Heart of Danger

by Lisa Marie Rice

  It had been incredible, feeling all that steely energy, but now that she wasn’t touching him it was gone, just when she needed it.

  They sat, facing each other, like adversaries. Which, of course, they were.

  Remember that, Catherine. However much she liked him—and she liked him against her will—he wasn’t her friend.

  She clasped her hands in front of her, to still them.

  He mirrored her gesture, but unlike her, it definitely wasn’t to still them. “Okay,” he growled. “This has gone on long enough. I’m grateful—we’re all grateful—for your help with Bridget and . . . the baby.” His mouth quirked, unable to say the baby’s name. Mac. “But that doesn’t change anything. The fact is we’ve got some vulnerable people here, people I want to protect. People you might hurt. I have no idea how dangerous you are to us, and that bothers me. No one should be able to find us here, but you did and I want to know exactly how you did that. And if I don’t hear something that convinces me, please believe me when I say I will blast your mind back to last week. After which I will make damn sure you never find your way to us again.”

  “Oh, I believe you,” she said softly. And she did.

  He stared at her unblinkingly, then leaned back a little. “I’m listening. And I particularly want to understand how the hell this Patient Nine of yours gave you all that information on me. He couldn’t talk. He couldn’t type. What the fuck could he do?”

  Something terrible was happening. Catherine needed all her wits about her. She needed to explain something that was inexplicable, outside the bounds of anyone’s experience. She needed to convince this tough man she wasn’t a threat. She needed to convince him to help Patient Nine.

  All of this while she couldn’t think straight.

  She thought straight for a living. Clarity of mind, an ability to focus—that’s what she was about. She was a scientist and her mind was her weapon. Right now it was misfiring badly.

  Just seeing him across the table from her messed with her head. Possibly messed with her neurons.

  Was there a scientific explanation for this? She’d gone into neurology with a hope of understanding who and what she was, but so far science hadn’t helped her.

  One thing she had known up until now as a bedrock fact was that without touching, her connection didn’t work. The instant she lifted her hand, the person she’d been touching turned back into an enigma and she moved straight back into her own skin, totally unable to read the person who a second before had been open to her.

  The connection was lost in an instant.

  And yet . . . She still felt him.

  She was still attuned to Mac in some unfathomable way. Oh God, was this permanent? She was still connected!

  She looked at him, disconcerted. It was like being in two heads at once, like having double vision, only worse.

  She closed her eyes, tried to distance herself. Pictured herself turning her back on him and walking away.

  It helped. When she was a tiny dot on the horizon she opened her eyes and felt whole again. Alone again.

  “Okay. I need to backtrack a little. Tell you—tell you a little about myself.”

  He didn’t answer, merely bent his head. Go ahead.

  “Yes, um.” Catherine licked her lips and he stared at her mouth. She stopped immediately because—God!—a bolt of heat shot through her. Heat and a thick feeling, pooling in her groin. Desire. Hers? His? Her eyes locked with his. “I need to tell this all my own way.”

  He dipped his head again, dark eyes never leaving hers.

  O-kay. Time to do this. Catherine had never laid it out for anyone. All there, on the table. Everything she was. The freakishness of it. The weirdness of it. Being completely different from every other person on the planet. Everyone she knew had run shrieking without ever even understanding the whole of it. How could he be an exception?

  But—and it always came back to this—this was her mission. A desperate man had pinned all his hopes on her and she had to do this.

  Showtime.

  “I’m, um . . . I’m different. I’m not like other people.”

  “Go on.” His voice was low and steady.

  Here goes. “You know that I can—I can feel people’s emotions when I touch them,” she said carefully.

  “I got something of that yesterday.” He was watching her cautiously.

  She bit her lips and nodded. It was impossible to read his face except that he did not look happy.

  “It’s—it’s sort of a gift. But it feels like a curse most of the time and it comes and it goes. I was twelve before I realized that this didn’t happen to everyone. Luckily I had very cold parents who hardly ever touched me. So it wasn’t until adolescence that I discovered what I could do. Really discover it, I mean.” Her parents had loathed each other, and every time as a little girl Catherine touched either her mother or father all she got was an arctic blast of hatred. Instinctively, as kids do, she avoided the source of discomfort.

  “After several instances of people looking differently at me when I said something I shouldn’t have known, I finally got it that what was normal knowledge for me wasn’t for other people.”

  Looking differently at me. The words sounded so normal, everyday fare. Everyone got askance looks, didn’t they?

  Catherine had had iced drinks thrown in her face, like in that ancient TV show Glee, only less fun. Her first car had been a ten-year-old Economo she’d bought her senior year with money working in a supermarket weekends and one afternoon she’d come out from school to find the tires slashed.

  Kids avoided her in the hallways. Nobody wanted the locker next to hers.

  In high school more or less everyone’s emotions were raw and scorching just under the surface. The most popular girl in the school—at home, her father was abusing her. Surrounding her was a bright mirror-like surface of happiness and beneath was darkness shot through with a burning desire to die. The linebacker who couldn’t see a female without wanting to fuck her, a dark and painful compulsion. The science nerd who hated everyone with a viciousness that shocked her. It had all been too much. The only solution—don’t talk to anyone, and above all, whatever you do, don’t touch anyone.

