After killing the man, everything feels slow and sticky. Heavy Snow cradles the splintergun in both hands, taking several attempts to re-engage the safety. Her arm is wrenched and numb.
She sluggishly picks through her insystem's connections as she slowly walks back around the foot of the bed, removing the amateur block on the clinic's security system and pushing its servos into high alert. The man is not alone; his compatriots fall rapidly in the corridors under a barrage of bodily collisions and shock arc discharges.
Heavy Snow clumsily lays the splintergun in the Ink-Coloured Mouse's lap, and retraces her steps around the corpses on the floor to retrieve the Mouse's duffel. It doesn't occur to her to do otherwise; she doesn't consider it at all until she is walking back to the bed, bag in hand, and the Ink-Coloured Mouse is watching her, one arm clutching the baby, the other in her lap, hand simply resting over the gun, not even gripping it.
Heavy Snow puts the bag on the bed, then walks to another corner of the room, where there is a folded transit wheelchair. She stares at it foggily, then tentatively opens it out and wheels it next to the bed.
There is very little in the duffel. She lifts out a clean shirt and slowly, carefully, holds it out in Ink-Coloured Mouse's direction.
"It's not safe here," she says.
Ink-Coloured Mouse looks at it, and at her. Heavy Snow can see vast matrices of the complex calculus of betrayal cascading behind her eyes. The Apparat's jaw tenses.
"Assist me," she says, and moves only as much as she has to, holding the baby and only very reluctantly lifting her touch from the gun, as Heavy Snow slips the hospital gown off her arms and pulls the shirt onto her instead, buttoning it around her. She keeps watching Heavy Snow as she sets the Mouse's shoes next to the bed, and shakes out a pair of her trousers, and helps her slide off the edge of the bed into them.
Kneeling to slide on the Mouse's shoes and fasten them, Heavy Snow is very aware of the splintergun, in her hand now, dangling at her side. It is quite near to Heavy Snow's face.
Rising, she shrugs out of her blazer, and coaxes Ink-Coloured Mouse's arms into that, then drapes her long coat around the woman's shoulders before gesturing her to the transit chair.
"What is this," the Ink-Coloured Mouse says, finally, instead of sitting.
"Intruders," Heavy Snow says, already letting her hands work methodically on the next part of the plan. She rolls the Mouse's spare clothes into a neat bundle, finds a spare baby blanket, and carefully swaddles a baby-sized wad of cloth. "Gunfire. The Spider in the White Steel Palace is injured, trusts nobody, has their own medical care arrangements. Leaves. Is seen to leave. The clinic has two guards, aside from its security servos; I will call them to the room, there is a conveyance outside already. Go to your ship. Leave."
The Ink-Coloured Mouse allows herself to be gestured into the chair. "How can this work," she says flatly.
Heavy Snow swallows hard, and tugs the infantry mask off her head. She turns it in her hands, looking down at it, and not at the Mouse. "Everybody knows what the Spider in the White Steel Palace looks like," she says, and carefully smoothes it down onto the Ink-Coloured Mouse's head, trying not to look her in the face.
"I have a baby," the infantry mask says, in the scrupulously neutral tones of a Third Military infanty mask.
Heavy Snow puts the duffel into her lap. "You will have to hide the baby in the bag from the guards' arrival until you are in the conveyance," she says. "I'm sorry. If they wake and cry I suppose — I suppose you will have to shoot the guard and walk the rest of the way out? I'm sorry."
She is drowning in an endless fan-out of terrible possibility and lack of control and she cannot even think. Before she can falter any further, she pulls off her tunic, slides her arms into the discarded, skin-warmed hospital gown. Kicks her shoes beneath the bed, slides off her slacks, folds her clothes neatly.
"What is this," the Ink-Coloured Mouse says, and makes a gesture encompassing — everything.
"You told me to indenture you to a crime lord," Heavy Snow says, and hates that she is visible to say it, that her voice has inflections, her face expressions. "If I had, you might — have been safe from this. But they would never let you leave." Looking only at the clothes in her hands, she tucks them into the duffel in the Mouse's lap.
The mask watches her climb shakily onto the bed, slip beneath the sheets, carefully cradle the decoy baby to her chest; it feels like the only comfort left in the world.
"Why," says the Ink-Coloured Mouse.
"You looked hungry," Heavy Snow says, wretched and defenseless, and starts crying in earnest. The guards are almost at the door, she chirps to her. Hide the baby now. Hide the gun; I do not use guns.
The Ink-Coloured Mouse stiffly, reluctantly, slides her baby into the duffel, then brings the whole bag back to her chest, clutching it to her, the other arm beneath it with the splintergun obscured in folds of canvas.. It works, Heavy Snow thinks dimly; it works as a picture of the Spider in the White Steel Palace, taken off guard, on the defensive, making sure not to lose anything.
"What's your name," the Spider says impassively, seconds before the guards arrive, and Heavy Snow hesitates long enough for them to open the door and start exclaiming over the disaster.
"I sell data," the Spider in the White Steel Palace says, from their wheelchair. "This has gone beyond my remit. I am leaving; please assist me to my conveyance at the exit."
One of them pushes the transit chair. The other stays in the room with Heavy Snow, and begins making frantic connections.
As the mask's system warfare capabilities slip away, she can no longer be certain whom the connections are to. Not certain; but her stomach plummets. Nothing within the clinic, she thinks.
My name was Oblique One Running Mara Heavy Snow, she chirps, silences all connections to the Ink-Coloured Mouse, draw her knees up, and clutches the blanket-wrapped bundle of clothing to her.
