Diamond Eyes (42 page)

‘What did you see that frightened you the most?’ asked Van Danik.

Mira shivered at the memory of red fog and the killer koala. ‘I’m not sure, but it had lots of teeth and claws.’

‘Don’t worry until we get you into the hot seat,’ Zhou said. ‘If the various filters are having an amplified effect on those remarkable eyes of yours, it will be a fairly easy theory to put to a test.’

‘What about that boy?’ she said, allowing Ben to lead her to the chair. ‘It doesn’t explain how he could see me.’

‘What boy?’ asked Zhou.

Ben pulled the chair back and guided her into it. ‘Mira claims she saw a boy out there near the elevator —’

‘Not just claim — I did see him! And he saw me. He was mongoloid, you know, very cuddly looking with a big round head and eyes like my father.’

Ben crouched beside her. ‘Your father had Down’s syndrome? That’s not on your file. Why didn’t you mention it earlier?’

‘It wasn’t important … was it?’

Van Danik whistled. ‘If both parents carried the Fragile X gene, it would certainly help to explain your mutation.’

‘Mutation?’ Mira frowned. ‘So I really am a mutant?’

‘Oh no, no, no!’ Zhou replied swiftly. ‘With or without your eyes, you’re still the same lovely person. It’s just rare — almost unheard of — for a Down’s syndrome male to sire a child, let alone one with such fine motor skills as you have.’

Mira blushed and fidgeted.
Dr Zhou thinks I’m lovely!
She wondered how close lovely was to sexy.

Sensing the warmth of Ben’s arm on the table close to hers, she edged a little closer to him. He responded by clasping her fingers and his warmth engulfed her. She blushed again, trying to relax and forget what Van Danik had said about her mutation.

‘I still have doubts,’ Ben confessed. ‘If her father suffered Down’s syndrome, how did he manage to run the bird sanctuary? I mean, obviously there’ve been cases where sufferers have received so much therapy and attention as children they’ve managed to develop well enough to lead close to normal lives as adults, but if that were the case, surely it should have been documented? There has to be something else going on.’

‘He didn’t run the bird sanctuary,’ Mira said. ‘My grandfather did, and when he died of a heart attack, my father pulled down the sign at the gate and told any visitors who came to go away.’

‘How long ago was that?’ asked Ben. ‘That your grandfather died?’

‘I’m not sure. My first year at school, I think, so I must have been five or six.’

‘Regardless,’ Zhou said, ‘you have a unique condition, young lady, that seems to be limiting oramplifying what you’re seeing. Are you ready to find out which it is?’

‘Am I ever!’

Mira listened to the sounds of Van Danik retaking his seat, then allowed him to take her hand away from Ben’s and guide her fingers onto the cool glass receptor. Zhou assisted her with the remote EEG units for her head, and Ben helped attach the heart monitors to her chest, although his fingers seemed almost hesitant.

‘We need to calibrate,’ Zhou told her, ‘so please could you take off your glasses for the control questions.’

‘Didn’t you ask all the control questions last time?’

‘Standard procedure,’ Van Danik explained. ‘Your body’s metabolism runs slightly differently every day, depending on how you’re feeling, what you’ve eaten … Even the ambient temperature and surroundings can affect our readings. So we need to recalibrate our equipment each time.’

‘If I have to start with my glasses off again, can we turn off the lights, please? The bright light hurts me.’

Van Danik and Zhou agreed as one voice.

‘I’ve got the switch,’ Duet offered, still near the door. ‘Karin, you stay in here. I’ll keep watch from the hall.’

‘Isn’t Mr Hawthorn already doing that?’ Mira asked.

‘What did you say?’ asked Duet, sounding shaken.

‘Mr Hawthorn — I saw him out there.’

‘Sergeant Hawthorn? Are you sure?’ asked Karin Sei, equally surprised.

‘Sergeant? I don’t know about any sergeant, but Mr Hawthorn was out there. His first name’s Hank, isn’t it?’

Footsteps hurried past Mira in a perfumed breeze, but when someone bumped against the wall near the door, Mira couldn’t guess if it was Duet or Sei. They were both there and their movements seemed agitated.

‘The hall’s clear,’ Duet reported.

‘Where did you see him?’ asked Sei.

‘He was just there in the hall. I walked through him to get in here, but his ghost goes much slower than his sounds, so maybe he’s still coming?’

‘Oh …’ Duet sighed. ‘I forgot you were crazy.’

