“But it’s faster if you follow me,” Hope finished.
Rachel nodded. Whatever she may have thought of Hope as a person, the woman knew her way around cyborgs.
Hope pulled a Bluetooth headset out of her shirt pocket and clipped it over her ear. “Testing.”
“Received.” Rachel replied through the headset.
“Okay,” Hope said. “Give me a minute to walk to his location.”
Hope left again, and this time Rachel looked around for a safe place to sit. The toilet was right out (no lid) and the floor was no better (it fluoresced under her equivalent of a black light), so she propped herself up in the tight gap between the sink and the wall.
“Going out-of-body?” Phil asked.
She nodded. “Always a good idea to get a feel for the physicals before you start poking around the psychologicals.” And with that, she stepped out of herself.
Splitting her mind in two was getting easier, but it was still annoying as hell. There was the bumbling dual sensation of being in two different places at once, of course, but it was more that she liked having feet. When she went out-of-body, she projected herself as her own copy, a second Rachel, cut from the same bright green energy as Jason’s digital constructs. This second Rachel had the ability to walk and talk—as well as pass through walls, fly, and whatever else could be expected from what was basically a sentient hologram—but something important was missing when the ground didn’t push back.
Her second self breezed through the wall of the bathroom and hurried to catch up with Hope. Hope was familiar with the ICU and was able to circumvent some of the chaos, but like the rest of the hospital, the ICU was a rambling knot of identical rooms. Rachel kept a firm grip on her connection with the signal from Hope’s headset to make sure the other woman didn’t take a sharp corner and disappear.
She saw why Hope had stuck them in the bathroom. The deeper Hope took her into the ICU, the worse it got. Every single bed in the ICU had a patient in it, and most patients were covered in an extra layer of anxious friends and family. These spilled out into the halls, slowing down the medical teams. And here and there were the clusters of police officers or Homeland Security representatives, demanding to speak with their witnesses… Her out-of-body self winced.
Luckily, she wasn’t making things worse. As with Jason’s projections, her out-of-body state didn’t exist to anyone without an implant. It was easier to move through people and objects than take the time to go around them. And—
“… government set-up…”
—it was also shamefully easy to eavesdrop. Rachel usually went out of her way to maintain general expectations of privacy when she was scanning or traveling out-of-body, but the speaker was mid-rant and past caring who heard him.
“Fuckin’ mark my words,” the man said, as Rachel passed between him and a woman in scrubs. “This is the government’s fault. Our own people killed them.”
“Sir…”
Rachel sympathized with both the man and the nurse. She didn’t need the emotional spectrum to see the man’s heart was broken; the collar of his shirt was wet from tears. But he was also twice the size of the nurse, and he was mad enough to say or do anything.
“Hope?” Rachel called. “You might want to circle back. I’ve got a full-blown conspiracy nut, and he’s threatening a nurse.”
“Oh boy.”
“Oh yeah, this is prime. Here,” Rachel said, and started streaming audio to Hope’s headset.
A small crowd had begun to gather around the man and the nurse. Several of them were trying to intervene, but the man wasn’t budging. “My daughter!” he shouted at the nurse. “My wife! They could have stopped this, and they didn’t! They let them die!”
Rachel felt a shoulder under her arm, a man’s hand at her waist… She let her connection with her second self falter, and smelled Phil’s shampoo as he hoisted her physical body to move her out of the bathroom. “Phil,” she said. “Forget me. Get Santino over to help Hope. He’s MPD. If anybody’s going to calm this guy down…”
She heard him say: “Right,” then felt the bumpy texture of the fiberglass tile under her fingers as he lowered her to the floor.
The bathroom must be within earshot… Rachel thought. “Hey, Hope?” she said. “I’m getting my body. Santino’s on his way.”
She broke the connection and snapped back to her physical self. The first thing she noticed was the bathroom floor was unforgivably clean; she needed to spend some time working out the differences in fluorescent rates between the residue of sanitizing fluids versus biologicals.
