Crosstalk

  She nodded unhappily.

  “Hey, don’t look so glum. You said you wanted things back the way they were, didn’t you?”

  I said a lot of things, she thought. I said I never wanted to speak to you again. I said we weren’t emotionally bonded. I said I wanted you to go away and leave me alone. And none of that was true. None of it.

  “I mean, think of it,” C.B. said lightly, “you won’t have to worry about being spied on in the shower anymore or barged in on in the middle of the night, and I won’t have to listen to psychopaths and perverts and people who don’t know the words to ‘The Age of Aquarius,’ and spend the rest of my life screaming, ‘It’s Aquarius, not asparagus!’ at them.”

  “But you won’t know what people are thinking—”

  “I can always ask Suki,” he said, and turned suddenly serious. “The main thing is, Maeve won’t have to grow up like I did, constantly afraid somebody’ll discover her secret and use it to destroy her. Or the world. She’ll be able to live a normal life,” he said. “Or as normal as possible with your sister Mary Clare for a mother.” He grinned.

  Briddey nodded. “She’s conducting an investigation to find out who corrupted Maeve into watching zombie movies.”

  “I know,” he said. “Maeve told me. She called me last night.”

  But not me, Briddey thought.

  “I explained to her what was happening,” C.B. said.

  “Was she upset?”

  “Yeah, you might say that.” He winced. “But I managed to convince her it was all for the best.”

  For the best.

  “Lyzandra, on the other hand, is threatening to sue Verrick for everything he’s got if he doesn’t give her her psychic spirit gift back. Speaking of which, I promised I’d call Verrick and tell him what I found out about the tinnitus.”

  He opened the door a crack and looked out—an action that convinced her more than anything thus far that he could no longer hear the voices. “The coast is clear,” he said, and headed for the elevator, calling back over his shoulder, “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  No, you won’t, she thought sadly, going out to her car and driving home. You won’t ever talk to me again.

  And he was wrong about them having a few days. At the rate things were going, the intervals when she could hear would be completely gone by the time she got home.

  Or not. On her way up the stairs to her apartment, she heard a male voice too faint to identify say, “…can’t get through.”

  C.B.? she called hopefully.

  “I’ve tried to make her understand,” the voice said, and it wasn’t C.B. after all. It wasn’t even one of the voices. It was just someone coming down the stairs. “But she can’t accept that it’s over. I just can’t forgive her for what she did, you know?” There was a pause, and then he said, “I don’t know what to do.”

  Neither do I, Briddey said, wondering how she was going to get through the evening. You can’t spend it just sitting here wondering when you’re going to be blanked out for the last time. Right now she could still hear the voices when she listened closely, a faint murmur like the one that had been beyond her perimeter—the perimeter she no longer needed.

  C.B.? she called. Maeve? But no one answered.

  It was too early to go to bed, so she went into the kitchen, poured the last of the tasteless multigrain cereal and some milk into a bowl, and took it back to the computer.

  There was an email from Mary Clare. Kathleen hadn’t eloped after all. She’d been with Aunt Oona at the Daughters of Ireland meeting. “Apparently they’re getting ready for some big Hibernian Heritage thing, and that’s why I haven’t been able to reach them. They were there all day yesterday and last night, and they’ve been there all day today.”

  I thought Aunt Oona was laid up with rheumatism, Briddey thought, wishing they were home so she could go talk to them.

  It was still too early to go to bed. She went online and looked up “tinnitus,” hoping to find an example C.B. might have missed of a patient whose symptoms had come back, but she didn’t, and after an hour she gave up and decided to go get ready for bed.

  The phone rang. “I’ve been trying to reach you,” Trent said impatiently. “Have you gotten any mental messages from me since you got home?”

  “No. Why?” she asked eagerly. If he’d started hearing her again, maybe C.B. was wrong about the cascade’s effects being permanent. “Have you?”

