Edge. Part 27

He went quiet, contemplating this. Then he sniffed in a breath.

"Will you teach me how you do it?"

"Maybe." Her smile looked surprised. "Maybe I will."

At the roundabout where he should have exited to join the motorway, he continued turning, into a second rotation.

"I need to do something," he said.

"Visiting hours must be over."

It was scary how she understood what he intended.

"I'll manage to get in."

"Then let's do it."

He took the Swindon road, and continued on to the hospital. Suzanne said nothing until he pulled in and parked the car. Outside, the night was darkening.

"Do you want me to come in with you?"

"No. Thanks."

Reaching over to the glove compartment, he became sensitive to her warm proximity, and the fragrance she was wearing: airborne molecules propelled by the heat of her flawless creamy chocolatte skin. Swallowing, he extracted a dull silver ring from the compartment.

"Fake ID?" asked Suzanne.

"A dummy, to make me look genuine." Josh extracted his phone from the console. "This is what will get me past the scanners."

He walked to the main entrance, nodding to the security guard beyond the gla.s.s doors, then held his ring close to the door, and faced the cameras. What should happen was a three-way check among data stored on the ring (including fractally compressed facial images), the camera scan, and the staff database; what actually occurred was fast intrusion from his malware, a false recognition code, and the clicking open of magnetic locks.

"Hi," he said to the guard.

"Evening, doctor."

Beyond reception, he walked corridors now half in shadow, conserving energy and helping patients sleep. The wall signs glowed, but he did not need them to find his way. At the nurses' station outside the coma unit, he stopped, opening up his senses while remaining still inside. From the sounds and other subliminal cues, he understood there were two nurses inside the open office, drinking lemon tea he could smell it. Their chairs creaked as they rotated them, one leaning close to murmur something to the other; and as they naturally faced away from the doorway for a moment, Josh slipped past.

Inside Sophie's room, machines sucked and hissed, susurrating as they worked her small lungs. Medicinal smells were strong. Monitors glowed and beeped, tracking her physiology and rendering a clear message in steady coloured graphs: no change.

Sophie's face was delicate, luminescent grey in the half light. He brushed a curl, fine and wispy, away from her forehead. Then he took her fingers in his, remembering her as a baby, grasping a single finger, smiling her heart-splitting smile.

My little girl.

For a long time he held still; then he leaned over, kissed her forehead, and stepped away.

"Good"

I can't say it.

A complete farewell was impossible.

His exit route was irrational, perhaps from the need for physical action. He raised the window of Sophie's room he was three floors up went through, pulled the window shut the automatic lock clicked home then spidered his way down in the dark. Brickwork was hard and gritty against his palms. His shoe soles made sc.r.a.ping noises as he descended. Then there was ground beneath his feet: an anticlimax that came too soon.

Everything people do is for unconscious reasons. Wasn't that what Suzanne had been trying to tell him? He knew symbolic logic, could design software in Evolutionary Z, but it seemed to have little to do with the way his mind worked, or the way Sophie's image remained in his mind no matter what he was doing.

When he opened the car door, Suzanne flinched.

"Where did you come from? I was watching the entranceway."

"Sorry."

He slid in and closed the door. And sat there.

"What happened, Josh?"

"I... I tried to say goodbye."

"What stopped you?"

He closed his stinging eyes as his mouth turned down. Then he blinked a few times.

"It's too late, because she's gone. It was too late the moment the car hit her."

Suzanne's hand was on his forearm. No psych trick, just a human gesture.

"That's not Sophie," he went on. "It's a remnant, like a fingernail or a a lock of hair."

"I'm so sorry."

He nodded.

Time pa.s.sed. Epochs or minutes, he could no longer tell the difference. Then he slid his phone back into the console, and turned on the engine.

"Let's get you home."

Once they were on the motorway and cruising, Suzanne told him how things had gone with the Brezhinski family.

"The parents are less stressed, and young Marek will be practicing healing visualisation."

