Finally, she found him approaching the door to the cubby he had been given, just down the tunnel from the makeshift hospital.
The pickup zoomed in until his head and shoulders filled the screen. She glanced down at her hand, surprised to see one silver finger on the stud which had called for the closeup.
She knew it was wrong to spy on him like this, but could not seem to help herself. From the moment when he had first touched her, first called her Angel, she had been drawn to him. The pull was constant and terrifyingly strong. It was like nothing she had ever experienced, and far too powerful to be denied by fear or shame.
Scarcely aware of what she was doing, she got off her pallet and drifted closer to the screen.
Sadness whispered through her. He looked so tired. There were bags under his eyes. His broad shoulders were slumped as if his silver arms weighed a hundred kilos each, and some vast unseen weight had been piled on his back.
Angel automatically switched to the pickup inside the cubby as he pushed through the door. She tabbed the sound on. Now he was coming toward her, sitting down, taking up a pad.
She watched him work, broad forehead wrinkled in concentration and his voice a soft murmur. It wasn’t until her metal-clad fingers clicked up against the smooth unyielding surface of the screen that she realized she had reached up to touch him. Trying to regain that momentary contact, that scary and splendid connection, which had since eluded her.
“Angel?”
She jumped, the sudden, unexpected sound from behind her catching her so completely off guard that her old angel-self responded reflexively. In the blink of an eye she snatched her hand back and whirled around to face the intruder, crouching down and preparing to pounce. She bared her teeth, legs coiling themselves to fling her across the room in a single bound, her hooked fingers ready to sprout gleaming blades.
Her exo-accelerated senses gave her ample time to recognize Salli Baber. To realize that there was no threat. To understand that once again she had allowed her old reflexes to betray her.
Salli’s reactions only worked at normal human speed. Even as Angel was untensing and beginning to damn herself for her lapse, Salli was paling at the sight she presented. Her mouth stretched into a frightened O and the stack of folded clothing she carried went flying from her hands like startled birds.
Angel compounded her first mistake with a second. She saw Salli’s legs start to fold under her and acted instinctively. Her amped systems empowered her to cross the room and catch the woman before she was even halfway to the floor.
Her intentions might have been good, but fear of the silver-skinned angel of vengance had been so deeply hammered into Anankeans’ psyches that most of them were still haunted by the stalking spectre of Scylla in their dreams. Salli let out a strangled squeak of terror and fainted dead away, her brown eyes rolling back into her head.
Angel stared down at the unconscious woman in her arms for several long seconds, faced with further proof of her own inadequacy. Shoulders slumped in defeat, she carried Salli to her pallet and gently laid her down on it.
Face tight with fury and shame, she shut off the monitor, then rifled through her drawers in search of a stim. Finally she found one, and trying to keep herself from thinking about how she had last used one on a man who had passed out during an atonement, pasted it on Salli’s neck.
Then she stepped back out of Salli’s line of sight, hugging herself as she pensively watched over her and waited for the stim to take effect.
Salli was a wiry, dark-haired woman in her early forties. Like so many others, Fist had made her a widow. Although of average height and fairly muscular, the baggy black coverall she wore made her look smaller. Like everyone else, the years of Fist’s rule had left her painfully thin. No one got fat on two bowls of processed algae a day.
Her face was of the sort you would call handsome, good bones and too much character to be merely pretty. Her olive skin was almost completely smooth and unblemished now. Before Marchey had arrived and worked on her, the left side of her face had been twisted and ridged with rough brown scar tissue, a puckered hole large enough to let her broken teeth show through punched in one cheek. That whole side of her body had been similarly scarred, and her left arm had been weak and stiff.
Angel could not keep herself from remembering when Salli’s accident had happened. An overage, under-maintained BoresAll head had exploded. One worker had been killed outright, decapitated by flying steel and stone. Salli had been standing a bit behind him, and so partially shielded from the blast by his body.
Fist had sent Scylla to check on Salli after her coworkers had carried her limp, bleeding body back into the living cubic. She had given them permission to remove the steel and stone splinters which had turned one side of her body to bloody meat, and at Fist’s behest, given them a coagulant and antibiotic spray to use on her. This departure from the ban on secular medicine came about because Salli was their best surviving drill operator and Fist didn’t want to lose her.
Nobody had mentioned the contradiction.
Nobody had suggested giving her any sort of painkiller. Not Fist, not herself, and least of all her comrades from the mines. They knew she was getting better care than most, and asking for such a forbidden thing would have earned them punishment.
Salli’s head moved from side to side, as if denying wakefulness. Angel called her name.
The woman on the pallet moaned as the stim reeled her back to consciousness. Her head rolled in Angel’s direction, and her brown eyes snapped open, bulging in terror as the fearsome silver afterimage burned into her retinas was replaced by the real thing.
“Forgive me—!” she cried, cringing back and flinging up her hands to ward Scylla off. As if that ever could have stopped her.
Angel hugged herself tighter, blinking her one green eye against the dampness she felt welling in it. “It’s all right, Salli,” she said soothingly, forcing the words past the constriction in her throat. “It’s just me. Angel. Not Scylla. I will not hurt you.”
“You won’t hurt me?” Salli repeated in a small voice, sounding unconvinced. She peered past her upraised hands.
“I will never hurt anyone ever again,” she answered with a quiet certainty. “I—I am sorry I scared you. You scared me, and I overreacted.”
Salli’s hands fell and she stared back in wide-eyed disbelief. “I scared you?” she said, surprise replacing her fear.
Angel forced a smile onto her face, carefully keeping her teeth hidden. “Startled me, anyway. I forgot you were coming.” That last was half a lie; it was more a matter of someone else filling up every corner of her thoughts.
The other woman returned a tentative smile that let the knot in Angel’s chest begin loosening. “I think maybe I better knock louder next time,” she said with an uneasy laugh, sitting up and looking around. “I brought you some things…”
“I will get them.” They were scattered all over the threshold where they had fallen. Angel went after them, careful to move slowly.
Salli was on her feet by the time Angel had gathered up the articles of clothing and carried them back.
“Thanks,” she said. She selected one item, dropped the rest on the bed. “Let’s see what we have here. I’ve had most of this stuff hidden away for years.” She shook out the pair of pants she’d picked out, then held them up against Angel’s waist.
“Too small.” Salli tossed them aside, rummaged around and found another pair. “Maybe. The color suits you.” She put them aside for the final cut. Next she pulled out something small and sheer, looked at it, then at Angel’s sexless, silver-sheathed body.