A Gift of Ghosts (Tassamara) by Sarah Wynde Read Free Book Online Page B

quick
keystrokes, and suddenly the screen became recognizably the bones of a hand. “Look
at that,” Natalya almost sighed. “What could she have done?”
    “Um, no idea?” Zane said, a hint of impatience entering his
voice. “What are we looking at?”
    “Oh, right.” She glanced at him as if she’d forgotten he was
there, and almost reluctantly touched several spots on the screen. “See those
light spots? That’s calcification. She’s broken the bones there. Five places, I
think, and probably all around the same time, so somehow she really smashed up
her hand. But that break pattern—I don’t know how she could have done that.”
She stared at her own hand speculatively, as if trying to imagine a way to
break the bones in those locations.
    “But she’s okay now?” Zane asked, and this time the
impatience was real. Was there a problem or not?
    “Um, yeah.” Natalya glanced at him again before shifting in
her chair, and then typing a few more words so that the screen shifted back to
meaningless gray blobs.
    “Nat?”
    She sighed, and typed again, this time for several sentences.
The screen turned into a picture of a skeleton. “Count the light spots.”
    Zane glanced. There were a lot of light spots. “What are
they?”
    “Places where bones have been broken in the past. Both bones
of her right arm in multiple places, her collarbone, the ribs at least a few
times, and her jaw, ouch. Plus the hand. And maybe a bone in the foot. Most of
them happened a long time ago, but it wasn’t one bad accident. You can tell
from the levels of calcification that they occurred at different times. The
hand was recent.” She looked at Zane thoughtfully. “Your girl has lived a
dangerous life.”
    “My girl?” Zane’s surprise showed. “She’s not mine. This is
only the second time I’ve met her.” He didn’t mention the number of times he’d
thought of her in the month since her interview. It was more than a few.
    “Oh, right.” Natalya busied herself with the keyboard again,
looking embarrassed.
    “Okay, sister mine, what do you know that I don’t?”
    She grinned at him. “Well, there’s that entire medical school
curriculum, for one thing.”
    “You know that’s not what I meant. You saw something, didn’t
you?”
    “And you know I prefer not to talk about those things. The
future is ours to control. Anything I see is just a possibility.”
    Zane sighed. His sister had inherited his father’s gift—the
only one in the family to do so. Max might call himself a serendipidist, but
the rest of the world would have called him a precognitive psychic. Not always,
not consistently, and not always accurately, but sometimes, and often when it
counted, he could see the future.
    So could Nat. But unlike their father, she tried not to act
on her knowledge and not to share it. Her exceptions were random—Akira’s
two-year contract had to have been one of them, Zane suspected—but rare. And
once she decided not to talk, nothing short of an act of God would get her mouth
open. Zane wasn’t even going to try.
    “So how do you think she broke all those bones?” he asked,
nodding toward Akira.
    Natalya glanced in that direction and frowned. “You could ask
her. But . . .”
    Zane raised his eyebrows when she didn’t continue. “Go on.”
    She was quiet again.
    “Come on, Nat. Tell me what you know.” This was right in
front of him, if he only knew how to read the scans.
    “This might fall under doctor-patient confidentiality,” she
finally said.
    “I’m in the room with you, watching the scans, and she knows
I’m here. She could have gone to a perfectly nice hospital, and she didn’t, so
tell me what you see.” He didn’t often dig his heels in, but he felt almost
annoyed that Nat knew more about Akira than he did. Bad enough that she wouldn’t
tell him what her gift revealed, but he knew he ought to be able to figure this
out for himself.
    “Ribs, jaw, spiral fractures on the arms? And that