Thin Air

I didn't even know her, not really, but that hurt. I tried not to let it show. "I'm not mad," I said. My voice actually stayed mostly steady. "You should sleep for a while. Rest."



Another one of those eerie lags, like talking to someone in space. While she was waiting to get the message, she seemed to be just...vacant. Then she excavated a hand from the foil wrapping around her and took mine. She had a tattoo around the ring finger of her right hand, some kind of Celtic knot work. I figured, given the alien gray tat on her back, she probably had more body art, probably in places that only her boyfriends knew about. A normalish girl, one who loved her looks and devoted a lot of time to their enhancement. A girl who probably had the guys buzzing back home.



A girl who'd been my friend. Who still was, in ways that counted.



She said, "Don't leave me here. Not by myself."



"I wouldn't. I won't."



"I'm scared." She didn't seem to be hearing me, although her huge blue eyes were locked on mine. "I can't just die, Jo. I didn't even do anything heroic yet. Not like you."



I looked over at Lewis, whose eyes opened as soon as I focused on him. Serene as the Buddha. I took in a trembling breath. "Isn't there anything you can do?" I snapped. I was displacing anger, I knew that, but it felt good to let a little of it out.



He sighed. "I can try, but it won't be enough, and it will only prolong things. It can't stop the process."



Cherise was visibly fading away now, panic in those huge blue eyes. She tried to move but her arm barely twitched.



Trapped inside her own body.



"Help." Her lips formed the word, but there was no breath behind it.



I was watching her die.



Sudden fury spiked through me. Not at Lewis-at everything. At the unfairness of the world. At losing someone I'd barely begun to know and like. "No!" I said sharply. "No, I'm not just going to sit here..."



I reached out and put my hands on her head. I had no idea at all what I was doing, but the frustration and fury inside left me no choice. I had to act. I had to try. It seemed like instinct, to put my hands where I did, but then I remembered David had used the same kind of placement when he'd healed Lewis.



"What the hell are you doing?" Lewis barked, scrambling up, but I wasn't listening to him. If this was magic, then I could do it, right? David had shown me how to reach for power...except that I had no idea what to do with it. I could grab the power and hold it, but handing a child a scalpel didn't make her a surgeon.



Show me, I begged. Come on, somebody, show me what to do. SHOW ME!



I felt a slow, warm, syrupy pulse come up through my body, flowing through my legs, up through my body's core, spilling out of my hands. Cherise dissolved into a sparkling network of tiny bright points of light, millions of them, layer upon layer upon layer, like a city at night. Some of the lights were bright white, some blue, some shading toward yellow and red.



And, ominously, a substantial part of her head was simply black. No lights at all.



And the black was spreading.



I heard Lewis shouting something at me, but I ignored him. I was expecting him to physically try to drag me away, but he must have had more sense than that.



Cherise's nervous system was an incredible design, mesmerizing and intensely beautiful, and I found myself mapping the lines of color and light in a kind of trace, my hands moving above her body just inches from skin.



I paused over the dead areas, both hands hovering uncertainly, and then I reached inside and touched one of the dead nodes.



Cherise screamed, both in my ears and-chillingly-inside my head.



"Stop!" Lewis was yelling in my ear now, but he wasn't touching me. I was radioactive, and he knew it. "Jo, you're not an Earth Warden. Jesus, you're not meant to do this. Stop!"



I was hurting her, but I knew, somehow, that it had to hurt. There wasn't any choice, if I wanted to save her. The blackness was spreading across that network of lights, slowly consuming her, and if I didn't do something she'd be gone, this beautiful creation would be gone, and I couldn't let it happen.



I just couldn't.



Smells and sounds and chaos rolled over me, a huge vista of things I couldn't comprehend, a presence that guided my hands and my powers to touch here and there and there, a tiny spark of pure white power jumping from one burned-out node to another, jump-starting and dying.



It's not working!



The presence inside wordlessly soothed me, and showed me again. And again. I was no longer seeing or hearing anything in the outside world; the world was what was under my hands and in my head.



