No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven) by Randall Farmer Page A

her room at the clinic and caught in a grinding depression, covers held tight over her head.  Down the hall, she metasensed the glow of her people, curled up like her, trapped in a despair echoing hers.
    The room was a mess, littered with clothes Gail didn ’t have the energy to pick up.  She hadn’t possessed enough initiative to change out of her nightgown in two days.  The dirty dishes of her last meal stood piled on the nightstand.  The window was wide open, and cool spring air blew through, driving the temperature inside the room into the 50s.  Without the window, she thought it too stifling in her room to breathe.
    Gail found no glamour in being a Focus.  Instead, being a Focus was an eternal, unending grinding of pain, hunger, and black, driving despair, endless throbbing drudgery extending forward into eternity.  How did Focuses stand it?  Why weren’t Focus suicides common?
    Van had done as he promised, and checked up on Dr. Mendell.  Mendell hadn ’t lied, but he hadn’t told them everything, not even all of the basics.  The big omission was how careful Gail needed to be about maintaining juice levels in her first month as a Focus.  Until a Focus had three triads, it was easy for a Focus to slip and turn her people into Psychos or Monsters.  That is, kill them.  According to Van’s med school acquaintances, accidental deaths happened fairly often with new Focuses, which was why the authorities required them to stay in a Clinic until the household was large enough to be stable.
    Gail didn ’t even want to think about the obvious implication: if she wanted, she could kill any one of her Transforms at any time.  The responsibility of having her hand on the sword of Damocles over all of her household was petrifying.  She couldn’t cope.
    Her father had been back again, organizing and arranging, Gail had no idea what.  She no longer had the energy to fight him.  She dreamed, sometimes, that maybe if she could bang her head against the wall hard enough, she could manage to knock herself out and get rid of the endless headache.
    Sometimes, in her worst moments, she thought about ending it all.  Sometimes, the peace of oblivion seemed so tempting.  She had told Dr. Mendell about her desires, and he said this was normal, the low juice was causing her depression, and her depression would ease after she added more people to her household.
    He worried about the headaches, though.  He said that Focuses were uniformly healthy, so the pain must all be in her mind.
    In her mind.  Hah!  She had a headache.  Of course the pain was in her mind.
    The doctor tried to get her to relax, told her to quit worrying, that everything would be all right.  That didn ’t work.  He talked about bringing in a psychiatrist, to try to figure out what might help Gail.  Her father categorically forbade that.  He refused to let his daughter into the hands of some headshrinker.
    Her father suggested bedrest, with absolutely no visitors or disturbances, and he somehow got Dr. Mendell to agree.  Her father even tried to forbid Van, but Gail had thrown such a piss-kicker Rickenbach fit the doctor overruled him.  The only exceptions, besides Van, were the two women and one man they brought in to be tagged and made part of her household.  She wanted Kurt and Sylvie with her.  She needed their comfort, but they hadn ’t been by, and Van artfully dodged every question she asked about why.
    Forbidden to do anything but lie around in bed and think about all the ills dragging her down, she moped.  She couldn’t read, watch television, or even play cards for more than a few minutes at a time.  Van stayed with her some of the time, but she drove him crazy in this condition, so he found excuses to be somewhere else.
    She tried to find out what had happened to the newspaper article she had been working on before she transformed, but wasn’t able to elicit anything better than a “There, there, don’t worry about