Thin Air (9 page)

“So what do we do now?” I asked. Lewis crossed his arms.

“What we were going to do before she showed up,” he said. “David and I scouted the route this morning. We hike to the rendezvous, make contact with Wardens we can trust, and find a place to hole up until David can lay his hands on Ashan and find out how to solve this thing.”

“Well, we can't just leave her!” I said. “And I don't think she's strong enough to hike it right now. Not in this weather.” Wasn't too sure I was, either.

“I'm sorry, but we can't wait. Kevin's still out there somewhere, and I have no reason to believe he can't find her. Or worse, he might know where she is already. We
have
to leave her. We can get David to lead a rescue party back for her. We'll leave her the tent, food, water, a supply of heat packs.”

“You think she'll last long enough to be rescued? Even with all the supplies?”

Silence. Lewis rocked back and forth, restless and weary, and shook his head.

“Then no,” I said. “I'm not leaving her here to die alone.” Not because she was supposed to be my friend; it's hard to have friends when you don't remember the good times, not to mention the bad. But because it was just plain
wrong.

Lewis looked like he wanted to argue with me, but I saw the torment in his face.

And the guilt.

“All right.” He sighed. “We'll see how she is in the morning. But I still think it's a mistake.”

 

Cherise looked better when we went back in the tent, but one glance at Lewis told me that was deceptive; he wouldn't be that grim if her condition had improved. At least she didn't seem to be in pain. Certainly she was giving off no on-the-verge-of-death vibes. The only thing strange about her was the haunted, empty look in her eyes, and the fact that she seemed to have a longer and longer lag in responding to anything around her.

I tried to ignore it. The rest of the day was consumed with small talk, nothing very deep or probing. I didn't ask her much about my own life; I wasn't sure I was ready to hear how close we'd been. She volunteered details, though, mentioned people and places that I didn't and couldn't recognize. I was grateful when she fell asleep, finally, and zipped myself into my own sleeping bag next to her. Lewis sat cross-legged, crammed in the corner of the tiny shelter, lost in what looked like meditation but could have been a sitting-up nap for all I knew.

I was about to drift off to sleep when Cherise said dreamily, “Jo?”

I sat up and did some unnecessary adjustments to her burrito-style wrapping. Her eyes seemed to take ages to focus on me, and she smiled slightly.

“You don't have to pretend. I know something's wrong,” she said. Her voice was soft. “Look, if I did anything…said anything, you know, earlier…I didn't mean it. You know that, right? I didn't mean it. Don't be mad, okay?”

I didn't even know her, not really, but that hurt. I tried not to let it show. “I'm not mad,” I said. My voice actually stayed mostly steady. “You should sleep for a while. Rest.”

Another one of those eerie lags, like talking to someone in space. While she was waiting to get the message, she seemed to be just…vacant. Then she excavated a hand from the foil wrapping around her and took mine. She had a tattoo around the ring finger of her right hand, some kind of Celtic knot work. I figured, given the alien gray tat on her back, she probably had more body art, probably in places that only her boyfriends knew about. A normalish girl, one who loved her looks and devoted a lot of time to their enhancement. A girl who probably had the guys buzzing back home.

A girl who'd been my friend. Who still was, in ways that counted.

She said, “Don't leave me here. Not by myself.”

“I wouldn't. I won't.”

“I'm scared.” She didn't seem to be hearing me, although her huge blue eyes were locked on mine. “I can't just
die
, Jo. I didn't even do anything heroic yet. Not like you.”

I looked over at Lewis, whose eyes opened as soon as I focused on him. Serene as the Buddha. I took in a trembling breath. “Isn't there
anything
you can do?” I snapped. I was displacing anger, I knew that, but it felt good to let a little of it out.

He sighed. “I can try, but it won't be enough, and it will only prolong things. It can't stop the process.”

Cherise was visibly fading away now, panic in those huge blue eyes. She tried to move but her arm barely twitched.

Trapped inside her own body.

“Help.” Her lips formed the word, but there was no breath behind it.

I was watching her die.

Sudden fury spiked through me. Not at Lewis—at
everything
. At the unfairness of the world. At losing someone I'd barely begun to know and like. “No!” I said sharply. “No, I'm not just going to sit here….”

I reached out and put my hands on her head. I had no idea at all what I was doing, but the frustration and fury inside left me no choice. I had to act. I had to
try
. It seemed like instinct, to put my hands where I did, but then I remembered David had used the same kind of placement when he'd healed Lewis.

“What the hell are you doing?” Lewis barked, scrambling up, but I wasn't listening to him. If this was magic, then I could do it, right? David had shown me how to reach for power…except that I had no idea what to do with it. I could grab the power and hold it, but handing a child a scalpel didn't make her a surgeon.

Show me
, I begged.
Come on, somebody, show me what to do. SHOW ME!

