I always knew. Other little girls played school or house with their dolls. I played Mindwalker. I’d set Nutter or Freddy Frog on a stool and have conversations with them about their traumatic pasts, then put a plastic teacup on their heads and pretend it was a Gate. At age ten, I would sit at the dinner table with Father and his friends, my legs not quite long enough to reach the floor, and join in their discussions about neuroscience, sipping grape juice from a wineglass. They’d chuckle as I stumbled over words like hippocampus and amygdala. Back then, IFEN hadn’t even started to train Mindwalkers, at least not formally. The field of neural modification therapy was still new, still experimental. Experts were batting around the benefits and drawbacks, like cats with a toy. In spite of this, my father was already working with clients, mostly volunteers from treatment facilities. Type Fours. During their visits, he always told me to go to my room, but sometimes I would sneak partway down the stairs and peek into the living room, watching Father talk to them, these men and women with scars and haunted eyes.
