Mindwalker

by AJ Steiger

  “Ugh,” Steven mutters. “Feels like there’s a hoedown in my brain and everyone’s wearing stilettos.”

  That’s a remarkably apt description of how I feel. “Do you remember anything?”

  “Not much. You?”

  I close my eyes, straining. A name leaps through my mind like a spark, and my eyes snap open. “St. Mary’s.” At Steven’s puzzled look, I continue, “You were in a place called St. Mary’s.” His expression remains blank. “It doesn’t sound familiar to you?”

  “No.”

  When I was researching Emmett Pike, I read a number of articles about the kidnapping. I recall that Steven was found by two men in the Northeast Quadrant, in the woods, near a small town called Wolf’s Run. Our city, Aura, is situated in the Central Quadrant, the most heavily populated. I’ve never actually been to the Northeast; it’s mostly farmland and wilderness.

  None of the articles mentioned a place called St. Mary’s.

  I rub my aching head. The more I try to remember what I saw, the farther it slips away. Maybe it’s like a dream. Maybe if I just focus on something else for a while, it will come back to me when I least expect it. “I think we need a break. Why don’t we have some dinner?”

  “Not sure I could keep anything down.”

  “I know the feeling.” I give him a shaky smile. “But we should at least try. We’ve hardly eaten anything today.”

  “If you say so.” He stands, clutching the chair for support. On wobbly limbs, we make our way upstairs.

  In the kitchen, I throw together a stir-fry from some leftover chicken and noodles and start a pot of coffee. I don’t usually drink it, but right now, I need something warm. As the coffee percolates and Steven pushes noodles around in a pan, I chop vegetables. The knife slips, and the breath hisses between my teeth. The pain is dizzying. My vision goes black for a second or two. When the dark fog clears, I watch, hypnotized, as the blood wells up and drips to the cutting board.

  I don’t know why it’s so fascinating, but I feel like I could watch those ruby drops all day.

  Steven gently grips my arm, jolting me from my trance. “Run that under cold water,” he says. “Where’s your first aid kit?”

  “The bathroom,” I murmur.

  He turns on the faucet, and I run my thumb under the stream. There’s a lot of blood. The knife must have cut deep. Pink-tinted water swirls around the drain, and I think about the bloody tears in the Lucid dream. Maybe that part was a hallucination. It felt so surreal.

  Steven returns with a small white box. “Let me see.”

  I turn off the faucet, and he examines the wound. The bleeding has stopped for the moment, but the sight of the cut makes my stomach squirm. The lips of the wound are white, the inside deep red. I shut my eyes.

  “Wouldn’t have thought you’d be so squeamish, Doc. I mean, after all the things you’ve seen in people’s heads …”

  “I know, it’s ridiculous. But I’m a sissy about cuts. Always have been.”

  He applies antiseptic cream, then bandages my thumb. His touch is so light, so careful, that I barely feel it. When I open my eyes and see the wound covered, I breathe a small sigh of relief. “Thank you.” I smile at him.

  He rubs the back of his neck. “’S nothing.”

  I take his hand in mine and turn it over, looking at his long, pale fingers. Though there are a few tiny scars crisscrossing the knuckles, his hands are almost delicate. “You have a healer’s touch.”

  His breathing quickens slightly. He pulls his hand from mine. “Yeah, right.”

  “No … really.” I look up, searching his face. “Have you done any more drawings since I last saw you?”

  “A few.”

  “Will you show me sometime?”

  A flush rises into his cheeks. He clears his throat. “Don’t know if I really should.”

  That’s an odd reaction. I’m not sure what to make of it.

  A smoky smell tinges the air. “Oh! The noodles are burning.” I hurry to the stove and grab a spatula.

  Once everything is ready, we sit at the table. My stomach doesn’t want the food, but I force it down. After a few minutes, I realize Steven’s not eating. A piece of broccoli sits at the end of his fork. He stares at it, his expression distant.

  “Steven?”

