I was fairly certain I’d already driven my point home to my warden on the whole trust issue, and on top of that, my jaw hurt more than it had yesterday. In other words, talking was both pointless and painful at the moment. I settled on giving a scornfully disbelieving grunt, squaring my shoulders, and walking into the room. In short order, I was given scrubs to change into, after which an excruciatingly detailed medical history was taken, covering me and every relative I knew of. Then again, a medical history was
attempted
might be a better way of putting it.
I knew nothing about my real father. I hadn’t
known him. He’d left town not long after he’d gotten my mom pregnant with me. I knew his name, and that was about it. Did he have diabetes or heart disease? Prostate cancer? Hypertension? Was he an all-powerful psychic with erectile dysfunction? Damned if I knew or cared.
Dressed in the pale blue scrubs given to me by a cute nurse who reminded me of Abby, I sat on the edge of one bed, with one hand holding ice at my jaw and gloves still firmly in place. Every answer I gave was clipped, short, and a little thick from my swollen jaw. Hector’s stone face had tightened perceptibly that morning when he’d opened the door to my room, and he’d immediately offered me more Tylenol. Apparently, I was a little less pretty than I’d started out yesterday. Dr. Guerrera had taken one look at me and disappeared into a back room, to return with an ice pack. I’d given serious consideration to ignoring it but decided in the end to let stubbornness take a backseat to pain this one time.
“I’ll get an X-ray of your jaw, Mr. Eye,” Dr. Guerrera told me as she finished up the history and put away the clipboard. “It would have been better if you’d been brought in yesterday.” The glance she gave Hector was pointed and cool.
He could’ve explained that he’d offered and I’d refused, but Allgood didn’t cut himself any slack. For a blackmailer, he set remarkably high standards for himself. “I dropped the ball, Meleah. I apologize.”
She sighed and shook her head as she gathered supplies at my elbow. “I’d thought better of the men assigned here. Who was the Neanderthal goon who did this?” Her latex-covered fingers touched my jaw gently, running from my chin to just under my ear.
“Sergeant Borelli, and he’s now out of the equation,” Allgood said flatly. He’d lost the lab coat from yesterday and was dressed in a simple black shirt and slacks. Somehow he managed to make it look like a uniform, starched and immaculate.
“Borelli.” She winced and frowned. “Yes, I suppose if anyone were to assault someone, it would be him. He doesn’t precisely spread goodwill and charm wherever he goes, does he?”
“He spread plenty on me,” I muttered.
Meleah Guerrera lowered her gaze, and Hector, if anything, looked more grim. His man, his fuckup, I could read it clearly behind pale eyes.
“Have you gotten Glory out of jail yet?” I asked abruptly.
“We’re working on it.” Allgood exhaled. “But even when we do, she’ll be in our custody until we’re finished with you, Eye. She’ll be treated well, certainly better than in prison, and when you’ve done your part for us, she’ll be released. Free and clear.”
A sharp-toothed vixen dumped back into the henhouse. But what could I do? She was my sister. She was all the family I had; bad genes and sociopathic tendencies didn’t change that. She was …
damn it, she was all that was left of the old Jackson. He’d died at age fourteen, somewhere between that old well and a shotgun. He was dead and gone, but sometimes when I heard Glory’s voice on the phone, all sugar over a layer of pure self-interest, it made me remember. Starry nights, peanut butter sandwiches, and the laughter of two little girls. If she were gone, if that were gone, it would be like those things, bright and hopeful, had never been. I didn’t want to admit that.
Pushing the unpleasant and futile thoughts to the back of my mind, I gave a hard-edged smile. “Eye? Come on, Hector. After all you’ve done for me, you should call me Jack.” I dropped the dripping ice pack carelessly onto the bed and added matter-of-factly, “Your brother did.”
He didn’t like that any more than he’d liked any of my other digs, but that didn’t matter, because Hector was a professional. Unlike Borelli, I sincerely doubted you would ever see him lose his temper. He was the embodiment of unbreakable control, with all his emotions—the fine and the not so fine—locked in a triple-chained suspended box that even the real Houdini, not my dog, would’ve scratched his head over.
