The Rainbow Maker's Tale

by Mel Cusick-Jones

  Cassie sounded so convinced, so sure of her memories – could it be mine that were flawed? Had adrenaline helped me in one way, but clouded my brain in another…? I needed to see Cassie’s face to be sure of what she was saying: she always hid so much behind her words.

  My right arm was still supporting Cassie’s injured shoulder like a sling. Leaning lightly into her back, I tipped her body forward and tilted her face towards me with my free hand. At the movement she opened her eyes, but she didn’t resist me.

  Once we were facing each other, I let my eyes wander across her features – ignoring the scratches and dirt – her gaze rose to meet mine. “That’s what I mean,” I looked deep into her eyes. “I know what you heard…you were answering me…but I didn’t say those things; I thought them.”

  I waited…first her face registered surprise and then confusion. Cassie’s lips trembled as though she was going to speak, but no words came out. I thought for a moment she might be about to cry. When no tears fell, I wasn’t sure what to do and so I just nodded at her, reaffirming my words.

  The stillness between us became uncomfortable. Our faces and bodies were so close together, and yet that was the furthest thing from my mind. I wanted to know what she was thinking, but could read nothing in her expression. Would she believe that something so impossible could have happened? I wasn’t even sure that I believed it myself.

  “I don’t know what you’re saying.” Cassie finally choked out in a whisper. Her eyes hadn’t left my mine, but no matter how hard I looked I couldn’t tell what was behind her words. It sounded like fear. Had my question scared her?

  Trying to reassure Cassie that I wasn’t crazy – and hadn’t meant to scare her – I took her face in the palm of my hand. The warmth from her skin felt so pleasant against my own, I could almost forget the question that had been irritating me earlier. Almost. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that something had happened when Cassie was unconscious. Some loose strands of hair stuck against her cheek and I brushed them aside, securing them behind her ear.

  “I’m saying that when you spoke to me before, you answered what I was thinking and not what I was saying – you answered as though you could hear exactly what was inside my head.” Even as I tried to make my words sound plausible, I knew what I was suggesting sounded ridiculous…but at the same time, the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced of what had happened. “My next question would be: how is that possible?” There it was – I’d said it – now to see what Cassie would say.

  I leaned back, folding my arms to let her know I would wait for an answer. Finally, Cassie replied.

  “It’s not possible…it must have been a coincidence…” She sounded uncertain, scrabbling for words. “Subconsciously I must have heard you calling me and I put some kind of meaning to your words and answered that instead.”

  Cassie didn’t call me crazy. She didn’t look at me as though I had lost my mind. She was immediately logical, answering me as though this was part of a sensible discussion at The Clinic. Nothing in her words rang true. There was no outright dismissal or rebuttal of my idea…if anything Cassie sounded guilty, as if I had stumbled across something she already knew.

  Was that possible?

  I shook my head. “You were talking to me,” I repeated. “I don’t know how – I’ll freely admit that – but you were answering me as though I had spoken the thoughts aloud.”

  “How can you be sure you didn’t say it? You said before you were in shock...” Cassie directed the question back at me. She sounded…defensive.

  I pondered this. To be answering words someone thought rather than said was an odd thing to happen, admittedly – but why would Cassie be so adamant nothing had happened? It could have been a freak occurrence, connected to adrenaline surges in the heat of the moment…or a connection between two people, like the odd de ja vu feelings I sometimes got.

  When I looked across at Cassie, I saw that she was resolutely avoiding my eyes. From everything I had learned about her in the time we’d spent together, her reaction to this was just so different. She was behaving in the same way I would if I got caught doing something I shouldn’t be. She was lying.

  I shook my head once again. “I know what I said and what I thought – and until I asked you now, you were sure I’d been speaking to you – you didn’t seem to hear what I’d actually said, just what I thought. You didn’t even hear me saying your name over and over again, did you?”

  “So what are you saying? You think I’m crazy?” The tension in Cassie’s voice ratcheted with each word, and the resentment that burned on her cheeks only emphasised her objections.

  “No! I don’t think that at all!” I wasn’t accusing her of being crazy. But something crazy had happened in the minutes after she fell. I just wanted to know what.

  “What do you think then?” Cassie demanded, her voice losing some of the harshness as she looked back at me for the first time.

  Why wasn’t she intrigued by this strange occurrence like I was? Cassie was normally curious, even though I knew she often hid that side of her personality from her school friends, but she was dismissing this out of hand…becoming angry when very little had been said. If it was such a silly notion, then why was she focusing this back onto herself, instead of accusing me?

  The only answer I could imagine was that she knew something about what had happened earlier. And if she did, I had to know what that was…perhaps it was the reason Scarlett had insisted Cassie would be able to help me.

  “I think – and I don’t know how it’s possible – but I think that you did hear what I thought and you answered me.”

  “You sound crazy,” she muttered, her words not carrying enough force to make it sound like she actually believed the accusation.

  I waited, but Cassie offered nothing further. We sat staring at each other for an indeterminate length of time, no words passing between us. I could tell she was thinking hard, she probably didn’t realise, but she was nibbling the corner of her bottom lip – a complete giveaway. I decided she needed a prompt. “Have you ever noticed anything like that before?”

