her like cool water on a burn. But I didn’t miss my father’s little smile or my mother’s near-subliminal frown. The gray-suited man had been given a level of courtesy and respect that a woman couldn’t get.
Lesson learned.
Truth was, Chogyi Jake looked amazing in the right outfit. Brown linen so light it was almost blond, a black linen vest of matching cut, pin-striped shirt and tie that coordinated like a symphony perfectly in tune. He’d let the stubble of hair grow out just enough for the scattering of gray at the temples to show. When he chose not to smile, he could look seriously dangerous. By comparison, Aubrey, even in his best suit, never quite gave off the air of command, and Ex’s long hair wasn’t quite overcome by his quasiclerical black and humorless attitude. And me? Yes, I was the money behind everything. Yes, I was the one Kim called. Yes, I was Eric’s heir and successor with the weird supernatural powers and protections. I was also twenty-four and a woman, and even in my best clothes and most understated makeup, I looked more like Jennifer Connelly than an international demon hunter and occult expert. So by common agreement, Chogyi Jake took point.
“Thank you for joining us, Dr. Oonishi. I’m sorry we couldn’t come to your office.”
“Thank you,” the man said. “It’s probably good if we don’t meet at Grace.”
“There are reputations to protect,” Kim said, only a little bitterness in her voice. Her dress was sherbet green and didn’t suit her. She wore it like a smock.
The restaurant sat on the river, broad windows looking out over water glowing gold with sunset. A yacht had tied up while we were being seated, and now a young man had climbed up one of the deck ladders and was paying for his to-go order. The skyscrapers of downtown rose up around us like trees above rabbits, and the cool evening breeze mixed the smells of water and freshly grilled steak. Oonishi sat forward with his elbows on the table. His gaze shifted between us, restless and uneasy.
“I take it,” he said to Chogyi Jake, “you understand why I need help with this problem?”
“Of course,” Chogyi Jake said. “And I understand why discretion is important. We have experience with this kind of issue. You don’t have anything to worry about.”
He delivered the lines with a conviction that almost had me forgetting that we’d had a small riot on the Cardiac Care Unit earlier in the day. Oonishi either hadn’t heard about it or hadn’t put it together with our arrival, because he looked reassured.
“What can you tell us about the problem?” Ex asked.
“You’ve seen the data sets?” Oonishi asked, turning his head almost imperceptibly toward Kim. When Chogyi Jake nodded, he continued, “We’ve been running the tertiary tests for almost three months now. Three nights a week, the subjects come to the lab. There are anomalies as early as the second session.”
“Can you give me the date on that?” I asked. It was a safe question. The kind of thing that even a jumped-up secretary might ask.
“I’ve brought a copy of the study logs,” he said. “Everything’s there. Dates, names, times.”
“Great,” I said, keeping the annoyance out of my voice. I’d asked him for a piece of information, not where I could go to look it up. But I let it slide.
“At first, it wasn’t simultaneous. It was only a common set of images. I thought it was day residue.”
“I don’t follow,” Ex said.
Watching Oonishi shift from embarrassed client to popular scientist was like watching the playback of myself in Trevor’s dojo. He didn’t exactly move, his expression didn’t quite change, but he was suddenly more grounded than he’d been before. His nervous half-smile vanished.
“What we’re learning about perception,” he said, “is that it’s very dependent on priming. The actual experience of vision, of seeing, is associated with activity in the V1 and V2 layers of your visual cortex. What the neuroanatomists have found is more neurons enter V1 and V2 from the deeper parts of the brain than from the optic nerve.”
“Implying what?” Ex asked.
“That your conceptual and emotional knowledge affects not just your interpretation of what you see, but what you actually see,” Oonishi said. “Five years ago, a man in Madison, Wisconsin, had a heart attack. Fell over in the street. An off-duty paramedic happened to be there. He started administering CPR.”
“They shot him,” Aubrey said. “I heard about that.”
“Yes,” Oonishi said. “The paramedic was black. One of the passersby saw a young black man straddling an older white man and shot him. When the police arrested the shooter, she swore the paramedic had been stabbing the man. She’d seen the blood. She’d seen the knife. There had been no blood. No knife. But she was adamant she’d seen it.”
“And you say she did?” Aubrey asked.
“I say she did. Not because it was there, but because she expected it to be. There are any number of simple experiments that prove your knowledge and emotion affect your actual perception. If you look at a sign just at the edge of your visual range, you can experience the letters becoming sharper when someone tells you what they are. This isn’t even controversial.”
“Okay, but back to the data,” I said. “The thing in the dreams. Day residue?”
Oonishi glanced his annoyance at me. I wasn’t doing a great job of letting Chogyi take point, but the further we veered from the issue at hand, the more impatient I got. I saw Kim nodding as if in agreement. Someone at the table behind us laughed at something, a high, masculine sound.
“If there was something,” Oonishi said, “that all the subjects had seen—a movie or a popular commercial—I would have had an explanation of the image’s recurrence. They would all have seen it recently, and so when they lost the input from their optic nerves, they would be primed to impose that image on the visual cortex from below, as it were.”
“Didn’t work out,” Chogyi Jake said.
“No. It didn’t. I talked to the subjects after that session. None of them identified the images. They didn’t even remember having dreamed them. And then, when the images started coming at the same time . . .”
“So it began two months ago,” Ex said.
“This did,” Oonishi said. “My study did. But I wasn’t looking before then. It might be something that’s been happening for years. Decades.”
Kim didn’t bring up the anecdotal evidence she’d heard—the walk-aways or the people coming up from anesthetic saying foreign phrases. She was paging through Oonishi’s study logs. Her mouth pressed thin, and her eyebrows drew in toward each other.
“Do your subjects have any recollection of the dreams now?” Chogyi Jake asked.
“I haven’t asked,” Oonishi said, and then, pronouncing each word very carefully, “I have been afraid to.”
“We may need to explore it,” Chogyi Jake said.
In the uncomfortable silence, our waiter appeared with our meals. I’d gotten the fourteen-dollar BLT. I took a bite as the waiter passed the other plates around and asked if he could get any of us anything. My tomatoes tasted a little like cardboard, but the bacon was good. Oonishi was quiet until the waiter had gone, and even then spoke in a low voice.
“I would rather that we kept this among ourselves,” he said. “I haven’t even spoken to the other researchers.”
“They must know something’s up,” Kim said. “Unless you invite parasitologists to your lab at midnight on a regular basis, they’ll wonder why I was there.”
“They think I’m trying to bang you,” Oonishi said. Kim’s eyes went a degree wider, and I felt some of her shock. My cough meant I was offended on her behalf, but Oonishi only gave a surprisingly boyish smile and shrugged. I found myself liking him less.
“We can be discreet,” Aubrey said coolly, “but we can’t work without evidence. Would you prefer that we address the subject outside your study, or would you like to present it as part of the research?”
Oonishi looked to Chogyi Jake in appeal, but he only got an enigmatic smile in return. After a long moment’s silence, he gave in.
“I can interview them about the dreams,” Oonishi said. “You’ll need to tell me what to ask.”
“One of us should be there,” I said, and Ex scowled at me. Having one of us present at the interviews would probably mean going back into Grace.
“We’ll discuss that,” Chogyi Jake said. “But we should also address the price.”
“Price?” Oonishi said.
