Neptune's Tears (9 page)

‘There are three possible paths,’ her adviser explained. ‘First, you could give up being an empath. It wouldn’t guarantee anything, but it
would
decrease the odds
of this happening again.’

‘Or?’

‘Or you could continue as an empath and cope with the occasional episode. There’s no medication for this, but there are strategies, blunting techniques that would help block both the
physical and emotional pain.’

‘And the third or?’

‘You could accept it,’ Dr Branning said. ‘You could develop your talent and take control of it, own it.’

Zee crossed her arms, a gesture of childish sullenness she hadn’t indulged in for years. ‘Why would I want to do that?’

‘Because you’re the one in ten million. The rare raindrop.’

‘No thanks.’

‘But you could do a great deal of good, Zee.’

‘Frederick!’ Zee’s adviser hissed. ‘She’s had enough for one day.’

But Dr Branning would not be stopped. ‘A
great
deal of good in the world. Finding the missing. Harvesting the last thoughts of the dead at crime scenes. Even forestalling attacks
like the ones today. Of course, it takes a good deal of training, and total commitment but —’

‘Frederick!’ The adviser looked daggers at Dr Branning. ‘Please go now.’

Zee waited until she heard the soft click of the door closing. ‘Is that true?’ she asked. ‘Are there people like me who could have stopped those bombings today? Could
I
have stopped those bombings today?’

‘It isn’t that simple, Zee.’

‘Could I?’ Zee asked again. Her adviser kept silent. ‘Please. I want to know.’

‘Yes. Yes, I believe you could do that. In time. But the price can be high. It isn’t an easy life.’

‘Have you known any? Diviners I mean.’

‘A few, yes. Empaths often make good diviners.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘Three died carrying out their mission. One dropped out of sight.’

‘That’s four,’ Zee prompted. ‘What about the fifth?’

‘He . . . he was captured by the anarchists. Six years of torture does terrible things to a human being. They turned him.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Now he goes by the name of his creation, Thanatos.’

Zee gasped. Thanatos was the man-made virus that had killed one in ten children the year Zee was twelve. She still remembered that year of fearfulness and isolation, of being kept at home behind
closed doors, of her mother obsessively scrubbing every inch of the house every week, her hands raw from the lye she added to the washing-up water. Thanatos, her father told her, was the Greek word
for death.

‘He was a good man once,’ her adviser said gently. ‘The diviner’s way is difficult, Zee, a path that takes more than it gives.’

‘Do I have to decide right now?’

‘Oh no, love. You don’t “have to” anything. And don’t let Dr Branning push you into anything, either.’

Zee felt bone tired. Three months ago, when she’d met David Sutton, her whole life and much of what she’d believed about herself had changed. Today it had changed again.

‘Does anyone know about me?’

‘Just Rani. We know she’s your best friend here, and didn’t think you should go through this alone.’

‘Are you going to tell my family?’

‘Not unless you want us to.’

‘
No!
No.’ She didn’t want more people climbing on the one raindrop bandwagon, especially her family. It was her life, and she wanted to think through her own
decisions.

Long after her adviser had gone, Zee lay alone in the dark as two cold tears trickled down her cheeks. She wanted it to be the morning again. She wanted to be nothing more than an empath. She
wanted to be the girl who worked with Mrs Hart, who worried about her patients and could spend hours thinking about David Sutton. She didn’t want what had been given to her.

The next morning, Zee awakened confident and full of calm, focused energy. She rose early, showered, signed out as a patient, signed back in as an empath, and saw that her
adviser had assigned most of her caseload to Rani. She wanted her patients back, especially her stroke victim, and she meant to get him. Step one was to find Rani and make sure she was willing to
transfer the case back. It shouldn’t be a problem since Rani had her own heavy caseload.

