"Just memories?"
"You tell me."
Riley stood there with the beach house's phone to her ear and gazed absently through the ocean-side windows. Ash was out there on the deck, waiting patiently, his own brooding gaze fixed on the water. She wondered what he was thinking, feeling.
She didn't have a clue.
Drawing a breath, she answered Bishop. "No, not just memories. More. Senses. Emotions. Even the normal ability to read other people, to have some idea of what they're thinking and feeling. It's all scattered, distant."
"But not knowledge. Not training. That you can still access."
"I think so," she said cautiously.
"Then I'm betting it's all still there, Riley."
"In pieces."
"You can reconnect the pieces."
"Yeah? How?" She was afraid her voice sounded as shaky as she felt.
"You made a start. You were able to use your clairvoyance at the murder scene."
"Not like I've ever used it before."
"There's at least a chance the electrical jolt may have changed that for good."
She realized her short nails were biting into her palm and forced herself to unclench her right fist. Staring down at the reddened crescents as they faded, she said slowly, "There's a precedent?"
"Of sorts. Electrical fields affect us, Riley. Virtually all of us. But how depends on the individual. It can have unpredictable side effects ranging from very mild disorientation to a radical change in our abilities. But a direct jolt to the brain…The only similar case I know of involved a second-degree medium who was accidentally electrocuted. His heart stopped, but they brought him back."
"And? He still sees dead people?"
"He couldn't see them before, just barely hear them. Now he sees them in Technicolor and hears them as clearly as you're hearing me. All the time, if he drops the shield it took us more than a year to teach him how to build."
"Like living in the middle of a noisy crowd only you can see and hear."
"Yes. Not pleasant."
"He's not with the team."
"No. Maybe someday, but not yet. Right now it's all he can do to have some semblance of a normal life."
Riley would have preferred to go on talking about someone else's troubles but reluctantly focused on her own. "So…the shock of that Taser might have strengthened or altered my clairvoyance to the point that I can actually experience visions."
"It's possible."
"You didn't mention that possibility before. Did you? Jesus, I don't even remember if I reported in yesterday."
"You did, briefly. And I noticed absolutely nothing unusual in the conversation, so you obviously were functional during those missing hours. As for whether we discussed the possibility that your abilities may have been altered, no, not specifically."
"Did you think this might happen?"
"Honestly?" For the first time a hint of weariness crept into his voice. "There's been so much going on here that I haven't had a great deal of time to consider possibilities elsewhere."
"Yeah, I saw you on the news. Looks like a tough one."
"It is. But all the teams are currently involved in tough cases. Including you. Riley-"
"I know. I should return to Quantico. But the answers are here, Bishop. Besides, at least one man has died and there's a strong possibility of another victim. And I'm involved. Somehow, I'm involved. I can't just walk away from that."
"An unknown assailant managed to blindside a trained agent and put you down hard on Sunday night."
"Don't rub it in," she murmured.
Bishop ignored that. "You don't know if it was meant to be a lethal attack, though all signs point that way. Your memories and instincts are, to say the very least, unreliable, and you've been burning energy at a rate far greater than normal for you. You've had two blackouts in the last forty-eight hours, losing well over half that time. You're experiencing dreams and visions of what appear to be extreme black-occult rites, which we both know are as rare as hen's teeth. And you have no backup."
"What's your point?" she asked, deliberately flip and not at all sure he'd let her get away with it. He usually didn't.
"Riley."
"Okay, it's insane. I'm insane. Probably. I'm also scared, in case you're not picking up on that."
"I'm picking up on it," he said. "Even without telepathy. The worse a situation gets, the more flippant you get."
Riley frowned. "I'm that predictable?"
"It's a defense mechanism. In your case, a survival tool."
"As in ‘Don't bother to kill the poor little lunatic blonde, she's obviously out of her mind and, so, harmless'?"
"That's part of it. And a different sort of…protective coloration. If you're laughing about a situation or taking it lightly, then it can't be all that serious, now, can it? Puts other people at ease and tends to stop them crowding you."
Riley returned her gaze to the man waiting outside on the deck, and said, "I don't think it's going to work this time."
"Not with everyone, at any rate. If Ash Prescott is your lifeline, you need to be totally honest with him."
It didn't surprise Riley that Bishop had picked up on her specific uncertainties; she wasn't at all sure he wasn't actually reading her thoughts, long distance. "I told him he was my lifeline. But…do you really think it'll come to that?"
"I think it might. You've experienced two blackouts in two days, Riley, the second one longer than the first. That alone suggests your condition is deteriorating rather than improving."
"Yeah, I was afraid of that. But the brain's designed to repair itself, right? To build new pathways when old ones are destroyed?"
"Yes, more or less. Which is why I would expect your condition to stabilize. The fact that it hasn't indicates some kind of continuing damage."
Riley considered that for a moment, trying to think clearly. There was an idea on the edge of her mind, something she couldn't quite reach, and it was maddening because she thought it represented at least part of the answer.
There was something…something I realized? Something that made sense?
Bishop said, "It's also distinctly unsettling that you were functional during the blackouts."
"You're telling me. Ash has been filling in most of the missing time for me, and as far as I can tell, I was behaving normally."
"So the most likely scenario we're left with is that you experienced the time, lived through it with perfect normality, and afterward, for some unknown reason, lost the memory of it. Or at least can't access it."
"That's what it sounds like."
"And we don't know what triggered either of the blackouts."
"If something did."
"Blackouts are always triggered by something, at least in our experience. You were using your abilities the second time, but not the first; do you recall any commonalities in the moments just before the blackouts?"
She was about to say no, but then Riley paused and thought about it more carefully. "Just before the first blackout, I was talking to two people from that group of satanists I told you about here on the island, Steve and Jenny; when I woke up after that blackout, it was from a dream in which I was watching the celebration of some version of a Black Mass-with Jenny serving as the altar."
"And the second blackout?"
"Happened just minutes after I experienced that vision at the crime scene. In the vision, the celebrants were masked, but the woman could have been Jenny again. The priest might have been Steve. I can't say for sure, but…"
"A possible connection."
"The only one I can think of." Riley was conscious of a chill as she realized it was becoming more difficult to concentrate, to focus. She was losing energy again. Already, she was losing energy.
Damn, damn, damn…