Cyborg Nation (29 page)

He looked surprised and then pleased. “Because we are bonded by contract? I found it in the wreckage. Gideon said that we must if possible else we would not have the file for official recording and the council might decide to dispute it.”

She frowned. “I wouldn’t have contracted to begin with if I hadn’t already felt bound to you three by affection,” she tried again.

He looked stunned, almost spilled the last of the soup down her neck. “You feel affection?”

Bronte thrust the cup away. “Yes.”

He thought that over. “It was something we did?”

She couldn’t help but chuckle. “A lot things.”

“How does this feel?” he asked curiously.

Bronte felt her smile slip. She sighed. “Maybe you’ll feel it one day, too, and then you’ll know.”

He nodded, looked for several moments as if he would question her further and then instead helped her to settle on the ground again and went to eat. Bronte stared at nothing, focused on trying to quash the hurt. It didn’t matter how many times she told herself that she was searching for something that wasn’t in their make-up, she still expected to find it. She still believed, or maybe just hoped, that it was there, that it just needed to be coaxed forth and nurtured.

She had to accept, though, that it wasn’t and probably never would be, that they just weren’t capable of feeling any sort of fondness at all. Could that void really matter, though, if she came to love them? Wouldn’t it be enough to have a life with them and know they were devoted to that life? To share passion? The passion alone was more than she’d ever expected to find in a relationship. They would be faithful, she thought, and industrious. Every relationship was flawed in some way and people still managed to make them work—at least for a while.

There was always the incompatibility clause if she discovered she was too miserable to live with it, she reflected morosely.

It was going to be a struggle to try to adjust in a lot of ways, she realized. She couldn’t help but find a lot of their confusion funny, but Gabriel had made it clear that, even while he didn’t fully grasp what there was about it that she found amusing, he
knew
why she thought it was funny. She didn’t want to hurt them by constantly pointing out failings they were already aware of and sensitive about.

It was going to be hard dealing with their idea of resolving disputes for that matter, but she’d already grown far more accustomed to it than she would’ve thought she could. And Gabriel had promised that they would rotate their shifts, which should make things more peaceful even if she did feel guilty about them sacrificing their companionship to be her companion.

And then there was the problem of getting used to living with three different men when she wasn’t used to living with even one. Even if they were in and out, she would still have to deal with that.

Typically, she’d jumped before she’d really thought everything through, she realized in dismay. She’d been so caught up in the passion they shared, though, and so bowled over by their ruthless determination to have her, and so focused on her own need to be needed, she had barely even considered the practical side of such a relationship. Beyond acknowledging that she was in a position where she would have to chose mates among them and the wisdom of having protection, she hadn’t even considered the mundane but absolutely essential economics of the arrangement—which Gabriel had thoughtfully pointed out.

Under the circumstances, it was impossible to ignore the fact that her decision had been almost purely emotional. She’d known that, physically, she found them tremendously appealing, and also on an intellectual level. She’d also known she was drawn to them because they seemed to need her in a way they weren’t even conscious of.

She’d accepted that she was fond of them.

But when she’d risked reopening her wounds, and thus death, she hadn’t been thinking about anything but protecting them. She hadn’t thought about what it might do to
her
if one of them fell on her. She hadn’t thought about anything beyond her fear that she would get one of them killed.

She was afraid that meant she’d become a little more than just fond of them.

Chapter Eighteen

It took a good bit of arguing to convince the men, or more specifically, Gideon, because he was always the one who made the final decision, that she needed to try to get up and move around if she was ever going to get her strength back. It didn’t help that it hurt so much even to try that Bronte wasn’t that keen on doing it herself and or that trying to move around was complicated by a broken leg. On one level, Bronte knew what recuperation was like—the physician’s viewpoint—but she’d never had any major illness or injury in her life and it was totally different from the patient’s viewpoint, she discovered. She knew everything she should do. She just didn’t want to and had to struggle to make herself do what she needed to.

She was out of depth beyond that. She didn’t treat major problems even as a physician. She monitored her patients’ health, treated minor injuries and illnesses, but everything beyond that went to a specialist in the necessary field, and besides that, she wasn’t familiar at all with nanos and had no idea what they might be doing to her. They had never been approved for human use except under extreme, life-threatening situations and even then the physicians ruled out every other possibility first.

Part of it was a fear on the physicians’ part that it would render them obsolete—so they weren’t enthusiastic about using them at all and had in fact gone to great lengths to make certain using the nanos didn’t become commonplace. Part of it, though, was a fear in patients and physicians alike that the microscopic bots might go rogue or otherwise malfunction and create more problems than they solved. Because, once they were released it was damned near impossible to recapture them. Even a complete blood transfusion couldn’t remove them all because they were determined to stay and ‘fix’, and interpreted efforts to remove them as attacks upon the body. They would fight first to keep the blood from being extracted at all and then, once they realized their host was receiving an infusion equal to what was being taken, they would rush to the infusion site to monitor the blood coming in.

And then they would figure out what was going on and ‘hide’. Efforts had been made to correct that particular programming nightmare, but not with any success. It seemed to be an either or situation. They could be programmed to repair as needed, in which case they were absolutely dedicated to searching out and repairing, or they could be programmed to repair one thing only and they might or might not. They had to have AI either way and if they’d been programmed to correct some problem that would create another, or fail to completely correct the problem, they would simply wander around aimlessly trying to ‘compute’ data they considered illogical.

