Crosstalk

by Connie Willis

  The voices and the water were rising faster now—…never regained consciousness…terminal…couldn’t save…nothing we could do…save…—and her fingers were slipping. She was losing her hold. She was going to call for help in spite of herself, to betray C.B., and there was nothing she could do…

  Yes, there is, she thought, and shut her eyes and let go of the tree. And she was in the roiling water—flailing, floundering—and under it, and her mouth was full of water.

  Thank heavens, she thought as she gulped and choked. Now I can’t betray him. Her lungs filled, and she began to gag, to cough.

  But not from the water she’d swallowed. From the smoke.

  No, she thought frantically. It can’t be smoke, but she could smell the acrid tang of burning, and when she opened her eyes, it was everywhere, so thick she couldn’t see the walls or the door, and C.B. had his arm around her, he was holding her head above water.

  “No!” she sobbed, fighting against him. “Go away! If you stay, they’ll hear you.”

  “Not over this din, they won’t,” he said, plowing chest-deep through the water toward the smoke-filled courtyard.

  “You don’t understand! Dr. Verrick’s got a psychic, Lyzandra, who can hear everything I think, even in my safe room! They’ll find out about you!” She hit wildly at him. “You’ve got to go!”

  “What are you—? Ow! Geez, Briddey, that was my nose!” He grabbed her wrists, pinioning them against his chest so she couldn’t hit him again. “What the hell are you trying to do, kill me?”

  “No, I’m trying to get you to leave!” she cried, struggling to free herself from his grasp, to dive away from him.

  He hauled her back to the surface. “Well, then stop fighting me,” he said, and half pushed, half dragged her out of the water and onto a dry patch of flagstones. It was covered with burning embers, and smoke obscured the adobe wall behind it. She collapsed against the wall, coughing.

  C.B. was coughing, too, bent over, his hands on his knees. He was drenched, and his face was streaked with soot. Water dripped from his clothes and down the back of his neck onto the flagstones. “Are you okay?” he asked Briddey between bouts of coughing.

  “No,” she said. “Why did you come?”

  “You’re kidding, right? When have I not come when you were in trouble?”

  Never, she thought. But this time you weren’t supposed to. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to call to you.”

  “You didn’t. I was already here. As soon as I realized Sedona was famous for its psychics and that one of its most famous ones had red hair, Verrick’s going there and wanting to keep it secret suddenly all made sense, and I tried to call to you. And when you shut me out, I figured something must be wrong, so I came straight to the hospital to find out what.”

  “You came to the hospital?” she said, horrified, looking past the courtyard to the reality of the testing room, hoping against hope that he wasn’t here, that he was somewhere else in the building—on the floor where she’d been that first night, or in the stairwell she’d fled to—and was doing this remotely.

  But he wasn’t. He was kneeling next to her as she sat huddled on the floor against the soundproofed wall. The headphones lay on the floor beside her, and she was surprised to see that they and the floor were both dry, and so were C.B.’s clothes and hair. She looked down at her own sopping clothes. They were dry, too.

  The chair she’d sat in was overturned, and Zener cards were scattered everywhere. The door was ajar, as if it had been kicked open, and in a minute Dr. Verrick would catch sight of C.B. on the camera and come in—

  “No, he won’t,” C.B. said, “but I’d better shut the door anyway. Correction, doors.”

  He stood up with an effort. “Stay here,” he ordered Briddey, and she watched as he walked through the scattered cards over to the testing room door to shut it and then waded back into the water, now only knee-deep and receding rapidly, and over to the open door of the courtyard.

  He pushed it closed. That shut out the worst of the voices, though Briddey could still hear their angry murmur behind it. He retrieved the bar, which was floating nearby, and jammed it into its brackets. He slid the iron bolt across and then sloshed back across the flagstones to sit down beside her. He looked exhausted, his face drawn and white under the streaks of soot. His hands were covered with soot, too, and beginning to blister. From the fire. The fire he’d come through for her.

