"Because I don't want the next call I get from Selnor to be informing me of your death!" she exclaimed. "Goddess on high, ariihir! You have no idea how deep the waters are you're diving in!"
"Oh, I have some notion," Vasiht'h said with a hint of asperity, "given that I watched my best friend almost die."
"And it didn't occur to you that he could take you with him?" she answered, silencing him. She lifted her data tablet and pointed at it. "I've been reading up on the mindline while you've been off experiencing it. And this period right now, the first few months after it forms? Are a big deal. And while I don't at all object to you pushing the mindline to the point that it guarantees you a lifetime of deep, psychic communion with someone you obviously already care about, I do care about the whole 'in the first few months it's much harder to disengage' part that suggests if your Eldritch lordling is going to get himself killed, you're going to get dragged after him!"
Vasiht'h stared at her, his ears sagging.
"Didn't think of that, did you," she said, fur bristling.
"I didn't know," he said meekly.
"You didn't bother to learn," she said. And then threw up her hands. "Oh, hells. It's not like you needed to know. If the two of you were living a normal life it wouldn't matter. I just did the reading because I was curious and I wanted to be able to help, and now you call me and tell me you felt him vanishing into nothingness and...." She shuddered. "Now it feels far too real. And much too significant." She pointed at him abruptly, her finger occluding part of the viseo. "This is far too much stress for me!"
"It hasn't been all that fun for me either," Vasiht'h said.
"No..." She deflated. "No, it hasn't, has it. Just... don't do any more death-defying tricks, all right?"
"Trust me, it's the last plan on my list." He smiled weakly. "So, you really did read about the mindline? For me?"
"Yep." She settled back down again. "It says the first half year or so sets the character for the bond. Basically controls how deep it's likely to get."
"And this is something you control by...."
"I'm not sure you control it, really," Sehvi said. "At least, not consciously. The books say you can make the attempt, but it's more about how open you are to it."
"There are good parts of it, worth being open to," Vasiht'h said.
She canted her head. "And the bad parts?"
"Those too," Vasiht'h said, quieter. "Because it feels easier not to be alone?"
"Even when your partner's dying?"
He looked away, all the fur on his spine standing on end. Then met her eyes and said, "But he didn't. And all that's in other hands now." He managed a lopsided smile. "Because really, what are the chances that the fate of the known universe could rest on the shoulders of two student xenotherapists?"
She chuckled. "When you put it that way. But then, it's not the known universe, right? Just a handful of people in a hospital in Heliocentrus."
Vasiht'h glared at her. "Don't give the Goddess ideas."
"She doesn't need any," Sehvi said. "She already has them all."
Jahir didn't need to be told the name of the woman who entered one of the rooms while he was waiting alongside the patient. She was Harat-Shariin, some sort of pard like Radimir but golden-hued rather than gray, with short brown hair tied down with a handkerchief and the scrubs worn by personnel in operating rooms. She could have been a healer-assist or anesthesiologist or any number of people, but he knew better.
"It was not your fault," he said.
From her start she hadn't noticed him sitting beside the bed—or more likely, she'd taken him for a family member, no doubt having seen many similar scenes in a career that had lasted long enough for her to become one of the best in her field. Her eyes narrowed as she considered him. But if she found him worthy of commentary she kept it to herself, and said instead, "I don't have the first rhacking clue how to fix these people."
From her such an admission was probably rare. He treated it accordingly. "I've been told they are not presenting with symptoms of any known drug."
"That's a radical understatement." She folded her arms. "Whatever the hell it is, it bonds to every cell it touches and then... what it does, no one knows. Except that when I try to remove it, it explodes like an angels-damned grenade and takes everything down with it. If I try to pussyfoot around it, I have until it decides to explode on its own, and once it detonates it's game over again. I have machines that can let me reach into someone's head and remove cells one by one, and all it gives me is a ringside seat to the inevitable meltdown when it fails." Her lips pulled back from her teeth, revealing carnassial fangs. "I was six hours into the last operation when the patient died. Six hours. I thought that one was going to pull through."
