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She turned, looked up at him. "I'm sorry?"
"Your book. What's it about?"
"Some people. I don't know."
"You feeling alright?" Valentine asked. She seemed distant.
"Very well. Doctor says I'm doing very well. But I need some sun, you see?"
Valentine took that to mean he should get out of her light. "Your accent, where are you from?"
"Down south."
Nothing to be gained by waiting, though he felt as though he were having a conversation with a child. "Do you ever want to go back ?"
The words slid off her like the water in the pool. "Back where?"
"Down south?"
"No. I have to stay here so the baby can come. It's part of being a healthy mom. There are four parts to being a healthy mom, did you know? Diet, Exercise, Care, and Attitude. I had to work on my attitude most of all, but it's much better now."
"Obviously," Valentine said, giving up. "Do you ever wish you could be with your child after it's born?"
Her eyes grew even larger. "Oh, no. Our children go to special schools. They learn, from their very first weeks, how to lead mankind out of darkness. The Long March to the Future. It would be selfish of me to want to keep my baby from that. That would be a very bad attitude to have."
"Absolutely," Valentine said, finishing his cigarette. Post had once told him that he and Gail had their falling out over an abortion. She did not want to bring a child into the world just to be disposed of at some future date by the Kurian Order. Was there anything left of that woman?
* * * *
On off days Valentine and Ahn-Kha went out to "the grotto"-a low pond ringed by trees on the southwestern perimeter of Xanadu-and plotted out how an escape might be engineered. They would eat and talk, then throw a fooball back and forth when they needed to think. At the next break they would talk again. The escape had to buy them enough time to get across the river before an alert was sent out and a pursuit organized.
They developed a plan, but it was like a string of Morse code, a group of dots and dashes with gaps in between. The biggest problem was the security system. Thanks to some postcoital perusals of Fran Paoli's file cabinets-he turned the television on after shutting her door to allow her to sleep in peace-he had learned that Gail was in room 4115 of Grand West, and that she was scheduled for her caesarian in early December. Valentine's ID would get him into his building and onto his assigned floors, plus the common areas for staff, but he couldn't even get access to a floor above or a floor below his levels, let alone a different building. Ahn-Kha could bring laundry into the basements of any of the four Grands, but couldn't access the elevators.
His conversations with Alessa Duvalier grew increasingly anxious. She wanted to know how his head felt.
"Go back home if you like," Valentine said. "Or are things getting heavy with Lance Corporal Scott Thatcher?"
"Soon to be Sergeant Thatcher. He's talking about getting married, said it makes a big difference in how the officers look at you when promotion time rolls around."
"That's wonderful," Valentine said.
"I'm counting the days until he pops the question. I hope your schedule lets you come to an engagement party."
Cooperation from Gail would make all the difference in the world. During daylight hours the women were free to visit their outdoor patio, or even a strip of park bordering the north tower.
But how to get cooperation from a woman who had to think long and hard over whether she'd finished a page in her novel or not, and what action to take about it once she did?
"We need someone who can drive. Drive really well," Ahn-Kha said as the days began to run out in October. There was frost on the ground most mornings now.
"That might be doable," Valentine said. "You think we could trust the doc?"
"Your lover? No-"
"I meant Doctor Boothe. I've seen her with pickups and that little ATV She says she hates people. Maybe she means she hates the system."
"She is risk-averse," Ahn-Kha said. "She does her job, wraps herself in it like a cloak, my David."
"There's one bit of skin showing. That assistant of hers, Pepsa, she's protecting her, hiding her. I wonder if she'd get her out with us."
