Karl waved his hand dismissively. "I don't care if she knows personal things about me, Doc. I have nothing to hide."
"Even so, be cautious. She might use those things against you."
Karl frowned skeptically. "I don't see how."
"I mean against you emotionally, even if she can't use them against Interchron as a whole."
Karl shrugged. "I'll chance it. I'll be careful," he added quickly when he glanced at Doc. "She's talking. That's all I care about. I think I can uncover some useful information.
Doc nodded, still looking vaguely apprehensive.
"What she has to say won't be things we want to hear," David said quietly. “More than likely, it will be more talk of the dark prophecy."
"I'm sure you're right, David," Doc nodded. "Keep in mind, she may try to lie to us, or at least twist the truth."
Karl nodded. "I'll take everything with a mouthful of salt."
"Well," David stood abruptly. "I'll let you all talk." He walked to the door, which Marcus and Karl blocked.
Karl quickly moved to one side to let David through. Marcus waited longer, glaring darkly at David. With obvious reluctance, he moved aside.
David brushed past them and out the door.
Marcus expression abruptly darkened. He spun and followed David out into the corridor.
Maggie leapt to her feet. "Marcus!"
He didn't give any sign he'd heard her.
She ran out into the corridor, praying this didn't come to blows.
Outside the room, David still walked away. As Maggie emerged, Marcus grabbed his brother's arm and swung him around so they stood nose to nose.
"Maggie's mine," Marcus growled.
"I know," David said calmly.
"Do you?" Marcus snarled. "I'm not sure you do."
David's face remained calm, but his eyes burned with intensity. "I understand you love Maggie, as I loved Laina."
Laina? Maggie wracked her brain, trying to pull up the reference. It sounded familiar. Something Marcus told her once, but she couldn't remember now.
Marcus frowned, forgetting to be angry. "What does Laina have to do with anything?"
David pressed his lips into a stony line.
"You barely knew Laina," Marcus said.
"That doesn't mean I didn't have feelings for her."
Marcus's voice rose again. "Is that what all this is about? You're pursing Maggie because you blame me for your girlfriend's death fifteen years ago?"
"Marcus!" Maggie said, putting a hand on his arm. He brushed her off without taking his eyes off David.
David's face darkened while his eyes widened in outrage. "I’m not pursu—" he cut off, visibly trying to take hold of himself. When he spoke again, it was through clenched teeth. "I don't blame you for her death."
"You sure?" Marcus asked.
David met Marcus's gaze head-on.
Maggie breathed shakily.
"The only thing I blame you for," David seethed, "is not trying to save her."
"She couldn't be saved," Marcus said firmly.
"I know that!" David thundered.
Maggie had never heard David yell before. He sounded monstrous.
The next moment he moderated his tone. "Because I loved her, you should have tried."
"Because I didn't, you turned me and dad into the collectives." It wasn't a question. "What you did that day sent dad into an early grave?"
A deep sadness entered the lines of David's face. "I know that too."
Did Maggie imagine the slight tremor in his voice?
David glanced down briefly before meeting Marcus's gaze again. No mistaking the tears in his eyes this time. A lump rose in Maggie’s throat.
Collectivists didn't cry.
"I'm sorry for what I did, Marcus. I'll regret it every second of however long my consciousness exists. I can't make it up to dad. It's too late. All I can do is ask for your forgiveness."
Marcus's face might have been carved from a boulder, but she saw him swallow past a lump in his throat. She felt his sympathy for his brother through the bond. She also felt him desperately warring with it. He still harbored so much anger for David, he didn't want to feel sympathy. Yet, he did.
"I…" Marcus swallowed again, then gave a single shake of his head. "I can't."
He turned and stalked away.
David watched him go, looking forlorn. He rubbed the middle three fingers of one hand across his eye. They came away wet, and he stared at the moisture on his fingertips, looking almost puzzled.
Maggie needed to go after Marcus. First, she turned to David.
