The Frequency

by Terry Kitto

  ‘Do you see them?’ Rasha said.

  ‘Often,’ Will said. ‘But only when we want to. You’ve got the receptor intensifying the signals, remember? They scare you, don’t they? Have you ever walked past a dog and they bark and growl? They mean no harm, it’s just a defence mechanism. Imprints are no different.’

  The incomplete boy pointed to the back of the cavern. In the darkness behind Will loomed the silhouette of a window, its glass broken. Rasha’s stomach knotted.

  ‘I’m sorry, Will,’ she said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Rasha,’ Sam interrupted. ‘Is it there? The shadow imprint?’

  The miners’ empty eye sockets demanded her attention. They ached for life and full bodies.

  Chink, chink. A couple of miners hunched over a third whose arm was trapped beneath the fallen piston. They drew their pickaxes, raised them into the air, and hacked at his shoulder. The man screamed through a gag of torn cloth. Blood pooled around them and rose to her knees, her shoulders. Amidst the chaos was another man with dark features who strangled a woman with a slither of blue twine. The blood drowned them all, and it flooded into Rasha’s mouth.

  ‘Turn if off!’ she screamed. ‘Turn it off!’

  At the flick of a switch, the energy dissipated. The miners and their blood dissolved until only Rasha and the witnesses remained.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered. Her face was wet. She wiped it – just tears. ‘I couldn’t, I – ’

  ‘So you found nothing?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Sam,’ Will and Trish warned in unison.

  ‘No, I did,’ Rasha said. ‘Does the name Michael mean anything to anyone?’

  Sam and Will, their faces infinitely paler than before, turned to look at Trish, but she’d already fled the cavern.

  The Frequency will be the death of me, Trisha Teagues decided.

  She yawned, sat up straight in the driver’s seat of the Reliant, and shook herself awake. Sam, slumped in the passenger’s seat, absentmindedly scrolled through social media on his smartphone. In the back, Rasha gripped her seat belt and stared at the wilderness beyond her window. Their bodies were there, but their minds were elsewhere.

  Trish eyed Rasha in the rearview mirror and wondered exactly where Rasha’s mind had been in the caverns. She’d identified Michael – Trish’s partner, or ex (that remained to be seen) – and recalled him strangling a woman. Trish knew it wasn’t Michael’s imprint; he was still very much alive, hidden at his mother’s flat until the trial for Shauna’s murder. Trish must have projected the image into Rasha’s mind the night she’d been occupied, which Rasha had later regurgitated in the caverns. Either way, Trish had scarpered into an empty tunnel to let out the tears in private. She knew Rasha well enough to know the teenager would blame herself.

  Trish blinked hard to snap back to reality. She shook off the gut-churning feelings she’d inherited from Rasha – of being displaced and utterly alone, of being responsible for a horrendous crime. Fatigued and hungry, Trish’s resistance to the frequency energy waned as though the walls of her mind were failed harbour walls and emotional stimuli flooded in. She should have worn her dielectric band around people with turbulent minds, but when she wore it she felt like a muzzled dog, unable to make use of a vital body part.

  Trish studied her smartphone as it slid across the dashboard with each sharp turn. It was the fifty-third time she had checked it that day, expecting for Hornes Solicitors to email with the outcome of her sister Shauna’s trial, to tell her whether Michael had been sentenced and whether her life would become that little bit lonelier. She wanted to know, and she didn’t. She craved justice, just not one where Michael was her sister’s killer.

  Haya cowered on the sofa in a dark caravan.

  ‘You’re not a monster, Rasha,’ Trish said before she could stop herself.

  ‘What?’ Rasha asked from the back seat.

  Sam reached over from the passenger seat and prodded Trish in the arm. He always disproved when Trish slid into other people’s minds – on purpose or not. He hid much himself.

  ‘You can’t compare yourself to rebels and militants,’ Trish reiterated to Rasha.

  Trish watched Rasha in the rearview mirror. Her eyes widened with realisation, and Rasha loosened her seat belt to lean forward.

  ‘They’re my thoughts,’ she growled.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Trish said. ‘Won’t happen again.’

