Crosstalk (37 page)

“That wasn't your fault! You said yourself you couldn't always tell where people are from their voices, and if I'd been visualizing my perimeter the way I was supposed to be, it wouldn't have happened.”

“And if I'd…never mind. The important thing is that it not happen again, and that's what the safe room is for. It'll provide a sanctuary where the voices can't get to you, and it'll also keep your thoughts from getting out and being overheard.”

Is that why I can't read C.B.'s mind the way he reads mine,
Briddey thought,
because he's in his safe room?

“Yes, but before you get on your high horse again and start accusing me of blocking Trent,” C.B. was saying, “a safe room only makes it possible to block your own thoughts from being overheard, not somebody else's.”

“I wasn't going to accuse you. When you told me about the Irish gene, I realized the reason Trent and I haven't connected is that his ancestors are English, and they probably have the inhibitor gene.”

“That's one reason,” C.B. muttered.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. You're right. The English got every invasion the Irish missed out on and did a fair amount of invading of their own; there's almost
no
history of telepathic occurrences, even with English saints. You, on the other hand, have more communication than you know what to do with, so let's get this safe room built.” He leaned forward. “I need you to think of a place you feel safe and protected from the outside world.”

The storage room,
she thought, with C.B.'s arms around her, but obviously that wasn't what he meant, and even if it was, she couldn't tell him that. Where else had she felt protected? Her imagined apartment with Trent, with a doorman to keep her family at bay, but she didn't think that was what C.B. meant either, and besides, all she felt now at the thought of being there was dread at all the questions Trent would ask. Safe and protected. “You mean like a fortress?” she asked.

“No, we're not going for a battles-and-sieges kind of safe here; that's for your perimeter. We need a place you associate with quiet and serenity. Not a park or a forest, though—someplace inside. Like your apartment, maybe, or your bedroom when you were a kid. Someplace no one else can get into unless you allow them in.”

Then definitely not her apartment or her childhood bedroom, which she'd shared with Mary Clare and Kathleen. And not her office. No place at Commspan was safe from people popping in, except possibly the sub-basement, and even there Kathleen had tracked her down. Besides, it was too cold.

She shivered at the memory of it, and C.B. said, “Are you feeling chilly?”

“No, I—”

“Well, you will be,” he said, walking over to the desk again. “Remember, they turn the heat down after the library closes.”

He disappeared behind the desk and came up holding a remote. He pointed it at the fireplace, and flames leaped up, casting a warm orange-red glow on the Persian carpet and the leather chairs, on the rich wood.

“What about
this
room?” Briddey asked. “Could I use it for my safe room?”

“Maybe, but it'll work better if it's something more familiar to you. Did you have a favorite hiding place when you were little? A closet you liked to play in? Or a tree house?”

“No. What do you use for your safe room?”

“I've had a bunch of them over the years: a western cavalry fort, a submarine, the Tardis,” and when she looked blank: “Doctor Who's blue police-box time-travel machine.”

“I thought you said it needed to be someplace real.”

“It
was
real. I'd watched about a million episodes of
Doctor Who.
Do you have something like that you could use, from your childhood? Rapunzel's tower or something?”

“No, that's Maeve's territory.”

“What about in college? Did you live by yourself?”

“No,” she said, and thought suddenly of a trip she'd taken during spring break to Santa Fe with one of her roommates. Allison's parents had had a sprawling adobe hacienda with a walled courtyard in the middle. She'd gotten up early every morning and gone out to sit in it.

“Alone?”

“Yes. Allison slept in, and her parents were in Europe.”

“Now you're talking. What kind of walls did this courtyard have?”

“Adobe. But it didn't have a roof. Doesn't that disqualify it as a safe room?”

“No, we're dealing in metaphor here, remember? If you think of it as a place nobody can get into, it will be. How tall were the adobe walls?”

“Tall. Above my head.”

“Did the courtyard have a gate?”

“No, a door, a blue door,” she said, remembering the heavy, brightly painted wood.

“Heavy is good. Did it have a lock on it?”

“No-o,” she said, trying to remember, “but it had an iron latch, and there was a wooden bar you could lower across it to keep people out.”

“Even better. You said the door was heavy. It wasn't too heavy for you to open, was it?”

“No. Why?”

“Because the instant the voices start to become too much for you, you're going to lift that latch and get yourself inside that door, so it needs to be something you can open fast.”

“But if I can open it, can't the voices open it, too?”

“No, because the moment you get inside, you're going to put that bar across the door.”

“But what if the voices have a battering ram?”

“They don't have a battering ram. This isn't a castle, it's a Santa Fe courtyard. There are no battering rams in New Mexico. And your voices are a flood, remember? Not an army. And the water can't get in because your adobe walls are too high and thick. So all you have to do to escape the flood is to run into the courtyard and slam the door shut. Which is what we are going to practice in a minute.” He looked at her. “You felt safe there? And happy?”

“Yes. I loved being by myself, and it was beautiful, all green and shady. There was a big cottonwood tree with a wooden bench under it that I loved to sit on.”

“Tell me what the rest of the courtyard looked like,” C.B. ordered, and for the next half hour took her methodically through every detail she could remember—the flagstone floor, the old gardener's cupboard that stood against one wall, the pink and red hollyhocks growing by the door.

“Okay,” he said when she'd finished. “I want you to close your eyes and visualize yourself standing in the courtyard.”

“Wait,” Briddey said. “If I'm in the safe room, how will I talk to you? And hear you talking to me?”

“It doesn't block talking, just thoughts, and you can let in—or keep out—whoever you want, so you'll still be able to hear my voice. Unless you don't want to.”

“Why would I not—?” she began, and then remembered the countless times she'd told him to go away. “I won't shut you out, I promise.”