  Slowly, he sets the fork down. “I almost died last night. I came so close. If you hadn’t come for me …” His voice trembles. He draws in a slow, deep breath and lets it out through his nose. His eyes are wet. “Damn it,” he mutters, rubbing a sleeve across his eyes. He keeps it there, hiding his face in the crook of his arm.

  I want to tell him that he can cry—that he doesn’t have to be embarrassed—but he’s the type who feels weak after any form of emotional display. In some ways, we’re very similar. So I wait, letting him regain control of himself.

  At last, he lowers his arm. The whites of his eyes are tinted a light pink. “You’ve probably dealt with a lot of people like me, haven’t you?”

  “People like you?”

  “You know.” He cracks a smile. “Suicidal sad sacks.”

  “I wouldn’t use that term. But yes. Many of my clients have been suicidal at one point or another. People generally don’t seek out memory modification unless they’ve tried everything else.”

  “Do you ever hate us?”

  I blink. “Of course not. Why would I?”

  “I mean … honestly. Do you ever think we’re just a bunch of selfish babies, running from our pain? I wouldn’t blame you if you did. Hell, sometimes I think that’s exactly what I am.”

  I shake my head. “Anyone who sees it as selfishness or cowardice has simply been privileged enough not to feel that pain themselves.” My grip on my fork tightens. “When it’s that bad, it consumes you. Nothing else matters. You can’t move, you can’t eat. You can barely even breathe. Death seems like the only way out, the only way you’ll ever escape that hell. I could never resent someone for feeling that way.”

  “Wait … You’ve felt that way, too? When?”

  I bite my tongue.

  “Sorry. You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to.”

  I avert my gaze. “It’s all right.” I pick up my plate, take it to the sink, and run it under water. Bits of sauce-covered noodles slide loose and disappear into the drain. I scrub the plate as I wait for my lips to stop trembling. We’re quite a pair, Steven and I. The Amazing Repression Duo.

  Once I’ve gotten ahold of myself, I turn to face him. “Anyway, you changed your mind. You made the choice to live.”

  His brow wrinkles. “I didn’t, though. If you hadn’t shown up, I’d be dead.”

  “But you called me. You let me into the building. You wouldn’t have done that unless you wanted to be saved.”

  “I guess so.” Absently, he pushes a bit of noodle around on his plate. “I should never have applied for that damn pill. But when you’re desperate and you see all these ads telling you there’s an easy, painless way out … well, it’s tempting.”

  “It’s heinous, the way drug companies profit from people’s despair.” I shake my head in disgust. “One day, the law will change. People’s attitudes will change. And the use of Somnazol will be seen as a shameful and barbaric chapter of our history.”

  Steven raises an eyebrow. “You seem pretty sure of that.”

  “I just can’t understand why our society tolerates this.” I seize a towel and dry my plate in fierce, hard swipes. “Somnazol’s very existence implies that some people are beyond hope, that they’re better off dead, that it’s okay to give up on them. It’s that attitude I hate, more than anything. Worse than that, people are encouraged to die. They’re told that it’s the responsible choice. And everyone just accepts it!”

  Steven raises an eyebrow. “This is personal for you, isn’t it?”

  Warmth rises into my cheeks. I clear my throat and put the plate away. “Anyway. We should try to find some information about that place.”

  “What p
lace?”

  “St. Mary’s.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Come with me.”

  He follows me up the stairs. “Where are we going?”

  “My bedroom.”

  “Uh … bedroom?” He sounds a little nervous.

  I almost smile. “Chloe’s up here. My avatar, that is.” I open the door and sit on the edge of my bed. “Have a seat.” I nod to the chair near my desk.

  Steven pulls up the chair and sits. He fidgets, looking around at the pale pink walls, the flower-patterned comforter on my bed, the rows of stuffed animals. “It’s girlier than I expected.”

  “Well, I hope you’ve had your cooties vaccine. I happen to like pink.” Come to think of it, this is the first time I’ve ever had a boy in my room. Not even Ian has been up here. A wave of self-consciousness washes over me, and I squirm. This has been my bedroom since I was a little girl, and—embarrassingly—I haven’t changed the décor much since then. What does he think of the stuffed animals? Why, yes, the girl who’ll be performing a highly specialized medical procedure on your brain does in fact sleep with a squirrel.

