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Thin air

Кейн Рэйчел

“What the hell are you doing?” Lewis barked, scrambling up, but I wasn’t listening to him. If this was magic, then I could do it, right? David had shown me how to reach for power…except that I had no idea what to do with it. I could grab the power and hold it, but handing a child a scalpel didn’t make her a surgeon.

Show me, I begged. Come on, somebody, show me what to do. SHOW ME!

I felt a slow, warm, syrupy pulse come up through my body, flowing through my legs, up through my body’s core, spilling out of my hands. Cherise dissolved into a sparkling network of tiny bright points of light, millions of them, layer upon layer upon layer, like a city at night. Some of the lights were bright white, some blue, some shading toward yellow and red.

And, ominously, a substantial part of her head was simply black. No lights at all.

And the black was spreading.

I heard Lewis shouting something at me, but I ignored him. I was expecting him to physically try to drag me away, but he must have had more sense than that.

Cherise’s nervous system was an incredible design, mesmerizing and intensely beautiful, and I found myself mapping the lines of color and light in a kind of trace, my hands moving above her body just inches from skin.

I paused over the dead areas, both hands hovering uncertainly, and then I reached inside and touched one of the dead nodes.

Cherise screamed, both in my ears and-chillingly-inside my head.

“Stop!” Lewis was yelling in my ear now, but he wasn’t touching me. I was radioactive, and he knew it. “Jo, you’re not an Earth Warden. Jesus, you’re not meant to do this. Stop!”

I was hurting her, but I knew, somehow, that it had to hurt. There wasn’t any choice, if I wanted to save her. The blackness was spreading across that network of lights, slowly consuming her, and if I didn’t do something she’d be gone, this beautiful creation would be gone, and I couldn’t let it happen.

I just couldn’t.

Smells and sounds and chaos rolled over me, a huge vista of things I couldn’t comprehend, a presence that guided my hands and my powers to touch here and there and there, a tiny spark of pure white power jumping from one burned-out node to another, jump-starting and dying.

It’s not working!

The presence inside wordlessly soothed me, and showed me again. And again. I was no longer seeing or hearing anything in the outside world; the world was what was under my hands and in my head.

And this time, the bridge sparked, flickered, and held, and the network of lights raced and flared and ignited through the dark.

I felt things shift into place. Click.

Cherise lit up with a blaze of power, and I heard her take in a whooping, gasping breath in the real world.

I did it.

Yeah. But now that the feverish desire to do it was passing…what exactly had I done?

“Let go!” Lewis was yelling at me, frantic. I tried. Before I could get free, another spark jumped from my fingers, accessing a network of brilliance in Cherise’s mind, and although I had no idea what I was doing…

I was suddenly inside her head.

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FOUR

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Being in Cherise’s body took some adjustment. I felt dizzy, squeezed, wrong. I involuntarily tried to move something, but in the next instant I realized a couple of important things…

One, I wasn’t Cherise. I was still me, but a silent observer sitting alongside Cherise in her body.

And two, this was the past.

This was memory.

It took me a second to absorb where Cherise was. Some kind of set. Movie? Television? I caught sight of the unmistakable configuration of a television news desk, and the call letters in red over it. Cameras. People milling around. There wasn’t any easy way I could figure out what date this was, or even what city. I could sense Cherise thinking, but it was a random jumble of stuff, nothing I could make sense of-until it suddenly did.

Oh great, she thought. Time to make nice with the new girl.

And with a sense of having fallen completely down the rabbit hole, I saw myself-Joa

But I couldn’t. I was trapped, helpless, watching the memory play out before me. Trapped.

“Hi. I’m Joa

“You’re Marvin’s new assistant,” Cherise said. “Right?”

God, did I really look that way when I smiled? My mouth looked fu

“Yeah, well, that’s Marvin for you. Hey. I’m Cherise. I’m the dumbass who runs around in the bikini to give the surf forecast.” Cherise rolled her eyes to show it didn’t really bother her. From this side of the conversation, I could tell that it wasn’t an act; ru

I watched the former me make a face that I resolved I would never, ever make again. “Oh, fabulous. Is he always that-?”

“Grabby? Always,” Cherise said, and leaned forward. “Okay, time for the potential compatibility quiz. Who’s the sexiest man alive?”

“Uh…” Joa

“Acceptable answers include David Duchovny, Joh

“I don’t watch a lot of television,” the other me confessed. Well, I consoled myself with the thought that losing my memory clearly hadn’t made all that much difference in my conversational skills.

“Well, I watch a lot of television,” said Cherise. “So you’ll need to catch up. I’ll give you a list of what you can start with, and yes, there will be quizzes later.”