Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 60

"Try to find a community," Todd answered, promptly. "Look for mentors and friends. Find places to hang out."

"Join clubs," Hafidha said, and felt the click. "Don't even say it, I'm on it already. The thing is, if they'd each just joined some club before It happened to them, they might not be in the computerized membership lists."

"Legwork, Hafs? My heart bleeds."

"Hah," she answered. "Look, I'm going to call Lau and tell her to ask about social groups and extracurricular activities, okay?"

"Okay," Todd said. "I think we're here, anyway."

"Hafidha!" Reyes' voice stopped her, finger hovering over the disconnect.

"Last time I checked."

"Send the brain scans to Doctor Frost."

Oh yes. That would be the logical next step, and if Hafidha didn't tend to cla.s.s Madeline Frost with the Boogeyman and the Grinch, she would have thought of it herself. She said, "In sa'Allah, sahib," and hit the disconnect.

And then, after a moment to compose herself, during which she put the wounded Ring Ding out of its misery, she bit her thumb in the general direction of Johns Hopkins and hit 666 on her speed dial.

Madeline Frost, M.D., Ph.D., bent over a microscope, humming Thelonious Monk to herself as she examined a slide biopsied from a forty-month-old male. Histologically, the tumor was well-circ.u.mscribed, firm, and pinkish gray. The cells demonstrated a well- defined pattern of rosettes.

She could confirm a primary diagnosis of medulloblastoma.

It was unlikely the patient would survive to his fourth birthday.

She returned the slides to their case, made a note, straightened, and stripped her gloves. She'd call the oncologist from the phone in her office. She expected the news would come as a disappointment, but not a surprise.

As she was dropping the shed blue nitrile into a red bag, what she thought of as her government phone rang. In addition to her hospital phone and pager, Frost kept a separate cell for calls from the BAU.

She did not own a personal cell phone, and never felt the desire for one. People did not call Frost to chat.

She considered that a minor personal success.

The separate cell was not because of ritual, or because she was superst.i.tious about contamination, or because she felt her work as an oncological pathologist needed psychological separation from her work as a forensic pathologist. It was because the instant the device sounded, she knew which set of rules she was meant to be operating under.

There would be a body, or perhaps several bodies, or perhaps parts of several bodies. They would be dead messily or mysteriously. They would present a perfectly intriguing puzzle, a pattern and a set of particulars to be worked out in detail and presented to the team.

It was challenging and satisfying, a welcome diversion.

Frost was fortunate that the chief pathologist was understanding of her sideline, as understanding as he was of her desire never to deal with a living patient as anything other than slides and specimens. Patients were fine, as long as they arrived in pieces.

Frost knew she was not good for living people, and she suspected that living people were not good for her.

Cancer offended her; it did not care for the rules. But it had its own rules, its own patterns. And Frost was very, very good at detecting those patterns, so others could use them to wage war.

It was not, after all, so different from what Stephen Reyes called the anomaly. That was a sort of cancer too, and it also offended her sense of the way the world ought to work.

She permitted the phone to go to voice mail, however. The call to the oncologist would not take long.

Once she had dispensed with it, leaving him to decide how to break the news and discuss treatment options with the family, she unclipped the silver phone from its hard case at her belt and hit redial without checking the time-one forty-three and seventeen seconds-or glancing at the number.

Hafidha Gates answered on the second ring. "Madeline Frost," Frost said.

"Check your email," Agent Gates said, without pleasantries. Frost appreciated that about Gates' dislike for her. It kept the interactions short. "There's a .zip file with some brain scans. Can you see what you can tell me about them?"

"I'm checking now. Living brains?"

"Those are the kind we can scan for electrical activity, aren't they?"

"Not my specialty," Frost said. She slid behind her desk-she'd made her call from the front side-and began to type one-handed. The phone would take a Bluetooth headset. She ought to purchase one. "But I will have a look... These are diffusion tensor images, which record electrical activity in the white matter of the brain. And Agent Gates? These are green across the frontal cortex. All five of them."

"Green?"

"Color code. a.s.suming these are awake images, it indicates depressed levels of activity in the frontal cortex. And there are other-" She almost said anomalous, and checked herself. Clarity above convenience of speech. "-unusual patterns of activity consistent across all five."

"What does that mean?"

"I'm not qualified to diagnose, Agent Gates-"

"Doctor Frost," said Gates. "Are you qualified to speculate?"

"It's consistent with patterns of electrical activity seen in schizophrenics," she said, a.s.sured that Gates would know a speculation from an opinion.

"Gammas?"

"Show increased frontal lobe activity, in the limited sample available. As do you and Doctor Villette, Agent Gates. It's unmistakable, and this isn't it."

"Thank you," said Agent Gates.

