by Dima Zales
I end up going for a light touch on her neck with the tips of my index and middle fingers. It’s the sort of gesture I have seen doctors make when trying to get someone’s pulse.
As my fingers touch her skin, I instantly pull my hand away, my heart rate picking up.
A second version of Liz is standing in the room, watching me pull my hand away from her frozen double. As the avalanche of confused thoughts hits me, some part of me is happy her neck was the part of her body I opted for. Otherwise, this would be not just the biggest surprise of my life, but also incredibly awkward.
“Thank you,” Liz says, smiling. “I was about to do this to you myself. I now have very little doubt that you are sane . . . and probably one of us.”
Chapter 16
I’m so stunned that I find myself in that rare situation where I have nothing to say. I just look at her—the woman I thought I’d known all this time.
As it turns out, I didn’t know her at all.
As moments pass, I begin to digest the severity of this deception. I recall all the conversations where I described the Quiet, and she acted like a shrink listening to a delusional patient. All the therapy meant to get me to stop imagining something that she clearly had always known was real. In a way, the anger I begin to feel is akin to the way I felt when I thought Sara had been a Reader but never told me—and sent me to a shrink, to boot. This is the shrink I eventually ended up with, and Liz’s deception is worse than Sara’s would’ve been had my mom turned out to be a Reader. Liz actually pretended to be fixing a problem she knew full well I didn’t have.
“I know you must be confused and upset,” she says, obviously reading my expression. “Before you make a final judgment, please allow me to explain.”
I try to get my emotions under control. It’s difficult. I have had a Reader in my life, all this time, and she allowed me to think I was crazy. When I feel like I won’t shout obscenities at her, I say, “Why did you wait for years to reveal to me I wasn’t the only one?”
She flinches for a second. I guess she’s not used to my voice being so icy.
“I had many reasons for this deception, and my choices were pretty limited,” she says, looking at me. “In the beginning, there was a chance that you might’ve been a rare, truly delusional case. This has happened before. Also, you were young enough when we met that you could’ve been making things up for attention. When you showed off your power to me, by knowing things in my books, I knew that you were sane and that you could do what you said. But you still could’ve been a Leacher—which would’ve been a big problem. You still might be, though I doubt it. I just didn’t know what to do, so I waited. When you just told me about the way you protected your new friend, I was about to take things to the next level—”
“A Leacher? What are you talking about?” I stare at her, my head spinning.
“Before I say any more, I have to test you to be sure. I know you essentially admitted that you Guided someone, but I still have to do this.”
“I did what?” I give her a confused look.
“You have to do the test first. I will not speak another word until after the test. Follow me,” she says and walks out of the room.
I follow. What choice do I have? At least this time I’m not at gunpoint during the testing.
“Her,” she says, pointing at the waiting room receptionist. “Make her walk into my office and say, ‘Sorry, we’re out of doughnuts.’”
Have you ever had a car accident? You know that feeling just before the accident, when you slam on the breaks with all your might? A situation where all you want to do is hit the pause button on the world? This is what I feel like right now.
I had been convinced that she was a fellow Reader, which would by itself have been odd. But now I begin to understand the enormity of this situation.
“What do you mean?” I say, wanting to hear it.
“Oh, come on, Darren. You’re smarter than this. I think you know what to do,” she says, smiling. “And you know what I’m talking about, even if you’re not familiar with the terminology.”
“Since it’s a test, I want to be sure,” I say. “What exactly do you want me to do with her?”
“Okay then. Do what you did to that man you mentioned. The one you Guided to do something that caused him harm in order to defend your new girlfriend. You had your hands on him after you ‘stopped time,’ didn’t you? You willed him to do something, and then you saw that he actually did it? That’s what you feel guilty about, isn’t it? Just do that again—only this time no one will be hurt, and Camilla will just walk into the office and say that silly phrase. That’s all. Then I can be sure that you’re one of us.” Liz’s voice takes on the same gentle tone as when she gives me all sorts of mundane advice.
Except this time she’s talking about Pushing, not how to best deal with stress. This can only mean that I’m right about my suspicions.
Liz is a Pusher, so the us she just mentioned is other Pushers. Liz wants me to prove I’m one of them by Pushing her receptionist.
My head feeling like it’s about to explode, I walk up to the receptionist.
She’s frozen in an unnatural position while starting a phone call. I gingerly place my finger on her right hand, the same hand that’s pressing the number dial.
* * *
“Okay, Mr. Davenport, I will reschedule your appointment for two p.m., Monday of next week. Thanks for letting us know,” we say and hang up.
I, Darren, separate my thoughts from Camilla’s. I’m here for a reason, and I need to do what I came here to do.
I visualize getting up, opening the door, and saying ‘I’m sorry, we’re out of doughnuts.’
Just to be sure the whole thing makes sense in Camilla’s head, I add a story around it:
‘The patient Darren requested a doughnut. He explained how hungry he is and how difficult it is to go on with the session without the treat. However, he’s diabetic and allowing him to take the doughnut from the box that’s sitting on the desk would be a bad idea. So let’s walk in and say, ‘Sorry, we’re out of doughnuts.’ The box can be hidden when he gets out. And it’s okay to interrupt the session for this reason. In fact, it’s critical to get this out of the patient’s mind, so he can focus on the rest of the session.’
