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everything will be fine."
But everything wasn't fine. Within days, the tingling had stopped, to be
replaced by numbness. Just like her feet. She began having trouble holding
things, and her lessons took twice as long now, since she couldn't touch-type
anymore and had to watch where her fingers went.
She completely gave up on doing anything that required a lot of manual
dexterity. Instead, she watched a lot of holos, even boring ones, and played a
great deal of holo-chess. She read a lot too, from the screen, so that she
could give one-key page-turning commands rather than trying to turn paper
pages herself. The numbness stopped at her wrists, and for a few days she was
so busy getting used to doing things without feeling her hands, that she
didn't notice that the numbness in her legs had spread from her ankles to her
knees.
Now she was afraid to go to the AI 'doctor' program, knowing that it would put
her in for Counseling. She tried looking things up herself in the database,
but knew that she was going to have to be very sneaky to avoid triggering
flags in the AI. As the numbness stopped at the knees, then began to spread up
her arms, she kept telling herself that it wouldn't, couldn't be much longer
now. Soon Mum and Dad would be done, and they would know she wasn't making
this up to get attention. Soon she would be able to tell them herself, and
they'd make the stupid medic work right. Soon.
She woke up, as usual, to hands and feet that acted like wooden blocks at the
ends of her limbs. She got a shower, easy enough, since the controls were
pushbutton, then struggled into her clothing by wriggling and using teeth and
fingers that didn't really want to move. She didn't bother too much with hair
and teeth, it was just too hard. Shoving her feet into slippers, since she
hadn't been able to tie her shoes for the past couple of days, she stumped out
into the main room of the dome, only to find Pota and Braddon waiting there
for her, smiling over their coffee.
"Surprise!" Pota said cheerfully. "We've done just about everything we can on
our own, and we zipped the findings off to the Institute last night.
Now things can get back to normal'"
"Oh Mum!" She couldn't help herself, she was so overwhelmed by relief and joy
that she started to run across the room to fling herself into their arms.
Started to. Halfway there, she tripped, as usual, and went flying through the
air, crashing into the table and spilling the hot coffee all over her arms and
legs.
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They picked her up, as she babbled apologies about her clumsiness. She didn't
even notice what the coffee had done to her, didn't even think about it until
her parents' expressions of horror alerted her to the fact that there were
burns and blisters already rising on her lower arms.
"It doesn't hurt," she said, dazedly, without thinking, just saying the first
thing that came into her mind. "It's okay, really, I've been kind of numb for
a while so it doesn't hurt, honest."
Pota and Braddon both froze. Something about their expressions startled her
into silence.
"You don't feel anything?" Pota said, carefully. "No pain, nothing at all?"
She shook her head. "My hands and feet were tingling for a while, and then
they stopped and went numb. I thought if I just waited you could take care of
it when you weren't so busy."
They wouldn't let her say anything else. Within moments they had established
through careful prodding and tests with the end of a sharp probe
that the numb area now ended at mid-thigh and mid-shoulder.
"How long has this been going on?" Braddon asked, while Pota flew to the
AI console to call up the medical program the adults used.
"Oh, a few weeks," she said vaguely. "Socrates said it wasn't anything, that
I'd grow out of it. Then he acted like I was making it up, and I didn't want
him to get the Psychs on me. So I figured I would ..."
Pota returned at that moment, her mouth set in a grim line. "You are going
straight to bed, pumpkin," she said, with what Tia could tell was forced
lightness, "Socrates thinks you have pinched nerves; possibly a spinal defect
that he can't scan for. So you are going to bed, and we are calling for a
courier to come get you. All right?"
Braddon and Pota exchanged one of those looks, the kind Tia couldn't read, and
Tia's heart sank. "Okay," she sighed with resignation. "I didn't mean to be
such a bother, honest, I didn't."
Braddon scooped her up in his arms and carried her off to her room.
"Don't even think that you're being a bother," he said fiercely. "We love you,
pumpkin. And we're going to see that you get better as quickly as we can."
He tucked her into bed, with Ted beside her, and called up a holo from the
almost forbidden collection. "Here," he said, kissing her tenderly. "Your
Mum is going to be in here in a minute to put something on those burns. Then
we're going to spend all our time making you the most disgustingly spoiled
little brat in known space! What you have to do is lie there and think really
hard about getting better. Is it a deal?"
"Sure, Dad," she replied, managing to find a grin for him somewhere.
"It's a deal."
CHAPTER TWO
Because Tia was in no danger of dying, and because there was no craft
available to come fetch her capable of Singularity Drive, the AI drone that
had been sent to take her to a Central Worlds hospital took two more weeks to
arrive. Two more long, interminable weeks, during which the faces of her Mum
and Dad grew drawn and frightened, and in which her condition not only did not
improve, it deteriorated.
By the end of that two weeks, she was in much worse shape; she had not only
lost all feeling in her limbs, she had lost use of them as well. The
clumsiness that had begun when she had trouble with buttons and zippers had
turned into paralysis. If she hadn't felt the need to keep her parents'
spirits up, she'd have cried. She couldn't even hold Ted anymore.
She joked about it to her Mum, pretending that she had always wanted to be
waited on hand and foot She had to joke about it; although she was terrified,
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