Crosstalk (57 page)

“Including the voices?”

“Yes, there's no sound at all. One second I could hear”—Briddey suddenly heard him think—
and then I couldn't.

I can hear him again,
she told C.B.

So can I,
C.B. said. “Trent, can you hear Briddey?”

“Yes.”

“I demand to know what's going on here,” Dr. Verrick said.

“We don't know,” C.B. said.

Liar,
Trent thought.
Schwartz is probably the one behind this. How do we know building these so-called defenses didn't cause…oh, no, they're back!
And he began brushing madly at his legs.

Good,
Briddey thought,
the voices will keep him from telling Dr. Verrick that,
and said,
Trent, this is why you need your safe room. Forget about the paintings and finish visualizing your walls.

“What do you mean, you don't know?” Dr. Verrick was asking.

“We don't know,” C.B. said. “We lost telepathic contact with Trent for a short time, but we got it back.”

Which meant he wanted to downplay what had happened.
And I should help,
Briddey thought.

“It's not an uncommon occurrence,” she said. “Trent and I have experienced gaps in our communication before. The first few hours after we connected, we only caught occasional words and phrases, didn't we, Trent?”

“Yes, but—” Trent began.

Briddey cut him off. “You said stress could interfere with connecting,” she told Dr. Verrick, “and Trent and Lyzandra have just undergone a tremendously stressful experience.”
And stress can also cause the voices to break through again,
she told Trent,
so you need to get a lock on your safe-room door now.

I will,
Trent said, and hastily began envisioning a deadbolt while Briddey retreated to the courtyard to consider what Trent had said about C.B.'s being behind this.

Was he? The blackout had felt like someone had put a soundproof barrier between her and the voices—like her perimeter, only much more effective—but C.B. had said he didn't have the strength to block the voices, and he hadn't been lying about how exhausted he was. Looking at him now, coaching Lyzandra, she could see the lines of weariness in his face and the shadows under his eyes. There was no faking those.

She believed what he'd said about not being able to block the voices completely for more than a few minutes, but that was all this was. He could have done it. Only what good would blocking them for a few moments do? It would hardly convince Dr. Verrick that the telepathy had stopped working. And if C.B. was behind the disruptions, he wouldn't have downplayed them.

Unless he's trying to make them think he had nothing to do with them, that they're a natural occurrence, so he can pretend to be blanked out when Dr. Verrick wants to do a scan.
That would explain why she'd been blanked out, too. He'd had to block her once to make it look like the disruptions were affecting all of them. It also explained why he'd agreed so readily to the scans. He'd never intended to undergo them.

How are you coming with Trent's safe room?
C.B. asked.
Can it stand up to the voices yet?

I think so.

Good,
he replied,
because I can't—

His voice cut off, slicing through the “t” in “can't,” and Briddey thought,
He's blocking me again
. But why? He only needed to block her once to convince the others.

So what do I do now that I've got this executive suite?
she heard Trent say.

Meaning I'm not the one who's blocked,
Briddey thought, glancing over at C.B.

His head was raised in a listening attitude, and the look on his face was one of shocked bewilderment.
C.B.,
she called to him.
What's wrong?
but he didn't answer.

Because he's the one who's blanked out. That's why I couldn't hear him, because his voice couldn't get through to
me
.
Or at least that was what he wanted them to believe. Nobody would suspect him of causing the disruptions if he was a victim of them, too.

But if he was faking it, why didn't he say aloud, “I just got cut off,” and tell Dr. Verrick he thought something was happening to the telepathy, that it seemed to be disappearing? He didn't say anything. He just stood there, looking stunned.

He isn't faking this,
she thought. And a minute later, when it ended and he said,
Briddey, I think the thing that happened to you just happened to me, too
, and she asked him what was causing it, and he said,
I have no idea
, she believed him.

When yours started,
he asked,
did it—?

She was abruptly surrounded by silence.
Did he get blanked out again?
she wondered, but it was obvious this time she was the one being blanked out. She couldn't hear Trent either—or the voices.

C.B.?
she called, even though it was clear she couldn't send messages in this state, and then said aloud, “It just happened to me again.”