On the battlefield, Josh had seen men who gave up and died from survivable wounds, while others fought, living against horrific odds. The worse the physical injury, the more vital was the mind controlling the immune system. Many soldiers developed a form of autohypnosis to cope with small combat wounds.

"Good." He forced his attention outward, onto the dark motorway, for the sake of Suzanne's safety as he drove. "You calmed them down."

"Actually, I got one of them sputtering with confusion as I tied them up in verbal knots, showing the contradictions in their behaviour. Sometimes you need to be outrageous and almost aggressive." She smiled. "Rapport can be overrated."

"So no hypnosis."

"Well, maybe a little."

"But you can't hypnotise someone against their will.""Uh-uh. Look, pay attention to the road right now, but in the past, have you ever drifted off while driving... then come to your senses, and wondered who the h.e.l.l was in charge for the past fifty miles?"

"Oh. So it's not just me."

"Everyone who's been lost in a good movie was in a trance, because that's all it is, an altered state. We drift through dozens of different mental states every day."

"Mind control," he said. "Tell me about the mind control."

"Bad metaphor. People want to learn how to hypnotise others but not go into trance themselves. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's more like a dance, leading someone into a state where they're more resourceful than usual. The fastest way to induce a trance is to go there first."

"You're joking."

"I go into a different state from theirs, because my eyes are open, my attention on the client while they go inside themselves. But I'm still in a kind of trance. The fMRI proves it."

Josh was not sure whether he was impressed or disappointed.

"You say it's like a dance. There are links between martial arts and dance, you know."

"What I use is not a weapon."

"Oh."

Clearly she could read his mind.

Later, still driving, he tapped the phone, then told it the URI to connect to. Ghostly outlines in blue, red, and green popped up on the windscreen: a translucent heads-up display. Via proxies, he had the postings list from his querybot, with two hits registered, both recent.

"What's that?" asked Suzanne.

"High-probability sightings of Richard Broomhall." He tapped for a map-pane, which he dimmed. "London, south of the river. We can check the video footage when we stop."

"How far to the services?"

"Ten minutes. Perhaps we should go on. I've had to control my bladder before."

"Do you like watching waterfalls? All the water splas.h.i.+ng down, splish-splash."

"Jesus, you are are a witch." a witch."

"No, I'm not telling you to think about a flowing tap, the ripples of running water down a channel that"

"All right, I'll stop."

"I promise to use my powers only for evil," said Suzanne. "Er, I mean good."

"Witch, witch, witch."

At the service area they pulled in, plugged the car in to recharge, used the facilities then carried cappuccinos back to the vehicle. Inside, he put music on. After ten seconds, it was replaced with a shus.h.i.+ng sound.

"That's odd," said Suzanne. "Has the channel gone offline?"

"No, it's anti-sound in the cha.s.sis and windows. There's one-way silvering on the gla.s.s as well, now that I've changed the polarisation."

"Er... Are there onboard missiles? Machine guns?"

"I think that's next year's model. And your phone's blocked, by the way."

"Oh." Suzanne had velcroed her phone around her wrist. "Right, it's dead."

"Standard anti-surveillance. I don't want you flagged as of interest, or no more than you already are, by a.s.sociating with Broomhall."

"a.s.sociating?"

"Or whatever. Anyway, let's see the footage."

Both segments were short, and he set them up to loop simultaneously in two panes. In one, the pinpointed youth walked along a street past piled-up bin bags a moving shadow might have been a rat while in the other segment, a youth in a green sweats.h.i.+rt maybe the same person crossed a road to avoid a group of larger teenagers.

"That's him." Suzanne kept watching. "In both loops, that's Richard."

"Right." Josh blanked the display, then called up the map. "Depending on how far he tends to move at night... if he's settled in somewhere, he's in Wandsworth, maybe Brixton."

"Settled in. Asleep in a doorway. Poor Richard."

"Maybe not asleep." Josh did not want to mention nocturnal predators. "But trying to keep out of sight and warm."

"So you're not likely to find him if you start looking now."

"But if we"

"We both need sleep."