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Pain hit at the center of my chest. Briefly, it nearly made my knees buckle.

I hadn’t realized,gaos,hadn’t connected the dots.

I hadn’t gotten far enough in my thinking to know she was a seer.

The girl slowly, reluctantly, achingly pulled her eyes off me.

It hit me only then that she’d scarcely looked at Nick or at Black since I’d first made sense of her face. She might be leaning into Nick as her possible protector, but something about me drew her attention and her light, too. I could guess what that something was. I probably seemed safe to her––in comparison, at least.

Now, she blinked reluctantly up at Black.

Her shoulders hunched. She looked like a dog waiting to be kicked.

She looked submissive, like she might be waiting for an order she already knew she wouldn’t want to follow.

That sick, angry, horror feeling closed my throat, made my gut burn.

I’d seen that look before. I’d seen it while I’d been at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. I’d seen it on patients I’d had in the past, the ones I tookpro bono,or assigned by the courts. I’d seen it in the victims Nick and I released the time we hunted down a child murderer.

She was in shock, but it was more than that.

She was in an ongoing state of survival and stress, and likely had been for a while.

She’d experienced so many emotions and fears, so intensely, for so long, whole parts of her had shut down to compensate. Allof her energy and focus got diverted to the essentials, in an effort just to keep her alive. The profusion of things held back, things felt and suppressed, made her cheeks, jaw, forehead, lips, and eyes flinch and tense and twitch with effort.

I’d glimpsed something like it on Black before, too.

It came back to him at times, mostly when he recounted his time in the slave pens back on Old Earth. He would go back there sometimes, in some part of his light. His whole face would change, his light would change, and I would see it; I would know he was that seer child again. He would be in that place again, with those people. The twitches and jerks would alter his normal expressions, just like what was happening to the girl now.

His eyes would grow far-seeing.

Parts of hisaleimiclight would shut down.

If he went too far into it, I might need Yarli or one of the other seers to help him out of it. Sometimes I could get him out by putting him into a kind ofaleimictrance. Either way, the nightmares would grow exponentially worse after, sometimes for days.

Black told me the hardest part of being in that prison in Louisiana had been how it threw him into a never-ending flashback of his childhood. He couldn’t end it. He couldn’t snap himself out. It felt like a nightmare he couldn’t wake from. And really, it was… the traumatized part of him couldn’t tell the difference.

Looking at this girl’s face was like seeing that in real time.

It was like Black’s nightmares, his memories, come to life.

She might even be close to the same age Black had been for the worst of his own abuse. Maybe it was my own trauma I was feeling, too, with Solonik and even with Nick, but with Black, I could reallyseeit. Looking at her round, too-young face, it didn’t feel like a memory.

It felt like right now.

It felt like those things never left him.

I sucked in a slow, silent breath. I calmed my heart rate with an effort.

This girl needed our help.Gaos,she needed our help right now. She wasn’t some avatar for Black’s pain; she was real. I needed to focus on her.

I consciously created distance in my mind and light.

Once I felt marginally more in my doctor headspace, and less in my hyper-emotional seer wife headspace, I tried to make sense of the profusion of emotion and intensity in her devastating eyes. I didn’t see relief, or fear, or anger, or any of the other emotions one might categorize as “expected,” if one only witnessed captives being freed on television shows and in movies.

Captivity and shock and trauma did strange things to people.

It did particularly strange things to young people. Depending on how long she’d been down there, how much of her life had been molded and shaped around living like this, there was no telling how she might react to us, or whether she could even communicate with us.