SECRET RADIO blog

"I'm sorry," Carrie said as they emerged into the cold day. The day had started bright and clear, but now a ridge of dark clouds reached from the west, like an expanding bridge. Carrie frowned. Sleet was coming.

"Fighting is not unusual for me. Many people want to try to fight with me. I don't hurt them." The eyes flicked to her, and she saw that Anne was now tense, perhaps expecting blame. "I didn't hurt him." The voice was insistent.

Carrie kept her voice quiet and sincere. "I saw that. Thank you."

Rolande, Carrie thought, had been a perfect nitwit. He was thinking he had defeated Anne, and he had not.

"Carrie," Anne said suddenly, her voice oddly grown up and surprised. Carrie looked at her. "Is your stomach hurting?"

"No," Carrie said. "I sometimes get an odd feeling---"

"From a scar? Did you have an operation?"

"No of course not. I mean, not really, I---" She felt desperate, but then Anne touched her, and for a moment Carrie stopped. Then Anne seized her hand, from the back, firmly but not roughly. "Life," Anne said. "Runs through the kidneys. The Jing, Carrie." She let go of Carrie's hand. The scraped feeling was gone.

Carrie was amazed. "What did you do?"

"I aligned the energy of your system."

"How?"

Anne paused. "It's a little like breaking concrete, but you don't use force the same way." She held up her own hand. "See that spot: the hoku. Very good for aligning energy." And she pointed to the webbing of her hand, between thumb and fingers. "Right where the muscles and nerves are shallow and close to the surface. Can I ask you something?" And now she looked at Carrie with a slight, hopeful smile.

Carrie realized it was coming, the worst question in the world, from a child whose parents had been killed. Did you really do that to your unborn child? But she had already decided to be honest with this person. "Yes Anne," and her voice sounded sad, even to herself. "You can ask me a question."

"Could we go buy some chocolate bars? Could you lend me the money and take me to the store?"

The innocent question made Carrie's eyes sting again, even as her surprise and relief nearly made her gasp. If Anne viewed her as a source for providing food, Carrie would not argue. And so she said, "Certainly. I'd be glad to. Do you like chocolate?"

"As a dead person, I try not to express appetite," Anne said automatically. "But I think chocolate is what I need right now."

And now Anne was fine. They climbed into the car, and she was just as eager to look out the front and side windows of the car on their trip into town to buy chocolate bars. She selected six chocolate bars at the drug store that Carrie found. Then she reconsidered and added two more to the pile.

"Is that all right?" she asked Carrie.

"Yes it's fine," Carrie said. "Would you like anything else?"

"I want you to have one. Is there one there that you like?"

"Yes, thank you." Carrie paid for the candy, and they left the shop. In the car, Anne had Carrie pick a bar for herself; then Anne selected one. She closed the bag and wrapped it carefully around the others, obviously saving them. But she carefully unwrapped the bar that she had chosen, and Carrie watched her for a moment and then followed her example. There was something ritualistic about this: a moment in which they stopped everything else, Carrie thought. In this guess, Carrie was proved correct.

Anne's face did not register pleasure from the confection, but she broke off a square of the chocolate bar and ate it very deliberately, her eyes as intent as a philosopher contemplating a rare manuscript. And then she spoke. "Your friend was only trying to understand," she said at last. "He learns best by doing things."

Yet again, Carrie's eyes stung. She felt a new throb in the scraped place. "Not at the end. He was trying to win. He wanted to show you he was better."

"All right," Anne said gently.

"He was being a bully!" She was furious all over again, seething.

A third of the way through the chocolate bar, the girl glanced over at her; and a smile, quick as lightning, crossed her face, lit up her eyes, and then was gone. "To an extent. He wanted to make sure that I would respect him. He wants me to be able to tell him the secrets I've learned in fighting. He thought he had to defeat me to do that." She broke off another third and put it into her mouth. "And he wants you to think highly of him."

