Ember Steiner- Victor

I opened my eyes and saw my father's face. I was dreaming, then. I was dreaming and I desperately hoped I was still walking in my sleep. I pushed aside my dream father and lurched out of bed. Even in a dream I was tired. My legs folded when they hit the ground. I fell in a heap, the relief of my body supported by the ground and not my legs bringing tears to my eyes. I stood and started to walk. The dream of my father took my arm and tried to stop me. I struck him in the stomach with my elbow so he would let go. They say what you do in a dream can reflect real life. I needed to keep walking in case the real me, the one on the Long Walk, had fallen over when I fell asleep. I walked in circles around the room while the dream of my crying father followed me.

Dr. Cassia Orb- Capitol Psychiatrist

They were tyrants, the Capitol. Sometimes I wished I had scored lower on the aptitude tests. It was only a few select elite that were marked to attend higher education programs like medical school. Most Capitolites got their job training and went on to their sheltered lives hardly any more educated than the unfortunates of Twelve. Even among the Capitolites there was a tiny ruling class with access to information and true choice. The rest of us were birds in gilded cages. I, however, had been allowed to learn. And that was a fruit of knowledge that could never be un-eaten. I was bound to live my life in fearful silence for the Capitol's greatest enemy was knowledge. In all the dictatorships of history there had been two targets: the religious and the educated.

Patients like Ember made it harder to preserve my passive veneer. Titian, with the complicity of the Capitol, had turned a well-adjusted and healthy child into this. If I didn't know Ember's history I would have assumed she was autistic. She paced back and forth in the area in front of my desk with a dull regularity I'd seen in dozens of nonverbal children. She hadn't spoken to me or even looked at me since she appeared in my office flanked by two nurses who had gently herded her down the hall and closed the door after her. I made no attempt to engage her at first while I did an initial assessment. On first glance she appeared to be cognitively confused and to believe she was still competing in the walk. She had been in a medically induced coma for nearly two weeks and such confusion was nearly omnipresent in such cases. My first task was to reorient her to reality. After that had been accomplished we could begin to touch on her psychological trauma.

"Ember," I said, keeping my voice mostly neutral with a hint of warmth. "What are you doing?"

Ember didn't respond. I switched courses to try to establish rapport.

"You're in the Long Walk, right?" I asked. She didn't respond but I knew she could hear me. "You won, Ember. You can stop walking now."

Ember didn't engage with me but I caught a glimmer of recognition in her eyes. She was hearing me. She just wasn't ready to trust me.

"Do you know where you are, Ember?" I asked. "Look around you. Do you see a road?"

Ember's eyes flickered and then went hard with concentration. She palpably stopped paying attention to me. She already hadn't been but she had been aware of my presence. Her attitude shifted and she seemed to think I wasn't there.

Some people would have chalked up my revelation to intuition. I'd never been an intuitive person. My breakthroughs came through years of study- through thousands of case files I'd read, analyzed, synthesized and finally filed away in my mind for future use. Ember had until recently been in a coma and before that she'd been severely sleep-deprived. Both of those led to hallucinations and impairment of cognition and orientation to reality. Ember, I realized all at once, thought she was dreaming.

"You really won, Ember," I repeated. "You won the Long Walk. Do you remember being in a bed? That was real, Ember. You're in the Capitol in my office. I'm a doctor."

It was uncanny to watch Ember. She appeared like an automaton painted like a human. Her face showed no injury but had the blankness of a mannequin. There was neither fear nor joy, neither urgency nor rest, in her hauntingly circling figure. I was again reminded of people I had seen who were born of man and woman but from birth never spoke or interacted with other humans. They were locked away in their own universe we would never know the contents of breadth of. But such things were from birth. Ember was part of humanity once and must be pulled back.

I pressed a button on my desk to call in a pair of nurses. If my plan was successful Ember would be reoriented to reality in a few minutes. She would be confronted with what she'd endured and the potential for intentional or unintentional self-harm was high. I waited for the nurses to arrive and discreetly station themselves near the wall to continue.

"Ember, did you know it's not possible to read in a dream? Not coherent reading, anyway. The words jumble and don't make sense." I tapped the keyboard screen on my desk and activated a holoscreen on the walls of the room. "Do you know anything about Guillain-Barre syndrome? I don't suppose you do. So if you can read this text it means you're not dreaming."

Black-and-white text lit up on Ember's face like wallpaper as the screen winked on. She kept walking, eyes emptily pointed ahead of her toward the wall, and their tiny movements proved they weren't empty at all. A switch flipped in less than an instant. Faster than thought she was on the floor, wailing like a child, her knees shoved into her chest and contorted into so tight a ball she seemed half her size. One of the nurses gripped her arm and guided it away from the hair she'd grabbed and begun to rip at while the other swabbed Ember's shoulder to administer a mild sedative. I watched the scene before me grieved with Ember's state but knowing that the wound had been exposed and now we could begin to heal it.

So in answer to many readers' questions, yes, Ember is very traumatized. Hella traumatized, you might say. So traumatized that I had to switch to Dr. Orb's POV because Ember's was so fragmented I couldn't put it into words. But after this chapter she's... still hella traumatized. But not QUITE as bad so that's something.