He sees me.
I woke with a garbled scream, arms flailing, to my dark room bathed in the ambient glow of monitors. I stumbled to the window, knelt with my forehead against the cool oak sill and blinked against tears that welled unbidden from my burning eyes. There I fell asleep with my head pillowed upon my arms, and woke next morning to Dr. Harrow"s knock upon my door.
"Emma," he whispers at the transom window. "Let me in."
The quilts piled on me m.u.f.fle his voice. He calls again, louder, until I groan and sit up in bed, rubbing my eyes and glaring at the top of his head peeking through the narrow gla.s.s.
From the bottom of the door echoes faint scratching, Molly"s whine. A thump. More scratching: Aidan crouched outside the room, growling through choked laughter. I drape a quilt around me like a toga and lean forward to unlatch the door.
Molly flops onto the floor, snorting when she b.u.mps her nose and then drooling apologetically. Behind her stumbles Aidan, shivering in his worn kimono with its tattered sleeves and belt stolen from one of my old dresses. I giggle uncontrollably, and gesture for him to shut the door before Father hears us in his room below.
"It"s f.u.c.king freezing in this place," Aidan exclaims, pinning me to the bed and pulling the quilts over our heads. "Oh, come on, dog." Grunting, he hauls her up beside us. "My room is like Antarctica. Tierra del Fuego. The Bering Strait." He punctuates his words with kisses, elbowing Molly as she tries to s...o...b..r our faces. I squirm away and straighten my nightshirt.
"Hush. You"ll wake Papa."
Aidan rolls his eyes and stretches against the wall. "Spare me." Through the rents in his kimono I can see his skin, dusky in the moonlight. No one has skin like Aidan"s, except for me: not white but the palest gray, almost blue, and fine and smooth as an eggsh.e.l.l. People stare at us in the street, especially at Aidan; at school girls stop talking when he pa.s.ses, and fix me with narrowed eyes and lips pursed to mouth a question never asked.
Aidan yawns remorselessly as a cat. Aidan is the beauty: Aidan whose gray eyes flicker green whereas mine muddy to blue in sunlight; Aidan whose long legs wrap around me and shame my own, sc.r.a.ped and bruised from an unfortunate bout with Papa"s razor.
"Molly. Here." He grabs her into his lap, groaning at her weight, and pulls me as well, until we huddle in the middle of the bed. Our heads knock and he points with his chin to the mirror.
" "Did you never see the picture of We Three?"" he warbles. Then, shoving Molly to the floor, he takes my shoulders and pulls the quilt from me.
My father had a daughter loved a man As it might be perhaps, were I a woman, I should your lordship.
He recites softly, in his own voice: not the deeper drone he affected when we had been paired in the play that Christmas. I start to slide from bed but he holds me tighter, twisting me to face him until our foreheads touch and I know that the mirror behind us reflects a moon-lapped Rorschach and, at our feet, our snuffling mournful fool.
" "But died thy sister of her love, my boy?" " I whisper later, my lips brushing his neck where the hair, unfashionably long, waves to form a perfect S.
I am all the daughters of my father"s house, And all the brothers, too; and yet I know not.
He kisses me. Later he whispers nonsense, my name, rhyming words from our made-up language; a long and heated silence.
Afterward he sleeps, but I lie long awake, stroking his hair and watching the rise and fall of his slender chest. In the coldest hour he awakens and stares at me, eyes wide and black, and turning on his side moans, then begins to cry as though his heart will break. I clench my teeth and stare at the ceiling, trying not to blink, trying not to hear or feel him next to me, his pale gray skin, his eyes: my beautiful brother in the dark.
After this session Dr. Harrow let me sleep until early afternoon. The rush of summer rain against the high cas.e.m.e.nts finally woke me, and I lay in bed staring up at a long fine crack that traversed the ceiling. To me it looked like the arm of some ghastly tree overtaking the room. It finally drove me downstairs. I ambled down the long gla.s.s-roofed corridor that led to the pre-Columbian annex. I paused to pluck a hibiscus blossom from a terra-cotta vase and arranged it behind one ear. Then I went on, until I reached the ancient elevator with its folding arabesques.
