“Wait.” Grace sipped the water, which tasted like water only, and sipped again. “How are other things?”
“Complicated. So was your recovery. Let me call the nurse.”
Dr. Maillard arrived on the heels of the nurse. “Well, that’s a good deal better,” she said to Grace. “You’ll have noticed your implant’s already in. Your arm’s fine. And the poison has cleared, though the damage it did hasn’t all been healed yet. Now for your mental status exam…”
Grace stared at the ceiling while reciting the date, the time, counting backward by sevens, and then naming her physicians. “Not the President?”
“No. I don’t like her.” Dr. Maillard’s face bunched into a scowl. “It’s more important that you know his name”—she pointed at MacRobert—“and your own name and my name and those of your nearest relatives than the President’s. Now: you are feeling much better, and you want out, right?”
“Certainly,” Grace said. She didn’t feel that much better but she definitely wanted out.
“Can’t happen now. Two more days at best, more likely longer. But you can get out of bed, and you can take a shower if you want. I want you up and walking the length of the hall five minutes an hour the first three hours, then a two-hour break, then ten minutes an hour the next four. Report any asymmetrical weakness or pain. Got that?”
“Yes, Doctor,” Grace said as meekly as she could.
Maillard reached out and laid a hand on hers. “You’re going to be all right, now. Don’t worry. But don’t hide any symptoms.”
She was gone with a swirl of her coat, and was talking to someone else on the way out of the room. “Yes, I’m on the way. Three minutes. Czardany can open for me.”
“You want me to fetch food, or do you trust the hospital?” Mac asked.
“I like having you here,” Grace said. “Can we send out?”
“I can,” he said. “And I have things to tell you. Your concern for those personnel Ky told you about was well founded, but we are going to have a hell of a time mounting a rescue.”
“Why?”
“Among other things, because you pissed off Basil Orniakos, remember? Who would ordinarily be on our side. Grace, this is going to be a delicate operation, and you must not lose your temper or go rogue.”
“You’re serious.” Her implant reminded her that Orniakos commanded Region VII AirDefense, and she had jumped the command chain to chew him out the day the shuttle had crashed.
“Very. They could all—well, all but the three who escaped, as you know—be eliminated very easily, and their deaths explained as due to some mysterious disease. We must work quickly and quietly. Ky’s begun.”
“What about that captain—?”
“He died. Suicided in custody, I’m convinced. The rest of that squad knew only that they were being told to pick up dangerous fugitives. Now, about that family you were having dinner with… tell me exactly how you ended up there.”
Grace told him, starting with her first glimpse of a woman in a red coat, walking a white dog.
“Conspicuous,” Mac said. “Had you ever seen her walking that dog there before?”
Grace shrugged. “Usually I didn’t pay much attention to anyone on the street—just went straight into the house.”
“It’s the coincidence I don’t like. And the fact that you weren’t suspicious. She shows up right at the critical moment, whisks you off to her house, and invites you to dinner—and you went. And her husband just happens to be from Esterance, where you were during the war.”
“Yes. I thought of that when I smelled the casserole. Not before.” Now she could recognize how foggy-headed she’d been, trusting the friendly stranger. “But he was too young.”
“You know perfectly well that family quarrels last through generations.”
“Yes.” Grace lay back. “And I did worry about that, but—” But she hadn’t been thinking clearly, thanks to the poison already working inside her.
“I ran background on them both. Sera Vance checks out clean. But her husband—he uses the name Vance now—his mother’s maiden name—his father’s name was Ernesto Arriaga.”
Grace nodded. “I know the Arriaga name. But the man I knew would have been Ernesto’s father or uncle or something—a generation older at least.”
“Felipe Arriaga, by any chance? Active in the Separatist movement? Jaime Vance’s great-uncle.” His brows went up and he said nothing, waiting. Testing her, she realized.
“Yes.” Memories rushed over her: smells, sounds, touch… the feel of his hands clamped on her wrists, his weight holding her down. The perfume of citrus flowers following the breeze through the window. The sound of gunfire nearby, which took his attention off her just long enough… the sight of his face, anger changing to fear, with the blade of his own knife in his throat. The memories went on: the gush of blood, hot on her face, the noise of a firefight outside, her friends breaking the house door, their voices. “I killed him,” she said.
“Well,” Mac said. “I thought it might be something like that. Jaime Vance seems clean so far; I’ll want to dig deeper, but his father Ernesto was pro-Unionist.”
He didn’t sound shocked, but then he wouldn’t. Grace debated trying to justify what she’d done. Felipe Arriaga had been a monster, delighting in causing pain. That morning he’d come in to beat her again, and threatened to kill the boy Grace had saved, the boy who had, in adulthood, become Commandant of the Academy. But she had explained it all, over and over, during the trial and the endless sessions in prison.
“Was that your first kill?” Mac asked. “You were what—eighteen?”
“I don’t know. I’d been in a firefight twice—no, three times, I think—but whether it was my bullet or someone else’s, when someone fell… I don’t know.” Hadn’t wanted to know, until later. Until after that night when she’d snatched the frightened boy, argued and threatened to keep him alive, had even endured Arriaga’s abuse to save the boy worse. Until her kills, starting with Arriaga himself, were for a purpose that made sense to her, keeping her and the boy alive, rather than for a cause she’d never cared about. The group that rescued her, nominally pro-Unification, had cared as little for her or the boy as the Separatists. She had had to fight for their side, again to save the boy, to earn food. Eventually she had fled with him into the scrub, her fragile link to sanity being the trust in his face.
He said nothing more for a moment, then sighed. “All right. I’ll send for some food from a trusted source, and then be here if you need help to shower.”
She watched him call in an order, wondering if he would be another casualty, if he would leave her now, or in a few days, with a good excuse. She had finally trusted him, but he might not trust her. And perhaps, if he didn’t, he was right. He was a soldier, with a soldier’s sense of duty and honor. She had had neither, back then. And as she had told Helen shortly before that last firefight, when she had killed and then been wounded to keep Jo’s twins alive, she believed she had no morals.
MacRobert wondered when Grace would be fully alert again; he could still see a trace of medication-fog in her eyes. He would not tell her yet about the nurse with a lethal dose of heart stimulant in a syringe who had been intercepted inside Grace’s room, about to inject it into the IV bag. Grace would be leaving the hospital for a more secure location sooner than Maillard had wanted, but he could not tell Grace until he was sure she was alert enough to keep that secret.
CHAPTER EIGHT