TEN

 

HALF A BOTTLE OF WHITE wine in an old plastic cup had not had its intended effect. Rather, it had been too effective; she had filled the largest glass she could find, and the wine had relaxed her to the point where she was almost asleep in her chair. Rachel was doing her best to stay alert as Santino and Josh shouted at the television, pretending she actually cared the Chicago Bears were about to lose their third game in a row. She usually enjoyed game night, but after that hour in the basement, all she wanted was to take a hot bath and then go straight to bed.

As neither Santino nor Rachel cooked, their formerly-formal dining room had been turned into an all-purpose media room. After Santino had moved in to her house, they had removed an old built-in china cabinet to make space for his new 70” high-definition television. Then they’d had a hell of a fight over what to call the room. Santino had said it should be the Man Cave; Rachel had replied she was not a man and the room was too open to be considered a cave. Santino had amended this to the Cyborg Café; Rachel had said that name was also wrong, as he was not a cyborg and besides, visitors might get the room confused with a certain bar uptown. This discussion had escalated until Santino had removed the set from the wall and hauled it upstairs to his room, threatening to keep it to himself until she apologized. He brought it back downstairs when he finally realized she had started the fight to get rid of the television until the World Series was over.

(Rachel, who was of the opinion that if baseball were any slower it would be called farming, was still trying to work out a way to escape the impending monotony of sixteen premium channels devoted to spring training.)

The doorbell rang. Santino and Josh stopped mid-expletive; Josh started grinning.

“It’s Phil,” she explained to Santino as she stood to answer the door. “Sorry, should have mentioned he was on his way. Mako’s coming over, too.”

“More the merrier,” Santino said, not shifting his attention from the game. His conversational colors, a dark navy blue streaked with white-rimmed orange, didn’t even bother to pick up Phil’s silver-light core.

Rachel was halfway to the door before she realized Phil was deeply gray. She yanked the old farmer’s door open, and he peered at her over two cases of beer. She moved to help him and he shook his head, stepping away so as to not touch her.

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh, Rachel…” he began, and then shook his head again. “In a minute. Right now, I don’t want to do anything but put away as many of these as I can.”

She reached up and pulled down the top case, then covered Phil’s hands with her own. He exhaled through his teeth as her languor passed to him; she had an image of scales balancing as his tension crossed over to her, and she was suddenly awake.

“Thanks,” she said, reclaiming her case of beer and heading towards the kitchen. “I needed that.”

“You needed that? I’ve been humming at capacity since mid-afternoon.”

The beers were crammed into the empty crisper drawer, and she and Phil retreated to her study. This room was hers alone; Santino was not allowed in except to clean. The study was her favorite room in the house, lined with windows and long cubby shelves overflowing with her book collection. It was also the only room in the house without a single potted plant.

Phil closed the French doors and flopped in one of her overstuffed leather armchairs. His beer frothed from the sudden drop. “Damn it,” he swore through their link, and took huge mouthfuls while she tried not to laugh.

“I can feel that,” he said.

She pretended to be sympathetic. “Are you okay?” she asked when Phil was finally in control of the bubbling.

“No. Rachel…” Phil’s mental voice trailed off. “Those pieces of the canisters I told you about? The ones with the serial numbers on it? It was our military hardware. We traced it back to Homeland.”

“What?!” It was aloud and loud; bad news, that.

Phil nodded. “There was a shipment stolen a few years back. The canisters were part of an aerosol fire suppression system. This guy I know over in Forensics? They found the supplier who works with Homeland, and got an intact canister from the same production line. They used the canister as a comparison, and the fragments we recovered are a match.”

“Man,” Rachel said, tossing her feet up on her old pine coffee table. “That won’t go over well with Homeland.”

“You’re not kidding,” Phil said, shaking his head. “I’m glad I’m not in charge of this. Sergeant Andrews asked Homeland to explain. From what I hear, they tried to rip him apart. And Andrews gave as good as he got.”

“Really?” she asked. She didn’t quite believe him. Sergeant Andrews was in charge of First MPD’s bomb squad, and Rachel had never seen him angry—in fact, after meeting Andrews, she was convinced that the primary job requirement for the head of a bomb squad was an innate inability to become angry.

