Winterlong (5 page)

Her voice caught for an instant before she answered. “My brother Aidan. My twin.”

“No—the other—the boy in the tree.”

This time she held her breath a long moment, then let it out in a sigh. “I don’t know,” she said. “But you remember him? You saw him too?”

I nodded. “Now. I can see him now. If I—” And I shut my eyes and drifted before snapping back. “Like that. He comes to me on his own. Without me recalling him. Like—” I flexed my fingers helplessly. “Like a dream, only I’m awake now.”
’

Slowly Dr. Harrow shook her head and reached to take my hand. “That’s how he found Aidan, too, the last time,” she said. “And me. And now you.” For an instant something like hope flared in her eyes, but faded as she bowed her head. “I think, Wendy,” she said with measured calm; “I think we should keep this to ourselves right now. And tomorrow, maybe, we’ll try again.”

He sees me.

I woke, my heart pounding so that for a dizzying moment I thought I was having a seizure and reflexively braced my hands behind my head. But no: it was the dream, it was
him
—

I breathed deeply, trying to keep the dream from fleeing, then slowly opened my eyes to my room bathed in the glow of monitors and a hint of dawn. In the air before me I could still see his eyes, green and laughing, the beautiful boy’s face adrift in a sea of young leaves more real than the damp sheets twisted around my legs. He reached a hand toward me, beckoning, and intense joy filled me as I smelled new earth, apple blossoms, the breeze carrying the promise of sun and sky and burgeoning fruit. I leaned forward in my bed, clutching the sheets as I began to reach for him, to take that white hand in my own—

When like the rind of some bright fruit peeled back to reveal squirming larvae, the boy’s skin shriveled and fell from him. A skeletal hand clawed desperately for mine. Beneath its shell of flesh the skull shone stark white. I screamed and snatched back my hand, then staggered from my bed to the window. He was gone.

I don’t know how long I knelt there, resting my forehead against the sill, blinking against tears: real tears, my own tears. Because it was not that awful cadaver that burned within my mind’s eye but the boy with green eyes and fair hair, heartbreakingly lovely, new leaves brushing his brow, and the cry of tiny frogs piercing the shadowy air about him. A sense of terrible desolation filled me at waking alone in this dark place. I thought of Aidan Harrow weeping: to have had the radiant promise of those eyes before him and then forever gone …

From outside came a sound. I lifted my head to see a phalanx of wild geese, black against the pale September dawn. Their cry held nothing but regret and sorrow for the summer gone, and a shrill hope for distant warmth. I watched until they disappeared, their grief fading into the rising wind, and fell asleep there with my head pillowed upon my arms. Hours later I woke to Dr. Harrow’s knock upon my door, and her announcement that we would not repeat the experiment that day.

Several days had passed since Morgan Yates’s suicide. As standard procedure Justice ran a standard post-trauma scan on me early one evening. I sat patiently before my window, staring out at the sun setting over the tops of the yellowing lindens while Justice ran the wires and stimulated the rush of recent memory.

Blood racing across dirty glass. The imagined thud of janissaries’ feet upon cracked macadam. A feathery explosion of bone and tissue from Morgan’s skull. I made my breathing quicken as I lingered over the memory of Morgan’s fury and held for a moment her words in my mind—

Bitch! Whore! How dare you laugh at
me?

—recalled the poem in her datafile—
Sacred Monsters
—and her face as she screamed at me. Justice stared at the screen, finally nodded. Then he pressed a sedative to my neck, as I knew he would, and left me with an extra handful to be taken as needed. I nodded goodbye as he left the Home Room, and waited for the others to arrive.

“Hello, Wednesday,” croaked a voice. A triangular face hung upside down in the window, dusky black and pinched as a bat’s.

“Hullo, Gligor,” I said, and moved over on the bed to make room for him.

His hands scrabbled at the sill and I thought he might fall; but he caught his balance, sighting me or the lingering warmth of the monitors that showed up as bright blue pulses in his mind. He swung clumsily into the room, one hand grasping the edge of the sill while he paused to catch his breath. He twisted until he found me, waited a moment for his shield to set me on the grid. Then, suddenly graceful, he sidled onto the bed beside me.

