Bones and Blighted Roses

by La Guera

When the Enterprise discovers a cryotube adrift in space, it reignites restless fears of Khan and his colony of genetically-enhanced superhumans, but what's inside turns out to be anything but, and Dr. McCoy finds himself face to face with living medical history. Sometimes it takes the deft hands of a surgeon to make things whole again.

5. Mile Marker One

Her mouth was full of lightly-buttered toast when the doctor swept in the next morning, crisp in his blue tunic and black pants. He tossed his tablet onto his desk and swept a scanner from the nearest tray.

"Eat light this morning," he advised as she chewed. "Assuming your vitals haven't gone wonky overnight, we'll be starting part of your therapy regimen this morning."

You're certainly not one for wasting time, Doctor. "Part?" she echoed when she'd swallowed and washed it down with a sip of watery, bitter orange juice. She wiped her fingers on her napkin.

"If I tried anything other than light stretching right now, you'd either wind up in traction or give yourself palpitations. You said yourself your stamina's shot." He waved the scanner over her with the jaded elan of an old magician.

"So did you," she pointed out. "And they still have traction these days?"

"Not really," he grunted, gaze fixed on the readouts from his musical salt shaker. "We have neuroskeletal regenerators for that now."

"Of course you do." She waited until he lowered his scanner and lunged over her tray for another bite of toast. Her knees rose beneath the coverlet, trembling spasmodically, and her toes fanned and curled.

The doctor's eyes slid from the readout, inscrutable and assessing beneath thick, brown lashes. He promptly exchanged his scanner for a hypo. "I take it you haven't had your Loxtan yet."

She shook her head. "Just the kidney pills and the bone supplement."

He strode to the bank of locked drawers on the opposite side of the room, keyed in his code, and pulled open a drawer to retrieve a large ampoule of blue liquid. He closed the drawer with a tap of his hip and re-engaged the security locks. He returned to her side, loading the hypo as he came, and she tugged down the neck of the scrubs that served as her wardrobe these days and presented her neck.

His lips twitched as he pressed the hypo to her pulsepoint. "I see you've conquered your fear of the hypo."

She shrugged. "It's kinder than the needle. My little brother used to flick me harder than that when he wanted to be a little bastard."

"You had a brother?" Pleasant and curious, but the had stung, the scrape of ground glass against her skin.

She nodded. "Daniel," she said. "His name is-was-Daniel." She grimaced as a microscopic shard buried itself behind her breastbone. "He was four years younger." She blinked at the crumbs of toast scattered on her tray. Dr. McCoy said nothing, but she could see him from the corner of her eyes, the sharp spar of his wristbone protruding from the vivid blue of his tunic.

He has lovely hands, elegant, she thought inanely. Then, stupidly, If he weren't a surgeon, he'd make a fine pianist.

An image arose in her mind of Dr. McCoy seated upon a piano bench in front of a black Steinway polished to a high gloss, the coattails of his tailored tuxedo draped over the edge like somber bunting. Nimble fingers flew over ebony keys, and his lean, muscled legs pumped the pedals as he followed the exultant flight of his hands. His ghostly reflection in the piano's flawless, obsidian surface was haughty and patrician and handsome, the high cheekbones sharp even at a dim remove.

Honey, you don't even know if he can carry a tune in a bucket, Grandmama Lavinia piped up, and the Steinway abandoned the opulent confines of the concert hall for the far humbler and snugger confines of a ten-gallon bucket carried by a muttering Dr. McCoy as he stomped down the street, sweating and straining beneath the weight of his improbable burden, coattails flapping briskly with every step.

The image was so absurd that she could only ponder it in mute befuddlement, but it provided a welcome distraction from the stirring of old bones she had no desire to examine too closely, and she was grateful for it.

Leave it to Grandmama to make it better, she thought, and bit her lower lip to stifle the urge to weep.

She twisted the coverlet in her hands and cleared her throat. "So," she said hoarsely. "Am I fit for duty?"

"Physically, yeah," he answered, and eyed her with mounting suspicion.

"Good." She scrubbed her prickling nostrils to ease the insistent, cayenne-pepper itch. When he merely eyed her in dubious silence, she offered, "Thinking about my brother just stirred up some old ghosts, that's all." She shook her head as though to rattle them loose. "They're like dust, they get everywhere."

He snorted at that, but didn't press the issue. Instead, he snagged the footplate of her wheelchair with one sneakered foot and dragged it closer to the bed. "Well, when you're finished with the housekeeping, get yourself into Therapy Room One." He nodded in the direction of the room he'd shown her the day before.

"No time like the present," she said, and pushed the rolling tray and the sad remnants of her breakfast away.

He held out his arm. "Use my forearm to pull yourself up and brace if you need to. A hernia on the first morning'll throw one helluva wrench in the works."

"Thanks for the show of faith, Doctor," she groused, but it was so much bluster.

The doctor withdrew his arm and folded it across his chest. "Oh, really? Well, feel free to prove me wrong," he demanded.

"I could try, but it would only end in sweat and tears," she admitted sheepishly, and threw back the cover.

"'S what I thought," he retorted with grim satisfaction, and held out his arm again.

She grabbed it with both hands and pulled herself forward, a rower bent to the till of a trireme. Despite the Loxtan coursing through her system, her legs trembled with exertion.

"For God's sake, don't give yourself a stroke," McCoy ordered irascibly when she wheezed. His free arm came up to support her back, and she sagged gratefully against it. "Let go." When she did, he curled his hand around her far leg and swept it around in a fluid motion. With the other hand, he steadied and straightened her wobbling trunk.

"You're good at this," she said when she'd found her balance and was gripping the edge of the bed with both hands. Her socked feet dangled bonelessly above the floor, and she stared at her toes in an effort to hide the embarrassment that warmed her cheeks and nape.

Helpless as a newborn, she chided herself. She wondered what all the old therapists who had poured thousands of hours into her as a child and young girl would think if they could see her now, floundering and weak and able to hold herself upright only by dint of the doctor's bracing arm.

"Had a lot of practice," the doctor answered.

"Medical school?"

"Drunks at the Academy, mostly," he said, and she was so surprised by his candor that she guffawed and nearly toppled off the bed.

The doctor's hand shot out to steady her. "Gonna have to have engineering lay down a rubber floor in here," he muttered, but his hand was light and gentle on her shoulder.

"Sorry," she told her socks. Inside the thick, warming cotton, her toes splayed and twitched.

"Stop talking to your toes, Miss Walker." When she raised her gaze, his eyes were resolute inside his face. "And stop apologizing. Save it for when you've got something worth apologizing for. You're on day one. I don't expect you to be turning somersaults. What I do expect is for you to try. As long as you do that, we'll be just fine."

She studied him, keenly aware of the warmth of his hand on her rounded shoulder. "I can do that," she agreed. "I'll do whatever you ask of me. Just...don't yell at me, and be patient with these creaky old bones and obstinate muscles."

"I'm not one for yelling at my patients. As for patience, I'm not going to coddle you. I expect you to work, and hard. If you want to get into shape and have a chance to live your own life, it's going to be a hard road. Maybe a long one, too. You'll sweat. You'll hurt. And sometimes you might think I'm a bastard. But I'm not a sadist. I'm not going to ask you do something I don't think you can. And if what I ask you to do hurts now, it's only because it'll hurt less later."

You're different, she thought as her eyes began to burn, and she shifted in his supporting grip. I've been the child of a thousand different doctors, but you're the first one who's ever told me the truth. Hell, you're the first one to ever talk to me at all. The others always talked to Mama or Daddy. Even when I got old enough to know my own mind, they just patted me on the head and told me not to worry myself about it, as though I were still a child. And since my parents were footing the bills, what they said went nine times out of ten, and when it didn't, it was only because the doctor had another regimen or surgery in mind. On the rare occasion I managed to strop and sulk my way into staying in the room, everyone talked over my head or around me. The doctors pretended I wasn't there or made noncommittal noises in the back of their throats while they scribbled on their charts, and my parents clucked and patted my hand and called me Rosie. The school might've said I was smart as a pip and a whip, and my parents might've believed them when it came to report cards and awards mounted in tasteful shadowboxes mounted over the fireplace and National Honor Society dinners, but when it came to matters of medicine and the real world, I was still their little girl, a squirming preemie the size of Daddy's hand who spent the first four months of her life lying on a diaper instead of wearing it and getting crud wiped out of my eyes and suctioned out of my nose. I was a living doll baby who needed to be protected from the world and all its pitfalls and sharp edges, so they insulated me with private therapists and PCAs and dictated the course of my treatment with the opening of their checkbook and the flourish of Daddy's signature on the check.

