"Simon. I need to talk to you." Gemma appears from a side corridor, clean and quiet as a cat in her scrubs. He envies her. There was a time he looked much the same. Now he has more in common with the patients, scrubs or not.
"Can we make it another time?" He keeps walking. Suddenly Gemma's presence is two-edged, a reminder of failure in two very different lives. "Chow just put me on probation and I'm already late for rounds."
"Simon--wait!" she chases after, harder with her shorter legs. "It's important."
He turns and offers a helpless shrug; she darts and snatches his sleeve. "I know! About your sister... River."
He cracks like a scab. In surgery, he knows he's a man cool in the sun, but worrying about River, about time, about money--so much worry--has eroded the armor that's always protected him. He grabs her wrist, hard enough to leave bruises and drags her out of the hallway's center. "What? Huh? What do you think you know about my sister?"
Even manhandled, Gemma's eyes bore steadily into his. "I know where she is."
Later.
Only a little; not enough time for him to process the enormity of this revelation, but enough for a change of location.
The canteen is awash in people, students, doctors, nurses, patients and patients' families. He feels hideously exposed. This isn't clandestine. But this isn't his game, either. It's never been his game. He'd like to imagine himself a knight, maneuvering to protect the Queen, but he suspects that's really too high to aspire. Even a pawn can capture a king, he reminds himself.
"How?" he asks finally, the first words he's spoken since she propelled him here like a dressmaker's wooden dummy.
Gemma regards him, a blank slate other than the trace of impatience. "Does it matter? We know where she is. We can get her out."
Ah, he thinks. We.
But in the end, it doesn't matter, and he knows it. Prices exist to be paid. "Tell me," he says.
Gemma starts talking. He listens to it all, but he hears only parts; his mind Dopplers in and out like a fading wave signal. Nonetheless, he understands.
Some of it he thinks he should have known before now, guessed. Gemma told him she'd been born in the black...and now here she is. "Gifted", they'd always said, but it didn't give him presence of mind to connect the dots between those two destinations and realise she had to have help, her mysterious 'we'. He didn't remember that nothing came for free, especially futures. And even Gemma's future--or the possibility thereof--came with a price. That she paid that price gladly was of no consequence.
"You...you've been out there now, Simon," she says, "You know what it's like, at least a little. And no matter how smart I am, all I was ever going to be was--at best--some 'businessman's' brains, or doxy, or both. Jian ta de gui! But the Alliance...the Alliance doesn't care, as long as the status quo is maintained. People--a person--don't matter to them."
"I don't care about your politics," he says. "I'm not interested in anything, other than River. Tell me about River."
Again her face is impatient, dappled in contempt. She is zhen zheng xin tu, a true believer, a zealot. He wonders how he never saw it before. "Do you know what they're doing to her? In their...their labs? How many have died? They're playing with her brain, Simon."
He doesn't know exactly what that means, but he can conjure all the horrible words: vivisection, dissection, electroconvulsive therapy, lobotomized. He can create the pictures, lobes, and gyri and sulci, pink in health and grayish in death.
Not dead mei mei, Lao tian, not dead...
"What do you want?" he interrupts her. Maybe later he'll be able to stomach the description of what they've done to River, but not now. Not yet.
"Nothing you're not willing to give," Gemma answers, now sullen.
"Money," he answers for her, and surprisingly, his cool returns, armor and armament both. It's not that he has the upper hand, he's painfully aware he doesn't, but there's something about dealing from the bottom. It's not that he has nothing to lose, but what he has to lose is all he has. All or nothing. The simplicity of it is strangely delightful.
"Yes." She names an outrageous sum. It will take some creative bookkeeping, especially if he's to have enough left for them to get lost, far enough to not be found, but it can be done.
All or nothing, he thinks.
"How will you do it?"
"We'll get her out in cryo. Meet you in Persephone. It's a main layover point for almost anything on the outer planets. From there you can go anywhere, the two of you."
I won't come for you. Gabriel Tam had said too, in the ugly aftermath of Simon's arrest. If you leave here, if you do this...I will not come for you.
It hurt at the time--still does--but in many ways it's always only the two of them--him and River.
The older Tams love their children--even now he doesn't doubt that--but it's like the light of the blue sun; distant, and not always warming. And sometimes it's more harmful than helpful.
If he does this--when he does this, because who is he kidding?--in all likelihood, neither he nor River will ever see them again. Never suffer through another another lecture on familial responsibility or have his mother's fussy fingers pick another piece of non-existent lint from his waistcoat before he leaves. Never sit in his father's warm, aromatic study with a snifter of brandy in hand while his father confides in him the business schemes and hopes of advancement he can't share with his largely incomprehending wife. Never have his mother's wu jia pi, or her special flan, neither of which she ever leaves to the servants, made by her own well-kept hands.
If he dwells on these memories too long, they will bleed, so like the surgeon he once wanted to become, he cauterizes them and hopes they don't fester.
"When?" His voice seems to belong to someone else, even sounds like someone else, but Gemma doesn't seem to notice, so maybe it's just him.
"Two days. That's when they'll hit the facility."
"Not 'we'?" The old loftiness, the cool arrogance, is back in his voice. He's never noticed it before, but he recognizes it now. Some things, he supposes, only become obvious in their absence. He wields it now like a weapon and knows it will work.
As he thought, Gemma blushes. She may look down on him for being a rich man's son, and pig-ignorant of the politics that make up her little life, but no one entirely escapes social conditioning. "They've risked too much to put me here to ruin it now," she explains.
"Ah," is the only comment he makes, and is rewarded by the deepening of color and the hardening of her expression.
"It's three days passage to Persephone...your contact will be..."
"No," Simon says softly.
"N...no?" Gemma is completely jarred; for the first time, he sees in her the girl, the woman. It's an interesting contrast. "What do you mean no?"
"I mean no," Simon says calmly. "As the financial backer for this little operation, and quite a few to come, for what you're asking, it seems to me I have some rights. I'm coming with."
Gemma's mouth opens and closes several in speechless astonishment. It would be funny, in different circumstances. "Simon, I... I never thought... I can't authorize that," she stammers finally.
"I didn't expect you could. But you know who can. Wave them. Your people need this money, as much as I need River. You wouldn't be doing this otherwise, would you?" He holds up his hand as Gemma opens her mouth to protest. "Don't," he warns. "You said it...I know what it's like, at least a little...and what I know is that nothing comes for free, not even altruism. You tell me the Alliance doesn't care...but you and your people don't care either. I'm just a means to an end. And that's fine. Now we both know where we stand. But where I'm standing is next to my sister, or this doesn't happen. So wave whoever you need to, and make it so."
Gemma's mouth shuts with a nearly audible snap. Wordless, she gets up from the table and stalks away, towards the public use wave sets. Once she's out of sight, Simon slumps in the chair, suddenly, keenly aware of every abrasion, bruise and throbbing ache. He feels hollowed out, but curiously its not terrible. It's an emptiness waiting to be filled.
I guess it's derring do, after all, he thinks to himself, and laughs.