Neptune's Tears Read Free

think he has a concussion?’ she asked.
    ‘I think he has a subdural haematoma. It could blow like Vesuvius any minute.’ His eyes sparkled with anticipation as he gestured at the door of the examining room. ‘See if you
can keep him here.’
    Zee took a clearing breath and entered the room. The young man sitting in the cubicle wasn’t that much older than she was. Zee had been trained to notice the small gestures that took place
in the first few minutes of an encounter, revealing the patient’s state of mind and openness to non-invasive healing. She caught a blur of motion. The young man seemed to have been rubbing a
small metal bar against his forehead, but it disappeared into his pocket so swiftly she couldn’t be certain.
    When he lifted his head, Zee felt a tug. Involuntary personal attraction. A reflex, like coughing when you walked into a dusty room. She’d felt it before with other patients, but not quite
like this. When he looked at her, his deep grey eyes seemed to draw her towards him. She wanted to go on looking at him, at the way a few strands of dark hair fell across his forehead. Clearly,
Piper had created more than a tiny pinprick in her calm. She’d never felt so open to someone before, and was determined to regain her sense of calm.
    ‘Hi,’ she said, ‘I’m Zee, your assigned empath.’
    ‘I’m David Sutton, unassigning myself.’ When he smiled, his eyebrows lifted, as if inviting her to share a secret joke. Then, looking at her, the smile changed into a different
kind of expression. Instead of hopping off the hospital trolley, he stayed where he was. Everything about him seemed to stop and the room floated into stillness, like a leaf or a feather settling
to earth. For a long moment he simply stared at her, and Zee allowed him to, without moving or closing her face to him.
    It wasn’t easy to let someone look at you like that, but many patients seemed to need to. ‘Like someone taking a car for a road test,’ their instructor had explained during
training, ‘only you’re the car.’ They’d laughed, but that didn’t make it easier. Five in her class had washed out because they could not be looked at without posturing
or fidgeting. It was harder than it sounded. At first, Zee had felt so naked standing before a patient she’d had to distract herself by making lists of song titles that started with certain
letters of the alphabet, or by wondering why two-hundred-year-old movies like
Titanic
were often better than the hologram remakes. Now that she was more confident, she’d begun to use
these small capsules of time to begin building a healing bridge to the patient.
    But that wasn’t happening tonight. She was having trouble re-establishing her calm, and felt as naked as she had the first time she’d been with a patient. No sooner had she dropped
the foundations of the bridge into place and sent invisible blue vines twining through the air than they crumbled and vanished from her mind.
    David Sutton’s eyes were still on her. She felt her skin grow warm and tried to think of song titles that began with the letter A. She drew a blank, so moved on to the letter B.
‘Bitter Poison’, ‘Borrowed Time’, ‘Been Around and Down’, ‘Boomdance’. It usually took patients less than thirty seconds to satisfy themselves, but
more than a minute passed and Zee still felt his gaze.
    Suddenly he smiled again. ‘You’re one of us,’ he said.
    Now what was
that
supposed to mean? Maybe Dr Morgan was right – this patient really did have a subdural haematoma, and his brain was already starting to suffer from hypoxia. Or did
he mean that he was also an empath? That would explain the ribbon of energy she’d begun to feel pulsing between them.
    He spoke again in a voice that was almost a whisper, the words such a quick, soft rush she could not even tell what language they might be.
    This was not going according to plan at all, and she tried to steer it back. ‘Dr Morgan