Damage Control - ARC

by Mary Jeddore Blakney

  It was opened every day at this time by one of the guards. (There were 12 in the rotation, and always two on duty at once. She'd gotten to know them all.) The time never varied, and the words spoken by the guard didn't vary much, either. Sometimes in Chuzekk and sometimes in English, it was nearly always either, "You will go to the cafeteria now," or "We will take you to the cafeteria now." Jade grabbed her Personal Device and turned to go.

  But it wasn't one of the guards. It was Gyze. "Happy birthday," he said in English.

  "Thank you." She was about to say, 'come in,' but he didn't wait to be invited. He walked to the desk and set something down. It was a small cake on a six-sided plate with a matching transparent dome. "Happy Birthday!" was written in icing on the top of the cake.

  "I brought you a gift," he said. He handed her a small clipping from a newspaper. "It's from today's Houston paper."

  Her glasses weren't on the shelf. Then she'd probably left them on the coffee bar.

  "You should stretch your eyes," said Gyze.

  Jade stopped on the way to the coffee bar, turned around and looked at Gyze. "Stretch my eyes?"

  "Yes. I believe you have difficulty focusing them because you spent many hours looking at one place almost exclusively."

  She nodded. "Eyestrain, yeah."

  "Eye focus is a muscle action. Your eye muscles require stretching."

  "But you can't stretch your eyes, Gyze," said Jade, laughing. "I mean, we can't. Maybe you can."

  Gyze pursed his lips, as though trying to be patient, then said, "Yes, you can. Without moving your head, you should look up as far as you can..."

  Jade looked at the ceiling.

  "...then look to your right as far as you can..."

  She looked at the bathroom door, then realized she could see a little farther and concentrated on the wall to the right of it.

  "...then look down as far as you can..."

  She looked at the floor. She never had figured out if it was ceramic or quarried stone or something beyond her own experience.

  "...then look to your left as far as you can..."

  She looked at the wall beyond the couches.

  "...look up as far as you can again, then focus on something far, and immediately after, on something near."

  "Ouch," said Jade, and rubbed her eyes.

  "Perhaps a massage will help also," Gyze agreed in such a serious tone that Jade laughed.

  After that, the newspaper clipping was easy to read. It was the baseball standings. Her beloved Red Sox were the league leaders, but then they often were at this time of year. She wanted to hug Gyze but decided not to. "Wow, thank you," she said sincerely. "This is a great gift. I'm surprised you could get permission. I thought Chegg would say it could be a coded message."

  "It could be a coded message if the people making the graph knew you would see it."

  "I know," Jade replied. "You take everything too seriously, Gyze. They're not going to put a secret code all over every newspaper just in case—"

  The door opened again, and Leed and Vyke came in together with clam chowder and red glop. Soon one of the off-duty guards showed up with a table, then another with a bag of fruit and onions.

  Ten minutes later, Laitt arrived with Koll, five more of her guards, various Chuzekk vegetables, nuts and packaged foods, a ladder, various bits of hardware, a few tools, and something else. It was a very large item, oddly shaped, much longer than it was wide, and apparently made of plastic.

  "Hi, everyone, thanks for coming," said Jade, even though she knew it wasn't Chuzekk custom to say thank you, at least for something like that. She followed the strange object with her eyes as three cheejes carried it to the pool along with the ladder and the hardware and tools. "What is that thing?" she said to Laitt.

  "A slide." Laitt grabbed her Personal Device and spoke to it, and immediately an American pop song filled the room. Jade recognized the artist but not the song. It must have been a recent release. Laitt spoke to her Personal Device again to adjust the volume. It was satellite radio.

  "Increase the humidity," Koll ordered in Chuzekk, and the radio was interrupted by a voice asking, "How much increase do you require?"

  "Switch control to my Personal Device," Koll replied, reaching for it.

  Another group arrived, but Jade didn't recognize any of them.

  "Hello," said Jade. "Thanks for coming."

  "You're welcome," said one of them, a cheej. He grabbed Jade's hands with two fingers and shook it like a bottle of medicine, then reached for her other hand.

