Sanctuary (Jezebel's Ladder Book 3) (19 page)

The colors of the shimmering, opalescent lights covered the
entire visible spectrum and beyond, averaging a milky red at the horizon and
yellow directly overhead. Mercy blocked the blue end of the spectrum with
shutters, fearing microwaves or other unsavory side-effects. They still
experienced a little heat loss, but could travel in this mode for a few months
without freezing. From time to time, those in Olympus recorded storms in the
windows, especially near a nexus point or an intersection. During such events,
the campers scheduled indoor activities to be safe. Once Zeiss trusted this
form of daylight, he freed Toby to resume his biozone duties, assessing the
damage from winter.

The bright afternoon of his release,
Mercy arrived at Toby’s bedside with a picnic basket, a spear, and binoculars.
“Ready for botanist-assistant duty, sir.”

Toby groaned. “My head hurts.”

Mercy handed him a thermos. “Gingko
something-or-other tea. Oleander sent it for the jump sickness. She harvested
it from the mountain and swears it helped her recover from her last subspace immersion.”

He gave a crooked smile. “Thanks.
Does it taste like dirt?”

She nodded. “The sugar helps,
though.”

He winced as he swilled down a cup.

“Bad?” she asked.

“No, just hot.”

“I’d get you an ice cube, but we
don’t have a freezer yet. I think they have a tree bark you can lick for the
burn.”

“No, a toad,” he corrected, making
her laugh. She remembered stories of people on Florida licking rainforest toads
for the hallucinogens. “I’ll meet you outside after I brush my teeth.”

“With a rat tail,” she giggled.

“How’s Auckland doing?”

“Fine, as long as he doesn’t run.
He’s been researching his condition and told Pratibha it could be months before
his system recovers.”

“If ever,” Toby whispered. “He can’t
go more than eight hours right now without a nap.”

****

The air outside was still cooler
after the second jump, requiring jackets. However, the greenery overwhelmed any
doubts Mercy had about the expedition. She stared in awe at the waterfall and
the small rainbows formed along the river’s sharp descent. For the first micro-biome,
Toby followed a gentle trail around the mountain until they reached a valley.
On the way, they listened to the promised Tennyson. Just before they arrived,
he turned off the reader and said, “Close your eyes.” He led her to a small
clearing. “Sit. Now breathe in.”

The scent of flowers enfolded her.
“Ahh.” She opened her eyes. There were flowers of several kinds on every side
and down below, recovering from the weeks of darkness. “It’s gorgeous!”

He watched her face light up as she
tracked the flight of an absurdly fat bumblebee. “Yes.”

She blushed when she saw he was
looking at her. Plucking a violet, he handed one to her. “For your hair.”

“There are layers on the petals,
like a target, not like the pictures I’ve seen.”

“That’s the way a bee sees it,”
Toby explained. “You have a unique perspective on the world. I envy you.”

She looked at her knees nervously,
waiting for him to whisper compliments or hold her hand.

“You’re nothing like Yvette,” he
began.

Mercy wanted to shout at him, but she
remained silent. Mother said sometimes you just had to let a man ramble till he
got to the important things. Dad had been a little slow in the romance
department, but that meant he had fewer bad habits.

She smiled, gritting her teeth
through an hour of talk where the biologist mentioned Yvette five more times. Condensation
from the ground was seeping through her pants, and she’d finished her lunch. Eventually,
she glanced at her computer pad. “Toby, we got off to a late start. I’m
enjoying this time together in a special place, but we need samples from the
next zone before dark.”

“Right,” the pale man said. “Let’s
do this again some time.”

As they cleared the picnic, he
pointed to a butterfly. “There’s a
beautiful
specimen.”

Removing a board from his pack, he
held it out for the insect to flutter onto. Just as she was about to coo over
it, Toby took out a large pin and stabbed it through the back. “Perfect for my collection.”

She could find nothing polite to
say after this display. In such cases, a lady said nothing.

At the second location, they found a
field of greenish-white flowers that Toby identified as hops. “Herk is going to
be happy about this. He drinks a lot of beer.”

Mercy harvested as much of the hops
as she could fit in her basket. “Weird. Do you think the aliens are trying to recreate
life at the farm in Oklahoma?”

“That farm didn’t have this variety
of wild rice or bamboo.”

“So maybe there were other, earlier
landing sites?”

Toby shrugged. “Have Red ask the
alien.”

“Since we entered the control room,
she doesn’t talk to him anymore—the test, remember?”

Mercy noted in passing that the
water levels had dropped a tiny bit more than expected. She scribbled notes on
the subject but didn’t say anything to alarm the biologist.

