by Rysa Walker
ALSO BY RYSA WALKER
The Delphi Trilogy
The Delphi Effect
The Delphi Resistance
Novella
The Abandoned
The CHRONOS Files
Novels
Timebound
Time’s Edge
Time’s Divide
Graphic Novel
Time Trial
Novellas
Time’s Echo
Time’s Mirror
Simon Says
Short Stories
“The Gambit” in The Time Travel Chronicles
“Whack Job” in Alt.History 102
“2092” in Dark Beyond the Stars
“Splinter” in CLONES: The Anthology
“The Circle That Whines” in Tails of Dystopia
“Full Circle” in OCEANS: The Anthology
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2018 by Rysa Walker
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Skyscape, New York
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Skyscape are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542048408
ISBN-10: 1542048400
Cover design by M. S. Corley
To Courtney, editor extraordinaire, who has now moved on to other adventures.
Kiernan sends his love.
CONTENTS
NEWS ITEM FROM THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
CHAPTER ONE
NEWS ITEM FROM THE WASHINGTON POST
CHAPTER TWO
NEWS ITEM FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
SHARED JOURNAL
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
SHARED JOURNAL
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
INTERVIEW FROM THE US SENATE COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS WEBSITE:
CHAPTER NINE
NEWS ITEM FROM THE COEUR D’ALENE PRESS
CHAPTER TEN
LETTER TO THE EDITOR, EVANSVILLE COURIER & PRESS
CHAPTER ELEVEN
OP-ED FROM THE HILL
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EXCERPT FROM “MIND BLOWN” IN THE SCOOP
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
NEWS ITEM FROM THE SAN ANGELO STANDARD-TIMES
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
NEWS ITEM FROM THE KANSAS CITY STAR
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
NEWS ITEM FROM THE PENSACOLA NEWS JOURNAL
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
NEWS ITEM FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
NEWS ITEM FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
NEWS ITEM FROM THE KNOXVILLE NEWS SENTINEL
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
NEWS ITEM FROM THE KNOXVILLE NEWS SENTINEL
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
NEWS ITEM FROM CREGGFOROURFUTURE.COM
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
NEWS ITEM FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NEWS ITEM FROM THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
April 11, 2020
Police are searching for any additional witnesses to the murder of Cameron Applebaum, 13, in Virginia Beach. The boy was struck late Wednesday night while crossing Paladin Drive on the way back from a friend’s house. The killing was initially reported as a hit-and-run until images of the body posted anonymously online revealed the word freak, apparently written in blood, scrawled across the boy’s forehead.
Four other victims have been discovered in the US with the words freak or mutant written either on or near the body since the beginning of the year. A group calling themselves The Natural Order has taken responsibility for all five killings, which they claim are not acts of murder but proactive self-defense.
A spokesperson for the Applebaum family refused to comment on whether the boy had been tested or had exhibited any sort of psychic ability, but it seems likely. Like many of the individuals who tested positive for psychic ability, Applebaum’s father (deceased) was assigned to the PSYOP battalion at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in the late 1990s.
CHAPTER ONE
Carova, North Carolina
April 23, 2020, 9:20 a.m.
The sand beneath my cheek smells of salt and fish, and of something harsh and pungent. Motor oil, or maybe gasoline.
How the hell did I get here?
I want to sit up, but my body feels too heavy to move. So I lie still, eyes closed, digging my fingers into the cool, wet sand.
Then an icy wave hits my bare legs. It jolts me awake, and I scuttle away from the tide to avoid a second dousing.
“Anna? Anna!”
I turn toward the sound as I brush the grit from my face and hands. It’s Aaron, maybe a hundred yards down the beach. He’s talking on his phone as he jogs toward me.
Damn it. Damn. It. Did he follow me?
Why can’t I have a half hour to myself? I need space. I need room to breathe. To think. To simply be.
My heart hammers erratically in my throat as I pull my feet under me, preparing to bolt. Aaron is already winded. I’m a better runner. He’ll never be able to catch me.
What? No. No, no, no. I draw in a deep breath through my nose and close my eyes, pushing down the panic. I love Aaron. He loves me. Why should I care if he followed me?
And then my mind starts clicking through the questions he’s going to ask, and I want to run again. When did I leave? Why didn’t I wake him? Why was I lying on the beach? Did I faint again?
Focus, Anna.
Aaron stashes his phone in his pocket and picks up the pace, closing the distance between us. Time to get my story straight. Employ a few selective truths detailing the things I do remember and add enough filler (lies, you mean lies, lies, lies) to cover the things I don’t remember.
Out of sheer necessity, I’ve gotten quite good at fabricating a plausible story. These memory gaps are becoming more frequent. Longer, too. I thought my symptoms would improve steadily over time as my brain healed from the concussion. But Kelsey warned me from the beginning that progress after a traumatic brain injury isn’t predictable. It comes in starts and stops, and sometimes symptoms can worsen temporarily.
