When She Woke (33 page)

“Yes,” she said. Her foot found Simone’s under the sheet, stroked the warm, tender underside of the arch. She pushed herself up, leaned down to kiss Simone’s mouth. “Close your eyes,” Hannah murmured. “Spread your legs.”

T
HEY DOZED A
little afterward, lying in a tangle of limbs. When Hannah woke for the second time, Simone was regarding her with something like bemusement.

“You are full of surprises.”

Hannah looked away, feeling suddenly shy. “So are you.”

Simone’s lips curved into a sly smile. “It was nice, non?”

“Yes,” Hannah said, but the fact was, it had been a great deal more than nice. It had been astounding, both physically and emotionally: intimate, intensely erotic, healing in a way she hadn’t known she needed. Nothing would ever erase the horrors she’d been through, but Simone’s touch and her own response to it had dimmed them, diluting their power over her and pushing them away to a bearable distance. For the first time since she became a Red, Hannah felt fully human.

“We cannot stay much longer,” Simone said. Hannah heard the regret in her voice and felt a twinge of it herself, mixed with relief and guilt and other emotions she couldn’t even identify. The guilt was mainly for Kayla: because Hannah had been rescued and Kayla had not; because she’d been intimate with the woman who’d been prepared to kill Kayla just three days ago; because while she’d been making love with Simone, she’d put Kayla from her mind.
I’m a terrible person,
she thought.

Simone rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. Her expression turned dark, reflecting Hannah’s own thoughts. “We will leave as soon as it is dark,” she said. “I have business in Columbus.”

Hannah smiled grimly. “Guess Stanton won’t have to suffer through the living hell of renovations after all.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s why he sold us. To pay for restoring his house.”

“This
is for what he betrayed us? For a fucking
house?”
Simone shook her head. “His mother, Claire, was one of the very first to join us. That a son of hers would do such a thing is unimaginable.”

“He spoke about her. I got the feeling he resented her for putting your cause first.”

“She was a true patriot. She would kill him herself if she were alive.”

Instead, Hannah knew, Simone would do it. Hannah pictured the scene: Stanton tied to one of his precious chairs while Simone questioned him. Tortured him, just as she and Paul must have tortured Hannah’s would-be abductors yesterday to find out what they knew. Silenced him. Once, this would have troubled her conscience. But now, thinking of the women Stanton had consigned to abuse and death, thinking of Kayla, drugged with thrall, begging her captors to rape her, Hannah was not only undismayed, she felt a deep, primitive pleasure. Cole’s words echoed in her head:
Some things don’t deserve to be forgiven.
Perhaps the two of them weren’t so different after all. It was a disturbing thought.

Simone sat up, bent down and grabbed her pants from the floor, fishing in the pockets for her port. “Go now and shower. I need to make some calls.”

“Okay.” As Hannah pushed herself up, her stomach growled. “Is there anything to eat? I’m starved.”

“Nothing, sorry. We will stop as we leave town and get something. It will have to be fast food, though. We have a nine-hour drive to make, and the sooner I deliver you to George in Bowling Green, the sooner I can come back and take care of that
chien sale de
Stanton.”

“No,” Hannah said, without thinking, her hand flying up in emphatic denial. “No more.”

Simone knitted her brows. “He has to die, surely you must see that.”

“I mean no more being at the mercy of strangers. No more huddling inside of crates and trunks and locked rooms, wondering whether the person on the other side is going to let me out or not.”
No more boxes.

Simone stroked her arm. “Ah,
chérie,
I understand very well your feelings, but it will not be for much longer. Next you go to George, and then to Betty and Gloria. You can trust them. They will see you safely on.”

“Like Stanton did?” Hannah saw Simone flinch a little. “And what about the next person, and the one after that? Can you look me in the eye and tell me you’re a hundred percent certain I can trust them all?”

Simone made an exasperated sound. “What in life is a hundred percent certain? But yes, I have confidence in the others. And in all cases, there is no other way.”

“Yes, there is. Rent me a car and give me an address in Canada. I’ll drive at night and hide during the day.”

“Es-tu folle?”
Simone exclaimed, circling her forefinger around her temple. “You would never make it past all the frontiers.”

