Chapter 24: Can You Hear Me Now?

The ability arrived without fanfare, which was unusual for the System and suspicious for Andy.

He had been running the two-kilometer speed trial, gallop efficiency climbing through the sixties, when the notification appeared between one stride and the next with the quiet, almost sheepish energy of a system that knew it had been withholding something important.

[EVOLUTION PERK UNLOCKED: LIMITED TELEPATHY]

[DESCRIPTION: PROJECT WORDS, PHRASES, AND SIMPLE SENTENCES INTO THE MINDS OF NEARBY ORGANISMS. RANGE: 15M. COMPLEXITY: BASIC. REQUIRES LINE OF SIGHT. NOTE: THIS IS A SEPARATE ABILITY FROM YOUR EXISTING EMOTIONAL IMPRESSION COMMUNICATION AND OPERATES THROUGH YOUR HORN’S LIFE MAGIC CHANNEL.]

[CONGRATULATIONS. YOU CAN TALK NOW.]

Andy stopped running. His hooves planted in the soft earth and carved twin furrows in the moss and his body went completely still while the notification settled into his consciousness.

He could talk.

He could TALK.

Not the psychic impressions he shared with the fox and the hawk. Words. Actual words. Sentences with subjects and verbs and, presumably, the capacity for the kind of mortifying oversharing that had characterized his verbal communication in his previous life, because some things transcended species and bodies and entire planes of existence and one of those things was Andy Snodgrass’s inability to say anything smooth under pressure.

He could talk to the ranger.

He could talk to the RANGER.

The fox sent an impression of curiosity mixed with concern. Andy was standing in the middle of the trail with an expression that combined elation with terror in proportions that produced a kind of vibrating paralysis.

“I can talk,” Andy sent, through the old channel, the impression channel, the wordless emotional transmission that was all he’d had for months. “The System just gave me telepathy. Words. Real words. I can talk to her.”

The fox sent: about time.

“I’m going to throw up.”

The fox sent: you are not going to throw up. Also, horses can’t throw up. Also, you’re being dramatic.

“I have been preparing for this moment since I was a frog and I am telling you, right now, standing in this forest in this body with this horn, that every single thing I planned to say has evaporated from my brain like water on a hot rock and I am going to stand in front of that woman and my mind is going to be as empty as Barnacle’s contribution to party combat and I am going to ruin this.”

The fox trotted around to face him and sat down in the trail with the affection-to-exasperation ratio she had perfected: I love you and you are being ridiculous and both are true simultaneously.

She sent: you fought a chimera. You grew flowers in your sleep. You are the most powerful creature in this forest and you are panicking about TALKING.

“Yes. Obviously. The chimera didn’t require small talk. The chimera didn’t have freckles. I can purify corruption, I can heal wounds, I can grow an entire garden by napping, but I cannot, have never been able to, and will apparently never be able to, talk to a beautiful woman without my brain staging a full evacuation of all useful content. This is not a new problem. This is the oldest problem. This problem is older than my horn and my horn has been with me since I was a bacterium.”

The fox sent a slow, deliberate impression through the bond. Flat. Unimpressed.

Then she sent: practice on me.

Andy blinked. “What?”

Practice. Use the telepathy. Say words. Say them to me. Get the awkward out before she arrives.

This was an excellent idea. No one had ever been a better friend to him, in either life, a category that included exactly one prior candidate (his college roommate Derek, who had once made Andy practice “Hi, I’m Andy” forty times in the bathroom mirror before a date, and Andy had still fumbled it because the girl wore a yellow dress and his brain decided to think about lemons).

He focused. The new ability operated through the horn (of course it did; everything operated through the horn; his horn was the Swiss Army knife of magical appendages): think the words, direct them through the life magic channel, project them at a target.

He pointed his horn at the fox.

He thought: “Hello.”

The fox’s ears swiveled. Her amber eyes widened. For the first time since he had met her, her expression was completely without sarcasm.

She sent: that was a word. That was a real word. I heard a word. In my HEAD.

“Did it work? Could you understand it?”

She sent: you said hello. You SAID hello. With WORDS.

“I said hello! I said hello with words! With actual words that have consonants and vowels and the semantic capacity to convey meaning beyond vague emotional impressions! I can TALK!”

The fox pressed her nose against his foreleg, her version of a hug, and sent a burst of feeling: pride, happiness, and something Andy’s truth sense authenticated as genuine, uncomplicated joy for a friend who had been given back something he had lost.

“Thank you,” Andy sent, through the new word channel, the channel that turned thoughts into language and language into connection. “For being my friend through all the versions of me that couldn’t say that.”

The fox sent: don’t make me cry. Foxes don’t cry. It’s undignified.

“Right. Absolutely. No crying. Very stoic. Very predatory. I take it back.”

She nipped his foreleg. It was affectionate.

They practiced for an hour. The telepathy had limitations: sentences couldn’t be long or complex, the projection fatigued with extended use, and the range was fifteen meters of line-of-sight that operated best when the horn was pointed at the target. His horn had to be aimed at whoever he was talking to. He had to point his horn at a woman to communicate with her. The innuendo had gone beyond writing itself and was now on its third printing.

