Knell (2 page)

Uncle Marv moved toward her. “You are obscene and are damned to hell.”

“Fuck you, too, Uncle Marv. They will take away the scars you inflicted on a child that you should have protected and leave me as whole as God made me. I will bear no marks, and I intend to forget about all of you the moment that I leave the planet. There is nothing for me here if you know I exist and am having a life of my own. You would try to destroy it. Time for a fresh start.”

She turned her back and her mother shouted. “You are our daughter and we have a right to forbid you to go.”

Dot turned slowly and looked at the woman who had watched her brother almost beat her daughter to death without stopping him. “You gave me to Farrow Home. They authorized my release. You have no rights. You signed them away twelve years ago when you left me half dead on the reception room floor expecting them to clean up your mess.”

It was the last thing she said as she returned to the safety of the secure area. It wasn’t the worst meeting with her family that she had ever had. Knowing she had someone at her back had made all the difference.

The trip to the moon base had to be done in secrecy. The church that her parents belonged to was staging a protest regarding ungodly pursuits in the hunt for technology.

The terms of the departure contract were simple. Since her world could not offer her treatment for her mental sensitivity, they had to let her go, as she had no true life with her own kind. There had been hearings, and finally, the court had given in to her insistence when the police forces of the nine counties surrounding Farrow Home came forward to testify that her information had been useful and timely in averting disasters.

The rest of the case had been settled quickly, and she had been smuggled out under the cover of darkness to the shuttle and from there to the moon.

Dot was a little nervous about the base, but her instructors were friendly and they helped her through the withdrawal from the last of the medications that numbed her mind.

On the moon base, she found out that healing was not just something a body did, there were actually people who could encourage a body to heal with a touch of their hand. She took full advantage of the healers and was feeling refreshed and alert for the first time in over a decade.

“You are looking better, Dot.” Healer Tanson was using slow strokes of her hand to remove the scars on her back.

“Thank you. I feel better. I am just waiting for my physical strength to build up. I wasn’t aware that I was in such feeble shape until I got my assessment tests.” She wrinkled her nose as she stared toward the floor through the loop of the massage table.

“You are doing well. I am saying that as a healer. The change in your muscles is palpable.”

Dot chuckled. “Not everyone will be giving me a back rub. Everyone else has to gauge my improvement on my track speeds and weight pressing.”

“Well, once your body is strong, your mental training will commence. You are nearly to a solid base that will let the minder take over your training. It will be fine. Have you had any issues here at the base?”

Dot smiled and grunted as the tingle of Tanson’s touch kept roving over her and breaking down the scars. “Nothing major. I am guessing that the initial assessment was right. I have to be in proximity to disaster to sense it. The base is pretty quiet. I have only picked up on a few broken limbs.”

Tanson finished the massage. “Yes, and because of your warning, we were ready to repair the damage before it could move on to infection or embolism.”

“I am sure that everything would have been fine without me.” She sat up, clutching the sheet under her to her breasts.

“I am not so sure. There was a reason that the voices haunted you. The injured might not have been found in time to stop complications.”

“If that is the most that I hear, I am glad. It is a relief from fires and floods.”

Tanson laughed and draped another sheet over her back. “No atmosphere here and no water on the surface. No worries.”

Dot sighed and shifted. “I think you managed to loosen things up a little.”

“You are a week away from normal skin. There might still be a little shine from the old marks, but they will be hard to see unless you are looking for them.”

“I understand.” She had been warned that only flame healers could take care of the tissue completely, but since there currently wasn’t one on the base, she had to make do with Tanson’s regenerative touch. It was nice; Dot got a massage and the scar removal at the same time.

“All right, off to the warm room for you. I want you to keep those muscles relaxed for an hour.” Tanson smiled, her gaze warm and her four grey-green hands rubbing against each other as she cleaned up after the healing.

Dot headed off to the hot room with the rear sheet tucked around her and she dropped the front sheet before entering the hot room.

Two other humans were in the hot room after their workouts, and Dot sat nearby. “Afternoon, Anna, Willow.”

Willow smiled. “Good afternoon, Dot. You are looking better every day.”

Anna was leaning back with her eyes closed, and Dot became sure that she was actually sleeping. The snoring gave it away.

“Thank you, Willow. You look like you took a bit of a beating.” There was no other way to say it. Willow looked exhausted and there were red marks on her cheeks.

“I did. Combat training sucks, but it is necessary. We are heading out there and we won’t have police to call on when we get where we are going. If you can’t depend on your own skills, why would anyone want to take you on?” Willow sighed and leaned back.

Dot nodded. “That is the same thing I keep telling myself. I wonder if that is why they picked us?”

Willow chuckled. “It could be. Stranger things have happened.”

Dot sighed and leaned back against the bench. “Tomorrow I start my conditioning in earnest. If your face is any indication, I am going to be in trouble.”

“It is fine. I was in stick training today. Ikvaro is a good trainer. It is sad really.”

Dot sat up. She was scheduled to train with Ikvaro in the morning. “What is sad?”

“Well, the rumour is that he was in love with one of the trainees, but they never acted on it and then she went missing while on assignment. He hasn’t been the same from what my other instructors have said.” Willow sighed.

Dot had seen Ikvaro and it was indeed sad. He was so very attractive that if he had found a woman he wanted to give his heart to, she had to be someone special. To have that person taken from him before they could start anything had to have left a hole in his soul.

Dot had only had one person leave her life poorer for their disappearance. Her pop-pop died when she was seventeen, and he had bequeathed funds to pay for her stay at Farrow Home. It was only in the last week that she had learned that she was his sole heir and her family had pillaged the estate. They had wanted to keep her in the home so that she would never learn what they had done.

