‘How long have you been awake?’
‘Too long,’ Ariel Corta says. Beijaflor brings up the head of the ICU bed. Her hair hangs loose, limp, unclean around her face. Her skin is dull and waxen, grey; her eyes sunken. Tubes and cannulae run from her wrists to the smooth white arms of the medical machines.
‘I don’t think you’re supposed to—’
‘Fuck supposed sideways,’ Ariel says. She turns the bed to face Marina. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I watch over you, remember?’ After Ariel was brought out of her artificial coma her family had buzzed around her. There hadn’t been an hour when one or more hadn’t been at the bedside, holding hands, smiling, there even when she slipped back into the long healing sleeps the medical team had programmed for her. Over the hours, the days, the demands of the company drew them away. The vigils became visits. The media mob at the door flew away, the entourage dissolved. In the end, Marina sat the hours in the ICU. She feared the solitude, that would not be able to escape from the face of the man impaled on the spike but she found the watch peaceful, healing. Time away from people and their wants. She could accommodate what she had done to the man who tried to kill Ariel. In time she might justify it.
‘Well you look like shit,’ Ariel says. ‘And what are you wearing?’
‘Clean stuff. I like it. It’s comfortable. And you can talk.’
Ariel’s laugh is a dry, bitter bark.
‘God yes; be a dear and get me some make-up? I’m not facing the moon like this.’
‘Already ahead of you.’ Marina hooks the zip-case out from under her chair and sets it on the bed. It’s only a Rimmel Luna travel-pack, one upgrade from budget, but Ariel opens it with the impatience and excitement of a New Year present.
‘You are a treasure.’ Ariel’s eyes soften as she regards her face through Beijaflor and surveys the restoration work. Abundant thanks for the cosmetics, not a word for saving your life, Marina thinks. ‘And where is my ever-loving family?’
‘Planning a wedding,’ Marina says. Ariel jerks upright, then collapses back in pain. ‘Are you all right?’ Lipstick rolls from Ariel’s fingers.
‘No I’m not fucking all right. I think I tore something. Where’s the doctor? I want a human. Get me some pain relief.’
‘Easy.’
A nurse arrives at speed and bustles Marina away from the bed. Marina catches glimpses of Ariel’s exasperated face as the bed is reset, the monitors checked, the dosage administered. The cosmetics are repacked and parked on a table out of reach.
‘Give me those,’ Ariel commands when the nurse is gone. She applies foundation, eye shadow and liner; mascara in careful, precise strokes. Ariel’s ritual transformation of her face is a reclaiming of her body, a degree of control in an environment, a body outside her command. Finally, the lips. Ariel turns her head from side to side to catch every angle of her restored face.
‘So: my nephew. Who’s looking after the nikah?’
‘Lucas.’
‘Lucas! The kid’s fucked. Get him over here. Now. Has he signed anything? Gods save us from amateur matchmakers.’
‘The doctors say you’re still very frail.’
‘Then I’ll fire those doctors and hire ones who have a bit of respect. What am I supposed to do, lie here and gaze up at the ceiling and have Beijaflor play me womb-music? It’s my legs don’t work, not my brain. This is therapy. Beijaflor, get Lucas over here.’
External communications have been restricted on medical grounds, Beijaflor says on the common channel. Ariel shrieks in exasperation. The nurse returns and is driven from the room in a fluster by Ariel’s bellow. Marina turns away to hide her delight.
‘Marina, coração, can you get Lucas for me?’
‘Already done, Senhora Corta.’
‘I keep telling you: Ariel.’
The cry wakes Marina. She’s in the corridor, running while Hetty is still informing her of the alarm in Ariel Corta’s room. Ariel has been moved from the ICU to a private room up on the former Corta floor. The level is airy and quiet and secure. Machines walk or flit by, sniff Ariel’s vital signs, drift on. Marina’s momentum carries her into the room and hard into the wall beside the bed. Medical bots reach out from their hatches in the walls to examine her. Superficial bruising, no lasting trauma.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I heard – Hetty alerted me.’
‘Nothing!’
The bed again brings Ariel Corta into a sitting position. Hetty displays diagnostics but Marina can see the fear in Ariel’s wide eyes, the tightness of her breathing, the resentment in the set of her mouth that she should be found like this: unseemly.
‘I’m not going.’
‘Nothing. No. I saw him.’
‘Barosso …’ Marina begins. Ariel holds up a hand.
‘Don’t say it.’ She gives an exasperated sigh, fists clenched. ‘I see him all the time. Every time anything moves; the bots, someone in the corridor, you; it’s him.’
‘It takes time. You’ve had a trauma – a serious trauma, you need to heal the memories …’
‘Do not give me that therapy-speak, healing shit.’
Marina bites back her words. She grew up in the vocabulary of well-being, of balancing and aligning and rebirth. Crystals turned, chakras glowed. Hurts crippled, traumas wounded, offences maimed. She realises she has never examined its principles and beliefs. It is all analogies. But healing, practical healing, might be a thing of the body only, not the emotions. A different process might apply to the emotions – if what is wounded are emotions at all, if wound isn’t just another analogy for a realm that has no names or words beyond the experience of the emotion itself. Or perhaps no process at all, except time and the decay of memory.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Self-help shit,’ Ariel growls. ‘What I need: I need to be able to walk, I need to be able to take a piss or a dump without feeling something warm in a bag next to my hip. I need out of this bed. I need a bloody martini.’
You’re angry, Marina makes to say. No. ‘My brother-in-law, Skyler, was in the military.’
‘Really?’ Ariel props herself up on her elbows. The bed catches up with her. A human story. People doing things; those interest her.
‘He was working down in the Sahel. That was when they brought the army in on any kind of emergency; some multiple-resistance outbreak or refugees or famine or drought.’
‘What you people get up to down there, I don’t understand any of it.’
A spike of fury stabs through Marina. Who is this lofty rich bitch lawyer? A rich bitch lawyer on the moon. Stabbed and paralysed. Let the emotion go. Calm. Heal.
‘He was in information support. Every crisis needs information support. But he still saw things. Kids. They were the worst. That was all he’d say. He wouldn’t talk about it. They never do talk about it. He was diagnosed as a PTSD victim. No, he said. I’m not a victim. Don’t make me a victim. That’s all people will see. That will become everything about me.’
‘I am not a victim,’ Ariel says. ‘But I want to stop seeing him.’
‘So do I,’ Marina says.
‘What do you mean, you don’t do other people?’
Two o’clock and Marina and Ariel are insomniac again in a med centre room. They’ve talked people and politics, law and ambition; unspooled their stories and histories and they’ve come round to sex.
‘I’m not sexually attracted to other people,’ Ariel says. She lies propped up in bed vaping. Dr Macaraeg has given up her admonitions and warnings. Who pays for your breathing, darling? The vaper is new, longer and more deadly than the one with which Marina stabbed Edouard Barosso. Its flowing tip mesmerises Marina. ‘I can’t be bothered with them. All that neediness and attention seeking and having to think about them when they’re not thinking about you. All that having to negotiate sex, and the falling in and out of sex, and then there’s love. Spare us that. It’s so much better to have sex with someone who’s always available, knows what you want and who loves you more deeply than anyone else ever can. Yourself.’