Free Busted Flush by George R. R. Martin Page B

you’ve been having bad dreams.”
    “Yes. It’s because they give me this stuff to make me sleep.” He looked straight at the doctor. “Can you make them stop giving it to me?” Although Drake’s first idea was to find his parents and go home, he was also sick of being put to sleep.
    The doctor nodded and scribbled on his clipboard. “I see. That medication is a nonopiate, but it can turn loose the subconscious in an uncomfortable way. I’ll make a note of it.”
    Drake smiled. “Okay. Can I go home soon?”
    “I’m also recommending that you be transferred to another facility.” He put a hand on Drake’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, son, but we have to figure out exactly what happened to you, and we don’t seem able to do that here.”
    “Will my folks be at this place?” “Just remember everyone is trying to help you. Have a good trip.” The doctor stood and left the room with a rustle of his white coat and no further explanation.
     

     
    Mom? I don’t feel real good
.
    Niobe Winslow felt her oldest child dying, felt him melting away like so much ice cream dropped on a summer sidewalk. Soon there would be nothing left of Xerxes but memories. And another hole in her heart.
    Through their bond she felt the warming lamps perched over his incubator; needles squirting filtered blood and synthetic proteins into his forearm; plush swaddling.
    Hang in there, kiddo. Momma’s coming
.
    Month-old Xerxes was the longest-lived of Niobe’s seventy-six children. Xue-Ming had lived nineteen days, thirteen hours. Xander, eleven days and change. Xerxes’s breakthrough longevity had slipped through her defenses, bolstered her with vain and foolish hopes.
    He’d been so strong. So healthy.
    Her chair clattered to the floor as she jumped to her feet. The joker to whom she’d been reading rocked back and forth on his bed. His head, a featureless extrusion of flesh and bone, knocked against a white-spackled patch on the wall. The orderlies had given up on repainting it.
    She righted the chair with her tail as she yanked the door open. “Sorry, Mick. Gotta go. Back tomorrow.”
    Knock. Knock. Knock. Little flakes of plaster rained down on Mick’s sheets. The door slammed behind her.
    A bell chimed the hour. She ignored it.
    I feel funny. My tummy hurts
.
    Almost there, kiddo. Just hang in there, ’kay?
    She ran through the corridors of the Biological Isolation and Containment Center, a facility carved into the caverns of an old salt mine deep under southeastern New Mexico. The corridors glowed with light from fiber-optic skylights connected to an array of heliostats on the surface. The skylights shone brightly; one could forget that the desert was half a kilometer overhead.
    As both a voluntary committal and a trusty, Niobe had the run of the place. It was the nation’s foremost biological research center, where an army of doctors and scientists struggled to cure hundreds of patients of their afflictions. The facility resembled a wagon wheel tipped on its side: a central hub, with radial spokes connecting it to an outer ring. In places, the outer ring connected to the original warren of mine tunnels, some large enough to swallow a freight train. The pie sections of the wheel were color-coded, like a Trivial Pursuit piece.
    Niobe ran around the rim of the wheel. This wing (minimum security, voluntary committals) was decorated in shades of green, complete with oil paintings of forests and verdant hillsides. The corridors turned orange and red as she approached one of the medical wings.
    Her tail caught an orderly’s medicine cart as she skidded around the corner toward the infirmary. The cart flipped. Hundreds of pills skittered along the floor.
    Over her shoulder, she yelled, “Sorry!”
    “Damn it, Genetrix . . .”
    Half the staff thought that was her real name. Genetrix. The Brood Mother.
    The connection to Xerxes strengthened when she entered the infirmary. But still their telepathic link felt staticky, like a