Part 49 (2/2)

Someone told him a great deal about my room, she thought. ”Ferris, who did you ask to help you make this room?”

”Are you angry?” he asked.

Sweet mother.... ”No,” Rhani said, ”I'm not angry. I think it's beautiful.”

He licked his lips. ”Clare helped.”

”Clare Brion?”

He nodded. ”And Aliza Kyneth, a little. Though she didn't understand why I wanted to know what your room was like. I was afraid to tell her. She probably thought me a nuisance. _Her_ children are all clever.”

Rhani said, ”This is better than clever, Ferris. This is kind.” Releasing her hold on the rocking chair, she walked to him, stretched to tiptoe, and kissed his cheek. ”So kind that I think I'd like to stay here a little while, until Zed is out of the Clinic, at least. May I do that?”

Ferris' mouth went slack with astonishment. Then, straightening, he said, ”Domna, I am honored.”

”I am only Rhani,” Rhani said. She glanced toward the closet, wondering if there were clothes in it. She was willing to bet there were, and that they were her size. She wondered if the washroom contained a blue-and-cream-tiled shower stall. ”Is there a com-unit in this room?”

”I can have one installed,” said Ferris. ”Shall I?”

”Please,” she said. She needed to talk to Christina Wu, and Loras U-Ellen if he would talk to her, she didn't know, he might be still hiding from Michel A-Rae, and, if Christina approved, she would then call Tak Rafael....

She blinked as the door slid closed. Ferris had left with such uncharacteristic delicacy that she hadn't heard him. Kicking her shoes off, she curled her toes in the kerit fur. To her left, the metallic grate of the intercom gleamed in the azure wall. In the washroom, her favorite soap sat on the shelf beside a replica of the ivory brush Zed had brought her at the close of one Net circuit. It had come, she thought, from Sabado.

She did not want to think about the Net. As she took off her clothes, she admired the verisimilitude of the two chambers. So much time spent on fantasy.... She leaned close to the round mirror and saw that the stress of the last few weeks had bestowed upon her a legacy of threadlike lines.

I'm getting older, she thought. Soon I'll look like my mother.

The thought dismayed her. She didn't want to look like Isobel. I won't!

she said to the doppelgaenger in the mirror. Naked, she laid both hands on her abdomen. It didn't feel any different. I'm pregnant, she told the mirror, I'm going to bear a Starcaptain's child.... It was romantic nonsense, the kind that Isobel would have silenced at once, had she heard it. Gazing into the mirror, Rhani rubbed her arms. Remembering her mother gave her chills. ”_Whoever you are_,” she said to the unborn child in her womb, ”_I promise you won't grow up as I did, loving and hating your mother as I loved and hated mine, tethered to one world with no chance to escape it. I promise you will have your chance_.”

And, nodding at the mirror -- which contained, after all, no image more terrible than herself -- she stepped into the blue-and-cream-tiled shower stall.

That night she went to visit Zed in his room in the Clinic, and found him on his feet.

The guards in their blue-and-silver uniforms were huddled together outside the room, speaking softly. They separated as she walked up to them.

”Good evening,” she said.

”Good evening, Domna,” said one, a big man, almost as big as Jo the Skellian.

”How's my brother?” she said.

”Awake.” He tilted his head. ”And in a foul temper. That little man -- the surgeon -- won't let him s.h.i.+nny.”

”Ah,” Rhani said. She tapped on the door. ”Zed-ka, it's me.”

”Come in!” His eager voice rea.s.sured her. She palmed open the door. Zed was standing by the window. His arms and hands were bandaged from elbows to fingertips and beyond. ”Rhani,” he said. Lifting his swathed left hand, he laid the bandage against her cheek.

It smelled medicinal. Under the yards of gauze, she knew, was new tissue, and under it bone, and under it the intricate mechanics of the permanent claws, all of it layered with several different kinds of regenerative paint. Over the grotesque lump Zed's face looked leaner, warier. What happened on the Net, she wanted to ask him. Darien Riis betrayed you, and you killed her, I know. What has it done to you? Aloud, she asked, ”How do you feel?”

”Impatient,” he said. He walked to the bed and back again to her side.

Through the window she glimpsed darkness broken by pools of lamplight and, beyond the dark, the s.h.i.+ning interior of another wing of the Clinic building.

She wondered which it was. ”Ja won't let me out of here.”

”What do you want to do?” she asked.

His face grew stony. ”Find Michel A-Rae,” he said.

It was on the tip of her tongue to say, _I know his birth name, Zed-ka_.

But the ferocity behind that stony gaze held the words back.

Instead, she said, ”I hope the Abanat police can find him, Zed-ka. It looks, by the way, as if the referendum most certainly will not take place.”

”Ah.” His shoulders hunched. ”I'm glad.”

”I saw Loras U-Ellen. Dana took me.”

”_Did_ you.” His whole frame seemed to curve away from her. ”We didn't talk about it, did we?”

”No.”

”There's a lot we haven't talked about.” He wrenched himself around to face her, bracing his elbows on the bed. His arms dangled between them. He was waiting for her to speak, she realized, for her to question him as she had not been able to question Dana Ikoro, to ask him what Dana would not have known the answers to.... Did you love her? Would you truly have left Chabad? She closed her hands to fists and stared at the gleaming floor. The tiles made a diamond pattern.

She was not Isobel; she would not punish him. She said, ”You haven't asked me where I'm staying.”

She heard him exhale. ”Where are you staying?”

She looked up, smiling. ”At Dur House.”

His eyebrows lifted. ”Isn't that a trifle premature?”

”Not really,” she said. ”I'm not going to marry him.”

”Tell me.”

Rhani explained. She expected Zed to grow sardonic, to comment in that voice he reserved for emotions that he didn't share, or didn't want to share. Instead, compa.s.sion, or at least pity, moved in his eyes for a moment. ”The poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d,” he said.

He let his bandaged arms, which had been sticking awkwardly out in front of him, fall to his sides. Rhani wondered how he slept, trussed like that.

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