The Reach

—12—

“Maria’s given her notice,” Dr. Wasserman said, leaning forward in his chair and fixing Jess with an intent and serious gaze.

This time his tic did not show itself, but his nervous energy remained. He picked up a sharpened pencil, tapping the eraser against the resignation letter on his desk, like someone knocking to get in. “It’s a tragedy of course, a terrible setback for the hospital. Maria was one of the few I trusted to tend to our more difficult patients… Are you all right?” Wasserman was looking at her curiously now.

“I’m fine.”

“Did you notice anything when you were here last? Did she seem unhappy, angry?”

“She did seem a little upset.”

Wasserman shook his head. “It was very abrupt. I tried to speak with her….”

“I’m not exactly sure what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.” Wasserman leaned back in his chair, then forward again, as if trying to get comfortable. “It’s unfortunate, but I cannot allow it to adversely affect what we’re trying to accomplish here.” He paused as if to emphasize his point. “I have to say that Sarah has made a rather remarkable improvement. She’s more alert, docile, cooperative. We’ve adjusted her medication, but I’ll admit that your visits may have had something to do with it.”

“I wanted to speak to you about that, actually, Dr. Wasserman. I wondered if it might be possible to take Sarah outside the quiet room for a few hours, maybe a couple of times this week. I think she might benefit from a more interactive environment.”

For the past several days Jess had been trying to decide how to approach the situation. The one conclusion she seemed able to reach was that she wanted to help Sarah at whatever the cost. It was obvious she would have to do some damage control with Wasserman after the last visit, but kissing ass had never been her thing. Especially a slimy one. No matter how hard she tried, she could not get an image of him out of her head: Wasserman sitting in his office after her first meeting with Sarah, grinning at her when she told him she was going to report what she considered abuse. Like a teacher with an unruly student. And now that image had grown, twisted, so that he was leering at her inside her mind, openly mocking.

Go on. Get it over with.

But Wasserman surprised her. There was something different about him today, Jess noticed, something that went beyond Maria’s resignation. He seemed more uncertain, a look in his eyes as if he were uncomfortable with her presence. Had something else happened? she wondered. Whatever it was, it couldn’t possibly last.

“From what Jean has told me, you visited the family and you have some idea what we were dealing with so many years ago. I hope you can understand why it was necessary to take her away from that situation. And also why confidentiality was such an issue.” He sighed and shook his head. “Strange people. I can’t say I ever met them in person, but I did talk to her grandmother at the time of Sarah’s admittance. The experience was unsettling.” He was staring out and beyond her now. “A woman with strange ideas.” He focused on her suddenly and smiled, but there was no warmth held there. “Silly, isn’t it? Childish superstitions.”

“Dr. Wasserman, about Sarah. Now, you’ve brought me in here to try a different approach, you’ve agreed to give this a chance.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Just that I need you to trust me enough to let me try to get through to her.”

“Hmmm. You don’t make it easy for me, now, do you? We have rules here for the health of each patient. I don’t just make them up to amuse myself. Sarah was restrained for her own well-being, and for the good of the staff. We’re all just lucky something terrible didn’t happen.”

“I’m sorry for any harm I may have done.” Jess swallowed to keep the sour taste down. “I did what I thought was right under the circumstances.”

Wasserman took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow. “If she weren’t so improved I wouldn’t even consider it. But we all want the same thing here.” He studied Jess’s face as if he would find the answer in her expression. Finally he folded the handkerchief into neat little squares, smoothed the creases, and stuck it back in his pocket. “I’ll have her brought up to the play area. You may have an hour in there during each session together if you like. No more than that, I don’t want her to backslide.”

“Thank you, Dr. Wasserman.”

“Just don’t disappoint me.”

—13—

As her routine and surroundings changed, Jess began to feel more at home in the facility.

On the days she did not have class, she would arrive each morning at nine o’clock. The janitor and handyman, Jeffrey, would let her into the playroom, then take up a quiet vigil in the corner, arms crossed. Apparently he had been told that his duties during Jess’s visits would include acting as a chaperone.

Almost in spite of herself, Jess liked the man, maybe because he always seemed to be around, and he seemed to genuinely enjoy the children. He rarely interfered in any way during their sessions. In fact, she often forgot he was even there. Wasserman had insisted that he was trustworthy, if a bit slow, and that whatever they spoke of would most likely go right over his head, so she shouldn’t worry about what was said around him.

All that seemed to be true. He did not talk much. After Sarah arrived in the room he would smile at her, and then make a show of studying the bookshelves or cleaning up the toys.

During the first three visits to the playroom, Sarah sat quietly at the little table near the window. They were careful to keep her visits at times when other children were not around. She was clearly more alert, her eyes following movement, but she would not speak again or get up from her chair until an orderly arrived to return her to her room.

Jess spent the hours talking about what had happened during the previous day, or problems she was having with a paper or an exam, or she sketched, or simply took notes on Sarah’s condition. Sometimes she felt as if she was getting more out of the sessions than Sarah herself.

On the fourth visit, however, something had changed. Sarah was already waiting for her in the playroom, dressed in a simple blue jumpsuit and standing by the window.

Jess hardly recognized her at first. Her hair had been brushed and held away from her face with a band, and her eyes were alert and bright, though ringed with dark circles like bruises. She looked almost pretty, in a plain, backwoods sort of way.

Her breasts are starting to show, Jess thought with some surprise. She’s so young. Is it just something I hadn’t noticed before?

The air hung heavy and still. Sunlight fell in squares through the wire mesh windows onto the maroon carpet and children’s toys. A large plastic tube to crawl through, and a low, yellow plastic slide. More toys lay abandoned along the edges of the room; nothing sharp or heavy, everything plastic and worn smooth from hundreds of tiny hands. Jess noticed the sink the little girl had been playing with the first time she had come here. She wondered about Dennis, the autistic young man in the baseball cap, whether he had anywhere else to go, whether they would ever release him. What had he said to her that first day? / make her spirit glow.

The room was empty except for the three of them, Sarah, Jess, and Jeffrey standing motionless now in the corner. Jess caught Sarah’s eyes darting left and right. Her eyes settled on the man for a moment, something glowing there, a spark of emotion. Then back to Jess’s face.

How long has it been? she wondered. How long since you’ve been aware of something other than the padded walls of that cell, or the walls inside your own mind?

As she stood there, dumbfounded, Sarah crossed the room without a word and took her hand. Her grip was like that of a swimmer clinging to the rocks in deep water.

She convinced Jeffrey to lock the doors and leave them alone, promising to behave herself. He told her he would be right outside, and to call if she needed anything.

“Go ahead,” Jess said to the girl, after he had left. “You can do what you want in here, play with what you like. No rules.”

Jess let Sarah explore the room slowly. She sat in a molded plastic chair near the door and watched without speaking as Sarah picked up a naked plastic doll, and discarded it; then a set of soft cloth blocks with pictures of animals; then a bright yellow plastic plate and spoon from a child’s tea set. The girl moved easily, her visible symptoms almost completely gone.

Jess wondered again why Wasserman had had such a sudden change of heart since he had agreed to move the sessions upstairs. He had hardly spoken with her at all the past week. Do not allow her to touch you. From restraints and unsettling warnings to almost complete freedom. Had he simply seen an astonishing improvement and rewarded it? It seemed unlikely, considering his distrust. Why wouldn’t he just assume Sarah was playing more games, waiting for another chance to escape?

Sarah climbed up the colorful little slide and sat at the top, then climbed down. She went and looked inside the plastic tunnel. She went to the window and stood on tiptoes, looking out into the sunlight for a long time. Then she turned away and picked up a picture book from the built-in shelves on the opposite wall, and carried it with her to a smaller chair near a child’s table, where she sat with it in her lap, looking at the cover.

“I’ve got a present for you,” Jess said. “Some people say ten is too old for something like this. But I say you’re never too old for a friend.”

She picked up the paper shopping bag she had carried in with her and took out a worn, well-loved teddy bear. She had removed the plastic eyes and replaced them with two pieces of blue felt, but otherwise he was the same as he had always been.

“This bear’s name is Connor. He was mine when I was about your age. He helped me through some hard times. He’s yours now, if you want him.”

For a moment she was back in the bedroom she had shared with her mother, holding on to that bear with her life, waiting for the bang of the screen door. She never knew if her mother would be alone, or would be half carried, half dragged to the couch by someone she’d met at the bar. On the worst nights, she’d crawl under her bed and sleep curled against the wall in the dust, rather than face what was outside the bedroom door.

Sarah got up and crossed the room. She took the bear and studied its face, fingering the spots that were worn smooth with age and handling. Then she returned to the table and picked up the book again. The bear sat next to her, deaf and blind.

They both sat in silence for a while. “I like it here,” Sarah said without looking up.

“Didn’t you come to the playroom before I started visiting you?”

“I don’t remember.” She nodded somberly and made brief eye contact. “I guess maybe.”

Her eyes are so very dark, Jess thought. And so sad. “Does that happen a lot, are there a lot of times when you can’t remember?”

“Yes,” Sarah said, flipping the pages of the book in her hand. “Those are gray times.”

“You were sick for a while but now you’re feeling better.”

“I waited for you to come back today,” she said, shyly now. “I knew you would. You were nice to me. You want to help me. I can tell.”

“Aren’t there others here who want to help you?”

She shook her head. “They give me pills and shots and the gray comes and swallows me up.” She put the book down on the table and went over to the window again, hooking her little fingers into the wire mesh. “It’s pretty out there. I like it.”

“We’ll go out and play on the lawn sometime.”

“Can we?” Turning back excitedly.

“As soon as Dr. Wasserman says it’s okay.”

Immediately Sarah’s smile vanished. “He’ll never let us.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. He might surprise you.”

“No way,” she said. “But I could leave if I wanted, right now. I could just… break out.”

“Just walk out the door?”

She shrugged. “If I wanted.”

“But they’re locked.”

“I can break them.”

They were silent for a moment. Jess hesitated. “Why don’t you, then? Just open those doors and walk out.”

“I’m not supposed to.” Sarah turned to stare at the large wooden doors. She narrowed her eyes into squints, her forehead wrinkling, mouth tightening into a pucker of concentration. Jess waited, held her breath as if breathing would break the spell. What am I expecting? The doors to go blasting off their hinges?

“I can’t,” Sarah said finally. “I told you. I’m not supposed to do that here.”

“All right,” Jess said. “That’s fine. I’d rather have you stay here with me. Now I want to ask you something. A while back when I was here you had a seizure. Do you know what that is?”

“Not a see… see-sure. I only fainted. I do that sometimes when I get really upset.”

“Well, maybe that’s one of the reasons the doctors want to keep an eye on you. To make sure you don’t hurt yourself.”

“I wouldn’t hurt myself. I just didn’t want any more shots.”

“You wanted them to leave you alone?”

“That’s right.” Sarah smiled. “I’m glad you came here. Before you came I didn’t care about anything.”

“So I make you care again. I’m happy about that.”

“Are you really my friend?”

“Of course.”

“And you won’t tell them what we talk about? You’ll keep everything a secret?”

“I promise. Is there anything you want to talk about now?”

“Sometimes I wish… I wish I didn’t do bad things. So I wouldn’t get punished. But I can’t help it. It’s scary sometimes when it happens.”

“Like you lose control?”

“Yeah. It’s like my head gets full and I… empty it.”

“Like a bowl full of gray mush. You just dump it out.”

“Yeah!” Sarah walked quickly across the carpet to stand close to her. She lowered her voice in a conspiratorial whisper. “You know what I did yesterday? When they brought me my pills? I pretended to swallow them, only I didn’t. I hid ’em under my tongue. Then when they leave I spitted ’em out on the floor and ground ’em up and rubbed the paste under my bed.”

“You spit them out. You didn’t swallow them.”

“That’s right.” She nodded. “That way my head doesn’t get all… fuzzy. Only the shots, I can’t do anything about those, see? That’s why I hate them.”

Sensing she was being tested, Jess said only, “I see. That’s very clever. You’re a clever little girl, grinding up your pills like that.”

“No, I’m not. I’m dumb. See, I told you about it, and now you’ll tell them. You won’t tell, will you? You promised.”

“I won’t tell. Sarah, can I ask you something? Why do you think they give you the pills and the shots?”

“It’s a game, see, a big mean game, they’re trying to get something from me and I won’t let them have it. And they don’t really want it anyway because they’re scared.”

“Do you know what this thing is?”

“I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”

“Hmmm. I like secrets. Maybe you’ll share yours with me sometime.”

“You wouldn’t like this secret. And anyway, maybe you’re just part of the game. Maybe you’re on their side and it’s all a big trick. You’re gonna put me in the bad room!”

“No, Sarah, I would never do that. I would never make you do something you don’t want to do, or put you someplace you don’t want to be. We’re friends, remember?”

But Sarah wasn’t listening. “They want to get rid of me. They’re trying to kill me.” She walked to the table and picked up her bear, clutching it to her chest. Then she went back to the window.

“I’m going to break out of here soon,” she said, looking into the sunshine. She was trembling. “Then they all better watch out. Oh boy, they better.”

—14—

The Fingertip Bar and Grill is located just outside of downtown, directly off the C subway line. Barely visible from the street, unmarked and “long and thin as the tip of a finger,” it is a favorite of local students looking for someplace a little off the beaten path. Road signs interspersed with the grilles of classic cars decorate the walls like some kind of automotive graveyard. A traffic light mounted over the door flashes green, yellow, and red.

Saturday evening, Jess stepped though into that smoky, alien place, and paused to let her eyes adjust, searching for Charlie. A moment later she spotted the smiling, chocolate-brown face moving toward her from the bar, as jazz swelled and throbbed from somewhere in back. The bar was narrow and deep; drunk students would sometimes confess to getting lost in the depths, and the rumor was that on particular dark nights you could just keep going, that the bar never ended.

“Hey there, girlfriend. Thought you might be thinking about standing me up.”

“Never, Charlie. I haven’t been out on the town in a while. I forgot how long it takes to get anywhere.”

The woman appeared concerned, her powerful features managing to seem exotic and warm at the same time. “You look like death. Come on over here and tell me all about it. We’ll get some food into you and you’ll feel better. It’s not man trouble, is it?”

Jess shook her head and smiled. She followed the swish of Charlie’s silk skirt to a small booth against the wall, amazed as always how the crowd seemed to part for her as if by magic. Charlie was a large woman, but lithe and quick on her feet. At twenty-seven, she had a beauty that transcended her size, a breathtaking nobility that others often found intimidating. But she could be refreshingly blunt. They had met in a shared lab class a year earlier, and since then had become fast friends. Jess admired the way nothing ever seemed to get to Charlie.

“If it’s not a man,” the woman continued, after they settled into the booth and ordered a plate of nachos and two Blue Moon beers from the tap, “then it must be family. I can’t think of anything else that would make a girl look the way you do.”

Jess wondered how on earth to respond. Normally she was fiercely independent, proud of her ability to thrive on her own. But since she’d returned from Gilbertsville, her evenings had been endless and too quiet. Something fundamental to her own nature had been changed. She felt like a caterpillar that had crawled into a cocoon—though she had no idea what kind of shape she would find herself in when the metamorphosis was over.

She was pleased with the sudden progress Sarah had been making. The girl seemed to be getting comfortable with her and opening up. They were bonding. And she and Shelley had been meeting regularly for coffee to discuss the case. But she was still uncertain about the experience of meeting Sarah’s family, and what it all meant. The image of Annie Voorsanger standing up in that dusty, forgotten room, the sound she had made, the sudden, wild look in her eyes, remained with Jess no matter how hard she tried to shake it.

And she was lonely. Late nights were the worst—waking up in the emptiness of her apartment, Otto gone from his customary spot at the foot of her bed. That was when she had the strongest feeling that some basic part of her had been shaken, some simple truth exposed. Her mind seemed to be humming, voices muttering at a distance too far to be overheard. It was then, and only then, that she would allow herself the longing for another human being, anyone who could fill these moments in time with something other than ghosts.

Finally this afternoon she had decided to follow up on something else that had been bothering her. Now she wished she hadn’t. Not until tonight had she been so desperately bewildered, so incapable of discovering her true feelings.

“I’ve been thinking about my brother a lot lately,” Jess said. “The way he died.”

Charlie knew about her brother. She knew about the agreement with Professor Shelley and the sessions with Sarah. Charlie knew more about Jess Chambers’s life than most people. “I think you’ve got an angry spirit,” Charlie said. Her eyes sparkled.

“What?”

“An urban myth, you might call it. Anyone you’ve done harm to will come back to haunt you. The gangs believe it. They’re careful about who they shoot. Only,” she said, leaning forward and fixing Jess with those deeply black, shining eyes, “you didn’t harm anyone, least of all your brother. So that’s all in your head. Just like it is with those Latin Kings.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Simple psychology,” Charlie explained patiently, like mother to child. “Come on, it’s an established phenomenon. A gang member who kills without proper justification decides he’s cursed. He’ll be dead within a year. Why? Not because he’s pursued by the souls he’s killed, because he takes risks, he exposes himself, he has a guilty conscience. He makes it happen.”

“Charlie—”

The woman shook her head. Jewelry tinkled somewhere. “Dear Lord, girl, let yourself go for a bit. I’ve never seen anyone so wound up. Sometimes I wonder if you’re gonna just shoot off right through the ceiling.”

The drinks came. Jess let the cold beer wash down her throat, listening to the thump of the music, the loud chatter of voices. She had spent yet another hour with Sarah just that afternoon, going over what little schooling she had received. She had to search hard for any trace of mental illness; Sarah spoke with an intelligence and sophistication Jess would not have believed if she hadn’t been there herself.

And then she had gone home to make the telephone call. And that call had rattled her more than she believed possible. Only now, sitting here in the smoky confines of a bar filled with people, did she begin to relax.

“So what you’re doing, is trying to calm the dead.” Charlie glanced at a table to their right, then back again, the twinkle in her eyes. “What you need is a good, hard fucking.”

“Charlie…”

“I mean it. It would clear your head. That man over there seems willing to oblige.”

Jess glanced at the table, saw the man staring at her and smiling slightly, hunched and broad through the shoulders, heavy jaw and brow.

“No, thanks,” she said. “I prefer my own species.”

“Your prerogative. But let me ask you. Do you ever wonder why you surround yourself with women?” Charlie nodded. “Me, for example. Professor Shelley. All your other friends.” She paused for dramatic effect. “You’re afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Letting someone in, and I mean really inside, where you can’t hide things the way you normally do. The kind of vulnerability that comes from sleeping naked with another human being. They see all your flaws, pudgy thighs, puckered cheeks, moles and freckles and bad breath in the morning. It’s just a thought.”

“Let’s get up off the couch, shall we?”

“Mmm-hmmm. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Let me ask you something. Can you think of any reason why a woman would suddenly quit a good job where she seemed to be respected and competent?”

“I can think of many reasons. Her boss is a creep. She’s found a better job. She won the lottery.”

“But she refuses to give an explanation. One day she’s there, the next she’s not.”

“Again, her boss is a creep. Coming on to her or something similar.”

Jess tried to imagine Dr. Wasserman putting his arm around Maria’s wide shoulders, leaning close to whisper in her ear. The image was laughable. “I don’t know.”

“Are we talking about someone at that place you’ve been spending so much time at, when you should have been spending it with me?”

“The woman who worked with the difficult patients. She gave her letter of resignation. And I keep thinking maybe it’s connected, the way she looked, the way she acted around Sarah, and Sarah’s sudden improvement—”

“That’s your problem,” Charlie announced, “you think too much.” She drained her glass with a tip of her wrist, somehow making it look dainty and sophisticated, and announced, “Tonight is not a thinking night. Am I getting through to you?”

“I called her,” Jess said absently, her mind continuing to play over the earlier conversation in a way she hadn’t allowed it to before. Maria’s voice over the phone line, her accent so difficult to understand, but the emotion unmistakable. “Swiped the number off her letter on Wasserman’s desk. You know what she said?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“That Sarah was ‘inside her head.’ That she was embrujado. I looked it up, it means—”

“Haunted,” Charlie said. “And from what you’ve told me about this poor girl, I’d agree. You’re not dealing with some suburban teenager with adjustment problems. This is a girl who probably doesn’t even remember what the outside world looks like.”

“That’s what I don’t understand.”

“Is that all?”

“Something’s not right here, Charlie. We’ve got a hospital director who until recently acted like he had a serial killer in his basement instead of a ten-year-old girl. We’ve got a file on said girl that reads like a medical textbook on diagnostic procedures, except when it comes right down to diagnosing anything. We’ve got a family that for all intents and purposes didn’t exist a week or so ago, insisting that their granddaughter is the spawn of the devil—”

“Let’s cut to the chase here, Miss Chambers. What you’re saying is you’ve discovered a case for the X-Files. I’ll be Scully to your Mulder. Have you seen the girl’s head spin around? Any speaking in tongues? Projectile vomiting?”

“You’re impossible.”

“Honey.” Charlie leaned across the table and touched Jess’s arm. “I am telling you to let it go. Get away for a while and fly to Florida. Take a break and clear your head. We’ll all be here when you get back.”

“I can’t leave now.”

“You should. You’re getting this confused with your feelings for your brother, everything that happened to you when you were young. You’re like a greyhound after that rabbit. But even greyhounds take a few minutes to lie down in the sun.”

“She’s stopped swallowing her medication, Charlie. I can’t afford to take a few minutes. I have to decide whether I break her confidence, or say nothing and risk a setback in her treatment.”

“How do you feel? What does your heart tell you to do?”

“That’s just it. How can I know when I can’t even decide if she’s unstable or not?”

They sat and drank for a while in silence. The music throbbed like a heartbeat. Charlie closed her eyes and moved with it. Then she opened her eyes and said, “Have you thought about talking to someone? I mean, if you insist on playing this silly game of yours?”

“A therapist?”

“Someone who specializes in the sort of thing you mean. Not a spiritualist or medium, but a gen-u-wine scientist. Double-blind experiments, the works. Very above-board. There’s a group right outside of Boston related to the Rhine group in, where is it, Carolina? I only mention it because I happen to be friends with someone who works for them.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Charlie,” Jess said tiredly. “Maybe you’re right. I am just trying too hard to make up for something. My brother, maybe.”

