Read Online Lost In Translation by Edward Willett - Free Book Online Page A

empath locked in feedback, all her abilities turned inward, chasing her own thoughts and emotions around and around twisted neural pathways. The trauma of her parents’ deaths had trapped her in an endless emotional loop. And she’d been that way so long that when he touched her she almost pulled him into the black whirlpool inside her head. It was just as well he’d come himself: she was strong enough, and traumatized enough, to be dangerous to a lesser empath.
    After a moment he pulled his hand away and turned back to Mrs. Spencer. “Mrs. Spencer, this child is suffering bondcut.”
    â€œNonsense! She’s perfectly healthy.”
    â€œBondcut is not a disease; it is a trauma suffered by empaths when someone with whom they are emotionally linked dies in their presence.”
    â€œEmpaths? Katy’s not—”
    â€œYes, she is. And she must come with me. I’ve shown you my authorization . . .”
    â€œBut if she’s not well, she needs—”
    Karak would have liked to have let his impatience into his voice, but he still didn’t know humans well enough to be able to mimic such emotional nuances. “What she needs, Mrs. Spencer, is the company of fellow empaths, in the Guild of Translators. As the letter states, the Commonwealth Treaty permits us to draft—”
    â€œYou mean kidnap!”
    â€œâ€”any individual who shows possibility as a Translator. If you will be so good as to pack her things . . .”
    Mrs. Spencer gave him a look he didn’t need empathy to interpret, then walked over to Katy, giving him a wide berth, and took the girl’s hand gently. “Come along, Katy. You have to go with this . . . person.”
    â€œKarak,” Karak supplied.
    Mrs. Spencer ignored him. “It will be all right, Katy.”
    She took Katy to her room to pack (with the maximum number of banging noises), and Karak returned to the hallway to endure the continued stares of the other children. He wondered sourly, as he watched them, if, after he’d taken Katy away, Mrs. Spencer would use him as a threat to maintain discipline. “You do that one more time, young one, and the monster from the stars will come and get you just like he got Katy!”
    Mrs. Spencer came down with Katy and a small suitcase. Karak took the suitcase, thanked Mrs. Spencer just as if she deserved it, and led Katy out.
    As they went down the walk he heard Mrs. Spencer remark loudly to someone that if Katy hadn’t been happy in the orphanage with other children, she certainly wouldn’t be happy God-knew-where with only monsters for company, and how could the government sign a treaty that let things like that kidnap little girls, and as Karak opened the door of the black floatcar and Katy climbed inside, he heard Mrs. Spencer starting to sniffle about how brave Katy was being . . .
    â€œSpaceport,” he told the floatcar, and it lifted and drove away.
    He had what he’d come for—and he was more than ready to leave Earth and its Mrs. Spencers behind.
    Â 
    Katy heard Mrs. Spencer talk about how brave she was being, too, but Mrs. Spencer was wrong. Katy wasn’t being brave, because she wasn’t scared. She just didn’t care. About anything.
    The alien didn’t speak as they drove to the spaceport; unlike human adults, he seemed to have no need to talk unless he had something to say. She liked that—as much as she liked anything.
    At the spaceport, they boarded a ship very different from the one that had brought Katy to Earth. Inside the main airlock’s massive outer hatch were seven different inner hatches, each a different color and marked with strange symbols. Karak led Katy through a green hatch and down a short corridor to a complex of rooms like the inside of a little house, with a kitchen, a multileveled living room space without any furniture but with lots of cushions spread around on the blue-carpeted floor, and four