They didn't mean it as an unkindness. It was love, smothering and insatiable and all-consuming. They made the hard choices so I wouldn't have to, one less cross for me to bear. And it was. But every choice they made for me was one less that I could make for myself, and my world shifted on its axis with each new edict they handed down with smiles and endearments. Sometimes it expanded, and sometimes it contracted, but it always changed, and it was never quite solid beneath my feet. It was never really mine, either, but the world as they believed I'd want it if I just tried it for a while. Mama knew best, after all, and Daddy paid for it with his platinum Visa.

The summer after my sophomore year, there was talk of breaking my back and inserting a steel rod into my spine. They were worried about scoliosis after a routine x-ray showed a ten-degree curve.. They hauled me off to an orthopedic specialist for second opinion and consults and more x-rays. It's a wonder my ovaries didn't shrivel up and die that summer, and never mind the little metal hearts they slapped on my lower belly. Doctors and x-ray techs examined the results, and then the doctor ushered my parents behind doors too heavy for me to open even if I wanted to, and I got left in the waiting room with cranky toddlers too young to know why they were hurting so much and parents who weren't granted that numbing luxury.

The let me in the room just one time. They said it was because they wanted to hear my opinion, but I didn't get two sentences and a mouthful of adolescent terror in before the doctor swiveled away from me on his stool and started talking about surgical options and recovery periods and optimal long-term outcomes as though it were a foregone conclusion that his will would be done, God issuing wisdom from his vinyl-seated mount.

I might've just sat there and taken it like the good little lady I was meant to be, but I'll be damned if that smug bastard didn't pat me on the knee and hand me a Highlights magazine as if I were a fussy child who needed distraction from adult matters and not a sixteen-year-old girl listening to a goddamned horror story in which I had a starring role whether I wanted it or not. A spine snapped as neat as you please and bracketed by titanium rods. Six months in a body cast and six more of rehab to correct the atrophy of muscles gone dormant. Skin rashes from the cast. The wet-cotton stink of unwashed skin and the relentless itch of sweat rilling between breasts I couldn't scratch while the summer sun turned all that plaster and fiberglass into a goddamn broiler. A permanent catheter. The joy of marinating in shit and blood when the nurses were too slow with the bedpan or the tampon.

It was the condescension, the sheer, galling presumptuousness of it. Maybe if my parents had even pretended to hear me out or that fool of a surgeon had handed me anything else-a Cosmo or an Elle or a Vogue-I might not've lost my mind, but there they were, in that office where the walls matched the green of the doctor's scrubs, chatting it up like they were just sitting a spell and deciding my life like it was the easiest thing in the world to be torn apart and remade by inexpert hands who had assumed a gift meant for God's hands, and all they'd left me with was the daunting prospect of boiling in my own mess for six months and a magazine meant for children still fuzzy on what number came after six.

Until that moment, I thought anger was hot. But it isn't. Anger-real anger-is cold, so cold it burns everything it touches. It scorches flesh and freezes blood and turns bone to stone. Real anger has no conscience, and it doesn't give a fart in a high wind for the social niceties. My parents were sitting in those boxy chairs that sprout from the floor of every hospital room and doctor's office like squat, staid toadstools. Mama had her legs crossed at the ankle beneath her skirt, and her nylons rasped whenever she moved. She was leaned forward in her chair with her elbow propped on the armrest and her chin bobbing as she nodded, an acolyte held in thrall by the Word of the Lord. Daddy was leaned forward, too, elbows on the knees of his khakis and tie hanging down like a drooping tongue, and I remember that I wanted to reach out and jerk on that tie until he came out of that chair with his eyes bugged out of his red-faced head.

I didn't, though. Instead, I took a hold of that infuriating magazine, cocked back my arm, and whopped that doctor upside the head with it. He was so absorbed in his litany of the miracles he would work upon my imperfect form that he never saw it coming. My impromptu cudgel caught him flush on the ear. I've never seen a doctor come out of his amphibious crouch faster, hand clapped to his insulted ear and incredulity etched on his face. In retrospect, it wasn't the smartest thing to do to a man who might be holding my spine in his gloved hands, but at the time, I didn't give a damn. Anger narrows your focus, and all that existed for me was his profile as he sat on that stool and the drone of his voice as he dissected the next year of my life with the clinical efficiency of a med student vivisecting a dead fetal pig. I wanted to shut him up and make him see me, not the case file bulging inside his clipboard.

He saw me, all right, and he was fit to be tied as he stood there with his ear stinging within the cup of his palm and my chart hanging from his fingers. He was the emperor shorn of his clothes, naked for the world to see. Mama and Daddy were mortified, and Mama opened her mouth to give me both barrels and a piece of her mind, but before she could, I opened my own mouth and let fly with the contents of my spleen. I used words I didn't even know I knew, and by the time Daddy collected his wits and hauled me out of there, I'd let them know just what I thought of their proposed plans for the next year of my life. Somewhere in the middle of the caterwauling, I'd started to cry, and there were tears and snot on my face when Daddy rolled me into the hall, pushing so hard that my neck whiplashed on the initial shove out the door.

He was disgusted with me, they both were, but I never did spend my summer and fall roasting in plaster and piss, and not long after that, a nurse with enough sense to look figured out that one leg was nearly two inches shorter than the other. A custom shoe lift did in one afternoon what a lesser god and one hundred thousand dollars wouldn't have done in a year. Mama and Daddy never brought it up, but I think they realized that they'd dodged a bullet, because their pique at my unbecoming misbehavior faded pretty quickly. They took me and Daniel up to Pawley's Island for two weeks in August, just before school started up again, and the only itch on my skin was from the sand in the crack of my ass and the sunburn on my nose.

I'd always thought they never went through with it because they'd decided to let well enough alone and let God have His way for once, or because they couldn't bring themselves to inflict that much prolonged misery for such minimal gain. Good parents love their children, even the broken, graceless ones, and they were good people, fine and just and doing the best they could. Maybe mercy stayed their hand.

Then Daniel told his bitter home truths and sent me marching to the cryotubes, and now I can help but wonder if you'd been wrong for all those years. Maybe it was mercy that keep you out of that bed in the long-term recovery ward at the children's hospital, or maybe it was simple self-preservation. Maybe they drove home that afternoon and toted up the cost over glasses of scotch, the tongue of Daddy's tie not just hanging, but lolling like it had been torn out by the roots, and Mama scratching her forehead with the tips of her perfectly-manicured nails while she lay on the leather couch in Daddy's office. Maybe the calculator and Excel spreadsheet spat out figures Daddy just couldn't stomach, no matter how much they loved me.

Or maybe they just didn't want to be the ones to scrape shit and blood off plaster while all their friends summered in the Caymans.

Either way, that was the first and last time I was included in decisions about my medical future. Now here's this young doctor who's got vinegar and home in his mouth, and he's asking me to choose. Not just asking, but expecting it. Like it's the most natural thing in the world and the way it should be, and I'll be damned if I know what to do with it.

She rested her palms on the warm solidity of his upturned forearms. "I'm ready when you are, Doctor."

The doctor began his familiar count, and on the count of three, she slipped from the edge of the bed and dropped to the floor. Her hands found his shoulders, and his found her buckling hips and held her up. "I'm going to lift up your left hip, bring it in true with your right. When I do, I want you to turn with me. It'll be like a two-step waltz. Ready?"

She nodded. "I've always wanted to dance."

"All right, now. Here we go." His hand cupped the spar of her hip, warm and sure and steady, and then he raised it. For a moment, she was straight, and then the doctor's own hips were rolling as he pivoted with her. She was weightless in the turn, a leaf carried on the wind, and she grinned, exhilarated. It lasted only a moment, and then the doctor set her into the wheelchair. All the weight that she had momentarily lost found her again and settled over her in a smothering, wet mantle that collapsed her hips and bowed her spine.

"Thank you," she said quietly.

"I do believe that was part of a foxtrot." He rested a hand on the push handle of her chair. "You'll be doing it for yourself soon enough. The AFOs I ordered for you should be done in the next few days. I've also put in for a pair of shoes with a corrective lift. It'll straighten you out, make you more comfortable, and once you're straight, your balance will improve and I can have someone from engineering put some handrails in."

"I appreciate it."

He shrugged. "It's my job."

"Maybe," she agreed. "But I've had far worse."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"Good, because it's the way I meant it."

