It was me. On the inside. Specifically my skull.
Every detail: sinus cavities, teeth, bones, muscles. There were symbols marked in various spots on the skull. I angled my head hard and noticed that to the right of the large screen were four smaller ones.
Those took me longer to figure out but I finally realized each was showing different parts of my brain. There were symbols marked on those images, too, concentrated in—if I remembered my biology courses correctly, and unfortunately at the moment I seemed to be recalling them with horrifying clarity—the limbic region of my brain.
I knew what the limbic region was. We’d studied it in my abnormal psych course. It was a set of brain structures located on both sides of the thalamus, and it supported emotion, behavior, and long-term memory, among other things. The limbic system included the hypothalamus, the amygdala, and the hippocampus. It was highly tied to the brain’s pleasure center and tightly linked to the prefrontal cortex.
The reason I recalled all this so clearly was because our university had been participating in a study while I was taking my AP course, and the professor had solicited volunteers for it.
The purpose of the study had been to explore whether a “turned off” limbic system or brain damage in that area was a valid marker of psychopathy. He’d told us there was significant evidence acquired from incarcerated criminals that there was indeed a correlation.
I remembered looking at my classmates, who’d eagerly thrust their hands in the air, thinking: Who would be stupid enough to volunteer for this? What if they got their brain scanned and learned they were psychopaths? Was that really something you wanted to know? More importantly—was it really something you wanted everyone around you to know?
I’d shoved my hands deep in my pockets that day and kept them there.
Now, as I studied the screen of my brain, I pondered the implications. I lacked the training to decide if my limbic region was “turned off” or damaged, but from the look of the instruments on the table and the symbols on the various parts of my brain—it was about to be.
The Sweeper thought my brain needed to be fixed. I scowled. There was nothing wrong with my brain. Had I been able, I would have clamped both my hands protectively to my head. Would my skull keep remodeling as it tried to cut me open? Sealing around its instruments? I had no doubt that whatever barbaric surgery it had planned wouldn’t go easy. I wondered if it was the presence of the Book inside me that made the Sweeper consider me both powerful enough and fractured enough to require fixing. The damned Sinsar Dubh just never stopped messing up my life.
A voice broke the silence from my left—first, scaring the shit out of me, then filling me with far more horror than I’d realized I could even hold.
“It’s my heart,” Jada whispered. “What’s it planning to fix of yours?”
36
“And I will wait, I will wait for you…”
I closed my eyes and sagged limply against the table.
No, no, no, I screamed inside my head. Not this. Anything but this.
Then I surged violently from head to toe, trying to explode from my bonds. I flailed, shuddered, and flopped. Minutely.
I got nowhere.
“No,” I finally managed to whisper. And again more strongly, “No.” Not Dani. Never Dani. No one was “fixing” anything about her, and certainly not her bodacious heart.
“So,” she prodded in a whisper. “What’s it fixing on you?”
“You’re strapped to a table, about to be fixed, and you’re curious?”
“If I hadn’t told you first, wouldn’t you be curious about what it thought my problem was?” she whispered back.
“How do you know its purpose is to fix things?”
“Pretty obvious from the images, Mac,” she said dryly.
“How did you know I was here?” I hadn’t known she was. I hadn’t bothered looking to my left. There hadn’t been any sounds over there. Perhaps our would-be surgeon had already set up her instruments before I’d regained consciousness.
“Superhearing. You’ve been sighing. Occasionally, a snort. Can you reach your cellphone?”
“No,” I said.
“Me either.”
How had she gotten here? Had the wraiths broken out a window in BB&B, swooped in and plucked her unconscious body from the bed? Had they always possessed the power to defeat Barrons’s wards and just been pretending? And why? As far as I knew, my ghouls hadn’t been stalking her. Had the Sweeper simply tucked her into its cart like a grocery store customer indulging in a buy-one-get-one-free deal because she’d been handy and according to its nebulous and highly suspect criteria was “broken,” too?
“How did it get you?” I asked woodenly.
“I looked out the window and saw you walking down the alley.”
“I thought you were unconscious.” Damn it, she should have been unconscious! Then she wouldn’t be here.
“I was waiting for everyone to finally leave. Ryodan finished my tattoo today. I had someplace to go. But I looked out the window and saw you following what looked like a walking trash heap.”
“Following it?” I’d never even seen it. Apparently the noisy, rattling heap could cast a glamour.
“It was about twenty feet ahead of you. Then I heard Barrons’s voice coming from it and knew something was wrong. The minute I stepped outside, the ZEWS were on me. I didn’t even have time to access the slipstream.”
They’d straitjacketed her, too, I realized. Smothered her and knocked her out, and like me, she’d awakened restrained from head to toe.
“Slipstream?”
“Used to call it freeze-frame.”
“Got any superhero ideas?” I said. I wasn’t hopeful. Restrained, even her extraordinary gifts were useless.
“Everything I learned Silverside requires use of my hands. Can you move at all?”
“Only my head and only a little.”
“Ditto,” she said.
I searched for something reassuring to say but could find nothing. Barrons would have no reason to look for us beyond the eight-block circumference of the storm, and I doubted we were in that part of the Dark Zone that was inside it. I’d underestimated my ghoulish stalkers. I wasn’t making that mistake again. I had to assume anything that put so much premeditation into its “work” would put an equal amount of thought into choosing a place where it would not be interrupted.