Sharp

by Alex Hughes

  Michael put down his notebook and leaned forward. “They’re a registered business here in Atlanta and have been for thirty years. All their taxes are current. All their permits are filed on time—early, even. Just because they’re foreigners—”

  “They’re from India,” Cherabino interrupted. “India.”

  “Just because they’re from India doesn’t make them Tech smugglers,” Michael said. “Frankly, it’s insulting that you’d make that jump so quickly. And me? Because my grandparents are from Korea, that makes me a Communist? This kind of cruel prejudice is what puts a gun in the hand of a black kid and makes him shoot the white one, and both of them turn and shoot the innocent Asian one.” He stood up, looked at her with this disappointment and anger, and I saw suddenly the strong emotional memory this was coming from.

  Michael’s little brother had been shot, in front of him, when they were both kids, a stray bullet in a gang fight. It never left him. It never would. Now, after seeing his brother’s lifeblood seeping out onto the street, it would never leave me either. There was tragedy, real, earth-shattering tragedy, under Michael’s cheerful exterior.

  He paused, like he’d caught me reading him. Then he looked away. “I’m getting myself some coffee.”

  I stared at him walking away, shock and sorrow blooming inside me.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Thursday night NA meeting was at a church, but the basement was flooded. They sent us up to the huge sanctuary instead. Our circle of chairs was set up in the back of the huge room, curled around the last pew, some solid wooden thing with a seat arched to fit the curve of your butt. Its seat was worn enough from the pressure of a hundred thousand butts to make me think it was actually used. A lot. Well, Swartz said God gave a lot of people comfort, especially in hard times. And for all the God-talk in this group, I suppose the church wasn’t going to make or break anything.

  Someone had set up a folding table in the back of the room for snacks. Raquel had brought two pans of her carob chip loaf, slices of lumpy carob heaven. I took two. And, of course, a cup of coffee. Plus Norman had figured out some kind of thick barbecue sauce for bacterial-protein cubes that made them taste like chewy old-fashioned cocktail weenies. I took a double spoonful and a pile of toothpicks to eat them with.

  “You outdid yourself, Norman,” I said.

  “Thanks.”

  Swartz came behind me at the table to get his own snacks. He was still quiet, his mind . . . Off. Likely he was worried about one of his kids. At least, I hoped that was what it was. He wasn’t talking, and I respected him too much to go rummaging around in his head for the answer, but I was still worried a little.

  I handed him the soy-powder canister without being told to. He opened and closed his hand once with a frown on his face before he took it and doctored his coffee.

  He picked up the cup and took a few steps toward the waiting pew. “Why don’t you . . .” He stopped talking then, and got a strange look on his face. A strange feeling from him in Mindspace.

  Suddenly the coffee cup was on the floor, liquid splashing everywhere. Swartz was on his knees, gasping.

  Pain, sudden pain, was in the air, my pain, his pain, shock, dismay, as he clutched his chest and I stared, unable to move.

  Raquel was on the floor next to him. Heart attack, she mouthed. “Call the ambulance.”

  And behind me, a tall, skinny guy, a new guy, turned and started to blubber. My legs felt like concrete blocks; I couldn’t move. I couldn’t move! Swartz was on the floor, while all around me people rushed in and out. Colors blurred, lights and sound turning into whispering nothingness, as on the floor Swartz gasped like a fish in air and panicked.

  My heart beat, far too fast, fast like a bongo drum hit with someone’s hard hand over and over, as Swartz stopped breathing. I couldn’t move. I still couldn’t move as the ambulance crew arrived and swarmed over him with cold efficiency and hard plastic tubes.

  * * *

  We pulled up to the hospital. A huge red-and-blue sign proclaimed EMERGENCY ENTRANCE; a central sliding door opened and shut, feeding into the hospital from the circular drive we were on.

  Raquel put the car in park. “Go on, go. I’ll take care of the car and meet you in there.”

