“I can feel everyone else in the building.” Everyone except the older Madhura—Verity said his name was Rochak—but his thoughts had been hidden before Verity disappeared. Bringing him into this would just confuse things. “Besides, this isn’t the sort of silence I get when someone blocks me out. I mean, it is. But that never starts with pain. I’ve never felt anything like that before.”
Kitty made a small, frustrated sound. “Which means, if I believe you, that the damn Covenant probably got her. Fuck. Do you think they killed her quick, or did they take her prisoner so they could torture her first?”
My breath caught in my chest, wedging there like a stone. I struggled to force it out, trying to get my voice back. Finally I said, “How can you even ask me that?”
“Look, Sarah. For you she’s family; I get that, I really do, and it sucks that you’re the one making this call, almost as much as it sucks that I’m the one taking it. But if she’s dead, she’s dead, and I have living people to worry about. If the Covenant knows what Verity knows, they can clean this city out. You follow me? Nobody’s safe if they’re torturing her—and don’t try telling me that she won’t break. Given enough time, and enough knives, everybodybreaks. It’s just a matter of finding out how hard you have to push.” Kitty spoke with a soft assurance that whispered of experiences I’d never had, and never wanted to have. I found myself wondering which end of the knife she’d been on. I realized just as quickly that I really didn’t want to know. That sort of thing was Verity’s territory, and she was welcome to it.
Kitty listened to the silence for a few seconds. Then she sighed. “Look, Sarah . . . if they took her prisoner, that sucks for us, because we don’t know what she’s going to tell them. We have to be prepared for the worst. But it could be awesome for her.”
“How is being taken prisoner by the Covenantawesome for anybody?” I asked.
“People usually keep their prisoners alive for at least a little while before they kill them. If she’s been taken prisoner, there’s a chance that you can get her back.”
“But how am I supposed to—”
“I’m sorry, Sarah. I really am. I know she’s your cousin, and I know you love her. I owe her a lot. I wish it hadn’t gone down like this. But you’re the one who has to worry about getting her back. I’m the one who gets to worry about getting my people through this alive. Good luck.”
Kitty hung up after that. She didn’t say good-bye. There wouldn’t have been any point.
Mike and Istas were in the main room when I emerged. The Madhura I could detect was still in the kitchen; I assumed the older Madhura was there with him. Having someone in the building that I couldn’t “hear” made me profoundly uncomfortable. I was used to people being hard or even impossible to read. Them being invisible was something entirely different. It was like when—
I stopped where I was, eyes going wide. Uncle Mike looked away from the deadfall he’d been arranging over one of the windows—Istas was holding the rope that supported the deadfall’s weight with one hand, like it was negligible to her—and frowned at me. “Sarah?” he asked. “What did Kitty say?”
“That charm.” I started briskly toward the table where Verity had dumped Margaret Healy’s possessions. Midway there, I broke into a run. When I reached it, I started rummaging frantically through the knives, ammo packs, and things I didn’t know the uses of. “Where is it? Why can’t I find it?!”
“Hey. Hey! What are you trying to find?” Uncle Mike’s hand settled on my shoulder. His thumb grazed the skin above my collarbone. As always, the skin-to-skin contact did what it would normally take months of close contact to do: his mind snapped into sharp relief, a picture seen through a window blind that I could open if I needed to. Touching people does that for me, especially when it happens repeatedly in a short period of time. It’s why I try to avoid it whenever I can when I’m not dealing with people I’m already attuned to.
Uncle Mike was petrified. He knewVerity was dead. Not because he had some fact that I was missing; just because he’d been in situations like this one before, and he knew the odds had been against us from the start. Should never have let her go out alone, no matter what she was used to,he was thinking, blame and self-loathing dripping off every thought/word and sense/impression. This is my fault. How am I going to tell Kevin that I let his baby girl go out and get herself killed? Hell, how am I going to tellEvelyn ? She’ll never be able to look me in the eye again. This is all—
I shrugged his hand off, breaking the endless loop of his thoughts before it could drag me even further down. If he wanted to put on a brave face and pretend that he thought everything was going to be okay, I’d let him. As long as I made sure not to touch him again, it might even make me feel better.
“The charm. The one the Covenant uses to block telepathy.” I looked up at him. “Margaret was a hole when we met her. She wasn’t a human, she wasn’t an individual, she was a hole. When Verity put the thing on to test it, she was a hole, too. She vanished completely from any sort of nonvisual spectrum.”
Uncle Mike nodded slowly. “So you’re thinking that, if she’s wearing one of those things, that might explain her disappearing the way she did?”
“I’ve never been attuned to someone who died, but I can’t imagine it’s as easy as ‘ow that hurts oh I’m gone.’” I stood up a little straighter, trying to ignore the waves of curiosity emanating from Istas. At least she hadn’t come over. That probably had something to do with the rope she was still holding, and the desire not to drop Uncle Mike’s deadfall on the slaughterhouse floor. “She’s not dead. She’s just missing.”
“So can you track holes?”
“No. I can follow dead spots, maybe, if I see people with my eyes who don’t appear to my mind, but . . .” I shrugged helplessly. “There are two Madhura in the building. I only know that because I’ve seen them both. If the one I can’t read decides to leave, I won’t know about it. He’ll just be gone, and I’ll have no idea.”
“Your ability to observe the minds of others seems exceedingly limited in scope,” commented Istas. She switched the rope to her other hand. “Of what use are you?”
“I’m really, really good at calculating how much I need to leave for a tip when I eat out, even if I never pay for my actual meals,” I said flatly.
“So what you’re saying is that you won’t know you’ve found someone you can’t read until you see them with your eyes,” said Uncle Mike. “Okay. That’s not as convenient as it could be, but it’s something. You saw Margaret, right?”
“She forced her way into my hotel room.”
“Could you describe her well enough for the mice to draw her?”
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep myself from saying something I’d regret later. Then, carefully, I said, “My eyes don’t work that way. Or, well. I guess they do, since I see on a human wavelength, but that’s not how I process visual information. There’s no way I could describe her.”
Cuckoos can see—we’re not blind, and I’m glad, since that would make answering my email really hard—but our brains aren’t wired to register the same things that human brains are. We don’t need to recognize individuals by their faces when we can recognize them by their thoughts, the unique mixture of ideas and emotions that make them who they are. All those shows about mistaken identity and identical twins or cousins are lost on me, because to my eyes, pretty much everyone looks cosmetically alike, and it’s totally impossible to mistake anyone for anyone else. Oh, hair and eye and skin colors differ, but faces? They’re just faces. It’s what’s behind them that’s unique.
Uncle Mike nodded again. “If that won’t work, we’ll have to think of something else. What did Kitty have to say?”