“Are you going to quote Freud at me, Alam-Sama?” Eiji asked, making no effort to disguise his sarcastic tone.
He glanced up; scornful of the loving concern on her face; of the warmth in her voice.
Dr. Meera Alam, clamped into her wheeled seat, turned her head to look. She stared at Eiji for a long while, expressionless. The record played behind Eiji with a familiar tune from his native Japan. It was airless in the office.
The office was painstakingly neat and ordered, exactly the preserve one might expect of a woman like Meera Alam-Sama. She read her way across the paperwork spread out across the desk. This afternoon Alam-Sama seemed to have supplied everything that had been asked for, and she took attentive notes. He duly noted her drop in deferential tone to him. She, like Sensei, seemed well-acquainted with the nuances of his culture, its polite speak.
Eiji walked around the wheel chair once, and came to a halt facing Meera Alam-Sama. The doctor made direct and immediate eye contact without flinching. Her dark, bright eyes seemed to lunge at Eiji in the yellow glow of the room. Eiji could sense—
“…!”
That afternoon, Eiji felt particularly twitchy. It could have been the unexpected music from home, but his palms were damp, and there was a coppery taste in his mouth. It felt like adrenaline, the feeling he got in the zone, the feeling of being on all the time. He hadn’t had it this bad in weeks, and it seemed to be getting worse and worse as he looked back at Alam-Sama.
He had to fight back a desire to duck for cover.
What was doing it? What had set him off?
He looked around, turning a full circle, but there was nothing new to see and no one around except the doctor. He was hyper aware of the distant hum of electricity, the shadows playing across Meera’s face, the yellow glow of room, the languid lap of an orchestra running softly through his mind, the drab stone of the walls, the smells of cleansing product and polished wood, fern leaves, the fume of his breath in the air, the beat of his heart, and the flaked and faded paint of the nearby desk.
Nothing.
He sniffed a breath, and relaxed his grip. Eiji had braced himself to deal with a threat. But, whatever it was, it had gone now.
The soldier stopped and rubbed the bridge of his nose, eyes closed.
He noticed, to his disgust, that he was getting yet another memory flash cued by the music from home… his jaw clenched.
When he came back to Moscow, Eiji Lynx was confronted by a life he’d never known before. Before the CCD and the fighting in Cambodia, he’d been a street kid; it was all down to his past, the years he’d spent growing up on the bad side of Shinjuku. He could remember the old days, days spent with empty pockets and an emptier belly, when he and some of the others would venture to market stalls to try to lift a little food or clothes, though the back streets were private and full of menace. And then he’d been armed forces, rattling wearily from one hell hole to another. He’d spent a lot of years doing things that he wasn’t especially proud of.
Suddenly he was a grown man, an officer, with responsibilities, and a pretty comfortable pension, and the best part years of CCD cash backpay stagnating in his bank account. There was nothing to do but to wait and drill, and sit around and find something to spend your pay on. There was no immediate sign of active deployment in the offing.
Stuff it! She knows what she’s doing. All the while you’ve been spilling out that self-pity, Alam-sama's been working. You know what you’re doing. Tell her what she can do. She can help you, Eiji, but in order to do that, you’ve got to learn to trust her.
He looked at Meera. His eyes were fierce.
“Yeah, PTSD and more,” Eiji agreed. “Any veteran can tell you that adjusting to civilian life is hard, like kicking a drug habit. Your body is too used to living on an adrenaline high for months at a time. You grow detached. You get jumpy, antsy, restless. You suffer migraines, dizziness, anxiety. Your sleep suffers. Your hands sweat. If you’re really unlucky, you get phobic or develop anti-social habits. You experience memory flashes cued by something innocent, like the sound of shouting or the smell of a camp fire, and wind up on a diet of pill cocktails, or in prison on a formal statement.” He looked at Meera and smiled. “On the bright side, there may be some prescriptions to write soon, eh, Alam-Sama?"
His joke fell flat... Eiji Lynx was not a stupid man. He was well aware that this thinking—his pathology—was pretty twisted, which was why he hadn’t shared its details with anybody. He told himself that dreaming was a coping system, that it kept him sane, and that it beat descending into the hell of drug abuse, or drink, or much, much worse.
“Do you dream of wolves often?” Meera asked, still studying the various documents.
He cleared his throat.
“We’ve only just begun. I’d learn how to fend for myself early on. I’d run with the others who’d taught me some life skills. But it was fighting in the ruins of Asia that had been the making of me,” he said, skidding matter-of-factly through the account as if it was a summary of how he’d spent an idle morning off-duty. “In soldiering, in war, I discovered my own dreams: wolf dreams; running with wolves; running as a wolf. At the beginning, the dream would vanish in the time it took me to write it down. Now, I just can’t seem to forget any.”
His command of the common English was excellent, but he had an accent, a clipped accent that put an edge on the words, and made each syllable sound as though it were draped in razor-wire.
“Have you ever lucid dreamt, Alam-Sama?” he asked. "I wake in this strange place, and find, upon my soul, I’m nearer to the end of the dream, where I’m running. I bite my fingers, arms, anything to wake,” he said. He paused, and looked away, as if hearing a distant voice. He began to mutter again. “At times, a silver wolf saves me. Every night, he comes to me. Why? Because I'm stressed?"
“As far as you can tell, that man with the snake tattoo is a... witch of this era? He's real?” He shrugged.
“No, I’ve only seen him in one dream, and survived by the skin of my teeth,” he replied in that voice of accent and barbed wire. “Fighting such a monster— I’m not sure I want to do that. I’d be damning myself.”
Sensei had mentioned a fascination with surgical and genetic experimentation amongst some of the channelers. What does Meera Alam-Sama know of these... people? He shook his head.
“Now, what can you tell me?” asked Eiji. It was still and airless in Alam-Sama’s office. He wanted to rap on her door and urge whoever responsible to crank up the ventilation.
He had walked back to Meera’s side, and was reaching out his hand to pause the record player. He hesitated. “When you say something is off, what do you mean?” he asked.
Eiji Lynx