“Ah ke.”
He frowned again. “Sorry. I don’t know what that is.” The patient seemed to respond with agitation and he knew it wouldn’t aid recovery if she was upset. “It sounds like ‘ah ke’ to me. Is that what you’re saying?” She shook her head no almost imperceptibly. “You’re not able to say the word clearly because of the swelling around your mouth?”
She sighed. “Hmmm.”
“Pretty soon, maybe even tomorrow you’ll be able to tell me. For now, I’ll think of it as a puzzle and try to solve it.”
He said he would come whenever he could. That turned out to be every day for most of the day. Elora’s speech started to improve and soon she was able to enunciate her full name and correct the misimpression.
Storm didn’t ask a lot of questions nor did he reveal anything pertinent. He would make small talk about weather and ask how she was doing. Every day he asked if she needed anything and every day she answered that she wanted a window, but one day she followed that with a request for “locket”.
“Locket.” He looked perplexed. “You had a locket with you?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure it was with you when you came here?”
“Yes.” Although she could form words at this point, it was still with great effort, so her sentences were as efficient as possible. “Saw them take.”
He said he would try to find it. He asked the nursing staff about the locket, but no one was on duty who had been there when she arrived. While he was there, he made sure they understood that the bursar in the Operations Office had been instructed to release funds for whatever she wanted when she was able to ask, unless it was a weapon or something that could obviously be used as one. He anticipated the day would come when she would want some of her own clothes or toiletries and such.
Storm came back into the room to let her know he would look for the locket and asked if there was anything else before he left for the day.
“Where am I?”
“You’re in a hospital unit on a military base. We don’t know how you got here, but when you’re better, we’re hoping you’ll tell us. Right now just use your energy for getting well. That’s your only priority. Everything else can be sorted out later. Right?”
“Okay. And thank you. It’s nice they assigned me to somebody named Angel.”
“You speak German?”
“Some.”
“Well, don’t start setting the bar too high. It was wishful thinking on my mother’s part.”
Sol looked up from reading a brief when he peripherally noticed a shape standing in the open door of his office. Storm was waiting for an invitation. Sol took his feet off the desk and turned the swivel chair toward the door, motioning Storm inside. “Sir Storm. What can I do for you?”
“Sovereign.” Storm replied in kind, using Sol’s formal title, nodding in the way men with combat experience greet each other, as if there was an unspoken fraternal consciousness that only they shared. “It’s about the patient upstairs.”
Sol’s mouth, held semi-permanently in a rigid line, turned up just a little at the corners. “I suspected as much.”
“She says she had a locket when she arrived. Do you know where they would have put something she had on her person that was salvageable?”
Sol scrutinized Storm while contemplating whether it could do any harm to return the locket. He realized, of course, that the hesitation had already given away that he did, in fact, know something about it. The near-imperceptible release of tension in Sol’s shoulders was the tell-tale signal that he had decided to give up the information.
“Go see Monq,” was all he said. When Storm left without another word, Sol called Monq and told him to expect a visitor momentarily. Then he gave Monq clearance to release the locket and brief Storm on the intelligence gathered so far.
After hearing Monq out, Storm paid a second visit to the infirmary. Elora was sleeping. So he pocketed the locket, planning to return the next day.
He decided to spend the evening researching Elora’s supposed counterpart in his dimension. He grabbed a club sandwich to go from the hub diner and took it back to his quarters. When Monq had mentioned the similarity between his name and the owner of the locket, Storm had reasoned that, if Monq’s hypothesis regarding near-parallel experiences held, there would be an Elora Laiken, or someone with a similar name, in their reality.
With relatively little effort the investigation revealed that there was, in fact, an Elora Laiken, born twenty-three years earlier, died at the age of twelve, daughter of a Briton royal clan. Cause of death was a freak case of pneumonia that didn’t respond to any known treatment.
There was a short article written about her with a photo of her in equestrian gear, wearing a shy smile and holding a trophy with blue ribbon that was far too large for her.
The article said she had just won a steeplechase event and that she had personally trained the black, thoroughbred jumper named Crowers Keep. He noticed the photo had a video link. When he clicked it, the photo came to life.
The young Elora was telling an interviewer that the gelding, Crow, had been a gift for her ninth birthday, that he was two-years-old at the time, and that he had shown an extraordinary exuberance for running and jumping, the two skills required for steeplechase. With self-effacing humility and a relaxed and engaging style far beyond her years, she said she couldn’t really take credit for training him, that she had more or less just hung on for the ride.