“Well, honey.” Charlie touched her hand gently again. “That might be true. But you ever need that number, you let me know.”

—15—

It’s possible to help this girl Jess thought as she made her way back to her apartment in the early morning hours, the sounds and smells of the bar still with her like ghosts in her clothes. Really make a difference. But the first thing we must accept is that the traditional analytical approach may not work. A good psychologist tries to unlock every door, using any key available.

And if those keys don’t fit, you look for the ones that you aren’t even sure exist.

Sitting down at her desk, her head still pleasantly thumping from the beer, she opened up her MacBook and jotted down everything she could think of relating to her feelings about this case. She stared at the words floating on the glowing screen, typed in a few others. There was more to add but she didn’t know where it fit. Wasserman and Shelley and their places in all this. Mrs. Voorsanger’s strange description of her granddaughter’s first year of life. Maria suddenly quitting. And those… incidents she could not seem to shake. The way she had felt the first time she had visited Sarah. And the second visit, the shattering light-bulbs, the way the air crackled with a presence unseen but definitely there.

One thing was certain; regardless of the truth surrounding Sarah’s supposed paranormal abilities, Sarah herself believed them. Her frustration after her attempt to open the locked playroom doors was proof of that.

The question remained; should she tell Wasserman Sarah had stopped taking her pills?

For most of the following Monday, Jess’s thoughts were occupied with more mundane things. Lately she had allowed her grades to slip, something she had never done before, and she concentrated on getting to class on time and taking good notes. Her class with Professor Shelley did not meet until Thursday, for which Jess breathed a sigh of relief. She did not know what she would say to the woman yet. Lately Professor Shelley had seemed preoccupied. Perhaps the visit with Sarah’s family had upset her more than she let on.

After her last class ended, Jess made a quick sandwich and grabbed her laptop and book bag. She walked the three blocks to the Brookline Library through an early evening chill, seeing the imposing stone and brick building as if for the first time, though she had been there many evenings in the past. Now it seemed to dig itself into the hill, or rather rise up out of it like some Gothic stone castle, and she wondered why she hadn’t seen it that way before.

Inside it was warm and bright. Recent renovations had put the sparkle back into a space that had grown tired and worn. At the reference desk she asked for a stack pass, and slipped down into the lower level, where she stashed her bag in one of the cubicles nestled beyond rows of musty books. It was a good place to sit and think, suspended over the back alley and silent as a tomb. The light in the stacks was dim and thick with dust, but the cubicles were made of a much friendlier wood, and built into the side of the building like bubbles in a submarine.

She left her book bag in the cubicle and returned to the main floor. Computer monitors lined the walls beyond the information desk. She found a free one and began a search. Soon she had gathered an impressive pile of books, which she stacked on the cubicle desk. She began to scan through them, starting with the earlier titles. Some were based upon specific cases of hauntings and “expert mentalists,” and those she set aside; others were filled with technical experiments on dice throwing and remote viewing techniques.

A full hour later, she had begun to get discouraged. The books were filled with outdated experiments and philosophical ramblings. Then she picked up a book called The Reach of the Mind, and the name on the cover made her pause. J. B. Rhine. At the Fingertip, Charlie had mentioned the Rhine group. Curious, she opened to the beginning of the book, and skimmed down the first few pages. More philosophical bullshit. Jess flipped farther into the book. There she found something that gave her pause.

The effects of narcotic and stimulant drugs (on ESP and PK) are like those produced on higher mental activities. Large doses of narcotic drugs force performance in tests to drop practically to the chance level… the drugs do not, on the other hand, nearly so quickly or so seriously affect the efficiency of the sensorimotor functions.

Sarah’s comment about her head being “fuzzy,” the “gray days” that came upon her and blanked out her memory. A symptom of drug therapy, especially the heavy one employed by the Wasserman Facility. She remembered how Sarah had blacked out during their second visit, how Maria had moved so quickly to administer the injection. How the big woman’s hands had trembled as she held the syringe up to the light and bent to the unconscious girl’s arm.

A simple sedative to calm the heart, Jess had assumed at the time. But now she wondered whether Maria had had more sinister intentions. The woman was obviously superstitious. It would not be too large a stretch to imagine that she had come across this passage in Rhine’s book, or something similar, and, fearful of whatever imagined threat she believed Sarah held for her, decided to take matters into her own hands.

She read on, through descriptions of tests on students and supposed “sensitives,” through the piles of data and the secondhand accounts of paranormal events. The book seemed desperate to prove something, but in the end she found nothing that convinced her of the existence of anything other than coincidence. And yet something was beginning to form in her mind, the raw substance of a possible answer. She flipped through another of the books about alleged poltergeist phenomenan and psychokinesis, looking for something she had read earlier.

Finally she found it, a passage about a young woman named Esther Cox who had lived at the turn of the century. Esther became the center of attention when a supposed poltergeist began terrorizing her family’s home. Loud banging noises occurred at all hours. Boxes flew around the rooms. Water boiled in the girl’s presence. Fires burned all over the house, resisting efforts to put them out. Esther’s sister had a boyfriend, and it was rumored that this boyfriend had tried to rape Esther one night, and the strange activity had begun at that point. A best-selling book on the subject was written by a man named Walter Hubbell.

Esther was described as a plain and psychoneurotic girl under eighteen years of age. She lived at home in poverty, sharing a bed with her sister. A girl who had already exhibited signs of mental instability; a rape or attempted rape could likely have pushed her over into a full-blown psychosis. She might have caused the pranks herself, Jess thought, and not even been consciously aware of it. In fact it was very likely. Most supposed poltergeists were connected with adolescents in some way. Strange events in “haunted” houses always seemed to occur when the teenage son or daughter was around, and disappear when they left.

Put it together with what we know to be true. There was a biological theory, lately advanced, that introduced the idea of gradations of mental illness. Many researchers believed that a group of genes were responsible for the majority of mental diseases such as schizophrenia, and that it was possible to inherit one or several of these genes without becoming a full-blown schizophrenic. This person would become a “schizotypal personality,” and would exhibit a milder form of the disease. Such a person would be suspicious of others, prefer isolation to groups, would be preoccupied with unusual ideas such as UFOs or belief in the paranormal.

And anyone or anything that encouraged those beliefs would only serve to reinforce them.

Which led her back to Sarah. A girl who had very likely inherited one or more of the “schizophrenic genes” from her mother. A girl with developmental problems, regressed to an earlier childhood stage, experiencing delusions of grandeur, omnipotence, a powerful need to have control over herself and her world. At such a young age, she had been taken away from an abusive family. Isolated. Poked and prodded. And naturally those rumors, the stories her family had told, would persist. You couldn’t stop things like that, even in a medical environment. All it would take were a couple of superstitious orderlies.…

Convinced that she had finally found what she was looking for, Jess packed up her bag and returned the books to the reference room to be reshelved. Sarah was not a true schizophrenic, of that she was sure. She had not been misdiagnosed, exactly; it was simply a matter of degree. The girl could have a milder form of the illness, which would become more or less severe depending on the circumstances, hence her remarkably quick “recovery.” She would be suspicious of people trying to help her, exhibit odd behavior, even fits. At the same time she would seek out attention, crave acceptance. She would believe herself to be gifted, even psychic, and she would perpetrate any sort of prank or trick to prove it to others.

As she walked quickly through the deepening twilight, leaves crunching under her feet, Jess tried to imagine that Wasserman would not have come to the same conclusion. Impossible. He was an expert in the field; surely he would be familiar with the latest theories.

Then why had he treated Sarah so roughly? Why had he kept her from the proper treatment for this type of disorder? Why had he isolated her, put her in restraints, treated her so heavily with drugs? And most of all, why had he brought in a young graduate student and risked exposing all the mistakes he had made?

But those were questions for another time. Right now Jess felt as if some great crisis had been turned away, an abyss looked into and then avoided. She would concentrate now on continuing to gain Sarah’s confidence and they would see from there.

First thing tomorrow.

—16—

The private helicopter landed at Downtown Manhattan Heliport (DMH) at 6:43 p.m. An attendant scurried tree and opened the passenger door, and then held his hand out to assist those disembarking. A white-haired man and a blonde woman in business attire climbed off the fold-down steps and nodded to the attendant. They looked like wealthy middle-aged lovers on a date, but they were not. Far from it.

The man, who carried an attaché case and wore a very expensive blue silk suit and red tie, slipped the attendant a bill while the woman hurried inside, clutching her jacket around her shoulders. The evening air was chilly with a breeze coming off the water. The attendant was pleased when he had the chance to look down at his hand; the bill was a fifty. He hurried after them, to see if there was anything else he could do.

The DMH is located on Manhattan’s East River, and provides its users with breathtaking views of the New York and New Jersey skylines. The heliport’s main terminal contains an operations control center, pilot and VIP lounges, and a passenger waiting area. Because of its proximity to Wall Street, it is often used to transport documents for investment and law firms and large banks, and the occasional high-powered business meeting is held in a pair of private rooms above the lounge, overlooking the water.

The man’s name was Steven Berger, and the woman was Philippa Cruz. Berger, as the head of business development for Helix Pharmaceuticals, was the fund-raiser, the salesman. Cruz was the brains. At the tender age of forty-two, she was the lead investigator and head of the project team, with an M.D. from Harvard Medical and a Ph.D. in biology from Duke. But she did not fit the stereotype of a geeky researcher; today she wore a pin-striped Brooks Brothers power suit, impeccably tailored, with clean lines and the timeless look of quality. Her straw-colored hair was cropped short and groomed in a rake-fingered, mussed style.

Berger might have been accused of trying a bit too hard to project money and importance. To Cruz, it was effortless.

They arrived at one of the private function rooms and were shown inside, the first of their party to appear. Berger and Cruz had met others here on several different occasions, so they were familiar with the layout. This time, a table had been set for six, though there would be only two other guests.

“Something smells delicious,” Cruz said. The air held the scent of curry and wine. She removed her jacket and draped it over one of the mission-style wooden chairs, and then drifted over to the wide stretch of windows and stood next to one of three lush, potted Boston ferns. Lights blinked on in the deepening dusk. It was a hauntingly lonely, breathtaking scene, one that she rarely had the time to appreciate properly. She rubbed at the goose bumps on her arms.

A waiter knocked on the door and then entered, asking them what they would like for drinks. Berger ordered a Bombay, while Cruz ordered a Manhattan. “How appropriate,” Berger said when the waiter had gone. Cruz smiled.

“Only one,” she said. “I want to make sure we remain focused. This promises to be an interesting evening.”

Steven Berger placed his attaché’ case on the table. He removed his wire-rimmed spectacles and rubbed at the indentations in his nose, then set them back again. “An interesting

evening,” he said quietly, almost to himself. And then, “You really think we’ve got things moving in the right direction again, eh?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“So you can assure all of us that there won’t be any more… accidents?”

Instead of answering immediately, the blonde woman turned and stared back out at the water. “Did you know that when a person breaks his neck,” she said finally, “the severed nerves don’t actually die? They form this scab called a growth cone, and that cone pushes ahead like a blind man trying to find his way in the dark, fumbling around with these tiny strands called philipodia. Eventually these strands come up against a barrier and just stop. They’re at a dead end, and so it goes. Our friend remains in a wheelchair, drooling across his lap. But the potential is always there, waiting to be tapped.”

“So how do scientists help give the philipodia a helping hand?”

“They’ve recently discovered that the key is very likely a group of proteins called EPH.”

“Always proteins,” Berger muttered. “You’d think we could just eat a steak dinner and be done with it.”

Cruz didn’t seem to notice him as she continued. “Different EPH proteins either attract or repel nerve strands, and in that way they help guide the philipodia along. So what if you could get rid of the particular version of EPH protein that repels or blocks nerves? Well, scientists at Melbourne have tried it, and guess what? Mice with broken backs are jumping up and down five weeks later. Nerves have completely regrown. It’s a miracle.”

“Yes, yes,” Berger said. “A miracle indeed!” He often got caught up in the woman’s enthusiasm in spite of himself; she was breathtaking in her passion for science and the infinite possibility of mankind.

“Jesus healed the sick, walked on water, rose from the dead,” she said, turning back with her sharp predator’s eyes gleaming. “At the same time, a giant ball of flame rose each day in the east, and then fell again in the west. Who’s to say which is the more significant event? Why is one considered miraculous, the other accepted as scientific just because we understand the mechanics of it? My point is, it’s possible to perform many so-called miracles, if we understand the mechanism of action.”

“Ah, I see. But some might say that the intentions of God are not for man to discover these things. That we are going down a path that can only mean our ruin.”

“Small minds,” Cruz said.

Berger chuckled. “Perhaps they possess too much of the bad sort of EPH. You’re not going to get too philosophical with our guests when they arrive? I don’t think my heart can take the suspense.”

A knock on the door and the drinks were brought in on a silver tray, along with bread and a bottle of chilled wine.

They held their tongues for the waiter to leave. “No,” Cruz said, after the door had closed with a soft click. “I’ll try to keep it as straightforward as possible. Small minds, as you say.”

“Let me ask this once more. If we begin the testing again, you’ll have total control?”

“This is the tightest molecule we’ve ever designed. Think of it like a thermostat, giving us the ability to dial things up from zero to a hundred, and back down again. It’s an excellent candidate. I believe we’re starting some extensive testing tonight, perhaps even as we speak.”

“That’s good enough for me,” Berger said. “Now, the key elements here are to make them understand what we’ve discovered, the data we already have, and the breakthrough we’ve experienced recently. I want them to see the potential. So don’t get preachy. These people are simply interested in the bottom line.”

“You’re the expert in that,” Cruz said. She picked up a small loaf of dark bread and ripped it in half, dipping a chunk into a bowl of garlic oil. The smell was delicious. She hadn’t eaten since that morning, and now she attacked the bread like piranha in blood-threaded water.

A few minutes later the others in the party arrived; first an older man with Nordic features and a slight limp, then an Asian carrying a small, wrapped gift, which he handed to Berger with a nod and a smart bow. They all made small talk while the two waiters took drink orders, and then they sat down for dinner.

The meal began with a mesclun salad with grilled fruit and edible flowers, and then a small pumpkin-curry soup, followed by a very rare filet served with a garlic butter sauce, asparagus almondine and wild rice, and finally a black plum sorbet. The party ate with enthusiasm, remarking on the weather in this part of the country, and the situation in the Middle East, and the state of airline travel. The waiters came and went, bringing fresh drinks.

Finally the meal was complete. “Please excuse me,” Berger said to the others.

He got up and went to the waiter at the door. “We’re about to engage in something more confidential now,” he said. “Please, do not disturb us until I call you. And lock the door.”

After the waiter had left, Berger went to his attaché’ case and removed a small black device. He scanned the table and chair legs, moving carefully around the personal spaces of his guests, then went to the window and traced a pattern around the edges. Finally he examined the potted plants, and the door frame.

“Very good,” he said, and put the device back in his case and removed a small silver DVD player. “Can’t be too cautious. You have the nondisclosures I faxed you? Excellent. Let’s begin, then. I’d like to show you something very exciting.

For the next five minutes the four were glued to the DVD player’s seven-inch screen. Nobody said a word; the events playing across the liquid crystal display were words enough for anyone.

After it was done, the Nordic-featured man said, “It could have been faked.”

“I assure you, it’s absolutely authentic,” Berger said. He was unable to keep the small smile off his face. “You’ve seen some of the initial data in the encrypted files I sent you, but we’ve kept most of the details back for security purposes. Here’s another copy with a bit more revealing information.”

He pulled photocopies out of his attaché case and handed them to the two men. “Most of the technical readings and results are there, as well as the history of the company. As you can see, we’ve been at this for quite some time. We have a real expertise in small-molecule design and cell-signaling. It’s taken us years, but we feel that we finally have a viable candidate in this particular case to proceed with confidence.”

He glanced at Cruz. This was getting beyond his own comfort zone. It was time for the technical side of the house to take over.

She stepped in smoothly. “The building blocks of life,” Cruz said. “DNA gives way to genes, genes give way to proteins. Proteins are the worker bees, you see. To unlock the greatest secrets of mankind, all we have to do is figure out how and why these proteins do their jobs. Then we can decide how we can make them work for us.” She tapped a graphic in the file the Asian man held open in his hands. “Our research is focused on discovering and developing these small-molecule drugs my colleague has referred to, those that can regulate cell-signaling and gene expression. But it’s not a simple thing to do. First, you need to understand how the human machine is built. As you probably know, the most critical processes of life—metabolism, cell growth and differentiation, gene transcription—are handled by signals carried from the cell surface to the nucleus through a system of molecular pathways. Are we okay so far?”

The two men nodded at her.

“Good. We understand quite a bit about some of these genes’ proteins and pathways, but others are still a mystery. In fact, most of the genes in the human DNA strand do not seem to serve any apparent purpose at all. We call them dormant or junk. Some scientists believe that they function in a way we don’t yet understand, or they served an important purpose somewhere back along the evolutionary chain but are now simply residual, the equivalent of male nipples.

“Then, of course, there are the subtle differences that make us unique from each other. These are the genes that belong to only you"—she nodded at the Nordic man—"or you.” She smiled warmly at the Asian, who seemed to be drifting. “Or more specifically, to your family. There aren’t many that are different. We’re all pretty much the same animal.”

Berger made a subtle cutting motion with his hand. “This is all very interesting,” he said. “Would you talk a bit, please, about the opportunity we’re offering?”

“Almost there, thanks. I was about to tell these gentlemen about the psi gene.”

A silence descended upon the group. “Please go on,” the Asian man said. Now she had his attention. Suddenly she had everyone’s attention.

“We’ve discovered a particular subject—the subject you just viewed on that video—who was born with a rather remarkable gene. This gene, which is either dormant or does not exist at all in most people, actually produces a protein, which acts in a particular way, on a particular cellular path. This mechanism of action has to do with the transfer of heat at a microscopic level, and it allows the subject to influence her natural environment physically through thought.”

“Amazing,” the Nordic man said. “The psi gene, you say?”

“From the word psychic. Psi encompasses a lot of different things—telepathy, clairvoyance, psychic healing, precognition, to name only a few. But what we’re concerned with here is what’s commonly called psychokinesis—”

“I’m not sure I understand,” the Asian man interrupted. “What exactly are you offering us?”

Berger motioned for Cruz to sit. “The investment opportunity of a lifetime,” he said. “The possibilities here are limitless—literally as far as your imagination can reach. Government and military applications, certainly. But medical, corporate, and even nonprofit entities could benefit tremendously. This is, quite literally, a revolution waiting to happen. But to get there, we’re going to need more capital. Research and development is tremendously expensive, as you both know.”

He took out another two packets from his case and handed them to the men across the table. “This will explain in greater detail what we’re going to do, and what we need from you. I’ll talk about that in a moment. But first, I want to show you one more video clip. This one is a little more… impressive. I think it will give you a good idea why we’re so excited about this opportunity.”

Steven Berger flipped open the little screen once again. The small party gathered around it to watch.

This was Berger’s favorite part. He kept stealing glances at the two men, at their faces, full of wonder, awe, and disbelief. Even Cruz was riveted, though she’d seen it many times before.

The scene played out across the little screen. Nobody spoke, moved, even breathed until it was over.

After another five minutes the screen went black. They sat back in silence for a long moment.

“Take this information back to your people,” Berger said quietly. He handed both of them a Helix business card with his name and private contact information across the front. “We’ll be entertaining partnership offers from as many as seven major players.” He let the pause go just long enough, waited for the beat. “I’ll begin the bidding at five hundred million.”

Across the table, Cruz tore off a fresh piece of bread. Smiling to herself in satisfaction, she bit into it with a vengeance.

—17—

Sarah awoke with a scream lodged thickly in her throat. It had come again, the dream that used to plague her night after night. The howling machines with metal tubes and wires swarming across her face, webbing pinning her down, the smell of metal and burning flesh. Needles dripping clear fluid. The screams. Darkness, and she was lost! It was hot, so hot she was gasping for air, and she knew she had brought this upon herself, that she was the cause of the burning.

Dream images faded into a pattern of pink, swirling dots. She swallowed and blinked, fighting against the fear that rose up inside, fighting against her own mind. / know where I am. I’m in my room. Not in the bad place.

But how could she know for sure? The room was pitch-black when she slept. They had kept it that way on purpose to punish her at first, and as she slid deeper into her own private darkness they hadn’t bothered to change things. Not that it would have mattered then.

But her world had shifted now with all the swiftness of a flash flood. She thought of the woman who had been coming to see her, and it gave her heart a forgotten surge of hope. She allowed herself a moment to wonder what it might be like to be normal. But what did that really mean? To be like the others she used to know before the gray fog came, Aimee who talked to herself and Shawn who picked his hands until he bled?

No. They were different too.

She squeezed her eyes shut tight and waited for the voices, but they did not come. Her mind had been unusually clear lately; she could function without the fog creeping up on her, and that made her feel uneasy. She was not used to such freedom, such long stretches where she had nothing but her own thoughts as entertainment. Maybe she should start taking the pills again? What would they do to her? Would they stop having to give her the shots? Would she have to go back to the bad place?

She heard a sudden noise. Something shifted nearby. Memories floated to the surface and she was transported to another time, another place. Disorientation. Nothingness. Whispers of words too faint to understand. Smoke touched her face, heat singed her skin.

Her arms and legs were held down. She stretched out her finger and fumbled for something, anything to tell her she was still alive. Somewhere in the distance she thought she could hear screaming again. Terror flooded her body and for a single moment she thought she might lose control.

When the lights flickered on she was blinded and hopelessly disoriented. The flashback had been vivid and had almost put her over the edge. She blinked as shapes swam into focus, and held on with all her might, biting back her scream.

“You’re awake,” the doctor said. She flinched. He was standing just inside the door. “Good. It’s time we talked this out. Long past time, actually.” He bent to undo the straps on her wrists, hesitated. “There are three men tight outside the door. You’ll behave?”

She nodded. His skin was slick with sweat. She had never seen him with a single hair out of place until now, and it disturbed her more than his expression.

She studied him as her pounding heart shook her thin frame. His face had changed for her, and something deep inside had broken because of it. His face, a source of warmth and comfort for so long, was now cold and the light had gone from his eyes.

