Distortion Offensive. James Axler
“I thought they were dead, but they’re not,” Kane explained briefly. “But I can’t seem to wake them up.”
Brigid made her way beneath the jagged crossbeams and knelt beside Kane, while Grant stood at the opening.
“I’ll go back into town and see if I can get some medical help,” Grant announced. “Stay in touch,” he added, tapping the side of his face with his finger before turning to make his way up the beach. He meant by Commtact, and didn’t need to spell that fact out to his colleagues.
“What’s happened to them?” Brigid asked as she shook the girl gently, trying to rouse her while Kane focused his attention on the boy.
“No idea,” Kane admitted. “Flesh is cold so I’d guess they’ve been out here all night, but this is more than simply the effects of exposure.”
“I concur,” Brigid agreed as the blond-haired girl finally started to groan as if waking from a deep slumber.
“Wh—” the girl groaned. “What is…it?”
“It’s okay,” Brigid told her in a sympathetic voice. “You’re okay, you’re safe.”
The teen boy was waking up, too, and Kane reassured him in a sharp, professional tone as he held his head steady and stared into his eyes. The pupils were normal and reactive, and there was no trace of blood in the whites.
“What happened to you guys?” Kane asked, turning his attention from one to the other.
The girl was staring at Brigid, her eyes wide. Slowly, she reached up and grabbed a lock of Brigid’s vibrant hair. “It’s so colorful,” she muttered. “Does it hurt?”
“My hair?” Brigid asked, perplexed. “No, it doesn’t hurt. It’s hair, just like yours.”
The girl shook her head, smiling with disbelief. “There are things in your hair,” she said, “hidden in the angles. They live in the shadows, making the tangles their home. The tangles of your hair turn back on themselves, creating non-space, like a tesseract. That’s where the things live. That’s where you hide your memories.”
Brigid looked at the young woman, a disconcerting sense of fear gripping her. At first she had thought that the girl had seen lice there, but that wasn’t what she was describing at all. A tesseract was a dimensional anomaly, a place that appeared bigger on the inside than it did from without. An advanced mathematical concept, a tesseract was something that a girl of that age wouldn’t normally be speaking of, Brigid reasoned. And yet, the way she had used the term, it was as though she could see it as she looked into Brigid’s glossy mane of sunset-colored hair. To see the impossible.
“My name’s Brigid,” the woman offered, trying to remain calm despite the strange turn in the conversation. “What’s yours?”
The teenager looked at Brigid, her blue eyes fixed on the older woman’s curls as she ran them through her fingers once more. “Pam,” she said. “I’m Pam. Your hair hides lots of secrets, Brigid. I wish mine could do that.”
Beside Pam, the other teen had started muttering, too, and Kane helped him to his feet and led him out of the dark shelter of the pier with Brigid bringing the girl along shortly after. “Watch your head,” Kane instructed as he ducked into the sunlight. “Let’s walk it off together, okay?”
Kane walked the youth in a little circuit across the beach, instructing him to take deep breaths and get himself together. As they walked, Kane’s Commtact came to life and Grant advised that he had found the local doctor and would be along shortly.
A couple of minutes later, having quizzed the teenagers some more and assured themselves that the two were all right—physically, at least—Kane took Brigid to one side and asked what she made of them.
“They’re whacked out on something,” Brigid concluded. “The girl’s seeing visions wherever she looks. She told me the sea was being dragged to and fro by the moon.”
Kane grimaced. “That’s kind of true, I guess. You know, with tides and so on.”
To Brigid, it sounded as if Kane was trying to convince himself. “Teenage girls don’t say things like that, Kane,” she told him. “She was talking about a tesseract being hidden within the angles of my hair. A place where I kept my memories.”
“They’ve been smoking something, all right,” Kane growled, looking around the campfire for evidence of cigarette butts or drug-taking equipment. There was nothing there; all he could see were the shells of smoke-damaged shellfish, cracked and empty.
“Or perhaps eating it,” Brigid realized as she crouched by the empty mollusk shells to put her boots back on. “I think they had a little snack out here, Kane—look.”
Kane cocked an eyebrow as he picked up and examined one of the empty shells between thumb and forefinger. “Breakfast?” he suggested.
“More likely a midnight snack,” Brigid told him, gathering up several shells and peering at them. They were different sizes, and each had been burned so that they were streaked with black, but they appeared to be of the same creature type.
“What are they?” Kane asked.
Brigid peered at them for a long moment, turning them on the palm of her hand, her brow furrowed.
“Baptiste?” Kane urged when she didn’t respond.
“I don’t know,” Brigid admitted, mystified. In another person, this admission may have seemed innocent, but Kane knew that Brigid Baptiste had a phenomenal knowledge base, augmented by a rare natural quirk known as an eidetic memory, which meant she could visually reproduce in her mind’s eye anything that she had ever seen. And as an ex-archivist and natural scholar, Brigid Baptiste had seen quite a lot. In many ways, she seemed more like a walking encyclopedia than a person when challenged to produce theories.
When Brigid looked up, she saw Kane’s puzzled expression.
“No ideas?” he asked.
“It’s from the same genetic strain as mollusks and crustaceans,” Brigid assured him, “but I can’t place the type. Not off the top of my head, anyway.”
“And that’s a lot of head,” Kane mumbled.
As they spoke, Grant returned, accompanied by the church warden and a local medical practitioner called Mallory Price. Price was a tall, gangly woman with a gaunt face and thin blond hair, and she looked very much as if she had just been woken up.
“What do we have?” Mallory asked as she approached the two teenagers, glancing over at Kane and Brigid. Her voice was husky, as if she had spent a lifetime shouting or smoking. Kane couldn’t tell which.
“I found them in a trancelike state under the pier,” Kane explained as he joined the medical woman. “They just didn’t seem to want to wake up.”
“The girl said some stuff,” Brigid added as she walked over to join them, her boots back on her feet once more. “Unusual things, not what you’d expect from a teen.”
Price checked the two teenagers briefly, but other than their general disorientation, she could find nothing ostensibly wrong with them. “They’re both suffering a little bit from exposure,” she told Kane and the others, “but they’re young. They’ll be fine.”
“What about their altered state of mind when he found them?” Kane asked.
The woman shrugged. “Teenagers being teenagers,” she said. “Who knows what they’re getting hooped up on. You probably did the same when you were their age.”
Overhearing this, Grant laughed. “Oh, you don’t know Kane,” he muttered.
Kane opened his fist and showed the mollusk shell to Mallory. “Have you seen one of these before, Doc?” he asked, letting her handle the little shell.
The medical woman turned it over