She didn’t know if Claire would play along or not. She knew Claire wasn’t getting as good a read off her as she did with everyone else. Dr. Cans was very, very good at concealing her feelings. She had been for a long time. It had been necessary to walk in here and do the job she’d been hired to do, but now it was a weakness. She needed Claire to trust her or, if not trust her, at least follow her; but without being able to read her emotions, Claire was wary. She was the key, though, so one way or another, Dr. Cans had to get her on board. And she had to do it quickly.
She glanced at her watch. It was almost seven in the morning. She would go back to the empty apartment she had been assigned as living quarters, shower and dress, and schedule an emergency session with Claire. It was the logical thing to do - Claire had witnessed the carnage of the night, after all. No one would think anything about it. And she would step up her campaign.
Course of action decided upon, Dr. Cans turned to the bookshelf that contained her more interesting books. When she returned, she had no doubt her office would no longer be the safe, private place it now was. She slid a thick volume off the shelf and pushed it into her bag. No sense risking everything by leaving it here. It would be safer with her.
Squaring her shoulders, making sure her mask was in place, she stepped through the door and allowed the final act to begin.
Chapter 42
“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.” Lucius Annaeus Seneca
One down. Four to go.
I wait, eager for more.
***
Claire
Claire sat quietly in her chair, legs crossed, hands folded neatly above her lap. The only sound in the room was the monotonous ticking of the clock above that massive desk. Dr. Cans sat in the chair across from her, mirroring Claire’s posture, head tilted slightly to the side. Today, however, there was no hint of the laconic smile that was usually present on the polished doctor.
Claire had never been one for small talk, and she didn’t feel particularly inclined to talk about what was on the doctor’s mind, anyway. She let her gaze wander away from Dr. Cans’ grave expression and to the big picture window at the back of the room. The snow had started around midnight, coming down heavily at times, though now it was slightly more than a flurry.
Claire had heard one of the staff members say more was expected, but it didn’t really concern her. She didn’t get to feel it. She didn’t get to fight slippery sidewalks or stamp her feet to warm her toes after stepping in a drift. She didn’t get to brave the frigid air or push wet hair off her face after the flakes melted.
It was funny. She never used to like those things. Snow was cold and wet and made driving difficult, which was part of the reason she and her husband had moved to Florida when he retired from the postal service. Neither of them liked the cold. Now she’d give almost anything to be stuck out there in the middle of it.
“Claire?”
She pulled her attention back to the present. It was dangerous to let her mind wander when she was with the doctor, and she gave herself a mental shake.
“You seem sad today,” the doctor remarked pointedly.
Usually Claire wouldn’t bother to respond to an open ended remark like that, but today was different. Today, all she could see was red. Red on the dirty tile floor. Red splattered across the uneven walls. Red on her hands.
She wasn’t sad though. It had been a very long time since she had felt anything but numbness from her own heart. If anything could shake loose buried feelings, it should be finding Andre bleeding out on the floor of his room. There was nothing, though.
Isn’t it better this way?
Was it? There was no pain. She knew it was sad. She felt the grief for Andre and the fear for themselves pouring from Amy and Miguel like oil over a flame, but her own heart was untouched. She could still function. She could still think. Maybe she had too much time to think.
Andre was just the first. You’ll all fall, one way or another.
The others had been opening up to Dr. Cans more in their individual sessions, allowing her to help them understand their enhancements and trying to learn how to use them to their advantage. It seemed to have opened up something else in them, though. Something dark. Along with periods of hope, Claire had also felt waves of depression rolling off them at different times. Now that they had bought into Dr. Cans’ theory, it seemed to be happening more and more. Andre’s had been especially bad, which had surprised Claire. Of the three, she would have thought Amy would succumb first. But the idea that she might see her son and husband again, that she was actively working on a plan to get there, had buoyed Amy up through the worst of her depression.
Claire herself hadn’t experienced any of that. She suspected her lack of emotion was what was insulating her from the deep wells of dread and hopelessness that washed over the others, although it didn’t seem to protect her from the voice that whispered dark thoughts in her head. She wondered if the others heard it, as well.
Claire wasn’t quite ready to admit to her own particular foibles though, so she focused on theirs.
“Amy has been practicing,” she said mildly. It wasn’t anything the doctor didn’t already know. “She’s been zipping around after hours, creeping through our residence hall like she owns the place.”
“Good,” Dr. Cans said. “The more familiar she is with it, the more useful she will be.”
“To Rhinehardt,” Claire said. “Not to herself, right?”
“Of course. She is here on Mr. Smith and Mr. Anderson’s dimes, after all.”
“Uh huh,” Claire answered. “Now, why don’t I quite believe that?” Dr. Cans’ words didn’t ring quite true today, and Claire didn’t know why.
It was obvious the other woman was struggling with what happened, too. Her appearance in Andre’s room last night, the words she’d spoken in anguish, and the shadows under her eyes, even more pronounced than usual, were enough to attest to that. But there was also something in her manner that felt different. Something that felt a little less…hidden.
