When Good Fortune pulls up at the dock, we find Marina there arguing with the harbormaster, trying to get a boat. Right. She can find me now that she’s better developed her technique with the bioscanner. And she’s not shy about doing it whenever she so pleases. My good mood starts to wilt.
“No, you don’t understand,” she pleads. “Something happened. I’m his doctor—” That’s when she sees me coming down the gangway. “Are you okay?” Her eyes dart between me and Cleve.
“Yeah, we’re fine,” Cleve says breezily. “We went on some training exercises.”
“What happened?” she demands. “There were some extremely anomalous readings. Did Morgan’s forces attack? Or—”
“No!” I interrupt, wanting to stop this before it gets out of hand. “No, they’re weeks away.” She knows that.
“Okay, so you’re fine?”
“I’m fine,” I insist. “Can I check out of the hospital? Is there some other place I can stay?”
“Yup!” Cleve says, perhaps tired of all his time in that armchair.
“You can crash on my couch,” Marina offers, which I guess was the plan back before I got abducted and spent every night since on a hospital bed. “I don’t have a guest room.”
“You want to camp?” Cleve asks me.
“That’s true, that’d be safe for you,” Marina murmurs. Then she adds the qualifier, “-ish,” still reluctant to declare me beyond danger.
“We should camp out,” I agree with Cleve. “That sounds great.”
“Cleve, you should not spend more time outside than you have to,” Marina admonishes him, “even though it’s safer at night and in town. That’s an unnecessary risk.”
“We’re going to camp,” he tells her. The authority with which he says it indicates he has already evaluated the risks and decided that they are worth it. I wonder if this is about my mental health, given how he saw me fall apart earlier. “I can sleep in the rover,” he offers as a compromise. Ah, our normal camp arrangement, me on a blanket outside, Cleve with the driver’s seat reclined. “There are miasma alarms in this place; it’ll be fine.”
“If you’re going to do this, then I will camp out with you to make sure you’re still safe,” Dr. Citali declares.
“Wanna sleep in the rover with me?” Cleve asks, knowing how dangerous the atmosphere could be for Marina. Or perhaps realizing that I desperately need a break from her. I understand that she is just trying to take care of her patient, but she has other motivations as well, and those are making me increasingly uncomfortable. It’s stifling.
When all is said and done, we end up back at Marina’s apartment. It’s on the ground floor, and she has a patio. We essentially set up a tent in her backyard, like kids pretending to have an adventure. Marina chews her gum, on edge the whole time even though her home is right there to evacuate to if neither the windmills nor my biochemistry can keep the area free of miasma. Cleve, though, is delighted to be outside. With my whole life up until Chiron having been spent in a city, I never would have thought I would be so glad to sleep on the ground, but I am so relieved to have traded my mattress for no more walls or medical monitors.