Page 27 of Tribute
Palk sauntered over to her. “Lee, my felicitations on surviving. I’m impressed.”
“Why are you here?” Her voice was still husky.
“I’m the head of the whole Tribute project. Didn’t Akran tell you?”
“Why would he?”
His smile widened. “Nice comeback, Lee. Now I’m going to let the others get on with their work while I speak to Akran privately. Then I’ll come back to talk to you.”
Rehz crossed his arms over his chest. “There’s nothing you need to say to me, Palk. I’m staying here to oversee your people.”
“I don’t really want tospeakto you, Akran. I was just being polite for the benefit of my inferiors.”
Rehz held his gaze. “I’m no longer one of them.”
“One of what?”
“Your inferiors. Lee was my last trainee, my ticket out of the service.”
Palk blinked. “Whatever gave you the idea that you could get out of anything?”
“Shall we discuss this later?” Rehz nodded at Anna. “I want this to be over for her as soon as possible.”
Anna forced herself not to panic as she answered yet another detailed question about her time with theUngrich. There wasn’t much she could tell them, after all. The whole seven or eight days she’d been there were still blank. She was no longer sure if it was because her mind simply couldn’t deal with the experience, or they had wiped her memories.
Strangely enough, with Akran sitting beside her, holding her hand, deflecting some of the questions and allowing others, she felt a lot calmer. She couldn’t quite believe how he’d stood up to Palk either. She got the sense that it didn’t happen to that cold, vicious thug very often.
But then Akran would probably argue that Palk had saved him, so he owed him something. Mitan was a strange, mixed-up world, and she hated everything about it.
“Did they deal with you any differently than with the males, Lee?”
“I’m not sure. I didn’t really see much of anyone after the first few seconds.”
The female scientist sat forward. “Interesting. The males saw glimpses of each other occasionally. I wonder if you were kept in a different area.”
“I can’t say. It’s not like it was a set of rooms or anything. It was . . . it was like floating through chicken noodle soup.”
“What exactly do you mean by that?”
“There were no structures that were recognizable to my eye. I was just absorbed into theUngrichand I existed.”
“Did you gain a sense of any of them as individuals?”
“There were definitely different personalities within the whole, but I’m not sure where one ended and another began. There was one—” She swallowed down bile. “One primary voice communicating with me.”
“Male or female?”
“I don’t think they use those distinctions, although that’s the first thing any of them communicated with me.”
“What exactly did they say?”
“Female.”
The psychiatrist took over the questioning, and Anna concentrated on trying to appear like a balanced, normal individual who hadn’t been subjected to a week of alien testing. Although technically she supposed she was the alien. TheUngrichwere the original inhabitants of the planet.
“When will I be considered ready to return to civilization?”
She realized she sounded abrupt, but she’d given them everything she had.
