Crosstalk by Connie Willis

pneumonia.
    Only it wasn’t the nurse. It was C.B. She recognized the shaggy outline of his hair in the light from the corridor. “What are you doing here?” she said. “Go away.”
    “I can’t,” he whispered, shutting the door. “There’s an orderly out there mopping the corridor. He nearly caught me as it was. You wouldn’t want him to tell Trent he saw a strange man coming out of your room in the middle of the night, would you?”
    She sat up. “Why—?”
    “Shh,” C.B. said, putting a finger to his lips. “He’s right outside.” He tiptoed over to the door and listened for a minute. “Okay, he’s moved down toward the nurses’ station.” He pulled the door shut and came over to the foot of the bed.
    Briddey switched on the light. He looked even scruffier and more thrown together than he had at Commspan, his dark hair a tangled mess. His T-shirt and sweat pants were badly wrinkled, as if he’d snatched them from that pile on the sofa in his lab, and the hood of his jacket was half caught inside the neck. “Why are you here?” she whispered.
    “I wanted to make sure you were okay,” he said. “Sorry it took me so long. When I got here, they’d already brought you back to your room and there were a bunch of people around, so I waited till they’d left, and then I had trouble sneaking past the nurses’ station.
Are
you okay?”
    “I’m fine,” she whispered, frowning. He was talking to her. Out loud. Her heart lifted. It had been a dream after all.
    Afraid not,
C.B. said.
And no, I’m not a ventriloquist.
He pointed at her water jug.
If you want proof, I can drink a glass of water and talk at the same time. No, wait, ventriloquists can do that, so it wouldn’t prove anything, would it?
    “No,” she said, but it did because he was just standing there, looking worriedly at her and not saying a word, and she could hear him perfectly.
    Here,
he said, and sat down on the bed beside her.
    She shrank away from him. “What do you think you’re—?”
    Shh. The orderly, remember?
He turned his head away and pulled his hair up away from his neck.
No shaved patch, no stitches, no scar
.
    “Show me the other side.”
    It can’t be on the other side. The area of the brain the EED—
    “Show me.”
    Fine,
he said, and turned his head, lifting his hair on the other side. There wasn’t a shaved patch there either.
    He stood up.
Now do you believe me? I didn’t have a rush-job EED, I didn’t bug your room, and I didn’t drop a two-way radio into your brain while Dr. Whatzisname wasn’t looking. I was just sitting in my lab, minding my own business, when you started talking to me.
    “I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Trent.”
    Well, you should have been more specific. All I heard—
    “And stop doing that. It’s creepy. Talk out loud.”
    “Fine,” he said in a low voice after glancing toward the corridor. “All I heard was you asking, ‘Are you there?’ and I was, so I answered you.”
    “But you weren’t
supposed
to be there. And what are you doing here now? I thought you said you hated hospitals.”
    “I do,” he said, “and you’re Exhibit A of why. They lose track of patients, they try to freeze them to death.” He looked around. “Jesus, this room’s even colder than my lab.”
    “The nurse who was just in here is bringing me a blanket.”
    “Wanna bet? She was the hot little brunette, right?” Briddey didn’t dignify that with an answer. “She went off duty fifteen minutes ago. And the rest of the staff have spent the last twenty minutes having a confab at the nurses’ station, trying to decide whether to call Dr. Whatzisname—”
    “Dr.
Verrick.
”
    “—about your little escapade.”
    “What did they decide?”
    “I don’t know. They were still at it when I came in here, but it seemed to be split fifty-fifty between waiting till morning and not telling him at all.”
    Please let it be the latter,
she thought. But if they were all at the nurses’