Rani was alone in the empaths’ lounge, drinking tea and watching her favourite Hindi soap opera. Ever since Zee had met Rani, the soap opera had exactly the same story. It was always about
a young girl trying to avoid the marriage her parents had arranged. Sometimes the girl escaped with the village boy she really loved. Sometimes the girl didn’t escape, but over the next
season fell in love with her new husband. Once a girl had thrown herself into the sea but was rescued by a handsome young fisherman who turned out to be a prince.

Usually, nothing could tear Rani away from these tales, but today she blanked the screen the minute she saw Zee, and when Zee explained that she’d like to re-claim Mr Caldwell, Rani
volunteered to immediately resign from the case in writing. Then, not quite looking at Zee, she held up the packet she’d been nibbling from. ‘Ginger biscuit? Or can I make you some
tea?’ Her brow furrowed as if she were trying to tempt an invalid to eat.

Zee understood what was happening. ‘Oh no, Kapoor,’ she said, reverting to their student habit of calling each other by their last names. ‘Don’t tell me you took that
divining stuff seriously. That seems to be Dr Branning’s favourite theme. But he got the wrong end of the stick. What happened was a one off, a fluke.’

Rani perked up a little. ‘Really?’

‘Of
course
. Dr Branning is just so anxious for the Royal London to have its very own diviner.’ Zee shook her head. ‘That isn’t me. I’m not anyone’s
dewdrop.’

‘Raindrop,’ Rani corrected.

‘Whatever. Raindrop, dewdrop, lemondrop. Not me.’

‘Gumdrop?’ Rani giggled.

‘That either.’ Zee smiled back at her.

By nine a.m. Mr Caldwell was Zee’s patient again, and a few days later she had him sitting up and surfing the web.

Zee was working on an idea for Mr Caldwell that might help lots of other patients as well, and she was eager to get started. It was Mr Caldwell’s speech centre that had been affected. The
re-grown and patched-in slice of brain, though fully functional, was as blank as a baby’s and would have to be re-mapped. An avid gardener and rose-grower, Mr Caldwell loved looking at garden
sites and pictures of roses. When he came to a picture of a favourite bloom, he bookmarked the page.

‘That’s good,’ Zee said, glancing over Mr Caldwell’s shoulder and noting his growing ease with the process.

She matched the bookmarked images and with words, hoping they might form a healing bridge, and Mr Caldwell would see not only see the blossoms but the words for them whenever they worked
together.

She pulled an image from a file she’d already done, a large pink and cream blossom with abundant petals with
Rose
printed beneath it. But when she showed it to Mr Caldwell, he
frowned and became agitated, shaking his head.
No, no, no.
He held up one forefinger, then held up the other one beside it. When Zee failed to understand, he repeated the gesture. Finally,
glancing from Mr Caldwell to the picture, she understood.

‘
Double rose
. Is that it?’

Mr Caldwell nodded vigorously. Maybe he couldn’t yet recognise the words, but he recognised a rose, and remembered that a double flower needed a double word.

‘Very good, Mr C. I’m impressed! ROSE.’ She enunciated the word carefully, pointing to the word. ‘DOUBLE ROSE.’

‘Roadj. Dhubba roadj,’ Mr Caldwell repeated, smiling. It was a good start.

At first, the multiple bombs seemed to be a major victory for the anarchists. Stock markets fell, people got into arguments and accidents, governments came up with protocols no
one could follow. Then something changed. So many people in so many cities had been affected that their thoughts turned and focused on the anarchists like a swarm of angry bees. Ideas, as Dr
Branning might say, were out there. And not all of the ideas were bad. After years of feeling like sitting ducks, people began to see ways of fighting back. A flautist in Vienna suggested lining
public places with exquisitely sensitive tuning forks that would sound an alert if touched by the shock waves.

One of the most successful ideas was the Shock Sock, a microfibre tube that folded into a package smaller than a deck of cards. In case of attack, the user slid the corsetlike tube over his
torso so the tube encased the entire trunk of the body. Pulling a ring caused the tube to contract. If the person hadn’t been injured, no harm was done, but if they had been hurt, the
compression slowed internal bleeding and kept organs functioning for up to forty-eight hours. Factories swung into high production and within weeks governments were distributing them to citizens.
Zee’s was blue and identified her as a Priority One Responder. David’s was grey with a red
AG
for Alien Guest. Zee didn’t like to think about the markings because she knew
they meant that in an attack she would be evaluated and treated first, while David would be left to the very end.

