Nova (19 page)

Authors: Margaret Fortune

BOOK: Nova

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No such luck. Shar’s sprawled on her cot perusing, of all things,
my
old reader. She sits up when she sees me coming. Her spine is stiff and her eyes wary. I can’t blame her. One day we’re fighting and the next I’m giving her gifts for no apparent reason. If I were Shar, I’d suspect I was bat-slag crazy, too.

I stop at the end of her cot. “Hey.”

“Hey,” she answers slowly.

Still in the dirty tank and baggy gray shorts she sleeps in, Shar hardly looks like the sort of person anyone would go to for help. However, I’m not seeing her as she is now. I’m seeing the girl whose last touch inspired a series of nightly dreams about my past. I’m seeing the girl from my dreams who touched my head after saying I didn’t try hard enough. I’m seeing the unregistered psychic who might just possibly be able to tell me what I need to know.

“I need your help.”

The wary look in her eyes intensifies. “With what?”

“I need you to tell me who I am.”

24
MY WORDS CLINCH IT. SHE
really does think I’m bat-slag crazy now. “Look, I don’t know what kind of joke you’re trying to play, Johansen—”

“It’s no joke,” I interrupt. “I need you to use your psychic abilities on me.”

That
gets her attention. She jumps to her feet and grabs me by the collar. “Are you
lunar?
” she hisses. “Anyone could hear you.
Seal it!
Just seal it! Or are you here to bust me?”

“What people hear—what
PsyCorp
hears—is entirely up to you.” My eyes flick to the hands that still hold me.

Shar’s eyes narrow as she grasps the threat. Her nostrils flare in anger, hands fisting tighter over my collar, but her eyes . . . In her eyes is
fear
. Pure, gut-wrenching, ice-in-your-veins fear. Hatred wars with terror, and for a moment, I’m sure she’ll refuse me. Call my bluff and tell me to go frag off. Then with a growl, she releases me. She paces back and forth in front of her cot for a minute. When she finally looks back at me, the fear is gone, her eyes now guarded and hard. “So say I help you. What exactly do you want me to do?”

“I have some memories—blocked memories about my past. I need you to try and access them.”

“What sort of memories?”

“How would I know?” I ask evasively. “They’re blocked. I can’t reach them.”

“If they’re blocked, it’s probably for a reason. It would be better not to know.”

“I
have
to know.”

Shar frowns. “Why don’t you just go to PsyCorp then? They’re trained for this sort of thing. I’m sure that creepy psylieutenant whatever-his-name-is would be happy to help you uncover whatever horrible mystery lurks in your past.” When I don’t answer, realization slowly dawns across her face. “You have a good idea what it is, and you don’t want them to know, do you? So frag-nosed little Lia Johansen has something to hide, too. Well, isn’t that something.”

I have her now. She just can’t resist the urge to get some dirt on me. It’s not ideal—what if she runs straight to PsyCorp with whatever she finds out?—but I have to hope that her own fear of discovery is enough to keep her away from them.

“So do we have a deal?” I ask.

“Fine.” Shar spits on her hand and extends it. Her hand trembles, and she yanks it back, folding her arms across her chest and tucking her hands safely out of sight. Her eyes dare me to say something. I don’t take the dare. Instead, I spit on my own hand and hold it out. “Deal?”

After a short pause, she relinquishes her hand long enough to slap mine. “Deal.”

White flashes in my head at the contact, and we both jump back. No need to start anything before we absolutely have to.

“Are you sure you still want to do this?”

Tamping down my nerves, I nod. “Yes.”

I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor of the tunnel across from Shar. Though I can hear the faint rumble of the SlipStream through the wall, on this side it’s quiet enough to hear a chit drop. Silent, deserted, private—it’s the perfect place for what we’re about to do. Save for Michael, I’ve never seen anyone else in here, and it’s unlikely he’ll venture out to the hub anytime soon after what happened between us.

A pang flits through me at the thought of Michael. I push it away and extend my hands. “Well?”

Shar fidgets in her spot, scratching her arm and picking at a non-existent bit of lint on her T-shirt. If I didn’t know better, I would think she was nervous. Afraid, even. About what, I have no idea. After all, I promised not to rat her out to PsyCorp if she helped me.

“You realize this could be dangerous,” she says, her voice smaller than I’ve ever heard it before. “I’m not t-trained for this; I’m not really trained at all. Anything could go wrong.”

Seizures, brain damage, death.
It’s one of the reasons all psychics are required to register with PsyCorp—to ensure they receive the training they need to keep from accidentally harming anyone. Letting Shar into my mind is a risk, but it’s one I’ll have to take. Assuming Shar doesn’t get cold feet and back out on me, that is. Her anxiety is almost palpable now. Funny, she doesn’t strike me as the type to balk at breaking a few rules.

“What’s wrong?” I scoff. “You scared?”

“Maybe I am!”

“I don’t know why. If something happens, it’s going to be to me, not you.”

“Yeah, well I’m going to be the one who has to explain your dead body to PsyCorp,” she retorts. She takes a long breath, visibly pulling herself together, and adds, “Do you know what kind of penalty unlicensed psychic activity carries?”

“Then don’t frag up.”

Hatred flares in her eyes and her gaze hardens. “Fine,” she agrees sarcastically, “but if you die, I’m throwing your corpse out the nearest airlock.”

I actually smile faintly at that.
This
is the Shar I know—the belligerent, sarcastic girl who hates everything and everyone. Better her than the nervous, self-conscious Shar who momentarily reared her head.

I hold out my hands to her. “Agreed.”

