Cracking the Sky (8 page)

“So she wasn’t veiled in her picture? You know what her face looks like?”

“Yes. But she had on a turtleneck and a neck scarf in the desert.” She frowned. “She’s pretty. Almost thirty-five, and her skin’s like cream.”

“What did she tell you about the caravan? Did she, like, narrate?”

“Just the names of the camels and the people. I think she liked the camels better. Who’d have thought I’d be doing a camel fair in 2021?”

“I think it’s cool the world is still different in some places. Did you feel like she was talking to—well, to you? Or was she narrating for a stranger?”

Kay laughed. “I am a stranger. Look, I gotta meet my group from Online Finance. We get to see if we made money yet.”

“Of course you did.”

“Well, how much.”

*

My next class was Vertical Gardening, a bit of engineering daydream about feeding the world by planting green skyscrapers full of dirt and lights in major cities. I kept seeing Valeria walking around the buildings in my head, her strong dark face and slender body limping among the lush corn and beans and wheat on the fiftieth floor or striding through the rooftop flower garden, looking down at the sculptured beds as if they represented evil instead of beauty.

Each student got to call their hosts at night. They required we do that from the diplo department offices. Our calls were by team for the first day, so Kay and I met again in Dr. Peter’s tiny office. There were only two real books, stacked horizontally on top of his desk. A copy of the
Rubiyat
, the big illustrated kind, and a slim, battered version of
The Art of War
. I couldn’t picture him reading the
Rubiyat
.

He told us what to say (thanks, and to ask any questions we had about the day) and what not to say (anything that would make them think we saw ourselves as better than them, a lecture we got all the time, not to think we were better at all, ever. We knew that, but Dr. Peters told us every day anyway). Lecture delivered, he told me to wait and asked Kay to follow him to another office.

When he came back into his office, he sat down more quietly than I expected and gave me a thoughtful look. It felt like he wanted me to say something, but I held out. I didn’t want to be the one who started the process of beating me up for feeling Valeria. Finally he said, “You are a rare one.”

I waited.

“Only one in a hundred people have your empathy with the hosts.”

“What about Mathew?” I challenged him. “He was almost crying.”

“Because of what he saw, and how that made him feel. Not because of how much he felt his host’s pain.”

I wasn’t sure I understood. “You think I feel Valeria more than he felt . . .” I had to reach for the name of his host. “Jacob? Why?”

“It’s almost never men.”

“Oh.”

“And you had so much feeling in your report.”

Yeah. I felt my cheeks get hot. He must have read my uncertainty about his reaction on my face. “It’s okay. But I wanted a moment with you. What you think you feel from her may not be what she is feeling. Your interpretations will still be filtered through your own experiences, even if you are as strong an emotional rider as possible.”

I twisted my hands a bit and thought about it. “So you’re saying I may think I know what she feels but not really know?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“So why are you so sure I’m feeling more about Valeria than the other students feel about their hosts? Was it what I wrote?”

“Partly. And partly how your brain waves pattern.”

Right. Like we students were bugs. I’d known it was all experimental.

He went on, his voice almost soft and friendly. “It means you’ll be particularly valuable. Your skill is rare enough that I’m sure I can get you work—real work—even before you graduate.”

“Diplo work?”

He shook his head. “Sort of. We’re information gatherers. We ride victims and catch bad guys. Remember the story in last week’s paper, where the slaver ring in South Korea got busted up and fifty teenage girls got to go home? We caught the bastards by riding one of the girls. That’s how we got descriptions of the slavers and figured out how to find evidence.”

Oh. Wow. What would that feel like? “So wouldn’t you want someone who didn’t feel their hosts for that?”

He smiled. “Some hosts can feel their riders. They get good at this and use it for misinformation.”

Oh.

“Plus, an empath we’ve validated can use the emotional state of the host in court.”

All right. Enough new information. “Can I call Valeria now? She must be waiting for me.”

The way his gaze stopped for a long time on my face, I figured that if he could stick me with a pin and display me he would. But instead, he nodded. “Go on. But push her. Tell her to show you what she’s scared of. I’ll be done with all the other students at nine tonight. Can you drop by then?”

