Teleporter (a Hyllis family story #2) (15 page)

‘

As Tarc and Daussie lay in the Hyllises’ tent waiting while Prichard maneuvered his wife up and away, practically carrying her back toward his house, Tarc turned to Daussie. He whispered, “Daussie, can your ghost feel this tiny little pebble just beyond the tip of my finger?”

“I thought you were trying to sleep so you’d be rested up for your watch tonight?”

“Yeah, that’s not working so good. Can you feel the pebble? It’s more like a big grain of sand.”

Daussie expanded her ghost into the darkness, found Tarc’s arm, then finger, then the minuscule rock off the end of his finger. “Yes. What about it?”

“Try pushing it.”

Gloomily, Daussie said, “Why are you doing this?! You know I
can’t
push things.”

“Maybe you can,” Tarc said tensely. He sounded like he felt pretty excited about whatever he was thinking. “
I
can push things that are too big for Dad to move.
You
can sense a bigger area than I can. Maybe you
can
push but your push is even weaker than Dad’s. Maybe, even if you can’t push a copper, you can push something smaller. It might not help a lot with treating patients, but if you could tug on things inside of people to see if they’re irritable, it could really help with making a diagnosis.”

Daussie focused on the miniscule rock for a second and thought about trying to move it. Nothing happened. “I can’t do it,” she said mournfully.

“Oh come on! You didn’t really even try! Focus! Shove that thing!”

Daussie turned her attention back to the pebble and concentrated.

Tarc continued exhorting her, “Push it away like it’s a spider! A nasty bug! Move it, move it, move it! Keep focusing… Wha’, what the hell just happened?”

Daussie wasn’t sure what had happened either. The pebble was gone! She hadn’t sensed it moving, but it must have. She spread the attention of her ghost out, “Um, is that it… there by your elbow”?

It was dark in the tent, but Daussie could sense Tarc’s sudden shift of attention in the way he altered the position of his head. “Maybe? Maybe it’s just another big piece of sand that we didn’t notice before?” The tiny rock skidded back across the floor of the tent to where the original pebble had been, presumably under the influence of Tarc’s ghost. “Try pushing it again,” Tarc said.

Again the pebble disappeared. This time, to Daussie, it didn’t feel like much effort was involved at all. The first time she’d had to focus and push, but this time it seemed like she… knew what to do. She cast about near Tarc’s elbow to see if she had simply shoved it to that same location so quickly she didn’t feel it go, but she couldn’t feel it this time.

Tarc breathed, “It’s gone!” Wonderingly, he said, “I’m not sure if it just disappeared, or if you moved it so fast I couldn’t see it go. What do
you
think happened?”

“I don’t know,” Daussie said with a sense of awe. “Maybe you were thinking so hard about it that
you
moved it.”

“I don’t think so. Let me get another pebble.”

Daussie expected him to get up, or at least roll over and reach out under the flap of the tent, but he did neither. Suddenly she realized that he was just reaching out with his ghost. Sure enough, a few seconds later an oddly shaped pebble floated in and stopped in the same location the two tiny ones had been before. This one was a little bit bigger and shaped something like a tadpole.

Tarc said, “This pebble’s weird enough that we won’t be left wondering whether it just disappeared and we found another one. Give
it
a shove.”

Daussie said, “It’s too big!”

“You moved that tiny one so far and so fast we can’t even find it! I’m pretty sure you can move this one a little ways.”

Daussie reached out and did what she’d done to the tiny one. Nothing seemed to happen for a second, then the tadpole disappeared!

“Damn!” Tarc exclaimed, jerking himself up onto one elbow. “Where the
hell
did it go?!” Even though he was rigidly still, Daussie had the impression that he was casting about for it with his ghost. She had just started to reach out with her own ghost when he suddenly said, “Here it is! By my ribs!”

