“I can understand some ASL, but I can read lips well enough. As long as you don’t talk too fast.” I hold out my hand, but Dax doesn’t return the gesture.
Asshole. It’s myleftarm that’s fucked, not my right. I can still shake hands.
“I haven’t heard from Austin in six months. Are you going to tell me where he is and why the hell he won’t respond to any of my emails?”
Dax’s lips twitch, and he rubs the back of his neck as he returns to the seat behind his desk. “Not sure exactly what he’s gotten himself into, but he’s in Edgewater with someone he met on his ‘walkabout.’ Got back from Mexico last night.”
“And he called you. Not me. Did the man forget how to type down there? Or FaceTime?”
Dax’s shoulders straighten, and he presses his hands flat on the desk in front of him. “He didn’t call me. I sent two of my guys down to Edgewater to help him out with a problem, and he gave me an update. Now are you going to sit down?”
“Fine.” I drop into a chair and rub my left shoulder. It’s humid as fuck today, and the socket is chafing my residual limb something fierce. I shouldn’t have bothered with it, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to meet new people when I looknormal.My left hand is covered in a layer of silicone that almost looks like skin—if you’re not paying close attention. “Why am I here?”
“Because Second Sight does a lot of things, Griff. We’re known as a security and protection firm, but we also work with two companies on the west coast specializing in adaptive tech.”
“In what?”
As if he mumbled the last two words on purpose, Dax passes me a tablet with the words“specializing in adaptive tech”on the screen.
“So, you put your own speech-to-text program on an iPad. Big deal. Siri already does that.”
“You’re not looking at justanyspeech-to-text-program,” he says, and the words appear in front of me with almost no delay. “It learns. All those words unique to you? It’ll catch.”
I don’t look up. I’ve watched YouTube videos night after night after night working on my lipreading skills, but the mental load of always translating in my head? It can be exhausting.
“Prove it.”
My own words appear on the screen, but unlike Dax’s speech, which is in black, my words are in blue.
“Prove it yourself.” He sits back and skims his fingers toward a cup of coffee. The movement’s odd, like he’s worried he’s going to knock it over.
“I don’t need a fuckingtabletto help me communicate with the rest of the world, Holloway. Austin doesn’t know a damn thing about my life these days, but as you can see, I’m managing just fine.”
His head snaps up, and his entire body goes rigid. “As I cansee?”
“Yeah.” I gesture to my prosthetic arm, then catch sight of the tablet screen. Dax isn’t wrong about the software. It even italicized the words we emphasized. And it didn’t change fucking to ducking.
Dax sets his mug down carefully, then removes his glasses to reveal scarring all around his eyes. Without the tinted lenses, his irises are pale as the morning sky. “You don’t know me, kid. But choose your next wordsverycarefully. I’m blind.”
Fuck me. Of all the stupid presumptions… I should know better. Anger, shock, and a hell of a lot of shame clog my throat, and I swallow hard before I can reply. “Dammit. No one told me.”
“No shit. Austin says you’ve got the best damn instincts of anyone he’s ever met—besides me and my ODA team. Those of us who are still alive, anyway. But you’re so caught up in your own shit, you can’t see what’s right in front of you.” He lunges over the desk and holds out his hand. “Give me the goddamned tablet.”
Thrusting it at him, I shove the chair back and stand. “I’m sorry for my shitty choice of words. But the rest of it? I don’t need your help. I’m managing just fine on my own.”
I’m out the door before he can say another word, and when Marjorie waves at me, trying to get me to stop, I ignore her too.
* * *
Staying in a hotel room?It makes me feel…normal. I turned down the accessible room. It was on the ground floor, and that’s just too much risk when you can’t hear anyone breaking in.
Even though I didn’t loseallmy hearing in Islamabad, my world’s been reduced to low rumbling noises most people would consider annoying. Semi trucks. Trains. And the elevator car as it travels up and down the shaft right next to my room. Strange how what used to be just noise now almost makes me smile.
Alone in the dimly lit room, I sit with my back against the headboard watching the Red Sox on TV. Sports are one of the few things I can follow without closed captioning, and I don’t want any more of the broken pieces of my life thrown back in my face right now.
Then why am I emailing Austin?
Pritchard,
