Psion Gamma (31 page)

“Oh good. You found it.”

“This?” Jeffie asked holding the envelope.

“What else?” Strawberry never bothered containing her excitement. “Are you going to say yes?”

“I don’t know,” Jeffie muttered. “That’s what I was just thinking about. You put it in my pillow?”

“Naturally.” Strawberry gave a short bow and sat down on the bed next to Jeffie.

Jeffie exhaled hard and said, “Do you think I should go?”

“Yes!” Strawberry said breathlessly. “Kobe is so cute. Antonio likes him, too. Well, everyone likes him except—”

“Brickert,” they finished together.

“But you can’t do everything to please Brickert!” Strawberry pleaded.

“Trust me, I know.” Jeffie laughed but not in a mirthful way.

“You don’t owe anyone anything. You’re allowed to go on dates. Especially with stunningly cute boys with stunningly cute dimples.”

“But I told him to slow it down and give me some time. He gave me a week. I’m supposed to reward him for that?”

“He’s a boy, Jeffie. You’re lucky he waited a week.”

Jeffie knew her roommate was right. And after all, it was just a date. She’d never even gone on one with Sammy. “Okay. You’re right. I’ll go.”

“Yay!” Strawberry cheered, bouncing and clapping in place.

Jeffie looked at the envelope again with a half smile.
So he can be thoughtful
, she mused to herself as she pulled her com off the charger and sent Kobe a short text accepting his invitation.

March 25, 2086

S
AMMY AND TOAD SPENT TIME RESTING
from their travels. Thomas and Lara gave them a bedroom, three square meals, and tried to keep them involved (or at least informed) with what was going on around the palace, but Sammy didn’t like sitting around doing nothing. Too much time on his hands left him with bad thoughts of home, Rio, Stripe, and walking forever with horrific hunger pains.

During this time, Sammy noticed that Thomas and Lara acted differently around him than Toad. Lara instantly liked Toad and established a matronly bond with him, but with Sammy she spoke very softly, as though he was delicate. Meanwhile, Thomas would often ask Sammy if he was happy and comfortable, if he was okay with the food and living arrangements, or whether he needed anything that hadn’t been offered.

They had pancakes for breakfast on Monday the 25
^th
. Sammy noted the date because Brickert’s birthday was only a week away, and he had hoped to be back in time to celebrate it. Toad ate like he wanted to break the world record for most pancakes downed in one meal. Lara watched him with a bemused expression. Twice during the meal Sammy caught Thomas glancing nervously in his direction. Each time he met the older man’s gaze, Thomas’s eyes returned to his holo-tablet where he read the morning news.

It was Lara who spoke up. “You know, Sammy, I think Dr. Vogt wants to examine you again.”

Sammy noticed that soft tone in her voice.
Careful
, he thought,
she’s being careful
.

“Oh yes,” Thomas added in a similar tone. “He’s been out of town, but he should be back sometime today. I think he did mention that.”

“What for?” Sammy asked.

Thomas shrugged. “Just to check a couple things.” The look in his eyes told Sammy that Thomas wasn’t being completely truthful.

“I—uh—I told the doctor about what happened to you in Rio,” Toad admitted.

Sammy threw down his fork. “What did you do that for?” he yelled. Thomas stood up quickly, and Lara moved closer to Toad.

“Toad did the right thing, Sammy,” she said.

“It’s not his place to say anything about me!” Sammy stared at Toad, who would not look back at him.

Lara and Thomas exchanged a wary glance, and this made Sammy even madder.

“The doctor’s not here,” Thomas reminded him, “no need to worry. You can see him after lunch.”

Sammy stared at Toad, who, in turn, stared at his plate, occasionally sniffing. Again he had to fight back the darkness inside of him that wanted to do violent things to those who made him angry.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I’ll be in my room.”

The afternoon came quickly. Sammy read
Great Expectations
on his bed until Dr. Vogt came for him.

“Ready, Sammy?” the doctor said with a light tap on the door. He was wearing neither a doctor’s coat nor a stethoscope, just a pair of relatively new jeans, tennis shoes, and a maroon and gold t-shirt with the word MONARCHS printed across the chest. “Back upstairs we go.”

“What’s this all about?” Sammy asked when they sat down in Dr. Vogt’s office.

“I want to talk some more about what you went through in Rio. Not just what the Aegis did to you, but the time you spent in isolation before that. You must be pretty messed up inside.” He tapped the side of Sammy’s head.

“I’m fine.” Sammy’s statement came out monotone and unconvincing.

Dr. Vogt put his hands in his lap and stared at Sammy for a good ten seconds. “To be perfectly honest with you, I’m a medical doctor. I have a degree in psychology from Hastings College, but that was almost twenty years ago. After that, I went to Johns Hopkins Medical School.”

“So, you’re a psychiatrist?”

“No, I was an internist. So I’m about as qualified to treat whatever is going on in your brain as you are to treat my ulcers.”

Sammy saw the smile in Vogt’s brown eyes, even if it didn’t reach his mouth.

“Then how are you supposed to help?” he asked the doctor.

“I thought you said you’re fine.”

“I am.”

“I didn’t bring you up here to waste time, Sammy. Just admit you have a problem so we can get on with it.” Dr. Vogt’s tone of voice wasn’t harsh, but frank.

It angered Sammy to be spoken to that way. Fresh memories of his time spent with Stripe played in his mind like an out-of-focus holo-film. Tears crept into his eyes, and he had to bow his head to hide them.

“You were tortured, Sammy,” Dr. Vogt said in the same, frank voice.

A barrage of emotions slammed into Sammy, and he found himself reeling from betrayal, fear, anger, and shame all at once. Each emotion was like a different anvil pressing down on his chest and shoulders. It was so much that he didn’t know how he could cope with it.