‘That’s enough,’ Zhou snapped. ‘Get out and let us get started.’

‘And if you see a waiter,’ quipped Van Danik, ‘order a platter of jelly snakes for us and some chocolate for Mira.’

Mira brightened, surprised that he, of all people, would remember that chocolate was the only sweet she liked.

She heard the door close and the perfume wafted past her again. A chair rolled away from her on casters across the carpet, and she guessed it was Karin Sei rolling her seat to the furthest corner of the room. The chair and her footsteps stopped at the window, and the cushion sighed as it took the weight of her body.

Sighed sexily,
Mira thought. She shrugged her hair back off her shoulders, hoping it made her look prettier.

‘When you’re ready,’ Zhou said. ‘The lights are off now, so you can take off your glasses any time.’

Mira took one last look around the foggy room: the lights were still blazing, and there was no sign of Van Danik’s ghost there to assist with the equipment. But she shunned the fear that was swelling up in her chest and resolved to trust them, or at least to trust them not to hurt her any more than was necessary. She didn’t bother to close her eyes this time. She prepared herself mentally for the pain and the terrifying leap into foggyblue sky, then took off her sunglasses in front of Zhou’s ghostly ophthalmoscope.

His ghost and that of the scope disappeared upwards in time with the raising of her glasses. So did the desks, chairs and heavy drapes at the window, replaced by a ghostly blue bed with the bulge of a young couple wrestling … Not wrestling, she realised as the bedcovers fell back. They were naked!

She blushed and looked away, only to find herself inside an old timber wall that had appeared immediately behind her, halving the room. Startled, she shied away from that too, trying hard not to look at either it or the Olympics in the bed.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Ben. ‘What do you see?’

‘It’s a hotel room! What do you think I see?’

‘Can you be more specific?’ asked Zhou.

‘Everything’s blue.’

Metal brushed her cheek and she startled again, but settled quickly, guessing Zhou had adjusted the scope into a slightly different place to its ghost, which she couldn’t see now anyway. She tried to stay still and look around by turning her eyes.

‘You’re in the sky?’ Zhou asked.

‘No, thank goodness. I’m still at ground level, but this conference room is now a bedroom, and we’re not alone. There are two … two ghosts in here.’

She glanced at the lovers. The woman had switched places with the man and was now on top, writhing and silently panting. Her long hair fell wildly down her back, her face contorted and she looked anything but sexy! More like a feral animal.

‘Is it hot in here?’ Mira asked, feeling flustered.

‘Your body temperature has risen a little,’ Van Danik reported. ‘Are you feeling okay?’

Mira tried to concentrate. ‘It’s much smaller in here. There’s a new … I mean an
old
wall behind me that’s new … The door and window stayed the same, except for the curtains, and all the paint is gone.’

‘Paint?’ asked Ben. ‘You mean paintings?’

‘No, the walls are all bare timber now. So is the floor, except for a big sheepskin rug near the bed. Oh, and the light fitting has changed. It’s not a long fluorescent tube anymore. It’s just a bare light bulb.’

‘You have an excellent eye for details,’ Zhou replied. ‘Better than many sighted people. That sounds like an old house I used to live in as a child. It was built during the Depression, when paint was expensive, and my parents were poor political refugees so it never did get a coat before it burned down.’

‘All true as far as she’s concerned,’ Van Danik reported. ‘But she’s still spiking off the scale, same as yesterday. Brain activity, cognitive patterns — they’re all haywire — almost as if she’s getting too much blood supply.’

Mira closed her eyes briefly to ease the pain of trying to focus through a haze. Without the sunglasses, she could feel the perpetual ache beginning to sharpen. She rubbed her eyelids.

‘Hey, look!’ Van Danik said. ‘Do that again, Mira.’

She complied, leaving her eyes closed longer this time and clenching them tighter to maximise her relief.

‘Yes, look, look!’ Van Danik shuffled something metallic across the desk. ‘See that spike, Zan? What do you make of it?’

‘It’s a glitch, unless …’ Zhou moved something else on the desk. ‘Keep your eyes closed, Mira … Now relax your eyelids.’

She obeyed, keeping them closed, but a three-pronged shadow whisked past her face with a breeze and she flinched.

‘Whoa!’ Zhou cried. ‘She saw that!’

‘I saw what?’

‘You tell me,’ he replied. ‘Ask your subconscious.’

‘Please don’t tease me. I had my eyes shut, so even I know I couldn’t see anything.’

‘Even so, you detected something specific — admit it.’