She reminded herself once again that she was the cause of the change. She had been very bad. She had done something so terrible, so unforgivable, that it could never be taken back. Never.

The straps fell away, and she sat up on her narrow mattress. This room had a dresser in it, and a lamp on a table by the bed, but the walls were bare. An upholstered chair faced her. There was a window across the room, with a shade pulled down and taped tightly to the window trim, to keep any light from entering. She knew there were heavy bars on the other side.

Dr. Evan Wasserman sat down in the chair across from her and crossed his legs, being careful to keep the creases in his pant legs straight. He smoothed the fabric with his palms and folded his hands in his lap. He patted down his hair with one hand. Then he looked at her, his gaze searching her features. His eye twitched. She could not tell whether he was satisfied with what he found there.

“Modern Catholic thought holds that each person is sacred,” the doctor said. “The church believes in the inherent dignity of the human form. Do you know why that is?” He did not wait for her to respond. “The idea is grounded in the belief that man is made from the image of God. The human form is the clearest and most obvious example of God living among us.”

He pulled out a white napkin from his pants pocket and dabbed at his face. “It’s rather hot in here. We should have lowered the temperature. But this is an old building, you see, and the controls are not very accurate. If one were to lower the thermostat here, the lower levels would become uncomfortably cool. Do you know why I mentioned God? This is important. I want you to listen carefully.” He leaned forward in his chair, hands in his lap again. He twisted the napkin as he spoke. “I mention these things because I want you to understand what you’ve done. By murdering another person you are, in essence, killing a piece of God himself. You are committing a mortal sin, one that cannot be undone. And, perhaps worst of all, by taking another person’s life you are acting as God. That. Can. Not. Happen.” He twisted until something ripped. His eye twitched at her. “You have something inside you that can be dangerous. That part you must keep tightly bound. The rest are parlor tricks. You must always remember that.”

She was trembling. Wetness streaked her face, and she wiped at the snot running from her nose. A single, choked sob escaped her lungs. “I didn’t mean… to… to…”

“But you did. You lost control and two people died. You forgot that whatever God has cursed you with, you are no different than anyone else on this earth. No different. You live, you breathe, you shit and piss, and you are here because someone else has willed it to be. I have willed it to be!” He stood up abruptly, knocking the chair backward against the wall. “This, above all, you must remember. I am in charge. I decide what you do and when you do it. You will not shut me out anymore.”

He was breathing heavily now, and his eye twitched violently. She stared at him through swimming tears, as the light refracted into a multitude of colors and blurred his features. She wanted him to go away now, please, leave me alone.

Wasserman took a step closer. “I say all this because we will resume our lessons tonight.”

“No!”

“You must learn control. The world demands it. God demands it.”

“I won’t do it! You can’t make me!”

The lightbulb in the lamp blazed brightly for a moment, popped, and went dark.

Wasserman glanced over at the lamp, and at the cord that had been unplugged from the wall since he came in. He stared down at the little girl on the bed, and chose his next words very carefully. “Your new friend. You like her, don’t you? I want you to understand something. She comes under my supervision, and only as long as I say so. Would you like to continue her visits?” He waited for her nod. “If you don’t cooperate, she can never return to this place. You will be alone. We will lock you away downstairs, and you will never see the light of day again. You will never be allowed to see anyone except for me and the person who delivers your medication. If you do not learn to control yourself, you are not fit to rejoin the rest of the human race. The risk is too great. This is why we must continue, tonight.”

Fear bloomed deep within as her emotions battled each other. Above all, she did not want to return to the Room. She did not want the needle. Did not want to begin all over again. What if she could not hold herself in, what if it happened again? She could not bear to think of that, the smell of the burning, the screams.

But to refuse would mean the end of all hope.

“You have the opportunity to make amends,” Wasserman whispered, leaning over her. “You have taken lives, but now you have the chance to save one.”

For a moment, his face was full of naked fear. She realized that this pan of what he was saying was very important to him, as important as life and death. She didn’t know why, but she thought that maybe she had found something else she could use.

Finally, she nodded. Wasserman smiled, reached out as if to pat her head, then thought better of it. “Good.”

He opened the door. Three large men in open white lab coats entered the room. They regarded her as a zookeeper might study a dangerous animal. Weapons were strapped to their waists; she could see the bulge there, and caught the flash of black as they moved.

“She’s cooperating,” Wasserman said. “But I’ll want you to follow at a safe distance. Should something happen, you know what to do.”

They strapped her to a gurney and rode up in the creaking elevator in silence. Her stomach cramped and burned, her pulse raced as they rolled down the familiar hallway toward the Room. She studied the patterns on the ceiling and tried not to scream.

They prepped her quickly. A nurse bent over her to administer the shot. Panic overwhelmed her, and she tried to twist away. No needles! But it was too late. Prickles of fire ran up through her shoulder, through her body. “Stay calm,” the nurse said. “This is going to make you feel a little strange. That’s normal. You’re going to do just fine.” She touched Sarah’s wrist. The light pressure of her fingers tingled. Then she was gone.

They pushed her into the Room. The gurney’s wheels squeaked as they slipped across the black padded floor. She could see the black ceiling, could feel the emptiness, the weight of the air. The walls swallowed sound. People spoke through layers of cotton. There were many of them around her now. Wasserman’s voice cut through the rest, directing everyone to their various duties.

She felt herself trembling, sickness welling up inside as her pulse thumped in her throat.

Wires were placed about her face and temples, monitors attached to her fingertips. Faces loomed over her, filling her sight, quickly replaced by others.

The prickling fire had spread through her limbs, her neck, her tongue. She felt something building deep within her body and began to feel the familiar itch of pending release. With it came another wave of terror.

They left her alone. The door closed. She was plunged into utter blackness.

She could not hold it back now. She screamed.

The Room swallowed the sounds with ease, and everything else that came after.

—18—

“We’ve had a problem,” Dr. Wasserman said.

Shelley had called that morning as Jess was sipping her tea at the window, watching the trains. She borrowed Charlie’s car and rushed there as fast as she could, arriving in under twenty minutes. She knew it was serious enough, calling this early.

Now he was walking quickly and she had to trot to keep up. “It was in the playroom—Sarah was accidentally brought in when the other children were present. You’re the only one she seems to respond to now, not that any of us had great luck before….”

Jess had never seen him in this state. His tie was pulled down and his shirt looked damp in back. He looked like a man on the edge of a very dark and very deep drop, who was looking for something to grab hold of before it was too late.

She could hear the sound of raised voices through the thick concrete walls as they moved quickly down the hall. By the time they reached the playroom, she could tell that the current disruption, at least, did not involve Sarah. Still, she had to pause for a moment to stare openmouthed at the scene that greeted her through the half-open doors.

Toys were scattered everywhere. The slide was overturned; a tattered, one-limbed doll lay against its base. Books had flown like fluttering birds across the room. The little plastic table had been upended and the legs popped off.

The bear she had given Sarah lay just inside the door, a mute eyewitness to the tragedy.

Light flashed in her eyes. She glanced across the room at the right-hand window. Behind the wire mesh ran a long, splintering crack, winking in the sun.

The commotion came from the corner farthest from the door. Two white-shirted counselors were slowly closing in on a disheveled, hysterical figure.

“She touched him,” Wasserman said. “Dennis does not like physical contact of any kind, as I think I told you.”

Dennis was backed against the wall. His baseball cap was tilted to the right and upward, his shirt untucked. His hands were up and pawing the air and his head whipped back and forth like that of a dog trying to free itself from a choke collar. His voice was a constant, piercing scream. “Nonononononono…”

“Where’s Sarah?”

“We managed to get her back downstairs. It took three men and almost fifteen minutes. She scratched one of them badly. I believe he’s gone for the first-aid kit.”

“I want to see her.”

“She needs to calm down. I’ll go with you in just a moment.” Wasserman stepped into the room and raised his voice to a commanding pitch. “You there! That’s not the way to treat him. Step away, give him air.”

"Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineten. Twoandtwoisfour. Threeandthreeissix. Fourfivesix. Seveneightnine."

The two counselors slowly moved off. Dennis continued to scream numbers in a wild, high-pitched stream. Jess remembered her brother’s similar episodes. Sometimes they wouldn’t even know for sure what had set him off, only that he had felt threatened by something. Her mother would have been drinking, most likely, though she hadn’t been doing that as much when he was still alive. Somehow he had always seemed to know when she did. He tried to draw it out of her by force.

What did we used to do? Talk softly to him, talk him down…

Wasserman spoke in a calming, quiet voice. “There, there, Dennis, no one’s going to hurt you. We’re all friends here. Friends, Dennis.” He moved slowly closer, hands at his sides. “There, now, that’s better….”

She took the bear and slipped down the hall to the elevator. Downstairs, she told Jeffrey behind the desk that she was here to examine Sarah. She let him examine the temporary pass Wasserman had given her after her first visit, even though he had seen it many times. Finally he led her through the dreary corridor to Sarah’s door.

Now that she was away from the scene upstairs, she allowed her anger to boil to the surface. How could they have made such a stupid mistake? To leave the girl with a group of other children when she hadn’t seen another child in God knew how long…

When Jess caught a glimpse of the poor girl, crouched against the wall, she was glad Wasserman had not followed her down here.

Sarah’s eyes were already beginning to glaze over. A long, thin scratch divided one cheek. They had slipped her back into her restraints and the drugs were at work on her already. But Maria was gone. So who was giving her these heavy sedatives?

“Sarah, fight it,” Jess said, over by her side. “Fight it. Do you hear me?” She unbuckled the jacket and slipped Sarah’s arms out, then lifted the girl to her feet. Sarah muttered something incomprehensible.

Jess made a sudden decision. “Hold on, we’re getting you out of this place,” she said. She piloted them to the door, hit the buzzer with her palm. Come on, you son of a bitch. A moment later the door swung open and she pushed by the startled Jeffrey—"I’m taking her back upstairs"—and through the hall, half carrying, half dragging Sarah to the elevator.

Upstairs she poked her head into the hall, which was empty. “You stay with me,” she said, holding Sarah’s chin and looking her in the eye. “You focus. Do you want to see the sky? Do you want to feel the breeze outside?”

Sarah muttered. Her eyes rolled and focused and rolled again. What the hell am I doing Jess wondered, carrying the girl down the empty hall. But Sarah needed something to shock her from this trance. If it went too far she might never come back out again.

Noise still from the playroom; Dennis had calmed down a little, but not much. She went for the doors, and didn’t see anyone until they were on the front steps, blinking in the bright sun.

She sat Sarah down on the top step. “Now you listen to me.” She took the girl’s chin in her hand again and tried to make contact with her eyes, tried to force her way through the soft glaze and hazy sun. “I know you’re scared, and angry, and hurt. They treated you like an animal in there when you had a good reason for what happened. How were you supposed to feel, with all those people looking at you?”

Sarah moaned. She pulled her arms into her sides and rocked, head cocked, eyes squeezed tight.

“You didn’t deserve to be treated like that. You didn’t mean any of it. You only fought back to protect yourself. Am I right, Sarah?”

Sarah twisted her head away. “Leave me ’lone.”

“I’ll go if you want. Do you really want to go back to your room? Do you want them to lock you up again?”

“No! I don’t!”

“I want you to fight that gray feeling that’s trying to fill you up. I want you to push it away. We’ve come too far to go back and I don’t want to lose you. Can you do that? Can you open your eyes?”

“I don’t want to!”

“Then you’ll miss it. Can you smell the air? It’s cool out here. There’s grass and some trees in the yard. There’s a squirrel by the fence, he’s standing up and holding something in his paws. He’s chattering at us. Can you hear him, Sarah?”

Slowly, her eyes still squeezed tightly shut, Sarah nodded. Then she opened her eyes to the sun and struggled to her feet. Spreading her arms wide, she stood there for a moment, then stepped away into the grass and stumbled to her knees.

Jess felt a curious chill creep over her that had nothing to do with the wind. Sarah’s face had suddenly gone absolutely smooth and a smile touched her lips as she knelt in the grass.

She bent and grabbed two handfuls and pulled, digging her fingers into the dirt. She rolled on her back and wriggled herself into the earth.

A strange sound the girl made. It took Jess several moments to realize Sarah was crying and laughing at the same time.

The sun slipped behind a cloud. Jess sat on the steps and watched as Sarah sat up and swayed like a snake, eyes closed, cheeks streaked with dirt and tears. “I don’t feel too good,” she said in a slurred voice.

“They gave you a drug. It’s supposed to calm you down. It will make your mouth feel a little dry and your head kind of full. You’re going to feel calmer and you might get sleepy.”

“I don’t like it.”

“What happened in there, Sarah?”

She opened her eyes. “Nothing!”

“You mean you don’t know, or you don’t want to tell me?

“I didn’t do anything.”

“I don’t believe you did anything on purpose. You were scared.”

“You weren’t there. In the Room. I needed you!”

“If I’d known they were going to bring you to the playroom today, I would have come sooner.”

“I looked for you out the window.”

“Did you break the glass, Sarah?”

“I don’t know! I just wanted to get out!”

“And then what happened?”

“I tried to talk to that boy, to help him. But he wouldn’t listen. He started screaming, and he tried to take Connor. Then they came to take me away. You don’t know what they do! They grab you hard and they give you shots and tie you up. They take you to the bad place. I didn’t want them to do that anymore. So I pushed them. I… pushed.” Sarah smiled and closed her eyes again, drifting. “I pushed…”

“You fought them.”

“That’s when the glass broke. They made me do it.”

“You didn’t mean to.”

“I’m stronger now. I’ve been practicing. Do you want to see?

“No, Sarah. I don’t want any more fighting. No matter how bad things get, violence is not the answer.”

Sarah opened her eyes again. “You don’t know anything. I’m not going to let them tie me up. If they try it again I’m going to make them dead.”

“Sarah, I know you’re angry. You have every right to be. But they’re adults, and they’re bigger than you. No matter how hard you fight them they’re going to win.”

Jess saw the man in the guardhouse down the driveway watching them. He raised something to his mouth and spoke into it. Then he stuck it back into his belt and started walking up the driveway.

The gates were shut and the fence ran unbroken around the perimeter of the building. There was no reason they couldn’t be out here. Still, for some reason she felt threatened.

The temperature had dropped noticeably. Jess noticed Sarah following her gaze to the guardhouse and the man walking up the drive. She hugged her arms to her chest and rubbed her fingers. “We should go inside now,” she said.

“No!” Sarah staggered to her feet, shaking her head. “You lied to me! You don’t want to help me at all! You’re just like them!” Her face was twitching, its slack, sedated look giving way to something else. She was fighting hard against the drugs coursing through her veins. Jess wondered at Sarah’s strength while at the same time she felt her own heart rate increase, the hair on her arms beginning to stand on end. The strange disorientation she had felt during her first visit returned as the temperature around her plummeted still more, as her icy breath plumed around her face.

A shimmering in the air, as behind her she heard a door open; a shout.

She turned through the sudden, drifting mind-fog; saw Wasserman and three others there on the doorstep, two of them in uniform. “Wait!” Wasserman cried, his face bleached white, his lips a purple, bloodless wound. “Get away from her! Get away!”

Jess turned back again through a slow-motion dream. Sarah stood on the lawn under gathering shadow, her arms tight at her sides, her hands balled into fists. Her body trembled as a sudden wind grew and whipped through her hair.

“Get back!” someone else shouted from far away. “She’s not under yet!”

The man from the guardhouse started running. The two men in uniform rushed past Jess and jumped at Sarah’s trembling, shuddering form. They met, collided, rolling, Sarah’s feet drumming the ground as the seizure ripped up and through her.

Darkness met, joined, spread over their heads. A deep rumbling began below their feet.

And then it was as if the very air exploded. Jess threw herself to the ground, covered her head with her arms, as everything around her shuddered and rocked like blows from the fists of a giant.

Cries from the men still on the steps; she looked up, shocked, unbelieving, as something began to fall and the men ran, as the rain of great black stones thundered down on the roof and walls of the Wasserman Facility and shook the earth.

—19—

The familiar larger brick and stone structures that made up the city had long since given way to smaller, private homes by the time Jess Chambers reached the Dorris-Edgecomb Non-denominational Church. Her hands clenched on the wheel as she thought about what she might be giving up by coming here. It was night and the lights were dark, but she had called ahead and she knew they would be waiting for her.

The Church was an old clapboard structure that had once been in the Episcopal fold, before the church board (controlled by several prominent members of the business community and a great deal of money) led a small mutiny and convinced the congregation to go independent. At the heart of the dispute was the church’s growing belief in what they called the “new science.”

The Organization for the Study of New Science had been on their own and a licensed nonprofit by the state for over ten years now. They were interested in not only the spirituality of man but also man’s potential to evolve as a spiritual and physical being, to stretch the boundaries of accepted scientific phenomenon. The OSNS believed in life after death; they believed in man’s capacity to overcome. They also believed that the full power of the mind had only begun to be explored.

Jess had learned most of this from Charlie, who had insisted on setting up a meeting for her that very night. She was driving Charlie’s car too; another favor insisted upon and finally accepted.

The leaves had turned and the air had a late-fall bite. Stepping from the car, she thought of afternoon walks home from school in Maine, haying time in the fields, apple picking, and wood-burning stoves. For a moment she slipped into the false comfort of memory, and struggled to hold on to the mood, for she did not know when it would come again.

Most of her usual remembrances were filled with drunken neighbors and yapping dogs chained to dirt tracks between mobile homes. The grass would be worn to crackling wisps of spotty brown. Other families would hang their laundry there to dry, until the fall days turned so cold they would go out one morning to find the shirts and socks all frozen stiff and hanging like cardboard from the line.

When she knocked at the big church doors there was no answer. It was not until she moved around to a side entrance that she had any luck. A short, scruffy young man with curly-blond hair and a goatee introduced himself as Ronald Gee. Gee moved as if he were intent on slipping through space with the least possible resistance. He led her through a short hallway to a set of narrow stairs leading down to a white-painted door with a sticker that read psign: we knew you were coming, and a smaller sign that hung from the doorknob, experiment in progress. Music bled faintly through the walls.

“Shhh,” Gee said, finger to his lips. She couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. His mouth held a permanent half smirk. “They’re creating a mood. It was no good earlier but they might have it by now.”

He pushed open the door. The OSNS had strained the basement of the church well beyond its original design. Tables and file cabinets lined the walls and middle space, the rest filled with laboratory and electronic equipment: microscopes, computers, and related peripherals, and other unrecognizable machines. A large refrigerator/freezer occupied a corner. Shelves held jar after jar of medical specimens. Unrecognizable objects floated in milky fluid.

It was impossible not to feel cramped. Jess felt everything crowding at her, demanding her attention. She felt like ducking her head, though the ceilings were at least ten feet.

At the far end of the basement was a tiny observation room she had not noticed at first. Gee led her closer. Through a plate-glass window, a man and woman faced each other with their hands clasped across a wooden table and their eyes closed. The woman had a blood pressure cuff attached to one arm and electrodes fastened to her forehead.

A tall, slender man stood just outside, watching a set of monitors with a clipboard in his hand. Classical music played from somewhere out of sight.

The woman opened her eyes. “Close the door, Gee,” she said. “I can’t think with all that going on.”

“Close it yourself. I’d like to see that sometime. One of you sensitives actually doing something.”

“Cut it out, Gee,” the tall man said, coming out and looking at Jess. “We’re all familiar with your opinion.” He introduced himself as Patrick Elwes and spoke with a slight lisp. He was olive-skinned and serious, with round, frameless glasses and dark hair cropped tight against his scalp. His face was handsome and boyish, at odds with the rest of him.

“You’re Charlie’s friend. Dr. Chambers, isn’t it?”

“I’m not a doctor. Quite a setup you’ve got here.”

Patrick smiled in an awkward, pleased way that reminded her of a proud parent. “We make do. They won’t let us in any other place in town. Scared of the publicity.”

“So what is it?”

“Excuse me?”

“Gee’s theory.”

“Oh. Gee is of the opinion,” Patrick said, “that table raising, levitation of any kind actually, is beyond the scope of psi. Gee is what we call an informed skeptic.”

“Which just means that I’m withholding judgment,” Gee said loudly. “Isn’t that what proper experimenters do?”

She motioned toward the two others in the observation room, who were pretending to watch each other but kept glancing at her and then looking away. “Are they all right?”

“I think they’re playing hard to get. Bilecki is a sensitive; she may already know all about you. The other one is James something. I just met him myself today.”

“What were you doing over there again?”

“Table levitation. Attempting it anyway. We can’t even get Bilecki’s heart rate up, and her beta waves are too flat. It’s no good.”

“I knew it,” Gee said. “Parlor tricks. We should get David Copperfield down here, it’d be more entertaining.”

“That isn’t what Miss Chambers has come here to see. I believe she has something very interesting to share with us.”

They waited, watching her. Jess took a deep breath. “What has Charlie told you?”

“Only that you may have had a genuine psi experience. It really isn’t that unusual,” Patrick said. “You don’t have to feel that you can’t discuss it. We treat that sort of thing very seriously here. It’s what we do.”

“I really don’t know what I have to tell you,” she said. “If I was sure, I wouldn’t have come. Let’s just say I wanted to explore my options.”

“Have you read the book The Reach of the Mind, Miss Chambers?”

“I… skimmed it.”

“Rhine is a legend. The man who started it all. He coined the terms parapsychology, psychokinesis. What we call the Reach.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“The interaction of the mind with physical space. Mental energy. Mind over matter, you might say.” Seeing her skepticism, Patrick explained, “It isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. Cases are continuing to surface, documented cases involving hundreds of scientists across the world. There are plenty of frauds out there trying to make a buck, but there are others. True sensitives.”

“Like Bilecki here?”

Patrick smiled. “When the conditions are right, she’s quite remarkable. It’s rare to find a subject able to perform on command. So, what is it you’ve seen?”

“I don’t really know. But levitating tables can’t begin to describe it.”

A sudden silence descended upon the group. Looking at the faces surrounding her, Jess said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry.”

Patrick studied her, the way she held her briefcase in both hands. “It would be better to talk in private,” he said.

—20—

“Charlie tells me you’re a flier,” Patrick said, lighting a candle near the upstairs door.

