Neptune's Tears (2 page)

When the sample shipment of Neptune diamonds finally reached earth, the last of the robots had fallen silent. All had spent the last hours of their existence fulfilling the mission, making sure
at least one shipment of diamonds was sent back to Earth. The diamonds had become Neptune’s Tears. Two sets of Mrs Hart’s designs were made. The one with the real diamonds was put on
display under bulletproof glass with a plaque that read,
To Heroes
. The other set was fitted with fakes and given to Mrs Hart.

Mrs Hart’s were awfully good imitations, Zee thought. Whoever had made them even managed to replicate the unique champagne sparkle of the real thing. People were still trying to replicate
the shade, and hunting for it in the diamond-rich mountains of the Antarctic Ocean, but no one had succeeded. Zee wondered who had made these.

Zee looked at Mrs Hart, suddenly understanding the tangle of emotions she’d sensed earlier. ‘Disappointment,’ she said. ‘These became bad luck designs, didn’t they?
You never got to go to New York, even though nothing that happened was your fault.’ For a split-second, Zee felt the weight of Mrs Hart’s disappointment. ‘That’s so
unfair!’

‘It was a long time ago, now. Almost a hundred years. And these fakes have been my good luck charms all this time, more than you’ll ever know.’ She shook her bangles as if
clearing the air. ‘Well, I’d say you’re more than up to your job. Shall we get started?’

Zee wished she’d been on duty when Mrs Hart was re-admitted. With divesting and two or three patients to see first, it would be two a.m. before Zee got to Mrs Hart’s room.

Mrs Hart would be sleeping when their session began, which was fine from a treatment standpoint, but Zee wouldn’t get to talk to her.

She looked at the rest of her patient list. Caroline Neville was back as well. Zee needed to talk to her adviser about that, because there was really nothing wrong with Caroline except that she
was lonely on Friday nights. Zee touched the screen again to see if there were any requests from her patients. Mrs Hart asked her to think of a lake at dusk with loons calling across it. A new
patient, a boy who’d had a leg grown to replace the one he’d lost from the knee down, asked if she could please imagine him running the four-hundred-metre race at his school’s
sports day and being the first to cross the finish line.

This was why Zee loved working with kids. They had a gift for healing. His parents had probably reminded him that first he’d have to learn to walk again, or told him that winning was a
team
effort. But little Antoine with the budding leg had asked for just the right thing. Sometimes you
did
have to run before you could walk, at least in your heart.

Finished, Zee touched the screen one more time and it turned back into a mirror. Her two eyes appeared where names and charts had been. Her hair! It took two hands to gather it back, and even
then a few spiralling strands escaped. She tried tucking them in, without much luck. It wasn’t long enough yet. That pinecone cut really
had
been a mistake. She snapped a band around
it, then slid her ID over her head, making sure the sensors in the cord touched the skin on the back of her neck. Two years training, one interning, and she still felt the tickle of excitement when
the sensors made contact and her name tag began to glow with the soft, optimistic blue of her profession.
Zee McAdams, Empath.

Zee pushed through the double doors marked
DIVESTING
and entered a long, quiet corridor where the light gradually went from white to shadowy blues and greens. It was like wading into a
tranquil pool, the colours reaching first up to her knees, then her waist and shoulders. Another twenty-five metres and she began to feel like a tadpole swimming beneath a canopy of lilypads.

She had taken to divesting faster than most. In the beginning, it could take interns hours to divest, but Zee had seldom taken more than an hour. And once she divested, she hung onto it. She
didn’t get distracted and she’d never boomeranged, snapping back into herself. Everyone in her class envied her for catching on so fast, but Zee thought it was probably just because she
was young and not much had happened to her.

