That would be a hell of a way to make him understand that I was interested in his body: taking it over seemed a little bit extreme, but it seemed like a reasonably likely outcome of this particular act of raging stupidity. I’d been in Artie’s head before, both with and without an invitation. I’d never been so far inside his head that I wound up in his mindscape.
“That is such a stupid word,” I muttered, and took a step forward . . . or tried to. My legs worked, but I got the distinct feeling that I wasn’t actually moving. The lights on the horizon certainly didn’t move. They stayed exactly where they were, bright and shimmering and impossible, and I stayed exactly where I was, pale and lost and stranded in an infinity of bruised blackness.
“Artie?” My voice echoed as if bouncing off unseen canyon walls. I cupped my hands around my mouth and tried again, shouting louder this time. “Artie!”
The ground began to crack and crumble underfoot. I glared at it. “You stop that.”
It stopped that.
Great: so I had some control over my environment, which was also Artie’s mind, which meant I should probably be careful about how many orders I wanted to give. Since I also didn’t want to plummet into the next layer of the—ugh—mindscape, a few orders were going to be necessary. I cupped my hands around my mouth again, forming a primitive megaphone.
“Artie! It’s Sarah! I know you can hear me, I’m inside your head!”
No reply.
“If you don’t come talk to me right now, I’m going to make you wish you had!”
No reply.
“Okay. You did this to yourself.” I took a deep, unnecessary breath, and began to sing at the top of my lungs, “I am a happy banana! A happy happy happy ba-na-na! Happy happy happy—”
“I hate that song.”
I stopped singing and turned, beaming when I saw Artie behind me in the darkness. He scowled and the expression made perfect sense. I was inside his head; I didn’t need to read his mind to know why his face was doing the things it was doing. That was a nice change.
In here, I could also see that he was handsome, and that was a nice change, too. Oh, I would have thought he was handsome no matter what he looked like, because I really was in love with his mind—his weird, sweet, comforting mind—but Artie’s brain knew how to process human faces and I was inside his head and that meant that for right now, I could do the same thing. And he had a nice face, sweet and open and expressive. I spared a moment’s resentment for the fact that I belonged to a species that didn’t get to enjoy faces like his, because we simply didn’t see them. It wasn’t fair.
“I know you hate that song,” I said. “That’s why I was singing it.”
“Couldn’t you come up with a better way to get on my nerves?” Artie rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “You could do your multiplication homework or something.”
“I haven’t done math inside your head since we were kids.”
“Yeah, but it was always really annoying when you did it.” Artie lowered his hand. “Where are we, Sarah?”
The vague hope that this was normal for him—that his mind always looked like this from the inside, and so he’d be able to tell me how to get us out of here—faded to wistful nothingness. “We’re inside your head. Don’t you know the inside of your own head?”
Worry strong enough to verge on panic spiked in his eyes and rolled through the mindscape around us, fuzzy and static on the idea of my skin. “Wait, we’re inside my head? You’re inside my head? You’re not . . . looking . . . at things, are you?”
“I promised a long time ago that I wouldn’t rifle through your memories uninvited,” I said, feeling suddenly tired. “Don’t you trust me anymore, Artie?”
“I trusted you not to hurt yourself and shut me out for five years, and look how well that went.” His eyes widened and he clapped a hand over his mouth, like he thought he could somehow manage to take the words back. “Oh, jeez, Sarah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . I’m sorry.”
“Like I said, we’re in your head. It’s harder for you to lie to me in here, unless you’re also lying to yourself.” A dozen questions sprang to mind, each of them more inappropriate than the last. I pushed them all down. It wouldn’t just be an invasion of his privacy to ask those questions when I knew he’d have to answer them truthfully. It would be a violation of our friendship, of the careful, questionable peace we’d constructed between ourselves, one promise and compromise at a time.
Being a telepath in a non-telepathic world is hard. Sometimes I think my ancestors made a big mistake, leaving whatever dimension they originated in. Then I usually think that no dimension is awful enough to deserve us, and I’m glad to at least be in a world where the Internet exists. Telepaths would never have invented the Internet.
It’s easier on the Internet. Everyone is the words they use and nothing else. It’s fair.
Artie was still staring at me, guilt written broadly across his face. Maybe being able to read expressions wasn’t such a good thing after all.
“I didn’t get hurt on purpose,” I said.
“I know.”
“I wouldn’t have done that to you. I wouldn’t have done that to myself.”
“I know.”
“So why are you mad at me?”
Artie looked at me for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was soft, almost distant, like he was remarking on the weather and not talking about one of the most important relationships in my life.
“Because you shut me out,” he said. “You let Aunt Angela and Uncle Martin take care of you, and that was fine. You let Alex live in the same house as you, while all the rest of us were being told you were too dangerous to be anywhere near us, and that was fine. You let Alex move his human girlfriend into the house, you let her sleep right down the hall, and that was fine. But every time I asked if I could come to Ohio to see you, you said you weren’t ready yet. Every time I asked if I could help, you told me ‘no.’ You said you were fine when you weren’t fine, and I don’t think you ever lied to me before, and I didn’t like it. Five years, Sarah. You left me scared that I’d lost you for five years. That’s such a long time. I’m mad at you because I’d almost finished grieving for you, and now you’re standing inside my head, and I can’t get away from you. Why couldn’t you come back sooner? Why couldn’t you stay gone?”
His voice broke on the last word. He looked away, off at the distant, prismatic horizon.
“Oh,” I said.
He didn’t say anything.