They had retreated into the deserted’ church. Gentle moonlight glowed through stained glass. The candlelight flickered across the backs of empty pews, sparked against something hidden within the shadows of the altar.

“I have a license, yes.”

“What’s that like?” he asked almost dreamily, his voice echoing back as he walked away from her along the wall, lighting more candles. As it grew the light gave life to the carvings, made the walls and stained glass figures dance like merry ghosts.

Jess felt a little off balance. She wasn’t sure exactly what she thought of Patrick Elwes, but something about him made her want to hurry to catch up.

“Like freedom,” she said. “At its best, weightlessness. Like a dream.”

“And at its worst?”

“A way of avoiding things, I suppose. An escape, when running away isn’t always the best choice. And sometimes it’s a little hairy, especially in bad weather.”

“I’ve always wanted to learn to fly.”

“You’ve been up before?”

“No, never. I’m scared to death of it too. Isn’t that crazy?”

“There are worse things to be afraid of.”

Patrick nodded, turning back to face her. “How right you are.”

They sat down next to each other in the front pew, Patrick with his long legs stretched out in front, Jess with her briefcase clutched on her lap.

Jess had the faintly unsettling feeling, half dream and half memory, of kneeling in front of an altar much like this one when she was a little girl. Her mother had dragged her to the Congregational church one Sunday morning to offer some kind of penance, the details of which had gone over her head. But she remembered a feeling of quiet dread mixed with embarrassment, as if they were interlopers at a private party.

Today she felt like speaking in whispers, as if they might be disturbing someone here in this empty house of God.

“I hope you don’t mind the candles. I find it peaceful. And when it’s not so bright, the neighbors don’t notice the lights on and call the police.” He smiled. “There’s a rumor going around that the place is haunted. We like it, actually. It keeps the attention away from what we’re doing.”

Jess was trying not to stare at his eyes, which she had noticed were two slightly different colors, hazel and a light misty gray. They held the candlelight in their centers like tiny flickering suns.

The effect was distracting. She wondered if something had happened to him when he was young that had affected the pigment. He had a very slight accent that she couldn’t quite place, or perhaps a speech impediment that he had spent many hours trying to erase.

“Heterochromia iridium,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“It’s the scientific name for two different color eyes. Relatively rare in people, but it happens pretty frequently in other species. Science used to believe eye color was controlled by one gene, but it’s been established as polygenic. It’s an inherited trait. Most common cause is a mutation of the PAX3 gene on chromosome 2q35.".

“I’m sorry. I was staring, wasn’t I?”

“No problem.” Patrick smiled. “Hypnotic, aren’t they? Helped me get away with a lot more mischief when I was a kid.”

“They’re beautiful. So, how do you know Charlie?”

“We grew up together. She was always trying to get me to go out with her, but I refused.” Candlelight flickered in across his features. She could not tell if he was being serious at first. “Actually, I suppose you could say I had a crush on her. She lived just down the block and was a year older. A real exotic beauty.”

“She’s told you all about me?”

“Only a very faint idea of why you might come. And about your flying airplanes.”

Jess considered how to begin. “This doesn’t leave the room. It involves a patient I’m helping to treat and so any information I tell you is confidential. Can I trust you with that?”

“Of course.”

“This person—a young girl—has been treated for a schizophreniform disorder for several years. While in this girl’s company I have been witness to several strange events. Light-bulbs exploding. Drops in temperature. Jammed door locks. These things seem to happen when the girl is upset or under stress. I have spoken with several members of the girl’s family, and they insisted that similar events occurred almost from the moment of her birth. And then, this morning…”

“Go on.”

“We were outside the hospital. She became upset, didn’t want to go back inside. There were men there who tried to restrain her, the hospital director as well. It got very dark, very cold—this happened extremely quickly—I don’t know how to say this. Large black rocks—chunks of ice and stones, actually—began to fall from the sky like rain. And it was clear to me that somehow, this girl was causing it to happen.”

There was something almost sacrilegious about saying it in a church. Patrick didn’t seem to notice. He had a way about him that was very serious, very intense. “What did the hospital director have to say after this occurred?”

“Storms had been forecast all day, severe weather warnings. The stones matched the ones used to landscape the hospital grounds. A tornado of some kind, a minicyclone—”

“The ice,” Patrick interrupted. “Did it melt quickly? Were the stones themselves warm?”

“Yes.”

“And the temperature had dropped, you said?” She nodded. Patrick said, “I see.” He pulled out a notepad from his jacket pocket. “Do you mind? It’s easier if I write this down. We’ll go over it later.” He held the notebook in his palm and scribbled something with a stubby end of a pencil. “Hmmm. So the director, he’s asking you to believe that this storm came up out of nowhere, picked up a hailstorm of stones without doing any other damage to the grounds, and dropped them on the roof. Without damaging a single other person or object within a ten-foot radius?”

“I don’t know half of what he said, to be honest. I was pretty shaken up, and I suppose he was too. I don’t know if he believed it himself. But you have to understand that Dr. Wasserman is a man of science.”

“So am I.” Patrick edged slightly closer. She could not look away from his eyes, such strange eyes. “You know how ancient man worshipped the sun as a god because they could not understand the meaning of such a great, shining presence in the sky? Or that before they understood mental illness they believed in possession of the body by spirits?”

“I’m not very good at this, Patrick. If it wasn’t for this girl… you might call me one of your skeptics.”

“I’m only trying to make a point. I want you to entertain for a moment another possibility. This is quite scientific and utterly reasonable. Suppose that there are functions within the mind we have yet to understand. Perfectly rational, explainable abilities if only we knew how the process worked. In some cases these abilities are more advanced, more developed, the same as musical talent or physical coordination. A person might even be able to improve these abilities, strengthen them with practice.”

“I’m listening.”

“The human brain contains over seventeen billion cells. Seventeen billion. These handle approximately one hundred million messages per second. There are many different areas of specialty inside the brain itself, and we understand the functions of a bare fraction. What are these other cells doing? Is it fair to assume that we have no idea? That we cannot even speculate? Look at your airplanes. And yet they’re so primitive compared to what we’ve been given. If you told anyone that you could build a machine with seventeen billion parts and make them all work fluidly together, and explain what each part does and how it does it, do you think they would believe you?”

“Being in here inspires you, doesn’t it?”

“It just serves as a reminder of what a gift we have. And it keeps me humble. There are many mysteries in the universe, and I’ve chosen to focus on just one of them, because to take them all on at once would be impossible.”

They were very close now, knees touching.

Deeper in the shadows above the altar was a life-size statue of Jesus on the cross. Patrick saw her looking at it. “We believe now that he was very likely a sensitive. Certainly telepathic, clairvoyant, quite possibly psychokinetic. It would explain a lot—his knowledge of future events, the power to heal, even walking on water.”

“Rising from the dead?”

Patrick smiled. “We’ve chosen to leave that particular miracle to the imaginations of the parishioners.” He touched the briefcase she still held on her lap. “This girl you’ve told me about, she may have a gift, a portion of the brain more developed than the average person. We’ve studied that here, and we’ve come to a few conclusions based on scientific method. One, these psychic abilities do exist. Two, they follow specific physical rules. And three, they are not as rare as you might think. But they are variable, much like personalities, and for the most part they are minute, measurable only in a laboratory setting.”

“But not always?”

“Stories like yours have been told for centuries. A mother who suddenly has the strength to lift an overturned car. A grandfather clock stopping at the exact moment of someone’s death. A rain of stones. Generally they happen only once or twice in a lifetime, and so it is very hard to document them. A person who can perform at such a high level over time is extremely rare.”

“You asked me if the stones were warm.”

“If you’ll recall from your early physics classes, it takes energy to create motion. If something is being levitated, raised into the air, some force must be accountable for it. What we’ve concluded here—and it’s been documented in South Carolina and other places—is that psychokinesis involves some sort of heat transference at a microscopic level. In any successful PK experiment, the air temperature drops while the surface temperature of the moving object rises.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Neither do we,” Patrick said with a smile. “We don’t understand the process. But what is heat except the movement of molecules? Isn’t it possible that during a psi event, a person is somehow able to borrow motion and energy from moving particles—perhaps at the atomic level—and use that energy to affect a change in the environment?”

“Anything’s possible.” Just don’t ask me to believe in the bogeyman. That would be next, Jess felt suddenly sure; she was careening down a path with no brakes and no map, without even an idea of where she might be at the end. I’ve never believed in anything my eyes couldn’t see. Maybe it was the way I grew up. Maybe it was Michael’s death. But I’ve got to believe the world has a set of rules. And this goes way beyond anything the world has ever shown me.

But that wasn’t really true, was it? Didn’t she know just one split second before Michael ran out in front of that car, wasn’t there a single moment in time where she knew what was going to happen? Or was that just hindsight?

“In your little girl’s case,” Patrick was saying, into the deep and heavy silence of the church, “she would have been pulling heat energy from the air and using it to exert force upon the stones. The resulting temperature drop causes moisture in the surrounding air to form ice almost instantly, even as the stones heat up. How did she do it? It’s difficult to say. There’s been a lot of study lately on brain wave activity and microparticles. But the fact is, we don’t know for sure.”

“Would you take CAT scans in a case like this? MRIs? EEGs?”

“Absolutely.”

Jess touched her briefcase and unsnapped the clasps. With slightly unsteady hands she withdrew the yellow folder. “This is her file,” she said. “What I’ve been allowed to see of it anyway. I’d like you to take a look and tell me what you make of it.”

Patrick took the folder and withdrew the contents, spreading it across his lap. He studied in silence for a few moments, his eyes moving quickly across the pages of notes and reports. Then he held a transparent film up to the flickering light. “Here, you see a slight enlargement of the cerebral ventricles,” he said, pointing at a gray area. “And here. But no visible reduction in the hippocampus or hypothalamus. In fact, I’d say it’s enlarged.”

“In other words, if they were looking for a neurobiological sign of schizophrenia, they didn’t find it.”

“Mmm-hmm. And yet there are abnormalities.”

Suddenly he stood up and went to the candles at the altar, holding the film up to the light and pacing, peering, his voice rising in excitement. “There’s definitely increased activity here. Let me see the rest of it.” He returned and fumbled through the records with more urgency. “You see, look at these readings. The patterns are positively abnormal. Ordinarily you would have a beta wave reading if the person was awake, delta if they were in deep sleep. Occasionally you might see an alpha or even a theta in a state of hypnosis. But in this case it isn’t either, but rather a combination of the two, even when she’s supposedly awake. And in several instances"—he punctuated this with a tap of his long finger on a graph—"there’s a spike, a surge of terrific proportions. It’s as if someone jump-started her brain with a car battery.”

“Have you ever seen anything like it before?”

“Not like this.” Patrick seemed to lose himself for a moment. “I’d heard stories, seen hints, but nothing like this.”

He turned to face her, leaned down, and smacked both hands on the back of the pew. He grinned. “Do you know what you’ve done? If what you’ve told me is true, and these records are accurate? Something we’ve been failing to do for years, with people like Bilecki, thousands of them.”

Patrick clapped his hands together like a child. The sound was like a gunshot in the silent church. “You’ve found us our Holy Grail.”

—21—

Jess Chambers dreams she is in a large, cavernous building. The lights are all off, but emergency bulbs allow her enough light to see. Red light glints off polished metal doorknobs, shines dully from the stone walls, and turns the wooden trim as black as blood.

She pauses to listen. Monsters are chasing her, and she does not know which way they have gone. Paranoia creeps like stealthy dark figures into her mind. She feels them around every corner, watching her from every door frame. She hears them running after her. But she is searching for something, and she cannot leave until she finds it.

Jess hears her mother’s drunken voice echoing through the empty stone corridors; crashing into things, knocking over a lamp that shatters all over the floor, laughing and shouting. Glass tinkles and crunches. Others hissing at her to be quiet. A door opens somewhere close by. The sound of voices becomes very loud. Jess presses herself into a shadowed doorway, listening in a near panic as the footsteps become louder. She has nowhere to go. If they find her they will rake her away and lock her up.

She reaches behind her and turns the knob, stumbling into an open room. White carpet shows bloody footprints leading across a sea of broken and dissected toys, past a toy sink and through a plastic tunnel. Something seems to catch in her throat. What has she been looking for?

She hears a noise over by the bookcase. A little boy stands with his back to her, his blond hair curling over his collar. Both arms are raised and she sees the blood running down his wrists and dripping onto the carpet.

Michael? she says. Her brother turns. Blood pulses from holes in both palms. The look on his face is one of sadness. She sees her mother in him. But something is missing. She does not see any trace of the autism that has plagued him from the moment he was born.

Then the look changes. Suddenly she is afraid. Michael frowns, little furrowed brows coming together in a pantomime of adult emotion. He raises his hands higher. The door swings shut behind her with a bang. Papers pick themselves up off the carpet and whirl through the air. Michael’s shoulders shake, his eyes roll backward into his head.

The plastic tunnel shivers, rocks, lifts into the air. Books slam against the walls and flop like broken birds. Glass shatters in the window with a crack like a lightning storm.

Toys batter her face as a wind picks up and whips through the room. Glass shards flash like little silver arrows in the sun. Fists pound at the door, voices shout her name. She looks at her brother and sees the light of revenge in his eyes. She realizes too late, she hasn’t been running away from them, after all. She has been running away from him.

Miles away, a little girl opens her eyes to inky darkness. Her throat is tight, her limbs slick with sweat. The dream remains with her, of a woman, and a little blond boy, and blood. Lots of blood.

She tries to turn over, but her wrists and ankles are strapped down.

Voices come to her like ghosts now, murmurs in an alien tongue. It is difficult to separate them from the things that happen inside her mind, these other voices that come and go and bring the dreaded gray fog. She isn’t sure right now whether any of them are real, or whether she is truly lost inside herself.

The gray fog is a method of control, a weapon in battle, maybe the only one they have.

She used to think about what might happen if someone came for her. She has only the faintest memories of a woman who might or might not have been her mother. Would this person care for her, would she take her away and soothe the voices, take away the pain? Would someone please, please help?

She knows the woman in the dream she has just had, knows her face. But the truth is frustratingly out of reach. She was here recently. What has happened? Please, remember.

But it does not come. There is only the dream, the terrible, bloody dream.

Her head pulses slowly, throbbing with the pain of a thousand pinpricks. She is lost, and alone, and too weak to move. She lets out a single, choked sob, and lets the gray fog swallow her whole once again.

She keeps her heart jealously guarded, and does not let it beat too loudly for fear that they will hear it.

—22—

Jess awoke into darkness close and cool, got up, and shuffled into the kitchen, hugging herself in the soft tick and hiss of early morning heat as the radiators sputtered to life.

Okay, so suppose Patrick is right. Suppose for one moment that they’re not all off their rockers, that there actually is a portion (where? how?) of the human brain that is capable of exerting an effect on the outside physical world, simply by a particular sequence of thought.

The question then became: where to go from here?

Of course, Patrick wanted to see this miracle child right away. He was already mapping out a plan to test her, record the results, contact the people in Carolina and elsewhere. But it would not be that easy; there was Wasserman to contend with, for one. And it was important to consider what was best for Sarah.

There was also the question of how far this talent could reach. There was still a big difference between levitating parlor tricks and the ability to bring the very walls down around their heads. A rain of stones. Or something larger. A little girl with a mind like that could be very valuable to the wrong people.

Jess sat clutching a cup of tea at her kitchen table, while Otto rubbed his fluffy tail against her bare legs. Outside the window it was still dark, though it must be approaching dawn; she had not heard the trains running for a while now, and the traffic was almost nonexistent. Soon it would pick up as people resumed their daily lives, rushing into work so they could hurry up and go home again.

As she sat there in the empty kitchen, the silence hit her like a backhanded slap. For some reason she thought of Patrick’s face, and she stood up and went to the sink. Not good to think about him now. She needed to focus.

When she used to wake up like this as a child she would sneak out onto the front steps, hug her knees to her chest, and look at the stars. The stars were always larger and brighter in the country. If she tried very hard, she could find the answers there. The night sky gave her perspective. She would feel impossibly small in a universe of endless planets. Somewhere up among the stars, she felt sure, someone was looking back at her.

At the window now, she leaned over and craned her neck to see if she could see the sky. She felt a moment of numb heat in her palm, before something bit down hard.

She yelped and yanked her hand away from the still-hot coil on the stove, then pressed her palm to her mouth. Already the skin was throbbing. Damn it. Unreasoning anger welled up inside, the product of too much stress and lack of sleep, and as she turned to run her hand under cold water from the tap, her half-full mug of tea slid off the kitchen table and shattered on the floor.

She stood for a few moments in disbelief. Brown liquid had spattered across the linoleum, up the front of the refrigerator and cabinets.

Someone pounded on the floor from the apartment below and shouted at her. She swore to herself and went about cleaning up the pieces of ceramic, being careful not to cut herself on the sharp edges. Otto padded over and licked at the tea with a pink tongue. She grabbed a wet sponge from the sink and wiped all the surfaces down before he made himself sick on milk and sugar.

When she had finished cleaning up the mess, she soothed her burn with an ice cube from the freezer. By then the sky had lightened with the coming dawn.

The day was not off to a very good start. First the dream, then this. Somehow the shattered cup seemed to symbolize where her life had gone. And she still had to come to some sort of decision about Sarah. What was she going to do?

Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. How do you think Isaac Newton felt? Or Ben Franklin?

Okay. All right. But we’re losing track of what’s important here. Inside this hypothetical situation was a very real little girl. A girl who was confused and alone and very probably scared to death. No matter what happened, Jess would not allow a witch hunt. That was far too dangerous.

Perhaps Shelley could help. Jess looked at the clock by her bed. After four; she considered calling anyway. Instead, she dialed Charlie’s number. She was surprised when Charlie seemed to be expecting her. She did not even mention the hour.

“Patrick’s a good boy,” Charlie said. “He may be a little intense, but he’s honest.”

“I know, Charlie, but do you trust him?”

“Absolutely. Listen, you trust yourself, girl. Then let the rest come.”

“Where would I be without your advice?”

“I suppose you’d be happily married to a millionaire.”

“I’d die first.”

She could hear Charlie grinning through the phone. “Well, maybe you’d settle for a slightly mad scientist with a fetish for the paranormal. He’s single, you know.”

“You don’t say. He is kind of cute. I think he’s carrying a torch for someone else, though.”

“Why don’t we all get together for drinks when this is over?

“I’ll think about it.”

She hung up smiling, then thought about climbing into bed for just a few more minutes. Maybe there would be a chance for some honest sleep after all.

—23—

Sarah lay on an examining table, arms and legs hanging limp, eyes vague and unfocused. Straps held down her wrists and ankles; Wasserman had insisted upon them, though they were hardly necessary, Jess thought. They had pumped her so full of tranquilizers it would be a wonder if she could move a finger.

“She’d stopped taking her regular medication,” Dr. Wasserman said from their place by the door, as they watched the young doctor do her work “We found them under her mattress. I don’t suppose you know anything about that?”

Jess glanced at him. “I had no idea.”

“That’s how these things happen. The brain is a very delicate thing. The slightest change in chemistry, and you’ve lost all that you’d gained.”

Jess had the feeling that Wasserman was speaking for his own benefit as much as hers. But he seemed to have regained his footing, looking calmer and more self-possessed than the last time she’d seen him. She had expected more resistance from him than she had received; when she had pressed for a fresh opinion on Sarah’s condition, then asked to be present at the exam, he had not only agreed but seemed almost glad to have her. His only requirement was that it occur on-site.

The doctor undid the restraint from Sarah’s right leg, then stretched it and released. Then she tested Sarah’s reflexes lightly, tapping the bottom of her foot with a hammer.

“I want to make something clear,” Wasserman said. “I must admit you seem to have connected with her in some way. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that you’ve gone against my wishes on two separate occasions. I’m only allowing you in here because Jean insisted upon it.”

So that was it. Her urgent phone calls had done some good, after all. Professor Shelley had missed last Thursday’s class, leaving only a note taped to the lecture hall door saying she was ill and giving the week’s reading assignment. Jess had been unable to reach her. She had left several messages on the professor’s machine, but did not know until now whether she had received them.

The doctor looked into Sarah’s eyes with a penlight. She raised Sarah’s lids and lowered them, frowning; flashed the light on and off, on and off. She felt about Sarah’s skull and neck, ran her fingers carefully through the girl’s hair, searching for scars. “We’ll need to do some more scans,” she said. “MRI, EEG, CAT. I want to absolutely rule out a lesion. Are you sure she’s never had a serious fall? Some sort of disease or swelling in childhood, an infection?”

“We’ve tested for all that already, years ago,” Wasserman said. “Do you have a firm medical opinion?”

“Well,” the doctor said, “from what you’ve told me I’d say it was some sort of muscular contractions caused by damage to her temporal lobe. A lesion such as that would explain the schizophenic-type behavior, as well as the seizures. Though I can’t see anything right away that would bear that out… is this level of sedation really necessary?”

“She’s tried to harm herself before. And when I’ve tried to bring her out she’s begun to have the convulsions again. Right now this is the only way I’ve been able to keep her still.”

“All right. It will make testing her more difficult, but not impossible. I’d like to start with the EEG. We’ll look for an abnormal pattern, and then, if nothing shows up, I’d like to go to the GAT scan. Maybe we can uncover a pocket of fluid somewhere that’s causing a pressure.”

They set up an IV glucose drip to deliver a continuous stream or medication and keep her relaxed and docile. Jess requested and received permission to have a cot set up next to Sarah’s bed; for the next several days she left only to go to class, and to go home to shower and feed Otto. She saw Jeffrey during her first visit every morning and evening, when he came through to clean. He would smile at her in that soft, gentle way of his, and it made her feel safe to know he was nearby.

One night she sat in semidarkness. The smell of the fresh flowers she had brought filled the room, but it wasn’t enough to kill the sharp scent of disinfectant. The smell of hospitals. When Michael had been struck down she rode in the back of the ambulance with her mother, screaming through the streets while her brother’s tiny, crushed body lay strapped to the gurney. The EMTs had worked over him like machines, fast and furious and calculating. But she had known even then that it was too late; whatever had lived in him was gone. She had felt it go, like a soft breath of wind.