  Behind her, Gyze laughed. "That is not what is meant by shaking hands,” he said. He offered Jade his hand in the classic Human style, and Jade took it. They shook hands. "These people are all part of your interrogation team," he said to Jade.

  "Nice to meet you," she said to the strangers, then to Gyze she said, "So these are the people you work with every day."

  "Some, yes," he replied. "Some work in other areas of the interrogation and I see them less often. For example, the job of the three cheejes at the food table is to find supporting material."

  "Supporting material," said Jade, "like those documents Chegg puts on the wall sometimes?" she thought the air felt muggy. And she wondered if the three cheejes would be the ones taking her home tomorrow.

  "Yes." He took out his Personal Device, opened it and typed. The American female vocalist currently playing was interrupted in mid-syllable and replaced with a different one: apparently Gyze had changed the station. "I prefer internet radio," he explained. "It is easier to customize." He glanced at the cheej who had shaken Jade's hand, and a female cheej who stood beside him, and they opened their Personal Devices, too. While Jade stood watching, the three of them customized the music mix. She knew they were watching her reactions, as they tried style after style. It was interrogation practice, no doubt about it. But it fascinated her: usually she didn't get to see this side of the operation. Before long, the station was perfectly customized to her own unusual tastes: a little merengue, a little old-fashioned British rock'n'roll, a lot of modern Russian rock, and a lot of Chuzekk dance music with its deep-voiced male vocals, its techno-sounding air instruments and its warbly-sounding water instruments. She decided to keep listening to see if there were any songs sung by female artists.

  The guests certainly seemed to appreciate the change. Every time a Chuzekk song came on, a lot of them started dancing. Jade had to work hard to keep herself from laughing: Chuzekk dancing was hard to take seriously.

  But what surprised her was what happened with the first merengue song that came on after Gyze and his cheejes were through. Vyke called her name enthusiastically, crossed the floor quickly and began to dance the merengue in front of her. “Please dance with me," he asked in Chuzekk, and she tried, but his merengue was much better than hers. What made it worse was the humidity, which had increased beyond mugginess now. She could actually see it if she looked at the far wall.

  "Jade," a female cheej called from beside the pool as soon as the song was over, "you should be the first to use the slide."

  Jade shrugged, smiled, walked to the ladder and climbed it. When she got to the top she hesitated. Should she sit? No, she'd better not risk it. She lay on her stomach and let go, and slid down on her faltoopp, feeling a little bit like a turtle. Her boots hit the water first, with a splash.

  Two female interrogation cheejes jumped into the pool as soon as she was finished her slide. "The air is much too humid," said one in Chuzekk, and the other one said in English, "We find it annoying."

  "I'll see what I can do," said Jade, and began to swim toward the steps. But by the time she had reached them, the rest of her guards had arrived. She knew this more from sound than from sight: a haze hung in the air and made it hard to see across the room. She wrung out her hair and went to meet them at the food table. She'd barely said hello when the door opened again and Chegg walked in with a zeed she didn't know. She hadn't seen Chegg since the day he'd refused to let her call Geonily on
her birthday, and she didn't want to. Knowing she was going home tomorrow made it hard to keep on suppressing all the hate she felt for him. She decided to go look for Laitt, to see if anything could be done about the humidity.

  The fog made it nearly impossible to find anyone in particular, but by wandering around you tended to meet people randomly. You also tended to bang your shins a lot, but that didn't matter if you were wearing Chuzekk uniform-boots. The uneven floor was a problem: you had to step carefully to keep from tripping. Jade kept wandering until she managed to randomly meet Laitt. She almost randomly met Chegg, but when she realized it was Chegg, she turned and wandered in the opposite direction, fell into the pool and swam to the edge.

  When she did come across Laitt, she nearly collided with a male zeed. He and Laitt were slow-dancing even though the song was a fast one.

  "Do you like your party?" Laitt asked, still dancing and apparently not bothered by the intrusion.

