Cleve and Marina stay with me the whole time I’m at the clinic. At least, they’re right there whenever I open my eyes. The trip over there and the next several hours are pretty fuzzy. I’m sure Marina has the details of what the doctor there did to patch me up—as well as what Dr. Citali herself determined about what Dr. Gupta did to me. After all, she has a pile of notes and a tape recorder that she recovered from the operating room. If she doesn’t know yet, she’ll figure it out, I’m sure. After the doctor leaves me to rest and rehydrate, Marina settles down in a chair by a side table and spreads everything out to start going through it. Fortunately she doesn’t play any of the audio back at this point—I do not want to hear that voice while I’m still kind of out of it.
When I do get a little more clear-headed, Marina tells me that I need to take it easy for a few days. There’s a limit to how quickly they can replenish all the fluids I lost, and even then, my iron may be out of balance… There’s other stuff too, but it kind of goes right over me. I overhear a hushed conversation about me maybe needing to talk with a therapist about what happened, but no one directly addresses that with me.
Cleve gets all his cuts and bruises taken care of and then takes up a watch position in another chair, one with a clear view of the door and the window. His rifle rests across his lap. The first blush of dawn is just lighting up the view from the window when there’s a light rap on the door, causing him to sit up straighter.
Deirdre comes in, slightly disheveled and distraught. “I got here as soon as I could,” she tells me, pulling a chair next to my bed. Marina helps me adjust the pillows so that I can sit up while we talk. Deirdre has spent her time rustling up people to help and stopped by Dr. Gupta’s lab before coming here, meaning she’s gotten a report from Xiao on what happened after our phone chat. “Mariah, I’m so sorry,” she says before she has caught her breath.
“What are you going to do about it?” I ask, my voice far more level than the last time we spoke. Now that I’m no longer in immediate danger, the ramifications of what happened stand out starkly to me.
Deirdre lets out a sigh and then I see her struggle to be the politician she has become. “We’re going to do everything we can to make sure you’re whole, make sure you’re fully capable…” I think she can read on my face that I’m not looking for platitudes. Her voice drifts away to just a defeated puff of air. “What do you want done?” she asks. “What would that be?”
“There’s still an outstanding sample,” Cleve tells her. “We believe a ranger took one of Mariah’s. These rangers seem to be operating on their own directives. Outside of—”
“Common decency?” I cut in bitterly.
“Yes, well,” Deirdre says, “Dr. Gupta was a ranger, so…”
“So that justifies this?” There is real anger in my voice, and it takes Deirdre aback.
“No, not at all! But I can see why they did something like that. We can definitely try to get that sample back from them, but that’s… non-trivial. The rangers are an organization that…”
This is not my old scientist friend. This is someone politicking around, and I am not in the mood. “Are there not laws here?” I ask, bewildered by the response we are getting. Deirdre hems and haws, which does not help. “Is this a thing that just happens here?!”
“People getting abducted?”
“And experimented on.”
“No, generally speaking, it is not. So, it’s a little bit new for all of us. Again, I apologize. I’m going to try to… fix this.” Deirdre sounds as weary as I feel. “Take as much time as you need. We will of course not be having our meeting tomorrow, er, today. We can sort out that problem after you’re done being treated.” She glances up at the bag of fluid hanging above my bed. A tube snakes down from it and into a catheter attached to my right hand—one I consented to. “I will try to bring the rangers to heel,” she promises.
“Do they have a leader we can speak to?” Cleve asks.
“No, they don’t. They don’t use names. Well, I mean, they’re people; obviously they have names. But when they’re working, they are just all one ranger.” Deirdre goes on to tell us about some of the rules that exist for who can be in the rangers. The physical requirements are not just about fitness, there are also set height and weight ranges that allow rangers to be interchangeable once fully geared up. “Only when they leave the service do they fully regain their identity.”
I look over at Marina. “But you clearly knew Ayumu was the ranger escorting you across the Monsoon Jungle,” I say, confused by this practice of misdirection.
“I could tell,” Marina says. “I knew Ayumu personally.”
“So are they a club?” There’s a minute catch in Cleve’s voice as he asks that, and for a moment, I think he is going to say gang. “As opposed to a career? Because Dr. Gupta was obviously making a name for herself.”
“They would say it’s a calling,” Marina corrects. “It’s not a religion—it’s not like the cult.”
“I bet Dr. Gupta couldn’t stand the anonymity of it,” I say.
“That wouldn’t surprise me,” Deirdre says, nodding. “But I will try to get back your sample. And maybe—maybe!—we can get them to help make you whole. Dr. Gupta was one of them, so maybe we can get them to take ownership. I don’t know. It’s going to be difficult, and war is coming, right? Morgan’s forces are coming. I don’t want our people panicked about our own rangers—our own people. That is only going to hurt us more.” When she words it that way, yes, I can see her point. She empathizes with me, but she also highlights the larger realities we need to consider. “This was horrendous, awful. Dr. Gupta was a monster. That is not what we want to be like.”
Marina backs up Deirdre. “It’s like you told me, Mariah, sometimes whatever it takes is not taking the easy but horrible route. It’s converting people’s hearts and minds. And that’s just as true here as it is in the Morgan domes.”
