Chapter 8
“I just can’t believe you think that ‘Hey Ya’ is better than ‘Bohemian Rhapsody!’” Jana said, “It’s a classic!” She had been trying to defend Queen’s music for the better part of an hour, after leafing through her car’s old CD collection and seeing ‘A Night at The Opera’ among the disks. It was the next day and it was already dark outside the car. Nicole had wanted to leave sooner but, despite going to bed around midnight, Jana had slept like a coma patient until almost two in the afternoon. Then, Anita had insisted on giving a crash course on how to utilize her prion-art-weapon safely, since, as she warned many times, it would infect a human mind just as easily as it would Gravewater’s. That, plus several offers of food that could not be refused, meant that the sun was already setting when they left the shimmering cabin.
“It’s not that I don’t like the song,” Nicole responded, smiling without looking away from the road. “Bohemian Rhapsody is great. It’s just that Hey Ya is the best song ever, so all other songs are automatically not as good. It’s nothing personal against Queen.”
Jana sighed dramatically but otherwise declined to respond to this line of reasoning. In the absence of voices, the car filled was filled with the sound of wind and tire, a steady roar that waxed and waned with the curves in the pavement. Jana glanced at Nicole as she turned the wheel, smoothly avoiding a horse drawn cart exiting a farm road on the right. Her dark curly hair filled the space above her head and filtered the light coming in the driver’s side window, turning street lamps and porch lights into flickering stars as they traversed the sheet of glass. Her arms were bare, despite the cold air that seeped in through the old weather stripping on the doors, and Jana could just barely see the flexing of muscles under her dark skin as she turned the steering wheel. Nicole looked more comfortable driving Jana’s car than Jana thought she ever had.
Jana pushed into the newly awakened corner of her mind, and looked at the connection between Nicole and the car. It was a strong line, shining brightly in the short space between Nicole’s chest and the center of the steering wheel. Jana focused and looked at the detail in the thread. She could see that it was carrying streams of information back and forth, buzzing with intention and data like a live wire. Nicole was communicating with the car, actively using the Sight and her connection to better understand and control the vehicle. She was-
“Can I help you?” Nicole interrupted Jana’s thoughts, filtering the question through not-quite-a-laugh.
“What?” Nicole responded, looking up quickly.
“You were staring at my chest for a little while there, I was just wondering if there was anything… in particular, that you were looking for.”
Jana coughed loudly and turned her head and her eyes back to the front of the car, hoping that the meager moon light wasn’t enough to see how red she could feel her face becoming.
“Sorry, I was just um… I was trying to focus on the connections. And uh…” Her voice faded and she prayed that Nicole would take pity on her and fill the silence.
“No need to apologize.” Nicole responded to her prayers, adding a real laugh to punctuate the statement. “I understand.”
“So, how long have you been living in Gravewater?” Jana asked, desperate to change the subject. “Did you live with your mom before?”
“Seven years, and yes.” She waited a second then turned her head to look at Jana, smiling to let her know she had been messing with her before.
“I was actually born in the city. My mom had been living there for decades, though my dad moved out when I was like two or something.” Nicole saw the expression on Jana’s face and added, “Oh don’t worry too much, it’s hard to miss what you can’t remember. Anita says he left because he couldn’t handle all the weirdness that comes along with the connection stuff. He thought she was crazy, always talking about lines and networks and stuff that weren’t there. He told her to leave it alone, stop talking about it. She didn’t. He left.”
“He couldn’t see them? Why didn’t she give him the Sight?”
“She may have wanted to, but it just doesn’t work on most people. You need to have a strong natural ability to perceive relationships, be aware of the social world, that kind of thing. Although,” She paused, tilting her head to the side for a moment. “She might not have tried to give it to him at all. She’s always stressed how much power the Sight gives someone, how we need to be careful not to give it to the wrong person.” Nicole was silent for a moment as she navigated a left turn onto a busier road.
“Anyway, we moved to that cabin after I finished middle school. Anita home schooled me, mostly regular high school stuff, a little bit of practice with the Sight. My natural skill level is… not quite as high as you or my mom’s, it took a while for me to get good.” Jana felt guilty for a second before squashing the thought. It wasn’t her fault that she was naturally skilled, right? Nicole continued, “But once I was good I wanted to do something with it, something more than art or sculptures, so I moved back to Gravewater. What about you, you a native?”
“Um, yeah. I grew up pretty close to where you were living actually. I went to college all the way over in California but I decided to move back here after I graduated.”
“You move back in with your parents?”
