A Gift of Ghosts (Tassamara) (6 page)

Inside the General Directions building, Zane took her through
an innocuous, unlabeled door behind the reception desk and into a small
security room where a guard was watching multiple monitors. The guard
acknowledged Zane with a laconic nod, but his alert eyes took in everything
about Akira as they passed through the room, and into a hallway that led to an
elevator.

This was such a strange place. That guard had the lean
musculature and clipped hair of a professional soldier, and the wall of
monitors was as high-tech as any security she’d ever seen. Research labs had
security, of course, but this one was in the middle of nowhere. And it was a
Sunday. Did they really need such precautions? And if so, why?

But as the elevator door slid open, she stopped worrying
about it. The woman waiting on the other side had to be Zane’s sister: she had
the same dark hair, only hers was long and braided, and the same blue-gray eyes
and fair skin. But where Zane had a look of hidden mischief, Natalya had a look
of hidden depths, as if she had the kind of serenity that would be the calm in
the midst of disaster, the still presence in a panicked emergency room.

“So Dad was right,” Zane said, by way of greeting.

Natalya’s eyes widened. “Dillon?” she asked.

Akira’s eyes widened, too. If she’d known Zane was going to
be so cavalier with her secret, she wouldn’t have told him! Except, of course,
that she’d given it away, she corrected herself. Still, she would have at least
tried to swear him to secrecy before admitting the truth.

“Yep.” Zane nodded. He looked back at Akira. “Is he here?”

“I—um—ah,” Akira stammered a little, trying to decide what
she should say, how she should answer, before admitting defeat, and saying, “No.
He’s tied to the car. He can’t get this far away from it.”

Natalya’s mouth dropped open but only slightly, before she
pulled it closed again and said, “Ghosts are real. And they haunt cars?”

Akira scowled at Zane, before shrugging reluctantly.

“And my nephew is a ghost?”

Akira’s scowl deepened. Damn him for putting her into this
position. She didn’t do this! She didn’t talk to relatives of ghosts. It just
made for messy, uncomfortable scenes when Akira admitted that she didn’t know
why Dillon was a ghost, or how to help him, or really anything at all.
Relatives always expected her to have the answers, as if seeing ghosts came
with some gigantic book of profound insight into the spirit world. It didn’t.
Or if it did, her copy of the book had gotten lost in the mail.

“And Dad was right?” That final question wasn’t directed at
Akira, but at Zane, who was grinning.

“We should have known better than to bet against him,” he
acknowledged.

“That was you,” Natalya said. “I did know better. And I look
forward to Thanksgiving dinner. You’d better start practicing.”

Maybe Akira was looking confused, because Zane took a moment
to explain as they walked down the hallway. “A couple of years ago, my dad met
a woman who claimed to be a medium. She told him that the car was haunted. He’s
been searching for another medium ever since. I bet him a home-cooked
Thanksgiving dinner that she was lying, but he insisted that she was telling
the truth. He’s not usually wrong, so betting against him was probably not one
of my better moves.”

As they entered an examining room, Natalya shooed her brother
away, sending him to another door further down the hallway. “We’re not really a
hospital,” she explained. “I’ve got a medical degree, but I spend most of my
time on research. I wouldn’t have agreed to this, but Zane said you didn’t
think you were badly injured and our scanner is so much better than anything
any local hospital has that if you do have any minor internal bleeding, I’m
more likely to find it. We’re using susceptibility weighted imaging, with a 3T
high-field system, and the contrast is great for traumatic injuries.” Clucking
disapprovingly at the long scrapes on Akira’s arms, Natalya handed her a
flowered hospital gown.

Akira was mystified. No one responded to the news that ghosts
were real like this. It was as if Natalya had heard the words, accepted them
immediately, and moved on just as quickly. Where were the questions? The
doubts? The demands for proof?

Natalya must have mistaken her surprise for lack of interest,
because she continued with a smile, “Okay, I can see that you don’t really care
about my treasure. I’ll skip the tech notes. Just take everything off,
especially anything metal, and put the gown on. There’s nothing metal in your
body, is there? No pacemaker or artificial joints?”

Akira shook her head no, and Natalya went on. “The scanner is
next door, and I’ll be in the screening room on the other side with Zane. Just
come through when you’re ready, and lay down on the table. I’ll be in to help
you get comfortable.” With that, she disappeared through the door.

Slowly, Akira changed into the gown, folding her clothes
neatly and leaving them on the chair. Maybe she had hit her head really hard.
Maybe she was dreaming? But no, the scrapes on her arms hurt like hell, in the
way that only brush burns and paper cuts could, a stinging pain of raw nerve
ends. There was no way she was imagining that.

The table was cold but Akira was so busy thinking that she
barely noticed as the machine whirred its way around her. The brief period
where she and Zane had talked in the car had only added to her list of
questions. She had been trying to hide her insanity for as long as she could
remember, but everyone she’d met in this town seemed to be willing to accept it
as matter-of-factly as if she’d told them the sky was blue. What was wrong with
them?

***

In the screening room, Natalya watched as images appeared on
a computer screen, slide after slide showing sections of Akira’s body. Zane, on
the other hand, was watching the soles of Akira’s feet through the glass. She
had nice feet. Not that he could really see much of them from where he was
standing, but they looked nice, narrow and pale.

“Ouch,” Natalya said in a low voice, shaking her head as she
stared at the monitor.

“Is she okay?” Zane asked, promptly turning his attention
back to the computer screen. The images were just gray and white shapes: he had
no idea what he was seeing and none of it meant anything to him. He could be
looking at a picture of a Martian landscape for all he knew.

“Yeah.” Natalya nodded, her lips moving as if she were
counting. “She’s fine. Now, anyway.”