  High school had been her own solitary private hell.

  “What do you know? What do you pick up on?” The questions sounded reluctant, as if asking them meant he bought into the whole thing, was diving into the madness headfirst. “What kind of intel—info—do you get?”

  She thought carefully. “I can’t read minds, if that’s what you think.” Until Patient Nine at least. “It’s not like a radio station that broadcasts the thoughts in your head as if they were the evening news.” He relaxed slightly. He was hiding something. That was cool. Everyone had secrets. God knew she had her own. “I don’t know what’s on your grocery list or what’s in your bank account or who you’re meeting for a date. I don’t know specifics. But . . . I’d know if you were worried or happy or sad.” Or suicidal or homicidal or schizophrenic. She suppressed a shudder.

  He sat still, processing this. She let him work his way through it because it was a lot to swallow. Blinking as if just coming out of a cave into the sunlight, he leaned forward a little. “Let’s fast-forward to Patient Nine.”

  “Okay. You believe me then?” She looked at him hopefully.

  “Let’s say I’m suspending disbelief.” He drummed long fingers on the table. She stared at his hand, so big and powerful. The skin was rough, not a pampered manicured hand at all. A long white scar covered the back, flanked by tiny white lines, like a ladder. A wound, stitched up. “It’s a lot to take in.”

  She nodded. It was.

  “So . . . Patient Nine. At Millon Laboratories.” His face was impassive. No expression at all, except grimness and intense focus. “How long have you worked there?”

  A sudden bust of impatience seized her. “Come on! Stop that! I saw the computing power you’ve got here, Mac. Don’t forget that. A clever man—and you all strik
e me as clever men—can find out just about anything with that kind of crunching power. You probably already know my grade point average in high school, the classes I took in college, you most certainly know how long I’ve been working at Millon.”

  She didn’t even try to keep the sharpness out of her voice. What the hell. She was baring her soul here and he was playing games with her.

  He wasn’t taken aback by her outburst. He just dipped his head. Point taken. “So let’s cut to the chase. Tell me what you do there. Your duties.”

  “Running a dementia project. I told you.”

  He cocked his head slightly to one side. “What did you read off the dementia patients?”

  “I wear latex gloves. We all do.”

  He said nothing, just watched her.

  “Okay,” Catherine sighed. “Sometimes I touched them.”

  “And you read—?”

  “Darkness,” she said softly. “Despair. Sometimes—nothing.”

  He flinched slightly.

  “Yes. It is a terrible disease. I wanted to have a hand in helping to do something about it.”

  “So you have the patients for how long?”

  “Six months. We test various drug protocols. We were very excited about a new drug. It has gone through several iterations. It sometimes re-creates new neuronal connections that bypass the damaged areas of the brain and is definitely in line with the latest hypotheses of the brain as a connectome. Management believed we might be on to a miracle drug. We’d tested it on chimpanzees and their problem-solving abilities shot up.” She stopped, remembering the chimpanzee massacre with a shudder. “Unfortunately, one iteration was a major fail. We were drawing up protocols for human trials when it emerged that after about a month of treatment, one of the iterations of the prototype drug drove the chimpanzees insane. There was an uprising. An entire generation of chimps had to be put down. They were highly aggressive, out of control. It was a disaster.”

  “Move on.” His jaw muscles clenched. “Patient Nine.”

  Yeah. Happy to move on, very happy.

  The massacre of the chimps had been a dark cloud hovering over the lab for months.

  “Of course. Patients are switched out on June 30 and December 31. So on December 31 we had a new intake, twenty patients. I started work in the new year on January 2 and took the original anamneses. Patients One through Twenty, suffering from severe dementia. I assessed them all, going over their medical records. Everything had to be impeccable because if the new drug with the new molecule worked, we had to have a baseline. So though the patients’ medical records were complete, we started again from scratch. They were too advanced to do the usual mini mental exams but we did everything else. Fundoscopy to measure intracranial pressure, EMGs to measure fasciculation, the Barré test for pronator drift . . . the lot. Then each patient had a complete blood workup and a functional MRI.”

  He hadn’t looked lost and his eyes hadn’t glazed over. He’d had medic training. Clearly he was familiar with medical terminology.

  “Immediately I saw that there was something . . . different about Patient Nine.”

  “Different how?”

  She shrugged. “I couldn’t put my finger on it until the fMRI came back. Functional MRIs in dementia patients show completely different patterns than in normal patients. And they show inactive areas. Did you ever see those maps of internet connections in North Korea before the Uprising and the founding of the Korean Republic?”

  He nodded.

  “It’s like that in dementia patients. Entirely blank areas, in human brains that have more connections than there are stars in the Milky Way. Patient Nine’s scan was completely different. Clinically, he showed signs of very advanced dementia. But his scan—it was, well, it was one of the most unusual scans I’d ever seen. It was as if—as if his mental faculties had been artificially suppressed, but underneath there was cognitive function. Highly unusual.”