“Yes. He… Penguin, he was all set to go to war with Homeland.”

“Just because the canisters were registered to Homeland doesn’t mean that Homeland is involved,” Rachel replied. “The amount of stuff that goes ‘missing’ from the federal government? Government procurement services use the least efficient supply chains on the planet. They’re a Gordian knot of subcontractors and institutionalized fraud.”

“I know that, you know that, everybody knows that,” Phil said, and took another drink. “And it still looks really, really bad when it’s the main story on the nightly news.”

“Yeah,” Rachel agreed. “What did Homeland tell Andrews?”

“Short version? To get fucked,” Phil sighed. “Long version is they’ll look into it, that the information should be kept private until such a time as its release would not cause undue public alarm, blah blah blah, unspoken threat, and blah.”

“And how do you know all of this?” Rachel asked. “I’m guessing Andrews didn’t tell everybody in the bomb squad about the source of that serial number.”

Phil shrugged. “OACET, of course. He implied it would be very convenient if I hopped into a few databases and tracked down exactly when and where that shipment went missing.”

“Wow,” she said. “That’s bad. No, forget bad—that’s illegal. Did he mean it, or was it just the rage talking?”

“He meant it,” Phil said. “Illegal or not, he wants me to start poking around.”

“But why? It’s out of Andrews’ hands,” Rachel said. She didn’t have to worry about misuse of power from Phil, but she hadn’t expected that type of request from someone like Andrews. “The bomb squad figures out what went boom and how, and then the MPD investigates.”

“Yeah, except Andrews is furious,” Phil said. “When Homeland froze him out, he took it personally. This is his city, and Homeland’s response is to deny and delay? Andrews isn’t going to go rogue, but his report might be a little more extensive than Homeland wants.”

“Huh. Sturtevant was worried that something would go wrong with the investigation. You think he expected this?”

“Who knows?” Phil said. “Do you think you can get me a warrant?”

She was stunned. “You’re not actually thinking of doing what Andrews wants?”

“Rachel, I know the drill. If I do it at all, I’m doing it legally,” Phil said. “But face facts. We need that information, and we shouldn’t be blocked from it by a power play. This is what warrants are for.”

She searched Phil’s conversational colors; he was shifting towards the deep professional blue he wore at work. “Yeah,” she relented. “I can’t promise anything, but I’ll call Judge Edwards and see what he can do.”

“Thanks,” Phil said. “We need help. We still don’t know anything substantial about the bombs, other than they were tied into the gas lines.”

Her cop brain kicked at her conscious mind again. Gas lines… she thought.

Phil glanced up as he felt her sudden change of mood. “What?”

The doorbell rang, and Rachel reached through the walls to see Mako on her porch, with Zockinski and Hill coming up the walk behind him. “Oh, hell,” she snapped.

Phil followed her scans. “Shit,” he agreed. “Did you tell Mako his cousin has never been to your house?”

“Nope,” she replied. “But Josh is here.” She pinged Josh and told him to keep the detectives out of her kitchen; she was not in the mood to spend her night doing damage control.

She opened her front door and was swept off her feet.

Mako Hill was enormous. Not just tall, like his cousin, but weightlifter-massive and broad enough to need to turn ever so slightly to fit his shoulders through the doorway. He was perpetually happy, and a hugger besides: he claimed to have been a hugger before the implant, and saw no reason to let the new issues posed by accidental skin contact change his habits. Nearly every time Rachel bumped into him, the first fifteen seconds of their meeting were like wrestling with a jovial bear.

“Hey, little thing,” he said, setting her down. “Are you okay?”

She nodded, grinning. “Busy day,” she told him.

“But are you okay?” he asked, and she felt his feather-light mental touch brush against the palms of her hands. She nodded and showed off Jenny’s handiwork, and then escorted Mako and the detectives straight into the TV room and told them to stay put and enjoy the game.