"Well, don't go singing my praises just yet, because your rehab starts now. I'll meet you in the therapy room." He gave her push handle a brisk double tap and went to his desk to retrieve his tablet. "What are you waiting for?" he demanded when she lingered to watch him. "Go on."

She went. Even with her head start, he passed her on the way in the door, tablet swinging from one hand. He was waiting for her by the time she pulled up in front of the blue exercise mat that dominated the floor.

"Do you want me to get out?" She reached down to set her brakes.

"Not yet. We're starting slow and easy." He snagged a small, rolling stool from the corner and settled himself on it, and then he heel-walked it to where she sat. "Top or bottom?"

"What?"

"I'm not going to give you many choices in here, Miss Walker, not until I'm sure I've got you on the right road, but I'm giving you this one. I'm going to stretch you from top to bottom. The only choice you get is where I start."

He's all doctor now, she realized. No joking or foxtrotting, just a long, hard, lonely road. "Top."

"All right." A brusque nod. He stood and put a hand on the back of her head. "I'm going to slowly push your head toward your chest. I want you to push back as much as you can without straining, If it starts to burn or hurt, you're doing too much. Deep breath in." When she complied, he applied gentle pressure to compel her chin toward her chest. "Push back and breathe out. Slow and steady." When her breath hissed from between her teeth, he murmured, "Just like that. Good. Try and hold me here until the count of ten. If you can't, it's all right. Today's all about getting baselines."

Her resistance meant little in the end. Her head drooped inexorably toward her chest, a willow tree bent to the earth by the inexorable insistence of ropes twined through its slender branches. He made it to six before her chin met the rough fabric of her shirt. His hand left her head. "Up." When she obeyed, it returned. "Again."

Five times he rested his hand on the back of her head and bid her resist, and five times, her muscles surrendered before her will. When he was finished, he paused to scribble something on his tablet, and then he dropped the stylus and placed a hand on either side of her head. His palms were smooth against her ears. "I don't want you to do anything," he said, his voice muffled by the light but firm press of his hands. "I'm just going to roll your neck. Just take a deep breath, close your eyes, and let it out like before."

The world rolled in the darkness behind her eyes. Right, back, and a long, unhurried roll to the left. He brought her head forward by slow degrees, and blood rushed into muscles gone to stone through years of unremitting spasticity. It was an unfamiliar sensation, but hardly unpleasant, and she fought the ridiculous impulse to purr.

Five seemed to be the doctor's magic number, because after five repetitions, he paused to make another note on his tablet. The stylus chattered against the screen with amiable urgency as he wrote, and then he tossed them both onto the nearby table.

"You're awfully rough with that," she mused as he placed one hand on her shoulder and gripped her wrist with the other.

"It'll live," he muttered. He held her arm out to the side and pressed his palm against her shoulder joint to keep it stable as it wobbled in its socket. "I'm going to stretch your arm to test your range of motion. You tell me when it starts to feel uncomfortable, and I don't mean when it hurts."

"Yes, Doctor."

He hummed low in his throat in acknowledgment of her acquiescence and pulled on her arm with careful, deliberate pressure.

"My upper arm is starting to ache a little," she told him once her arm was fully extended.

"Where? Front or back?" His tone was calm, but his eyes were alert and searching as he gazed down at her.

"Back."

The hand at her shoulder drifted down to prod her tricep. "Mm. I'm guessing it's because they're used to propping on your armrests. They've stiffened up on you, contracted. It's not too bad, but it could get worse as you get older. The more stretching you do, the easier it'll be." His hand returned to her shoulder. "I'm going to pull again," he said, and then he did.

He repeated the process with her other arm, and then he moved behind her. "Hold your arms out to your side."

She did as she was told. Later, as the days wore on and her routines became ossified, set by the doctor's meticulous schedule, she would chafe beneath the monotonous tedium, but today there was a dull comfort to it. It was familiar, safe. She couldn't get out of bed or use the bathroom by herself, and she had no idea how to work the replicator behind the doctor's desk, but she knew this, understood it with the fluency of the native speaker. It was a sliver of life as she had always known it, and even as her chest tightened at the prospect of never escaping it, she clung to the loveless embrace it offered.

Dr. McCoy gripped her wrists from behind. "Lower your head and relax. I'm going to pull on you from behind."

She dropped her head and waited.

"I won't hurt you," he promised quietly, and he sounded so much like Georgia that she wanted to weep. Then he began to tug. Cartilage that hadn't moved in centuries crackled and popped in her shoulders and sternum, and her arms jittered with helpless tremors as muscles unaccustomed to such extension fought the shift in position.

"Relax," he urged. "That's as far as I'm going."

She hung there, suspended by his grip. Her arms shook, and her fingers splayed helplessly as blood flowed into them, unencumbered by the perpetual crook of her arms. Her pectorals simmered with a pleasant heat, and her breasts, aided by her outthrust chest, stood high and proud.

If only they could look like that all the time, she thought ruefully. Most of the time, they just sit there like leaking sandbags.

He slowly released the tension and lowered her arms. Then, he swept to her front and made another note on his tablet. When he was finished, he settled himself on his stool, knees turned outward, and reached for her hands. "So what's your favorite color?"

The question was so unexpected that she started and closed her hand around his fingers in a convulsive grip.

"Something hurt?" he asked sharply, and tried to pry her fingers loose.

"No. No," she answered, and forced her fingers to relinquish their panicky hold. "Just surprised. Wasn't expecting you to ask me anything but to hold out my hands. Did I hurt you?" she asked anxiously, and eyed his fingers as he shook them between his knees.

"No. And I do want you to give me your hands. I also want to know your favorite color."

She held out her hands. "It depends. My all-time favorite is red. The brighter, the better. Fire-engine, candy-apple red. I used to love watching firetrucks as a kid. And those Corvettes made my covetous little heart go pitter-patter."

"Lay your hands flat to mine. You a car buff?"

"Not really. I just liked the ones that went fast. Maybe I got it from my brother. He loved cars, always had those little Hot Wheels. I always wanted to go fast. When I was a kid, this kid from my class figured out how to get the governor off my electric wheelchair. Once he got it off, I spent the afternoon pulling the skater kids up to their makeshift skate ramps. It was awesome. At least until I got home and nearly shot myself through the sliding glass door and into the pool. I thought Mama was going to kill me. I got grounded instead. Not like it made much difference in my social calendar, but two weeks without books, TV, or the Internet is a long time when they're all you've got." She fell silent, embarrassed by her outpouring of ridiculous incidental anecdotes about which the doctor likely gave not a single damn. "I like yellow, too, I suppose," she added. "Only sunshine yellow. Everything else reminds me of pus."

And with that, she clamped her mouth firmly shut. Oh, for Christ's sake, why can't I keep my fool mouth shut? she wailed.

He lifts her palms with his own, bending her wrists back. "I was always partial to green," he said as though she hadn't just been babbling inanely on about speeding motorized wheelchairs and pus. "The fields around the family farm turned the most amazing shade of green every spring and summer. It went as far as the eye could see. I used to run through it in my bare feet. Soft as carpet."

There was a wistful timbre to his voice that stirred a chord of empathy within her, but his gaze was on the steady rise of her hands as the angle of her hands neared ninety degrees.

"The dairy farm you mentioned before?" she asked. It seemed safer than offering platitudes like stale canapes at a failing afternoon social.

"Mmhmm." He paused at the first sign of resistance. "I'm going to push a bit more," he warned.

She bit back a bark of pain at a bright, sharp throb from the top of her wrist. "Son of a biscuit!" she swore.

"Sorry," Dr. McCoy said, but damned if he didn't sound amused. "That's one I hadn't heard before."

Comprehension dawned and snuffed her burgeoning flicker of nettled pique. "Grandmama Lavinia said ladies didn't curse in polite company."

"So I didn't hear you cursing a blue streak when you first came to?"

"Extenuating circumstances," she said primly. "And it wasn't a streak. It was one word."

"Or two." He lowered her hands and slowly bent them downward. "All right. Can you turn them palms up?"

She hesitated. "They don't really work that way." She held out her hands and turned them palms up. The right was nearly flat, but the left pitched toward her chest at a steep angle.

McCoy frowned. "Does it hurt?"

"If you pull on them, it will."

He tried to turn her recalcitrant palm flat, but pain cramped her hand, and she jerked it from his grasp and curled it into a tight fist.

"Dammit," she snapped. "I told you that hurt. I don't know why you doctors never take my word for it. I've only been living in this body for thirty years. I think I know when something's going to hurt."