“Very well, Jack,” he said with a metallic calm that thinned only slightly over my name. “Let’s get on with the tests, shall we?”
Dr. Guerrera called for Eden, who turned out to be the Abby-nurse, to start an IV in the back of my
hand with quick and painless efficiency before leading me to an X-ray machine. I folded my arms and shook my head at the paper that mostly covered the table,
mostly
being the key word. “Unless this thing is fresh out of the factory, I need a sheet. An unused sheet.” I couldn’t touch any part of it with my bare skin. At first consideration, it didn’t seem like it would be too bad. The majority of the people who had lain there wouldn’t have stayed long enough to leave much of an impression. It would be the quicksilver of minnows in a rushing stream. Splinters of memories, here and gone. But there was always an exception.
Death was a big goddamn exception. People tended to die on medical equipment. A peaceful slipping away wasn’t so bad, a momentary tightening in my lungs, a coldness that numbed hands and feet. A heart attack? Crushing trauma? A burst blood vessel in the brain? Those were … disagreeable. Dis-fucking-agreeable. It had happened to me once. A fender bender had caused me to end up in the ER. I’d been woozy, concussed, and sloppy. One full-blown seizure later, when transferred to a gurney, it was ingrained in me never to be that careless again.
Dr. Guerrera turned and tilted her head curiously at Hector. He nodded immediately. “Do it, Meleah. We’ve actually found the genuine article. If he says he needs it, then he does.”
She seemed doubtful; a scientific heart beat
under the stethoscope that rested on her chest, but she retrieved a sheet from a shelf full of linens and spread it. “Have a seat, Mr. Eye. We can do your jaw while you’re sitting up.” It would’ve seemed odd to see a doctor personally performing tests like X-rays, but I was guessing the fewer people they had involved with their project, the happier they were. One doctor, one nurse who was drawing blood from me at the same time I was getting my jaw X-rayed. Who they all were, of course, was still a mystery. There was obvious military involvement, yet Dr. Guerrera didn’t appear to be military, and neither had the scientists performing yesterday’s tests. Hector, on the other hand, he had definitely been military at some point in his life, but he didn’t seem to be now.
Summerland.
Allgood had said, “Welcome to Summerland.” I wasn’t an idiot, and although I had nothing but scorn for my colleagues and the history of paranormal phenomena in general, I
was
familiar with it. I knew of Summerland. It was a name given to the land of the dead, heaven, the afterlife, whatever the hell you wanted to call the crutch you used. It was spawned in the late 1800s by a fraud of truly great proportions, the Joyce Ann Tingle of her time. I had to wonder in what capacity they were using it here. Since they were bringing “psychics” in so late in the game and because, according to Hector, people were dying, I had to think it was less about the
paranormal and more about the death. And wasn’t that a fun thought.
Yeah, not so much.
My jaw wasn’t broken. That was the bright point of my day. The tests, more scans than your average grocery cashier saw in a week, lasted until mid-afternoon. In between them, the nurse, Eden, kept up a constant chatter. I didn’t mind. It was what reminded me of Abby, not her looks. Abby had the short platinum curls and pale brown eyes. Eden had a polished bob of chestnut hair, eyes the color of a country pond, dark green and still. She also had small winged fairy earrings that swung cheerfully. That whimsical touch and the talking, and she and Abby may as well have been twins separated at birth.
“A real psychic. I can’t believe they found one, and you even look like one.” She used her gloved hands to peel off the round EKG pads from my chest. It seemed my heart was fine. “Or maybe you make yourself look like one because you are one. Part psychic, part actor.” She smiled, her teeth small, white, and even. “I wonder if I brought my Silly-cat in … I call her Silly, short for Priscilla. I inherited her from my mom who had a huge thing for Elvis. But if I snuck her in, could you tell me what she’s thinking? Or why she pees in my boyfriend’s shoe instead of the litter box?”
She
was
an Abby clone. It was the only explanation.
“I can tell you what she’s thinking right now, no touching necessary,” I drawled. “She’s thinking if she were three times her size, she would eat you.” Funny, yes, and every cat person asked it sooner or later, but funny or not, it was the truth. Every cat that was awake when I’d smoothed its fur with a bare hand thought that. Every cat I touched that was asleep dreamed that. Not that animals thought like people. As I’d told Hector, it was more emotions. But their emotions were so much stronger than ours that it was, in a way, a method of thinking. It was no less an expressed intelligence than what we worked with—only different.