“Let me play hostess,” she told Zockinski and Hill. “I’d show you around, but the place is a disaster. Oh, and use one of the upstairs bathrooms. The one down here doesn’t flush.”

She shut certain doors, ordered pizza, and poured all of the ice in the house into a five-gallon bucket to make a cooler for the beer—anything to keep the detectives out of the kitchen. Once the men were settled and wearing their team colors (Zockinski was a closet Cheesehead, she noticed, the gold and green of Green Bay butting up against Chicago’s blue and orange), she and Phil returned to the study.

“Think that’ll do it?”

“Hell if I know,” Rachel said, as she returned to her chair. “They’ve got no reason to go to the back of the house, and Josh will block them if they try. If they do stumble into the kitchen, I’ll… I’ll make something up, I guess.”

There was a knock on the glass of the study doors, and Mako let himself in, the old brass doorknob disappearing under his hand.

“Thought you were watching the game,” Rachel said to him.

“It’s a slow one. I’m running scores and instant replays,” he said, tapping his head. “If it gets interesting, I’ll rejoin the menfolk.”

“Hey!” Phil protested.

“Don’t let him push your buttons,” she said to Phil. “Once you let him start, he’ll never stop.”

Mako waggled his eyebrows at Phil, grinning lewdly. Phil resisted as long as he could, his colors a sturdy brick wall withstanding a wave of purple humor and Mako’s core of forest green. The wall wavered and finally crumbled, as Phil shook his head and chuckled.

“So,” Mako said to Rachel. “How was the cellar?”

“Dirty and smelly,” she replied. “And I learned I don’t like to sit on a pile of melted plastic for an hour.”

“I learned Rachel’s seeing someone,” Phil told him.

“Lord, save me from gossips,” she sighed.

“Oh really?” Mako cleared himself a seat by moving a stack of papers from one end of her old pine coffee table to the other. The coffee table creaked ominously under his weight. “Details, woman. When’s my kid going to have another aunt?”

“All right, I’m busted,” Rachel surrendered. “I’m not really seeing her. We’ve just gone out to dinner. We’re going out again this week, so I’ll see how that goes.”

“Third date?” Mako used his eyebrow trick on her.

She snorted. “Second, thank you very much. And don’t you dare say U-Haul lesbians.”

Phil went ever-so-slightly yellow. “U-Haul lesbians?”

“You’ve never heard that one? What does a lesbian bring on a second date?”

Mako burst out laughing. “That’s awful!”

Rachel shrugged. “Just a stereotype. World’s full of them. She’s made it clear she wants to take it slow.”

“How slow is slow?”

“You know how the first date is mostly small talk? Work, pets, family stories, that sort of thing? Becca told me straight out that she doesn’t talk about her job until the second date.”

“Huh,” Phil said. “That’s ominous.”

“Yeah. I’m fine with it,” Rachel admitted. “It buys me more time. Women have walked out when I’ve told them I’m OACET. But…”

“But what’s worse than OACET?”

“Yep.” She returned her feet to her coffee table and ran a scan through her palms. The liquid bandage was still hugging the stitches. She started to pick at a loose flap until she realized Jenny might find out and slap her through the link.

“I still can’t believe you want to date normals,” Mako said. His wife, Carlota, was also an Agent. They had been one of the community’s first marriages, and they were the ones who had had OACET’s first baby a couple of months earlier. “That’s unbelievably boring!”

“Forgive me for wanting my relationships to exist outside of the collective,” Rachel said.

“The sex alone!” Mako shrugged. “It’s so… limited.”

“I prefer to know where my genitals end and hers begin,” Rachel said primly.

“No thank you.” The large man shook his head. “Why be a cyborg if it doesn’t punch up your sex life?”

“Why have a sex life if it’s essentially masturbation?”

Phil, who had been chuckling throughout their exchange, laughed so hard he squeaked. “She’s got a point.”

“Pft,” Mako rolled his eyes. “Philistines. Once you go cyborg, you’ll never… ugh.”

“Still working on that one?”

“The only thing that rhymes with ‘cyborg’ is ‘morgue’. Try and turn that into sexual innuendo!”