  I nudge Nutter behind a pillow, trying to be discreet about it.

  Steven doesn’t notice. He’s looking at the photo on the nightstand, the one of my father holding my four-year-old self. But he doesn’t say anything.

  “Anyway …” I interlace my fingers in my lap. “Chloe?”

  Chloe materializes at the foot of the bed. Steven gives a start.

  I tilt my head. “Never seen a holoavatar before?”

  “Most of them aren’t this real-looking.” He leans closer, squinting, and pokes her. His finger passes through her back as if she’s made of smoke.

  Chloe sniffs. “How rude.” She rises and walks to the side. Her feet don’t disturb the bedding, but other than that, she looks and moves exactly like a real cat.

  “Chloe, this is my friend Steven. Steven, Chloe.”

  “How do you do?” She offers a paw.

  Gingerly, he grasps it, though of course, he’s grasping thin air. “Um. Fine.”

  Chloe turns to me and chirps, “So, what can I help you with?”

  “Look up St. Mary’s.”

  Her ears flick. Her eyes glow a brighter green as lines of text shimmer across them. “There are millions of search results for ‘St. Mary’s.’ Please narrow it down a little for me. Is it a church? A hospital? A school?”

  “We don’t know. But it’s probably close to a town called Wolf’s Run.”

  Steven seems to recognize the name. He glances at me.

  “Is this town in the Northeast Quadrant?” Chloe asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “That’s right.”

  Her ears flick back and forth. “I found only one result within a fifty-mile radius of Wolf’s Run.”

  “What is it?”

  “An abandoned asylum.”

  Steven frowns. “A what?”

  “Asylum is an archaic term for a psychiatric ward,” I say.

  Chloe nods. “This particular facility is a remnant of Old America. It hasn’t been used for over a century. Take a look.” Light shines from her eyes, and the screen flickers to life above her, a hovering rectangle of light.

  Steven leans forward. The pale glow bathes his face.

  The screen is filled with black-and-white photographs of crumbling stone walls, empty rooms, and ceilings riddled with gaping holes. My heart sinks. This can’t be the place I saw in Steven’s memories. I could widen the search to the entire Northeast Quadrant, but who knows which—if any—of the results would be accurate? The name alone simply isn’t enough to go on.

  “Do you need anything else?” Chloe asks.

  “No thank you. That’s all.”

  Chloe curls up and vanishes.

  Steven sighs. “So we’re back to square one. What now?”

  I close my dry, itchy eyes and rub them. I’ve barely slept these past few nights, and the exhaustion is starting to catch up to me. My limbs feel like sandbags. “Maybe we should just get some sleep.”

  “You know … we’ve still got two more.”

  I pull the compact from my coat pocket and flip it open, revealing the two pills—the smiling mushroom and the Chinese dragon—rolling within. “Ian told me we needed to space them out. It’s dangerous to take more than one a day.”

  “Tomorrow, then?”

  I study the shiny little pills, with their deceptively harmless-looking cartoon images. Do I really want to put Steven through that again? Should I really be pushing him to relive the horrors from his childhood?

  I remind myself that he chose this. He wants the truth, too. “All right,” I say. I snap the compact shut and put it back in my pocket. “Tomorrow.”

  He stands.

  I know we both need to get some rest, but I find I don’t want him to leave just yet. In my head, I see him lying on the floor of his apartment, still and silent. I remember the lurch of panic in my chest, the horrible fear of not knowing whether he was alive or dead. I want to wrap my arms around him, to feel the warmth and solidity of his body, the rhythm of his heart and lungs—to reassure myself, once again, of his realness. “Steven … I…”

  He waits, looking at me.

  I could invite him to stay the night. The couch folds out. He could sleep there. But I’ve already crossed too many lines.

  The ghost of my psych-ethics professor whispers in my head: Compassion and empathy are admirable traits, but empathizing too strongly with a client can be dangerous. Once you lose your distance and objectivity, you can’t effectively do your job. Though it may not seem like it, the client wants you to maintain that distance, even if he may not fully realize it himself. He is counting on it.