He waited, and was rewarded as she continued, "I'm the angels-damned best in the entire sector. And these people are dying on my watch. Under my fingers. And no one knows the hell what's wrong with them and it's rhacking me off."
So many things he could say, and yet what he did was, "It does me as well."
That snapped her out of her monologue with a sharp, surprised bark of laughter. "Does it?" She raked him with another of those looks: not the kind he associated with Harat-Shar, but a surgeon's assessment. "How long you been on world? Mediger's, yes?"
"Nearly four weeks, and yes. It is so obvious, I assume."
"To anyone with a brain." She paused, her ears sweeping back, and scowled at the patient. "You're the one who figured out what we were facing."
"Yes."
"No doubt any words of wisdom you might have conjured up, you would already have shared. You're... what, xenopsych?" She snorted. "Hell of a thing, having a half-crippled esper shrink fall over the truth in a hospital full of people who should have seen it first."
"It has occurred to me as unlikely."
She laughed. "Humble. Didn't expect that. So, tell me truly, doc." A smile, hiding too much anger and anguish to fully use her mouth. "What do you think?"
"I think that I would very much not like to feel another one of these people die," Jahir murmured.
"You and me both." And then she paused. "Felt it, did you."
Jahir threaded his fingers together in his lap. "Intimately."
She was staring at him now, with that clinical gaze. "What was it like?"
Revisiting the impressions was not something he enjoyed doing, but because they were both fumbling toward the empty holes where the answers were supposed to be, he replied. "Like feeling everything you thought made sense... lose cohesion."
"Same for all the patients you touched?"
He looked at her sharply.
"Well?" She cocked a brow.
He forced himself to step back and examine the sensations... and then he compared them to what he'd felt when Nieve had died in his arms. But Nieve's mind had fallen out from beneath her when her body failed, and though her thoughts had scattered, the last few of them had carried a sense of her personality, her self. Neither of the two who'd died on Selnor had given him that, even when he'd received fragments of their memories. Memories alone did not convey a soul. Did neurons? God and Lady knew.
"There is something, isn't there," she said. "Tell me."
"I was just noticing," Jahir said, piecing the impressions together, "that... there was chaos on both occasions. A... shredding of the mind."
"Yes." She drew the word out, rubbing her nose with a finger as she stared at the readings on the halo-arch. "I can see that."
"Does it help you?" he asked.
"I don't know. But I'll take anything." She held up a hand. "No, don't talk. You're about to try to psychoanalyze me, or palliate my pain at having failed. Don't bother. I know I'm upset. I know why I'm upset. I don't need a fancy rare breed therapist fresh off the shuttle explaining it to me. I'll work through it in my own rhacking time."
"Will you?"
She stopped, eyes fixing on him. He held her gaze and lifted his brows, and drew from her an unwilling chuckle.
&nbs
p; "All right," she said huskily. "Maybe I won't. But it's not your job right now to heal my pain, Long and Tall. Understood? We have jobs to do."
"So we do," he said and stood. He was due to move to the next patient anyway. And he was turning when he felt the first sparks, like the warning of nerve pain pricking up the pathways. He halted immediately and reached for the patient's wrist, knowing full well he shouldn't, and yet: he refused. Not this time. This time, when the cacophony came, he was full: full of the sea stretching to the horizon and the cry of kites and the joy of the children in his arms, bursting with the rapture of new experiences, spilling over with the strength of them, and this was the order he imposed on the chaos the mind tried to devolve into. No more noise, but music! No more blinding lights, but a soothing nightfall, pierced by the gemmed veil of stars and city lights. No more racing, screaming, flailing, no more no-sense, but sense and a heart beating, one note to the next, one breath to the next.
No, he told the unmaking force. He exerted himself on it, and used every ounce of his strength. NO. NOT THIS TIME.
