by Koby E Hill
The three of them sat at the end of the glossy table, Ella in her wheelchair. No one rose as Alice entered the room with Craig, as they seemed to be deep in some thought. Craig immediately clicked a remote that lowered a projection screen. “We’ll have time for catching up later. Emmett, Tobias—wake up.”
The men lifted their heads from the table and noticed Alice. Ella had smiled politely. They raised themselves upward while Craig turned off the lights.
“It’s nice to know you’re alive still, Alice,” Emmett said without making eye contact with Alice, then stretching with an obnoxious yawn.
“Hey," Craig intruded. “What did I just say? Keep it down for a minute.”
Alice sat in a chair on the opposing side of the table. She threw Tobias a wink before turning her attention toward Craig’s slideshow.
The first click of the button showed the outline of a certain pathway on a map. “So far, we have connected the death of five people within this province, Alice—all within a very similar radius of one another. Each one seems to inch closer to Crowden.”
Craig clicked the remote. A photo of an older man in a beige suit struck their vision, with a wide smile that seemed to touch the tip of his eyes. “This is Morgan Abborcroft. He died six months ago in the middle of a court hearing for one of his clients, Richard Allen. He was a veteran lawyer who’d begun defending those below his pay grade, seemingly out of nowhere. The symptoms appeared as a heart attack or brain aneurysm, but his autopsy says otherwise.”
Another click. A brain sliced open displayed through a grainy flash photo. “An autopsy was performed by a Leanne Alisster, who immediately found some abnormalities. It had appeared that his amygdala had exploded, causing imminent death.”
The group watched in silence as Craig clicked over to the next three slides in rapid succession. “Over the next four months, three more lawyers abruptly died, along with a police officer. All within the same province, and all were educated under the same law office. Detectives investigated the town thoroughly—where they ate in common, slept in common, fucked in common—the concept of a fast-acting virus was proposed, put into practice and even mock-created in a lab. They were unable to dignify any theory with casual or practical explanations.”
“And this is where we come in,” Emmett whispers, seemingly to himself.
“One of the police chiefs of Trendor—the county where two of lawyers were killed—went to school with Morgan, the first lawyer killed. They’d lost contact a long time before, but something about the cases bothered him. He followed it closely and contacted me three weeks ago.” Craig had gone from a standing position to sitting with a single butt cheek resting on the table. Alice didn’t care for men sexually, but even she was able to appreciate how firmly his rear was shaped in his well-fitted dress pants. In another life, Craig could have been a model, or some overpaid bad actor, instead of somehow falling down the rabbit hole of semi-paranormal domestic and international threats.
He’d motioned his chin toward Alice with a grimace just as Alice’s eyes had moved off his bubble rear end. “We’ve been trying to string the pieces together since then—all male deaths, the explosion of the amygdala that wasn’t caused by a tumor, an illness, and cannot be refuted as a medical abnormality. That’s what we have for you, Miss. Any questions?”
Alice smiled, and leaned forward on the table. “I have several. What was it that indicated to you that it was another psy? And why a woman?”
“Always straight to the goods,” Emmett once more whispered, but crossed his arms and leaned back far in his chair. Tobias still had his head resting on his forearms, while Ella listened earnestly.
“Well, I didn’t want to disappoint anyone, if that’s what we were expecting, right? Maybe I should direct that question towards you.” Alice re-positioned her chair to face Emmett, who still had his arms crossed and was avoiding eye contact.
“What made you think that it was a woman? And why does that fact stand out beyond any pieces of evidence as relevant?”
Emmett sighed. “I wasn’t in the QR for very long. She wanted me to know. She wants to reach out to us.”
Alice laughed, slowly opening the lid of her left eye. “To us? Or to you? And did you effectively estimate that it was a woman because she asked you to join her in a nail-painting session?”
“All right, kids.” Craig stood up. “You two can fence out your problems later when time is not of the essence. Stick to the facts.”
“Look me in the eye at least and tell me,” Alice commanded with authority. Emmett sighed once more and turned his head ever so slightly to look at Alice. With her left eye slightly open, she could detect that Emmett was perspiring heavily. He was a sweater, and detested more than anything that no matter how many layers of effort he put into trying not to consciously sweat, Alice could detect it. He emitted it from his armpits, the top of his forehead, and his crotch. It was never due to anxiety, as Alice was able to observe, but frustration. Frustration was Emmett’s main problem, and it leaked into every facet of his life, especially his psy abilities. Because of this, he was perpetually irritated by Alice, and that translated into an unnecessary projection of misogyny and sexist remarks. Alice herself wasn’t entirely sure he meant them, but used them as his only weapon against a woman who was more secure in her gender than any other corner of her life. But as often as she could, she liked to convince him that it got to her, all so she could possess the moral excuse to throw back clever remarks that would further his own self-appointed annoyance.
