His shoulders smacked into her palms and she grabbed with outspread tentacles, taking the expected weight on flexed thigh muscles as her whole body leaned into the task. But she had forgotten the slick, polished floor and her smooth soled shoes. Her feet slipped out from under her and she pitched forward, landing, prone with the Gen's weight smashing down right on top of her. Her head snapped down hard against the tile floor. Pain starred her forehead, and a black curtain engulfed her.
Twenty-two minutes later, she came to with a Gen bending over her anxiously—a Donor, the one from the front desk. "Hajene Fa– I mean, you must be Laneff!" He looked up at the empty bed. He had flipped on the light—painfully bright. "The prisoner! Shenshay!" He lunged toward the door, then checked himself. "You all right?"
Laneff tried to pull her legs under her, then gave up as her head burst. "Go! Tell Yuan. Call out the guards! Polk has a twenty-three-minute head start!"
The Gen pounded away down the narrow corridor. Moments later, loudspeakers filled the compound with a raucous buzzing sound. Laneff groped her way to the door, clutching her ears to cut the aching sound. Yuan's voice came on over the alarm giving cryptic instructions. Before the booming echoes died, feet were pounding everywhere, and Laneff thought her head would fly apart.
Ten minutes later, Bianka arrived, took in Laneff’s condition, and called for Jarmi. Then she helped Laneff to an examining table. "Can you walk, or should I carry you?"
"Walk! I've got to go help—" The world dissolved into a dazzle with billowing blackness on the edges.
"How long were you unconscious?"
Laneff told her, certain of the time by her Sime senses.
Bianka draped one of Laneff s arms over her shoulders and lifted her onto the hard treatment table in the emergency room. Flat on her back, Laneff actually felt better. Bianka bandaged Laneff’s forehead, which had bled mightily, all the while muttering about having just cured one concussion patient and being saddled with another. Then she made a full lateral contact examination.
Nen came in with Jarmi, and the ambient nager was suffused with pure Genness. Jarmi ran to Laneff’s side, taking her arms to look for bruises. "What happened?" she demanded.
At that moment, Yuan appeared in the doorway, his nageric brilliance overshadowing the other two Gens. Laneff felt instantly better and began to struggle against the restraining chest strap to sit up.
"Oh, no you don't!" warned Bianka, pushing her down. "You're not moving that head for at least twenty-four hours even if I have to sandbag it for you! Understand?"
"Will you let her answer some questions?" asked Yuan.
"Make it quick," answered Bianka from her drug cabinet.
Yuan spread his hands wide in a silent plea.
Laneff confessed why she had been there, and how she'd let the Gen get by her. Tears of shame pooling at the outer corners of her eyes, she finished, "And now I can't even help you get him back!"
"You're a scientist, Laneff, not combat-trained. And that man was willing to die in that escape attempt. I knew his state of mind when I decided to let him sleep without the shackle. Don't blame yourself too harshly. But next time you doubt me, do a little more research before trying your experiments!" "Any chance of recapturing him?" asked Jarmi. Yuan sighed. "Not if he's gotten outside, like we think he did. Besides—there's no point to it. One look at the sky and he'll know where he is. Let's just hope he doesn't realize how large this installation is. And—I think they'll still go for the Last Year House– Oh, no! I've got to warn Mairis!" He turned on his heel and ran from the room.
Laneff remembered the times Mairis had been called away from Digen's funeral arrangements for a supersecret phone call, the rumors that it was the self-styled Sosectu ambrov Rior urging Mairis to stand for Unification now and pledging the support of the powerful Neo-Distect in a true alliance. Now she was the cause of a call of a different kind.
They moved her into a room off the hospital corridor, and she slept holding Jarmi's hand to blunt the pain Bianka's drugs couldn't reach. In a few days, she was back on her feet, determined to let nothing interfere with her concentration on the problem in hand: the real cause of Digen's death. With the Diet knowing of this location, she couldn't be sure how much time she'd have in this well-equipped lab. But still, in the hours between midnight and dawn when Jarmi had gone off to sleep and she had to face the cold fingers of need gripping her guts, she found herself dwelling on getting her Me in order for her own death.
Unable to work, she often sat writing letters to Shanlun, Mairis, and her father, her older brother, and others she'd known in her life. She wrote them among the notes in her bound notebooks, certain that people considered these so valuable they would see that they survived. She didn't bother disposing of her few personal possessions. As she'd already been proclaimed dead, no doubt her possessions had been disposed of. She told them how she felt about them, and what she remembered best about them.
She found herself composing a letter to Shanlun in which she tried to explain Yuan, and how much it had meant to her when Yuan had not been angry at her for what she'd done behind his back. No! It's impossible. Just a waste of time! Jarmi had found her slumped exhausted over the open notebook page, having accomplished little or nothing through the night.
The next night, she steadfastly refused to indulge in letter writing, but despite her good intentions, she found herself reviewing each task and her notes on it with a very real sense that someone else would be forced to finish her job. She became so meticulous in her note taking that each procedure took twice the time it should have.
A little over a week after her turnover, there was a raid by the Diet on a Tecton Last Year House. Twelve people died—eleven terrorists and a channel.
Yuan brought the newspaper to the lab personally, sitting on one corner of her desk, his nager paralyzingly brilliant and terribly controlled. "Mairis's strategy worked. He told me he'd triple the guard at Teeren House, and make no changes elsewhere, so they'd attack Teeren, which was prepared."
Teeren House was the Last Year House just off the Rialite campus, and run mostly by the Zeor Farrises who answered to Mairis. It was an old renovated Householding compound, originally built to be defended against Freehand Raiders. "They were foolish to attack Teeren," said Laneff.
"Not foolish, desperate. They believe everything they've been saying for ten years." He handed her a more disreputable newspaper.
"Do you read this thing?" she asked, taking it with the tips of two tentacles, as if it were a noxious substance.
"There are people who believe every word of that garbage just because it's in print and contradicts what the legitimate press has verified."
This article suggested that the Diet in fact knew that Laneff was alive and working—if not at Teeren, then somewhere under Tecton supervision. Mairis, it said, had staked so much of his campaign on Laneff’s research that it seemed logical he would lie about her death to protect her remaining time for her work. And since the Distect was his known ally, and it was known that the Distect condoned the kill and harbored real juncts, it could easily be providing Donors and even real kills for Laneff.
The editorial took off on that article and suggested that the only way for Mairis to clear his name was to renounce his alliance with the Distect.
"But Mairis never publicly espoused your shenned Distect! You are the only one who ever said anything about an alliance!"
Yuan laughed. "It's easy to see where your loyalties lie! Mairis is a good man. He's accepted our support privately. And I understand why he hasn't been able to make a public statement; opinions like this," he said, smacking the paper with one hand, "aren't limited to the wild fringes. But Mairis knows that some of the prominent people who are now supporting his candidacy, who have never done anything like it before, are our people. He knows how much weight we swing in modern politics. Nobody else has to know—yet."