Neptune's Tears (14 page)

‘I’ll try to remember that next time,’ Zee said.

Clara gave a little laugh. ‘Call me if you need a reminder. Oh, oh, here comes another labour pain.’ She gritted her teeth and gripped the bed rail so hard Zee could see the tendons
in her arm tighten.

‘Tell you what,’ Zee said. ‘Think of it as a wave – a big, blue wave. Relax into it and let it carry you.’

Zee closed her eyes and used the wave to start building a healing bridge, this time a bridge with lap lanes and lots of calm blue water. When Clara’s breathing slowed and evened, Zee knew
she’d caught the other end of the bridge, and when the next contraction came she winced but no longer seemed fearful.

‘Was that easier?’ Zee asked.

‘Actually, it was. Still hurt like holy hell though. Don’t tell anyone I said that. The press loves to catch celebrities swearing. Very embarrassing.’

‘Your secret’s safe,’ Zee assured her.

Dr Onyango arrived in time for the next contraction. ‘You’re progressing well,’ she told Clara. ‘How’re you doing with the contractions? Still begging for a
C-section?’

‘No, I think I can do this now.’

‘Great work, Zee.’ Dr Onyango glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘I think you can go back now, but if you swing by the nursery in three or four hours, the baby should be
here.’

‘You’re sending her
away
? Please, can’t she stay? Since my husband isn’t here, I really need someone. Please?’

Zee felt a ripple of excitement. She’d helped during a labour before, but she’d never been at an actual birth. Three hours and sixteen minutes later, when the blue-blanketed bundle
of baby boy was put into Clara’s arms, she felt as tired and as exhilarated as anyone else in the room.
No wonder they call it labour,
she thought.

‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ Clara beamed.

Despite a slightly pointy head and a face like a squinched-up rose, Zee was surprised at just how beautiful he was.

As she walked away from the room, Zee realised that her face was wet with tears. Dr Onyango said it was a common response, something that had to do with female hormones. That didn’t seem
like a big enough explanation to Zee. Right now, Clara Miller’s baby was losing himself to baby concerns.
I’m tired. Where did that breast go? I like the way she holds me.
But
Zee had been there when he’d arrived from parts unknown, wrapped in layers of mystery. Hours ago, in a place without hours, he’d floated in a firmament of stars. What kind of world had
been his then? What dreams had he brought, so magnificent the merest flashes would carry him through an entire existence?

Her tears were tears of awe.

The next morning Clara’s husband would arrive and see his son for the first time. At this thought, Zee felt the divesting wall, the mental barrier that separated her self from her work,
begin to crumble. It was impossible to imagine that reunion and not envy Clara. Her life was so settled, the path to happiness so clear, whereas Zee’s own life was anything but clear. She
wondered if she would ever have what Clara had.
Not on this planet,
she thought with a sudden sense of longing. Not with David. Her longing became a knife point and her tears began in
earnest.

By the time Zee got home it was seven-thirty a.m., and all she wanted was the comfort of sleep and maybe a hologram running in the background. She activated the wall screen and
scrolled through several pages before she settled for catching up on episodes of
Survivor: The Mars Edition
. She drifted off to people yelling about freezing temperatures and no drinking
water and woke up to the same thing. Only the yelling she woke up to sounded much more desperate, and it soon became apparent that she’d left the realm of reality holovision and was getting
the live news default channel.

‘Every building!’ a woman was saying in accented English. ‘The Corniche, the roads, every building within at least a mile inland. All of Beirut is gone. The dust and debris is
so thick you can see nothing, not even the sun.’

Zee sat bolt upright. It was the song, the one that had been playing in her head since before her birthday.
Until the sun leaves the sky.

‘For those of you just joining us, we’re continuing with live coverage of the Beirut earthquake. Striking at eight-fourteen this morning, the quake, now estimated at nine-point-five
on the Richter scale, levelled virtually all of Beirut’s buildings and caused a massive tsunami throughout the Mediterranean area. Here again is the stunning footage taken by a news crew from
their studio on Mount Lebanon.’

Zee found herself staring at a panoramic view of a beach – only the beach extended for what looked like miles, taking up the space where the sea should have been.
Until the sea runs
dry.

Along the beachfront, thousands of people gathered, hypnotised by the sight. More and more people joined them, though whether it was to escape the ruined buildings or to look at the eerily empty
sea wasn’t clear. A thin dark line appeared on the far horizon and rapidly thickened, sweeping towards the beach with alarming speed. The crowd now turned and tried to run to higher ground,
but was blocked by the human tide still arriving. The black line of the tsunami rushed forward and Zee, unable to look away, watched as it engulfed thousands of people and slammed inland with
them.

‘The main wave was an estimated sixty metres high, travelling at speeds in excess of six hundred miles per hour,’ the presenter was saying. ‘As might be expected, the majority
of those on the beach are now feared dead. To recap, the quake struck without warning at eight-fourteen a.m. and lasted for approximately one minute, levelling most of Beirut and its suburbs. Red
Cross and Red Crescent agencies worldwide are banding together to send aid. Thought to be stronger and certainly more lethal than Beirut’s legendary 551 A.D. earthquake . . .’

Zee could not get the phrase
struck without warning
out of her head. There
had
been a warning. She had received it. But she’d been so caught up in her own concerns
she’d been blind. Before she could change her mind, she found the slip of paper her adviser had written the Psi Centre’s number and address on and made an appointment to be tested.