“I won’t cross the state borders on the major highways, I’ll take the back roads. You can’t tell me they man every single point. And when I get to the Canadian border, I’ll walk across in the woods, if I have to. I’ll figure out something.”

“And this you call a plan?”

“People do it all the time,” Hannah said, with more confidence than she felt. Border security between the United States and Canada wasn’t airtight, but advances in thermal scanning, biometrics and robot surveillance had drastically reduced the number of illegal crossings since the days of “Thousands Standing Around.” Still, some people made it across. “There are ways, there have to be. And I bet you know what they are.”

“Non.
It is too dangerous.”

Hannah knew Simone’s objections were well founded, but even so, her high-handedness was galling. “I’m willing to take my chances.”

“That may be, but I am not disposed to risk you.”

“I’m not yours to risk,” Hannah retorted, more angrily than she’d intended. She saw a flash of hurt in Simone’s eyes and was briefly sorry for it, but on a deeper level, she wasn’t sorry at all. What she’d said was nothing less than the truth. She wasn’t Simone’s. She wasn’t anyone’s but her own.

Hannah reached out, touched the other woman’s cheek. “Don’t you see? I can’t go back to being dependent, to being
handled
by other people. I’ve spent most of my life being that person, and I’ve had enough. Please, help me do what I need to do.”

Simone’s jaw tightened. Brusquely, she took Hannah’s hand and returned it to her lap. “I cannot permit this, Hannah. You know too much now. If they catch you, they will drug you, and you will tell them everything.”

Hannah felt herself quail a little at the idea of being drugged again. But then her gaze fell on the nightstand, and the object lying upon it. “Then give me the gun and show me how to use it. If they come for me I’ll use it on myself, I swear it.”

“I am sorry, truly,” Simone said, “but what you ask is not possible.”

The finality in her voice cracked something open inside of Hannah, a hard kernel of tenacity submerged so deep within her she’d never known it existed until now, when she saw her hand reaching out and grabbing the pistol, her fingers curling around the solid steel of its barrel and holding it out, butt first, to Simone. “Then you do it,” she said. “Because I’d rather be dead than be anyone’s victim again.”

A wild exaltation seized her as she realized that she meant it; that she was laying claim to her life as she’d never done before. She had never felt more wholly alive than at this moment, sitting naked with a gun pointed at her chest, in a cheap motel room with a woman she’d just made love to in defiance of everything she’d ever been taught, a woman who was looking at her in shock and consternation, because she could see that Hannah meant it, and empathy, because in Hannah’s place, Simone would have felt exactly the same. All this, Hannah read in an instant. She held herself stone-still, watching the war of emotions on Simone’s face, and saw the moment when empathy won.

Simone let out a long breath. Carefully, she took the gun from Hannah and set it back on the table. “I do not like this,” she said.

Hannah leaned forward and kissed her.
“Merci. ”

As she got up and walked to the shower, Hannah allowed the treacherous thought that had been tunneling deep in her mind to wriggle to the surface: Now, she could go to Aidan.

I
N THE END
Simone decided to rent a car for herself and let Hannah take the van. “You will be much more safe this way,” she said. She was rooting through her suitcase, completely and unselfconsciously nude. Hannah was sitting on the bed fully dressed, studying Simone—
my lover,
she thought, with undiminished amazement—covertly; or at least, she hoped she was being covert.

“The logo of the church will dissipate suspicion,” Simone said. “And you can sleep in the back without being seen.”

Hannah wondered, not for the first time, how the Novembrists were financed. They must have plenty of money, if they could afford to just give her a vehicle. “Won’t Susan and Anthony mind you giving away their van?” she asked.

“They will get it back eventually, or another one similar.” Simone shrugged. “In all cases, it is not their place to object to anything I decide. Susan and Anthony follow my orders.”

“Come again?” Hannah said.

Simone regarded Hannah with amusement. “I am their superior.”

Hannah felt flummoxed. “But you all deferred to Susan,” she said.

“Did we?”

