“I guess you don’t really need panties, do you?” she said, chuckling as she tossed the silky undergarment atop the discarded pants. “Or a bra, for that matter. You could probably park an ore truck on them babies and they wouldn’t sag.”
Angel didn’t know how to answer that. She watched Salli start pulling one item after another from the pile and measuring them against her. Before long she was chatting away as if nothing had happened, telling Angel about her first bra and her first pair of something called “crotchless panties” while she picked out things for her to wear.
Angel only stood there in wide-eyed dismay, stiff as a pot-metal mannikin. This was a lot more than she had bargained for when she asked Salli to help her dress like a regular woman for her final chance to see Marchey. All the different cuts and colors bewildered her. The rules for matching the various items seemed incomprehensible.
Getting the right things picked out would not be the end of it, either. Then she was going to have to ask Salli to help her put them on.
Rack her brain as she might, she could not remember ever getting dressed like a normal person. The girl she’d been before being turned into Scylla must have worn such things, but she couldn’t remember it.
Marchey put the pad aside, his throat dry from almost an hour of straight dictation.
But he was done. The pad now contained the proper procedures for dealing with anything likely to come up with any of the patients he was leaving behind. The tap of a button copied it into the old Medicomp. He’d put new MedMems in both the pad and the Medicomp for Mardi and Elias to fall back on, but this would be faster and easier. All either of them would have to do was name the patient and his or her symptoms. The pad would search out the proper response and walk them through the correct course of action. It wasn’t quite the same as being there, but it would have to do.
He settled back, taking a last look around the room. The Kindred had given him this cubby to use as a combination office and guest room just a couple days after his arrival. The rough-walled room contained the old Medicomp and chair along one side, and a bed at the far end. Along the other side they had placed a couch, table and chair set taken from Fist’s chamber to give it a homey feel. It was supposed to be a place of his own here. They’d even put his name on the door, as if hanging out his shingle for him.
By then he had come to his senses enough to realize that he didn’t belong here, and his stay would be temporary. There had been no polite way to turn it down, but he had used it as little as possible. The bed had never been slept in.
He poured a cup of water from the carafe at his elbow and took a sip. It was flat and tasteless. It eased the scratch in his throat, but did none of the things another sort of drink would do for him. A glance at the clock told him that the time for what he thought of as the Final Appointment had finally come around. Angel was due to show up any minute now.
Thinking about facing her only made him want a real drink all the more.
Just one more. That old familiar refrain.
Less than ten seconds’ indecision passed before he reached toward his pouch for the small flask he’d brought with him in case he needed another shot of nerve tonic. No sense in letting such careful preparations go to waste.
Just as his hand closed around it he heard something thump against his door.
Angel stood before the door to Marchey’s cubby, the present she had brought him clutched in one hand, the other poised to knock. She stood there like that for over a minute before she let her hand fall, admitting to herself that she had made a mistake.
She looked down at herself. The problem was with the clothes. She had worn a pair of coveralls once, using them to disguise her silver body when she had ventured into the steel corridors of the hospital wheel to kidnap Marchey. Fist had occasionally bidden her to wear a white ceremonial robe.
But all that had happened in another life. Those things had not been worn so that she might look like a normal woman. So she might look, well, pretty.
For all the life she could remember her silver armor had been enough. Never once had she felt a whisper of shame or self-consciousness. She hadn’t even known that all the things which made her a woman were hidden under there.
Now she did know, and covering the places other women covered made her acutely aware of them, secret places that felt suddenly exposed by being doubly hidden.
All she had wanted to do was try to breach the wall he had thrown up between them, a wall that might as well have been built from meter-square blocks of nitrogen ice, it was so palpably cold and solid.
Scylla would have torn the wall down and forced him to acknowledge her. To Angel, it looked insurmountable.
In the beginning he had been so kind and warm. He smiled when he saw her, that smile making her feel like her insides were filled with warm syrup. He took time to talk to her, tried to make her laugh. He called her Angel, and when he said that name it made her want to be Angel more than ever.
Then suddenly one day the warmth and kindness were gone. It was almost as if he’d gone to bed one night as one man and woken up the next as a stranger.
From that moment on he had begun treating her with a brusque impatience that left her hurt and bewildered. He would grimace when he saw her, as if the sight of her pained him, and speak only in monosyllables, if at all.
Sometimes she thought that maybe he still saw her as Scylla, as the monster who had threatened his life and hurt him. Or maybe he was angry at her for refusing to let him release her from her exo. Maybe she simply didn’t deserve his attention. Hadn’t earned it. Maybe it was all that and more, each reason another block in the wall.
When she had found that he was going to leave, she had thought she was going to die. She had gone to him, and though she had wanted to beg him to stay, she had only asked that he give her an hour of his time before he left. He had grudgingly agreed, and she had kept herself away from him since then so that he would not have an excuse to change his mind.
Now that fateful hour had come around, and with it her last chance to break through. She had thought that maybe if she looked different he might see her differently. But this was not going to work. The blouse and slacks were only making her so nervous that she was sure to make a fool of herself.
So she put his present on the floor and began trying to figure out how to remove the blouse. She remembered that it had fastened up the back—for reasons Salli had not been able to make entirely clear. She reached behind her and began fumbling at the buttons.
Either the exo limited her range of motion just enough to make the operation impossible, or dealing with things such as pearl buttons was an arcane, acquired skill. No matter how she contorted herself, she could not get even one button loose. Finally she abandoned that approach and tried to pull the blouse off over her head.
Only to get hopelessly stuck when she had it half on and half off. She wriggled and writhed in rising desperation, face trapped in a fold of silky cloth, unable to see, afraid she would tear the fragile thing, and wishing she had learned to curse.
Now in full-blown panic, she shuffled and shucked and spun, only succeeding in kicking over the present she had brought.
She heard it skid across the stone floor. Her heart froze when it clunked up against the foamstone door panel. Moments later she heard the door open, followed by the surprised sound of a sharply indrawn breath.
Her first impulse was to shred the source of her humiliation into a thousand pieces as she ran away to hide. But this was her last chance to see him, and she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away.