Almost half a million people had been killed in the earthquake and tsunami. Zee wrote the number on a card and put it in her wallet as a reminder. She never again wanted to
feel as useless as she’d felt watching the tsunami wash over Beirut. Empathy was a skill that many people had an affinity for and a fair number chose to develop. There was no shortage of
empaths in the world. There was, however, a shortage of diviners. No matter what her adviser had said about the choice being hers, the misinterpreted song and its devastating consequences had
changed everything. If she had abilities that could be developed to save even one life, there was no choice.

She knew very little about the tests themselves. She’d been told only that they’d take the better part of a day and she shouldn’t plan on doing anything strenuous that evening.
Zee, who did fine
with
patients but not so well
as
a patient, began to imagine mild electronic shocks and needles extracting blood.

To calm herself as she walked to the building, she thought of the evening ahead. She and Rani were having a night in, just like they used to when they were students. Only now they had salaries,
so instead of fish and chips – or sometimes just chips – Zee was picking up two orders of artichoke pasta, garlic bread and stuffed mushrooms on the way home. Rani was in charge of
entertainment and pudding, and had told Zee she’d got in a basket of fresh strawberries, three different kinds of cream, series one of
Stranded!
and this year’s Best of Janies
winner,
Punk and Prejudice
. And at some point in all this, Zee was going to enlist Rani’s help in what she’d come to think of as Plan A, the next step in her personal life. Rani
already knew Zee was testing this afternoon, and the awed, slightly gobsmacked look had returned to her face. That plus a lot of whipped cream and strawberries would probably do it.

The offices of the Psi Centre were bland to the point of arousing Zee’s suspicion. Everything in the reception area existed in a narrow colour spectrum, ranging from cream to pale caramel.
But the person who greeted Zee and introduced himself as Major Hamish Dawson, Special Air Service Counter-Terrorism and Anarchy, retired, offered a completely logical explanation.

‘We don’t want to inadvertently seed people’s minds and skew the results,’ he said, leading her down a long corridor. ‘We work with a lot of International
Anti-Terrorist Forces, you know, and have a lot of military on staff. Some government efficiency expert came around once and hung a lot of battle scenes and whatnot on the walls, to “make us
feel as one”. A greater mental maelstrom you have never seen. We didn’t get reliable readings for over a month. Well, here we are then.’

He led her into a small office and motioned her to a chair. Zee was relieved to note that they hadn’t passed any medical-looking rooms. ‘I’ll be supervising your tests today,
but let’s get to know each other a bit first.’

What followed was a conversation Zee recognised as a verbalised version of a codified personality test designed to weed out subjects whose temperament or motives were unsuitable. Did she realise
the work was essentially unpaid? That any work she did would become property of the Psi Centre and/or its clients? That the government would necessarily open and maintain a file on her? That should
her identity become known, she would most likely get death threats? And finally, why did she want to be come a diviner?

‘Actually, I don’t,’ Zee answered. She told him how happy she was being an empath, and how three incidents had intruded on this happiness – the day in the hospital when
she caught the thoughts and emotions of victims of the simultaneous shock bombings, the day at Blackfriars Bridge when she’d known beyond a doubt that the fifth ambulance in line had a bomb
in it, and most recently the tsunami. ‘I’d rather this wasn’t happening, but since it is, if there’s a way it can help people, well . . . at least there’s a
purpose.’

There were a dozen different tests, all of which she did more than once in what Major Dawson called ‘runs’. Some of the tests were fascinating and absorbing, more like puzzles or
games, while some were so pointless they made her want to scream. Like predicting what the next card to be turned up from a deck would be, or being asked to pick five winning lottery numbers from a
grid. These two in particular irritated her, and of course they were the ones Major Dawson wanted to do ten runs of each. Other tests were more interesting, like one where an office envelope
containing a picture was placed in front of her and she was asked to describe the picture in words or by sketching it without opening the envelope.

Her two favourite tests involved a large transparent box. The first one Major Dawson referred to as
The Cube
. Lying on the bottom of an empty plexi-glass box measuring about a half-metre
on each side was a glowing, cherry-red disc. When Zee slipped on a pair of membrane-thin sensor gloves, she could move the disc by moving her hands. Major Dawson asked her to think of the box as a
large area, like an office building.

‘A target has already been placed there at random but is hidden from you at present,’ he explained. ‘Imagine the target is a hostage who needs to be rescued and place the disc
next to where you believe the hostage is.’

Zee did and when the disc was where she wanted it, pressed a button. A blue disc instantly appeared just a few centimetres away. Zee’s results were so unusual that after a run of ten, the
Major still asked her to repeat the test. Of her first ten trials, the cherry disc was almost exactly on top of the blue one in half of them. In the other half, it was almost as far away as it
could be.

‘I think you’re trying to predict where the target will be,’ the Major explained. ‘So if it was in the top right corner one time, you think it will be in the lower left
the next. But the target is placed totally at random. It could as easily be in exactly the same place the next time. Try not to predict where it might be, just feel where it is.’

Zee tried to follow his advice, which wasn’t easy. How could you feel something in an empty space? You had to clear your mind and act on pressures so slight it was impossible to be
consciously aware of them. On the second round, she wasn’t sure if she was finding a way into the problem or simply guessing and placing the disc rapidly out of frustration. Whether it was
skill or luck, she improved the success rate to seven out of ten.

But it was the final test that was her favourite. Major Dawson brought out another plexi-glass box shaped like an oversized shoebox. It was nearly a metre in length and completely empty. Unlike
the Cube, there was no glowing disc inside and no pair of gloves to wear. The test must have been the Major’s favourite too, because he set it in front of her with a flourish, as if he were a
waiter serving a slice of thirteen-layer chocolate cake.