The second floor was off limits to empaths, but Anna had memorized a dead patient"s release code and she and I occasionally crept up here to tap sleeping researchers. No medical personnel patrolled the rooms. Servers checked the monitors and recorded all responses. At the end of each twelve-hour shift doctors would flit in and out of the bedrooms, unhooking oneironauts and helping them stumble to other rooms where they could fall into yet another, though dreamless, sleep. I tapped the pirated code into the first security unit I saw, waiting for it to read my retina imprint and finally grant the access code that slid open the false paneled wall.
Here stretched the sleep labs: chambers swathed in yellowed challis and moth-eaten linens, huge canopied beds where masked oneironauts turned and sighed as their monitors clicked in draped alcoves. The oneironauts" skin shone gla.s.sy white; beneath the masks their eyes were bruised a tender green from enforced somnolence. I held my breath as long as I could: the air seethed with dreams. I hurried down the hall to a room with door ajar and an arched window columned with white drapes. A woman I did not recognize sprawled across a cherry four-poster, her demure lace gown at odds with the rakish mask covering her eyes. I slipped inside, locking the door behind me. Then I turned to the bed.
The research subject"s hair formed a dark filigree against the disheveled linen sheets. I bowed to kiss her on the mouth, waiting to be certain she would not awake. Then I dipped my tongue between her lips and drew back, closing my eyes to unravel strands of desire and clouded abandon, pixie fancies. All faded in a moment: dreams, after all, are dreams. I reached to remove the wires connecting her to the monitors, adjusted the settings and hooked her into the NET. I did the same for myself with extra wires, relaying through the BEAM to the transmitter. I smoothed the sheets, lay beside her and closed my eyes.
A gray plain shot with sunlight. Clouds mist the air with a scent of rain and seawater. In the distance I hear waves. Turning I can see a line of small trees, contorted like crippled children at ocean"s edge. We walk there, the oneironaut"s will bending so easily to mine that I scarcely sense her: she is another salt-scattered breeze.
The trees draw nearer. I stare at them until they shift, stark lichened branches blurring into limbs bowed with green and gentle leaves. Another moment and we are beneath their heavy welcoming boughs.
I place my hand against the rough bark and stare into the heart of the greenery. Within the emerald shadows something stirs. Sunlit shards of leaf and twig align themselves into hands. Shadows shift to form a pair of slanted beryl eyes. There: crouched among the boughs like a dappled cat, his curls crowned with a ring of leaves, his lips parted to show small white teeth. He smiles at me.
Before he draws me any closer I withdraw, snapping the wires from my face. The tree shivers into white sheets and the shrouded body of the woman beside me.
My pounding heart slowed as I drew myself up on my elbows to watch her, carefully peeling the mask from her face. Beneath lids mapped with fine blue veins her eyes roll, tracking something unseen. Suddenly they steady. Her mouth relaxes into a smile, then into an expression of such blissful rapture that without thinking I kiss her and taste a burst of ecstatic, halycon joy.
And reel back as she suddenly claws at my chest, her mouth twisted to shout; but no sound comes. Bliss explodes into terror. Her eyes open and she stares, not at me but at something that looms before her. Her eyes grow wide and horrified, the pupils dilating as she grabs at my face, tears the hibiscus blossom from my hair and chokes a garbled scream, a shout I m.u.f.fle with a pillow.
I whirled and reset the monitors, switched the NET"s settings and fled out the door. In the hallway I hesitated and looked back. The woman pummeled the air before her blindly; she had not seen me. I turned and ran until I reached the doctors" stairway leading to the floors below, and slipped away unseen.
Downstairs all was silent. Servers creaked past bringing tea trays to doctors in their quarters. I hurried to the conservatory, where I inquired after the aide named Justice. The server directed me to a chamber where Justice stood recording the results of an evoked potential scan.
"Wendy!" Surprise melted into disquiet. "What are you doing here?"
I shut the door and stepped to the window, tugging the heavy velvet drapes until they fell and the chamber darkened. "I want you to scan me," I whispered.
He shook his head. "What? Why" I grabbed his hand as he tried to turn up the lights and he nodded slowly, then dimmed the screen he had been working on. "Where is Dr. Harrow?"
