Free No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven) by Randall Farmer Page B

noise and backed away from the still muttering and unhappy Van.  Vera Bracken lay at the bottom of the stairs, moaning.  She had fallen down the stairs!  Gail rushed down the hall to find out how badly Vera was hurt.
    “Focus, juice,” Vera said, a breathy whisper.
    Gail gasped in horror, knowing exactly what she had done.  Van ’s unhappiness over the small infant’s room had destroyed Gail’s good mood, and she had unconsciously stripped juice from every Transform in the household.  All the way down to the funny lower juice level point where Gail herself felt pain.  She put everyone’s juice back.  “Sorry, sorry,” Gail said.  “Are you hurt?”  Gail helped Vera sit up; the always immaculately dressed business-woman looked mussed, but save for a scrape or bruise, she wasn’t hurt at all.
    As she helped Vera, Gail couldn’t help but pick up the emotion Vera radiated – annoyance at Gail.
    She pick ed up a lot of that recently.
     
    ---
     
    “I’m sorry, Gail, but we think it’s for the best,” Kurt said.  Ed moaned; Gail had shorted his juice, enough to notice, as they stood nearly a hundred yards from the Ebener farmhouse, near the tiny three-tree orchard of pear trees.  “It’s temporary, only until you get enough control over the juice so you aren’t pumping and stripping people by accident.”
    Three days.  She and Van had lasted all of three days in their tiny farmhouse room, before it came to this.  The day before yesterday, Kurt and Ed had braced her on another topic, the household evening meetings.  Everyone wanted to do anything Gail would suggest, just to get the pleasurable surge of juice Gail gave them every time the dark cloud of pain lifted.  Which happened every time a vote went her way.  Even Van thought she needed to withdraw from those meetings.  Gail hadn’t fought the exile from the meetings; she had seen the same behavior herself.
    Now, this.
    “Do you think this will help?”
    “We ’ve noticed you don’t short people as much when they’re farther away,” Kurt said.  “We’ve got a family sized tent for you and Van.  It’s a little old and leaky, but we can fix that by putting up a plywood temp roof.  It’s just until things settle down.”
    “Okay,” Gail said.  She expected Van to have a fit.  For one thing, even a family-sized tent wasn ’t tall enough for him to stand and not hit his head.
    Exiled.
    Dammit.  Moreover, everything was all her fault, the usual.
    Gail took a deep breath and tried to relax.  “Cots?”  No room for a real bed in a tent.
    “Cots.”
    Gail helped as they unpacked the old musty tent and set it up, a dozen yards from the edge of the giant vegetable garden.  The old thing was a Guynes family heirloom, and as promised, she could see through the tent roof when she looked up.
    She looked down, stomping down patches of tough Michigan grass and the bulges they created in the tent floor.  With each day, her optimistic dreams she had spun in her head during the drive from the Transform Clinic to the Ebener farm wore away more.  Not only didn’t her people come to like her, their dislike had grown, and they now lived in fear of her moods and tempers.
    Dammit.
    After they finished setting up the tent, she sat in it, alone, waiting for Van to come back from U of M.  This time, she would make sure she stayed outside metasense range of her Transforms when she braced Van with yet another unpleasant surprise.
     
    ---
     
    Plink.  Plink.
    A weekend, and no Van.  He had bailed on her 30 minutes after her parents showed up, gone to U of M to work on his dissertation.
    Gail looked over to the pot to make sure the rusty old copper-bottomed piece of trash wasn’t full of rainwater again.  Three days of rain, which she didn’t like, and three days of unseasonable May cold, not unexpected for Michigan, but surprisingly pleasant for her.  The rest of the household bundled up when they went outside, but Gail didn’t