Neptune's Tears (5 page)

Rani’s impatient sigh brought Zee’s attention back. ‘Well? What’s the story?’

For a frozen moment, Zee thought Rani was asking about David Sutton. But how could Rani know? ‘I . . .’

Rani was always the first person she wanted to tell things to but, right at that moment, standing in the hallway with Rani’s bright, inquisitive eyes on her, she found herself pushing
David deeper into a protective corner of herself.

‘Don’t tell me you forgot, Zee! Menthol Light is playing at Blue Elm. Joshua’s got four passes.’ Rani held up four fingers. ‘Me. Joshua. Joshua’s friend
Tarquin. You? You said you’d let me know. You even said you kind of liked Tarquin.’

Zee did kind of like Tarquin.
Had
kind of liked him, anyway. Things seemed different now, like her snow-globe world had been turned upside down and given a good shake. All she wanted was
to be left alone, so she could think it all through.

‘Sorry, Rani, I just don’t feel like it.’

Suddenly, Rani pressed the back of her hand against Zee’s forehead. ‘Oh my gosh, you’re burning up.’

Was she? Zee was just thinking she felt cold. Cold and a little empty, the way she’d felt when David found her outside the hospital. He’d made her feel warm and hopeful for a while,
and now it had seeped away. All she really wanted was to get inside her room, lay down under her floating duvet, and find that warmth again.

‘You must be coming down with something,’ Rani said. ‘Maybe you’d better get to bed; I’ll get someone else for Tarquin. And if you feel better later, call me.
We’ll rustle up an extra pass from somewhere.’

Zee’s two tranquil rooms in the residence hall had never looked more welcoming. The hall had once been four separate buildings bordering Ford Square, an old-fashioned
block of green grass and trees not far from the hospital. Several years before, the buildings had been joined together and the square roofed over and climate controlled, a private front garden
where peonies and roses always bloomed. Often when she came off a shift she would wander out there barefoot, letting the cool green grass relax her from the toes up.

But this morning was different. Zee tapped a panel and the window cycled to sunset and nightfall and then to a blank, midnight blue. She noticed her email stick on the nightstand pulsing with
colour, picked it up, pointed it at the wall and scrolled through her mail. Exhausted as she was, she smiled to see one from Jasmine. Between her work at the hospital and volunteering at a free
clinic at night, Jas had so little free time that an email from her was a real treat, and always included at least one interesting titbit of news. This one began with the headline item.
Remember
the new intern I told you about? Raj? We’ve had three dates now and are driving to the beach this weekend
– and went on to take up most of the wall. Zee opened the hologram
attachment and there was Raj. He looked nice, handsome even, but she couldn’t help comparing him to David. Raj’s gaze was open and forthright, but didn’t draw her in the way
David’s did. His hair was neatly brushed back, without David’s rebellious little cowlick or the wayward strands that tumbled forward.

Don’t be so lame,
she told herself. She would never see David Sutton again, so thinking about him was a waste of time. She clicked the stick to close the email.
Save
attachment?
No. She’d always thought there was something creepy in saving holos of people you didn’t know. Especially other people’s boyfriends.

Zee peeled out of her clothes and dropped her favourite four-sizes-too-big T-shirt over her head, then slid into bed and pressed the bedside panel that dimmed the bedroom walls. Finally, she
pulled the pale yellow duvet over her. She found the corner tab and pressed the upper left of the square twice. Instantly, the duvet lifted and formed a cocoon, leaving two centimetres of space
around her. She pressed the upper right part of the square and felt the envelope of space that surrounded her fill with gentle, warming air. And then she let herself begin to think about David
Sutton.

Against all odds, he’d made her laugh.

First, though, he’d brought her back to the world of the living. By the time he’d found Zee outside the hospital, the fact that Mrs Hart was dying had spread inside her like a cold,
deep lake. On the short walk from the hospital to the café, she was sure he’d seen her shivering once or twice. She liked that he didn’t ask her what was wrong, just directed
them to cross from the shady side of the street to the side that was in the sun.