Hopeful that my Push will work, I exit Camilla’s head.
Chapter 17
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s get out.”
Without waiting for Liz’s response, I walk back into the office and touch my forehead.
The ambient noises of the office come back. Liz is sitting in front of me, her arms crossed in anticipation.
There is a hesitant knock on the door.
Liz doesn’t respond. I don’t either.
Slowly, the door opens and Camilla walks in, looking extremely uncertain. I find it fascinating to watch this. On some level, this woman knows that interrupting the doctor with her patient is wrong, despite the rationalization I placed into her mind. However, she’s clearly unable to fight the compulsion.
“Sorry, we’re out of doughnuts,” she says, looking at me. Then she reddens and runs back out of the office.
“That’s very good,” Liz says, putting her hands on the handles of her chair. She was clearly tense the last few moments.
“Will I get some answers now?” I ask, figuring that’s what I should say. “Am I one of you?”
I have a dilemma. I know more than I probably should. I decide not to show it. If she’s a Pusher who assumes that I’m a Pusher too, then she would likely react negatively if she knew I was a Reader as well. She clearly isn’t the Pusher who tried to kill me—whoever that is must know what I look like. Of course, it makes sense that the first Pusher I would meet face to face would not necessarily be the one who wants me dead. There are probably as many of them as Readers—not that I know how many Readers there actually are in the world. Still, I need to be careful: Liz could know that Pusher.
“Yes, you are one of us,” she says.
“We call ourselves Guides, for obvious reasons.”
Guides. That’s much nicer-sounding than Pushers. “Because we can force people to do what we want?”
“Force is a crude word for it, but yes—though I don’t like to think of it that way. We don’t force as much as provide guidance for people to wish to do what we intend. It’s not all that different from making a thoroughly persuasive argument.”
Yeah, right, I think, but don’t say it. What argument could I have given someone to take a bullet for Mira? But then I realize that one could say that the Secret Service agents have been persuaded to do exactly that for the President.
“What are some of the other things you mentioned?” I resume my questioning. “What are Leachers? Why are they so dangerous? Why did you think I could be one?”
“Let’s talk more privately,” she says and looks like she’s concentrating for a moment. The next instant, I’m standing in the middle of our chairs, looking at her touching my frozen self on the cheek. Was her touch a bit too gentle, almost sensual, or is that my imagination?
The room is silent again, which makes me realize that Pushers can also phase into the Quiet and pull others with them. Not a huge surprise, but I can’t take anything for granted.
“Okay,” she says after winding up her watch. I wonder if she’s concerned about spending too much of her Depth, or whatever Pushers call it. “Leachers are a group of people who can also ‘stop time,’ which we call Splitting. Only instead of Guiding people, they do something disturbing and unnatural. They Leach people’s minds of information—which is the ultimate violation of privacy. Make no mistake, this is not the harmless telepathy you might’ve seen in movies, where a mind reader gleans some surface thoughts. No, Leachers go much deeper. They can ferret out every secret, uncover every desire and forbidden fantasy. No memory is hidden, no interaction is sacred for them—they can access it all.” Her nose wrinkles with barely concealed disgust as she adds, “And yes, they’re very dangerous.”
Given how void of emotion her face usually is, her disgust is that much more striking.
So, as I was beginning to suspect, Leachers are Readers. Leachers are considered an abomination by the Guides, just as Guides—Pushers—are considered a crime against nature by Readers. This isn’t that surprising. Two groups who hate each other will always vilify one another.
Until now I had the Reader outlook, and I assumed Pushers were diabolically evil. After all, one of them killed Mira’s parents, while another one, in Caleb’s memories, wanted to blow up the Reader community. A Pusher also tried to kill me at the hospital. Or have me killed. That Pusher/Guide was likely the same one who killed Mira’s parents. So in my short experience with them, Pushers don’t have a good track record. But I can do what they do, and I’m certainly not a lost cause. Liz being one of them confuses things further. She’s a good person. At least I thought so before I learned that the Liz I knew is not the real Liz.
I also realize something else. Clearly, Pushers/Guides can’t Read/Leach the way I can—she’s condemning the Reading ability, in fact. Nor did she expect a Reader to be able to pass that test with the secretary. All this adds up to something I already suspected: I am something different.
I decide I’m going to call Pushers Guides in my mind going forward, since it’s a nicer term, with the exception of the fucker who’s trying to kill me. He’ll remain the Pusher.
“Why are Leachers so dangerous?” I ask, realizing that I’ve been quiet for too long.
“That’s harder to explain without going into some history. I have to warn you, no real records of the time I’m going to tell you about exist. A lot of this is verbal tradition combined with hearsay and conjecture,” she says and proceeds to tell me a story, a bit of which I already heard from Eugene. She doesn’t talk about how phasing into the Quiet works or go into Eugene’s Quantum Mechanics theory. Instead, she tells me something that sounds like an origin myth.
