“Mora, I need you to trust me, okay?! Go with the lady in the purple suit. She’ll help you. Can you hear me?! I c-”

***

You wake up to find that you fainted at the first sign of danger.

Pathetic.

This feels like one of those choose your own adventure books I used to pick up from the Rookery library where I always ended up getting myself into a nasty scrape, or worse.

Fear and self loathing scratch at my brain behind the dizziness, but I’m still too dazed to feel anything as strongly as I should.

I’m on my own bed, that much I know - I mean - my bed in the George’s house - and the room is almost pitch black. The only light comes from the hall light creeping under the thin gap beneath the bedroom door.

When my ears start doing their job again,  I can hear Judith on the phone, saying my name, saying that Therese called her.

This is one of those moments where I can feel her disappointment.

But it doesn’t matter if I failed. As long as I’m still alive, she still has a job to do, a back up protocol to make up for my shortcomings. At least for the moment, George’s haven’t breached it, so now she has to fix my mess.

It’s the standard instructions for every harbor giver: When I show weird symptoms, like dizziness and fainting they’re supposed to call Judith, NOT the hospital, and she'll make an excuse for me. She’ll say that ‘they’ - they being that umbrella name for whatever group of higher-ups in The Sanctuary allegedly call the shots though they have definitely never met me and probably don’t even know my name - ‘they’ say I’m too sick for a harbor home, and I’ll be taken back to Rookery. 

She’ll say it’ll be for good, though every time it’s only been until a new harbor opened up.

This time it might actually be for good until I age out of the system since I’ve ‘run a Boston’ - managed to be found out by an Actaeon at every single sanctioned harbor home that wasn’t already occupied by another phant child.

I’m balancing on the rope bridge between Larksborough and Rookery - this close to losing the picture-perfect life, so close I can reach out and touch it.

I can’t let that happen, but I’ll never win the trick, not when I’m playing against Judith.

“Hello? Mora? Mora, are you there? Can you hear me?”

All the doors have been closed, but for all I know, the George’s could be just outside, I try to make my voice and reply both sound natural, “Um, yeah. I’m here and I can hear you.”

Just barely, over the sound of my own heartbeat that feels like it’s whaling away at my chest way too loudly.

“Oh, thank goodness. They told me you fainted. Is everything okay? What happened?”

“I’m fine,” I fib, more or less honestly, answering the first question but ignoring the second as my tongue roots around in my mouth for a lie. “I just got a little bit…dizzy…I guess.”

No use trying to lie about that when she already knows I fainted, but that admission is already good as selling myself out.

My chest starts to feel hot and constricted, or contaminated with this nervous attempt at calm.

“Oh?” The tone is too sweet.

This is the woman who taught me how to lie, how am I supposed to trick her?

We’re playing hangman, but I’m the dummy, betting with my life, or my sanity.

“Dizzy?” There’s a slight raise in pitch at the end of the single word that seems to imply a deeper meaning, but which or what meaning she’s hinting at I can’t guess. I see that look on Judith’s face as I close my eyes and try to steady my breathing. She’s raising one thin eyebrow, always so much darker than the rest of her hair, somehow. For some reason that only makes it seem more accusing as she waits for me to answer a geography question or recite a protocol that I was supposed to have memorized.

I try to guess confidently, filling in the blanks in a sentence that she barely even started writing, but I have no idea what I’m glossing over. What she’s probably assuming.

Correctly.

“Might be heatstroke,” I say quickly, “The weather has been pretty hot lately, and it makes the air really dry.”

“Yeah, and the heat can raise vapors from any number of things.”

She says it casually, but she’s getting warmer.

“Mostly, I’m just worried I’ll dehydrate since it's almost summer, and I’m still running track.”

“Mm, but dehydration doesn’t usually make you dizzy. It’s not in your constitution.”

She’s too good at this.

But that’s what happens when I’ve never had any privacy.

“You probably caught a whiff of something. You know how sensitive you are to unusual scents, and then you get your fits. Especially when you get around bath salts and smelling salts.”

Bath salt? Was it?

Ironically, it’s the one smell I can never remember. Last time I thought I smelled flowers, and Grammy’s wicker baskets.

“Last time you ran into those, you got delirious.”

That too.

She has me cornered.

What more was I expecting?

No matter what I say she’ll still divine what’s really going on. I can’t keep secrets from her. I can barely keep my own thoughts from her when they’ve given her permission to spend years, sometimes for full days at a time analyzing my behavior, my health, my mannerisms, triggers and sensitivities.

Mr. Alcott says she’s a child psychology genius.

Part nurse, part teacher, part guardian, part psychologist, part mother.

All the people who hold your life and your mind in their hands, wiring and rewiring it.

-Doesn’t make for a good combination.

Just for an efficient one. An infallible one.

Pretty soon, she’ll find a way to usher me back to that cage they call a sanctuary where I can be safe from my peace of mind and my sanity for good.

“Mora?” Judith’s voice worms through the speaker with an agonizing buzz.

“Yeah. I’m still here.”

 My voice sounds like I’m crying.

That seems premature.

My bedroom door rattles lightly in its frame.

“Mora, ma choupette, are we allowed to come in?” I hear Therese knocking on the bedroom door and I’m almost surprised out of my tears.

“Is somebody in the room with you?” Judith asks quickly.

“No, they’re knocking outside,” I say evenly, wiping my hand swiftly over my face, and blinking until my ‘normal’ expression reappears.

“What do they need?” Her voice is already changing to that one she uses for parents and adults.

“Umm,” I say in a loud voice to let Judith know I’m replying to Mrs. George, “I’m still on the phone!”

“Could we talk to your social worker before she hangs up?”

Social worker? Is that she tells the harbor givers she is?

Maybe ‘keeper’ would sound bad to the outside world, though to be fair, nobody but Alcott ever uses that term.

“They want to talk to you,” I tell Judith, and I hear what sounds like the faintest little rustling sound like she’s shifting her posture, though nobody can see her.

“Of course, put them on - actually - turn the phone on speaker mode.”

So I can know what lies she might end up telling them and perpetuate them more smoothly, most likely. 

There’s nothing like slipping up and telling the truth by accident to make a big mess of things.

Mr. George and Therese both enter the room, leaving the door wide open as I set the phone down on the bed.

The room is baptized in orangey dim light as Judith rings out in her sunshine voice, “Mr. and Mrs. George, you had a question for me?”

That’s one of her psychology things. She always asks people if they have questions ‘for her’ as if they’re doing her a favor to make them feel more at ease…or more talkative, anyway.

“Well, something like a question,” Therese tilts her head back and forth a little as if weighing whether what she has to say is more question or statement, her bandaged hand wavering in the air in tandem with the motion.

“We were just wondering if there was anything we could do when our Miss Mora gets a little faint to revive her instead of just waiting for her to come do,” Verner smiles, and you can HEAR the smile in his voice.

Maybe a little too casual as he adds:

“She had a pretty bad scare earlier thanks to the snake, and though we’re dealing with the situation…”

“Snake?” Judith interrupts delicately, “Please excuse my rudeness, but did you say there was a snake near the house? Venomous?”

“I’m not sure,” Verner raises his dark eyebrows, a little more serious now, “I didn’t see it myself, our son did. But we’re securing the house with Fangsbane, so it shouldn’t be too inclined to come back.”

At the word Fagsbane I can hear Judith’s breathing alter the same way I’m sure mine did.

It doesn’t make sense does it? Did she know the George’s knew about that plant when she gave me to them?

Did they get it before or after the Actaeons burned Iris Wood?

Still her voice is poised and professional, like an automated message, “Fangsbane should work fine. But it’s unlikely that the scare is what caused Mora’s fainting spell. She must have come in contact with something like bath salts or smelling salt. Those things make her lightheaded.”

“But…we don’t keep either of those in the house,” Therese looks at her husband with an expression of genuine bafflement. Or seemingly genuine bafflement. Her face scrunches up in a way that seems a little too charming, a map of wrinkles appearing on her smooth chin like a thousand diverging trails.

Uncertainty again. But this time Judith masks it with a casually pensive, “Hmmm.”

“Maybe someone you know uses bath salts and might still have smelled like them when they came on?”

“We haven’t had any guests over since Mora’s onboarding six weeks ago.”

Judith is drawing a blank. 

I’ve never known Judith to NOT know before - or understand anyone like so many numbers and patterns.

I thought I would like to see that someday.

Now my skin is crawling.

I can feel the wheels turning in her head and sense her mounting discomfort.

She’s going to end the call soon. She needs to talk to her crew.

It would draw too much attention to drag on too long about something that’s supposed to be a simple sensory sensitivity to something most people don’t react to at all.

This…specifically…anyway.

“Well, keep me updated about Mora’s health, then,” Judith says finally. “If she has another fainting spell, I’ll have to come get her. She might be having a relapse…”

I can’t tell if the look that washes over the George’s faces is genuine concern or…a wariness I should be wary of as Judith rambles on about my alleged health condition I suffered from for nearly a year before they sent me to stay with the George’s.

Psychosis. Accompanied by a phantosmia. An inability to perceive, decipher and process language and emotions - people’s expressions.

Therese’s face seems to ebb, darkening slightly with a furrow of her eyebrows that seems unsettled.

“Psychosis?” She mutters, half to herself, before glancing sideways at Verner.

I might end up going back to the Rookery anyway, even if they are completely safe, if she scares them too much.

Is she doing it on purpose?

“For now, make sure she gets plenty of fresh air, and make sure her bed linen and clothes are free of artificial scents.” 

Judith is rambling off tips for my care like I’m a houseplant and the Georges nod along with a sort of serious abstraction - listening to her and something in the ether or their own heads at the same- 

I feel like I’m watching their perception of me mutate in slow motion and hyperspeed at the same time…

As I tune out this rundown I’ve heard a thousand times, and brace myself again for the worst case scenario.

Well, not the worst. I can’t begin to imagine what that would be like. Just the ‘very likely awful.’

I wonder if Judith will call me again tonight. I hope she won’t, and I hope she will at the same time-

Nothing makes sense anymore. It never did, but for a fraction of a second - 6 weeks - I was confused enough to believe it did. 

Maybe I was just ‘losing touch with reality.’

Now I’ve already alerted Judith to keep an eye on the George’s with the text I sent earlier.

The rest is a ticking time bomb.

I don’t know what else to do.

It couldn’t hurt them if they are good people, right?

I can’t tell anymore. To be honest, I know very little about how the Sanctuary deals with deposed harbor givers. There’s a whole set of ‘extra laws’ relating to phants that I don’t know yet, if I ever will, so it’s doubtful a family of regular humans would. 

If Actaeon’s knew the ends they would come to, would they think again?

I’ve never been told for sure, but there’s something sinister about the story behind that code name.