"Yeah, well, I can't just take your word for it, Miss Walker. For all they want my help, people have an alarming habit of fudging and embellishing the truth. They exaggerate and minimize and fail to mention that the pimples on their backside are oozing green pus that smells like Louisiana swamp gas. Nor do they mention that the symptoms started two months ago after a rendezvous at a shuttleport cathouse."

"Cathouse?" she repeated incredulously, and bit the inside of her cheek to stifle a cackle that could be badly misinterpreted.

He fell abruptly silent. "My point is," he said brusquely, "that folks do an awful lot of lying when they shouldn't. It would make all our lives easier if they would just be honest, but my father used to tell me that I could wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one got filled first."

"I don't think 'spit' in the word you're looking for, Doctor," she said mildly.

"Well, it's the one I'll be using," he retorted. Then, more softly, "You're not the only one who knows about polite company."

Well, my, my, my, Grandmama Lavinia crooned. Looks like chivalry isn't dead, after all.

"I don't suppose I am," she said, and returned her hand to his care.

"Until human nature changes, I have to see for myself just what 'hurts' means to you. That means I have to poke and prod and do things I'd rather not. Trust me, Miss Walker, I take no pleasure in making you think I'm a merciless son of a bit-biscuit."

Nice save, Doctor, she thought, and her lips twitched.

"I need to rotate it the other way," he told her. "I won't do it twice."

He gingerly coaxed her lopsided palm in the other direction. Spastic muscles and atrophied tendons rebelled with a bolt of agonizing reprisal, and she jerked involuntarily, feet flying from the footplates and splaying in front of her, narrowly missing the doctor's shins.

"Sorry!" A timorous, strangled peep, and she blinked to clear her watering eyes. Fuck.

"Nothing to be sorry for." He set her hands on her lap. "Sit a minute." He turned on his stool and busied himself with his tablet.

She watched him for a moment. "The dairy farm you grew up on, was it a working farm?"

"It was." The stylus flew to and fro across the small screen. "It was small, local mostly, but it kept the family working."

"I thought you said there was no money nowadays."

"There isn't. Money isn't the only reason to take up a profession, you know."

"But if you don't sell what the farm produces, what do you do with it?"

"Distribute it, of course," he answered.

"But where?"

"Schools, hospitals, missions, daycare centers, probably a even a few restaurants. If you want to know more than that, you'd have to ask my mother."

"She runs it?"

"The business end, yeah. My brother oversees the day-to-day operations, does the heavy lifting."

"But if it's not for profit, then what's it for? What do get out of it?"

He looked up from his tablet, brow furrowed in consternation. "What do you mean, 'what do you get out of it?' Family history and tradition, for starters. My grandfather started the farm, and my father ran it all his life. I grew up on that farm, tended the horses and the livestock, even learned how to milk a goat. It's my home, that's what I get out of it. Not to mention the personal satisfaction of doing some good for the world." He finished writing with an emphatic tap of his stylus.

"I'm sorry, Doctor," she said, startled by his vehemence. "I meant no offense. It's just-how do you live without money? So replicators make food, medicine, and clothing, but who builds houses? Who decides where to build a house in the first place? Does everyone barter for land, or do they scrap for it like Buford Pusser in a bar brawl?"

"Buford Pusser?" he echoed blankly.

"Character from Walking Tall, an old movie from the 70s? Well, the 1970s," she clarified. When he continued to stare at her in mute incomprehension, she shook her head. "Never mind. Doesn't matter. I'm just trying to wrap my head around how things work without money."

"You sound like a Ferengi," he muttered, and set his feet on the floor, toes and knees pointed outward. He held out his hands. "I'm going to pull you forward and down to stretch your spine. Keep your feet on the footrests and don't let me pull your behind off the seat."

His hands closed around hers, and she let him pull her forward and down. Soon, her stomach was on her knees and her hair brushed her ankles with cool, golden fingers. Her spine creaked and crackled as muscles relaxed and compressed vertebrae expanded. She stared at the floor between her feet and the sides of the doctor's clean, white sneakers and the hint of black dress sock that peeked from beneath the hem of his scrub pants. He smelled of soap and aftershave, clean and crisp, and she was content to let herself drift as she hung in that improbable position, arms outstretched and chin resting on her shins.

"As for what makes the world go 'round these days, I'm not the one to ask. I learned the basics in high-school civics, but that was a while ago, and I'm a doctor, not an economist," McCoy said above her head, and his calves flexed and bunched as he shifted on the stool to ease her forward another painstaking fraction.

"Should I add that to the ever-expanding list of things you're not?" she mumbled to her shins.

McCoy snorted. "Once I get you a padd, you can access any number of books on the subject. Or anything else that strikes your fancy."

"A pad?"

"A padd," he corrected. "It's a handheld computer. You can store information on it and access archives, databases, and libraries. There's nothing you can't find if you know how to look."

"So the Internet lives. I always wondered if it would survive the global collapse and inevitable nuclear war."

"You can rest your head on that score. It came through just fine, along with the cockroaches and palmetto bugs. Those bastards are still as big as my hand."

"Huh. I wonder if my teenage blog is still there. And the bad music videos I watched."

He released her hands. "Come up slowly so you don't get a head rush," he ordered. "As for your blog, I couldn't say, but I doubt it. Most of the pre-war stuff was purged if it was deemed to be of no historical value."

She fumbled for the armrests of her chair and heaved herself upright. "So no dancing gerbils or overheated musings on the rank unfairness of the world." She took a deep breath to ease the cramp in her chest and brushed the hair from her face.

"Afraid not." He slipped a hand behind her knee and lifted it from the seat. "Just let it hang a second," he said when she made to lift it from his hand. "You can start a new one if you've a mind. We call them logs now. Once you get settled, I'll show you how it works. Raise your leg for me. Bring it toward me and hold it until I tell you."

Her leg shot out and jutted stiffly in front of her, toes pointed outward. She tried to hold it still, but to no avail. It swayed and bobbled, a dancing cobra in an opium fugue, and her quadricep ached and burned. She gritted her teeth with the effort of holding it aloft, but after a few moments, it collapsed, heel barking the footrest.

"Sorry," she said, and sank in her seat, embarrassed by her gross lack of stamina. She studied the drab, grey wall to her right."

"Just baselines," he reminded her. "Once we figure out where we are, we can get you where you need to be." He switched his hand to the opposite leg. "I'm not here to judge you, Miss Walker. I'm here to help."

You aren't real, she thought as the warmth of his cradling hand seeped into the cold, stiff flesh of her knee and calf. I've died in that tin can, and this is just some dream my disintegrating brain has conjured up as it turns to jelly inside my skull. Or maybe this is heaven. It's not the way I pictured it, not the one I wanted, but maybe this is the one I deserved. This isn't real because doctors don't talk this way, act this way. They poke and prod and shill medications that cost an arm and a leg and give you dry mouth and pimples and dry out your untapped snatch, and then they charge you the other arm and leg for their oh-so-precious time. And if you happen to get sick during their tee time, then take two damn aspirin and don't call unless you're dying.

"You know the drill," he prodded when her leg hung slackly in his grip.

"Mm? Oh, of course. Begging your pardon. I was just...wool-gathering." She raised her leg. It was the stronger leg, the plant-and-pivot leg, so it lasted longer than the other, but not by much. Soon, it, too, began to sway and wobble precariously on the steady brace of his cradling hand and clattered onto the footplates.

"Good," he said, and gently rearranged her foot on the footrest.

Hardly, she thought wryly, but kept it to herself.

He stood and strode to a small replicator on the far side of the room. "I'm going to give you some water, and I want you to drink it before we get down on the mat."

"I just had a glass of orange juice with breakfast."

"And now you're having some water. You need to get in the habit of drinking more than a hummingbird." He entered his request into the keypad.

"I told you it plays hell on my bladder."

"And I told you that I don't care," he replied tartly. "Your kidneys need plenty of liquid to flush your system, and the last thing you want is kidney disease on top of everything else." He picked up the glass of water the replicator produced and started toward her, only to backtrack and key in a second request. A moment later, it spat out a flexible straw.

"I figured you would've cured that by now," she teased, touched that he remembered such a small detail.

"We did. That's not the point." He returned to his stool and handed her the glass.

"Maybe I'd go more if I didn't have to leave my dignity at the door every time I need to go. Thirty years old and having a spectator for every tinkle and plop."

So much for polite society, Grandmama Lavinia said primly, and she nearly inhaled her sip of water.

