Now Marianne walked carefully, right hand on the wooden wall that had been hastily erected to create this makeshift corridor. The wood no longer smelled raw, but the unsanded surface felt uneven, with bumps and ridges rough under her palm. To her left, rows of curtains hid equally makeshift cubicles, each holding a bed or gurney or pallet with a v-coma sleeper. Some cubicles were empty, their patients already awakened.
A carry-bot trundled past, laden with towels and basins and cleaning supplies. The nurse walking beside it, a very young woman in faded scrubs printed with daisies, smiled at her tremulously. Too young to be an Army nurse and still faintly suntanned—she was one of Colin’s Settlers, overcoming her aversion to tech enough to help out the overworked medical staff.
The sight cheered Marianne. People adapted. Hand still on the wall although she was feeling stronger, she moved toward the end of the corridor, where a soldier stood guard at the door dividing the infirmary from Lab Dome’s commons. “Commons”—a term from another life, academic teas in an oak-paneled, pseudo-British room at the university. Funny she should think of that now, when—
A man in a hospital gown erupted from the curtain to her left, screaming. Before Marianne could react, he grabbed her arm hard enough to topple her from her feet. “Run! Run! They will— Run!” He threw back his head and howled like a wolf.
Then it all happened at once. The soldier pulled a gun from the holster on his thigh. The young Settler nurse turned from the carry-bot and gaped. Lindy Ross flung aside the curtain of the next cubicle, where Susan McKay lay comatose. The screaming man thrust Marianne between himself and the soldier’s gun, whatever paranoid fantasies his mind was prone to now strengthened, justified, stronger and wilder in his stronger and wilder brain. He howled again, and his arm tightened across Marianne’s throat.
The soldier, uncertain, didn’t fire, but he kept his gun trained on them. Marianne could see his lips move in subvocalization to his mic. The deranged man’s arm tightened further, and she struggled to breathe.
Details were suddenly scalpel-sharp: the soldier’s lips moving, the antiseptic smell of her captor’s arm, the worn geometric design in the cubicle curtains, the realization, sharpest of all, that these might be the last things she experienced before she died.
Then something hit them from behind, hard. The man fell, dropping Marianne. She gasped for breath. The nurse shoved the carry-bot to slam into her captor’s back. The soldier sprinted forward and grabbed the man, who started to cry. Lindy bent over Marianne.
“Are you all right? Oh my God—”
Marianne couldn’t talk. She was still gasping for breath, trying to get air down her bruised throat, wheezing in desperate wrenching pants. But the thought she couldn’t utter was clear in her mind:
Some people cannot adapt, not to changes in their own brains.
Then everything went dark.
She woke back in bed. Lindy sat beside her.
“Marianne?”
“What… how long…”
“Only a few minutes. Your oxygenation is fine, and except for a bruised neck, you shouldn’t suffer any consequences from that attack. If you hadn’t already been so weak, you probably wouldn’t have blacked out at all. Does your throat hurt?”
“Yes.”
“That’ll go away.”
Already Marianne could talk more easily. A little more easily, anyway. “The attacker?”
“He’s a soldier. Jason will deal with him.” Lindy’s face was grim.
“He isn’t… entirely responsible. V-coma strengthens… whatever pathways…”
“I know. Major Holbrook will advise Jason. Marianne—where were you trying to go?”
“Dr. Farouk.”
Lindy’s eyebrows lifted. “The physicist? Why?”
“I… need to see him.”
“Well, you’re not going to. Not unless he comes to you, because you’re not going anywhere for a while. You’re not a young woman, you know.”
Like Marianne didn’t already know that? And yet people kept telling her. But it wasn’t like Lindy to be condescending. Lindy looked distracted, and purplish circles blossomed under her eyes. Something was hurting her. Jason?
Marianne didn’t ask. She said, “Send Dr. Farouk to me.”
Lindy stood. “I can try. But I doubt he’ll come. He’s working on something important and will hardly stop to eat. Just like Toni Steffens. Are you, too, going to start behaving like your health is irrelevant?”
“No.”
“Well, good. We need at least one sane Awakened around here. And a few more sane un-Awakened wouldn’t hurt, either.”
“Tell Dr. Farouk…” What? Nothing that Marianne could put into a neat, short message for Lindy to carry.
Lindy waited.
“Tell Dr. Farouk I have something new about time.”
Lindy’s forehead wrinkled. “Time? What do you mean?”
“Just tell him. And that it’s urgent.”
“I don’t see how the—oh, Ryan.”
Marianne’s son thumped into the cubicle as fast as his cane would let him. “Mom?”
“I’m fine, Ryan.”
“They told me that you—”
“I’m fine. Really.” But before she turned her attention to Ryan, Marianne directed a long look at Lindy.
“Please. Dr. Farouk. Now.”
CHAPTER 22
Zack was frustrated. He’d carefully repeated to Toni all of Marianne’s speculations about the ASPM gene, the mutation carried by all the v-coma victims, and human accelerated region 1. Toni had barely listened—or maybe she had. How would Zack know what this mentally enhanced Toni was doing? Maybe she was capable of following multiple pathways of thought at once. Or even all possible pathways, like electrons in an uncollapsed state. Or maybe she really wasn’t listening to him.
He finished with, “So maybe we should look more closely at the ASPM gene.”
“Okay.”
“‘Okay’? That’s it?”
“You look at it,” Toni said, and went back to her own work. If her attention had ever really left it in the first place.
He started to work, but after only an hour, Claire Patel came into the lab. “Zack—”
He knew. From the tone of her voice, the wideness of her eyes, his own half-dread, half-eager anticipation. He said, “Susan is awake.”
“Yes. She’s asking for you.”
“Is she all right?” Is she still Susan? Caitlin, to his immense relief, had emerged from her coma a brighter, more thoughtful child, but still Caitlin. She had pouts, she had tantrums, she liked snuggles, she still carried around Bollers, who now had stuffing oozing out of his fuzzy neck. But Caitlin was four. Her brain was expected to be highly plastic, her personality in flux. Susan was… Susan was his heart. What if she had changed in some important way other than intellectually, what if she no longer needed him, what if…
Claire said, “She’s as healthy as someone can be who’s been in a coma this long.”
Not what he’d meant. Zack rose on suddenly unsteady legs. “Tricia, can you finish this?”
The lab tech nodded. “Sure.”
When Zack reached the infirmary, someone had already brought Caitlin to her mother. Susan sat up in bed, Caity nestled beside her, and Zack thought his heart would split along its seam. Susan was thinner, her cheekbones sharp beneath shadowed eyes. She smiled at him.
“Zack.”
“Is it you?”
What a dumb thing to say! But she seemed to understand.
“Yes, it’s me.”
“How do you feel?” Also pretty dumb, but complexity seemed to have deserted him. There was something in her eyes… Claire tactfully withdrew.
Caitlin said, “Mommy is awake now, too. But she can already read good.”