Daussie sensed the tadpole as Tarc’s ghost scooted it back into the spot it had come from. Because of its distinctive shape she was sure it was the same pebble. “That’s it all right. Um, it has to be moving really fast since we can’t see it go… or maybe, our ghost senses don’t see things that move even a little bit fast? Well, I guess ‘see’ isn’t really the right term for what our ghosts do, but, you know what I mean? Can you see things that are moving quickly with your ghost?”

“Yeah…” Tarc said slowly and thoughtfully, “I can see my knife flying to a target well enough to control it. It’s going pretty fast.”

“Are you seeing the pebble move?”

“Um, no… Maybe my ghost can sense my knife because it was thrown by my hand, but I wouldn’t be able to follow something moved entirely by my ghost?”

“Oh, that’s a thought. Why don’t you try moving the pebble as fast as you can with your ghost and we’ll see if we can follow it?”

Daussie had her mind focused on the pebble when it suddenly shot from where it lay, back to where it had been by Tarc’s ribs. It moved quickly and seemed a little bit hard to follow, like something someone had thrown, but she definitely had the impression that her ghost had tracked it. Tarc said, “Could you follow it?”

Daussie nodded, trusting Tarc to follow the motion of her head with his ghost senses. “Maybe I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t known you were about to move it though. Let me try moving it again with you forewarned. Maybe you’ll be able to follow it. I’m going to try to move it back from where it’s lying, to that spot where it started, okay?”

“Sure,” Tarc said.

Daussie focused on the pebble, thinking about how she wanted to move it from the one spot exactly to another spot, rather than just trying to “push it” like she had before. She even pictured it moving slowly. At first, like before, nothing happened. Then, suddenly, the pebble simply was
at
the new location where Tarc’s finger had originally been.

Tarc’s head drew back in startlement, “Whoa! It’s like… it just…
jumped
from the one spot to the other! I don’t have any sense that it’s moving! Just that it disappears in the one place and appears in the next!”

“Yeah,” Daussie said slowly, “that’s what it feels like to me too. It seems like I have to push on it for a little while, and then suddenly, bang, it’s in the new place. Kind of like I have to push it up over a little lip, then it rolls instantly to the new spot.”

Tarc said, “But it has to be going from the one place to the other so fast we can’t sense it! Otherwise how would it get there?”

“Yeah, I think you’ve got to be right. It seems weird that it goes so fast we can’t see it when I do it, but that we
can
see it when you do it.”

“Hey!” Tarc said, “Maybe if you were moving something bigger, it would go slow enough that we could see it?” He dug into a pocket.

“But I can’t move big things!”

“Maybe you can, now that you’ve learned how. I can move a lot bigger things now than I could when I first started. Try it with this copper,” he said reaching out and putting a copper coin on the ground sheet of their tent.

It was moderately bigger and substantially heavier than the pebble she’d been moving. Daussie reached out with her ghost, grasped the copper and focused on moving it over by Tarc’s ribs. Nothing happened. “It’s too big,” she sighed, “I can’t move it.”

“Keep trying! You’ve just got to get it up over that ‘lip’ you were talking about.”

Daussie resumed shoving it. A second later it vanished, reappearing by Tarc’s ribs!

“Damn!” Tarc said excitedly, “I
still
didn’t see it move! Do
you
feel it going from the one place to the other?”

“No,” Daussie said slowly. “It seems to me that it just disappears in the one place and reappears in the other. Is that how it seems to you?”

“Yeah!” But… it’s got to be just moving too fast to see, doesn’t it? Wait, I’ll fold it in my blanket, then when you move it, it’ll pull on the blanket, right?” Tarc said this last musingly, as he tried to consider the ramifications of what seemed to be happening. He’d picked up the copper, put it on the corner of his blanket then folded the blanket around it a couple of times. “There, you can still sense it right?”

Of course I can,
Daussie thought to herself,
I can feel things deep inside of you!
She didn’t say anything aloud however. Instead she simply focused on the copper as it lay wrapped in the blanket, trying to move it back to the spot on the ground sheet where he’d first placed it. At first nothing happened, just like before, but she continued pushing. Suddenly, the blanket collapsed where the copper had been. The copper appeared out on the ground sheet exactly on the spot where Daussie had been trying to send it.

