Page 53 of Heart of Danger
“I’m, um…I’m different. I’m not like other people.”
“Go on.” His voice was low and steady.
Here goes.“I can—I can feel people’s emotions when I touch them,” she said carefully.
“I got something of that yesterday.” He was watching her carefully.
She bit her lips and nodded. It was impossible to read his face except that he did not look happy.
“It’s—it’s sort of a gift. But it feels like a curse most of the time and it comes and it goes. I was twelve before I realized that this didn’t happen to everyone. Luckily, I had very cold parents who hardly ever touched me. So it wasn’t until adolescence that I discovered what I could do.Reallydiscover it, I mean.” Her parents had loathed each other, and every time as a little girl Catherine touched either her mother or father all she got was an Arctic blast of hatred. Instinctively, as kids do, she avoided the source of discomfort.
“After several instances of people looking differently at me when I said something I shouldn’t have known, I finally got it that what was normal knowledge for me wasn’t for other people.”
Looking differently at me.The words sounded so normal, everyday fare. Everyone got askance looks, didn’t they?
Catherine had had iced drinks thrown in her face, like in that ancient TV show Glee, only less fun. Her first car had been a 10 year old Economo she’d bought her senior year with money working in a supermarket weekends and one afternoon she’d come out from school to find the tires slashed. Kids avoided her in the hallways. Nobody wanted the locker next to hers.
In high school more or less everyone’s emotions were raw and scorching just under the surface. The most popular girl in the school—at home, her father was abusing her. Surrounding her was a bright mirror-like surface of happiness and beneath was swirling darkness shot through with a burning desire to die. The linebacker who couldn’t see a female without wanting to fuck her, a dark and painful compulsion. The science nerd who hated everyone with a viciousness that shocked her. It had all been too much. The only solution—don’t talk to anyone and above all, whatever you do, don’t touch anyone.
High school had been her own solitary private hell.
“What do you know? What do you pick up on?” The questions sounded reluctant, as if asking them meant he bought into the whole thing, was diving into the madness headfirst. “What kind of intel—info—do you get?”
She thought carefully. “I can’t read minds, if that’s what you think.” Until Patient Nine at least. “It’s not like a radio station that broadcasts the thoughts in your head as if they were the evening news.” He relaxed slightly. He was hiding something. That was cool. Everyone had secrets. God knew she had her own. “I don’t know what’s on your grocery list or what’s in your bank account or who you’re meeting for a date. I don’t know specifics. But…I’d know if you were worried or happy or sad.” Or suicidal or homicidal or schizophrenic. She suppressed a shudder.
He sat still, processing this. She let him work his way through it because it was a lot to swallow. Blinking as if just coming out of a cave into the sunlight, he leaned forward a little. “Let’s fast forward to Patient Nine.”
“Okay. You believe me then?” She looked at him hopefully.
“Let’s say I’m suspending disbelief.” He drummed long fingers on the table. She stared at his hand, so big and powerful. The skin was rough, not a pampered manicured hand at all. A long white scar covered the back, flanked by tiny white lines, like a ladder. A wound, stitched up. “It’s a lot to take in.”
She nodded. It was.
“So…Patient Nine. At Millon Laboratories.” His face was impassive. No expression at all, except grimness and intense focus. “How long have you worked there?”
A sudden bust of impatience seized her.Come on. “Stop that! I saw the computing power you’ve got here, Mac. Don’t forget that. A clever man—and you all strike me as clever men—can find out just about anything with that kind of crunching power. You probably already know my grade point average in high school, the classes I took in college, you most certainly know how long I’ve been working at Millon.”
She didn’t even try to keep the sharpness out of her voice. What the hell. She was baring her soul here and he was playing games with her.
He wasn’t taken aback by her outburst. He just dipped his head.Point taken.
“So let’s cut to the chase. Tell me what you do there. Your duties.”
“Running a dementia project. Millon operates on the basis of projects. It tends to keep teams compartmentalized, particularly in the Palo Alto lab, where we work in leading edge research. The practice at Millon is to keep each research team completely separate and we collate data on a quarterly basis. There’s very little contamination from one department to another. I was actually working alone on an aspect of the company’s project to find a cure for dementia. We’re testing various formulae involving genetically modified human growth hormone, the idea being to restore lost neurological tissue. We have a rotating cycle of test subjects, most of them suffering from extremely advanced dementia. They had either given informed consent previously, while they were still of sound mind and body, or else their relatives did, hoping for a cure. Most of them were end stage patients. We weren’t given their names or backgrounds, since most of what they had been was lost to them anyway. They were simply assigned numbers.”
He cocked his head slightly to one side. “What did you read off the dementia patients?”
“I wear latex gloves. We all do.”
He said nothing, just watched her.
“Okay,” Catherine sighed. “Sometimes I touched them.”
“And you read?—?”
“Darkness,” she said softly. “Despair. Sometimes—nothing.”
He flinched slightly.