  “No,” he said. “Damn. I was hoping you might still be hearing enough that Dr. Verrick could do another imCAT—the ones he did didn’t get enough data to identify the telepathic synapses—and I could show it to Hamilton. Without something that definitively proves the telepathy existed, he won’t be willing to commit the resources we need to move forward on this thing.”

  Move forward? “Trent, you can’t still be thinking of designing a direct-communication phone! You saw what happened when the voices—”

  “I know.” She could hear the shudder of disgust in his voice at the memory. “But now that we know there’s a way to stop them, we know there must also be a way to control them—”

  Maeve was right, Briddey thought bitterly, seeing the smoke-ravaged walls of the courtyard and the blistered paint on the door. Once they got hold of it, there was no way we could have convinced them to stop.

  “But we can’t do anything till we find a way to reactivate the telepathy,” Trent went on. “And we can’t do that without a scan that shows what’s going on in the brain during the communication. Is Schwartz still in contact with you?”

  “No.”

  “Damn. He didn’t happen to mention knowing of anyone else who might be telepathic, did he?”

  “No. And even if he did, their connections would have been shut down by the cascade, like Dr. Verrick’s patients’ were.”

  “Well, there must be someone out there we can test.”

  Like Maeve? Briddey thought. Thank goodness the cascade had wiped out her telepathic ability, too, or Trent would have had no qualms about using her, even if she was nine years old.

  “We need to find somebody fast,” Trent was saying. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to stall Hamilton. Call Schwartz and tell him how critical this is, that we’ve got to have a telepath. Damn, I can’t believe this happened! We were so close to getting the proof we needed.”

  So close. Thank goodness it happened when it did, she thought. And that it affected everyone. Otherwise, they’d be busily administering relaxants to Verrick’s other patients, not caring whether they killed them or not. And Trent would be busily designing the circuitry for his phone.

  We were so lucky, she thought, and had a sudden memory of Maeve showing up at her door Sunday morning just in time to rescue her from Trent. She’d thought that was a lucky coincidence, too.

  “Did you hear me?” Trent said. “I said to text me the minute you find out anything from C.B. This is your future hanging in the balance as well as mine, you know.”

  “I know,” she said. She hung up and then stood there, thinking, It can’t have been a coincidence. Or luck. The timing was too perfect. And illogical. If the shutdown had really been caused by Lyzandra’s reaction to the voices, it would have started the moment they overwhelmed her, not half an hour later.

  And why had it affected C.B.? He’d been hit with the full force of the voices at age thirteen, with no defenses at all, and that hadn’t triggered the creation of inhibitors or work-arounds. So why had this?

  It didn’t, she thought. He lied to you. He’s blocking the voices, even though he said it wasn’t possible. Maybe Maeve was helping him, the two of them taking turns blocking while the other slept. Or maybe C.B. had lied about its being impossible, and he could block anybody and everybody whenever he wanted.

  But if that were the case, why hadn’t he kept Lyzandra from hearing her thoughts during the Zener tests? Or better yet, kept Trent from hearing her when she called out, Where are you? to C.B.? Or kept her and Maeve from hearing the
voices in the first place?

  Believing C.B. could block the voices at will meant she also had to believe he’d intentionally let her nearly drown and let Maeve be terrorized by zombies, and she couldn’t. He isn’t like that, she thought stubbornly.

  Plus, there was how he’d looked the first time he’d been blanked out, so shocked and so…stricken. She’d been certain then—and she was certain now—that he’d had no idea what was happening.

  Which left Maeve. But if she’s doing it, and she thought I suspected her, she’d pop up with a story to throw me off the trail.

  She didn’t. The only one who did was Trent, texting her at eleven to ask if she’d gotten in touch with C.B. yet, and when she told him no, Trent texted back, “Probably in lab. No coverage down there.”

  Or anywhere, she thought, listening to the silence. It seemed to her as the night progressed that it was deepening, taking with it the final vestiges of the voices beyond the perimeter. And any hope that Maeve—or C.B.—was doing the blocking.