The last thing he heard before sliding to the ground was the scream of the halo arch's alarm switching off, and the resumption of its soft chimes and clicks.
Chapter 16
"This time I called him for you." Jiron's voice, sounding tinny and out of focus, but slowly swimming back into tune. "Not that it mattered, because he was on our doorstep by the time it went through."
Jahir blinked past crusted lashes and tried to sit up.
"Don't," Vasiht'h said just before the world began to spin. Jahir clutched at the edge of… a chair? No, he was on an unused bed in a dark room. Not only that, but there was a halo-arch above him; any further movement upward was going to be repelled by its force field.
"I'd say you have another ten minutes, maybe twenty to get yourself together before the entire organizational chart falls on you," Jiron continued. The mindline's hissing worry and warm support made the words seem distant, as if they were floating on water. "Pretty sure the only reason it's taken this long is because… well, you're in a bed. I've got Radimir over there watching the corner though, because I think you're about to have visitors. A lot of visitors."
"Why—"
"Because," Jiron said, and there was wonder and tension in his voice. "You kept one of the unresponsives from dying."
Silence. From everyone.
The human pushed himself upright. "I'll be right outside. When you hear noise, that's when your reprieve's over. And make sure you tell them the cost of what they'll be asking." A strange note in his voice then, but emphatic.
"Understood," Jahir managed, though he was puzzled, and then they were alone.
"So. What exactly was it you were doing?"
The mindline conveyed reluctance, and the pressure Vasiht'h had pushed through to speak without terror or anger: as if he was buried alive and suffocating, pressing against the earth. Jahir shuddered. "I didn't intend anything. But when he started dying, I… I refused. I refused it." He sought the Glaseah in the dark and found his gaze. "It was disorder and cruelty and a heinous way to go to one's death, so I… imposed myself on the disorder, and made it sensical again."
This silence was far more threatening. There were demons hiding in its darkness. Jahir groped through the dark until he found Vasiht'h's shoulder, and the touch yawed a world open around him, one where an aching void stood in for him because he was gone. His wordless apology spilled into that hole and strove to fill it, and failed for so long he thought the mindline would dump him back into his own head, alone… and then Vasiht'h covered his fingers with a hand.
"When I showed up, they'd hauled you onto this bed because you were having an arrhythmia." He cleared his throat. "A potentially fatal one."
"A what?" He sought some memory of this, had only a hazy one of tasting his pulse in his mouth, a flutter.
"I'm not sure how it worked," Vasiht'h said, and though his voice remained calm his hand on Jahir's was trembling. "Maybe it was that you overdid it physically and that triggered the episode because your body's already under too much strain. Or maybe some of this… disorder… devolved onto you through the mind link you had with the patient. Either way…" He trailed off again, and this time Jahir caught a flash of limbs flailing, the wail of a halo arch, the tense back-and-forth of Jiron and someone else. He swallowed.
"You need to do some serious thinking," Vasiht'h continued after a moment. "About the wisdom of throwing yourself into situations where you have no data on the dangers involved."
"That… is gently said," Jahir answered, quiet. "Since what I believe you should be telling me is 'Arii, what the hell did you think you were doing.'"
Vasiht'h met his eyes, and in them there was such grief. "Is that what I should be telling you or what I want to be?"
"Both?"
"Jahir—"
"Vasiht'h," he said. "I vow this to you now—I will not do these things again without you."
"That's making the assumption you're going to do them again!"
"I am making the promise I know I can keep," he said, with more urgency, for he heard voices in the corridor. "I am hoping I will be less involved, but I can't guarantee it. What I can is that I will no longer do it without help. If you'll help me."
"And if I say no?" Vasiht'h asked, and then they were no longer alone.
"Well," Grace Levine said, leaning on the door. "What the hell are we going to do with you, Mister Jahir."
