Fervor (23 page)

The Finder’s rescue efforts had come just in time. Elliot’s thoughts were horribly tangled, like he had been trapped in some terrifying nightmare that he could not escape. There was an inflexibility to the technician’s mind that hadn’t allowed Elliot to adapt when confronted with something that seemed far beyond his comprehension. Children’s minds were more like uncongealed gelatin, willing to shift and flow as necessary. It was already assumed that there were things that they might not understand and that they might have to accept at face value. Elliot’s mature mind, on the other hand, was searching for something concrete, something well-defined within the connection, and he had not been able to find it. That was the primary cause of his psychological distress.

While Sam and Francis struggled with Elliot, trying to bring his walls up to minimal standards, Sarah stood in front of Fiona’s locked door, begging the young woman to let her in. Sam could follow their conversation on a basic level, although most of his attention was required to keep his walls up around Elliot.

“
Maybe I can help. I helped Nathan and Francis a little. It’s not as bad as it seems, Fiona. The stasis is down, and your body is just trying to catch up to where it should be,”
the Fixer said, trying to reassure her
. “Let me in, please. We’re all going through our own issues at the moment.”

“
You have no idea,” Fiona moaned quietly. “I’m not coming out of here ever. It’s awful. I’m a complete mess. I don’t want Nathan seeing me like this.”

“
Fiona, be reasonable. You know that we can’t make anything work around here without you,”
Sarah sighed, not sure why the Keeper was so reluctant to let her in. She didn’t want to resort to having Francis order Fiona to unlock her door. That would just aggravate an already unhealthy situation.
“Besides, Nathan more than likely won’t be seeing anything. He’s under strict orders from Francis to try to avoid looking at any of us, and he’s not supposed to make contact with us without keeping solid walls up.”

“
What?” Fiona protested. She wanted to voice her annoyance loudly, but she was still subject to Francis’s earlier command. “Now he’s messing with Nathan’s head? Why that weasely, good-for-nothing, pain in the...”

“
Don’t be like that, Fiona,”
the Fixer chastised.
“It was necessary, for Elliot’s sake – and therefore for our sake, too. Just open the door. Let me come in. Sam and Francis won’t see anything, I promise. They are too busy with Elliot.”

“
Elliot?” the Keeper sniffled. “Did you finish fixing him? Is he okay? Can we talk to him?”

Sarah welcomed the distraction as far as negating Fiona’s outcry against the Teller, but it still had not assisted her any at getting through the locked door.

“
I finished doing what I can for him, but he’s not okay – not yet, anyway. Sam and Francis are helping him to set up walls. There’s a problem with introducing adults to the connection. Elliot found that out the hard way. Francis said that that was why the stasis was in place to begin with. He says...”
But Fiona didn’t allow her to finish the thought.

“
Oh, so now he’s finally talking, now that we are buried up to our necks in steaming manure. First Royce, and now this. This knowledge would have been much more useful to us ahead of time. He thinks he’s going to win my favour by offering us information that we were in the process of learning anyway? How does that prove anything?”

“
That’s not fair,”
Sarah contested.
“I told you we needed to let him in on what was going on sooner, but you wouldn’t listen. You claimed he wasn’t trustworthy.”

“
He isn’t,” Fiona stated bluntly.

The argument between the Fixer and the Keeper was proving to be a greater distraction than Sam had anticipated, and he felt his walls slipping. He glanced over at Francis with concern. The Teller was also having trouble concentrating with the two girls bickering in the background.

“
Enough!” Francis barked, and everything went silent. It stayed that way until Francis had made sufficient progress that he felt comfortable testing Elliot’s ability with what he had just been taught. Sam lowered his walls, and everything seemed to be functioning well enough that Elliot appeared to be no longer at risk.

“
Let me talk to Fiona,”
he thought softly at Sam and Francis, who had maintained their link with him in case they had needed to jump in for him again.
“This would be a lot simpler if I was a woman. While I know what she is faced with in theory, I haven’t experienced it myself. Still, I think I can offer her some solace if she’s willing to hear me out.”

Sam was amazed at how faint Elliot still was in the connection, even though he had been properly fixed by Sarah and he was sitting there in front of them in person. It was almost as though he were a ghost instead of a real being. Sam felt like reaching out and touching the man just to make sure that he was actually there and not some sort of illusion sent by the scholars to trick them.

Francis hunched his shoulders and shot a quick look at her door.

“
You are free to do as you please if you can get her to listen. I think they gave us the most stubborn Keeper on all of Fervor.”

“
She’s frightened. That much I can understand. What they did to you is so wrong. And what they did to your parents...”
Elliot hesitated, and Sam could tell that this statement was directed at Francis and not himself.
“We have an awful lot to discuss, and I’ll tell you everything that I know, I promise you that, but this will be a lot for all of you to digest, probably best handled in smaller doses. And then there’s the issue of my hover, not to mention the fact that if they picked up on anything unusual from your Watcher, this could be over before it has barely had a chance to begin.”

“
What about my parents?”
Sam asked.

