The bourbon was Caitlin's.
She didn't drink it — kept it in the cabinet over the fridge for guests who wanted something that wasn't wine. She'd taken it down at 11:47 PM and put it on the coffee table between us with four glasses and walked back to the kitchen without offering to pour. The pour was somebody else's job. She'd done the listening. She was done with the doing.
Barry poured.
He filled the four glasses and his hand was steady, which surprised me. Three hours of a conversation in this living room had not done what I'd thought three hours of that conversation would do to him. He'd gone in with the suspicion he'd held since Powell Boulevard. He'd come out with a confirmation. Some men get smaller when their worst guess turns out to be true. Barry had gotten compact. Like a fist closing.
He pushed a glass at Cisco. Pushed one at me. Took one for himself. Set the fourth in front of Caitlin's empty seat at the end of the couch.
"To Joe," he said.
Cisco lifted his.
"To Joe."
"To Joe," I said.
We drank.
Joe was not in the room because Joe could not yet be in the room. Barry had been very clear about that during the conversation. Joe is the most honest person in my life. If we tell him, he goes after Jay tomorrow morning at the lab. Which means we tell him last, when we're ready to move. He'd been right. We'd put it on the list.
Caitlin came back from the kitchen with a tea kettle. Set it on the coaster. Sat. Picked up the bourbon. Held it without drinking.
"So when do we move," she said.
Barry put his glass down.
"That's the next conversation. Not this one. This one we just sit in for another half hour because if I leave my body now I'm going to drive to STAR Labs and put a hand through his face."
"Don't."
"I won't."
"Promise."
"I promise."
Cisco was looking at his glass.
"It's going to be Christmas in eleven days," he said.
"Yeah."
"I don't know why I said that. Sorry. My brain is just — that's what it has."
"It's fine."
"He brought us coffee. He brought us coffee and I drank it on Tuesday. I drank his coffee."
"It was probably just coffee, Cisco."
"Probably."
"Cisco."
"Yeah, yeah. Probably."
We sat quiet for a minute. The tea kettle ticked as it cooled. Outside Caitlin's window, the building across the alley had its hallway lights on the timer that always cycled at midnight, and the rectangles in the windows shifted from yellow to a slightly cooler yellow, which was a thing I'd noticed the one summer I'd spent some nights here in another life of mine and had never told anyone about.
Caitlin set the bourbon down without drinking.
"Then we're done for tonight," she said. "Go home. Sleep. We start Friday."
Barry stood up.
He looked at me.
"You did the right thing, Harry."
"I held it too long."
"Yeah. You did. And then you did the right thing."
"Okay."
He walked out. Cisco followed. The door clicked.
I stayed on the couch.
Caitlin looked at me. The cardigan cuff on her left hand had bloomed white again — not the small ring of frost from the meetings before, a full hand-print of it, like she'd closed her fist on a glass of ice water for a minute.
She'd held it the whole conversation.
She hadn't moved her hand from the arm of the couch in two hours.
I noticed because I'd watched.
"Cait."
"I know."
"Show me."
She lifted her hand.
The arm of the couch where her hand had been was a perfect frost rectangle six inches by four. The fabric had crystallized in a clean grid that followed the weave of the material. The cushion under it would be wet by morning.
She closed her fist. Opened it.
The frost on her hand did not retreat.
"It's not stopping," she said. The voice was small. "I tried for the last forty minutes. It's not stopping."
I moved to the floor in front of her.
"Look at me."
"Harry —"
"Look at me. Eyes here."
She looked.
"Don't look at the hand."
"I'm not looking at the hand."
"Don't think about the hand. Think about the kettle. The kettle's still warm. Pour yourself a cup."
"I can't move my fingers."
"Then I'll pour. You watch."
I poured. The water came out at the temperature of recently boiled but rested for ten minutes, which was the temperature you wanted for a green tea and not what was in the box on her counter, which was chamomile, but neither of us was going to have an opinion about tea tonight. I put the cup on the table in front of her.
Steam came off it.
"Look at the steam."
"Harry."
"Look at the steam, Caitlin. Don't try to do anything. Just look at it. Tell me what color it is."
"It's not a color, it's —"
"Then tell me that. Tell me about the not-color."
She looked at the steam.
She told me about the steam. Quietly. The way it lifted, the way the column came apart at about six inches above the cup, the way her bedroom ceiling fan was running on low and the air-current from it was bending the steam east. She talked for about a minute and a half.
When I looked at her hand, the frost had stopped at the wrist.
It hadn't reversed.
But it had stopped.
"Look down."
She looked.
She looked at her hand.
She kept her face very still.
"It stopped."
"Yeah."
"I didn't — I didn't do anything."
"You stopped pulling against it. That's enough sometimes. It's not control yet. Control comes later. Not-pulling-against is the first thing."
She was breathing slow. The kind of slow you breathe when you've spent forty minutes hyperventilating in the kitchen and didn't want anyone in the next room to hear.
"Will you teach me."
"I said I would."
"I want it to be more than once."
"I'd assumed."