"Keep trying, David," she said gently. He's almost there. Just, not quite."
"Almost. Almost." David repeated the word as though tasting it for the first time. His shoulders slumped. "A lonely word."
"No," Doc said at Maggie's shoulder, and she jumped. She hadn't heard him come up behind her. "A hopeful word," Doc said. "Someone who can almost do something is on their way to doing it. Maggie's right. Difficult though it is, Marcus is making progress. He'll come around soon."
David still looked upset, but nodded. Maggie thought she detected a glimmer of hope in his eyes. He turned slowly, then, looking confused, and walked in the opposite direction Marcus had.
With a sigh, Maggie turned to Doc. "Let me make sure Marcus is okay. I'll be back and then we can do some work."
Doc patted her shoulder. "Of course."
Maggie swept past the doorway, which Karl leaned against, giving her a strained smile.
"Keep trying with Tenessa, Karl," Doc said, his voice growing faint as Maggie moved away from them. "Be careful, but vigilant. We need to know what she knows."
"I know, Doc," Karl's voice rumbled softly as Maggie turned a corner. "I know."
Chapter 9: Spectrums of Color
“There’s something here.” Jonah made a circular motion with his right hand. He felt like an idiot. Nothing tangible hung in the air on his right side. Only energy, but he couldn’t stop making the motion. The energy felt so real.
“On the right?” Lila asked from where she sat fifteen feet away, staring at the computer conducting the test on his brain.
He cleared his throat self-consciously. “Yeah.”
She nodded, and Jonah waited for the next sequence to begin. He sat in a relatively comfortable reclining seat that felt for all the world like a dentist’s chair. Lila had administered some kind of purplish serum into his arm via syringe, and injected something else into the base of his neck. A chip, she said, which would temporarily attach to his spinal cord and help administer the test.
The idea of the microchip—actually, Lila said it was much smaller; a nanochip—gave Jonah pause. Dramatic pause, and then some. Yet Maggie trusted these people. He’d seen them come to both her and his own aid, saving their lives. They were obviously decent people—or at least the lesser of two evils as compared with those evil spider henchmen. What had Maggie called them? Arachnimen?—so Jonah tried not to let all the weirdness of this new world, this new time, freak him out. Maggie had gotten used to all of this. Jonah was still adjusting.
The colors came swimming toward him again. Something Lila couldn’t see, because it was in Jonah’s own head. His perception of what the chip generated in order to determine what his neurochemical abilities were.
The colors came in waves—every color and hue he could imagine, and more than one shade he couldn’t put a name to—speeding toward him like sea creatures. Each sequence held different colors. This one mostly had bright oranges and yellows. He found it difficult to tell where one color ended and the next began. They faded into one another, a rainbow of color spanning across his vision. With each sequence, the colors evaporated right before hitting him between the eyes. His task was to tell Lila what he sensed in the silence. It wasn’t anything he truly saw or heard. Sometimes he felt a feather-light pressure on his ear, or a strange scent he couldn’t identify filled his nose.
Then it came—the sensation he’d felt mo
st often since the test began—the feel of something hovering nearby. This time, it came at his left shoulder. He got the feeling someone or something stood there, breathing on his neck, though he didn’t feel or hear any breath.
“There’s something behind me,” he said, reaching his right arm across his chest and pointed to where he felt the thing. “Here.”
Lila swiveled in her chair from the panel, studying him in a calculating way. “When you say ‘something,’ what is it you feel? Can you describe it to me?”
Jonah shrugged uncomfortably, not sure how to define it without sounding insane. With her keen eyes boring into him, he voiced his earlier thoughts. “It’s like something is standing behind me. If it had breath, it would be breathing down my neck.”
Lila frowned, studied the floor, as if trying to decide what to ask next. “Like a person?” she asked.
He shook his head slowly. “No. I don’t get the impression it has any intelligence. Not a human. Or an animal.”
She raised an eyebrow. “How do you know?”