She reached out and took hold of Sarah’s hand. The flesh was cool and dry. “I know you can hear me. Please, try to come back I’ll do whatever it takes. Give me one more chance.”

She felt a gentle pressure. Sarah’s hand curled in hers. Her eyes were closed, and now her mouth turned downward in a gentle frown, as if she were puzzling with something.

The next morning Jess woke up to find Sarah looking at her from the bed. She didn’t move for a long moment, and then she rolled over and stood, brushing at her wrinkled clothes. “Look who’s here,” she said lightly, rubbing at her face. Her mouth tasted stale and sour. “I’m glad you could join us.”

“I heard you talking to me last night. I just didn’t want to wake up yet.” Sarah’s eyes were bright and clear. A moment later Jess saw the reason; her IV had come loose during the night. Fluid dripped out to stain the sheets.

“You were scared?”

“Just tired. I’m always tired after… you know.”

“Honey,” Jess said, moving to the edge of the bed and sitting down, “can you tell me what happened that day we went outside? Do you remember?”

“I don’t want to.”

“It’s important that you try.”

“No!”

“Okay. But you’re not alone. I want you to know that. Maybe I haven’t given you much reason to trust me yet, but I’m on your side.”

Sarah looked intently at her for a moment. “You were thinking about something sad last night.”

“I don’t remember anything like that.”

“It was about your brother.”

“How do you know about Michael?”

“He died a long time ago. I’m not him, you know. He’s not here anymore.”

Jess felt a chill hand against her heart. She couldn’t have overheard anything; she hadn’t been talking to anyone. How long had the IV been disconnected? An hour? All night?

“Well,” she said, “I guess I underestimated you, didn’t I? I suppose Dr. Wasserman knows something about it by now. You overheard him talking, maybe? You can learn a lot by eavesdropping.”

“I wasn’t eavesdropping. You told me the first time you came to visit.”

Jess sat down on the edge of the bed. “But how did you know I was thinking about him last night?”

“I just knew.” Sarah let her head sink back into the pillow and closed her eyes. Dark circles ringed their edges. “Sometimes these things about you come into my head. It’s like you’re speaking to me, only there’s no sound.”

Poor thing. Jess was overwhelmed with pity. She looked so young. You don’t deserve to be here, she thought. You deserve a family, someone who understands you.

They sat silently for a moment. Jess took her hand. Just as she thought Sarah had drifted off, she spoke in a sleepy voice, her eyes still closed. “Do you have a mom?”

“Sure. She lives in Florida, near the water. It’s where her parents live, so she can be close to them.”

“Do you see her a lot?”

“Not very much. Florida is a long way to go. And we don’t get along very well, Sarah.”

“Why not?”

“Well, we don’t agree on some things. There are parts of her I don’t like very much.”

“Like what?”

“She drinks a lot. And she’s very angry most of the time. Sometimes things happen where it’s nobody’s fault, but people just can’t accept it that way. And sometimes a person reminds you so much of someone or something else you’ve lost that whenever you’re with them, you get sad.”

“Like what happened with your brother?”

“Yes, exactly like that.”

“Oh. You’re lucky, though,” Sarah said. “I wish I knew my mother.”

“Sometimes parents aren’t what we’d like them to be. They might be too sick to take care of their children, or they might even be dangerous. In that case it’s better if they aren’t around.”

“My mother wanted to keep me with her. I know she did.”

“Do you remember her?”

“Sometimes I do. Sometimes I dream about her. Why did she leave me here? Why doesn’t she come get me?”

“Oh, honey. I’m sure she would if she could.”

“You don’t think she’s scared of me?”

“Why would she be scared of you? I’m not scared of you.”

“I just want to be like everyone else.”

“Being different can be a good thing. If everyone were the same, what a boring world it would be!”

Sarah was quiet for a minute. “Will you go get Connor? I want him to stay with me.”

“Sure I will.”

When she spoke again, her voice came drifting back from the depths of sleep: “I dream about her a lot….”

Jess waited until Sarah’s breathing deepened. She slowly disengaged her hand and stood up.

She was surprised to find herself shaking. Whether it was from anger, sadness, or something else, she couldn’t tell.

—24—

Shelley still wasn’t in class the next day. The guest lecturer told them she would be out for at least another week. After the session ended, Jess reached her by telephone. “I’m sorry to bother you at home, but it’s important.”

She thought she sensed a moment’s hesitation. “All right,” Shelley said. “I’m feeling a bit better today. It’s time we met again anyway. Why don’t you come here? It’s a nice day and the leaves are turning. We’ll sit out on the deck and have a drink.”

She jotted down the address. Charlie was using her car to go shopping in Natick, and so Jess took a taxi into Chestnut Hill. She knew the neighborhood, and was prepared for the quiet, tree-lined streets and stately homes tucked among the gentle hills; but she was nevertheless surprised when the taxi turned into the driveway of what was obviously an estate of considerable size. Iron gates swung open to admit them up a gently sweeping drive, and around tumbling juniper and rock displays to a sprawling Tudor mansion with perfectly manicured lawns and flower gardens that were just beginning to droop and curl in the crisp fall air.

She avoided the imposing front entrance as Shelley had instructed over the phone, instead following a flagstone path that led down a slight slope and around the side of the house. Several big hunks of rough-hewn granite formed steps that ended at a rear door.

Feeling out of place, she hesitated before ringing the bell, half expecting a somber-faced maid or English butler. But Shelley herself answered, looking as if she’d just splashed her face with cold water. Her flesh was puffy and very pale. “Come on in,” she said, “I was just making something to eat. Are you hungry?”

The house held a deep, expectant silence. They walked through a hallway lined with a patterned wine runner and hung with oil paintings, into a spacious, well-lighted kitchen. Stainless steel Viking appliances offset warm wood tones, and an oak-topped island in the middle of the room kept a sink and dishwasher.

But what held Jess’s attention was the contents of the full-length granite counter to the right of the cooktop: whole oat bread, a cube of white, fleshy tofu on a cutting block, a container of what looked like seaweed, and a plastic bottle full of greenish liquid.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Shelley said, busy inside the huge refrigerator, “how you managed to pay for school. It doesn’t sound like you had much help from your parents.”

“A full scholarship to the University of Connecticut. I waited tables there for spending money.”

“And now?”

“The man who taught me to fly airplanes died when I was a junior. He left me his plane, along with his wishes that it be sold and the proceeds set up as a scholarship fund.”

“You were close?”

“He was the only person I trusted as a child.”

On afternoons after school, when she knew her mother would be drinking, she would listen at the foot of the driveway for the sound of the plane. She would linger at the farm down the street, watching him do his graceful loops and spins, wishing she could be up there too. Sometimes, if she was lucky, he would land and take her up again.

“I hope I’m not being too personal. I just wondered.” Shelley had turned from the open refrigerator with a container of orange juice. She looked very frail in the yellow light, years older. Jess caught a glimpse of the swelling showing in her wrist, and what looked like a particularly nasty rash up the inside of her arm. Something clicked like tumblers falling into place inside her head, and she wondered how she hadn’t seen it before.

“It’s not important,” was all she said.

“As a matter of fact, it is. Evan and I were very concerned with who we picked to help with Sarah. It’s important for us to know what makes you tick. To be perfectly blunt.”

“She’s not a schizophrenic.”

“I know.” Shelley put the juice down on the counter, turning away from the sudden silence. “Actually, I’m not very hungry after all. Why don’t we go out and sit on the patio?”

They walked through a room dominated by a huge Steinway grand piano, decorated with an antique oriental rug in deep earth tones, a Chippendale walnut chest and china cabinet, a Tiffany clock, through French doors, and onto a stone deck that overlooked the lawn and gardens. The air was pleasant but cool, the distant trees peppered with orange and yellow leaves.

“That’s better. A little sun always lifts my mood.” Shelley settled into a cushioned deck chair. “Have a seat.”

Jess took a chair opposite. “What was all that on the counter?”

“Macrobiotics. It’s supposed to help clean out my system.” She waved her hand. “Diet, meditation. You try something new. I have good days and bad days. More lately of the latter, I’m afraid.”

“You’re sick, aren’t you? Is it cancer?”

“Acute lymphocytic leukemia. You know, I never thought I would go this way. It’s not the kind of exit you wish for when you’re a little girl. And I thought, if I could cleanse myself, if I eat well and pray… it sounds silly when I say it out loud.”

“Not at all.”

“I won’t go without a fight,” Shelley said. “I’ve been living with this for ten years now, and it doesn’t get any easier. My father was CEO for the largest steel company in the country. I’ve seen the best specialists in the world. But money can’t solve everything. You go into remission, you think you’ve beaten it, and then it comes back to bite you harder than ever.”

“I’m sorry.”

They sat in silence while a gentle breeze rustled the leaves at a distant edge of lawn, while flowers bobbed their multicolored heads. There had been a frost last night; when Jess woke up it had been written across the window, the crust of ice on the inside so that when she’d dragged a nail across the pane it had come back flaked with snow.

“I’ve tried to keep this as quiet as possible. I like my privacy. I assume you’ll respect my confidence.”

“Of course.”

“Anyway, enough of all that. You didn’t come to talk about my life. You’re here to talk about Sarah.” Shelley turned to look at her, and for a moment the pain was so naked, so obvious, Jess had to keep herself from flinching.

“I always knew it would come to this,” Shelley said. “That’s one reason I fought Evan so hard to bring you into our confidence. I needed someone to uncover everything, bring it into the light, and you were the perfect choice, for a number of reasons. But I hope you don’t blame me too much for letting you in slowly. You had to do it on your own terms, in your own way. Do you understand what I mean? When you’re faced with the fact that something you’ve believed all your life is a fiction, a silly superstition… the belief dies hard. It did for me.”

“I deserve to know the whole truth. You owe me that.”

“And you’ll get it.”

“If you knew that what her family said was true, why did you let Dr. Wasserman lock her up? Drug her? Treat her for a disability that didn’t exist?”

“It wasn’t that simple. Remember that there is a history of mental illness in her family, she did show many of the classic indications—”

“With all due respect, that’s bullshit. And you know it.”

Shelley stared out over gently rustling leaves. “There are other factors involved here. I truly wanted to help her. I thought maybe we could help each other. But there are things you can’t know, things that make it all but impossible. Especially now.”

“Then tell me.”

But Shelley was no longer listening. “I’ve spent ten years trying to forget that night, the night she was born. I was the first thing she saw, coming into this world.… Can you imagine what a doctor looks like to a child coming into the light for the first time? Hooded and gowned, mask covering her face? What a human being looks like to someone who has never seen one before? I know because she let me see. I saw through her eyes.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“I don’t know how she did it, how it happened. But I can’t ever forget that. It isn’t easy seeing yourself as a freak. Huge. Misshapen. All those features you look at in the mirror each day, turned into something alien. The next thing I remember was the firemen pulling me out, the hospital coming down, and I kept asking them where was the monster, where was that thing’"

They had gone all that way to New York, they had spoken with the family, they had listened to the stories that seemed too fantastic for belief, and never once had Shelley said a word about any of this. All Jess could think of now was Maria’s voice on the phone; Sarah, inside her head. Embrujado. Haunted.

Betrayal stung her like a slap to the face. “Sarah’s not the devil. She’s just a little girl.”

“Let’s assume she’s the product of some random genetic mutation. But do you think it’s a coincidence that my cancer began nearly ten years ago? I had no family history, no previous symptoms. I contracted what is almost exclusively a childhood disease, caused by changes in the cells of the bone marrow, changes that have been linked to high doses of radiation or exposure to toxins. Somehow she lashed out at me— I felt it—and she did something to me. She changed me. At the cellular level.

“When she was barely a minute old, I saw her tear a building apart. What do you think she’s capable of now?”

Jess had no idea what to say. During the taxi ride she had gone over and over in her head how she would present her case, and again and again she had come up against the same problem. Shelley was a pragmatist. She would never believe it.

And now here she was, saying that she believed every word. Worse, she had known about Sarah’s talents from the beginning.

“My God, listen to me,” Shelley said. “I’m a doctor, for God’s sake. But it happened. It happened.”

“I don’t know what she’s done to you, or what she’s capable of doing. I can’t answer to any of that. But we’re responsible for her, as a human being. She deserves a chance to live her life. I want to take her to see someone who has experience with this sort of thing, a parapsychologist—”

“Evan’s under a tremendous amount of pressure, more than you can imagine. He’ll never go for something like that. And he’ll never let you take her out of the hospital alone.”

“Then you’ll have to help me.”

“Impossible.”

“You brought me into this for a reason. You wanted me to reach her, and I have. I can’t believe you would stop now. Imagine if she were your child. She’s just a little girl, no matter what you say she’s capable of, what she’s done. She scared, and she’s alone. We owe her this. You owe her this.”

“I don’t owe her anything.”

“How can you say that? She’s spent most of her life behind the bars of that place. She’s been drugged and restrained to keep her docile. You put her there. You sentenced her to that prison. And if you don’t help me right now, if you don’t give me the chance to get her out, I will go to the authorities for child abuse charges. Then it will all be out in the open. This will be over, one way or the other.”

“It will kill her if you do it that way. You know that, don’t you? The media pressure, the people falling over themselves to get at her. She’ll be destroyed, just as if you’d held a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”

Jess had gained her feet. She found that she was breathing hard, and her throat felt tight. She fought to regain control of herself. “Then help me now,” she said. “Help me do what’s right for her.”

For a moment she thought Shelley wasn’t going to answer her at all. Various emotions passed across her face like ghosts. And then something seemed to move like a shudder through the professor’s body, and she nodded.

“This isn’t because of any threat of exposure. I’m beyond that now, understand? But you’re right, I did bring you into this for a reason. It’s time to force the issue, one way or the other. Evan’s gone too far with her and it has to end.

“I’ll call him to set up a private meeting off-premises for Sunday afternoon. They’ll be at minimum staff then. Do you know Jeffrey? I helped place him there, nearly ten years ago now. He’s an old patient of mine, in fact. He trusts me, and he’ll do what I say. He’ll help you get past the guard.”

She stood with effort, pain etched across her face. “I can’t go with you. I hope you understand. From then on, you’re on your own.”

—25—

“Okay, Sarah,” Patrick said. “We’re all friends here. I want you to try to relax.”

They were huddled around the table in the tiny observation room of the church basement: Patrick, Gee, Jess, Sarah, and Connor the stuffed bear. It hadn’t taken them long to get there. Jeffrey had seemed more than willing to cover for them, and he was good at it. In fact, he had done much more than that, getting Sarah upstairs and into the back of Charlie’s car without drawing suspicion, and providing a distraction for the man at the gate so that they could get out without anyone noticing a thing.

But Jess was already looking at her watch. She couldn’t be sure how long Wasserman would be gone, and what would she have accomplished if they were caught?

What she hadn’t counted on was Sarah’s resistance. The girl had been willing to go with her, eager to see the outside again. But when she explained what they were going to do, Sarah grew upset. No, Jess thought, it had been more than that; she had become frantic. It took everything Jess had to convince her that she would be all right, that these were friends who wanted to help her. Even now, she looked ready to bolt at any moment.

The empty worship hall hung like an expectant audience above their heads. Already she was regretting the decision to come. She was trying to reason, to find alternatives. Shelley had simply buckled under the terrible pressure of her disease, and was spending the rest of her life trying to deny the fact that her body had forsaken her. As for Sarah’s grandmother, she was crazy as a shit-house rat; and what about all those strange things Jess herself had witnessed? There were explanations, there had to be. Perfectly reasonable solutions. If only she could find them.

Yes, the whole thing was crazy. What could possibly happen now, here under the lights and the intensely scrutinizing eyes of Patrick and Gee? And how could she put Sarah through this? She had told the girl that they were her friends, but what did she really know about this group, other than what Charlie had told her? They were certainly odd, but whether it went further than that, she couldn’t tell.

She felt like a wrecking ball gathering speed and coming loose through its swing. This carelessness wasn’t like her. Damn it, you should have checked things out more carefully. You know better than that.

But there hadn’t been time. And it was too late now.

“We’re going to run a few tests, nothing serious, but I’m going to have a look at your brain waves, and we’ll record your heartbeat and blood pressure and respiration. There’s nothing that’s going to hurt, and nothing to be afraid of, okay?” Patrick fiddled with the contacts that had been taped to Sarah’s skull. He was very gentle with her, adjusting the cuff around her upper arm. “Can I talk to you for a moment, please?” He gestured Jess out into the larger chamber and closed the door.

“This isn’t going to work if you can’t calm her down,” he said, when they were out of earshot. “She can feel your nervousness. I can feel it. There’s something on your mind. Let’s get it out.”

“I was just wondering why, if this sort of psychic phenomena is as widespread and proven as you say, we all haven’t heard about it.”

Patrick looked at her oddly for a moment. His lighter-colored eye seemed to bore into her, searching for her private heart. She felt uncomfortable and crossed her arms. “You have, you just don’t know it. Let me tell you something. In 1985 the Army Research Institute was commissioned by Congress to study aspects of psychic phenomena. In their subsequent report they said that the data they had reviewed constituted genuine scientific anomalies for which no one had an adequate explanation. There was no scientific answer to what they had seen. And yet nobody listened. The report was buried, along with four others that said the same thing. In 1989, Radin and Ferrari at Princeton used meta-analysis to evaluate 148 different die-casting experiments performed during the last fifty years. They eliminated all except the most scientific and rigid of the group. What was left still proved the existence of psi with the odds against chance of more than a trillion to one.

“The truth is, the Defense Department has been conducting secret parapsychological experiments for years. Psi isn’t a belief anymore. It’s a proven fact. The data is there.”

“So what are you telling me? There’s some sort of conspiracy?”

“Absolutely.”

An intercom clicked into life. “Come on,” Gee said loudly from inside the observation room. His round, scruffy face peered through the window in the door. “Let’s get the show on the road. I gotta get home and watch The OC on Tivo. It’s a new episode, you know.”

Jess wondered for a moment how it might feel to get her hands around Gee’s skinny little neck.

“Calm yourself,” Patrick said. “We’re coming.” To her, more gently, he said, “We’ve got to get Sarah to relax, to enter a premeditative state more conducive to psi. She’s too tense, there’s something upsetting her. But you have her trust. We can’t do it without you. What have you got to lose?”

Jess held her breath, let it out slowly. “If she shows any signs of discomfort, seizure, anything at all, we stop. Immediately. All right?”

“You’re the boss.”

She had to admit, even before they began the serious testing (if such things as die-casting and random number generators could be called serious), that there was a feeling of heavy expectation in the air. Sarah seemed to sense her change of mood, as soon as they rejoined the others. Now she tugged at Jess’s hand, and whispered in her ear, “I don’t like it here.”

“Do you want to leave?”

“Do you?”

“Not just yet. Are you scared?”

“I don’t like tests. I don’t want anything bad to happen!”

“Then we’ll just make sure it doesn’t.”

“I had a dream last night,” Sarah said. “I was in a big room and I was really mad. And I was hurting people.”

“Recording,” Gee said, bent close to a nearby glowing screen. A machine nearby started spitting out jagged lines on paper. “I’m getting betas. She’s ready to roll.”

“All right,” Patrick said. He was standing in front of a bank of electrical devices with quivering needles and gauges. “Blood pressure slightly elevated, within normal parameters. Heartbeat coming down. Let go of her hand, Sarah, that’s right, you can hold Connor. We won’t bite you. I’m detecting slight magnetic or electrical field. Overheads, Gee.”

Gee turned a dimmer switch. The narrow room was transformed with a soothing wash of pink light.

“Can you tell me any more about your dream?”

“There were people coming after me and I was running, I was looking for my mother but I couldn’t find her, and I hid in a big room and they were going to catch me.… I was doing things. I couldn’t stop.”

“I had a dream like that too. My brother was in it. But then I woke up and I realized it was just a dream. And dreams can’t hurt you.”

“But I was so mad!”

“We all get angry sometimes. But anger is something you can control.”

“I don’t like tests,” she said again. Her fingers clutched at Jess’s wrist. “No needles?”

“No, honey,” Jess said. “I promise.”

Patrick had returned with a set of headphones to the chair where Sarah sat, and he picked up a pair of halved Ping-Pong balls and began to tape them carefully over her eyes. They had lined the tabletop with pillows in order to make her more comfortable, and now he helped her climb up on them and lie down. “This is called the Ganzfeld approach,” he said, into the strange pink light. “It’s simply a way of allowing the mind to concentrate by reducing the amount of sensory stimuli. We’ll turn on some music, and all I want you to do is relax, and try not to think about anything.”

To Jess, he said, “I was thinking about the contents of that file. The people who put that together were aware that something unusual was going on with her. You don’t take those kinds of tests, you don’t record that kind of data without a reason. Gee, tweak the frequencies, will you? I’m getting some feedback.”

“It’s not me,” Gee said. “Everything peachy here. Sure it isn’t coming from your head?”

“Very amusing,” Patrick said. “Pay attention, please.” To Jess, he said, “So what else is our good hospital director hiding from you? That would be my question. If I were asking the questions, I mean.”

“I guess it’s lucky for him you’re not.”

Patrick left the room briefly and touched a button on a CD player. They were surrounded by gentle piano and strings. “Sarah, you’re going to feel sleepy, you’re going to feel like you’re floating. I’m going to put these headphones on you to make that easier. Jess, why don’t you take a seat? Gee, what are we reading?”

Chopin rolled and swelled within the basement chambers. Sarah lay on her back with her eyes closed, holding Connor while Patrick and Gee tended to the machines, conversed quietly, and took notes. Finally Jess pulled Patrick aside. “This isn’t working.”

“We’re getting normal readings.”

“That’s just what I mean. Whenever something happened, something unusual, Sarah was in an extremely agitated state. I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere by hypnotizing her.”

“So you want to piss her off?” Gee said, coming over. “I could give it a shot.”

“We’re going to start running her through a series of escalating steps. This is just to allow her to reach an alpha plateau….”

“I dunno, though. She might melt my brain or something,” Gee was saying. “Maybe I’ll pass.”

“Hush,” Patrick said. “Why don’t you check her readings, Gee? You’re the best at it.” When Gee had turned back to the bank of machines, and a second printer buzzed into life, he said softly, “He knows this isn’t a joke. It’s just his way of blowing off steam.”