The next thing she noticed was the bathroom door swinging shut. She rocked herself forward and into a sprint to catch up with Santino and Phil.
The three of them shot through the hallways in the direction of the shouting. They arrived at the same time as Hope, who shoved her way through the crowd to take a position slightly behind the man. Rachel grinned. Hope was a Roku-dan in judo, and if the man did decide to start swinging, he’d end up needing a doctor. He was in the right place for it, but still.
Santino came at the man from the front, his suit coat pulled back to expose the badge on his belt. “Sir?” he said. “People can hear you. Can we go somewhere to talk?”
The man stopped and blinked, then looked around. His colors crashed in on themselves, the fiery red of fury falling to the sickly reds and oranges of shame and grief. Gray appeared within the red; the asphalt gray of old roads and depression. He slumped to the floor, put his head in his hands, and wept.
Santino did the move along gesture and the crowd dispersed. Hope went with them, but returned a moment later with a box of tissues which she nudged towards the man.
“What’s your name?” Santino asked him, kneeling beside him.
“Dalder. Ah, William Dalder,” he said, scrubbing at his eyes. “I’m sorry, it’s… It’s been a hard day.”
“We know,” Rachel said. She sat on the floor next to Dalder. “We’re with the MPD. We’re part of the team working the scene on Gayle Street. Did we hear you say you lost your wife and daughter…?”
Dalder nodded. “They were meeting for lunch…” he began, but couldn’t finish. She caught sight of his core colors beneath his grief, a sweet summer sky blue.
Meeting for lunch? Odd phrase to apply to a woman and her daughter. Rachel took a careful look at his face and found him to be older than she had assumed, probably closer to sixty than forty. Old enough to be a grandparent, maybe.
As if Dalder had read her mind, he said, “Joanna’s husband’s on his way. He’s bringing the kids… Joanna… Joanna’s my daughter… She was still alive when I told them to come. The doctors thought she’d pull through…”
“We’re sorry for your loss,” Rachel said. How she hated that hollow phrase: how she wished there was something better; how she regretted there wasn’t. “Is there anything we can do for you now?”
Dalder rocked his head back and forth in a slow no.
“Guys?” Hope said, pointing down the hall. The river of health care workers had vanished, but only to avoid Dalder. Rachel followed the line of Hope’s finger and found some of the other officers from the MPD were watching Dalder with lidded eyes. “We should move.”
The man raised his head slightly and looked at Hope. His colors brightened in surprise.
Oh shit, Rachel thought. She had been briefly famous, but as Mulcahy’s wife, Hope was on the cover of a magazine or was at the top of the news crawl at least once a week. And there was some heavy-level government conspiracy angst swimming around in the upper levels of Dalder’s thoughts.
“Are you Hope Blackwell?” Dalder asked her.
Hope nodded.
Dalder was quiet for a moment. “Just…” he started, then said in a rush: “Thank your husband for me. He’s one of the only honest people out there. What he’s done, taking OACET public? If we had more people like him, maybe today… wouldn’t…”
Dalder’s conversational colors fell again; he had
lost his will.
They helped him to stand, and the five of them moved into a nearby office too small to be good for anything other than temporary storage. Santino and Phil moved a few boxes of files and helped Dalder into the only chair, an old, overstuffed thing covered in cracked Naugahyde. It had heavy plastic arms, and Dalder bent almost in two so he could lay his head on one of these.
Rachel knelt beside Dalder. She glanced back at Santino: he was waiting for her in patient pinks and salmons. As were Hope and Phil… Goddamnit, she thought. Thanks. Nothing better than being the default bad guy.
“Mr. Dalder? William?” she asked. “Can I ask you a couple of questions? I know you weren’t there, but anything you can tell us might help.”
Dalder couldn’t stop staring into space, but his conversational colors picked up a trace of Rachel’s own southwestern turquoise core as he shifted part of his attention to her.
“I have to ask this, William, you understand? When you were in the hallway, you were talking about how the government was responsible for Gayle Street. Do you have any evidence?”
