“Complicates things,” Bose admitted. “But I’d still like your opinion.”

“Again, it would help if I knew what’s so important to you about Orrin and these notebooks of his.”

“Better if we discuss it tomorrow.”

Sandra negotiated the lunch details, a place reasonably close to State Care but slightly more upscale than the strip mall alternatives; then Bose said, “Gotta go. Thanks, Dr. Cole.”

“Sandra,” she said.

Chapter Five. Sandra and Bose

CHAPTER FOUR

TREYA’S STORY / ALLISON’S STORY

1.

You want to know what it was like, what happened to Vox and afterward?

Well, here it is.

Something to leave behind, you might say.

Something for the wind and the stars to read.

2.

I was born to the name Treya and a five-syllable suffix I won’t repeat here, but it might be better to think of me as Allison Pearl Mark II. I had a ten-year gestation, a painful eight-day labor, and a traumatic birth. From my first full day of life I knew I was a fraud, and I knew just as truly that I had no choice in the matter.

I was born seven days before Vox was due to cross the Arch to ancient Earth. I was born into the custody of rebel Farmers, born with my own blood weeping down my back. By the time I remembered how to speak the blood had mostly dried.

The Farmers had crushed and carved out of my body and subsequently destroyed my personal limbic implant, my Network interface, my node. Because the node had been attached to my spine at the third vertebra almost since birth, the pain was intense. I woke up from the trauma with waves of agony sparking up my neck and into my skull, but the worst part was what I didn’t feel, which was the rest of my body. I was numb from the shoulders down—numb, helpless, hurt and frightened beyond thought. Eventually the Farmers poked me with some kind of crude anesthetic from their primitive pharmacopoeia … not out of kindness, I suspect, but simply because they were tired of hearing me scream.

The next time I came to myself my body was tingling and itching unbearably, but that was okay because it meant I was recovering my physical functions. Even without the node, my augmented body systems were busy splicing damaged nerves and repairing bone. Which meant I would eventually be able to sit up, stand up, even walk. So I began to take a greater interest in my surroundings.