He also discovered his mental voice sounded like him. Not his old voice, but the voice of a consciousness that had been that person and become this creature. The same essential thing expressed through a different form.

The fox helped him calibrate: too quiet, too loud, too garbled, too emotionally charged (the telepathy carried emotional undertones he couldn’t control, which was either a feature or a catastrophe depending on how you felt about involuntary emotional transparency).

“Is the emotional bleed obvious?” Andy asked.

The fox considered. She sent: when you said “thank you for being my friend” earlier, I could feel the gratitude underneath the words. Like the words were floating on top of a warm current. It was nice.

“And when I say something I’m nervous about?”

She sent: try it.

Andy thought about the ranger. About the sound of her heartbeat through his horn. About her twelve freckles and the way her hands felt when she held his face and the word she had whispered into his horn on the day it sang and the expression she wore, the one with no professional distance in it, the one that his truth sense had confirmed was completely, devastatingly authentic.

He projected: “I need to tell you something.”

The fox’s ears flattened. She sent: oh, that was VERY nervous. I could feel the nervous. The nervous was LOUD. The words were almost drowned out by the nervous.

“Perfect. Great. So when I try to talk to her, she’ll receive the words ‘I can talk now’ delivered on a tidal wave of anxiety so overwhelming that the actual content will be secondary to the sensation of being psychically blasted by the emotional equivalent of a man sweating through his shirt on a first date. This is going to go very well.”

The fox sent: you’re overthinking this.

“I’ve been overthinking things since before I had a brain. I was overthinking as a cell. Overthinking is my CORE TRAIT. It’s the one trait that’s been more persistent than the horn.”

The fox sent: just say hi.

“Just say hi.”

The fox sent: that’s what you said to me. Hello. And it worked.

“You’re a fox. She’s a… she’s everything. She’s the reason the horn sings. She’s the reason I run the speed trials and heal the forest and grow the flowers and want to become what I’m becoming. She’s the reason forward is a direction worth going. I can’t just say HI.”

The fox sent, with the patient, level energy of a creature who had watched this exact emotional spiral develop over the course of weeks and had been waiting for this exact moment to say the exact right thing: you can. Because it’s not about what you say. It’s about who you are when you say it. And she already knows who you are. She’s known since the day you healed her hand.

Andy stood in the forest with luminous flowers blooming around his hooves and his horn painting the trail in silver-white and the fox sitting in front of him with her amber eyes steady.

“Hi,” he projected. Quietly. Simply. With all the nervous energy he had been trying to suppress flowing underneath the word like a river under ice.

The fox sent: perfect.

* * *

She came at the usual time.

The ranger came at the usual time. Mid-morning. Apples (three today, bigger than before; she was going out of her way to source them, and the going-out-of-her-way was filed under “evidence” in the mental folder labeled “things I know because of the truth sense and cannot un-know”).

Andy heard her before he saw her. His hearing detected her footsteps from a hundred meters, the distinctive cadence of her walk (he knew her walk from a hundred others; this was either romantic or creepy depending on the species doing the identifying, and since he was a magical horse with a truth-sensing horn, he chose romantic). Her heartbeat followed through the horn’s life magic awareness, the rhythm he recognized the way a musician recognizes a familiar note.

She entered the clearing.

She was carrying the satchel, the apple bag, and the expression. The expression had settled into something certain: no pretense left in it.

“Good morning,” she said, in the language he could not understand. A voice he loved saying words he couldn’t parse.

Today he was going to answer.

Andy stood in the clearing with his heart hammering at ninety-two beats per minute and his horn pulsing in time with it, broadcasting his emotional state to the entire clearing like a moonlit mood ring. The fox was on her rock. The hawk on his branch. Barnacle was downstream, doing nothing, which was on brand.

She began the familiar routine: notebook, measuring tape, charcoal sticks, and the first apple. The greeting apple.

Andy walked forward and took the apple from her hand. The apple was perfect, as always. She chose them carefully. The every-day-ness was love expressed through fruit and he knew it because of the truth sense and because of the way her eyes softened when he ate from her hand.

She reached for his horn. The habitual touch, the morning greeting in the language of contact they had developed: a hand on the horn meant hello. A hand along his neck meant I missed you. Both hands framing his face meant something larger.

Her fingers touched the spiral. The horn sang, the low vibration it produced exclusively in response to her contact. The moonlight glow brightened at her touch, involuntary, the horn’s admission that Andy could not control and could not hide and at this point was not trying to. His horn responding to her touch with visible, audible enthusiasm. On brand.

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She spoke. Something soft. Something she said every morning, a phrase he had heard a hundred times and understood not at all and understood completely.

Andy’s horn pulsed.

He had prepared a speech. Weeks of composition. Opening (dignified), middle (informative), conclusion (moving). Possibly the best thing Andy Snodgrass had ever composed, better than his college application essay and his Yelp review of the Thai place on Seventh and the text he had been typing when the truck hit him.

He looked at her. She was looking at him the way she always looked at him, with the expression that had no distance in it, the expression his truth sense confirmed was real, every time, without exception.

The speech evaporated. The entire speech, gone. Vaporized by the freckles and the hand on his horn and the heartbeat that his magic could feel through the contact.

He oriented his horn toward her.

He focused.

He projected: