[vii]
“HELLO, JACOB,” NATALIE said. She hadn’t called him that before, but Dad wouldn’t cut it. Her father gripped the foot of her bed while the door’s locks cycled, clunk-clunk.
“I don’t like this, you know.”
“Then let’s stop it. You untie me and let me go, and we’ll part ways. Not every family stays a family forever. I’ll send you a Christmas card every year and I’ll come to the funeral. No hard feelings.”
He looked wounded. That might have been partly genuine, which was amazing, considering that she was in four-point restraint. The moment passed.
“Your mother and sister want to visit.”
She rolled her eyes. Dis had been her constant companion since she’d awoken in the bolt hole. Without her, Natalie imagined she would have been in quite a weakened state, desperate for company. Solitary confinement was officially torture. She ping-ponged between a conviction Dis was a traitor and the possibility that Dis was genuinely on her side, but even that state of indeterminacy was a chewy mental problem that kept her sane.
“It’s not like I could stop them.”
He pursed his lips. “Don’t be difficult” – she suppressed a snort – “I can’t bring them in while you’re like this.”
She couldn’t suppress the second snort. “You make it sound like I tied myself up.”
“What the fuck else was I supposed to do? Natalie, I’m being gentle with you. Do you know what other parents do with kids who run away with your friends? Do you have any idea what that kind of de-programming looks like?”
“I have a pretty good idea. I remember Lanie.”
Lanie Lieberman was her best friend until the year they turned thirteen, when Lanie went off-piste, sneaking away for daring encounters with boys, booze, and the kind of club where the bouncers let a thirteen-year-old in if she dressed right and came with the right louche rich boy. They’d grounded her, put trackers on her, droned her, put a bodyguard on her, then two, but Lanie was a Houdini – especially with help from scumbag kid-fiddling older boys from families even richer than hers, who had their own money for the countermeasures Lanie needed to get away.
After that, it had been private school, then military school, then a place for troubled kids, and finally a place whose name Lanie never spoke. It was the only one she couldn’t escape from. Judging from her pallor when she returned, it had been underground or somewhere far north. In Natalie’s imagination it was an abandoned mine or a stretch of tundra. The Lanie who came back from it was... hinky. Not just wounded, but cross-wired in a terrifying, mystifying way. Sad things sometimes made her laugh. When other people laughed, she’d get a look of concentration and anger, she had to keep her rage in check.
They stopped pretending they were friends by fifteen. At sixteen, Lanie got early admission to a university no one had heard of in Zurich, supposed to be an amazing boot up in the finance industry, where even math dumbos could learn to be high-flying quants. The last Natalie heard of her was a hand-delivered invitation to her father’s funeral, a neat ink signature below the engraving. Natalie didn’t go to the funeral and couldn’t imagine the database cross-section that spit out her name as a potential attendee.
Her dad smiled wanly. “Things have come a long way since the days of Lanie Lieberman. There’s trade shows for what we could be doing right now. I made two discreet queries and now I get brochures on rag paper so thick it could shingle the roof. Natalie, you’re a growth industry, and the methodology is faster, more ruthless and more effective than anything from back then. Thumbscrews versus psychoanalysis.”
Curious in spite of herself: “But you didn’t ship me off.”
“Not yet. Natalie, hard as you might find this to believe, I respect you in addition to loving you as your father. I would like the part of you that makes you you to survive this adventure. I don’t want an automaton with a superficial resemblance to my daughter. I want you to realize all this pissing around with radical politics and camp-outs with dropouts is not a long-term strategy. I understand you feel guilty about having so much when everyone else has so little, but what good do you think it does to turn your back on reality? You can’t wish inequality away. In my ideal world, you’d run the family foundation, oversee our good works. There’s a lot of poor people out there who owe their vaccinations, water and education to the Redwater Foundation. Take some of that energy you put into anarchy and channel it into something productive. You could even set aside a little brownfield for experimental communities based on walkaway principles.”
She just stared at him. She knew if she’d really been in solitary all that time, this would have sounded like a hell of an offer. If not for Dis, she’d beg for this. She knew how susceptible she was to isolation. It wasn’t just being alone. It was being alone with herself. Did this mean Dis wasn’t working for her father? Or was this a subtle, super-Machiavellian Jacob Redwater deal that made him the stuff of legend, even in zotta circles?
“When are Mom and Cordelia going to visit?”
He shook his head. It was so patronizing. “Your mother isn’t going to bail you out. She’s more upset than I am. Cordelia, well, she’s afraid of you. Wants to put you on anti-psychotics. Thinks you’re going to attack her.”
“When are they coming for a visit?”
“Do you want to see them?”
She stared him down. He’d tilted her bed up to a forty-five-degree angle, so she could look at him over the rumpled white hill-scape of her sheet-draped body.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
When he was gone, Dis whooped loudly enough that she winced.
“Jesus, keep it down!”
