Guardian Angel (35 page)

“What about the other girl?” I asked. “The little one. What happened to her?”

“I think she’s okay. Terry left her in Scott’s place before the fighting started.”

“Good,” I said quietly.

“Who is she?”

“Someone who belongs with the Angels,” I replied. “So I guess she’ll be going home soon. Alia will be happy when I tell her.”

I looked over at the bed. My sister’s breathing was still pretty shallow, but otherwise she seemed comfortable. Closing my eyes for a moment, I decided that I would tell her about Marion first, and wait till she recovered her full strength before telling her about Terry.

As we sat together waiting for the dawn, Candace asked me about my time in the Resistance, and I told her what little I could. But I would have preferred to sit in silence, and Candace eventually got the message. We sat quietly for several more hours, and once we started yawning a little too frequently, I closed my eyes and asked Candace if she could telepathically call Ed Regis up to relieve us.

I woke on the sofa with Candace’s head on my shoulder. Candace had fallen asleep too, but Ed Regis was sitting in another chair, watching over my sister. By the light streaming in through the curtains, I guessed it was around noon.

Ed Regis turned to me and said pleasantly, “Good morning, Adrian.”

“Is it?” I asked quietly so as not to wake Candace.

“Well, Alia’s still alive,” said Ed Regis. “And Scott said he could get a message out to the Guardian Council. We might still be in time to warn the Resistance about what Raider was up to.”

“Then I guess it is a good morning.”

Ed Regis frowned, saying, “Scott and Rachael told me about Terry. They said she was killed.”

I nodded with my eyes. “I heard too.”

“So I guess it’s just you and me now, huh?”

“And Alia,” I reminded him.

“Yeah,” he breathed. “About Alia… Dr. Hanson says he’s going to call a friend that he’s sure he can trust. The guy’s a physician, and he’ll be able to set up the feeding tubes and everything.”

“Feeding tubes…” I repeated quietly.

“Well, we don’t know how long she’ll be out, after all,” said Ed Regis. “I figured that as long as we’re trusting Dr. Hanson, we might as well trust him all the way. The vet has done all he can, Adrian. We need a human doctor now.”

“She hasn’t woken yet?” I asked. “Not even for a few seconds?”

“Not yet.”

“I guess it’s still too early,” I said, moving my head and accidentally waking Candace.

“Rise and shine,” I said to her. “It’s a new day.”

Borrowing Dr. Hanson’s motorcycle, Scott had left early in the morning to send out our warning message to the Guardian Council. Though I didn’t have the details, I knew that this wasn’t as simple as making a phone call or mailing a letter. Even if all went smoothly, Scott wouldn’t be back until late night, maybe even early tomorrow morning.

Before sending Scott out, Ed Regis had also asked him to pass on our request for any information they had related to the Angels’ Royal Gate. Ed Regis had carefully debriefed our new teammates without giving away our true target. The official line was that we were still hunting King Divine and that the Royal Gate was our ticket to his hideout. We weren’t very hopeful that the Council could provide us with useable intelligence, but it was a start.

Rachael had given Scott all the hiding protection she could: enough to last him two full days. I knew how worried she was and sympathized with her, but my primary concern was still my sister. I sat by Alia’s bed all day and called her name over and over. She didn’t open her eyes, and I heard nothing in my head.

The physician, Dr. Greene, arrived in the late afternoon. He was the same age as Dr. Hanson, and they had been friends since high school. As much as he trusted his friend, Dr. Greene was skeptical about the existence of psionics. Candace, who we discovered had become a graviton in addition to a telepath, made him a believer.

“I’ll be goddamned,” said Dr. Greene when he found that his feet had become too heavy to lift, anchoring him to the floor.

“You will be if you tell anyone,” Ed Regis warned him. “I guarantee it.”

Before leading him up to Alia’s room, we briefly explained to the doctor about the psionic world, the war and what we were trying to do. Just like with Dr. Hanson, we didn’t give him too many details, but enough to satisfy his curiosity and feed his fears about what could happen if he loosened his lips. I also gave him a little of Alia’s personal history so that he wouldn’t be too shocked by all the other scars on her body.