In the divesting room she found an empty pod, chose her light levels and programmed sounds and images. Some empaths liked to lie down, some preferred sitting on the floor, cross-legged. Just an
ordinary table and chair worked fine for Zee. In the pod, she dropped her arms to her sides, closed her eyes and let her head tip forward like a heavy flower. Then she began building the healing
bridge, the invisible waves of energy that connected her to each of her patients and would, over the course of her shift, draw her to each of them in turn. No two empaths built their bridge in
exactly the same way. Zee’s started with magic beans tossed into the darkness and a quick flurry of vines and leaves – different coloured vines for each patient. When the vines began to
glow, a drift of sparkling mist almost always appeared around them. Zee felt her shoulder, elbow, and wrist joints – oranges, lemons and limes in her visualisation – grow heavy, and all
the things that were her daily self began to flow away through her fingertips.

Forty minutes later, just as she set out for the paediatric wing, Piper Simms caught up with her. ‘Dr Morgan wants you in A&E exam room two,’ Piper said.

Zee didn’t like to talk to anyone between the time she finished divesting and the time she saw her first patient. Too much of herself might bubble back into the space she’d
created.

‘Can it wait? I’m on my way to a new patient. Leg bud.’ Zee found it hard to hide her impatience. Leg buds on children were not common, and she was eager for the new
experience.

‘The leg’s been reassigned.’ Piper flashed her handheld for Zee to see the orders screen. ‘To me.’

There was no need to look so triumphant about it, Zee thought. Three years ago, when Zee had started her training, Piper had been the best empath in the unit. Now she was struggling with burnout
and seemed to resent each new class of empaths that came along, and Zee in particular. Piper’s flashes of meanness were so frequent Zee had talked to her adviser about them.

‘Empath envy,’ the adviser had explained. ‘Piper knows you can become as good an empath as she was.’

‘But I make mistakes. I miss so many things.’ Zee had paused a moment. ‘Why did you say was?’

‘What?’

‘Was. You said I could be as good as she
was.
’

‘Ah.’ Her adviser had become thoughtful. ‘Well. Piper’s three years older than you and suffering an affliction hazardous to all empaths. She’s fallen in
love.’

It was the first time Zee had ever heard how deeply personal attachments could affect her work. Strong emotions, hate as well as love, could derail an empath’s ability to concentrate. Zee
felt truly sorry for Piper.

‘Will she ever get it back? I mean, if she gets married and that’s all settled down and taken care of, will she be best again?’

‘Some do,’ the adviser had said. ‘Some wash out, and some struggle with it all their lives. There’s no way of predicting. Piper will always be a good, even gifted,
empath. But as good as she was? Time will tell. In the meantime, always try to be gentle with an empath who’s suffering. It could be you someday.’

Zee didn’t think so. She had no intention of falling in love – especially now. She had raced back to the dorm to tell the others what she’d learned. And was embarrassed to
discover that everyone knew but her, because everyone else had already been in love and love, they explained, was just the highest form of piercing. Zee knew about piercing, the disturbing
phenomenon of being so overwhelmed by attraction to a patient that you lost your focus. Zee had felt attraction, but never the piercing they described. When someone else was all you could think of,
or you found yourself wanting to wear his T-shirt under your scrubs so you could feel him around you all during your shift, you’d been pierced.

‘But that’s against the rules,’ Zee said when she heard about the T-shirt. The hospital had a dress code for everyone.

‘Yes it is,’ Mariko Sanchez had said, ‘but you want to anyway. That’s how you know you’ve been pierced.’

‘Thank goodness it doesn’t last long,’ someone added, and they all laughed with relief. It took a lot to become an empath, and none of them wanted to lose her position now. If
Piper hadn’t been so gifted, she probably would have been asked to leave some time ago.

Zee had tried to be patient with Piper ever since but right now it wasn’t easy.

‘Don’t you think you’d better get going?’ Piper asked. ‘Dr Morgan asked for you especially.’

Zee didn’t argue. Once you started your shift, you had no personal opinions. And Piper would probably report her for it.

‘All right,’ Zee said at last. ‘I haven’t had any A&Es since Wednesday, so it will be a change of pace.’