"You're only a girl. Especially to him. He's so much older than you."

Anne smiled again, a rueful smile this time. "Come on, I'm a martial arts master! Anyway, that's what the publisher says." The smile faded, and the eyes, when they glanced at Carrie, showed a sudden, brief light of strong emotion, a genuine concern. "Forgive your friend. I see it in his eyes that he's proud. But you're important to him."

And then the distress for Carrie was gone, and Anne Thomson was calm again, and suddenly direct. "He knows that I'm tougher than what you think." She hesitated, and then she said gently, "You mustn't think of me as a living person, Carrie. I'm dead. I want to be what I am." And she ate the final third of the chocolate bar.

As Carrie still seemed shaken by her anger, the girl added, "When you're dead it doesn't really matter. It's just another event to die to. A test of being dead." She nodded to herself. Then she said nothing.

Carrie started the car, and they pulled out. Anne seemed to withdraw entirely into herself, her eyes quiet, her face very still. She was, Carrie realized, reinterpreting everything to herself on those terms. Carrie drove on. She kept her face calm, but inwardly, she felt agitated. She didn't know why.

After several minutes of silent driving, they reached the storage bins and pulled in. Anne opened her door and got out. "Thank you."

But Carrie also got out on her side. Anne would have walked back to the interior of her training room, but she stopped as she heard Carrie open her door. Yet Anne stayed with her back to Carrie. "I must train today. Thank you. Goodbye."

"If we could get you in to interview the man from the robbery, would you help us?" Carrie asked.

Anne wouldn't turn around. "If you question him without fear and without prejudice and you'll see through him."

* * * *

Carrie didn't acknowledge Rolande when she returned to REACH. She went to her office, closed the door, and buried herself in the reports. She'd had her fill of legwork, and she'd had her fill of Rolande's outdated, outmoded, unrealistic opinions of the way life ran and his own incredible abilities.

Any time that Carrie spoke out of her place, Rolande and the Director ignored her with a polite form of pretending. They behaved as though she had not spoken at all. But when she ignored them, they became confused to the point that they nearly bumped into each other in the hallways as they cast about for some way to entice her back to good natured acceptance that she was not now and never would be a really equal part of the team. They did want her to be happy at REACH. They just didn't want her to assume she was as capable as they.

But she had reports to prepare. She'd faxed the image of the talisman out to the best known resin impregnation clients, and they had faxed back lists of the independent shops that did most of their work for them. She had to follow these up.

But first, she re-checked the data on the attempted bank robbery. They had gone in with their standard weapons, but for such a huge undertaking they had also relied on guns. So then, she thought, what was the point? Why enter a bank to rob it, armed with guns, and then choose to use medieval-level weaponry? A day earlier, she would not have cared about their rationale. But now she had met a different way of thinking. The answer to all of this, she thought, was found in a philosophy, a way, as Anne called it. Not in the scraps and bits of hard evidence.

The phone trilled at her, breaking her out of her reverie. Annoyed, she scooped it up, expecting that Rolande was calling her on a pretext to get her back to the lab so that he could make friends again. It was Rolande, but he was all business. "Supina just called. The police say two of the victims participated in a PBS documentary about five years ago. On surviving catastrophe. One was a survivor of a light plane crash where he and another fellow lived for 33 days in the Alaskan wilderness, alone and stranded, until they were rescued. The other was given a dose of insulin inappropriately when she went into the Emergency Room for flu symptoms. Spent two years recovering."

"They think it's a link?" Carrie asked.

"They want us to be aware of it. See if anything in the autopsies or forensic materials ties in. They're going to see if they can broaden the link to all the victims. And I had Jo Brandt check the newspaper. It lists the legal names of everybody who's been booked in Wake County. I got the contact information for our friendly bank robber. Do you think Anne Thomson will talk with him?"

"I'll ask her. Goodbye." And she hung up on him.