Hannah thought back to the group’s interactions at the safe house, remembering how Susan’s and Anthony’s eyes had constantly darted to Simone—to give her instructions, Hannah had thought at the time, but now she saw that they’d been checking in with her, getting her approval. And during the last conversation, the one that Hannah had overheard, it had actually been Simone, not Susan, who’d made the final decision to send them to Columbus.

“Huh,” she said. “Well the four of you sure put on a good act.”

“We have had a lot of practice. Susan, Anthony and Paul are among the very few who know the truth. And now, you.”

Why me?
Surely not because they’d slept together. Simone was the last person in the world who’d let sex rule her judgment. But why else would she have confided in Hannah?

Simone finished dressing and inspected herself briefly in the mirror. Her pale eyes, now a gray blue, shifted in the glass and found Hannah’s. She saw attraction in them, but they also held a new respect. For her, Hannah realized. She felt a gust of something, sweeping through her like a powerful, bracing updraft, and recognized it finally as pride. How long had it been since she’d felt proud of herself? More than being desired and trusted, more even than her freedom, this—the return of her self-esteem—was a gift, infinitely precious because she knew it wasn’t lightly given.

Simone put on her jacket and walked over to the bed. “And now, I must go out for a little and get you a cash card and some food for the journey. The less often you have to leave the van, the more safe you will be.”

“I have plenty of money,” Hannah objected.

“You cannot access it. The moment that you use your NIC, the police will know where you are.”

“Right. Of course,” Hannah said, feeling foolish and naive.

“Do not be embarrassed,
chérie.
It takes time to learn how to think like a ruthless terrorist.”

The comment didn’t register for a few seconds, but when it did, Hannah dropped her jaw and widened her eyes in burlesque surprise. “I can’t believe it.”

“What?”

“You, Simone, actually made a joke.”

Simone smiled wryly.
“Ben,
there is a first time for everything.” She bent down and gave Hannah a lingering kiss. Hannah felt her lips tingle, an electric thrumming. “I will return in one hour,” Simone said. “And then, perhaps …” She dragged her thumb across Hannah’s lower lip, eliciting a soft, involuntary moan.

Simone chuckled. “Wait for me. I will drive fast.”

A
FTER SHE LEFT,
Hannah flopped back onto the bed and stared as Simone had at the ceiling, letting the events of the morning—immense, concrete, irrefutable—take shape in her mind. She’d just been intimate with another woman. She’d initiated their intimacy, taken pleasure in it, felt deeply connected to another woman. Did that make her a lesbian then, or a bisexual? Would she be attracted to other women besides Simone, or had this been an anomaly, sparked by her kidnapping, near-rape and rescue? A phrase came to her: “the act of love,” and Hannah shook her head, rejecting it. She cared about Simone. What they’d shared had gone beyond sex. But there hadn’t been the fever of love between them, the yearning of two souls for union, not like she’d once known with Aidan.

And might again.
Her earlier thought about going to him in Washington came winging back. She’d resigned herself to never seeing him again, but now that it was possible, now that she’d been given this unexpected chance to travel on her own, how could she not at least try? She needed to look into his eyes and know the truth of his feelings for her. To ask his forgiveness, to hold him and be held, to weep with him for what they’d lost. But what if he refused to see her? Surely he wouldn’t be so cruel, even if he were no longer in love with her; at least, the old Aidan wouldn’t. But the one she’d seen on the vid at Susan and Anthony’s …

There was only one way to find out.

She sat up and turned on the vid. Her first thought was to call him, but she rejected it almost immediately. He could be with someone, and besides, she wasn’t ready for him to see her. She’d have to face him eventually, of course, if her plan succeeded, but not today. She knew if she let herself go there now, to that moment, she’d never find the courage to contact him.

She opened her mail account, intending to send him an audio message, and there, waiting for her, were three vidmails from Edward Ferrars, one of them sent just four days ago, on Christmas morning. She felt a feathered rush of hope, mixed with worry. Now that she was a Red, netspeak was riskier than ever. She knew the government randomly monitored the mail accounts of Chromes, and she could only hope that Aidan’s messages would get lost among the millions they had to keep watch on.

She opened the first one, sent the evening of December 8—two days after she’d left the Straight Path Center. Aidan’s face was drawn and tense, his complexion curd-pale, as if half his blood had been drained from him.