KORDA

Chapter Six

Although I easily found the little marina, I didn't dock there. I got as close as I could, avoiding other little boats, and saw no activity of the sort I wanted to see. I zoomed eastward along the shore finding no one and nothing, and when I spotted a secluded enough area, I let the boat run aground, pulled it further onto the beach and got out. By the time I pushed the boat back into the water and started the engine again, I was bewigged, booted and (I hoped) lovely in blue.

Now I cruised further eastward, wondering how long it would have taken Tegan on a bicycle to reach the eastern shore, and how long it would have taken Selena on a motor scooter to catch up with her, if indeed she ever had, and assuming Selena had not had to seek medical attention instead of proceeding.

Then as if I had conjured her up by thinking about her, I spotted Selena on the pink scooter, coming west along the beach. The sidecar was unoccupied. "If only this boat had a horn!" I muttered to myself. As if in response, the horn button caught my eye and I pressed it. Selena almost fell off the scooter. She saw me right away. I beached the boat and hopped out; she rode up to me, jumped off the scooter, threw her helmet into the sidecar and had her arms around me in an instant. "Are you all right?" we demanded, simultaneously, and both of us burst out laughing. Then, no longer laughing, I realized, "Oh, you didn't find Tegan, I guess."

"I did," she corrected me, also serious now. "She is being interrogated by a citizen's brigade in Toye."

"Can they do anything to her? You have no police; how powerful is a citizen's brigade?"

"Very," she sighed. "They can hold her indefinitely, keep her isolated, inflict corporal punishment…."

"No!" I admit I was shocked. "Where is Toye? How far?"

"There." She pointed. "About two hours away but my tank is nearly empty. Anyway, it's a pretty big small town on the southeastern corner of Powell, with no trolley service. They have her at the community center."

"Why?"

"I'm not even sure. Maybe they think she had something to do with the robbery in Sabu. Maybe they think she helped a runaway."

"Me."

"Yes."

"You go fill your tank. I'll wait here and we'll start off together. Let's not lose sight of one another. I'll take the boat and you take the scooter. We need to get Tegan out of there."

It took us longer than expected to reach Toye because neither Selena nor I was as all right as we'd pretended to be, even to ourselves. We'd both been cut by the same dirty knife. Selena'd had both the foresight and the ability to wash the cuts on her hands almost immediately, right there in the wake of my captor's motorboat. Even so they'd become infected. She was having trouble steering the scooter. I hadn't had a chance to wash the slash on my forearm at all for half a day. It was ugly now, hot, slightly swollen and throbbing. About halfway to Toye I used the boat's horn again and we stopped on a beach and compared booboos. "You have a fever," said Selena, the back of her hand against my brow. We had to decide whether I was to seek medical attention as a not-very-convincing-past-first-glance woman or as chattel belonging to Selena, who didn't have allies in this part of the country but had heard rumors of a sympathetic doctor in Morris, which we had already passed. We decided to keep me in disguise and double back to find the doctor, whose name she didn't remember; she thought she would probably recognize it in a directory. "Mary something," she said. "Mary Anne? Mary Lou?" She had a disposable razor in her backpack; she dipped it in the sea, then sat me down and shaved me. "We're not joining the circus today." The wind was cool on my cheeks as I sat in the sidecar, watching the scenery fly by as Selena took us westward, hoping the motorboat on the open beach would not be discovered and stolen.

Morris was about as big as a sneeze and had only one medical building, two stories high. Dr. Mary Ellen Reseda was on the ground floor, as were the podiatrist, the optometrist and the dentist. Gynecology took up the entire first floor.

Dr. Reseda took one look at my arm and said "Oh, my!" She whispered something to a nurse, who left the examining room but returned within minutes and handed something to Dr. Reseda. The nurse gave me a pill to reduce my fever, which was minimal anyway, then washed my wound thoroughly; I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes. Then I felt the doctor rub something into the wound before wrapping it loosely in gauze. "Come back in three days," she said. "Meanwhile, let's play it safe, shall we?" She gave me a shot of some antibiotic I'd never heard of; she was quick and deft and I barely felt the injection but the wound on my forearm felt, for lack of a better word, creepy. The doctor gave me a roll of gauze and told me to replace what was already wrapped around my arm after 24 hours; she also gave me a bottle of analgesic which I was determined not to take but for which I thanked her politely. "Stay hydrated, Goldie" she warned. I nodded.

The doctor pronounced Selena's wounds superficial - not actually infected but irritated - salved them to help the healing process and gave Selena the same antibiotic she'd given me.

I don't think I was fooling anyone but no one outed me, and I was permitted to pay the cosmetologist on the way out, for Selena's visit and my own.

The motorboat was where we'd left it. I was relieved; something had gone right. We dragged it back into the sea and I got in, started the engine and passed out. Selena had dropped her backpack on the beach in order to wade out with me, and now she had to swim as the boat started up; I came to right away and there she was, sopping wet, directing it back onto the beach. I sat up, regretted it, lay back down. "I don't want to go back to Morris," I said, weakly. "We have to rescue Tegan."

"Fat lot of good we can do her if you're out of commission," said Selena. "You're burning up."

"I'm fine," I insisted, trying again to sit up, in the beached boat. Selena propped me up against a bench and made me drink down a whole bottle of water. I spat some of it up, but she just opened another bottle. I'm not sure what happened next. I lost time, which is a funny thing for a Time Lord to do. I remember trying to get out of the boat and being restrained. I remember hearing music and wanting to dance to it. I remember being distressed that I couldn't find my pockets (I was wearing my stolen blue dress). I remember shrinking from a neural tenderizer, pointed at my head, then drinking water from it, then standing up and stepping easily out of the boat when it seemed Selena had been gone a long time, falling down and crawling to the edge of the sea, where she was filling the tenderizer, wait it was just a water bottle, with sea water. She turned and saw me and yelled at me, so I stopped crawling and lay peacefully on the beach while she brushed sand off the gauze around my forearm. That hurt but I didn't care. "I'm fine," I periodically insisted.

Selena just kept pouring water down my throat until at last I felt that fever pop like an Ingram balloon. (She had filtered out not all but a significant amount of the salt in the sea water she kept fetching in that little bottle, and used unfiltered sea water as well to cool my burning face; apparently there was still plenty of sheet left to tear up.) "Now you're fine," declared Selena, "but rest."

I slept on the beach; Selena covered me with my coat. She slept in the boat; there was a tarp under a bench and she covered herself with that until it began to sprinkle and she spread the tarp over me, and, as an afterthought, drew it under me as well, so I wouldn't be sleeping on soggy sand. She borrowed my coat and shivered in the boat. At four in the morning we folded up the tarp and shoved it back under its bench, but I insisted that Selena keep my coat on. Off we went, in the drizzle, all the way to Toye.

It wasn't easy to find a secluded spot to leave the boat in bustling Toye; it was seven o'clock before we scooted into the community center parking lot and sat wondering how to find Tegan within. "You can't go in at all," admonished Selena.

"You find out where she is and I'll find the air ducts."

"I wouldn't do that."

"Why not?"

"First of all, they're narrow, filthy and amazingly air-free. Second of all, there are jagged edges. And third of all they're flimsy and might collapse under your weight, under anyone's weight."

"I see. Well," I sighed, "There goes a perfectly good escape plan. Say, how do you know so much about air ducts?"

"Experience" was all she would say.