A hazy, muffled sensation, like she's watching the world through a layer of thick gauze. A distant voice—her own? A reply, cheerful in a way that's brisk and sharp and brittle: "You're not really awake yet, dear, give it time." Another layer of gauzey darkness, a vague sense of time oozing like molasses. The curious sense of a hand in hers, now absent.
Vanessa Kimball opens her eyes, blinking against harsh light. Dr. Grey is standing above her, out of armor but in surgical scrubs, smiling brightly. "There you are!" she says, and leans in to squint. "I think. You awake this time?"
Vanessa coughs, raises a heavy arm to swipe at the grit in her eyes. Her vision's still blurred, but she can make out a small, white bedroom; she and Grey are the only occupants. It practically screams the word 'sterile'. "Hospital," she mutters. Her throat grates, and she grabs eagerly for the cup of water Grey hands her. "Why?"
"You were poisoned, sweetie. Just one week into the ceasefire, too! Someone really wanted you dead. You've been out for almost two days."
Vanessa freezes with the edge of the cup at her lips, but thirst overrides paranoia and she swallows the water down. "Poisoned?"
"Keeled right over during lunch. Nasty stuff, too. Guess nobody ever told you 'puke your guts out' is supposed to be a figure of speech, huh?" Grey laughs brightly and presses a button to raise the head of Vanessa's bed to a sitting position; Vanessa grasps nervously at the bedsheets for balance as the world spins. "The Freelancers wouldn't let anyone near you at first, but since I'm a close personal friend of Agent Carolina's, she trusted me enough to let me help."
"Carolina put me in the care of a Federal Army doctor," Vanessa says, hoarsely. The political ramifications are staggering, but it has that blunt-instrument practicality that seems to be the Freelancer's hallmark.
"No, silly, she put you in the care of the best doctor on Chorus." Grey grins, checking a monitor next to the bed. "And a close personal friend. I doubt anyone else would have known what to look for, anyway. This stuff is more common in experimental engine fuel than anything else."
Broadly speaking, 'just ingested an engine fuel byproduct' paints a pretty accurate picture of how Vanessa's feeling. She shifts uneasily against her bed. "Did they figure out who did it?"
"Nope." Grey pops the 'p'. "But they're narrowing down the suspects. Had to be someone close to you, by the way. Someone with access. This wasn't a one-time thing—I almost didn't catch it because there was less than the immediate lethal dosage I expected in your system. Someone's been putting this stuff in your food for at least a few days. Probably did the math or the chemistry wrong and didn't expect it to build up the way it did. I mean, they probably just wanted you getting sicker and sicker so it looked more natural. This stuff starts messing with brain function at really low doses."
Kimball rubs her forehead with the palm of her hand. "Brain function," she says, flatly.
Grey blinks at her, then laughs. "You're fine. The seizures should taper off in the next week or so—"
"Seizures," Kimball says.
"—but I got in there before there was any permanent damage. Been working on you full-time for a while, now. You've been a nice project. Do you want to go outside?"
Kimball blinks at the change in subject. In what she's pretty sure is her mind's attempt to escape the conversation, she's been staring at the small window in the corner of the room, where the sun is streaming in. "Sorry?"
"Outside," Grey repeats, more slowly. "It's a beautiful summer day. Do you a world of good. Come on, now, up and at 'em! No use lounging around just because you were technically dead for two minutes! There you go, don't you worry about that gown, everyone looks ridiculous in them. I tried designing a more fashionable but still effective version when I was in grad school the third time, but it never really caught on. Okay, into the chair. Supplies are a little short right now, you know how it is, old manual type. You good? And away we go!"
Vanessa blinks; somewhere in the span of Grey's cheerful chatter, she's been expertly maneuvered from her bed into an old rattling wheelchair, which Grey is now pushing toward the nearest exit. The New Republic soldiers dotting the hallways are a reassuring sight, and Vanessa even manages to wave them off when they move to stop Grey's terrifying forward momentum.
Outside, it's warm. It's sunny, for what feels like the first time in months. Grey stops them in a small, unpopulated courtyard, and Vanessa turns in her chair toward the sun like some sort of wilted flower. She's pretty sure she's got the world's dopiest smile on her face. Grey gives a happy sigh. "Summer," she says. "Doesn't last long here, huh?"