At the final stop of the day, he uprooted
a bean plant and examined it closely. After chopping it and dropping it into an
analyzer, he nodded. “It’s genetically modified.”

“What for?”

“To make it richer in oil, which
also keeps away more of the insects. You wouldn’t want to eat it, but we could
make fuel for lamps, heaters, or engines. Processing effort would be minimal.”

“Wow. We packed a lot of
discoveries into one day,” she said, staring at the mountain in the distance. “I
learned a lot, but the shutters above us are closing. We’d better head back.”

****

Rachael ambushed Mercy as soon as
she reentered the storage caves. “What do you think you’re doing to my compost
heap?”

“Huh?” Mercy asked as Toby snuck
away to the dining hall.

“You put pine sawdust in my
delicate mixture?”

Mercy considered pointing the
finger at Toby, but the man was already gone. “It’s good fertilizer, and the
wood’s not treated.”

“The carbon to nitrogen ratio
should be thirty to one. Wood shavings can be five hundred to one! You’ll kill
my reaction.”

Mercy was hungry, so she kept
moving toward the mess hall. “The chicken poop should balance it. My mom used
horse manure and sawdust in her roses.”

“It’s too hot! You have to cook
that for a few years before it’s safe for our greenhouse.” Rachael kept
haranguing her through the line, but Mercy’s eyes were drawn to Lou as he
strode into the room.

“Hey Baaa-tease.” Lou sat down on
the bench beside Toby, exaggerating the sheep sound in his last name. “How do
they make virgin wool?”

“Go away,” whispered the biologist.

“From ugly sheep,” Lou shouted. The
word ugly stabbed through Mercy like a shard of glass. Rachael stopped
lecturing to stare in the direction of the brewing conflict.

Staring at his tray, Toby said, “I’m
not going to ask you again.”

“Come on, mate. Tell us. Did you
bang her like a ewe . . . I mean, like you said you were going to?”

Mercy sank to the floor, hugging
herself.

Toby tried to punch the pilot, but
the man dodged, laughing. Lou hopped off the edge of the bench and crouched
playfully. “Come on, lad, you can do better than that. Did you show her your
blunt-nosed mole or lecture her about the birds and the bees until she fell
asleep?”

When Toby took another swipe, Lou
caught his arm and twisted it behind him. “Say Uncle.”

Oleander broke up the fight,
setting Lou to scrub duty, which left Mercy with no evening job to do. Instead
of applauding her freedom, something inside Mercy felt broken, and she had
trouble catching her breath. She called Olympus and offered to bring them some
of the still-warm apple strudel from the kitchen.

Zeiss wasn’t sure about this until
Red said, “As long as you travel during daylight.”

Mercy whispered a “Thank you” to the
couple after the commander approved the request.

Leaving a note for Oleander to
watch the yard birds, she said nothing to anyone until she reached the top of
the stairs about thirty minutes later.

“Dominoes, we deliver.”

While the others shared strudel, Yvette
accompanied Mercy into the medical lab and closed the door behind them. “How
did the field assignment go?’

Without warning, Mercy started to
cry. “Sojiro and Mary were right. I’m going to be a nun!”

Yvette pulled the younger woman
close and patted her back. “Why would you say that?”

Mercy sniffed. “Toby is still too
hung up on you. Even filtering that out, it was the
worst
date I’ve ever
been on, and I went to MIT!”

She described the look on Toby’s
face as he killed the perfect butterfly. “Now, I worry what will happen if he
ever calls me beautiful.”

Yvette laughed. “Surely it was not
so bad.” She gestured to the violet that Mercy still wore in her hair. “Give
him some time.”

Mercy thought,
He creeps me out!
But maybe her instincts were wrong. Maybe Toby was merely a little awkward. “I’ll
try.” Privately, she was already thinking of how she could approach Oleander
and try to set the security specialist up with him. Maybe punishing Lou meant Oleander
liked the pale scientist.

Cocking her head, the therapist
asked her, “Is there another reason you shed your tears?”

Sighing, Mercy said, “It’s hard. I’m
used to being the best at my job. Now, I’m useless. Everybody’s better at
something.”

“Why is it important to be the
best?”

“In my family, every person has a
niche.”

Softly, Yvette said, “Had.”

The tears resumed. Mercy couldn’t
talk coherently for twenty minutes. Yvette made out sobs that sounded like,
“Great mother . . . father . . . friends . . . nothing . . . everyone gone!”
The only coherent sentence had to do with a tire swing she’d wanted to share
with her own child. “Our mansion turned to ash. My childhood blew away. I don’t
know who I am anymore.”