‘Of course, I felt your —’

‘No, Mira,’ Van Danik interrupted. ‘We’re not interested in what you could feel. This scan clearly shows that your brain just received data from your eyes, even though they were closed.’

‘That’s crazy!’ she complained.

‘No, that’s quite normal,’ Zhou replied. ‘All sighted people can detect a certain degree of light through their eyelids, and the brain uses this information to keep reflexes and instincts alert to danger, especially during rest or sleep. Your striking response simply suggests that you’re hypersensitive to this too. So go ahead and ask your subconscious what you think you saw.’

‘I can only guess … it was your hand, maybe … No, wait.’ The answer came to her and she smiled. ‘It was your hand with your thumb and little finger folded down into your palm.’

‘Yes!’ Zhou slammed something hard onto the table. ‘That’s exactly what it was! I just swept three fingers close past your face.’

‘But I’m blind. I can’t see you with my eyes open! How could I manage it with my eyes closed?’

‘An excellent question that’s easily answered — usually. Eyes are elegantly sophisticated and yet quite simple to understand and explain, but yours are … Well, they’re quite obviously different.’

‘What about her eyelids?’ Ben asked. ‘I thought light just stopped when we shut them, but if our brains stay alert to light changes through our eyelids, even when we’re asleep, does this mean her eyelids function normally?’

‘That’s a reasonable deduction,’ Zhou agreed.

‘How, though?’ Ben persisted. ‘How can we possibly see light with our eyelids closed?’

‘The light spectrum is a complicated thing,’ Zhou said. ‘Colours and shapes are interpreted easily and with acute precision by our brains when our receptor shields — our eyelids — are open, but what you may not realise is that many wavelengths can pass through our skin easily: X-rays, gamma rays, microwaves … theoretically, any wavelength that can be blocked enough to cast a shadow may still permeate or pass through a body in microscopic doses, including light waves from the visible spectrum. And it’s not only our eyes that can detect light waves. Our skin, and even our internal organs, can be sensitive to light and radiation. We know this to be true because our bodies react in various ways to prolonged exposure by browning, burning or developing cancer.’

Ben’s clothes rustled as he leaned closer. ‘Mira once told me she could
feel
colours.’

‘Having seen the complexity of these brain patterns,’ Zhou replied, ‘I wouldn’t doubt it. It’s well known that humans and animals, once deprived of one sense, often develop the others to compensate. Auditory and olfactory senses are the two most easily measured — that’s hearing and smell, Mira. But theoretically, it’s possible that sensitivity to colour radiation may also be heightened. I wouldn’t let her go outside anymore, by the way, without a high-quality sunscreen. I suspect she’s more susceptible to skin cancers than the rest of us.’

Ben patted Mira’s hand. ‘I’ll make sure Matron Sanchez knows.’

‘Try another pair now,’ Van Danik suggested. ‘From lightest tint to darkest.’

‘It’d be more helpful to evaluate them in order of their tint across the spectrum,’ Zhou said. ‘Line them upfor us, like a rainbow, Ben: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. But hand them to Mira out of order so she won’t be influenced by any foreknowledge.’

‘I only bought four pairs,’ Ben said. ‘No green, blue or indigo. And where does black tint, brown or mirrored come into it?’

‘Brown and black aren’t strictly part of the spectrum,’ Zhou replied. ‘They’re colour combinations, so just hold them up and see as best as you can in this light which tint they most resemble.’

‘Got it. Here’s the first pair, Mira.’

Ben eased them onto her face, and she heard him shuffling the others. Zhou shifted in his seat and cleared his throat.

‘When you’re ready,’ he said, ‘open up and describe what you see.’

‘The fog is orange,’ Mira replied nervously. ‘Sort of a light golden orange, and I’m in a dry, lightly treed field at the edge of grassy sand dunes. I tried this pair in the van on the way here, but I was on the other side of this field and the hazy sun was over my left shoulder. Now it’s over my right.’

‘Hey, that’s true,’ Ben said, just as Van Danik confirmed it too. ‘We were facing south on the way here, but now, in this room, she’s facing north. And that
is
the pair I gave her to try in the van; one of two pairs that seemed to frighten her.’

‘What frightened you with these?’ Zhou asked ‘Aside from the dreadful way they clash with your pretty dress?’

‘A spear.’ Mira blushed, distracted momentarily by embarrassment. Then she glanced from side to side, her movements limited by the chin strap. ‘But I can’t see any hunters now.’