  "Yes," Jade answered in Chuzekk. "But what is the fog for? Is it a Chuzekk tradition to have fog at a party?"

  "I don't know," said Laitt thoughtfully. "I have never heard of this tradition. I do not know the purpose of the fog."

  So Jade began wandering again. This time she didn't run into Chegg or fall into the pool. She nearly hit her head on the ladder, but it touched her hair first, and she stopped herself just in time. Eventually, she found Koll.

  "Koll," she asked without ceremony in Chuzekk, "why the fog?"

  "It is by your request," Koll answered, taking advantage as always of the chance to speak English with a native speaker.

  "There must be a mistake," said Jade. "I didn't ask for fog."

  "Laitt told me that you went to a birthday party that had a cloud, and that was nice."

  Jade buried her face in her hands and groaned. "Not a cloud," she said, looking up again. "A clown. A person dressed in colorful clothing, giant shoes and a red plastic nose. And I don't even want a clown at my own party. It's nice for children. A cloud! Thanks anyway, Koll, I appreciate it."

  In fifteen minutes the cloud was gone, and Jade could finally see her guests. They seemed to be enjoying themselves—talking, laughing, eating, drinking, dancing. Some were in the pool and some were out—in the air, as the Chuzekks called it. And from the look of the water splashed all over the room, she supposed that at least some of them had been going in and out of the pool frequently.

  Chegg was in the pool, and he saw her and started toward her.

  She made it to the bathroom door and opened it, but not before he caught up with her and grabbed her shoulder. The door swung shut again.

  He pulled her to the side and turned her around so her back was against the door. She was trapped between the bright red door and the big muddy-colored keev.

  For a moment they just looked at each other, he looking down and she looking up, his hands on the wall on either side of her, her arms stiffly at her sides. Then he spoke.

  "Why are you avoiding me?"

  She didn't speak. She didn't trust herself, for one thing. She was afraid that if she opened her mouth, she'd start to yell at him. And anyway, he knew why. She crossed her arms.

  His eyes twinkled and the corners of his mouth twitched. "I believe you are angry with me," he said in a playful voice, then broke into a full smile.

  It was too much. "Yes, I'm 'angry with you'!" she shouted up at him, and the song ended right then, letting her voice ring out clearly through the room. She didn't care. It felt good to finally say it to his face. "I don't care who you are!" she continued just as loudly, as a comedic British rock song from the beat generation began to play. "You have no right to interfere between a—"

  Hot pain erupted in the back of her neck as he grabbed her with the claws of his left hand, then a split second later it shot like shivering bolts of electricity down her back and through her limbs. He glared at her with narrow eyes and hissed a single word. "Gashh!"

  "Keev!" she gasped, and the pain subsided.

  17

  the cocoon

  Jade’s arms, her legs, even her fingers wouldn’t budge. All she could do was yell.

  She had woken up slowly, sleep still clinging to her mind for a long time after her first inkling of consciousness. It was one of those mornings when sleep paralysis lasts too long; the mind is awake and ready to control the body, but the body refuses to move.

  By degrees, she came to fuller alertness, and realized that whatever was going on was no sleep paralysis, and wherever she was, was not her bed. Her muscles contracted on command, but her limbs would not move. Whatever the Chuzekks were restraining her with this time made her wish for the relative freedom of the garoshh.

  She couldn’t move her head to see herself, but she could feel her arms and legs, her fingers and toes. She seemed to be upright with her hips and knees slightly bent and her arms sloping out from her body. Tingling pains and sensations of hot and cold came and went at random through her legs and back. Sometimes she felt a touch on her skin, as though a curtain were brushing past her as it blew in a summer breeze.

  Her eyes were open, but the jumble of unfamiliar shapes they saw held no meaning for her. It didn’t help that she couldn’t move her head even a millimeter to change her angle of view.

  She took a deep breath, half expecting the new restraint to prevent her from making even that much movement. Her chest expanded freely, though. Breathing seemed to be the only thing she was allowed to do, but that didn’t mean she had to be quiet about it. Hadn’t armies been using their voices to intimidate their enemies for millennia? She concentrated all her frustration into one loud, long roar.

