I kissed her throat, touched her breast, waiting for the feedback of her senses, waiting for every sensation to double for us both as my mind reached deep inside her to give her a kind of pleasure that Ezra never could. Waiting. Reaching—
It wasn’t happening. I couldn’t reach into her thoughts, to answer her every desire … I couldn’t even find her.
I remembered suddenly that the last time I’d been with a woman I’d still been using the drugs that let me use my psi. But they’d been gone for a long time. Now I didn’t know what to do next, didn’t know whether it was the right thing, whether it would satisfy her, whether she wanted more, or wanted me to stop—
I broke away from her, swearing under my breath as the truth put out the fire of my need, turned my burning flesh to the cold, slack flesh of a corpse. I pulled my shirt together to hide the gooseflesh crawling up my naked body; to hide the signs of death from her, from myself.
“What—?” Kissindre sat up, blinking. “What is it?”
I didn’t answer, and she touched my face gently with her hand.
“I can’t,” I whispered.
Her hand fell away. She sat on the side of the bed, looking down, her fingers picking at the edges of her open shirt. I heard her try to ask and lose her nerve.
“I can’t—feel you,” I said finally. “I don’t know what to do.”
She took one of my hands in hers.
I looked up, seeing confusion in her clear blue eyes that just stopped, the way all eyes stopped, because I couldn’t reach through them into anyone’s mind. “I want you,” I said thickly, “but I can’t find you.” I took a deep breath. “I can’t feel you.” I touched my head. “I can’t feel anyone.” I should have died. Maybe I had.
She moved her hands slowly, taking my hand with them until it rested on the warm skin of her shoulder. “I’m right here,” she said gently. “I know what to do. Just follow me.…” She bent her head; her lips burned against the cold flesh of my palm. “That’s all you need, to be a human being.”
“I don’t know how.” I pulled my hand free. I pushed to my feet; not human enough, not Hydran enough. I looked back at her, stretched out on my bed: her shining hair, the curve of her breast. Trying to want her the way I’d wanted her five minutes ago, trying to let my body answer her, mindlessly, as if there was nothing between us but sex. Once I’d believed that was all there was, sex between strangers. But not now. Now it was too late. I looked away finally, because nothing at all was happening. “Maybe you’d better go.”
I listened, keeping my eyes averted, as she got up slowly from the bed. I heard her unsteady breathing as she pulled her clothes together; I heard her start toward the door.
“Kissindre.” I forced myself to turn back, made myself cross the room again before she could go out. “It only happened because you matter too much to me—” I pulled her against me and kissed her again, let her go as her body began to soften and yield. “It’s not your fault.” I touched her hair. “And it’s not your problem. Please—just tell me you understand that.…”
She nodded, slowly. “Will … will you be all right?”
Some sick part of me wanted to laugh, wanted to ask her, Tonight, or ever—? I strangled it. “Yeah. I’ll be fine.”
She opened her mouth, shut her eyes, shook her head. She went out of the room. The door closed behind her.
I stood for a long time wondering where she’d gone: whether she was going back to Ezra, or going to tell her uncle we were both miserable little shits, or going to an empty room exactly like this one.…
I stopped staring at the empty surface of the door and turned back to the bed. Its surface was just as smooth and featureless. Like nothing had happened.
I went to the bed and lay down on it. I ordered the window to opaque and called on the threedy, jerked the headset out of its cradle and pushed it onto my face. With my clothes hanging open and my mind fused shut I blew through the menu, searching for what I needed right then: something hot and raw and meaningless; a virtual fuck.
Something that didn’t exist, here.
By the time I was absolutely sure of that, there was no emotion at all left inside me. I reached up to pull off the headset, ready to shut the access down.
But there was a message light blinking now at the corner of my vision. The message was from Wauno: access to a Hydran language tutorial. I pulled the program and dumped it into my brain in one long, masochistic feed.