“You don’t know anything about it!” He glared at the doctor as he spoke.

“Do you want help?”

Sammy tried to gain control over his emotions but couldn’t. A pump inside him was regurgitating up his darkest feelings, and he couldn’t find the off switch.

The tears kept flowing.

“Because if you want help, I’ll try. It’s got to be better than having all the junk stewing in your brain. Right?”

An old wooden clock on the wall ticked the time away and rain pellets tapped on the window panes. Sammy hadn’t noticed until now, but a big storm was rolling through.

“Have you suffered any hallucinations? Any distortions in reality? Anything odd or upsetting?”

Sammy mumbled a few words about a crocodile and his leg.

“I didn’t catch that.”

It sounded so stupid to Sammy that he wouldn’t repeat it.

Dr. Vogt folded his arms across his chest and sighed impatiently. “Look here. From the short time I’ve been observing you, I’ve been very impressed. You seem to be extremely emotionally stable and—”

This time Sammy shook his head madly.

“What?” the doctor asked.

“I’m not—I’m not . . . stable.” The things he wanted to say were humiliating, but he wanted to be rid of the demon inside him. He’d managed to bury the memories by focusing on making it to Wichita and fighting off gnawing hunger, but over the last few days they had been resurfacing. Reading had helped a little. “I—I’m—I wake up from horrible dreams every morning scared so badly I think I’m going to pee on myself. Sometimes Toad annoys me so much I want to kill him . . . and I imagine ways of doing it. He sniffs all the time!”

The doctor looked up from the paper he’d been scrawling on as Sammy spoke. “He has a badly deviated septum and it clogs his nose. Combine that with his ultra-kinetic anomaly and it’s a recipe for a Tourrettes-like tick.”

Sammy shook his head in the same irritated way. There was one more thing he had to say. Swallowing hard, he forced himself to tell the doctor the most embarrassing thing of all. “And I’m not smart.”

“Oh? I beg to differ. Just getting here proves you’re very smart.”

“No! I figured out all that stuff before I was—before everything happened. I used to be able to—to see!” He shouted the last words and banged his fist on the arm of his chair. The chair trembled lightly. Tears flowed again, but he wiped them away as if they were acid.

“See what?” the doctor asked, jumping slightly in alarm at the unexpected outburst.

“I don’t how to describe it. My brain,” he explained, tapping his head just as the doctor had. “It figured things out so clearly that I could see it sometimes.”

“You mean your Anomaly Eleven?”

Sammy nodded slowly.

“And now you can’t? You can’t see?”

Admitting it made Sammy feel naked, even more than when the doctor had examined his skin from head to toe and every part in between. He wasn’t the same person anymore, and a part of him he’d loved so much—a part he’d come to depend on—was gone. And the idea that he might never get it back was unbearable. All because of Stripe, because he had been stranded in Rio, and because all the Psions back home thought he was dead. Sammy wished now that he could go back to Rio and do worse things to Stripe than what he had. He wished he had fought the Aegis in Floyd’s store, and even if he’d died, at least he wouldn’t have suffered through all this crap.

The doctor’s hand gently rested on his shoulder. “I’d like to help you, Sammy.”

“How?” Sammy cried. “I’m so screwed up! Even if I make it back home, no one’s going to know me.”

“Half of that is right. You are messed up. But your youth and your intelligence will help you heal. Are you willing to try?”

Sammy gave a great sniff.

“Who’s sniffing now?” the doctor asked.

An abrupt laugh came from Sammy, and he felt a little better.

Dr. Vogt left his hand on Sammy’s shoulder and continued speaking. “It’s funny because I was fascinated by psychology in college. It was my major. Then I went to medical school and never got to use it. I fell in love with surgery, and it was more exciting. Now all I ever do is give people stitches or antibiotics. I’d love to help you. We can work through this. I’m not saying I can cure you, but I can help. Since you got here, I’ve been looking through different resources and studies on torture victims, abused children and spouses. Things to help rebuild the psyche.”

“What’s a psyche?” Sammy asked.

“I’ll teach you all of that. But the kind of therapy I have in mind is intense, and it’ll last about a month. You’ll have only limited contact with Toad and Thomas and Lara. You and I will have very involved discussions about yourself and what happened to you when you were tortured. It may very well be as hard to go through as what caused the damage to your mind. Do you think you can handle that?”

“I guess.”

“Don’t give me an ‘I guess’ answer, Sammy. I need a commitment. A month is a long time, and I know how badly you want to get back home—”

“NO!” Sammy rose out of his seat. “I want to be whole again before I go back. I want to feel . . . like myself. And I’m not myself.”

The thought of his friends whispering behind his back, knowing they thought of him as a psycho . . . If he went back to headquarters, he needed to be the person that they knew, otherwise he would never really be home.

“You’re okay with beginning right away?” Dr. Vogt asked.

Sammy didn’t answer. He was still absorbed in daydreams of his friends staring at him with frightened expressions.

“Did you hear me?”

Sammy jerked out of his reverie. “Huh? No.”

“I said we’ll start right away. Again, I’m no psychologist. I’m not trained to do this, but I’m as qualified as anyone you’re going to meet around here. And I want to see you through this.”

Outside the window, rain and hail came down in sheets. Wind blowing off the windows and walls of the building howled like ghosts. A tiny sliver of sunlight broke through the vast cover of gray-black clouds in the sky.

Sammy sighed. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

Dr. Vogt got up from his chair and went to his bookshelf. “I sleep here, you know. The infirmary is my apartment. You’ll be here with me after breakfast until dinner every day. I’ll give homework to keep you busy at night.”

“Oh, great.” Sammy tried to grin, but his face felt tight as though he hadn’t smiled in ages. He watched Vogt pull several books down off his shelf. Nine total.