Blinded

by Teyla Branton

  Cody rolled his eyes. “Whatever.”

  The building was set back on the large lot to make room for two rows of parking in front. There was no sign except one in the window proclaiming they were open. Only one other car sat in the lot, an old cream-colored sedan which I assumed belonged to the scientist. The nearest building lay to the right beyond an empty expanse of tarmac, where a few stacks of rusting iron made a good privacy barrier. On the left side was a narrow road and beyond that another similar building that seemed to sell plumbing supplies to contractors during the week.

  The growing heat already made me feel sticky, though the air smelled remarkably clean. A bird winging its way across a palette of blue sky and puffy white clouds calmed me—until I saw Cody checking his pockets for an extra magazine for his pistol. I hurried ahead.

  Cody trod heavily behind me as we approached. There were no flowerbeds, trees, or other greenery in sight except a wilted plant in a pot near the glass door. White aluminum blinds covered two large windows on either side of the door.

  A man opened the door before we reached it, dressed in a white lab coat. “Hello. Are you Autumn? I’m Easton Godfrey. It’s great to meet you.” He had thick black hair sprinkled slightly with silver, and large brown eyes. I judged him somewhere in his fifties, perhaps a decade younger than Cody. His height was average, his skin great, but he was only borderline good looking, in part because the right side of his mouth twisted unnaturally when he smiled, as though some of the muscles there had grown the wrong way. He thrust out a hand, gripping mine in a limp manner that repulsed me.

  I held his hand tighter, shaking it firmly. “Thanks for meeting with me on such short notice, Mr. Godfrey.”

  He looked at our hands as I let go, his brow furrowing, perhaps in surprise. I hoped I hadn’t squeezed too hard. My height was average for a woman and I was on the thin side, but with my martial arts training, I was stronger than I looked.

  “Please, call me Easton,” he said.

  “Okay.” Since he hadn’t pushed for my last name, I’d go with whatever he preferred.

  His eyes went past me and his voice became more wary. “Hello, Cody. Nice to see you again.”

  “Not for me. I told her not to come.”

  “Well, uh, yes. Come in anyway, would you?” Easton held the door open and ushered us inside. Was it my imagination that he glanced around the parking lot? Was he looking for possible witnesses?

  Inside was a narrow room with a waiting bench and a small desk. “I test a lot of indigents and college students,” Easton said, seeing my stare. “Pay them for tests, too, if they show any ability. We run on a grant, though. Not much money for furnishings. Please come this way.”

  He led us down a hallway decorated with several framed diplomas and into what looked like a doctor’s small examination room, complete with a sink in the left corner. A table in the middle of the room held a laptop and a monitor, their backs together with the monitor facing the door. One chair sat on the far side and two chairs on the side closest to us. Against the back wall rose two tall bookshelves full of books and several dozen shoe boxes. Easton indicated that we should sit in front of the monitor.

  “We’re not here for testing,” Cody said, scowling at the monitor.

  “I’ll have to do a few tests if I’m going to help your daughter.”

  Cody flushed. “What makes you think she’s my daughter?”

  “On the phone Autumn declined to say that you were related, but I can tell that you are—mostly because of your eyes. Heterochromia can be caused by trauma, but when two or more members of a family have different colors of eyes, it’s obviously inherited. Am I wrong? Isn’t she your daughter? Her hair’s dark, but she does look a bit like you did when you were younger.”

  That shut Cody up because he wasn’t accustomed to announcing our relationship. Neither was I.

  When it became clear that neither Cody nor I were going to confirm his assumption, Easton Godfrey skirted around the table and sat, powering up the laptop. “Anyone want water?” he asked. “Please help yourself at the sink while I pull up the program I need.”

  “I’ll have some.” Cody returned with a paper cup of water for each of us.

  “Okay,” Easton said to me. “I’m going to show you a series of pictures, and I want you to tell me if you know what each is—without seeing it, of course.”