“Holy crap!” Tarc breathed. “That’s amazing!” After a moment he said, “
You
might be able to do a lot better than just pushing a stone out of a bile duct! You might be able to remove stones completely!”

***

When Eva woke her up in the morning, Daussie still felt exhausted. She might not have stood a watch like Tarc did, but she had lain awake for hours thinking about her newfound talent. She wondered what she would be able to do with it. Would she really be able to remove gallstones?

She decided that before she tried it in a patient, she should try wrapping a pebble in some meat and seeing if she could extract it without harm to the surrounding flesh. After a while, she wondered whether any animals might have real gallstones that she could practice on. Her eyebrows rose, or kidney stones?
Wait a minute, chickens! They have pebbles in their gizzards! If I can remove them without hurting the chicken, that would be relatively good proof that it could be done without harm.
She paused, thinking for a moment,
and I can swallow a pebble and remove it from my own stomach!

Still, she felt disheartened. Removing stones from patients would certainly be very helpful to those
few
patients who had stones, but gallstones and kidney stones only made up a small portion of the very, very many things that could go wrong with patients. Tarc could help a lot more people than she could.

They didn’t actually cook breakfast for the camp that morning. Even though they got up early so that they would be able to do it, Norton came around minutes after they had risen. He exhorted the people in each wagon to get up, eat some of their traveling food, hitch their teams and be ready to leave as soon as possible. He was apparently following the suggestion that they try to get out of this part of the country before the bandits realized they were there.

Even though the Hyllises knew that, with the scouts watching them, it was pointless to try to leave before the raiders noticed, they rushed to get ready as if they were unaware. During his time on guard, Tarc had seen a couple of scouts come out of the woods where the one man had been standing. They had circled somewhat near the caravan, never coming close enough that Tarc thought he should roust the rest of the guard. Nonetheless, the raiders certainly knew of the caravan’s presence and exactly where it was located.

Despite being awake and hurrying as fast as they could, the Hyllises were the last ones to be ready to roll. All the other wagon owners had a great deal more experience with the preparations necessary to move out. Once the caravan had started to move, Eva called Daussie over to the back of their wagon. For a moment she studied her surprisingly attractive young daughter. Considering that the girl never made an effort to look better, it was amazing how good she looked. Daussie hadn’t even asked to have her irregularly chopped hair cut any nicer after Krait’s men had been driven away. The hair still looked like someone had hacked it off with a rock but Daussie had combed it out straight and somehow it looked good. She looked good enough that Eva could imagine some thinking she’d cut her hair that way as a style choice. Eva sighed, keeping the boys away from her daughter was going to be difficult just like Tarc had suggested.

She reached up and messed up Daussie’s hair. “Let’s get in the wagon and I’ll wrap you up. We’ll get you in boy’s clothes again and smudge your face a little.” At Daussie’s apprehensive look, Eva said, “We’re gonna get through this girl, but if there’s trouble, the last thing you want to do is to look pretty!” She reached up and started muddling her own hair, lifting an eyebrow and saying, “Me either, for that matter.”

The guard wagon was barely leading the way out of the caravan’s field when Arco came by asking Daum and Tarc to get up onto the shooting platform. Daum got up there and Tarc led the horses until Eva had finished wrapping Daussie. Once again, Eva took over leading the Hyllises’ team while Tarc climbed up onto the shooting platform. Once Daussie had on her boy’s clothing, she mounted the bay horse.

Arco again had everyone wearing or carrying whatever weapons they owned. All the guards mounted up on horses with two scouting ahead and the rest scattered alongside. Henry Roper had again come up to lead the team of mules pulling the guards’ wagon and Daussie found herself riding beside him. Roper glanced up at her, then turned his entire head to stare. “Um, I’m Henry Roper. Who are you?”