And then they heard Hill’s voice from the kitchen, saying, “What the fuck did you people do in here?”

“Oh for shit’s sake, Josh,” Rachel muttered. “You had one job. Stay here,” she told Mako and Phil, as she sprinted from her study.

Rachel pushed open the kitchen door to see Hill standing in the middle of the room, saturated in a flummoxed yellow. He turned when she came in and pointed to a particular kitchen cabinet. Its door was splashed with several dozen different colors, each with the name of one of their coworkers from First District Station written somewhere in the white space around it, with a little arrow to indicate which name corresponded to which stripe. Santino’s name was linked to a streak of rich cobalt applied straight from the tube, with Rachel’s own core color (a middling turquoise, not too light, not too dark) painted beside his. Below these came the hues of the MPD’s police hierarchy: Sturtevant’s was a strike of dark gold. Then came Zockinski, with his bright autumn orange, but once you hit on Hill’s forest green, things got complicated, colors and arrows slapped up every which way, connections formed between persons and agencies and the offhand friend or relative who lived within more than one world.

The arrows were crucial. Nobody but Rachel would know what the colors meant without them.

She had finally carried out her threat to make a chart.

Right after Santino had moved in, they had the idea she could explain how she perceived emotions if she had the right visual aids. She had started with markers and copy paper, smearing the inks with her finger to try to get the right hues. Crayons came next, but even with sixty-four colors she soon ran out of combinations. Then came the acrylic paint sets, and the two of them had spent an entire weekend slopping around in pigment, Rachel blending, Santino pinning paper to the corkboard next to the refrigerator while the paint dried. When they ran out of room on the board, he started taping the paper to the cabinets, and when they ran out of paper, she had started on the walls. By late Sunday night, the kitchen looked as though a Pantone guide had exploded, a spectrum of colors coating every available surface and spilling into the hall.

Even the tile backsplash hadn’t escaped. There was a strong chance liquor had been involved in that particular decision; Rachel knew she’d never get the paint out of the grout.

The tedious part had been the labels. Not for the core colors: those were easy. A core color was—with certain exceptions—simple and unchanging. It was the layers of color over that core that were the problem. Since no one else in OACET shared her abilities, there was no one to help her describe what she perceived. And, since what she saw was human emotion manifest as color, the naming process had devolved into the chaos of subjective linguistics. She and Santino had pitched battles over mixed emotions: how, for example, one person could be angry (Tuscan red, mixed with scarlet), horny (also red, but more of a crimson-carmine combination), and frustrated (red again, this time a rusty burgundy) simultaneously, and how the intensity and movement of these colors within a constantly changing surface layer revealed which emotions were driving the person at any given time.

Occasionally, their discussions on the nomenclature of emotions became so heated that Santino’s temper would rise to match her own, the two of them shouting and hurling objects. He insisted she couldn’t create terms for made-up emotions: she said that if she could see “lustafury”, it was real enough to deserve a name of her choosing. Such fights usually ended when Rachel added another color combination under the hastily-scrawled heading: “Adult Male Temper Tantrum,” and Santino would storm outside to plant something in spite.

“Why is my name here?” Hill asked, his palm pressed against the cabinet with the cores from First District Station. “Zockinski’s, Sturtevant’s… What’s going on?”

Rachel had been trying so hard to keep the lying to a minimum. “Pet project of mine,” she said. “I’m planning to do some major renovations to the house. Do you do any interior design?”

“What?”

“Personality color-matching! You design your home around colors you think your friends would like… I know I’ve got the magazine around here somewhere… You want to read it? The article’s only about ten pages, and most of that is pictures.”

Hill’s colors went orange-yellow and then quickly glazed over; Rachel read some confusion, but mostly annoyance. “Maybe later.”

“You sure? You can borrow it if you want.”

“I’d rather see it when it’s done.” His shoulders were pockmarked; not just a white lie, but a full-on Lord, save me. Rachel covered her mouth to hide her smile. “You got any paper towels? I spilled some beer.”

“Yeah,” Rachel said. She retrieved a roll and the two of them returned to the den, where she chewed Josh out through the link. Nine yards on a first down was no excuse for him to slack off.

