“You mean like some knight in shining armor coming along to rescue you?” Merry clasped one silver hand in hers. “Sorry, love, but there ain’t any such animal. At least not outside the storybooks.”
Marchey still had his drink in his free hand. He took a long pull on it, regarding her over the rim of his glass and pondering what she’d said.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said at last. “But what if there were? What if that knight suddenly came along, riding out of nowhere on his white charger, and all at once both your face and hands were whole again? What would you do?”
She snorted. “Drop dead surprised.”
“No, really,” he insisted. “If suddenly, unexpectedly, you had choice again, would you recognize it? And if you did, what would you choose? Would you stay a prostitute, become a tech again, or choose to become someone else entirely?”
Merry shook her head. “I don’t know.” She didn’t even like thinking about it. Thinking like that could make you crazy.
An uneasy laugh escaped her. “It doesn’t matter because it would never happen anyway.”
Marchey put his glass aside. “I’ll tell you what, Merry. Think about it for a while. Let me know what you decide.”
“When?”
He gave her a smile she hadn’t seen yet. A mischievous gleam lit in his gray eyes and a bawdy twist curled onto his lips. It made him look younger. It made her smile back.
“Later,” he said.
She watched those shining silver hands drift toward her. Felt them circle around her waist. He leaned toward her, planting a tender kiss on her numb cheek, then pulled back to look deep into her eyes. Not like a juan looks at a whore, but as a man looks at a woman. Eye to eye. Asking if she felt what he felt. Inviting her to share rather than demanding his money’s worth.
Merry gazed back at him, knowing that for all her talk of honesty she had lied to him. She’d worn a mask for years, worn it this very night. It was a cold and brittle thing, the name and persona called Merry. It had been melting and slipping all evening long. Looking into his eyes something inside her finally gave, like ice melted to the point where it crumbles and slides off what it has sheathed, letting the warm come in. Merry vanished, leaving the woman who had hidden behind the mask naked before him.
“In the morning,” he said.
“All right,” she whispered, then covered his mouth with hers, kissing him with an abandon Merry had never given a juan. His mouth tasted of whiskey and dreams.
He embraced her, and she closed her eyes and held on tight, transported back to a time when love and happy endings had not seemed out of reach, and hope had not yet become a four-letter word.
It was five in the morning local time when Marchey sat up in bed, wakened by a signal from one of his arms. He yawned and stretched, then took a moment to gaze down at the woman sprawled across the bed beside him. In the low amber light of the bedside lamp her long lean body looked like it was shaped from ivory, coral, and gold wire.
But nothing made of such things could be so soft and warm. So beautiful. So giving.
A fond smile slipped out onto his face as he drank in the sight and smell of her, the very feel of just being beside her. He wanted to fix this moment, these sensations, this feeling in his memory, frame it like stained glass so it could lend its glowing colors to the gray days ahead.
“‘Thank you,” he whispered under his breath, knowing she couldn’t hear him but needing to say it. She had given him so much. More than she knew.
There remained one more thing she had it in her power to give, in its own way the most precious of all. But he would have to wait to see if it came to him.
There were things which needed to be done to prepare the way for that moment. Debts to be paid in the most valuable coinage he had. It was time to get up and get started.
He slid out of bed and dressed quietly, even though there was little chance that she would waken. The tab he’d slipped into the drink he’d brought her just before their last bout of lovemaking would see to that.
First he retrieved a pocketcomm from his pouch, carried it into the other room, and made a couple calls. Once those arrangements had been made, he returned to the bedroom.
Leaning over, he planted a kiss on her forehead, then padded to the foot of the bed and began the breathing exercises that would take him into his deep working trance.
Before long he was ready to begin. He laid his silver arms aside and ratcheted back around to the side of the bed.
Had she wakened then and seen him, her trust would have turned to horror at the frightening, forbidding look the trance put on his face.
But the woman who called herself Merry slept on, untroubled and serene.
Merry awakened some four hours later with a dreamy smile on her face. She stretched lazily, yawning hard enough to make her jaw crack, then rolled toward her bedmate to see if he was awake yet. If not, she knew how to bring him around.
She found that she was alone among the tumbled covers. She peered hopefully out into the sitting room, but it was deserted. Just like she had been.
The bed’s warmth turned to cold as it was transformed from a cozy lover’s nest to a whore’s padded workbench in an instant.
She slumped back, squeezing her eyes shut to blot out the sight of her own stupidity. Not even one juan in a thousand wanted a morning after with an old hooker with a messed-up face. How could she have been dumb enough to let herself think this one would be any different?
But she had, damn her. She’d thought he understood just how awful it felt to be used and abandoned. She’d let him raise up her expectations only to chop them off at the knees.
So much for the knight in shining armor.
So much for answering his stupid frigging question in the morning.
Choice. What a laugh! But somehow she didn’t feel much like laughing…
She couldn’t even choose just to lie there and feel sorry for herself. Now that she was awake the messages from her bladder were too urgent to be ignored any longer.
No rest for the wicked, she thought sourly, heaving herself out of bed and padding naked into the small dark bathroom. There was no need to turn the light on. She knew where everything was.
Draining off some of the far too much she had drunk made her feel a little better. Remembering the thousand credits waiting for her made her feel a little better yet, at least partially blunting the sting from the slap in the face.
When she turned up the lights and tried to check herself in the bathroom mirror to see if she looked any better—or worse—than she felt, she found that it had been covered over with the pink plastic tablecloth from the sitting-room table. Something had been written on it in tall black letters so meticulously formed that they might have been machine printed.
Merry frowned and rubbed her bleary eyes, then started reading.
Choice it began, is better than money.
By the time Merry had finished reading the message Marchey had left her, he was already over two thousand kilometers away from Vespa, the ship around him still gathering velocity as it carried him toward the next place his skills would be used. Where he would be used.
He sat in the small galley nook, nursing a coffee and brandy, and musing on the past day and night.
The two surgical procedures he had performed were routine in that only a Bergmann Surgeon could have done them, that he had not met the patients before or after, and the hospital staff had given him the bum’s rush the moment he was done. No one had called him a pariah to his face. They hadn’t needed to. Actions spoke louder than words.