“You’re facing a time limit,” the doctor said. “One formal—the legal requirement to show competency before your estate is finally distributed—and one informal—before whoever did this to you finds you. So we aren’t going to waste any time: you will have a full schedule of rehab work, every day, no vacations.”
Cecelia thought about that, and her immediate wish to stretch out on that unseen medbed, and jerked her shoulder Yes with as much emphasis as the earlier No. She was tired, but better to be tired than forever lost in this helplessness.
“Except tonight,” the doctor said. “Most of your therapists are still in transit. We didn’t want to make it obvious where you were if someone is keeping track of them, so they’ve had to take roundabout routes. So tonight you can just rest.”
Until that moment, she hadn’t thought of pursuit—Brun had mentioned it, but reality itself seemed hardly real. Now, with the familiar smells and sounds around her, the thought of being recaptured, returned to a blank prison existence, terrified her. It was the wrong place; it was the obvious place. Anyone would know where she was. What fools!
Brun recognized her panic somehow. “It’s all right,” she kept saying. “It’s not as obvious as you think.”
Why not? she wanted to say. Brun went on to explain. Rotterdam had horses, but no advanced medical facilities. It was far from the logical place for someone in her condition. Moreover, her lifelong investments in Rotterdam—not only money, but time and friendship—meant that few mouths would talk. And even if they did, Rotterdam lay far off the usual networks of transport and communication.
“They’ll figure out it was Dad’s yacht, eventually. They’ll think of Sirialis, and then Corhulm, where most of our pharmaceutical research is done. They may send a query about Rotterdam, but—I’m assured nothing will come of it. At least for months.”
Cecelia hoped Brun was right. She would much rather die than go back to that nonlife.
Her earlier experiences in recovering from more minor injuries helped only a little. It had been twenty years since her last broken bone—well, large broken bone—and longer than that since the near-fatal headlong crash in the Trials. She had forgotten how infuriating it was to struggle, panting, for what seemed like hours, in order to twitch something slightly—and then have the physical therapist’s bright, cheerful voice say, “Pretty good, hon, now do it again.” And again and again, until she was a quivering wreck. She had forgotten how much weakened muscles and ligaments hurt when forced to work again; she had forgotten how even the best therapists talked over patients’ heads, as if they weren’t really there. “There’s a spike on that adductus longius” and “Yeah, and isn’t that a twitch in the flexor radialis?” and “If she doesn’t get something going on these extensors we’re going to have to start splinting; the tone’s up on the flexors.” She hated that; she wanted them to remind her what they were talking about, and what it meant.
And she was tired. Bone-tired, sore, short of sleep—because she woke in a panic, night after night, afraid she was back in the nursing home. With so limited a communication system, she couldn’t tell them that, and they’d decided she would sleep better alone. She was too old for this; she didn’t have the resilience, the sheer energy, that she had had two decades before. She had not believed she was old—not the woman who could still ride to hounds—but now she believed it. If she had been able to talk, she would have said it; she would have argued, out of exhaustion and despair, that they were wasting their time. She couldn’t talk; she could only endure.
But twice a day, between sessions with physical therapists and occupational therapists and massage therapists and tests and all the rest, Brun took her out to the stable yard. That was her reward for a good morning, incentive for a good afternoon. She learned each horse’s voice, and the voices of the stablehands only a few days later. Brun poured handfuls of sweet feed into her passive hand, and she felt the soft velvet horse lips mumbling over her palm. Brun lifted her hands, and laid them against satiny necks and shoulders. The first time her fingers really moved, it was along a horse’s shoulder; her first strong grasp was of a horse’s mane.
And yet she hated the obviousness of it. She did not want her love of horses to be so utilitarian, so selfish. They deserved her love for themselves, not because it could help her therapy. She would have sulked, except how could she sulk when she couldn’t talk at all? How could she rage, when her movements were slow and awkward, and she couldn’t scream?
Cecelia free. Heris held that thought in mind as she laid out the roundabout safe course from their present location to the Guerni Republic. It had to be Brun’s plan; she told herself that the villains in this piece had no reason to abscond with Cecelia. Only her friends did; only Brun could have put together the resources to do it. She imagined Cecelia in Sirialis; it was easy to imagine her in rooms Heris had seen, around horses and people she knew. Obvious, of course, to the king and anyone else, but—she put it out of her mind. Brun had acted; the first part had gone well. She could do nothing herself until she’d delivered these clones and the prince (if he was one of them). Then, she promised herself, then she would find Cecelia.
Somewhat to Heris’s surprise, the rest of the trip to the Guerni Republic went peacefully, jump point after jump point, day after day after day. The three clones, each of whom insisted he was not the prince, were less trouble than Ronnie and George had been at first. They agreed to wear nametags to help the crew avoid the confusion of offering a meal to a clone who had already eaten. This helped, although it occurred to Heris that they might switch the nametags for a lark. Heris could not assess their intelligence, not with the possibility—no, likelihood—that they would not cooperate and perform at their best. Yet they seemed to have more common sense than she’d expected.
“There’s no use our pretending, with all three of us here,” A. said when she asked. “Our cover’s blown, totally, as far as you and the others aboard this ship are concerned. You know we’re clones of the prince; you know what that means legally. It wouldn’t matter if one of us were the prince; the damage has already been done.”
Heris didn’t like the sound of that. Cold tickles ran down her spine, as if a frozen cockroach were rousing there. “You mean we’re now a danger to the prince, or to the Crown?”
“No—we are.” That one wore Gerald B.’s tag. “After all, that cruiser captain knows; some of his crew either know or suspect. There’s no way to be sure the secret’s safe even if they silenced you. They’ll probably dump us.”
“Kill you?” asked Petris, putting down his fork.
“No, there are other ways. They can do plastic surgery to make us no longer doubles, and there’s some kind of way to mark our genomes more prominently.”
“Look through the microscope and the chromosomes spell CLONE,” said one of the others. He sounded perfectly calm about it; Heris wondered if that was part of their act.
“But what will you do?” Petris asked. “Have you had any . . .” He paused, struggling for a tactful way to say it.
“Job training?” asked the one with the C. tag. “No, we just laze around acting like silly-ass rich boys.” One of the others snorted, and Heris realized it was supposed to be a joke.
“Some,” said the one who had snorted. “Lots of courses in all sorts of things he’s supposed to know. Of course, we didn’t attend formal classes, or get degrees, but I’m sure they’ll cobble up some sort of resume for us.”
They seemed remarkably unconcerned, but they were, Heris reminded herself, twenty or more years younger than she. People that age had more confidence than their lack of experience warranted.