Ammonite Planets (Omnibus): Ammonite Galaxy #1-3 by Gillian Andrews Read Free Book Online Page B

for the surge of relief that she felt at those words. She had been more worried than she thought. She led the way past the voting and exercise chambers into the private family rooms. As she had expected, her mother was sitting on the sofa there.
    “Grace, can I go back to the tanato chamber now? Has he gone?” Then she spotted Vion. “Oh. What are you doing still here?” And she lifted the knife out from her body, pointing it at the doctor threateningly.
    Vion pretended that he hadn’t seen the knife. “Good morning, Cimma!” he said, moving forward and presenting his fingers in the stretched out position for the standard greeting.
    “May the orbits of the heavenly triangle remain stable,” he said.
    Cimma looked confused. She hesitated, and then put the knife down to touch Vion’s fingers as protocol required. Grace held her breath. At last she had put the knife down!
    “May the flares of Almagest remain quiescent,” Cimma chanted obediently.
    Vion dropped his hand, and Cimma turned round immediately to pick up the knife again. Grace was disappointed, but Vion showed no interest in it.
    “I have come to give you a medical,” he said, getting some of the usual doctor’s paraphernalia out of his case. “Just the usual things, Cimma. Is that all right?”
    Cimma touched her face slowly in an almost robotic movement. “I suppose so,” she said.
    “Good. Good.” He was already taking the vital signs. He checked her over quickly and then stood up. “There. Finished.”
    Cimma was surprised. “Is that all?”
    “Do you want me to look at anything else?” he queried.
    “No.”
    “Are you sleeping, Cimma?” he asked. Grace’s mother shook her head dumbly. “No? Then I will leave you some pills you can take. They will help you sleep. And a tonic both you and your daughter need.”
    Cimma looked at him warily. He asked no further questions, however, and instead turned back to Grace.
    “Perhaps you could show me to the lift, Grace?”
    It was when they were walking back on their own that he asked her about the knife. Grace bit her lip.
    “Come on Grace, you will have to tell somebody sometime. It might as well be me.”
    “She … that is …” Grace didn’t know where to start. Vion nodded encouragingly, and she felt encouraged to go on, “She heard my father talk to her, after … after he died. She says he told her that she must always carry a knife, always be ready to defend the two of us … her and me.”
    “Does she talk to him all the time?”
    “Of course not!” Grace said. “Just that once … well, and another couple of times, perhaps. But only a couple.”
    “All right, Grace. Calm down. I will just give you a sedative for now that will help her to sleep. But I can see that she isn’t eating, and this knife business will have to stop eventually.” He touched her on the shoulder, sympathetically. “You are getting run down yourself with all this worry. Make sure you take the tonic too.”
    Grace nodded.
    “And call me if you need me.”
    She nodded again.
    “I mean it!”
    She smiled. It was nice to have someone interested in them. She had been struggling for so long on her own.
    “I will,” she told him, as the lift arrived and he stepped through the door as it thinned.

Chapter 5
     
    DIVA, WHO WAS usually good at concentrating when Atheron expected it, was finding the current subject very heavy going. The teacher’s voice droned on and on in waves that seemed to wash up so monotonously on the shore in her head that he was sending her to sleep. She tried to keep her eyes open, but the eyelids were so heavy that it was proving a gargantuan task. Vaguely she could hear his voice in the background, receding away from her. Her eyes closed and she gave a sudden start as she felt for a split-second that she might be falling. Her hands clutched at the orthogel chair she was sitting in, and her eyes finally closed.
    At that moment she had an oppressive sensation of somebody else being