Page 193 of Hunters and Prey

He watched as she pressed her lips together, staring at the couch as if she was still waiting for Miri to reappear.

She gestured towards one side of the cushions helplessly.

“She scared the shit out of the masseuse,” Angel said, after a too-long pause.

Seeming to think about that, or remember it probably, she let out a humorless sound, not quite a laugh, not quite anything else, either.

“…I’ve never heard anyone scream like that. It wasn’t like a scream. More like a kind of strangled shriek. I looked over, and Miri was just… she just…”

Again, Angel trailed, staring at the empty spot on the couch.

But it wasn’t empty, Black realized.

A pair of sweat shorts lay crumpled on the seat there.

They were the same ratty, dark red jogging shorts Miri tended to wear when she just wanted to laze around the apartment, or when she didn’t feel well––which generally meant the same thing. She wasn’t really the lay around the apartment type.

Even when she didn’t feel well, getting her to slow down wasn’t easy.

Next to the dark red shorts was one of his old, threadbare T-shirts with a band insignia on front. He saw the straps of her dark red bra under the T-shirt… he had to assume her panties were there as well, inside the sweat shorts.

He stared at the articles of clothing, somehow feeling violated by them sitting there, where anyone could see them.

When he spoke, his voice sounded far away, even to him.

“You said she doesn’t remember any of it,” he said.

Only after he spoke did he realize he was talking to the seers who’d followed him down to his apartment, and now stood in an awkward cluster in the middle of his living room.

“Miri,” he clarified, still speaking to Holo, Yarli, Jax and Mika without turning. “You said she doesn’t remember any of it? Nothing?”

“She had no conscious memories of any of it, yes,” Mika said, frowning as she folded her arms. The small, Japanese-looking seer scowled. “I mean, there has to be a ‘memory’ in her somewhere, but whatever’s there, it’s probably lodged in those same structures she uses to do the dimensional jumping. She hasn’t quite awakened those structures enough to access anything like that. Not consciously,” she repeated.

“Could any of you access them?” Black said, still staring at the couch. “Can you… find some way to look at past the Barrier echoes of her light? See if you can find the parts of her that might be storing the experiences?”

Holo who stood right next to Mika, shook his head.

“No, brother,” he said. “We’d have to try and induce the memories in her. Then we could read them off her maybe, as she translated them to her conscious mind. But it’s not possible for us to read anything in structures that high up. We can’t even ID those structures at this point. They’re too high for most of us to even see them clearly.”

Exhaling, Holo shook his head, combing his fingers through his long hair.

“We’re out of our league with this,lao ban,” he admitted. “Maybe when we get Jem back, he could look at it. Otherwise, I think it’s going to have to be you.”

The seer looked at him nervously after he said it, almost like he worried he’d been too informal.

Black barely noticed.

He was too busy trying not to think about the fact that his wife was somewhere else, possibly in some other dimension. Naked. Possibly without her memories. Likely without any way to get back to him––at least none she could control.

He tried not to think about the fact that he had no idea when she’d come back.

He had no idea if she’d come back at all.

When Black looked up from the rumpled pile of clothes on the couch, he found Angel staring at him. He saw more of her in the stare that time, enough that he found himself focusing on her, really seeing her.

“She’s always come back before,” she said, almost like she’d heard him.

Black nodded.

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