Dr. Greene gave my sister as complete an examination as was possible with just the contents of his medical bag. He looked at Alia’s eyes and in her mouth, listened to her heart and breathing with a stethoscope, checked her motor reflexes and measured her blood pressure. In other words, nothing more than the basics that anyone would get at a common health examination, but I was immensely grateful nonetheless. Dr. Greene also looked over Dr. Hanson’s handiwork on Alia’s bullet holes, and then jokingly concluded that if ever he was shot, he wanted a vet to handle the operation. I wasn’t amused, but I was relieved to hear Dr. Greene’s praise of Dr. Hanson’s skill.

Then he gave us the bad news.

“To the best of my diagnostic capabilities, I suspect that Alia is in a coma,” said Dr. Greene, “probably caused by temporary lack of oxygen to the brain during her injury.”

“Please speak plainly, Doctor,” I said. “How long do you think she’ll be asleep?”

“To be honest, I don’t know,” said Dr. Greene. “A coma can last hours, days, weeks…”

“Months?” asked Ed Regis. “Years?”

“It’s impossible to say,” said Dr. Greene. “But if she has major brain damage, then it’s quite possible that she will never wake.”

“You just said you didn’t know!” I countered angrily.

“Without taking her to a hospital, yes,” Dr. Greene replied calmly. “I am no expert in this field myself, but I do know that people who recover from trauma cases like this usually start to show improvement within hours, or a few days at the very most. So we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Patience, Adrian.

“She just needs time to recover her strength,” I said. “She’ll wake up in a day or two.”

“She could very well do just that,” the doctor agreed in a cautious voice. “What’s important is that you’re there when she does, Adrian. Do you understand me?”

I nodded.

“I’ll check in on her every two days,” promised Dr. Greene. “But if anything changes, you call me immediately, alright?”

“Thank you, Doctor,” I said, breathing slightly easier.

Dr. Greene then taught us how to insert and use Alia’s feeding tube, which went into her nose and down her throat. I had some direct experience with these tubes myself, but I still didn’t like using them on my sister. There was just something disturbing about how people looked with plastic tubes sticking into their bodies, and I didn’t like seeing my sister that way. But Alia had to eat somehow if she was to recover.

Dr. Greene further explained that the feeding tube had to be regularly removed and replaced to avoid various medical complications, and that, if Alia didn’t wake in a few weeks, she would eventually need a more permanent kind of tube that went directly into the front of her stomach, sort of like an umbilical cord. I assured the doctor that this wouldn’t be necessary.

But taking care of an unconscious person wasn’t just about feeding her through her nose.

“Adrian,” Candace said awkwardly, “I know you’re her brother and you’re sort of her mother and father too, but Alia’s almost a teenager now. I don’t think she’d want you to… you know… so I’ll handle all of her washing and her diaper-changing and all that, okay?”

“Be my guest,” I said, grateful for Candace’s offer.

Dr. Greene stayed for dinner. Our host, apparently overjoyed to have so many houseguests at once, prepared a gorgeous feast for us. But I didn’t have much of an appetite. It wasn’t just the feeding tube stuck into Alia’s nose, but Dr. Greene’s words about comas and brain damage. Of course I knew he was wrong. I knew that my sister would recover. But I still couldn’t eat.

Scott returned safely just before midnight.

“Mission complete, message delivered,” reported Scott. “I just hope we’re in time.”

“Did you learn anything from your contact?” asked Ed Regis. “Any news?”

“Yeah, they told me that Wood-claw joined the Angels,” Scott replied wryly, adding, “They almost shot me before I could convince them that I wasn’t converted.”

“What about the Royal Gate?” asked Ed Regis.

“They said they’d look into it,” said Scott. “I’ll have to check back in a week.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “It’ll give my sister time to recover and I could use a week’s rest too.”

I figured that once Alia regained consciousness, she could use her healing power to accelerate her recovery. As long as she woke up in the next few days, then if the Council really could point us toward the Royal Gate, we would already be prepared to move out. The loss of Wood-claw had made me realize again just how little time was left to us.

“Come on, Ali,” I whispered to her before I turned in for the night. “Snap out of this so we can go finish this war together.”

When I woke the next morning, my sister was still asleep. She looked as physically stable as Dr. Greene had claimed, but also just as brain-dead. Her eyes remained shut, her body completely limp. I reminded myself that I had been unconscious for longer periods of time, such as when I had drowned in the sinking towboat.

