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You know how trauma sometimes gives you flashbacks? A bad spot gives you flashforwards to the most traumatic things you haven't encountered yet. The worse the bad spot, the more traumatic the event. Sometimes you can feel when someone else hits the event they saw in the bad spot. For me it's like a singing through my bones, and if it's someone I'm close to, I can almost sense what's happening. It was more common during the war. Less so now, especially when so many go out of their way to avoid bad spots. It takes three things to get that sense. The first, hit the bad spot, is the easiest. The second is to hit the event it flashed at you. Not easy, but it happens pretty often. The third is surviving the event. That's rare.
There isn't much left for bad spots to throw at me these days that's worse than I've already seen. Not that I tempt fate that way much any more. In my courier days I'd skim the edges and take the visions for warnings. Knowing it's coming, somewhere, somehow, made life simpler if not easier. Not so good for the dreams, but my tattoos hold me in my skin tightly enough for survival. Some days, Charlie's seems like the dream and I'll wake up someday and find myself back in a catnap on the road, beside a courier's silver-trimmed bike.
Sunshine's only sung in my bones once though, and she came back. Back out of seas of blood and vampire fangs with old and new trauma swirled through her like the filling in her cinnamon buns. But I didn't know that she didn't know what it does to you until she shot up from my arms one night with a hissed, "What the carthaginian hell is that?"
The faint singing in my own bones had an answer for her, but it was nothing to the next word she spoke.
"Con!"