The pizza arrived at the same time Santino’s phone rang. He stepped into the kitchen to duck the bill, and Rachel sighed and picked up the tab. Pretending to be a good hostess was expensive.

The next room over, Santino’s conversational colors went white in shock.

“Take these,” Rachel said to Mako, shoving the pizza boxes into his arms. She found Santino standing in the kitchen, staring at his phone, feet frozen to the floor.

“Hey,” she said, tugging at his arm. “Santino? C’mon. You need to sit down.”

He blinked, not seeing her, then shook himself slightly and looked down. “Rachel…”

“Come on,” she said again, and led him back into the den. The men paused over the pizza boxes as they came in.

“Guys?” Santino said. “Got some bad news. Two cops over at Sixth? They just fished them and their car out of the Potomac. Looks like they were murdered.”

The Agents and those from the MPD went white, then gray.

Mako, a computer science expert who had no involvement with law enforcement, recovered first. “Did you know them?”

“No,” Santino said. This was echoed by everyone else in the room. “My friend says they were working security on Gayle Street.”

Rachel and Zockinski exchanged a glance. There was some honest fear in his colors.

That third phase of panic, she thought. So soon… I thought we had more time.

“Shit,” Hill said. He slumped over his knees. “Can this week get any worse?”

“Come on,” Zockinski said, standing. He whacked Hill on his shoulder and moved to the front door. “It won’t be our case, but we’ll do what we can. If this ties in with Gayle Street, we need to know how.”

There were some muttered goodbyes, and the two men left. They’re homicide detectives, Rachel realized. How did Sturtevant know we’d need homicide detectives on this? She was reminded of Santino’s comment about how Sturtevant played a good long game of chess. The Chief couldn’t possibly have known how the Gayle Street case might turn, but…

Eh, maybe. Maybe not. Experience counted for a lot in Rachel’s book, but so did preparation. Fill your roster with career cops, academics, ex-military, and cyborgs, and one of them would probably have the skills needed to deal with any given situation.

The television was muted, another round of beers came out. The death of one officer could wreck a good time, but when two or more were killed, it became a straight-out nightmare.

“You think people are gunning for us?” Santino asked.

“Thought had crossed my mind,” Rachel replied. “Everybody wants closure. Vigilante justice is a goddamned stupid way to get it, but some people are goddamned stupid.”

Over on the couch, Phil sighed. “Can you imagine how bad it’ll get if people start to blame Homeland for this? There’s going to be riots. Serious blood-in-the-street riots.”

“Why would they blame Homeland?” Santino asked, his colors shifting to curious yellows.

“Oh. Um…” Phil looked around, realized there wasn’t anyone he didn’t trust, and described the serial numbers and the possible connection to Homeland.

“Oh fuck,” Josh said, his grays growing to submerge his core, his head dropping into his hands. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

“Josh?”

He rolled the bottom of his beer around his knee for a moment, then said, “I spend more time up on Capitol Hill than you guys do. We’re at the point where it almost doesn’t matter who bombed Gayle Street—all that matters is who the public thinks bombed Gayle Street! The climate is…

“Okay,” Josh said, as he organized his thoughts. “Imagine you’re a politician, and the Manning scandal breaks. That’s a problem, but it’s manageable because some of the reporting methods are shoddy at best. It plays well with the conspiracy theorists and the liberals, but it doesn’t hit in a big election year, and most of the voters forget about it before presidential election season begins.

“Then comes OACET. Your constituency suddenly learns their government has created cyborgs that can control any machine, anywhere in the world. This would be bad enough, but the government didn’t make this fact public—OACET did. And the first thing the government does is to say we’re lying, and when we prove we aren’t, the second thing it does is to say it was all a big misunderstanding. Even though we can prove certain members of Congress had over a hundred Agents murdered to cover it up, but whatever. Mistakes happen. Nobody knows what anybody else is doing in a bureaucracy.

“Not too long after that? Drones attacking American citizens. And after that? Snowden, who’s got an insane amount of evidence to prove that all of the things that Homeland and the NSA promised they won’t do? Absolutely, totally doing.

