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asks.
     
    I shrug one shoulder. I don’t
honestly know. I haven’t talked to him. Since I got back, the entire Fleet’s
been attacked. We’ve moved, been hit, then moved to foldspace. I suspect the
captain’s been busy.
     
    “Are you sure it was him who
ordered me back?” I ask.
     
    “Enough,” Leona says. “We can
talk all night, but until we have facts, I can’t help you. And I need to know
what you want. I know what they want. They want to test you.”
     
    She’s looking at me, and her eyes
hold no emotion at all. Only a few people can effectively do that. She’s
clearly learned it over the course of her career. She doesn’t know what to
think of me, and she doesn’t want me to know that.
     
    She wants me to think she’s on my
side.
     
    As if I know what my side is.
     
    “I can block the tests,” she
says.
     
    My heart leaps as she says this,
but I dry swallow yet again. I am afraid of the tests. I am afraid of what they
will reveal. I am afraid of what they won’t reveal.
     
    “Why don’t you study my case,” I
say, sounding calm and logical, which I am not, “and then we’ll decide what to
do.”
     
    “We need to take her out of the
residential wing,” the woman says. “She’s dangerous.”
     
    “We don’t know that,” Leona says.
     
    “We can assume,” the woman says.
     
    Leona turns back to her. Leona’s
expression changes, from that flat look she gives me to something akin to
anger. Only I’m not sure that emotion is real either.
     
    “From my understanding,” Leona
says, “she’s been here for days. If she was going to snap, she would have
already. Lock the doors, post a guard, put some kind of monitor on her. But
leave her here. You know as well as I do that familiarity provides comfort.”
     
    But the apartment isn’t familiar.
     
    Well, part of it is. The
furniture, the mementos that I have brought from previous trips, my bedding, my
clothing.
     
    But the view from the portal—it’s
unfamiliar, and bound to become more so.
     
    If I don’t have to look outside
the ship, I might feel better.
     
    “Do you have portals in the
evaluation ward?” I ask the woman.
     
    “Yes,” she says.
     
    So outside lurks here, there, in
any place they’d take me.
     
    I let out a shaky sigh. “Then I’ll
stay here.”
     
    As if the decision is sane.
     
    As if I am.
     
    As if I would know the
difference.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    They
all leave me, Leona who is off to do research, the three medical personnel.
They’ve posted guards, just like Leona told them to, and they made a point of
letting me know. The guards—both big, muscular men—displayed the laser pistols
attached to their hips and gave me a stern look.
     
    The warning was clear. If I tried
to leave, they’d shoot.
     
    If I tried to leave.
     
    Which I’m not going to do.
     
    Maybe they’re the ones who aren’t
thinking. I’m the one who locked myself in my apartment. I’m the one who has
hidden from everyone I love.
     
    My twin sister Deirdre has left
me increasingly urgent messages, using her technical skills to override the
protections I’ve put on my private communications. She is worried, she says.
She has heard horrible things, she says. She wants to see me, she says.
     
    Too bad. I don’t want to see her.
     
    I don’t want to see anyone.
     
    Not even Coop.
     
    Jonathon Cooper, our captain. My
former husband. He looks like a captain of the Fleet should. He’s tall,
broad-shouldered, dark haired, handsome, and oh, so intelligent.
     
    We married young and I was going
to have a thousand babies, or maybe the acceptable two. But the babies never
happened. Every time I got pregnant, I had to go planetside on some mission or
another, and every time, I lost them.
     
    The prenatal unit offered to
harbor the fetuses for me, so that my risky job wouldn’t have an impact on my
children, but Coop didn’t like the idea. For a man who has attached himself to
a machine—loving the Ivoire more than