Viv sat next to Judy. “Good for you. It will help.”
“I hope so. I don’t know what to expect.”
“Just be open and honest, and everything will be great.” Viv poked Judy in the side. “Don’t you agree?”
“Openness and honesty are a good idea in most cases, not just in therapy,” Judy said. She sat up and smoothed her skirt, then cursed. “I forgot about your stupid cats. There’s long hairs everywhere.”
“They shed more in the summer. You can use the lint roller. Didn’t you have dogs growing up? Those shed, too.”
Judy accepted the lint roller with a scowl. “They were familiars that looked like dogs. The illusion doesn’t extend to making them seem to shed.”
“Well, a little cat hair never hurt anyone.”
“Unless they’re allergic,” Viv pointed out.
“All right, except for then.” A thought occurred to me. “I have to email the other custodians about what Lucia told me, and about what happened yesterday in the store.”
Judy and Viv followed me into the kitchen, where I set up my laptop on the table and opened my email program. “I hope they’re all all right,” I said. “I should have done this last night, but I was overwhelmed.”
“It’s fine,” Viv said. “If anything had happened, we’d have heard about it.”
“I don’t know. The Sanctuary is mostly off the grid.” I typed my message about what Lucia had said as succinctly as possible. Then I hesitated. Where to start? Just thinking about yesterday’s events made me tremble again. I told myself to stop being stupid and described the attack on the store, from Victor’s warning to the deaths of the invaders. I don’t know if your Neutralities are vulnerable to that kind of attack, I concluded, but as long as you’re consulting stone magi about the wards, you should find out the details. Though after what happened near Barga, maybe the threat isn’t what we thought it was.
I signed the email and hit Send. “That’s all I can do for now,” I said.
“Don’t you wonder what the authorities in Italy are going through?” Viv said. “I wish there were a way to reassure them they’re not dealing with a bioweapon.”
“They wouldn’t believe anyone who told them the truth,” Judy said. She brushed futilely at her skirt one last time and said, “Let’s go. Shopping, and smoothies, and lunch.”
I nodded agreement, but as I gathered my purse and put on my sandals, I couldn’t help glancing back at the TV. Even though it was off, I imagined I could see the pictures of the unnamed village they hadn’t shown—bodies fallen in the street, crashed cars, doors hanging open like someone had just stepped out—and wondered how long it would be before the invaders struck again.
6
Viv and Judy volunteered to drive with me to the node that afternoon, but I declined. I had no idea how long a therapy session lasted, and I didn’t want to make them sit around if it was a long time. Not to mention it made me feel like a little kid taking her mommy along to the doctor. I was a grown woman, and needing therapy didn’t make me weak.
I parked in the gravel yard next to the airplane hangar that was the entrance to the Gunther Node and crunched my way up to the smooth concrete. The thorny circle on the floor had recently been repainted and looked more pale pink than white now. I wondered whether magic went into the painting, or whether the circle was just a mundane way of marking the space where the teleportation happened.
I spoke my name into the telephone handset on the back wall, took my place within the circle, and two seconds later the world blinked, and I was elsewhere. The cavernous, three-story-tall central hub of the Gunther Node bustled with Wardens, some of them carrying folders or tablets, others pushing mine carts full of glowing purple ore that was unprocessed raw magic. Nobody paid any attention to me, which was comforting. I already felt like I was wearing a sign saying Mentally Unstable.
The rainbow-colored spaghetti tangle of lines painted on the polished concrete floor was no help to me, since I rarely came here, but I didn’t need it because I’d been to Green 1 before. I set off toward the big opening rimmed in green paint where the infirmary was. The last time I’d been here, the hall had been full of injured Wardens and the stink of sulfur and burnt rubber. Now it smelled only of gardenias, a strange contrast to the industrial hardness of cold concrete walls. People still filled the hall, but they walked at a normal pace, not the breakneck speed of a life or death situation. Again, no one showed any interest in me beyond some polite nods and smiles. I relaxed. This would be all right.
The wooden doors lining the hall had large glass windows filled with wire mesh that reminded me of my middle school, though that had smelled of paint and boiled cabbage rather than gardenias. Almost all the rooms were unoccupied, something I knew because there were curtains on the inside and most of them were drawn back to reveal empty beds and dormant medical monitors. There were a lot of rooms, and I knew there were other halls in the infirmary with even more of them. It was frightening to remember a time only a few months back when all these rooms had been needed. The attack on the Gunther Node by invaders who’d breached its wards had devastated the Wardens. We’d won, but at a tremendous cost.
After a minute or so of walking, I neared a big open space, this one brightly lit with white lights. It had a lower ceiling than most of the halls in the node, and the walls were painted a warm cream, giving it a comforting look most hospitals lacked. The operating tables filling it dispelled that comforting feeling, especially when I remembered the screaming that had echoed through this room the last time I’d been here. None of the tables were occupied now. It was quieter than the hall, as if people respected it as a place of healing even when no healing was going on.
I made for a circular desk in the center of the room that reminded me of a nursing station in a hospital, though I’d never seen one in the middle of a room before. Two Wardens in hospital scrubs, one maroon, one teal, stood behind the desk. The maroon Warden was typing rapidly and swearing under her breath at whatever showed on the computer screen. The teal Warden looked up from his tablet as I approached. “Ms. Campbell, right?” he said, coming around the desk to shake my hand. “Owen Jefferson. It’s good to meet you.”
“Um, you too,” I said. “I don’t know…what do I do now? Is there paperwork?”
“We have a couple of pages of questions for you, yes. Sorry about that. We try to make it as easy as possible, but this provides background for your therapist so she has something to start from.”
So it was a woman. “What’s her name?”
“Sydney Fallon. She has a lot of experience working with the kinds of trauma Wardens usually suffer.” Owen rooted around behind the desk and pulled out a clipboard with some papers clipped to it and a ballpoint pen. “Be as complete as you can. There aren’t any right or wrong answers.”
I glanced at the top sheet. There was a place for my name and then a long list of questions with bubbles next to them like on a standardized test, only these were for responses ranging from “Never” to “Almost Always.” I found a chair next to the wall and began filling out the form. Despite what Owen had said, I couldn’t help thinking of how this Sydney person would interpret my answers. If I said, in answer to question five, that I felt something was wrong with my mind, did that mean I was crazy? It was tempting to guess what would make me look normal. I closed my eyes briefly and berated myself. I was here for help, and if I lied about how I felt or thought, that wouldn’t happen.