Her mom was at her side, getting a shoulder beneath the arm whose hand didn’t have an IV. The merc disconnected the other end of the hose from its bed feed, capped it with a sterile, elasticated wrap, draped the hose around Natalie’s neck. Her mom smelled of her own perfume, made special by a man in Istanbul who used to come to the house once a year, during Sacrifice Feast, when he’d tour the world and drop in on his best clients while all of Turkey ground to a halt. Natalie hadn’t smelled that scent—not quite sweet, not quite musky, and with a whiff of something a bit like cardamom—for years, but she remembered it more clearly than her mother’s face.
Her mother gasped when she settled her weight over her shoulders. Natalie thought she was too heavy, then: “Jacob, she’s like a bird!” in tones more horrified than Natalie had ever heard from her. She saw her mother’s perfect skin crumpled in a grimace, eyes narrowed into slits that made the hairline wrinkles at their corners deepen in a way she hated.
“Hi, Mom.”
They stood, swaying. She felt her legs giving out.
“I should sit.”
They both sat. The opening in the mattress where the hoses retracted, smelly and dark, was right behind them. Her mother twisted to look at it, twisted back, and captured Jacob on an even fiercer look.
“Jacob,” she began.
“Later,” he said.
Natalie enjoyed his discomfiture. Cordelia stood halfway between the parents, fretting with her hands, picking her cuticles. She’d been a nail-biter, broken the habit only after several tries, and Natalie could tell that she wanted nothing more than to chow down on her own fingers.
It struck Natalie that she was the least upset among them, except for the merc. She was on a team with the merc, them versus these fucked-up zottas. That was stupid. The merc was not on her side. Come on, Natalie, focus.
“I won’t be tied down again.”
“No, you certainly won’t,” her mother agreed.
“Frances—” her father began.
“No, she won’t.” The staring contest smoldered again. The balance had changed. There was a new implicit threat—what would a divorce court judge say about a daughter tied to a bed, starved and intubated, locked away in a safe room? Her mother had been furious about her going walkaway, but that wouldn’t stop her from deploying any leverage Jacob Redwater had handed her.
“No she won’t,” he said. “Excuse me.” He stepped out of the room. He shut the door. Clunk-clunk.
Cordelia took a tentative step. Her mother extended an arm and she stepped the rest of the way, let Frances give her one of her hugs, always warm enough, always ending a moment before you expected.
Cordelia subtly leaned to Natalie, testing for the presence of a potential hug, but Natalie didn’t signal back. Fuck her. For that matter, fuck Frances. They had known she was a prisoner and neither had sprung her. Getting her loosed from four-point restraint hardly qualified as liberation.
“Natalie, this is just terrible,” her mother said.
No shit. “Uh-huh.”
“Why, Natalie? There are more constructive ways to engage with the world. Why become an animal? A terrorist?”
It was so fucking stupid she couldn’t manage a derisive snort. “What would you prefer?”
“Move out, if it’s so bad. Your trust is mature, you could buy a place anywhere in the world. Get a job, or not. Take up a cause. Something constructive, Natalie. Something that won’t get you killed or raped or—”
“Kidnapped by mercenaries and tied to a bed in some rich asshole’s basement?”
Her mother set her jaw.
“Natalie,” Cordelia said. “Can I get you anything?”
“A lawyer. Cops.”
“Natalie—” Cordelia looked hurt. Natalie didn’t let herself give a shit.
“You knew I was down here. You knew he had me snatched. You don’t like the walkaways and you don’t like that I’m one, fine. But in case you haven’t noticed, I’m an adult and whether I become a walkaway is none of your business. Neither of you get a say in what I do.”
“Of course we do. I’m your mother!”
Even Cordelia smirked.
She saw rage boil in their mother, different than their father’s, but no less deadly. “Natalie, if you think being an adult means you don’t have any duty to anyone else in the world—”
She and Cordelia both snorted. It further enraged their mother, but it was the most sisterly moment they’d shared since Natalie first went away to school.
Frances went rigid and stared straight ahead, not acknowledging them, wishing she hadn’t gone straight to the maternal moment, which left her with no gracious out, and if there’s one thing Frances Mannix Redwater was, it was gracious.
The door clunked, opened. Jacob came in trailed by the med-tech/paid goon, who carried a precarious armload of clothing. Natalie recognized the clothes from the dumbwaiter in her previous incarceration.
“We’ll bring in a proper bed later today,” Jacob said, while the man put the clothes on the floor.
“Books, too,” Natalie said. “Interface stuff. Paper and something to write with.”
He looked at her, then at Frances.
“No interface stuff,” Frances said. “But everything else. Some furniture, too. A fridge and food.”
“Hop to it,” Natalie said, with a giddy laugh. Jacob ignored her. He had a goat, but you couldn’t get it with a jibe as crude as that.
“Now everyone else out,” Frances said. “I need to talk to Natalie alone.”
Natalie closed her eyes. Not one of those talks.
“I’m tired,” she said.
“You’ve had plenty of time to rest.” Frances managed to make it into an accusation, as though Natalie had lazed around eating bonbons. It wasn’t sarcasm—Frances was capable of being simultaneously outraged because she’d been tied to a bed, and because she’d been too lazy to get out of bed.
“Everyone, out.” She glared at the merc, who had the sense not to look at Jacob. That would have been the end of her employment in the Redwater household. Natalie guessed being a merc in the employ of zottas required political sense.
They left and before the door clunked closed, Frances called out to Jacob. “Private. No recording.”
“Frances—”
“She’s not going to jump me and hold me hostage, Jacob.”
“You’ve seen the video—”
“I saw it. That was before you tied her to a bed for a week and fed her through a tube.”
“Frances—”
“Jacob.”
Jacob turned to the merc, who was already holding something out, palm down. He passed it to Frances. “Panic button,” he said.
She pointedly put it in her purse, then set the purse far from the bed, leaning against the wall, buttery yellow leather slumped against stark white. “Good-bye, Jacob.”
They left the door open.
[viii]
Limpopo was volunteering with the scanner crew when Jimmy showed up.
He didn’t look as cocky as the last time they’d met, with his stupid weapons and such. He’d had a hard walk, fetched up in Thetford with a limp and a head wound, in filthy overlapping thermal layers. He was gaunt, frostbite in three fingers and all his toes.
“Fancy meeting you here,” he said, when Limpopo came upon him in the great hall of the Thetford spacies, tended by a medic who listened to advice from someone far away who diagnosed Jimmy.
“You look bad,” she said.
“Could have been worse. We lost fifteen on the road from Ontario. It’s getting mean.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault. Actually, possibly it is your fault, you being a big beast in the world of scanning and sims.”