“It will be sore for a couple of days,” said Torgvald, smiling at her. “But that’s normal. You may have pain around the attachment area, but the numbing gel I prescribed should help with any leftover aches as it heals.”
“This is so much cooler than I thought it would be.” Kita touched and squeezed her hand, whispering, “I can feel that.”
If Aralyn could have gotten up and hugged the girl, she would have. Instead, she stared down at her legs, dangling uselessly off of the table, not even so much as a twitch. The firm cushions behind her and her hands along it were the only things keeping her upright. It was one of the oddest sensations she could ever recall having.
One of the computers beeped, and Ider Torgvald hurried over and pressed a few buttons on the large desk panel that popped up. On the see-through screen, Aralyn could make out what looked like the glowing neuro-pathways in her own head. As her grandfather typed in a few commands, distantly, Aralyn felt a strange warmth coming from her back.
“So, will I be able to use my legs right away, like Kita can use her arm?” Aralyn asked.
“I’m afraid the damage in your back was a bit different,” he replied. “Whereas her prosthetic is compensating and feeding her brain information back about the arm, your spine has quite a few more nerves than your arm, and its possible for the information to get… confused, since your nerves aren’t fully healed yet from the surgery.”
“What do you mean?”
He looked up at her and shrugged. “You’re going to be able to walk soon. But likely won’t make much more progress than standing or crawling today. We had to create artificial nerve endings to attach to your damaged ones inside the prostheses. It will take a little bit of time to adapt to your physical commands, which is really what the neuromapping is for―so that your brain and your nerve endings can relearn how to cooperate with one another.”
Aralyn opened her mouth to say something, but then closed it. Days had passed while she was in a coma. Eladia was trapped on the moon, and they needed to find her and rescue Caden from the bizarre orachal. Guilt bit away at her. How could she not have noticed how odd he’d been acting? And Kragg―
She shook her head. Later.
“We’ll see about that,” she said. “Okay, what next?”
“Now,” said her grandfather, “try and move your feet.”
Aralyn looked down at her legs, but they stubbornly refused to listen to her mental command. Again, she tried to kick a foot, but nothing happened. Panic began to well in her chest. If I can’t stand, how the hell am I supposed to go after Eladia? In a fucking hover chair? Resolutely, Aralyn commanded her right foot, then her left, but nothing happened.
“Why isn’t this working?” she demanded, panting at the effort it took to merely try to move her legs.
“At first, it’s going to be very difficult to move them,” her grandfather said. “The nerves are waking up from the anesthesia, and you’ll likely feel a little bit of pain. Try focusing on a single, simple movement and directing all of your attention on that move.”
Aralyn bit back the concern over never actually being able to direct her legs again and did as she was asked, focusing with her entire mental will to tell her right foot to move. With a sudden twitch, the foot surged an inch forward, then rocked back to rest in its original position. Aralyn let loose a relieved sigh and let her chin fall against her chest.
“Next stop, walking,” she whispered, and focused on the other leg.
Chapter Thirteen
It took Aralyn nearly three hours before she could even lift her leg from the knee, and walking looked like a far-off dream, but whenever she felt inclined to complain, she looked over at Kita and her new arm and let guilt swallow her pride instead.
Riordan had joined them about twenty minutes from the time he’d gotten the message and broke out into tears when he saw Kita’s arm. He didn’t even have time to recognize that Aralyn was focused so hard on moving her own feet that she was drenched in a cold sweat. He’d practically fallen on Kita with chest-heaving sobs, and she’d had to console him and assure him that it wasn’t his fault.
Once he’d quieted, Rio moved over to a chair and took a seat, staring at the floor and chewing on his nails in silence. Kita sat beside him, exploring the range of her robot arm with child-like determination and fascination.
