“That’s good, Suze, that’s smart, but you’re right, this time’s different. Your mommy would want you to call 911. The 911 people know how to help, and they’ll tell you exactly what to do.”
“I’m afraid.” It sounded as if the tears were about to brim over.
“Sure you are, but that’s part of being brave. Even the bravest people get scared. That’s when they ask for help, right?”
“I guess.”
“So I’ll hang up, and then you call 911. Right away, okay? Don’t wait. They’ll stay on the phone with you until everything’s fixed up. After that I’ll call back and check on you. Okay?”
“I guess.”
“Don’t guess, Suze. Just do it.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll hang up now, but I need you to promise to make that call. Do you promise?”
“Yeah.”
“Say it for me.”
“I promise.”
“Good girl.”
I ended the call and looked at the phone in my hand. The phone was shaking. Because my hand was shaking.
Amanda came over and touched my shoulder, and I told her what Suze had said.
She frowned and nodded. “God, that’s awful. It sounds like Rachel’s a cutter.”
“A what?”
“Self-injury. It’s a personality disorder. People cut themselves, burn themselves, things like that. Enough to hurt, but not enough to do real damage. So it probably wasn’t a suicide attempt. You said she had psychiatric drugs in her bathroom?”
Her stash of pharmaceuticals, the kind prescribed for ADHD, OCD, depression, anxiety, even a couple of antipsychotics. Most of them had been prescribed to Rachel, though I had seen a different name on a couple of the labels—Carlos something-or-other, her barroom buddy.
Amanda’s Tau telepathy was acute enough for her to guess what was going through my mind. “You didn’t take advantage of her, Adam. You didn’t know she was crazy until—”
“Until after I took advantage of her.”
“No. You didn’t do anything wrong. Rash, maybe, but not wrong. That’s the thing about outsiders. They’re unpredictable. Not always bad, but dangerous in all kinds of ways, to themselves and others.”
I opened my phone again and tried Rachel’s number. I was gratified that the line was busy. I hoped it meant Suze was doing what I had told her to do.
Amanda said, “Rachel’s damaged in ways you couldn’t have known about. I just don’t want you to be collateral damage.”
“I’m thinking about Suze. Does she count as collateral damage?” I looked at the others in the room, my tribe, all of us leaning on each other in one way or another. Suze didn’t have a tribe. She barely had a mother.
Amanda took a step back and said, “What I mean is—”
I could guess what she was about to say. My welfare was more important to her than Rachel’s. She didn’t want me to get hurt. Outside Tau, people were unpredictable and relationships could go wrong in countless ways. Misunderstandings were inevitable. And so on.
But she didn’t finish the sentence.
* * *
At the time—when the window glass shattered, when the drapes billowed as if an invisible finger had tugged them, when Amanda looked startled and then fell down—we didn’t understand what was happening. Later, we reconstructed it this way:
Gordo MacDonald had put his security detail on alert. Marcy Britnell, a Tau from Cleveland and formerly a second lieutenant in the US Marine Corps, was working the tree line at the western edge of the property, armed with a pistol and equipped with a pair of IR goggles, when she spotted a figure in the forest. The figure appeared to be carrying a long gun, and Marcy quietly called the news in to Gordo while keeping the stranger in view.
Gordo didn’t want Marcy tackling the intruder by herself, so he told her to hold her position while he sent out a couple more of his people. And that’s what Marcy did, until she saw the figure raise his weapon and aim it toward the house. At which point she leveled her pistol and shouted to the gunman to lower his weapon and stand down.
The gunman didn’t lower his weapon. Instead, he began to swing it toward the sound of Marcy’s voice. Marcy wasn’t sure how visible she was in the moonlight, but she was taking no chances. She squeezed off a shot.
The gunman twisted to the left, obviously hurt, and reflexively fired a round of his own.
The rifle he carried was a Remington 783, and the bullet he fired went nowhere near Marcy Britnell. Instead it flew toward the house, clipped a pine bough, penetrated the glass of the sliding doors that adjoined the deck, pierced the coarse fabric of the curtains, passed within inches of the phone Gordo was holding to his ear, and struck Amanda just under her left shoulder and inches from the curve of her spine.
I looked away from her at the sound of the bullet cracking the window. I saw the curtain billow and settle back as if a wind had lifted it, and I saw Gordo pause in mid-conversation, mouth open but motionless as he tried to sort out what was happening. When I turned back to Amanda she looked perplexed. Then she fell toward me, eyes open, and I caught her.
* * *
In those days we liked to talk about “Tau telepathy.” It wasn’t really telepathy, of course, but we understood each other so deeply, so intuitively, that it often felt that way. What we discovered that night on Pender Island was something even deeper than Tau telepathy. Call it Tau rage.
Amanda tumbled into my arms, struggling to say something that emerged as a choked whisper, and time began to stagger forward in a series of static moments, snapshots taken in a glaring light. Probably everyone else in the room could say the same thing. But we worked in concert despite our confusion. I went to my knees, Amanda’s weight carrying me down. I helped her to lie on her right side. I could see the wound now, a flower of blood on the back of the wrinkled white blouse she was wearing. The wound was bleeding freely but not gushing. Her eyelids fluttered and the pupils of her eyes rolled upward.
I said, “Amanda?”
Hands pulled me away from her, and Gordo MacDonald knelt down in my place. “I’m qualified in emergency first aid,” he said, “and Marcy’s on her way in—Marcy did time in Afghanistan as a field nurse. Let us look after her.”
Before I could answer he had taken a knife from his belt and cut away her blouse. Amanda gasped, a sound like water bubbling over rocks.
The exterior door flew open almost immediately. It was Marcy, breathless, with a plastic case the size of an overnight bag in her hand. A med kit, which she had stashed in the trunk of one of the cars that had come over on the ferry. She looked frazzled and breathless, but she moved straight to where Gordo was tending Amanda. She inspected the wound, checked Amanda’s pulse, called her name and got a weak response. “Hang in there,” Marcy said. She turned to Gordo and added in a low voice, “We need professional help.”
“The shooter?” Gordo asked.
“Nelson’s bringing him in.”
* * *
Damian was on the phone to a Tau contact back in Vancouver. He put down the handset and began a brief, intense conversation with Gordo. I couldn’t hear what they said. All my attention was still focused on Amanda.
She was alert enough to murmur something about the pain. Marcy took a syringe from her kit and with practiced efficiency gave her a shot of morphine. Almost immediately, Amanda’s eyes drifted to half-mast. “She’ll be okay, Adam,” Marcy told me over her shoulder. “I mean that.”
“She needs a hospital.”
“Setting it up right now,” Damian said from across the room.
There were a couple of local physicians on Pender and a small regional hospital not far away on Salt Spring Island, but we needed a better and faster option. Late as it was, it took Damian only three calls to find a Tau who ran a helicopter-commute service out of Tsawwassen. A Sikorsky S76 was in the air twenty minutes later, by which time Damian had located a Tau physician near Ladner with access to a fully equipped clinic. The doctor agreed to assess and treat Amanda without reporting a gunshot wound, as long as she didn’t require complex surgery—which Marcy had said she would not.