Rules of Conflict (50 page)

The vending alcove, the source of so much lousy tea, looked
appropriately tatty. The floor was covered with a runny, white-streaked liquid,
a blend of foam and . . . what? Sam saw the broken water
connections, the spray still covering the furniture and counters, and shook his
head.

“What was she trying to do?” What had happened at Knevçet Shèràa
that she thought smashing water valves an appropriate response? Did she try to
drown Neumann? The Laumrau? Did she even know what she did?

He kicked something as he crossed the floor, and bent to retrieve
it.
A turnstick.
The long one Janitorial used when ceiling lights needed
switching out. One of the polywood ends was cracked and dented.
She used
this to smash the valves.
His mind plundered the thought.
What was she
trying to do?
He had a right to know. They were in this together, after
all.

Together.

Sam’s eyes stung. He coughed, as Parini had coughed, to loosen his
clenching throat. He leaned on the turnstick like a cane as he walked to the
janitor’s closet to return it to its rack.

Together.

All these years, he had known, in his bones, that despite all
evidence to the contrary, Jani Kilian lived. As proofs of her death cropped up
all over the Commonwealth like mushrooms, he treated them as conjecture only.
Anecdotal evidence, not even worthy to be dubbed hypothesis. He knew her to be
out there, somewhere. He knew that someone else had survived the hell he had
lived through. He knew he wasn’t alone.

He opened the closet door and inserted the turnstick back into its
niche. He touched the places where Kilian’s hands might have gripped, and a cry
caught in his throat as the first hot tears spilled. He stepped into the
closet, inverted the bucket used to catch leaks from the coffee brewer, sat
down, and wept.

He wept for Eva, and for Orton, and the others. But mostly, as
much as it shamed him, he wept for himself. This was what it meant, to choose
Simyam over Sam.
If she dies, I’ll be the only one.
The only one left to
remember. The only one left to bear the weight.

She felt like this for years.
The thought caught him like a
sharp blow. His breath stopped, starting only when he consciously forced
himself to pull in the air.
She felt like this . . . so
alone.
The sole survivor.

He stripped the helmet from his head, let it fall to the floor.

“I don’t want to be the only one! I don’t want to be the only
one!”

Then he thought of the dying other, and finally wept for Jani
Kilian. Wept as Parini and Shroud refused to. Wept as people in HazMat suits
splashed into the alcove and stared at him. Wept until Odergaard, much less red
of face than he had ever seen him, escorted the two white-garbed men into the
storage room and led him away.

Quiet, cool, whiteness. It stretched around Jani for as
far as she could see. She slept in it—it nestled her like velvet, soft as the wings
of angels. She couldn’t walk in it—when she tried, she sank in to her hips and
fell over. But that was all right. She didn’t want to walk anyway.

Neumann only bothered her once. He sprayed pink foam in all
directions as he slopped toward her, his head nestled beneath his good arm. His
mouth still worked, unfortunately. She told him to go to hell and he stalked
off, muttering about colonial lack of respect for their betters.

At times, she’d see one in an assortment of faces. Male. Female.
Dark. Light. Flashes only, barest traces of variety in an endless sea of white.

Sound. Her consciousness revolved around sound. It ebbed and
flowed like the tide, fingering the white space with swirls of imagined color.

“—and after Gruppo Helvetica wins the Cup and I take your money,
I’m going to—”

“—and the Lake Michigan Strip talks are still ongoing, but it
looks better from our end. The Vynshàrau have backed off, just like you said.
They’ve even turned the temperature down! And I spoke with Tsecha last week.
Hantìa was with him, and he said, “‘Colonel Frances, you must tell—’”

“—foam everywhere, and guess who has to work cleanup detail for
three fuckin’ weeks because everybody said I should have been watching you—”

“—so Piers and I are having a little informal contest, to see
which one of us has a heart attack first—”

“—I never stopped loving you. Please come back—”

“—I’m not mad at you anymore for ditching me in Felix Majora, but
you owe me dinner for putting me through hell—”

Blues. She heard happiness in most of the voices, and happiness
touched her as blue. Even the complainer, who muttered about lost gloves and
crap in his hair. Granted, at times his voice radiated into violet, with the
occasional flash of scarlet. Self-pity, she sensed. Worry, about himself.

But blues, mostly. All the emotion that touched her came to her in
blue.

Except love. Love was white, like the velvet that enveloped her.
She recognized the color of the voice.