"I want you to do it." I tightened my grip. "I think I have entered a fugue state."
He smiled, shaking his head. "That"s impossible, Wendy. You"d have no way of knowing it. You"d be catatonic, or " He shrugged, then glanced uneasily at the door. "What"s going on? You know I"m not certified to do that alone."
"But you know how," I wheedled, stroking his hand. "You are a student of their arts, you can do it as easily as Dr. Harrow." Smiling, I leaned forward until my forehead rested against his, and kissed him tentatively on the mouth. His expression changed to fear as he trembled and tried to move away. s.e.xual contact between staff and experimental personnel was forbidden and punishable by execution of the medics in question; empaths were believed incapable of initiating such contact. I grinned more broadly and pinned both of his hands to the table, until he nodded and motioned with his head toward the PET unit.
"Sit down," he croaked. I latched the door, then sat in the wing-back chair beside the bank of monitors.
In a few minutes I heard the dull hum of the scanners as he improvised the link for my reading. I waited until my brain"s familiar patterns emerged on the screen.
"See?" Relief brightened his voice, and he tilted the monitor so that I could see it more clearly. "All normal. Maybe she got your dosage wrong. Perhaps Dr. Silverthorn can suggest a"
His words trickled into silence. I shut my eyes and drew up the image of the tree, beryl eyes and outstretched hand, then opened my eyes to see the PET scan showing intrusive activity in my temporal lobe: brain waves evident of an emergent secondary personality.
"That"s impossible," Justice breathed. "You have no MPs, no independent emotions What the h.e.l.l is that?" He traced the patterns with an unsteady hand, then turned to stare at me. "What did you do, Wendy?" he whispered.
I shook my head, crouching into the chair"s corner, and carefully removed the wires. The last image shimmered on the screen like a cerebral ghost. "Take them," I said flatly, holding out the wires. "Don"t tell anyone."
He let me pa.s.s without a word. Only when my hand grasped the doork.n.o.b did he touch me briefly on the shoulder.
"Where did it come from?" he faltered. "What is it, Wendy?"
I stared past him at the monitor with its pulsing shadows. "Not me," I whispered at last. "The boy in the tree."
They found the sleep researcher at shift-change that evening, hanging by the swag that had decorated her canopied bed. Anna told me about it at dinner.
"Her monitors registered an emergent MP." She licked her lips unconsciously, like a kitten. "Do you think we could get into the morgue?"
I yawned and shook my head. "Are you crazy?"
Anna giggled and rubbed my neck. "Isn"t everybody?"
Several aides entered the dining room, scanning warily before they started tapping empties on the shoulder and gesturing to the door. I looked up to see Justice, his face white and pinched as he stood behind me.
"You"re to go to your chambers," he announced. "Dr. Harrow says you are not to talk to anyone." He swallowed and avoided my eyes, then abruptly stared directly at me for the first time. "I told her that I hadn"t seen you yet but would make certain you knew."
I nodded quickly and looked away. In a moment he was gone, and I started upstairs.
"I saw Dr. Leslie before," Anna commented before she walked outside toward her cottage. "He smiled at me and waved." She hesitated, biting her lip thoughtfully. "Maybe he will play with me this time," she announced before turning down the rain-spattered path.
Dr. Harrow stood at the high window in the Home Room when I arrived. In her hand she held a drooping hibiscus flower.
"Shut the door," she ordered. I did so. "Now lock it and sit down."
She had broken the hibiscus. Her fingers looked bruised from its stain: jaundiced yellow, ulcerous purple. As I stared she flung the flower into my lap.
"They know it was you," she announced. "They matched your retina print with the masterfile. How could you have thought you"d get away with it?" She sank onto the bed, her eyes dull with fatigue.
The rain had hung back for several hours, a heavy iron veil. Now it hammered the windows again, its steady tattoo punctuated by the rattle of hailstones.
"I did not mean to kill her," I murmured. I smoothed my robe, flicking the broken blossom onto the floor.
She ground the hibiscus beneath her heel, took it and threw it out the window. "Her face," she said: as if replying to a question. "Like my brother Aidan"s."