Emmett started for a moment, before piercing his lips together like a grumpy child. “She refers to herself in the third person. She used ‘her’ as a pronoun. She caught me peering instantly, and sent me back with a half-day headache.”
Emmett was telling the truth, as vague as the description was. Alice would read his mind later to pick up the actual transcript of the interaction. Alice shrugged. “Women, right?”
Emmett turned his head back to Craig, keeping his arms crossed.
Craig turned off the projection screen and turned the lights back on. “What is most urgent is to get you in the QR. Ella and Tobias tried, but she shot them back instantly. They were able to uncover some helpful information though. Tobias?”
“Hmm?” Tobias looked like he’d been taken from bed at an ungodly hour. He turned toward Alice with his head to the side and mumbled into his arms. “I tapped into some of the local business owners over in Trendor, to pick up any anomalies. A few had memories that were of interest enough for them to store it for long term. A woman with long braided blonde hair came into a courthouse on two occurrences, asking for someone who didn’t work there.”
“Were you able to pick up the name?” Alice asked.
Tobias shrugged from his indifferent position, nearly laying the entirety of his upper half torso on the table. This was the kind of behavior only Tobias could exude without Craig’s teacher-like scolding. He knew that the kid had had a rough life, and probably didn’t feel too positive about any authority-figure.
“I’m getting a sense of something, but it’s blurry and intangible. I keep getting the word ‘warrior’ though, pops up in my head throughout the day.”
Alice and Craig nodded in unison. “You keep going with that, please. Has there been any other strange occurrences in Trendor? Or any of the other countries associated with the deaths?”
Tobias finally sat up, and moved a sheet of paper that he had been hiding beneath his arms with the three remaining fingers on his right hand. “A couple who owns a local bar called ‘The Armored Times’ noticed a woman a few weeks in a row who looked out of place. She came three Thursdays in a row apparently, sitting in the corner, on karaoke night drinking gin and tonic. She ordered politely, but didn’t participate in any other form of interaction.” Tobias kept his eyes on the sheet of paper as he read the information he had obtained through projecting his mind into the loosest of those most easy to access. “Another hardware store owner noticed a woman, again,
seemingly out of place coming into the store and not buying anything for around three weeks in a row in a week. And then there are some scattered observations you can take a look at.” Tobias pushed the paper slightly over toward Alice.
She bit her bottom lip and grinned. She raised her right hand and curved two of her fingers slightly. The paper slowly began to cruise over the table until it found its place right in front of her. She took a glance at the list for a moment with her good eye. She looked up at Tobias. “Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. I appreciate all the work you’ve done, man. This is helpful.” Tobias shrugged again, and placed his head back down onto the table. He intentionally placed his right hand under the left, shielding the missing fingers from curious eyes.
“As Alice said, that’s some good work you’ve done, Tobias. If you could keep working on the name she was looking for at the courthouse, we’d appreciate it. Ella?”
From the looks of it, Ella was having what she called “a good MS day”. She moved her hands freely into her purse that hung from her wheelchair to remove her tablet. Her fingers glided freely over the glass as she scrolled through her documents. There were days when the weight of the tablet, or even something as small as her phone, was cumbersome enough for Ella to feel sore. On even better days, Ella tried not to use her wheelchair. She would take walks outside of the building where she worked, and around her apartment complex on her days off. She had once informed Alice that her neurologist suggested this as a good practice, but not to overdo it. Her tone implicated a dislike of her doctor, and the look on her face connected with Alice’s estimation that her doctor was trying not to get her hopes too high, all to have them dashed by “a shitty MS day”.
“What’s the point in having hope if you’re afraid of it being demolished?” She’d asked Alice, rhetorically. Alice had looked her directly in the eye, and spoke to her as if she were a sister.
“Even if you have hope for a day, I think it is worth it for that day on its own.”
If anyone else were to pose this to Alice, she would agree cynically. She didn’t remember the last time she allowed herself to have hope for anything beyond work, or anything temporarily stimulating.
But on that day, she was able to easily thumb through a thick document and read it aloud with little to no hesitation. Her voice was soft and delicate, but also assertive and aware.
“It’s been a little hazy out there. I’m not getting anything of note—that stands out, I mean. There’s a man and the color purple, mostly. Something lilac. I’m not entirely sure if that is echoing the color itself, or the flower. His voice along with the others are garbled, I can’t really make out too much.”
