Olivia found so many more harsh memories ... so many.
For her, viewing another's memories was as natural as breathing, and ripping the memories from a person's head was child's play.
She didn't dare take all of the painful memories. Such memories forced people to grow. They were like weights. Carry a little and you get strong. Carry too many, and they break you.
Besides, removing a recollection could be tricky. A memory of the kind with Mr. Golper helped shape a person's worldview. Even if Olivia removed the vile thing, Bron's habitual thoughts, his way of seeing the world, would remain for awhile.
But in time, healing might come. Eventually, he would look into his memory, and would not understand why he felt so hurt and angry, and perhaps his thoughts would be free to form new paths.
Olivia hoped for healing.
She reached for the most damaging memory that she could find—one where Bron huddled as a child while his foster father, Mr. Lewis, slapped and choked his favorite foster mother.
It was a loathsome memory. Bron remembered Helen Lewis well, her tears streaming down a bruised face.
Bron had run from the room and tried to call 911, in order to protect her. But it was Helen Lewis herself who rushed in and hung up the phone. "Don't call the police," she'd begged. "If you call them, they'll take my husband away, and they'll take you away, and I'll be all alone!"
Bron had let her disconnect the phone. Of course, within eight hours, once the paramedics were shown Mr. Lewis, huddling naked in a fetal position on the floor, he was taken to the hospital.
Without a father in the home, social services removed Bron, too. Helen was left all alone, despite her pleas. Often Bron wondered if she was happy, if she'd had a good life.
Olivia gently pulled the foul memory of the fight from Bron's head, and held it for a moment. It was as loathsome as a wriggling worm or a dead rat.
Olivia didn't want that ugliness infesting her own memory, so she simply abandoned it, tossed it away.
Bron would never recall what had happened to Mrs. Lewis when he was eight. As far as he would know, the parents would have had a happy, supportive relationship.
Then she went into his recollection of the morning after, when Bron had risen to find Mr. Lewis, naked and huddling in the kitchen, beside the refrigerator.
Moments later, his wife had called the paramedics. Mr. Lewis had died that afternoon.
Olivia wiped the memory clean.
In the future, Bron would only recall tales of Mr. Lewis dying in some hospital.
She decided to leave the memory of being chased by Draghouls. Bron needed to know that he had enemies, and she suspected that even if he learned of a teen's death, he'd be able to handle it.
Olivia considered what she'd done. She hadn't practiced like this on anyone in years.
So she cleaned away some harmful memories, then peered deeply into Bron's character. He was a humble boy. He didn't think of himself as special. He felt that he had no real talent, and so worried about what others would think about him at his new school. In the past, his art had so often been scorned or ridiculed that he'd all but abandoned it.
Olivia knew that she could change that.
But she found something odd about Bron: he was well practiced when it came to withdrawing from others. He fought any feelings of love. His life was emptier, sadder, than she had imagined.
Olivia had a code in life: give more than you take. Removing harmful memories might relieve some pain, but she wanted to give him something more. She decided to train him.
Training is harder than ripping away memories. Training requires time, concentration. She needed to recall a skill, practice it in her imagination, and transplant the knowledge into her student.
The body can be conditioned to act a certain way by repetition. For example, to run, or to sing, requires that some neural pathways to the body's extremities be trained.
Olivia studied the pathways that led from Bron's amygdala down into his brainstem, and from there to his ears and larynx, and down his arms, legs and into his wrists and fingers.
She could only "train" Bron in things she knew.
For instance, she knew how to unsheathe her sizraels. As she had suspected, Bron didn't. The muscles that he needed to access were atrophied, as were the nerves that led to them. When he'd been given up as a nightingale, someone had caused him to utterly forget those muscles, until they wasted.
She woke them, opened the neural pathway from the brain to the muscles, and let him unleash.
Olivia glanced down at his hands. The sizraels stood out on the ends of his fingers, nice and oval, but the ridges were small.
She didn't know what kind of masaak Bron might be. Most masaaks were at-tujjaarah a'zakira, memory merchants, of one order or another—more than eighty percent. There were rarer breeds, with different abilities, and Bron might be one of those, yet probing his mind would not tell her what talents he held. He couldn't share information he didn't know. She'd have to wait, let him experiment, and see what she could learn.
Now, she considered how best to help him.
Olivia could only share from her own store of knowledge. She'd spent most of her life learning to sing and play the guitar. She was far better in private than anyone had a right to be, better than anyone knew.
Bron yearned to play well, and she could help. She could give him some skills, but that alone wouldn't take him to the top. There was a component that he would have to bring, some innate way of communicating to the world. Lots of people have talent, she knew. She hoped that Bron had it, along with drive.
Many people with raw talent give up on music too soon, she'd learned. They don't have the heart for it. They didn't love it the way that she loved it. For her, creating music was an end in itself, not a path to adulation.
So she began to teach Bron to play. It was not simple. She had to imagine herself playing several songs in a row, envision herself fingering each note on the guitar. She had to let the notes flow through her, and retrain Bron's neural pathways so that he "naturally" held his guitar correctly, struck each note, each chord, precisely.
She had to strengthen the neural ties between the prefrontal lobes—the part of his brain that let him plan-and his medulla oblongata, the center of the brain that allowed people to perform tasks automatically.
Bron's memories showed that he tended to sing with a falsetto, trying hard to mimic his favorite pop singers. He hadn't trained his ear to hear properly, or his vocal chords to seek their full range. He didn't know how to create a vibrato, or to unlock his natural talent.
So she trained him for two hours. It was a grueling session that left sweat beaded upon her brow, while streams of it raced down her arms, down to her sizraels, so that her hands became slick.
When Olivia felt physically and emotionally exhausted, she began to pull out of Bron's mind slowly, and wondered at how much work she had left to do.
There were things that Olivia yearned to teach him. She hadn't even begun to teach Bron finger picking, or multiphonics, or a hundred other things.
But teaching that would take several sessions, and she didn't have the time or energy for it tonight. She needed sleep, like anyone else.
Tomorrow, Bron will wake, she imagined, and he will discover that he has grown overnight, like the beans in Jack's beanstalk. He'll discover talents that he never imagined. He'll play the guitar with greater ease and precision. Hell sing like a natural-born star. Oh, he might not be world-class yet. That will take a few weeks....