If she’d caught Dr. Cans off guard, the woman didn’t show it. Claire couldn’t even feel a prickle of alarm or concern from her. She simply quirked an eyebrow, silently inviting Claire to continue.
“You toe the party line, claiming to be prepping us to use our symptoms to make the Rhinehardt Collaborative a profit, but you also encourage Amy’s nighttime excursions and Miguel’s education. You’re empowering them, which is the exact opposite of what Rhinehardt expects.”
“And yet, for some reason, I’m not empowering you,” Dr. Cans pointed out. “Amy and Miguel and…Andre,” Dr. Cans tripped over his name. It was the first true sign of weakness Claire had ever seen. “They’re exploring their abilities, understanding that knowledge and skill is power in a place like this. But not you. Why?”
“Because knowledge and power isn’t the only thing they’re finding, is it?” Claire asked.
“There are always consequences to our actions.”
That had never been more apparent to Claire than these last few hours.
“RNB comes with some wonderful gifts. It saved each of your lives. But the flip side of surviving such catastrophic injuries through an alteration in your neurological anatomy is depression, anxiety, and insomnia.” The doctor sighed. “I’ve talked about these responses with the others as we’ve explored their abilities.”
She tossed her notebook aside and rubbed her forehead. She seemed exhausted. A deep in her soul kind of tired. The kind of tired that didn’t come from one long and painful night. Claire wondered why she hadn’t noticed it before.
“I knew Andre was feeling low. I knew he was struggling. I just didn’t know it was this bad yet. I didn’t know he would…”
She trailed off and the women sat in silence, each absorbed in their own thoughts.
“It’s hard, you know,” Dr. Cans finally said, “fighting feelings that are constantly inflamed by a voice inside your own head, nudging you to do something you
know you don’t want to do.”
Claire snapped to attention. “Are you saying Andre was hearing voices?”
“You all are,” the doctor answered distractedly. “Whether you admit it or not, it’s a benchmark of the condition. In fact, most of the patients we located had already died by the time we managed to find them.”
“So Andre was hearing a voice, telling him to do…what he did?” Claire asked hesitantly. Claire’s voice was constantly nudging her in the same direction. It had been easy to ignore it so far because she had no real feelings for it to play on. But for Amy, Miguel, and Andre, how exhausting would it be to constantly fight off suggestions that felt true?
“I think we’ve approached a point of no return,” Dr. Cans said, ignoring Claire’s question. “What happened to Andre was a wake-up call for Rhinehardt, and it should be for you, too. They won’t risk losing more of you. I suspect,” she said wryly, “that our situation here is about to change. A couple of days, a week maybe.”
Dr. Cans leaned forward and looked Claire dead in the eye. “You need to be ready, Claire. You need to make sure they’re all ready, too.”
“For what?” Claire asked, a faint tremor of dread seeping through from the doctor.
And then it was gone. Dr. Cans sat back up, straight and proper in her chair. “Our time together is almost over,” she remarked, coldly professional once again. “But I thought I might leave you with something from our session today. Call it homework,” she said, reaching behind to her massive desk and picking up a thick volume.
Claire woodenly accepted the book, confused. Had Dr. Cans been trying to warn her about something? The feeling had been there so briefly, and then it had been gone. A crack in the flawless mask she usually wore, but a purposeful crack.
Claire glanced down at the heavy book in her hand. It was old, the leather cracking around the edges and the title, embossed in gold, dull and worn in places. Faust. She cracked it open. Written in the original Italian.
“You should read it tonight,” Dr. Cans said dismissively, moving behind her desk without looking at Claire. “I think you might find something that catches your interest.”
The door opened and Barnes stepped through, indicating it was time for Claire to leave. She rose and stepped hesitantly to the door, glancing back one more time. The doctor was scribbling something in her notebook, having apparently moved on from the strange session. But just as Claire started to turn back around, she glanced up and met Claire’s eyes. It was brief, but it was pointed. Read the book.
Claire replayed her conversation with Dr. Cans as she followed Barnes back to her room, absently rubbing her thumbs over the worn leather of the book in her hands. The book was thick, but she should have plenty of time to glance through it. The prisoners, the ones who were left, anyway, were being confined to their rooms after what had happened last night.
Dr. Cans’ words floated through her mind again, and the brief sense of dread she’d felt from the doctor settled deep inside Claire’s chest.
…approached a point of no return…you need to be ready…you need to make sure they’re all ready, too…
Our time together is almost over…
Chapter 43
Dave
Dave continued to sit beside Quincy after she’d fallen asleep. He’d been meaning to talk to her about the supply of metoclopramide he’d acquired after Logan had called in a panic on their way from Sheraton. Quincy had been in the middle of a migraine attack and Logan had been near hysterical.
“Migraine” wasn’t really the right word for them. Migraines usually gave some sort of warning before striking - tenseness in the shoulders, vision problems, irritability. Something that suggested it was coming. But Quincy didn’t exhibit any signs. One moment she was fine, the next she wasn’t. Not that he’d ever seen it for himself. He suspected she’d had a few over the last couple of weeks, but she’d always been in her room and he was hesitant to intrude.
