Was that why, after doing so much and absorbing so much, she was struggling now? Living in the Courtyard, she absorbed more images and information in a day than she would have seen in a week at the compound. And even in the compound, although no one would have told the girls why it was done that way, there would be one week of new images, and then the next week they would look at things they had seen before.
Plateau. Resting place. She had done some of that instinctively, reaching for a magazine she’d perused before instead of looking at the new issue. But she hadn’t done enough of it because she hadn’t considered how important it was to stop before she reached overload. From now on, she would give herself more resting places.
And if she needed those resting places, so did the other girls—especially the girls who hadn’t chosen to live in the outside world.
Meg picked up the phone in the sorting room and called Merri Lee. “Merri? I figured out another bit we need to put in the Guide.”
CHAPTER 12
Firesday, Maius 11
Steve Ferryman drove out to the Gardner farm. The Simple Life folk didn’t have telephones in their houses, and they sure didn’t own digital cameras. Or any kind of camera, for that matter.
Would a drawing work as a reference for a blood prophet? Something he needed to ask.
After talking with Simon Wolfgard yesterday, he had taken his personal camera to the B and B where the five young cassandra sangue were staying and took pictures of each of the bedrooms—after he and several other men helped Margaret and Lara, the B and B’s owners, clear the rooms of everything that wasn’t considered essential or part of the room itself. He even took pictures of rooms the girls wouldn’t normally see, like the laundry room. Then he took pictures of the outside of the building and the surrounding land—parking lot, grass, gardens, anything he could think of. While he did that, Roger Czerneda, armed with the village’s new digital crime scene camera, took pictures of the village shops and public buildings, including the medical center, inside and out.
No one in Ferryman’s Landing understood why looking at images instead of the real thing made such a difference to the girls, but it did. And understanding that no change was a small change for these girls helped the adults cope with helping the girls.
“Seeing life secondhand so it doesn’t interfere with some damn prophecy,” he muttered. Of course, anyone who hadn’t seen Meg Corbyn not only functioning but thriving in the tsunami of sensory input that came with being the Human Liaison for the Lakeside Courtyard could understandably conclude that these girls needed a restricted, almost sterile environment in order to stay sane.
But they didn’t need sterile. They just needed help adjusting to a world full of sensation. And they needed that help because they’d been trained to see the world as images.
Gods, he hoped that was true.
The B and B was a stopgap solution to housing the cassandra sangue. He had people working as hard and fast as possible to design and build a home for these girls that would give them a chance to thrive.
And the urgency wasn’t just to save the five girls who were here. The girls who were cassandra sangue originally came from his own people, the Intuits—people who had such a finely honed sense of the world around them that they knew when something around them might turn good or bad. Some of them could sense a change in the weather before there was any discernible indication. Other Intuits had a sense for animals, knowing when to buy an animal overlooked by everyone else and when to walk away from a deal. Discriminated against and persecuted by humans who didn’t want to deal with people who had such a sharp internal gauge, the Intuits had fled into the wild country and made their own bargains with the Others.
Now some Intuits worked as consultants for the terra indigene, listening as humans made a proposal to acquire more land, more minerals, more water, more of whatever they wanted that day. Some proposals were honest and sound and would benefit at least some of the terra indigene as well as humans. But other proposals offered nothing that the terra indigene would want.