Her Pop-pop had given her a legacy and they had pissed it away. It explained a lot of the hostility that she faced.

Her grandfather had been her only visitor in her early days at Farrow Home until he couldn’t make the trip anymore. His death had followed swiftly.

Dot sighed and cleared her mind. Being obsessed with death was not a good thing to be, it left her a little grim.

After her hour, Dot woke Anna and followed Willow out by fifteen minutes. A quick solar shower and she was ready to put on her generic grey bodysuit and get to her language lessons.

A schedule had to be maintained.

Two months of training, language, driving and dance lessons changed Dot’s body from the feeble and awkward creature who had existed at Farrow Home. With the help of Minder Xaruck, Dot had learned to portion her mind and that had opened a whole new universe to her.

By taking her daily reflexes, sensations and thoughts and separating them from the part of her mind open to the temporal warnings, she had been able to expand her scope to cover the entire moon. It was dizzying at times, living in two timelines at once, but she got used to it with the help of her instructors.

Her mind heard one set of events while her ears heard what was going on around her. The sensory conflict would need to be addressed in the long term, but in the short term, they gave her a psychic muffle that numbed the volume of the voices in her mind.

Clairaudient was her description, and as she worked to get a handle on everything she was, her trainers were thrashing around to find her a placement on a world that could use her talents. She could only hear the events even after training. It meant that she had a limited appeal to the Alliance, but apparently, the Nyal Imperium was not so fussy.

Her posting on Nixos was in the works, but it was difficult to send an untrained psychic into a situation on one of the most violent worlds in the Imperium. Frankly, given what she had learned about it, Dot wasn’t convinced that her brain wasn’t going to explode.

Nixos had a group of Guardians on it, a paranormally gifted gathering of men and women who worked to keep the chaos to a minimum. They were the folk that needed convincing. They would have to protect her and that made her a liability. If they weren’t willing to take that on, she wasn’t going to have much of a chance.

Dot worked on the Nyal yoga that her instructor was teaching her. She stretched, pulled and felt her body hum with energy. She grimaced and switched positions. More energy was what she didn’t need. She was living on the edge of anticipation and she was about to fall off.

A shadow cruised across her. “Hello, Trainer Ikvaro.”

“Get to your feet, trainee. There is a high-protocol conference going on and you need to be part of it.”

The manner that he had taken on gave her a clue as to how serious this was. She got to her feet, grabbed a towel and blotted off the sweat on her face before following him.

He didn’t say a word, but they walked past the communications centre to the boardroom where all of her instructors were lined up on pedestals and facing a projection of four very alien creatures that Dot’s mind began to catalogue as she looked.

Ikvaro took one of the spare pedestals and pointed at the remaining blank space for Dot.

She stepped into place, and she was suddenly staring at the physical forms of the four members of the Nixos Guardian detachment. “Well, this is peculiar.”

The foremost member had huge dark wings and skin touched with dark plum. He was a crossbreed of at least two species, and her limited knowledge couldn’t pin down the second, though the Enjel was clear.

“Trainee McKenna, your Representative Norz has been most insistent that we bring you onto Nixos, and your trainers believe the same. I want you to tell me why you think you need to be here.”

He stood in his armoured suit with his mixed-blood group behind him, and he stared at her with scarlet eyes in pools of black.

Dot stood calmly and said, “I have been painting the skies above Nixos since I was a child, since before my talent emerged into something noticeable. It is the only constant in my life and the only thing that I see that relates to my own existence and not someone else’s. When others feel pain and panic, I hear their screams, moans and cries for help and I hear it in enough time to do something about it, if there is someone there to listen.

“I do not always know how to find them, but with the help of someone who can help decipher what I am hearing, I can be a tool for the safety and lives of the inhabitants of Nixos. All I know is that is the only image I have ever been given, so that is where I need to be.”

She stood calmly and waited while their image disappeared. She had said what needed to be said.

Dot looked around and felt her heart thump at the familiar faces of her doctor, therapist, healer, minder, trainer and etiquette instructor as all smiled back at her. They had all come to speak on her behalf, and she was touched beyond words.

It felt so odd to make friends easily among people who actually knew what she was and how her mind differed from most.

No one spoke. No one moved. Three minutes of silence passed before the display lit up once again and the four strangers were all staring at her with focus.

The man with the wings inclined his head. “Specialist Dorothea McKenna of the Alliance Protectorate of Terra. We extend formal acceptance to you in your capacity as Oracle.”

She swallowed and nodded. “Thank you.”

“We will expect you within ten days. Good evening.” He bowed shortly, and he and the other men disappeared.

The room erupted into cheers and Dot was suddenly hugged and patted on all sides. This was what they had been working toward and it had just come to pass. She was going to Nixos.

Shaking, she smiled as they bustled her down to the refectory for a celebratory snack. It still hadn’t sunk in, but their words reverberated through her mind. She was going to Nixos.

Dot sent a final message to her parents and stepped into the cryo pod. She was being sent by courier, and since her sensitivity to a space jump was unknown, they had agreed that she would be put into cold sleep for transport.

Her tutors and trainers were all there to see her off. She waved at them as Doc Algerat put the connections into her flesh. When she felt herself growing tired, she lay back and hoped for a swift transport. She wanted to be on the world of her dreams as soon as she could.

Dot carried the work of seven other people within her, and she had promised to keep them apprised of how she was doing. She closed her eyes and dreamed of Nixos.

Hands moved over her quickly, heat crept into her from the skin inward. Dot shivered and tried to open her eyes, but they were covered with something. Grimacing, she pawed at her eyes and heard a chuckle.

“Easy, short stuff. This is for your own good. We don’t want you going into shock.”

The things on her eyes were soft to the touch and the voice was deep but soothing. She settled. “Where am I?”