He carried it to the sofa, then opened it on his lap. I sat beside him, watching. He turned to smile at me as we waited for the machine to log on as him. “I hate the circumstances,” he said. “But this is kind of like old times.”
I didn’t answer. His statement felt too right to acknowledge. Instead, I nodded at the laptop. “So what are we databasing?”
He chuckled. “We really need to teach you how to talk tech.”
“You know what I mean,” I asked as theForza Westscreen popped up and he navigated to his personal area. “What are you looking for?”
“Honestly, I’m not sure. I’m logged intoForza’smain search engine. Let me do a search for incidents involving sleep talking or speech from a comatose patient.”
He typed a bit, then looked up at me. “I’ve already done this, you know. I’m doing it again just in case I missed something. Changing up a few parameters. But I don’t expect we’ll find anything. Still, it’s a good place to start.”
“You already tried this? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Of course I did. It’s Stuart, and you love him, and there’s something going on with him.”
“You believed me. Even that first day, you believed me.”
“I’ve always believed you, Katie.”
“I know. Thank you. This is all very strange.”
He reaches over and presses his hand against my back. I scoot closer, telling myself I just want to see the screen better.
“Yes,” he said, his voice soft. “Very strange.”
For the next few minutes, he typed and I tried not to be impatient. We came up with absolutely nothing, and he sighed, then told me he was going to change a few more parameters. “If he’s warning about the future, maybe he’s channeling an oracle.”
He typed, then hit enter, then turned to me with a grin as a half-dozen hits filled the screen.
“Okay, now we might be getting to something.” He tapped the screen. “Check out this one. A dead man spoke.”
I shifted, taking my eyes off the computer. The way he was bouncing around in the text was making me queasy. “Stuart isn’t dead.”
“True, but this account is from the fifteenth century. TheForzainvestigators are calling him dead, but there’s some suggestions in the text that he was in a coma. They might not have understood the difference back then, and the patient’s breathing may have been extremely shallow.”
“What else does it say?”
He reaches out and tugs a lock of my hair. “I changed my mind. This isn’t at all like old times.”
“Excuse me?”
“You never gave a flip about what was in the books before.”
I laughed, and he took my hand, his thumb lightly brushing my skin in a way that felt decidedly intimate.
For a moment, I let him touch me that way. For a longer moment, I want him to touch me more. Then I remembered myself and pulled my hand away, conjuring what I hoped was a casual-looking smile.
“So what happened?”
He cleared his throat. “Well, ourForzainvestigator didn’t actually witness it, but he reports that several of the town’s residents said that they would come to see the dead man to hear what he had to say. And each time, he spoke the truth.”
“Oh. Wow.”
“But….” He trailed off as he read some more.
“Well?” I was nothing if not impatient. “What did he tell them?”
“According to this, the words he spoke were true, but it also sounds like the statements were a lot like a fake psychic. The things they say can be interpreted in different ways depending on the circumstances and what the hearer wanted to be said.”
