Crystal Vision

by Patricia Rice

  Keegan shook his head. Teddy was talking in circles. He shifted Mariah into his arms again. Oddly, the pain didn’t return. So, yes, it seemed Brenda was another Lucy, one with a healing talent. “So you think Mariah did something to shut down the internet, and when I interrupted, she somehow set it free again?”

  “Put like that. . .” Teddy grimaced. “It doesn’t make much sense. But playing with a computer shouldn’t make anyone catatonic either.”

  “Maybe she’s like a faulty wire that blows a fuse,” he suggested.

  “I’ve heard of people who fry electronics, but my computer was still working. Mariah was the one who fried,” Teddy protested, leading the way down the narrow dark stairs.

  Gritting his teeth against fear, Keegan carried Mariah across the narrow two-lane highway and up the deserted path to her bungalow. With difficulty, he fished her key ring from her belt. It was awkward, but he got the door open.

  She stirred as he carried her back to the bed they’d left surely a hundred hours ago.

  She snuggled into her pillow as if conscious that she was home. He ought to let her sleep, but the nurse had seemed to think hydration was important. Besides, he was too agitated to sit idle. The book was boring as hell, but he had to read it, and if it helped wake Mariah—even better. He pulled out his glasses again.

  Sitting on the bed beside her, he watched her eyelids for movement while reading through descriptions of each stone in his ancestor’s collection. The nomenclature Dougal used wasn’t exactly the names currently in use, but as he read, Keegan began to discern which was what. Mariah’s bedroom had bright LED bulbs, so the writing was easier to discern.

  He just couldn’t stay focused while watching for signs of life. He thought she responded when he stroked her palm. He wasn’t as certain the reading was reaching her.

  Finally, unable to tolerate her stillness any longer, he tucked the precious book away, took off his glasses and boots, and sprawled beside her on the bed.

  Maybe she needed the energy the Lucys talked about. He had energy to spare, if only he knew how to transfer it. Touching was what he did best.

  He dragged her on top of him, with her cheek against his good shoulder. He situated her so she’d be comfortable, then wrapped his arms around her waist to hold her in place. “Breathe, Mariah,” he whispered. “Let me know you’re alive.”

  She wiggled and settled in more comfortably, so he had to assume she was in there somewhere.

  “I can’t read to you like this,” he muttered, his body reacting mindlessly to her proximity. “And if you don’t wake soon, I’ll descend to the lowest dimensions of hell. So if you’re in there, let me know.”

  She seemed to hum in contentment, and the fingers of one hand curled in his shirt. That would have to be signal enough, although he wasn’t ready to relax with relief yet.

  “I’m looking for ways of sharing my energy, acting as charger for your battery,” he told her. “Let me know if I do something right.”

  He ran his hands down her back, massaging gently. She purred and snuggled closer. Feeling justified, he stroked her round, firm derriere. She dug her fingers deeper, groping his chest. She was in there! He continued to stroke.

  Little by little, her breathing expanded and her heart rate escalated. After a while, he dared apply his mouth to hers, breathing into her lips first, until he felt them respond with a pressure that might be a kiss.

  “Not exactly Snow White’s breath of life, princess,” he muttered. “You can do better than that.”

  And to his relief, she did.

  Mariah drank in the essence of Mountain Man, the strength and integrity and concern that was pure Keegan. She inhaled his breath, took energy from the muscular arms holding her, the strong heart pounding beneath her breasts. The kiss, when it came, was the electric spark that ignited her engine.

  She was still weak, but no longer catatonic as she poured her gratitude and passion into responding to his mouth on hers. He returned the pressure with gentle reassurances, sucking lightly on her lip, planting small pecks on the corners of her mouth, devoting time and thought to her pleasure—giving instead of taking. She was almost giddy from exhilaration.

  Being savored made her feel special, and knowing the quality of the man favoring her in this way raised far more than her spirits.

  But as she gradually gathered all her spun-out electrons and restored them where they belonged, she awoke to physical pressures and all her senses—and panicked.