“Of course not,” Dalder said in a flat, quiet voice. “I didn’t know what I was saying. It was grief talking… It’s… We put so much time and money into making this country safe, and things like this can still happen? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Ah, okay,” Rachel said, checking his colors to learn if he was lying. Nothing: Dalder was clean.
“I’m not criticizing you,” he added, glancing towards Santino. “The police, I mean. The police are different. You’re… You’re like us. There’s no way in hell you guys would ever blow up a street.”
“And the government would?” Rachel asked as gently as she could.
Dalder turned to face Hope. “I’ve heard the stories about what they did to your husband,” he said. “They killed over a hundred Agents as part of the cover-up. What do you think?”
“I think you’re grieving,” Hope said. “And I think anything you say today might not be how you felt yesterday.”
“Yesterday?” A little red flame had rekindled in Dalder’s conversational colors. “Yesterday, I had a family.”
“Sir—”
“No, I want to understand this,” Dalder said. He pushed himself out of the chair and loomed over her; Rachel realized she was kneeling at the perfect height to take a knee to the chin. “I want to understand how we can pay billions of dollars, let the NSA rip through our privacy, have fucking drones flying overhead, and my family is—”
Dalder’s conversational colors suddenly lost their intensity, and Hope released her grip on his shoulders. “Sit down,” she told him. “Slowly.”
Dalder did as he was told, his eyes rolling back in his skull ever so slightly. His colors went purple, and he gave Rachel a happy grin.
“Do I want to ask?” Santino said to Hope.
“Vulcan neck pinch,” she said.
“What?”
“Haloperidol-promethazine mix,” Hope sighed. “Paramedic’s little helper for agitated or violent patients. Not enough to knock them out, but enough to take the edge off.”
“He’s not a patient,” Rachel said.
“He is now,” Hope told her. “I’m checking him into the psych ward until I’m sure he’s not a danger to anyone.”
“Not a danger,” Dalder said, his head lolling on the chair’s backrest. “Rather die.”
“Or a danger to himself,” Hope said. She slid an arm under Dalder and helped him stand. “Santino? Got a few minutes?”
“Yeah,” Santino said. He was roughly as tall as Dalder, and a much better fit to help him to the nearest wheelchair than Hope was. He wove his left arm under Dalder’s right shoulder and the two of them half-carried Dalder into the hall.
“Hey, Hope?” Rachel called to her. “I’d still like to get a look at Meisner.”
“Oh, right,” Hope said. “Uh…” She glanced around to get her bearings. “Room 3304—down the hall, right, right, left, and it’ll be on your left.”
After another long stretch of wandering and elbowing their way through the dense crowds jamming the hallways, Rachel and Phil eventually found Jordan Meisner’s room. There were a goodly number of people on the other side of the glass doors. Meisner’s family, Rachel guessed, judging from the similarities of their earthy core colors.
Phil pulled the chart out of the plastic sleeve by the door and paged through Meisner’s medical status. “Looks good,” he said. “He’ll definitely make it. No serious damage other than the burns and…” His colors blanched white.
“What?” Rachel asked.
“Ah… He’s lost both eyes.”
“Right,” Rachel said smoothly. “I thought that was likely. His face was a mess.”
“Rachel…”
“Phil…” She mimicked his pleading mental tone as she turned away from him and pretended to peer through the glass at Meisner. “Drugged,” she said, as the man on the bed’s conversational colors swirled like a liquid prism on a soap bubble. “But conscious. Aren’t you supposed to sedate patients with burns?”
“I guess it depends on the case,” Phil replied.
Rachel sent her scans through the nearest rooms within the ICU, briefly touching on each patient. Some of them were fully conscious, others were so far gone their cores seemed nearly drained, but many of them shared the same soap-bubble glimmer coming from Meisner. “Bet you a dollar I could get something useful out of him,” she said to Phil.
He chuckled. “If I thought you meant that… Come on, let’s go find Santino.”
“I’ll catch up in a minute,” Rachel told him. “I want to talk to Jenny.”