I felt a slow, warm, syrupy pulse come up through my body, flowing through my legs, up through my body's core, spilling out of my hands. Cherise dissolved into a sparkling network of tiny bright points of light, millions of them, layer upon layer upon layer, like a city at night. Some of the lights were bright white, some blue, some shading toward yellow and red.

And, ominously, a substantial part of her head was simply black. No lights at all.

And the black was spreading.

I heard Lewis shouting something at me, but I ignored him. I was expecting him to physically try to drag me away, but he must have had more sense than that.

Cherise's nervous system was an incredible design, mesmerizing and intensely beautiful, and I found myself mapping the lines of color and light in a kind of trace, my hands moving above her body just inches from skin.

I paused over the dead areas, both hands hovering uncertainly, and then I reached inside and touched one of the dead nodes.

Cherise screamed, both in my ears and—chillingly—inside my head.

“Stop!” Lewis was yelling in my ear now, but he wasn't touching me. I was radioactive, and he knew it. “Jo, you're not an Earth Warden. Jesus, you're not meant to do this.
Stop!
”

I was hurting her, but I knew, somehow, that it had to hurt. There wasn't any choice, if I wanted to save her. The blackness was spreading across that network of lights, slowly consuming her, and if I didn't do something she'd be gone, this beautiful creation would be
gone
, and I couldn't let it happen.

I just couldn't.

Smells and sounds and chaos rolled over me, a huge vista of things I couldn't comprehend, a
presence
that guided my hands and my powers to touch
here
and
there
and
there
, a tiny spark of pure white power jumping from one burned-out node to another, jump-starting and dying.

It's not working!

The presence inside wordlessly soothed me, and showed me again. And again. I was no longer seeing or hearing anything in the outside world; the world was what was under my hands and in my head.

And this time, the bridge sparked, flickered, and held, and the network of lights raced and flared and ignited through the dark.

I felt things shift into place.
Click.

Cherise lit up with a blaze of power, and I heard her take in a whooping, gasping breath in the real world.

I did it.

Yeah. But now that the feverish desire to do it was passing…what exactly had I done?

“Let go!” Lewis was yelling at me, frantic. I tried. Before I could get free, another spark jumped from my fingers, accessing a network of brilliance in Cherise's mind, and although I had no idea what I was doing…

I was suddenly inside her head.

Being in Cherise's body took some adjustment. I felt dizzy, squeezed,
wrong
. I involuntarily tried to move something, but in the next instant I realized a couple of important things….

One, I wasn't Cherise. I was still me, but a silent observer sitting alongside Cherise in her body.

And two, this was the past.

This was memory.

It took me a second to absorb where Cherise was. Some kind of set. Movie? Television? I caught sight of the unmistakable configuration of a television news desk, and the call letters in red over it. Cameras. People milling around. There wasn't any easy way I could figure out what date this was, or even what city. I could sense Cherise thinking, but it was a random jumble of stuff, nothing I could make sense of—until it suddenly did.

Oh great
, she thought.
Time to make nice with the new girl.

And with a sense of having fallen completely down the rabbit hole, I saw myself—Joanne—walking toward her. There was something so utterly
wrong
about seeing myself like this that I felt another surge of disorientation, and I wanted desperately to turn away.

But I couldn't. I was trapped, helpless, watching the memory play out before me. Trapped.

“Hi. I'm Joanne,” that other me said, and held out a long-fingered, strong hand with a halfway decent manicure. French nails. Not a great tan, but a pretty good one. She looked rested, but a little bit nervous. First day on the job, maybe? From Cherise's point of view Joanne was annoyingly tall, and most of it was leg. I sensed Cherise making an assessment. She was a cold and merciless judge of other women's looks—not unkind, but precise.

“You're Marvin's new assistant,” Cherise said. “Right?”

God, did I really look that way when I smiled? My mouth looked funny. “Assistant would be a kind way to put it,” Joanne said. I couldn't stand thinking of her as
me
. “He just called me the weather girl.”

“Yeah, well, that's Marvin for you. Hey. I'm Cherise. I'm the dumbass who runs around in the bikini to give the surf forecast.” Cherise rolled her eyes to show it didn't really bother her. From this side of the conversation, I could tell that it wasn't an act; running around in a bikini really
didn't
bother her. She was pretty, and she knew it, and there wasn't much point in denying the fact that guys found her hot. She figured she had the rest of her life to use her brains. A fine body had a short shelf life, when it came to stripping down to a G-string. “So how's it working with Marvin so far?”

I watched the former me make a face that I resolved I would never, ever make again. “Oh, fabulous. Is he always that—?”

“Grabby? Always,” Cherise said, and leaned forward. “Okay, time for the potential compatibility quiz. Who's the sexiest man alive?”

