keepers. They could take me anywhere, order anything done."
I stepped away from the wall on trembling legs. The silver familiar had gone into hiding, as if I had to stand alone, without any of my guardians.
"You unethical cowards should never be allowed to practice medicine again," I shouted. "Look at you! Was it easy money, a contract with the social services? Yes, those creeps were threatening me. Did nobody think about really protecting me where I had to fight day after day? Were you willing to let me be gang-raped as long as no evidence showed up? As long as no 'helping' medical or social professional would be held accountable for being unable to control the group homes?"
I grabbed the goosenecked lamp and yanked it, wrenching the electrical cord out of the wall. I swung the metal lightbulb hood at the overhead light fixture, bringing huge splinters of the plastic lens and then the shattering fluorescent tubes down on the examining table, dimming the awful glare, making the table a sea of sharp shards.
"I remembered you all as aliens," I told them all, "aliens who'd abducted me, and you are. You are alien to the human race, the real unhuman ones."
I started tearing the paper covering off the wave-shaped examining table. I kicked over the foot-operated white trash can that would have held the bloody cotton. I grabbed the tray and crashed all the metal instruments to the floor. I launched myself at the table itself and somehow pushed it off center and into the wall.
When I paused for breath and brushed my hair off my face, the room was a shambles and the nurses were cowering in a sheeplike clot by the wall rack crowded with torn, years'-old magazines now out of print. One title read Modern Contraception.
"T-t-this is my office," Dr. Youmans said. "You've trashed it. I could s-s-sue you."
Helena stepped into the mess to put a hand on my shoulder. "You sue us? I didn't find any place in the buried records where you ever actually removed the IUD from your underage patient."
The silence said everything I needed to hear.
I lashed out with my boot-toe, dead center of where it hurts a guy the most.
"And you gave me hideous menstrual cramps for eternity? May you have phantom ball pain for the rest of your days, Dr. Malpractice."
I held back from contact, but he cringed, writhed, and cupped his privates anyway.
A nurse objected from the corner of the consulting room. "This is ... this is a physical attack. The police - "
Ric stepped between us. "I'm a Fed. You don't want to involve the locals." He glanced to the doctor's clenched knees and protective, palsied hands.
"You're lucky she's taking it out on ... uh, inanimate objects, Doc, and only figuratively. Me, if she wrung all your necks, I'd just call it in as self-defense. Who's to say different? The last time Delilah was here she was assaulted against her will by all of you."
Chapter Nineteen
"SHOCK THERAPY MAY be okay to use on an illiterate boy once enslaved in the Hell Zone between the U.S. and Mexico," Ric told his foster mother.
Angrily.
He slapped his palm on the table of her boutique hotel suite, making Helena's eyelashes flinch. "Not on Delilah. Not with me there."
Me, I was beyond flinching. I'd batted my last eyelash. My mind and emotions were churning, trying to make sense of the last half of my life. The post - Millennium Revelation part, when I'd been physically altered against my knowledge and will.
Ric was not done ranting.
"It's not something to spring on a woman who blotted out a childhood medical assault because it was too damn traumatic to remember at all." He stopped behind me, bending down, voice lowered.
"You didn't damage your hands or feet, did you, paloma? Butt-kicking inanimate objects can hurt you more than it will ever damage them."
I let him kneel beside me to examine and clasp my fingers. His hands were as warm as his riled temper, and my ice-cube core of dazed fear and fury was melting. I was mad enough at Helena to let him rage, which was rather mean, because I could see Ric's every accusing word flayed the foster-mother inside the scientist.
"She had to confront it, Ric." Helena's soft, controlled voice was pleading. "She had to see what had happened to her in a legal as well as a personal sense, and grasp it all at once. She needed her 'day in court,' because she won't get justice