4
HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN, JIGGITY JIG
[I]
DEFAULT SMELLED. IT wasn’t a technological smell. If there was one thing walkaway had, it was technological smells. It was an inhuman smell. There were background processes looking for BO and bad breath, zapping them with free ions and tasteful anti-perfume. It smelled like something just unwrapped.
When she woke, the smell was her first clue, before opening her eyes. She noticed it before she was fully awake, experiencing a gorgeous state of being aware of not being awake, a drug-feeling. She got that feeling once from something very good Billiam had. Not Billiam. Limpopo. No, Limpopo didn’t try new pharma, just stuff she knew. Seth had the pharma thing, downloading new stuff and piloting it in full sensor gear for the analytics groups to pore over, then showing up with a basket of fresh apples and a vaper set to dose them with weight-adjusted amounts.
What had Seth given her? What was that smell? Oh, default. Did Seth download a default drug? What a fucking terrible idea. Why would he do that?
Rising awareness, conscious consciousness. Despair. Either her father had her, or someone who planned on ransoming her. If it was the former, she would likely never get away. If it was the latter she’d end up in with her father, and (see above). Because if there was one thing Iceweasel – fuck it, Natalie – had known for as long as she’d known anything, it was that the daughter of Jacob Redwater was worth more alive and intact than dead or damaged. If her father had finally come to get her – or if he was about to have to do so – he would not let her go again.
All through her walkaway time, she’d known this day would come when Jacob Redwater twitched his little finger and brought her back before she could be leverage against him – or worse, an embarrassment. She’d never opened his messages, had boycotted her sister and cousins’ messages, because good as her opsec was, good as the best brains of walkaway could make it, she was sure that if there was a zeroday that would let him bug her that he would be able to afford it before it was found and patched, and wouldn’t hesitate to use it. Wouldn’t even understand why anyone would hesitate to use it.
Eyes open now. Hospital bed. Four point zip-restraint and when she saw them, she realized her sleeping brain had already noticed, tugged against them in her sleep and expected them.
Hospital bed, but not a hospital room. Private house. The smell. Her father’s house. She was home. She started, softly, to cry.
Her sister came to her bedside. Cordelia, two years younger than her, hair different from last time they’d seen each other, during a university break, more sophisticated with a precise degree of insouciant messiness, but otherwise she hadn’t changed. She looked down at her big sister with an unreadable expression, set down a large purse on the floor and settled into an angular wooden chair Natalie vaguely recognized as having once lived in the girls’ side of the house. She could see a burn on one arm that she remembered more clearly than the chair itself.
The two sisters contemplated each other. Natalie took after their father, had his weird, blade-like nose and the double-dimple in her cheek, both of which she’d hated as a teenager and come to treasure later as setting her apart. Cordelia looked like Mom, faint memory from girlhood, a round china-doll face and wide green eyes and a sprinkle of toasty Kewpie doll freckles, but with a satanic glint in her eye for the look-and-feel of a knife-wielding horror-doll.
Natalie gave up. She smiled. There was no honor in pretending to be made of ice. “Nice to see you, Cordelia.”
Cordelia smiled back, and she saw the ghost of her own smile. Everyone always said they looked alike when they smiled.
“You’re looking good, sis.”
“You too. Got some scissors in that giant purse?” She rattled her restraints.
“I do, and I’m delighted to inform you that I have been authorized to use them.” Her sister always put on a sarcastic, officious voice when she was nervous.
“Best news I’ve heard all morning. I have to piss like a racehorse.”
“Let’s get on it.” They weren’t normal scissors; they came in a special sheath that crinkled, and their black blades ate light. Cordelia handled them like they were red hot, snipping at the zip-ties with pantomime caution to keep the tips away from Natalie’s skin, though they parted the plastic ties with normal cut-plastic noises.
There was a partly open door to Natalie’s left, opposite the blind-darkened window, and she tottered to it, feeling floorboards beneath her feet with alarming, hallucinatory clarity. The bathroom behind it was small, fitted with the same brand of mirror and toilet and shower-heads as the rest of the house. The towels were familiar, off-white with a scalloped edge. She peed, washed, didn’t look in the mirror, then did.
She was clean. Her hair was combed out and trimmed to uniform length, five centimeters all over, the length of the shortest sections of her last haircut, administered by Sita, who could do unexpectedly great things with a pair of scissors.
Her eyes sunk in dark bags. Her skin was dull, her expression thickened with grogginess. She made a face, checked the back of her head, saw a bruise poking out of her hospital robe. It extended down her shoulder and now she saw it, her ribs and shoulder throbbed, or perhaps she noticed the throbbing that had been there all along.
Seeing the injury made her remember the snatch, the little woman with the grip of steel, the unseen man who’d loomed out the shadows. Then she remembered the bodies, Etcetera’s weeping on Limpopo’s shoulder, Gretyl’s head wound, the smoldering ruin of the Better Nation and the fate of its crew.
She searched the bathroom for a weapon. She couldn’t imagine hitting Cordelia, but she couldn’t imagine not hitting anyone who got in her way.
Nothing more dangerous than a squeeze bottle of eye-watering peppermint shampoo. Even the toilet-seat lid was bolted. Fine.
She stepped into the bedroom. Cordelia turned to her, smiling, then the smile faded as she saw Natalie’s expression, and Natalie reached for the room’s door. She wasn’t sure which corridor it opened on, but from there, it’d be easy to find the door and the street and –
She turned the knob and stepped into the hallway.
The small woman with her weight forward on the balls of her feet was unquestionably the woman from the woods. The smile, the small teeth. Natalie would have recognized them anywhere, even though without the dazzle paint, the woman’s face was transformed into a forgettable, statistically average mask of mid-Slavic nondescriptness. The teeth, though.
Natalie looked her in the eye. There was no tough-guy stare-down, just a mild interest. Natalie stepped forward to the side, to go around the woman, but she was right there, moving faster than Natalie had ever seen anyone move. That might be the drug hangover. She stepped to the other side, the woman was already there.
Staring, she said “Excuse me,” and tried to step past. The woman blinked.
“I said excuse me.” She put a hand on the woman’s shoulder, gently pushing her to one side. She didn’t push.
“Get out of my fucking way.” Natalie regretted the fuck as she said it, nothing to be done about it.
From behind her, Cordelia: “Natalie, come back in here, okay?”