McCoy regarded her in silence while she drank, tablet balanced precariously on one green-scrubbed knee. "This ship wasn't designed with disability accommodation in mind," he said. "Most conditions like yours are easily treatable shortly after birth, and while Starfleet will generally take any body dumb or desperate enough to blunder through their door, they stop short of recruiting at old folks' homes."

"But this is essentially a floating hospital, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Then don't you have people who break their legs coming down the stairs or slip a disc in the engine room?"

"I can repair those in minutes."

"What about catastrophic accidents? You said some crazy guy blew up half your ship. Didn't you have major casualties then?"

"Most of them were sucked through a hull breach and died instantly. There was nothing I could do for them. The ones I could treat recovered completely within a few days. They could get around on crutches or lean on an orderly. They didn't need anything but a handrail."

You can heal the whole goddamn world in half an hour, but you couldn't fix me, she thought bitterly. "How lucky for them," she croaked, and stoppered her lips with her straw before she lapsed into a bout of unbecoming self-pity.

"It's not ideal, I know," he said, and then, to her surprise, he stopped. He stared at his tablet for a long moment before he spoke again, turning it thoughtfully in his hands. "It's not fair is what it is. I'd change it if I could, but I can't remodel the whole damn ship. I don't even think Scotty could."

She had no idea who Scotty was, but she knew the truth when she heard it, and though she was grudgingly grateful for the sincerity of the doctor's regret, it did little to sweeten the taste of gall that burned in her belly and sat sour and rotten on her tongue. It was familiar, the scalding tang of disappointment, but now there was no spoonful of grandmother's soothing sugar to help the medicine go down.

It ain't fair, honey, it surely isn't, but don't you take it out on him. If you do, you'll regret it later, and nothing good ever came from spreading the misery.

I don't see much good from holding it in, either, she pointed out dully. It's like walking around with a hot poker in your gut that never comes loose.

That may be, Grandmama agreed, and the compassion in her voice made her jaws ache. And Lord knows I'm not telling you to fashion your guts into bootstraps and throttle yourself with them. Lock yourself in a room and scream your fool head off if you have to. Pound a pillow. Ask your young doctor there to set up a punching bag and kick the tar out of it until you either feel better or you can't lift your arms. Break a few dishes. Do whatever you have to do to get the poison out, but don't you dare pour it over his head for want of anywhere else to put it.

If I go breaking dishes, they're liable to put me on a psych hold. And in case you haven't noticed, I don't exactly have my own room to scream in.

Well, then, you're just going to have to bear up, honey. You just set your feet and square your shoulders and get on with it, and you do it with as much grace as you can muster. It's what I taught you, and it's how a lady behaves, cool under fire no matter how hot the flames. You just keep your head up, and the hardship'll pass in its time.

I'm tired, Memaw. No matter how far I walk, it all looks the same, and I just want to sit right down and tell the rest of the world to keep on going.

I know, my little rose, I know, but you can't. This is your path to walk, and you have to follow it, see it through. I can't tell you where it's going, darlin', but I promise you I'll be there at the end of it.

She sucked down water gone to sand in her throat and surreptitiously surveyed the doctor from behind the fall of her hair. His expression was grave, but his eyes were soft, and his hands still turned his tablet like a futuristic worrystone.

Go on, her grandmother urged. Go on now. Shoulders up and back straight. A Walker pays her debts, and you need to repay his kindness in kind.

"I guess I can add engineer to the list of things you aren't." It was a feeble joke, and probably a tired one, but it was the best she could manage.

"You keep adding to that list, you're going run out of room for much else," he warned, but the tablet had stilled, and some of the tension had left his face.

"I've got to have something to occupy my mind. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy, as the old saying goes." She took another pull from the straw.

"Like I said, I'll get you set up with a padd, and once I'm not worried about you breaking your ankles the minute you bump anything harder than the exercise mat, you'll be free to explore the ship. That ought to keep you occupied."

"Is it big?"

"Oh, sweetheart, there's so much to see, you won't know where to start," he promised, and clapped her on the shoulder.

"Sounds exciting," she said, intrigued, and offered a small, fleeting smile. She finished the water with a final gurgling slurp and held out the empty cup.

He took it with a hum of approval and set it on the table behind him. "You have no idea. Now let's get you on the mat."

She expected him to roll out of the way and watch her technique as she flung herself out of the chair in an unwieldy tangle of trembling, splayed limbs, but instead, he leaned down and scooped her from her chair. She squawked in surprise and curled an arm around his neck.

"Didn't mean to take you by surprise," he said as he dropped to one knee and lowered her to the mat. "I don't think you're up to complex transfers right now, and I don't want you burning all your energy for no good reason." He knelt beside her and carefully straightened her legs and aligned her hips. "Your knees always hyperextend like that?" he asked.

"They did a hamstring and adductor release when I was a kid. The surgeon admitted he got a little overzealous.

"You ever hurt yourself with it? Any sprains, tears, dislocations?"

"A few sprains, and my kneecaps slide and catch sometimes."

He manipulated her kneecaps with deft fingers. "They don't seem to like going anywhere but backwards," he observed.

She shrugged. "It never really hurt, so I just let them be. Had too much else to worry about."

"Well, once we get you stronger, I can fix them if you want. It's not much, but it'll give you a little more stability."

"Will it hurt?"

"It shouldn't take but a few minutes under local anesthetic. You might be a little sore and experience a minor burning sensation at the incision sites for a day or two, but that's about it."

"Is 'minor burning sensation' doctorese for 'It'll burn like hell for a week, and you'll wish you could saw your legs off to make it stop'?" she asked dubiously. "In my experience, doctors undersell the pain levels involved in their procedures."

"I can't say for certain," he admitted. "I've never had it done. But I haven't heard any horror stories, and if there is pain, I've got something for it. Anti-inflammatories, too, so you won't swell up."

"Long recovery period and rehab?"

"Not really." He knee-walked to her feet. "Laser scalpels are very precise, do minimal damage, and what little they do is treatable with tissue regenerators. A week, ten days, and you'll never know you had surgery."

"It sounds too good to be true."

"Welcome to the wonderful world of modern medicine, Miss Walker," he answered proudly, and she grinned at his obvious enthusiasm.

Her pleasure was short-lived. The doors to the therapy room opened with a pneumatic whoosh, and two pairs of crepe-soled sneakers appeared in her peripheral vision, attached to socked feet and hairless ankles and white hems. Her heart sank.

Orderlies, she thought glumly. Or PT interns looking to earn their hours.

"This is Yeoman Stuart," Dr. McCoy said, oblivious to her shift in mood, and he gestured to a slender, young man with a long nose and red hair that bristled atop his scalp. "And this is Yeoman Connors." He shifted his attention to a short, dainty woman with short black hair cut into a bob and eyes to match. "They're PT specialists doing their residencies aboard ship. Once we've established a routine, they'll be overseeing your day-to-day exercise regimen."

What good will that do them? she wanted to shout. It's not like they can look forward to a long career treating CP patients. You cured us all, remember? She said nothing. She merely pressed her lips together and offered them a curt nod of acknowledgment.

There's no use getting het up about it, Grandmama Lavinia said frankly. They're part of the deal, just like the sweat and the stink of a body pushed past its limits and the shadows that lurk outside the door while you're using the ladies' room. No doctor, no matter how fair or compassionate, takes on the scut work of reshaping a broken body. They don't have the time or the inclination, and even if they had the latter, they've got too many other lives to save, too many other wounds to patch. You might as well make your peace with them, because you can't wish them away.

Such lovely scenery on this road of mine, she fumed, and rolled her head to spare them a cursory glance. It didn't matter what they looked like. They would be nothing but dry, efficient hands on her stiff, touch-starved flesh and voices that drifted over her head like passing clouds and left the sweet, bitter smell of stale coffee in their wake.

"Now that the gang's all here, I'm going to get straight to it," Dr. McCoy said briskly, and curled his hands around the spare, hairy spindles of her ankles. "All I want you to do is take a deep breath, relax, and stretch your feet."

And so it begins. There was no choice. The road she'd started on thirty years ago, rolling on her infant belly and crawling on pudgy toddler hands and knees was far behind her now and forever closed, and she had given the doctor her word. So she took a deep breath that smelled of surgical scrubs and plastic mat and willed her toes and feet to stretch.

Her feet and calves shook and juddered in his steady grip, a powerful shudder that started in her soles and rose into her stringy hamstrings in a convulsive, helpless ague, and she knew without looking that it was so much purposeless movement on the ends of her misaligned legs. She could feel their eyes on her, avid and intent, ants crawling over her exposed weakness, and she turned her head to escape their scrutiny and stare vacantly at a power point in the shadow of the table.