“Politicians are scared. The only thing they’ve got going for them is the attention span of the average American. News fatigue is a politician’s best weapon, because Americans have been whipped up into a frenzy over trivial bullshit so many times that it’s hard to get them to pay attention when a real problem shows up. But they know that the country is getting close to a breaking point, because the average person is getting tired of being lied to and misled by their leaders.

“Finally? The extremes are looking for an excuse. Liberals hate conservatives, conservatives hate liberals, the rich and the poor loathe each other… It’s an unsustainable system on the verge of collapse. We’ve reached a point where only thing that’s holding the country together is the people in the middle, those decent, average folks who recognize that nothing good will come of fighting each other.

“But if the middle tips to either extreme? The situation becomes unbalanced. The guys in the Capitol are terrified of hitting that tipping point, the one where the middle decides it’s finally worth the cost to act.”

Josh’s anger had been amping up along with his speech. He looked red and ready to attack someone, the neck of his beer bottle seized in a death grip.

“If you’re going to throw that, go outside,” Rachel told him.

He closed his eyes and his reds slipped in intensity as he recentered himself. “You guys do realize that if Homeland is in any way responsible for Gayle Street, we’ve probably hit that tipping point, right?”

“What?!?” Mako, the eternal optimist, couldn’t consider the possibility. “Why in the hell would we do this to ourselves?”

“Public pressure is powerful,” Rachel told him. “If Homeland thought Gayle Street could be used to achieve a specific goal…”

“No,” Santino said. “It doesn’t matter what the goal might be. Nothing justifies Gayle Street.”

Santino was unconvinced. So were Mako and Phil. Must be nice to be innocent, she thought. Rachel didn’t know how any Agent could still have faith in their own government after what they had been through, but more power to those who did.

“I’ve got to go to work,” Josh said, standing. “This might—God, I almost said explode. This might get bad.”

“You’re taking some food,” Rachel said. It wasn’t a request; Josh was as bad as Phil when it came to remembering to eat. She grabbed the nearest pizza box and brought it to the kitchen with her, then started scanning through the mess under the shelves for tinfoil wrap. The tinfoil was on the very bottom of the cabinet, covered with a hodgepodge of plastic to-go plates from restaurant carry-out meals.

We really need to start cooking, she thought. Waste of money, eating out every—Damn!” She yelped the last word as the rigid cutting edge on the side of the tinfoil box sliced the side of her finger open. She wrapped a clean paper towel around her hand before shoving the whole mess into the pocket of her sweat pants. “Damn,” she said again, quietly this time. Nothing looked less professional than a cop with a big old Band-Aid, except maybe a cop with a Band-Aid and whose hands were already covered in scratches and transparent semi-permanent goop. She’d probably have to wear gloves for a month.

She yelled at Josh and told him to finish wrapping up his own stupid pizza, and retreated to the den. The mood was black; she curled up against Mako and the four of them pretended to watch the second quarter. Phil and Santino started passing a tablet back and forth, showing off their collection of recent Internet finds. Rachel and Mako quickly grew bored with clever macros, and Mako headed home to be with his wife and baby girl.

“Going to bed,” Rachel announced to the room at large.

“Night,” Santino replied. She got a quick wave and a distracted hug through the link from Phil.

She shut her bedroom door behind her and threw a casual scan around the room, noting how she had really let her housekeeping skills slide. Her sex life had been nonexistent over the last few months, so she had abandoned the pretext that the state of her bedroom might matter to anyone other than herself. It was part therapy, she reminded herself; she’d break that old Army habit of making the bed the moment her feet hit the floor if it killed her.

The tub, at least, was clean, but the urge to take a bath was gone. And she didn’t want to sleep, and she couldn’t get lost in a book, and watching television in her own lonely head was a step down from wearing nothing but purple and filling her house with pets…

“Fifty-seven thousand channels in your brain,” she muttered to herself, “and nothin’ on.”

Deep in her pocket, her finger throbbed.

She reached out to Phil before she could think it through. “Do me a favor?”

