Still, she was not going to wait here obediently for Bandholtz and whatever companions he might arrive with.
She walked quickly to the elevator and tapped the up button.
Nardie Dinh waited until the elevator door had closed, then went to the one next to it and pushed its up button.
She was blinking back tears. I can do it, she told herself firmly, and I will do it. In a way it'll be self-defense, for if I'm not the Queen, I'm not anything at all. I wasn't born for it, but my damned half brother carved me into it. It'll be his fault, not mine.
In the last few days she had managed to eat several meals—mostly spinach and beans and rice, with olive oil—and had drunk several cartons of milk. She hoped she would have the strength for what she'd have to do here.
The doors slid open, and she patted the bulge under her jacket and stepped resolutely inside.
And someone was right behind her. She turned, and as the doors sighed closed she recognized Ray-Joe Pogue grinning down at her.
"I've got you!" he exclaimed joyfully. "You knew I was here? And I forgive you. Listen, Nardie, I just killed one of the King's bodies! I just heard a nurse say that an old guy who was drinking coffee in the cafeteria stopped breathing and then died of a big heart attack, ventricular fibrillation, before they could do anything with him!" He touched her shoulder. "I'm going to win, Nardie. Saturday you and I can get married."
The elevator had started moving up. She could feel her weight increase.
Nardie knew he had a gun. Well, so did she. But she doubted if either of them could draw a gun in here without being jumped by the other before the gun could be freed. And in a hand-to-hand fight he'd beat her.
He doesn't know why I'm here, she thought, where I'm going. Pretend to be giving in to him.
So she sighed and nodded, looking at his feet. "I had to fight," she said. "For my self-respect."
"And you fought well," he said, laughing. "Once or twice I thought you were going to evade me and ruin us both." He was brushing some kind of dust out of his ear.
The doors opened on the second floor, and an old woman pushing an aluminum walker hobbled in.
"I'm glad you found me," Nardie said in a small voice.
"I wasn't looking for you," the old woman snapped.
Nardie glanced up and caught her half brother's gaze. Both of them grinned—
And Nardie realized that they were sharing a joke, and that she wanted to kill Diana now, and then leave with this man, whom, after everything, she apparently still loved. She opened her mouth to tell him why she was here and ask for his help—
And only when her knuckles cracked hard into his nose and she fell back against the closing doors did she note that she did still have some willpower—in her spine, perhaps, if not in her brain.
The old woman was screaming shrilly. Pogue had tumbled into the corner, and bright red blood was spilling out from between the fingers of the hand that was clasped to his face. His eyes were still blank with pain and surprise, and Nardie turned around, forced the doors open and hurried away down the hall.
She would take the stairs up to the room where Diana Ryan's son was. She patted her hidden gun again and wondered if she had broken her knuckles. Even if she hadn't, the recoil was going to hurt. It was going to hurt badly.
She wondered if she would ever recover from it.
"You certainly don't look like you've been too sick to visit him," the nurse said coldly, standing in an almost protective posture beside Scat's bed. "You look like you've been at some kind of health resort." She looked Diana squarely in the eye then, and must have sensed her real agony, for after a moment her expression softened. "Well, he's better. You can see he's breathing on his own now. He's being fed through the nasal gastric tube; the IV is mainly just for hydrating and antibiotics and to keep a line open for anything we want to get into his veins fast." She waved toward the monitor over the bed. "His vital signs are stable. He's"—she shrugged—"just very deeply asleep."
Diana nodded. "Could I be alone with him?" she said softly.
"Sure."
The nurse had started toward the door, and Diana added, "I'm supposed to be meeting Dr. Bandholtz in the lobby in a few minutes. Could you not tell him I'm here yet? I'll be down soon."
"Okay."
Diana looked down at her son in the tilted-up hospital bed, and she bit her knuckle. The green nasal gastric tube dented his blond curls on the right side of his head; the left side was bandaged, but she could see that his scalp had been shaved on that side. His eyes and mouth were closed, but he was breathing gently, and the monitor over him beeped regularly and showed a regularly bouncing green line on its black screen.
Even if I'd been here every day, she told herself earnestly, he wouldn't have known. He's probably dreamed of me, and that's been more immediate than my physical presence would have been.
Until today. Today, with the full moon overhead, I might make a difference by being here.
She reached out toward the little limp hand that was bound to the rail of the bed by a strip of plastic.
And then she stopped, for she had heard the solid click-and-snap of an automatic pistol being chambered behind her.
For three heartbeats she just stood there with her arm extended; then she lowered her arm and turned around.
It was the young Asian woman she'd seen in the lobby downstairs. The barrel of the gun she held was lengthened with a fat metal cylinder—a silencer, Diana was sure.
"Do you mean to kill me?" Diana asked. Her voice was calm, though her heart thudded and her fingertips were tingling. "Or him? Or both of us?"
"You. My name is Bernardette Dinh."
"Diana Ryan. Uh—why?" Dinh was too far away across the carpet for Diana to be able to kick the gun, and there was nothing she could hope to grab and throw. She could dive behind the bed, but if Dinh shot at her the bullet would probably hit Scat.
"To be Queen. Do you have any change in your pockets? Bring it out slow, and if you throw it, I'll shoot."
Mystified but glad of any delay, Diana slid her hand into the pocket of her jeans, then took it out and held it forward in her palm.
The quarters and dimes still shone silver, but the pennies were all black.
With her free hand Dinh reached into her own pocket and took out a penny. It was shiny red-brown.
"See?" she said. "And if you've tried to wear linen during the last few days, you'll have noticed it goes black, too, just like the pennies." She was talking fast, licking her lips nervously between phrases. "And purple cloth bleaches if you touch it. And if you should happen to approach a beehive, the bees will all leave the hive. All this year those things have happened to me at my time, at the full moon."
"You want to become the Queen," said Diana. "Why?"
"I didn't really come here to talk. Why? To … for the power of it. For the family of it, to be a—a mother, in the profoundest way."
"I already am a mother."
Dinh glanced past Diana toward Scat. "Biologically, I guess. Maybe you sent a lot of get-well cards."
Diana felt her face reddening, but she made herself smile. "And you'd kill me to get that? You'd make a ten-year-old boy an orphan to get that?"
"I'll—I'll adopt him. I'm going to have a very big family."
"But I'm the Queen's daughter."
"Damn it, that's why I've got to. With you gone, I'm the most natural successor." Dinh sighed unsteadily. "There's lots of deaths in this, you know that. Death waits in the desert and in the hot sky, for any of us. I don't know how many times I've thought of suicide."