“The buzzing is back, and it’s getting worse.” Iris closed her eyes and rubbed the back of her head. “I need to get out of here. There too many people trying to get into my head.”
Iris stood up so fast that the chair tipped back and fell on the floor as she ran toward the doorway and out of the room. Danya jumped up to follow her, but Iris was faster. She was in the elevator with the doors closing before Danya could get there. The motion detector for the lifts sent a second elevator for Danya. By the time she got to the surface, Iris was out of sight.
Danya called out for her, but the noise of heavy machinery plowing under fields and excavating for new housing stopped her. She knew Iris couldn’t hear her. Instead, she went back inside the building and commed Vyken. He could alert the other cyborgs through their internal network with an image of Iris for them to keep watch for her. She would let Vyken tell Jolt what had happened.
###
“Knox, Axel tells me that Jolt is injured. Will he recover?”Commander Dark contacted the medic over the private cyborg channel.
“Yes. I tried to contact his mate, but was prompted to leave vid-mail.”
“Because she sensed Jolt was hurt and couldn’t block out the other people’s thoughts from her mind. She fled from the enclave, and we can’t find her. Teag discovered she is a dawning telepath. He gave her medication to help with the process, but we are not sure why it stopped working.”
“Jolt suffered serious damage, and he won’t be coherent until late tomorrow. His nanites shut him down before his damage became critical.”
“Damn! That probably means Iris can’t sense that he is alive. I have people out looking for her, but she slipped away without anyone noticing.”
“That’s how most of these people survive in the ruins, especially lone females. Do you think she is in danger?”
“If we don’t find her before dark she might be. The nights are getting colder. Danya said she didn’t even have a jacket. Naturals can’t regulate their body temperature like we can. Can Jolt be moved?”
“On a stretcher,”Knox responded.
“What’s the soonest we can wake him up safely?”
“Maybe three hours.”
“Load him in a transport and send him to the Enclave it’ll be close to that by the time he gets here. I’ll have Teag wake him. Meanwhile, I’m sending out fliers to see if they can pick up any human heat signatures. I’ve got trackers on the ground looking for her trail but we had so many people tramping over the ground near the elevator housing, we can’t pick up her trail.”
“You think Jolt can because she is his female.”
“Exactly.”
“He will be on his way in about ten minutes.”
“Knox is going to send Jolt here, and I’ll get Teag to wake him,” Commander Dark told his mate, Danya.
“Teag thought she would be okay on the medication. He thinks she may need to increase the dose.” Danya said, shaking her head. “Even Kydel has only limited experience with dawning psions. Iris seems to be dawning faster than the scan indicated.”
“But, she was fine until she sensed Jolt getting shot?”
“Yes. I was about to com you to ask you to find out exactly what happened. She bolted while I was getting her some tea,” Danya told him.
###
Iris didn’t know where she was going when she emerged from the old milk house that sheltered the elevators to the underground enclave. She only knew she had to get away from that awful buzzing. She paused for just a moment to locate a clear path of escape. She did so quickly and set off on a dead run toward the thick stand of trees in the distance.
She was out of sight by the time Danya notified Vyken that she had run. But she was out of sight before Danya had commed him. He immediately sent her image to the cyborgs on duty, but they had no reason to be watching for her.
The buzzing in her head receded directly in proportion to the distance she put between her and the Enclave. Because of thick underbrush in the woods, moving forward became difficult until Iris found a less obstructed path by a small stream. She followed the stream, jogging deep into the woods to a small clearing.
Iris was tired by the time she reached the clearing, so she sat down on a fallen log. She didn’t know exactly where she was. She’d just kept running until the underbrush got too thick. Then she pushed through it until she found the stream. Now she didn’t know the way back.
Suddenly, she wasn’t so sure she wanted to be a telepath. The way it was coming onto her made her feel like she was going crazy. It was like being alone in a room and trying to hold the door closed against hundreds of people trying to get in. Back inside the Enclave, the voices in her head got so loud it became painful.
Alone in the woods, she felt safe and calm as she sat watching the bubbling stream flow over the rocks. The buzzing in her head was gone. Her only company in the woods were small animals and birds. Iris regretted that she couldn’t comply with Jolt’s wishes for her to stay at the Enclave while he finished his work. It was only tolerable while he was there with her.
In this quiet place, Iris was finally able to calm herself enough to try the first meditation technique from the instructions that Teag had provided. She closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing slowly in and out. The air smelled fresh and woodsy with the scent of decaying leaves on the ground around her.