She frowned. “Silly-cat loves me. Don’t tease like that, or I’ll be afraid she’ll smother me in my sleep. She’s fat as a biscuit.”
“Eden, enough,” Meleah warned in a low voice. “If Thackery heard you, he’d fire you on the spot.”
Eden shook her head and gathered up all the plastic-wrap trash that medical tests produce. “That one. He has one mood. Bad. If you ask me, he needs to get laid in the worst way.” She laughed. “Of course, if he was psychic, his dowsing rod wouldn’t find a thing. If he even has one. He probably had it removed so’s not to distract him from his almighty science.” She gave me a wink and walked off to dispose of her armful of waste. Definitely Abby all over.
Meleah—Dr. Guerrera—must’ve notified Hector that all the prodding in the world that could be
done on a live person had been performed. He showed up just as Eden walked away. And about time. By then, I was hungry enough to eat whatever was slopped on my tray in the cafeteria, and it was a good thing, too.
I poked dubiously at the shriveled brown lump on my plate that was masquerading as a baked potato. Fluorescent orange goop cascaded over the sides of it and pooled into a sticky puddle. It looked more like a biohazard than the questionable source of nutrition it was. Hell, at least it was soft. Theoretically. I started in on it.
“And here we are again.” Hector contemplated the limp tuna fish sandwich before him. “Meleah will have all the scans read by the morning.”
“Whoopee,” I responded. “I’ll tell all my friends.”
“Aren’t you at all interested to know if what you do is detectable by medical means? How the structures of your brain might differ from others’?”
It seemed Hector and Charlie did have something in common, an insatiable curiosity. Charlie’s had been blazing bright and out in the open. His brother kept his far more tightly under wraps, but it was there. Almost reluctant, mostly hidden, but there.
I countered his question with one of my own. “So, Hector,” I said, imbuing his name with mock camaraderie, “what are you a doctor of? Or was that a lie, too?”
“No,” he said evenly. “I have a doctorate in quantum
physics, as well as one in applied mathematics. Charlie was a neurobiologist but also had a doctorate in engineering.” He tilted his head slightly, watching for a reaction … any reaction. “Not that you’re remotely curious about that, either, I’m sure.”
He didn’t get a reaction from me, but I couldn’t deny to myself that there was a fleeting sense of warmth within. Neurobiologist and engineer. Good for Charlie. I never had a doubt that he’d be something impressive, because Charlie himself was an impressive man. Even at the age of seventeen, he’d been a man, and one hell of one to boot. The potato, thick and cloying with cheese, stuck in my throat, and I chased it down with milk. Plain, no chocolate today.
“And did the Army put your overachieving ass through college, Dr. Allgood?”
“Very good. One would almost think you were psychic, Jack.” He used the name I’d facetiously requested with false courtesy and checked his watch. “Nearly done? We have an appointment with the project leader.”
“He’s not going to poke and prod me, too, is he?” I picked up a few packets of crackers and put them in my pocket. One thing you learn when you’re a hungry kid on the run: you see food, you take it. If you weren’t hungry then, you’d be hungry later. It was a habit I’d never been able to shake. “Because that’s getting old fast. Of course, that’s only the
guinea pig’s point of view, which I’m sure amounts to jack shit.”
“I don’t think you have to worry.” He stood. “Dr. Thackery considers his time too valuable to be spent running tests that mundane. He has people who do it for him.” It was said so very mildly that I was immediately suspicious.
“So, there’s a tall dark asshole in my future, eh?” I raised my eyebrows and added, “Besides you, I mean.”
“Actually, he’s blond.” He left the rest conspicuously unaddressed, pushed his chair under the table, and gestured. “After you.”
We walked to another one of the buildings in the compound—the largest one. The moment I passed through the door, I could hear the hum. I could feel it, too. It was everywhere—in the air, under my feet, throbbing behind my eyes. It wasn’t loud, but it was inescapable and annoying as—