After Mind Read Online Free PDF

me.”
    He stared, as blank as a slate.
    “I need more. I want the real you. And from where I’m sitting, out here, I can see you imagining yourself in this hospital room.” she said. “I can even see the memories you dream.”
    “What do you mean? You’re sitting right here,” Packet said.
    Daniel reached up from beyond the foot of his bed and took down the festive “Welcome” letter cutouts that drooped from the curtain’s rail.
    “You remember Tungatinah, that’s great,” Meg said. “I know you saw the pipes. Do you remember what color they were?”
    “Orange.”
    “Do you remember the condenser that dripped? Was it broken or fixed?” she asked.
    “Easy. Broken.”
    “Okay, good. Now, if I put this cream on your temple,” she said as she dotted the cotton ball over his left ear, “tell me, where did the owie come from that I would be touching right here?”
    He flinched as she reached. “Can we go home now?”
    He could tell she was tired by the way she twisted slower from her waist and tossed the spent swab onto the instrument tray. “Not until you tell me so I know it’s you,” she said. She took a tortoise-shell hand mirror from the tray and showed it to him.
    “I don’t know.” He looked in the mirror. “Did I scratch myself?”
    “No, you didn’t,” she said.
    “Is that the boy who splashed me?” Packet asked, pointing at the boy in the mirror.
    Daniel laid the letters on the tray, but by their weight and tangle they fell into a scattered chain on the floor. He didn’t bother to pick them up. He must have been tired, too.
    “No,” Daniel said. “It’s not. But that boy in the mirror is like an infant with twelve years of memories.”
    “Then how’d you get that boy in this mirror to look like me?”
    “You are that boy in the mirror,” Meg said. “It’s you, Cessini. We’re on the second floor of the DigiSci building. Remember the cabinet on the pallet?”
    Packet tilted his head and squinted at the mirror’s screen. It simply didn’t make any sense. “But that boy is so much older than me,” he said. He humphed and rubbed the cream from his head.
    “Don’t do that.” Meg hurried in with her hand. “You’ll smear the magic.”
    The cream dissolved between the rub of his finger to thumb. She held up the mirror again. The boy in the mirror looked back and smiled an innocent grin. He had no cream on his head. Packet laughed himself into a wonderful temper. “Are you a magician?” he asked.
    Meg slouched forward over her knees at the edge of the bed. She flopped the mirror’s rectangular stem between the roll of her fingers, then looked toward the door, then Daniel. “No way can I do this in real time. From toddler to twelve. I won’t wait that long. I can’t,” she said. Her eyes were glassy and tired.
    Packet cupped his hands over his eyes. “If you’re a magician, can you make yourself disappear?”
    Meg didn’t like that at all. She looked up. She was far more than tired. She was angry. “I’m not here right now,” she said. She sprang off the bed and stormed toward the door on the left. “It’s only you in this fabricated room of your mind.”
    Daniel grabbed her arm as she pulled the door handle.
    “Even an eighteen-month-old recognizes himself in a mirror,” she said. “It’s failed.” She twisted free from his grip. “It’s not even close. I can’t do it. I won’t.”
    Daniel skipped to her side and blocked her from opening the door. “This is my fault. Please,” Daniel said. He pleaded. “I need you. And he needs you more than me.”
    “He can’t even pass basic questions,” she said. Her voice cracked deeper as she began to tear up.
    “If it wasn’t him, he wouldn’t know you here in this room. Not like he does.”
    Meg’s hand fell from the door handle and a tinge of her loneliness crept through the room.
    “If you’re not here right now,” Packet asked her, “then where are you?”
    “She’s close,” Daniel said as