Torgvald, who had maintained a doctor’s sense of patient privacy about what had gotten them there to begin with, finally asked to know what happened, since the bits and pieces he’d gotten from Kita during Aralyn’s coma were somewhat of a jumbled, chaotic mess. So while Aralyn struggled to lift the dead weight of her legs, Kita told the story, perhaps a bit more hyperbolic than needed to be, of their interactions from the start when Aralyn had obtained the damnable datastick that had gotten all of them into this mess to begin with. He listened stoically, occasionally butting in to clarify a statement or to ask a question of his own, but otherwise was the best listener Aralyn had ever met.
“So then Eladia shot Aralyn’s old man,” Kita said, “and everything else I told you.”
Ider’s eyebrows dipped in confusion. “She killed your father?” he demanded, looking at Aralyn and speaking in the Scandinavian language she hadn’t heard since childhood.
For a moment, the words escaped her, but she could faintly recall the lilt of the syllables from when he would read her books. She shook her head, grateful at her father’s insistence that she get language implants to help retain the knowledge even if she didn’t use it anymore.
“Not my father-father,” she replied. “The man who raised me after he abandoned me.”
Ider nodded, looking as though he was on the verge of tears. “I should have tried harder… After your mother died, I tried to convince him to let me take you, but he wouldn’t hear reason. You were his child, he kept reminding me.” He waved away the memories like dusting an old cobweb. “The courts were of no use either… I should have tried harder.”
“He’s a psycho,” Aralyn said, trying to dismiss the thoughts of what life might have been like had she been raised by her grandfather instead. “He probably would have just paid them off anyway.”
Meeting her grandfather again felt a bit like waiting for a unicorn your whole life and then only meeting one when you were old and burned out and it wouldn’t want anything to do with the tatters that remained of your innocence. She tried to focus instead on moving more of the muscles in her thigh, which was proving difficult.
“He’s got a DNA-specific bounty on her, you know,” Kita said nonchalantly.
“He what?” demanded Torgvald, fury in his eyes.
Aralyn sighed. “If I ever go back to Earth, once I get scanned on any machine, I’ll show up on the shout box. It’s not a bounty for my head, so to speak,” she clarified once it looked like her grandfather’s rage would make his eyes pop out of his head. “It’s to take me to him. Basically, if I won’t have anything to do with him, I can’t go home… at all.”
Torgvald crossed his arms across his chest and glared at the tiled floor. “Wyndam always was a jealous, spineless bastard.”
“Yeah,” Aralyn agreed. What more was there to say?
The room grew quiet, and he stood from behind the computers and went to help Aralyn back into the chair since walking wasn’t happening. They headed out to the main factory floor and then the elevators, piling the four of them in as he explained that they would be able to get a nice meal and a good night’s rest. As they passed one room, which was holo-windowed and incredibly dark inside, a sudden thump from inside made them jump.
Without warning, a door to the right slid open and out ran Dror, wrapping himself around Kita’s knees, then turning and practically throwing himself into the chair with Aralyn, holding her tight. Aralyn had no idea what she’d done to garner this level of affection from the boy but she returned the embrace anyway. She could distantly feel his weight on her lap, which gave her hope that the nerves would indeed “wake up” in her lower body.
“It’s pretty amazing how this kid can say so much by saying nothing at all,” Aralyn said. She turned her head as they moved forward into a café area. “Speaking of which, Rio, you’ve been awfully quiet.”
Riordan’s head snapped up and he stared at her, but quickly went back to sulking and chewing on his fingernails. They entered the room, which held a wall of “windows” that looked like it had been programmed to display some of the gardens and terraformed places on Mars. There were wide, open tables and a cafeteria-style serving area along the back wall where three women in hair nets and aprons unboxed packages, cleared the dirty trays, and served food from behind a holo-sneeze guard. The light in the room seemed to be set to mimic that of what it felt like on Mars, and once more, Aralyn’s chest stabbed with pain as images of Kragg’s broken body filled her head.
None of this is going to help Caden.
Torgvald pushed her toward a table, and Dror hopped down to take a seat between her and Kita with Riordan on the other side.