‘More than you know,’ Piper said behind her, in a chilly, sunken voice Zee was certain she hadn’t been meant to hear.

Zee didn’t know what she’d find in A&E. She hoped it wasn’t severed body parts. Blood always made her queasy, and a severed part made the whole body angry
and difficult to work with.

Dr Morgan was waiting for her with a grim look on his face, but that didn’t mean anything because Dr Morgan
always
had a grim look on his face. Except when the problem turned out to
be routine. Then he looked disappointed.

‘Gash to forehead,’ he said, steering Zee towards A&E exam room two. ‘He refused a head scan and now wants to check out AMA.’

Against medical advice. Yes, that would certainly annoy Dr Morgan.

‘Do you think he has a concussion?’ she asked.

‘I think he has a subdural haematoma. It could blow like Vesuvius any minute.’ His eyes sparkled with anticipation as he gestured at the door of the examining room. ‘See if you
can keep him here.’

Zee took a clearing breath and entered the room. The young man sitting in the cubicle wasn’t that much older than she was. Zee had been trained to notice the small gestures that took place
in the first few minutes of an encounter, revealing the patient’s state of mind and openness to non-invasive healing. She caught a blur of motion. The young man seemed to have been rubbing a
small metal bar against his forehead, but it disappeared into his pocket so swiftly she couldn’t be certain.

When he lifted his head, Zee felt a tug. Involuntary personal attraction. A reflex, like coughing when you walked into a dusty room. She’d felt it before with other patients, but not quite
like this. When he looked at her, his deep grey eyes seemed to draw her towards him. She wanted to go on looking at him, at the way a few strands of dark hair fell across his forehead. Clearly,
Piper had created more than a tiny pinprick in her calm. She’d never felt so open to someone before, and was determined to regain her sense of calm.

‘Hi,’ she said, ‘I’m Zee, your assigned empath.’

‘I’m David Sutton, unassigning myself.’ When he smiled, his eyebrows lifted, as if inviting her to share a secret joke. Then, looking at her, the smile changed into a different
kind of expression. Instead of hopping off the hospital trolley, he stayed where he was. Everything about him seemed to stop and the room floated into stillness, like a leaf or a feather settling
to earth. For a long moment he simply stared at her, and Zee allowed him to, without moving or closing her face to him.

It wasn’t easy to let someone look at you like that, but many patients seemed to need to. ‘Like someone taking a car for a road test,’ their instructor had explained during
training, ‘only you’re the car.’ They’d laughed, but that didn’t make it easier. Five in her class had washed out because they could not be looked at without posturing
or fidgeting. It was harder than it sounded. At first, Zee had felt so naked standing before a patient she’d had to distract herself by making lists of song titles that started with certain
letters of the alphabet, or by wondering why two-hundred-year-old movies like
Titanic
were often better than the hologram remakes. Now that she was more confident, she’d begun to use
these small capsules of time to begin building a healing bridge to the patient.

But that wasn’t happening tonight. She was having trouble re-establishing her calm, and felt as naked as she had the first time she’d been with a patient. No sooner had she dropped
the foundations of the bridge into place and sent invisible blue vines twining through the air than they crumbled and vanished from her mind.

David Sutton’s eyes were still on her. She felt her skin grow warm and tried to think of song titles that began with the letter A. She drew a blank, so moved on to the letter B.
‘Bitter Poison’, ‘Borrowed Time’, ‘Been Around and Down’, ‘Boomdance’. It usually took patients less than thirty seconds to satisfy themselves, but
more than a minute passed and Zee still felt his gaze.

Suddenly he smiled again. ‘You’re one of us,’ he said.

Now what was
that
supposed to mean? Maybe Dr Morgan was right – this patient really did have a subdural haematoma, and his brain was already starting to suffer from hypoxia. Or did
he mean that he was also an empath? That would explain the ribbon of energy she’d begun to feel pulsing between them.