Chapter 23

Miles, I commend you for your continued consideration for a 2.7, but the decision has been made as per our majority vote in the contract: Theodora has been rehomed in a situation far more suitable for her. She will be educated as is appropriate to her Gradient level.

—Message from Marshall Hyde to Miles Faber (4 February 2063)

Nineteen Years Ago

THEO WAS SCARED, so scared that it made her bones hurt. She tried to resist being put into that white chair that looked like the reclining chair she had to sit in when the dentist checked her teeth. It was white and leather and it had belt things around it. She wasn’t scared of the dentist—she’d always found it interesting, all the tools he used, and the way he didn’t mind talking to her about what he was doing.

But there was no white-haired M-Psy specializing in dentistry in this room. Only the woman named Upashna who was probably a doctor because she wore a white coat like a doctor, her grandfather, and a man who also wore the same blue clothes as she’d seen on the people in the corridor. Only he didn’t have a white coat. That man looked at her when she tried to resist walking to the chair and suddenly she couldn’t move at all.

Even as she opened her mouth to scream, her grandfather said, “I expect you to behave like a Marshall, Theodora.” His voice was ice. “It’s only necessary to incapacitate you because you refuse to cooperate as you should. Now stop with the theatrics, take off that coat, and get into the scrubs provided for you.”

Theo didn’t know what scrubs were; however, she could see that the man she didn’t know had turned and was picking up a set of green clothes like the kind she’d seen on the man who’d cried and the woman who’d smashed her head against the wall. They didn’t make a very big pile and she understood that those must be scrubs and the pile wasn’t big because they were her size.

“I don’t want to be like the people outside, Grandfather,” she said to her grandfather, even as she struggled against the invisible force that held her in place. Her heart thudded, thudded, thudded. So hard, so fast. The man in blue, she understood, was a telekinetic just like the driver outside the door, and he was much stronger than Theo’s 2.7.

Panic was a siren inside her brain, making high-pitched sounds over and over again that blurred her vision.

“We’re not here to do that,” her grandfather said dismissively. “However, you do need a little help with your Silence, so get in the chair.”

But when the telekinetic released Theo, she didn’t move to the chair. Instead, she turned and tried to run away. She only got a few steps before the telekinetic stopped her again.

“This is ridiculous,” her grandfather said. “Get her out of the coat and up in the chair. We don’t need her in scrubs as long as her arms are exposed for the needles.”

It was the woman who took off Theo’s coat and put it aside. Theo stared into her eyes, hoping that she’d help her. Dr. Upashna had disagreed with whatever her grandfather wanted to do. But Theo should’ve known better. It didn’t matter how much the woman might disagree with Grandfather; he was the boss and Dr. Upashna would do exactly what he said.

No one touched Theo to get her to the chair itself; the telekinetic just lifted her up and put her on the cold white leather-synth. The landing was soft. He was very good at telekinesis, she thought in the part of her mind that liked to examine things, liked to take mechanical objects apart to see how they worked so she could then reassemble them.

Colette had even given her a game where Theo had to use her small amount of Tk to put tiny plas and metal pieces into holes meant for them. If she made a mistake and a piece touched the sides of the hole before slotting into the bottom, the board went red and she got a “strike” against her—she only had three strikes before she had to restart.

Theo spent hours playing it.

She was already on level twenty-eight.

Dr. Upashna went to a table full of bright silver tools. Theo’s heart kicked like the horse she’d seen on the comm screen inside a computronic shop once. She wished the man in blue wasn’t one of her grandfather’s people so that she could ask him what it was like to be a powerful telekinetic. Theo would never be able to stop anyone from moving. She could hardly even pick up a mug of nutrients and float it across the room. She could only move small things a little bit.

Now, the Tk used his hands to pull the straps on the chair across and over her so that she was tied down to the white chair. The straps were wide and they buckled tight on either side of her body, keeping her pinned in place even after the Tk released her from his power.

The worst was the strap against her forehead that stopped her from moving her head, making her stare straight up at the ceiling. It was pure white except for a small dot that she thought might’ve been a fruit fly. She hoped it was a fruit fly. If she pointed out that this room wasn’t clean like hospital rooms were supposed to be, maybe they would stop.

But something pricked her inside her elbow even as she was opening her mouth to speak, and she realized that the doctor was putting something inside her. Not a pressure injector. This was a needle all long and sharp and it hurt.

Why did she use a needle? No one used needles anymore, that was what she’d learned in her science lesson.

“C-cold.” Her teeth clattered as she tried to speak, to tell her grandfather that something had gone wrong and that a burning cold was spreading through her body from the point where Dr. Upashna had injected her.

But she couldn’t form words anymore. Her heart had started to race so fast that she thought it would jump out of her chest. The edges of the world went fuzzy, her spine tried to curve and lift her off the table. And then . . . Nothing.