“It did?” C.B. said, and there was no way he could be faking the confusion and anxiety in his voice or on his face.

He isn't causing it,
she thought.
I'm convinced of that.
But then what was? Or who?

Maeve,
she thought, and was glad she was blanked out so neither Trent nor Lyzandra could hear that.
Maeve's doing it.

Maeve had promised she'd stay in her castle. She'd also been certain her defenses could protect her. And a mere promise wouldn't stop her. She'd promised her mother she wouldn't do any number of things and then promptly gone and done them.

I need to talk to her,
Briddey thought. But she couldn't while she was blanked out, and when the disruption ended, Trent and Lyzandra would be able to hear her. And her top priority had to be keeping Maeve off their radar.

I'll have to wait till they're blanked out at the same time,
she thought.
If that happens.
So far the disruptions had only lasted a minute or two, though this one seemed to be going a little longer.

Perhaps if they get longer, they'll start to overlap, and I'll be able to—
she thought, and could abruptly hear again.

Lyzandra was telling C.B.,
I don't think my door's strong enough to hold them,
so she obviously wasn't blanked out.

Trent?
Briddey called.

He's incommunicado,
C.B. said.
I take it you were, too?

Till just now. Were we out at the same time?

I'm not sure. I think they're getting longer.

I need a stronger lock,
Lyzandra said.
And not just a deadbolt. I need—
“It just happened again!”

“It's happening to me, too,” Trent put in.

“What—?” Dr. Verrick said, advancing on C.B.

I should stay and help him,
Briddey thought, but this was more important. And it might be her only chance to talk to Maeve while no one was listening. She dived for her courtyard, shut herself in, and called to Maeve,
I want to talk to you right now.

No answer.

Of course not,
Briddey thought.
Because she knows what I'm going to ask her. Cindy!
she called again.
Rapunzel! Maeve! Answer me this instant!

Still no answer, and Briddey was rapidly running out of time. Lyzandra or Trent could come out of the disruption any second, or C.B. would notice she'd gone into her safe room and—

I can't believe you guys did that!
Maeve said.
I stayed in my castle just like C.B. told me to, and I didn't talk to anybody. So how come you blocked me like that?

“This time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail.”

—L
EWIS
C
ARROLL
,
Alice in Wonderland

Shh, Maeve,
Briddey said automatically, looking at Lyzandra and Trent and Dr. Verrick.
Not so loud. They'll hear you
.

No, they won't,
Maeve said.
I've got like fifteen firewalls and encryption walls up around me. You didn't have to
block
me, too! I can't
believe
you did that!

Tell me exactly what happened
.

Oh, like you don't know!

I don't,
Briddey said.
I swear. Tell me.

I was listening to C.B.—he didn't say I couldn't listen
,
just that I couldn't talk—and all of a sudden I couldn't hear anything. It was like when your laptop crashes and the screen goes blue, you know? I couldn't hear
anything
, not even the zombies.

And then what?

Then I yelled at you and C.B. that I couldn't believe you guys did that. It's
so
not fair!

What did you do after you couldn't hear anything?
Briddey asked.

I tried to reboot it, but I couldn't. I hit every key I could think of—

Every key?

Yeah, you know, like on a keyboard. They're not really keys, it's just visualizing, like the safe rooms and your radio. Anyway, I visualized my laptop, and did everything you're supposed to do when it crashes, like turn it off and back on again, and I reset the default codes, in case it was a V-chip or something. But nothing worked. And then the sound came back on, just like that
.

How long did it last? The not being able to hear?

A really long time. Like fifteen minutes. You guys didn't have to do that. I did just what C.B. said to. I pulled up the drawbridge and lowered the portcullis and then went in my tower and stayed there. All I wanted to do was find out what was going on.

And you didn't do anything but listen?

No!
Maeve said vehemently.
I
told
you, I—
Her voice bit off in mid-syllable.

Oh, no, now I've been cut off,
Briddey thought, which would make Maeve furious—she'd think they were blocking her again—and then heard Lyzandra saying,
It happened again. Why does it keep happening?
and realized Maeve
was
the one who'd been cut off.