  A pause, then “No.” Cassie shook her head at the same time as looking away from me.

  “You’re lying to me,” I said. And you’re really bad at it.

  Incapable of looking at her, I focused on the ground beside me, suddenly fascinated by a rough cluster of grass. It was surprisingly painful to acknowledge that Cassie didn’t want me to know something about her – didn’t trust me – when I found myself revealing so much to her.

  Again there was a long silence. When Cassie finally spoke there was no denial of my accusation, she just said, “I need to get home.” The conversation was over, whether I wanted it to be or not.

  Resisting the urge to punch my fist into the ground, I buried my frustration. Perhaps this wasn’t the right time to get her to talk…she nearly died less than an hour ago. That incident might be affecting Cassie more than whether she trusted me or not, and it was an explanation I really liked the sound of. I would let it go…for now.

  Chapter 10

  “So…are you going to be OK?” I leaned around Cassie to peer into her apartment. The open-plan living space was empty and everything was quiet, so I assumed her parents weren’t home yet, even though we’d dawdled on our way back from the park and detoured via a café for dinner.

  Cassie looked pale – well, paler than usual, at least. I guessed she was tired after everything that had happened: a near-death experience, an almost declaration of love and a scientific mystery were a lot to handle in one afternoon.

  “I’ll be fine.” Cassie said.

  Her voice stirred me from my thoughts and I realised she was answering my question. I found I was disappointed not be staying with her longer. Even more so when she added: “I’m just going to grab a shower and get an early night.”

  I cleared my throat. “Do you have anything here for pain relief?” The enquiry was a lame attempt at distracting myself fr
om the hormone-driven images that had overloaded my brain at the mere mention of Cassie and shower in the same sentence. Maybe there was some sense in reducing testosterone levels, after all. It seemed to make me stupid.

  “I think so.” Cassie paused, wrinkling her nose as she thought about it. “I’ll find something to help – don’t worry about it.”

  My lip curled up at her blasé response. Cassie was dismissing her needs – again – and I just knew that if she could have moved her shoulder, she would have shrugged off my question as well. As if I could forget that she had mangled her arm and nearly died, because of me! Well, if she wasn’t going to help herself, I would just have to make use of my skills and get her something from The Clinic.

  Speaking of special skills, I realised that we hadn’t said anything more about the weird thing that happened in the park over dinner. It was odd. Everything about the way Cassie reacted to my suggestion made me think that there was more to it, rather than just an odd coincidence. Did she actually have something to hide? I stared at her, and she watched me back, as I first tried to figure out what might be going on, and then I tried asking her. Can you really hear what I’m thinking?

  “What?” Cassie snapped at me, her eyes flashing brightly.

  I chuckled, taking in the exasperated expression on her face: she obviously didn’t enjoy being scrutinised. “I was trying to tell you something,” I said truthfully, adding: “but it obviously didn’t work – maybe today was a one-off after all…”

  Cassie’s head shook, her eyes rolling skyward as she allowed herself a short laugh. Just as before, there was something off about her reaction. Her laugh was a short bark, and she moved away from me, stepping back into the shadowy apartment as if distancing herself from the conversation.

  “I’m not one of your science experiments you know!”

  I laughed at her reprimand, although it was my turn to be false this time. In just a few short weeks of watching Cassie, I knew that it was fear that I saw in her eyes just then, not laughter, not anger. For now, I pretended not to see it and teased her back. “We’ll just have to see about that.”

  This definitely isn’t over.

  She frowned and I could see Cassie fighting to make her anger seem real, but she didn’t manage it and a genuine smile softened her face a moment later.

  What was she so afraid of? I couldn’t think of anything that should make her so nervous, and it just seemed wrong that she was pretending to laugh it off, instead of actually doing that.

  Some of my old fears bubbled to the surface as I found myself questioning what Cassie might be trying to hide. I didn’t believe she was part of the web of lies we were trapped inside, but at the same time, it appeared that I wasn’t the only one capable of keeping a secret. For the second time today, I felt the stabbing pain of rejection, realising that Cassie just did not trust me.

  I stared at the floor, taking a deep breath to steady the nerves that were suddenly twisting my stomach into knots. “I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that I like you so much.” In a surprising step, I made a completely honest admission, not really knowing why I felt the need to do it. Then, in a typical Cassie-move, I shrugged my shoulders dismissing my own words.

  In the short silence that followed my random, but honest confession, I felt my control beginning to slip. I needed to get out of there before I said, or did, something I’d regret.

  “You didn’t say goodbye,” Cassie called as I retreated down the hall.

  From the sound of her voice I guessed that she had ventured forward to watch me leave. I raised my hand in a half wave, but didn’t turn around to check if my assumption was correct. “Goodbye Cassie!” I shouted back, as I dropped into the stairwell.

  My feet slapped against the hard plastic resin steps as I plunged downward. I was about to do one of the stupidest things I’d ever attempted, which was saying something. Maybe, after this, Cassie would know that she could trust me.

