16. Annani
ANNANI
O gidu stopped the golf cart in front of the clinic, got out, and offered Annani a hand. "Should I wait for you outside, Clan Mother?"
"You can return home. I will call you when I am ready to leave."
He did not look pleased about being dismissed, but he dipped his head nonetheless. "Of course, Clan Mother."
He waited for her to enter the clinic before climbing back into the golf cart.
It never ceased to amuse her how everybody treated her as if she was fragile. She was the most powerful person in this village, in the world really, and that included her cousin Toven, who was a powerful god, but not as powerful as she was.
She was safe from almost anyone.
She might not be safe, though, from the eight enhanced soldiers with a merged mind.
No one knew for sure if Annani was immune to compulsion because Kian had never allowed it to be tested. What they did know was that the specialized earpieces that filtered regular compulsion were not going to block compulsion riding on thralling rather than sound waves.
"Good afternoon, Clan Mother." Bridget stepped out of her office with an expression that was part amused and part understanding. "There is not much change since last night."
"I know. But I had to come."
If she was bothering the doctor with her visits, Bridget would just need to get used to it because Annani intended to be in the clinic every day to check on Khiann's progress even if there was none.
If she could, she would have moved into one of the patients' rooms to be near him.
Actually, that was a good idea. There were no patients in those two rooms at this time, so theoretically she could.
But that was silly. She was a five-minute golf cart ride away, and twenty minutes away on foot. Moving into the clinic made no sense.
"I understand perfectly," Bridget said. "Would you like to come into my office so I can give you a proper update?"
"I would rather see them with my own eyes if you do not mind."
"There isn't much to see. They are still unrecognizable."
"I know." Annani held Bridget's gaze steadily. "I would like to see them anyway."
"Of course." Bridget gave her one more of those understanding doctor smiles. "We can go downstairs together. Julian and Gertrude are there to monitor the five, and I only supervise."
"Good." Annani fell into step with her. "You should not overtax yourself."
"I try not to."
She led Annani toward the stairs instead of taking the elevator, and Annani was glad for that.
"All five have been successfully transferred out of the chests and into hospital beds.
We managed not to break any bones, which was what I was most afraid of.
The bodies are very fragile, and their bones are brittle.
We have used fresh mineral water to activate the regeneration process.
We put in feeding lines, which was difficult, and I am glad you weren't there to witness it.
Their veins are barely there. Five thousand years of stasis doesn't leave much to work with tissue-wise, and finding a vessel that would actually hold an IV needle took a while. "
Annani's gut twisted at the image of needles penetrating veins in bodies reduced to almost nothing.
When Bridget pushed open the doors and they entered, Annani swept her gaze over the transformed operating room, noting that it looked different from last night—less of a space in transition and more like an active ward.
Julian was examining a monitor as they arrived, while Gertrude stood at the far end inspecting an IV line.
"We're rotating our small crew. Merlin and Hildegard have the other shift," Bridget said.
Annani approached the first bed and made herself look.
It was worse than she had braced for, and she had braced for a great deal.
The body on the bed was skeletal in the most literal sense of the word, with skin drawn so tight over bone that it looked less like a person and more like an anatomical illustration.
The shape of a face was reduced to its underlying structure with almost nothing left to soften it.
Monitors beeped behind the bed, slow and faint, and Annani had to look at the screen twice to convince herself the weak, irregular blip crossing it was an actual heartbeat.
"The heart gets repaired first." Bridget came to stand beside her.
"Before anything else can be repaired, the body needs a functioning circulatory system to deliver the resources it's drawing on to do the rest of the work.
So that's where all the visible effort is concentrated right now. Everything else waits its turn."
Annani had thought it was the brain that needed to be restored first, but what Bridget had said made sense. The brain needed the heart to work first so it could get proper blood supply.
The whole process seemed more like magic than science, but that was probably because Annani was not a scientist and did not understand how it worked.
She looked at the faint, stuttering rhythm on the monitor and thought of Wonder.
"Looking at these five, I cannot believe that Wonder came back from this on her own." She shook her head. "A broken pipe supplied the fresh water, and her body did the rest on its own. How was that possible?"
"I guess that her body had spent a long time working on repairing itself before she woke up," Bridget said. "By the time she became aware of her surroundings, the hardest work had already been done, which is why her recovery afterward went as quickly as it did."
"So, you are saying that given enough time, they could regenerate without any of this. Some fresh water as a catalyst and the rest on their own."
"Possibly. I wouldn't want to test that theory intentionally, though.
Left alone, with no monitoring and no support, there's no guarantee the process would happen cleanly, or that it would happen at all if something went wrong along the way.
Better to give them every advantage we can, even if the body might eventually have managed it without us. "
Annani nodded. "Of course. I would have never suggested that. I was just curious."
She walked up to the bed in the middle, drawn to it for some reason.
It was likely just the central positioning. The medical team had placed the bodies in these beds with no regard for anything other than where the Guardians had put down the chests. The middle bed held no more significance than any of the others.
Standing over the skeletal face, she searched it for anything, any curve of brow or set of jaw that her memory could seize on and call Khiann's, but there was nothing.