Candace shooed me out of the room so she could change Alia’s diaper and give her a sponge bath, and later we sat together on the sofa again, waiting.

That evening, on a hunch, I pulled Alia’s blanket down and lifted her shirt to examine the large square bandage on her abdomen. I carefully peeled it off, and smiled. The wound had already healed.

“Alia, wake up,” I said happily. “Wake up!”

My sister didn’t move, so finally I even shook her shoulders a little, but she remained oblivious to my calls.

Dr. Greene stopped by the next day to check up on us.

“A miracle!” he exclaimed, examining the light scarring over the otherwise completely healed entry and exit points on Alia’s body. “Truly marvelous power.”

“I told you she was special,” I said, adding confidently, “She’ll be up any day now.”

But despite his amazement at Alia’s psionic healing, the doctor wasn’t as convinced. “I’m afraid she is still showing no changes in her bodily reflexes,” he said after the examination. “She is still comatose.”

“Trust me, Doctor,” I said to him. “She’ll be up by tomorrow.”

But Alia didn’t wake up the next day, nor the next.

Nor the next.

I took to quietly meditating in Dr. Hanson’s guestroom, sitting on the floor cross-legged like I used to do with Cindy, trying to find an inner peace that just wasn’t there to be found. At nights, I slept fitfully on the sofa or on the floor next to Alia’s bed. Whenever I thought I heard the slightest whisper in my head, I immediately pulled my sister’s eyelids up and looked anxiously into her dark pupils, desperately searching for any sign of recognition or consciousness. But nothing changed.

Scott returned safely from his second meeting with his Council contact, but he bore grave news. The Council had passed our warning to the Resistance, but not soon enough for them to prepare countermeasures. The Seraphim attacked the very next day, and even though Raider’s mapping mission had ended prematurely, Guardian safe houses all across Lumina had been decimated. The full casualty count wasn’t in yet, but the Council believed that more than two thirds of the Resistance was lost. Mark and Proton were both unaccounted for, which meant that they were either dead or captured. And if they had been captured, once they were converted, the Angels would know the exact locations of the remaining safe houses.

“It’s over,” concluded Scott. “We lost.”

“The Council isn’t giving up, is it?” asked Rachael.

“No,” said Scott, “but in a few more months, it’ll hardly make a difference.”

“We can still make a difference,” said Ed Regis. “We just need to find the Royal Gate.”

Scott shook his head. “The Council reps claim that they haven’t even heard of the Royal Gate. They could be lying, of course. That kind of intelligence would be top secret, and they wouldn’t easily share it with independents like us.”

“You’ll need to ask them again,” said Ed Regis. “Convince them to help us. We gave them a heads-up on Raider’s mission. Even if it didn’t work, they owe us their trust.”

“I’ll try again in a few days.”

He did, but once again returned with nothing to report regarding the Royal Gate. I didn’t care. I wasn’t leaving here without my sister.

March was upon us, and as each day and night passed in silence, I felt like I was thirteen years old again, back at the PRC, drained and helpless. I started to hate Dr. Greene’s visits. Every time he checked Alia over, his answer was unchanging except to note how many days Alia had gone without any sign of improvement.

Dr. Greene wasn’t a coma specialist, but he had done a fair amount of reading on the subject since first seeing Alia. Personally, I didn’t want to hear the ugly details, but Ed Regis asked Dr. Greene for them, so I was required to listen too.

“Perhaps you’ve seen a movie or television show where a person who has been in a coma for years suddenly wakes up,” said Dr. Greene. “Unfortunately, that hardly ever happens in real life. The only reason we sometimes hear about such miracles in the news is because they are so very rare. Far more commonly, a comatose patient progresses into PVS, or ‘persistent vegetative state.’ And neither coma nor PVS are stable, non-progressive conditions. Various medical complications arise from long-term immobility.”

“Such as?” asked Ed Regis.

“Muscles waste away while limbs become contracted. Lungs can become scarred and collapse over time. Then there are various infections, ulcers–”

“I get it,” interrupted Ed Regis, who also seemed to regret asking for specifics.

Dr. Greene nodded understandingly. “The point is, Mr. Regis, if she doesn’t show any sign of improvement in the very near future, you will have to start considering more long-term care. I know you can’t simply put a psionic up in a major hospital, but comatose patients can do well on home care.”