This time she takes them.

A flash of white bursts in my head at her touch. Fear pulses through my chest and every nerve ending in my body screams for me to pull away, but I only squeeze her hands tighter. Then I feel it. A presence, something foreign and unfamiliar, sliding into my mind.

I force down the instinct to fight, to repel the presence with all my strength, and instead try to accept the invasion. It’s not easy. Though it doesn’t hurt, it feels strange and uncomfortable and inappropriate. Like having a stranger touch you in your most private places. I squeeze my eyes shut, as though not being able to see Shar will help. It doesn’t. Opening my eyes again, I gasp. I can still see Shar sitting in front of me, legs folded and elbows resting on her knees, but now I can also see myself, wide-eyed and slightly trembling. It’s like I’m seeing from both our eyes at the same time, one image superimposed over the other.

“C-can you see it too?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

I remind myself to breathe, and watch as my chest swells and subsides. “Is this supposed to happen?”

“I-I’m not sure. Maybe it would be easier if we close our eyes.”

I watch myself nod, and then shut my eyes again. It does help not to see the double images anymore. After a minute, I start to relax a little. Though Shar’s presence feels alien and far, far too intimate, it doesn’t feel threatening. I sit back and wait for her to do her thing. And wait. And wait.

“Um, Shar? What now?”

“I don’t know! I told you I wasn’t t-trained in this. I thought maybe it would be obvious once I went in, but it’s all so big.” She takes a breath, and I can hear how shaky it is. No, more than that—I can
feel
how shaky it is. Wisps of fear leak in around the edges of my mind, and my heart picks up tempo the smallest bit.

“Big?”

“Vast, like an ocean rippling with currents in every direction. I just, I don’t know where to go.” Panic limns her voice, and the fear suddenly sharpens, high-pitched and unallayed. Her hands tighten on mine, bone-crushingly hard, and I can’t help letting out a squeal.

I try to yank my hands away. “Shar? Shar! Let go, you’re hurting me!”

She doesn’t seem to hear me. Desperate, I dig my fingernails into the back of her hands.
That
gets her attention. She lets out a yelp, arms jerking in surprise, but it seems to do the trick, as both the grip and the fear suddenly ease. “Thanks. I needed that,” she says quietly. She takes a deep breath. “Maybe you could try thinking about something. Something specific.”

Okay, that seems easy enough. Eyes still closed, I let the first thing I can think of pop into my head.

“Cereal, with a banana sliced on top,” Shar says.

“It’s what I had for breakfast this morning.”

Shar directs me to recall something else, and I do, bringing to mind our first fight in the cargo bay, when I jumped her for stealing my reader. She lets out a snort of amusement. “I sure didn’t expect that.” More emotion blooms in my brain—a feeling of surprised respect, I realize after a minute. Shar’s emotion, not mine.

We try a few more memories, all of which Shar picks up with ease. It’s almost kind of fun, like a game, with me trying to come up with progressively harder images while she tries to guess them. Shar mentally rolls her eyes at my thought, clearly much calmer now than when we started, and nods. “Okay, I think I’ve got it. Try to access one of your blocked memories now.”

My previous anxiety comes racing back, but I do as she says. I start with the transport, thinking about my last moments before disembarking on the station, then slowly work my way back. It’s not particularly interesting—sleeping, eating, and staring out the window mostly—though Shar does get a kick out of seeing me half-electrocuted by the malfunctioning door control. At last I get back to my very first memory, that of being in the spaceport getting ready to board. Taking a deep breath, I try and push myself back even further.
Where
was I before that?

My name is Lia Johansen, and I was a prisoner of war.

“Whoa!” Shar’s nails bite into my hand as her fingers clench.

I yank my mind away from the memory back into the safe realms of the present. “What is it?”

“I don’t know, I need to see it again. Go back. Do it once more.”

My heart is racing now, fear starting to rise up now that we’re so near my past, but I obey, pushing my mind back to my very first memory and then beyond. It reels out again, that catchphrase that has haunted me as far back as I can remember.

My name is Lia Johansen, and I was a prisoner of war.

“My name is Lia Johansen, and I was a prisoner of war,” Shar repeats aloud as I pull myself back to the present. “It’s like the pathway to your memory has been rewritten.”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

“Well, think of your mind like a gigantic city, with each memory being a different house or building within the city. Every memory has a different set of directions you have to take to reach it. Normally when you can’t remember something, it’s because you no longer know the directions to get there. Only in your case, it’s like there’s this roadblock; a detour, forcing you to go down another road, back to—”

“My name is Lia Johansen, and I was a prisoner of war.”

“Exactly. Whatever’s blocking your memory, it’s not natural, that’s for sure.”

“Can you break through it?”

Shar hesitates, and again I feel that spike of fear. “I don’t know. Maybe. This time when you hit the roadblock, I want you to try again. I want you to keep trying and trying until you get through.”

My palms are sweating—or maybe it’s Shar’s palms that are sweating, who can tell?—but I nod and take myself back into the past.
Where
was I before?

My name is Lia Johansen, and I was a prisoner of war.

I break off and try again. Where was I . . . ?

My name is Lia Johansen, and I was a prisoner of war.

Again.

My name is Lia Johansen, and I was a prisoner of war.

Again.

My name is Lia Johansen, and I was a prisoner of war.

Again.

My name is Lia Johansen, and and and and and and and and and and—

My head jerks back as something explodes in my brain. Spots of color burst across my vision, images reeling across my mind in a cacophony of senses—sight and sound and touch and smell.

Then everything goes haywire.

25
*and and and and and
and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and*