Tanaka tried to picture her face, jawbone removed, and waiting while they grew her a replacement, her mouth hanging loose and formless. Her scalp tightened at the image. That, at least, was one indignity she’d dodged.
“How long?”
Gagnon’s bushy white eyebrows rose like a pair of startled caterpillars. “Will that be an issue?”
“Maybe.”
He folded his hands in his lap like a sculpture of the Madonna.
“It might be better to wait until your current mission is complete, then, before beginning,” Gagnon said, his voice sounding deeply worried about her life choices.
The memory of a small redhead asked if she was ugly. The rawness, and the vulnerability, and the overwhelming pain of her love for the child. The humiliation in her ringing like a wineglass.
“Jesus fuck,” she whispered, shaking her head.
“Excuse me?”
“I said no. Start now.”
“What are you in for?” a voice asked from very far away. Tanaka tried to open her eyes, but the world was in a twenty-g burn, and the lids weighed a thousand pounds.
“Mmmbuhhh,” she said.
“Oh, shit, sorry,” the voice said, from not quite as far away. Male. Gravelly. Off to her left. “Didn’t see you were sleeping. Just heard them wheel you in.”
“Mmmuh,” Tanaka said in agreement, and someone eased down on the acceleration and her eyes opened. Bright white light crashed into them, frying her optic nerve. She slammed her lids shut. She tried to find her body with her hands, and something limp and flopping like a dying fish skipped across her chest.
“Yeah, give it a minute,” the man said. “You must be post-op. When they put you under, they put you all the way under. Takes a minute to climb back out.”
Tanaka tried to nod in agreement, and her head fell over to the side. The world continued to ease down on its acceleration, and she was able to straighten her head and risk opening her eyes again. The room was still too bright, but it wasn’t a laser shooting into her brain anymore. She’d made a mistake, but she couldn’t quite recall what it was.
She looked down at herself. She was dressed in a hospital gown that only came down to her knees. Her calves, marathon-runner thin and covered with knots and scars, poked out of it. Her hands were lying limp on her chest. The left had a tube running out of a vein on the back.
She felt a brief moment of panic, then a voice said I’m in a hospital. I just had facial reconstruction surgery. I’m fine. The voice, which was both her own and a stranger’s, reassured her.
“You okay?” Gravel Man asked. “Should I call someone?”
“No,” Tanaka managed. “I’m fine. I just had facial reconstruction surgery.” She stopped herself before telling him that they were in a hospital. He probably knew.
Now that the gravity in the room only felt like the one-third g of Gewitter Station’s rotation again, Tanaka risked rolling her head to the side to get a look at him.
It turned out he was mostly not visible, buried inside the mass of medical machinery that surrounded his bed. No wonder he hadn’t been able to see her when they rolled her bed into the room. But Tanaka could see the top of his head, graying blond hair in a high-and-tight military cut. At the bottom of his bed, past the machines that nearly covered him, one callused foot poked out.
“That had to suck, huh,” Gravel Man said.
“I got shot,” Tanaka said before she’d even thought about it. I’m still a little under, her voice told her. Be careful what you say. Keep your secrets secret.
“In the face?” Gravel Man said, then gave a wheezing laugh. “Most people get shot in the face, surgery ain’t necessary, you know? Needing to get patched up sounds like a win to me. Congrats on another day outside the recycler.”
“Hurt, though.”
“Oh, I bet it did. I just bet it fucking did.” Gravel Man wheezed another laugh.
“You?” Tanaka said.
“Face is about the only piece of me ain’t all fucked up. My patrol skiff was chasing smugglers. Followed ’em to what we figured was their drop point. Shitty little asteroid not much bigger than our ship was. Got close to look it over . . .”
He trailed off. Tanaka waited, wondering if he’d fallen asleep, or if the memory was simply too painful to talk about.
“Then BOOM motherfucker!” Gravel Man wheezed out. “Whole rock goes. Wasn’t no smuggler. Was some underground shithead looking to bag him some Laconians. The skiff folded up like it was made outta tinfoil. Ricky and Jello never even saw it coming. But the ship folded around me like it was designed to cut off everything I didn’t need to live, and keep me from bleeding to death at the same time.”