"You are welcome," said Madeline Frost, because that was what one said to conclude a transaction, and severed the connection.

Act III As they sat in a cramped observation room in the first of three mental inst.i.tutions on their schedule for today, Todd flipped his phone closed. "Well, if he's trying to make gammas, he's doing it wrong."

"Small mercies," Reyes answered, without moving his eyes from the one-way gla.s.s they sat behind. Beyond it, curled in an armchair in an interview room, sat Melanie Wosczyna.

She was a tall young woman, hunched now into a spasmed curve, her elbows cramped against her ribcage. She had a long neck and a long nose and a long jaw. The strong architecture of her face made her slack disaffected expression more terrible. Todd thought she should have been working on smile lines by thirty. Over her pallor, her complexion was olive. Fluffy-curly brown hair was matted flat on one side, and her right hand twitched convulsively, first two fingers and thumb pressed together and jerking like the beak of a hungry bird.

Todd would have touched Reyes' elbow, but Reyes had already seen it. "Come on," he said, standing, and Todd fell in behind him, making his sure his footsteps didn't fall in the same rhythm. A whole different playbook with a victim than with a suspect. Here, they came as potential rescuers. As friends. Not to intimidate.

Melanie was medicated. She didn't look up as they entered, but her hand jittered faster. Todd knew his part in the scenario; he was the supportive observer. 'Deferential, glad to be of use, politic, cautious, and meticulous.' A battered couch stood against the wall, perpendicular to the desk and armchair. Todd a.s.sumed it, while Reyes moved across the small room silently to the knotted-up girl in the battered, burnt-orange chair.

Todd found himself wondering, as he often did, if inst.i.tutions such as this one chose their furnishings with an eye towards repeat business. He had an uneasy Socialist inkling that when they reached the private inst.i.tution where Hanson Cape was being cared for, they would find more appealing surroundings.

Reyes, with every appearance of unselfconsciousness, dropped a knee and crouched beside the victim's chair. "Hey, Melanie," he said, in conversational tones. "I'm Stephen. How are you?"

Not Agent Reyes. Not Doctor Reyes. No, softer and more oblique, an avuncular approach. This was the girl whose father was a likely-abusive binge drunk; Todd watched with respect as Reyes made himself seem small and soft and positioned himself so she had an escape, if she wanted it.

She didn't acknowledge him overtly, but Todd saw the dip of her eyelashes as her gaze slipped sideways. The antipsychotics were having some effect, and so was the Reyes charisma.

Her right hand jittered faster.

"Melanie," Reyes said, "do you understand me?"

Her mouth opened, and she made a sound that wasn't quite a wordless complaint, and also wasn't quite glossolalia. And then she said, with soft absolute clarity, "It's the rats."

"Melanie?"

"I can hear the rats underground. It smells like a ghost train. Can you smell it? And then there were cigarettes."

Not exactly word salad, either. But when Reyes gave Todd a tight sharp glance over his shoulder, Todd nodded. Disorganized thinking, loose or disa.s.sociated chains of speech. As if the subject were having difficulty stringing together coherent logic.

A check mark in the box.

In the meantime, Melanie was staring at Reyes as if she were absolutely captivated by whatever he might choose to impart.

Reyes looked her calmly in the eye and asked, "What are the rats saying?"

Melanie shook her head, jerky as a broken toy. "Baker, baker," she said, voice unresonant. A crushed guitar. "Is that your girl? Think she'll wait? We'll get you home. Hang on. Hang on."

Todd put his fingers to his mouth. Again-or still-with her hand. The motion, distressingly familiar.

"The rats are saying, 'baker?'" Reyes reached out and lifted her left hand, which was not moving in sympathy with the right. She looked at where he touched her-stared at it -but did not draw her hand away.

Todd was reminded of a seductive cult leader he'd known once, among whose disciples he'd lived, briefly and under cover. Reyes had that same charisma when he wanted it, that way of looking at you like you were the only important person on earth and the center of his world.

"I don't understand rat," she said. "It's a language I don't know. But they're talking about me down there. They got baker. They got clement. The ghosts need me. To tell their stories. n.o.body cares about the ghosts. n.o.body wants to tell their stories. They have to hear. It's for their own good."

Reyes rocked back, allowing her hand to drop back to her knee. Hallucinating schizophrenics not infrequently heard voices, or received strange instructions in code.

Todd hadn't heard of one hallucinating languages she didn't understand. Usually, under schizophrenic patterning, everything made sense. Too much sense, terrible towering inescapable inexorable sense.

"There's more death than on the wall," she said. "Plenty came home dead, just walking. The kids ran through fire. Right through it. And kept running. Burning. Baker, clement, mack. I fell off the wall. And all the King's horses."