  “There’s no way I’ll know.” I wondered if Tawnia could. Or if she’d be able to draw it, though the images she drew usually had to do with my cases, a sort of symbiotic twin thing.

  Easton gave me an easy smile. “This is just to relax you, to get your mind going. But you’d be surprised how many people have crossover abilities.”

  “I don’t,” Cody said.

  “Well, people are different.” Easton’s words were mild, but there was steel in his eyes.

  “I’ve lost my ability,” I reminded him. “So even if I did have any crossover, I don’t think we’d be able to test it.”

  “Actually, sometimes a cessation of one ability magnifies another one.”

  I could tell he meant to conduct his tests before he told me anything useful, so I might as well get them over with. I’d even try my best.

  He showed me a few pictures on the monitor facing us to give me an idea of what I would be trying to guess. “Let’s begin then,” he said. “I’ll look at the picture on my side for ten seconds and then I’ll ask you to guess.”

  After each guess, he showed me the actual picture, but I got them all wrong, or at least enough that he quit trying. For some reason, he didn’t have herbs or antiques in his picture collection, and I guessed items I was more familiar with. I mean, whoever thought of choosing an aardvark? That wasn’t something I thought of on a daily basis. Now, chamomile and music boxes were more my speed. I’d have to be psychic to guess his pictures—which I suppose was the point.

  Next, he brought out a box from a shelf against the wall and gave me wrapped objects to identify. I got them wrong too. My dizziness surfaced momentarily, however, as I held them to my forehead, according to his rather theatrical request.

  Finally, he drew out a pack of cards, spreading them in a fan, and asked me to predict what card he would pull out next. I utterly failed again, getting only the eight of spades right and the two on the two of hearts.

  Yep, no precog ability here, I thought. I wanted to say “I told you so,” but he looked dejected enough.

  “It could be that what happened to you yesterday did affect every ability,” he said with a frown.

  I shook my head. “Look, the only thing I’ve ever been able to do is read imprints on objects. And only certain ones.”

  “Imprints?”

  “That’s what I call the emotions and scenes I experience, since they seem to be imprinted on the objects.”

  “Imprints.” He appeared to be tasting the word. “I like that. We normally refer to them as signatures, but imprints is much more apt. I think I’ll start using the term in my tests—if you don’t mind.”

  “That’s fine.” I didn’t hide the impatience in my voice. This whole hour had been wasted, and I was already wishing I hadn’t come. As for Cody’s fear of the man, well, maybe he’d softened with age. Even if Easton tried to detain me, short of pulling a gun, I doubt he’d have success.

  “What happens to you now when you touch something you know has an imprint?” Easton asked.

  “Nothing. Except for a couple times.” I explained how I’d experienced the imprints when touching Cody.

  “Are you sure you were only touching Cody?”

  I hesitated. “Well, no. I might have been touching the object, too, but I was definitely touching Cody.”

  He typed something on his laptop, staring at his screen momentarily before saying, “Okay, so you feel nothing. What about a headache or dizziness? Or maybe goose bumps, nausea, or hives?”

  “I did have a whopper of a headache all day yesterday. Only a bit today. And I’ve been dizzy.”

/>   He pounced on that. “Dizzy? When? How long? Tell me everything you can remember.”

  “She was in an explosion,” Cody groused. “For crying out loud, of course she’s going to be dizzy.”

  “Maybe.” Coming to his feet, Easton took down another box from the shelf behind him. “Here are some items I’ve collected. Some, I know have signatures—imprints—on them. Some don’t. They aren’t all the same, but Cody might recognize a few of these from the tests we did with him years ago.”

  Ah, so Cody had agreed to be tested at one point. I’d figured as much, but it was nice having it confirmed.

  Easton dumped out ten objects on the table. “Before we test you, Autumn, I’m going to have Cody verify that there are imprints. Cody? Without telling Autumn which ones have imprints and which do not, please examine the objects.”

