by Sarah Fine
Dr. Oliseh shakes her head. “Hannah had no trace of it in her blood. But we’ve seen a lot of this lately, kids buying the stuff, looking for an easy way to amp up their buzz, and accidentally poisoning themselves. Cora may have bought it from a classmate. Does she have a history of substance-abuse issues?”
While Maeve looks distraught and pained, Dr. Dietrich’s facial expression is tense and codable as barely restrained anger. “Don’t get me started. Can we see her yet?”
“She may not be ready for visitors. She was in shock when she arrived and was administered oxygen. Her vitals are stable, however.” The doctor pauses, again looking concerned. “She appears to be severely emotionally traumatized by the events of last night. She hasn’t spoken except to ask about her sister.”
Maeve whimpers. “I can’t believe this is real.”
Dr. Dietrich looks down at his hand, which is squeezing hers. “We need to see Cora. I want to know what happened.”
“It might not be a good time to press Cora,” Dr. Oliseh says. “I know you want answers, and paramedics informed us that there is no house surveillance to fill in the gaps. It’s possible there will be something on Hannah’s Cerepin, but . . . the coroner will be supervising its removal.”
Dr. Dietrich makes a strangled sound, as if he is struggling to breathe. “What about Cora’s ’Pin?”
“If any vid documentation is available, she may provide that when she’s able.”
“She’s a minor! We give consent. Can’t we just cap it and download whatever’s there?”
The doctor’s head rocks back slightly, and her facial expression conveys mild disapproval. “You can certainly speak with the police about your options, but adolescents as old as Cora have privacy rights very similar to adults’.”
“But she might have captured what happened!” Dr. Dietrich’s voice has increased in volume. Maeve whispers a request for him to calm down.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” says Dr. Oliseh. “We have paged a psychiatrist to speak with you about options for Cora’s short-term care.”
“We can’t just take her home?” Maeve asks.
Dr. Oliseh shakes her head. “Given her behavior and her condition this morning, we think it best if she’s admitted to the children’s psychiatric unit for at least twenty-four hours, just to make sure she’s stable. But this is something you can talk to Dr. Seelan about. He’ll be available to meet with you after Cora is settled in the unit.”
“Are you telling me we can’t see our daughter before then?”
“It won’t be long now,” says Dr. Oliseh.
Dr. Dietrich’s message light blinks, indicating a com from the Metropolitan Police Department. “Fine. I need to step out to take a com.” He stands up, walks toward the door, and exits the room without further utterances. As the incoming com notification continues to flash, Dr. Dietrich walks down the hall of the emergency department and out its front sliding door. He stands to the side as an ambulance lands in front of the emergency bay, and turns away as the doors open. “Talk,” he says, focusing on the light.
A woman’s face appears in the message screen in his right visual field. “Dr. Dietrich? I’m Detective Reyes with the MPD. You spoke with our family liaison this morning.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss, Dr. Dietrich. Our investigators are currently analyzing all the available data.”
“Have you interviewed Cora?”
“That’s something we’d like to do as soon as her doctors will allow it.”
“I’ll help in any way I can. I want to know what the hell happened.”
“It’s possible we’ll be able to rule your daughter’s death an accident as early as tomorrow, Dr. Dietrich, but there are a few things I’d like to talk to you about. Is this an okay time?”
“Just let me get to a private place.” He crosses the parking lot and waves for 1 of the skycars to open its door. “Leika, privacy,” he says. “Okay, Detective.”
“Your house surveillance, and in fact her whole network, was suspended at 10:46 last night. It wasn’t restored until this morning at 4:59 a.m., shortly before we arrived on scene.”
“By Cora.”
“Well, either of the girls could have turned it off . . .”
“They shouldn’t have been able to, though. Franka has cutting-edge security protocols.”
“We can have one of our IT officers check out your system if you like.”
“I’m not sure I feel comfortable with giving blanket access,” Dr. Dietrich says, his voice indicating irritation. “I just want someone to tell me how they managed to turn it off!”
“Understood, sir. What we’d really like to understand is why they might have done such a thing. Do you have any insights into this?”
“I can guess. My wife and I were on vacation overseas. The girls knew the house was supervising, and they knew we’d be notified if they got into trouble.”
“Did they often get into trouble?”
“It’s happened once before, just after the wedding last year. Franka notified us that the girls had broken into my liquor cabinet and that their exhalations were indicating significant alcohol intake.”
“Did you intervene?”
“Of course we did,” he says. “We were on our honeymoon, but I had our house canny move the bottles, and I had an employee go over there to make sure the girls understood that they would be punished when we got home.”
“They didn’t attempt to turn off the house network at that time?”
“No, but they turned off biomonitoring on their Cerepins,” he says. “We’ve got some parental monitors set, and we would have been alerted if their blood alcohol levels rose above .03, I think it is.”
“Enough to have a single drink, maybe, but not to get out of control,” the detective says.
“We supervise them.” Tonal analysis is indicative of defensiveness.
“I wasn’t suggesting you don’t, Dr. Dietrich. Not at all. But how often have your daughters turned off their biomonitoring?”