  Tears stung her eyes. C.B., I am so sorry.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he said tiredly, and leaned his head back against the wall. He closed his eyes.

  “No, you can’t do that,” she said, getting to her knees. “You’ve got to leave. There’s a camera—”

  “It’s okay. I disabled it.”

  “But you still have to go. Before Dr. Verrick finds out you’re here, before she tells him—”

  “She’s not telling him anything right now. Neither’s your boyfriend, and Dr. Verrick’s got his hands too full to worry about us.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do. I was in the hall outside Verrick’s office when you let loose that deluge and heard both him and the psychic shouting, so I can read all three of their scheming little minds. And, trust me, eavesdropping is the last thing they’re doing. You didn’t just unleash those voices on yourself, you know. The psychic and Trent were both listening to you, and the voices roared straight through you and into them at full blast. They’re too traumatized to tell anybody anything right now. Especially Lyzandra. Was Verrick giving her something?”

  “Yes, a relaxant of some kind, Valium or Xanax. To enhance her receptivity.”

  “Well, from all the medical personnel in Verrick’s office right now, I’d say it enhanced her, all right. A relaxant,” he said, shaking his head. “Jesus.”

  “Will she be okay? I didn’t mean to hurt her. I was just trying to keep her from hearing me. They were asking me all these questions, and I was afraid I’d give you and Maeve away, and I thought if I let the voices in…”

  “I know,” he said. “You couldn’t have known what would happen.”

  “But they’re going to be all right, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah,” C.B. said. “Trent’s okay—he’s only partially telepathic. And I think I got the door shut before Lyzandra suffered any permanent damage. But if Verrick had given her something stronger…” He shook his head angrily. “The man should be shot.”

  “I agree, but right now our priority’s got to be getting you out of here while she’s still traumatized and won’t notice.”

  “You’re right,” he said, but he made no move to get up.

  “If you’re worried about me, you don’t have to be. I’ll be fine. It’s you they can’t find out about.”

  He leaned his head back wearily against the wall and said, “I haven’t told you everything.”

  And whatever it was, it was bad. “They heard me say your name?” Briddey asked fearfully. “Or, oh, God, Maeve’s?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Then why can’t you leave?”

  “Because they’re still hearing the voices.”

  “But I thought you—” She looked automatically over at the blue courtyard door. It was shut and holding, the bar and bolts still in place, and no water was coming in.

  “I stopped your voices by using the defenses you already had in place,” C.B. said, “but neither Trent nor Lyzandra has any. If we don’t teach them how to erect some—”

  They’ll keep on hearing the voices, and it will drive them mad, she thought. Or kill them. “But if you tell them how to keep the voices out, they’ll know you’re telepathic. Can’t you put up a barricade for them, like you did with Maeve? And like you did with me in the Carnegie Room?”

  “No,” he said. “I wasn’t blocking nearly as many voices, and that was only for a short period of time—”

  “But you’d only have to do it till the relaxant wears off.”

  He shook his head.
“We can’t count on the voices stopping then. The deluge obviously did more than trigger their receptivity. It overwhelmed their inhibitors.”

  “So they’ll go on hearing the voices forever, like us.”

  He nodded. “I’d have to block them indefinitely. And not just take them down to a murmur, but shut them out completely, which takes a lot more energy and focus.”

  Briddey thought of the toll just trying to keep them from hearing C.B.’s and Maeve’s names had taken on her. It had exhausted her completely. And C.B. would have to block them from hearing his thoughts, too—and hers—or they’d know what he was up to.

  “Two people are exponentially harder to block than one,” he said. And he was already completely worn out from saving her from the flood.

  And the fire, she thought. And from rescuing her before in the hospital and the theater and the storage room, and getting almost no sleep because he’d had to take her home from the hospital and take her to get her car and rescue Maeve.

