We got to our rendezvous point like an hour early. Utah wasn’t there. Seriously—if I had been him, I would have waited at the rendezvous point the whole time and been ready as soon as we showed up. So, Chelsea had to call him (it turns out he was hanging with a local friend while we were risking our lives!) and we sat around for about 10 minutes. By the time he arrived I was seeing spots and had thrown up a couple times from the pain of the laser burn.
At least as soon as he arrived he took us straight to the hospital. I got painkillers right away and I was out of it for a while after that. The next time I was really awake was a couple days later. I was in a private room in the super ward of the Mayo Clinic, and Chelsea was sitting next to me. She was dressed nice and had her makeup on and all like usual, but even so she was a wreck. She almost cried all over me as soon as I woke up, and kept talking about how bad she felt that I had gotten hurt.
I tried to comfort her, but almost immediately Utah and a lawyer and a doctor came in. All 3 of them were Waking Guard—these guys are freakin everywhere in the super world once you start looking for them. It’s terrifying. They had come because they needed to hear my version of what had happened right away. No time for me to recover or anything. Noooo.
It was probably a good thing though, because even though I was totally awake the painkillers were still helping me out a lot, and thanks to them I didn’t feel bad at all about lying to the WG. Also, being laid up with a bad injury made it easier to act like I was mad at TDH. Even though I don’t remember all of what I said, I am sure that I proved to Utah and the others that I was on their side.
(I was thinking back later, to the experience at TDH’s house. I don’t remember too much of what happened in the end, but I am almost sure that the second after I got hit, all the weaponry in the room turned off. Like, he must have had his finger on the off switch, and just wanted to make sure that I could give the WG a good show.)
The next day, Utah and Chelsea went back to the Centre. I stayed at the hospital for close to a week, mostly to do some physical therapy and practice some healing exercises. They fast-tracked the recovery process, and by the time I left the doctors said that the scar looked like it could have come from 3 months of normal healing.
I went back to the Centre, and tried my best to catch up to Chelsea for our last few days. Then, with Utah’s okay and an official “we trust you” from the top guys (all WG), we flew back to Minneapolis just in time to take our finals. Gah. But, at least the NSC promised that we would get decent grades for the semester no matter how we did. We’ll probably do better even though we missed a whole month than we would have if we had stayed around, considering our progress reports for Sep/Oct.
And now finals are over and it’s winter break.
Thanks, Daddy, for not letting me tell you all of this out loud. That would have been stupid—but I didn’t think I could keep in inside any longer. Writing it down helped a lot.
As soon as I finish typing this up I’m going to print 1 copy, and then reformat the laptop. Tomorrow, we’re going down to the safety deposit box together to lock my story away. And then, hopefully we can all forget that it’s there. But if anything ever happens to me, I want someone to know the true story. I don’t know how much good it will do you, though.
Here’s what I do know. The Ancients are bad news. They nearly destroyed the world trying to take it over once, and of the 2 I’ve met, 1 (Darcy) would have had no problem with trying for a repeat performance. I don’t want to go all Waking Guard on you or anything, but I’m sure that there are other Ancients out there who think like Darcy.
The Waking Guard is also dangerous. They think they’re doing the right thing (and probably, for the most part they are) but they’re so powerful, and I think they’re too prejudiced against the Ancients to think clearly. And since they run the NSC, I’m pretty sure that if they went on record saying anything about the whole situation, the world would believe them. And they have all the supers, willing to do whatever they ask.
As for me, I trust Chelsea and the Petrovskis—and I trust TDH. I don’t know if I should trust him, but I do. He saved me the once from Darcy, and he saved me again when I was putting my life on the line to do something that I knew was wrong. And if the WG are right and there is a war coming, I want to be on his side. Even though his side will probably be like 3 people, and they’ll probably be able to keep up the fight for like 5 minutes tops.
That’s a pretty depressing ending, huh? I’ve been thinking too much about this stuff. I need a vacation.
I hope you never have to read this, Daddy. But if you do, remember that I love you.
Your Deena
(The end. Return to the table of contents.)