I could tell Aaron the truth. That I don’t remember. But that will just tighten the net around me. They won’t let me out of their sight if I admit I’m blacking out.
Even worse. They’ll lock you up.
Let’s go with this story, then. I woke up early, just before daybreak. Couldn’t sleep. Everyone else was still in bed, so I pulled on my jogging clothes and hit the beach. And I’ve been running for the past . . .
I glance at my watch: 9:22.
Three and a half hours? He’ll never believe I’ve been running since dawn. I don’t even believe it.
&nbs
p; And . . . time’s up.
Aaron drops onto the sand next to me, panting.
“What the hell, Anna? You know you can’t leave without telling anybody.”
He sounds more worried than angry, even though he has every right to be mad. This isn’t the first time in the past few months, or even the second time, I’ve slipped away without telling anyone. It’s also not the first time I’ve had memory lapses, but I’m getting better at disguising those.
Better at lying.
“I’m sorry. But I did tell someone. I told the guard I was going for a run. The night guard—the young guy with freckles?”
That part isn’t a lie. I remember this. Glancing at the clock as I tied my running shoes. Thinking I needed to hurry and get downstairs before six when the guard changed. The night guard is scared to death of the Delphi adepts, especially me. He’s one of the guys who received a few new memories—memories I planted in their heads—when Aaron, Taylor, Deo, and I went AWOL from Sandalford back in December. He and his buddies willingly loaded the truck with weapons, medical supplies, anything we asked for, because I made them think it had all been cleared by their boss. I even made them remember Miller ordering them to help us.
I can’t mess with their heads that way anymore. That ability was courtesy of a temporary hitcher, Daniel Quinn, Aaron’s half brother. When I returned Daniel’s spirit to his comatose body on Christmas Eve, his powers of persuasion went too.
Or at least I assume they did. Daniel is in Maryland, no longer in the hospital but still undergoing daily rehab. Luckily, he retained a good deal of his gross motor ability. He’s able to walk on his own now, and he’s recovered his speech almost completely. For the first several weeks, it was just a few words, and according to his mom, the vast majority of them were impolite. That doesn’t surprise me. Daniel hates being dependent on anyone. Having others take care of him has to be driving him mad.
There’s no rehab for psychic abilities, however. And since his mom is still in the dark about his ability to “nudge” people, as Daniel calls it, I doubt Aaron or Taylor have had the opportunity to ask him whether his Delphi skills are back to normal.
The guards here at Sandalford seem to think I can still push them around, though. When I approached the guard at the gate this morning and said I was going for a run, he shrank back instantly. I almost expected him to make the sign of the cross to ward off evil, but he settled on a nervous nod.
“The night guard?” Aaron says. “But . . . that means you’ve been out here for over three hours! You didn’t leave us a note. You didn’t even sign out. We’ve combed the entire beach. Deo’s already been down this way twice and he didn’t see you.”
Another wave of guilt hits me. Deo must be freaking out, the same way I would be. The same way I was when Graham Cregg’s people nabbed him a few months back. We may not be related by blood, but he’s my brother in every sense of the word, and I hate that I’ve made him worry. That I’ve made any of them worry.
“I wasn’t on the beach the whole time. I ran on Sandfiddler Road for a while.”
This might be a lie. I don’t know. The truth is I have no memory of running anywhere beyond those first few steps out of the gate this morning. But you can’t really hide on a wide-open beach. If Deo came down this way and didn’t see me, the only logical explanation is that I was on one of the roads that run through the Currituck Wildlife Reserve.
“Look at me,” Aaron says. I’ve been avoiding his gaze, staring out at the water or down at my knees, but now I turn toward him. He searches my eyes for a long time. Looking for the truth, I guess. Searching for some sign that I’m being honest.
Eventually he shakes his head, breaking the stare. He picks a shell out of the sand and flings it toward the water. “You’re lucky Miller is with Magda. Otherwise, we’d never be able to keep this under wraps. It’s almost like you want to end up with one of those ankle gadgets.”
Magda Bell owns Sandalford—not just the big house but also the empty lot to the north and the property to the south, encompassing nearly a mile of oceanfront. She set the place up as a safe haven for Delphi adepts, most of them kids who inherited something extra from parents who were used by the military as guinea pigs. The experiment, which had its roots in the Vietnam War but reached its apex in the late 1990s, involved a serum designed to ramp up natural psychic abilities. It worked, but it also had major side effects that made many of them, especially the male subjects, violent and suicidal.
Magda’s missing husband, Erik Bell, was a former TV psychic and one of the Delphi Project’s civilian subjects. Both of her daughters are apparently adepts, but no one has any idea exactly what it is they can do. Magda keeps them separate from the rest of the adepts in the big yellow house on the southernmost lot, which she dubbed Bell Isle. A small team of nurses and Dr. Batra, her private physician, live there, too. Batra is the doctor who helped stabilize Deo, and he continues to monitor him to make sure that Deo doesn’t have a relapse of the brain swelling that came very close to killing him after he was injected with the Delphi serum. Batra seems nice enough, but the whole thing over at Bell Isle feels off.