“Derah.” The doctor waved one of the women over to the table, and she approached, a small electronic keypad in hand.
“Doctor,” she said affectionately. “What can I get for you?” She pressed a button on the pad in her hand and a large menu board hologram appeared beside their table.
After a few moments of trying to learn what Dror wanted to eat through a mash of charades and twenty questions, they’d each ordered meals that felt like they had more place in a fine-dining restaurant than in the cafeteria of a hovercraft―and medical parts―factory.
“So, how did you know who I was?” Aralyn asked in between the last bites of baked vat chicken so delicious and moist she wouldn’t have known the difference if someone hadn’t told her. “When you asked the officers to bring us here, I mean.”
At that question, Torgvald smiled. “They were showing me video of the damage, asking if I could help. And when I saw your face on the screen, I thought I was looking at your mother, reincarnate.”
“Really? I look like her?”
Aralyn smiled and touched her cheek self-consciously. She really couldn’t remember her mother at all―what she’d looked like, sounded like, or even smelled like. She could only remember the smell of the preserving fluid from the funeral and then the scent of burned remains after they’d cremated her.
“What’s that Old Earth saying? ‘The spitting image.’ I never thought about what it meant, but that was what popped in my head the moment I saw your face.” Torgvald smiled warmly, but then he schooled his features. “Aralyn, if we might have a moment alone?”
Aralyn looked over at Kita and Riordan, but he was still hanging his head and largely remaining silent. “Uh… sure,” she said.
“There’s a rec room down the hall,” said her grandfather to Kita and Rio, pointing to the right. “You can go and watch some vids, if you like. We just got in some new ones from Northern America on Earth, I think.”
Kita, surprisingly taking the hint, stood to her feet, patted her stomach, and belched. “Well, I’ve got to sleep off this food baby, so I’m fine with some good ol’ R&R!” She tapped Riordan on the shoulder and took Dror’s hand. “Want to watch a movie?”
His face lit up as she led them both away, talking in excited bursts about how long it had been since she’d last seen a film.
Once the room was clear, Torgvald, who had been sitting on the other side of Aralyn, stood and moved closer, taking up the seat next to her.
“Little Ari,” he said with a smile. “I know that you probably don’t feel like it’s my place to say anything, but…” He paused, searching for the right words. “I want to help you get out of all of… this”―he gestured to her legs, then to the doorway where Kita and the others had left―“because it seems like you’ve fallen in with a bad crowd.”
“I wish it were that simple, Granddad,” she began. “But there’s more to this story, and… I’m actually the reason that we’re here. Not them. I guess. Well, I mean… I’m the bad influence, then?”
“No, no. I meant… This business with Eladia Galven. This is bad news. You could end up hurt worse than I could fix you, you know.”
“Wait, you know Eladia?”
Torgvald sighed. “Of course I know her. She’s been staying in that mansion for years. The UDA pups here are new for a purpose; fresh out of the academy. They don’t care who she is, and she makes sure to keep her head down, at least on this moon, but it wasn’t that long ago that she came here, bloody and bruised, demanding that I help her or she would ‘kill my granddaughter in front of me.’ When I saw that video earlier, for longer than I care to admit, I thought she’d made good on that promise.” Tears pooled at the edge of his eyes.
Aralyn reached forward and grabbed hold of his hand. How unfair was it that her actions had affected one of the only decent family members she had left? The guilt continued to pile on. “I’m so sorry for that. I failed. You. Kita. Caden, Kragg. Everyone.”
“It’s not about apologies,” he scoffed. “I want to keep you safe. I want you to stay here with me, Ari. I want to help you. Your friends could stay, too. Ganymede is a good place, mostly. And now that Eladia will no longer be welcome here, it could be the safest place in the solar system for you.”