“What did they give you?”

I handed him a sedative. He pressed it to his temple, waited a few moments before making a face and discarding it.

“Nothing else?” he whined. “Merle said she saw Dr. Harrow here yesterday with the
NET
.”

I started to nod, then stopped. Suddenly I didn’t want to share Emma’s memories with Gligor or Anna or anyone else. Reaching beneath the bed, I withdrew a hand-rolled cigarette and lit it. I went to sit on the windowsill and stared moodily down at the lawns where servers were clipping the grass.

“So?” Gligor prodded. He sniffed hungrily.

“Leave me alone.” I blew smoke out the window, refusing to look at him or offer him a cigarette.

From the other end of the room echoed a faint creak, a muted giggle. Gritting my teeth, I glanced back. The door swung open. Andrew slipped into the room.

“Hah! Merle was following me but I took the back stairs, the secret way, and now she thinks I’m in the north turret. What’s the matter, Gligor?”

He flopped onto the bed next to him, breathing on the smooth surface of Gligor’s eyeshield and then drawing a squiggle in the condensation.

Gligor took his hand and nipped at his bare shoulder. “Mmmm,” he murmured. He leaned back, drawing up the shield so that I could see the empty white balls of his eyes, and licked his lips. I knew he was trying to annoy me. I snorted and stared at Andrew.

“What’s the matter?” he repeated. He leaned over the little refrigerator at my bedside and rifled its contents.

Gligor snapped the shield back down. “Wednesday won’t share,” he said petulantly. “Harrow did something with her yesterday and now she won’t share—”

I took a last long drag on my cigarette and flicked it out the window. “Nothing happened,” I said, glaring at the back of Andrew’s head.

Abruptly he turned around to stare at me. His eyes widened. He blinked once, very deliberately, and lowered his head. The face that lifted itself to me a moment later was dark with cunning, and Anna’s huskier voice rang out.

“I know,” she said triumphantly. “Something about the poet, something about the suicides!”

Gligor hissed admiringly. I stiffened, tightening my grip on the windowsill where I sat. Anna grinned. Then, before I could dart away, she lunged at me and pulled me to the floor.

“Come on, Gligor!” she barked, pinning down my arms and kneeing me viciously when I tried to push her back. “She shared with me the other day and it was
wonderful—

“No!” I protested, kicking at Gligor as he slid behind Anna and slapped ineffectually at my feet. “It wasn’t the poet, I swear—”

“That’s it, get her feet,” she ordered Gligor. She straddled my chest and looked at me, grinning, her face flushed with delight just as mine had so many times before in the same circumstances. “Now, Wendy, hold still—”

Anna’s strong hands gripped my head and held me steady. She lowered her face to mine and kissed me, her tongue probing my mouth before she nipped my lower lip gently and then bit it, hard enough to draw blood. She shut her eyes and threw back her head, letting out her breath in a long sigh. I waited several seconds to be sure her rush had begun. Then I shoved her from me and kicked at Gligor, taking him by surprise so that he sprawled onto the floor with a groan. I turned back to Anna, furious.

There was nothing I could do. It was too late to revoke whatever response the neurotransmitters in my blood now carried to her brain. I could only hope that there had not been enough blood, or enough of the resonant chemicals within it, to satisfy her hunger for sensation.

I glared, waiting to see how she reacted. Beside me, Gligor rubbed his leg and watched too. Occasionally he darted furtive glances at me, so that I saw my sullen face reflected in the matte surface of his shield.

“Look, Wednesday,” he whispered.

Anna had sunk back on her heels, eyes closed. A rapturous expression crept over her, making her face seem remote and otherworldly. I watched, fascinated, wondering if she saw the same unearthly figure I had, or if she was still tapping in to Morgan Yates’s death. Gligor moved his head back and forth, back and forth, his eyeshield tracing some invisible pattern in the heat emitted by Anna.

Suddenly her eyes opened. She stared at a point some distance above her head and smiled in delight, as though she greeted some beloved friend in the empty air. I caught myself leaning forward to grasp her hands as she reached for whatever it was she saw. But before I could touch her, her expression changed. She snarled and wrenched back her hands as though someone had tried to grab them, then turned to me blindly.