Elliot gave him a look that the boy knew could only mean that he was treading in places where the technician was not prepared to go just yet.

“
That will have to wait,”
Elliot sighed, looking very uncomfortable.
“I will have an awful lot to explain before we get to that. It could get – awkward.”
Sam wasn’t sure that he wanted to know what Elliot meant by that.

“
It’s worst than that,”
Francis confessed.
“We had problems with our Control. I had to report him. I would have refrained if I had had any idea what these three were up to, but they left me in the dark. I don’t know what the scholars will be doing to respond to that. It wasn’t a problem that they had been anticipating.”

“
But you told Royce that they might be sending someone to get him. You didn’t know?”
Sam said, surprised.

“
It was a possibility. It still is, and if they send someone to replace him, or come in to investigate our house-family as a result...well, let’s just say that if Elliot here has any specific plans, we can’t allow for any delays. The longer we let things go, the more likely we could be facing another kind of trouble,”
the Teller replied.

Sam had a feeling that when Francis was saying “we”, the emphasis was more on himself. He was the one who was supposed to uphold the Directives in intent as well as in what was written. If they were caught, Francis would be the one taking the fall and bearing the brunt of any punishment, along with Elliot.

“
Well, I can’t accomplish what I need to if Fiona won’t come out of her room,”
the technician assured them.
“Let me see what I can do.”

He approached her door, standing next to Sarah and spoke to her quietly, not making use of the connection. That in itself seemed to encourage the young woman, and moments later Fiona allowed entry to Elliot and Sarah, locking the door once more after them.

Sam watched Francis stare at the door for a few moments before he wandered away again, hissing in pain. He wished the Teller were not such an enigma, and he would have traded his greatest find to know what Francis was thinking at that moment.

Challenges

Fiona did spend a fair amount of time speaking with Elliot and Sarah in her room, but she continued to refuse to come out and put her walls up to everyone else. She agreed that she would come out eventually, when she was feeling more at ease with everything that had happened, but at the moment she was still in shock and in pain, and would rather suffer alone than face her insecurities.

Sam did feel bad for the Keeper. She had never handled any changes well, and this one added insult to injury. Nevertheless, he could not imagine that things were as bad as Fiona was making them out to be. Not that he would know for sure. Sarah would not talk about it to Sam, respecting Fiona’s wishes.

By that point, Sam was starting to feel a little isolated. Elliot had returned to Sarah’s room, in need of more rest, and the Fixer sat outside of Francis’s room waiting for him to come out again. The whole house-family seemed to be in an unnatural state of disorder, and Sam didn’t like it at all.

Realizing that everyone had forgotten about Nathan, dealing with their own problems, Sam decided that he had better check in on their Watcher. Francis seemed fairly convinced that Nathan would manage just fine, but the Finder wanted to make sure of that himself.

Sam suspected that, where Francis was concerned, there was a little bit of bias when it came to Nathan. He didn’t understand this, because Nathan had always respected Francis’s authority, had never resisted the Teller’s instructions, and hadn’t held him at fault the way that Fiona had. The only suggestion of defiance from Nathan that Sam had ever seen had been a matter of compulsion, when the Watcher felt that the safety of one of his family members had been somehow placed in jeopardy. In fact, of anyone one in the house, Nathan had always been the most carefree, the most kind, and the most forgiving. Any tension between the two of them clearly originated from Francis, and without any obvious explanation.

Sam could sense that Nathan’s walls were unusually thick that day when he reached for him through the connection. Francis had indeed succeeded in helping the Watcher compensate for any distraction caused by his painful transformation. Sam knocked really hard, and after a few moments Nathan let him in.

How are things going, Nathan? You looked pretty bad when you headed out this morning. I’m sorry about all of this, especially the lack of warning. We wanted to tell you what was going on, but under the circumstances, we couldn’t.”

“
It’s okay, little buddy – I guess I can still call you that can’t I? You’re not so little anymore, but you are still smaller than me.”
Nathan chuckled a little internally, with a bit of a mental groan
. “It still hurts, a lot, but I’ll get by. And I understand you not telling me anything about your ‘new friend’. It only makes sense considering everything that Francis told me. How are the rest of you handling all of this? Are you and Sarah okay? What about Fiona? I know that she was still asleep when I left. The last couple of times I took a break, when it got to be too much, I tried to talk to her but she wouldn’t answer me. Did I do something to make her angry with me
?” There was a hint of anxiety in the Watcher’s question.

“
No, Nathan – it’s nothing like that. She’s shutting everyone out right now. She spoke for a little while with Sarah and Elliot but...”
Sam began.

“
Don’t use his name when you speak to me, Sam,”
Nathan interrupted.
“Francis warned me not to. You never know when they might be listening in.”

“
They won’t be able to hear anything. Your walls are rock solid. I tested them myself,”
Sam assured him.

“
That may be so right now, but you never know when I might let them slip, especially with all of this pain. It’s like someone’s trying to stretch me from the inside out. And places are itching too – places that shouldn’t be itching. I never missed any of the pain or itching over the last few years. I didn’t mind giving that up,”
the young man admitted.