“No, they actually moved to a different state my senior year, but I had done an internship the summer before and I got a good job offer here to work on the mayor’s gubernatorial campaign, so I came back.”
“You’re into politics?” Nicole laughed just lightly enough to avoid offending Jana, “That makes so much sense. It’s like, the perfect job for a natural.”
“I was pretty good at it.” Jana said, a little defensively. “What did you do?”
Jana could feel and see the atmosphere in the car shift as she asked the question, the connection between her and Nicole souring momentarily.
“I… I was a detective. I thought it was the perfect job, you know? Use the Sight to solve crimes, catch bad guys. I went from cop to detective in only four years, but once I was there I started seeing… I don’t know, too much, I guess.” She paused, swallowing hard, then continued. “I knew when people were guilty, most of the time, and I saw them go free because of some legal technicality or lawyer bullshit and it just, it got to me, after a while. I was angry and tired at the same time, all the time. Then,” She paused again, “there was one day, we raided this tiny apartment where they thought some missing kids may have ended up. Of course, I had known they were there for days, but you can’t get a warrant based on magic lines no one else can see. Anyway, we break down the front door and we see the guy and the kids and I could see the connections between them and I instantly knew that—“ She stopped abruptly, taking a hand off the wheel to wipe at her eyes, “I knew that he had been… that he—“ Nicole stopped again, and Jana wanted to say something, to be able to help, but she couldn’t think of anything.
“Sorry.” Nicole continued. “Anyway, I knew instantly that he was guilty. I knew the kind of person that he was and I… I shot him. I didn’t even realize that I had drawn the gun until he was on the ground. He survived, but just barely. The psych guy told everyone I had occupational stress overload or something, but of course they still fired me, they had too. And I mean, I’m glad they did.”
“I am so sorry.” Jana found her voice, “That’s… terrible. To have to… to see that kind of thing every day, I can’t imagine.”
“Thanks. Yeah, it was pretty bad, I actually had to move back in with Anita for a while, stay in the cabin.”
“Why did you decide to come back?”
Nicole seemed to think for a moment before she responded. “Didn’t you wonder why my mom isn’t in the car with us? Why she isn’t coming to help use the weapon she made?”
Jana admitted that she had.
“It’s because she’s scared. After I was born she got started looking deeper into the connections, trying to use them to find patterns that would warn her about dangerous situations, so she could keep me safe. She was constantly searching for the smallest sign of anything that could threaten me. She started watching herself too, making sure no one was trying to get to me through her. She became paranoid and anxious, the normal chaos of the world was just… too overwhelming for her.” Nicole paused as she had to brake a little too hard to stop at a light that had just turned red. Jana looked out the window and realized that they were already on the outskirts of the city.
“That cabin?” Nicole continued, “That beautiful cabin that she’s coated floor to ceiling in her art? It’s a prison. That art is a shield, it’s like the chess pieces, it cuts her off from the outside world. And it also means she can’t really leave, certainly not to somewhere as populated and active as Gravewater. She’s segregated herself. She chose blindness over the things she could see.” They were in the city now, navigating their way past the houses and small business on a path to the denser downtown area. “I decided that I couldn’t want to let that happen to me, that I didn’t want to hide. I mean, yeah, the world is a shitty place sometimes, and being able to see the connections can be give you more information than you really want. But it’s also power, and as long as I think I can use that information and that power to make the world better, to help people, then I have to try.”
They drove in silence the rest of the way to the library, Nicole weaving the car expertly through the last mile of crowded streets. She backed the car in to a space in empty library parking lot and turned it off, plunging the interior into a darkness that lacked even the faint lights of the dashboard.
“So I think the doors will be locked,” Nicole said, “but I should be able to-“ She was cut off abruptly as Jana leaned across the seat and kissed her, holding her face with the hand that was not braced against the seat for balance. Jana heard as Nicole drew a sharp, surprised breath in through her nose, and she was afraid she would break away. But then she relaxed and leaned into Jana, returning the kiss and holding her so she wouldn’t fall into the wheel. They stayed locked together like that for several seconds until Nicole did break away, gently pushing Jana back into a sitting position.
“As much as I would like to continue.” She said, her voice low, “I’m afraid we have company.”
A second later, the interior of the car was lit up by headlights streaming through the windshield, blinding the two women. Jana instinctively clapped her hands over her eyes to shield them. When she opened a gap between her fingers to peer cautiously out of, the blinding white light had been joined by red and blue, chasing each other lazily over the interior of the car.