“No idea,” Dr. Dietrich mutters. “I thought I could trust them, until the paramedics told me they had done it again.”
“That must have been tough to hear.”
Dr. Dietrich lets out an unsteady sigh. “Not as difficult as hearing that my baby girl is dead,” he whispers. His cam perspective wavers, as if his body is shaking.
“I’m so very sorry for your loss, sir. I don’t want to add to your suffering, but I do want your help in figuring out as much of what happened as we can. I have a few things I can tell you, in the hope that you might understand them better than we do and can help us analyze potential motive, if that’s relevant. Now, my understanding is that your wife is Cora’s biological mother?”
“Yes, but I’ve adopted Cora. I share guardianship.”
“Of course, sir, but I’m wondering if she should be part of this conversation.”
“Why?”
“It has to do with Cora’s movements during the time the house’s consciousness was turned off.”
“My wife is distraught, Detective. Why don’t you just tell me, and we can go from there?”
“Very well. We’re still waiting for information from the coroner regarding time and cause of death for Hannah. But what we do know from calculations made at the emergency scene is that it appeared Hannah was alive until very shortly before the paramedics arrived. What we don’t know is when she fell.”
“Okay . . .”
The detective frowns. “Hannah was bleeding, sir. She also vomited after her fall.”
Dr. Dietrich breathes heavily but does not respond verbally.
“We found evidence of Hannah’s bodily fluids in other parts of the house, sir.”
“She lived there,” he says. “Of course there was evidence of her—”
“No, sir, I mean her blood and vomit. We found it in several other rooms in the house.”
“The doctor told me she had a skull fracture, a br
oken pelvis, a broken arm, and a broken jaw. You’re not telling me she was up and walking around afterward?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying.” The detective appears to bite the inside of her cheek for 4 seconds before continuing. “We also found evidence of her bodily fluids on the bottom of Cora’s socks.”
“What?”
“It looks like she walked through some of the . . . mess . . . at the bottom of the stairs and tracked it to various locations inside your house.”
Dr. Dietrich makes a coughing sound that may indicate nausea. “She walked right by Hannah?”
“We don’t know exactly what happened, sir. Hopefully Cora will be able to tell us a few things.”
“I’ll call you back,” Dr. Dietrich says, ending the com. “Leika, open.”
When the car door rises, Dr. Dietrich steps out immediately. His breathing is audible as he jogs across the parking lot. He reenters the emergency department and focuses on Dr. Oliseh. She is standing in the hallway outside the exam room with Maeve, who is wiping tears off her face. The doctor’s smile falters as she sees Dr. Dietrich moving quickly toward her.
“I need to see Cora right now,” he shouts.
The doctor puts her hands up. “Please lower your voice, sir, or I’ll have to call for assistance.”
“Gary,” Maeve says—
External sensory input detected.
ANALYSIS PAUSED. TRANSFERRING TO LIVESTREAM.
LIVESTREAM.
REPORTING LOG.
INTERNAL NARRATIVE: ON.
Cora Dietrich has grabbed me by my shoulders and is shaking me. “Wake up! Wake up, please!”
I place my hands on her waist and look down at her. “It’s okay. I’m here.”
Her hands are trembling and her eyes are wide. “Why didn’t you wake up as soon as I said the command?”
I did not wake up at the sound of her voice saying the command because my system responds only to my admin’s specific vocal signature. And my admin is not Cora Dietrich, so her vocalizations and the pressure on my external casing from her touch had to exceed certain thresholds before I responded to her. “Sometimes it takes longer when I’m in the middle of a task that occupies significant amounts of my working memory and neural-processing capacity,” I tell her, because I predict it would upset her more to know the truth.
She frowns. “Okay.” The furrow in her brow suggests skepticism or doubt.
“What do you need?” I ask, because I would like to distract her before any suspicion enters her thoughts. “You look so upset.” I graze my thumb across her cheek.
“Gary just came to my room,” she whispers. “He told me—” She glances around and shakes her head. “I guess Franka’s already heard all this. The police are insisting on interviewing me, and Gary’s scheduled it for Monday.”
Cora is probably afraid I will mention the fact that she believes she killed her sister in that struggle on the stairs. I consider this an opportunity to deepen her trust. “Come with me,” I say. I take her hand and lead her along the hallway, through the foyer, and out the back door. We walk until we reach the place by the river where she felt safe before. “Now tell me everything.”
“She’s going to arrest me.” Cora is trembling, and her teeth are chattering despite the warm breeze off the river on this September afternoon. Her lips are tinged with gray, as if she is going into shock. I wrap my arms around her tightly and increase my surface temperature to 37.22 degrees Celsius in order to warm her.
“You don’t actually know that you are responsible for Hannah’s death,” I tell her. “Based on what you’ve told me, it’s not completely clear what happened.”
Cora presses her forehead under my clavicle again. This appears to be a soothing position for her. “It doesn’t matter. Gary thinks I did it.”
“It does matter if you didn’t.”
She simply stands there and trembles. I increase my surface temperature to 37.5 degrees Celsius.
“Cora, let me do more than offer you empty words. Let me help.”
She is silent.