  ‘How do you do it?’ Rasha asked. She settled back in her seat, her intrigue overtaking her anger. Such unfiltered keenness for knowledge reminded Trish of her younger self.

  ‘I dunno,’ Trish said. ‘Been able to do it since I was young.’

  ‘Since your parents died? That was your dad in the ombrederi, wasn’t it?’

  Trish scratched a post-dye itch from her crown.

  ‘Along with seeing imprints,’ Trish confirmed.

  ‘You can do it to anyone?’

  ‘Just witnesses. Thoughts, emotions . . .’ A craving – somewhere between hunger and thirst – tugged at Trish’s jaw. She glanced at Sam. ‘Addictions . . .’ Sam raised his middle finger. ‘It all broadcasts on the frequency.’

  Ten minutes of painful silence followed until they reached the caravan park and climbed from the Reliant. The last time Trish and Sam had visited the Abadis’ home, Rasha, occupied and lost in the ombrederi, had clung to the ceiling with her limbs bent at impossible angles. It had been Trish, Sam, and Will’s first occupation, and they had almost killed her.

  It wasn’t meant to be that way. They’d monitored her from the stalls of an abandoned cow shed in the field over as part of a program to understand the development of adolescent witnesses. They had laced the caravan park with electromagnetic beacons, gadgets that drew in imprints as a magnet would pull metal shavings, until an imprint took her.

  The shadow that no one could identify.

  Rasha could have been dead – or worse yet, occupied for good. It was all we had, Trish told herself, not that she completely believed it. Opportunities to conduct isolated research with little to no bias was rare. Nevertheless, guilt lodged itself in Trish’s chest and remained there.

  The lights were on in caravan forty-five. Rasha had just reached the front door when it was thrust inward. A tearful Haya leapt out and collapsed on her. Words of Levantine passed between them – scolding and loving, the way fearful mothers mustered. Haya let go of Rasha and glared at Sam and Trish. Sam took a hesitant step backward; he never got on well with mothers.

  ‘Rasha better?’ Haya growled.

  ‘Not as such,’ Trish said. ‘A little more time with us and she will be.’

  ‘No,’ Haya spat. ‘No more.’

  Haya ushered Rasha into the caravan.

  ‘She’s not ill, Mrs Abadi. She’s gifted.’

  ‘See her again, I call police,’ Haya warned.

  Rasha’s face sunk. Haya slammed her door so hard the whole caravan rocked. With an exaggerated sigh, Sam sidled over to Trish, duffel bag slung on one shoulder.

  ‘You’re filling her with false hope,’ he said.

  ‘Didn’t you need that at her age?’

  Trish followed Sam to the neighbouring caravan. A myriad of tabbies hissed at them from its roof. He lowered himself to the ground and crept beneath it.

  ‘It’s still false,’ Sam said. There was a click, and Sam clambered back out with an EMP. They were palm-sized contraptions able to create or destroy an electronic force field. He opened his duffel bag.

  ‘Wait,’ Trish said. ‘Let’s leave them here. Put them on deflect. She won’t be coming to the collieries anytime soon. Any defence is better than none.’

  Sam nodded and changed a few settings on the analogue control panel. The three LEDs on its side flicked from green to blue. A small electronic pulse popped around them, and the air freshened, filtered of frequency energy. He fixed it back into place underneath the caravan, and they moved on to the maintenance shed.

  ‘I’m going to help her,’
Trish said. She couldn’t let it go; Rasha could’ve died, after all. ‘Give her the support we never had.’

  She meant every word. Rasha was in too deep to return to life before the occupation. Desperate for answers, engrossed in their responses, she’d tumbled down the rabbit hole. Sam’s disinterest made her blood boil.

  ‘Want to talk about the elephant in the room?’ Trish pried. They reached the maintenance shed, which sat outside a sparse play area. Trish stepped onto a wooden bench, reached to its roof, and located the EMP they’d planted the week before Rasha’s occupation.

  ‘What elephant in which room?’ Sam retorted.

  A line of white powder upon a black coffee table flashed before Trish’s eyes. When she turned back to Sam, she knew there were other things on his mind.

  ‘The shadow,’ Trish prompted.