  “Do they know he smokes?” Smoked, I guess, but he’d only quit a few months ago. My brain kept grabbing onto details—him smoking, the ashen gray color he was turning on the floor, Raquel’s faux-blond hair against her chestnut skin.

  “We told the ambulance crew, but you’d better make sure they have the information. Better go now.”

  I pulled off my seat belt with numb fingers and fumbled with the latch of the door. She reached over past me and unlocked it, pushing my arm to encourage me to go.

  I wasn’t expecting the skin-to-skin contact; her brain hit me like a tidal wave, all force—and then gone. I sat, blinking.

  “They’re flagging me to move. Now would be a good time.”

  I staggered out of the car. Everywhere around me were screaming people, crying people, people terrified about injury and sickness and emergencies of all kinds. Police waved at Raquel’s car again, and she pulled out with a lurch to be replaced by another car.

  Three women piled out of the car, screaming at the tops of their lungs, while one of them clutched a bloody limb wrapped with gauze; her pain hit me like a club in Mindspace and I staggered back—Only to run into a woman literally foaming at the mouth, her mind spitting blocks of razor blades through my brain. I screamed, and ran—straight into the mouth of the waiting doors, a burst of air pressure hitting me as I passed the threshold.

  A full room of worried patients filled the air with the strong scent of despair, long rows of antiseptic chairs in faded patterns filled with people of every kind, blood seeping from various wounds into gauze, a child crying softly in the corner. A male nurse in blue scrubs and ugly white shoes stood to one side, giving court in front of a massive array of air filters, the whole right side of which was color-coded as antimicrobial. A steady stream of air pushed out from them into the waiting room; another, smaller set of fans pushed used air out through the doors to make the air pressure I’d felt.

  He gave me a tired glance. “If you’re here for psychiatric admittance, it’s two doors down.”

  “No, my friend—”

  He looked up then. “Is he—”

  “The ambulance should be here already. I need to see him. . . .”

  “Hold on, buddy. Hold on.” The nurse grabbed a board from an open window to one side of the room. “Okay, who is he and what was his complaint?”

  “He collapsed,” I said, suddenly everything rushing in all at once. “He couldn’t breathe. He was holding his chest. The ambulance . . .” It was like my throat closed up, and I couldn’t move again.

  The nurse grabbed my arm, and another mind was jabbed forcibly onto mine. I pulled away, raw and aching. Something about triage, overloaded staff, who would die and who would not.

  And the information I needed, including a detailed mental map of the hospital and my next steps: “He’ll be in Cardiology, next wing, first floor. Check in with the nurses’ station in Intake at the front of the hospital, six doors on the left, one turn past the probiotic aerators. Anything else I need to know? Any place I can’t go?”

  He backed up like he’d been stung. “What . . .”

  “Telepath. Sorry, no badge today. Yeah. I’ll find it.” I’d hardly noticed the telepathy actually working on time, perfectly, the first time. In the evening, no less.

  His mouth twisted. “Leave the patients alone.”

  I ignored his fear, though it tried to grip me like my own panic, the panic of Swartz on the floor like a fish. I walked, ignoring the commotion to my right as more nurses and doctors struggled to save someone dying. The soul was already Falling In, making a ripple in the fabric of Mindspace I could feel from here. I hel
d on to my sanity with white-knuckled hands, wanting my drug with every fiber of my being, knowing I needed to find Swartz. Now. No matter what this damn hospital cost me, or how much damage I did to myself just by being here.

  * * *

  In the waiting room, my numb panic merging with the exhausted despair of everyone else waiting for loved ones, everyone else waiting for someone to pass between life and death—or make it back out, somehow, to come back to them. Waves of distress hit me from all sides, and I sat, struggling to breathe, to think, to do anything but endure. It was like my final test before I’d gotten my certification, my final control test as a telepath, all over again.

