Chapter 52: A Kind Offering
Aide Lance came to the hospital himself, which he did not have to do, and which he had spent the entire drive telling himself was efficient. The folder on the passenger seat held the servicing rider, which nobody above him had asked for and nobody below him would ever read.
He found Theo in the corridor outside 1104 with a clipboard and a marker, labelling boxes.
There was a smear of dust across the young man’s forearm and a pen behind his ear, and he was writing SESAN’S MEDICAL SUPPLIES on the side of a crate in handwriting you could read from the far end of the hall.
The crates went three deep along the wall under the window, lids off, packing paper spilling out of two of them, and every one of them wore a strip of pale tape on the front waiting for its word.
Theo had moved what he could out of the old apartment first, because he did not want any of it mixed up. Vials in one crate, folded blankets in another, the good pot separate from the rest of the kitchen because the good pot was the good pot. He was sorting it himself, accurately, in his own handwriting, so nothing that belonged to one wife ended up buried in a box marked for another.
"Mr Theolyne."
"Aide Lance!"
Theo straightened up, delighted, and stuck out a hand with the marker still in it, noticed the marker, apologised, swapped hands, and shook.
"Have you eaten?"
Lance had been asked that question by exactly nobody in eleven years of civil service. Superiors asked whether it was filed. Subordinates asked whether they could leave.
"...No."
"There’s soup."
He smiled politely.
"I regret to turn you down this time. The matters at hand are rather urgent."
Theo held the door for him anyway, and Lance went in past the two hard-looking men in black suits, who did not move to let him through and did not move to stop him either.
Past the brown partition the machines kept up their slow green rhythm. On this side of it there was the low table, the couch against the wall, and two women looking at him.
He glanced at the lady with pale frost hair first, seated on her chair in a lotus position with her cheeks working around something, watching him with a flat and unhurried stare that did not blink when he met it.
Then the lady in the wheelchair, whose amber eyes came up off her lap and stayed on him a beat longer than the room needed.
He gulped and sat down opposite Sesan, with Theo next to him. A cup was in front of him before he had finished squaring his folder on the table, warm, unasked for, set down and let go of without comment.
Then he set his cup down and got to it.
"The array is confirmed. Vaunhold builds inside the month, and I have put a servicing rider on it so an engineer comes to your house four times a year instead of you driving a comatose woman back here every time a coil drifts."
He let that land. Behind the partition, the monitor ticked over.
"I would also like to move you myself. Association transport, Association escort, and a hold on the western checkpoint so you don’t sit in a queue."
Theo blinked at him.
"That’s... a lot."
"It is a normal courtesy for a licensed S-rank privilege holder."
"But I’m not S-rank yet, right? It has not been confirmed, what if you’re wrong?"
"Mr Theolyne, I know I’m not."
Lance smiled, tiredly.
"Please allow me to be generous. It is very rare that my job lets me."
Theo thought about it deeply, turning the marker over between two fingers under the table. He had already been meaning to find a way to hire escorts himself, and had already worked out that he did not know how. He had Uthed. Uthed was worth more than any paper the Association had ever printed about him. But Uthed was one man, with one blade, in one seat of one vehicle, and the road to the far shore of Lake Merrin ran forty minutes past the checkpoint with nothing on either side of it but trees.
On the road they were going to be vulnerable. The assassin who had come at them the other night was still out there, and Theo did not know what the man was doing right now, only that he had waited once already and could wait again, and that a convoy carrying a wheelchair, a hospital bed and thirty labelled crates was exactly the kind of opening a patient man waits for.
So this suggestion was something he was really glad about.
’A free escort is an unexpected boon.’
"I’d be very grateful."
He allowed a kind smile.
"Thank you."
Lance nodded, stood, and did up one button of his jacket. At the door he stopped, and for a moment the tiredness went out of his face.
"One condition, and I’d like you to take it seriously. If anything happens on that road, anything at all, you stay in the vehicle. Doors shut. You do not get out to help. You do not get out to look."
"Why?"
"Because there are people in this city... who seem to be very good at everything else except minding their business. One thing we want to do at all cost is keep your identity a secret."
Theo nodded in agreement and watched the Aide leave, folder under his arm, giving the men in suits one nod each on his way past them, which neither of them returned.
He stood in the corridor with the marker in his hand for a while after that, looking at the tape on the next crate down and thinking about trees on both sides of a road.
Then he wrote KITCHEN THINGS on it, because the crates were not going to label themselves.
The discharge day started badly and got funnier.