Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Failure is total. The malfunction has burned lesions into her brain. Probability of full recovery is negligible.

—Dr.Nils Verhoeven in report to Shoshanna and Henry Scott (11 November 2075)

AUDEN WOKE IN her bed, dressed in a nightgown of plain white that reminded her of a hospital smock. Looking at her bedside table, she took in the date and time as projected by the small device attached to the wall just above.

Three days since the day she might've come face-to-face with a feline changeling.

Auden was used to losing time, but of late, since she'd begun to regain a semblance of coherence, she usually had basic awareness of what she'd done through the day. Fuzzy and faded and confused memories, but memories .

But when she looked back through the past three days, all she got was a blank.

Yet her legs and arms ached as she got up, as she moved. Not the ache of pain. The ache of exercise.

Rising, she padded across the carpet and into her bathroom suite. Her arm brushed the inside left wall to bring up a soft light even as she continued on to stand in front of the mirror. Her hair was in braids tight to her skull. The work was clean and precise, intricate; it would've taken three hours at the very least.

Yet she had no memory of strands tugging at her scalp.

As she had no memory of making the decision to adopt this style. It wasn't her. Her father's mother had taught her that it was an excellent option to protect her hair from breakage, and had made her wear her hair that way through her childhood.

No choice. No discussion.

Perhaps that was why adult Auden never utilized it. She liked to pull her hair back into a single knot, or—when she was at home, with no outsiders around—to leave it out but pushed back from her face using sleek hairclips.

A vague awareness of something inside her mind…but she wasn't afraid.

A surge of protectiveness washed over her instead, and she found herself touching her abdomen. There was no protuberance, but she'd lost her slightly concave shape.

"I'm pregnant."

She felt no surprise at that. What she didn't understand was why she was pregnant. Even at only a quarter away from twenty-four, she was too young by the standards of Psy society, and far too young per the standards of her family. The Jacksons weighed each individual on their merits, but the Scotts had a firm rule: no reproduction contracts until at least thirty. The family—her mother —simply would not support any earlier applications.

And the Scotts, Shoshanna, were her family now. She wasn't and would never be a Jackson again.

Information so embedded in her memories that she remembered it as rote.

Charisma…had told her something, but Auden couldn't remember what now. However, while that lack of memory was blurry, today and yesterday and the day before were a total blank. Suddenly remembering what else Charisma had told her, she returned to her bedside table to pick up the pocket organizer that lay beside a bottle of water.

"I'll create a diary for you on this." Charisma's voice coming into focus in Auden's thoughts. "You can make entries in it of course, but I'll also enter information on the days when you aren't fully mentally present. That way, you can read back and see what occurred over the day. Dr.Verhoeven believes it may help you maintain longer periods of coherence."

The last entry glowed on the screen the instant she scanned it open using her voiceprint. Charisma's name and familial code pulsed at the very top.

Auden, you decided you needed to exercise. As Dr.Verhoeven's colleague in obstetrics has encouraged appropriate exercise during the pregnancy, I took you to the private gym set up in the household security HQ after calling in a personal trainer under contract to the family. (He has signed an ironclad NDA and knows the penalty for any breach will be severe in the extreme.)

Your mother authorized these actions during her short twenty-four-hour visit.

You exercised with him for an hour, and he took care to ease you into it, and to not permit you to do anything too strenuous all at once. You were breathing hard by the end, but completed the exercises he set. The trainer has suggested you make this a daily routine so that you can build up the strength you've lost in the years since the initial failure.

I didn't confirm or reject the plan—that's up to you. But I have placed the trainer in a rental residence in the adjacent town so that you can utilize his services as required.

Auden tried to remember lifting weights, tried to remember walking or doing stretches, or even seeing Charisma's slender form and dark hair, and came up against that same blank wall. But…no, the wall wasn't quite blank. There was a taste on her tongue, a slickness of metal that made her wonder if she'd cut herself, was tasting her own blood.

But when she checked in the mirror, she had no cuts inside her mouth.

Yet the taste of metal persisted. It also came back four days later, and with it, another—larger—blank in her memories. She brought it up to Charisma at that point, and the other woman had Dr.Verhoeven check her over.

His conclusion was that her brain was burning itself out as it functioned at full capacity again for periods. "It'll settle down," he promised her. "Right now, it looks like you're going into a variation of the ordinary psychic flameout. In this state, your mind can no longer create memories for a period. You had major neural damage—such hiccups are to be expected."

That didn't sound right to Auden, especially when Charisma's notes in the diary indicated that Auden was coherent and determined to proceed with her self-assigned tasks during those same periods, but she didn't have the words to argue back. Not then, and not in the weeks that followed, as the memory blackouts grew in volume until the metal on her tongue was a taste so strong that she threw up from it one night.

Her cheek on cold tile. Her throat choking. Her body spasming.

Baby. My baby!

Alarms going off.

A rush of feet.

A pink-red face over her. "—overload! Get her to—"

Later, snatches of a room with machines that hummed and beeped, fine tubes going from her body and outward.

"—stop for the—" Charisma's sharp voice, fading in and out of her consciousness. "—won't be—"

"It could've caused a miscarriage. You must convince her to limit—"

Nothing, her thoughts as tangled and as soft as snarled wool.

The taste of metal was gone when Auden surfaced the next time, and though she waited, it didn't return in the days that followed. She still lost time, but those memories were present, just fragmented and blurry. No chunks of blankness, more as if an omnipotent being had taken a bad eraser to penciled-in thoughts and left behind a mess of smudges.

Yellow-green eyes wild and hot with anger.

Claws hard and deadly.

A touch that burned.

That false memory would not fade, would not vanish. It haunted her in her dreams, through which prowled a big cat whose form she couldn't quite pinpoint. All she could see were his eyes glowing in the darkness…