The face beneath her was not a face yet, only the promise of one, features so reduced that even her desperate imagination could not reconstruct it into the face of her beloved.
She moved to the next bed and performed the same futile search. And the next. And the one after that.
None of them gave her anything to hold on to.
By the time she reached the fifth, she had stopped expecting to find him and simply stood there for a moment out of the pure stubborn need to have looked at each of them equally, refusing to let her earlier irrational pull toward the middle bed count for more than it deserved to.
"Not much to look at," Julian said. "But give it a week, and you might be able to tell who is who."
"I hope so." She turned and smiled at him. "Thank you for taking care of them."
"It's our privilege, Clan Mother," Julian said, and Gertrude just smiled and nodded in agreement.
"Let's go to my office," Bridget said. "Would you like some tea, Clan Mother?"
"I would love some." She followed the doctor out through the double doors. "But can I ask you a favor?"
"Anything." Bridget took the stairs again.
"Please call me Annani. We will be seeing each other daily now, and I would like to do away with the formalities."
"As you wish." Bridget kept climbing.
The doctor's office was small, but well organized. Nowadays, everything was done on tablets and computers, so there were no handwritten notes or charts anywhere to be seen.
The electric kettle sitting on a low shelf beside two mismatched mugs was a new addition, and Annani suspected it had been Merlin's idea. Bridget would have gotten a matching set, and Julian would not have bothered.
"I apologize for the mugs," Bridget said. "If I had known I would be hosting the Clan Mother, I would have brought some fine china from home."
Annani chuckled. "It is not the cup that matters, it is the company, and please, call me Annani."
Bridget poured hot water over two teabags, and Annani accepted hers without comment on the simplicity of the whole arrangement, because the tea was truly incidental to the conversation.
"How are the new arrivals settling in?" she asked.
Bridget sat down behind her desk with her mug.
"I've only gotten secondhand reports. They are shell-shocked.
Too much is happening to them too fast. I think that out of everyone who arrived at this village, they are experiencing the biggest change.
Well, other than Ell-rom and Morelle. They were in stasis for seven thousand years and woke up on a very different Earth than the one they had been expecting.
Not to mention that Ell-rom didn't remember anything about his life from before. "
"They have both acclimated nicely." Annani took a sip from the tea, which was surprisingly good for something that came in a bag instead of loose leaves. "Finding their mates even before waking up helped speed up the process."
"Indeed." Bridget set her mug down on the desk.
"I want to get blood samples from all of them once they've settled in and are not afraid of their own shadow.
They're all Dormants, which means the moment any of them bonds with an immortal male, they'll transition.
I want to establish a baseline before that happens. "
"There is plenty of time for that," Annani said. "These women have been traumatized, and it will be a long while before any of them are ready to think about relationships."
"I'm not so sure about that, actually." Bridget's eyebrows rose slightly over the rim of her mug. "Julian told me that there seems to be something romantic brewing between one of the women, the one with the little boy, and Number One. The spokesman for the enhanced soldiers."
Hope sparked in Annani's chest at the news. "That is marvelous. It bodes well for the others. If one of them can bring herself to trust a male again, and especially one of the enhanced, then the others might be ready for relationships sooner than I thought was possible."
"She must be a brave soul," Bridget said. "Falling for a male who shares his mind with seven others complicates things. I can't imagine what that must be like for her, or for him, honestly."
"Nor can I."
Bridget turned her mug between her hands.
"As a physician, the collective consciousness fascinates me.
It's unprecedented. There's no medical framework for what that actually means, physiologically and psychologically.
I would like to examine them. Run some baseline brain scans.
I want to understand how they function. Now that the five are stabilized, I can make a quick run to the keep and see for myself what we are dealing with. "
Annani set down the mug. "I understand your professional curiosity, but you cannot visit them just yet. You are a council member, which means you know where the hidden entrance to the tunnel leading into this village is located."
Bridget understood immediately why that posed an issue.
"You are correct, of course. I should have realized that myself.
They can get that information from me," she nodded.
"Their compulsion doesn't use sound. They can do it with a thrall, which is another ability unique to them.
That's why Kian asked Turner to be in charge of them.
He's immune to all forms of mind manipulation, so they can't get anything from him. "
"Then you understand."
"I do. I'm disappointed because the scientist in me wants nothing more than to sink my teeth into their mystery." She tilted her head and smiled. "Maybe you could thrall me to forget where the entrance to the tunnel is?"
Annani smiled. "I can, but they might be able to retrieve it anyway because all I can do is push the memory to your subconscious. Erasing it is not possible."
"I know." Bridget let out a breath. "It was worth a try, though. How long until the restriction lifts?"
"When Kian decides it is safe."
Bridget laughed. "Then I suspect I'll be waiting a very long time. Possibly forever. Kian doesn't relax security measures. He adds new ones."
"This is so true. My son takes caution to another level, but in this instance, I cannot fault him for being extra cautious."
"Neither can I." Bridget sipped her tea. "I'll simply have to content myself with whatever the Russian scientists can tell me until Kian decides the risk the Eight represent is tolerable."
"I regret the unfairness of it," Annani said. "The Eight were a great help to us, and they did everything in good faith. In exchange, we keep them at arm's length because we cannot trust what we cannot control."