Vanessa glances back her, and all self-consciousness about her own blissful grin vanishes immediately. Grey is beaming up at the sun with an expression of such honest joy that Vanessa can't quite bring herself to look at it dead-on.
"Thanks," Vanessa says, a little stiffly. "For everything. I can't imagine my people made it easy for you to do your job, but I'm glad you did it."
"Oh, soldiers have great imaginations," Grey says, pulling up a chair beside Vanessa's. "Comes from all that standing around waiting to die horribly. Makes you all super easy to intimidate with any old rumor that happens to be making the rounds. 'I hear she once carved someone open while he was still conscious!' Psh, I mean obviously that was more the anesthetist's fault than mine, and I stopped the surgery eventually. Of course, it could have been interesting to see what—" Grey seems to notice Vanessa's expression for the first time, and shuts her mouth in a rare display of tact. "Anyway. Nobody gave me trouble for long."
Vanessa shifts, feeling the pull of new scars, but the ache is muted enough that she can tell she's on some pretty serious pain medication. As if the vaguely dreamlike quality of reality right now wasn't her first clue. "You're a very strange person."
"Not really," says Grey. "Statistically aberrant, I guess. I score off the charts in pretty much everything. But I'd say I'm a lot less unusual than you." She pulls something from her pocket that Vanessa initially takes to be a packet of cigarettes, but it turns out to be a box of candy. She pops a few little hard cylinders into her mouth and chomps down; Vanessa's teeth ache in sympathy. "Soldiers in general are pretty weird."
"I guess I can't argue with that," Vanessa says.
Grey shrugs. "It's all that dying-for-what-you-believe-in weirdness. Lots of soldiers are super big on the idea that they're signing up for some noble self-sacrifice, when they're really just signing up to help the other guys meet their self-sacrifice quotient. I guess 'killing for what you believe in' just doesn't have the same ring to it." She laughs, high and brittle.
"That's a pretty cynical attitude," Vanessa says.
"Not really. I just figure there's nothing heroic about soldiering." Another rattle of candy from the upturned box, another tooth-jarring chomp. "Because let me tell you, I've stitched up a lot of soldiers, and what I've seen is a lot of killers and a lot of victims. Sometimes both at the same time. But in all that time, I haven't managed to get hero's blood on my scrubs once."
"Doesn't mean it's not out there."
Grey grins; the candy's dyed her teeth a startling blue. "Sure. Cool thing about science is that you can theorize plenty of stuff before you see any evidence of it."
Vanessa digs her fingernails idly into the wheelchair's armrest; there's a welt on the side of her hand. She probably tried to catch herself on the gritty floor when she fell. "There are things worth dying for," she says. "There are certainly things worth killing for."
"Tell that to all my vaporized friends back at the Fed outpost," Grey says. Her voice is calm and steady. Vanessa finds herself flinching in expectation of a reaction that isn't coming.
"But sure," Grey continues, cheerfully. "Stuff worth killing for. No question. But there's nothing heroic about it, that's all. War's the failure of all other means. New Republic guy said that, by the way. Read a couple history books when I joined up. Now here's one from me: war's the slapdash job when you're out of surgical supplies and your corpsman bled out an hour ago and all you've got left is biofoam, so you keep packing it in and packing it in even though you know your patient's going to die and you're just prolonging her suffering. War's going through the motions so you can look yourself in the mirror in the morning and pretend you like what you see. Nothing noble about that. Nothing heroic. It's cruelty that somebody somewhere thinks is for the greater good. Whether or not it's justified, we should be ashamed."
Her tone hasn't changed, Vanessa thinks, watching from the corner of her eye. Her bright smile hasn't flickered in the slightest through her entire speech. Despite the drugs and the vague haze of pain beyond them, Vanessa's mind keeps slipping back to the start of their conversation, turning words over and over, had to be someone close to you. We should be ashamed.
"Well, for all that, we've still got ourselves a beautiful summer day," Vanessa says, a little weakly, desperate to change the mood. "That's important too, sometimes."
Grey breathes deeply, closing her eyes; she's quietly, perfectly content. Then she says, "A beautiful summer day is always important," and smiles.