And this time, the bridge sparked, flickered, and held, and the network of lights raced and flared and ignited through the dark.



I felt things shift into place. Click.



Cherise lit up with a blaze of power, and I heard her take in a whooping, gasping breath in the real world.



I did it.



Yeah. But now that the feverish desire to do it was passing...what exactly had I done?



"Let go!" Lewis was yelling at me, frantic. I tried. Before I could get free, another spark jumped from my fingers, accessing a network of brilliance in Cherise's mind, and although I had no idea what I was doing...



I was suddenly inside her head.



Chapter Four



FOUR



Being in Cherise's body took some adjustment. I felt dizzy, squeezed, wrong. I involuntarily tried to move something, but in the next instant I realized a couple of important things...



One, I wasn't Cherise. I was still me, but a silent observer sitting alongside Cherise in her body.



And two, this was the past.



This was memory.



It took me a second to absorb where Cherise was. Some kind of set. Movie? Television? I caught sight of the unmistakable configuration of a television news desk, and the call letters in red over it. Cameras. People milling around. There wasn't any easy way I could figure out what date this was, or even what city. I could sense Cherise thinking, but it was a random jumble of stuff, nothing I could make sense of-until it suddenly did.



Oh great, she thought. Time to make nice with the new girl.



And with a sense of having fallen completely down the rabbit hole, I saw myself-Joanne-walking toward her. There was something so utterly wrong about seeing myself like this that I felt another surge of disorientation, and I wanted desperately to turn away.



But I couldn't. I was trapped, helpless, watching the memory play out before me. Trapped.



"Hi. I'm Joanne," that other me said, and held out a long-fingered, strong hand with a halfway decent manicure. French nails. Not a great tan, but a pretty good one. She looked rested, but a little bit nervous. First day on the job, maybe? From Cherise's point of view Joanne was annoyingly tall, and most of it was leg. I sensed Cherise making an assessment. She was a cold and merciless judge of other women's looks-not unkind, but precise.



"You're Marvin's new assistant," Cherise said. "Right?"



God, did I really look that way when I smiled? My mouth looked funny. "Assistant would be a kind way to put it," Joanne said. I couldn't stand thinking of her as me. "He just called me the weather girl."



"Yeah, well, that's Marvin for you. Hey. I'm Cherise. I'm the dumbass who runs around in the bikini to give the surf forecast." Cherise rolled her eyes to show it didn't really bother her. From this side of the conversation, I could tell that it wasn't an act; running around in a bikini really didn't bother her. She was pretty, and she knew it, and there wasn't much point in denying the fact that guys found her hot. She figured she had the rest of her life to use her brains. A fine body had a short shelf life, when it came to stripping down to a G-string. "So how's it working with Marvin so far?"



I watched the former me make a face that I resolved I would never, ever make again. "Oh, fabulous. Is he always that-?"



"Grabby? Always," Cherise said, and leaned forward. "Okay, time for the potential compatibility quiz. Who's the sexiest man alive?"



"Uh..." Joanne blinked. "Probably...um...I have no idea." Oddly, I couldn't answer it now, either. I only really knew two guys in the whole world, and they were both pretty damn sexy.



"Acceptable answers include David Duchovny, Johnny Depp, and James Spader. Sean Connery is always allowable. So-favorite TV show?"



"I don't watch a lot of television," the other me confessed. Well, I consoled myself with the thought that losing my memory clearly hadn't made all that much difference in my conversational skills.



"Well, I watch a lot of television," said Cherise. "So you'll need to catch up. I'll give you a list of what you can start with, and yes, there will be quizzes later."



Joanne laughed. She had a good laugh, one that made you want to get in on the joke-the first thing about her I couldn't quibble with. "You always this take-charge, Cherise?"



"Pretty much. I'm little, but I'm fierce," she said, and inspected Joanne's nail polish, giving it a nod of approval. "Seriously, if we're going to be best friends, you really have to be able to intelligently discuss the relative hotness of television stars. It's a must. What do you think, too green?"