That'll make her even
more
furious,
Briddey thought, and then,
I've got to tell C.B.

But how? She couldn't risk them being overheard, which meant she needed to wait till both Lyzandra and Trent were blanked out, and from the sound of things, neither one was. They were both clamoring to know why the disruptions were happening.

“I don't know,” C.B. told them.

“A likely story,” Trent said. “How do we know you're not doing it?” He turned to Dr. Verrick. “He could be disrupting the telepathy to keep us from getting the data we need. This whole ‘helping' thing could have just been a ruse so he could sabotage—there, you see? He just cut me off again.”

Good, that's one down,
Briddey thought.

“If you're interfering with my patients' telepathy, Mr. Schwartz—” Dr. Verrick said, moving forward menacingly.

“He isn't,” Briddey said, inserting herself between them. “It's happening to us, too. We don't know what's causing it.”

“Is that true?” Dr. Verrick demanded.

“Yes,” C.B. said, “although…I've been thinking, Lyzandra was the first to experience it. Right, Briddey?”

“Yes,” she said, hoping that was what he wanted her to say.

“Okay, it happened to Lyzandra first and then to Briddey,” C.B. said, pointing at them in turn, “and then to Lyzandra again, and then to Trent—”

“What difference does it make what order it happened in?” Dr. Verrick asked impatiently.

“Because I think Lyzandra may have caused it.”

“Me?”
Lyzandra said, outraged. “My psychic spirit gift is everything to me. Why would I—?”

“Not intentionally,” C.B. said. “Dr. Verrick, when you were attempting to get information from Ms. Flannigan, you gave Lyzandra a relaxant. It diminished her ability to limit the number of voices she heard, and she began to hear more of them, hundreds—”

“Thousands,” Lyzandra said. “Millions.”

“Exactly,” C.B. said. “She suddenly heard many more voices than her mind could handle, and her mind shut down, like when an electrical system becomes overloaded and blows a fuse.”

So Maeve was right,
Briddey thought.
The system did crash.

“But
I
wasn't given a relaxant, and neither were they,” Trent said, pointing at her and C.B., “so why did the shutdown happen to us?”

“Because all three of us were telepathically linked to Lyzandra,” C.B. said, “so both the voices and her reaction to them would have cascaded from her to us in turn. And when her mind shut down, ours did, too, like when a breaker trips, and that trips the next, and the next.”

I thought it was a fuse, not a breaker,
Briddey said to herself.
And if it was a response to the deluge, why didn't it happen right then, instead of half an hour later?

But Dr. Verrick didn't seem to have a problem with that—or with the rest of C.B.'s explanation. “So as the effect of the relaxant wears off, these shutdowns should get shorter in duration and then stop,” he said.

C.B. nodded.

“I want to know exactly when each one begins.” And while C.B. and Briddey worked with Trent and Lyzandra on getting into their safe rooms the second they heard the voices, Dr. Verrick charted the pattern and duration of the disruptions.

They didn't grow appreciably longer, but they didn't grow shorter either, and Trent's and Lyzandra's didn't overlap, so Briddey had no chance to tell C.B. that Maeve was having them, too.

If she was.
Just because she told you that, it doesn't mean it's true,
Briddey thought. Maeve was perfectly capable of lying. And very good at it. She had to be, with Mary Clare for a mother. Her entire story could have been concocted to keep Briddey from suspecting her.

Because she knows I'd tell her to stop, that it's too risky.
And impossible, no matter how much of a whiz she was. To do any good, she'd have to block both Trent and Lyzandra for long enough to convince Dr. Verrick and Trent that the telepathy had permanently vanished, which might take days or even weeks, and she could only keep it going for as long as she could stay awake.

And even if she could somehow manage that, it wouldn't convince Dr. Verrick. He had other patients who were telepathic, and Maeve couldn't block them. She didn't know they existed. And even if she'd been listening when Briddey and C.B. had discussed them, she hadn't heard their voices, so she'd have no way of finding them in amongst the thousands of clamoring voices. And she was already having trouble just blocking Trent and Lyzandra for more than a couple of minutes at a time.