But tonight, he wasn’t able to ignore it. He’d been pulled to the edge of her curtain by her wheezing, breathless gasps and when she hadn’t answered his call, he’d pushed the curtain open to see her huddled on her side, face buried in her hands, unresponsive to his voice or touch. He didn’t know if she was allergic to the medicine or not, but this was severe enough to risk it. It was likely she didn’t even know, herself.
The injection had taken effect quickly. Much more quickly than he expected. Also a sign it wasn’t a true migraine, in the sense that they understood migraines anyway. As Quincy’s body relaxed, her hands fell away from her face and he could see her eyes were already closed. He hoped she would sleep for longer than usual. She had told him the best sleep she got was usually after a serious attack like this one, and the drug should help ensure she stayed down for awhile. She needed the rest.
Dave slowly stood, noting the creaking hips and knees as he did. When had he gotten so old, he wondered? He reached back down and tugged Quincy’s blanket up over her shoulders and pulled the curtain back around her. Instead of going back to bed himself, though, he collapsed into the chair behind his desk and leaned his head into his hands.
He could have guessed that using her abilities set off the migraines, but this was pretty conclusive proof. The more she used them, the more frequent the headaches seemed to become.
Quincy’s gift was different than Jones’s had been. They could have isolated Jones’s hearing, dampening it with noise-cancelling headphones or a sound-proof room where he could rest. They could have shut Jones’s version of RNB down for a few hours at a time to provide rest. But Quincy’s RNB didn’t affect just one sense. Quincy took in information like a computer. Her data processing never stopped. Whatever she heard, saw, felt, tasted, she internalized. He could put her in a completely dark isolation room and her brain would still be on.
She didn’t sleep. She didn’t have an off switch. That was a major problem. The human mind wasn’t designed to be on all the time. It needed to rest. In sleep, the average brain sorted the information it had received during the day, solidifying what it needed to keep and discarding what it didn’t. Quincy’s brain wasn’t discarding any information. Which was why, he suspected, she couldn’t shut her mind down. Why she always had a constant storm of noise swirling around inside. There was nowhere for it to go.
The brain was just like any other processor. It had a finite capacity. The human brain’s capacity was much larger than the largest computer processor in the world, true. But what happened when it finally did fill up? What did a data processor do? It started deleting information that wasn’t backed up - soft information, information that wasn’t essential to core processes. What would that equal in the human brain?
It wasn’t so hard to figure out. Quincy had no memory of who she was before the accident that landed her in the hospital and she had no memory of the six years before she emerged as Kara Scott. Dave had hoped desperately that it wasn’t true, that he would find something that would disprove his theory.
Quincy had already gone through at least one reset. And with each data wipe, she wasn’t losing facts and figures. She was losing names, places, and memories. She was losing herself.
It was only a theory, but it was the right one. The more information Quincy took in, the more internal memory was taken up. And the more internal memory she used, the less she had for herself.
Quincy had quickly become part of Dave’s small family. She and Logan were all he had. They were going to lose her and he didn’t know how to stop it. He couldn’t change how her brain worked. He couldn’t correct the defect that eliminated the filter in her brain. She was heading for another data wipe, and he was afraid he couldn’t stop it.
Chapter 44
Claire
Claire sat on the far end of her bed, staring at the ancient copy of Faust in her hands.
The context was clear, but did she trust it? Or rather, did she trust the source?
Her individual sessions with Dr. Cans had not progressed as far as the
others. Miguel was actively participating, she knew, learning to control his abilities a little more every day. For Miguel, the key had been to understand what was happening and then gain a little scientific knowledge.
Claire knew from Amy that her sessions weren’t going quite as well. She had confessed to Claire that she was a little disappointed by what the doctor had to say. Once Miguel had read part of the book Dr. Cans had given him, he’d perked right up. Now he was pointing out different kinds of energy that the rest of them couldn’t see, just to make sure they knew it was there. He was the reason they now knew exactly where their surveillance monitoring extended and where the blind spots were. Which was why Claire was sitting at the end of her bed near the wall rather than in the middle of it.
Amy had assumed her experience would be the same as Miguel’s, and that she’d see a clear path between admitting her abilities, learning to use them, and seeing her son again. But it hadn’t been as clear-cut as that. Claire had known that it wouldn’t be, but Amy was a little more excitable than Claire. After several private sessions, Amy had confided that Dr. Cans thought her severe insomnia was actually something she called hypervigilance. When Amy pointed out that all the patients suffered from insomnia, Dr. Cans had insisted it wasn’t the same.
Claire had to agree. Claire’s sleep was broken, certainly. She could usually get a couple of hours a night, here and there. The same had been true of Andre and Miguel. But Amy never slept. She didn’t nap or doze. She was in a constant state of alertness. More alert at times than others, but the principle stood. It made sense, Claire thought wryly, why Amy was so moody all the time. She was up, she was down, she was angry. All signs of sleep deprivation.
Burning Bridges (Shattered Highways Book 2) Page 25