At the café, he picked a booth away from the door and motioned for her to slide in. ‘It’s better if you sit first. My legs kind of take up the rest.’ He looked
embarrassed, but it was true. When he slid in across from her, his knees almost touched her side of the booth.

He must have seen her eyes widen when a waitress went by with a tray of double hot chocolate Krakatoa Mochas, a house specialty. ‘Let’s ditch Plan A and have those,’ he said.
‘With extra . . . hmmmm . . . extra everything.’

She reminded herself that just a few minutes ago she’d been intent on uncovering his real reason for being on the planet. Could a man with marshmallow froth at the corners of his mouth be
up to anything truly sinister? Zee bent her head and stirred her Krakatoa Mocha, swiftly willing her mind to go smooth and blank.

Catching another person’s intent was hard even for an empath trained many years beyond Zee’s level. The body had no reason to lie and gave its secrets up easily. But the heart and
mind had endless secrets and endless defences, which very few empaths were ever able to penetrate. She tried anyway. Not just once as they sat in the café but several times. And each time
the result was the same. It wasn’t that she picked up nothing at all. It was that she could go only so far and then was flung back, forcefully and purposefully. The third time the pushback
happened, the words
For your own good
floated in her mind.

Yet Zee found it impossible to believe he meant her harm. Sitting with him she felt protected, as if his long legs were a drawbridge that created a small space just for them. His legs were so
close to hers she could feel the warmth of his body. It was like sitting near a low, comforting fire.

Halfway through her Krakatoa Mocha, she asked him how he’d come to be in her A&E room in the first place.

‘You have to promise not to laugh,’ he answered. ‘I was knocked out. By Nancy Drew. In the stacks at the library. An entire shelf of her fell on me. The originals, not the
digitals.’

Zee couldn’t help it. She laughed.

He smiled too and brushed back a cowlick of dark hair. ‘Do you know how many Nancy Drew books there are? Over a thousand! I was practically buried alive.’

‘And that’s what you’re here studying? The literature you crossed half a galaxy for? I read Nancy Drew when I was ten.’

‘So did almost every Earth girl for the last three hundred years. It’s what you’ve all got in common.’ He leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘We think Nancy Drew
may be the key to female dynamism in the universe.’

That time they had both laughed.

Zee found the tab on the duvet and reset it to let it float down onto her shoulders and body. That was what she wanted, that feeling of lightness and warmth near her, the feeling of being in the
booth with David again. She wanted to make the feeling last. Because at the end, she’d felt an almost physical snap when he stood, breaking their connection. He hadn’t said anything
about seeing her again; he hadn’t even walked her home. He’d said goodbye outside the café and vanished into the blur of London.

Zee slept most of the day and the next morning put her name on the emergency availability list. She wasn’t due back at work until Tuesday, but she didn’t want to
give herself more time to think about David either. No one had called in sick and she’d all but decided to go for a run when suddenly her handheld shrieked and all of her screens started to
flash. The wall screen shimmered to life and began to feed her information. There’d been another anarchist attack, a shock bomb in Trafalgar Square, and the TBDs were being brought directly
to Royal London Hospital.

The swift pump of adrenalin flooded her veins. Zee still had her headset and track shoes on but was flying out the door before the hospital broadcasting system finished ticking through the
details.

The bombs had gone off fifteen minutes earlier, one near Nelson’s Column and the other across the square by the National Gallery. Nineteen dead at the scene. Twenty-four known injured.
TBDs: four thousand, six hundred and fifty-four.

That was the thing about low-grade shock bombs. They didn’t make noise or send up flames and smoke. Instead, an undetectable device the size of a dewdrop, activated by remote control, sent
shockwaves skipping silently across a large area. The waves weren’t strong enough to break glass or bring down buildings. Usually, they didn’t even tear the skin. Instead, they passed
through the skin to bruise, compress and tear at soft internal organs.

No one knew who’d been hit and who hadn’t, not even the victims. Only a few died right away, usually children and the elderly. Some, often those closest to the device, were clearly
and seriously hurt. Most people insisted they felt fine, unaware of the internal injuries that would kill them hours or weeks later, when damaged organs failed or tiny ruptures became infected.
Hospital slang classified them as TBDs: patients to be diagnosed.