He moved his shoulders around again. “I don’t know. It’s just an impression. I guess it’s more like backing up against a tree or a wall or something. Before hitting it, you sense you’re about to. But it’s inanimate. This seems…more animate than a wall, but not like a person either.” He rubbed his forehead. “I guess that doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
He glanced up to find Lila smiling at him. “It makes perfect sense. What you’re sensing is energy. Obviously it doesn’t have the organized intelligence of a living creature, but it has more mobility than stationary atoms. Most of us believe energy has intelligence of a sort.”
Jonah rubbed his jaw, feeling two days’ growth of stubble there. “That’s…creepy.”
Lila laughed out loud, then. A merry sound, not a mocking one. “It’s always been true, Jonah. Scientists just didn’t always realize it.”
“Realize…what, exactly?”
She shrugged in an offhand way. “It’s particle physics. Think about it. If an atom held no intelligence, how would it know to be attracted to one polarity, and repelled from another? If electrons have no intelligence, how do they know which level to stay in, or how to transfer themselves between elements to create compounds? If they were as inanimate as…a table, they wouldn’t be able to do anything of their own volition. But they can. They do.”
Jonah blinked when his eyes began to glaze over. She’d lost him at particle physics. “Um…right.”
She smiled again and this time it looked mocking.
“So, are we done?” he asked, motioning toward her computer.
She shook her head, turning more serious. “Not yet. A few more sequences to go.”
“Have you learned anything yet?” he ventured, not keen to begin the test again, though he couldn’t have said why it made him nervous.
She turned to look at him over her shoulder, keeping her body toward her computer screen. “Yes.”
He arched an eyebrow at her.
She merely smiled. “Let’s finish the test first, and then I’ll tell you everything, okay?”
Her smile held sympathy, as though she knew exactly how he felt. Despite feeling slightly manipulated, he smiled back at her.
“Okay,” he said quietly.
“Okay.” She turned back to her screen, tapping a seemingly random sequence of buttons. “Ready? Next sequence.”
He stared at the cavern wall straight ahead of him as the next wave of colors came into view. This one held fewer hues. The spectrum ranged from white to black, with mostly silvers, grays, and blues in between. They came toward him, and he noticed something strange. He felt something—the same hovering feeling—but it came from part of the spectrum. He hadn’t felt it prior to the colors evaporating before. He opened his mouth to tell Lila what he sensed. The colors reached him, evaporated, and searing pain lanced across his forehead. A red-hot awl making its way from his right temple to his left.
With a grunt, he grabbed his head, threw his legs over the side of the bed and rested his elbows on his thighs, fighting against the burning. He thought only a second or two passed before the pain receded. It must have been much longer because when he raised his head from his hands, Lila squatted in front of him, looking up into his face with concern. He vaguely remembered her calling his name several times. It sounded like it came from far away, from another room, perhaps. He’d been too focused on the pain to register it.
Now, sound came crashing into his ears at full volume. Strange, in the silent cavern. He could tell the difference, though.
“Jonah, are you all right?” Lila asked. Her hands rested on his knees, face inches from his. When she frowned, a tiny, V-shaped wrinkle appeared between her eyes. “What happened?”
The pain had receded completely now, leaving him feeling drained. “Shouldn’t you be telling me?” His voice sounded weak. Almost sleepy.
Lila’s frown deepened. “Nothing happened that I saw. The test proceeded normally. Did you…hurt yourself?”
“Did I hurt myself?” Jonah blinked at her incredulously. When she blinked at him uncertainly, he shook himself. “Can you just take this chip out of my neck now please?”
Her worry shifted to confusion. “No.” Her tone said it was the most obvious thing in the world.
He stared at her. “What do you mean, no? Doesn’t it come out when the test is done?”
She shook her head. “We don’t take it out, Jonah. Your cerebral spinal fluid disintegrates it after an hour. It’s why we only have so long to administer the test.”
