The room Leanora was wheeled into had a familiar feel. It was a hospital room, albeit of an unfamiliar style, with a lot of equipment she could not name. Still, it was a hospital room. She was very, very familiar with hospital rooms. At only nineteen she could write a whole book on the subject. She would title it “Living through Centuries of Medical Science in One Short Lifetime.” She did not, unfortunately, have time to write it.

Each breath was now a struggle, despite a steady flow of pure oxygen from a strange device that a nurse placed under her nose. It looked like a metal ring with glowing gems, surrounding a thin membrane. As best she could tell, it both separated pure oxygen from the surrounding air and blew it towards her nose. She could have dedicated a separate chapter in her book to different oxygen machines and variations of artificial lungs. A year ago, one of her lungs had already been replaced with a modern prosthesis in the desperate hope that this would slow her body’s decline. It may have given her a few extra months, but that was the limit of what the New Circe City Hospital could do for her. The Hospital. It was by all accounts the best medical facility on the planet, run directly by Earth’s Outer Planets Humanitarian Foundation. If only they had seen her ten years earlier, the doctors said...

If only. Those two words became the story of her life. If only her grandfather had permitted his granddaughters to be genetically tested. If only the family doctor, a trusted retainer who was, unfortunately, her grandfather’s age, had recognized the early symptoms. If only the clinic in Leiner that her parents finally took her to over her grandparents’ objections had been much better. It took years to get him to accede to her getting a passport to travel to New Circe City, the Earth Enclave surrounding the planet’s only functional spaceport. By the time her condition was correctly identified, it was too late. The body’s decay had progressed too far for the retroviral therapy to correct. They did it, of course, and that probably gave her a whole year.

None of the treatments she had been subjected to stood a chance of being the cure, but they did win her some time. A month here, two months there. One comes to value these precious months when reaching the next birthday counts as a major miracle. She had pulled off three already, but it looked like the fourth was out of reach. She winced as a slight movement sent a shot of pain through her. Those were coming more and more often. It had been several years since she last managed to stand on her own feet. More than a year since she could comfortably sit. This was her last chance. At something. Of sorts.

She was not sure what the chance was for. There were rumors ... There are always rumors of miracle cures, healers, even witches that promised to cure any and all ills if only you were to pay them a small fee ... By the time she was fourteen she could spot charlatans in the first minute of conversation. Alx said there were rumors about her among them now. They stopped coming.

Alx. Alaxandres.

She was a viscountess, whether or not her father had renounced his rights to the March title. He was a half off-worlder from the Enclave. An Earth non-citizen national, resident of the extraterritorial area, which was ceded to Earth’s Exoplanetary Development Institute by the treaty of the Twelve Nawabbies, Alx had been raised by a Circe-born single mother. His father disappeared off-planet, never to be heard from again, before the child was even born. The mother did not even know which world he was from. Alx was, by his own account, a mutt that neither Earth nor the Nawabbies wanted, confined to the glittering high-tech cage of the City and the mud of the surrounding marshes.

They met when Leanora’s parents finally brought her to the Enclave hospital in New Circe City. Their rooms were next to each other. At night, when she could not sleep from the stabs of pain running down her limbs as the retroviral treatment attempted to mend what could still be mended, he snuck into her room, sat in the guest chair, his own monitor carefully placed on a tiny table next to him, and they would talk about everything. She marveled at his experience of growing up in the Enclave, while he wished in turn that he could have walked on the grass of mountain meadows. They talked about the politics of Earth and its Enclaves. They argued over whether the Mother Planet had any obligations towards its colonies, first seeded and forgotten, and then rediscovered. They planned wild, impossible ways they could get off the planet and travel among the thousands of habitable worlds, both knowing full well that this was just not written in their stars.

To her immense surprise they stayed in touch. He was walking. Running. Doctors even said he might one day play sports. He had a future. He returned to school. He was there for her at her worst times, but he never pitied her. He was there to lend her a shoulder when her own strength failed. He carried her back when her legs gave up. He would not let her despair when pain was getting so bad she just wanted it to end. How many of those birthdays were really his work?