I lay there awhile longer while the brain-smog of data-strings stupefied my concentration until I could almost forget; almost let the mnemonic buzz sing my mind to sleep. It was almost enough.…
But it wasn’t. I got up from the bed, fastened my pants, fastened my shirt. I put on my coat and went out of the room.
I left the hotel, making sure I didn’t cross the path of anybody I knew. I took an aircab down to the river’s edge, where the bridge arced across the canyon to the Hydran town.
The bridge was dark, sealed off, closed for the night. I pressed against the yielding, invisible barrier of the force field until a disembodied voice activated, warning me that I was out past curfew, that my identity was registering at Corporate Security headquarters.
I swore, backing off, turned, and strode away, following the canyon’s rim, triggering the ghosts in every fucking lamppost and hype-kiosk along the promenade. There was no one else visible for as far as I could see. I sat down on a bench, finally, letting my head rest against its iron brocade, my hands hanging strengthless in the space between my knees, as I waited for the cab I’d called to come back and get me.
I still breathed the taste of strange spices with every exhalation, still felt the rhythms and structure of a strange tongue highlighting alien road maps in the circuits of my brain. I tried to remember if I’d ever walked those roads before, in a long-ago time and place.
Eventually everything fell silent. All I could hear now was the sound of the river, so faint and far below that I almost thought I was hearing the echo of Hydran voices. Faces I’d seen across the river accreted in my mind like dreamfall in the reefs … all of the eyes, the hair, the spice-colored skin morphing into one face: Her face. A Hydran woman with a human child, alone in the night maze of Freaktown.
The cold wind touched my face almost gently, like an unexpected lover. I sat up, opening my eyes, glancing around, because there had been something almost familiar about the touch of the wind.
Someone was sitting with me on the bench. Miya.
TEN
MIYA. I REACHED out, my hands closing over her arms. I felt her muscles harden under my grip; felt my own surprise as they proved her body’s solidness.
She looked into my eyes, unafraid, and didn’t try to pull free. I knew as well as she did that there was no way I could hold her if she didn’t want to be there.
I let my hands drop. “Miya?” I whispered, and heard my voice catch on the sound of her name.
The pupils of her eyes widened, narrowed again. Surprise. Surprise that I knew her name.
But not the kind of surprise I felt as I realized that she could only have come here looking for me. “It’s not safe here.” The words dropped off my tongue, surprising me again, because the last thing I expected my gut response would be on seeing her was to want her safe.
I saw her pupils dilate again, as if it was the last thing she’d expected too. Her gaze hovered on my face like a moth hypnotized by a light. But she only shook her head and lifted her hands, letting the sleeves of her hooded parka slide down: No databand.
Invisible. I glanced at my wrist. The databand was still there, forcing me to remember what the Corpses had done to me because I wore one … because of her. “I’m not invisible,” I said, looking away as anger gave me the strength to break her gaze. “Tau’s Security didn’t have any trouble finding me.” I gestured at my bruises. “What the hell do you want?”
“I…” Her hand rose again, hesitated in the air, fell away. “I wanted to thank you.”
??
?For what?” I said sourly, totally lost to her logic.
She gazed at me without answering, until I began to think she had no more idea of why than I did. Or maybe she was trying to decide what to make of me, when the one thing that could have told her was missing. “I couldn’t see any other Way,” she murmured finally, and it still wasn’t an answer. “I felt that I had to come,” she said, as if she could tell from my face that I still wasn’t getting it. She spoke Standard, with no real accent. She was dressed in pragmatic, sexless human clothes; if we hadn’t been face-to-face, she could have passed for a human.
“Like you felt you had to slip me that databand, back in Freaktown?”
She looked away, across the river. “Yes,” she said faintly. She looked at me again, and I saw something in her eyes that was closer to anguish, or even longing, than to guilt. I didn’t know what the hell to make of it. “I needed to be certain…” She broke off, her hands worrying the seal of her jacket. “They said that you were all right. I had to see it for myself.”
