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and she was self-conscious about hurting his feelings. There was a tiny fleck of white soap on his neck. He usually shaved before he showered, but had told her he was so tired from the ordeal of the hospital that if he didn’t run through the shower first he’d fall asleep while he shaved. And they had to get back to be with her father and mother when the operation on Bjorn Rolvaag was completed so there wasn’t any time to sleep.
She hadn’t like the hospital either. She stood up and walked over to him, with her finger wiping the shaving cream off his neck. “Miss something?”
“Hmm — ” he leaned over her and took her in his arms and kissed her hard on the mouth. She rubbed the shaving cream off her finger and onto his nose, escaping his hands as they closed around her. “I’ll get pimples,” he laughed.
She only smiled.
Paul was fully dressed before she had her underwear on but she tried to hurry, getting into one of the Chinese dresses with the slit along the left thigh and getting Paul to zip it up the back for her. She could have zipped it herself but it was more fun having him fumble with the little hook and eye at the collar. They weren’t in that much of a hurry, the laser surgery scheduled to take at least another hour.
They left their apartment in the Government building and took the monorail back to the hospital, Paul sitting beside her and holding both her hands in one of his and telling her not to worry, that Rolvaag would be fine. She didn’t worry, somehow feeling that he would. She had pondered why, when her father had been shot by the Russians in their underwater complex while he’d been trying to rescue Natalia, and was near death—why she hadn’t felt the danger reaching out to her, felt that he was in trouble. And she reasoned that perhaps she had felt it and been unable to sort out her feelings, in so
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much danger herself then. Or was it that she hadn’t listened to her feelings because they frightened her and on one level of her consciousness she had dismissed them?
She would never understand this “gift” as those who didn’t have it called it. But that it was more a curse seemed obvious. By the time she really felt anything about his plight, he had been on his way back to Mid-Wake for repairs to his surgery after the fight to the death with Karamatsov. And then too,’she had just felt it that he would be all right. Like she felt now about Bjorn Rolvaag. She made a mental note to go to the veterinary hospital and play with his dog for him before she left with Paul. Hrothgar would be lonely without his master.
As the monorail neared the hospital, other feelings took hold of her. For Natalia. She sensed confusion, sorrow, despair. If she hadn’t known better, she would have worried that Natalia wanted to take her own life. “Hold my hands tighter, Paul,” she implored . . .
Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna sat cross-legged, her black canvas bag —it could be used as a purse or a small day pack —on the hospital bed before her.
When the plastic razor blade had been crafted for her
to be hidden in her boot, she had ordered a second one,
hidden this inside her purse.
She held the razor blade over her left wrist and stared at her vein.
There was really no sense in living. If she died, John would grieve, remember her, but— With the baby coming, the grief he felt for her death would be washed away by joy, his joy and Sarah’s.
Living only caused more grief for John. It was important to understand, despite what John espoused, that some situations were indeed hopeless, that sometimes
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there wasn’t any choice left but giving up.
She lay the razor blade against her skin. It felt warm to the touch, the warmth of her own hand from having held it for the last hour.
Natalia began humming a tune. She couldn’t remember its name. So she kept humming it over and over again, trying to remember, her eyes fixed on the razor blade where it touched her flesh. One fast movement and a few brief moments of pain and then a tired feeling and a warm sleep where there would be no dreams of loving John or killing Vladmir and it would all be ended. She would miss dreaming about John.
She couldn’t name the melody, but it was very sad and just hearing her own voice cooing it brought a melancholy feeling over her that hadn’t been there, the sadness replacing the calm, the razor blade falling from her fingers as tears welled up in her eyes and she felt them roll down her cheeks, her tears seeming to her like acid burning her eyes and her flesh and her soul.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
Michael Rourke, his gear packed and sent off with Han and Otto to the waiting German helicopter, stepped from the monorail, Maria Leuden beside him. Maria looked beautiful, he thought, wearing one of the Chinese style dresses they called a chong san. Michael Rourke was in full battle gear, his handmade double shoulder rig with the twin Berettas, the knife made for him by old Jon the Icelandic bladesmith, the four-inch Smith 629 in the holster at his hip.
“You look like you are on your way to a war, not a peace mission,” she said quietly, looking up at him, her gray-green eyes half shadowed by her lids, her eyelashes seeming impossibly long at the angle, like a long ago memory of a butterfly folding its wings.
“Peace through superior firepower,” Michael grinned, letting Maria walk ahead of him through the pneumatic doors into the hospital lobby. His father, the battered old brown leather bomber jacket wide open (his guns would be under it), paced the floor, his mother standing beside the machine which dispensed hot Chinese tea in various flavors. Sometimes Michael found himself longing for the scenes he vaguely remembered from his youth— soft drink machines everywhere and real Coca-Cola that wasn’t five centuries old like the few bottles left at The Retreat.
“Mom. Dad,” he began, his father ceasing to pace in mid-stride, turning toward them, Maria moving ahead
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slightly, his father embracing her like a daughter (would he —Michael —ask Maria to be his wife? he wondered). His mother set down the two red plastic cups of tea on the small table beside the long couch beside which she stood, then embraced Maria in turn.
“Son” John Rourke said, extending his right hand. Michael took it, held it a moment. He sensed his father’s awkwardness as much as he sensed his own, smiled, released his father’s hand, his father’s eyes smiling. His mother put her arms around his neck and kissed him lightly on the lips, then held him close to her for a moment. Biologically, as opposed to chronologically, Sarah Rourke was barely old enough to be an older sister and he and his father, he was reminded once again, looked enough alike to be twin brothers. “Any word on Bjorn, yet?” Michael asked.
“Nothing,” his mother told them. “But I suppose no news is probably good news in this case. Sit down. Would you like some tea?”
“I can get it, Frau Rourke” Maria Leuden volunteered, drifting off toward the dispenser.
“How about Natalia?” Michael asked, taking a seat opposite his father and mother as they sat.
His father just shook his head.
“Nothing has changed. She’s resting,” Sarah Rourke told them. “I think she’s just really tired. And, God help her, what she did —it’s a miracle Natalia hasn’t lost her sanity. All of us need a rest, and she needs it more than any of us. The tension —of all this,” Sarah Rourke concluded, taking a sip of her tea, setting it down, folding her hands in her lap then with an air of helplessness. With her hands in her lap that way, the baby seemed suddenly noticeable. As a grown man, it was hard to accept the fact that he would soon have a new brother or sister. Doctor Munchen, or for that matter the medical wizards of Mid-Wake, could have determined the sex of
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the child or even altered it to suit the desired sex with relative ease. Eye color, hair color, all could have been altered. But Sarah Rourke had insisted that she wanted to find out the old fashioned way.
Michael Rourke secretly felt that his mother and father’s decision was probably best, but had said nothing. It was not his affair to say.
“Look — ahh — ” As Maria handed him one of the red plastic cups of tea, he started to suggest that he and Maria could go up and visit Natalia, but he heard Annie’s voice behind them.