Mad Skills by Walter Greatshell Read Free Book Online Page A

heroes, they were back together again, reunited as a family, and it was all so effing wonderful. Stupid.
    Maddy felt bad about not sharing the moment—obviously this was a huge deal to them—but from her point of view, she hadn’t gone anywhere. Apparently she’d snoozed through all the really rough stuff. Her most meaningful event was Ben’s death … and obviously nobody cared about that anymore. Ben Blevin, the first boy she’d ever kissed, was old news.
    Maddy looked past her parents to Dr. Stevens, who was standing unobtrusively in the corner.
    “So … when can I go home?”
    “Soon. We’d like to keep you a few more days, just for observation.”
    “Haven’t you observed me enough by now?”
    Her folks laughed gratefully at her wry tone—this was the Maddy they remembered—but the doctor only smiled and said, “Not quite.”

SIX
     
    THE PROCRUSTEAN READING ROOM
     
    THE Braintree Clinic was different in her dreams. In dreams, it was much bigger inside than out. In dreams, it was old. She remembered it as a magic box, a brightly mirrored portal into a strange castle riddled with crazy catacombs and pools of white light. It echoed.
    The reality was less impressive: a generic silver module five stories high, with a pleasant view of trees. Braintree was obviously very well funded, everything gleaming and state of the art, but Maddy thought it was a little lame how they wanted it to look like something out of Star Trek when behind the chrome veneer it was really the same old crap. The inefficiencies drove her crazy, not to mention the health hazards—she could practically smell formaldehyde leaching from unstable compounds in the furniture. And forget cracking a window! Wandering the faux-futuristic halls, she half expected to turn a corner and find herself in a cavern full of enormous, rusty machinery. But Maddy knew there could be no such place there—that it had to be some kind of residual memory from the fun house.
    The fun house. Maddy had read news reports of the carnival accident, but thankfully she didn’t remember very much of that night. And it was hard to tell which of her memories were true, so she was always looking for independent confirmation. Verifiable facts. There were still a lot of gray areas, neutral territories where dreams and reality battled for turf in her head. However much she would have liked to make peace with both sides, they could not share the same ground; they did not mesh. They could be remarkably similar at times, but they occupied separate universes. Nevertheless, she homed in on any points of congruence she could find, seizing them like handholds—intersections along the tightrope where her fumbling mind could find purchase.
    One such place was the Reading Room.
    In her dreams, she had spent a lot of time there, and was surprised to find it much as she remembered: a cozy library and study center, all wheelchair-accessible. She had overheard Dr. Plummer call it the Procrustean Science Reading Room—she wasn’t sure why. Unless maybe because it had the pleasant, crusty smell of old books.
    It was Hell.
    Even wide-awake, she was still a little scared of those books. They figured prominently in her most recent nightmare, a long, weird episode in which she craved books like a drug, cracking their covers and inhaling their contents. No matter how many books she devoured, nothing slaked her terrible thirst. The frustration caused her to rip many of the books apart, cutting her fingers to ribbons as she sought richer marrow to suck. She found a computer, and that helped for a while, but in the end its flow of sustaining manna became a trickle of thin gruel, another starvation diet. Out of desperation, Maddy mangled the computer, too, chasing the spring to its source, enlarging the well. But the dream ended before she finished.
    Perusing the shelves, she knew the books were just books. They did not beckon like insanely addictive fruit. She couldn’t crack them like coconuts