“Shh,” Yvette said as she stroked
the orphan’s hair. She murmured calming words, and eventually sang her a French
lullaby. When her patient drifted off, Yvette poked her head out into the
control room. “Mercy will be staying with us for a few days. Red, I’d like you
to do the honors.”

Mira Zeiss, the Index page, kissed
her friend Mercy’s cheek and woke her. “Would you like to become blood
sisters?”

Mercy nodded. “I need to belong
somewhere.”

Yvette handed them a diabetes
sampling needle, and the two women pricked their thumbs and mingled the blood
like summer campers.

Then, Mira leaned over Mercy’s ear
and whispered the words inscribed on the first paragraph of the first alien
page read by Jezebel Hollis:
We all come from the same over-world and will
return there someday. Someone once said, if we closed our eyes at the same
time, we’d see the same thing. That’s close. We do all go to the same plane,
but with different locations and with different points of view. This
multiplicity is important when defining or triangulating upon a higher truth .
. .

From his chair in Garden Hollow,
Sojiro looked up to the sky. Over the radio, he said, “She’s a flower. Welcome,
sister. Dream. We won’t let you fall.”

Red and Yvette never left her side.
Mercy had such vivid dreams that night; the colors were more brilliant than
ever before.

Mercy spent the next three days of the others’ shift with
them, experiencing the support of two female empaths and a man who could ‘hear’
when his wife was awake. Feeling the Zeiss’ bond on this level made a part of
her ache, but she could still share. She told them all about raising the birds
and the places she’d explored in the biosphere until they had to be sick of her
constant talking.

She couldn’t believe the new colors
everywhere. Even Olympus had nuances she’d never noticed before. With her new
access to the Collective Unconscious, she could not only sense the presence of Actives
in the same room, but Snowflake required almost no effort to access anymore.
The alien interface felt like an extension of her will.

Sojiro and Oleander came a few
hours early for their shift just to give the Zeiss’ ears a break. Oleander
visited with her first, telling her about the birds. “They poop everywhere, but
they’re not so bad. Strut fell asleep in the pocket of your lab coat. They miss
you.”

“I hope Toby helped with the
chickens while I was gone. He learned about chickens from his mother. I hear
that the way a man treats his mother is a good indicator of how he’ll treat his
spouse. I also noticed that he’s the only man on the mission the same age as
you. He keeps his room as neat as you do. I thought you might—”

Oleander cut her off. “No offense. I’d
rather sleep with you.”

Mercy blinked. “Okay. No ambiguity
there.”

Smiling, the older spacer said, “Don’t
worry; I haven’t done . . . that since prison. I don’t prefer women, but if I
had to choose, I’d want the other person to love me. I know you’d cut out your
own kidney for me if you thought you could help—and you just met me. I’ve known
Toby for months, and he’s more passionate about a microscope slide than
kissing.”

“Prison?” Mercy said, her voice
rising.

“They didn’t tell you? My brother
blew up bank property, and I did a few years hard time until Professor Horvath
sprung me for Out-of-body experiments. I was the only one out of three women to
survive the first year.”

“Wow.”

“Does this mean you want to leave
the dorm?”

“No. I feel safe with you. You’d
beat anyone senseless who tried to hurt me.”

“Damn straight.”

“And I can’t blame you about Toby.
I just feel bad for a guy when every available woman would rather be a nun or a
lesbian.”

“Nadia said she’d rather join the
French Foreign Legion.”

“Ouch.”

Both women laughed for a moment.

Sojiro poked his head in. “What’s
so funny?”

“Do you think Toby’s hot?” asked
Oleander.

The Japanese artist cleared his
throat. “Oleander is more butch than he is. Now, Herk or Z? I’d sign up for
that Chippendales dream.”

Oleander high-fived him.

“You guys aren’t making this any
easier,” Mercy complained. “Are you sure you’re not just a little het?”

Sojiro shook his head. “Sorry,
sweetie. You want to see my ideal? Come to my room and I’ll show you a video of
Mikhail Baryshnikov. Mmm.”

“I hear that,” Oleander echoed.

In his room, he had smart paper
plastered over an entire wall panel. The current image was a palace reminiscent
of King Ludwig’s. Gesturing to an array of computer-linked pencils and
airbrushes, Sojiro said, “Whatever color I touch it with appears on the
computerized surface, but I miss the texture of real paper. On the plus side, when
I hit this button, the image will be stored on a special hard drive and can be
recalled at any time.”

