Tara fluttered back out of unconsciousness and opened her eyes against the great weight that seemed to drag at them. The world seemed strange, distorted, as if she were looking at it through a thick piece of warped glass, and the sounds came to her ears both muffled and too loud at once.
She was moving, but she was lying down on some sort of bed. A gurney, she realized. The ceiling above her was white and curved like the interior of an egg, except that it glowed. With great difficultly, she made herself concentrate on the voices around her.
“An IUD. If that had perforated the wall of her uterus—” a light female voice said.
“Well, it didn’t, now, did it? And the problem’s solved.” This voice was also female, though a little deeper.
“What doctor would do an insertion on a shifter? It’s criminal negligence,” the first voice said, tinged with outrage.
“A human one, Rho,” said the second voice patiently. “The chances that he or she had any idea of what the shifter was or what that meant are almost none.”
“Humans and their damned worthless degrees—”
“She’ll be coming out of sedation now,” the second voice said. “Everything’s fine now. Let’s not upset her.”
Suddenly, a face leaned over Tara, coming into her field of view. It was a woman with the peculiar slanting eyes and pale blue-tinged skin of Dr. Torrhanin. Oh, and pointy ears. Those were pretty hard to miss. She was wearing a circlet much like his except that the jewel or whatever it was in the center of her forehead was a darker shade of blue.
“Can you hear me? Blink twice for yes,” she asked in her light voice.
With great difficulty, Tara blinked—once, twice.
“Excellent! I am Lady Rhohanashim, First Doctor of the Order of the Lily.” The capital letters slotted into place. “Most among you call me Dr. Rho, and that will be sufficient for informal address. Dr. Torrhanin told me that you requested a female doctor, and so I performed the procedure that you requested and gave you your prophylactic injection. Everything went perfectly. If you understand what I said, I’d like you to give me a little nod.”
Tara debated for a moment before even trying to nod. First Doctor? Order of what? But she did nod because she figured that Dr. Rho was asking whether she heard all the words rather than whether she understood the more obscure references. Her head moved fractionally.
“Excellent!” Dr. Rho said again. “Dr. Marishataen here took over your sedation, and you should find that you are not as queasy as you were during your arrival.” She seemed to choose the word sedation diplomatically. “We couldn’t risk a shift during the procedure, and we understand that you are under a great deal of stress at the moment, so it was best for all concerned that you be sedated one more time. It shouldn’t be necessary to do it again.”
Tara found that her throat was working again, too. “Good,” she said thickly. No matter what their intentions, being stabbed with needles and sprays and knocked unconscious wasn’t exactly a great way to lower her overall anxiety level.
The gurney that she was on stopped, and there was a flurry of movement beyond her range of vision as Dr. Rho clasped one of her hands in both of her own. Tara had a moment of confusion before she realized that the doctor was removing an IV from the back of her hand, pressing a piece of gauze over it as she did so. Then she rubbed the spot with her thumb through the gauze once, twice, and when she lifted her hand, only a fading bruise remained as evidence.
The doctor made the gauze disappear into a yellow biohazard bag that she pulled from the folds of her robe. And it was a robe, an open-fronted white robe instead of a regular lab coat.
Because even that had to be weird, Tara thought.
The gurney started to move again, and Tara realized that it must have stopped for a door to open because they went through the doorway from the brilliant white corridor to one that was the same slightly dingy battleship gray as her cell at Black Mesa. After the brightness of where she’d just been, her new surroundings seemed almost depressingly dark. And as she heard the sound of the door shut behind her, she suddenly realized that in the other place, there had been the sound of singing, so very faint and far away that she hadn’t noticed it until it was gone.
The effects of the sedation were continuing to fade, and she turned her head to get a look at Dr. Marishataen. Her hair was honey-colored next to Dr. Rho’s silvery blond, and though both their faces were perfectly unlined, Dr. Marishataen had a softness about hers that made her seem younger. They were each keeping pace on either side of the gurney, and as Tara craned her neck, she realized that no one was actually pushing it along.
“Um,” she said. “You have robot beds here?”
Dr. Rho raised an eyebrow, but Dr. Marishataen cracked a smile. “Robot beds. Two hundred years ago, you would have called it magic.”
“Uh, thanks?” Tara hazarded.
“Not robot,” Dr. Marishataen said as the gurney’s back raised so that Tara was in a semi-sitting position. “It is what you might call science, not magic, but it is a science that is unlike yours.”
“Okay,” Tara said, for lack of anything else to say. She was, after all, being wheeled down a corridor in a secret facility by two elves on a self-powered gurney.
Either that or she was crazy. The second seemed more and more likely by the moment.
Tara’s arms still felt heavy, but they were not the immoveable blocks they had been moments ago. She flexed her hands, then rubbed her lower arms. It wasn’t actually cold in here, but the drab gray seemed to suck some of the life out of the air, especially after the brilliant glow of the place—the hospital wing?—where she had just been.
They stopped in front of a door that pierced the purple-striped wall, and Dr. Marishataen turned the lever that slid the bolts back on the door, which swung open to reveal her cell.
Not much for décor, Tara thought, taking a steadying breath against the spurt of panic that threatened to overwhelm her at the sight of the place where she’d been confined.
“Can you stand?” Dr. Rho asked.
“I don’t know,” Tara said honestly, but she pushed back the blanket that covered her lower body and swung her legs over the edge of the gurney, which helpfully sank under her with a soft hiss of air until her sock-clad feet touched the cement floor. Experimentally, she pushed off the edge of the mattress, and she was pleasantly surprised when her legs only wobbled slightly under her weight.
“Very good,” Dr. Marishataen said, as if impressed by the efforts of a small child.
Tara went to the door’s threshold, which was high like that on a submarine, and stepped over it carefully to avoid rapping her shin. She turned back to the elves, awkward in her calf-length hospital gown. Her eyes were dragged inevitably to the gurney that she’d just climbed off. She’d assumed the reason the gurney had stopped was because of the high threshold, which would be impossible for wheels to roll over.
Stupid her, because she’d assumed that the gurney would have wheels...instead of hovering a foot above the ground with nothing but air under it.
“Um,” she said, unable to look away.
“Yes?” Dr. Rho raised an eyebrow.
“It’s floating,” Tara said. “The bed, I mean.”
Dr. Marishataen giggled, then quickly hid her smile behind her hand as she regained her composure.
Dr. Rho didn’t twitch. “I can understand how it might seem that way to you.”
Tara waited for more of an explanation, but there didn’t seem to be one forthcoming. So after an awkward silence, during which she stared at the two elves and they looked patiently back at her, she asked, “Now what?”
“What do you mean?” returned Dr. Rho.
Did elves really mean to be that infuriating? “What happens next?” Tara pushed.
“Why, I haven’t any idea.” Dr. Rho smiled, and the door swung shut under an unseen power, leaving Tara alone.