Crystal Choice: The Second Novel in the Projector War Saga by K. A. Excell

Author:K. A. Excell [Excell, K. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Action, Fiction, Espionage, Sci-fi, Neurodiversity
Published: 2020-09-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter eleven

Someone was shaking my shoulder.

I groaned and tried to sit up. “Is everyone okay?”

That earned a laugh from whoever was talking—I still hadn’t opened my eyes to find out. “The reinforced door and walls protected everyone but you. We’re fine.”

I peeled my eyes open and fought through the blur of color. As soon as I could tell Steele’s extended hand from the background, I let him help me up. A moment later, the world stopped spinning, and I evaluated myself.

By some miracle of fate, most of the debris had missed, and I was relatively unharmed. That didn’t keep my head from screaming, or every single muscle from protesting when I tried to move—but alive was alive. Everything else could heal later.

I picked my way through debris from the blast—slowly to avoid stepping on splinters of wood or tripping over shorn rebar sticking out of concrete chunks—until I could lay eyes on the rest of my team. Tolden crouched by Tabitha, radiating unshielded concern. Something was wrong with her?

I sorted through my disordered mind until I could find the WATCH module, then jury-rigged some program to make it work while the rest of my blue lines tried to fix what the blast had shaken up.

I winced as the module engaged and my already disordered vision crowded with damage reports. I fought through the noise to find the analysis tools I needed, then shoved the WATCH module out of the way. It landed in a heap of other damaged programs that my blue lines were trying desperately to repair, but I ignored it. This was nothing a good night of sleep wouldn’t fix.

With the analysis tools in hand, I focused on Tabitha’s huddled form. She had no visible injuries, and it would take an entirely different suit of analysis tools to figure out if she was bleeding internally. I sighed. My mind and the tools my blue lines used for analysis were the product of an entire childhood of programming my own brain for small, individual tasks that could work together to complete the analysis I needed. The benefit of such a large machine was that I could take it apart and rearrange it to do almost anything I needed it to do. The disadvantage was that I couldn’t do much if those machines weren’t exactly where I expected them to be.

I reached out to Tabitha’s mind as carefully as I could, then jerked back as I felt the sheer terror pouring from her.

Tolden looked up at me. His thoughts were a mess, too, but a mess of a different kind. He was arguing with himself about—my abilities? Finally, his jaw tightened. “Farina, you caught the brunt of the blast. Are you alright?”

I nodded. “I’m more worried for Smith, right now. What’s wrong?”

“She’s an Auditory. The ringing from the blast is agony.”

I squinted at him, unsure if I’d heard him correctly. What ringing? I focused for a moment, and then I understood. I’d dismissed that hollow, echoing sound that muffled everything the moment I’d woken up.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.