As she explains it, Guides and Leachers started off from the same selectively bred branch of humanity. It all started, as these things sometimes do, with a crazy cult. There were people who began a strange eugenics program. It focused on breeding people who had one thing in common: they described the world slowing down when they were under extreme stress and having out-of-body experiences in near-death situations. This breeding, over many generations of arranged couples, led to a branch of humans that could bring about, at will, something like a near-death experience for variable lengths of time—only back then, they thought it was the spirit leaving the body. After this point, the breeding focused on extending that length of time in the spirit world—what I term the Quiet.
Almost a century later, two new aspects manifested among the people who, at that point, could spend some minutes in the spirit world. Some could Read, or Leach, as Liz put it, and some learned to Guide, or Push, as Readers would see it. The cult split into two groups. At first, they just lived apart, but soon, each group started to view the other as heretical. There was a leader on both sides, and Liz’s version painted the Leacher leader as particularly evil and responsible for starting the war between the groups that would go on for ages.
Later in history, one Leacher was advising Alexander the Great, according to some accounts—or, according to others, Alexander himself was a Leacher. In any case, in the process of conquering the city of Thebes, he destroyed almost the entire Guide community of that time, along with six thousand regular people. And this was just the first of the genocides that Leachers tried to commit against Guides, according to Liz.
“Do you now see why I had to make sure you weren’t a Leacher—as unlikely as that possibility was?” she says when she’s done.
“No, not fully,” I reply honestly. “I mean, what happened in history sounds really abhorrent, but are modern-day Leachers so bad? Plenty of countries and ethnic groups have dark histories in the past, but now they’re mostly civilized. Just look at Europe. Why do you think Leachers still want to wipe us out?”
“Because they tried to wipe us out as recently as World War II,” she says harshly. Then, moderating her tone, she adds, “Granted, that is now also history. Personally, I just don’t trust them. They view everything as wrongs done to them, and they’ll never forgive and forget. With their skewed perspective, they’ll always want to get revenge. Of course, there are many among us who feel stronger about this issue than I do—and many who are more liberal and think bygones should be bygones. You’ll probably meet both kinds, though most of my friends hold liberal views. This is Manhattan, after all.” She smiles at that last tidbit.
“Okay,” I say, though the idea of meeting more Guides seems of questionable safety. “So why did you think it unlikely that I was one of them? If one can Split, isn’t there a fifty-fifty chance that the person is a Leacher?”
“Actually, the chance is more than fifty-fifty in Leachers’ favor. There are more of them than of us—which is why I had to be extra careful. As to why I suspected you were one of us, well . . . you look like a Guide. Many of us have the look I’m talking about. It’s a certain facial bone structure, a prominent nose—the look of a born leader, if you will. Of course, these things alone are not very reliable. A much bigger clue for me was the fact that you were adopted.”
“Oh? How would that be a clue?”
“Leachers have strict taboos about breeding outside their little clique. They shun anyone born as a half-blood, as they call them. We’re much more open about it. It was even encouraged to some degree in the past, when our numbers were particularly small.”
“Really?” From what Eugene told me, a Reader’s power is directly related to how long one can spend in the Quiet, and having children with non-Readers seems to reduce the latter ability. I wonder if it’s the same for Guides, but I can’t ask that without showing that I know too much.
Liz nods. “Yes, after one of the worst genocides, we were down to just a dozen or so individuals. If we hadn’t become more open-minded, we would’ve had seriou
s inbreeding problems. Even now, our genetic diversity is fairly low. Of course, back in the day, our stance on having kids outside the Guide community was the same as that of Leachers. And to this day, there are some people—we call them the Traditionalists—who want us to have assigned mates. Fortunately, they’re a tiny minority and are usually ignored. The only downside, and the thing that scares the Traditionalists, is that children born of such mixed lineage usually have diminished Reach. So, theoretically, if we keep diluting our gene pool, we might lose the very thing that makes us different.”
“What’s Reach?” I ask, guessing that she gave me a segue into learning about the power variation that Readers value so much.
“It has to do with how long you can freeze time, which impacts how deeply and for how long you can Guide someone,” she says, confirming my suspicions.
“Interesting. So how long can you freeze time and how does that affect your control over people?” I say, wondering if Guides have the same taboo when it comes to talking about this stuff.
“It’s not a topic for polite conversation,” she says, confirming my suspicion. “But if you agree to keep it confidential, I would be willing to share. You have, after all, shared your life with me all these years.”
“Sure, I won’t tell anybody,” I say. “And your telling me this only begins to scratch the surface when it comes to making up for all this ‘therapy.’”
“Fair enough,” she says with a wry smile. “I can spend almost an hour in the Mind Dimension, which is what we call this place where we are right now. When I use my power to aid in therapy, I’m able to get my patients to change their undesirable behavior for as long as a week—but my Reach is much less than that. I’m just good at getting people on the right track with my suggestions, so they continue doing what I meant them to for a while. This works out nicely, since my patients usually see me once a week.”