  I’d called Selah, Swartz’s wife, who would be here in a few moments. Cherabino was in the hallway, on the phone, taking care of department business. The emotion ghosts across the way sat in chairs too, generations of people sitting, waiting for surgeons, waiting for news. The air was bitter, the strong taste of neutral bacteria aerated in the air to crowd out anything that would possibly make us sick. I coughed; they claimed the stuff wouldn’t affect you, but I could almost feel it coating the inside of my lungs.

  Cherabino walked into the room like a pool of crisp water in the middle of a muddy maelstrom. I latched onto her, the anchor I needed. Instead of blocking me out with bricks upon bricks of defenses, she held out a mental hand.

  I grabbed onto it, gentling, and she sat. We waited a long, long time.

  * * *

  The surgeon was a short, fat man with sweat-drenched hair flattened in the shape of a headband. He was standing like his back hurt, slumped like he was exhausted. I was shielding too hard here in the hospital to know for sure, but I was betting he’d just been through the fight of his life. He did, however, meet Selah’s eyes squarely and without apology.

  “I’m Dr. Carver.” He held out a hand utterly without apology for the name. “You must be Mrs. Swartz.”

  “That’s right,” Selah said in a small voice, and took his hand. “Is my husband okay?”

  “Your husband had a myocardial infarction,” the surgeon said gently. “A heart attack. A very serious heart attack. Even with surgery, there are complications.”

  “Will he live?” I demanded.

  “There was some real damage. His brain seems okay, and the patch we put on the artery seems to be holding. He’s stable for now, and I’m having him moved down to Intensive Care; he should be reasonably stable for the next day or so. But after that . . . You have to understand, Mrs. Swartz, that the damage was extremely extensive. I can’t just put in an artificial heart; the tissue in that area is just too fragile.”

  “What does that mean?” Selah asked in a terrified voice.

  “We got him through the immediate danger. He’ll likely wake up in the next day or two. You’ll have some time with him. But unless something dramatic changes, I’m sorry, Mrs. Swartz, but this is almost certainly fatal. I’ve bought you some time with him. I’m sorry, but that’s all I can do.”

  My insides felt . . . empty, like someone had scooped me out with a spoon. This was Swartz. Swartz—the man who’d stood by me no matter what, who’d cared enough to show up with cookies to rehab after a major fall off the wagon, who believed I could do something, that I could still make it despite the huge crushing weight of failure that dogged my every step. Who took my calls no matter what. Who dropped everything to drive me to a meeting, or to show up at my apartment and just sit. Who would yell at me or praise me, make me work and make me think. This was Swartz.

  “How long?” Selah asked.

  He stood up straighter, and yet somehow seemed more exhausted. “A week. Maybe less. I’m sorry, Mrs. Swartz. I genuinely am.”

  Selah nodded mutely, and the doctor bid her good-bye. I just stood there, literally unable to think, unable to process. Despair was crashing in on me, and the emotion ghosts around me felt like attacking bees, constant stinging, constant despair.

  “Would you wait with me?” Selah asked.

  Hospitals were horrible, horrible things to telepaths. But I heard myself saying, “Yes, of course.”

  * * *

  Hours later, I was feeling as mind-sick as I ever had felt in my life, almost burned completely out from the relentless pressure of the minds and death around me. Death, attacking me like a tangible force.

  But another thought was pulling at me, and I couldn’t let it go. With all the people around me—with the FBI and the Guild and a known killer targeting me—had I caused this? Had something happened to Swartz because I had pissed somebody off?

  I went to find the nurse, hands shaking so hard she asked what I was on.

  “Nothing. I’m a telepath.”

  She replaced a panel on the aerator, the white-dotted sludge inside a stronger-smelling version of the bitter taste to the air. Engineered microbes; they seemed ominous somehow, for all they were used in every hospital in the country.

  “What do you need?” the nurse asked me, looking sympathetic.

  I explained my suspicions. She, God bless her, went to find the doctor immediately, sitting me down in a chair in the middle of the hall.

  When the doctor arrived, I asked him the same terrible question.

  “No, no, that I can say for sure,” Dr. Carver said. “It was obvious during the surgery. This has been building for years. With his medical history—well, there’s a lot of damage.”

