A Gift of Ghosts

  ***

  In the screening room, Natalya watched as images appeared on a computer screen, slide after slide showing sections of Akira’s body. Zane, on the other hand, was watching the soles of Akira’s feet through the glass. She had nice feet. Not that he could really see much of them from where he was standing, but they looked nice, narrow and pale.

  “Ouch,” Natalya said in a low voice, shaking her head as she stared at the monitor.

  “Is she okay?” Zane asked, promptly turning his attention back to the computer screen. The images were just gray and white shapes: he had no idea what he was seeing and none of it meant anything to him. He could be looking at a picture of a Martian landscape for all he knew.

  “Yeah.” Natalya nodded, her lips moving as if she were counting. “She’s fine. Now, anyway.”

  “And was she not fine before?” Zane asked. Natalya’s narrowed eye focus on the screen was making him uneasy. He’d seen her scan people more than once, and she didn’t usually pay much attention, just storing the records for cross-referencing later. Of course this scan was different, since she was looking for injuries, but if she wasn’t finding anything, why was she watching so closely?

  Not bothering to answer, Natalya typed a few quick keystrokes, and suddenly the screen became recognizably the bones of a hand. “Look at that,” Natalya almost sighed. “What could she have done?”

  “Um, no idea?” Zane said, a hint of impatience entering his voice. “What are we looking at?”

  “Oh, right.” She glanced at him as if she’d forgotten he was there, and almost reluctantly touched several spots on the screen. “See those light spots? That’s calcification. She’s broken the bones there. Five places, I think, and probably all around the same time, so somehow she really smashed up her hand. But that break pattern—I don’t know how she could have done that.” She stared at her own hand speculatively, as if trying to imagine a way to break the bones in those locations.

  “But she’s okay now?” Zane asked, and this time the impatience was real. Was there a problem or not?

  “Um, yeah.” Natalya glanced at him again before shifting in her chair, and then typing a few more words so that the screen shifted back to meaningless gray blobs.

  “Nat?”

  She sighed, and typed again, this time for several sentences. The screen turned into a picture of a skeleton. “Count the light spots.”

  Zane glanced. There were a lot of light spots. “What are they?”

  “Places where bones have been broken in the past. Both bones of her right arm in multiple places, her collarbone, the ribs at least a few times, and her jaw, ouch. Plus the hand. And maybe a bone in the foot. Most of them happened a long time ago, but it wasn’t one bad accident. You can tell from the levels of calcification that they occurred at different times. The hand was recent.” She looked at Zane thoughtfully. “Your girl has lived a dangerous life.”

  “My girl?” Zane’s surprise showed. “She’s not mine. This is only the second time I’ve met her.” He didn’t mention the number of times he’d thought of her in the month since her interview. It was more than a few.

  “Oh, right.” Natalya busied herself with the keyboard again, looking embarrassed.

  “Okay, sister mine, what do you know that I don’t?”

  She grinned at him. “Well, there’s that entire medical school curriculum, for one thing.”

  “You know that’s not what I meant. You saw something, didn’t you?”

  “And you know I prefer not to talk about those things. The future is ours to control. Anything I see is just a possibility.”

  Zane sighed. His sister had inherited his father’s gift—the only one in the family to do so. Max might call himself a serendipidist, but the rest of the world would have called him a precognitive psychic. Not always, not consistently, and not always accurately, but sometimes, and often when it counted, he could see the future.

  So could Nat. But unlike their father, she tried not to act on her knowledge and not to share it. Her exceptions were random—Akira’s two-year contract had to have been one of them, Zane suspected—but rare. And once she decided not to talk, nothing short of an act of God would get her mouth open. Zane wasn’t even going to try.

  “So how do you think she broke all those bones?” he asked, nodding toward Akira.

  Natalya glanced in that direction and frowned. “You could ask her. But . . .”

  Zane raised his eyebrows when she didn’t continue. “Go on.”

  She was quiet again.

  “Come on, Nat. Tell me what you know.” This was right in front of him, if he only knew how to read the scans.

  “This might fall under doctor-patient confidentiality,” she finally said.

  “I’m in the room with you, watching the scans, and she knows I’m here. She could have gone to a perfectly nice hospital, and she didn’t, so tell me what you see.” He didn’t often dig his heels in, but he felt almost annoyed that Nat knew more about Akira than he did. Bad enough that she wouldn’t tell him what her gift revealed, but he knew he ought to be able to figure this out for himself.

  “Ribs, jaw, spiral fractures on the arms? And that hand . . .” Nat pulled up the image of the skeletal hand again, and looked at it, shaking her head.

  “What about them?” he asked. He glanced back through the window. Nat’s typing had caused the table to slide out of the machine, and Akira was sitting up.

  “If this was an emergency room, and she was here with fresh injuries, I’d be sending in a social worker before I let her leave. And probably a police officer, too,” Nat said, before adding with a sigh, “But since all I’ve got is you, go bandage her abrasions.”