Ella had told Alice on one of her good days about how she essentially had to make a pact with the dead. If they allowed her at least four or five nights of proper rest, she could listen to their woes without interruption. This proposition worked most of the time for the souls that were reasonable, at least. The majority of them wanted to speak with their loved ones, or to find out information that they’d lost after they’d passed. But there were some, that Ella put frankly, were complete assholes. These were the ones she had to make a deal with.
But if there were particular dead souls, such as that of the murdered lawyers and police officer, that she was attempting to contact, it was far different from a matter of lying in bed and waiting around. She had to lure them in somehow, toward her, toward her light. She had to make it more appealing than any other area the dead souls wanted to explore. To make the connection more direct, she would have to explore the lives they lived and find an item or memory that they clearly identified with. This was a totem that tied them to their times of being alive. It would take a few nights of having the item or a memory held keenly in her mind (or literally in her hands) before they would arrive. And often when they did, their messages were difficult to understand. Ella likened her side of the equation to that of having to learn another language in a single evening.
Alice had no doubt in her abilities. Plus, it gave her meaning beyond trying to survive the disease climbing up her brain stem.
“I’ll try again, of course. They seem to like privacy, so I’ve been working overtime on these ones, with their own individual totems at night.”
“You be sure to book in some extra naps for yourself then Ella, all right? That’s an order.”
Ella smiled, then moved the paper down the table towards Alice.
“I believe we’ve heard everything that resembles being entirely necessary, for now. Alice, I believe it’s your turn to add to the pile. Come on then.” Craig motioned toward the doors with that sharp chin. Alice stood up and motioned herself toward the rest of the most trusted members of the Crowden team. “Save some pancakes for me later, alright?”
She followed Craig out of the room, the door closing behind them with an audible slam.
“Well, that was mostly painless.”
“They’re pissed Alice. Royally. Only Emmett at this point has the balls to actually express it.”
Alice followed closely behind Craig, who was streamlining down the hallway with a track-runners intent. His dress shoes clicked against the floor like some sexy heels Alice remembered Claire wearing for her, one night three years ago.
We’ll dive into that pool later.
Alice shook her head and continued their path toward the QR.
“Because I didn’t immediately hitch myself onto the new threat wagon? You, more than anyone, knows how many times we have received fake threats. And jurisdictionally wise, it generally takes a millennium for local authorities to let us get involved.”
Craig stopped outside another room, this time, it was a black, velvet-looking door. He pressed his finger against another scanner, while a voice asked him to describe how he first felt when meeting the next person entering the QR. “When I met Alice Solie for the first time, I was riveted. And annoyed.” The door slid open like an alien spacecraft. Alice shrugged, with her palms facing upward.
“I suppose some first impressions are everything, aren’t they?”
Alice stepped into an empty white room. The ceiling, the floor and the side paneling were all made of flat stone linoleum. Beneath this surface was the most refined sound isolation material that has ever existed. It was told to Alice that it was the quietest room in the world, and that any person who wasn’t a psy, who sat in it would be able to hear the sound of a person’s blood moving through their veins. Alice, as presumably, one of the world’s most skilled psies, already possessed this ability. But along with other normal external sounds that blocked her ability to project her mind into the world, these internal sounds of thoughts, blood and neutron movement, as well as body temperature fluctuations and bone cracking, made for a frustrating melody and sensations. Alice’s injured left-eye possessed the ability to dial these sensitivities, but only to a certain extent in the real world. She would become easily overwhelmed if she always had it open, because then a rush of physical stimuli could take over: Thermal imaging, the sight of more unsatisfying movement, the pulsing of colors that detected mood of the environment and sometimes the individual. But in this room, the world was silent. And Alice was alone.
The door behind her sucked shut. It had been a few years since she had used the QR to harness her abilities. But the process for someone like Alice was simple—she would sit, with a device on her head that connected her to the observation room, where Craig watched the changes in her brain and would record possible information Alice may not detect. The device was white, almost mythological-looking. She placed it over her head and had to be sure that its thin ends connected to the orbital, parietal, frontal and temporal lobe of her brain. She sat in the center of the room and crossed her legs. She closed her eyes and thought to herself that the device on her head looked more like the remains of a dinosaur skull, before she began projecting.
Black room, oil like. Claire is here, she’s naked. She’s kissing me. She’s taking me away and leading me out through a field of weed
s—
No, stay close. There’s someone else here. It feels like Claire, but it’s not her. It’s unkind. It means harm more than anything else. It wants me to know that.
Something wet on my ear—a tongue. Not Claire’s. It’s whispering, saying something.
“I think you know.”
No, I don’t.
“We’re not so different, really.”
What do you mean? How could we possibly be the same?
