Touched by an Alien

like hours as the water washed my tears down the drain. Finally, though, the tears stopped. And I was left with one certainty: This wasn’t over yet. I wasn’t letting William Cox die for nothing.

CHAPTER 55
    I SPENT MOST OF THE NEXT DAY and a half sleeping. I really wanted to see Martini, and during one period of actual consciousness I convinced a random A-C to take me to the isolation area.
    It wasn’t one or two chambers, as I’d been naively expecting. It was over a hundred isolation chambers covering a full half of one of the lower levels. The A-C explained that all empaths needed isolation from time to time, as blocks and empathic synapses wore out. Reader had told me this, of course, but somehow I’d still imagined something small and somewhat cozy.
    The A-C went about his business, and I wandered through the chambers. There was nothing cozy here, and it was easy to see why Reader felt creeped out in this area. They reminded me of large tombs with medical beds and equipment in them and not much else. Each one had a large window in the door, so you could look in. The empath inside couldn’t look out—the beds were turned so the occupant would be facing a blank wall.
    Per my A-C guide, there were smaller home models for use with empathic children. There were a few of those down here, too. They looked like space-aged coffins. The mere idea of having to spend time in either kind of chamber was horrifying, but nothing compared to seeing Martini in an active one.
    I reached his room. There were two A-C security guards and some medical personnel outside, monitoring. I was allowed to peek in—and a quick look was enough. There were tubes and needles going into Martini all over his body. There were even some going into his head. I wanted to break down the door, rip everything out of him, and take him away, pronto.
    “You need to leave,” one of the doctors said quietly. She didn’t sound as though she was trying to be nasty.
    “Why?”
    “The rooms are emotion-proofed, but Commander Martini is very powerful, and he can feel your distress.” She showed me an electronic pad that was flashing red and orange.
    I felt awful. “Sorry.”
    She smiled. “It’s okay. Isolation is harder for nonempaths to watch than it is for the empaths themselves.”
    I found that hard to believe, but didn’t argue. I headed back, but I got lost. This was like getting lost in some creepy Egyptian tomb or the Frankenstein burial ground. I wasn’t a fan, and I got jumpy fast. I kept thinking someone was following me, but every time I turned around, no one was there. A few times, I was sure I’d just missed seeing whoever it was, but I was too chicken to go find out. By the time I finally found the elevators, I was an emotional wreck. I managed to find my room, crawled into bed, and hid under the covers until I fell asleep again.
    For my next bout of consciousness I wanted to talk to Reader, but he and Paul were also sequestered, though only in their rooms, not in some horrible Chamber of Horrors. I couldn’t blame them or resent it.
    I spent the time instead sending a lot of text messages to a lot of people, in which I practiced lying in new and unusual ways. Work seemed to find my absence acceptable; I wasn’t sure if this was a reflection on what they thought of my daily contributions or if White had cleared things for me already. I decided not to care.
    To everyone else, I managed to make what was going on with me sound totally boring, to the point where no one other than Chuckie seemed worried or even interested. Chuckie refused to buy any line I tried to pass, mostly because I refused to let him call me. He was like my mother— I couldn’t lie to him because he never fell for it—and there was no way I could hope to fool him if he could actually hear my voice.
    I finally told him that my parents were with me and they were okay with things, and he let it go. I rejoiced that I’d managed to lie to one of my best friends for exactly three seconds, congratulated myself for clearly hurting Chuckie’s feelings for another three seconds, then wallowed in guilt over it for a nice long while. The guilt was exhausting, but the crying really tired me out, and I fell back asleep to dream about fighter planes somehow carrying everyone I knew and cared about crashing in the desert.
    By the time I dragged out of bed in the late afternoon of the second day, I was lonely, and by the time I’d wandered the whole Science