The last time she really traveled to the Enclave (she did not count just getting shipped to and from the Hospital as traveling), he accompanied her to the Minister’s reception the Keroon Mission marking the Nawab’s Coronation Day. Her grandfather made her attendance a condition. She was already wheelchair-bound, though she could still walk for a short time if the pain was not too bad. The faces were a blur of self-important gaudiness, condescending to a never-will-be and yet envious of her rejected title. She did not know, and did not care, what favors they thought they could extract from her grandfather.

She spent most of the evening sitting gracefully and smiling through the muscle spasms that sitting upright cost her. The only part that stayed with her from the evening was talking to a young woman. Her name was Leena, and she came from a cadet branch of some minor provincial nobility, borderlands abutting barbary chiefdoms. She wore her formal gown as if this were the first occasion she attended. Her manners had a learned quality, as if a tutor trained her on how to do and say things but never really trained her on when exactly the right time to do them was. She was the only one that had not completely ignored Alx. She was eager to listen to his stories about the Enclave, though she did not share much in return. In her defense, there was not much to share about provincial living that would be new to her, and neither of them was interested in provincial gossip.

That was the trip when they tried their scheme. It was harebrained, desperate, and they almost pulled it off. It was easy to get to the spaceport. There were no restrictions on accessing the passenger terminal. They waited, blending into the crowd of travelers, as much as a girl in a wheelchair with a noble crest emblazoned on her tailored jacket could blend in. She thought she saw the girl, Leena, cutting through the moving crowd toward the customs and immigration checks line.

Leanora never asked where Alx got the spaceport blueprints or how he acquired a security card that worked in his hands. He did. He rolled her wheelchair into a shipping container that looked like a tiny cabin on the inside. The door sealed. Not ten minutes later the container moved. They could track it being loaded looking at a small monitor that Alx extracted from the wheelchair and plugged into the wall.

The container was taken to a tramp freighter resting at the edge of a landing field, loaded into its hold, and secured in a berth. No customs inspector looked at it. No security team went around the cargo, which was loaded by a team of dock workers in dirty uniforms. Just as Alx said it would happen. They waited. The take-off time got pushed back once, twice. It was her fault they got caught. She should have listened to Alx when he said they had to remain inside until the ship was space-borne. There were no facilities in the container. She had to step out. It was not far, but there was no room in the narrow passage between stored containers for her wheelchair. She walked, moving through the hurt, but her legs gave up on the way back, her mind going black from pain. Alx said the ship computer’s internal scanner picked up a weight anomaly during a pre-flight check. It was investigated. They were found.

Her name and title made the incident disappear, though it took a personal call by the Minister on the Exoplanetary Institute’s Resident Coordinator. She was made to be present for that, sitting in her wheelchair and listening to the Coordinator, who was Earth’s colonial governor in all but title, go on promising to request better multi-language signage at the passenger terminals.

It was Alx who first proved to her that among the charlatans and money grabbers there was someone different. They had no name, though some called them Travelers. There was no official acknowledgment of their existence, but any sailor in a spaceport dive could whisper a tale if he had enough drinks in him. In their search they came across a few stories that appeared to be more than just drunken fantasy. All of them involved young desperate women. There seemed little in common between them, except for one thing: each girl was pronounced incurable. One had broken her back after falling off a horse, her body rejecting the prosthetic neural implant. Another had been suffering from blinding headaches and losing her sight. The third ... There were not many, but all the stories were remarkably consistent in a few key details. All the girls were noble born, yet none had been prominent in social circles. All had been taken from home and returned months later, all seemingly cured of whatever ailed them, but then every one of them promptly left home for the Enclave and vanished.

For the last year they researched everything they could about them. She found a common thread, and she herself dropped the hints where they would be seen. In the end she was not surprised when a Traveler showed up at the door of the small house her parents rented near the University Hospital in Keroon, the capital city and the largest port of the Nawabbi. She was expecting him, and she had accepted his offer. It was not a very generous one, but it was a chance she otherwise did not have.