Captive Girl (3 page)

“
I want to keep working.”

Marika lets out a hard breath. “I don’t think
they’ll let you.”

“
But the ships—”

“
Never came back. And they say they
have machines that can search the sky just as well as you can
now.”

“
The machines didn’t warn us last
time.”

“
They’re better now. A lot
better.”

Alice gropes at her mask, fingering the
indentations over where her eyes once were. “What will they do with
us?”

“
That’s what they’re discussing
right now. They think…they think they can make you normal
again.”

“
Normal,” Alice echoes, and
struggles to remember what that means. Eyes instead of empty
sockets, ears not hooked up to speakers, a mouth she can talk with,
breathe with, eat with, legs strong enough to hold her up. And no
mask.

She reaches up to touch the metal, and for the
first time in ages, she wants it gone.

“
Are you positive the machines are
as good as we are?”

“
I think so. I mean, they don’t have
the flexibility of a human mind behind them, but humans will be
analyzing their data, so…” Another exhale. “We should be
safe.”

“
And I’ll be normal
again.”

In a small voice, Marika says,
“Yes.”

Alice struggles to tie the back of her gown
closed and says, “When I’m normal, then we’ll finally…” She trails
off, not actually able to type the words.

Marika wordlessly helps her tie her gown, then
sits with her, holding her hand, waiting for the meeting to
end.

*

When Alice comes to in the hospital, there are
bandages where the mask once was, and when she flutters her fingers
over them, she can feel their gentle touch on her face. She draws
in a deep breath, and is startled to feel it going in through her
nose. Her fingers explore further, and find breathing tubes
piercing the bandages. Her raw skin crinkles in a smile.

A warm, male voice says, “Can you hear
me?”

She nods and tries to type a response, but
instead of her tongue controls, she finds teeth.

“
I’m Dr. Metz,” the voice says.
“I’ll be coordinating your recovery. I’m happy to say that the
surgery was a complete success. Your new mechanical eardrums work
on a similar principle to your old speakers, so they should be easy
to adjust to. The eyes, on the other hand — they’ll take more time.
We’ll switch them on in stages once the bandages are off. The
program surgeons did some serious rewriting of your visual
processing centers. It’ll be tricky to get your brain to process
normal human visual input again, but I’m confident you’ll manage
with sufficient training.”

Alice finds more bandages on her chest and
stomach where her tubes used to be. Her hands drift farther down,
and find that there are still tubes in place of her old seat/body
interface.

“
Once you’re mobile, we’ll work on
retraining those muscles.”

She nods again, and feels an odd tug on her
arm. She reaches out to find out what it is.

“
An intravenous drip. It’s replacing
your feeding tube for now, but we’ll have you eating soon enough.
Your digestive system was in fine shape.”

She points to her mouth.

“
Ah, yes. We’ve implanted artificial
teeth and a mechanical voice box, but it’s too soon to switch it on
yet. Your gums and lips still need time to heal. Don’t worry. We
should have you talking again in a few days and eating soon after
that.”

How is she supposed to communicate until then?
She raises both hands and gropes at the air helplessly before
balling them into fists and bringing them down on the
bed.

Dr. Metz takes one hand in his and says, “Just
spell out what you need on my palm.”

M-A-R-I-K-A.

“
Marika.” He gets curiously silent
for a moment, then says, “She visited you a few times, but now that
you’re awake…” He clears his throat. “Well, I’m sure she’ll be
back. Is there anything else you need?”

She shakes her head.

“
Want me to put on some music for
you? Get a nurse to sit down and talk with you?”

She shakes her head.

“
All right. I’ll see about getting a
message to Dr. DeVeaux…er, Marika. If you need anything, just press
the call button.”

Dr. Metz takes her hand and guides it over to
the bed’s rail. The button is large and unmistakable. She nods in
understanding, and he drops her hand. She hears footsteps, then
nothing but the precious sound of her own breathing.

And until Marika comes to visit, it will be her
only company.

*

The door opens, there are footsteps, and then a
hand is in hers. “I’m here.”

The voice is richer and fuller than she
remembers. She has never heard it firsthand before, only filtered
through speakers embedded in a chair.

This will take getting used to. But she is
desperately looking forward to it.

Alice runs her hand up Marika’s arm, up to her
face, and cups her beloved’s cheek. There is so much she wants to
say that she is grateful she can’t say anything at all, because the
peace of the moment would just be lost in a frantic, jumbled mass
of words.

“
Oh, Alice.” A hand strokes her
bandaged face. “You won’t be my captive girl much
longer.”

No. Soon she will be something better. Soon she
will be able to see the face of the woman she loves, be able to
press her body against hers, unencumbered by her walker, to speak
endearments in her own voice instead of with sterile text. She will
be able to kiss, to stroke, to embrace, to explore. She will
finally be able to be a full partner in the relationship, to fully
reciprocate with every cell in her body.

And she will be able to do so secure in the
knowledge that the planet is safe, that she had faithfully done her
job as long as they had needed her, and that she had done it
well.

“
Look at you.”

Soon she would be so much prettier to look at.
No matter how battered her face was, it had to be prettier than a
solid metal mask.

Marika’s hands glide down Alice’s body and rest
on her bandaged chest and stomach. “It’s like you’re a different
person already.”

She shakes her head. No, not a different
person. A more complete person. Why is Marika saying these things?
Doesn’t she understand—

“
Alice.”

There is a tone in Marika’s voice that Alice
has never heard before. Despair.

