Midnight Lamp Read Online Free PDF

the whole fucking time .’
    ‘Doctor, doctor. I had my liver and half my right lung torn out ten months ago, and now I can’t swim a mile in freezing cold water without feeling poorly.’
    ‘Half a mile.’
    ‘Yeah, really? A country half-mile. You’re unreasonable… How’s “Relax”?’
    The Unmasked concept was brain-burning immix applied to golden oldies, a simple idea that had turned out to be a bugger to implement.
    ‘Not,’ said Sage. ‘I should call Holly, tell him it isn’t going to happen.’
    ‘Nah, don’t do that. You’ll get there.’
    The mist had descended. Fiorinda, the Nevada kids and the Pabellón kids played rounders down the shore, dim figures wavering in cloud.
    ‘What do you think of her now?’ asked Ax, quietly.
    ‘She’s…okay. No better, not much worse.’
    ‘I think she’s better, Sage. Look at her, she’s playing . It’s like the childhood she never had. I think she had a nervous breakdown and she’s coming out of it.’
    On the beach at Drumbeg, Fiorinda’s father had used his last breath to promise Sage that neither he nor Ax Preston would enjoy her again. Sage had been convinced (he was in no position to doubt Rufus O’Niall’s power to make a prophecy stick) that this meant he would die, and they would blame themselves and split up. Or else he’d linger on, a hopeless invalid, and ruin their lives. You can reach technologically-mediated Nirvana, and your life can still be a fuck-up. But O’Niall had cursed his daughter, not his rivals. Sage crept back to health and strength, it was Fiorinda who was lost.
    No one at home knew what what had happened at Tyller Pystri, but everyone who knew her had seen Fiorinda was in trouble. She had seemed to make an incredible recovery from her ordeal, but as fear for Sage’s life had receded, she’d begun to fall apart: quietly, day by day, and at last the collapse had come. It was natural, maybe even cleansing…
    ‘She isn’t having a nervous breakdown,’ said Sage, breaking in on Ax’s hopeful reasoning. ‘Psychologically, she’s in amazing shape.’
    ‘Are you kidding ?’
    ‘I am not kidding. You and I both deserted her. Her bastard of a father raped her for seven months in the body of a dead man, the English tried to burn her for a witch, she helped me to kill Rufus, and she came out of all that emotionally intact, because she is our babe, and there is no one like her. The damage is to the hardware.’ Sage pulled back the hood of his drysuit, and rubbed at the drying salt on his forehead. ‘She has frontal lobe trauma. I’d need a scan to give you the details: but it wouldn’t make any odds, there’s nothing anyone could do. Fiorinda’s brain is too weird, nobody would dare to contemplate surgery.’
    ‘What are you saying?’
    ‘I’m saying, prolonged mental or physical torture will make people schizophrenic. It will do that. It’s a syndrome, not a disease, and once the damage is done, doesn’t matter a fuck how it was induced.’ He held out his tanned right hand, and spread the long, strong, square-tipped fingers. ‘You know the world is nothing but virtual particles, popping in an’ out of existence, don’t you Ax? You know technically you could be dreaming, right now, because everything you perceive, sleeping or waking, is just firing neurons? It doesn’t bother you, it feels okay, because of a trick your brain does. That’s what Fiorinda has lost. She can’t distinguish internal and external stimuli. She’s lost the illusion of a single reality, and all her horrors rush in to fill the gap.’
    ‘You’re telling me that Fiorinda is crazy.’
    ‘No, I’m telling you she has neurological damage and her brain chemistry is fucked, and unfixable. But in Fiorinda’s case there’s an extra twist. She knows what she is , she knows what her father was. It’s not just that the world doesn’t feel real. She knows … She’s changed the code: and so have I, or I wouldn’t be here. I can deal