Read Online Icons by Margaret Stohl - Free Book Online Page A

toward the door, pulling the tag from my finger, ripping the bandage off my skin. My arm appears to be fine, only a small bloody smudge next to my marking. I exhale.
    I scan the room, but there is no sign of where the voice could be coming from. Then I see a small, round grating rattling next to me, on the wall.
    “Lucas has already taken issue with me twice this morning on the subject.” I start at the name. “Allow me to clarify: I was not watching you sleep. I was
monitoring
your sleep. For diagnostic purposes. Would you like me to explain the difference?”
    I remember my dream. “No.” My own voice sounds wrong here. I clear my throat. “Thank you, Room.”
    I steady myself with one hand on the wall. I see other gratings—in the ceiling, the walls, above my cot. This room, it seems, is made for this exact sort of conversation.
    Faceless. Bodiless. An ambush.
    “Diagnostic purposes?” It is better, I think, to keep the voice talking until I know more.
    It
talking. Because it really isn’t a person at all, and the voice isn’t a voice. It has no inflection, no emphasis. No accent. Each word is a chord of machine sounds, syntheticnoise. Grassgirl that I am, I have never heard such a thing.
    “You might be interested to know you are in fact running a low fever. I am curious to learn if that is customary for a Weeper.”
    I clear my throat again, trying to sound calm. “A what?” There’s no way in Hole I’m telling anyone at the Embassy anything about myself.
    “That is, to be precise, what you are called, is it not? A young person of your genus classification? A Sorrow Icon? A Weeper—that would be the correct Grass colloquialism?”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My words echo in the empty room. I grab my clothes off the chair.
    “I can see how you would be confused. It is important to understand context, which is of course a problem I find almost singularly ironic. Not having a physical context, myself.”
    My underwear and undershirt are strangely stiff. They have been washed, and not in the old Mission bathtubs. I sniff the cloth. It smells like disinfectant spray. I touch my hair with the sudden realization that it is clean, too. I have been washed and dried and scrubbed. It feels wrong. I miss the dirt, my comfortable second skin of muck and must.
    I feel exposed.
    “Who are you?” I pull my army pants up under my robe. “Why am I here?”
    “I am Doc. That is, to be more exact, what Lucas callsme. His companion, Tima Li, calls me Orwell.”
    “Companion?”
    “Classmate. Kinswoman. I believe she was there when you were retrieved.”
    The girl at the Chopper. I make a face, thinking of her glare. “Got it.”
    The voice pauses—but only for a moment. “Ambassador Amare calls me Computer.” I freeze at the mention of the Ambassador’s name. As if I could forget she was here. “The Embassy Wik recognizes me by my binary code. Would you care to know it? I am happy to tell you.”
    “No. Thank you, Doc.” I add his name, impulsively. Somehow, the fact of his nonhumanness is comforting. You can’t be a sympathizer if you can’t sympathize.
    I pull my thick, woven sweater over my head. A present from the Mission looms, made of fifty different colors of scraps of yarn. A Remnant sweater, perfect for a Remnant like me.
    “You are most welcome, Doloria.”
    A new coldness shoots through me at the mention of my real name. The name only the Padre knew, and Ro. And now this voice, echoing through the walls of the Embassy. I could be talking to anyone. I could be talking to the Ambassador.
    I sigh and jam my feet into my combat boots.
    “You’ve got the wrong person, Doc. My name isDolly.” I can’t bear to hear my full name spoken in the Embassy. Even by a voice without a body. I pick up my binding and begin to wind the cloth around my wrist. “You still didn’t tell me what I’m doing here.”
    “Breathing. Shedding squamous skin cells. Pumping oxygenated blood