“Uh…” Joanne blinked. “Probably…um…I have no idea.” Oddly, I couldn't answer it now, either. I only really knew two guys in the whole world, and they were both pretty damn sexy.

“Acceptable answers include David Duchovny, Johnny Depp, and James Spader. Sean Connery is always allowable. So—favorite TV show?”

“I don't watch a lot of television,” the other me confessed. Well, I consoled myself with the thought that losing my memory clearly hadn't made all that much difference in my conversational skills.

“Well,
I
watch a lot of television,” said Cherise. “So you'll need to catch up. I'll give you a list of what you can start with, and yes, there
will
be quizzes later.”

Joanne laughed. She had a good laugh, one that made you want to get in on the joke—the first thing about her I couldn't quibble with. “You always this take-charge, Cherise?”

“Pretty much. I'm little, but I'm fierce,” she said, and inspected Joanne's nail polish, giving it a nod of approval. “Seriously, if we're going to be best friends, you really have to be able to intelligently discuss the relative hotness of television stars. It's a must. What do you think, too green?”

That would have thrown most people. It definitely threw me now, observing, but Joanne had followed the shift without trouble. She looked at Cherise's nail polish critically, tilted her head, and said, “No, it's perfect. Picks up the color in your shirt.” I felt Cherise's surge of satisfaction. “But,” Joanne continued, “you might want to consider pairing up that underlayer with a sheer teal instead of green. Make the color really pop.”

Cherise blinked, looked at her nails, then at her shirt. “Damn. You're
good
. Shopping,” she said. “Tonight. Shopping and mojitos. Seriously, anybody who can one-up me on color analysis must be worth my time.”

Then-me looked a little taken aback by that, searched for a reply, and then said, with a hilarious amount of consideration for Cherise's potentially bruised feelings, “I'm not, you know, gay or anything.”

Cherise found that funny. “You mean you wouldn't go gay for me? Sheesh. I'm not looking for a date. Nobody else here understands the power of Zen shopping. I think”—Cherise swept a look over her ensemble, then Joanne's, which actually was pretty cute—“I think we can do some real credit card damage together. Somebody's got to keep the economy growing. It's almost patriotic.”

Joanne looked relieved. And then smiled. The smile still looked wrong to me, from this side.

“Deal,” she said.

It was a warm place to be, and I wanted to stay there, bask in that sensation of liking and being liked.

But I couldn't stay.

There was a blurring sensation, like being pushed hard from behind, and I jumped tracks, falling endlessly, falling, lost, and then there was a sudden burst of light.

Rapid-fire memories. Fragments of conversations. Ice cream on the couch, watching movies with Cherise. Shopping. Chatting.

Normal life. I'd had a normal life, once.

Another lurching sensation, a blur, and when I blinked it away, Cherise was pushing open a door from a dark hallway to the outside world. Time had passed, although I didn't have a good notion of how much. She looked over her shoulder, and I saw Joanne following her out of the building.

“So,” she was saying, “What do you think? Hot Topic? And maybe some Abercrombie. Then lunch.”

“Girl, do you ever do
anything
but shop?” Joanne asked, but not as if she was really opposed to the idea. Cherise blew her a kiss.

“Well, I was thinking of dropping by the chess club, but you know how shallow those guys are….”

“Shut up.”

It was a bright, sunlit morning. The air was muggy and warm, with just a hint of salt air breeze. Joanne looked good: more tanned, more toned, wearing a pair of low-rise blue jeans and a teal blue sleeveless tee that rode up to reveal some firm abs.

Cherise, of course, looked even better. She was like orange sherbet, layered in pastels, all edible colors. She could have stepped out of a hair product commercial. The poster child for healthy and vibrant.

“Just for that, I'm adding Old Navy to the list,” Cherise said, and checked her purse. She frowned at a mirror and touched up her lipstick as they crossed a weedy picnic area behind the building they were exiting, toward a parking lot. “And I'm going to make you eat sushi, too.”

“Hey,” Joanne said. Her tone had changed, turned quiet and dark. “Cher. Heads up.”

Cherise looked up, alarmed, and focused on a man standing near the cars in the fenced-off parking area. I felt the surge of pure adrenaline go through her, sending her heart rate soaring. “Dammit. I really thought that restraining order thing would work.”

Joanne's face had gone still and tense. She took her purse off her shoulder and handed it over to Cherise. “Stay here.”

“Don't,” Cherise whispered, and grabbed her arm. “Let's just go back in. We can call security—they've got his picture. They know to call the cops.”

“Yeah, that's done a hell of a lot of good so far,” Joanne said. “This jerk isn't going away. How many times does this make that he's shown up here?”

Cherise sighed. I could feel the dread in her, honest and real. “Six.”

“And phone calls?”

“God, I lost count. And don't even talk about the ugh-worthy letters.”

“Then this guy needs a stronger message,” Joanne said. “Look, trust me. You just go back inside, okay?”