  With effort, she pushed off him and rolled back to the mattress. “You stink. I need to pee. Where’s the computer?”

  The entire bed rumbled with his laughter. It went on so long and so silently that she feared he was having hysterics. If so, she didn’t want to know about it. She punched his arm, kissed his bristly cheek, and ran for the bathroom.

  What had she done? Did she want to know? Terrified, she hid behind closed doors while she pulled herself together. She’d had a computer. She’d dived down too many rabbit holes. She needed to stuff that information where only she could find it. How would she do that without a computer? She did not want to go through that again. She had nowhere left to run, and if she harmed any more innocents like Keegan. . .

  By the time she returned, she was frantic. Keegan, however, was calmly rummaging in her refrigerator for her mineral water and his beer. Looking like a rumpled god, he passed her the chilled bottle and waited, crossing his arms and setting his square jaw dangerously.

  She needed water before she could even begin to process any of this. She gulped at the bottle.

  “Zoe de Cervantes, I presume?” He didn’t drink but waited for her to deny it.

  She hadn’t used that name in so long. . . Mariah—Zoe—wildly sought curse words strong enough to cover this moment. He knew? Damn, the man was too good at adding two and two and hitting the jackpot. “You’re better off not knowing,” was the best response she could form. Her brain cells were just recovering.

  “I like to know if I’m sleeping with the enemy.” He drank from his beer, big gulps as if he were trying hard to swallow more than he could chew.

  “I’m not the enemy! And if that’s your attitude, you can waltz right on out of here.” It nearly killed her to say that, but she had no way of telling that story easily.

  She had to focus on retrieving this latest download of nuclear material. Panic didn’t help focus.

  He pointed his finger at her. “You busted international criminals to bring the trolls to justice. Tell me the rest was incidental.”

  “Very definitely incidental,” she said in a desert-dry tone, mind still racing, trying to remember what she’d done now, not then. “But I can’t stop the connections when they start happening. The criminal trolls were connected to other criminals who were connected to banks who were. . .”

  “And the banks led you to my father’s company.” He sounded as if he accepted that. He took a normal sip of beer. “I just wanted you to be honest for a change.”

  Her eyes widened as she absorbed that. “The whole world hates me! I destroyed your family. How can you not be angry?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve been told I’m an emotionless robot, but what’s done is done. If you didn’t mean to hurt my family, where’s the point in erupting now?”

  “You’re hardly a robot,” she protested in incredulity, but she had more urgent matters to consider than his weird voidness. “Right now, I have to track down whatever I just did and hide it before more honesty gets spilled around the world.”

  Mountain Man wore his stern face. “You’ll have some difficulty prying Teddy’s laptop out of her hands again. You scared us half to death.”

  “Not a robot then,” she pointed out, taking a deep breath. “I’m sorry. It happens when I’m upset and the connections are strong. I look something up, see three more things I need to follow, and I lose it.”

  “You lose yourself,” he guessed, correctly.

  She gulped down half the bottle while sorting her me
mories. “Teddy’s website,” she said, recovering that lost brain cell. “It’s all stored there. I have to take it down before some troll finds it.”

  Keegan rolled his eyes and slammed his bottle on the counter. “I’ll blow up every damned computer in town before I let you near one again.”

  “That’s a strange tactic.” She would mock his he-man display, but she had to concentrate. What had she dug out? How dangerous was it?

  To distract from her panic, she eyed his dusty clothes. “You might want to shower before you go all macho destructive. What did you find in the cave?”

  She reached in the refrigerator for some of Dinah’s leftovers. She was ravenous. If the information was safely stored on a private website, it should be safe until she had replenished her energy and could think straight.

  “My clothes are at my place,” he said in a growling tone. “So I’ll just have to stink while you tell me what the hell you thought you were doing, Zoe.”

  She winced, not certain if he was angry because she’d not given her real name or because of what she’d done to his family. One thing was certain, he was not a robot.