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow."
"Here. Not the lab. I don't want to do this in front of Cisco yet."
"Here."
"Bring tea. Better tea than the chamomile."
I almost laughed.
"Yeah."
She looked at her hand again.
The frost was retreating now. Slow. A quarter-inch every twenty seconds. Skin coming back pink underneath.
She put her face in her good hand.
She didn't cry. She just sat behind her hand for a long minute. I let her sit there.
When she came back up her eyes were dry.
"Go home," she said. "I'm okay."
"Are you."
"I'm not. But I'm going to be. Go home."
I went.
I closed the door behind me very softly.
In the hallway I leaned against the wall for a moment with my eyes closed.
[Caitlin Snow: Cryokinesis. Class — Emergent. Compatibility: Resonance acquisition possible at later stage.]
[Recommendation: Do not approach.]
I dismissed the line.
Took the stairs down. Drove home in light traffic. Slept for five hours.
---
Friday I brought oolong.
She'd left a key for me in a magnetic box behind the radiator in her hallway. I'd never had a key. I let myself in at 6:14 PM. She was on the couch in sweats with her hair in a clip. She'd been reading a textbook. The cover was Principles of Cellular Cryobiology.
She held it up.
"I'm researching myself."
"How's the patient."
"Not a great bedside manner."
"Tea?"
"Tea."
I made it. We sat on the floor with our backs to her couch and our cups in our laps. I'd thought about how to start, all afternoon. I'd come up with several frameworks and discarded all of them before deciding that the only honest framework was the one I'd actually used on myself, in February, when my hand had been phasing through doorknobs and I'd wanted to tear my own arm off.
I told her that.
I told her how I'd sat in my own apartment with a coffee table between me and a piece of paper, and I'd put my hand on the paper, and I'd told my brain to let the hand go through the paper. And it hadn't worked. And I'd stopped telling, and started watching. And the paper had begun to interest me — its weave, its grain, the slight dust on the surface of it — and somewhere in the middle of the interest, my hand had gone through it without my asking it to.
"The trick was to stop trying to phase," I said. "To remember that phasing was just being interested in the molecule structure of a thing. If I was interested enough, I could move through it. If I was trying to be interested, I couldn't."
"That's stupid."
"I know."
"That's meditation."
"Yeah."
"You're telling me my biggest problem is meditation."
"Not just. But yeah, in the beginning."
She drank her tea.
"Show me what you mean."
I picked the salt shaker off her side table.
"Ice this."
"Now?"
"Now."
She took it.
She closed her hand around it and pulled. Her shoulders went up half an inch. I watched her hold the shaker hard for about ten seconds. Nothing happened. Then her fingertips bloomed white and the salt shaker frosted over fast — too fast — and the glass cracked, hairline, and salt began to leak out of the bottom in a slow trickle.
She swore.
"That's — no, that's not what I —"
"Don't fight it."
"I wasn't —"
"Cait. You were squeezing your fingers. Watch."
I took the shaker back. Set it on the table. Salt continued to trickle.
"The squeeze was you trying to aim the cold. The cold doesn't have an aim yet. The cold is just there, in your hand, and when you squeeze the muscles you push it out at full bore. So don't squeeze. Open the hand. Let it lie flat. Notice what the cold feels like before you do anything else with it."
"I notice it, Harry."
"Notice it more boring than that."
"More boring."
"More boring. The cold is cold. It's not interesting. Let it be the most boring thing in the room. Then we can find what interesting things you can do with it."
She gave me a look that was 80% disbelief and 20% the small Caitlin smile she did with the corner of her mouth when something I said was annoying enough to be possibly correct.
She held her hand out flat.
She breathed.
A frost ring formed in the center of her palm. About the size of a coin.
It did not spread.
It sat there.
She looked at it.
She looked at me.
"Boring."
"Boring."
"The boring one stayed where I put it."
"Yeah."
"That's — actually that's —"
"I know."
She tried again. Smaller circle.
The third try, she made a snowflake.
A small one. Six points. Sloppy, not symmetrical. The arms of it were too short on one side and too long on the other. But it was a snowflake. It was a thing she had made and not a thing the cold had done while she was holding her breath.
She started to laugh.
It was not a polished laugh. It came out of her in pieces. Some of it sounded like crying. I sat next to her on the floor and didn't reach over and didn't speak and just let her have whatever it was for as long as she needed it.
When she came back, she set the snowflake on the floor.
It stayed.
It didn't melt.
We both looked at it.
"Day one," she said.
"Day one."
"Same time tomorrow."
"Same time tomorrow."
I went home at 9 PM with the small worry I'd been carrying for two months a fraction lighter and the small relief about Caitlin a fraction more solid, and a snowflake in my coat pocket I'd taken on the way out without asking, because I wanted to look at it later under the kitchen light to see what kind of crystalline lattice it had decided to use.
It was a hexagonal lattice.
Earth-1 standard.
She wasn't her doppelganger. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
I put the snowflake in the freezer next to a half-finished container of kung pao and went to bed.
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