Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls - Jane Lindskold [77]
“I said ‘Hello, Sarah,’” Dr. Haas says in a voice that contains the rumble of distant thunder. “Don’t you like talking?”
Still spinning, although more slowly now, I manage an angry, “Sure.”
“Sure? That’s it?”
She’s enjoying my discomfort so much I can hardly bear it. Betwixt and Between hiss softly in one ear; Athena churrs and tightens her claw grip on my shoulder. Then, suddenly, I remember a single word.
Consensus.
She can’t do this without my permission. My anger shifts from her to myself. It seems that I have been running from her, letting her order my life, since her first appearance at the Home.
“Yeah,” I finally reply. “That’s it and so’s this.”
I concentrate, just as I did with Jersey and as easily as wiping steam vapor from a bathroom mirror, the setting changes to the familiar rope-strung cylinder of the Jungle. There is almost no resistance. I wonder at this until I realize that if I could make my presence known to Jersey, who created the interchange, surely I have the advantage over Dr. Haas.
Dr. Haas and I are on the same scale and I sit at ease on the edge of my hammock. She is gripping the edges of one of the cubwalks.
Athena launches from my shoulder and her departure sets me swinging. The vibration must be felt on the cubwalk as well, for Dr. Haas’s hands tighten on the guide ropes. Her smile fades.
“What is it you want me to check for you?” I ask, feeding a French fry to Betwixt, deftly dodging Between’s snaps at my fingers.
“Check out?” Dr. Haas says, nervously edging towards a ladder.
“Yes, isn’t that the reason for these visits? I check out something and then tell you about it.”
“Yeah.”
Dr. Haas stops and I feel her concentrating, see for a moment solid flooring and aluminum side rails transform the cubwalk into a sturdy bridge. I remember the Jungle as it was, my own fumbling first attempts at the Reaches, the joy of graduating from cubwalks to the lines. Her feeble reordering vanishes before my reality.
When she looks up at me, she is angry, her emerald eyes sparkling and hard. Maybe anger makes her say what she does next, maybe fear. Maybe just a desire to show me that she still has power over me.
“You’re a bitch, Sarah. You always were, even when you were a little, sniveling, snot-nosed brat who couldn’t even learn to finger sign.”
Her hands are shaking so hard that the cubwalk trembles, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Betwixt stops eating the French fry and Between doesn’t even dive for it, transfixed as I by the next words of the tirade.
“I was important. I was the first! Then Dylan came along and he looked like he was going to be even better. But when you were tested, I hated you because even baby tests said you were good, that you just might be the best of all! How I laughed when they learned you were crazy—that you couldn’t talk, couldn’t read or write or spell. Now they’d have to come back to me, back to poor little Eleanora.”
Now it is my time to shake. How had I not seen it before. Like me, blond hair, green eyes, but in her the colors were richer. We even had similar features, but the similarity was slight. Like stylized masks, our faces had been etched by our lives and hers had made her into a predator, a shark, lovely, graceful, and blood-hungry.
“Eleanora?” I push away disbelief. “Yes. But why have you treated me like this? We’re sisters. We’re alike.”
Eleanora Haas sneers, but there is something pathetic in her disdain. “Alike? Oh, no. In what matters, I am your poor copy.”
She starts inching toward the ladder again. “Dylan was good but he was naive. They’d kept him in a box, you see. No current events or news, no idea of how the information he was providing was being used. They did give him carefully edited old-time stuff: fairy tales, science fiction, romances. He had a cute idea of right and wrong and