Mercy whined, “It’s not fair. I can
understand and admire you. You don’t know how rare that is for a guy.”

“You relax around me
because
I’m safe. Hey, I finished your royal gown. Check it out.”

He restored a painting almost as
tall as Mercy herself. It showed a princess in a blue-and-white gown
embellished with snowflakes. The elegant woman could’ve been a Parisian noble in
a bridal ensemble apart from the hair bound in a medieval habit. She also had a
halo-shaped, blue-green aurora floating above her head. “You made me an ice
princess.”

“You’re beautiful,” Oleander
insisted. “Chaste.”

“It needs something,” mused the
artist. “Maybe a bluebird or something you’re talking to, like your chicks. No,
that’s too Disney. Maybe I can give you a curse that your father cloistered you
to avoid? Some burning evil that the church can hold at bay.”

“Are we talking about Lou now?”
joked Oleander.

“Can you show us what she looks
like without the wimple, the headdress?” Mercy asked, admiring the detailed
painting.

“Girl, I can’t draw what I haven’t
seen.”

Mercy sighed as the artist pulled
out his personal computer pad and scrolled through this movie collection,
searching for
White Nights
. “Does it bother you . . . being alone?”

“I’m not alone. You’re here.”

“I mean physically.”

“People who spend too much time in
the interface can lose that drive, and sometimes even forget to eat.”

Grunting, Mercy said, “I’m afraid I’d
be just the opposite. Without swimming every day, Johnny’s cooking is going to
make me cow out.”

Both Sojiro and Oleander nodded
their agreement. The artist said, “I work out with a bamboo stick for an hour
every morning with one of the other guys.”

The other woman said, “Running
helps me.”

“You could help me learn to make
rice paper. When I succeed at that, I can use my real markers.”

Mercy smiled, remembering when
using licorice-scented markers was all she needed to be happy. The blossom of
memory resonated with Sojiro, as if she’d hit ‘Like’ on Facebook. That was
it—emotional networking.

She sensed Toby coming in through
the main door—like a miniature rain cloud, an Eeyore in the room. When he
popped into the medical bay, she scampered out and skipped down the spiral
stairs, glorying in the colors of the day. She waited for Yvette at the bottom,
like a girl walking her friend to school.

****

Toby noticed Mercy’s scent in the
medical room immediately. She’d been sleeping here. When he located Yvette
packing her gear to return groundside, he asked, “What was wrong with Mercy?”

“She needed to talk. The loss of
her family and coworkers has hit her hard. We had to perform an emergency page
induction and stay close to her for a few days. She’s still a little . . .
fragile, so Red and I will take turns escorting her for a while.”

“Sure. Are you going to the
wedding?”

“But of course. The ceremony is
scheduled for the last day of our stay here in the true sunlight of this
system, three weeks from now. I would not have imposed, but as Auckland’s nurse, he wanted me to be best man. As his caregiver, I’ll need to be at his
side the whole time, monitoring.”

“I’ll be fine. Mercy promised to
come back a little early and bring me cake.”

“See you in a week, and thank you
for understanding.”

The doctor peered out the side
window at Yvette as she descended the stairs. Using the zoom feature of the
window, he watched the two women walk hand-in-hand. They stopped to check on
the strawberries and chatted all the way back to Garden Hollow. He froze an
image with Mercy tipping her head back, laughing.

He had to know what they were
discussing, so he said, “Snowflake, add sound.”

Her laughter rang in his ears,
lovely and innocent. Then Yvette, the bane of his existence, said, “So
basically, you made certain no other woman on this voyage would sleep with poor
Toby before you decided to enter a convent.”

“I did it for you . . . what we
discussed before.”

“You are a sweet girl,” the
therapist said, brushing the younger woman’s bangs out of her face lovingly. “Your
hair is growing so long again. Let me show you how to braid it.”

Toby howled in rage at the betrayal
he’d always suspected—Yvette was ruining his chances with every other woman in
the world! In his fury, he scattered the tray of instruments beside the bed.

Red called, “Everything okay?”

He reset the window to normal and
replied, “Yeah. My nurse rearranged the room, and I smacked into an unexpected
obstacle.”

“That hurts.”

“I’ll be ready for it next time.”

****

On his next infraction, the women
in the kitchen ordered Lou on an expedition with Mercy to locate and map hives
that had honey. Such an expedition had to start in the fields of flowers.

Lou kept his eyes on the narrow
path the entire way around the mountain.

“What did you say to get Rachael so
peeved?” Mercy asked.

“You know Johnny’s latest
experimental Chicken Cordon Bleu?”

