She said, “Maybe we could, after all, find common ground. Work together. Maybe we can team up.”
I said, “I need to go home, Farweather.”
She smirked bitterly. “So do I.”
“That didn’t sound like a decision, exactly.”
“No,” she said. “Nor loyalty.”
I wondered if she really was a human bomb. Like Niyara.
Niyara had chosen it, though.
I waited. We stood, facing each other. I knew I was too close; but I wanted to be there.
This is a bad idea, said the little voice in my head. My own internalized ghost of Singer. Haimey, step back.
She moved so fast I didn’t even see her, swinging with one straight arm, taking a single lunge step forward, and clapping her cupped left hand against my right temple with force and accuracy.
I fell to the floor. I felt the impact on my limbs and body, treacherous gravity. Treacherous gravity.
Treacherous gravity. My ally in this fight!
She’d—what had she done?
I tried to reach out into the parasite, to slam Farweather back against the wall, but all I got was a tickle of presence and then a crushing, incapacitating pain. Not from the fall; from my chest and my belly. From my heart.
I’m having a heart attack. She’s somehow triggered a heart attack. I am going to die right here.
CHAPTER 21
IT HURT SO MUCH, I wished I would die. I was felled, like a tree. Like an ox. Like all those primitive, atavistic things that humans used to fell with their primitive, atavistic tools. The hard way. An axe through the heartwood; a hammer at the center of an X drawn between the ears and eyes.
Swing hard; follow through to the other side of whatever you are swinging at.
Zanya Farweather had been swinging at my soul.
My identity, my selfhood. The person I’d been for nearly twenty ans. It dropped away, and I was left wrecked and retching, cramped, choking up a thin stream of bile.
She hadn’t really done anything to me physically. This was just what a broken heart felt like.
I’m an engineer. The little bit of my brain that stayed clear and focused in a crisis asserted itself, contemplated the problem. My fox wasn’t working.
I curled in on myself. The pain was physical, immobilizing. As if I had been electrocuted.
Which is another way they used to fell animals, and people.
I couldn’t… think. My mind skittered, blurred. I decided I needed to stand up; started to. Some indeterminate time later I realized I was still lying there. It seemed fine.
Somebody was touching me. Farweather. I wanted to recoil, but instead my body twitched feebly and lay still. She had pillowed my head on something uncomfortable, bony and soft. Her thigh. She petted my hair.
“Rest,” she said. “I’ve got you.”
I tried to organize myself, my thoughts. Tune the pain and grief and confusion down. Reflexively, I reached for that solace.
It wasn’t there. Concentration failed me. I wasn’t… unconscious, exactly. But I also wasn’t aware. The world swam fuzzily, as if on the other side of a high fever, a concussion, a heavy drunk or other mild poisoning. My limbs didn’t respond when I told them to, or when they did, they didn’t behave in the ways I desired. Like a small child who couldn’t quite get the stylus to move properly on the pad to make the smooth line she envisions.
Eventually, I slept.
I awoke several times into half-awareness and hungover discomfort before the final time, when I swam up into something like real consciousness. My body ached; I huddled in nausea. My skin felt chafed where the edges of my suit touched.
Farweather was right beside me. She seemed to be sleeping, sitting upright against the wall. She’d dragged me onto her improvised mattress. When I moved, the materials rustled, and she stirred.
“Drink this,” she said, when my eyes opened. She handed me a squeeze bulb of something green—an electrolyte drink from her stores.
The chain I’d put on her rattled as she did it; she didn’t seem to have gotten free.
I took the bulb, tried to sit up, and rapidly thought better of it. I lay back down and tried to remember exactly what had happened.
“How long?” I asked.
“About twelve hours,” she said. “The vascular effects should be wearing off by now. You might have some memory and attention deficits for a while. Drink.”
There was a bulb in my hand. I wasn’t sure where it had come from, though it looked like the ones in her stores. I put it to my lips and bit down on the valve.
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.