"Don't turn your head," the doctor chided. "I need your spine straight."

She returned her head to its original position and closed her eyes in a bid to find respite in the darkness, but her mind had always been keen, and the sensation lingered, intrusive and licentious. Her hands, which had been splayed palms down at her sides, curled into fists, and her legs twitched and contracted in an effort to draw her knees to her belly.

"Hey, easy," Dr. McCoy said, confused by her sudden tension. He did not understand, and she couldn't think of an explanation that would not cut and offend, could not tell him that she felt naked and misbegotten, an abomination to their clinical gazes. So she kept her eyes and mouth resolutely shut and willed her muscles to obey.

"You hurting?"

Not anywhere you can reach. "No. Just...no.

Just close your eyes and ride it out, her grandmother said. Concentrate on the good things, honey, like how hard that nice doctor is trying to help you. Think about how nice his hands feel. Smooth as warm butter, with no nicotine stains on the fingertips, no calluses, He's a fellow who seems to practice what he preaches when it comes to taking care of himself. He smells nice, too, sandalwood and soap. Just keep your eyes closed and pretend you're getting a rubdown from some well-oiled cabana boy. You can get through it, and it'll be done with.

Until tomorrow, whispered the grating, gleeful voice of hard experience in her head. And the day after that. And the one after that. You've given him two hundred and forty days to reshape you into an image more pleasing to his eye. Those warm, smooth hands are going to pull you apart a muscle fiber at a time, or rather the clumsier hands of his subordinates will. You're going to burn and ache and grunt like a whore riding bareback on cheap cotton sheets, and when you're done, you'll be just as anonymous. They'll pull you apart and put you back together again a hundred times, and none of them will bother to see what they've made. You're just another jigsaw puzzle to be solved and set aside, and when your time is up and there are no more mysteries to be unraveled, no more secrets to be mined from your strange and twisted anatomy, the interns will be off to the next milestone in their fledgling careers and the doctor's compassion will dry up like so much piss in the hot desert wind. He'll pat you on the back made straighter by the work of his hands and move on to his next miracle, and you'll be left on some desolate outpost like a piece of delayed freight left to the lost and found. Except no one is going to claim you, are they?

She thought of her brother, sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of tea and delivering his terrible truths with a voice sweet as honey. She thought of his conspicuous absence the day the cold, sucking waters of the cryotube had closed over her head and smothered the light for two hundred and thirty-five years. She thought of him in Rio, fingers slick with suntan oil and the condensation from his beer and heart beating strong and sure inside his chest. Alive and vibrant and free. Glad of it while she drifted in a forgotten sleep from which she could not wake. She thought of the wild hope in her mother's eyes when she had first broached the subject, and of the guilty relief in her father's when she had agreed over mashed potatoes and green beans. She thought of Mama singing all the way home on that last day, singing like a bird released from her cage, and of Grandmama Lavina, standing on her front porch and waving goodbye with a smile on her face, never knowing there would never be another chance. Grandmama would have come for her, would have come on the fly and with fire in her belly, but she was two hundred years in the ground, and she had used up her last miracle with her first breath.

There was no one else to take her in. This was as close to home as she was ever going to get, and she would have to earn her keep, would have to sing for her supper as she'd done when she'd taken his battery of intelligence and aptitude tests. She would have to earn her keep with every probing proprietary touch of their hands, every stretch and butt lift and clinical, scouring gaze.

So she shoved the voice aside, retreated into herself as deeply as she could without slipping from awareness, and sang for her supper.

The therapy room was a place beyond time. Even had her eyes been open to see it, there was no clock upon the bare, grey walls. There were only the grasping hands that prodded and shifted and repositioned her as they chose and distant voices that bid her stretch and resist and roll and raise and lift and turn. She complied, shielded by the darkness behind her eyelids, and each act of submission was a note in her joyless song.

McCoy's hands gripped her hips and rolled them first to one side and then the other. Then he pulled them up into an inelegant arch. The roll of it was so perversely intimate that her breath hitched, and she squeezed her eyes more tightly shut.

The doctor hesitated, hands bracing her hovering hips. "You all right?" he demanded.

Sing for your supper, Rose. Sing like a little bird. "Yes. I'm fine, Doctor."

She waited for the thorough inspection to resume, but he lowered her hips to the mat, and she felt him shift above her.

"I think that's enough for today."

She was so surprised that her eyes flew open. Dr. McCoy knelt over her on bended knee beside her right hip. He glanced at her as she lifted her head from the mat with the airy kiss of vinyl parting from skin.

"We're done?" she asked disbelievingly.

"I've gotten enough to get some ideas," he said. To the interns, he said, "You two can return to your duties. We'll discuss schedules and exercise plans tomorrow after I've completed the evaluation."

"Yes, sir," they chorused. Connors made to leave, but Stuart lingered, rocking on the balls of his feet with his hands clasped behind his back. "Do you need us to help with her transfer, Doctor?"

"No, I got it."

"Very good, sir." He saluted crisply and followed his companion through the door.

"You can always tell the ones fresh from the Academy," McCoy muttered when the doors had slid shut behind them. "They do stupid things like salute me." He patted her shoulder. "It's about time you opened your eyes. You were squeezing them so tight I thought you were going to sprain your forehead. I'm going to sit you up."

"It's just easier," she said as he grabbed her by the hand and pulled her into a sitting position.

"What is?" He slipped an arm around her shoulders.

"Not to look at them."

"Wh-?" he began, and then comprehension dawned. He slipped his free arm behind her knees. "Why?"

She shrugged. "It just is," she repeated diffidently.

He lifted her with practiced ease and set her in her chair. "Once we finish the evaluation tomorrow, I'll sit down with you and go over the results, and we can figure out a plan.

"Are we finished for today?"

"Almost. Go on and have Nurse Ogawa prep you for the hydrotherapy pool. "

The thought of him seeing her in a bathing suit, all skewed joints and rounded shoulders and skinny shanks flattened by years of sitting made her stomach roll, but dignity would not allow her to beg off, so she nodded and rolled out of the therapy room to find Nurse Ogawa.

A decontamination shower and ten minutes later, and she found herself stuffed into a silver bodysuit that bore a suspicious resemblance to Studio 54 haute couture.

You look like you've been in a losing fight with Reynolds Wrap, Grandmama noted wryly. At least your derriere isn't hanging out. Apparently, folks have relearned modesty since the days of having dental floss lodged up your hind end.

Thank God for small mercies. Better to look like a plucked chicken in a roasting pan than to let him see the extent of her unloveliness. Some things he had to see by dint of his profession, but the rest she would keep to herself, buried beneath layers of fabric. She would never be the object of any man's desire or the stuff of his idle, slick-handed fantasies, and she could live with that cold truth as she had learned to do with so many others, but she would be damned if she would ever be an object of his pity.

She had just reached down to tug the snug fabric from her throat when Dr. McCoy emerged from his office. She froze, crooked finger lodged in her collar like a fish hook. If for her the suit was an abetting ally that concealed her sins and shortcomings, on the doctor, it was a revelation. It clung to him, molded itself to his sturdy legs and trim stomach and lean, defined chest. She gawped helplessly, mouth gone dry and rational thought blotted out by a wave of astonished lust as her gaze fell upon his thigh.

There's some meat on that bird, she thought stupidly, and willed her mouth to remain firmly shut.

Rosalie, honey, I do believe you've got your first official case of the vapors, her grandmother said, and chuckled. And Lord have mercy, I can't say I blame you. He does cut a mighty fine figure. But it's impolite to stare, darlin', and you don't want to make him uncomfortable.

She shook herself and reluctantly raised her gaze to his face. He was mercifully occupied with the contents of his tablet and so had not noticed her wide-eyed scrutiny. Thank God.

He tapped the screen twice and set it on the desk. "You ready to go?" he asked.

She swallowed to moisten her throat. "Whenever you are," she managed, and admonished herself not to let her gaze drift to her natural sight line, lest she end up with an eyeful of groin.

Oblivious to her discomfiture, he spun on his heel, and despite her noblest intentions, her eyes fell to the swell of his ass as he led her down the corridor. I have never been so glad to see life at waist-level in all my life, she thought deliriously as the better angels of her nature tried in vain to raise her eyes to the small of his back, and followed him through the door and beyond the smothering confines of sickbay for the first time.