"I beg your pardon?" he asked as behind her the Harat-Shar surgeon, two healers-assist and one male Hinichi in street clothes crowded close.
"Saving a life by throwing yourself into ventricular fibrillation is a little dramatic, don't you think?" the Harat-Shar said, looking past Levine. "How did you do it? Can you do it again?"
Beside him, Vasiht'h made a noise somewhere between growl and despair.
Levine cleared her throat. "I believe you know of Healer-surgeon Septima."
"We have met."
"This is Marron Celvef. He's an investigator with the local police department."
The Hinichi inclined his head.
"And all of these people are necessary right now why?" Vasiht'h interrupted. "Given that it's only been maybe an hour since my partner collapsed and nearly died?"
"No one with the sense to have a VF in a hospital emergency room nearly dies," Septima interrupted. "He was fine the moment they put them under the halo-arch. This isn't some backwater frontier or bygone century." She pushed past Levine into the room. "So can you do it again? Because if you can keep some of these patients from collapsing I might have more time to do the surgery that fixes them."
"And if there are memories you might have of anything relevant to where these people might be buying these drugs.…"
Jahir looked at the Hinichi, who shrugged, a small motion of his shoulders. "Doctor Levine explained how you'd derived the first information. I don't pretend to understand it, but I'm willing to be educated."
"Later," Septima said. "We've got five people here who need your help now."
Through the mindline, Jahir could feel how badly Vasiht'h wanted to say 'no' for him. To urge him to say no, either in words or through the link they shared. But the Glaseah was sitting on that impulse with a discipline that felt like pain, like a heart racing to bursting and a diaphragm stitched through with burning from struggling to breathe.
"I don't know," he said, carefully. "How safe this is for me."
"Obviously not safe at all," Radimir said from behind the crowd. "Can I say something here?"
"You're going to anyway," Septima observed, dry.
The other Harat-Shar put his ears back. But he spoke. "It's obvious that by the time these people get to this stage, they're not coming back. I can see wasting Septima's time on finding a miraculous solution, but siccing the resident esper on them in the hopes of… what? Finding some clue? Why not talk to the bleeding people who are still alive? Why aren't you finding them?" He looked at the Hinichi, who flipped
his ears back but remained composed. "Save the criminal investigation for the professionals who know how to do it. And the surgery to people who like it. This isn't our field. We're xenopsych. We deal with people who are awake!"
The comet that streaked through the mindline was Vasiht'h's, not his, and it shimmered against the words: people who are awake, people who are awake
/I've done work with people who sleep. We both have./
Jahir glanced at him, met his eyes. /You have changed your mind./
/No,/ Vasiht'h said, his words throwing off cold shadows and shivers. /Yes. No. Just… we've done similar things before./
/Sleeping people are not people in comas./
A silence between them, too taut, filled with all the things they were thinking and unable to articulate.
"I won't do anything else without Vasiht'h," Jahir said aloud, and wasn't sure if the keen in the mindline then was born of pain or the fierceness of a Pyrrhic triumph.
Levine eyed him. "This is your…friend? Do you have any credentials?"
The bristling of Vasiht'h's fur had a texture in the mindline, like the static electricity in the air before a storm. "I'm also a xenopsych student. We've worked together before."
"Two of you?" Radimir sounded interested. "Same specialty?"
"I was research before I went clinical," Vasiht'h said. "I studied the effects of dreams on mental states—"
"All of which is very fascinating but doesn't solve my problem, which happens to be these dying people's problem," Septima said.
"We will help you," Vasiht'h said. "But right now, all of you have to leave."
It was almost amusing, how complete the confusion in the room became.
"Excuse me?" Levine said.
"All of you," Vasiht'h repeated. "Out of here. Until the halo-arch releases him and he can sit up he's not doing another Goddess-blessed thing. So go away."
Jahir added, quieter, "I would appreciate the time to recuperate. I can hardly help anyone when I cannot even sit up."
Mindline Page 16