“I’m sure.”

“Really,” Patrick said. “If he hadn’t come here, he’d be working on his Ph.D. at Duke. We’re lucky to have him. But he’s never been much of a people person, an only child and all that. His parents were both physicists and they were gone a lot. I don’t think he had much of a social life.”

“I’ll be damned.”

Patrick turned to a small monitor where an animated flipping coin played out across the screen. “This is a random number generator, fully automatic data recording. It uses radioactive decay times to provide electronic spikes at several thousand times a second. Heads is one, tails is zero. The computer chooses randomly, with the chance of one or zero being equal over time.

“We’re going to ask her to influence the pattern. I’d expect hits in the range of fifty-three to fifty-five percent over time, if things go well.”

“That doesn’t seem terribly significant.”

“The odds against it are billions to one. Now, I’d have done a blood test but I’m afraid I’d frighten her. Do you know what she’s been given in the past to control her mood?”

“Sodium amytal, mostly.”

“Sodium amytal, hmmm. Rhine used that exact drug to practically eliminate psi effects during his tests at Duke. Your director knows exactly what he’s doing.”

“We’re getting alphas, but they’re slipping,” Gee said. “You better hurry. She’s gonna fall asleep.”

Patrick took a deep breath. “I want you to get her up and bring her out here. Gently, now, you can take off the Ping-Pong balls and blood pressure monitor but don’t loosen the contacts, they’ll reach. Don’t make her nervous.”

They sat down facing the random number generator and Patrick refastened the blood pressure cuff, Sarah trailing wires from her skull. She was still clutching Connor, but her eyes kept closing and she seemed deeply relaxed, as if in a trance. Patrick explained to her that the coin flipping across the screen was a computer image that corresponded to the numbers one and zero, and that she must try to make the image come up heads. She must try to think of the number one, or the image on the coin. His voice was slow and deep and soothing. Jess could not tell whether Sarah heard him or not.

They sat back and all watched the screen. The coin would bounce, flip, then bounce, flip again; after a while it seemed that tails was coming up more frequently. Two in a row. Three. Six.

Finally a long, straight line of tails had flashed across the screen. Sarah frowned. She sat up a bit straighter in her chair and stared at the flipping coin.

“I’m getting betas,” Gee said. “No, wait, hold on, something’s happening here—we’ve got alphas with very high peaks—it’s like Mt. Everest over here.”

“She’s fighting herself,” Patrick said, voice quiet and tight with excitement. “You see that, Gee? It’s a reverse pattern.”

“I see it,” Gee said. His voice had lost all traces of sarcasm as he collected a steady stream of spitting paper printout. “You gotta look at these betas, I’ve never…”

“It happens sometimes,” Patrick was saying, almost to himself, “people fight their own minds and do the opposite. If she’s afraid of what she might do, if she’s trying not to make it happen—”

“Whoa,” Gee said. “Hold on. Jesus. She’s off the chart.”

Sarah was sweating lightly, her eyes wide open now, her little brow furrowed, mouth tight. A steady line of tails streamed across the computer screen.

The screen shivered; blinked. The temperature in the room had dropped. Jess felt the hairs on her arms rise up to meet it. Once again she was confronted with the familiar feeling of electricity, of a charge like an invisible presence in the room. The atmosphere had subtly changed; she held her breath and watched the air shimmer before her eyes.

The computer monitor began to smoke. A wisp curled like a gentle ghost-tongue around the plastic housing and drifted away; then the smoke grew black and thick.

“Dear Christ Almighty,” Patrick said. “Gee, get the extinguisher. Gee.”

Ronald Gee stood frozen as sparks jumped within the depths of the machine. The screen flickered and blinked again and went dark. Jess reached for Sarah’s arm. Her fingers brushed the girl’s skin and the effect was like walking across a thick carpet. She gasped. Every hair on her head prickled as she felt the charge enter her and wait, coiled.

Sarah trembled, clenched, as flames licked at the monitor and the smell of melting plastic filled the room. The temperature kept dropping. The room was frigid. Someone called out and the words were lost within the buzzing that rose up like the flight of a thousand bees.

“Let it go!” Jess shouted at her. “Into me! Just let it go!”

Sarah turned to look blankly at her and for a moment fear rose up and an oily sickness turned Jess’s stomach, and then the girl looked away and a cry like a splitting inside forced itself from her lips as a series of small cracks and then explosions came in quick succession from across the room.

Sarah slumped; then her body jerked once as Jess gathered the girl into her arms and felt the coiled charge jump from her hands and dissipate into the air.

“Oh, baby, sweetheart, it’s okay, it’s going to be all right…” she whispered into the girl’s muffled sobs, her body tingling, muscles suddenly weak. She stroked Sarah’s hair, smoothed the sweat from her brow, pulled the electrodes from her skin as her own tears spilled out over her cheeks. Sarah curled into her lap like a small child and rocked, shaking. Jess clutched her bony ribs, rocked her, rocked. “It’s okay now, I’m here….”

Jess heard the hiss of the fire extinguisher and from somewhere far away she watched Patrick spraying the monitor’s smoking husk with white foam. The air was thick with a choking, acrid smoke.

Only then did she glance around at the place where the explosions had come from, and saw the rows of specimen bottles shattered across the shelves, their contents lying among the dripping ruin of glass and bottle tops like dead things, evidence at the scene of a crime.

—26—

She was in the empty church, standing with her arms wrapped around herself for warmth, as the afternoon sun trickled through stained glass and painted the polished floor in reds and yellows beneath her feet. She had wrapped Sarah in a blanket and laid her down in the backseat of Charlie’s car, had smoothed the fine black hairs away from Sarah’s forehead until the girl’s breathing deepened and she slept.

Her heart broke for the girl. Who had been there to protect her, all these years? Who had been there to hold her when the darkness crept in, to explain that whatever affliction God had given her, whatever this curse was (and yes, Jess thought, it was a curse), it didn’t destroy her humanity?

Her words, whispered before she knew what she was saying: “I’m here for you, Sarah. Everything’s going to be all right. I promise. “

She stood now among the shattered remains of her confidence, struggling to find something whole, something she could hold on to and use. But everything needed to be rethought, reevaluated. The world was different now, not on the surface but underneath, where it really mattered. For some reason, her thoughts kept going back to Michael’s death; had she wanted it to happen? Had there been a part of her, however small, that had wanted it all to end, had she reached out at that moment and pushed him away when she should have been pulling him in close?

A voice spoke from somewhere like a chittering devil: You were happy when he died, weren’t you? Happy to have the burden relieved?

Her helpless gaze fell on the statue of Christ, hanging cold and lifeless in the shadows of the altar. A half-remembered children’s prayer rose unbidden to her lips, a prayer for forgiveness, for absolution. For strength. What sort of God would make a world like this? she wondered. Where children were given terrible burdens to carry, left alone, abused, even killed?

Everything had happened so fast. It baffled her. When had she become so attached to this girl? Surely she felt sorry for Sarah, felt as if she should do all she could to help. But when had these feelings blossomed into real responsibility, into something even more?

A noise came from the direction of the door. Footsteps offered into silence. A moment later Patrick stepped up next to her, smelling sharply of smoke and chemicals and light sweat. “She’s still asleep. I suppose you have someplace to take her?”

“She needs to get back to the hospital before she’s missed.”

“Are you sure—”

“What else can I do? Another hour or two, they’ll arrest me for kidnapping. I can’t do anyone any good from jail.”

“You’re questioning yourself.”

“Of course I am!”

“I want you to know that everything you’re doing for that girl is honorable. You’re the only one who’s really tried to help her. You’re the only friend she has right now.” Patrick’s excitement was palpable. But he was fighting hard to hold it in, probably for her benefit. He slipped an arm around her shoulders. The movement did not seem inappropriate.

For a moment she allowed herself to lean into him and regain her balance. She looked up into his face, felt him lean in as well, his lips brush hers. Then he pulled away.

“I apologize,” he said, a look very close to shock on his face. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“It’s all right. I—”

He was shaking his head. “No. That was crazy. I’m taking advantage of an emotional situation. It’s just that I’ve witnessed something I’ve waited my whole life to see. It’s overwhelming. I’m sorry.”

He turned and walked down the empty church aisle, pacing, a ball of nervous energy. She watched him go, not sure what to think of anything. Had she wanted that to happen? Had she been sending out some kind of signal?

“She’s at the right age,” he said finally, turning back. “Puberty often triggers psychic phenomena. We call it the poltergeist effect. But once she’s older, these phenomena may very likely grow easier to control. They may even disappear.” He studied the light and the patterns falling from stained glass. “I’m sorry for my part in this. I got carried away, I didn’t think about how it might affect her. She’s scared to death of it, I know. But you’ve got to understand what this means to me. She’s revolutionary. She’s one of a kind, all that you told me and more.”

“Just don’t you try to exploit her, Patrick. I won’t allow it.”

“You misunderstand me.” He turned back, and she searched his eyes for honesty. “The important thing now is to teach her. She’s going to face skepticism, fear, mistrust. She’s got to learn to hold on to her anger. She has to learn that psi isn’t a curse, it isn’t something to fight, to be ashamed of. What she’s been given is a gift, a blessed, extraordinary gift.”

“You’re forgetting the fact that she’s been involuntarily committed to an asylum and they aren’t about to let her just walk away.”

“They haven’t been playing straight with you. They know exactly what they’re doing, and I’m willing to bet there are more people involved in this than you think. Look at the tests they’ve run, the missing information. Look at her file. They’re going to try to push her. They may just push her too far.”

“What do you suggest we do?”

“She could disappear tomorrow. I know people who could make it happen. There’s a network, you understand? People just like us, who want to help, who could teach her how to live with this gift of hers. More of them than you think. Anywhere in the country, a new name, a new beginning. She’d be in good hands, capable hands.”

“You’re asking me to break the law. And what’s the difference between you and the people I’m trying to get her away from? Do you honestly expect me to believe you won’t end up pushing her too far too?”

She was struck by the intensity in his eyes. Patrick reached into a pocket of his coat. He showed her what he held in his hand; a shapeless lump of blackened plastic and metal. “It’s the number generator’s CPU. We tested the circuits before you came; there was nothing wrong with the machine. She melted it down to nothing. Do you see that? Do you understand what this means?”

“Electricity,” Jess murmured. She took the lump from him and held it in her hands; it was still slightly warm. “That’s what it feels like. Some kind of electrical charge.”

“I don’t know what it is. But I want to find out. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. There have been cases, once or twice a century, of people with a talent like hers. Uri Geller was one, though even his abilities were never truly proved beyond the shadow of doubt. But we all have the possibility inside us, I’m sure of it. It’s just a matter of learning how to unlock the right doors.”

“Why are you doing this, Patrick? What’s made you search these things out, what drives you?” Do you understand, I have to know before I can possibly trust you?

“You don’t want to hear that story. It’s really nothing special.”

“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have asked.”

“All right. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Patrick gestured at the empty church, at the rows of pews, as if it would make her see. “My father was a minister. I grew up in churches, spent more time in them than I did at home. But my father loved God more than he did his children. At least that was the way it felt. I was always trying to impress him, make him notice me. But nothing worked.

“Then one day, I was about eight years old, I ran away from home. I didn’t get very far at first, it wasn’t a real attempt, but I remember getting lost in the woods behind our house. Those woods were deep. It got late and I remember being very frightened by the dark. And finally I remember someone speaking to me. It was my father. He said, come home, son, come this way. And I just followed his voice until I saw the house again.

“When I got to the front steps my father opened the door. He didn’t say a word, he just held out his arms. There had been people out looking for me, but my father had just stayed behind. He said he wanted to be there to guide me home.

“After that, my father and I had a special bond. I understood him and he understood me. And I never forgot that night. You don’t forget something like that.”

“Where’s your father now?”

“He died when I was seventeen. Diabetic shock. They put him in the hospital overnight, said he’d be out the next day. But I knew he was never coming back. I knew. Have you ever felt anything like that? Not a hunch, or an educated guess. When the moment comes you’re sure, you’ve never been so sure of anything your entire life. It becomes a part of you, a certainty.”

“I don’t know.” Tiredly. Yes. She thought of childhood dreams, headlights, and the scream of car’s tires, of nights waking in a choking sweat. Memories surfaced like creatures from the deep. Maybe I have. Maybe I just don’t want to admit it.

“We’re holding in our hands the key to a new kind of life, Jess. A higher life on earth. More spiritual, more peaceful, more connected. Mind over matter. Imagine the possibilities. I truly believe that it’s just within our reach.”

“Maybe so. But you’re wrong about Sarah’s being able to learn to control it. She’s barely able to hang on for the ride. And if you push her, if you try to dissect her like some kind of lab specimen, you’ll be no better than anyone else.”

The door slammed open at the other end of the church. “Two hundred beats per minute,” Gee announced, trailing paper like white fluttering birds. “Blood pressure through the roof. Her EEG was off the charts. Temperature dropped thirteen degrees, enough heat energy to lift a truck. Big one too, one of those semis with the eighteen wheels.”

“Good Lord,” Patrick whispered almost reverently. “And she was still on sodium amytal. Imagine what might have happened if she were clean?”

“I’m imagining it,” Jess said grimly. “Is that supposed to make me feel better, or worse?”

“Give me the word,” he said with urgency, facing her, holding her wrist gently between two fingers, as if he was afraid to touch her. “Just tell me and I’ll have it all planned by tomorrow. She’ll be free to live her life as normally as possible, I promise you.”

“I can’t do that. I have to go through the proper channels. It wouldn’t be fair to her. It wouldn’t be fair to anyone involved.”

Patrick looked at her for a beat. He nodded, and did not look too disappointed. Did he know something she did not? Or had he just anticipated her response?

“All right. Here’s my home number. Just tell me you’ll think about it. It’s a standing offer. For now, take her back, go home and get some sleep. You look like you could use it.”

—27—

She tried; oh, how she tried.

But back in her little apartment that evening, with the October wind whispering to get in and Otto pacing restless by the door, Jess could not think of sleep. Not now, not here, maybe not ever, with the feeling of Patrick’s kiss still haunting her lips. She didn’t know what to think of that, of him, of anything. When she closed her eyes the walls pressed in close and she couldn’t breathe, could not find herself among the voices clamoring to be heard.

Finally she set up a blank canvas on the easel at the window, mixed her paints at the sink, turning yellows into reds, swirling and dipping, smoothing, finding her place. A rough bristle will do, she thought, tonight is calling for broad, bold strokes. It was necessary to clear her head. She wished briefly she could be up in the night sky, above the clouds and under the full moon. But this late the airport would be empty, planes tied down and covered for the night like slumbering metal beasts. And she knew from experience that the need was only her desire to escape, something she had to fight against, especially now.

Her mind was free to drift back in time. She had been left alone more and more often after Michael’s death, as her mother searched for answers at the bottom of a bottle. An orphan of alcoholism. It made her more self-sufficient, but also took from her a portion of her childhood. She became the adult in a family of two. At times her mother would not come home at all, and she would have to fend for herself. It made her grow up too fast, kept her from forming a solid foundation upon which to build her life, left her with a shaken self-confidence, left her as an overachiever, a person who pushed herself to the dropping point and then pushed some more. If she had to run a mile for gym class, she would run two; if she needed a B on a test to get by, she would get an A. There were no markers for her performance, no limits set. So she set her own, always trying to prove something. That she was better than this life.

Understanding your weaknesses is the difference between a person who is led by life and a person who leads, Jess told herself. She bathed the canvas in a base of gray, a touch of lighter orange near the top to simulate the color of a coming dawn, as the 2:00 a.m. train rattled by down below. More paint, thicker strokes. White and dark playing off each other, creating shadows and light, texture and depth. The night she had returned from college her freshman year, Christmas Eve, filled with the hope of a new beginning; her mother on the phone, I’ve started going to meetings, I’m getting with the program. The tree was up and decorated for the first time in years. The living room was clean and bright and empty. Waiting on the sofa, angry, then worried, then finally hours later her mother at the door, slurring her words and stumbling, the sound of a man’s voice. Get the fuck out of here, my daughter’s home….

So she knew. The point was, she knew something of how Sarah felt. Unable to trust, to ever feel truly secure. Sarah felt like the world was out to get her. And why shouldn’t she? Jess searched for that common thread and clutched at it. She knew it was important to have a bond with the person you were trying to understand. You had to walk in her shoes.

And yet the differences were immense. At least she had been able to escape, to choose another life, to make her own decisions. Sarah had been a prisoner from the moment she could think. Her frustrations and her anger had built over years of barred windows and institutional walls.

And finally those emotions were manifesting themselves physically. The walls were coming down. Even now, after all she had seen, Jess found it hard to believe. But the proof was before her eyes, in shattered lightbulbs and a rain of stones and a piece of electronic equipment melted into oblivion; even Connor the bear, singed where Sarah had clutched him. She thought of the case of Esther Cox and her poltergeist, pots and pans flying off the walls, water boiling in pails, beds shaking and thumping up and down. Before she had believed it to be a clear case of psychotic delusion; now she believed otherwise. And what about Uri Geller, world-famous metal bender extraordinaire, who had been continuously denounced as a fraud and a cheat by the scientific establishment? Did she believe now that he too, along with countless hundreds of others, was the real thing?

Her painting was too dark. A storm was coming. Frowning, she dabbed white paint, lightening the clouds and searching for moonlight. The angles of shadow were wrong, the moon was not overhead, but behind…

The proof was in more than just those things too, she thought as she dabbed paint and searched for an angle of imaginary moonshine. Little more than a month ago Sarah had been a catatonic invalid, and now she spoke, thought, imagined, dreamed. You had something to do with that, Jess told herself, and from that thought arose pride, an unreasoning hope, and a long-dormant faith. It was one of those thoughts that came easily in the stillness of early morning. Where one impossibility exists, why not two? Hell, why not all of them? Why couldn’t Patrick be right in insisting that they stood on the edge of a new era of mankind?

It was a lot of weight to put on the shoulders of a single little girl. Jess put down her brush, clenched and unclenched her hands, remembering the feeling of the charge inside her, how it had coiled in her belly and then leapt from her palms like a living thing. Was that how such a power felt? Like a muscle tensed and quivering for release?

Jess knew she had found herself again. She had put her feet back firmly on the ground. She could go on, she could finish this thing now without second-guessing herself. But there were so many questions left unanswered. What were Wasserman’s real motives? And Professor Shelley. What was her role in all of this? There was something more behind Shelley’s confession that she needed to get out.

Give me the word. She’ll be free, I promise you.

No, Patrick, she thought, I won’t do that. I won’t entrust Sarah’s life to another set of strangers that take her and disappear. But there were organizations that would listen to her case. The state licensing board, mental health charter, even the American Medical Association, if it came to that.

For a moment the feeling thrilled her, filled her with hope and a sense of coming struggle. She would have to go up against Wasserman again. She would have to be very careful.

But Shelley was still Sarah’s court-appointed guardian, and that carried a lot of weight. And Shelley would have to do something when the truth was out in the open.

She would have no choice but to listen now.

—28—

Three men and a woman stood in a small room filled with electronic equipment and leather bucket chairs. The room resembled the cockpit of a submarine with a viewing window that opened up over a vast, black space that appeared as deep as an ocean trench.

At the moment, all eyes were on one of the flat-screen monitors bolted to the wall, where a flurry of activity had reached its end. The sound was low, but the quality was such that they had no trouble hearing everything.

On the screen, several technicians moved into view, eclipsing the figure on the floor save for one pale hand and part of an arm. They watched in silence as the hand flopped once, like a fish out of water, and lay still.

“That’s better,” Philippa Cruz murmured, flipping through the pages of her chart and jotting down more notes. “She’s like a light when the {rower’s cut. I think we’ve got something, right there. Run it back and play it again.”

The monitor blinked gray static before the camera picked up the little girl again. She was surrounded by a fine, white mist that made it difficult to see. At first this had been a very unsettling thing to witness. They knew now that it was caused by the rapid acceleration of subatomic particles and the wicking of moisture and heat from the air, which in turn caused an intense drop in temperature and condensation to form in the surrounding space.

Simple physics, Cruz thought. Just like anything else. There are no miracles, only science.

When discussing the phenomenon of the psi gene and its effects with others, Cruz had found it helpful to present it in terms of conventional versus microwave heat. Most people are at least somewhat familiar with how a microwave oven works when heating food. Conventional heating requires contact by an object with another warmer one, like a pan on a hot stove. Energy is passed between the two in the form of heat. Microwave heating does not require direct contact, but accomplishes much the same thing.

To put it another way, Cruz thought, to push someone, most people would have to reach out their hand and make physical contact. A person with an active psi gene could accomplish the same thing through a process that utilized wave energy.

There was much more to it, of course, so much that they still didn’t understand. But they were getting closer. Blue light leaped in staggering jagged flashes across the screen as the scene played out once more. Cruz glanced at several other monitors displaying heart rate and brain wave activity at the time the video had been filmed. Right here, they had administered the inhibitor; see how quickly it had taken effect. She counted less than thirty seconds. It was remarkable.

She made more notes. “Have you been taking blood samples at precisely the right time?” she asked. “You know how important this is. Within three minutes before and after the event, and no later.”

Evan Wasserman bobbed his head. He had combed his thinning hair back and used a light oil to calm the wisps that tended to float in a halo about his scalp. “It’s all in the latest report.” He handed her a file.

What a strange bird, she thought. He was so anxious today, as if anticipating something tremendously important. She hadn’t seen him in person in over a month; she hadn’t had to be so personally involved in the testing until recently, which was fine. She preferred the lab setting. But now that they were so close to a breakthrough, she needed to be on-site.

Her boss’s dependence on this man was a mystery to her. At one point, Wasserman’s influence over the girl and his ability to persuade her to cooperate had made him useful to them, but now that they had a viable drug candidate his usefulness was mostly gone, and he had to know it.

He was so jumpy she thought perhaps he was finally breaking down. She had always supposed it would be a matter of time, but with the added pressure they were all under, there was actually a reason for it.