  And stand guard over me, she thought, gazing at him as he sat slumped against the wall, looking defeated and bone-weary. He was right. There was no way he had the strength or endurance to block Trent and Lyzandra for long enough to do any good.

  “We can’t just leave them to the mercy of the voices,” C.B. said. “Even though I’d like to. You’ll notice they didn’t send a nurse in here to make sure you were okay. You could be in here having seizures, for all they know. Or care.”

  And if Lyzandra hadn’t volunteered to take the relaxant, they wouldn’t have hesitated to give it to me. But—

  “Exactly,” C.B. said. “We can’t just stand by and watch them have a psychotic break when we’re the ones who caused it.”

  You mean I am, Briddey thought sickly. This was my bright idea. And it had totally backfired. Not only had she nearly killed Trent and Lyzandra, but instead of protecting C.B., she’d delivered him right into their hands. “I am so sorry I got you into this,” she said.

  “You couldn’t have known opening the door would—”

  “No, I mean all of this. If I’d listened to you when you tried to warn me about having the EED, none of this would ever have happened. Your secret would be safe—”

  “Yeah, well, and if I’d told you what Trent was up to in the first place, it wouldn’t have happened either. But it did, and we need to go try to get those voices under control. Come on, get up,” he said, even though he was the one sitting on the ground.

  “But couldn’t I go in there instead? I know how to erect a perimeter and a safe room. I could teach them—”

  He was shaking his head. “A perimeter and a safe room won’t be enough to protect Lyzandra. She needs—”

  “You could give me directions. You could stay in here and tell me what to say, and I could—”

  “It would take too long. And they already know you were talking to somebody. They’ll be determined to find out who, and I’m not sending you in there alone to face an inquisition.”

  “But—”

  “Besides, this is going to take both of us. Come on,” he said, extending his hands to her so she could help him up.

  She reached for him, and the two of them were instantly back in the testing room, and she was the one sitting on the floor, and he was standing over her with his hands extended. There wasn’t a mark on them—no soot, no burns.

  Thank God, she thought, clasping them tightly.

  He pulled her up.

  But if they find out he’s a telepath, they won’t think twice about sending him back into the fire, she thought. They’ll interrogate him, they’ll give him drugs to enhance his receptivity, and he won’t be able to hold back the voices. He’ll be burned alive—

  “Ready?” C.B. was saying.

  “No. There has to be something else we can do. In the library, you said you’d been working on a jammer. Could you—?”

  “Invent something in the next five minutes to block the voices? Afraid not.” He smiled at her gently. “Maybe it won’t be as bad as we think. Maybe after what’s happened, they’ll decide they don’t want to have anything more to do with telepathy. From what I’m getting from Trent, his voices take the form of bugs crawling all over him, and the psychic’s reaction has to have scared the hell out of Verrick. They may already have figured out telepathy’s a terrible idea—”

  You’re crazy! Maeve’s voice said out of nowhere. They won’t ever think that. Aunt Briddey, tell him he can’t let them find out who he is!

  “What are you doing here?” C.B. demanded. “I thought I told you to stay in your safe room.”

  I was listening, Maeve said defiantly, and it’s a good thing. Helping them’s an awful idea!

  “So is them finding out about you. Get inside,” C.B. ordered her, and they were all abruptly back in the courtyard, Maeve standing there on the blackened flagstones in her Rapunzel dress and tiara, arms akimbo.

  “You can’t tell them about the telepathy,” she said. “Once they know about it, they’ll never leave you alone. They’ll keep pestering you till you tell them everything.”

  “She’s right,” Briddey said. “Once they smell blood in the water—”

  “—they’ll make you tell them,” Maeve said. “And Trent’ll put it in his phone, and all the moms will buy it, and they’ll know all the things their kids do that they aren’t supposed to, and nobody’ll be able to do anything or go anywhere! Danika’s mom is really strict. If she finds out about Danika watching zombie movies, she’ll ground her forever, and some of the kids have parents who are really mean! It’ll be worse than hearing the voices even! You can’t let them find out!”

