Rachel Caine - Thin Air

I was hurting her, but I knew, somehow, that it had to hurt. There wasn’t any choice, if I wanted to save her. The blackness was spreading across that network of lights, slowly consuming her, and if I didn’t do something she’d be gone, this beautiful creation would be gone , and I couldn’t let it happen.

I just couldn’t.

Smells and sounds and chaos rolled over me, a huge vista of things I couldn’t comprehend, a presence that guided my hands and my powers to touch here and there and there , a tiny spark of pure white power jumping from one burned-out node to another, jump-starting and dying.

It’s not working!

The presence inside wordlessly soothed me, and showed me again. And again. I was no longer seeing or hearing anything in the outside world; the world was what was under my hands and in my head.

And this time, the bridge sparked, flickered, and held, and the network of lights raced and flared and ignited through the dark.

I felt things shift into place. Click.

Cherise lit up with a blaze of power, and I heard her take in a whooping, gasping breath in the real world.

I did it.

Yeah. But now that the feverish desire to do it was passing…what exactly had I done?

“Let go!” Lewis was yelling at me, frantic. I tried. Before I could get free, another spark jumped from my fingers, accessing a network of brilliance in Cherise’s mind, and although I had no idea what I was doing…

I was suddenly inside her head.

Being in Cherise’s body took some adjustment. I felt dizzy, squeezed, wrong . I involuntarily tried to move something, but in the next instant I realized a couple of important things…

One, I wasn’t Cherise. I was still me, but a silent observer sitting alongside Cherise in her body.

And two, this was the past.

This was memory.

It took me a second to absorb where Cherise was. Some kind of set. Movie? Television? I caught sight of the unmistakable configuration of a television news desk, and the call letters in red over it. Cameras. People milling around. There wasn’t any easy way I could figure out what date this was, or even what city. I could sense Cherise thinking, but it was a random jumble of stuff, nothing I could make sense of-until it suddenly did.

Oh great , she thought. Time to make nice with the new girl.

And with a sense of having fallen completely down the rabbit hole, I saw myself-Joanne-walking toward her. There was something so utterly wrong about seeing myself like this that I felt another surge of disorientation, and I wanted desperately to turn away.

But I couldn’t. I was trapped, helpless, watching the memory play out before me. Trapped.

“Hi. I’m Joanne,” that other me said, and held out a long-fingered, strong hand with a halfway decent manicure. French nails. Not a great tan, but a pretty good one. She looked rested, but a little bit nervous. First day on the job, maybe? From Cherise’s point of view Joanne was annoyingly tall, and most of it was leg. I sensed Cherise making an assessment. She was a cold and merciless judge of other women’s looks-not unkind, but precise.

“You’re Marvin’s new assistant,” Cherise said. “Right?”

God, did I really look that way when I smiled? My mouth looked funny. “Assistant would be a kind way to put it,” Joanne said. I couldn’t stand thinking of her as me . “He just called me the weather girl.”

“Yeah, well, that’s Marvin for you. Hey. I’m Cherise. I’m the dumbass who runs around in the bikini to give the surf forecast.” Cherise rolled her eyes to show it didn’t really bother her. From this side of the conversation, I could tell that it wasn’t an act; running around in a bikini really didn’t bother her. She was pretty, and she knew it, and there wasn’t much point in denying the fact that guys found her hot. She figured she had the rest of her life to use her brains. A fine body had a short shelf life, when it came to stripping down to a G-string. “So how’s it working with Marvin so far?”

I watched the former me make a face that I resolved I would never, ever make again. “Oh, fabulous. Is he always that-?”

“Grabby? Always,” Cherise said, and leaned forward. “Okay, time for the potential compatibility quiz. Who’s the sexiest man alive?”

“Uh…” Joanne blinked. “Probably…um…I have no idea.” Oddly, I couldn’t answer it now, either. I only really knew two guys in the whole world, and they were both pretty damn sexy.

“Acceptable answers include David Duchovny, Johnny Depp, and James Spader. Sean Connery is always allowable. So-favorite TV show?”

“I don’t watch a lot of television,” the other me confessed. Well, I consoled myself with the thought that losing my memory clearly hadn’t made all that much difference in my conversational skills.

“Well, I watch a lot of television,” said Cherise. “So you’ll need to catch up. I’ll give you a list of what you can start with, and yes, there will be quizzes later.”

Joanne laughed. She had a good laugh, one that made you want to get in on the joke-the first thing about her I couldn’t quibble with. “You always this take-charge, Cherise?”

“Pretty much. I’m little, but I’m fierce,” she said, and inspected Joanne’s nail polish, giving it a nod of approval. “Seriously, if we’re going to be best friends, you really have to be able to intelligently discuss the relative hotness of television stars. It’s a must. What do you think, too green?”

That would have thrown most people. It definitely threw me now, observing, but Joanne had followed the shift without trouble. She looked at Cherise’s nail polish critically, tilted her head, and said, “No, it’s perfect. Picks up the color in your shirt.” I felt Cherise’s surge of satisfaction. “But,” Joanne continued, “you might want to consider pairing up that underlayer with a sheer teal instead of green. Make the color really pop.”

Cherise blinked, looked at her nails, then at her shirt. “Damn. You’re good . Shopping,” she said. “Tonight. Shopping and mojitos. Seriously, anybody who can one-up me on color analysis must be worth my time.”

Then-me looked a little taken aback by that, searched for a reply, and then said, with a hilarious amount of consideration for Cherise’s potentially bruised feelings, “I’m not, you know, gay or anything.”

Cherise found that funny. “You mean you wouldn’t go gay for me? Sheesh. I’m not looking for a date. Nobody else here understands the power of Zen shopping. I think”-Cherise swept a look over her ensemble, then Joanne’s, which actually was pretty cute-“I think we can do some real credit card damage together. Somebody’s got to keep the economy growing. It’s almost patriotic.”

Joanne looked relieved. And then smiled. The smile still looked wrong to me, from this side.

“Deal,” she said.

It was a warm place to be, and I wanted to stay there, bask in that sensation of liking and being liked.

But I couldn’t stay.

There was a blurring sensation, like being pushed hard from behind, and I jumped tracks, falling endlessly, falling, lost, and then there was a sudden burst of light.

Rapid-fire memories. Fragments of conversations. Ice cream on the couch, watching movies with Cherise. Shopping. Chatting.

Normal life. I’d had a normal life, once.

Another lurching sensation, a blur, and when I blinked it away, Cherise was pushing open a door from a dark hallway to the outside world. Time had passed, although I didn’t have a good notion of how much. She looked over her shoulder, and I saw Joanne following her out of the building.