Page 43 of Prima
Her heart sinks endlessly. The forgetting has already begun. She has disrupted it, maybe, but it has begun.
He comes close and places a hand on her arm, the perfectly normal warmth of his hand a shock to her system. “Lanzhou, you weren’t hurt, were you?”
“I—I was.” Her voice shakes and she can’t make it stop. “The body servant hit me with a nerve gun right before I killed him. You took away the pain.”
And saved her.
And doomed them even more than they already had been.
He looks as if she struck him and doesn’t speak for nearly a minute. And when he does, he sounds dazed. Lost. “That memory is already gone. I thought—I thought I would remember you for longer. But how come I’m awake and feeling more or less normal?”
Her voice still shakes. “Must be the effect of the experimental drug I gave you to wake you up. But it lasts only three or four hours. Afterwards you might fall unconscious again.”
He still remembers her. All she wants is to hold him, for as long as possible. But they do not have that luxury. “Listen, time is short. You must first deal with the situation at hand.”
He rubs a hand over his face. “You’re right. There’s so much to do.”
They gather up all their belongings, including the blankets, now a sodden mass, that he threw on the sand in the morning before he kissed her, an eternity ago. They attach the laden raft back to its understructure, collect the mast blasted off by gunfire from the seaplane—its presence might lead to questions he doesn’t want to answer—then navigate out of the lagoon.
“If I’m going to be unconscious again in a few hours for goodness knows how long,” he says as they nearThe Arrow of Time, “I’ll have to turn on the emergency beacon in my boat and let rescue come to me. I don’t think I have a choice.”
“How will you explain Prince Eleven and his body servant?”
He sighs. “Don’t worry. I grew up in the Potentate’s Palace, I’ll know what to say to paint the situation in the kindest possible light yet leave no doubt that Eleven was conducting an unwise dalliance with the Risshvai and possibly plotting treason with their help.”
He leaps from her raft to his boat—the experimental drug is working as advertised. After five minutes, dressed in the same pair of low-slung trousers in which she first saw him an eternity ago, he returns to her side.
“The beacon is on. You need to leave, right now.”
“When will the rescue boat be here?”
“Not for two hours, at the earliest. But don’t you have a certain time by which you must finish your Grand Tour? You already went to the war zone, which wasn’t on your itinerary, and now you’ve lost at least two whole days in Dawan.”
But she’s not ready for goodbyes.
As if he heard her, he adds, “I’ll come with you. And then I’ll swim back here.”
The reprieve feels both wonderful and terrible. “What if you start to lose consciousness in the water?”
“Old Friend will carry me.”
So that’s the orca’s name, Old Friend.
They throw his things onto his vessel, except the camping stove and the pot of porridge—those he carries carefully. Over her objections—she’s convinced exertions right now will exacerbate his memory loss later—he took the autocannon apart and put the components back.
“Even though you’re not in active agony, you’ll still suffer the effects of the nerve gun for a while and you won’t be able to move the autocannon on your own. This way, with it back in storage, maybe people at home won’t ask you questions you don’t want. And if they do, just say you used it in the war zone.”
She set the raft to advance at six knots. He does not admonish her to go faster, but does ask if she wouldn’t mind putting on the dress from the night before—he would like to see her in it one more time. In her extraordinarily costly dress, they sit side-by-side, shoulders touching, and eat some rations.
She hands him her vambraces. “I’ve already taken out the sculptable cords from these. Give them to your mother to use as tokens when she and your sister make their way to New Ryukyu. Tell them to ask for Sun Yi. Lanzhou is my courtesy name, used among friends, and not on any official documents.
The technology for the vambraces originated in Lion City, so they do not scream New Ryukyu. But will he remember what they are for and not look upon them someday as merely trinkets he doesn’t remember acquiring? “Am I correct in thinking that you don’t forget everything right away?”
He caresses the blue ?on the inside of her left vambrace. “So far that seems to be the case, gradual memory loss over weeks.”
His jaw clenches. “Unfortunately I don’t dare write down anything about you. My boat, my person, everything will be searched in the coming days, probably when I’m unconscious. This close to Dragon Gate, any breath of New Ryukyu and Four will argue that Eleven died because he caught me meeting one of the Sea Witch’s representatives. And there’s no telling when I’ll see my mother next—I’ll be sequestered for a while and questioned.”
If he’s deliberately trying to kill her hopes, he cannot do better.
