Chapter 13. Shep Wakes Up
Two days later when I came downstairs for breakfast, Angel was waiting for me in the common room. She had on what I think is called a shift dress, sleeveless, light blue with bands of white around the neck and the armholes and the hem, and sandals, and she looked as great as ever. And the instant I saw her, I remembered Simon asking me who I would have sex with if I could choose, and me choosing her, and it got me sort of hot. I was grinning at her like a moron, and I could feel my face getting red.
"Good morning," she said, and she looked down with this little smile, and I just knew she could tell exactly what I was thinking.
"Good morning," I said. "You look really nice. It's nice to see you."
"Thank you." She smiled up at me. "What does Shep like for breakfast?"
"He—what?" It took me a second and then I realized what she might mean.
"Yes," she said, nodding and smiling. "He's awake. I thought you could take him his breakfast, like I did you the first morning after you woke up."
"Is he okay—is he well?"
"He's absolutely fine," she said. "They wouldn't have let him wake up unless they were sure. Now, what does he like?"
We didn't have to carry the food up the stairs. In the hallway outside my room there was another magic food hatch that I'd never even noticed—maybe it hadn't been there before—and there was a cart there in a kind of janitor's cupboard. We loaded it up with French toast and fresh fruit and eggs and stuff, and Angel left.
The door that had been blank now had a name plate that said, "William Shepherd." I hadn't even noticed when I left my room that morning. Or maybe it hadn't been there then. Didn't matter, I decided.
I knocked on the door and then pushed it open and went in with the cart and shut the door behind me. The room looked a lot like mine had before I customized it. Shep was coming out of the bathroom, naked, with his hair still damp and just starting to curl. He had a big scar over his solar plexus, slanting up to the right, but it was already kind of faded, not even very red. There was another faint scar on his forehead, up by the hairline.
I grabbed him and hugged him and we thumped each other on the back and yelled some.
"I brought your breakfast," I finally said. I wheeled the cart over to the table in front of the windows. "Get some chairs."
"Where are my clothes?" he asked as he put the chairs on either side of the table.
I grinned to myself as I unloaded the food onto the table. "Be thinking about what you'd like to wear," I told him. "Your own stuff isn't available at the moment."
"Why not? Where are we? Where's my mom and dad? Is this a hospital? What happened?" He sat down and reached for the fruit.
"Wait," I said. "It's better if you start with some hot milk. You haven't eaten anything solid for a very long time, so you need to be kind of gentle with your insides right at first."
"A long time?" He took the mug of hot milk I gave him and started sipping it. I was a little surprised that he didn't argue, or grab the fruit anyway, and then I was a little surprised at myself for thinking that.
"Between ten days and two weeks," I told him. "I'm not sure. I've only been awake for about four days, and apparently they kept me out for eight or nine days myself."
I hadn't had any breakfast yet, so I couldn't talk politely like Angel had while Shep ate. We both talked, mostly with our mouths full. I told him about the TSA—about what it was and how it worked, and then about what it was actually like. I told him a little about Angel—I tried very hard to not talk too much about her, as I didn't want to give him any ideas, but I had to explain how we'd been rescued. And I told him a little bit about Simon.
"I talked to him about, about the raft and stuff," I told Shep. "He's nice. He helped me figure out my feelings, got me sorted out. I'm not weirded out anymore, man. I'm still not interested in continuing our, our—"
"Mutual exploration?" Shep supplied.
"Yeah, whatever, but I'm totally cool with all of it now." I was, too. I'd thought about it more over the last couple of days, after my session with Simon, and I really couldn't even remember why I'd been so freaked about it.
"Maybe I should talk to him," said Shep. "I'd kind of like to. Depending on whether they let us stay."
"Huh?"
"Think about it," he said. "You were here until you were well, and then you were here to wait for me, until I was well. And now I am. So will they let us stay any longer? Why should they?"
"Why shouldn't they?" I said slowly. "It doesn't matter as far as going back goes. No matter how long we stay, we go back to the same moment we left."
"But our rescue was kind of unauthorized, right? I mean, this Angel was just sort of messing around and happened to see us through the magic periscope or whatever it is, and she insisted on bringing us here to get patched up."
"Which it's a good thing she did," I interrupted. "You were—well, you would have been dead. Trust me."
"Okay, I get that, but there isn't any other reason for us to be here, right? Not like the other people, who are all here for some good reason, who work here or do research or whatever. So don't you think they'll send us right back now that we're okay?"
I hadn't thought about it. I'd just sort of assumed that now that Shep was awake I'd have plenty of time to show him all around the TSA, that we'd be able to hang out here together for a while. How long a while? It hadn't even occurred to me to wonder. Then I remembered Angel saying "clothes for a week."
"I guess," I said.
"And what if they don't want us to remember?" he added.
"What do you mean?"
"They might not want people who aren't authorized to be here to go back knowing all about this place. They might think we'd tell someone, and they might not want us to. I bet, with all the technology they have, I bet they could wipe our memories if they wanted to."
"No." I shook my head. "It wouldn't work. We get back to the wreck of the MG, a minute or two after it happens, and we're fine? We've got scars, but we're okay? That wouldn't work."
He shrugged. "So we wake up, and we've been in a wreck, and as far as we can remember it happened not even two minutes ago. We don't know what's happened in between—as far as we're concerned there isn't any in between. We're okay, and we have scars, and that's just a mystery. If we can't explain it, we can't explain it."
I thought about it. I thought about how I'd felt, what I'd been thinking, right before Angel turned up, and I thought about being back there at that moment, only the way I felt now, without knowing that Angel had turned up or anything else that had happened. It would be totally strange and inexplicable, and we wouldn't be able to explain it—nobody would be able to explain it. Tough. People would think there was something weird about it, and they would be right, but there wouldn't be any way to know what had happened. We wouldn't know—I wouldn't know. I wouldn't remember any of it. I wouldn't remember Angel.
Not acceptable.
"Look," I said persuasively. "There's no reason to wipe our memories. We're smart enough to know that nobody would believe us, so we won't tell anybody. They know that."
"So how will we explain the scars?" asked Shep.
"Same way we would if they did wipe our memories—we don't know what happened to us." I grinned happily at having solved the problem. "This is way too cool to forget."
"I hope they agree with you," said Shep.
"Hey," I changed the subject. "Have you thought about what you'd like to wear?"
"It'll just have appeared in my closet?" Shep sounded totally skeptical.
"Go look," I told him.
He came back in jeans and a t-shirt, shaking his head in amazement. "I don't get it," he said.
"Who does? Come see my room." I took him across the hall and showed him. I'd decided I didn't want to be at the lake, so now the room had one glass wall sort of cantilevered out the side of a very high mountain, like the house in some old movie, the name of which I forget, and you could see the ocean way off and way down. Shep
was amazed, but not quite as amazed as I thought he should be—as he would be when we went downstairs into the common room and then outside into the rest of the TSA.