“For us to build the world that we want, we can’t be doing that, what Dr. Gupta did,” Deirdre says. “That kind of… of violence, frankly, is not who we are in the Stepdaughters of Chiron. We’ve done some questionable things, yes, but we’re going to do better. The first thing we have to do, though, is survive so that we can have a chance to be better.” Dr. Citali points out that in the Morgan domes, people (like Arx) are experimented on. If there’s anything the Stepdaughters of Chiron want, it is to not be like Morgan Industries. Deirdre declares, “We’re going to nationalize the miasma treatment lab. We’re going to make sure it’s used for the good of people and that we gain that knowledge ethically.”
Wow, okay. That’s a major change, if that lab was private before. I wonder if Deirdre had a set of hurried and intense phone calls with the other council members this morning. Other than Xiao, of course, who saw firsthand how out-of-control Dr. Gupta’s work got. “I don’t object to sharing scientific information,” I tell her. “It just has to be… in a trustworthy environment. Like I told you on our walk yesterday evening, we were always going to come here, regardless of the army.”
“We’re going to put those samples to good use, however besmirched their origin was. We’ll do what we can to rescue the people we can. That does mean that—” Deirdre presses her lips together in irritation—at herself, at the situation, who know? She swallows and then continues, “To better help us defend against Morgan, we need the full support of everyone here.”
“I don’t need to make a public stir about this,” I assure her. It’s pretty clear that Dr. Gupta was working alone, and even if the rangers are sympathetic to her, she’s really the only one who was to blame.
“How would you feel about putting in your evidence that Morgan is responsible for this?”
She barely gets the question all the way out before I flatout reject it. “No.” I’m not saying no one in the Morgan domes would have experimented on me if they knew about me, but that has not happened yet. There are enough true things for Stepdaughters citizens to be worried about regarding Morgan Industries that we don’t need to fabricate claims.
“No? Just for the public release of the briar beasts.”
“No, no, no.” It doesn’t even make sense to do that. Morgan would not work with native Chiron lifeforms that way.
“Let me ask you a different question. Was Dr. Gupta working for Morgan Industries?”
I snatch up my satchel from where it is hanging alongside my bed and rifle around in it for a moment before producing a crumpled sheet with a few bloody fingerprints on it here and there. “No, she was working with the University,” I declare, presenting it to Deirdre. “Who, in turn, is working with Morgan.” Now we have something we can spin that still places blame on Dr. Gupta but can serve the present needs. “She was working with the same people who are providing Morgan Industries with leadership and weaponry.”
“So the rangers are working with Morgan Industries,” Cleve concludes.
“That might be a step too far,” I object, mere moments before Deirdre does.
“But then why did the rangers steal one of Mariah’s samples?” Cleve demands. Deirdre offers for explanation that the rangers are very insular. They protect their own, even after retirement. “If they’re ‘all as one’ then it stands to reason that they could all be working with the University,” Cleve continues.
“I will get to the bottom of that,” Deirdre assures him. “I recommend that you not personally investigate the rangers, as they are the most dangerous force within the Stepdaughters of Chiron.”
“If they can keep their hands off Mariah, then I think we can be okay with that,” Cleve agrees, looking at me for confirmation.
“I’m not going to go hunt down any rangers,” I reply, wide-eyed. Cleve nods. He’s not going to ask me to.
Satisfied with where things stand, Deirdre tells us she’ll meet with us about the Data Haven alliance after I’ve had a chance to recuperate. “There will be challenges with that still, unrelated to this assault on your person,” she warns. “Again, I’m—” She drops her head with a sigh, recognizing that another apology won’t fix anything. “None of this was supposed to be this way, Mariah,” she groans, slumped in her chair now. “This was supposed to be humanity’s big chance to restart, to be better.” She throws up her hands in defeat. “But we’re still just humans. We’re not actually better.”
“It doesn’t matter what planet you put people on,” I tell her. “There’s still opportunity—in both directions.” She sighs. “But I don’t mean to derail you from the other things on your plate,” I say, realizing I can’t just keep her here. I know this isn’t my fault, but these events surrounding me have caused her trouble, and from the sounds of it, she was already being stretched thin.
“I—” Her voice wavers, and she clears her throat. “I will get started on setting this straight. You get some rest.” She turns to Cleve and says, “You watch over him,” then points to Dr. Citali and reiterates that instruction. Deirdre lays her hand on mine and gives it a gentle squeeze.
I can’t let her leave here so dejected. I catch hold of her hand before she pulls it away and offer her a smile. “If you can push through all the bureaucracy and leadership and admin stuff that you did not come to this planet for… On the other side of that, when you have a little downtime, there is some juicy, juicy data from two cryobeds for you to flip through when you can put back on your scientist hat.” My eyes sparkle, with playfulness and with resonance energies.
Despite appearances, I’m quite worn out by this whole exchange. But my show of levity pays off, and Deirdre smiles back at me. This time her sigh is fond, rather than world-weary. “You always find something positive to look at, Mariah.” She gives my hand a final pat, and with the promise, “I’ll be back,” she leaves.