“But—Jo, you can't—”

Apparently, she certainly could. I watched myself walk purposefully toward the shifty-looking fellow standing near the red convertible. He was wearing an overcoat—a dead giveaway of weirdness in the current heat wave—and even from Cherise's distance looked like he needed not just a shower but a full-scale disinfection. Wild-eyed, wilder-haired.

Scary.

Joanne stopped just a couple of feet away from him. Cherise couldn't hear the conversation, because all of a sudden thunder rumbled overhead. Cherise looked up, startled, to see dark clouds moving in from the west—which, Cherise thought, was really strange, because she'd just been giggling about Marvin's out-of-the-box weather prediction about storms when the coast seemed clear, and all of the other stations were talking sunny skies.

Joanne must have wondered, too; she looked up at the sky with a frown, and it distracted her for a second from the guy in the trench coat.

Who suddenly lashed out at her with a fist.

I had to admit—this former version of me clearly had fantastic reflexes. She leaned back, and his punch sailed cleanly past her chin. He snarled and reached in his pocket and pulled out…a knife.

“Call the cops!” Joanne yelled to Cherise, who dashed for the doorway. She dialed 911 on her cell while she ran, and yelled for help while it rang. Gaffers and techs came running from the studio—big strong guys, union guys. Tough guys. “Jo's in trouble! Parking lot!”

They scrambled. Cherise blurted out the facts to the 911 operator and hurried back out to follow, terrified of what she'd find…

…only to find a ring of big, tough union guys standing around, and the stalker with the knife on the ground, flat on his face, with Joanne kneeling on his back. She had his left arm twisted up behind him, painfully far, and she looked calm and cool. A passing gust of wind swirled through the parking lot, stirring sand and trash, and blew her hair over her face. She shook it back, and Cherise saw that Joanne was grinning.

“No problem,” Joanne said. “One less stalker, Cher. That only leaves Brad Pitt, right?”

Cherise sucked in a shaky breath. “He has
got
to stop calling me,” she said, in a brave attempt to make it look like she hadn't been terrified out of her mind that she'd find the other me dead on the ground. “His wife's getting pissed.”

The stalker on the ground writhed and said some not very nice things. Joanne put her right hand on the back of his neck, and Cherise was almost
sure
she saw some kind of spark zap from her into her prisoner.

“Play nice,” Joanne said. “Or you'll be waking up in a coma.”

Head electrician Sully, who was commonly acknowledged to be the hardest guy on the union team, clapped his hand over his heart. “I think I'm in love,” he said.

All the union guys whistled in agreement.

Cherise held in a crazy urge to giggle as Joanne winked at her.

“All in a day's work for a weather girl,” she said, and the howl of sirens took over as the police arrived.

That, I realized, was the day Cherise had truly thought of me as not just a friend, but
the
friend. Her best friend.

And that feeling…that was love.

I lost the thread of the memory, falling into a blur of sound and color. A spiral of confusion. I felt a dull, leaden ache in my head, and wanted to get off the ride now. And never, ever get back on.

The next thing I caught was only a flash, a very brief one—I wasn't even in it, it was Cherise in a shoe store with a polished-looking blond woman griping about her ex-husband.

And about her sister. From Cherise's sense of disgust, she just never shut up about her sister.

And she was still talking about her. “I didn't like her much, you know. When I was younger. Joanne was a total bitch.”

Oh.
I
was the sister. So this was—who, exactly?

Cherise put a pair of shoes back and turned to face the other woman, frowning. Before she could open her mouth to defend me—if she was going to, which I couldn't actually be certain about—the blonde plunged ahead. “Joanne was always
special
,” she said. “Mom treated her like a little queen. I was always the one who had to work harder, you know? So we weren't close. Really, I wouldn't have come looking for her help if I hadn't been desperate.”

“No kidding, Sarah,” Cherise said. “I guess it's nice that she's let you stay in her house, eat her food, and use her credit cards.” She put some emphasis on the credit cards, and I looked over the blonde with new interest. New dye job and haircut. Fancy designer outfit. The shoes she was trying on must have been a minimum of three hundred, and they didn't even look that cute on her.

Sarah didn't seem to take the rebuke all that well. “Well, it's just temporary. So, do you have sisters?”

“Brothers,” Cherise said. “Two.”

“Any of them rich?” Sarah was joking, only not really. Cherise gave her a flat stare. “Oh, come on, don't be so judgmental. Marrying for money is a good career move. You're a nice-looking girl. You should take advantage.”

“I do,” Cherise said, and shrugged. “I'm on television. That's shallow enough for me.”

“That's not what I mean. Surely you've met some rich, successful guys, especially in television.”

“Of course I have.” The feeling flooding through Cherise was annoyance, mixed in with a little toxic-feeling contempt. No, she didn't like my sister. At all.