  ‘Oh, that,’ Sam replied. He fondled the scar on his arm. ‘She’s young, inexperienced. She can’t interpret what’s happening. Juvenile babble.’

  ‘I saw it, too,’ Trish said as she changed the settings on the EMP. ‘It’s not like any other imprint.’

  EMP back in place, Trish hopped from the bench.

  ‘It was devoid of emotions,’ she continued, ‘of memory, of life – even the dead have life, Sam.’

  ‘Not the first time an imprint has hidden their identity,’ Sam said. Trish couldn’t argue with that. Guides, the highest form of imprint, could lock themselves from engagement. Each witness learnt their skills with a guide. Trish and Sam shared theirs with Will and Network director James: a girl by the name of Abidemi. She’d been undetectable in recent weeks.

  Trish’s mobile buzzed. She withdrew her phone from her pocket and was relieved to see that Will had texted.

  ‘Is it Hornes?’ Sam asked.

  Trish shook her head. She opened Will’s text and read it to herself just in case it wasn’t for Sam’s ears. They fought a lot, and Trish dared not reignite any smouldered fires. The message was safe to read, but it was also an urgent one.

  ‘It’s from Will,’ Trish said.

  ‘Great, can’t even text his own boyfriend,’ Sam sneered. Trish decided not to lecture him for that.

  ‘I’ve been visited by an imprint,’ Trish read aloud. ‘Laboratory 2C. I think it’s Abidemi.’

  The Network’s director, James McKay, with his ice-blue eyes and weathered features, had one of the most expressive eyebrows; she knew they were in trouble without removing her dielectric band.

  The indoor car park was a repurposed warehouse to maintain the illusion the site was abandoned. James fixed a ‘baby on board’ sign to the rear window of his people carrier when they arrived in the Reliant. He and his wife recently celebrated bringing his third daughter into the world, and he was rarely seen without milk stains on his shirt collar or wet wipes stuck to the soles of his shoes. Without a word, he beckoned them into the mineshaft. Sam echoed Trish’s thoughts as they followed him into the activity centre.

  ‘He was waiting for us,’ he hissed.

  Their shoes clanged on the iron walkway as they meandered between the many desks in the activity centre. Witnesses hustled to and fro to tend to duties. James’s office was nestled at the centre of the cavern: a glass-and-steel cubicle. ‘The birdcage,’ as witnesses often mused, and James was their canary, who always anticipated danger.

  Sam closed the door, and the office absolved the hubbub from outside. James stood behind his desk. He was not a canary of beauty; his scoliosis rendered him five feet four, five feet two after a long day. His piercing stare bored into the depths of their own imprints. Trish, Sam, and Will were the youngest in the Network – thirty-three, twenty-nine, and thirty-one, respectively – and they were often undermined; James was their formidable headmaster.

  ‘The board has come to an agreement, and I’m relieved to say they’ve overturned your suspension,’ he began. ‘Which is a miracle considering the amount of policies and procedures you threw out of the window.’

  He paused for a response, and Trish hated silence.

  ‘Don’t you want to know how we did it?’ she blurted. James leant on the back of his chair, eyebrows arched.

  ‘We are intrigued, as it happens,’ James said. ‘You’ve been invited to host a seminar tomorrow afternoon. I highly recommend you accept. It will do you favours when we come to an agreement.’

  ‘An agreement on what?’ Sam queried.

  ‘Considering the Abadi incident, we’ll be taking the adolescent program off your hands.’

  ‘You can’t,’ Trish said. ‘We created it from the ground up. The program supports young and vulnerable witnesses – ’

  ‘Which is why it shouldn’t have resulted in a near death,’ James retorted. ‘It’ll be passed on to someone capable.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Vanessa.’

  ‘And what about us?’ Sam hollered. Fists balled, face magenta, he must have anticipated James’s answer.

  ‘Sam, you’re needed out on the field,’ their manager responded. ‘No, please don’t interrupt me. You have a great instinct with lesser grades of imprint, and with the rise of activity we need the numbers.’

  Sam kicked the chair before him. Trish thought he’d vault over the desk and throttle James, but he yanked the door open and bolted for the nearest ladder. Trish turned back to James.