  * * *

  The Family Quarter had turned dark in the time it took me to walk from the café to Cassie’s apartment, and then back to the central area at the edge of the Green and Blue Residential Zones. As the mirrored ceiling had tilted into artificial night, softer lights came to life on the outside of the buildings and tall street lamps. We learned at school that the normal cycle of day and night had been imitated on the SS Hope to give inhabitants a sense of comfort and familiarity. Normally, it seemed odd to me that we created a false darkness on the station, only to illuminate it, but for once I actually found something comforting in the change. Perhaps, it was because tonight I wanted to hide in the shadows and make use of the darkness.

  Across the plaza ahead of me loomed The Clinic. In daylight it was so clean and bright you could barely stand to look at it, but now in the dim light the reflections disappeared and instead you could see the movements inside the building, through the transparent façade. I watched a few dark suited figures gliding through the rooms, watching over the patients as they rested. It looked quiet, just as I had hoped. All the daytime services that operated in The Clinic had finished running at 6.00pm and so, few staff would still be here now unless they were working on the occupied wards.

  I dropped onto a bench, pulling my day sac onto my knee so that I could activate the portable viewing screen inside, without taking it out. As I waited for the system to warm up, I listened to the happy splashing sound of the water in the fountain, not two metres from where I sat.

  In daylight hours I liked watching the patterns the droplets would make as they sparkled and tumbled over one another. I would often wait here to accidentally run in to Cassie at the end of a placement day; enjoying the peace after a few hours with Olivia. There was something real about the fountain. I could appreciate the freedom water had – at the same time I resented its easy liberty! The only force each droplet adhered to was gravity, albeit the specially created gravitational field that operated on the space station. The water went up and came down, but everything in between was unknown. I wished my life had such opportunities.

  Beep.

  The viewing screen was ready. As I reached my fingers towards the keypad, I suddenly realised that I might actually get my wish. With everything I’d been doing recently, perhaps I was creating my own opportunities. Right now, I was going to try something I had never dreamed of previously, and I had no idea what the consequences might be if I got caught. In the past, had I been scared to push myself this far? I couldn’t be sure, but I knew that today – when Cassie needed my help – I was going to do this.

  Was that what Scarlett had wanted from Cassie? For her to push my boundaries?

  My fingers moved across the screen and within seconds I had logged into the main Family Quarter computer system. It was easy to navigate and I had a good general knowledge of pretty much everything that happened in the Quarter, based on what I had learned over the last few years. With a few swipes and taps I was able to work my way into any area I wanted – with the exception that I couldn’t get to any systems beyond the Family Quarter. From what I could see, there was a completely independent setup from the systems that ran the wider space station, even the Retirement and Married Quarter systems were not connected to ours. The independence of our system was only a minor irritation today, because I wasn’t looking for information on what existed beyond the grey resin boundary walls of the Family Quarter.

  Without really focusing on what I was doing, my fingers had automatically guided the screen to the engineering blue prints for The Clinic. I scanned the image, zooming in when I found a likely candidate for the medicine storeroom, and zooming out when I realised it wasn’t.

  Finally, I reached the basement level. There were two floors that extended below the ground level of The Clinic. According to the blueprint, the medicine storeroom was immediately beneath the great entrance hall. And it was huge.

  Zooming into the plan again, I was able to pull up the security settings for the area. There was a general access keypad at the
main entrance to the corridor leading to storerooms – Level 3 clearance. That wouldn’t be a problem: watching my Father over the years, I had memorised all of his number-chains, which ran to Level 4 areas. However, the main medical store itself was a different matter. This was a swipe reader, and I knew that the only people issued with swipe cards in The Clinic were the Medics themselves.

  “Damn it!” I muttered. If I had already qualified as a Medic, this wouldn’t be a problem, but I was just a Medic’s son.

  Just a Medic’s son…

  The words repeated themselves in my head, and sparked the beginning of a plan. Closing down the viewing screen, having already memorised the route I needed to take, I hopped up from the bench and slung my bag across my body.

  With one last glance at the fountain, I realised that I was getting my wish to be as free as the water that flowed there. I was here right now, but what would happen next, was completely unknown. Trying not to grin, I set off toward the welcoming entrance of The Clinic.

  The scanner in the doorway beeped softly as I passed. I barely noticed the familiar sound as it registered my mark, although out of habit I looked down at the small combination of shapes tattooed in black onto the inside of my right wrist. It never changed no matter how much I looked at it, but I could just never shake the feeling that it should.

  The usual crowds were absent this evening and the large entrance hall was quiet, except for a few Medics passing through from one area to another. A couple of parents – I assumed – were leaving for the night, one looking calm, the other…scared? I turned away, uncomfortable at the unfamiliar show of emotion in an adult.

  This evening there was a lone receptionist seated at the large reception desk off to one side of the hall. The counter would normally be filled with five people during the daytime and so the woman looked abnormally small as she perched behind the long narrow desk. At the sound of the scanner she looked up, glancing at me and then turning to the screen beside her. I had no choice but to go over.