I figured they must be HARM. “Did they tell you that it took Draco’s Chief of Security to get me out of Borosage’s lockup—?”
“No,” she said, and frowned.
“Tau’s CorpSec thought I was one of the kidnappers. They were going to torture me to get answers I didn’t know. Jeezu, they could have killed me!”
She grimaced like I’d hit her and murmured something that sounded like a curse. “I didn’t know.… That night, when I saw you—”
“You saw a freak.” I watched her confusion form like the fog of my breath. “You know what I mean.” I jerked my head. “A halfbreed. You think I don’t get the same reaction on this side of the river?”
This time her restless hand actually touched my sleeve. “That’s not what I meant. I meant that I realized how much our safety mattered to you.” She searched my face for something that wasn’t there.
I shrugged off her touch, frowning. Fumbling my gloves out of my pocket, I pushed them on. “You don’t know me.”
“I felt it when you touched me—”
I grunted, not remembering anything but the pain and surprise as our bodies collided.
“—here.” She touched her head.
Just for a second my breath caught. “Nice try,” I muttered, and touched my own head. “But this doesn’t work.”
She made the same odd listening gesture I’d seen Grandmother make: Trying to figure me out. She might sound perfectly human, but she wasn’t.
“You’re not reading my mind now,” I said, disgusted. “You couldn’t then. Lie to me if you want to, but not about that.”
“You’re wrong,” she said, forcing me to look up again. “In the first moment, there was nothing—not even a Human mind. You terrified me. And then you looked at me, and Joby, and you opened to us.… You wanted to help us. It was why you were there. You were the Way.”
The Way. I thought about Grandmother, thought about fate and predestination. Even Hydrans couldn’t see the future clearly. Precognition was the wild card power; it could give you an edge, but that was all. Humans followed their hunches; so did Hydrans. But those with the Gift had a lot more reason to. Sometimes it was enough … sometimes it was too much. I remembered a friend, the look on his face as he’d foreseen his own death. And I wondered again what I’d been doing on that Freaktown street, at just the wrong moment … or just the right one.
“Why didn’t you teleport to get away?” Finally I was able to ask the question that had been gnawing at me ever since that night.
“I didn’t have time.”
“Time—?” I said. “It doesn’t take that much.”
“No, not for myself. But for Joby.” She shook her head. “If you know who I am, then you must know what’s wrong with him.”
“Neurological damage,” I said. And then I understood.
“You believe me.” It wasn’t a question.
I glanced at her again. “But you’re not reading my mind now.”
“No.” She shook her head, without anything in her eyes, not doubt, not pity. “You’re not letting me.” She didn’t ask what was wrong with me. I wondered why not. From the way she’d been staring at me, I didn’t think the reason was indifference.
“Where is Joby?” I muttered, glancing away.
“Safe.” She half frowned, as if she thought I’d changed the subject because I didn’t trust her, but it was myself that I suddenly didn’t trust. “I love Joby more than you can imagine,” she said, as if she had every right to expect I’d believe that. “I’d never do anything to hurt him, or put him in danger.”
“I know.…” I whispered, telling myself that she couldn’t know the real reason for my change of subject; any more than I knew why I’d wanted to trust her with my life the moment I’d laid eyes on her. “So why did you kidnap him?” I asked hoarsely, looking back at her again. I knew she’d told me the truth about not reading my mind; she couldn’t influence how I felt without my knowing it.
She took a deep breath, as if this time she’d been ready for the question. “How much do you know about all this?”
“I know his parents are sick with worry. That they can’t understand why you did it.”
“You’ve talked to them?”
I nodded. “Tau made certain I met them. I guess they felt being arrested, drugged, and beaten up wasn’t enough to teach me a lesson. I had to eat some shit too.”
She glanced down. When she looked up again, she looked uncertain for the first time. She took another breath, let it out slowly, in a whisper of fog. “I can take you to Joby, if you trust me. Then you can tell Ling and Burnell that he’s safe.”
