Free BirthStone by Sydney Addae

listen
until the pain subsides.
    She nodded.
    Releasing her hand, he stood and backed up
to his chair. He sat and pondered what happened. “Amazing,” he
murmured.
    “What?”
    “The device latched into your brain keys
into not only your vision but also your speech. The pain comes when
you say certain words, which causes you to back off or… modify your
words. Have you done that? Instead of saying the lab or whatever
the building is where you were located, what if we called it red
site? Can you say that without pain? Red site.”
    “Red site.” She straightened. “The red site
was surrounded by a lot of trees with…” she paused. “Give me
another word for below…” She pointed downward.
    He grabbed his pad from his inner pocket and
a pen. “Below ground, like a bunker?” She shook her head.
    “Not a basement, an underground facility
like this one?”
    “Yes.”
    He wrote red site in his pad, along with the
words, underground labs. With his other hand he pulled out his cell
and turned on the mini-recorder. “So the underground lab, red site,
is surrounded by a lot of trees. Was it near a main highway?”
    “No.”
    “Okay, to access it, you had to drive down a
long dirt road.”
    “Yes.”
    He wrote that information down. “The next
questions I want you to answer with numbers, hopefully none of
those will be a trigger.”
    “I’d rather know now and avoid saying it
later. Let’s get on with it.”
    He marveled at her eagerness to assist them
in this process. “There are three suns in the sky.”
    “One.”
    “A hybrid is made up of four beings.”
    “Two.”
    “You’ve had twenty surgeries.”
    “Forty-seven.” Her mouth opened and then
snapped close. “That was good. Keep going.” She scooted closer to
the edge of the bed.
    “How many fingers on your right hand?”
    “Five.”
    “How many pups does La Patron have?”
    “Three.”
    His brow rose at that, but he continued.
“What state does La Patron reside?”
    “West Virginia.”
    “And you were born in?”
    “Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.” She gasped, and
swallowed hard. “Keep going.”
    “Your favorite color?”
    “Blue.”
    “The color of your eyes?”
    “Dark brown, now reddish brown.”
    He wondered if the camera lenses in her eyes
were the reason they had changed colors. “Your hair color?”
    “Dark brown.”
    “You are fifty years old?”
    “One hundred and forty-four.” Her hand flew
to her mouth. “Holy shit,” she whispered. “Keep going.”
    “Two brothers, two sisters?”
    “Zero.”
    “Father?”
    “Don’t know.”
    “Car color?”
    “Silver.”
    “Mother?”
    “Roda-Mae.” Her breath hitched and she hung
her head.
    Dr. Passen wiped his face as he processed
the information. After a few generic questions, he asked. “How many
doctors worked on you? Five? Ten? Fifteen?” There were only so many
men qualified to do the type of research and work that had been
done to her over the years. He’d run a check going back a hundred
years and ran the names by her.
    “Over fifty. They never used names, only
codes. The codes were alphabet and numerical combinations. Like
ADJK0039.” She paused and then relaxed. “He worked the metal in my
leg. He’s foreign with a German accent. I remember he had thick
fingers and smelled like tobacco.”
    “Okay.” He typed that information into his
phone and sent the email to his team so they could do a search.
“The metal was placed in your leg ten years ago.”
    “Twelve. Twelve years.”
    “You received a metal leg after falling from
a moving truck.”
    “Airplane.” She winced.
    His eyes widened, she had fallen from the
sky? No wonder she had a new leg and arm, her body should’ve
shattered. He glanced at her. She had placed her hands in her lap
as she sat perfectly still. Frowning he asked her, “Are you in
pain? Does your head hurt?”
    “No. It works to empty myself and focus on
the questions so I can answer them succinctly.”
    He nodded with approval.