Death in Winter - Michael Jan Friedman [73]
But she didn’t have the luxury of taking a breather. Not when the centurion might come back at any minute.
Taking a deep breath, she forcibly put her discomfort aside. Then she planted her hands on the floor, swung her legs into a sidesaddle position, and with a jerk rocked herself onto her knees.
It should have been easy to get up at that point. But she had tortured her legs so, it wasn’t. It took perhaps ten seconds for her to lurch to her feet.
Moving on trembling, uncertain legs, she made her way across the floor and through the foyer to the door. It had taken a remote control device to get her and the centurion in, but she didn’t think she would need one to get out.
As it turned out, Beverly was wrong. The door wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard she pushed against it. Apparently, her “friend” had the only “key.”
She slumped against the wooden surface and heaved a sigh. All right, she thought, I can’t get out. But I can free my hands before he comes back.
The centurion was a magnificent fighter, but anyone could be taken by surprise. Anyone, the doctor insisted. And if that was her only chance of helping the Kevrata, she would take it.
But she would need something sharp to slice her bonds, she thought, as she retraced her steps into the main room. A cursory scan of the place didn’t show her any likely objects, so she took a closer look.
Finally she found it-a place where one of the stones in the wall had partly cracked away. The jagged edge it left was a little higher than Beverly would have liked, forcing her to get up on her toes to raise her wrists to the right height. But once she did that, she was able to begin sawing away.
It wasn’t easy. The edge wasn’t very sharp, and her bonds were tougher than she would have imagined. But she worked at it as diligently as she could, and as she worked, she found herself looking back on her life.
It wasn’t because Beverly expected to die, though she knew that was certainly a possibility. It was more because she had been penned up and frozen and bludgeoned about, and she wanted to go somewhere more pleasant for a while.
Where she could gather her thoughts. Where she could reflect.
Funny, she thought. For a long time she had been too busy to reflect, too absorbed in her work to examine the entirety of her life and achieve some kind of perspective.
But it hadn’t always been that way. Beverly hadn’t been anywhere near that busy when Jack was alive. She had spent hours with him, even days, doing nothing at all.
Just being with him. Just living.
When Jack died, everything changed. She had always been strong, equal to any challenge. But she couldn’t accept what had happened, couldn’t meet it head-on.
She needed distractions-and she found them. Work, first of all, and plenty of it. And raising Wesley. And when he started to take care of himself, she found other ways to fill her time-writing and directing plays, practicing dance routines, research, correspondence with other medical officers.
But never just living.
The closest she had come to it were her breakfasts with Jean-Luc. She had looked forward to them with such eagerness, each one a refreshing oasis in a wasteland of hard work. And no two of them were exactly the same. In fact, she and her breakfast partner had dedicated themselves to finding unusual dishes, which they would then serve to each other and wait for a reaction.
Most often, it was positive-an expression of delight. But not always. The durien, for instance, that Ensign Jaiya had recommended, which ended up tasting like rotten eggs-that was definitely not one of Beverly’s fonder breakfast memories.
But she could still taste her favorites-especially the uttaberry pudding, a specialty of Betazed. Sweet, pungent, and bitter by turns, it seemed to excite every taste bud in her mouth before it was done.
She wished she had some now. Hell, she thought, under the circumstances I might even give the durien another try.
But it wasn’t just the food that made those