She thought back to the dinner meeting at the heliport. It had gone spectacularly well. After viewing the second video clip, the two men had fallen all over themselves to express their interest. They were efficient brokers and already Helix had received partnership inquiries from three other companies, and an outright buyout offer from one.

Clinical trials were expensive; prostituting themselves was a necessary evil when they needed to come up with another five hundred million. To get that kind of money they would have to produce more concrete results, of course, and eventually demonstrate the new compound’s effectiveness in another subject.

But from the looks of this latest video, they were well on their way to something truly special.

“Hmmm…” Cruz flipped through pages. She noted something else that excited her a great deal. “Expression is tight as a drum. PSI-526 blood levels jumped over three hundred percent by half an hour after dosing, and then we dialed it back down to almost nothing. That’s very good.”

“Talk dirty to me, my dear,” Steven Berger said, smiling up at her from his seat on one of the bucket chairs. “‘Tight as a drum.’ I love it.” His thick head of white hair was very carefully groomed today, and he had an extra bounce in his step. He had insisted on coming here, even though he didn’t have much to offer in terms of expertise. He simply wanted to be a witness to their future. Here was a man who was motivated by greed, and had no problem letting everyone know it. And yet he held a certain poetic sense of the moment in history.

Berger certainly had a reason to be giddy with their recent success, even if he didn’t understand the technical details. Structure-based drug design was always a slow process; much of the work done under the microscope and through computer-assisted modeling, and potential molecules had to be tested, tweaked, and tested again. It was necessary to identify and validate the drug target using functional genomics, chemical genetics, and proteomics, and it required an encyclopedic knowledge of biology, chemistry, and genetics.

But the potential payoff was huge. The purpose was to throw out the old hit-or-miss way of drug discovery in favor of the intelligent and informed design of synthetics. If you studied the structure of a protein carefully enough, you could create a molecule that bound very tightly and selectively to its target, thus creating more potent and effective results.

Designing a drug that would tightly control the psi gene’s expression was essential, of course. It was no good to just turn the gene on and let it go like a runaway train. They had already seen what could happen without an effective “off” switch, and the accident and the deaths that resulted from it had forced them to shut down testing for nearly a year. The next attempt had yielded a compound that, along with the other drugs she had received as a precautionary measure, had caused a nearly complete catatonic state. The new compound had brought her out of it, and so far it looked like a winner.

But this was only the first step, and Cruz knew it. The psi gene was carried naturally by one in approximately five hundred thousand people in the world, as far as they had been able to estimate. There were markers to help identify them, but it was still a very small pool. To create something truly revolutionary, they needed to take the next leap forward. They needed to be able to deliver that gene into the general population.

Cruz stepped closer to the observation window. With the lights off inside the adjoining room, she could see nothing clearly now except her reflection. But she knew what lay beyond the specially coated glass. It was, in essence, their safety valve, constructed shortly after the fire incident. Wave energy interacts with various forms of matter that absorbs it, reflects it, or passes it through. This was why they had lined the testing room with a material that first absorbed that energy and then served to disperse it.

The whole thing was perfectly contained. And they had several other rooms just like it, along with better equipment and more space, at a facility in Alabama. Empty now, and waiting for them to arrive.

“You want dirty talk, imagine this,” she said, studying the mirror images of her own ice-blue eyes, her nose, the rather sensual curve of her lips. “A stripped adeno-associated virus is loaded with the cloned psi gene and a transcription factor. This is injected into anyone you like; a construction worker, scientist, doctor, member of the U.S. Marine Corps, perhaps. The virus acts as a gene delivery vehicle into muscle cells, where it waits in a dormant state, until we decide to ‘turn it on.’ We do this using a small-molecule drug that activates the transcription factor, and which can be taken orally. The level of gene expression depends on the amount of the small-molecule drug administered, giving us complete control over the result.”

“I don’t know exactly what you just said, but I liked it.” Berger sat up in his chair. “Evan, did you get all of that?”

Cruz turned to Wasserman, who had paled visibly. “Exogenously regulated expression of a transferred gene,” he said. “Can you really do it?”

“U Penn researchers did it years ago with erythropoietin,” Cruz said. “They demonstrated sustained and precisely controlled expression in rhesus monkeys over a period of months, with only one injection to deliver the gene. The regulating drug was in oral form, a simple pill, dial it up, dial it down. Easy as pie.”

“Incredible,” Wasserman said. “But you can’t do that in this case. You know what it will mean. A member of the Marine Corps? You’re talking about a weapon.” He turned to Berger with his hands out and palms up in a gesture of supplication. “Steven, you can’t be serious.”

“Why not? Every single person in the world would kill to have an ability like this. The military applications alone are limitless. And we’ll be the only ones able to give it to them. At a fairly hefty price, of course.”

“No, no, no.” Wasserman moaned. He shook his head. Beads of sweat had broken out across his brow. He looked ill. “Listen to me. You haven’t been here when it’s been let loose, you haven’t seen all of what she can do. You haven’t seen her lose control.”

“We’ve seen the tapes.”

“That’s not the same!” Wasserman shouted. The sound was deafening in the cramped space. “I was there, I saw the damage firsthand. I saw those men die, I heard their skin crackling, for God’s sake. What if that kind of power fell into the wrong hands? It could make the atom bomb look like a firecracker.”

“Hold on now,” Berger said. He was still smiling, trying to placate. “The system we’re talking about is very tightly regulated, that’s the beauty of it—”

“I won’t let you do it,” Wasserman said. “This has gone far enough. I can’t let… my own—feelings—” He stopped. “I found her,” he said. “I earned her trust the first time around. Don’t forget that.”

“And without our help, you would have been moldering away in an adjunct position at the local community college by now,” Cruz said. “A place like this, there’s a lot of overhead. We’ve bankrolled you for too long, let you have your way, working everything from your own location. It’s a wonder anything’s been accomplished at all.”

“All right, Phillipa.” Berger waved his hand. “Let’s not get carried away here….”

A knock came at the door. Wasserman’s eye twitched frantically. He swiped at a trickle of sweat rolling down his cheek. “Come in,” he said.

“Sorry to interrupt,” the big orderly who stuck his head in said. “But we’ve spotted the woman you asked about coming in at the gate.”

Wasserman blinked. “She’s here now?”

“May already be inside.”

“All right. Thank you. Please take her directly to my office to wait for me.”

The orderly left. All three of them stood in silence, considering each other, each realizing something irrevocable had happened and not sure where to go next.

“This conversation isn’t over,” Wasserman said finally. “I have to see to something important. I’ll be right back.”

After the door closed, Cruz and Berger exchanged a look. It had happened a bit more abruptly than they might have liked, Cruz thought, but it was time now. In fact, it was past due. They had made all the progress they could with her here, and Wasserman was a liability.

Alabama was waiting. Now all they had to do was tie up a few loose ends.

“Would you like to make the call, or shall I?” Berger said.

—29—

The guard at the gatehouse was not one of the regulars, but Jess had seen him once or twice before. He waved her ahead in Charlie’s car with barely a glance at her temporary pass, and a smile that was a little too friendly. She stopped and backed up. “Excuse me. Is Dr. Wasserman around?”

“Don’t know that he’s arrived as yet, but I just got on duty ten minutes ago. Say, I know you, I never forget a face like that. You wouldn’t want to grab a drink with me when I get off shift, say, around five o’clock?”

She smiled vaguely. “I’ve got a class.”

“No kidding? That late, huh? You in school? I would’ve thought you were another of them specialists. People coming and going, I gotta open the gate every goddamn three minutes—”

“Sorry, I’m sort of in a hurry.”

“Some other time, then. Be seeing you.”

Good Christ Almighty. She parked in a space behind the hospital and went around to the front. No point in letting Wasserman know she was here too quickly.

But inside the doors she noticed an unusual silence. The playroom was empty. Her footsteps were too loud in the deserted hallway.

At the elevator, something made her pause. There were four floors in this building. The third, she knew, held bed-rooms for the children. But what was above them? She stepped in and pressed the fourth-floor button, but nothing happened. She noticed a slot for a key next to the button. Curious. As she was jamming the button hard with her thumb, an orderly she didn’t recognize hurried around the corner and stuck his arm in the door to keep it open. “You there! The doctor wants to see you in his office as soon as possible.”

She thought of protesting. The orderly was big, heavy through the shoulders. He had her by the elbow. “Come on, Miss Chambers. Right this way.”

He knew my name, she thought. They were looking for her. Why? Did Wasserman know she had taken Sarah out of the facility? Of course he knows. If not, it could only be a matter of time; though Jeffrey had done his best to get them out without being seen, cameras could have caught something, someone would have talked.

The orderly steered her down the hall into Wasserman’s office and closed the door. She found herself alone with the memory of him. Desk swept bare, coat hanging in the corner, a lingering scent of shoe polish and Old Spice aftershave. For a moment she saw him at home in a spotless and slightly outdated apartment, decorated to hide the absence of a woman’s touch. Wasserman was bright and proud and completely socially inept. She wondered briefly if he had trouble finding dates and thought his awful aftershave would help.

All right, okay, let’s put this time to use.

She cracked open the door and checked the hallway; empty. The file cabinets were locked. She found the key in the center drawer of his desk. She found the patient files kept alphabetically by name and flipped through them. Her fingers paused for a moment on Brigham, Dennis, and she thought rather fondly of the poor, sad boy in his baseball hat and white socks; and then she moved on to H.

Sarah’s file seemed no fatter than before. Jess scanned it quickly and saw nothing that hadn’t been there the first time. She replaced the file and tried the other drawers on his desk. Locked. A wire end of a barrette would do the trick. You’re getting in pretty deep. But judging from the behavior of that orderly out there, things couldn’t get much worse. This might be her only chance.

She found a barrette in her shoulder bag, crouched, and slipped the lock in twenty seconds flat. Inside the top left drawer was an assortment of pens and pencils, a tape recorder, three pads of legal paper, a Snickers bar wrapper, a half-empty bottle of bourbon, and in the back, a handgun, curled like a blackly oiled snake. She checked it; loaded. What the hell is that for?

No time now. In the bottom drawer were more file folders done up in plastic slipcases and rubber bands. One of them was stamped project sv-alpha. Sarah Voorsanger? Jess took it out and carefully undid the rubber bands, slid it away from static-free plastic. Here were the missing PET scans from a number of intensive tests using radioactive dye to study glucose metabolism and regional cerebral blood flow. Several areas were circled in red marker and labeled.

PET scans were expensive, and the use of radioactive tracers in children was unusual. There were scans from more than fifteen separate tests. She slipped one into her bag.

There was more: the missing family history, transcripts from interviews with Cristina and Ed Voorsanger, a medical diagnosis on Annie Voorsanger …

And then this, the last. A series of charts that seemed to track medication levels. But they were nothing she recognized.

The sound of a doorknob made her skin prickle. She slid the drawer closed but did not have time to lock it.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Wasserman stood red-faced in the doorway, wearing a white starched shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He was sweating profusely. “Get away from my desk. Do they teach snooping in graduate school, Miss Chambers?”

“Excuse me. I dropped my barrette—”

“You’re out of line. I know you took Sarah off the premises yesterday afternoon. That was a very stupid thing to do. It went against my explicit orders, it violated countless number of state and federal laws, and it put my patient in danger.”

“Dr. Wasserman, surely you know that something un-usual is going on with her. It’s not ethical to continue drug therapy in her present condition. Anyone can see that she’s perfectly lucid and capable and she’s being held against her will. Now if you’ll just listen to what I have to say—”

“Don’t you preach ethics to me. What sort of treatment I choose to administer does not concern you any longer. You’re through here as of this minute.”

Jess felt her control slipping a little. “Why didn’t you show me her complete file, Doctor? Is there something you don’t want me to see?”

She was learning a great deal about Evan Wasserman now, and what she saw didn’t suit him. Anger made his eyes red and piggish and his underarms itch. She could tell by the way his shoulders twitched.

He was moving now, around the desk, close enough to her so that she could smell his breath. “This experiment is over. I will see that you are reprimanded and that your school records show this as a permanent black mark. You’re a fool, Miss Chambers, if you believe the things others are preaching. Sarah Voorsanger is a very sick young woman and her delusions are barely being held in check. I’m sure she would be better served if you were out of her life.”

Bullshit. “If you would just think this through, I’m sure we can—”

“I’ve done enough thinking. Give me your temporary staff pass.”

“I forgot it at home,” she lied. “The guard out front knew who I was.”

Some emotion surfaced briefly in his face and he seemed to fight it down. For a moment she wondered if he would frisk her. “I want you to turn it in to Jean Shelley as soon as you get back to school. She’ll have some words for you, I’m sure. Good-bye, Miss Chambers.”

She refused to give him the satisfaction of watching her slink out with her tail between her legs. “What are you afraid of, Doctor? That I’ve found out the truth?”

“The truth about what, for God’s sake?”

“Sarah, and what you’ve done to her. You had to know I’d see something sooner or later. Why did you allow me in here? There has to be some reason.”

“I’m not going to listen to another word of this nonsense.” Wasserman marched over to the intercom on his desk and pressed the button. “Andre? Come in here please, and escort Miss Chambers to her car.”

“I can find my own way out,” she said. “Thank you.”

As she walked toward the half-open door she caught movement in the hall. A white-haired man in a navy blue suit; not an orderly, or a patient. Too well dressed. He smelled of money. A family member? She glanced back at Wasserman and caught him white-faced and sweating, evasive, like a man exposed in a lie.

He closed the door behind her. She heard a lock click into place.

In the hallway, the man had disappeared. She hurried to the corner, but then the big orderly was coming toward her again.

“Excuse me, Andre, isn’t it? This is embarrassing. I was wondering, that man in the blue suit? I met him last week but I can’t remember his name.”

“Out,” the orderly said. “Right now.”

He followed her all the way to the parking lot, folded his arms, watched her from the walkway. She got into the car and sat for a moment in silence, and resisted the childish urge to pound her fists against the steering wheel. Sarah was still inside somewhere, alone and probably scared to death, and there was no way to reach her.

Jess thought about their return trip from Patrick’s church, poor Sarah awake now and staring absently out at a crimson wash of autumn leaves, poor, lonely Sarah; something terrible is going to happen. I know it.

Nothing’s going to happen to you.

I don’t want to go back. Am I ever going to get out?

We’re going to find a better place for you. I promise.

If my mom can’t take care of me, I want to live with you. Will you please help me?

A stiff breeze lifted brittle leaves from the corners of the parking lot and sent them tumbling end over end. She could hear the dry hiss of their passage. It sounded like the whispers of a thousand ghostly voices. She took a deep breath and let it out. Goddammit, Wasserman, this isn’t over. I swear it isn’t. She put one hand on the PET scan inside her bag. Maybe, just maybe, she had something.

Thank God for Charlie’s car. The orderly was still standing and watching her as she left the parking lot. She resisted the urge to give him the finger, and waved genially instead. If he was aware of the sarcasm, he didn’t show it.

—30—

Jess Chambers drove Charlie’s car too fast through crowded city streets. She cursed at stoplights and tested the brakes on more than one occasion, earning the glares of her fellow motorists. But all that went unnoticed.

She was thinking of the changes in Dr. Evan Wasserman since she had first met him, only weeks before: the breakdown in his control, the cracks appearing along his formerly smooth surface. What are you hiding, Wasserman? You’re scared to death of her, aren’t you?

But that wasn’t it exactly. This was what really bothered her, his discomfort aimed not entirely at her but somewhere. She turned onto Washington Street and drove through Brook-line, moving away from traffic, using this time to calm herself again and think. The man in the blue suit, Wasserman’s face when he caught a glimpse…

Important pieces were missing. She needed answers, and there was only one other place she might find them.

This time when she rang the doorbell there was nobody to answer the door. She went around the back of the house, stepping carefully past pruned juniper hedges and pine bark mulch. The smell of freshly watered soil touched her nostrils, and with it came a feeling of calm, of peace. She flashed back to fields of rustling corn, the smell of turned earth, of September rainstorms. It washed away the stink of the city.

Professor Jean Shelley sat in front of a garden table on the grass. On the ground was a large, silver bowl and a folded towel. She kept her back and neck rigid under a cotton sweater, watching birds flit to the feeder. Jess stood for a moment transfixed. From this angle, she could see clearly how swollen Shelley’s wrists and ankles were, how worn she looked. Death comes gradually and then all at once, like headlights around a corner at night.

Shelley turned her ghostly face slightly but did not look at her. “I thought you might come back. I’m sorry I didn’t answer the door but I’m not feeling well enough at the moment.”

“You should have someone here with you.”

“That’s thoughtful, but I prefer to be alone.”

“I won’t stay long.”

“Then please, find a seat.” Jess took a chair from the deck and set it on the grass. “Good, good. Now how did your little trip turn out?”

Jess told her about the afternoon at Patrick’s church and the events immediately following: the meltdown in the computer, her recent visit with Wasserman. “I spoke with him this morning, actually,” Shelley said, when she had finished. “He told me you were no longer welcome at the hospital. He wanted me to speak to the school administrative office and have you expelled.”

“Did you?”

“Of course not. I don’t think you’ve done anything I wouldn’t have done, in your shoes, and I feel guilty enough for my part in this. But you’ve been missing classes. I know your grades are starting to slip. You need to be careful not to let this consume you.”

Jess opened her shoulder bag. She took out the PET scan and handed it over. “It’s from Sarah’s private file,” she said. “The one I didn’t get a chance to see. Can you tell me what it means?”

Shelley looked at the scan for a long moment, and put it down on the table between them, where it sat like an unwanted visitor. She seemed to be struggling with something. “Let it go,” she said. “It’s out of your hands now. Go back to school, take back your life. Be young.”

“I can’t do that, Professor.”

They were silent for a moment. Jess burned with impatience, but let it simmer under the surface, waiting for the right time.

“Let me ask you a question,” Shelley said. “Forgive me for being blunt, but I’ve been thinking about this since you came to visit before. That man who taught you to fly. Did he try to… touch you? Do something inappropriate?”

Jess was surprised by the question. She considered what to say. “Yes. Once he did.”

“And you stopped him?”

“I thought it was disgusting, it made me angry. I was hurt. I was old enough to know about what he wanted to do.”

“I wondered. His gift of the plane seemed like an offering. Only once, though? He never tried again?”

“No. He seemed genuinely sorry, like he had slipped. But we never talked about it and I didn’t go see him much after that. Things were different between us. Something had changed.”

Shelley seemed satisfied with the answer. She nodded. “Sometimes we take too much responsibility for others, don’t we? We assume that they’ll act as we do, with decency and respect. And when they don’t we take it upon ourselves, we take in their sins and we try to erase them from memory in any way we can.”

“I guess so. But it isn’t as simple as all that.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Professor Shelley, I saw a man today with Dr. Wasserman, he was well dressed, white hair, short and stocky. I hadn’t seen him before. Do you know what he might have been doing at the hospital?”

Shelley didn’t seem to hear her. When she spoke it was with distance, and tinged with a dull anger. “I don’t think I’ll be going back to school,” she said. “I’ve been feeling very nauseated lately and my strength is gone. I just don’t see the value—”

“Professor, please. You’d said before I’d have the truth. Tell me what’s going on.”

“Do you know anything about acute lymphocytic leukemia? It’s a brutal disease. Your bone marrow makes too many immature white blood cells. These cells never develop into lymphocytes, as they should. Here are the symptoms. First you feel a shortness of breath, exhaustion. Your skin is too pale. This leads to bruises and cuts that do not heal. Finally, there are infections, as the dwindling number of white blood cells can no longer fight off germs.

“First-line treatment is chemotherapy. Next is a bone narrow transplant. I tried both. There is no third option.”

They sat in silence for a moment as a breeze rippled through the flower heads and rustled the trees. A smattering of red and orange leaves drifted down to settle upon the ground.

“Evan has always suffered from a lack of self-worth. It’s important you understand that. His father had run up a tremendous debt and he was determined to show that he could overcome it. In trying to save the business, Evan accepted a very generous sum of money to help study Sarah and catalog the results. But he couldn’t get her to cooperate. There was… an accident. Two men died in a fire. Sarah felt responsible. She withdrew from him, fought him; he was frightened to death of her and what might happen if she lost control again. And he was beginning to feel the pressure. I finally convinced him that if we brought in someone who could relate to Sarah in a slightly less professional manner, connect to her as a friend and mentor, we could use that to our advantage.”

“You have some sort of hold over him, don’t you?”

“We have a history. I met him in grad school, there was something briefly between us, he thought it was more. He’s still in love with me, even after all these years. I suppose I use it, just like anything else.”

“What did you think would happen when I found out the truth?”

“That you would have won her trust by then, and that I might win yours in the end. That’s it.”

Jess watched a pigeon strutting across the grass, looking out of place here. Two people, dead. It made better sense to her now. Wasserman’s evasive manner, his slow disintegration, the fear in his eyes. But something important was still missing. “Where did the money come from that kept the facility afloat? Who is the man in the blue suit?”

“Does it matter? People are interested in her for the same reasons they have always been interested in things like this. Power. They don’t care where it comes from or why. They just want it.”

Bitterness tasted sour at the back of Jess’s throat and she swallowed it away. “You lied to me from the beginning.”

Shelley shook her head. “I never really lied, Jess. I just didn’t tell you all of it. As I’ve said before, you wouldn’t have believed me.”

“You should have given me the chance.”

“Maybe so. But it’s water under the bridge, isn’t it?”

“You’re still her legal guardian, you can move her. All you need to do is petition child and welfare services—”

“You haven’t been listening to me. It’s out of our hands now.”

“But goddammit, why?”

“I’m tired,” Shelley said. “There are too many others involved now. Sometimes you have to bow your head and admit defeat. Maybe you don’t believe that. But you’re young.”

“What are they going to do to her? They’re going to keep pushing her until she breaks, aren’t they?”

“Now, don’t you jump to conclusions. I’m sure she’ll be treated gently enough. The Wasserman Facility is still a li-censed institution, Evan won’t want to risk—”

“So you’re not going to help me,” Jess said. Anger made her cheeks feel hot and her skin prickle. “Goddamn you. You’re a coward,”

“I want you to understand something, all right? I’m not an evil person. I’m not uncaring. I did what I could for her, and what I thought was best for all of us. But I don’t have much time now, and I’ve got to make a choice. I have to choose how to live the last of my days. I can’t be bothered with this anymore.”

