“Certainly—thanks. I’ll just get the team together—”
Sirkin was asleep, curled on her side like a child, when Heris arrived. She looked perfectly healthy, with color in her cheeks again, and no obvious bandages. Heris had made herself visit Cecelia’s attendant first, though she didn’t know the man at all . . . now she sat beside the bed and waited for Sirkin to wake. Once an attendant peeked in, jotted down some numbers off the monitor above the bed, smiled at Heris, and went back out. Heris dozed off, waking when Sirkin stirred.
“Captain . . .” Her voice was drowsy.
“You’re almost recovered, they tell me,” Heris said. “I’m sorry—all of us are. We should have trusted you.”
“I—don’t know. I didn’t trust myself. And I don’t know how she could—she had been on your ship—”
“Don’t worry about her. Let’s talk about you. You know Lady Cecelia stood by you all along?”
“Yes—she came to my cabin and said she knew it wasn’t my fault.”
“She’d like you to stay with us, Brig, though no one will blame you if you don’t. We all want you to.”
“You’re sure?”
“Of course. I can make stupid mistakes, but I can also admit them. It wasn’t your fault; you did good work and someone else messed it up. You’ll do good work again. It’s more a matter of whether you trust us—if you’re sure of us.”
“I want to,” Sirkin said. “I like you.” That almost childlike admission struck Heris to the core. She could have cried. “You were all so . . . so good when Amalie died. Even Lord Thornbuckle’s daughter . . .”
“Even? Brun’s a remarkable young woman, if she did happen to be born rich. She liked you; I daresay if she’d been aboard she’d have chewed my ears about you, and made a dent in my suspicions.”
“I really like her . . .” That was said so softly Heris barely heard it, and Sirkin flushed. Heris mentally rolled her eyes. Youngsters. Meharry had told her privately that Brigdis and Brun were likely to go overboard. Clearly Sirkin had. But they’d have to work that out; she never interfered in her crew members’ romantic entanglements unless it endangered the ship. This wouldn’t . . . in fact . . .
“Not surprising,” she said dryly. “Considering—” Considering what, she didn’t say. “One of us will be by every shift, until you’re out of here. You’re under guard, because we still don’t know how much trouble we face, but you can call the ship any time you’re concerned. I’ve got to go down and see how Lady Cecelia’s coming along.”
“Thank you,” Sirkin said. Completely awake now, she had begun to regain that sparkle she’d had at first. Resilience, thought Heris, and wondered again if she would be able to afford rejuvenation someday. And what her employer would think about it.
Chapter Twenty-two
Cecelia had had reports sent up to Heris—encouraging reports, on the whole. Heris didn’t entirely understand the medical terminology—she skipped whole paragraphs of multisyllabic gibberish and tried to figure out the “prognosis” sections. Here she hoped the percentages referred to functions recovered, and not permanently lost—87% this, and 79% that, and 93% the other thing. Livadhi’s medical teams might have helped interpret, except that they were spending all their time in the station hospital. She would do better, she decided, to go down and find out in person.
The receptionist recognized her now, and gave her Cecelia’s room number. When she came out of the lift on that floor, Meharry was stretched out in the visitors’ lounge.
“How is she?”
“Better you should see her,” Meharry said gruffly. “We’re taking alternate shifts now; Arkady’s in the visitors’ hostel.”
“Sirkin’s doing well,” Heris said, anticipating Meharry’s question. “She’s staying with us.”
“She’s a sweet kid,” Meharry said. “Almost too sweet for her own good. I think that’s what made me so mad—I liked her so much, and she was so good, and then—you know, if Skoterin had been anything but a bland nothing, I’d have figured it out.”
“So we look out for bland nothings,” Heris said. “See you after I talk to Lady Cecelia.”
“You’ll be surprised,” Meharry said. It was an odd tone of voice, not at all encouraging, and Heris worried all the way down the corridor. The bright floral prints and soft carpet did nothing to reassure her.
She found the number and knocked lightly.
“Come in.” It didn’t sound like Cecelia; perhaps a nurse was with her. Even more worried, Heris pushed the door open.
The large room opened onto an atrium filled with flowering plants and ferns. Across an expanse of apricot carpet, a woman in a green silk robe stood by a table set for a meal.
The woman couldn’t be Cecelia, Heris realized after a startled glance. She was only in her forties, and although she was tall and lean, she had not a single strand of gray in her red hair. It must be the wrong room. Heris turned to look at the room number, and the woman chuckled. Heris felt that chuckle as a blow to the heart.
“It is—but how—?”
“Do come in and shut the door. That’s better.” Cecelia gestured to the chairs by the table. “Here—sit down; you look as if you’d seen a ghost.”
“I—I’m not sure—”
“Vanity has its uses, you know.” Cecelia sat down herself, and grinned at Heris. “I decided to take advantage of it.”
“But you—you said you’d never go through rejuv.”
“If you’d asked me, I’d have said I’d never be poisoned by that wretched Lorenza. Here, have a cup of broth. They have quite good food here.”
Heris opened her mouth to say she wasn’t hungry, and realized she was. And her employer was looking at her with a wicked gleam in her eyes. She sipped the broth.
“It was vanity that saved me, actually,” Cecelia said. “And now I’ll have to confess it, and you’ll laugh at me—”
“No, I won’t. I’m too glad to have you alive—and by the way, thanks for saving us from that mess on the ship.”
“I only wish I’d done a better job of it. But—let me tell you. You remember how smug I was about taking no medicines and refusing rejuv?”
“Yes,” Heris said cautiously.
“Well, I was lying. To everyone and to myself. There was this . . . this preparation. Herbal stuff. Lots of women used it, and none of us considered it medicinal exactly. Or cosmetic, exactly. I thought of it as a kind of tonic . . . of course I knew my skin was smoother, and I felt better, but I didn’t consider what it really was.”
A pause followed; since a comment seemed to be required, Heris said “And it was . . . ?”
Cecelia laughed. “I was so arrogant about drugs, it never occurred to me that many of them come from herbs—plants. That I was taking quite a solid dose of bioactive chemicals that functioned in some ways like the rejuvenation chemicals.” She shook her head. “So there I was, smugly certain that I wasn’t like those others—the ones I despised—and in fact I was. I must have known—I didn’t tell anyone I took it, not even my maid, and certainly not anyone medical. My doctor just thought I had naturally good genes. Which I do, but not that good.” She paused and drank a few swallows of broth herself.
“So when Lorenza poisoned me, she used a dose based on my supposed drug-free biochemistry. It worked, but the damage was not as complete. It required more maintenance drug than expected, which meant that when I came off the maintenance drugs, I could recover with therapy . . . and it also meant that a complete rejuvenation treatment would reverse all the damage.”
“And so you thought if vanity had saved you so far, you’d go the whole way?”
“That, and the fact that nothing but rejuv would give me natural eyesight again. That visual prosthesis is good enough for walking around without bumping into things, but it doesn’t begin to substitute for real sight.” Cecelia looked out at the atrium. “The colors . . . the textures . . . oh, Heris, I thought I would go mad, locked away in that darkness, motionless, helpless.”