I stared at her blankly.
"When I found him," she went on, turning to me with glittering eyes. "On the tree."
I shook my head. "I don"t know what you"re talking about, Dr. Harrow."
Her lips tightened against her teeth when she faced me. A drop of blood welled against her lower lip. I longed to lean forward to taste it, but did not dare. "She was right, you know. You steal our dreams..."
"That"s impossible." I crossed my arms, shivering a little from the damp breeze. I hesitated. "You told me that is impossible. Unscientific. Unprofessional thinking."
She smiled, and ran her tongue over her lip to lick away the blood. "Unprofessional? This has all been very unprofessional, Wendy. Didn"t you know that?"
"The tenets of the Nuremberg Act state that a scientist should not perform any research upon a subject which she would not undergo herself."
Dr. Harrow shook her head, ran a hand through damp hair. "Is that what you thought it was? Research?"
I shrugged. "I I don"t know. The boy Your twin?"
"Aidan..." She spread her fingers against the bed"s coverlet, flexed a finger that bore a simple silver ring. "They found out. Teachers. Our father. About us. Do you understand?"
A flicker of the feeling she had evoked in bed with her brother returned, and I slitted my eyes, tracing it. "Yes," I whispered. "I think so."
"It is " She fumbled for a phrase. "Like what is forbidden here, between empaths and staff. They separated us. Aidan...They sent him away, to another kind of school. Tested him."
She stood and paced to the window, leaned with a hand upon each side so that the rain lashed about her, then turned back to me with her face streaming: whether with rain or tears I could not tell. "Something happened that night..." Shaking her head furiously she pounded the wall with flattened palms. "He was never the same. He had terrible dreams, he couldn"t bear to sleep alone That was how it started "And then he came home, for the holidays...Good Friday. He would not come to Ma.s.s with us. Papa was furious; but Aidan wouldn"t leave his room. And when we returned, I looked for him, he wasn"t there, not in his room, not anywhere...
"I found him. He had " Her voice broke and she stared past me to the wall beyond. "Apple blossom in his hair. And his face "
I thought she would weep; but her expression twisted so that almost I could imagine she laughed to recall it.
"Like hers..."
She drew nearer, until her eyes were very close to mine. I sniffed and moved to the edge of the bed warily: she had dosed herself with hyoscine derived from the herbarium. Now her words slurred as she spoke, spittle a fine hail about her face.
"Do you know what happens now, Wendy?" In the rain-streaked light she glowed faintly. "Dr. Leslie was here tonight. They have canceled our term of research. We"re all terminated. A purge. Tomorrow they take over."
She made a clicking noise with her tongue. "And you, Wendy. And Anna, and all the others. Toys. Weapons." She swayed slightly as she leaned toward me. "You especially. They"ll find him, you know. Dig him up and use him."
"Who?" I asked. Now sweat pearled where the rain had dried on her forehead. I clutched a bolster as she stretched a hand to graze my temples, and shivered.
"My brother," she murmured.
"No, Dr. Harrow. The other who is the other?"
Smiling she drew me toward her, the bolster pressing against her thigh as she reached for the NET"s rig, flicking rain from the colored wires.
"Let"s find out."
I cried out at her clumsy hookup. A spot of blood welled from her temple and I protectively touched my own face, drew away a finger gelled with the fluid she had smeared carelessly from ear to jaw. Then, before I could lie down, she made the switch and I cried out at the dizzy vistas erupting behind my eyes.
Aniline lightning. Faculae stream from synapse to synapse as ptyalin floods my mouth and my head rears instinctively to smash against the headboard. She has not tied me down. The hyoscine lashes into me like a fiery bile and I open my mouth to scream. In the instant before it begins I taste something faint and caustic in the back of her throat and struggle to free myself from her arms. Then I"m gone.