Aralyn blew out a deep breath. Before Kragg, before Pris’s death even, she would have jumped at the chance for a real, honest-to-stars safety net. But now…? She looked down at her legs, wiggled her toes to make sure it could still be done, and then turned back to her grandfather. He’d lost his wife, then his child, then his grandchild. He’d been wanting to see her for years, and now here they were; but Aralyn knew irrevocably that she couldn’t stay with him.
“I wish I could,” she said, squeezing his hand gently, “but I can’t. Not yet, anyway.”
“Aralyn, please,” he begged. “It was unbearable to watch them haul you in here, bleeding and half-dead. The damage to your spine was horrific; I wondered every day if you would wake up again, or if I had lost you before I had even gotten you back… Please don’t make me bury you, too.” A small cry slipped from his throat and he closed his eyes in pain.
“Granddad, you haven’t met him yet, but there’s a man named Caden―”
“Ah yes,” said her grandfather, his face vitriolic, “the one who did this to you.”
“No,” Aralyn said. “I mean, yes, but―”
“He nearly killed you,” Torgvald said. “Is that not enough to prove that you shouldn’t be involved with him?”
“He was under orachal,” Aralyn explained. “He didn’t know what he was doing. I swear.”
“Orachal?” said Torgvald. “That’s impossible. Orachal leaves you open to suggestion―and it almost completely erases short-term memory, of course. There’s no way that he could carry out those tasks without being aware of it. Those slaves become little more than drones that require constant supervision. The officers told me what he did. That he shot you and tried to shoot the others, then left to follow that… that… witch, Eladia.”
“Trust me,” Aralyn began, “not too long ago, I would have been right there with you in condemning Caden, but there’s no way he would have done that on his own. None. The orachal is something new Eladia’s been working on. A vapor-form… it’s way stronger than regular orachal. We have some samples on the Phantom. He was like… a man possessed.”
“Aralyn, can I ask you something?” Torgvald said. He hesitated, even as she waited to hear what it was. “Aren’t you tired of it all? Is your association with these people getting you anywhere happy in your life?”
Aralyn’s face flushed with heat. At the downcast look to her eyes, her grandfather immediately launched into an apology, but Aralyn shook her head. “I’m here because of choices that I made, okay? It’s not their responsibility. Caden’s father, well, he… Look.” S
he wanted to change the direction of the subject because she didn’t know what might come out that would have her grandfather condemning her as crazy and locking her in one of the rooms downstairs for examination. “I owe these people my life, several times over. And we’re working for something good. Something that would benefit the entire fuc… er, freaking solar system, okay?”
Ider Torgvald hung his head. “Just like your mother,” he whispered. “Once she made up her mind…”
Aralyn watched the resignation enter his eyes, and as much as it hurt to see it, she didn’t have the heart to tell him that apart from the personal vengeance stake she had in this, she was also facing jail time and death if she didn’t come through, so she squeezed his hand instead.
“When this is all over, I’d like to revisit this conversation, if you don’t mind,” she whispered.
Her grandfather smiled tightly and released her hand to pat her shoulder. “You should probably rest, yes?” He stood and moved her chair away from the table, pushing it forward.
The two of them made their way down the hall to the rec room, which Kita and Riordan had darkened so they could watch a film on the enormous vid screen against the back wall. They sat on a low-lying couch, Dror between them, clinging to Kita’s arm.
“Stars, it’s like a real theater,” Aralyn said. Torgvald went to push her into the room but she grabbed the doorframe, looking back at him. “Actually, there’s something else I think you might be able to help us with.”
Her grandfather followed her line of sight to the young boy and he said whimsically, “I thought you might ask. I would love to have a great-grandson running around here.”
Aralyn’s face flushed. “No, he’s not mine, he just―”
“If the request comes from you, he’s as good as blood to me.”
The worry lifted from Aralyn’s shoulders. She didn’t know how Dror would take it, but he belonged somewhere safe; not gallivanting around with some of the most wanted criminals in the solar system on a suicide mission. She frowned. She kept alternating between a “what if” they survived feeling, and the concern that she wouldn’t come back.
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