  “That’s a little tough to explain,” she said honestly. “There are clean jeans and a shirt on the dresser. Tullah said they’d fit you. She found them on special at eBay, and I figured they might come in handy. I’ll throw yours into the washer.”

  “Are you insane, woman, or just pretending you are so you don’t have to explain?” he roared in frustration. “You can’t shut down every computer in town and go catatonic for hell knows how long and then just fix lunch!”

  Oh well, if that was what had him so angry. . . She considered that. “Well, yes, I can. And I am. I’m hungry. You stink. Basics. Easy. The rest. . .” She waved her hand. “Not easy, so it has to wait. And again, whoever told you that you’re a robot needs a kick in the posterior.”

  She itched to get her hands on Teddy’s website. She had a vague idea of what she had done, but she had no means of explaining it. But Keegan deserved an explanation, so she needed time to put herself back together. Her mind worked like a computer program, one line after another in logical progression until the goal was achieved. He needed to deal with it and not loom over her like a menacing cloud.

  An all-encompassing cloud that had absorbed her, breathed life back into her, whose heart beat with hers. . . She wasn’t certain how to fit that into life as she knew it. When she’d fallen into the Void this time, Keegan had been there to catch her. Her mind didn’t do fantasy well. This did not compute, but she was immensely grateful for his presence anyway.

  He stalked off, apparently afraid he’d say something he shouldn’t. Keegan was like that. She ought to be, but she’d spent too many years as an automaton to react humanly now. If anyone was a robot, she was.

  She’d shut down computers? Or the internet? She suspected the latter. She’d sucked up the entire band width of the cable system. She would terrify herself even more if she thought about it too hard, so she didn’t.

  By the time Keegan returned to her front room, Mariah had a table laid with all the leftovers Dinah had sent home with her for the last few days. It still didn’t look like enough to feed a man Keegan’s size plus her ravenous hunger, but it would have to suffice.

  His hair was still damp and curled rakishly on his forehead. The black t-shirt and blue jeans were bland but fit way too well on his narrow hips. She had to force her gaze away while she set two more bottles on the table and took a seat. He glared and yanked out a chair for himself. Damn, but he was the smartest thing that had happened to her in forever, and he had to look good while doing it.

  She chewed thoughtfully, still trying to find words. He tore at his bread as if he were ripping meat off bones. She rather enjoyed all that intense focus on her.

  “Your Void may serve a purpose,” she said conversationally between bites.

  He waited. She couldn’t decide if that was annoying or useful.

  “Mostly, you’re this walking black hole, but when you picked me up, you surrounded me with energy. You shielded me in that energy field until I recovered. It took me days in the hospital last time to pull myself together. I’m not sure how any of this works. It’s not as if there are encyclopedias of the paranormal.”

  He finished chewing and gulped his beer before replying. “My library is an encyclopedia of the paranormal. You have only to request information on a topic and the librarian will scan whatever you need.”

  Mariah felt her eyebrows rise to her hairline. “Really?” Then she shook her head. “Nope, not buying that. Your library is full of ancient tomes, and computers are too new. Ancient tomes do not include computers. Even I don’t understand what I do enough to write it down.”

  “I don’t know what you do well enough to request the appropriate volumes, but I don’t think you invented it. You’ve just found new uses for your abilities. We are not alone in the universe,” he added with a touch of scorn, applying himself to his meal again.

  “I suppose it is possible that we have ancestors who flew in the minds of hawks or who could use telepathy to communicate with receptive minds. Maybe they even developed a vocabulary to explain these phenomena. I haven’t. What I do involves human essence—that’s the only term I know.”

  “Not ectoplasm?” he asked, still chewing.

  She frowned. “Similar, possibly, although ectoplasm seems more corporeal to me. I suppose it isn’t or everyone could see it. Essence may be what others call the soul, but soul is just too spiritual and illusory for what I actually see and do and feel.”

  His brow drew down to form a V over his nose, but he didn’t intervene while she formed her words.

