Claire certainly wasn’t wrong in that assessment.
“I’ve seen them watching us, Mr. Anderson especially, and the other man who comes around once a month or so. They observe, and there’s almost a gleam in their eyes as they watch us, like they’re waiting for something specific to happen. Like we’re toys they can’t wait to play with.” She pinned Dr. Cans with her eyes. “Or guns to be fired.”
Dr. Cans thought she probably knew how Claire and the others felt, because Claire was watching her with that same obsessive, speculative look in her eyes. Like she would see everything Dr. Cans was hiding. She decided to come at the question sideways.
“You protect them, don’t you?” she asked mildly. “The others. You talk to them, you keep the peace. When Amy is heartbroken over little Jack, you hold her hand. When Andre is so angry that he wants to bury his hands in the walls, you talk him down. Even Miguel,” she said, eyeing Claire speculatively.
“What about Miguel?”
“Miguel is scared,” Dr. Cans said. “You know that. The others may ostracize him for cooperating, and you certainly don’t make a public example of paying attention to him, but I’ve seen you when you think no one is looking.”
Claire frowned. “He is scared. And I would be too, if I couldn’t see.” She shook her head. “Just because I disagree with the way he chooses to handle the situation doesn’t mean I’m going to be unkind.”
“You hold them together. You’re the leader,” Dr. Cans said.
Claire snorted. “I’m not the leader. Andre-”
“Andre postures and rants, drawing a lot of attention. He may thinks he’s the leader, but he’s not.”
They lapsed into silence again, each taking the measure of the other, before Claire finally shrugged, acknowledging the truth the only way she was going to.
“I’m not here about me,” she reminded Dr. Cans. “I’m here about you.”
“And what about me?”
“Like I said before, there are two attitudes around here - disinterested and proprietary. And then there’s you. You watch us, like the people in power do, the people who want to use us. But you watch us in a different way.”
She stopped, considered her words. “They watch us with a possessiveness that sends chills down my spine. But you watch us with a calculation that’s almost as unnerving.”
Calculation was better than manipulation, Dr. Cans supposed. That’s the word she would have used.
“We’ve been comparing notes, you know. On our individual sessions,” she clarified when Dr. Cans frowned in confusion. “The others don’t see the pattern, but I do.”
“And what do you see?” Dr. Cans asked, curious. This was the most Claire, or any of them, had opened up and she wanted to see where it led.
“You’re not just playing La traviata and Madame Butterfly during our sessions for background music. You’re playing them because you know I’ve performed both.” She eyed Dr. Cans speculatively. “That’s calculation, not possession. You’re after something very specific.”
“Maybe I’m just trying to be kind,” Dr. Cans suggested. “Seems as though no one’s shown you that since you got here. Would it be so hard to believe I care about you as people rather than just experiments to explore?”
“No,” Claire admitted. “It wouldn’t be that hard to believe. In fact, Miguel is already on board and Amy and Andre are starting to soften.”
“But not you?”
“I see more than they see,” Claire answered distantly.
“I’m beginning to believe that,” Dr. Cans agreed, “but what is it that you see?”
“I see,” she paused, trying to decide whether to keep engaging or pull back. Pulling away, retreating, was the safe option, but there was something happening here. Dr. Cans could practically feel the tension in the air.
“I see,” she began again, “someone attempting to build trust, not out of kindness but for a specific purpose. I’m just not sure whether that purpose is in our best interests or the company’s.”
“An honest answer,” Dr. Cans said. “I respect that. If you had to guess, which side of that question would you come down on?”
Claire narrowed her eyes. “I don’t guess,” she said. “I know. Usually.”
She glanced down at her hands, balled tightly in her lap.
“It’s harder now, isn’t it?” Dr. Cans asked. “Harder, knowing your intuition now affects more than just your own best interests?”
As she said it, she knew it was true. That’s what the point of this whole exercise had been. The looks, the tension in the air. Claire wasn’t trying to get a read off her. She was actually reading her. Reading her emotions, her motivations.
“How does it work?” she asked, curious. “Can you sense the emotions of the people around you or is it more physical?”
Claire didn’t speak, giving her time to think it over.
“If I were guessing, I’d lean towards the physical, simply because most of the RNB symptoms we’re aware of manifest physically. You pick up minute changes in facial expression, posture, and heart rate, similar to how a polygraph works.”
“Are the others safe with you?” Claire asked, neither confirming nor denying. “Because that’s all I care about right now.”
“I’m one of the more simple aspects of this circus you’ve found yourselves in. Surely I’m not all you care about,” Dr. Cans mused. “Amy isn’t the only one separated from her family. You have a husband who misses you, but you’ve never mentioned him.” Dr. Cans tilted her head, watching Claire’s reaction to the question. “Why?”
Claire finally broke eye contact. She must have hit a nerve. She closed her eyes for a moment before opening them and looking down at her hands in her lap again.
