Touch: Awakening

Part Sixteen

Brij bursts through the door of my office, Bee trailing behind her. Brigit's normally calm face is scrunched in panic. Bee's worse. Bee's vacant. She's a doll, her eyes empty, face a mask. Even her curls are flat.

I spin my chair toward them, dread pooling in my stomach. "What's up?"

Brigit nudges Bee toward Parker's empty chair, and she sort of flops into it. "Shannon's back," Brij says.

Oookay. "The extraction went all right?" Based on my friends' appearances, I'm guessing no.

Brij levels a look at me that says seriously? "Same as the others. Not really present when you're talking to her, forgetting things, losing words in the middle of sentences. She almost ran into a tree the other day."

Pointing out the tree wasn't actually there wouldn't be smart right now. Her words sink in, and my panic level kicks up. This is what Shannon was afraid of. This is what I'm afraid of. Centuries after having developed the wipe, it's still not sensitive enough. Losing memories would be difficult on its own. Losing knowledge on top of that? Only the strongest would survive. And I didn't know if Shannon would.

"Is it just me," I say slowly, "or does it seem to be getting worse? The number of women who lose something to the wipe?"

Brigit leans against my desk, brows drawn together as she studies Bee, slouched in the chair. She hasn't moved and doesn't react when I flick a hand in front of her face to get her attention. "Has she already been implanted? I thought that wasn't for another week."

"Next week," she confirms. "She pinged me yesterday, freaking out because of Shannon. Parker was weird, but at least she was cognizant and able to function. Shannon's pretty much a ghost." Worry deepens the line between Brigit's eyebrows. "When I caught up with her today, she was like this. They couldn't have moved up the procedure." Women are usually out for at least two days around an implantation; the AI monitors them for twenty four hours after the first wipe. Bee wouldn't have been allowed into the Realms today if she'd been implanted yesterday. Brij nibbles on her thumbnail. "You think maybe they gave her something to calm her?"

"Kinda looks like it, doesn't it?" I get up and kneel in front of her. "Bee? Hon, you in there?"

"What's going on?"

I whip my head toward the door so fast something cracks in my neck. Drew's frame takes up most of the space, and an image from the night before flashes in front of my eyes. The greedy, hungry look on his face. How it twisted in a rictus of pain and pleasure seconds before the world went black. The most inappropriate of inappropriate thoughts, but it's where my mind goes, first thing, when I see him. How we can get our clothes off as fast as possible and learn the next secret our bodies hide from us.

I swallow hard at the fierce heat in his eyes, like he knows what I'm remembering. I gesture to my practically comatose friend. "She's not responding to conversation."

He frowns and comes over to crouch beside me. "I thought the system was off," I whisper fiercely. She's obviously been given something to make her this way. If the monitoring system were truly off, she'd still be freaking out.

"It is," he mutters, waving a hand in front of Bee's face. "What the fuck?"

"I can hear you," she slurs. "Juss...tired."

Relief trickles through me as I crack a grin. "Good to know, 'cause you're kinda scaring us."

A light goes on in her eyes, and she focuses on me, her cheeks trembling with the effort to smile. "Hey." It comes out in one long syllable. Heeeeeyyyyy. "M'I in Parker's chair? How'd I get here?"