  “What did he look like?” His eyes had sharpened, narrowed. He seemed to be listening to her with his ears, but also with his eyes and his skin, attention completely focused on her.

  “Tall,” she answered. “Even bedridden. His charts put him at one meter ninety-five, weight sixty-five kilograms, down from probably one-ten. He was emaciated. He’d once been a muscular man, but now his skin hung off his bones. That is usual in advanced dementia cases. Patients lose their appetite, sometimes they even forget what food is for, or they mistake objects for food. Everything is haywire. He was, to use a layman’s term, a mess.”

  “Did you have background information?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I told you, they were referred to by numbers. Everything except their medical background was redacted from the file so our observations would be unbiased. But—I think he was in the military.”

  “If you have no info on him and he was bedridden, how could you assess that?”

  “I touched him.”

  “Touch . . . touch?”

  “Yes. I don’t use my ability”—curse— “for research purposes. There’s no way I can corroborate what I learn. It’s untested, unscientific. Misleading, even. I never know when I can trust it.”

  “Have you ever made a mistake?” His voice was quiet.

  “Mistake?”

  “Yeah. You ever get a bad reading? Think someone was real happy but turns out was suicidal? Think someone was in love and he stabbed the girl instead? Get it really really wrong?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Not that I know of.”

  He digested that while she just looked at him. She was finding it hard to concentrate because he was this huge . . . distraction, sitting right across from her. Filling her field of vision, sucking all the oxygen out of the room, taking up all of her head space.

  He was fascinating to look at, a magnet for the eyes. Her eyes, at least.

  She’d spent almost her entire life in school. Three years ago she’d left the confines of graduate school only to move directly into a research lab which was virtually indistinguishable from her university lab, except the equipment was better and more expensive.

  And every step of the way, the men were clones of each other.

  The only variables were height, otherwise the men she’d spent all her grad student and working life with were virtually the same. Thin, because science nerds don’t have time to eat. With glasses, old-fashioned as that was. Surgically enhanced eyes still had trouble coping with the close work required of someone staring into the small screens of electron microscopes all day, and since nerds weren’t vain, it was just easier to wear glasses. In a world where no one wore glasses anymore, it was like a sign, right there on their faces. I am a nerd.

  They had no muscles, none. Building up muscles required time and desire and the men she worked with had neither. They lived entirely in their heads. Their bodies were an afterthought.

  And they had no hormones, or at least none that she could detect, not that she was any kind of an expert.

  They were the exact opposite of the man sitting across from her, who was huge, heavily muscled, fairly oozing testosterone and pheromones.

  Everything about him was so fascinating. He was like some chimera, some wild mythical beast of the forest suddenly come to life. She could observe him for days, a little wary, as you should be with mythical creatures. He could disappear, he could leap on her . . . you had no idea what he could do.

  The men she was used to had vague gazes, inward-directed, trying to puzzle out the secrets of nature. This man seemed to know them already. His gaze was direct, knowing, hard. A man who lived in the real world. And that body. Wow. A body like that should be illegal. Or at least he should have the good taste to keep it away from susceptible women.

  He leaned back slightly, big hands on the tabletop. They were incredibly fascinating, too. Rough-skinned, nicked, callused. With that long white ladder-like scar across the back of the right one.

  He kept perfectly still. She’d never seen anyone, man or woman, who co
uld keep as still as he could. As he listened to her, he moved only his eyes. It was like sitting across from some huge jungle cat crouching, stealthily awaiting its prey.

  Her.

  “Patient Nine.” It wasn’t a request.

  She looked down at the table, as if there were some fact there, though of course there was nothing but a wooden surface. But she didn’t need a memo. Patient Nine was etched in her memory with acid.

  “I first saw him, as I said, on January 3.” She remembered it so well. She’d spent New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day on her own. Going in to work had been a relief because at least she’d hear human voices. “Patient Nine was physically in a bad way. As I said, he’d had numerous surgeries, and though the wounds had all closed without infection, sometimes you could tell that he’d had surgery on top of surgeries.” She shuddered at the memory. There had been something . . . unsettling about seeing a man who’d been worked over so much. “He was restrained. His eyes were closed when I came into the room. I’d dedicated the morning to going through all the patient files, checking their paperwork and giving them a physical examination. Just getting a baseline, like I said. Then I went into each room to get a feel for them. Just a preliminary check. Patient Nine was unresponsive, as were most of them. I was taking his BP when all of a sudden his eyes opened wide and he grabbed my wrist, above the latex glove. It was . . . it was a shock.”

  Open, aware eyes, deep and pained but fully human, fully alive. It had shocked her, she’d been so used to the dull, dazed eyes of the other patients, once human, now so lost.

  This man wasn’t lost, not at all. He was tethered by the IV lines and he couldn’t speak but he was aware. Terribly aware.

  “He spoke to me,” she whispered, remembering that electric moment. “He told me he was trapped. Some terrible wrong had been done. People he cared about had suffered. He needed . . . he needed something very badly. He wanted something to be done but I couldn’t understand . . .”