Unaware of the battle between his patient's conscience and her frustrated libido, Leonard McCoy led her down the gently-sloping corridor toward the turbolift. A session in the hydrotherapy pool would do her good. The evaluation had hardly been strenuous; in fact, he'd gone easier than he'd wanted in deference to the fragility of her miswired neuromuscular system, but there was still a good chance of soreness in the morning. It was clear from the preliminary results that she was unaccustomed to much movement. Her range of motion in all four extremities was severely stunted, and her hips had resisted any attempt to move them into an open position. As far as they were concerned, sitting was the natural position, and anything beyond ninety degrees was the work of the devil. The same went for her feet, which had marked trouble either straightening or bending past ninety degrees. She had spent her whole life folded in upon herself like a child's origami project, and smoothing out the misplaced creases was going to take time, patience, and a whole lot of work.

The stretching and exercises will help, but what she needs are half a dozen corrective releases, said the bloodless analyst inside his head. Ankles, heels, and hips for certain. And her joints need restructuring, especially her hips. They're eaten up with arthritis, and a lifetime of sitting has warped them in the sockets. The anti-inflammatories and bone remineralization treatment I've started should stop the deterioration, maybe even reverse some of it, but if she keeps sitting, it'll just go right back to how it was.

Good luck selling her on more surgeries, grunted the gravelly voice of pessimism. Getting her to agree to eight months of non-surgical rehab was like wrestling a bobcat for filet mignon. You come at her with a sales pitch involving multiple surgeries, and she's liable to call you a welsher and a no-good, lying son of a bitch and demand to be dropped on the nearest airless rock, never mind the starbase.

Besides, from the looks of her, she's already seen more than her fair share of surgeries.

He'd seen the scars during his initial triage when they'd removed her from the cryotube. One set on her inner thighs, rough and wattled and white with age, and one on the backs of her knees, rough and fibrous beneath his probing fingertips. He'd thought them cold burns at first, the results of coolant leaking into the compartment, but they had been too uniform and too intimately placed, tucked into folds and creases that not even liquid could touch. It had taken him a moment to understand, and when he had, he'd simply stared, torn between incredulity and horror. He'd heard of the primitive surgical methods employed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, had seen ancient lithographs and grainy stills and video, but to see them in the flesh had been unnerving. He'd run his finger along the rough ridge of scar tissue, fascinated and appalled, and he'd been tempted to grab some surgical emolient and a contouring scalpel and repair them before she awoke. He hadn't in the end, prohibited by conscience and the protocols of consent, but he'd turned them over in his mind as he'd focused on the more pressing concern of shepherding her back to the land of the living safely.

There'd been another scar in the center of her chest, a small, circular pucker between her breasts. He'd thought it was the mark from an ancient MMR vaccine, but he'd found that on her right shoulder, right where it should have been according to the medical history books. He'd spent hours poring through medical texts and archived medical files in search of an answer, but it as yet eluded him. He'd even considered the possibility of an old parasitic attachment, but nothing in her scans or bloodwork lent credence to that theory. Aside from the wreck of her ravaged skeletal system, she was a healthy woman.

You could always ask her, you know. You're well within your rights as her doctor.

He could, and he would, but not today, and likely not anytime soon. It was low on the list of problems he wanted to address, and the time would be better spent building on the trust he'd begun to establish with her. It was fragile as spidersilk, bated breath and tentatively outstretched hand, and if he pushed too hard or spoke too soon, she'd shy from him like a spooked horse and never come back. Best now to let her find her feet in this strange new world that looked just enough like the old one to open hurts he couldn't see and prove himself a man of his word. Once she figured out he wasn't all flash, hot air, and empty promises, he could broach the subject of additional treatment.

It might be easier than you think, his father said. She might not've leapt at the chance to let you cut on her, but she didn't dismiss it outright, either. In fact, I'd say she was thinking it over. That's one hell of an improvement from a couple of days ago, when she was hollering to raise the dead about you taking her blood while she was under.

He glanced behind him to see her following quietly in his footsteps, hugging the inside wall to let foot traffic pass. She was impossibly delicate in the too-big chair, and the sagging seat was playing hell with her already-poor posture, but she rolled doggedly along, quiet as the grave and just as solemn, the bony crooks of her arms slapping the armrests with every snap of her wrists.

I don't understand how she's not screaming her fool head off. She's got to be hurting. Her hips are bone on bone, and her lumbar vertebrae aren't much better. She should be wracked with pain.

Maybe she is. Maybe she keeps her mouth shut to keep the screaming in. No one likes a complainer, after all, especially not in polite society. Or maybe she's so used to it that she doesn't notice it anymore. You've seen a few of those in your time, horses that have foundered so badly that they walk on the bones of their forelegs because it's the only way they can walk at all. Cows who went right on chewing cud while their chapped and ulcerated udders festered. They'd done all the bellowing and whining they could, and when they realized help wasn't coming, they stopped wasting their energy and simply got on with it as best they could. Maybe she's just all screamed out.

But help's here now, he protested.

That may be, son, but she doesn't know that, not yet. She will. Just keep doing what you're doing. It's working.

"You can walk up here, you know," he said. "You don't have to creep in my shadow."

She started so hard he thought she was going to topple out of the chair, and an inexplicable blush rose in her cheeks and spread to the roots of her hair. "Oh, uh, all right," she muttered, and quickened her pace until she drew alongside him.

You'd think I'd reached out and goosed her, he thought, perplexed by her sudden and uncharacteristic bout of timidity, but he opted not to press the matter and simply kept moving toward the turbolift.

"You ever been in a hydrotherapy pool before?" he asked as he approached the doors to the lift.

"No. The closest I came was to my uncle's hot tub."

"Well, that ought to give you an idea." He stepped into the lift and waited for her to follow, but she didn't. She hung back, eyeing the door with fascinated trepidation. "What're you waiting for?"

"The door won't close on my ankles?" she asked dubiously.

"There's an obstruction sensor."

"Does it work?"

"It's a starship, not a junk freighter."

"I'll take that as a yes." She rolled into the lifted and pressed forward until her toes touched the opposite wall.

"You trying to kiss it?" He stepped to the side to give her more space. "Hydrotherapy room," he said, and it began its smooth descent.

"Just trying to maximize space in case others need to get on."

"Well, you can relax. We're the only passengers this trip."

A few seconds later, the doors opened on Deck Nine, and she blinked in surprise. "That was fast."

"Another perk of the future." He stepped out and joined the flow of human traffic that moved through the corridor.

"If the hydrotherapy pools are part of the medical complex, why aren't they in sickbay?"

"They're not just for medical use. Anyone can use them if they book the time. Medical bookings take priority, and I can override appointments if I need to."

The hydrotherapy room housed half a dozen pools constructed from medical-grade steel and filled with sterile hot water. A control panel to the right controlled temperature and safety protocols, as well as the sling lift suspended in the corner above it. The room was empty as he'd requested, and all but one of the pools was turned off, their tops sealed against contaminants. The one nearest the door was on and open.

"Let me get the sling set up. Set your brakes." He moved to the control panel and keyed in his authorization code. The sling's motor hummed into obedient life, and it glided along its track in a soundless descent until its seat scraped the floor like the folds of a debutante's gown.

"Arms around my neck," he ordered when he returned to her side. "We'll work on the proper transfer later."

A small arm slithered around his neck and clung to it with deceptive strength, but she was light as birdbone and dreaming dust in his arms. Her legs jutted stiffly at awkward angles, and her fingers curled spasmodically into the fabric of his bodysuit.

"I'm not going to drop you," he told her as she began to shudder and her nostrils began to flare. "I've got the steadiest hands in the fleet."

"Good thing for a surgeon to have," she said nervously, and flashed him a timid smile that disappeared as quickly as it formed.

"Good for a dairy farmer, too. Heifers aren't exactly forgiving of a misplaced hand." He eased her into the sling.

She giggled, and he was surreptitiously glad of it. Her stress levels had been sky-high since she woke up, and even a med student could've felt the sudden spike of tension when the PT interns had made their appearance. She had gone from reasonably lax and pliable to rigid and unyielding in the blink of an eye, and no amount of kneading or patient cajoling with his hands had restored her suddenly-intransigent limbs to their former state of trusting passivity.

It's just easier, she said inside his head. Not to look at them.

"Are you saying you think I'm a heifer, Doctor?" she asked innocently, but her thin mouth was curled into a mischievous smirk.

"What? No," he answered, flustered. "I'm just saying I'm not known for mishandling things."

She hummed speculatively at that, and her sly smirk only deepened.

The implications of what he'd said caught up with him, and he turned from her before he blushed like a schoolboy. "Hang on," he muttered peevishly. "Don't want you falling out when this thing rises." He stalked to the control panel and plotted the sling's course.

