Artie frowned. It was sort of neat, seeing the muscles move and actually understanding what the expression was supposed to mean. “Meaning you want to do something my brain is going to think of as even more unreasonable, huh?”
“Yeah. I do.” I took a step closer to him. “The woman who looked like me—she was a cuckoo. The bad kind, not like me or Mom.”
“I picked up on that,” he said, sounding resigned. “She whammied my head, didn’t she?”
“Yeah,” I repeated. “She must have followed me from the airport. Whatever she did, it’s not here, at the surface level. That would be too easy for me to find and untangle. It’s somewhere deeper inside your mind, where I don’t usually go. I need your permission to go down and find it, even though I may see some things you don’t want me to see. If you’re okay with that, I think I can wake you up.”
“What if I’m not okay with it?” There was a brittle bravado to Artie’s words that took me a second to recognize.
He was scared. Of me.
Sometimes I’m glad I don’t have a heart. It means it can’t be broken. “If you’re not okay with it, I can step out of your mind, tell everyone that I can’t get consent for treatment, and call Mom. Maybe you’d be okay with her seeing your secrets.”
To my surprise, he shook his head and stepped closer to me. I could have reached out and touched him. “I don’t really want anybody digging around that deep in my head,” he said. “But if it’s going to be someone, I’d rather it was you. Is that silly?”
“It’s sweet,” I said, and reached for his hands. They were slightly too cold, like his mental image of himself didn’t quite know how to keep things circulating properly. I offered him a small, hopefully encouraging smile. “I won’t look at anything I don’t have to, I promise.”
“Cool,” he said. He exhaled, slowly. “Is this going to hurt?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and tightened my grasp on his hands. There was a glint as his eyes reflected the light growing in mine, and then the thunder rolled on the lightning-lashed horizon of his mind, and I was falling, Alice toppling into Wonderland, dropping down, down, down into the dark.
* * *
Artie didn’t fall with me, which made sense, since I was technically falling into Artie. He was everywhere, all around me, and I had left the conscious levels of his mind behind: there was no reason for his brain to project an avatar of the man when I was dropping into memory and autonomous systems.
The darkness around me twisted into an almost funnel-like shape, apparently influenced by my thoughts of Wonderland. Doors started appearing in the walls as I dropped past them, some labeled with words, others with images. These were the vaults of Artie’s memories. I knew that, just like I knew that if I’d wanted to, I could have reached out and opened any one of those doors, stopping my descent. They weren’t real doors, and I wasn’t really falling; much as Artie’s mind had attempted to protect itself by creating a landscape he could deal with, my mind was now protecting its core by giving me a framework to hang this whole unreasonable experience on.
“School” said one door, and “Girls” said another door, and “Comic Books” said a third. Then there were the more abstract labels—a leaf, a bat in flight, a bird. I slowed to a stop, frowning at the bird. It had a dark back and a pale belly, wings spread as if it was getting ready to flee.
A cuckoo.
This was the door to Artie’s memories of me.
Opening it would be an invasion of his privacy. Yes, he’d given me permission to be here, but he was expecting me to use that permission to find the snare the other cuckoo had set in his mind, not to peek at whatever secrets he’d kept from me, about me. I still hesitated for what felt like a shamefully long time before shifting slightly backward and allowing myself to resume my descent.
The labels on the doors got more and more abstract and more and more broad as I dropped—fruit becoming food becoming bowls of what looked like porridge and mashed vegetables. Several doors appeared for immediate family members, almost as if he sorted the memories of them differently depending on their age as well as his own. When I started seeing doors labeled with things like “Numbers” and “Language” and “Sleep,” I knew I was getting close.
There, almost at the bottom of the tunnel, was a door labeled “Dreams.” Unlike the doors around it, this one was covered in a thick, cottony layer of what looked almost like spiderweb. I stopped in front of it, barely managing not to recoil. Standing in front of that door was like standing in front of an open freezer. Each individual strand in the web was putting out waves of cold, strong enough to almost knock me backward in the air.
This was the door. This had to be the door. None of the others had been protected this way, not even the ones I was sure Artie didn’t want me opening. It’s one thing to agree to let your weird telepathic cousin poke around in your head. It’s another to know that she’s planning to look at the door labeled “Masturbation.” If he’d been able to seal doors against me, he would have done it with at least a dozen of the ones I’d passed getting to this point.
“It can’t hurt you,” I muttered. “It’s a booby trap planted by someone who isn’t here, and you are here, and you’re stronger than it is. It can’t hurt you.”
But it could hurt Artie. I had no idea how to go about placing a psychic landmine, which meant I didn’t know how to disarm one, either. Mom wouldn’t be any help with this. Even if I pulled all the way out of Artie’s head and called home, her powers were too limited compared to the cuckoo norm. She couldn’t tell me what to do. I had to feel my way through the situation and hope I didn’t make things worse.
No pressure.
Annie had fire in her fingers. That was her phrase, stolen from the surface of her mind while she was focused on burning the car: fire in her fingers. I thought about what that felt like, how the heat moved through the skin, how warm it was, how safe. How much the fire loved her. It didn’t have a mind, not in the sense that I could reach out and touch it, but it loved her all the same; some things are more important than thought or logic.
In the real world, there was no fire in my fingers. But here, deep in the tangle of Artie’s mind, I was as close to a superhero as I would ever get, and if I understood what it was to have fire in my fingers, why couldn’t I choose it for myself? I focused on my hands and smiled as they burst into lambent blue-white flame, hot enough to turn back the cold from the webbing. I stepped forward, hands held in front of me, and watched as the web shriveled away, shying back from the possibility of my touch.
“Not yours,” I said aloud, in case it would help my fire catch hold. “Not your door to bar; not your mind to steal. Not yours.”