  Cody grimaced. “You had a couple of really nasty ones, if I remember correctly. I ain’t going to touch them. Don’t worry. I’ll still be able to tell which ones.” He held out his fingers over the objects, and I knew he was testing for tingling. He nodded. “Okay four of these have strong imprints. Two have fainter ones and six have none at all.”

  “Fascinating,” Easton breathed. “I thought only four of them had imprints. The other people I tested must not have been strong enough to read the additional signatures. Either that or I suppose they could have imprinted their own feelings. But you didn’t even touch the objects, and you could still tell they had something—you’ve been keeping secrets from me, Cody.”

  “What of it?” Cody thrust his chest forward and grinned. “Anyway, I couldn’t always feel the tingle before I touched them. It came later.”

  “The others can’t do that?” I asked.

  “No. And they could only feel those four stronger imprints with their receptive hand.”

  “Receptive hand?” I asked.

  “That’s the hand you’re most in tune with. For most people, their receptive hand is not their dominate hand. So if you’re right-handed, that would mean your left.”

  I stifled a laugh. “Uh, isn’t it kind of weird to say most people when you only know four people who do what we do?”

  Easton’s nostrils flared, and I knew I’d offended him. “Not only were my subjects tested thoroughly, I have, of course, studied psychometry in detail. There are eight others documented in the world, and I am the foremost authority in the US on the subject.”

  Probably because no one else wanted the job. This time I managed to keep the words inside.

  “Anyway, Cody’s the only one I’ve found who can use either hand equally well. He also can use his arms and his face.”

  I nodded. “I’ve never noticed any difference whatever I use.”

  “What about your feet? Can you feel imprints through them?”

  “Of course. I can feel them with any skin. Didn’t I already say that?”

  Easton grinned, looking more and more excited. “That’s wonderful. Cody, you can’t feel them through your feet, can you?”

  Cody shook his head. “You know I can’t. You tested that. I seem to remember something about a little electric shock when I didn’t succeed.”

  Easton waved a hand as though to dismiss the words. “That was then. Hmm, maybe it’s because Autumn goes around barefooted and that makes her more connected to everything. Either that, or she’s a lot stronger than you are. We sometimes see that in successive generations. Something to do with better nutrition.”

  An unease slithered across my shoulders. I hadn’t noticed him looking at my feet, and the long skirt covered all but my toes. Not something to call attention. His powers of observation were stronger than I’d expected.

  “Or maybe her genes have mutated,” Easton added pensively. “There are some tests we could do to see. But we’d need to do them in a medical lab with a colleague of mine.”

  Great, now I was a mutant. Anyway, none of this was helping, and I certainly wasn’t interested in visiting a medical lab to have needles jabbed into me. “So have any of your subjects ever lost their ability?” I asked. “Or any of those you’ve read about?”

  “Yes. Bear with me a bit longer, if you will.”

  I sighed, wondering if all scientists were so methodical.

  “Okay, I want you to do what Cody did,” Easton directed. “Hold your hands above the objects. See if you can feel any vibrations or tingling.”

  I passed over them slowly: book, shot glass, bracelet, toy, bell, photograph of a family, basketball trophy, handwoven basket, vase, stapler. From experience, I suspected the toy, the photograph, the bracelet, and the trophy would have some type of imprint. The other possibilities would be the vase and the shot glass.

  I felt nothing. I shook my head. “Sorry.”

  “But normally you’d feel tingling?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would it affect your energy level? Make you tired?”

  “Not unless I touch them.”

  “Okay, so touch them. One at a time. Slowly. Tell us if you feel anything.”

  I touched them all, one at a time, but there was no change, except my dizziness returned strongly enough to nauseate me. I had to stop several times to regain equilibrium.

  “This is useless,” I muttered, rubbing my temple where it had started pounding. I stood to leave.

  “Quite the contrary.” Easton looked up at me, hand pausing over his laptop keys.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Every time you touched an object that has an imprint, you experienced dizziness. Isn’t that right, Cody?”

  I looked at Cody, and he nodded, a deep furrow of consternation between his eyes.