Rosalie was nothing if not obedient, and she curled her fingers around the sides of the sling as it rose and carried her to the tub. Another set of coordinates, and it lowered her into the water. She hissed at first contact, and her feet jerked away from the heat.

"Too hot?"

"It's just my nerves playing hell," came the reply, and her feet drooped once more.

He lowered the temperature a few degrees just to be on the safe side. "It's gonna set you down on a bench. Just hang on, and I'll be there in a second."

"Yes, Doctor."

He left the control panel and crossed to the pool, and then he stepped over the side and into the water. He drifted to where she sat upon the sling. "I'm going to raise you up so I can get this out from under you." He wrapped an arm around her hips and canted her forward to tug the sling from beneath her shanks. When it was free, he set her down again. "There." He pressed a button on the side of the sling, and it rose with a slosh of displaced water and returned to its original position, dripping water as it went.

"What now?" she asked.

"Now we sit. It'll keep you from getting too sore to get back at it tomorrow, and just between you and me, it'll do wonders for my back." He moved backward and sat on the bench adjacent to her.

Her brow furrowed in concern. "You haven't hurt yourself on my account, have you?" she asked in alarm.

"No, ma'am," he assured her. "To be honest, you don't weigh enough to do damage. The captain has more to do with it. Man's got me jumping off cliffs and dismantling seventy-two torpedoes cum cryotubes at a time. All the sitting behind a desk isn't doing me any favors."

"Maybe not, but I'm stuck on the part where you jumped off a cliff."

"Yeah, well, it wasn't my idea. Jim decided it would be a good idea to steal the religious scrolls from the local tribe who inhabited the planet we were surveying. If that weren't bad enough, the trigger-happy idiot stunned our ride. The villagers were hot on our trail, so it was either jump or end up skewered like a pair of ceremonial boars."

"And you serve under this guy?" she said incredulously.

"He has his flaws, but he's a damn good captain."

"I'll take your word for it. And if you don't mind me saying, Doctor, you sound awfully proud of that escapade."

"I'm just glad I came out of it in one piece," he retorted, but he couldn't help the brief flush of fond pleasure that accompanied the memory of running through a forest of red-leaved trees with Jim in front of him and a swarm of spear-toting natives on his heels. It had been absurd and stupid and terrifying, and he knew he had missed a painful, ignominious death by the fleetness of his churning feet, but it had been so quintessentially Jim, and he'd seldom been so alive as he'd been when he'd sailed over the edge of the Niburan world and plunged into the waters below.

Rosalie knew nothing of Jim, and so she merely shook her head and spread her palsied fingers beneath the surface of the water. He watched her study their movements as they opened and closed, the lazy pulsations of an albino jellyfish. Pensive and quiet again, and terribly remote.

"The water should help with your range of motion," he said. He knew she was probably sick of discussing and dissecting her frailties, but he didn't know what else to say. There were more than two hundred years between them, and professionalism demanded that he keep her at arm's length. Even so, his heart ached for her as she gazed at her bobbing, ungainly hand. He knew loneliness when he saw it, and isolation. She was a woman adrift, and there were no solicitous hands to pull her to shore.

"It does feel quite nice," she said, and raised her left foot as best she could.

Topics of acceptable conversation exhausted, they lapsed into silence. She sank into the water up to her chin and scissored her arms and legs in dreamy, uncoordinated circles, and he positioned himself in front of a jet and let the water work its magic. He had been sitting too much, absorbed by test results and research into ancient treatments of CP and similar conditions and comparable modern treatments that could be used to alleviate her symptoms. Not to mention the experiments he was conducting with the serum he'd synthesized from the blood collected from Khan and his people. Given that it could raise the recently-deceased, he was eager to see what else it could do, particularly when it came to the treatment of degenerative neurological conditions.

All you have to do is cure every neurocognitive disease in the universe, and maybe the voice will stop drifting out of your subconscious like way it used drift out of that room. Please, son. Please. The pitiful bleating of a dying sheep.

"I know they can't help it," she said quietly, and he was so grateful for the interruption that he didn't care that it made no sense.

"What?"

She paddled idly in the water for a moment before she answered. "I can't remember the last time people didn't look at me like that," she said diffidently. "Ever since I was little, there've been people staring at me, poking me, tugging on me. Most of the time, it doesn't hurt; it just feels...odd, like being touched by mechanical hands. Other kids got told they should protest if someone touched them in a way that they didn't like. I got told I had to let the strangers touch me because they were trying to help."

He opened his mouth to defend his profession's integrity, but his father spoke inside his head, a farmer calming an impetuous thoroughbred. Wait, son. Just wait.

"I know they were, but..." She paused, and her index finger stirred the water as though sorting her thoughts. "I don't know. Even normal stuff was never really normal. Dentist appointment? Hey, let's bring the students in so they can observe the treatment of a patient with special needs. First pelvic exam at sixteen? Bring in the obgyn residents so they can get a look at how to handle atypical presentations and procedures. I'll never forget all those faces coming in to look at me while I was trussed up in the stirrups like a dressed turkey. There's my private business all out on public display, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it but lie there. A few of them even got the privilege of watching the gynecologist trying to force a speculum into-well, you can guess," she finished abruptly.

Yes, he could, and the images that presented themselves made his stomach roll.

"Sometimes I think that if I'd ever managed to have sex with someone I actually wanted to, they'd've observed that, too, maybe even have written a paper on it. Probably have given it a scholarly title, too. The Copulatory Processes of the Congenitally Aberrant Female."

...have sex with someone I actually wanted to. The phrase resonated in his head and raised gooseflesh on his arms despite the heat of the water.

Oh, Lord, I think I'm seeing the wound now, he thought with numb nausea. And I'm not sure I want to.

"All those strangers. Always looking, but none of them ever seemed to see me. They were nicer when I was younger. I guess kids are kids no matter how twisted they are. But when I got older..." She shrugged. "It always made me feel like a-" Her lips rounded, then flattened. "-science fair specimen."

That's not what you were gonna say, he thought shrewdly, but before he could respond, she spoke again.

"I know they've got to look if they're ever going to learn. I just wish they could see me somewhere in all this wreck." She flapped her misaligned arms.

He knew he should say something, but he could think of nothing that didn't smack of worthless platitudes and inept fumbling, so he took refuge in what he knew best. "I can change out Stuart for another female PT if you want," and God help him if he'd didn't sound like an insensitive fool.

"It wouldn't make much difference," she said. "It'd just mean another new set of eyes. Thank you kindly for the offer, though."

He nodded brusquely. "Welcome. I think we've had enough for one day. Much longer, and we'll look like boiled prunes. Stay there while I get the sling."

She said nothing, but she tracked his movements as he got out of the pool and padded to the control panel, feet slapping on the floor and leaving wet footprints in his wake. He instructed the sling to retrace its earlier course, and then he retraced his and got back into the pool.

When the sling had dipped into the water, he eased over to Rosalie. "I'm going to raise you up and slip this under you."

She obediently placed her hands on his shoulders and allowed herself to be pulled toward him, and she made not a peep when he raised her hips and slipped the sling under her buttocks. Ordinarily, he would have been glad of her placidity, but there was an air of exhausted resignation to it that made his heart drop.

C'mon, sweetheart, don't you quit on me before we even start. Give me a chance. "All right, I'm going to sit you back."

One arm curled around his neck, but she didn't sit up as he'd expected. She simply sat, cheek resting on his shoulder and palm pressed lightly between his shoulderblades. Her wet hair tickled his nose, and he could feel her breath on his neck. He knew he should disentangle himself, but she was tired, so very tired, a small bedraggled bird swamped by the surf and clinging to the only solid ground she could find. He thought of her trapped in those stirrups while gawking med students paraded through the cramped room and a jaded obgyn jammed a metal speculum between her legs. He thought of her lying on the therapy mat, rigid as a tentpole and face turned from that familiar, awful scrutiny. At least until he'd made her turn back.

He couldn't change the nature of the profession, could not shield her from their eyes or their impersonal mechanical hands with no tenderness in them, but he could give her a moment to catch her breath before she was thrown headlong to their fickle mercies, could offer her a point of contact that did not carry with it the burden of future price, and so he simply stood there and let her breathe, let her curl her fingers into the slick fabric of his bodysuit.

He gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. "I have to sit you up now, Miss Walker."

"I know," she said softly, but she made no move to sit up, and it was even longer before he reached for the buttons on the side of the sling.