  At eleven thirty the phone rang. It’s Trent again, she thought, and then, when she saw the number, It’s Mary Clare. But it wasn’t either of them. It was Maeve. “I have to talk to you,” she said.

  “I thought your mother took your phone privileges away.”

  “She did.”

  “So how are you calling me now?”

  “On the stupid landline. I had to wait till she was, like, snoring, and then call you. I hate it that I can’t just talk to you whenever I want to anymore! I can’t do anything.”

  “You’re still grounded?” Briddey asked.

  “Yes,” Maeve said disgustedly, “and it’s all your fault. If you hadn’t let the voices out, none of this would have happened. There wouldn’t have been that stupid cascade, and I wouldn’t have been blanked out, and I’d have heard Mom coming into my room, and she wouldn’t have caught me. And now I can’t watch anything on my laptop. She put a block on everything, even Hulu and YouTube, so I can’t watch videos at all. You ruined everything!”

  I know, Briddey thought, and knew it wouldn’t do any good to tell Maeve—or C.B.—that she hadn’t meant to. The fact remained that she’d done it. C.B. had tried to warn her about unintended consequences, but she hadn’t listened.

  “This so sucks!” Maeve wailed. “I mean, the zombies were really scary, and I’m glad I don’t have to hear them anymore and hide all the time and worry about what’ll happen if I go to the mall and school and stuff. But some of it was fun. I loved having a castle and being able to talk to you guys—”

  “You can still talk to us—”

  “It’s not the same!” Maeve wailed. “I could talk to you anywhere! I hate not having that anymore.”

  So does C.B., Briddey thought, in spite of what he told me.

  He’d hated the hiding and the roaring voices and having to constantly witness humanity’s nastier side, hated being an outcast and having people think he was crazy. But it was still his life, and the only one he’d ever known. And his gift—and it was a gift, in spite of everything bad that went along with it—had molded him and made him who and what he was: kind and funny and selfless and unbelievably brave.

  And there had been parts of it he’d loved—the late-night silences and the Carnegie Room and the crosstalk they’d shared.

  “And now not having it is like way worse than before I got it,” Maeve was saying, “because before, I didn’t know what it was like, but now I do, and I know how neat it was, and I really miss it, you know?”

  “Yes,” Briddey said, thinking of C.B. sitting next to her in the car, leaning over her in the stacks, talking to her about Guys and Dolls and Bridey Murphy and where they were going to go on their honeymoon.

  “You don’t think there’s a chance it’ll come back, do you?” Maeve asked wistfully.

  “C.B. doesn’t think so.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Maeve sighed. “I really liked him. You’re not going to marry Trent now, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s good, anyway. Are you sure it won’t come back? I was watching Tangled before I called you, and the witch kills Rapunzel’s boyfriend, and it’s awful. You don’t think there’s any way they can fix it, but then Rapunzel starts to cry and one of her tears falls on his cheek and it grows into this big gold fireworks thing and he comes back to life and they live happily ever after.”

  I don’t think tears are going to bring the telepathy back to life, Briddey thought. And because she was afraid she might start to cry, she asked, “How were you watching Tangled? I thought your mother blocked your laptop.”

  “She did, but I figured out a way around it. You can’t tell her. If she finds out, I’ll be grounded forever!”

  Which you probably deserve, Briddey thought, but she said, “I won’t, I promise.”

  “You have to promise you won’t tell her about my watching Zombiegeddon either, or—” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’ve gotta go. I think Mom’s awake. I hate this!” Her voice cut off.

  I hate it, too, Briddey thought. And I hate that I’m the one who did it to you.

  And if she’d needed any more proof that her theory had been wishful thinking, that phone call should have been it. There was no way Maeve could have faked the frustration and disappointment and sorrow in her voice.

  Although Maeve was an even better actor than C.B., and she’d been able to get around all of Mary Clare’s restrictions and blocks and V-chips to watch the movie she wanted. A movie in which something dead had come to life again. Could Maeve, sworn to secrecy by C.B. and unable to communicate any other way, have been sending her a message that all was not lost?

