had been. All the walking. Now she couldn’t walk away even if they cleared a path. Tears rolled down her cheek and slipped into her mouth.
She snotted up the rest of the tears and blinked hard, let herself be guided to her feet. She swayed, not looking at Mom or Cordelia, locking eyes with Jacob, letting him see what he’d done to her. He’d destroyed her body, but she made her eyes shine to let him know he hadn’t touched her mind.