His disconcertion must have shown because her voice turned soothing. “It’s designed that way. Everyone undergoes this test to figure out their abilities Jonah, including children. It’s not toxic.”
“Really?” he retorted. “Because as soon as you put it in, I started seeing spectrums of color and having blinding pain in my head. In our time, we call that an acid trip.”
Lila’s frown deepened further. “What’s acid got to do with anything?”
Jonah took a deep breath, telling himself to calm the hell down. Maggie warned him these people were clueless about a lot of things from Jonah’s time. “Nothing. Never mind. So, what happened?”
“I don’t know. Did you see anything out of the ordinary?”
“No.” He frowned, remembering. “Actually yes. The hovering feeling I have when one of the…energies is near me?”
She nodded.
“I felt it again, but before the colors evaporated. I think it came from one of the color streams.”
“You shouldn’t have felt anything before the colors reached you,” she said slowly.
“I haven’t with any of the other sequences. This time I did.”
Lila studied his face for several moments. She straightened her legs. Beside his reclining chair sat a stone outcropping—a natural outgrowth of the cavern—roughly the height and width of a standard bench, and worn smooth by generations of bottoms gracing it. She sunk down on it, eyes studying the floor. He could almost hear her thoughts whirling.
“Do you have any pain anywhere else, Jonah?”
Now that she asked, he became conscious of a twinge of pain on his inner thigh. “A little here on my leg. It’s probably just from falling onto the ground. I’m more interested in what caused my headache.”
“Headache?” She looked incredulous. “That’s what you’re going with? The way you grabbed your head, it looked more like you were being Drilled.”
“Drilled? Like…by the collective?”
She nodded, and he suppressed a shiver. “Is that what happened?”
She shook her head. “No. If they’d Drilled you, we’d know it by now. Trust me. Besides, the chances of it happening while inside Interchron are nil. I’m not saying you were Drilled. You looked like you were in that kind of pain, though. This was something else. I just don’t know what.”
“No offense, but you’re the test administrator. Shouldn’t you know?”
&n
bsp; She gave him a sideways glance, equal parts annoyance and amusement. “I’ve only been doing this a few years, and, until recently, we haven’t brought many new people into Interchron. Most who come in now are adults who have already come into their neurochemical abilities, so the test is unnecessary. Understand, this is usually done on teenagers. Neurochemical abilities surface with adolescence. This isn’t something I’ve encountered before, but that doesn’t mean it’s abnormal. Maybe it has something to do with you being an adult who’s never tapped into his abilities before.”
Jonah heaved another breath, somewhat mollified. “Okay. So, what does it mean?”
Lila shook her head and rose to her feet, returning to the chair in front of the computer. “I’m not sure. We might have to ask Doc. First, let’s run this sequence again.”
His head snapped up. “Again?”
She smiled at him ruefully. “I won’t keep torturing you. I promise. I need to get a better idea of what we’re dealing with here. If we go to Doc with, ‘this was weird and we have no idea what it is,’ he’ll tell us to run the sequence again anyway.” She swiveled in her chair to face him. “Since you’ve gone through it once, you have an idea of what to look for. Try to focus on the color band that hovered. Try to bring it toward you. Observe it up close.”
“Bring it toward me? How?”
“Just by focusing on it.” He didn’t argue again, but his skepticism must have shown because she gave him a just-do-it look. “It will to come toward you, Jonah. The mind is a powerful tool. You can try repeating the words, ‘come toward me’ in your head—or out loud—if it helps.” She turned back to her computer.
“Oh-kay,” he muttered skeptically. She didn’t respond. He wondered if the preoccupation with her computer screen was real, or if she was ignoring him.
“Here we go,” Lila said. “Repeating sequence.” She paused, turning to look at him again. “Do me a favor, Jonah. Don’t be so much in your head. You’re a lot like Maggie that way. Talk to me. Tell me what you sense. I need to know what you’re seeing if I’m to understand what’s happening.”
Dark Matter (Interchron Book 3) Page 14