Concern for her daughters is the key reason Magda is bankrolling the effort to find a cure. She’s made that clear from the moment she got involved. The latest addition to that effort is the small team of scientists who showed up at Sandalford three weeks ago, setting up shop in the guesthouse out back, complete with lab equipment and a half dozen caged monkeys. That bothers me. I mean, I guess they need to test whatever they’re cooking up on animals before they test it on children. It feels wrong, though, and sometimes when I hear the monkeys screeching, I want to storm in and fling open their cages.
But I doubt unleashing psychic, possibly aggressive, monkeys on the beach would help either our situation or theirs.
“Do you really think I’m trying to make Magda angry?” I ask Aaron.
“Not exactly,” he says. “But we both know it doesn’t take much to set her off. And she’s kind of the only ally we have against Senator Cregg right now.”
Technically, Magda is overseeing the effort to expose Senator Cregg’s role in the Delphi Project and his ongoing exploitation of the adepts for his own political purposes. But not much has been done on that front, as far as I can tell. The entire goal seems to be to keep the adepts in stasis. That’s why she hired Miller and his company, Vigilance Security, back in November when she was still living in London. Miller is former military, and while I don’t know exactly what he did during his time in the service, my guess would be drill sergeant. It’s been clear from the beginning that he doesn’t like children and he really doesn’t like psychic children.
Miller would run Sandalford like a military school for juvenile delinquents if not for Kelsey. She hates him with the fire of a thousand suns, and it takes a lot to make Kelsey hate someone. I’d hoped Magda would realize Miller is a bad fit for the position once she arrived here after we rescued the other adepts in late December. But no. He remains, partly because he is the King of Suck-Ups and would lick the sand from her feet if he thought it would put more money into his pockets.
The bottom line is that Magda calls the shots. And the last time I wandered off, Magda said if it happened again, Miller would fit me with one of the ankle trackers like the ones worn by the kids who were brought in from the school on Fort Bragg. Furthermore, she’d revoke my “travel” privileges, and I’d be forced to stay “on campus” with the other adepts.
Magda doesn’t have legal grounds to force anything on you, I tell myself. You’re an adult now.
It’s true. I’m eighteen. Aaron is an adult, too. And their mom refused to sign any legal agreement that would require Taylor to remain at Sandalford against her will. Kelsey did likewise for Deo, and Magda was so annoyed that I was fairly certain she was going to fire Kelsey for insubordination. In the end, Magda didn’t fire her, but she made it abundantly clear that all of us would be bounced out permanently if our actions exposed the group
as a whole to danger.
We can leave at any time.
But the outside world isn’t exactly a safe place for adepts right now. Especially ones like me and Aaron. Our faces were plastered all over the news for a few days last fall, as persons of interest in the killing of six children and several adults near Fort Bragg. And even though the media has moved on to other stories now, our faces are still out there. Once something is online, it spreads like pee in a swimming pool.
“I’m sorry, Aaron,” I say between clenched teeth. “I just . . . I got claustrophobic, okay? There are so many people in that house, and I needed to get out. I needed to run. To be alone.”
I emphasize the last word because I know it’s the excuse most likely to resonate with Aaron, who has far more reason to feel claustrophobic at Sandalford than I do. In addition to the two of us, there are currently twenty-nine Delphi adepts between the ages of two and nineteen living there, along with three parents of those adepts, seven security guards, two nurses, and Kelsey. Every time any of those residents gets the slightest urge to smack someone, Aaron feels that anger. If anyone should be sneaking out for three-hour jogs on the beach, it’s him.
“I understand the need to get away from Sandalford,” he says. “You know I do. What I don’t understand is your need to get away from me. From Kelsey, Deo, Taylor. The people who care about you. You can talk to us, you know.”
His voice is so gentle I can barely hear it over the surf and wind. I turn away slightly, and clench my fists so hard that one of my nails breaks through the skin of my palm as I try to rein in a flood of emotions. It’s partly guilt. It’s also fear, because I don’t know why I’m acting this way. Why I’m feeling this way. Why I can’t talk these feelings through with the people I love.
But what terrifies me most is that behind the guilt and fear is a mass of pure white-hot rage. I’m furious at myself for playing Aaron’s emotions this way, but also furious at him for turning it back around on me.
Aaron reaches up to touch my hair but stops abruptly. His fingers hover a few inches above the shorter patch, where my head was stitched up after Jasper Hawkins cracked it with the butt of his pistol, but it’s not because he’s worried the spot is still tender. It’s been fine, at least on the surface, for several months. The reason he stops short of touching me is that his little gift from the Delphi scientists, what we jokingly call his spidey sense, is on full alert. It’s telling him I’m barely holding in a feral rage—a tiger-footed rage that would love nothing more than to turn and snap, to bite those fingers—