The Lost Era: Well of Souls: Star Trek Read Online Free PDF

report.”
    “Skimmed, actually: All doctors, even erudite Vulcan psychiatrists, tend to write summaries that verge on the incomprehensible. Anyway, crazy isn’t a word we use to describe patients anymore.”
    “And Starfleet?”
    “I don’t recall they used the word crazy, either. Someone—I believe it was Captain Nash—mentioned that you were troubled. Other than that, he said very nice things. But you know all this, Darya. You have the same access to your personnel files that I do. Besides, no one would have allowed you to return to duty if they thought you couldn’t handle it. Captain Garrett’s put you at ops. You think she would have done that if she thought you were crazy?” (Actually, Tyvan had no idea how Garrett felt. The captain avoided him like the plague.)
    “Whatever.” Bat-Levi held herself ramrod straight, and Tyvan wasn’t sure if this was because her spine was less flexible, or she was really that defensive. Looking at the way her black eyes flashed—a veritable semaphore of hostility—Tyvan decided on the latter.
    “You want to talk about how angry you are, in general?” asked Tyvan. He shifted in his chair, and he caught the squeal of leather. “Or how frightened you are?”
    Bat-Levi jerked, and a servo clattered. “I’m not scared. I’m not scared of anything.”
    “Really?”
    “Really.”
    “Okay,” said Tyvan, and laced his fingers across his middle.
    The silence stretched for several minutes. An antique wind-up clock, with a brass disc pendulum, ticked, tocked, ticked. (He had a regulation chronometer that would ding at the end of their session, but he kept the clock because the face was circular and the sweep of the hands, round and round, was a reminder that life and the psyche were circular because the important things came up again and again.) Tyvan never took his eyes from Bat-Levi; Bat-Levi seemed to find something fascinating on the carpet. Finally, Bat-Levi looked up. “What?”
    “I was looking at your hand,” said Tyvan, deciding to go for broke. Besides, he was being truthful. “The artificial one.”
    He saw her flinch—and there was that squeal of servos again—then resist the temptation to hide the hand. “What about it?” she asked.
    “No nails. How come they forgot to give you nails?”
    A red flush bloomed along the underside of her jaw. “I ... I don’t know. I never asked. Then, once I noticed, I decided it wasn’t important.”
    “Oh. Well, that was an oversight. Makes it that much harder for people not to stare.” Tyvan blinked once, very slowly. (His therapy supervisor once said Tyvan reminded him of a lizard drowsing on a rock.) “You’d think they’d want to avoid that.”
    “Avoid what?”
    “People staring.”
    “ That? I don’t care. People are going to stare anyway, don’t you think? Nails, no nails, what are nails when you look the way I do?”
    “Well,” Tyvan’s eyes moved over her body as if taking inventory, “now that you mention it, nails aren’t that big a deal. Of course, I guess you were counting on that.”
    Bat-Levi’s jaw spasmed, pulling the scar along the right side of her face even tighter. It shone pink like the smooth skin of a naked rat. “I don’t know what you mean.”
    Tyvan pinned her with a look. “I don’t buy that.”
    “Oh?”
    “Yeah, oh, I don’t buy that.” He shifted his lanky frame (he was so thin, sitting for long made his tailbone ache) and ran a hand through cinnamon-colored hair that he knew needed a trim. “Look, you’re a smart woman. You’ve sat with shrinks before, right?”
    Bat-Levi pushed air out between her lips in a dismissive snort. “More than my share: first on Starbase 32 when they tried talking me into reconstructive surgery, then on Meir III at my parents’ place, and again on Vulcan. Want to know something?”
    “What?”
    “I liked the Vulcans best. They’re so logical, and they can be very passionate in their logic. But they know how to keep things in