“We’re not getting out of here,” she said simply. “I can’t change that. I’ll never see my husband again. He’s outside my reach,” she said, shrugging helplessly, “but Andre, Amy, and Miguel aren’t. I can still help them. Watch out for them. See to their best interests. And you are going to play a large role in what happens to them. Maybe you are only a small piece or maybe just the newest. I don’t know. What I do know is that I can’t help them leave this place. And I can’t protect them from whatever God-awful plans the company has for us. But I can help keep them safe inside their own heads.”
Claire stood, not bothering to replace the chair. “You may or may not be right about me being a leader, but I do know one thing - if I can’t trust you, I’m going to make sure they don’t either.”
Claire turned and strode to the door, pausing when Dr. Cans called softly after her.
“And do you?”
She didn’t turn, but she did hesitate before ghosting silently from the room.
“I still haven’t decided.”
Chapter 23
“That voice you listen to is no friend. It promises so much but when has it ever given you what it promised? When has it ever given you any happiness longer than a fleeting moment? It has your destruction as its goal, not your happiness.” Donna Goddard
The voice she hears is not a friend, no.
But then, I never pretended to be.
***
Quincy
They sat there for a minute, drinking their tea and letting the silence linger. Quincy closed her eyes and listened to the soft notes playing over the speaker set into the wall above Dave’s head. She had never really listened to jazz before, but it was nice. Relaxing.
“Quincy,” Dave finally said, breaking the quiet. “Can I ask you about the voice?”
Quincy tensed. She really didn’t want to talk about that. Logan knew about the thoughts she had sometimes. The thoughts that told her that she couldn’t go on like this forever. That maybe it would be better to end it on her own terms.
Since Logan knew, it was only natural that Dave would know. After losing Jones to those same thoughts, Logan was determined not to lose her too. But talking about the thoughts just kept them in the forefront of her mind.
Back on the train, Logan had confronted her about them without any of his usual humor. He had been deadly serious when he told her she needed to decide - live or die, the choice was hers. She had decided to give him and this mysterious doctor of his a chance. She had decided not to put him through another loss like Jones. That didn’t mean she didn’t think about it.
“What do you want to know?” she finally asked.
“Logan said you hear a voice, or voices, and that they whisper certain things to you.”
“Is that what he said?” Quincy asked, almost laughing. “That’s a polite way of putting it. It’s more like a constant reminder of how hard everything is.”
Quincy closed her eyes, thinking about some of the things whispering around her mind right now.
“Before coming here, it would tell me that the constant danger and the constant running from it would never end. That I would always be in danger. Or it would remind me of the exhaustion and pain that never goes away.”
She buried her head in her hands, grinding her fingertips into her forehead to alleviate the headache that wasn’t quite there. “Or how it’s never quiet. I start to think how nice it would be to go to sleep and never wake up. How it might be quieter. Calm. There are times it sounds really, really good,” Quincy admitted. “Especially after a migraine or a night where I don’t shut my eyes at all.”
Dave sat quietly, taking it all in, pen and notebook forgotten. When she stopped, he asked, “Can you tell me why you’re still here? How you’ve managed to ignore that voice for so long?”
“It’s silly,” she said, “but every time I hear that voice or think those thoughts, I always realize they might not be true. Like, is death calm and quiet? Would I really be asleep or would I find even more pain and exhaustion? I don’t know, and I’m not sure I want to risk it.”
Dave nodded, looking troubled. “That’s very perceptive Quincy. Most people plagued with suicidal thoughts can’t distinguish the difference between the urge they have and reality. Did you know,” he asked, “that I believe one of the benchmarks of Reflexive Neurological Bias is the high rate of suicide and suicidal thoughts?”
“Logan didn’t mention that specifically, no,” she said. “I did know that he lost Jones to suicide, so I guess I kind of assumed that was part of it,” she admitted. “Maybe you can tell me about RNB. Your version of it, anyway.”
Quincy cracked her neck, trying to break the tension in her shoulders. “Logan told me a little, and the Colonel told me even less. I guess it’s time I heard the whole of it.”
Logan’s information she trusted, even if he didn’t know the scientific facts behind it all. The Colonel, the sleaze ball who worked for the creepy company that was intent on kidnapping and weaponizing all of the RNB victims in the world and who’d come very close to kidnapping her a short few months ago, did not rank on her list of people who’s intel she could count on.
“Of course,” Dave said. “I’m sorry I didn’t start there. Logan mentioned you had bits and pieces but nothing concrete.
“The body really is a marvelous bit of creation,” Dave began, leaning back in his chair. “The human body was designed to withstand catastrophic trauma through a series of failsafe mechanisms…backup processes capable of healing and regeneration. The entire body is full of these duplicate failsafes. It’s how humanity has evolved and survived all these years. The only real exception to this system of checks and balances,” he said, “is the neurological system.”
“Brain tissue doesn’t regenerate.” Quincy had read somewhere that it was the only tissue in the human body that didn’t.
Dave nodded. “In a general sense, that’s true. Neurons, the primary cells of the neurological system, don’t regenerate. Some of the other cells do, but as the neurons are responsible for carrying the electrical impulses and synapses that promote life, their lack of regeneration is critical.”
“So the brain injury that Jane Doe suffered back in Sacramento,” Quincy still couldn’t quite bring herself to refer to it as her brain injury, “should not have been survivable.”