Before me looms a willow tree shivering in a breeze frigid with the shadow of the northern mountains. Sap oozes from a raw flat yellow scar on the trunk above my head where, two days before, my father had sawed the damaged limb free. It had broken from the weight; when I found him he lay pillowed by a crush of twigs and young leaves and scattered bark, the blossoms in his hair alone unmarked by the fall. Now I stand on tiptoe and stroke the splintery wound, bring my finger to my lips and kiss it. I shut my eyes, because they burn so. No tears left to shed; only this terrible dry throbbing, as though my eyes have been etched with sand. The sobs begin again, suddenly. The wrenching weight in my chest drags me to my knees until I crouch before the tree, bow until my forehead brushes gra.s.s trampled by grieving family. I groan and try to think of words, imprecations, a curse to rend the light and living from my world so abruptly strangled and still. But I can only moan. My mouth opens upon dirt and shattered granite. My nails claw at the ground as though to wrest from it something besides stony roots and scurrying earwigs. The earth swallows my voice as I force myself to my knees and, sobbing, raise my head to the tree.
It is enough; he has heard me. Through the shroud of new leaves he peers with lambent eyes. April"s first apple blossoms weave a snowy cloud about his brow. His eyes are huge, the palest, purest green in the cold morning sun. They stare at me unblinking; harsh and bright and implacable as moonlight, as languidly he extends his hand toward mine.
I stagger to my feet, clots of dirt falling from my palms. From the north the wind rises and rattles the willow branches. Behind me a door rattles as well, as my father leans out to call me back to the house. At the sound I start to turn, to break the reverie that binds me to this place, this tree stirred by a tainted wind riven from a bleak and noiseless sh.o.r.e.
And then I stop, where in memory I have stopped a thousand times; and turn back to the tree, and for the first time I meet his eyes.
He is waiting, as he has always waited; as he will always wait. At my neck the wind gnaws cold as bitter iron, stirring the collar of my blouse so that already the chill creeps down my chest, to nuzzle there at my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and burrow between them. I nod my head, very slightly, and glance back at the house.
All the colors have fled the world. For the first time I see it clearly: the gray skin taut against granite hills and gra.s.sless haughs; the horizon livid with clouds like a rising barrow; the hollow bones and nerveless hands drowned beneath black waters lapping at the edge of a charred orchard. The rest is fled and I see the true world now, the sleeping world as it wakes, as it rears from the ruins and whispers in the wind at my cheeks, this is what awaits you; this and nothing more, the lie is revealed and now you are waking and the time has come, come to me, come to me...
In the ghastly light only his eyes glow, and it is to them that I turn, it is into those hands white and cold and welcome that I slip my own, it is to him that I have come, not weeping, no not ever again, not laughing, but still and steady and cold as the earth beneath my feet, the gray earth that feeds the roots and limbs and shuddering leaves of the tree...
And then pain rips through me, a flood of fire searing my mouth and ears, raging so that I stagger from the bed as tree and sky and earth tilt and shiver like images in black water. Gagging I reach into my own throat, trying to dislodge the capsule Emma Harrow has bitten; try to breath through the fumes that strip the skin from my gums. I open my mouth to scream but the fire churns through throat and chest, boils until my eyes run and stain the sky crimson.
And then I fall; the wires rip from my skull.
Beside me on the floor Dr. Harrow thrashed, eyes staring wildly at the ceiling, her mouth rigid as she retched and blood spurted from her bitten tongue. I recoiled from the scent of bitter almond she exhaled; then watched as she suddenly grew still. Quickly I knelt, tilting her head away so that half of the broken capsule rolled onto the floor at my feet. I waited a moment, then bowed my head until my lips parted around her broken jaw and my tongue stretched gingerly to lap at the blood cupped in her cheek.
In the tree the boy laughs. A bowed branch shivers, and then, slowly, rises from the ground. Another boy dangles there, his long hair tangled in dark strands around a leather belt. I see him lift his head and, as the world rushes away in a blur of red and black, he smiles at me.
A cloud of frankincense. Seven stars limned against a dormer window. A boy with a bulldog puppy; and she is dead.
I cannot leave my room now. Beside me a screen dances with colored lights that refract and explode in brilliant parhelions when I dream. But I am not alone now, ever...
I see him waiting in the corner, laughing as his green eyes slip between the branches and the bars of my window, until the sunlight changes and he is lost to view once more, among the dappled and chattering leaves.