"Absolutely not," Anna said firmly. "I have a double doctorate; one of them is in headshrinking. I am quite capable of assessing you all by myself."
Tia's heart sank when Anna mentioned her degree in Psych, but it rose the moment she referred to Psych as 'headshrinking'. None of the Psychs who had plagued her life until now ever called their profession by something as frivolous as 'headshrinking'.
She patted Tia's shoulder. "Don't worry, Tia. It's my opinion that you are a very brave young lady. A bit too responsible, but otherwise just fine. They spend too much time analyzing children and not enough time actually seeing them or paying attention to them." She smiled inside her helmet, and a curl of hair escaped down to dangle above her left eyebrow, making her look a lot more human.
"Listen, Tia, there's a little bit of fur missing from your bear, and a scrap of stuffing," Kenny said. "Anna says you wouldn't notice, but I thought we ought to tell you anyway. We checked him over for alien bugs and neurotoxins, and he's got a clean bill of health. When you come out of Coventry, we'll decontam him again to be sure, but we know he wasn't the problem, in case you were wondering."
She had wondered. Moira wouldn't have done anything on purpose, of course, but it would have been horrible if her sickness had been due to Ted. Moira would have felt awful, not to mention how Tomas would feel.
"What's his name?" Anna asked, busying herself with something at the head of the bed. Tia couldn't turn her head far enough to see what it was.
"Theodore Edward Bear," she replied, surreptitiously rubbing her cheek against his soft fur. "Moira gave him to me, because she used to have a bear named Ivan the Bearable."
"Excellent name, Theodore. It suits him," Anna said. "You know, I think your Moira and I must be about the same age. There was a kind of fad for bears when I was little. I had a really nice bear in a flying suit called Amelia Bearhart." She chuckled. "I still have her, actually, but she mostly sits on the bureau in my guest room. She's gotten to be a very venerable matriarch in her old age."
But bears weren't really what she wanted to talk about. Now that she knew where she was, and that she was in isolation. "How long am I going to be in here?" she asked in a small voice.
Kenny turned very serious, and Anna stopped fiddling with things. Kenny sucked on his lower lip for a moment before actually replying, and the hum of the machinery in her room seemed very loud. "The Psychs were trying to tell us that we should try and cushion you, but, Tia, we think that you are a very unusual girl. We think you would rather know the complete truth. Is that the case?" Would she? Or would she rather pretend? But this wasn't like making up stories at a dig. If she pretended, things would only seem worse when they finally told her the truth, if it was bad.
"Ye-es," she told them both, slowly. "Please."
"We don't know," Anna told her. "I wish we did. We haven't found anything in your blood, and we're only just now trying to isolate things in your nervous system. But, well, we're assuming it's a bug that got you, a proto-virus, maybe, but we don't know, and that's the truth. Until we know, we won't know if we can fix you again."
Not when. If.
The possibility that she might stay like this for the rest of her life chilled her.
"Your parents are in isolation, too," Kenny said, hastily, "but they are one hundred percent fine. There's nothing wrong with them at all. So that makes things harder."
"I understand, I think," she said in a small, nervous sounding voice. She took a deep breath. "Am I getting worse?"
Anna went very still. Kenny's face darkened, and he bit his lower lip.
"Well," he said quietly. "Yes. We're having to think about mobility, and maybe even life-support for you. Something considerably more than my chair. I wish I could tell you differently, Tia."
"That's all right," she said, trying to ease his distress. "I'd rather know."
Anna leaned down to whisper something through her suit-mike. "Tia, if you're afraid of crying, don't be. If I were in your position, I'd cry. And if you would like to be alone, tell us, all right?"
"Okay," she replied, faintly. "Uh, can I be alone for a while, please?"
"Sure." She stopped pretending to fuss with equipment and nodded shortly at the holo-screen. Kenny brought up one hand to wave at her, and the screen blinked out. Anna left through what Tia now realized was a decontam-airlock a moment later. Leaving her alone with the hissing, humming equipment, and Ted.
She swallowed a lump in her throat and thought very hard about what they'd told her.
She wasn't getting any better, she was getting worse. They didn't know what was wrong. That was on the negative side. On the plus side, there was nothing wrong with Mum and Dad, and they hadn't said to give up all hope. Therefore, she should continue to assume that they would find a cure.
She cleared her throat. "Hello?" she said.