Damage Control - ARC (19 page)

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.

J
ade’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 said 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.

After that, she couldn’t identify anything.
It didn’t help that all she wanted to do was smash it all, instead
of study it. Of course, if she could have gotten out of the therapy
capsule to smash anything, she wouldn’t have bothered with that,
either. But trying to figure out what was in front of her was
better than thinking about being stuck here, and about her lost
chance to escape.

And of course, that’s exactly what she did
think about for precisely 27 minutes, according to the Chuzekk
clock. But it felt more like five hours.

When she heard footsteps again, she smiled.
“Nurse!” she called. “Nurse, I have a question.”

The footsteps grew louder, and Jade grinned
so wide her cheeks hurt. She could feel her top lip pull tight
against her gum. She’d never been so happy to see a person she
disliked, but any company was better than being alone and unable to
move a muscle.

But it wasn’t the nurse. “Perhaps I can
answer the question,” said Gyze, appearing around the corner of
some shiny things that looked like they could have been chrome
pipes or glass tubes.

“Gyze!” Jade didn’t realize she was screaming
until she heard herself.

He touched her mouth with his knuckle, and
bumped her teeth, since she was still smiling. “Capsule therapy is
unpleasant even for Chuzekks. I can only imagine what it is like
for an alien who has never even heard of it.”

“Gyze,” Jade said, her smile fading. “They
said my spinal cord is damaged. They said I have only limited use
of my legs.”

He looked at something to the right of her
head, where the nurse had looked. “That’s true, but you will be
better soon.”

“I hope you’re not just saying that. All I
can think about is I want to get home!”

He brought his left hand up to her face and
brushed the backs of his fingers across it from her left eyebrow to
her chin. “It is difficult to be patient, and time seems to
increase in a therapy capsule.”

“I miss Geonily so much!”

Gyze just looked at her and nodded.

“And my boyfriend, Diego.”

Gyze flinched, and Jade decided to change the
subject.

“You know what? This is silly, but I miss the
oak trees.”

“What are oak trees?”

“They’re big, strong hardwood trees that grow
behind my house. And in the fall...at this time of year, their
leaves turn orange and fall off.”

“On my planet there are bushes that turn
purple when an earthquake is coming.”

“That’s amazing! I wish we had bushes like
that. They must save a lot of lives.”

“Not as many as they should. They are almost
extinct.”

“Oh, that’s not good. How do they work?”

“No one knows. Our scientists have studied
that question for many dozens of years.”

“Do you really think I’ll get better? All the
way better? Or at least so I can walk again?”

“Yes. You just need some patience, and you
will heal soon.”

“Is this ‘therapy capsule’ really necessary?
The thing is worse than the garoshh.”

“Much worse. Yes, it is necessary.”

“I just want to go to my room and get better
there.”

“They cannot move the therapy capsules to
patients’ rooms. They’re integrated—“

“Into the hospital, I know. I didn’t mean
that. On Earth, when people get injured, they rest in bed, and heal
that way.”

“That sounds like a slow process,” said
Gyze.

“Not really. I broke my ankle once and—“

Jade stopped talking when Gyze caught his
breath and stared at the readout to the right of her head.

“What’s wrong now?” She almost didn’t want to
know.

“Nothing.”

“It’s alright, you can tell me.”

The squinty nurse walked up behind him, just
as the front of the therapy capsule began to swing slowly outward,
opening the capsule and letting Jade slip down until she was
standing on the floor.

“I told you that you would be better soon,”
said Gyze, “but you did not believe me.”

“What? You mean that’s it, I’m all...”

“You are healed,” said the nurse, “and you
may go home.”

“So that’s what? Totally healed? I have to
come back for more sessions, or what?” Jade rocked up on her toes
and stretched each leg gently, waiting for the shooting nerve pain
to come back.

“Totally healed,” Gyze laughed. “You are free
of the therapy capsule until the next time you attempt to correct a
keev.”

“I can go back to my room today!” said Jade.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I told you ‘soon,’” Gyze replied. “Is that
the wrong word?”

“No, it’s the right word. It’s just that
‘You’ll be better soon’ is usually just a polite thing to say in my
culture. You just say it to make someone feel better.”

“You are healed,” said the nurse, “but you
will not go back to your room today.”

Jade put her face in her hands and hung on
tight, trying not to lose control. One moment of weakness and she
could end up with Chuzekk claws in her spinal cord again.

“You are going home,” the nurse explained,
“to Earth.”

T
haddeus walked past
a nervous Chuzekk soldier on foot patrol, ducked into the Bierhuis
and ordered his usual Heineken.