The Chimera Vector by Nathan M Farrugia Page A

hint of blue. The words were Polish, tightly packed and skewed a fraction to the right. She recognized it as Leoncjusz’s handwriting. She could read Czech, but wasn’t sure how well she could decipher his Polish. She skimmed through the entry. He seemed to use W instead of V and G instead of H, but other than that she could understand it quite well.
    The entry was dated in German; she recognized the month as August.
    After a week of intense deprogramming, I am able to bring Sophia out of her slave state for the first time to archeopsyche—the real Sophia. She is calm and composed, but is suspicious still. I make a point not to prove any more to her; I only ask of her health, of her emotion and of her memory. I take notes of this. She tells me she cannot remember her true childhood. I do not know if the memories will come back in time or will be lost forever.
    Her behavior is erratic. On some occasions, she is composed, others she is enraged, others she is silent and does not respond to conversation. Nothing I say appears to comfort or soothe her. I do not know what to do so I leave her alone when she behaves this way.
    I am in regular contact with Cecilia McLoughlin now. She is with the Akhana. After all this time of hoping, now I know they are real. She says once I have successfully deprogrammed Sophia I must send the deprogramming procedure in case my copy is lost or stolen. I tell her this could take many weeks to achieve. She agrees with me and points out that I cannot risk traveling to the Akhana until Sophia has fully recovered. This is very important; we are too vulnerable and will be safer in hiding for now. I am hesitant to give Cecilia the deprogramming procedure; I will think on this further before making a decision.
    I bring vegetable soup to Sophia’s room. She is asleep so I leave the soup with her and do not return for the day. The following morning we continue deprogramming. Portion by portion, I dismantle the subpsyches and parapsyches inside Sophia’s neopsyche. It is a long and arduous process that exhausts both of us.
    When I visit her again, she tells me to stop doing this or she will kill herself. I still have some of the trigger phrases in place to protect myself, but I do not think I will have to use them. I tell her I will stop for now and tomorrow we can talk over lunch. She can ask me as many questions as she likes.
    I make us some gnocchi from the market and tea. She asks many questions. About her life. About how she was recruited. About the real world. About families. About love. About vengeance. Sometimes, her hands shake as she listens to me speak. Other times, she is silent and does not ask anything. Once, she even smiles. It is the most amazing thing I have seen this year.
    If one good thing comes of my dark existence, it will be Sophia.
    She turned to the next page. It was blank. She flipped back to the previous entry, only to find it written in German. Was he trying to conceal something? She rushed to the shelf of dictionaries and picked out an Italian–German dictionary. It would be nice if there was an English–German one, but she was in Tuscany after all. Instead, she found an Italian–English dictionary. It would have to do.
    Sitting at the desk she’d moved into the Pacciani Room, she scanned the German entries for anything that might catch her attention. She didn’t know what she was looking for, so she decided to just pick a paragraph with her name in it and work through it with the dictionary, translating from German to Italian and—if her basic Italian wasn’t sufficient—Italian to English. It was painfully slow, but she moved as quickly as she could, scribbling her translations on a loose sheet of paper.
    Sophia has stitches . . . right eye and bruises . . . arms and face . . . unharmed. I . . . injuries but . . . to see her. I have the Schlüssel.
    She checked the Italian–German dictionary for the word Schlüssel . The Italian equivalent was chiave . She