  I hope so, Briddey thought fervently. Because otherwise I have to face the fact that I’ve destroyed C.B.’s gift. And his life.

  He would never be able to get into the Carnegie Room again. Without the telepathy, the librarians would almost certainly catch him. And three A.M. would no longer be a star-scattered, enchanted time of night. It would be just like it was for F. Scott Fitzgerald and everybody else—a time for lying awake in the darkness squirrel caging about the terrible things that might happen. And the terrible things you’ve done.

  “Unless there’s some other piece to the puzzle that explains everything,” she murmured, and finally fell asleep at a little after one.

  She woke abruptly to even deeper darkness, convinced she’d heard something, though the room was completely silent. Middle-of-the-night silent, she thought, and reached for the clock. Three A.M. C.B.’s time of day.

  C.B.? she called hopefully into the darkness. Are you there?

  Nothing.

  And it wasn’t a voice, she thought, staring into the darkness, trying to reconstruct the sound in her head. Or a noise. It had been a sudden cessation of sound, like the stopping of a refrigerator’s hum. Or a car outside switching off its engine.

  Only this wasn’t outside, she thought, and knew with sickening certainty what had stopped: the feeling of C.B. clasping her hand in both of his and holding it close to his heart.

  She’d first felt it in the Carnegie Room when she’d woken and found him asleep, and it had been there ever since, though she hadn’t been consciously aware of it. It had even been there when she was blanked out. That was why she’d believed—in spite of all the evidence to the contrary—that the telepathy hadn’t shut down, that he and Maeve were somehow blocking it. She’d known that wasn’t possible, but she’d believed it because he’d still been there, holding tightly to her hand, pressing it hard against his chest. Until now.

  The thought that it had been the very last thing to go comforted her a little. It meant he must not totally hate her for ruining everything, though she didn’t see how that was possible. He had rescued her, protected her, waded through floods and fire for her, like Joan of Arc. Or the Hunchback of Notre Dame. And she’d repaid him by burning down the cathedral. And the library.

  You were wrong about the whole three A.M. thing, C.B., she said, though
she was certain he couldn’t hear her. And would never hear her again. Fitzgerald had it right. It isn’t the best time of day. It’s the worst. Definitely the dark night of the soul.

  “So what happens after he climbs up and rescues her?”

  “She rescues him right back.”

  —Pretty Woman

  The good thing about hitting bottom is that things can’t get any worse, Briddey thought, lying there in the dark listening to the silence, but she was wrong. She didn’t even make it out of the parking garage the next morning before she ran into Suki. “You look awful,” Suki said. “Did you and Trent break up?”

  At least she hadn’t asked her if it was true the Hermes Project had gone smash, which meant Trent must have thought of something to tell Hamilton, and they all still had jobs. For the moment.

  “You did, didn’t you?” Suki was saying, her eyes glittering with curiosity.

  “Of course we didn’t break up. I was just up really late dealing with a family problem. Why? Were you hoping we had?”

  “No,” Suki said, “although I love his car. And those flowers he sends. But right now I’ve got my eye on somebody else. Do you know if C.B. Schwartz is involved with anyone?”

  Not anymore, Briddey thought. Not since I ruined his life. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “He’s not gay, is he? The cute ones are always gay.”

  Briddey thought of him in the stacks, leaning over her, so close she could hear his heart beating. “No,” she said.

  “Oh, good,” Suki squealed. “He’s Jewish, isn’t he? Do you know if he’s Reform?”

  “Why don’t you just ask him?”

  “I was going to google him, but I lost my phone yesterday. I can’t find it anywhere,” Suki said, and launched into the saga of all the places she’d looked. “I borrowed a phone and tried to call it, but there wasn’t any answer—”

  “Which reminds me, I’ve got some calls I need to return,” Briddey said, and started toward her office.