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for everyone else s agony and when she discovered that she could touch the
sufferer and take the agony into her own body and thus relieve them both of
it, things got worse instead of better.
When she learned how to eat death, she also learned that she had a limited
appetite, but that death spread an endless banquet. Her body would only take
so much she could help one person who was dying, or a few who were terribly
sick, or many who were merely ill, but when she reached her limit, she
collapsed. She couldn t move again until her body did whatever it did with the
horror it had swallowed. She lay where she fell, wracked with pain, poisoned
by death not her own, for hours on top of hours, until her body gradually
washed the stranger-death out of her and sent it& elsewhere.
She had always felt the pain of others Jimmy and Betty McColl, her adoptive
parents, had wearied themselves of taking her to the doctor for sudden fits of
screaming and vomiting and diarrhea before she was even old enough to speak.
By the time she was six, they had debated for the thousandth time giving her
to a children s home but they kept her, in the same way and with the same
grudging spirit that they kept the puppy they got from the pound to play with
her, the puppy that turned out to be too nervous and stupid to be housebroken.
Then, when she was seven, everything changed. She had felt the nightmare pain
of the old woman sitting next to her on the pew in church. She doubled over in
agony but kept quiet, because by the age of seven she had learned that there
were worse things than sharing the suffering of those nearby. Screaming in
church was worse, because the pain and the humiliation that brought her came
when she got home, where no strangers could see how furiously her adoptive
parents punished her.
So instead of crying out, she had rested her hand on the old woman s hand, and
she had wished the woman s pain would stop had thought she would do anything
to make that pain stop. And the pain and the death that were devouring the old
woman had listened. They poured into Molly s young body through the old
woman s hand heart failure and kidney failure and arthritis and inoperable
stomach cancer. Molly didn t remember what happened right after that; her
adoptive parents told her later that she had turned the most terrible shade of
gray and fainted. The old woman, they said, stood up shouting, I ve been
healed, I ve been healed, and ran from the church.
Jimmy and Betty McColl scooped the child up and took her home, wondering at
the odd coincidence of Molly passing out at the same moment that the old woman
sitting beside her suddenly went crazy and believed herself miraculously
healed. But Molly had been sick so often in her short life with things that
had never amounted to anything that they didn t make the connection until days
later, when Molly was better again and they heard that the woman had been
cured truly cured and that her doctors were mystified.
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A short season of experimentation had followed, while Molly learned to eat
death by being presented with a steady diet of it. Jimmy and Betty McColl had
looked like good people on the surface, but beneath the veneer, they were
nightmares; they found within the person of their adoptive daughter an
unexpected gold mine, and their relative poverty coupled with the potential
for vast wealth proved more of a temptation than their surface niceties could
survive. They began offering Molly s services underground; they developed her
healing as a cash-only black-market commodity, and they grew very rich from
her pain.
She ran away when she was fifteen, but Jimmy found her and brought her back,
and she became a virtual prisoner. Her next chance to flee didn t come until
she turned eighteen, when Jimmy and Betty were trying to decide how to keep
her in the house now that she had reached her majority; after all, they had a
lifestyle to support. She moved heaven and earth and got herself to a
recruiting station and joined the Air Force. That was the day she said
good-bye to eating boozer death. Said to hell with the drinkers, the
pill-poppers, the gorgers, the bingers, the pukers, the mainliners, and the
rest of the hide-from-the-world horde. Those who bought their own poison could
keep its sting. She couldn t save the world and she wouldn t try.
She used her time in the military and almost every penny she earned trying to
find her real parents. She succeeded after four years, but what she learned
was that they had died in a car crash when she was fifteen. She visited their
graves, and found she liked the town where they had lived and died. It was
tiny, it was quiet, and she found the people there easy to avoid. When she
finished her second tour of duty, she bought herself a little trailer in Cat
Creek and she made herself hard to find.
But not hard enough, apparently.
She paced through the lovely suite, restless, full of energy. These creatures
would want her to heal. They would keep her in this cage, as Jimmy and Betty
had kept her in a cage they would profit from her talent, and use her until
she dropped, and then wait until she could get herself up so that they could
use her some more.
No matter how reverent her guards, no matter how pretty her cage, that was
what this was all about. They would come with their pain and their death, and
because there was no end to pain and death, once they started coming, they
would never stop. Nothing she did would ever be enough. They would set her
before the ocean with a thimble and demand that she empty it, and as she had
done before, she would empty herself trying. Unless she could find her way to
freedom.
She heard soft voices through the glass, and glanced out the window. Far below
she saw creatures like her captors lining up across a stone courtyard. Some
held babes or children in their arms. Some supported infirm elders. Some
hobbled along on crutches; some limped; some coughed. And behind her she heard
the ring of footsteps in the metal hallway outside her doors. They were coming
for her coming to make her drain the first few drops of her ocean. She bit her
lip and waited for the sting of the waves.
Six guards came beautifully dressed, kind-voiced, patient. They led her from
the suite, and she did not fight them. Not yet. She needed to get the lay of
this place first. She would pretend compliance until she knew enough to get
herself safely home.
The guards were wary they bore no weapons that Molly could see, but they had
the gait and stance of martial artists and the edginess of the deservedly
paranoid. They d heard about her stunt with the blue guard; they clearly
weren t hoping for a repeat performance.
They took her into a vast stone room decorated with tapestries and covered
with rich, deep blue carpets, and they sat her on a chair that she could only
think of as a throne a tall, wide chair cushioned with velvet but otherwise
made either of gold or covered in a thick layer of it. She sat when they told
her to sit, all the while figuring a plan of attack should this get bad enough
that she needed to flee, and she watched as the first of the supplicants, the
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seekers of healing and release, crept across the floor to her, heads down,
afraid.
She waited for the pain to come, for the first touches of the poisons that
were destroying the one who approached her to touch her, to bite her flesh and
make her want to scream. But the creature the woman reached her and knelt
before her and murmured a few words in her own language, and Molly felt
nothing. No hurt. No suffering. No death. It was like the child brought to her
when she rode in the wagon.
She says, the guard at her right side translated, that a great snake eats
through her belly, and she cannot eat or sleep, and she fears that she dies.
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