Slow River

But she was alive. Alive enough to sit in the rain, skin stained with pictures of herself, and remember everything.

A taxi hummed past.

She did not call out, but she was not sure if that was because she was too weak, or because she was afraid. The taxi driver might recognize her. He would know what they had done to her. He would have seen it. Everyone would have seen it. They would look at her and know. She could not call her family. They had all seen her suffer, too. Every time they looked at her they would see the pictures, and she would see them seeing it, and she would wonder why they had not paid her ransom.

Her hair was plastered to her head. The rain sheeted down. She crawled into a doorway, realized she was whimpering. She had to be quiet, she had to hide. She had to lose herself. Think. What would give her away? She pulled herself up to her knees and tried to look at her reflection in the shop window, but the rain made it impossible. She scrabbled around in the corners of the doorway until the dirt there turned to mud on her wet hands. She smeared the mud onto her hair. After thirty days, the nanomechs coloring her head and body hair would be dying off and the natural gray would be showing. Only the very few, the very rich wore naturally gray hair. What else? Her Personal Identity, DNA and Account insert. But when she held out her left hand to the fiickers of light flashing in the doorway she saw the angry red scar on the webbing between her thumb and index finger. Of course—the kidnappers would have removed the PIDA on the first day to prevent a trace.

She was alone, hurt, and moneyless. She needed help but was afraid to find it.

It was almost dawn before she heard footsteps. She peered around the doorway. A woman, with dark blond hair tucked into the collar of a big coat, walking with a night step: easy, but wary. One hand in her pocket.

“Help me.”

Her voice was just a whisper and Lore thought the woman had not heard, but she slowed, then stopped. “Come out where I can see you.” The kind of voice Lore had never heard before: light and quick and probably dangerous.

“Help me.” It came out sounding like a command, and Lore heard for the first time the rounded plumminess of her own voice, and knew that she would have to learn to change it.

This time the woman heard, and turned toward the doorway. “Why, what’s wrong with you?” The hand shifted in its pocket, and Lore wondered if the woman had a weapon of some kind. “Stand up so I can see you.”

“I can’t.” Trying to imitate the slippery street vowels.

“Then I’ll just walk along home.” She sounded as though she meant it.

“No.” Lore tried again. “Please. I need your help.”

The woman in the long coat seemed suddenly to shrug off her caution.

“Let’s have a look at you, then.”

When she stepped closer to the doorway and saw Lore’s muddy hair and nakedness, she gri

Lore pulled herself up the metal and glass corner of the doorway, and stood. The woman caught her arm as she nearly fell.

“Hurt?”

“No.” It was numb now.

“It will.” That sounded as though it came from experience. “It’s too cold to stand around. Just put this on and walk.”

Lore took the coat. It was heavy, old wool. The lining was dark silk, still warm. “It smells of summer,” and there were tears in her eyes as she remembered the smells of sunshine on bruised grass, a long, long time before this nightmare began.

“Put it on.” The woman sounded impatient. She was glancing about: quick flicks of her head this way and that. Her hair, free of the coat collar now, swung from side to side.

Lore struggled with the coat. She flinched when the warm silk touched her back, but all she felt was a kind of stretched numbness like the opening of a vast tu

“Spa

On that first night it seemed to Lore to be miles and miles from the city center to Spa

She had a vague impression of a shop window and railings, and then stone steps. The stairwell was made of unfinished brick. The mortar looked old. Spa

Spa

“You need to sleep,” Spa

Lore knew she must be saying things, responding in some way she assumed reassured Spa

Then Spa

Lore was alone. Alone in a room filled with shadows of furniture she had never seen before, things that belonged to a woman she did not know, in a city that was strange to her. Alone. A nobody with nothing, not even clothes. It was like being kidnapped again, but this time she had no escape to dream of, nowhere to run to. Her sister had killed herself. Her father was a monster who had lied to her, year after year after year.

She stood in the middle of the room, aware of the strange smells and temperature, and knew clearly that she needed this woman Spa

The bathroom was enormous, its window bare; It was too dark outside to see much, but she thought there were perhaps walls, and the remains of a path. She did not want to put the light on, but she could make out a yellowing, old-fashioned tub and huge, cracked black and white tiles. The water ran from the bulbous taps under low pressure, twisting like crossed fingers. She let it pour over her fingers automatically, tasted with the tip of her tongue. Salty. Ions: probably chloride and fluoride and bromide… and suddenly she was crying.

Her fingers turned cold under the tap as she wept. She would have to drink this water that wheezed out from old lead pipes, would have to accept what she was given from now on, and she would have to like it.