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“I’m Leesa. I will help you. Please sit.” She offered Paige a chair next to her by the table.
Closer up, Paige realized that Leesa was older than she first appeared—there were dark wrinkles around her eyes and in the folds of her neck. She had bony hands and thin wrists around which she wore several metal bangles with jewels embedded.
“You speak very good English,” Paige said, easing into her seat.
“Thank you. I also speak other Earth languages: Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, and Arabic. I think my favorite is English.” There was hardly any accent in her speech.
Paige lowered her eyes. “I only speak English.”
“In a few days, you will be speaking Vendian.” Leesa placed a device on the table and flicked a switch. “I found a few documents to help you start to learn our alphabet, which is phonic and not pictorial. We only have nineteen letters, but in combinations they can form up to three hundred different sounds.”
Already Paige’s head was buzzing. She pressed her finger against her temple where the implant was hidden. “This will help?”
“It helped me.” Leesa tapped her head. “I’ve been using mine for years.”
Paige wasn’t convinced. “How can I possibly learn all this in a week or so?” She deflated further into her seat. Coming to Halos was starting to feel like a mistake. She’d no friends with whom to have fun and not even shopping to distract her. Jamen was focused on work and she had nothing else to do. She puffed out her lips.
Leesa ignored her pouts. “There are techniques that will help you utilize the implant. You need to integrate your thoughts with it. The best approach is deep meditation.”
She’d not expected to hear that word. “Meditation.” She stared at the letters, expecting them to leap out and give her some clue as to the sounds they made.
“I will put you into a trance—I’m a hypno-linguistic—and will program your mind to hear and embed the sounds in your cortex—”
“Hypnosis.” Paige slid the chair back. Have an alien delve into her mind? This was not her idea of language tuition. Tedious repetition of sounds, writing out sentences, and memory games were what she had assumed they would be doing. Definitely not going into a trance.
“Er, I’m not sure,” she said, grimacing. “This is the only way?”
“It is how the implant works. It’s not magic. You must open your mind and let me impregnate—”
“Whoa,” Paige jumped to her feet. “Impregnate? That’s not the word that comes to mind when I think about learning a language.”
Leesa drummed her fingers on the tablet. “Maybe my choice of terminology is not the best. But, humans do not have this kind of technology or advanced techniques.”
“Well, we don’t usually let people force a language into our heads.” Paige edged toward the door. “Perhaps I should check with Jamen.”
Leesa’s eyes widened into white moons. “Interrupt the senator? Absolutely, no. He would not welcome the intrusion. Please sit. Then, we can begin. This won’t hurt and you need to relax.”
Paige crunched her fingers into a knot. “I can’t relax,” she croaked. “This is too strange. I don’t think I can do it.” She bolted out of the room and along the corridor. She didn’t look back.
Flinging open the door, she charged in on Jamen who was speaking to his multiple screens. Countless faces turned to look at her. It hadn’t crossed her mind that they were two-way projections. A dozen pairs of eye fixed on her flushed face.
“Shit,” she said under her breath.
As she stood on the threshold panting, Jamen frowned the kind of frown that stayed and deepened with every passing second.
“I can’t do it,” she wailed pathetically, ignoring the audience. “It’s a mistake—”
“Paige!” Jamen gestured at the faces.
Tears splashed down her face. She really didn’t care who was there. “It’s too hard. I’m not good enough—”
“Where’s Leesa?”
He wasn’t listening. How could he possibly understand how it felt to be so alone and useless? She darted through two images, the scattering light bouncing off her face, and into the little side room. With the door slamming shut behind her, she threw herself onto the nearest couch and cried.
Chapter Nine