  It sounded like the wail of a fussy toddler.

  She heard footsteps and realized she could tell by the sound that they belonged to an air person. They continued for a long time before their owner entered her field of vision. It was a female, small for a Chuzekk and with the same wider face and browner coloring she had noticed in the keev. Yet somehow, she looked nothing like him. Something about her eyes made Jade think of the word ‘squinty,’ and she disliked her immediately.

  “Mind telling me what’s going on?” Jade said.

  “Your spinal cord is damaged.”

  “What the hell do you mean, my spinal cord is damaged?” Jade spat out. “Don’t tell me I’m paralyzed. I mean, I think I have at least some use of my legs...at least.”

  The Chuzekk shifted her eyes from away from Jade for a moment, and seemed to be reading something beside her head. “That’s correct. You have limited use of your legs.”

  “Spinal cord damage and limited use of my legs! Isn’t that enough punishment? Why do I have to be in this garoshh on steroids, too?”

  The nurse, or whatever she was, shook her head. “You are not on steroids. Perhaps the residual effects of anesthesia resemble a previous experience you had with steroids.”

  Of all the Chuzekks swarming the solar system, why do I have to be stuck with this cold, arrogant bitch? Jade took a deep breath and tried to be patient. “I’m talking about this thing, this restraint. It’s like the garoshh they put me in, in the pod, pumped up on.... Oh, never mind. How come I have to be in this thing? Aren’t my injuries punishment enough?”

  The nurse’s mouth twitched into an amused smile, but it didn’t reach her voice. “You are in a therapy capsule. It is designed for medical treatment, not punishment.”

  “Medical treatment! I thought you lizards were supposed to be technologically advanced or something.”

  She had to find a way out of this thing, somehow. She had to get back to her room and talk to Fletcher, get him to make any adjustments that might be necessary to get her home in her new semi-paralyzed state. She could still hold up her end of the bargain, she would tell him. There was no reason not to go through with it. She could convince him to keep their deal, she would make sure of it. But first, she had to find a way to get out of this garoshh-on-steroids and back to her room.

  “How long am I going to be in this thing?” she s
aid out loud.

  The nurse shrugged. “As long as you need. Until you are better.”

  “And how long will that be, do you think?”

  “It depends on how well your nervous system responds to treatment. There are things you can do to make it more receptive.”

  “Yeah, right! I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but I can’t do anything.”

  “They are things you do with your mind.”

  “Can I just recover in my room?

  “Yes.”

  Jade could barely believe her ears. Freedom was still a possibility! She’d be back with Geonily again, and Diego, Liesel, Brooks and Becky.

  But the nurse was still talking. “We can recover anything you wish from your room. What do you want us to recover?”

  Muscles tightened all over Jade’s body, but of course, everything but her ribcage and her jaw was locked in place. Not even her toes moved. Suppressing the urge to scream, she took a deep breath and tried to let it out slowly. “No, I mean, can I get better in my room? Can I spend my healing time there?”

  The nurse shook her head. “No. The treatment pods are integrated into the rest of the hospital. You cannot heal in your room.” She turned her head away again, in a different direction this time. “There is another patient in distress. I will check on you later.” Then she turned quickly and marched back out of Jade’s field of vision.

  To keep her mind occupied, Jade tried to concentrate on the shapes in front of her and see if she could figure out what she was looking at. Seeing the Chuzekk nurse walk in and out of the room had given her a little bit of perspective, and a sense of the size and shape of the room. There was a clock almost straight in front of her, and a little high and to the right. It consisted of a small light, which apparently represented the sun, with a little model of a planet to the right of it. There were 12 hour-markers just outside the planet, and a little blue peg attached to the planet was the hour hand. The hour hand seemed to be pointing to about one-thirty, but if the placement of the sun-light was any indication, it was also evening, and the sun was down. Which sun, Jade couldn’t tell. Maybe it was the Chuzekk one.