therapy. Almost every family on the rich list had a crazy uncle in the attic. Now, that crazy uncle could receive the best of care in the lap of luxury.
If only every fairy in the facility was as docile as Opal Koboi. All she needed was a few intravenous tubes and a monitor, which had been more than paid for by her first six months’ medical fees. Doctor Argon fervently hoped that little Opal never woke up.
Because once she did, the LEP would haul her off to court. And when she had been convicted of treason her assets would be frozen, including the clinic’s fund. No, the longer Opal’s nap lasted, the better for everyone, especially her. Because of their thin skulls and large brain volume, pixies were susceptible to various maladies such as catatonia, amnesia and narcolepsy. So it was quite possible that her coma would last for several years. And even if Opal did wake up, it was quite possible that her memory would stay locked up in some drawer in her huge pixie brain.
Doctor J. Argon did his rounds every night. He didn’t perform much hands-on therapy any more, but he felt that it was good for the staff to feel his presence. If the other doctors knew that Jerbal Argon kept his finger on the pulse, then they were more likely to keep their own fingers on that pulse too.
Argon always saved Opal for last. It calmed him somehow to see the small pixie asleep in her harness. Often at the end of a stressful day, he even envied Opal her untroubled existence. When it had all become too much for the pixie, her brain had simply shut down, all except the most vital functions. She still breathed, and occasionally the monitors registered a dream spike in her brainwaves. But other than that, for all intents and purposes, Opal Koboi was no more.
On this fateful night, Jerbal Argon was feeling more stressed than usual. His wife was suing for divorce on the grounds that he hadn’t said more than six consecutive words to her in over two years, the Council was threatening to pull his government grant because of all the money he was making from his new celebrity clients and he had a pain in his hip that no amount of magic could seem to cure. The warlocks said it was probably all in his head. They seemed to think that was funny.
Argon limped down the clinic’s eastern wing, checking the plasma chart of each patient as he passed their room. He winced each time his left foot touched the floor.
The two janitor pixies, Mervall and Descant Brill, were outside Opal’s room, picking up dust with static brushes. Pixies made wonderful employees. They were methodical, patient and determined. When a pixie was instructed to do something, you could rest assured that thing would be done. Plus they were cute, with their baby faces and disproportionately large heads. Just looking at a pixie cheered most people up. They were walking therapy.
‘Evening, boys,’ said Argon. ‘How’s our favourite patient?’
Merv, the elder twin, glanced up from his brush. ‘Same old, same old, Jerry,’ he said. ‘I thought she moved a toe earlier, but it was just a trick of the light.’
Argon laughed, but it was forced. He did not like to be called Jerry. It was his clinic after all; he deserved some respect. But good janitors were like gold dust, and the Brill brothers had been keeping the building spotless and shipshape for nearly two years now. The Brills were almost celebrities themselves. Twins were very rare among the People. Mervall and Descant were the only pixie pair currently residing in Haven. They had featured on several TV programmes, including Canto, PPTV’s highest-rated chat show.
LEP Corporal Grub Kelp was on sentry duty. When Argon reached Opal’s room, the corporal was engrossed in a movie on his video goggles. Argon didn’t blame him.
Guarding Opal Koboi was about as exciting as watching toenails grow.
‘Good film?’ enquired the doctor pleasantly.
Grub raised the lenses. ‘Not bad. It’s a human Western. Plenty of shooting and squinting.’
‘Maybe I’ll borrow it when you’re finished?’
‘No problem, Doctor. But handle it carefully. Human disks are very expensive. I’ll give you a special cloth.’
Argon nodded. He remembered Grub Kelp now. The LEP officer was very particular about his possessions. He had already written two letters of complaint to the clinic board about a protruding floor rivet that had scratched his boots.
Argon consulted Koboi‘s chart. The plasma screen on the wall displayed a constantly updated feed from the sensors attached to her temples. There was no change, nor did he expect there to be. Her vitals were all normal, and her brain activity was minimal. She’d had a dream earlier in the evening but now her mind had settled.
And finally, as if he needed telling, the seeker-sleeper implanted in her arm informed him that Opal Koboi was indeed where she was supposed to be. Generally the seeker-sleepers were implanted in the head, but pixie skulls were too fragile for any local surgery.
Jerbal punched in his personal code on the reinforced door’s keypad. The heavy door slid back to reveal a spacious room with gently pulsing floor mood lights. The walls were soft plastic, and gentle sounds of nature spilled from recessed speakers. At the moment a brook was splashing over flat rocks.
In the middle of the room, Opal Koboi hung suspended in a full body harness. The straps were gel-padded and adjusted automatically to any body movement. If Opal did happen to wake, the harness could be remotely triggered to seal like a net, preventing her from harming herself.
Argon checked the monitor pads, making sure they had good contact on Koboi’s forehead. He lifted one of the pixie’s eyelids, shining a pencil light at the pupil. It contracted slightly, but Opal did not avert her eyes.
‘Well, anything to tell me today, Opal?’ asked the doctor softly. ‘An opening chapter for my book?’
Argon liked to talk to Koboi, just in case she could hear. When she woke up, he reasoned, he would have already established a rapport.
‘Nothing? Not a single insight?’
Opal did not react. As she hadn’t for almost a year.
‘Ah well,’ said Argon, swabbing the inside of Koboi’s mouth with the last cotton bud in his pocket. ‘Maybe tomorrow, eh?’
He rolled the cotton bud across a sponge pad on his clipboard. Seconds later, Opal’s name flashed up on a tiny screen.
‘DNA never lies,’ muttered Argon, tossing the bud into a recycling bin.
With one last look at his patient, Jerbal Argon turned towards the door.
‘Sleep well, Opal,’ he said, almost fondly.
He felt calm again, the pain in his hip almost forgotten. Koboi was as far under as she had ever been. She wasn’t going to wake up any time soon. The Koboi fund was safe.
It’s amazing just how wrong one gnome can be.
Opal Koboi was not catatonic, but neither was she awake. She was somewhere in between, floating in a liquid world of meditation where every memory was a bubble of multicoloured light popping gently in her consciousness.
Since her early teens Opal had been a disciple of Gola Schweem, the cleansing coma guru. Schweem’s theory was that there was a deeper level of sleep than that experienced by most fairies. The cleansing coma state could usually be reached only after decades of discipline and practice. Opal had reached her first cleansing coma at the age of fourteen.
The benefits of the cleansing coma were that a fairy usually awoke completely refreshed but also spent the sleep time thinking, or in this case plotting. Opal’s coma was so complete that her mind was almost entirely separated from her body. She could fool the sensors and felt no embarrassment at the indignities of intravenous feeding and changing. The longest recorded consciously self-induced coma was forty-seven days.
Opal had been under for eleven months and counting, though she wasn’t planning to be counting much longer.
When Opal Koboi had joined forces with Briar Cudgeon and his goblins, she’d realized that she needed a back-up plan. Their scheme to overthrow the LEP had been ingenious, but there was always a chance that something could go wrong. In the event that it did, Opal had no intention of spending the rest of her life in prison. The only way she could make a clean getaway would be if everybody thought she was still locked up.
So Opal had begun to make preparations.
The first was to set up the emergency fund for the Argon Clinic. This would ensure she was sent to the right place if she had to induce a cleansing coma. The second step was to get two of her most trusted personnel
