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“Nope. I’ve known you long enough to conclude that you are irritating, stubborn, and obsessed with finding out who stole a day and a half of your life. I can deal with all that, because I share those personality traits. But an assassin wouldn’t have picked up a box of cupcakes because he felt sorry for me on my birthday.”
“You’re an expert on assassins?”
She groaned. “Never mind. Tell me about the scalpel.”
“What about it?”
“Why would you use a scalpel on those two men in white coats if you could kill with your psychic talent?”
Luke hesitated. She could see that he was mentally recalibrating events. “At that point I probably didn’t know what I could do with my talent. It would have been instinctive to pick up a weapon.”
“I would have thought that under those circumstances your intuition would have kicked in and you would have discovered your new ability. That’s how it happened with me. I didn’t know I could find dead bodies until I accidentally discovered the first one.”
“The bottom line is that I was holding a scalpel, Talia, and those two men had clearly been killed with a blade.”
“You said you walked through a lot of blood.”
“Yes.”
“Was there any blood on the scalpel or on your clothes?”
That stopped him. He seemed to focus on the middle distance, as if trying to summon up his memories. After a time he shook his head.
“I can’t remember,” he said slowly. “Why can’t I remember?”
“Excellent question. Blood has enormous symbolism in dreams and visions. If you had used that scalpel there would have been a lot of blood on the blade, your hands, your clothing. I think that would have made an even stronger impression than the memory of the blood on the floor.”
Luke went silent again but she knew he was trying out the new version of events she was offering. Energy heated his eyes. And maybe hope.
“When and how did you discover what you could do with your new talent?” she asked after a moment.
“I can’t remember those first few hours, but when I woke up on a street in Seattle, I knew I had to get lost until I could figure out what had happened to me. I picked up a few things at a shelter and then found a doorway. That first night some doper tried to steal my stuff. I tried to talk him out of it using my old ability. But instead of calming down and going away quietly, he dropped to the ground, unconscious. I realized then that if I’d kept up the pressure I probably could have killed him.”
“But you didn’t.”
He hesitated. “No.”
“You said you were Subject A.”
“Right.”
“Why not just ‘the subject’?”
Luke’s eyes tightened. “What?”
“It sounds like the people conducting the experiment had to distinguish you from someone else. If you were the only subject in the lab, why would they label you A?”
“Who knows what those guys in the white coats were thinking?”
“There were three subjects in the experiment in Lucent Springs,” she said. “Amelia, Pallas, and myself. There were two subjects in the experiment that took place in Carnelian. So, yes, I’d say there’s an excellent possibility that there were two in the experiment in which you were involved. Maybe more.”
Luke thought about that for a moment. He did not relax completely but she thought some of his tension dissipated.
“Maybe,” he allowed.
“We’re wasting time,” she said. “Enough about you. We need to focus on finding Phoebe Hatch.”
“You’re right,” he said, decisive and controlled once again.
