Linked by Imogen Howson EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Imogen Howson
- Language: English
- Genre: Teen & Young Adult Fiction about Siblings
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
AS ELISSA and her mother entered the waiting room, the sky above
Central Canyon City was a chill, predawn gray, the spaceport a colorless
blaze on the horizon. Lines and points of light pricked up from the canyon
floor far below.
Elissa walked to the window, trying to ignore the tightness in her chest and
that her palms were damp enough to leave handprints on the glass ledge of
the windowsill. As she stared, struggling not to give in to her creeping
anxiety, the sky changed. First from gray to a thin twilight green, hazy
where it curved down beyond the spaceport, then—as all at once the sun
rose high enough for its light to hit the desert floor—to endless blue, a color
deep enough to drown in.
The light made Elissa’s eyes water. She blinked and looked away, just as the
waiting-room lights went to sleep and a ripple of cold at the back of her
neck told her the air-conditioning had come on, preparation against the
scorching heat of late springtime in the city.
Elissa shivered. No one ever got the temperature right for her. Four years—
a lifetime—ago, Carlie and Marissa used to joke that she was as coldblooded as the tiny glass-lizards that scrabbled up the sides of the school
buildings to lie on the flat, sun-hot roofs.
Pushing the memory away, she turned to pick her sweatshirt up from the
chair behind her.
At the far side of the room, her mother sat, straight-backed and exquisitely
thin, a bookscreen in her hands. In the adjacent corner amber lights glowed
behind a tiny waterfall that ran over a tumble of pebbles into a small pool.
In the background, music—chimes and harp strings—trickled quietly from
invisible speakers, and the scent of chamomile and lavender hung in the air.
Everything was designed to calm, to relax.
Elissa’s hands were still sweaty. She wiped them surreptitiously on the
sweatshirt as she pulled it on.
If this guy can’t fix me . . .
No one had said it, but Elissa knew very well this was a last resort. How
many times now had she sat in doctors’ offices, waiting for them to tell her
how they were going to fix her, how they were going to make her normal?
How many treatments had they tried? The sleep medication, the pain
medication, the little electronic device designed to interfere with the signals
her brain sent to her body. That last one had seemed to work at first, and her
hopes had soared, only to crash when, abruptly, the symptoms returned.
Then there was the hypnotherapy and the weird white-noise machine they’d
fixed up in her room, which had been supposed to help her sleep but had
just filled her room with an infuriating sensation, like a buzz she heard not
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