  “And that headache?” Easton went on. “Well, that came after you touched the stapler. I can tell you now it was used in a homicide.”

  I sank back down in my seat. Slowly, I retouched all of the items, easily identifying those with the strongest imprints by my bouts of dizziness. “I thought I was just light-headed. But I don’t think I was always touching something every time I felt dizzy the past two days.”

  “Well, there would have been some residual disorientation because of the explosion.” Easton sat back, a smile on his face. “And even when you touched things with imprints, the dizziness may not have kicked in until after several strong imprints left a buildup. Basically, I believe you are still experiencing imprints, but that the trauma of being caught in a nasty repeating loop caused your brain to overload. To protect itself, it has stopped allowing the imprints through to your conscious mind. I would also hazard a guess that you are a bit claustrophobic, which exacerbated the problem when you were trapped in the car during the crash. Thus adding to your brain trauma.”

  He was spot on about the claustrophobia, even if he didn’t realize I’d been wrapped in a rug during that repeating imprint.

  “I always wondered what could happen if I went too far,” I said. “I mean, I’ve passed out before, but I wondered if—” If experiencing the imprint of someone dying would kill me too. I’d experienced a woman losing consciousness before she died, but I’d passed out when she did in the imprint and let go of the object before her heart stopped—thankfully.

  Easton smiled widely, the right side of his mouth quirking even more oddly than normal. “Think of your condition as running with a severely injured leg, or like a computer programmer whose tendons are so overused they cease working and need an operation to return to normal.”

  “If that’s true, how do I fix it?”

  “Oh, that’s the easy part.” He paused, apparently enjoying his own expertise. “Don’t read signatures—I mean, imprints. You’ll need to wear gloves to protect yourself, and something on your feet. No imprints at all.”

  Gloves? Why did that seem familiar? “It’s that easy? For how long?”

  He shrugged. “A day, a week, a month, a year. I really don’t know. This is unexplored territory.”

  “You could be wrong.”

  “Yes. But I’m not.” He said it with confidence rat
her than arrogance.

  “Once I had tendon pain and the doctor made me stop working on my sculptures for six months,” Cody said. “Then I had to limit my work after that for a year, and do arm exercises to make sure it didn’t happen again.” He frowned. “Worst six months of my life. Fortunately, I was able to cheat a bit.”

  This was all good news, but the thought of remaining blind for six months made me feel panicky. I breathed slowly, trying to calm my thumping heart.

  “I don’t think it’ll be too long,” Easton put in. “You’re accustomed to reading a lot of imprints, and that has likely built your endurance. The fact that you experienced two events since the loss of your ability indicates that your brain felt well enough to let something through. As I said, I think it was the combination of the repeated loop and the claustrophobia that caused the loss in the first place. The explosion couldn’t have helped, either. Your brain needs time to rest before it can interpret more imprints.”

  “What about good imprints?”

  He arched a brow. “Good imprints?”

  “Positive ones, I mean. Negative imprints—the bad ones—they make me feel awful. I always need a lot of protein to recover after experiencing them. But the positive imprints, the ones with good emotions and memories, they have a strengthening effect.”

  Easton blinked. “Really?” he asked, his fingers typing at an incredible rate, though he never looked down at them. “I’ve never heard of that.”

  “It’s true. I’ve noticed the same thing.” Cody stood to get himself another glass of water.

  “You never told me.”

  “You never asked. Besides, I’d had enough of your needles and prodding.” The two glared at each other.

  “Well?” I asked. In my bag on the table, my phone vibrated, loud enough for everyone to hear, but I ignored it.

  Easton shifted his gaze to me. “Anyway, you should read no imprints. None at all. Good or bad. You’d still be using the same mental muscle, so to speak. You should even take off your rings, if they have even a hint of an imprint. Let your brain completely reset. I’d bet it doesn’t want to open up enough to see what kind of imprint is trying to get in, positive or negative. Once you start reading them again, you can test yourself to see if the good ones actually strengthen you or if it’s only an illusion.”