Part 3: Synesthesia

"Sarah. Sarah!"

He is making soup with Savannah in the kitchen, when he hears her scream. He nearly trips over himself rushing in to her, and he almost doesn't notice that Savannah doesn't seem all that surprised.

"Sarah!"

The screams have tapered off into another fit of coughing. He can hear the rattle in her chest as she breathes, and it doesn't quite go away when her gasps taper off into tiny whimpers.

"Hey." James brushes a strand of hair out of her eyes. "You're okay, Sarah. Easy, now. Let me help you, okay? Breathe. There we go. Now tell me where it hurts."

But with the restoration of at least some composure, she has found fresh bravado, and she turns over onto her side, already wiping clear her eyes. "Don't be ridiculous."

"Sarah..."

"I'm fine."

"You don't sound fine."

"It's only a cough."

"And a fever?"

"Maybe a little."

"Nausea?"

"Not that much."

"Headache?"

She hesitates, and he sees it in her eyes. Bingo.

"How bad?" he asks her.

"Bad enough to piss me off."

"That's not an answer. Scale of one to ten, Sarah. One is a bee sting. Ten is, I don't know, a GSW..."

"A through and through? Or the other kind?"

"A through and through."

"Oh. That's not a ten."

"Well, you tell me."

"Tell you what ten is? That's a story. The Something Terrible kind. And it's not exactly child-friendly."

Savannah has climbed into bed with her again, and is delicately extracting Mr. Fur from the tangled sheets. He tries to make his brain avoid going where she's just tried to send it.

"Well, you slept a little," he finally says. "Did it help?"

"Not really."

"Can I get you something? Tea? Soup? Maybe something from the med-kit to take off the edge?"

She shivers, a look flitting over her features that he can't quite interpret. "No," she says. "No drugs."

"You need to eat something. And you need sleep, Sarah. Proper sleep."

"I know I do."

He sighs. "You're not leaving me much to work with here."

"Giving you something to work with isn't really my priority right now, James. I'm a little busy working on not hacking out my insides."

She's such fun to live with sometimes. He reminds himself, as he plunders his reserves of patience, that she's feeling pretty terrible.

"Well, do you want me to stay with you?"

"No."

"Do you want Savannah to stay with you?"

"Better not."

He lifts Savannah off the bed, and Sarah hesitates for a second, then calls out to her. "Savannah?"

"Aunt Sarah?"

"Can I...can I keep Mr. Fur for awhile?"

And like that, his impatience melts, and he loves her again. Better that she lean on him, of course. But this is a start.

--

He returns to his soup-making, and Savannah has not surprisingly picked up on the mood. She's quiet, in that oddly thoughtful way she has. He's bought her a little junior chef's kit, at a craft booth during that ill-fated festival excursion, and she looks adorably serious in her tiny apron and child-sized chef's hat. He gives her tomatoes; they are soft enough to chop with her little junior knife. But she is more restless than he thought she was, and keeps putting down the knife.

"Uncle James?"

"Hmmm?"

"Aunt Sarah..."

"Oh. She'll be all right. She...."

"She's not, though. I know she isn't. Uncle James, I see things sometimes."

He puts down his own knife and looks at her. "Oh?"

"It's something...my daddy used to do it too. It's like....when I look at people, there are colours sometimes."

"Colours?"

She nods. "It doesn't work all the time. And not with every person either..."

"But it works with Aunt Sarah," he guesses.

"She's sort of a purply-green, most of the time," Savannah says. "Like eggplant. But right now, it's different, sort of a greyish with streaks of black mixed in. Like she's gone all cloudy."

He isn't sure he's completely processed what she's telling him. "Am I a colour too, Savannah?"

"A sort of orangey-red," she confirms. "Like watermelon candy. Do you think...do you think she'll be change back again, Uncle James? It scares me when the colours go different. I like it better when everyone is the way they are supposed to be."

He likes it better that way too. They finish the soup, and they don't talk about Savannah's odd little talent again. But it remains on his mind, and he wonders if she can somehow see his emerging anxiety when she looks at him. It's more than just having, at last, an explanation for Savannah's unusual perceptiveness as far as Sarah goes. It's that he finally has the sense that there might be reasons beyond mere parentage why a Skynet of the future might be interested in this little girl.

