No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven) Read Online Free PDF

his face but a cold, businesslike concentration.  She had expected recriminations or forgiveness, not his unfamiliar intensity.  Van sat back in the room’s single real chair, his face closed and thoughtful.
    “Give me the rest,” Kurt said.  “What ’s wrong with Sylvie now?”
    “Right now?  Right now, she ’s pumped because she just became a Transform.  She produced a bunch of extra juice because she became a Transform due to an induced transformation.  She used up lots of her extra juice powering up my transformation, but she still has a bunch extra.  Juice count affects mood, remember, and the higher the better, up to a point.  Her juice count’s large enough to make her high as a kite, and a high juice count makes her, uh, interested in, you know.”
    “So she ’ll get over, um, this.”
    “Yes,” Gail said, and nodded.  “Over the long haul, she’ll get some physical benefits.  She’ll be healthier.  She’ll probably lose a little weight.  She’ll probably have less trouble with her allergies.”
    “Fine,” Kurt said.  “ All common knowledge.  All the sweetness and light shit.  Tell me the secret stuff they don’t print in the newspapers.”
    “Over time I ’m going to be assigned more Transforms to care for.  As soon as they assign me some male Transforms, I’ll move the juice over to them, and lower Sylvie down to normal.  I think, actually, by hanging around me, her juice count will naturally be reduced, going into some strange thing they refer to as a juice buffer.”
    “Never heard of a juice buffer before,” Kurt said.  “The rest makes sense.”  Kurt thought for a minute, and studied his hands.
    “ Uh, one thing, uh, I don’t get any choice in who’s assigned to me,” Gail said, recalling another uncommon bit of information.  “But taking care of Transforms is my new job.”
    “Responsibility,” Van said.  Gail nodded.
    “And the ability to meddle,” Kurt said.  He glanced up again, and his gentle brown eyes were hard.  “You can change Sylvie’s juice level any time you want to.  ‘Pump her’, and make her happy and horny, and out of her fucking mind, or ‘strip her’, reduce her juice to almost nothing, and put her in agony.  Or give her too much and turn her into a Monster.”
    It was impossible not to have learned a lot of the slang, such as ‘stripping’ and ‘pumping’ and ‘moving juice’.  Transforms used their own language, of course.  The daily lives of Transforms, although taboo on television and in high school textbooks, filled the Sunday supplements, the women’s magazines and the Readers Digest, and far too many hours of casual college bull sessions.  This hadn’t stopped Dr. Mendell from going over everything, though, slowly and carefully and repetitively.
    “I think it ’s hard to do something like that,” Gail said.  “I don’t understand what I’m doing yet.”
    “It damned well better be hard to do,” Kurt said.  “Too much and she ’s a Monster – worse than dead.  You sure as hell better figure out what you’re doing before something bad happens.”
    Gail nodded.
    “Anything else?” Kurt said, a demanding expression in his voice and on his face.
    “Um, the juice flow is going to be real unstable for the first month or so.  The doctors are going to be finding more Transforms for me.  Things are supposed to stabilize when I get about ten people in my household.  Before I do, I got warned I’ll be having some big mood swings.  They’re going to keep us here in the clinic until we have enough people in the household for the juice count to stabilize and we find another place to live.”
    “Yes?”
    Gail searched her mind again, trying to find something else besides the big one.  She felt like she was on trial, under Kurt’s intense grilling, for the crime of becoming a Focus.
    No.  For the crime of transforming Sylvie.
    And, oh, hell, she didn’t see any way around it any more.  The one