“I'm glad to hear that,” he said. “Now visualize yourself standing in your courtyard.”

She did, imagining the flagstones under her feet, the high, leaf-shadowed adobe walls, the weathered cupboard with its stack of terra-cotta flowerpots on top.

“Okay, now I want you to open the door and go out.”

“Open the door? Why can't I just stay in here all the time?”

“Because it takes too much focus and energy to visualize it continuously. This is only for when you're in a crowd or the voices get too ugly or threatening.”

Or when I don't want you to hear what I'm thinking,
she added silently, remembering her reaction when he'd said, “I'm not a masochist.”

“You use it just like you'd use an actual panic room,” C.B. was saying. “For emergencies. The rest of the time you rely on your perimeter. Which is what you're going to do now. Think of your brick wall, and then open the door and go out.”

Reluctantly, she raised the wooden bar, lifted the iron latch, opened the heavy door, and went outside. “Now what?”

“Tell me what you see.”

“My perimeter,” she said, looking at the brick wall in the distance. She turned around to look at the adobe walls of the courtyard and the blue door. “It's got carved panels, and there's a
ristra
of dried chiles hanging on it.” She heard a low rumble behind her. The voices were coming.

“C.B.—” she said, and yanked the heavy door open. She flung herself inside, slamming it shut and pushing the bar across it and then leaning against it, out of breath.

“Excellent. Are you okay?” C.B. asked, and when she said yes, had her do it again—and again—trying to shave seconds off each time.

“You're doing great,” he said after the sixth run-through. “Let's take a break.” He walked over to one of the wing chairs and flopped down in it. “Gorgeous place, huh? A lot better than the stacks.”

No, it isn't,
she thought, and flung herself through the blue,
ristra
-hung door and into the courtyard to keep him from hearing the thought that had come to her, unbidden, of standing there in the stacks, her back pressed against the bookcase and him leaning over her, their faces only inches apart.
Thank goodness I've got a safe room to keep him from hearing that. If it's working.

It apparently was. C.B. wasn't looking at her. He was staring into the fire. She looked around the cozy room at the walls of dusty-smelling books. An old-fashioned library ladder stood against the shelves, there was a painting of George Washington—this one of him crossing the Delaware—above the checkout desk, and a large, leather-bound dictionary stood open on a stand.

“What's this place
doing
here?” she asked, walking over to look up at the portrait C.B. had pointed out before. “And who's Arthur Whatever-His-Name-Is?”

“Arthur Tellman Ross,” C.B. said. “He's the guy who donated eighty-six million dollars to the building of this library, provided they retained the old card file. And the bust of Shakespeare, the dictionary stand, the checkout desk”—he held up an old-fashioned wooden-and-metal date stamp—“and, of course, the books.” He waved his arm expansively at the ceiling-high shelves.

“Including
Ivanhoe,
” he said, bending his head sideways to read the titles, “
The Adventures of Robin Hood,
Robinson Crusoe,
”—he straightened—“and every other book Mr. Ross remembered from his college days, including a lovely selection of Victorian novels.”

“But you still haven't explained what this room is doing here,” Briddey said.

“It's here because the library had no intention of keeping card files
or
date stamps in this era of automated checkout, catalog terminals, and Kindle. So they came up with this,” C.B. said, walking over to the sofa. “It meets the letter of the agreement, and it's a perfect place for the university president to entertain other potential millionaire donors. And canoodle. If
he
wants to have sex, he doesn't have to deal with that uncomfortable floor in the stacks. It's also a perfect place for us to work.”

Except that we're trespassing,
Briddey thought.
If we get caught—

“We won't,” C.B. said confidently. “The campus police are busy answering a call to the Sig Ep house, where some guy passed out on the front lawn, and Marian's at home in bed, worrying about budget cuts. And even if we did get caught, we have a perfect right to be here. Arthur Tellman Ross apparently didn't trust the university to carry out his wishes—with good reason—so he put it in his will that anything he donated had to be available to the public at all times, which is why the door to this room isn't locked, even though the approach to it is. And why they keep its existence a deep, dark secret from the students.”

“How did you find out about it?”

“I was looking for
The History of Telepathic Experience,
which was in the library's online catalog but wasn't in the stacks and wasn't checked out, and one of the TAs said, ‘Maybe it's up in the Inner Sanctum.' ”

“And he brought you up here?”

“She,” C.B. said. “No, she clammed up as soon as she said it, but, as you know, I can read minds.”

“Yes,” Briddey said. “Speaking of which, why can you hear the campus police and the librarian, and I can't?”

“You can,” he said. “The problem is you can't separate their voices out from all the others.”

“And you can?”

“If it's someone whose voice I've heard before or I can figure out who it is from what they're saying—”

“Like the campus police.”

“No, actually, the Sig Ep who called 911. He gave the address of the Sig Ep house, and I heard him think,
The dispatcher said they're sending an officer right over.
That doesn't happen very often.”

“The police sending an officer right over, or a Sig Ep passing out on the lawn?”

“Somebody thinking an address,” he said. “Or their name. People hardly ever muse,
It is I, Jason P. Smythe, wishing I had a girlfriend,
so unless you know them—in which case you recognize their voice—it's very difficult to separate them out from the crowd. It's like trying to find a needle in an audio haystack.”

He'd obviously heard Marian the Librarian's voice and the TA's before, but what about the couple in the stacks?

“Proximity. With practice, it's also possible to determine who's nearby by changes in the timbre of their voices.”

That was how he'd known when there was someone in her hospital room—and what he'd been listening for when he dropped her off at the Marriott. He was making sure no one from Commspan was in the vicinity. “Are you going to teach me how to do that?” she asked.

“Yes, when you're ready. But you're a long way from that. It requires searching through the voices, which means—”