The Tower Read Online Free PDF Page A

repeated.
    â€œYou won’t.”
    â€œWhy is this happening?” I sobbed. “It’s bad enough I’m sick but you have to pull this kind of joke on me?!”
    â€œWhat joke?” Deanna-the woman-dressed-like-Miracle Mistress wanted to know.
    What joke ? “This!” I yelled. “This whole BS space thing with superheroes and Earth orbits and you’re gonna make me better…it’s always just another lie!” I broke down and sobbed, ignoring the reality that I was here.
    â€œThat’s not what you want, is it now?” Deanna asked. I had no strength left to say anything and even if they had left me alone, where could I have gone? She knew that I needed a helping hand to guide me along. “No,” she said sympathetically, “that’s not what you want at all. C’mon.”
    With that, Nurse Deanna-whoever put on her nurse’s robe again and took me back to the hospital room. She hooked up the medicine, and once the IV was in, the feeling of ice and fire came again along with the shaking and then…a moment of peace. “Don’t go, please,” I begged her. “I’m sorry about what I said before.”
    She nodded her head and her voice was soft and caring. “It’s okay; I understand. You’re young and sick and frightened. It’s only natural and you’ve been through so much already. It isn’t fair, but sometimes people get sick and that’s all there is to it. We’re here to help and you must believe that.” Sounded like something straight out of the comics; very corny but also sincere and oh-so-believable. I was so far gone it didn’t really matter, yet for some reason, right then and there, I trusted her.
    â€œPlease don’t go,” I said again.
    â€œI won’t, but you have to sleep now and let the medicine do its job.” She dried my tears. “There will be more changes; they’re part of the side effects,” she added.
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œYou’ll see; it’ll be okay,” she assured me.
    I was still very scared. “Is it going to hurt?” I asked her, my mind very foggy now.
    â€œYes; you’ll live.” She smiled at me, a real smile, not just a professional one.
    That was the last thing I remembered. The next time I saw her everything was a lot different.
    And that’s when my views on what reality was did a U-turn into the impossible.

Three: Whole Again
    â€œWelcome back,” said Deanna. She was gazing at me intently. Dr. Fustus and Avenger were on the other side of the bed, looking at my chart.
    â€œHow long was I out?” I asked. I’d woken up in a different room this time. It was full of boxes and unused equipment; probably a storage room. Instead of my old clothes, I was clothed in a white hospital gown.
    â€œJust two weeks; our medicine works very quickly,” she added. “You were in there,” she said, pointing to some kind of healing chamber in the corner. “We call it a WOMB: It stands for ‘Wellness Optimizing Matrix Biosphere.’”
    The WOMB was like a big cigar tube, roughly ten feet high and five feet in circumference. Fustus explained that I’d been kept in stasis while the medicine administered to me had stimulated growth of bone, muscle and organ renewal, plus blood cleansing and other bodily functions which weren’t worth thinking about. Looking more closely inside the sphere, there was some kind of faintly cloudy liquid there. Was that what I’d been floating in?
    â€œIt’s a type of amniotic fluid,” the doctor said, “similar to what babies are suspended in when they’re inside their mothers’ stomachs.”
    â€œI hope the treatment didn’t cause you much pain,” Deanna/Miracle Mistress said.
    â€œYeah, it did.”
    Avenger looked a bit surprised. “You were supposed to be asleep.”
    â€œI wasn’t.” Not all the