“This place is so shockproof you could use it to print holograms,” Dis said.
“My head isn’t shockproof.”
“Sorry. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but your dad is a colossal asshole.”
“I’d apologize for him, but fuck that.”
“Yeah.”
“If it matters, I’m more convinced you’re not working for him.”
“What a relief.”
“That voice sim is getting better at sarcasm.”
“I’ve been sneaking updates to my local copy. The voice synth people are good – merging normalized speech recordings from MMOs and voice-response systems, getting incredible stuff out of it. I’ve been playing around with some of the possibilities.” The last sentence came out in a growl of predatory menace, so scary Natalie jerked in her bonds.
“Jesus.”
“I know, right? I cheated, though. Used sub-sonics. It’s pretty amazing what I can do. You should hear my sexy ingénue.”
“No thanks. I can’t remember ever feeling less interested in sex—”
“They’re coming.”
The door clunked and clunked again and gasped open, and in came Natalie’s mother, in her pearl gray, like a monochrome Jackie O, smaller than Natalie remembered, but no older. She took a small step inside, her nose wrinkled at a smell Natalie had lost all awareness of. She stared at Natalie. Cordelia slipped in behind her, round face a china-doll mask. Natalie felt a pang of weird sympathy for her, being with their mother on her own, the sole focus of Mother’s attention.
“Hi, Mom.”
Her mom circled the bed, walking around three sides before coming to the wall, retracing her steps, coming to rest beside Natalie.
“Jacob,” she called. Jacob stepped into the room, looking pained.
“Yes, Frances?”
“Remove these restraints.”
“Mom—” Cordelia began, but her mother held up a shaking hand.
“Jacob. Now.”
They locked eyes. She remembered this from childhood, their wars of silent gazes. As she’d grown, she’d realized these were a game of chicken where each gave the other longer to contemplate the ways retribution could come, until one looked away. As usual, Jacob broke contact first.
“I’ll be back.”
Natalie assumed he’d gone to get the med-tech or whatever he was, but a moment later, he was back with the merc. She nodded a little at Natalie, a degree of acknowledgment that was practically a full-body hug given their previous interactions. Maybe Natalie had impressed her with her “spunk.” Or maybe she’d been given permission – or orders – to lighten up.
“Frances, Cordelia, please stand back.”
Mom looked like she was going to argue, but Cordelia dragged her arm. “Come on, Mom.”
Once they had a few meters’ distance between them and the bed, the merc stepped forward and locked eyes with Natalie.
“No trouble,” she said, and clipped a bracelet around Natalie’s wrist. Natalie lifted her head and strained to see it. It was evil blue metal. She didn’t want to even guess what it did, though she couldn’t stop her subconscious from gaming it out: not shock, because she could grab hold of Mom or Dad or Cordelia and the shock would go through them, too. Maybe something in her nerves, like pain, or seizures, or –
“No trouble,” she agreed. The merc impersonally lifted the sheet, removed her catheter, let it retract into the bed. The sensation made her gasp with humiliation. The merc wiped her hands with a disposable and dropped it into the bed’s hopper before offering her hand. Natalie took it, because after days – weeks? – supine, she was weak and dizzy and her stomach muscles refused to help swing her huge, numb legs over the bed’s edge. Tears sprang into her eyes, because when she’d been a walkaway, she’d been so strong – they all had been. All the walking. Now she couldn’t walk away even if they cleared a path. Tears rolled down her cheek and slipped into her mouth.
She snotted up the rest of the tears and blinked hard, let herself be guided to her feet. She swayed, not looking at Mom or Cordelia, locking eyes with Jacob, letting him see what he’d done to her. He’d destroyed her body, but she made her eyes shine to let him know he hadn’t touched her mind.
Her mom was at her side, getting a shoulder beneath the arm whose hand didn’t have an IV. The merc disconnected the other end of the hose from its bed-feed, capped it with a sterile, elasticated wrap, draped the hose around Natalie’s neck. Her mom smelled of her own perfume, made specially by a man in Istanbul who used to come to the house once a year, during Sacrifice Feast, when he’d tour the world and drop in on his best clients while all of Turkey ground to a halt. Natalie hadn’t smelled that scent – not quite sweet, not quite musky, and with a whiff of something a bit like cardamom – for years, but she remembered it more clearly than her mother’s face.
Her mother gasped when she settled her weight over her shoulders. Natalie thought she was too heavy, then: “Jacob, she’s like a bird!” in tones more horrified than Natalie had ever heard from her. She saw her mother’s perfect skin crumpled in a grimace, eyes narrowed into slits that made the hairline wrinkles at their corners deepen in a way she hated.
“Hi, Mom.”
They stood, swaying. She felt her legs giving out.
“I should sit.”
They both sat. The opening in the mattress where the hoses retracted, smelly and dark, was right behind them. Her mother twisted to look at it, twisted back, and captured Jacob on an even fiercer look.