In the three years since the first shock bomb went off in the middle of Paris, not a single bomb had been stopped and not a single bomber had been caught. Those responsible, a group of
anarchists who demanded nothing short of a full return to nature and demolition of all cities and social structures, had no support and almost no money, yet they’d mastered a terrifying
technology that killed thousands and overwhelmed hospitals wherever they struck. Taking down hospitals was important to the anarchists, who argued that man interfered with natural selection,
putting human survival ahead of other animals.
Only when balance is restored can Earth be free
was one of the anarchists’ many mottoes.

Zee reached the A&E entrance with the first wave of ambulances. This was the third shock bomb attack she’d worked and she knew the drill. First hurry to suit up, then attach the
sensors to the shaved spots high on the nape of her neck, make sure her hair covered them and check the master screen to make sure she was logged in and her brain waves were registering. Hospitals
were still developing protocol to deal with shock bombs, and so far empaths were the most promising way forward. Not only were there not enough thermal scanners to handle the high volume of
patients, the scanners were incapable of picking up the pinprick damage that could trigger a long, slow death. Empaths had so far been more accurate at triaging patients, separating those who
needed immediate care from those who did not. The sensors attached to Zee’s skin would monitor her brain activity over the next several hours. Ultimately, it would be mapped and translated
into patterns and thoughts that would give researchers a far better idea than Zee herself could have given of the hundreds of unvoiced factors that ended in a decision. The final result,
researchers hoped, would help train others throughout the world.

The A&E floor was chaos. Because there weren’t enough ambulances to handle the flow, hundreds of TBDs came in on their own, while hundreds more were brought by citizens who’d
turned out to help. The room was already overflowing, spilling into corridors and leaving a huge crowd outside. Zee saw they were going to have the same problem they’d had last time –
telling the TBDs from everyone else. Then she saw Rani swing through the doors with boxes of red, blue and green glomarkers. She put several of each in Zee’s pocket.

‘Mark on the forehead,’ she said, handing out pens to every empath she could reach. ‘Green for the helper, red for TBDs who need to be seen immediately, one blue line for
non-urgent TBDs and two blue lines for anyone who can wait longer still.’

‘They’ll resist,’ Zee warned, remembering last time, when TBDs went into denial and ripped off the coloured paper armbands they’d used.

‘Do it fast,’ Rani advised, ‘and tell them it will wash off.’

‘Will it?’

‘In about two weeks.’ Rani grinned and vanished into the crowd.

Zee spent the next hours under combat conditions. There was no quiet place to be, no way to calm patients who were in shock, who convinced themselves that they were fine and could go home and
block out everything that had happened. Children were the easiest to work with, especially when she told them she was going to draw a glowing red or blue star on their foreheads. But adults
resisted, their bodies hard with fear and closed to her.

She triaged patients as fast as she could, suppressing the constant worry that she was making bad decisions, missing things that could cost someone’s life. All of the empaths had come in
for the emergency, and most of them probably felt the same way she did. Zee saw the head of the department and almost all the teaching and training staff in the crowd. Once, as she hesitated over a
diagnosis, her adviser came up to her and pulled her gently aside. ‘I know it’s hard,’ she said, ‘but you can’t let the fear win, Zee. Right now this is our best
option and each of your decisions, even possible mistakes, helps us learn. Do you understand?’

Zee nodded and tried to hold this thought close while she worked. And as the hours went by, she did begin to feel more confident. Tiny signs and patterns revealed themselves to her and she
incorporated them into her decisions. By late afternoon, she was able to clear twice as many patients an hour as she had at first. But no matter how many she processed, there were always more.

She’d just sent a middle-aged man to critical care and was wondering if she could leave the floor long enough to find some juice to drink when she felt a sudden jolt of recognition. David
Sutton was in the room, pushing his way through the crowd and coming straight towards her. He carried a child, a girl of about ten, who seemed to be fading in and out of consciousness. When he
reached Zee, he held the girl out to her and said, ‘This one.’