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I.
Wine country burned when C.B. was twelve. It happened sometimes. It wasn’t the dry years, like newcomers assumed, but the wet ones. Everything grew like crazy, and the hills stayed green, and then in the summer fire came for every leaf of it. Dan had stopped the car at the top of El Camino to look back at the house— Mom’s house— as it caught, although the firefighters had shouted to keep driving. They’d watched in silence.
“Hell of a thing,” Dan had said once the windows blew out, and driven the two of them methodically away.
II.
He’d slept fine for the first few days After— after-jammer, after-Verrick, after the miracle of touching Briddey. There was the week’s blunt-force exhaustion to contend with, and a certain amount of, ah, physical exertion. (Oona laughed at them, but kept Maeve busy.)
On the fourth day he’d googled how to make eggs and Briddey had liked them. He’d cashed out his Commspan stock. After dinner they walked up into the hills and then home. He lived with her now, he guessed. Home.
That night he dreamed the walls fell so far out he couldn’t see them. He ran miles in silence, unable to move. Woke up shaking.
And of course after that it was a cycle. He sunburned himself walking for hours the next day, but it was too sharp-edged a fatigue to balance out the quiet. The couch didn’t help. TV. His car. He didn’t really worry until Friday, when he tried just removing himself from the jammer and was almost swamped by the roar. Defenses, he thought, thirteen again, tired. Defenses.
Even when he slept on the floor Briddey woke when he did, disoriented and afraid.
I’ll adjust, he was telling her at three am on Sunday, head in his hands, when Maeve exploded from some mental hidey hole on a wave of disgust. You don’t have to, she told him, exasperated, and in ten minutes his personal jammer station had a volume knob. He was leaning against the shower wall when she turned it on: a manageable murmur everywhere.
He barely made it back to bed. When he opened his eyes it was four pm. Briddey had left a sandwich beside him. He ate it, blank-brained, listening.
III.
“I just don’t get it,” he said to Briddey once. She’d been painting her nails and he’d been watching mesmerized from bed. Some dumb story about him had come up, a hospital visit or a rough high school night. She was furious yet again at— what? The early 2000s? The specifics of his DNA? “It all happened. I figured it out. We’re here. Why does it matter?”
“You matter,” she insisted, and when he rolled his eyes she waved a gold-tipped hand and said, “Imagine it was someone else, C.B. Maeve. Imagine we died, god forbid, and Maeve was by herself when the voices arrived, and no one came. Would that be okay?”
“That didn’t happen,” h told her, glad to have the facts on his side. “And she’s tough. And I was thirteen, not nine.”
And Briddey just watched him, leaning her tiny brush on the neck of the bottle. He listened for her thoughts, ready to explain, and didn’t find anything but tenderness.
He looked away, which did nothing. “I mean, it happened. Things happen. What, am I supposed to be— angry— or—”
She rescued him when his voice cracked, pads of her fingers carefully flat on his shoulders.
IV.
He’d gone to Mass with them on Christmas Eve. (Even Sean O’Reilly went, which was how C.B. knew it wasn’t optional. Sean O’Reilly rarely said much to Flannigans who weren’t Kathleen, and his walls were a cement dome. Sometimes he clapped C.B. on the shoulder. C.B. had tried and failed to find a more dignified word for his feelings about Sean O’Reilly than “crush.”)
There were candles and carols, like in movies. The priest prayed, and voices prayed with him. Where there wasn’t quiet in people’s heads there was memory. Happy years with the same words and lights. Sad ones.
On January 1st he’d emailed Dan’s sisters, and Aunt Louise had written back so fast he’d had a flash of paranoia.
Family doesn’t need telepathy, Maeve had said darkly, wandering without any sense of irony through the back of his brain. They just know.
He and Aunt Louise sent letters now. He had coffee once a month with a rabbi, a mom-looking lesbian who thought a lot about gardening. Briddey was concerned when he told her about this, because she reckoned spying on a rabbi’s thoughts was probably a sin.
V.
Everyone who’d said this year’s flu hit you like a train was right. He’d had a screwdriver several inches deep in a prototype when the idea that he felt… funny first surfaced. By the time he'd washed his hands, the room was swaying a little. He’d decided to sit down for a minute, and then he was curled around aching bones and surrounded by burning.
It was just a fever thing, he reminded himself. Fevers messed your mind up. With the jammer on, it probably wasn’t even an inhibitor issue, just a normal-grade nightmare. Low steady flames that vigilance could handle.
When he called to Briddey she was heading home from her meeting in the city, enjoying the CalTrain’s drone. (Coding wasn’t as good as reading, but it had a rhythm to it. The commuters’ other main sport of emailing was bad news, but more and more of them used the Sanctuary phone. People loved it. Apple hated it. Even in this state, C.B. spared a moment to hope Trent’s money made him miserable.) He pictured her head snapping up as she heard him, pictured her worry.
Hey, he said. Um. Could you.
For a long time he lay there, fire-fighting. He was going to go get a drink of water, like she told him to. Very soon. He just wanted to note, for the record, that when you spent all your time alone in a basement you didn’t encounter a lot of germs. And you didn’t need a flu shot. So maybe more people should try that instead. Just a thought.
“Sure,” Briddey was saying beside him. “Okay. Take this.”
They were in her courtyard. She’d vanished the soot from the air he was breathing. They were on his lab couch, her right hand soothing through the furrows in his hair and her left clutched in both of his.
He let go and took the ibuprofen she was holding. Took the glass. “Poor old Sky,” she said. “Get out the Vitamin A and the Bromo Fizz.”
“I’ll get you sick,” he told her.
“I’ll survive. It’ll give Mary Clare something useful to do.”
It was night in the courtyard. He smelled flowers, her lap, her hair.
Go to sleep, C.B., said the walls, and he did.