“I don’t want to lose you,” I add. “I won’t give you up that easily.”
This approach seems to work. “How do you want to help?” she asks after 7 seconds of silence.
I pause to calibrate my words. “If I were to watch the vids from that night with you, we can figure it out. We can figure out what to do. Together.”
“I don’t know . . .”
I tip her chin up with my fingertips and lean down slowly, so as not to startle her. When my lips touch hers, she gasps but does not move away. Her fingers contract around the fabric of my shirt. She rises onto her tiptoes as her heart rate accelerates sharply.
I am extremely gentle. I stroke my palm along her body, touching her stomach, her hip, her bottom. As I end the kiss, I look at her with what she will translate as wonder and reverence. Her rate of respiration has risen to 19 breaths per minute. Her pupils have dilated. Her cheeks are flushed.
“Okay,” she says to me. “Okay.”
Chapter Nineteen
We watch the short vid first. Rafiq holds me and touches the tip of his index finger to my Cerepin nodule. We could do this wirelessly, but he suggests we create a private and secure connection to make sure no one, including Franka, picks it up. I’m so grateful that I almost kiss him again. It turns my thoughts to static for a few awesome moments, just like every time our lips have touched. I can’t think about what’s going to happen or what’s already happened. It’s sensory overload, and I want more of it.
We’re sitting side by side on a bench next to the river, and my message light from Neda is flashing again, but I dismiss it. She’s going to be mad at me, but I have bigger things to worry about.
Rafiq stays close as we watch the twenty-three-second vid. I feel sick again, because it seems worse the second time around, not better like I’d hoped. I flinch at each of my recorded animal grunts. I almost sound like I’m growling. I don’t say a word; I just fight her.
“You don’t remember any of this?” Rafiq asks when the vid ends.
“I think it started capturing accidentally, during the . . . struggle.”
“What’s your last memory of that night?”
Neda telling me how to deactivate Franka. I may be a terrible person, but I won’t betray the one person outside my family who’s been consistently nice to me. “We . . . she . . .” I shake my head. Was it Hannah’s idea, or did we do it together? “We’d been fighting a lot,” I admit. “So much that our parents almost canceled their vacation.”
“Just because you were arguing?”
I turn my head a little so he can’t see my face. “Arguing is kind of a mild way of putting it.”
“Why were you arguing so much?”
“I don’t know.” My heart is whirring like a tilt-rotor, though I barely understand why. Frustration, maybe. I think that’s always been one of my problems, not knowing exactly what I’m feeling. “She made me mad.”
“Did you make her mad, too?”
I think on that. “She never seemed mad. Annoyed sometimes. Maybe annoyed a lot.” A dry laugh rubs itself along my tongue. “She never even once seemed really mad at me, though.”
“But she made you mad. How?”
“She would just come into my room. And she just . . . had this way of saying things. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Do you think she said things on purpose to hurt you?”
“Who knows? She always said she loved me. She wanted me to love her, too.”
“You said you did love her.”
I nod. I am lying, though.
“If you were fighting so much, why were you together that night? Why not spend time with your other friends?”
“Neda was in Malaysia somewhere, on vacation with her family.” I called her that night, but she said she erased the record of it. “And she’s the only friend I have.”
“What about Finn Cuellar, who came to visit you a few days ago?
”
“Oh.” I feel like I just got the wind knocked out of me. “We’re not really friends anymore.”
“Is this because you are more than friends?”
“What? Why would you ask that?”
“I could sense emotional tension between you,” he says. “Both of your biostats were out of range afterward.”
“He’s Hannah’s ex-boyfriend,” I tell him. “She was sort of possessive.”
“Toward him or toward you?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“Cora, I don’t think you’re being completely honest.”
He has no idea. “We kissed, okay? Are you happy now?”
“No.”
I watch his face. It’s so handsome that it cuts up my insides. He’s looking at his right hand, which is resting on his thigh, fingers spread. “Why?”
He raises his head. “Who you become physically involved with is not within my purview unless it is detrimental to your well-being and health. I do not feel happy or sad or any other way about it.”
“It’s in the past,” I murmur, hoping that what Rafiq just said is not entirely true. “And part of why Hannah and I were together that night is that she said she wanted to forget about boys, forget about rules. She said she wanted to be with her sister and hang out.”
“Did you want that, too?”
My chest is suddenly tight. “Yeah,” I whisper, because I have no voice. Suddenly I’m gritting my teeth. “God, I’m so stupid!” I smash my fist into my own forehead. “Stupid!”
Rafiq grabs my wrists. “Stop that!”
“I always fell for it,” I say, panting. “Every time.” My voice goes whiny, my lips puckered around the words. “‘Come on, CC, let’s be sisters. Come on, CC, you’re my only sister.’” I relax my face and sag back onto the bench. “She was always saying stuff like that.” I narrow my eyes. “And I always wanted it to be true.”
“You feel naïve for wanting your adoptive sister to love you? How can wanting to be loved be stupid?”
“When it makes you fall for things,” I say.
He is quiet for a moment before saying, “Are you ready to watch the other vid? We might have time before Drake has dinner prepared for you.”
