Body of Stars by Laura Walter (free ebook reader for iphone TXT) 📕

I waited until he left before I curled onto my side.

My mother patted my back. “Celeste. You’ll be all right. You’re back, and you’ll heal. That’s all that matters.”

“Not if my transcript reflects this. I won’t be able to go to university. My friends will go off to school without me. I’ll be alone, and I won’t be able to become a psychologist. My life is ruined.”

“It’s not ruined. It’s just changed.”

I didn’t want to hear it. I asked her to turn out the light and let me sleep, and she obliged. Sleep was my last refuge.

But once I was alone, I dwelled on how I’d lost the last few weeks. That time was gone, disappeared, and I could only imagine what unspeakable things had happened to me. Every now and then a streak of pain hit my body, a sizzling wave of discomfort. And I kept picturing Cassandra, kept daring to think it should have been her, not me, lying broken in this hospital bed.

I covered my face with my hands and cried—out of guilt, and shame, and humiliated disbelief—until I exhausted myself. I eventually must have drifted into a light sleep, because one minute I was alone and the next a strange woman was standing over my bed. She wore a navy skirt suit with a little red pin on her lapel. I gazed up at her, convinced I was dreaming.

“Celeste Morton?” she asked. She held a file in her hands. It was my government file, a stack of papers so slender it seemed to have almost no substance at all. She flipped it open to a diagram of my juvenile markings and tapped the mystery pattern on my left elbow.

“Those are gone now,” I said, holding out my arm. I still believed I was asleep. “You’re a government inspector, aren’t you?”

She gave a curt nod.

“Did you ever consider becoming a humanitarian ambassador instead?” I paused, gazing at the woman dreamily. “I was thinking maybe I’ll try for that career one day. I can’t be hired as a government employee, but I could become a humanitarian. Assuming they still hire women like me.”

“It is an equal-opportunity profession,” the inspector confirmed. She kept looking back and forth between me and the diagram of my juvenile markings.

“If I became a humanitarian, I’d make good money, plus I’d get to travel.” I let my gaze wander over the woman. The red pin shined on her lapel like a prize.

“And I could help people,” I added as an afterthought. “Humanitarians do good work for girls. That’s what they tell us, anyway. But I’m not sure about inspectors.” I squinted at the woman. “Are you here to help me?”

The inspector reached for my left arm and held it in her cool hands.

“I’m here to confirm,” she said. She pulled out a penlight and shined it on my arm, then ran her fingertips lightly over my elbow. The contact lasted only a moment before she dropped my arm and made a note in the file.

“Thank you, Miss Morton,” she said. “That will be all.”

She withdrew from my bedside. A moment later, she was gone.

I blinked, uncertain whether she’d really been there or if I’d dreamed it. She left no trace, not even a lingering scent. I lay on my side, facing away from the door that was always kept open a crack, and stared with wide eyes into the dark. All around me, I felt the press of night.

*   *   *

During those early hours in the hospital, the inspector’s visit blended into everything else, making a dark smear of confusion. Years later I would struggle to remember her face. I’d study diagrams of the human brain, focusing on the parts responsible for emotion and trauma to better understand my compromised memory from that time. I read about the almond-shaped amygdala, the seahorse-shaped hippocampus. “Hippocampus” as in horse, as in sea monster, but I lingered on monster. I was consumed by a monstrous force in that hospital. I carried the wounds from a battle I couldn’t even remember.

On the first night of my stay, I waited alone in the dark until Miles snuck in to visit me. I heard the door ease open, heard him slip into the chair next to my bed.

“Celeste,” he breathed. “Hey.”

He waited. When I did not respond, he tapped my shoulder.

“Mom’s been in the family waiting area for hours,” he said. “She thinks you’re asleep.”

I rolled over. “Did you see her?”

He paused. “I just told you. Mom’s waiting down the hall. She didn’t want to wake you.”

“Not her. The inspector.” I sat up.

“What are you talking about?”

“An inspector came to visit me. She looked at my arm. She had my file.”

Miles reached over to flick on the lamp by my bed, and for a few seconds we blinked at each other. He had a shadow over his left eye. No, not a shadow—the remnants of a black eye. A whole bruise of his own.

“I think I’m confused,” I said finally. “Maybe I dreamed it.” I was too weak to comprehend the true meaning of that woman’s visit, or to grasp the forces at work in our world—how the future churned on and how our vulnerable, mortal bodies struggled to control it. A dream was the best escape I could imagine.

“It’s my fault,” Miles said.

My first instinct was to comfort him. But then I swallowed, and my throat felt sharp, and I recalled my final memories of that night: How he pushed me into an alley to view my markings. How he was no longer the brother I’d known.

“Chloe may have had a hand in this, too,” he went on. “She probably tips off the trappers whenever she has changeling girls in her office. I’d heard of that type of arrangement, but I never fully believed it.” Miles paused. “Still, I didn’t see her as a risk. And I thought that moment in the alley might be my only chance to look at your markings.”

“You put me in danger.”

He