“All right,” she agreed reluctantly. “But Dr. Alvarez had them out for me a few months after they first went in. And she said there was nothing wrong,” she reminded him. She groaned as she tried to rise to a sitting position.
“Stay.” He pressed her shoulder back into the pillow and glared until she stopped moving.
“In a little wooden case in my reticule. I’m supposed to keep it with me at all times.”
“This reticule?” he said, pulling the small bag from the back of the doorknob to the sitting room area of their absurdly expensive stateroom. “The one you weren’t carrying on deck today? The case was in here?”
“That’s the one, yes. Don’t be unkind, Dexter. It’s not as though I’ve enjoyed casting my accounts all over the poor ship.” Indeed, Charlotte felt somewhat ill-used in general for having to suffer vomiting and scolding.
“You had these put in when you first started training on the airship, yes?”
“Yes. For the altimeter chime modification, and there’s also a port in the left one that can connect to a directional sonic amplificator built into the ship. Sometimes if the wind and geography are right I can pick up conversations on the ground from a few thousand feet up.”
“Mmm. Remarkable.”
He moved from the nearby chair to the edge of the berth, which sagged a little under his weight. Charlotte trembled as he leaned over her, turned her head to the side with three fingertips placed along her cheekbone, and deftly inserted the slender gold reed into her ear.
The click was wrenchingly loud, as always, and the quarter-twist to loosen the implant from its shaft made Charlotte’s hackles rise, as always. That moving thing felt horribly wrong inside her head. But that only lasted a second or so.
Once it was out, everything felt wrong—inside her head and otherwise. Without the equilibrium provided by having both implants functioning in tandem, Charlotte’s sense of up and down fell into disarray. The loss of functional hearing from the temporarily disabled ear added its own disorientation, making it difficult to tell which direction sounds were coming from.
She hadn’t even realized she was hyperventilating until she felt warm, heavy hands on her shoulders, rubbing in soothing strokes, and a rumbling voice from everywhere and nowhere reminding her to breathe out, not just in. She forced herself to relax, to open her eyes and focus on the nearest thing. Dexter’s face.
“If I take out the other one,” he said, exaggerating the movement of his lips to ensure she understood, “you’ll be deaf but not nearly as dizzy.”
She nodded, swallowed back her panic and presented her other ear. It was faster this time, the discomfort masked by the generally worked-up state she was already in.
And he was right. Though she could hear only echoing emptiness, like the sound of the ocean in a seashell, she could feel her body’s own orientation to the world clearly again. She could even sit up, though she did so slowly.
Dexter was scribbling something on a notepad, and before she could peek over his shoulder, he turned to show it to her.
You might want to clean your teeth while I work.
He grinned and moved off to the sitting room, holding the implants carefully in one hand. She sighed, feeling irritated that the sound did not register in her own ears. And then, because she did desperately want to clean her teeth, she sighed again and swung herself out of the berth.
She was in her nightdress. And if her nose could be believed, she was quite thoroughly clean.
“How long have I been asleep?” she asked, hoping she wasn’t too loud.
Not loud enough, apparently. He didn’t move, and she aimed her second try directly at his big, impassive shoulders through the open connecting door.
“How long have I been asleep?”
He jumped and whirled, eyes wide.
Perhaps that one was a bit too loud.
He mouthed something. Charlotte read lips fairly well, having learned in the course of her unique job training. But perversely, she shrugged and made a puzzled face to see what Dexter would do.
He cocked that skeptical eyebrow at her, is what he did, and jotted on his notepad in a sharp hand that almost tore the paper.
4 hrs
“Four? Hours?” He couldn’t be serious. She thought he’d said “a few” something. Perhaps her lip-reading was less accurate than she’d supposed. “Four hours? But when did I have a bath?”
More of a glare, this time, followed by another scribble.
Brush your teeth.
Charlotte put her hands on her hips and stood her ground. “Dexter! Did you change my clothes?”
He was securing one of the implants in a clamp under a magnifier, on the sitting room table he’d co-opted from the first day to house a number of vaguely scientific-looking devices, few of which Charlotte recognized. He didn’t write anything down, didn’t even turn his head to her this time, only nodded.
She tapped her foot. Opened her mouth to say something, then caught a whiff of her own breath and stormed over to the door to the lavatory, which the men all insisted on calling a head, just as the doors were all hatches on board the ship, and the beds were all berths or bunks. Tiresome.
After scrubbing her teeth thoroughly with a great quantity of tooth powder, Charlotte returned to her position in the center of the stateroom, feeling much better prepared to do battle.
Dexter was now hunched in intense concentration over the table, doing something intricate with what looked like a tiny pair of tweezers and a bottle of mineral spirit.
“Dexter,” she said experimentally. Not loud enough.
“Dexter!”
Perhaps a bit too loud again.
He looked around, querying with his eyes.
“Did you give me a bath?”
He smiled, a bit too broadly, and turned back to the table. Charlotte stamped her foot, feeling ridiculous and blaming him for it. She wanted her ears back. She remembered nothing of a bath, nothing of clothes being changed.
“Do you mean to say you saw me naked?”
He went still, head tilted to one side. For a moment she wondered if he would pretend not to have heard. Then he turned all the way around in the swivel chair, arms crossed over his chest. He was still smiling, an entirely different kind of smile now though. His dark eyes made a languorous circuit from her face to her ankles and back again, and he finished by meeting her eyes in what could only be a challenge. Then he swung the chair around to the table again and scribbled something longer on the notepad, then offered it over his shoulder without turning. She was forced to come closer if she wanted to take it from him and read it. While she did, he screwed the top back on the mineral spirit bottle and carefully replaced his tweezer-things in a little case with fitted velvet slots for holding various small tools.
The surgeon came by & gave you a tonic. You were charming after, & not sick at all. Obvs. had to burn clothes you were wearing. So I sponged you off and put you in a nightgown. You really don’t remember, do you?
“No, I don’t.” She also wasn’t sure she believed him.
He plucked the pad from her fingers and wrote on it again, letting her read over his shoulder.
I believe I have located and dealt with source of problem re: implants.
“No! That was five minutes. You can’t have!”
He shrugged and picked one of the tiny gold and crystal tubes up with a clean cloth, gesturing to her right ear as he fitted the retrieval hook onto the end of the implant.