“And was she not fine before?” Zane asked. Natalya’s narrowed
eye focus on the screen was making him uneasy. He’d seen her scan people more
than once, and she didn’t usually pay much attention, just storing the records
for cross-referencing later. Of course this scan was different, since she was
looking for injuries, but if she wasn’t finding anything, why was she watching
so closely?

Not bothering to answer, Natalya typed a few quick
keystrokes, and suddenly the screen became recognizably the bones of a hand. “Look
at that,” Natalya almost sighed. “What could she have done?”

“Um, no idea?” Zane said, a hint of impatience entering his
voice. “What are we looking at?”

“Oh, right.” She glanced at him as if she’d forgotten he was
there, and almost reluctantly touched several spots on the screen. “See those
light spots? That’s calcification. She’s broken the bones there. Five places, I
think, and probably all around the same time, so somehow she really smashed up
her hand. But that break pattern—I don’t know how she could have done that.”
She stared at her own hand speculatively, as if trying to imagine a way to
break the bones in those locations.

“But she’s okay now?” Zane asked, and this time the
impatience was real. Was there a problem or not?

“Um, yeah.” Natalya glanced at him again before shifting in
her chair, and then typing a few more words so that the screen shifted back to
meaningless gray blobs.

“Nat?”

She sighed, and typed again, this time for several sentences.
The screen turned into a picture of a skeleton. “Count the light spots.”

Zane glanced. There were a lot of light spots. “What are
they?”

“Places where bones have been broken in the past. Both bones
of her right arm in multiple places, her collarbone, the ribs at least a few
times, and her jaw, ouch. Plus the hand. And maybe a bone in the foot. Most of
them happened a long time ago, but it wasn’t one bad accident. You can tell
from the levels of calcification that they occurred at different times. The
hand was recent.” She looked at Zane thoughtfully. “Your girl has lived a
dangerous life.”

“My girl?” Zane’s surprise showed. “She’s not mine. This is
only the second time I’ve met her.” He didn’t mention the number of times he’d
thought of her in the month since her interview. It was more than a few.

“Oh, right.” Natalya busied herself with the keyboard again,
looking embarrassed.

“Okay, sister mine, what do you know that I don’t?”

She grinned at him. “Well, there’s that entire medical school
curriculum, for one thing.”

“You know that’s not what I meant. You saw something, didn’t
you?”

“And you know I prefer not to talk about those things. The
future is ours to control. Anything I see is just a possibility.”

Zane sighed. His sister had inherited his father’s gift—the
only one in the family to do so. Max might call himself a serendipidist, but
the rest of the world would have called him a precognitive psychic. Not always,
not consistently, and not always accurately, but sometimes, and often when it
counted, he could see the future.

So could Nat. But unlike their father, she tried not to act
on her knowledge and not to share it. Her exceptions were random—Akira’s
two-year contract had to have been one of them, Zane suspected—but rare. And
once she decided not to talk, nothing short of an act of God would get her mouth
open. Zane wasn’t even going to try.

“So how do you think she broke all those bones?” he asked,
nodding toward Akira.

Natalya glanced in that direction and frowned. “You could ask
her. But . . .”

Zane raised his eyebrows when she didn’t continue. “Go on.”

She was quiet again.

“Come on, Nat. Tell me what you know.” This was right in
front of him, if he only knew how to read the scans.

“This might fall under doctor-patient confidentiality,” she
finally said.

“I’m in the room with you, watching the scans, and she knows
I’m here. She could have gone to a perfectly nice hospital, and she didn’t, so
tell me what you see.” He didn’t often dig his heels in, but he felt almost
annoyed that Nat knew more about Akira than he did. Bad enough that she wouldn’t
tell him what her gift revealed, but he knew he ought to be able to figure this
out for himself.

“Ribs, jaw, spiral fractures on the arms? And that hand . . .”
Nat pulled up the image of the skeletal hand again, and looked at it, shaking
her head.

“What about them?” he asked. He glanced back through the
window. Nat’s typing had caused the table to slide out of the machine, and
Akira was sitting up.

“If this was an emergency room, and she was here with fresh
injuries, I’d be sending in a social worker before I let her leave. And
probably a police officer, too,” Nat said, before adding with a sigh, “But
since all I’ve got is you, go bandage her abrasions.”

Akira waited restlessly. The metal table, the dim light, the
feel of the cotton hospital gown against her skin—all were bringing back
memories, and while she was trying to feel grateful for Zane’s concern and
Natalya’s helpfulness, mostly she just wanted out. Quickly.

The door to the room opened and Zane entered, trying to
balance a few boxes with one hand while pushing the door with the other, not
looking at her. He was unsmiling, Akira noticed, his brows drawn down over his blue-gray
eyes, his face somber.

She frowned. She felt all right—bruised and stinging, but not
seriously hurt. “I’m okay, aren’t I?”

His brows went up, almost startled. “Oh, yeah, you’re fine.”
He smiled, but Akira could tell that it was slightly forced. “Nat has delegated
me to bandage your scrapes,” he adding, holding up his supplies.

She looked down at the abrasions, turning her arms out to
show them to him. They were just brush burns, really, not deep or bleeding, but
the skin was raw and red. “I hope you have some big Band-Aids.”

He grimaced sympathetically. “Nat gave me gauze and tape. GD’s
not a hospital, but we do a fair amount of medical research here so we’re well
stocked. Nat could probably handle anything short of the zombie apocalypse.” He
dropped the boxes on the table, opened them and took out what he needed, then
moved to stand in front of her.

As he took her right arm in his warm hands, Akira closed her
eyes and clenched her teeth. This was not going to feel good. She couldn’t
prevent a wince at his touch, but pressed her lips together and stayed silent
while Zane cleaned the abrasions and applied an antibiotic ointment lightly,
first on one arm, and then the next.