Seven of Nine - Christie Golden [42]
The young female looked up and Torres recoiled from the naked agony in the youngster's eyes. "I'm sorry," breathed Priana. "It wasn't right."
As she gazed at the alien, Torres suddenly felt eneraized. Her mind was clear and focused, her body strong and relaxed. She wasn't angry at Tom.
She wasn't even angry at Priana anymore. All she felt was a calmness, and in that pool of calm her love for Tom rose like a shimmering bubble to the surface.
When Priana did place her hand on Tom's, Torres didn't mind. A few seconds later he opened his eyes.
"B'Elanna," he rasped. "What happened? We were fighting the Ku-" "From what I heard, the console exploded," said the Doctor, stepping in briskly and running a medical tricorder over Paris's injuries. "You're lucky to be alive, though I imagine it smarts like the dickens."
"Actually, it doesn't hurt at all," said Paris in a wondering tone.
The Doctor glanced at him. "Shock," he said knowingly. "Ladies, I'll have to ask you to leave. In case you hadn't noticed, there are many others wounded here besides our intrepid pilot. Shoo."
Torres and Priana obliged. As B'Elanna turned to go, Tom reached out a burned hand to her. She hesitated, then clasped it as gently as she could.
"Dinner tonight?"
Torres felt a smile curve her lips. "Sure. What's on the menu?"
"Nothing blackened or well done," he said and gave her a wink.
Torres permitted herself a chuckle. She felt good, despite the dire situation, better than she had for days. Whatever mood had been upon Tom, it had gone. There were no more clouds between them.
Priana touched his hand a last time. The Doctor, examining his tricorder, frowned.
"That's odd," he said. But he said it to himself-, Torres and Priana had gone.
Annika/Seven found that nearly everything in Engineering was now familiar to her. She moved comfortably from console to console, assisting where needed and offering what help she could. The repairs were proceeding rapidly. Captain Janeway would be pleased.
At one point, the flowing red dress that had so appealed to her a few hours before snagged on a corner and tore. She frowned. A billowy dress might be comfortable, but it was not practical. Something more form-fitting was necessary to work efficiently in this environment.
The birds were still with her. Thirteen of them, sitting quietly on various pieces of equipment and regarding her with sharp eyes. She paused in her work to stare back at them for a moment.
The Doctor had said they weren't real, and certainly no one else could see them. They were, according to his thinking, part of her recovery from the hallucinations he assured her she had been having. At the moment, she couldn't remember them, but she'd witnessed recordings of herself deep in the throes of these other lives and knew that it had happened.
A bird... not a blackbird... It had spindly legs and scarlet-and-black plumage....
"A skorrak," she breathed. "I remember. ..
Not a hallucination. A memory. She recalled it not with the immediacy of living it, but with the softer, kinder haze of recollection. A true memory, as vivid and intact as recalling the battle with the Ku, or, as she knew them, the Tuktak, an hour or so ago on the bridge.
A smile curved her lips. This was a breakthrough, progress of a clear and definable sort. Perhaps she was finally starting to heal. She remembered Keela, remembered....
Her brow furrowed in a frown. More memories of Keela, the young Graa female, floated back. Bad memories, memories of fear and capture and Annika/Seven's grip on the engineering tool tightened until her hand hurt. She was remembering being assimilated-not as Annika Hansen, but as Keela.
Laid over this recollection of Keela's, like a thick layer of dust on an old piece of equipment, was her own memory, as Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero-One.
It was the same scene. The assimilation of Keela, and Seven now saw it from both sides. She had been the Borg who had slain Keela's mother,