“If it’s not too late.”
There was an edge to her voice I’d never heard before. Or maybe it had been there—it wasn’t as if we’d never argued—but no longer able to Sense beneath the words, I suddenly found it overwhelming.
I let a few flies buzz close, but they told me nothing useful. Skin temperature 94.2. Respiration 16. It was just data. My swarm had shrunk to the point where I could no longer tell how she felt.
“Are we okay?” I blurted.
“What do you mean?”
“Are we okay?” I hesitated. Took the plunge. “Do you still love me?”
“What on Earth would make you ask that?”
“That’s not an answer. Do you still love me?”
“Like when we were kids?”
“Yes… No… Like when…” Like when we clung against the partings. When we thought each moment might be our last. “Like we used to.”
Once, even without the Sense, I’d been able to read her soul through her eyes. But that was then. The Sense had augmented me but it had also contracted me. Now, I couldn’t read anything.
“Like we used to,” I said again.
She might have saved the moment with a kiss. Instead, she sighed. “Oh, Kip, of course I love you. It’s just that you’ve been gone so much… And when you come back… It’s as though part of you is somewhere else. Like you don’t really want to be here.”
“That’s not it. It’s just the job—”
“That’s what you always say. Well, this is ‘just’ ”—she fingered quote marks in the air—“us. ‘Just’ me. ‘Just’ Cora.”
I felt as though I’d been slapped. And I still couldn’t marshal enough bugs to get an integrated read. Heart rate 89. Pupils narrowed. Were those good signs or bad? A trainee could look it up in a manual, but I’d been deeply integrated for so long that I needed a true, fully functioning swarm. Friend/foe. Danger/safety. Love/love-lost. I no longer had enough sensors to translate “data” into “knowing.” I was losing that ability just when it felt like my whole life depended on getting it right.
“Are you seeing someone else?” I asked.
“What?” Skin conductivity 7.3. Breath 22. “What the hell are you talking about?” She swatted at a bug, distracting me as I reflexively pulled it back, feeling as though she was trying to destroy what little remained of me.
“You heard me. Are you seeing someone else?”
She pushed past me, heading for the side door, into the garage. “If you have to ask, you don’t really know me.” A moment later, the garage door rumbled up and tires squealed in the driveway.
The gully was deep enough to hide me, but also deep enough to dislocate my shoulder.
I’d always been told that on the pain scale, unless you go way high on the pain blocker, dislocations are about as close to a ten as you can get. But there’s also something about them that’s the stuff of nightmares. In training, there was a guy who slipped on a run, fell, and dislocated a finger. His left pinky, to be precise. I’ll never forget it, sticking out at an angle fingers aren’t supposed to point. We didn’t have a medic, hadn’t had any training yet in first aid, and it was just the two of us, so we ran back to base. Four miles. He never said a word. I didn’t either, but I couldn’t shut out the image of that hand. And now it was me. It wasn’t just the pain; it was the knowledge my shoulder no longer looked like a shoulder. My vision was tunneling toward a black spot and my ears felt stuffed with cotton—no sound but my pulse, receding by the second.
Then, training took over. Pain tab first. But not too much, because setting a shoulder correctly requires you to feel what you’re doing. Otherwise, you can wreck it forever. Or worse, damage nerves that helped integrate my tat with my swarm.
Next step: breathe deeply, calm down. Not easy because I didn’t have much time. The Ladenites knew where I was and would be here in minutes.
I thought of Denise, Cora. Fought back despair. If I was ever going to see them again, I had to do this right. I willed my breathing to slow, hoping my heart rate would follow. Thought of home. Thought of those before-departure nights in Denise’s arms. Felt my heart rate slow. Sensed myself to verify it was true.
Then I had to roll over on my stomach.
The first time it didn’t work. Bone rubbed against bone, thrumming through my entire body. For a moment, I thought the cotton would win and I’d pass out, helpless while the Ladenites found me. But when you really have to stay conscious, you can. On the third try, I made it onto my stomach and lay there, heaving, sweat cooling in the small of my back.
Next step, use the good arm to move the bad one out to the side. Slowly, because it hurt like hell. Forget the Ladenites who might already be heading this way. I had to do it right, and right was slowly. Besides, none of this had affected my swarm, and the familiarity of the Sense helped calm me. Reality was more than my own body. Nothing dangerous was coming yet.
Finally, the hard part. Reach upward and back, as though trying to scratch my back. Use the good arm to draw the bad one up and over. And then, snick, with a white-hot stab of pain, the shoulder was again a shoulder.
The disaster came later that evening. By mistake. A trivial, stupid, senseless accident. A Sense-less accident.
After Denise made her exit, I retreated to the basement—a cocoon into which I pulled what remained of my Sense with me. I tried to watch football. Couldn’t work up the energy to care. Channel-surfed. Wondered where she’d gone. Wondered if she was now with him. Wondered who he was. Wondered, in my more sane moments, if I was wondering the wrong things. Wished I knew. Wished I still had the ability to know.
And then, amazingly, I fell asleep.
Emotional trauma does that to you. One moment you’re balling your fists, wanting to punch through walls, as though you could physically hammer your way out of the box your mind has put you into. Then, suddenly, you’re so tired you can’t think. So tired the beer on the end table is an enormous dead weight, not worth the effort to lift, and instead of drinking yourself to sleep like you thought you were going to, you’re just suddenly, overwhelmingly asleep.
Until, of course, you wake.
Nowadays, waking comes too many times, too soon, at the behest of a middle-aged prostate. The first time, I stumble to the bathroom and try to pee in my sleep. Sometimes it works. Second time? No way. By then I’ve had the magic five hours—the amount the Corps says you can function on (if slightly zombified) nearly forever. At five hours, what you think is, Don’t think about it!Don’t… don’t… DON’T! Which of course means you can’t help but think about it. It being the Sense. Or Denise. Or Cora. Whatever was most hurting when you lost strength to lift that beer.
However long Denise was away, it wasn’t that long. What woke me was the knowledge someone was there. A swish of feet, a muffled thunk, a shadowed shape between me and the stairs, between me and escape. After enough years in the field, you sleep lightly, wake quickly, and give no sign when you flip from one to the other.
Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye? Who knows? Once upon a time, she’d have come quietly up, hugged me, and kissed my ear. Once upon a time, I’d have known this, pretended to be pleasantly surprised anyway.
Now, everything was a surprise.
For one horrible moment, I was back in the ravine.