And just like I’d sent him the paper without thinking, I nodded without thinking. Someday I was going to get out of the blind obey mode. Really I was.

But first, I placed my call to Valeria.

Her voice sounded slightly higher on the phone than it had in my head. We had video, a small square of her face showing in my computer monitor as she smiled and said, “Hello, Isa, how are you?”

We talked for a few minutes about nothing, the thank you’s and all that. I leaned forward in the hard chair. “What was it like for you, having someone else in your head?”

She looked away and then said, “Odd.”

At least she wasn’t lying. “Were you afraid?”

“No.”

“Of something besides me?”

Hesitation gave her away, although she said, “There is always fear here.”

“Show me.”

She blinked at the screen, and then started twisting her fingers through her copious dark curls. “Tomorrow we’re going to my home and you will see me talking to my family. In Spanish.” She grinned. “Sometimes I am afraid of my mother.”

I laughed. It was the most genuine response I’d seen from her. “Then ignore that fear. I’ll never follow the conversation. I only have two years of school Spanish.” But she wasn’t talking about her fears. I didn’t want another tourist day. “Can you go look at whatever scared you yesterday, instead? I want to understand how we can help.”

Her eyes widened and her mouth opened. She leaned away from the camera, which had the effect of making her head look smaller in my computer screen. A tense look took over her face, thinning her lips and narrowing her eyes. “You are like—the NGOs. You try to change the world into a better place, which means someplace you feel comfortable.”

That stung. “A safer place.” An uncomfortable silence stretched for a bit, then I said, “So show me what would be better. For you.”

“You don’t know what to do, so you flutter around the edges of our real problems.”

“Which are?”

“Maybe you should keep your eyes open and then you’ll see.”

I pushed back. “I’m in school. I need to learn something. If you hide yourself from me every time I’m with you, what will I learn?”

Her voice was stiff. “If I see anything I’m afraid of tomorrow, I’ll show you.” She glanced at her watch and looked resigned to spending more time on the call with me.

“I’ll tell you about me.”

She nodded.

“I’m interested in global sustainability. I want to help people find ways to live together.”

She stared straight forward at the screen.

“I mean it when I say I want to help.”

Silence.

“Don’t you want sustainability?”

More silence.

This time, I didn’t say anything either.

Eventually, she spoke. She had to; I was her employer. “I want to have the world back the way I knew it before. Before Hurricane Mallory, before my little brother died, when more tourists flew down here.”

“What did your brother die of?”

She looked away. “He ran drugs and he got shot.”

“I’m sorry.” What to say next? “There is no place to go but the future.”

She stared back at me from the tiny square on the screen. Her beaches were cleaner now, and so was her air. Maybe the reefs would recover, but there was no telling yet.

I made my words as gentle as I could. “You can’t go backward.”

“Forward means I have a tourist in my head.” I wasn’t riding her that moment, I couldn’t feel her. But some things can be written on faces. Despair, and feeling trapped.

“If you don’t want me with you, I’ll find someone else.”

She swallowed and looked away, her head bowed down at an angle and her hair falling across one closed eye. “Please don’t.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow. Please show me why you’re scared.” I fell silent. We’d been told to push them in this hour, that it was the only time we would really connect. After all, when we rode them, we couldn’t talk to them at all. I lowered my voice to almost a whisper, a soft-ball plea. “I need to learn.”

“I promised to tell you about more tomorrow, about what is scary for me.”

But she didn’t promise to look for it.

“I don’t promise to like you.”

I barely managed not to show my shock on my face. I liked her! “I know. Thank you,” I said, and closed the connection, setting her free to be herself. Maybe this was what the Good Doctor meant by riding victims, although I didn’t think so. Of course, being scared of something didn’t make her a victim; it made her scared. And not liking me made her smart, in the sense that I was an intrusive stranger. I had to become more to her.

At least I knew her fear was real. Maybe I was lucky to have a first-timer—I would be willing to bet Bani would never open up to Kay. Even if Bani hated Kay as much as Valeria hated me, Kay would never know it.

