“Oh, of course. Let’s go eat somewhere—I’m starved. I’m sure the food’s better at my hotel.” And Brun turned away, clearly someone who expected flunkies to do as they were told. Heris saw the amused glances of the others in the lounge, and gave them a wry grin as she followed Brun out into the concourse.
Chapter Seven
Cecelia’s first sensory impression was smelclass="underline" not a pleasant scent, but a sharp, penetrating stink she associated with fear and pain. After a timeless rummage through the back shelves of memory, her mind decided it was medicinal, and that probably meant she was in a doctor’s office. Gradually, over time she could not guess, she became aware of pressure. She lay on her back; she could feel the contact between a firm surface and her shoulders and her buttocks. She was less sure of her arms and legs . . . and in trying to feel their position realized in one stab of panic that she could not move.
She did feel the leap her heart gave then, and she heard, as if from a great distance, the voices that chattered above her. Her mind rattled around the vast dark space it sensed, and reminded her of other unpleasant wakenings. The eighteenth fence at Wherrin, that bad drop that she’d misjudged in the mud. The time a new prospect had gone completely berserk under a roofed jump, and nearly killed her. She wondered what it had been this time . . . she couldn’t quite remember. An event? Training? Foxhunting? Oddly, she couldn’t even remember the horse—even any horse she’d worked recently.
The voices above gave her no clue. No one asked her name or what had happened; no one spoke to her at all. A bad sign, that: she knew it from times she’d sat waiting outside for a hurt friend. A few of the technical terms sounded familiar, BP and cardiac function and perfusion. If she didn’t know what they meant, she knew they meant something. But others . . . her mind tried to grasp the unfamiliar syllables, but they slipped away. Demyel-something and something about selective pathways and neuromuscular dis-something. The drug names she didn’t expect to know, but she knew the voices discussed things to be put in this line or that. A harder pressure against her arm—at least she knew now that her arm was up there, not down here—might be an injection.
It didn’t hurt. Nothing hurt, and that scared her. If you didn’t hurt, something really big was wrong. The longer it didn’t hurt, the worse it was. If it was really bad—her mind shied away from the idea of spinal cord injury, brain injury—you would never hurt again, but that was worst. Sometimes even regeneration tanks wouldn’t work on central nervous system injuries.
If she could move something . . . she struggled, first to decide what to move, and then to move. An eyelid. She felt no movement, and the darkness did not lift.
“A bit of excess activity there,” someone said. Had she managed a movement she did not feel? She tried again. “Another tenth cc of motor inhibition,” she heard. “And increase the primary decoupler one cc an hour.” Inhibition? Decoupler? Just as the additional drugs pushed her beneath the surface of thought again, her mind made all the connections and nearly exploded in panic. No accident at all . . . someone had done this to her. On purpose. And she had no way to summon help. Damn, she thought. I was stupid. Heris was right. Hope she figures it out . . .
She woke again, to the same medical-ward smells, the same darkness, the same inability to move or speak.
“Hopeless, I’m afraid,” she heard. She didn’t recognize the voice. “There’s been no change at all, nothing in the brain scans . . . look, here’s the first. Massive intracranial bleed, typical cerebral accident. Probably all those years of riding, with repeated small concussions, caused significant weakening in the vascular attachments here and here—”
Someone else was here, not a medical person. Someone who wanted to know if she was going to get well. Someone who cared. If she could only make a sound, a small movement, anything.
“You can see the monitors yourself,” the voice said, nearer now. “If we use a strong aversive stimulus—” Acrid fumes stung her nose; her brain screamed danger/poison/run. “—you see a very slight reaction in the brainstem, there. The fourth line. But she doesn’t move. I can open an eye—” She felt the pressure on her eyelid, felt the movement across the eye itself, but saw nothing. “No change in pupil size, no response here. Cortical blindness. There’s no evidence of auditory response, no indication of higher cortical functions.”
“Couldn’t you have operated on the bleed?” The voice was male, used to authority, but Cecelia didn’t recognize it. Certainly it wasn’t her brother-in-law. “With all your facilities—”
“Too diffuse, I’m sorry. We think branches of both cerebral arteries failed at once. As if she’d been repeatedly bludgeoned, but of course that wasn’t the cause. I still think the years of riding had something to do with it, but I can’t prove it. I’ve sent for her scans after the previous accidents.”
“Could it have been . . . a result of poisoning?” YES! Cecelia thought. Good man. Smart man. Of course it was poisoning.
“I doubt it,” the other voice said. “There are neurotoxins, of course, that mimic natural strokes. But the evidence from her scans is clear: this is bleeding.” She heard a finger tap on something—a display, perhaps.
“I didn’t mean that it wasn’t bleeding,” the skeptical voice said. “I wondered if someone had induced the bleeding with a poison, perhaps a blood thinner or something of that sort.”
“Ah.” The professional voice sounded more relaxed now. Of course it would. “According to her records, she wasn’t taking any medication of that sort . . . and I don’t know if they analyzed her blood for that in the hospital that first night. They should have, of course; I just presumed that if it were a drug it would be in the records when she was transferred here.”
So she had been somewhere else and was now who knew where? She wondered where she’d been when she first woke up. Was that the original hospital? Had it been the big downtown one, or the upper-class clinic near her sister’s house?
“The thing is,” the skeptical voice said, “the family are concerned that she might have been under . . . er . . . undue influence, as it were, of someone. Until the formal proceedings, we cannot be sure, but the date of her last testamentary revision suggests that something happened recently. If there should be an unforeseen bequest, and if that individual had exerted undue influence, then there would have been . . . er . . .”
“Motivation to cause her harm. I see, precisely.”
Damn. The fool. The utter, incompetent fool. Now whoever had done this would have a chance to blame it on the one person it couldn’t be, and this stupid lawyer—she was sure it was a lawyer—had given them all they needed.
“But that’s another problem, and what we really need from you, doctor, is your assessment of prognosis. Is Lady Cecelia going to recover competency, or not? And if so, when? We have petitions of incompetency . . .”
“As I said originally, we cannot hold out much hope of recovery. I would hate to be hasty, but . . . my professional opinion is that irreversible brain damage has occurred, and I would be willing to present the evidence to a court. Although I see no reason for haste—”
“The statutes prescribe the waiting periods, doctor. It has been thirty days—” Thirty days. Thirty days. She had to scream, but she couldn’t; she forced rage and panic down and listened. “—and petitions may be presented, although of course no final action will be taken just yet.” A pause, during which she felt someone’s gaze across her face, painful in its lack of caring. “It is curious, isn’t it, that with so much damage she requires no life support?”