  “I know,” C.B. said. “And that’s why you’ve got to go home. They don’t know about you, and we’ve got to keep it that way. You need to go—”

  “Not till you promise me you won’t tell them! Remember when Mom went to that Helicopter Mom rehab seminar?” she said, appealing to Briddey. “And she promised she was going to stop reading my Facebook page and my texts and hovering over me every second, but she didn’t! You can’t trust them.”

  “We don’t,” C.B. said. “It’ll be okay.”

  “No, it won’t!” Maeve was practically crying. “They’re like zombies. It’s not good enough to just shoot them. You have to blow them up, or they’ll just keep coming. And why do you have to save them anyway? They’re creeps!”

  “Because we’re not,” C.B. said.

  “But that doesn’t mean you have to let them find out about you! I know you said you couldn’t block the voices for them, but if we do it together, we could. I could help, and we—”

  “No,” C.B. said.

  “We can’t risk them finding out about you,” Briddey explained.

  “They won’t,” Maeve said confidently. “I’ve got tons of barricades, and C.B. taught me frequency hopping. They’ll never find me. And I know lots of tricks for getting inside people’s defenses—”

  Obviously, Briddey thought.

  “—and ways to block them. We could take turns, and—”

  C.B. was shaking his head. “We couldn’t keep it up forever. Teaching them to build defenses is the only thing that’ll work. Come on, Briddey.” He extended his hand to her.

  “But it can’t be the only thing!” Maeve wailed. “There has to be something else. Maybe we could trick them like in Zombiegeddon. They made the zombies think they were hiding in this mall and the zombies all went there and they locked them in and gave them this drug that made them forget all about them—”

  “There’s no drug that will make them forget about us,” C.B. said.

  “No!” Maeve said in frustration. “I meant we could trick them. You said people don’t believe telepathy’s real and that there are all these people out there just pretending to read minds. So you guys could go help them build their defenses, and I could tell Mom I’m sick and get her to bring me to the hospital and—”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “Just listen. I could bring the nanny
cam with me and hide it in here, and after you’re done, you could say to Aunt Briddey, ‘Do you think we fooled them?’ and Aunt Briddey could say, ‘Yeah, they really think it’s telepathy. I hope they don’t look in the testing room,’ and then they will and they’ll find the nanny cam and think the telepathy was all a big trick and you guys were bugging them like Aunt Briddey thought you were bugging her hospital room.”

  “No,” C.B. said. “In the first place, they’re not going to be fooled by a nanny cam—”

  “But I could—”

  “And in the second place, you’re not coming anywhere near the hospital. You’re going to go home and into your castle and pull up the drawbridge and stay there till I tell you you can come out.”

  And I know exactly how well forbidding her to do something will work, Briddey thought. The minute they took their eyes off her, she’d be over the wall and undertaking some even more dangerous scheme she’d gotten from Zombiegeddon or Beauty and the Beast. The only way to stop her was to make her understand how disastrous it would be for them to discover her ability.

  “Come here, Maeve,” she said, going over to the cottonwood tree and righting the overturned bench. She sat down on one end and patted the space beside her. “Sit down.”

  “No.” Maeve folded her arms and jutted out her chin.

  “C.B. isn’t doing this to protect you—he knows you’re really smart and that you’re not afraid. He’s doing it because it’s crucial they not find out what causes the telepathy.”

  “I wouldn’t tell them—”

  “I know you wouldn’t. But just letting Dr. Verrick and Lyzandra find out you exist would give it away.”

  “But C.B.’s letting them find out about him. That’s the same thing.”

  “No, it’s not. Right now they think the EED caused my telepathy, not my being Irish. And they don’t know C.B.’s Irish, they think he’s Jewish. But if they find out about you, that will give them the clue they need—”

  “Like when the witch sees the horse,” Maeve said.