Deja Who (Insighter #1)(15)
“Unless I did it wrong again.”
“Again? Here’s some advice, doctor—if that is your real name,” he snarled, then ruined the fierce effect by puffing his bangs out of his eyes. “That is not something a patient wants to hear ever.”
“I didn’t want to be a doctor,” the intern confessed. He was a harassed-looking blond twentysomething who needed a haircut and about thirty hours of sleep. Leah had seen skulls with shallower eye sockets. “My dad insisted.”
“Why the hell would you tell me that?”
“Sleep deprivation.” Leah cleared her throat. “Your father insists because in two lives your father—and mother, actually, in your last one it was your mother—wants to be a doctor, cannot get it done, and makes you go to med school to fulfill their thwarted dreams,” Leah told him.
She looked away from their wide eyes. God, when would she learn not to blurt out Insights to strangers? (At least, strangers who weren’t new patients.) The intern had been trying to work and was clearly out of his depth and then . . . then she saw him. All of him. Saw his parents, saw their lives. Saw how it could end for him if he didn’t break the cycle. A maddening aspect of her “gift”: there were plenty of times she interacted with someone for hours (her receptionist) or saw them many times (the woman who cut her hair every six weeks) and never got so much as a glimpse into their lives, past or otherwise.
She cleared her throat again
(stupid nervous tic; anxiety phlegm!)
and added, “Really, you should be a veterinarian. It’s the only way I can see you getting out of this tedious cycle.”
The intern pounced. “I would love to be a vet. People are just gross.”
“Awful,” Leah agreed.
“Dogs and cats and, I dunno, birds and lizards, that’d be okay.”
“Much more interesting. Also,” she added, “they don’t talk.”
“They don’t talk,” the doctor replied, delighted. “But it’s too late now.”
“It’s not, actually.”
“All the money they spent, sending me to school.” He looked at his bloody gloves and shook his head. “I can’t do it to them. They took out loans. They took on second jobs. They helicoptered the hell out of me.”
“So?” She had zero patience with parents living their dreams through their progeny. And not much more for the progeny who wouldn’t stand up to said parents. Then again, Leah allowed she had a peculiar bias against parents in general, after being raised by the foul unnatural creature who was her mother. “If you won’t stand up to them, get used to this life again and again. It’s your fourth pass, you know.” It was. She could see it, could see the doctor, all of him: George Stanton, DOB 2/6/1821, DOD 6/2/1865. Harry Bennett, DOB 6/3/1865, DOD 1/2/1905. Carolyn Whitman, DOB 1/2/1905, DOD 12/5/1968. All docs. All hating it. All dying in a state of vicious dissatisfaction. The saddest thing about her gift was when she explained their mistakes to people, only to see them turn around and make more of them.
“I’m so sorry to interrupt this bit of career counseling, Dr. Pay Attention to Your Patient. I myself never planned on becoming a Pee Eye, but none of the local art schools would take me and I hated my part-time job at the morgue. But I am a stabbing victim in mortal agony, so fix me already!”
“You are not,” Leah said, annoyed.
“Which part?”
“You’re not in agony.”
“You don’t get to decide about my agony,” he snapped back. “You don’t get to decide anything about me. In fact, you should be way nicer to me so I don’t press charges. Like, fourth-date nice.” His gaze dropped to her breasts, which she should have minded, but he had such a stupidly hopeful look on his face she did not. On the other hand, he might have been eyeing her cleavage (such as it was) for weapons. Which, since she had two more knives concealed on her person, was wise.
“That reminds me,” the doc said, finishing the last stitch with a satisfied grunt. He straightened and rubbed his back, cursed when he remembered he still had bloody gloves on and had smeared just Archer’s blood all over his shirt, and yanked them off. “Did you want to press charges, Ms. Nazir?”
She closed her eyes but the outraged shriek came anyway: “What?”
“I did have cause,” she reminded him.
Archer was so outraged he could only gape at her for several seconds while the doctor cleared away the mess—they were short of nurses at Northwestern Memorial, and it was making everyone grumpy. Finally, he managed, “Right, I forgot, she’s an Insighter, so she gets a pass on felony assault because bogus.”
The doc nodded. “She does if you killed her before.”
He was wrong, but Leah said nothing. Sometimes it was better to let people keep believing the myths. In fact, she could file a complaint about the stalking, but couldn’t have him prosecuted for anything he might have done to her in a former life.
“First of all, I didn’t kill her before. I’ve never killed anybody in any life. Second, our judicial system,” Archer announced to the room, “needs work.” He thought of his father for a moment, and the uncle his father was in prison for killing, and shivered.
“On that we agree.” Insighters were rare, like physics geniuses, and like physics geniuses, they were treated with a combination of awe and impatience, and sometimes bone-deep dread. People needed them and resented needing them. They could do things most could not, and their talents weren’t quantifiable or controllable. It made for uneasy symbiosis. The Traynor bill, which had been plodding through Congress for years, did nothing to clarify matters. It had made things murkier, and even Leah didn’t think Insighters should get away with some of the things they got away with. “I won’t press charges. You have been punished enough.”