At the end of September, the Royal London was asked to contribute to a three-day seminar on shock bomb triage held in Paris. Emergency services, surgery, and the department of empathy were
specifically invited. In addition to senior and teaching staff, four teams of three empaths each would train empaths from around the world. The good news was that Zee and Rani both made the cut and
were on the same team. The bad news was that their third team member was Piper. Zee spent most of the long weekend on pins and needles, hoping Piper wouldn’t reveal her relationship with
David to Rani. And while Rani complained about their schedule being so heavy it left little time for socialising or sightseeing, Zee was relieved that it kept Piper occupied too. Each one of them
was responsible for training a team in different parts of triage protocol, and each saw more of the team they were responsible for than of each other.

On their free afternoon, Zee and Rani went to the city’s colourful and extravagant flea market. While Rani was trying on her hundredth vintage dress, Zee drifted to a jewellery seller
nearby. In a tray of antique charms she saw a small silver eagle in a circle of silver on a leather thong. David had once said that of all Earth’s animals, so different from those on Omura,
his favourite was the American eagle. Now that he knew her, he said, he liked the eagle even more. Zee bought the talisman without hesitation, even though it took most of her spending money. She
wasn’t sure if she was ready to give David such a personal gift, or if he’d remember the comment he made, but she knew the eagle was meant to be his and she needed to buy it.

‘That must be for someone special.’

Zee whirled around to see Piper standing behind her. Before she could say anything, Piper gave her an unreadable smile and melted back into the crowd. For all Zee’s worries, Piper never
said a word about David, and at the end of the weekend even Rani noted that Piper had been not-quite-but-almost-very-close-to normal at work.

‘Maybe she’s just vibing the way everyone feels,’ Zee said. That happened with empaths a lot. The skill was always there, on duty or off, and when there was a mass mood afoot,
empaths often picked up on it.

‘It’s possible,’ Rani said.

Everyone’s mood had improved over the last few weeks. Even though the anarchists hadn’t been caught and there was still no way to detect a shock bomb before it went off, people no
longer felt helpless. They were developing survival strategies. Just as they had found a remedy for the Thanatos virus years ago, they would find a remedy for this, too. They would eventually find
a remedy for everything the anarchists tried, and then they would find the anarchists themselves.

Zee willingly rearranged her schedule to make home visits to Mrs Hart on Tuesday and Friday afternoons. Though her adviser was pleased with her performance, Zee sometimes
wondered who got more out of their sessions, herself or Mrs Hart. No one in Zee’s immediate world had ever died before, except for a great-great-grandmother she hadn’t seen since she
was six months old. As Mrs Hart stepped closer to the end of her life with each visit, Zee saw there was something natural and even freeing about it, and that who you were and how you’d lived
came shining through to the very end.

One day she arrived to find Mrs Hart at an easel, painting.

‘I’ve heard that if there’s a skill you’re working on near the end, you can pick up where you left off on the other side,’ she explained. ‘This is a picture
of the house I grew up in. I probably won’t live to finish it, but so be it.’ Mrs Hart caught Zee blinking rapidly. ‘Now, now, no tears. We agreed. And I expect they’ll find
an apprenticeship for me over there somewhere. After all, I’m dying to get in.’ Mrs Hart chuckled but stopped when Zee didn’t join in. ‘Really, dear, this isn’t such a
big deal.’

But it was a big deal to Mrs Hart’s daughter, who cried every time she visited and sent far too many email updates on newly discovered miracle cures. Watching her sadness wash over Mrs
Hart, Zee realised that if you truly loved someone, letting go of them was sometimes part of it. She resolved that when her parents came to the same crossroad, she would put their needs ahead of
her own.