Mikkel

Piper came for me a short time later. By the sound of his breathing and the stumble of his uncertain, halted steps, I could sense his fear before he came near me. He grabbed hold of my left arm and started to pull me up, but then stopped and let me down again, unsure of how he was to carry me.

"Just pull me to my feet and let me lean on you," I said. "I can walk to the clinic from here as long as I have someone for support."

He didn't say anything, but responded with another strong pull on my arm, lifting me to my feet. While we walked, I dug into his mind, more out of curiosity than anything. He couldn't feel me connecting to his nerves and he had no idea what I could do. In fact, from what information I took from him, he knew nothing of Indigo Children, which surprised me, considering the people he worked with. Surely, Dr. Gore had written down all he had learned about Cory. And Miles, to my understanding, was still wanting to study her further. But it seemed, none of that was shared with Piper, the outsider of outsiders.

Instead, his mind was filled with little, self-conscious things—nervous things—like the constant desire to hide his Motherland accent. Or his fear of being afraid and some uncomfortable, hurt feeling concerning his family back home and his college. I didn't bother to dig into those thoughts. I didn't care to find out what family issues he had. The most important thing I gained from his mind was this: He had an unbreakable desire to help people and his self-identity was being peeled away from him. He was indeed a student of Dr. Gore.

"You've got to be kidding me," I said. The three of us patients of Dr. Gore were all in the same room together. I was the only one conscious even though all I wanted to do was sleep. Miles insisted on locking the guns away in one of the other rooms and wouldn't let me take even the one that I had had before. So instead, I sat on my cot looking over the two surviving Jaggars: the twitcher and the man he had shot. "Of all the people to survive that fray, it had to be the hothead that started it," I said.

"I'm sure you provoked him," Miles said from where he stood over the first casualty, checking his vitals and recording the numbers.

"Only to speed things up," I said. "He still would have been the one to start it. How is he, anyway."

"Which one?" Miles said. He looked back and forth between the two men.

"Your casualty."

Miles nodded at the man on his right. "He'll live. His blood oxygen level is still low, and he's having a hard time breathing, but he'll live."

"How does it feel to hold a gun again?" I said.

Miles gave me an awful look. "Why would you say something like that?"

"I was just curious to know if you ever feel any satisfaction for standing up for good and destroying evil. Or if pacifism had rotted you so far as to not feel passion for passion. If your marriage is any indication--"

"You shut up," Miles said. "What do you know about any of that? You know nothing."

"You know, for a pacifist, you resort to anger easily." It always intrigued me to see how much anger can grow when it's mentioned. Miles's jaw tightened. He clenched his fists and then let out a breath and relaxed a bit. He said nothing.

I tried to stand, but my feet had barely touched the floor before the blood drained out of my head and I fell back onto the bed.

Miles shook his head. "Stay in bed. If you're going to heal yourself, you'll need rest and energy. I'll get you something to eat."

I had never had to heal myself before. Honestly, I didn't even know how it worked. I just told Cory the basic theory about it and she took off with it. As prone to fatal injuries as she was, it was important that she had a way of recovering quickly.

I, however, never needed the talent. Nor did I care to sit around a room full of Jaggars and think about my blood flow for the next several hours. I needed to get back to the estate and talk to the woman I had hidden in the house—the one with skin, not the sack of bones in my closet. She was who I wanted to spend all my mental energy on. The information she had could tip the scales of our future battle with the Jaggars.

I started to drift off in thought about how to win over her trust when I heard the bang and crack of the clinic door breaking down. I jumped off the bed, but still couldn't stand and only crumpled to the floor as smoke grenades rolled into the room. There was no time to react before the room filled with smoke. Miles's form disappeared behind a screen of white. In another room of the clinic, I heard Piper gasp and Dr. Gore beg the intruders for peace. Then something hit my head.