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45.
The elevator door rumbled open, and Tedda stepped outside. She was now in the A world—the source world of all that she had known below.
As she stepped outside, heart pounding, she had a sense of the anticlimactic. The hallway she stepped into was drab and cramped. An maintenance worker in khaki pushed past here, with a mop and bucket that smelled foul. His sense of stressful urgency set the tone for the way the wartime world of West Gotha closed in around her with its cares and woes.
She came to a familiar-looking door. A large number 909 was embossed on the door in grayish-blue lettering upon routered particle board. It was the room in which she had wakened after her ordeal with near-drowning. It was the room in which Nurse Amit had first appeared and led her down into the fortress. She tried the door handle, and found it unlocked. She pushed the door open and looked cautiously into a large, sunny room. She stepped into the room, which seemed to swim in a sort of vapor of light, a faintly steamy or smoky whiteness that reflected blindingly in the polished floor boards. The light came in from several windows under the gabled roofs. She had been in here at one time. She recognized the plain gurney with its straps and black plastic body cushion. It was parked against a wall.
"Lost something?" a woman's voice said with languid sharpness.
She turned and saw a nurse standing behind her with hands folded over her belly and a frown. The nurse's face looked familiar, but Tedda couldn't place it. She told the nurse: "No, I think I found something."
The nurse pointed silently up the hall. Curiously, Tedda followed the direction with her gaze, then regarded the nurse. "What are you doing?"
"She's in there," said the laconic young woman, younger than Amit, lighter-skinned, but with a darker aspect. "The one you are looking for." The nurse made no effort to walk with her or guide her, but just kept pointing up the dark, almost smoky corridor. She added: "The guards were all rules, and they were terminated. For the moment, it is safe to go down there."
Tedda walked cautiously down the hall, looking left and right at the doors. The numbers were all 900's but in no apparent order. Tedda looked back, and the nurse had vanished.
The corridor ended on a stairwell leading straight down under one overhead window with some stained glass squares in it. Tedda retraced her steps, thinking that whatever the nurse had pointed to, it must be before that stairwell. On her right, she saw a door numbered 990—her former room, but with the two latter digits transposed. Did that mean anything? She turned the handled and walked in. Room 990 looked very much like Room 909, except that there was a hospital gurney in the middle, and a patient lying asleep on the gurney. Tedda felt a pang in her gut as she stepped cautiously closer. The woman lay bundled under gray and green military-style wool blankets. Her face was toward Tedda, with cold silvery light filling the air behind her from the windows, so Tedda could not quite make out who she was.
Until she got right next to her.
The woman sleeping under an array of I.V. drips and hanging bags was Amy von Tedda. Instantly, that told Tedda one of them must be a rule, and the other real. They couldn't both be rules, Tedda thought with pounding heart while holding her fingers over her mouth as if she were about to involuntarily scream or even throw up. Eyes contorted in sorrow, she thought: If I were a rule, I would not have been able to come up to Level A. Or how does that go again? As long as my source is alive, I am able to travel and exist freely?
As Tedda looked down on the sleeping woman, she knew the truth in her heart. She, not the sleeping woman, was the rule. If she dies, I will fall apart like a puff of dandelion spores. But isn't that how life is for everyone?
Tedda took out the note Edgar, the last Hedrock rule, had given her to give to this sleeping woman. She opened the crumpled paper and read the penciled scrawl. "He said to tell you he never really loved a woman until he met you. Have the rule Tedda take you out of the hospital. The right people will be waiting to take you to a safe place. Maybe there is still hope to save both Gothas. Best wishes/the rule Edgar."
As Tedda crumpled the note and put it back in her pocket along with the chip, the door opened behind her. It was that nurse again. "Hurry. I can't help you. You must get her out of here." The nurse rushed in anyway, and severed the IV lines with her belt-pack scissors. Get her away from here, and these drugs out of her system so she can wake up and think again."
"I thought I was her," Tedda said weakly.
The nurse barely looked up as she expertly bunched up the sheets to roll Amy von Tedda off the gurney into Tedda's waiting arms. "Honey, you have rule written all over you. Now get this woman out of here. And take good care of her—she is your source." She pointed to a camera in the ceiling. The camera pointed straight down and looked dead. "We shorted the system out. It will come back on line in a few minutes, but you'll have time to get out, and I'll have time to blend back in."
"Yes. Thank you. Can you show me the way?"
"Hurry." Reluctantly, darting fearful glances all around, the nurse helped Tedda get Amy out of the room. "Down the steps now, and good luck to both of you."
Amy moaned and gripped the stair railing while Tedda staggered a bit trying to manage the woman's near dead weight.
"Good sign—she's starting to move around." With that, the nurse took off running. It was an incongruous sight, Tedda thought. Probably an East Gotha spy, trying to do her duty while staying incognito.
"Come on, lady, let's get you moving." With that, Tedda pulled one of Amy's arms around her neck and hoisted her upright while trying to rush down the stairs. For a moment she thought they would both go crashing down, but she caught herself on the railing, rested a moment while catching her breath, and then started back down.
Two or three flights down, they came to a glass door locked to the outside. There was an emergency bar for fire exits, and Tedda kicked it open. Amy actually lurched out on her own power, straight into the arms of two waiting men. Tedda was alarmed, and Amy uttered a faint, drugged shriek. The men reassured her as they took her to a waiting black car. "Hurry," they urged Tedda. Tedda ran along and jumped into the passenger seat in front, while the two men had Amy between them. The car was already moving while the doors slammed shut.
"We work for Hedrock," the driver said. It was Watka, cleaned up and looking very sober and younger in a dark business suit.
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