  I shake my head. “It’s nothing.”

  I’m running through a gray forest. The trees are black knives, their branches sharp and jagged, cutting the sky into shards that pour down around me. Glass litters the forest floor, sparkling like solid rain. All around me, crows watch from the treetops with unblinking black eyes. My feet are bare, and the glass slices into them, sending jabs of pain through me. I’m bleeding, leaving splotches of red with each step.

  There’s something chasing me, some huge beast, panting and growling. I can’t pause, not even to look over my shoulder. If I hesitate for an instant, it will catch me. I run harder, faster. Pain screams up my legs with each step, but I don’t stop. I don’t dare.

  The crows are cawing, beating their wings in a frenzy. They take to the broken sky and circle overhead. One lands on a branch nearby and seems to smile, its dagger-like beak opening to reveal a red maw.

  “Turn,” the crow whispers. “Turn around.”

  But I can’t, I can’t.

  The beast is almost upon me, its breath gusting hotly on my neck. A dead end looms ahead, a wall of shadow. I turn and find myself staring into my own eyes.

  I wake with a start. The bedroom is bright, and birds twitter outside my window. Just a dream, of course. I exhale and roll onto my stomach, hiding my face against the pillow.

  Would one night of uninterrupted sleep be too much to ask for?

  I sit up, pushing a hand through my disheveled hair. When I glance at myself in the mirror, I wince, then grab a brush and try to tame my snarled brown mane. Once it’s suitably flattened, I bind it into pigtails, throw on my clothes, and trudge down the stairs. My head aches dully—a faint remnant of my Lucid hangover.

  What a night.

  I make myself a mug of apple cinnamon tea, slice a grapefruit in half, and sit at the table. Before I can start to eat, my cell phone buzzes. Expecting a text from Steven, I pull the phone from my pocket. The message is from Dr. Swan.

  REPORT TO MY OFFICE IMMEDIATELY.

  That’s it. No explanation. Just that single blunt order.

  Of course, I know what it’s about. He’s discovered that I’m a Type Two now, and naturally, he wants to discuss it with me. Or maybe …

  Has he somehow found out about me and Steven? />
  I push the thought away.

  I don’t bother to eat my grapefruit. I drive straight to IFEN headquarters and try to ignore the way my pulse thunders in my ears as I step into Dr. Swan’s office. His face is inscrutable as I sit down in the leather armchair. For a moment, he just stares at me across the expanse of his desk. “I don’t think I need to tell you why you’re here.”

  “Yes.” I realize I’m clenching my fists and force myself to relax them. I fold my hands in my lap. “I’m aware that I’ve been reclassified. I believe it’s some sort of mistake.”

  “So does everyone. You know better. But that’s not really why I called you here.”

  It takes an effort to keep my expression blank.

  Relax. He has no way of knowing about the immersion sessions or the Lucid. Maybe he saw some security footage of me with Steven, maybe he knows we’re spending time together, but that’s all. “What are you referring to?” I ask, carefully controlling my tone.

  “I’m not going to play games with you. I’m just going to give you one last warning. Stay away from that boy.”

  The anger flares in my chest, a rush of heat. I’m sick of this. “I’m almost eighteen. You can’t tell me who to spend time with. You have no right—”

  “I have every right. You’re not an adult yet. And even if you were, I’m still your supervisor, and you are my protégé.”

  I glare at him. “If I’d left Steven alone, he’d be dead by now. You knew he had a Somnazol, didn’t you? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  His expression remains rigid and closed. “He applied for it himself. He followed the proper procedures. There was nothing we could do.”

  “So I was supposed to just stand aside and let him die?”

  He closes his eyes, as if struggling for control. “If someone chooses to pass and does it legally, we must respect their choice, whether or not we agree. You can’t save everyone, Lain. As I’ve said many times, your father entrusted me with your well-being—”

  “Don’t talk to me about my father,” I snap. My fingers dig into the arms of the chair. “You’re not my father.”

  His eyes narrow. “You don’t know the circumstances leading up to his death, do you?” he asks, his tone almost casual.