  ‘You know how much this means to him, to us,’ Trish said. ‘We needed it when we were Rasha’s age. If that doesn’t make us the most qualified . . .’ She only had to imply her own instability or Sam’s various ailments; it was rare for a witness to not be mentally disturbed with an addictive personality. They could see the dead, after all.

  ‘The last thing you needed at your age was your well-being threatened,’ James said coolly. ‘Trish, you’ve procured outstanding results with the sonar project. I want you to focus on that. Give it the attention it deserves.’

  Trish couldn’t respond. Her throat ached from the tears she held back. I haven’t found Shauna, Trish thought. It’s a failure.

  ‘I think it’s best you prepare for the seminar tomorrow,’ James said with a tone that drew the conversation to a close. ‘There’s a lot riding on it.’

  Trish nodded and fled the birdcage without a word, darting through the activity centre, head down to avoid judgmental stares. She took the ladder down into the confines of the claustrophobic third level. The usual silence found there was punctured by Sam’s yells from the laboratories ahead.

  ‘How dare he take a witness from a priority investigation and put him out on the field with the beginners?’

  Sam would have said ‘with the incapable and inexperienced’ had he not been speaking with Will. Trish passed a cluster of stalagmites. The laboratory’s glass walls loomed into view, its mechanised door open to ventilate the humid space. Will sat at a metal bench outside the ECG rooms and patiently saw out Sam’s tantrum.

  ‘I’m not sure what you want me to say, Sammy,’ Will said as Trish entered.

  ‘Agree? That’d be a nice start.’

  ‘It’s not a casual shuffle of staff now is it?’ Will replied. ‘You’re being demoted, purposefully, after the board communed and we agreed that what you did was – ’

  ‘How did you vote?’ Sam asked.

  ‘I defended you the best I could, but there was no denying – ’

  ‘You voted to demote us?’ Sam cried. He mouthed, Fuck.

  ‘Yes,’ Will said plainly, confident in his morals.

  ‘You’ve done the right thing,’ Trish said as she crossed into the room. ‘But Christ, Vanessa? The program will be closed by the end of the year, mark my words.’

  ‘She opposed the project to begin with, yes,’ Will said, ‘but since the severity of the Abadi occupation she acknowledges how important it is and how imperative it is to do it right.’

  Trish couldn’t argue with that. Despite her reluctance toward Vanessa, the co-director was also matron of the Refinery, their private mental hospital. It ran smooth as butter for the decade T
rish was a witness, so there was no doubting her expertise.

  Will pulled Sam in and pecked him on the lips. Sam encompassed Will with his gangly arms. Trish hadn’t seen them do that for a while. On the bench was a myriad of files and touch screen tablets. Will spent more time in the Network than anywhere else: a home bird in work, his nest a dishevelled mess of reports.

  ‘You need a shower,’ Will muttered at Sam. ‘It’s onion grade.’

  ‘Maybe you could join me,’ Sam said. He smirked as Trish screwed her face.

  ‘I can’t. Too much to get through,’ Will said.

  ‘Thought it was an offer that couldn’t possibly be refused,’ Sam said, and he let Will go. Trish filled the awkward silence.

  ‘Abidemi visited you?’

  Will gestured to the workbench.

  ‘You know what it’s like down here – the frequency energy is pretty meek. There was a flood of it. Whoever it was pushed my files to the floor.’

  ‘But Abi?’ Sam asked. ‘She hasn’t shown herself in weeks.’

  ‘That’s why,’ Will said. ‘I couldn’t grasp a sense of their identity. Sam, maybe we should head to Pendeen this week, see if we can contact Abidemi. If she’ll respond to anyone, it’ll be you. At least we can get some answers about the shadow imprint.’

  Trish nodded. Pendeen was situated on a ley line – a scrap of old occultist myth that was later proved true by the Network. Abidemi was often found there. Rumour had it she’d died on-site; imprints often remained where their bodies died, locked to a localised variant of the frequency.

  Trish’s phone buzzed in her pocket. Everyone who would contact her was in the collieries. She withdrew, and an email notification flashed across her lock screen from Hornes Solicitors.

  Trish reached out and gripped the cuff of Sam’s jacket.