“Correct,” Dave said. “I’ve studied the imaging scans taken over the month that Jane Doe was in a coma and the damage is widespread in the thalamic region of her left temporal lobe.”
“Is the temporal lobe important to the diagnosis of RNB?” Quincy asked.
“Not the temporal lobe itself,” Dave corrected, “but the thalamus. Are you familiar with the thalamus and its functions?”
Quincy nodded. “It has something to do with relaying sensory signals to the brain.”
“Indeed. The thalamus functions as a type of filter, limiting the information the brain takes in from the world around it. Without the thalamus, we would process every piece of sensory data we are exposed to, which is vast and limitless.”
“It would be too much for our brains.” Quincy could understand the science, even if it was leading somewhere she didn’t think she’d like.
“It’s one of the failsafes I was talking about, created to prevent our brains from overloading and shutting down. There’s a lot about the thalamus, and indeed the brain in general, that we don’t know,” he said. “For example, we know the thalamus plays a role in sensory filtration but it also regulates our conscious awareness and sleep cycles.”
“So it could maybe explain why I don’t sleep?” Quincy asked.
“I think it could explain a lot more than just your sleep pattern,” Dave corrected. “I think it can tell us why there is so much noise in your head, why you struggle with headaches and chronic migraines. I think it can even explain how you can duplicate processes you’ve read or seen but never done before.”
“Like hotwiring a car or stitching up a torn artery?” she guessed.
“Exactly like that,” Dave agreed. “Speaking of which, that is something I would like to observe in action.”
“I don’t know when I’ll get the chance to perform field surgery on the fly again but when I do, you’ll be the first person I call.”
Dave grinned. “That’s not exactly what I meant. There are other tests I would like to run, more imaging studies for one, but I believe we’re ready to try another experiment, if you think you’re ready.”
“Nice of you to let me in on it this time,” she quipped. “What did you have in mind?”
Quincy would be lying if she said she wasn’t hesitant. The longer they talked about her issues, the more uncomfortable and tense she was becoming. The louder the noise was growing. It was something she’d noticed before when forced to talk about herself. She didn’t like doing it, and her brain seemed to respond to that distress by pushing back even harder.
In answer, Dave reached down and tugged open the bottom drawer on his desk, reached inside, and pulled out…a saxophone.
“Huh.” It wasn’t exactly what she was expecting. “Okay.”
“I hope you’ll forgive me, but I set our first test in motion before we even began.”
Sure, Quincy thought. Of course he did.
He gestured towards his phone. “For the last 20 minutes, we’ve been listening to jazz played primarily on the saxophone. While you may not have been listening closely, I believe the part of your brain affected by RNB has been absorbing the data around you.”
He held the instrument out to her. “Take it,” he urged. “Hold it. Feel it. See what happens.”
She had to admit, it wasn’t entirely without precedent. She had done something similar at a fall festival a few months ago. She had been with Logan, before she knew Logan was part of something bigger and before her carefully-constructed world had exploded around her. There had been an old farmer playing a hand-made fiddle for the crowds. Logan had gone to talk to the man and Quincy had followed, like she always did, and had somehow found the fiddle in her own hands. She’d given quite a demonstration that night and unknowingly confirmed Logan’s suspicions about her identity. This experiment with the saxophone would be more of the same.
Quincy h
esitated only a moment more before reaching out and taking the instrument. She stood and walked across the room, just holding it. What if she wanted to play it? How would she start? As she considered it, the room around her went soft, like the focus was slightly off, and all the noise clamoring at the back of her head blinked off, like someone had flipped a switch. She brought the sax up slowly, bending her head down to meet it in the middle, when suddenly -
“Stop!” Dave exclaimed.
Quincy startled, jerking violently out of the weird sensation of acting without knowing she was acting.
“That right there. What was that?” Dave stared her down, forcing her to concentrate on the question. “Something happened. What was it?”
Quincy thought back to when the world had begun to blur around her. It wasn’t the first time it had happened and, now that she understood there was something different about her brain, she could admit that something unusual always followed.
“I was just thinking about the sax,” Quincy said. “I was thinking about whether I wanted to play it or not. I decided I did and then…I don’t know. It’s like the world shifted around me. Everything else faded to the background - even the noise,” she said ruefully. “It was kind of nice.”
“Has it happened before? That exact feeling?” Dave asked.
Quincy nodded. “I’d never really noticed until the Colonel slammed me over the head with it but yeah, it’s happened before.”
“When?” Dave asked.
“When I spoke Spanish last week.” She tried to think. “When the Colonel’s lapdog tried to kill me in that gas station bathroom.” She thought back. “I knew I couldn’t let him get me in there. I knew I was going to have to fight, even if I had no chance of getting away. I was thinking about what my first move would look like and then world went all fuzzy. For just a few seconds, it was like being wrapped in cotton. Then everything sharpened suddenly, and I just moved. I don’t really even know what I did,” she admitted. “All I know is, Brandon was down and I was out the door.”
Burning Bridges (Shattered Highways Book 2) Page 15