“Oh, Wendy,” she breathed, awe tingeing her disbelief. “What have you done?”

Then she began to scream.

I tried to muffle her cries and yelled for Gligor to help. But he had immediately jumped onto the bed and now sat there whimpering while I restrained her. She swung at me wildly, clipping the side of my head so that I reeled back but did not let go.

“Him!” she shrieked over and over, her jaws snapping each time so that she bit her tongue and blood covered my hands.
“Him!”

I shouted at Gligor to get one of the sedatives from my bedside, but still he refused to move. And then I heard voices and running feet in the hall. Several Aides and Dr. Silverthorn rushed into the room.

They restrained her, though not without a fight. The Aide Justice swore fiercely when Anna bit him. Dr. Silverthorn pushed him away before administering a sedative to her. It wasn’t until after they carried her out that he noticed Gligor cowering on the bed. “Gligor!” Dr. Silverthorn shook him gently until the boy stopped whimpering. “What happened?”

“Something was there—” He gasped, clutching at his head. Dr. Silverthorn put his arm about him and drew him close. To me he turned eyes so cold that for a moment I forgot my own anger and disappointment.

“What the hell were you doing, Wendy?”

I shrugged. “Anna tapped me. I warned her—”

“Don’t you know what this means?” he shouted. Gligor winced and tried to pull away from him. “They’ll take him away, they’ll take all of you—”

“But it’s true,” said Gligor. “It wasn’t Wendy’s fault—but I’m so tired, Dr. Silverthorn. Can I go to my room?”

Dr. Silverthorn nodded and helped Gligor to the door, all the time regarding me with icy revulsion.

“I’m going to recommend that you all be forbidden to see each other. But I’ll let Dr. Harrow handle you, Wendy,” was all he said as they left.

“Didn’t you hear anything I told you the other day, Wendy?”

Dr. Harrow paused in front of my window, eyeing with disapproval the cigarette ashes blown into the corner in a small gray heap. She fixed me with a probing stare. “Don’t you understand what’s going on, why we need to be careful while
they’re
here?” She motioned toward the outdoors, where Dr. Leslie led a group of Governors and their accompanying janissaries on a tour of the grounds.

I sat on the bed, playing with the wires she had carefully arranged on the frayed counterpane in preparation for our session. “Yes,” I replied.

She continued to watch me closely. “I don’t think you do, really,” she said at last, then sighed. She glanced at the door. It had been fixed with a new lock. “Anna’s resilient, though. She’ll be fine.”

I shook my head indifferently. I hadn’t asked after Anna because I knew she would be fine. Empaths were always fine.

Dr. Harrow’s gray eyes narrowed. “You don’t really care, do you? None of you really care at all about each other.”

I yawned. Fruitless to point out that our lack of emotive response was due to the expertise of the staff of the Human Engineering Laboratory. My main concern had been that Dr. Harrow would learn that Anna had somehow tapped in to the same memory that had haunted Dr. Harrow’s dreams for most of her life, and that as punishment she would not permit me to continue with the empatherapy—or, worse, that Dr. Harrow would perversely choose to continue it with Anna. But Dr. Harrow had shown up once again with the
NET
, and wheeled the splintering cot from its closet, and otherwise behaved as though we were going to proceed as planned.

“Are we ready to start?” I asked.

She sighed again, pushed her hair behind her ears, and removed her pince-nez. “Yes, I suppose so.”

And though her hands were steady as she initialized the
BEAM
, I could smell the dreamy odor of absinthium on her breath, and fear like a potent longing in her sweat.

“Emma,” he whispers at the transom window. “Let me in.”

The quilts piled on me muffle 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 as he peeks through the narrow glass.

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 and lean forward to unlatch the door.

Molly flops onto the floor, snorting when she bumps 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, gesturing for him to shut the door before Father hears us in his room below.

“It’s fucking 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 Balkhash steppes.” He punctuates his words with kisses, elbowing Molly as she tries to slobber our faces. I squirm away and straighten my nightshirt.