That would have thrown most people. It definitely threw me now, observing, but Joanne had followed the shift without trouble. She looked at Cherise's nail polish critically, tilted her head, and said, "No, it's perfect. Picks up the color in your shirt." I felt Cherise's surge of satisfaction. "But," Joanne continued, "you might want to consider pairing up that underlayer with a sheer teal instead of green. Make the color really pop."



Cherise blinked, looked at her nails, then at her shirt. "Damn. You're good. Shopping," she said. "Tonight. Shopping and mojitos. Seriously, anybody who can one-up me on color analysis must be worth my time."



Then-me looked a little taken aback by that, searched for a reply, and then said, with a hilarious amount of consideration for Cherise's potentially bruised feelings, "I'm not, you know, gay or anything."



Cherise found that funny. "You mean you wouldn't go gay for me? Sheesh. I'm not looking for a date. Nobody else here understands the power of Zen shopping. I think"-Cherise swept a look over her ensemble, then Joanne's, which actually was pretty cute-"I think we can do some real credit card damage together. Somebody's got to keep the economy growing. It's almost patriotic."



Joanne looked relieved. And then smiled. The smile still looked wrong to me, from this side.



"Deal," she said.



It was a warm place to be, and I wanted to stay there, bask in that sensation of liking and being liked.



But I couldn't stay.



There was a blurring sensation, like being pushed hard from behind, and I jumped tracks, falling endlessly, falling, lost, and then there was a sudden burst of light.



Rapid-fire memories. Fragments of conversations. Ice cream on the couch, watching movies with Cherise. Shopping. Chatting.



Normal life. I'd had a normal life, once.



Another lurching sensation, a blur, and when I blinked it away, Cherise was pushing open a door from a dark hallway to the outside world. Time had passed, although I didn't have a good notion of how much. She looked over her shoulder, and I saw Joanne following her out of the building.



"So," she was saying, "What do you think? Hot Topic? And maybe some Abercrombie. Then lunch."



"Girl, do you ever do anything but shop?" Joanne asked, but not as if she was really opposed to the idea. Cherise blew her a kiss.



"Well, I was thinking of dropping by the chess club, but you know how shallow those guys are..."



"Shut up."



It was a bright, sunlit morning. The air was muggy and warm, with just a hint of salt air breeze. Joanne looked good: more tanned, more toned, wearing a pair of low-rise blue jeans and a teal blue sleeveless tee that rode up to reveal some firm abs.



Cherise, of course, looked even better. She was like orange sherbet, layered in pastels, all edible colors. She could have stepped out of a hair product commercial. The poster child for healthy and vibrant.



"Just for that, I'm adding Old Navy to the list," Cherise said, and checked her purse. She frowned at a mirror and touched up her lipstick as they crossed a weedy picnic area behind the building they were exiting, toward a parking lot. "And I'm going to make you eat sushi, too."



"Hey," Joanne said. Her tone had changed, turned quiet and dark. "Cher. Heads up."



Cherise looked up, alarmed, and focused on a man standing near the cars in the fenced-off parking area. I felt the surge of pure adrenaline go through her, sending her heart rate soaring. "Dammit. I really thought that restraining order thing would work."



Joanne's face had gone still and tense. She took her purse off her shoulder and handed it over to Cherise. "Stay here."



"Don't," Cherise whispered, and grabbed her arm. "Let's just go back in. We can call security-they've got his picture. They know to call the cops."



"Yeah, that's done a hell of a lot of good so far," Joanne said. "This jerk isn't going away. How many times does this make that he's shown up here?"



Cherise sighed. I could feel the dread in her, honest and real. "Six."



"And phone calls?"



"God, I lost count. And don't even talk about the ugh-worthy letters."



"Then this guy needs a stronger message," Joanne said. "Look, trust me. You just go back inside, okay?"



"But-Jo, you can't-"



Apparently, she certainly could. I watched myself walk purposefully toward the shifty-looking fellow standing near the red convertible. He was wearing an overcoat-a dead giveaway of weirdness in the current heat wave-and even from Cherise's distance looked like he needed not just a shower but a full-scale disinfection. Wild-eyed, wilder-haired.