  I took a breath. A long, cleansing breath. “The drugs? It was all the drugs he took and the cigarettes.”

  His eyes were kind. “That would be my guess as to cause. There’s no family history. I’m sorry. This is a bad situation. But you had nothing—nothing—to do with it.”

  I went back to sit in the waiting room, Mindspace crowding in on me in terrible pressure, relief there too.

  But an hour later while Selah tried to hide her tears and Cherabino and I pretended we didn’t notice, it occurred to me. Had I done to my body what Swartz had done to his?

  Would I die in a hospital, surrounded by dying memories in Mindspace? The Guild facility wouldn’t take me, not anymore. Was I going to die like this?

  As my brain started to overload from all the pressure, my vision started to tunnel in, slowly, blackness curling in around the edges of my vision.

  “What’s wrong?” Cherabino asked me, her face screwed up like she had a migraine. “Adam, tell me what’s wrong.”

  * * *

  At four a.m. Cherabino bodily pulled me out of the hospital. I was nearly seizuring, and barely able to walk, even with support.

  She pushed me in her car and it was too much.

  I threw up. In Cherabino’s car. Shame drenched me like the vomit.

  She breathed, outside. “Well, that was attractive.” But that was it. She got towels from the trunk and handed them to me, and didn’t say another word.

  “I need to go be with Selah,” I kept repeating. I couldn’t think. I held the towel in front of me. “I need to sit with Selah. Is she okay?”

  Cherabino got in the car, grabbed the towel, and started patting me down. “I called the NA chapter. I called her son,” Cherabino said again and again until I believed her. “I called her neighbors. I even woke up Bellury. I’m a cop. We can do this. People will be there. Someone will be there, Adam. I promise you someone will be there.”

  It was then and only then that I let her shut the car door. Only then did I let her take me back to the apartment and push me into the shower. She waited outside while the warm water rushed over me, more water dripping from my eyes as my insides screamed and screamed like they would never stop.

  Cherabino stayed that night, on my couch. She didn’t leave. She didn’t leave even when I asked her to, when I begged her to, when the water came streaming down from my eyes again. And in the morning, right before dawn, when the phone rang to call her in to a murder scene, I had somehow fallen asleep with my head in her lap, her arm
s around me.

  She kissed me, lightly, before she left, and only then built back brick by brick the shield between us.

  CHAPTER 15

  After the door closed behind her, I couldn’t get the doctor’s words out of my head. Swartz might die today.

  I caught the first bus of the day, the early Friday special. The commuters in the morning shied away from me, perhaps reading my mood. Swartz’s life hung in the balance, and I could no more go back to that hospital today than I could fly; trying either one would have painful—and deadly—consequences. But this was Swartz.

  Two bus changes, and I found myself in north Fulton County, the Buckhead business district. Then three blocks on foot to get to where I needed to go. I kept moving, urgency like a ticking time bomb in my head.

  The Guild campus towered above, four fragile-looking glass-and-chrome boxes, one a tall skyscraper, like an impossibly heavy trophy set in concrete. Most of the other skyscrapers in the area had the aggressive boxy defensive postwar look of anti-gravity supports, reinforced steel, and antimissile turrets; this area had been flattened by the Tech Wars sixty years ago, after all. The Guild was the only one dumb enough—or arrogant enough—to build back with the old glass and chrome, the only one willing to be so open to the sunlight and so vulnerable to attack. But then again the Guild didn’t need walls to defend them.

  Inside, through the huge glass-paneled doors, was the small guard’s desk, done in chrome. The foyer itself was a huge circular room topped by an impressive glass dome; weighty marble columns ringed the room above a flawless marble floor polished until you could see the blue of the sky. Small statues of Guild founders and heroes looked down from alcoves along the paneled walls. I’d been impressed, back when I’d walked through the doors as a kid. I’d been proud, working here, teaching here as a professor. Now it just seemed like a waste of space—a waste without even the dignity of a few chairs to wait in.