“With the Guinea Pig bacon? That
just seems wrong.”

“I know. Because to of the ham and
cheese, I called it ‘Chicken Not a Jew.’”

She burst out in a laugh, but
covered her face immediately, ashamed that she found him so funny. “She’s
usually pretty thick-skinned about religion. You probably hurt Johnny’s
feelings when you were making fun of the new dish.”

“Well boo-freaking-hoo.”

After that, Mercy had to prod him
into chatting. “So . . . I heard from my sister that Mira had her cap set for
you before she and Z got together.”

A little more swagger crept into
the pilot’s walk after that. “I didn’t notice at the time.”

“She wasn’t pretty enough?”

Snorting, Lou said, “Red was like a
guy with tits. She was a pilot, for God’s sake. Rumor at the time was that she
and Horvath had a thing going.”

“Her own aunt?”

“We didn’t know that. Red was just
. . . one of the guys.”

“How was Vanessa different?”

“She was the first girl since I
entered college who didn’t sleep with me on the first date.”

The admission surprised her, and
led to a dozen other questions. What did men really want in a woman? “So,
virtue is important to you?” she asked, trying not to sound too interested.

“That part was Red’s fault,
actually. She broke Vanessa’s nose, and I had to rush her to the hospital. They
used narcotics during surgery and for the pain, so I couldn’t touch her for two
weeks. I may be a lot of things, but I won’t take advantage of a woman who can’t
say yes.” Something inside Mercy fluttered at the captain’s chivalry.

“So Vanessa was more
girlie
than Red?”

Lou closed his eyes briefly,
savoring the memory. “Vanessa was the Holy Grail of dates—an underwear model. She
had the body of a porn star. I kid you not. I will never score like that again,
as long as I live. Every time I see lace, I’ll remember that woman.”

Mercy could feel her face heat up
until her ears turned red. She could never measure up to that standard,
although her sister Maggie might have. “Um . . . so Yuki was just a fling?”

Pulling out a pair of binoculars to
scan nearby trees for bee activity, Lou said, “I still have standards. Yuki was
world class and an acrobat in the sack. My entire old unit would’ve drooled
over her and called me a show-off bastard bringing her to visit. I wouldn’t
have been ashamed to take her into any officers’ club on any base in the world.
I might have even invited her to my folks’ Christmas party.”

“Past tense?”

Lowering the binoculars, Lou said,
“They haven’t told you yet, have they?”

“Told me what?”

“Her arm is definitely coming off.”

Mercy put her arm to her chest.
After a moment to process, she asked, “Why should that end your relationship?”

He wrinkled his lip. “People would
stare at her for the wrong reason.”

She wanted to smack him with the
spear.

When he noticed the change in her
posture, he asked, “What? Red looked at me the same way when we discussed the
issue. I’m not as evolved as the rest of you—public opinion matters to me. I
don’t want someone losing their sick over my date when I take her to a
restaurant.”

Several biting replies came to
mind, but she resisted all of them. Instead, she hinted gently. “I was
diagnosed with breast cancer when we first boarded the ship. If Sensei hadn’t
fixed the errors, I would’ve needed a mastectomy. Would you have gone on the honey-hunting
trip with me if I had one of those?”

Lou considered. “Depends. Was it a
full amazon job or just a snip with implants afterwards?”

Turning on her heel, Mercy left the
pilot standing in the field alone.

“What?” he demanded.

****

Toby started plotting his revenge
for the next time he could ambush Lou—the night of the wedding. If the fool
drank before his shift, Toby could strap the pilot into the Snowflake and make
it look like Lou cooked his own brain by accident. With any luck, there would
be hours of begging before he died. He’d need a way to block the radio
headsets, though, so no one else would hear the pleas. The silence of subspace
would mask things quite nicely—no one could come looking during the blackout.

Taking great care, he measured out
syringes full of everything he’d need for his revenge, based on current body
weights. Cheerfully, he added a few other necessities. It was no different than
packing for a holiday at the beach. He hid the ‘vacation’ bag in the luggage
room.

As Mercy returned to camp, Toby was
able to zoom in on her with the windows. Outside, Rachael stopped her. “Better
check in with Auckland and take precautions.”

“You need to have topic sentences
because I never know what you’re talking about,” Mercy replied, already
irritated.

“Auckland found out that Sensei
neutralized the time-released birth-control implants in our arms.”

Mercy had no such implant, but she understood
the implication. “Given my choices, I’d rather sew myself shut.”

This made the dour Rachael laugh
for the first time since Mercy joined the team. “How does his technique compare
to Dr. Baa-tjies’?”