I sat up straight with disbelief. “Where is he?”
She pointed over her shoulder. “Across the river.”
I followed her gesture with my eyes. “The bridge is closed.”
“We don’t need a bridge,” she said. “If you trust me.”
I almost laughed. Why should I? I looked into her eyes. Why do I…? The question died on my lips. Why should you? I didn’t ask that one either, even though street logic screamed that this was a trap. I thought about everything I’d gone through these past two days. And then I said, “All right.”
She took hold of my hand. My grip loosened as I almost lost my nerve. But her hold on me didn’t falter. Her eyes weren’t registering me now. I felt something indescribable charging the synapses of my brain, firing every nerve down through my body, as she manipulated the quantum field in a way I’d never be able to. I felt my body transforming, and inside the space of a breath, reality swallowed itself—
* * *
I was sitting on a bench, but the bench and everything else had changed.
I was in a room, in dim lamplight. It couldn’t be anywhere but Freaktown: the shadows and the forms, the smells in the air, the background noises, overloaded my senses with déjà vu until it felt like we’d traveled through time, not space. Miya was sitting beside me on the bench, breathing hard. She got to her feet as awkwardly as if she’d carried me here on her back, looking toward the far side of the room.
There were two other Hydrans in the room: two men, sitting cross-legged on the floor. One of the bat-things flitted between them, dodging a fist-sized bubble that seemed to have a life of its own. The gleaming bubble whacked the bat-thing and knocked it to the floor, and I realized the bubble was solid. The bat-thing floundered on the threadbare rug, trying to right itself; its skreeing cries hurt my ears.
In an eyeblink Miya was across the room, kneeling down, taking the stunned bat-thing gently in her hands. There was nothing gentle in her face as she looked up at the two ballplayers.
The bubble, still suspended between the two Hydrans, dropped to the floor forgotten. The ball rolled toward me, bumped to a stop against my foot. The two men were staring at us. They stood up, and one of them gestured at me with a guttural noise of anger.
An invisible hand forced the momentum of his turn, carrying him on around and slamming hi
m into the wall. Before the other Hydran could take three steps, he tripped over his feet and fell flat.
“Miya!” the first one said, his face red with fury and the impact of the wall.
She answered him in a flood of unintelligible speech, gesturing in disgust as the bat-thing launched off from her hands. I realized suddenly that she had taken them both down with her telekinesis in less than a minute.
The two men began to shout, pointing at me now. Her own voice rose until they were all shouting at each other in Hydran.
I sat listening, stunned by the motion and noise, wondering why the hell they even needed to speak out loud.
Suddenly Miya broke off. She looked toward the arched doorway that opened on another room. The two men stopped, then; I heard a thin, high cry from somewhere in the darkness beyond. For a moment longer the three of them were silent, although their argument went on mind-to-mind, emotions playing across their faces like sun and shadow. Then Miya ordered the two men still with a motion of her hand and turned away like they’d disappeared. She went through the doorway into the darkened room beyond.
The two men stood where her silent order had planted them; their eyes never left me. They were both young, not much older than I was. Each of them wore his pale hair long, held on top of his head by an ornate clip. The hair clips were made of metal, in intricate, vision-knotting designs. I figured the style must be traditional, because I’d never seen it on a human. I wondered whether the clips had been shaped by hand or by thought.
The two Hydrans wore heavy, human-made jackets that almost disguised layers of faded traditional tunics and worn-looking pants; but no one would have mistaken them for keiretsu. In another life, someone might have mistaken them for my brothers.
I stood up, watched them shift uncertainly from foot to foot. They weren’t carrying any weapons that I could see. I sat down again and let them stare at me. “My name is Cat,” I said. My breath frosted. There was a small radiant heater in the corner of the room, but it wasn’t enough. The room was almost as cold as the outside air.