Project Boussh: Reunion
by Durandir

There were no more "invitations" to dinner. Perhaps General Atner had
given up on converting her. That would be a relief; still, the solitude
of her room seemed even lonelier now that she knew a little better what
Atner's plans were. Having finished the Utopia, and stubbornly refusing
to open any of the other books, Becki turned at last to the final
defense of any English major.

She recited.

Poetry at first, lines that she had memorized and those that she knew
merely from having read them so many times. "Some say the world will
end in fire..." "Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea..." "A cold
coming we had of it..." "Batter my heart, three-personed God..." "It
little profits that an idle king..." "In Western lands beneath the
sun..." "That's my last duchess..." She rattled off line after line,
taking comfort in the rhythms and sounds. Scripture, too: whole patches
of it that she had fixed in her memory back in her Bible Quiz days. "O
death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?..." "But ye
are washed..." "The law of the spirit of life..." "For unto us a child
is born..." "O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me..."

Eventually she turned to prose, but that began to prove frustrating
when she found that she could not so easily recall lines lacking rhythm
and rhyme. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man
in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife..." "It was
the best of times, it was the worst of times..." "In a hole in the
ground there lived a hobbit..." After a while she found herself quoting
even from old French Lit classes. "L'homme est né libre, et partout il
est dans les fers..." "Rossignol mon mignon..." "Le mai le joli mai en
barque sur le Rhin..."

So she continued, passing the lonely hours in the familiar company of
beloved words. She was in the middle of a recitation of Chaucer (in the
Middle English: one of the least useful and most delightful things she
had learned in that History of English course) when she looked up to
see Tede at her door.

"And palmeres for to seeke straunge str--oh!" she broke off suddenly at
the sight of him. If he had heard her reciting, his face betrayed no
hint of a reaction.

"Come on," he said, nodding toward the door. "Time to go."

"Where?"

"You're being relocated." Instead of the decorative restraining collar,
this time he had brought a pair of binders with which he quickly
secured her wrists behind her back, and in a matter of seconds she was
being marched down the hall.

The passageways they took were different from those that had led to the
dining hall, she was certain, but they were no less disorienting and
bewildering. Though she tried to keep track of the halls and stairways
they passed through, it was difficult to keep a sense of direction. She
was fairly sure, however, that they spent more time going down than up.

Finally they reached a long hallway lined with a symmetrical pattern of
doors--and not a hint of baroque embellishments anywhere. Tede stopped
her at one of the doors, opened it, removed her binders, and quickly
shoved her through the door.

It slammed behind her again before she could say anything. "He must not
be feeling very conversational today," she grumbled, turning away from
the door to survey her new room.

If her first prison had seemed as far from Imperial as she could
imagine, this one struck her as everything that an Imperial cell ought
to be: stark, drab, ill-lit, nearly devoid of furnishings, and at the
moment, unpleasantly chilly. But such practical assessments of the room
would come later. Right now, she was too busy getting over the surprise
of finding that she was not alone in the cell to think about the decor.

There were two cots in the cell, and on one of them, just waking up,
lay a young woman. And Becki recognized her.

"Quiara!" she exclaimed.

Quiara blinked twice, then sat up wide-eyed. "Becki? Is it you? What
are you doing here?"

"Looking for you, actually." Becki grinned and went to sit by Quiara.

"Well, you found me, but somehow I get the feeling that it's not going
to do either of us much good..."

"No. I guess not," she admitted. "But everyone's looking for you, not
just me. A whole team of AFWers--and," she smiled as if sharing a
prized secret, lowering her voice to a whisper in case Atner and his
Imps were eavesdropping, "Wedge."

"Wedge?" Quiara whispered back, her face brightening at the news.

"That's right. And all the Rogues and Wraiths--the NR sent a whole team
to get you out. And in the midst of it all, I managed to get myself
captured. So now I'm lucky enough to be the first to find you, but I
guess it won't make any difference unless the rest of the team can find
us both."

"Oh, hey," Quiara smiled, "if Wedge is here, there's no question about
their finding us. It's just a matter of time. So even after he turned
down the presidency, he's still leading the rescue team for his
kidnapped campaign manager? That's so sweet!"

"I know," Becki smiled back, "but that's Wedge for you."