The fact that hers hadn’t been programmed for humans at all made her distinctly uneasy. She couldn’t complain. She was still breathing and she certainly wouldn’t have been if the men hadn’t given her the nanos. She knew better than to believe she’d just miraculously recovered from the sort of wound that usually resulted in a slow, horrible death if untreated very quickly, and sometimes even if it was. She was alive because of the nanos.

She just didn’t know what else they might decide to do once they’d finished repairing the damage from the crash.

She discovered one thing as soon as she recovered enough to notice anything besides her discomfort.

The nanos repaired her vision.

Not surprisingly, she’d lost her glasses in the crash. She hadn’t missed them because of her injuries, but she supposed she’d become so used to them it had just taken her mind a while to catch up to the fact that she saw perfectly clearly at a distance without them—either that or the nanos had just gotten around to repairing her vision. She wasn’t sure which because it was a while before she noticed. Once she did, though, she was naturally delighted.

Now, even without her glasses she could tell whether she was looking at Jerico or Gabriel when before she’d had to study their movements and individual characteristics to be sure because their hair was so nearly the same color and they were close to the same height and weight. That hadn’t been a problem with Gideon, naturally, since he was fair, but now she could see him better, see a lot of things she hadn’t noticed before because of the blurring.

The down side was that she noticed the faint scars all over all the three men that she hadn’t really been able to see that well before. Not that she thought the scars detracted from their appearance in any way, but their dangerous, painful existence was written on their bodies. It brought home to her as nothing else, not even Jerico’s recital of the battles they’d fought, that the horror of war and death, pain, and the ever present possibility of dying themselves was their way of life—all they had ever known.

Before. She was determined, despite her qualms, to change that. Maybe they didn’t want what they believed they did—a home life—because they’d never had it and just thought it sounded like something they would want, but she decided to do her best to make them glad they’d chosen her to try.

Before she could even try, though, she had to regain her strength so that she could be a mate to them, provide the things a woman traditionally brought into a house to make it a home. Gideon, Jerico, and Gabriel not only didn’t like the fact that she was determined to get up and move around, though, she discovered that it bothered them—deeply. As soon as she would begin her struggle to rise they would stop whatever they would doing, stare at her as if holding their breath to see if she would collapse again, and then disappear as if they couldn’t bear to watch while she struggled with the crutch Gabriel had fashioned for her.

It depressed her. She could see why they would be appalled at such weakness when they were so physically superior. She could even understand that her painfully awkward gate was probably a serious turn off sexually.

And it still hurt and it still made her angry. It made her wonder if they’d begun to have doubts about convincing her to join with them to begin with, maybe even begun to entertain the idea of ‘losing’ the contracts on the way back.

They weren’t without flaws themselves—close—but not flawless, she thought with a mixture of anger and hurt. And it wasn’t as if they weren’t aware of those flaws.

The main difference between her perspective and theirs, she realized, was that they didn’t care for her. If they had, they would’ve been able to overlook the fact that she was less than perfect. They would’ve at least tried, just as she was struggling to accept their flaws.

She supposed, all in all, it was a good thing that their behavior angered her because it also bolstered her determination to prove to them that she was still worth having. She was
going
to recover. Maybe she would have scars she hadn’t had before, but the cuts and gashes, even the two worst, seemed to be healing remarkably well. She was fairly certain there wasn’t going to be anything hideously ugly that she was going to feel like she had to hide just be attractive.

Bronte’s first order of business was a bath. Unfortunately, the first few times she ‘got up’ the most she could manage was to sit up for a few minutes and at that she had to have help. That was enough of a chore that she contented herself, at first, with the pleasure of being able to actually sit up to eat. By the end of the first day, though, she’d gotten to the point that she could sit up without being helped upright and
stay
upright for a long while before she had to lie down again.

Since it looked like that bath she wanted was another day or so down the road, she convinced Gabriel to find something to hold enough sea water for her to dabble in until she felt a little cleaner. The sea water wasn’t nearly as pleasant for bathing as fresh water, she discovered. She felt almost as sticky and uncomfortable when she’d finished as she had before she started. Overall she felt better, though, and she thought she must look at least a little better.

She couldn’t get to her legs. She couldn’t bend over enough to reach and she couldn’t bring her legs up close enough to grab them. Toward bed time, though, she finally bullied Gideon into removing the splint they’d made so that she could examine the break to see what progress there’d been in healing. The wound where the bone had torn through the skin had completely closed, she discovered with happy surprise, and the fresh pink skin was already lightening.

Gideon surprised her by bringing water and bathing her legs for her and for the first night since she’d been hurt, she was not only able to cuddle without a lot of physical discomfort, she could cuddle without worrying that she stank. She decided the next morning that she was ready to tackle getting up. If she’d had a bed to sleep in she might actually have been able to accomplish that by herself—probably not—but she might have. Getting up from a supine position to a standing position when she could only bend one leg wasn’t possible, not as weak as she still was. She’d managed to get on her hands and one knee before she realized that, though, and by the time she looked around for help, she discovered everyone had disappeared.

She lay down to rest from the effort and wait for somebody to reappear.

And she waited.

Finally, realizing they must be fully occupied elsewhere and that she couldn’t just call for help without the danger of the trogs hearing her, she looked around the cavern for something to use to help her get up. Spying a stone roughly the height of a chair, she decided to see if she could lift herself onto it and then get to her feet. The challenge was getting to the stone to start with. She hadn’t realized when she started just how far away it was in terms of strength. She had to stop and rest about halfway, and then, when she’d dragged herself the rest of the way, she had to rest again before she could start trying to figure out how she was going to lift her ass from the floor to the top.

Gideon, she discovered, had returned at some point—discovered it when she began fighting to get up on the rock.