They sat in the silence of the afternoon. Jess rose to her feet and blinked back tears of frustration. Betrayal stung like acid. Shelley had been a mentor, someone she had trusted. No way. You’re not going to see me break down. She turned to go.

“There’s one other thing you’ll want to know,” Shelley said, stopping her in her tracks. “Remember I told you that there were signs of abuse on Sarah? Hitting little kids wasn’t the only thing Ed Voorsanger was doing at that house. When Evan ran some genetic tests we found out that Ed was Sarah’s natural father. He never admitted it and his wife wouldn’t hear a word. Of course Annie never talked about it, never talked about the rapes, the sexual and physical abuse she must have been suffering from her father for years. She couldn’t. But those tests proved it to be true.

“After that was when things really began. Suddenly Sarah became very interesting to a lot of people. It’s in her genes, Jess, some sort of mutation, and something like that can be isolated. It can be enhanced. Replicated.”

Jess turned away again. She walked in stunned silence across the spotless stretch of lawn, toward manicured shrubs and pine mulch, into the shadows of the house. She tried to keep her mind from dwelling on the images that had sprung unbidden into her head.

“You’re fighting something you can’t possibly win,” Shelley called after her. “You can’t turn back the clock. Even if you saved her, do you really think it would stop whatever pain you feel? Do you think it would silence those voices in your head?”

“Good-bye, Professor Shelley.” The words felt strange in Jess’s mouth. “God be with you.”

—31—

As she left Shelley’s drive, trees looming over the car like threatening hands, Jess calmed herself enough to think. She thought about how the psychiatric system might deal with a child that was out of control. Foster homes, juvenile halls, outpatient facilities couldn’t hold her; this child was not only violent but utterly beyond the realm of anything humanity had ever seen, or could understand. Where would they put a child like that?

Buried, she thought, they would bury her where no one would ever come looking. In a maximum-security mental ward, for instance. Psychiatry preferred to bare its soul behind closed doors. But then why bring in anyone from the outside? Why risk the exposure?

An answer to that had already been given. Wasserman’s desperate attempt to save the hospital had led to his involvement with some very bad people, and he had done every-thing possible to reach Sarah again and pull her out of wherever she had retreated to in her mind.

But that wasn’t all of it. Jess still couldn’t rationalize Wasserman taking such a huge gamble. He had to know the chances were good that she would find out what he was doing and expose him. There was something else happening here, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

She thought of Annie and the abuses suffered at her father’s hands, the years of silence and the birth of an unwanted child. A genetic mutation. Annie carried it, and her father did too; mixing those genes again had produced something far beyond the capabilities of either of them.

Was that it? A twisting of genes, a double helix bent in upon itself, triggering the awakening of something long dormant and nearly forgotten?

Perhaps. But thinking of it in that way reduced Sarah to a lab experiment. She was more than that, much more.

I could petition for a hearing through Child and Welfare. I could call the police. But by the time anything was done, if anyone listened to her at all, she had a feeling Sarah would be gone. One way or another.

As she crossed the bridge and pulled into traffic on Cambridge Street, she glanced in the rearview. A dark blue Crown Victoria ran like a sleek, smooth shark three cars back. She had seen the same car ten minutes earlier. She watched as it turned into traffic and merged into her lane. Two men in the front seat, looked like maybe one more in back. Difficult to tell.

She turned left onto Harvard Avenue as the light blinked to yellow. The Crown Victoria swung across the intersection and through the red, causing others to slam their brakes, honk, and gesture out their windows. Boston drivers. She was worried now, but not much. Yet.

She debated whether to swing into the liquor store lot and see if the Crown followed, but decided to keep going. Traffic was always heavy here, with cars parked along both sides of the street and little stores lining the sidewalks. Thrift shops and unfinished wooden furniture stores attracted the college crowd. People darted and bobbed and weaved in and out of doorways. Nobody was paying any attention to the cars in the street.

She had shopped here herself, buying a lamp and rug and three prints for her walls recently. She had even bought used clothes once from the place on the corner when money was particularly tight, the smell of mothballs and dust mixing with her general discomfort at wearing other people’s things.

Okay, the Crown i still there. What to do?

Two cars back. She was being paranoid. Let’s just see. When it was her turn, she stopped dead at the green light on Commonwealth. The car behind her began to blow its horn. She heard someone shouting out the window. Hold on, girl, easy. She drummed her fingers on the wheel. People were suddenly paying attention. A couple stared from the doorway of the McDonald’s. The man smiled at the crazy woman sitting in the middle of the street, with the line of cars behind her all honking now.

The light turned yellow, then red. She floored the gas. Charlie’s car shot out across the T-tracks and into oncoming traffic. Brakes squealed. She swerved right onto Commonwealth and missed clipping the bumper of an oil truck by inches. More horns and shouting; she ignored them, corrected the car into the proper lane, and risked a glance back.

The Crown had tried to swerve around the cars in front of it by bouncing over the right-hand sidewalk, but it was blocked by the flow of pedestrians. The man in the passenger seat threw his door open and yelled at them to move, move out of the way now. He wore a white shirt and a tie and something black and threatening was clipped to his belt.

Jess turned back to the road and kept her foot on the gas. She swung the wheel hard, swerving around cars that were moving much more slowly. A light up ahead, but it was green, thank God, and she swept around a car in the left-turn lane and through the intersection.

Here the street turned steep, running up the crest of the hill and down the other side. A glance in the rearview told her that the Crown had not yet managed to catch up. She swung a hard left onto Washington, shuddered over the T-tracks, and flew past the Whole Foods Market. Another green light, someone looking down on me right now, yes, sir.

She forced herself to slow as she approached the playground and the Washington Square intersection. Red light this time. A short distance down Beacon on her left was her graduate school, and her apartment. She could not go home now, she did not know what might be waiting for her there. Another glance in the rearview told her that the Crown was nowhere in sight.

The library had an underground garage. When she reached it she pulled down into the lower reaches and switched off the engine. Metal ticked in silence. She heard the echo of a car door slam, the sound of footsteps moving away from her. A man’s voice speaking to someone else in unconcerned tones, both of them drifting away. She sat and caught her breath.

Inside the library she made her way back down into the stacks to a far corner of the lower level. A quick scan told her the area was deserted. She pulled out her cell phone.

A woman answered on the third ring. Jess could hear another voice in the background, a child’s high, clear, breathless laughter. She closed her eyes and leaned against the cool wood of the study cubicle.

“This is Patrick”

“It’s Jess Chambers.”

Suddenly his voice was attentive, crisp. “Hold on.” The phone, muffled by a hand; muttered voices, then silence. “Tell me.”

“I found something in Wasserman’s desk, a bunch of PET scans of Sarah’s brain. They’ve circled what looks like an area of heightened activity in the parietal lobe. Does that make any sense to you?”

“Sure, sure it does. The parietal lobe deals with the sensations of touch and pain, as well as a feeling of where the body is in space and what surrounds it. Sensations in general, so that if a person has damage to the parietal lobe they lose the ability to feel.”

“Would it follow that a person with an enhanced parietal lobe would have increased sensation? Perhaps a heightened sense altogether?”

“We don’t know that. But it sounds to me like your hospital director sure thinks so.”

“It’s not just him. There are others involved in this.” She told him about the man in the blue suit, everything Shelley had said just minutes earlier. “I think they’re following me, Patrick. I saw a car full of men and I managed to lose them, but they were after me from Shelley’s house. She’s sick, but she’s lucid. I think she was telling the truth. I don’t know what we’re up against here. Patrick, what do we do now? What the hell do we do?”

“I’ve done a little digging,” Patrick said. “Called in some favors. I want you to understand that this is coming through several sources, and I have no way to know if it’s accurate.”

“What is it?”

“A little background first. Just bear with me here. The human genome was entirely sequenced a few years back by the NIH and a private company called Celera Genomics. Scientists found that the genome contains less than thirty thousand genes. The function of the majority of these genes is unknown. Only a fraction of the human DNA sequence codes for a protein. The rest is dormant, and some people think it is vestigial or may have some future use.”

“English, please, Patrick.”

“There are rumors of genetic experiments by a pharmaceutical firm,” he said. “My sources say they’ve been working on isolating a particular protein produced by one of these normally dormant genes. It’s supposed to produce a psi effect, Jess. And these same sources tell me they’re testing it right now.”

“You think this has to do with Sarah?”

“I think you’ve gotten yourself tangled up in the middle of something very bad. Put it this way. The men in that car following you weren’t looking to deliver a Publishers Clearing House check.”

“Why would they do this to her?”

“Think about it. If they were able to isolate this protein, they might be able to reproduce the same effects in anyone. Imagine the possibilities here. Scientists able to wake up a long-dormant portion of the human DNA strand and induce psi capabilities whenever and wherever they choose. The military, hell, the business implications are enormous. It’s cutting-edge genetics, Jess. Billions of dollars are at stake.’’

“This is crazy. She’s just a little girl, Patrick.”

“I know. I know she is.”

“I won’t let them hurt her.”

“I talked to my people and they’re ready to go,” Patrick said. “She can disappear, I swear. Just say the word.”

Jess smelled the dust of old books and coffee and she drifted through shades of memory. The window glass here was gray and sticky, like the glass of a phone booth, smeared with children’s fingerprints. Eating a chocolate bar while her mother talked on the phone, talked forever on the phone, hurry up, Mama, we’re late for school.

Professor Shelley’s face drifted into her mind. Her mother’s face too. Jess felt the sting of betrayal once again. She opened her eyes, allowed herself a moment to grieve for something lost, a connection grasped at and missed. A fleeting recognition of a turning point, and a decision that had already been made.

There might still be time, before they figured out what she was planning to do. But she had to move, and move fast.

“Let’s get her out of there, Patrick. Get her the fuck out. Let’s give her a chance.”

—32—

Professor Jean Shelley sat upright in a straight-backed cane chair in front of the table and the window that looked out upon her garden. Jess Chambers was gone. The house was empty.

She tried to soothe herself enough to eat from the bowl of miso soup that steamed in front of her. It was no longer easy to do, this simple ritual of spoon to mouth that so many took for granted. She looked down at the swirl of soup and the fleshy gray squares floating in it and the smell nauseated her. She thought of hundreds of thousands eating Big Macs in their cars and dribbling mayonnaise down their fronts and wanted to scream.

Outside she watched a hummingbird flit to the feeder, tucking its long slender beak into an opening and darting away again. She had suction-cupped the feeder to the glass because she liked to watch them dance during the evenings, their nervous vibration of wings translated into a calming, fluid movement by the shadows of the trees in her backyard. Now that she could no longer play the piano without cramps in her hands, this was what beauty she had left.

A bit of a breeze made the shadows dance along in silent partnership, as beyond in the dusky light the multicolored flowers ducked and bobbed their heads. Soon they would be gone. It was fall, and they were dying too.

Next to her chair on the floor was the silver bowl. She kept it close to her because sometimes when the sickness rose up inside she couldn’t make it to the bathroom in time. Lately there was blood. She kept a folded towel next to it that she could use to wipe her mouth, though she had not yet been able to do it today. The towel held a delicate lace pattern along its edge. Seemed like such a waste, dirtying a perfectly good towel on something so useless.

From where she sat she could see the dust beginning to gather on things—the tabletop, the picture frames on the shelf above the telephone, the windowpanes. For a long time she had fought the dust and then she had given up when the pain and dizziness had become too great. She had someone who would come in for a couple of hours a day to help her cook, but she would not hire a cleaning service to come in and vacuum and dust for her. In her mind that was a luxury reserved for single old men. It would be too much for her pride to bear.

She thought again, as she had countless times the past few months: / will not give up. I will not let it win.

Outside, the heads of the flowers dipped and turned like an audience at a play. The breeze was light and the air was warm. She thought about getting up and opening a window, but the idea of it overwhelmed her and she remained in her seat. Best to just sit and enjoy until she had gathered her strength for what was to come.

After twenty minutes she was ready to begin. She stood up, her swollen joints protesting loudly. She left the bowl of miso untouched, and walked slowly under the lovely carved-wood molding into the sitting room. She had cleared this room of all but a series of yoga mats in various bright colors and a low long table against the far wall, where she kept towels and bottled water at room temperature.

This was going to be a difficult session, she knew. But it was necessary to prepare. There would not be any more chances to do so, and she needed to be clear and focused for what lay ahead. She ground her molars together against the pain as she worked herself into the lotus position on a mat in the center of the room, and faced the bank of windows overlooking the patio.

The sun gently touched her face. She let the warmth wash over her, soothing her breathing until it became slow and deep. She folded her hands against her lap, her mind an empty shell, focused inward on her heartbeat. In a state of deep meditation she could slow that beat to less than fifty times per minute.

Tibetan Buddhism concerns itself with the power of the mind over the physical body. The belief is that everyone is linked, and everyone has the ability to influence the world through thought. A great Buddhist master had once said, “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.” This was a goal Shelley had struggled to understand. She had studied the Dalai Lama’s teachings very carefully. She had visited Tibet three separate times. She had hiked through mountain peaks in pursuit of enlightenment, of spiritual peace. But this riddle remained beyond her reach.

She worked in silence, stretching and loosening her body, calming her heart and mind. A sheen of sweat clung to her skin. She did not like the smell of sickness that came from it. She should not be noticing the smell at all, if she were successful in clearing her thoughts. But the impurities must work their way through her pores.

She imagined a war happening at the cellular level, white blood cells maturing as they were supposed to do, and moving as one to attack the blast cells and drive them out. This visualization was the important part. This was truly mind over matter.

When first diagnosed she had visited countless doctors, believing in the miracle of Western medicine. Many of them had been friends or colleagues. She had subjected herself to countless prodding and pokes and treatments. Nothing had worked; the leukemia had always returned, more aggressively than before. Finally she had begun to look elsewhere to find some kind of hope.

Physician, heal thyself. She had thought that true devotion would lead to inner peace, a journey that would lead to the loss of self that brought the elusive ten thousand things. She would learn to focus her mind into an efficient killing machine, eradicating the mutating cells as they swept through her blood. Through all this, she thought, she would be able to lose her fear. After all, what did anyone have to fear if the only truth was what the mind created? And the mind had the power to change everything?

But the fear was still there. In point of fact, it had grown, slowly eating her up inside like the cancer that ate away at her guts. It distracted her, kept her from focusing on what she must do. Perhaps, she thought, she was not truly devoted after all.

So she turned to something else.

From the very beginning she had tried to understand the truths of Lamaism in a different light. Everyone is linked, and everyone has the ability to influence the world through thought. She had come to believe this to be literally true. She had no doubt about what had happened to her. That night so many years ago she had felt something alien worm its way inside her body. Some kind of energy had been released that had forever altered her genetic makeup.

First chemotherapy had failed. Then the bone marrow transplant wouldn’t take. Spirituality alone hadn’t solved anything. As far and as wide as she had looked, there was no other option. So Jean Shelley had created one.

They still didn’t know exactly how Sarah did it, but effect had something to do with electromagnetic energy. It seemed that whatever had caused her leukemia could cure it as well. At least, that had been Shelley’s hope. And in fact, Sarah’s strange power had put her into remission twice. Each time the cancer had returned, but already she had lived for six years longer than even the most optimistic doctors had predicted.

Both she and Evan had tried very hard to teach Sarah the importance of making amends for your mistakes. They had made real progress at first, until the fire. After that, they had lost her. She had come to hate all doctors, anyone who had anything to do with her life in the facility. In her mind, they had betrayed her. She had to be sedated every time Shelley was in the room, and then she had retreated deep inside herself.

Jean Shelley’s death was coming. She had one last chance, but it was all getting so complicated now. She had worked so very hard to play everything just right, teasing Jess Chambers along, letting Evan think what he needed to think to be useful to her. What she had done could not be undone, all the long, complex plans she had put into motion, and everything was spiraling toward an end. It wouldn’t be long before this last chance had passed beyond her reach.

The bell rang. The next scene in the last act. She closed her eyes and gathered her thoughts for a moment. She would have to give a command performance now, and she needed every ounce of energy she had left.

Evan Wasserman forced his way through the door before she had swung it fully open. He looked like a madman, tie pulled down and to the side, hair flying wild about his egg-shaped skull, eye twitching uncontrollably. “They want to introduce this into the general population,” he said in a rush. “They want to sell it like some kind of treatment for… for… high cholesterol levels or something. They don’t know what they’re getting into, Jean. It’s gone too far, do you understand? Too far!”

He clutched at her like a drowning man would cling to driftwood, his face close to hers so that she could smell the sour stink of his breath. “Oh God, Jean, what are we going to do? We’ve got to shut it down somehow. But your treatment— look at you, you’re so pale, God, I’m so sorry…”

“Hush, now,” she said. She forced a smile, reached up to touch his face with gentle fingers. “It’s all right. We’ve done what we could do, and it’s gotten away from us. But I’ll be okay.”

“Oh no,” he moaned. He buried his slick, sweaty face in her neck, and she managed to remain still, putting her hand around the back of his head and holding him to her. His voice was muffled by her blouse. “No, you won’t, not if we can’t get her to cooperate. We were so close to a breakthrough, I, I can’t lose you.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I love you, I’m sorry, but it’s true, I always have. I know you don’t want to hear it.”

“I know you do, Evan,” Shelley said. “I love you too.” And then he was trying to kiss her with his slimy, wormlike lips, wet with the salt of his tears, and it took every ounce of her self-control not to pull away from the horrible smell and taste of him.

Finally she got him to the couch, and poured a shot glass of brandy. His hands were shaking too much to hold it. “Here,” she said, holding it up for him to drink. “That’s better. Now, tell me it again, from the beginning.”

She listened as he described his conversation with Cruz and Berger. Then he told her about Jess Chambers’s visit.

“We should never have let her become involved,” he said. “Now she’s sniffing around and she’s got her wind up. It’s only a matter of time until she puts it all together. She’ll go to the state, the papers, she’ll expose us both.”

“Jess served her purpose,” Shelley said. “Sarah opened up again, didn’t she? Just as we’d hoped.”

“But now Helix is taking over. They’re going to cut me out completely, I can feel it coming. They don’t know what they’re doing with her.” Wasserman shook his head. “I just wanted to save the hospital,” he said. “And I wanted to save your life. I never thought it would go this far.”

“Perhaps they can control it, as they say.”

“There’s no controlling what she has,” Wasserman said. “Now they want to offer the ability to anyone with money enough to buy it. God forbid it gets into the hands of madmen. Dictators? Terrorists? Imagine someone like Hussein with that kind of power!”

Shelley stood up and went to the window, hugging her arms across her chest. Wait just long enough to add the proper tremor. She turned to find him staring at her. “What do you think we should do?”

“We have to stop them, and stop her,” he whispered. “The way we always talked about. Wipe this obscenity off the face of the earth. Destroy every sample, every record. It has to end right here.”

Shelley soothed him, agreed to all he said, let him caress and touch her. Then, after he’d gone, she went back out on the patio.

The air had turned cooler in the late afternoon, and a breeze picked up stray leaves and whirled them across the lawn. She watched the orange and red colors dancing through the deepening shadows, and sensed an air of neglect, as if the grass were just half an inch too long, the shrubs grown out and getting leggy. A dead branch had come down near the edge of the wooded patch on the southeast corner.

The phone was ringing. Shelley stumbled back inside and fumbled for it on the counter, picked up on the fourth chirp.

“Our men lost her,” Berger said. “She pulled a stunt at a light, there were witnesses. We didn’t have any secondary support, it was only tagged as a shadow. If we knew that she was on to us—”

For the first time that day, real fear washed over Jean Shelley. This was not part of the carefully designed plan. Up to this point, everything had gone perfectly with Jess Chambers. Shelley had planted the seeds of doubt, challenged her to let it all go, knowing full well she would not. Jess knew just enough to be suitably angry, but not enough to blow things wide open. Wasserman was the last piece of the puzzle, and his undoing would serve as the perfect final distraction for the firestorm that would come.

This would not do. She clutched the phone in a white-knuckled hand, took a deep breath, and let it out. “She wouldn’t have suspected a tail. She must have seen you following her and put it together.”

“These men are good.”

“Not good enough, damn it!”

Berger sighed. “She can’t have gone far. We have someone watching her place, the school.”

“Then find her. Don’t bring her in, just find her and don’t lose her again.”

“We’re working on it. But Philippa and I agree, we can’t wait any longer or this is all going to come down on our heads. The director is a liability, he’s at the breaking point and I can’t predict what he’ll do. We’ve put too much pressure on him, and he didn’t like bringing Chambers into this in the first place. / didn’t like it either, to be honest.”

“It was necessary for personal reasons. Everything we know confirms our decision. She has the family history with her brother, DNA testing was a match, and the results speak for themselves. They’ve made the connection and it’s strong enough to bear weight.”

“That’s your call. We have what we want.”

“Good. There are other endings available to us, if Jess doesn’t work out. You understand what I mean?”

“They’ll arrive by helicopter shortly.”

“Good. When you go in, you’ve got to be careful. You know what you’re up against. The girl is agitated and we don’t have her completely contained, whatever you and Cruz say about this new drug. When you move, tell Evan he’s done and that we’re pulling his funding.”

“He won’t like that.”

“Of course he won’t like it. That’s the point. If he’s riled up, it will look worse for him. If you can break him, go ahead. He’s got to be the fall guy for this.”

Dr. Jean Shelley looked out her window. The hummingbirds were back, hovering just beyond the glass. The sight soothed her. Then why did she feel unsettled, as if there were something she should understand, something she should remember, but could not?

It was probably the sickness at work in her brain. She could feel it coursing through her veins, carrying the killer cells to the farthest points in her body. Microscopic invaders sent to undo her from within. She did not have long now, and she was burning alive.

Where would Jess Chambers go?

When she really thought about it, the answer seemed so obvious she couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to her until now.

“You know what she’ll do,” Shelley said into the phone. The voice on the other end seemed like a million miles away. “She won’t wait. She’ll come back for the girl.”

“Then we’ll spot her.”

This was it; one way or another, this was the end of a very long road.

“That’s what we want. It’s time now. Everyone has to be on alert. Put the wheels in motion.”

And please, don’t let me down.