Or not. When Briddey came out of the disruption, Dr. Verrick told her it had lasted nearly six minutes, and that the frequency of the breaks was steadily increasing. “I want to run an fCAT on all of you to see exactly what's happening.”

Briddey automatically looked at C.B., expecting him to tell Dr. Verrick that wasn't a good idea, but he said, “Okay. Maybe it'll tell us something.”

Now see what you've done, Maeve,
Briddey thought, and tried to think of some way to signal C.B. that he shouldn't agree to it, but Dr. Verrick was already saying, “Mr. Schwartz, I'll take you and Lyzandra first. This way,” and leading them down the hall.

Please, please go into your safe room, C.B.,
Briddey thought.

Okay, I'm in it,
he said.

You can't do this.

I've got to. I need to find out what's going on.

You don't understand,
Briddey said.
I think—
And the voices vanished again.

Maeve,
she thought furiously,
if you did this
…But Maeve couldn't hear her. Nobody could. She was locked in a dome of silence.

She did this to keep me from telling C.B.,
Briddey thought, and hopefully that meant she would see to it that nothing would show up on his scan. But what if the signs of her interference could somehow be seen? Briddey had to talk to her. But she couldn't, not trapped in here.

You can call her on the phone,
she thought. If she could get out of here and away from Trent without him getting suspicious.

He had picked up his phone the moment the others left the room. Briddey waited till he started texting someone and then said, “Tell Dr. Verrick I need to use the ladies' room.”

Trent nodded vaguely, and she slipped out of the testing room, along the inner hall, through Dr. Verrick's office, and out into the hallway. She darted along the hall to a stairwell like the one she'd fled to that first night here in the hospital, and ducked into it. She took out her phone, listened a moment to make sure she was still blanked out, and called Maeve.

Mary Clare answered. “I'm sorry, Briddey,” she said briskly, “but you can't talk to Maeve. She's lost her telephone privileges. She's grounded.”

“Grounded?”

“Yes. I caught her watching
Brains, Brains, Brains
! She
knows
she's not allowed to watch zombie movies, and she expressly disobeyed me. Did
you
know she was watching them?”

“No,” Briddey lied. “How did you catch her?”

“I went in to ask her to take some soup over to Aunt Oona. I'm worried her rheumatism's acting up again. She didn't want to talk when I called her this morning, and now she isn't answering her phone, so I thought somebody'd better check on her, but Kathleen's not answering
her
phone either. So anyway, when I went into Maeve's room to ask her to run over, there she was, watching this awful zombie movie on her laptop. She tried to blank the screen, but she wasn't quick enough. Thank goodness she'd only watched the first few minutes. If she'd watched the whole movie, she'd have nightmares for weeks. Why did you need to talk to her?”

“It wasn't important,” Briddey said, thinking,
It's not her.
Because if Maeve had been blocking the voices and just pretending to be blocked herself, she'd never have let her mother catch her watching
Brains, Brains, Brains
.

Which meant it
was
some sort of blown fuse or tripped breaker, like C.B. had said.

But he'd also agreed with Dr. Verrick that the disruptions would grow shorter as the drug wore off, and that wasn't happening. Briddey was still blanked out when she got back to the testing room, and Trent, who was now on the phone with Ethel Godwin, stopped talking long enough to tell her he'd blanked out again, too. And when Dr. Verrick returned with C.B. and Lyzandra, she learned that disruptions, first in C.B. and then Lyzandra, had kept him from getting conclusive results.

Worse, C.B.'s blackout had lasted twelve minutes, and Lyzandra had been blanked out for nearly eighteen and still showed no signs of coming out of it. “They're not diminishing,” Dr. Verrick said. “They're lengthening! What's your explanation for that, Mr. Schwartz?”

“I don't have one,” C.B. said, “except”—he grabbed a sheet of paper and began drawing a diagram. “Look, it happened to Lyzandra and then to Ms. Flannigan and then Lyzandra again—”

“We've been through all that,” Dr. Verrick said.

“And then Mr. Worth and me,” C.B. went on, adding connecting lines to the diagram, “and Ms. Flannigan again and then Lyzandra.”