I left before Kay was done with her phone calls, and before Dr. Peters returned, hugging the walls, sliding past students preparing for night classes and joking about yesterday’s losing game. Outside, the cooling air braced me. I walked through it for an hour, aimless and meandering, thinking about feeling Valeria.

Just before nine, I waited in the hallway outside of the Good Doctor’s office. I hadn’t told Kay I was coming back, and it felt weird to keep things from her. I kept my all-in-one off so I wouldn’t have to lie to her if she reached out for me.

Darlene, the puking girl, finished up a conversation with Dr. Peters where she rubbed her belly and made funny faces and he shook his head at her and sat back in his chair looking resigned. Right on the hour he stood up while she was mid-sentence, waiting politely while she gathered her things. When she saw me she gave a little wave and ducked her head, and I could already hear the rumors. I should have been late.

And then he was closing the door behind him. “Have you eaten?”

Well, no. So I shook my head, suddenly mute.

“Then let’s go get a burger.”

Instead of walking over to the U-District, I followed him onto a Capitol Hill bus and we ended up in a cheap bar a lot like the ones closer to the University, except this one wasn’t full of students. He ignored the slightly-dressed hostess and led me through a room with pool tables and immersives and outside onto a deck with a view of the lights of West Seattle sprinkling glitter on the dark water of the Sound.

The table he picked wasn’t empty. A slender gray-haired man in a navy-blue sweatshirt nodded as Dr. Peters sat down. “This must be Isa,” he said.

Dr. Peters nodded and glanced at me. “Isa. This is Dr. David Meera from the NSA.”

The what? Why hadn’t Dr. Peters told me he was meeting somebody else? I held out my hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

Dr. Meera’s hand was dry, his grip firm.

Dr. Peters said, “I called him after I read your notes this afternoon. We have . . . something has come up and we may . . .”

The older man interrupted. “We need to give you more background. Valeria is in real danger.” He picked up the plastic-sheathed menu and glanced up at an approaching waitress, an older woman with stringy red hair and kind, blue eyes. “Let’s order.”

I’d just lost my appetite, but I managed to squeak out an order for a hamburger with a side salad and a microbrew. Neither man said anything else until our beers appeared. I finished a long, foamy sip. “Explain?” I suggested.

Dr. Meera continued. “Mexico still has a serious black market. Even though marijuana dried up with legalization, they can produce psilocybin and a number of other designer jungle drugs, especially in the Yucatán and Chiapas. Valeria’s mother and brother are in that business, which is why we recruited her.”

Her mother? Maybe she had been telling me her fears. I stayed quiet, sipping my beer while the pair of professors watched me. “They have some enemies, and that’s what Valeria was afraid of. You sensed that, right away. We were going to let her get used to being ridden with a few classes of students, then introduce someone better for her, an emotion rider like you, but with advanced training.”

Dr. Peters took it up. “Someone like what you could become.”

A sudden fear iced my stomach. “Are you going to take Valeria away from me?”

“We should,” Dr. Peters said sharply.

Dr. Meera, however, shook his head. He was clearly the boss. “There’s no time. Rivals are closing in on Valeria’s family. It’s possible you are the only one who can save her.”

The conversation had shifted into bad dialogue from a low-budget movie. I managed to come up with an appropriate line. “A little melodramatic aren’t we?” I watched them both as I took another sip of beer. They didn’t flinch under my gaze. “Tell me you’re just testing me. This is part of the class, right?”

Silence.

“I can’t talk to her. How am I supposed to save her from anything?”

Dr. Meera put his hand on mine, on the table. He used light force, flattening my fingers against the oak. “Sometimes you can’t. But if anyone threatens her, or hurts her, or kills her, you will be able to see who they are and act as a witness.”

“You aren’t pulling your punches.”

“We need to know if you’re strong enough.”

Dr. Peters had given all the real war zones to the men in the class. “I can do it.” Dr. Meera hadn’t moved his hand, so I tugged mine out from under his. “I’ll be okay. I want this job . . . I want into the corps and I need to do the hard stuff.”