  “To me, all living things are connected by this essence. Daisy and all who have gone before her have merely surrendered their corporeal bodies. They are still part of the essence. Trees, flowers—they’re life and are all there in some form. We live and breathe our ancestors. We’re this great living pool of. . . molecules, atoms, electrons, essence. In terms of physics—energy can neither be created or destroyed, only transformed.”

  “You are saying that you feel this energy essence, that you know for fact that we are all connected in this way?”

  “The same way you feel molecules, I imagine. But it’s impossible to convey except in spiritual terms,” she continued. “It’s easier to believe in the Holy Ghost, angels watching over us, reincarnation and those who died and are waiting to be reborn. . .”

  “I comprehend the theory,” he said, frowning. “If there were some way of proving what you feel, it would be huge. It may take me a lifetime to process, and I’m aware of the difficulty of explaining the inexplicable. Others would call you insane or want to worship you. You could be another Trevor Gabriel guru. But right now, I want to know what this has to do with computers?”

  “About as much as the minds of hawks,” she said, grateful that he grasped why she told no one. “And more to do with my hatred for trolls.”

  She thought she detected a curl of amusement on his lips, but he finished off his beer instead. Good reaction.

  “Every time one of the trolls asked for my help when they got stuck and didn’t give me credit for doing so, I planted what I call a hydra-wormhole. After a while, it became automatic, because they never thanked me for saving their hides, time and again. They got paid the big bucks. I did the heavy work for half the salary. At the start, I got my revenge by using the wormholes for sneaking into their computers and raiding their music, then reading their emails. That was simple hacking. No big deal. I could have emptied their bank accounts, but I didn’t. It was just gamesmanship. I could mess with their heads by moving files around or beat them out on projects I shouldn’t know about.”

  “But you were establishing a pattern,” he suggested, polishing his plate with the last of his bread.

  “Yuppers. When the stuff began going down with Adera, I happened to be working on an operating system update. I was out to torment all trolls by then. I edite
d the programming so I could manually enter any computer using that O/S. My hydras were multiplying by then. I used them to hunt the information on fraud I gave to Adera. I was only experimenting at that point, but then Adera died, and I went a little berserk. I’d never done that before, and it’s the part I can’t explain except in terms of essence.”

  Keegan held up his hand, apparently asking for time to ponder her rash declaration. She was telling him things that could get her jailed. She wasn’t certain anyone could prove she’d written any of the holes. But once it was known, they’d most certainly close them. She was practically holding her breath while she waited on Keegan’s reaction.

  She must have weakened her brain cells to trust a man with her future.

  “So, basically, you can hack any computer with that operating system?” he asked without any condemnation, just curiosity.

  Itchy with nervousness, she sat back, nursing the rest of her bottled water. “Basically, I can find a path to any computer in existence. It just takes longer if they don’t use the faulty O/S. The internet has become as interconnected as human essence. It could become the soul of Artificial Intelligence.”

  His eyes widened as he took that in. “I’m not sure I want to know more.”

  “That’s good, because it’s too tough to explain.” Which was her only saving grace. No judge in the world would believe what she did. But she knew, and that was worse. She prayed she hadn’t unleashed another time bomb. “So just pretend I’m really fast when I hack through webs to get what I want. And let’s figure out how to get my information off Teddy’s website as soon as possible.”

  “You are not touching another computer,” he said in a voice as stern as God’s.

  She had to accept that as one of her limitations now. Her career was shot. She didn’t exactly plan to lose herself to a computer. It just happened.

  Could she pray her essence had learned its lesson and not downloaded the universe this time? Or that Keegan had stopped her in time?

  “I don’t need to touch a keyboard,” she told him. “I know Teddy’s website ID and password. I can give them to you, show you where the data is stored, tell you how to back it up to an external drive. If you have a cloud drive, it would be good to back it up there as well. But once we move the information, I would appreciate being allowed to read the screen as you sort through it.”