“Hi,” she said, and immediately wanted to kick herself for it. “Do you know me?”
He didn’t answer. He only set down his spoon, silverware clinking the laminate of his tray. Deep behind her eyes, the ringing began. It crackled through her skull like static electricity, white and galvanizing as a lightning strike.
On a whim, she reached behind her ear and clicked off her implant. Instantly, the room’s ambient noises were extinguished. The steady hum of hospital equipment winnowed out and the thready huff of her breathing clipped to an immediate stop. In the hollow space left behind, her tinnitus flared.
“I’m Lane,” she said. “Do you remember me?”
A lurid smile—one that was not, Delaney felt, entirely human—stretched across Nate’s face. A feathery whisper of unease brushed the nape of her neck. She tried not to look afraid as something coiled between her ears. It sounded like a penny, rolled over stone. A presence took root, cold and alkaline. In the quiet of her thoughts, a voice crackled like static.
Yes,it said.We remember. We hoped you would come.
“We?” Panic gripped her by the throat. “What are you?”
There is no scope for me in your understanding. There is no word for me in your language.
Her nails bit into her palms. “And yet you’re speaking my language.”
Silence is universal, Delaney Meyers-Petrov.
She hesitated, her skin prickling. “You know my name.”
I know a great many things about you. I can read the chapters of your life like a book.
The words dripped over her thoughts like ink, bleeding through her until she felt dizzy and a little bit sick. She’d grown used to hearing things in the silence, but this was nothing at all like the restless dark—nothing like the fuzzing hum of a door between worlds.
This was something new.
She fought the urge to turn tail and run, to leave behind that vacant stare and that insipid voice inside her head. Her skin itched all over with the feel of cold, crawling things, as if some small insect had crept inside and laid eggs. As if she were a host, and the voice a parasite.
Similar, said the voice, though she hadn’t spoken aloud.I suppose, in some ways, I am quite like a mouse.
She held that blown-pupil stare, though she didn’t want to. “Explain.”
It didn’t escape her notice that Nate had gone too long without blinking. As soon as the thought occurred to her, his lids blinked two times in deliberate succession.Blink. Blink.As if being human was voluntary. As if he was a doll, and it the ventriloquist.
Whateveritwas.
I told you, it said.I am like a mouse.
“And I asked you to explain.”
It is difficult to compose an explanation over your shouting.
“I’m not shouting.”
Oh yes, you are.
She took a breath. She tried to still her thoughts. Her heartbeat raced through her like a rabbit in flight. In the quiet, the voice slithered through her skull. It writhed and it roiled. It hissed out an odious soliloquy.
I am that which slips into the secret spaces. When a door is left open too long, I am the thing that crawls inside. I am the beast who burrows in their hollows, the varmint who nibbles at their bones. This boy—
“Nate,” Delaney couldn’t help saying.
Nate’s mouth stretched open in a beatific smile. Spittle gathered at the corners, but he didn’t wipe it away.This boy, began the voice anew,threw his door wide. He invited me in.
“What does that mean? He wanted to die?”
No. He wanted to live forever.
