“There’s a system here you’re not considering,” he says. “Our work is a collaboration. You need a Scribe to write the script. And no one else here gives a damn about your brother.”
“I wouldn’t need a script from anyone else. I could do this on my own,” Dez says, staring at the stranger on the screen, willing her to disappear. Wanting more than anything to see her brother now. This isn’t what she came all the way here to do.
Suddenly, a burning sensation starts in her eyes and travels through her brain. She cries out, feeling as if her mind is being bent. The surround-screen fritzes with static, then fills with an entirely new image.
No, not an image. Footage. Film.
Close on a heart monitor pulsing, a wavy green line. And then the camera pans out to show a hospital room. A patient lying in a hospital bed, face and neck wrapped in heavy gauze. Gaps for eyes and the tubes running out of the patient’s nose and mouth. Dez stares,wondering what she’s looking at, who she’s looking at. Not the woman from Rafe’s film—the setting is entirely different.
The heart monitor flatlines.
Doctors and nurses flood the room, wheeling defibrillators, pressing paddles to the patient’s chest.
“Clear,” someone shouts, and the patient jolts beneath the current.
Dez’s eyes focus in on the patient’s hand. On it is an Egyptian Sphinx tattoo.
Which she’d driven her brother to get last fall and had ended up paying for.
Dez staggers toward the screen and touches it.
“Moses?” she whispers.
“WHAT DID YOU DO?”RAFEdemands.
“I don’t know,” Dez gasps. “I just wanted to see him.”
Rafe steps in front of her and reaches for the screen as if he’s trying to tear the scene down with his hands.
But Dez can’t bear that. She grabs his arms. “Please. Don’t make it go away.” She pushes him back until his body relents. She stares at the image all around her, so crisp and clear it’s like she’s in the room with Mo.
Her heart pounds.
She can turn her head and see every angle: cacti at dawn out the half-open blinds, a candy wrapper that’s fallen from a panicked doctor’s pocket to the floor, a whiteboard with cartoon faces of different levels of pain.
Is it really Mo? Dez can scarcely make sense of what’s before her eyes, and she can’t begin to fathom how or why.
Then something strange happens on the screen. It’s like the camera’s focus moves out of the ICU. Dez sees flashes of a hallway, doctorsand nurses speeding by. It’s so immersive, she feels faintly nauseated. She sees two large metal swinging doors—
And on the other side, her mother’s horrified expression.
With a motion of his hand, Rafe swipes it all away, leaving them standing inches away from each other, breathing heavily in the dim, gray light.
“That was my brother,” Dez struggles to say. “In the hospital.”
“Yes.”
“When? How?” Dez asks. On-screen her mother wore the same clothes as the night Mo was admitted. Had her brother flatlined right after Dez left to go to Acheron? Had it put him in the coma her mother told her he was in now?
Rafe runs a hand through his thick, dark hair, looking at a loss for words.
“You weren’t supposed to see that,” he says. “You shouldn’t have had access.”
“Well, I saw it.” Dez touches her temples, remembering the shooting pain she’d felt right before Mo appeared on the screen. “Now you need to tell me what’s going on.”
“Our equipment has the ability to work with filmmakers telepathically,” Rafe says, “to be controlled by your mind’s eye. But you haven’t learned that yet. It’s not something you’ll learn for months, sometimes years. And even then, I don’t see how—”
“I don’t care about the fucking curriculum, Rafe.”