“
I don’t know if…”

Alice grabs Marika’s hands and shakes her head
again and again. This cannot be happening. Not now. Not now that
they’re so close. All that stands between them is one flimsy layer
of bandages. If Marika just waits, if she can just see the naked
devotion on Alice’s soon-to-be-revealed face, if—

Marika sniffs wetly and gasps, “I’m sorry,”
before pulling her hands away running out of the room.

Alice shakes so hard that she can barely find
the call button.

Footsteps thunder towards her, and Dr. Metz
shouts, “She’s seizing!”

Alice thrusts out her hand, her entire arm
rigid, and when Dr. Metz touches it, she clasps it tightly and
writes, “Put me back.”

“
What?”

“
Put me back. In the chair. In the
mask.”

She hears other people racing into the room,
and Dr. Metz says, “No, it’s all right. She’s fine.” As the others
walk back out, he says, “Alice, you’ve just barely begun your
transformation. I understand that it’s scary, but—”

“
Put me back now.”

“
I can’t do that. The program’s been
shut down.”

“
It’s my body. I decide what to do
with it.”

“
But why—”

“
I want my life back.”

But they don’t listen to her. They call in
psychiatrists to talk to her, but she refuses to answer their
questions. When they take off her bandages and turn on her eyes,
she refuses to open them. When they activate her vocal cords, she
refuses to speak. The only things in her life that matter are the
job and Marika. The job is gone. So that just leaves
Marika.

And Marika doesn’t want her. Not like
this.

Dr. Qureshi comes by to visit several days
later and says, “This just proves why it was a bad idea to get
involved with her.”

With her eyes still closed, Alice faces away
from her.

“
She only loved you because you were
broken. She liked taking care of you, having power over you. You
had to know that, Alice. You’re not a stupid woman. You can do so
much better than that now.”

She feels tears welling up in her new eyes, and
chokes back a gasp as she wipes them away. The skin on her face is
still extremely sensitive. She’s having trouble adjusting to
that.

“
Alice, I know you’re terrified. But
you have to try. Just open your eyes. Just see what you’re missing.
Please, Alice. Please.”

“
No,” she murmurs, and claps a hand
over her mouth, horrified at how automatically speech has come
after ten years of silence.

“
Well, that’s a start.”

“
I want…” Her mouth is sluggish, her
words slurred. “I want her back.”

“
Forget Dr. DeVeaux.”

“
But—”

“
I’m here because I need you back on
the project. And to do that, I need you to finish your
recovery.”

Alice lets her eyelids flutter open, and is hit
with a cacophony of shapes and colors that she can barely make
sense of. She blinks hard, but it doesn’t help. “What?”

“
I’m over here.”

Alice turns towards the sound, and sees a brown
blur surrounded by jagged black spikes. There is red somewhere on
the blur, and a couple of splotches of white. Light twinkles around
its outline like sunlight off a weather satellite. She squeezes her
eyes closed, rubs them, then opens them again. The image is the
same, only fuzzier.

“
The security computers are on line
and working perfectly,” the blur that is Dr. Qureshi says, “but we
need to have people on the team who are specially trained to
interpret any anomalous data. I can’t think of anyone better
qualified than you and Jayna.”

“
What about Selene?”

The blur shimmies, making Alice’s head swim.
“She’s got a long road to recovery ahead of her. We need a team in
place within the month. I’ve spoken to your doctors, and they feel
that’s a highly aggressive schedule, but they say you could meet
that deadline if you really work at it.”

“
Will…will Marika be on the
project?”

Another shimmy. “No. Her specialty was the
brain/sensor uplink, and of course, caretaking. She had nothing to
do with interpreting the data you three collected.” Alice hears a
small sigh. “What we did to you girls was inexcusable.”

“
No, we volunteered.”

“
I don’t think little girls can
really give that kind of consent.”

“
But the ships—”

“
Almost destroyed the entire colony.
I know. They killed my family, too.” The white splotches vanish
from the brown blur, then reappear. “Look, I know how important
this project is to you. I want you back on the team. I owe you
that, at the very least. No one has more experience interpreting
surveillance data than you. No one.”

Alice closes her eyes. It’s too hard to think
when she’s trying to puzzle out what her eyes are sending to her
brain.

The project needs her. She needs Marika. The
project will not help her get Marika back, but it will help keep
the colony safe.

Ten years ago, lying in another hospital bed,
she was offered that same job. She sacrificed so much for it
then.

This time, no sacrifice is required.

When she looks at it that way, the answer is
clear.

She reopens her eyes, looks the twinkling blur,
and says, “I’m in.”

*

From that point on, she makes good progress,
adjusting about as well as the doctors expect. Her vision is jumpy
and often confusing, and many of her muscles are severely
atrophied, but soon she’s able to use a motorized wheelchair, and
go to the bathroom on her own, and use her new eye controls to
filter out confusing input so she can focus on a task.

The day they finally let her go out for the
first time, she heads straight for the park. There is warmth on her
too-pale skin, a riot of color in all directions, the cries of
children playing, and scents that threaten to overwhelm her senses
after a decade of smelling only metal.

She steers her wheelchair off the path and onto
the grass.

“
Hey!” her nurse calls, but Alice
ignores her and keeps going until she reaches a shady patch under
one of the few trees that looks old enough to date from before the
bombardment. She eases herself onto the ground, ignoring the
protests of her feeble muscles, and lies on the cool, tickly grass,
staring up into beautiful, beautiful green.