Free The Others 03 Vision in Silver by Anne Bishop

to pee?”
    Pete choked.
    “Something like that,” Monty said in a strangled voice. He walked out of Burke’s office. Simon followed him.
    Monty waited until they were outside. “Is Ms. Corbyn all right? That’s how you know the information is accurate, because she made a cut?”
    “Meg is fine—but she doesn’t know about the girls yet.” Simon shifted his weight from one foot to the other, a small sign of anxiety in someone who was usually bold and direct. “Humans paid a lot of money for prophecies. Thatmakes the
cassandra sangue
valuable to the humans who run the compounds. Why would they leave girls on the side of the road?”
    “The girls could have left on their own. Meg did.”
    “Meg
escaped
. These girls can tell police, can tell
us
they want to leave. They didn’t have to run away and be alone.” Simon’s eyes were full of sadness and acceptance in equal parts. “We won’t find some of them until they’re dead.”
    “The police will be out there searching too, and we’ll save as many as we can.” Monty waited a beat. “Anything else?”
    “Nothing that can’t wait.” Simon walked away.
    While Monty watched Simon and Blair drive off, Louis Gresh, commander of the bomb squad, approached.
    “You look like you’ve just found a ticking briefcase,” Louis said.
    “Close enough. But thank the gods, the bomb isn’t in Lakeside this time.”
    “Anything I can do to help?”
    “Plenty.” Together, they went back inside to help Burke send the warning to police stations throughout Thaisia.

CHAPTER 7
    Thaisday, Maius 10
    H
e looks sad,
Meg thought as Simon walked into the sorting room and stopped when he realized Merri Lee and Ruth were with her.
He looks angry and sad.
    She rushed toward him. “What happened?” When he didn’t answer, she looked at her friends, then back at him. “Simon? What happened?”
    What were you supposed to do when a friend looked angry
and
sad but you didn’t know why?
    “You’re the Trailblazer,” Simon said. “You have answers, and we need answers.”
    “He’s right,” Merri Lee said.
    Meg compared Merri Lee’s face to training images. Pale. Sick. Upset.
    She knows why Simon is upset. It’s because of the prophecy, because of the thing she didn’t want to tell me about.
    Ruth, on the other hand, looked concerned, but she didn’t look
knowing
.
    “This is what we figured out.” Merri Lee set a series of photographs on the sorting table. “Meg has created a framework of tangible things that acts as an anchor and keeps her from being overwhelmed by visual and auditory stimuli. The framework is a combination of big things like the sorting table and smaller things like where the CD player and the stack of CDs are placed on the counter. These are the constant things that can’t change because Meg needs to count on them being exactly where they are.”
    “It’s like the furnishings in Meg’s room at the compound—,” Ruth began.
    “Cells,” Meg said tightly. “They were called cells. They locked from the outside, and we only had what the Walking Names allowed us to have.”
    Ruth nodded to indicate understanding. “The cells’ contents didn’t change for as long as the girl lived in the compound. We think that lack of change balanced all the new images and videos the girls were shown as part of their training to describe the visions.”
    Meg didn’t add her personal bit of speculation: that the sterility of the cells made the girls want to study the images—and made them more willing to cut in order to experience
some
stimulus. The addiction was still there, the craving for the razor and how the euphoria made her feel. It still veiled her mind to protect her from the visions, but the euphoria didn’t feel as intense as the sensations she’d felt a few months ago. Or maybe she wanted to believe that because there were so many other kinds of pleasant stimulation now.
    Something she needed to think about a while longer.
    “We can’t say if