“Jacob,” she began.
“Later,” he said.
Natalie enjoyed his discomfiture. Cordelia stood halfway between the parents, fretting with her hands, picking her cuticles. She’d been a nail-biter, broken the habit only after several tries, and Natalie could tell that she wanted nothing more than to chow down on her own fingers.
It struck Natalie that she was the least upset among them, except for the merc. She was on a team with the merc, them versus these fucked-up zottas. That was stupid. The merc was not on her side. Come on, Natalie, focus.
“I won’t be tied down again.”
“No, you certainly won’t,” her mother agreed.
“Frances—” her father began.
“No, she won’t.” The staring contest smoldered again. The balance had changed. There was a new implicit threat – what would a divorce court judge say about a daughter tied to a bed, starved and intubated, locked away in a safe-room? Her mother had been furious about her going walkaway, but that wouldn’t stop her from deploying any leverage Jacob Redwater had handed her.
“No she won’t,” he said. “Excuse me.” He stepped out of the room. He shut the door. Clunk-clunk.
Cordelia took a tentative step. Her mother extended an arm and she stepped the rest of the way, let Frances give her one of her hugs, always warm enough, always ending a moment before you expected.
Cordelia subtly leaned to Natalie, testing for the presence of a potential hug, but Natalie didn’t signal back. Fuck her. For that matter, fuck Frances. They had known she was a prisoner and neither had sprung her. Getting her loosed from four-point restraint hardly qualified as liberation.
“Natalie, this is just terrible,” her mother said.
No shit. “Uh huh.”
“Why, Natalie? There are more constructive ways to engage with the world. Why become an animal? A terrorist?”
It was so fucking stupid she couldn’t manage a derisive snort. “What would you prefer?”
“Move out, if it’s so bad. Your trust is mature, you could buy a place anywhere in the world. Get a job, or not. Take up a cause. Something constructive, Natalie. Something that won’t get you killed or raped or—”
“Kidnapped by mercenaries and tied to a bed in some rich asshole’s basement?”
Her mother set her jaw.
“Natalie,” Cordelia said. “Can I get you anything?”
“A lawyer. Cops.”
“Natalie—” Cordelia looked hurt. Natalie didn’t let herself give a shit.
“You knew I was down here. You knew he had me snatched. You don’t like the walkaways and you don’t like that I’m one, fine. But in case you haven’t noticed, I’m an adult and whether I become a walkaway is none of your business. Neither of you get a say in what I do.”
“Of course we do. I’m your mother!”
Even Cordelia smirked.
She saw rage boil in their mother, different than their father’s, but no less deadly. “Natalie, if you think being an adult means you don’t have any duty to anyone else in the world—”
She and Cordelia both snorted. It further enraged their mother, but it was the most sisterly moment they’d shared since Natalie first went away to school.
Frances went rigid and stared straight ahead, not acknowledging them, wishing she hadn’t gone straight to the maternal moment, which left her with no gracious out, and if there’s one thing Frances Mannix Redwater was, it was gracious.
The door clunked, opened. Jacob came in trailed by the med-tech/paid goon, who carried a precarious armload of clothing. Natalie recognized the clothes from the dumbwaiter in her previous incarceration.
“We’ll bring in a proper bed later today,” Jacob said, while the man put the clothes on the floor.
“Books, too,” Natalie said. “Interface stuff. Paper and something to write with.”
He looked at her, then at Frances.
“No interface stuff,” Frances said. “But everything else. Some furniture, too. A fridge and food.”
“Hop to it,” Natalie said, with a giddy laugh. Jacob ignored her. He had a goat, but you couldn’t get it with a jibe as crude as that.
“Now everyone else out,” Frances said. “I need to talk to Natalie alone.”
Natalie closed her eyes. Not one of those talks.
“I’m tired,” she said.
“You’ve had plenty of time to rest.” Frances managed to make it into an accusation, as though Natalie had lazed around eating bonbons. It wasn’t sarcasm – Frances was capable of being simultaneously outraged because she’d been tied to a bed, and because she’d been too lazy to get out of bed.
“Everyone, out.” She glared at the merc, who had the sense not to look at Jacob. That would have been the end of her employment in the Redwater household. Natalie guessed being a merc in the employ of zottas required political sense.
They left and before the door clunked closed, Frances called out to Jacob. “Private. No recording.”
“Frances—”
“She’s not going to jump me and hold me hostage, Jacob.”
“You’ve seen the video—”
“I saw it. That was before you tied her to a bed for a week and fed her through a tube.”
“Frances—”
“Jacob.”
Jacob turned to the merc, who was already holding something out, palm down. He passed it to Frances. “Panic button,” he said.
She pointedly put it in her purse, then set the purse far from the bed, leaning against the wall, buttery yellow leather slumped against stark white. “Good-bye, Jacob.”
They left the door open.