Speaking of sense. She made sense, after a fashion. That was a terribly consistent stream of consciousness, when you got right down to it. And okay, she was medicated; she should be able to pull it together. But there was something about the pattern of what she was saying.

"If you crawl in a grave," Melanie said, "you come out dead the other side."

Todd concentrated on the motions of her hand, trying to isolate. No. It wasn't the motion of the hand. It was the motion of the fingers.

"Reyes," he said. "Look at her hand."

Reyes looked. "Give her your pen."

"Great," Todd said. "Let's provide the psychotic with a weapon." He pulled the green disposable roller ball from his jacket pocket and added his reporter's notebook, from the same supply that Brady had recently started filching from. In a moment, they had set up Melanie with both the writing implement and the writing surface, and she was staring at the page as if she meant to eat it. Then she looked away, eyes snapped up as if sighting on the horizon. And her hand began to move as if she had no idea it was tracing letters. Baker, she wrote painstakingly. Clemente. Mac.

"Automatic writing," Todd said.

"Names," Reyes said, looking at him. "Names."

When it struck Todd, it hit like a lightning bolt, so hot and shocking he could not believe it had taken him that long. His hands went cold; the four walls of the room wobbled woozily as he pushed himself to his feet.

"Names on a wall," he said, and shook his head. "Names on the Wall."

"The Vietnam Memorial." Reyes scrubbed a hand across the tight curls of his receding hair. "And one that fell off it."

"Rats in tunnels." Todd bit off the words. "Speaking a language you don't know."

"Jesus." Reyes rubbed his mouth. "So why is a teenaged girl having post-traumatic flashbacks to Vietnam?"

"I don't know."

She looked up at Todd and blinked, clear hazel eyes, affectless expression. "Don't you remember?" she said. "You were there."

Todd could still taste that bile in the hall, ten minutes later. "Do we check the rest?" Reyes nodded. "Make sure of the pattern. Oh, and get on the horn to Hafidha-"

"Baker, Clemente, Mac." Todd couldn't help but contrast the tenderness Reyes showed the victim with his current brusqueness, and wonder which was the lie. "MacDonald? MacAllister? MacLeod? Four Marines on a fireteam."

"Who's the fourth one?"

"Yeah," Todd answered. "I was wondering that myself."

"Right," Hafidha said into the phone, grateful that Reyes could not see her roll her eyes. "Yeah, two and a half names, all maybe in the same squad in the 'Nam. All maybe KIA. You need the other name and a half? Well, Kemo Sabe, I'm afraid we have a little problem here. No, the campus network is down. Yes, even a miracle worker needs a network. I'll call Worth and get Quantico on it, though. It's Friday night, Il Professore, how long do you think it's going to take?"

Nikki Lau was really good at the part with the grieving friends and families. She had a knack for it, a gift as absolute as Falkner's perfect pitch or Madeline Frost's time sense accurate to the second.

Being good at it, doing it all the time, didn't make it any less awful.

When she walked back into Hafidha's appropriated office, toting a short ton of Chinese takeout, she must have been showing it, because Reyes, of all people, grunted a greeting and pulled the box out of her arms. Lau stood inside the doorway, chafing her arms, trying to shake off an unseasonable chill. "I hope I didn't get too much," she said. "No Chaz."

"You have me," Hafidha answered brightly, snagging a tray of General Tso's chicken and a carton of rice right-handed while she grabbed up chopsticks with the left. "Paper plate?"

Reyes ducked out into the lounge and came back with Todd while Lau pulled plates from under the pile. She watched Hafidha and the other two sc.r.a.ping food out of containers and folded her arms across her chest. She didn't have any appet.i.te of her own, though Hafidha was already on her second helping.

Lau startled when Todd put a plate of rice and Buddha's Delight in her hands, the partially-missing fingers folded under automatically. He hid it better than James Doohan: she'd known him six months before she'd realized he was maimed, and when she asked about it he'd told some improbable Vonnegutesque story about following a girl who didn't love him to a communal farm in New Hampshire, and nearly freezing and/or starving to death the first and only winter. "Mangia," he said. "Tea?"

"Yikes, yes," she said. He spun a chair for her; she sank into it, and balanced the plate on her knees. Once she started shoveling rice and bean sprouts and bamboo shoots and bell pepper and tofu and cornstarch sauce into her mouth, she almost couldn't stop to accept the tea cup. She realized she was shivering, cold as if she'd managed to get sunburned, but the tea helped.

"You know," Hafidha said, around a mouthful of fried animal protein, "we have an excuse for the blood sugar crashies. What happened to you?"

"Three victim family interviews and four friends in six hours," Lau answered. She realized she was talking with her mouth full, chewed, and swallowed. "I couldn't eat."

"It's easier when they're dead," Reyes said, between bites of spring roll. "What did you learn?"