“Sure, what?” he answered.

“Ping me in half an hour. If I don’t answer, come and shake the shit out of me, and then call Jenny Davies.”

“Wha—” Phil was hot with concern in her head. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, pressing her finger down into the wad of paper towels in her pocket. “I’m about to try a new autoscript, and I’m not sure how well it’ll work.”

“Ah, right,” he replied, his concern fading. Autoscripts were a funny sort of thing. “Do you want me to babysit while you play with it?”

“Nah,” she said, suppressing her anxiety from their link as best she could. “Thanks, but I shouldn’t have any problems.”

She procrastinated by spending a precious few of her allotted minutes tidying, then yanked the sheets flat to cover the bed, kicked off her shoes, and laid down with a sigh. She folded her arms as Shawn had done, then uncrossed them just as quickly; this was stressful enough without mimicking a corpse. Instead, she tucked her hands behind her head, crossed her ankles, and did her best to ignore how her heart was racing at NASCAR speeds.

She wondered if she was about to do something incredibly stupid. Patrick Mulcahy had told everyone that sleeping with the implant on could be dangerous. Rachel believed him; everyone believed him. The mischief a subconscious mind and an active implant could get up to? Nobody wanted to be the one who accidentally nuked Miami. The moment an Agent decided to go to bed, the implant was turned off.

Nobody but Shawn would have discovered this, Rachel realized. Shawn knew the rules and obeyed as best he could, but he did tend to forget. The others would consider meditating with the implant on to be dangerously close to sleeping, and would remember to turn it off, but Shawn might not be as careful.

She took a deep breath, checked her clock, and summoned the new autoscript.

It was a soft ball of wool in her mind, and she spent an awkward moment fighting it before taking several deep breaths and relenting. The autoscript wrapped itself around her. Jenny had been right: it didn’t feel a thing like Shawn. It felt like Jenny, all confident and reassuring and safe.

Then, peace.

Her timer went off precisely fifteen minutes later. She woke, fully alert and able to see her bedroom upon waking since the first time she had lost her eyes. She ran Jenny’s diagnostic scan through her own body, bemused to find her blood alcohol content had dropped almost a full 0.06 percent. Agents metabolized alcohol at a fantastic rate, but even for her, that was fast. When she got to her hands, she pushed the scan as hard as she could, concentrating on the little details…

Well.

Rachel wasn’t sure what she had expected to find. Her hands were still a mess, the cuts and scratches still red and sore to the touch. But the older ones were no longer weeping pus, and when she unwound the paper towel from her finger, she saw the cut from the tinfoil box had stopped bleeding.

Could mean anything, she decided. Could be you just stopped using your hands for fifteen minutes.

She flipped off visuals and sat in the dark, running her thumb over the stitches on her left palm.

But…

Every cop the world over was aware their subconscious was just as smart as their conscious mind. It was what ticked away on the problems of the case even when the workday was over. It was what drove her to return to the scene again and again, to keep working the witnesses until they were past the point of breaking, until she found that one overlooked detail which locked the separate pieces of the crime together.

She used to be okay with this—she used to think it was normal. Hell, she had been told it was normal! During her early CID training, Rachel had suffered through long lectures from an officer who believed that Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences explained this division between the conscious and unconscious minds. The officer had turned every class into a discussion of how different people can excel at sports but can’t carry a tune in a bucket, or could speak a dozen languages while mathematics left them cold.

Rachel took this a step further: there may have been different forms of intelligence, true, but she carried around the strengths and weaknesses of those intelligences with her in different parts of her own head.

And after she got the implant, she became absolutely convinced the damned thing was smarter than she was.

She processed information a little better these days. New information was a little easier to handle, routine tasks completed a little more quickly. She told herself she didn’t have to like this new aspect of herself, she just had to like what it did for her, and it was definitely an improvement over Old Rachel, back when she was the only one inside her own head.

But…

But, oh, how she wished she could remember why she had stared at the sun.

She decided to chalk her hands up to the placebo effect and a good nap, and went back downstairs to catch the rest of the game.