A brick crushed her forehead. Every time she tried to open
her eyes, it pressed down more and kept them closed. She raised her arm and
tried to push it away, but something wrapped around her wrist and stopped her.

“L’go.” She tried to pull away, and the grip tightened.

“Get Shroud.”

“Roger will have a fit if we don’t call him.”

“Then get ’em all!”

Running. Swoosh of a door.

“Le’ go!”

“Please don’t struggle, Jani, you’ll pull out your IVs.”

“
Lemme go!
”

The brick smashed down.

“M’head.”

“That’s swelling from the shunt, Jani. Your head will ache every
time you move it for a few more days.”

Jani concentrated all her strength and will on forcing apart four
parchment-thin flaps of skin. Slits of light. Stabs of pain. She closed them,
then tried again.

Shapes. Surrounding her. Watching her.

A flash of white. Bending close.

“Hello.” John’s thin face filled her view. A smile. Light green
eyes, the milk skin beneath cobwebby with fine lines.

“I remember you.” Jani’s words came slow, slurred. Poured, rather
than spoken.

“And well you should.” A last, wider smile. Then nothing.

“Me next.” Val’s head replaced John’s. New haircut since Felix.
Shorter, more Service-like.

“Cousin Finbar—is it really you?”

His smile broke like sunrise. It was one of their Rauta Shèràa
jokes. He’d probably hurry to the nurses’ station after he left her to jot happy
notes about her long-term memory.

“Me last.” Scraggly blond hair and bloodshot eyes.

“Hi, Rog. Consorting with the enemy?”

Pimentel grinned sadly. “I had no choice. Patient before pride.”
Val made soothing noises, but he ignored them.

“Hmm.” Jani smiled. “Had your heart attack yet?”

His eyes widened. Twin rounds of pink bloomed in his sunken
cheeks. “Not yet. Any minute now, though.” He exhaled with a
whoosh.
“You remember that?”

“I remember lots of things.” She turned her head as much as she
dared and looked at John, but he pretended to fuss with the IV leads and
refused to meet her eye.

A DeVries shunt, a procedure developed by and named after
her least favorite
living
person in the Commonwealth, had been
performed. The exit and entry scars, located at her hairline on either side of
the base of her skull, pulled and tingled every time she moved her neck. She
had a new liver. It was undersized since they’d been forced to insert it when
it was still in its early growth stages, but it would reach full form and
function within months. To fill the gap, they’d implanted a partial adjunct to
help it along.

Beyond that, no one would tell her what had happened or what had
been wrong with her. Her nurses fobbed her questions off on her doctors, who in
turn fobbed her questions off on each other. Pimentel chewed his lip to blood.
Val oozed charm and changed the subject. John, she saw not at all. That worried
her more than anything else.

They wouldn’t give her a mirror. She discovered the first time she
touched her scalp that they’d shaved her head in order to jack in the shunt
main and attach the monitor buttons. She estimated length as best she could
with her thumb, and guessed that her new growth consisted of a centimeter of
wave. Unaided hair growth averaged fifteen centimeters a year. Hers had been on
the slow side since her rebuild.
I’ve been out over a month?
She checked
the color in the curved reflection of her IV stand. Still black. No bald
patches requiring implants.

They’d left her
àlérine
wounds alone. The gashes had healed
to ragged red lines on her right arm, thinner, paler threads on her left.

They had removed her eyefilms. Threat of infection, Morley said.
Green-on-green orbs goggled at her, warped to skewed ovals by the tubing
surface. She turned away from them repeatedly, only to have morbid fascination
draw her back. Judging from the blasé reaction of the nurses, however, her
eyes’ appearance bothered her more than it did any of them. A day and a half
passed before someone honored her request for filmformer—the male nurse who
finally brought it expressed disappointment that she’d decided to cover them.
Several of the guys had commented that they liked the way they made her look.

Big pussycat, indeed!

By day two, the headaches eased enough that she could sit up. On
day three, they removed the IVs and fed her soup. She shocked everyone on day
six by walking the halls. Especially Pimentel.

“Your progress is mind-boggling. I’d ascribe it to the
recuperative abilities of youth,” he said as he squired her back to her room.
“But you’re older than I am.”

“Watch it, Roger.” Jani kicked off her slippers and perched on the
edge of her bed. “So what do you think it is?”

He looked at her with the same hangdog expression he’d worn since
she awoke, and left before she could demand he answer the damned question.