“Sure,” Phil said, nodding. “Do me a favor and tell her I’ll have those results for her by next week. I keep forgetting.”
“Hm?” Rachel asked as she found an empty chair a few yards away from Meisner’s room. “What results?”
“Nothing exciting. She asked me to log my workouts. Blood pressure, heart rate, just routine biometrics.”
“That’s strange,” Rachel said, glancing down the hall. “She asked me to do the same thing.”
Phil shrugged. “Probably more research,” he said as he turned to walk away. “I never remember to reset my timer when I start, so it pooches the data.”
“Yeah,” Rachel agreed, glad they had stopped speaking through the link. She had an unpredictable and unfortunate tendency to vomit when trapped in a physician’s office, and being in a hospital had already pushed her into feeling queasy. She was sure Phil would be able to feel that extra wave of nausea that had smashed into her at the mention of Jenny’s data.
Rachel let the doors close behind Phil, and reached out through the link. “Hey Jenny, are you busy?”
Jenny Davies was one of twelve Agents who had medical degrees, but she was the most active in research. Over the past few months, Jenny had aggressively coerced Rachel to help her turn Rachel’s perception scripts into a diagnostic instrument, and Rachel had spent most of that time suffering from what could have passed as persistent morning sickness. Jenny owed Rachel a very large favor.
“Rachel? Hi! No, I’m not busy. What’s up?”
Rachel peered back into Meisner’s room. The man’s conversational colors were still there, but deeply muted; Meisner was doped out of his gourd.
“You know the bombings? I’m at the hospital with one of the victims.”
“Medical question?” Rachel’s mind was suddenly full of skulls, hundreds of them, and a laboratory-grade examination light over a table covered in loose papers: Jenny was in the OACET medical center.
“Yeah. The victim?” Rachel paused and steeled herself. “He lost both eyes.”
Jenny was silent for a moment, and then said, “Oh.”
“Is there anything I can tell him? I’d like to give him some hope.”
“Without revealing yourself?”
“Yeah,” Rachel said again. “Got anything new? I’m sure you’ve been going over my data in your spare time.�
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“What spare time?” Jenny laughed. “Your data is fascinating, honey, but it’s about halfway down the list.” The other woman must have felt Rachel’s rush of hurt feelings, as she quickly added: “Your abilities are a priority for me, Penguin. I just have a hundred other things that need to be taken care of first.”
Rachel sighed through the link. “I know. Sorry.”
“I wish I had something for you. Maybe I can get someone else to help me with the research side of—Hey! That reminds me. Can you come home soon? There’s something I need you to see.”
For one shameful moment, Rachel thought Jenny had meant the house she shared with Santino.
“It’s okay.” Jenny had picked up on it. “I’m trying to think of my condo as home, too. It’s a good thing,” she said, but sounded unconvinced.
“I’ll ask Santino to drive me over there sometime this week,” she told Jenny.
“All right, Penguin, see you soon.”
Rachel felt Jenny’s quick, strong hug before the woman broke their link.
She stood and walked back to Meisner’s room, and paused right outside of his door. She nearly knocked and went in, but her subconscious knew better, and she found herself moving away from Meisner before she could intrude.
Santino had guessed her secret. No one else outside of OACET knew—they might suspect, they might be trying to find proof, but they didn’t know.
She did not want to talk about it.
She did not want to think about it.
In Rachel’s mind, blindness was a lack. Lack of sight, lack of ability. Rachel, who had both, had decided the term did not apply to her.
She would not think about it.
(Not even at night, in that space between the moment her implant was turned off and the moment she fell asleep, when her bedroom went from a magnificent multihued, multi-textured world to nothing. Those little stray thoughts she did not have that nudged at the outside edges of her consciousness, telling her it might be worse for her than for a blind person who did not have the sensory augmentation provided by her implant, that the blending of senses when her implant was on also made her world all that much smaller when it was off, and that if she ever woke up one morning and the implant refused to activate, she might spend the rest of her life in a dark, tiny box…)
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