--

It's called synesthesia; he looks it up on Wikipedia while Savannah does her work for school. It's a recognized neurological phenomenon where the stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway activates a completely different one simultaneously. The most common form is called color-graphemic synesthesia, and people who experience it associate colours to letters and numbers. It's the closest thing he finds to explain what Savannah has shared with him; instead of letters or numbers, it's body language that she's interpreting. He knows there is nothing magical about this. A person gives off a thousand subconscious cues throughout their interpersonal dealings in life. He is reminded of the aunt he had who could predict, with astonishing accuracy, the gender of unborn babies. She had a reputation in the community for being 'a little bit psychic,' but he knows it was nothing of the sort. During his professional development, he would dabble in basic anatomy as part of the training in field first aid, and he would learn that boy-babies gestated in slightly different hormonal stews than girl-babies did. The cue was there all along. She was picking up on it subconsciously, the same way some people are more sensitive to perfumes or bad breath or body odour. This is what Savannah is doing too, and now that he's aware of it, he is curious to test the limits of her skill.

He writes her up another page of multiplication drills, and she happily occupies herself for an hour or so. As he sets out her lunch, she climbs into his lap again. She seems to crave physical contact when she's upset. And she's spent countless nights curled up beside himself or Sarah when she's sensed that they were, too...

"Uncle James?"

"Hmmm?"

"You're not angry, are you? About what I said before?"

"Is it something people have tended to get angry about?" he asks her.

She nods. "My mom...the one who went with John Henry...she didn't like to talk about it with me. Nobody did, after Daddy...after he...nobody did."

"You can always talk to me, Savannah. You know that, right? About this, about your dad, about anything."

"Yes, Aunt Sarah says that too. But then she doesn't like to talk about John Henry..."

"That's different."

"Well, yes. But then, you get too many things that are different, and next thing you know, your old mommy is gone and the one you have is not the same at all, is she?"

"Savannah..."

"I think," she says. "That Aunt Sarah still hasn't figured out that part. And until she does, she's not going to be okay again. Uncle James, we need to dock for awhile."

"Yes," he says. "I suppose we do."

"It's too small out here. She won't learn it this way. You won't learn it either. We need to dock."

He hugs her closer. "Savannah, you're a smart girl sometimes."

"It's not about being smart, Uncles James. It's never about being smart."

It seems that Savannah is further along in her training than he thought. He is not sure if that's from Sarah's influence, or from something inside the girl herself. And he's not sure, either, if he should be at all alarmed by this development.

--

Sarah comes out again just before dinner. She's dressed, and a little clearer-sounding than she was before. But there are dark circles under her eyes, and her hands are clenched at her sides like she's trying to hide that they're shaking.

"I'm not sleeping," she declares.

He leans closer, gives her a peck on the forehead---as much to check her temperature as anything else---and tries to keep his tone light. "I see that."

She shrugs away from him, the irritability wafting off her like perfume. "I don't mean right now. I mean in general. As a philosophy. I am taking a break from that."

His mouth quirks into a brief smile before he realizes that she's serious. "You're taking a break. From sleeping."

"Yes."

He doesn't know what to say to this. But Savannah saves him by bursting into tears and flinging her arms around her beloved Aunt Sarah.

"Oh, Aunt Sarah, you can't, you can't, it's all wrong!"

Sarah hugs back, but even he can sense the distance. Sarah finally sees that Savannah is not buying her weak placation, and crouches down, gently brushing the hair out of Savannah's eyes.

"I know I can't keep it up forever. Obviously, I know. But I need a break for a few days, Savannah. He won't leave me alone."

"But..."

"It's not helping right now, the sleeping. You know it's not helping, right?"

"Yes. I know."

"I thought you might. This is hard. For you too, it's hard. But I think it might get easier, if I just had a few days without...without...you know?"

Savannah seems to hesitate for a second. Then she wraps her arms around Sarah again, and clings. "We're here too. You know what we're here."

"Yes, I know. Will you help me, Savannah?"

Savannah nods. "Yes. We'll help you. But then you have to help us. We should dock, Aunt Sarah. Even if it means they might...we should dock. There are things we have to do, and we need a home for awhile. Okay?"

"Fine. We'll dock." She stands again, looks at him. "This is a big ask. I know it is. But I need some space on this."

"Sarah..."

"No nagging. No hovering. No interventions if I get a little...a little crazy on you. I get crazy sometimes, when I don't sleep."

"I'm here for you," he says.

"I shouldn't need that. But thanks. Now, have you got anything for me to do?"

"Find us a home. Someplace we can dock for awhile."

"Done. What else?"

"Savannah is ready for another novel study."

"Okay. And?"

"That's not enough?"

She gives him a look, and he sighs. "All right. Give me tonight, and I'll load up the laptop for you. There are some leads that need following up. Think you can handle that?"

"I've been handling that for 16 years, James Ellison. Don't ever forget that. Me at my worst? It's still a hundred times more kick-ass than most people ever get to be."

He lets her have that one. It's a small concession, given everything he's seen today.

--