Secret Legacy

by Anna DeStefano

  “I’m not going into that nightmare,” she said, “being guided by a mind I don’t know, whose sole focus would be to shut mine down if I don’t deliver the result you want. The dream’s already trying to do that to me and everyone else it touches. I may be insane, but I’m not an idiot.”

  The holograms shifted, faded, fizzled in and out of focus, as if a wave of electrical interference were zap-ping the transmissions. Except Richard had said the elders were linked to the conference room through psychic projection, not electronic transfer. It was Sarah’s anger and anxiety, she realized, interfering with the energy field sustaining the council’s images. Her ability to project emotion across realities was having a temper tantrum.

  The elders were right not to trust what she was becoming.

  “They didn’t trust you,” Richard’s mind said, his thoughts once again hers to read. “Because your loyalty had never been tested. Now it has, and they have a front-row seat.”

  “You shut your consciousness away to throw me off?” She stared at him.

  “To remind you and everyone else that you’re no longer powerless to harness your gifts.”

  Richard turned back to his council.

  Sarah wanted to slap him for scaring her so badly.

  “The mission won’t succeed,” he said, “unless Sarah trusts that she has the full support of the Watcher team that accompanies her. For that to happen, she’ll need to be designated a Watcher herself.”

  Jacob sat forward. “You want us to accept her into the order? She’s had no formal training. No vetting to determine her limits and stability.”

  “You expect me to commit to being a Watcher?” Sarah asked. That hadn’t been part of their plan.

  “You and Madeline have already accepted your calling,” he reasoned. “You’ve been watching out for each other since you were children, preserving and defending your own legacy. Making it official will mean you’ll have everyone in the Brotherhood supporting you in the dream, whether I’m there or not.”

  “One for all, and all for one.” She glanced at the council’s wavering projections. “I’m supposed to entrust your order with my family and the well-being of a child you wouldn’t be searching for if I hadn’t forced us all into this confrontation?”

  “Trust me,” Richard’s mind said.

  “Your recommendation is entirely out of the question,” Jacob countered. “Even your principal knows that.”

  Sarah’s stomach churned. Her programming’s darker impulses reached for her, but Richard was there to help absorb the dangerous energy seething inside her. His confidence that she could accept this or anything else she had to do was as rock solid as when they’d sparred in the gym. He’d asked her to give up control then, too. To follow him into danger. And because she had, he was now risking even more to back her up again.

  She squared her shoulders and faced the council, reining in her doubts and finally embracing the logic of the plan she and Richard had plotted in the lab.

  “Then I suppose you see capitalizing on the opportunity to identify your mole as out of the question, too?” she challenged. “Since my connection to whoever’s directing Ruebens’s programming is the only shot you have at putting eyes and ears inside the center.”

  “What are you doing?” Maddie’s mind asked.

  “Whatever I have to,” Sarah projected back.

  “Exploring my ocean dream offers you unprecedented insight into the center’s strategic intentions,” she said to Jacob. “Assuming you have the balls to take advantage of what my legacy can do before the center takes another crack at it. Isn’t that what all this is supposed to be about? You people watching and guiding and protecting legacies for the benefit of the psychic realm as a whole?”

  Sebastian sat straighter. “Why should we believe you’d be of any practical use to us after last night’s disasters?”

  “Sarah . . .” Maddie warned as the air around them began to sizzle.

  But Sarah was already harnessing their link, needing their shared ability to connect with minds through the collective unconscious that all beings shared.

  “This is the only way,” she said to her twin. “Richard’s right. We either become legitimate assets to these maniacs, or we’re already casualties. They either trust us now, or they never will.”

  Sarah stared down the council, reaching for Richard’s mind, too. Trusting she’d find it at her disposal. And once again, he was right where she needed him. She wrapped herself in his restraint.

  How could it feel as if she’d had him there, guiding her, her entire life? Just as the child’s cries she didn’t fully understand had always been there. As if every mistake, every failure, and every lesson Sarah had learned had led to this crossroads.

  “Trusting my psychic abilities may still be a risk,” she said to the council. “But you have no idea who your leak is, or where the center is conducting its latest dream testing. Which makes my legacy your only shot at putting them out of business for good.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Maddie watched her twin face down the council, sensing a fragile independence in Sarah that hadn’t been there before. She could feel her sister pulling away from her. Or maybe it was her twin’s determination to move toward something else that Maddie was sensing. Toward Metting and the new mission he was dragging them all into. Sarah was cornered and pissed and terrified of her own mind and fighting mad—but in a controlled way this time. She was handling the showdown with the council with an air of discipline, a confidence, that mirrored the restraint of the warrior now standing behind her.

  Maddie sent her thoughts deeper into her sister’s. Sarah’s emotional and psychic shields were wide-open to the man she’d sworn never to trust again. Her connection with Richard was balancing the wilder impulses Maddie usually helped Sarah restrain. Richard’s presence in Sarah’s mind felt like an immovable core of strength.

  Maddie saw colors, too. Metting’s purplish black, which Sarah was no longer cringing away from. Swirling hues that represented Sarah’s links to Maddie and Jarred were there, the amethyst and turquoise that Sarah found calming. Maddie sensed Sarah needing each of them to help her control the fear that she couldn’t see the ultimatum she’d just given the council through to the end. She felt Sarah’s conviction that without the Watchers’ help, none of them would return from her nightmare this time.

  Maddie took Jarred’s hand and was instantly filled with his unquestioning support. As one, they stepped behind Metting. Their new position created a circuit through Metting to Sarah, filling her sister with a swell of unity. Purpose. Strength.

  “We’re here,” she promised her twin. “Whatever you need, Sarah. We’re here.”

  She sensed her sister’s gratitude, then caught the image of her own and Jarred’s colors flickering around Sarah and Metting. Through Richard, they all sensed the council’s surprise at the power surge they’d generated. The old men’s curiosity. Then something so close to satisfaction, Maddie gritted her teeth.

  Metting’s Brotherhood finally had the Temple Legacy willingly at their beck and call. Maddie could feel the council’s smugness. Sarah could, too, and it was pissing them both off. But her twin was also pushing down the impulse to retaliate, gathering her emotions, drawing on Maddie’s and Jarred’s power, for a different purpose.

  She was pushing outward, relying on Metting’s knowledge of the Brotherhood’s inner workings to identify the location of each elder. Tampa. Reno. Seattle. San Diego. Denver. Saint Louis. Boston. She touched on every elder’s consciousness, scanned their environment, then left as quickly as she’d arrived. But not before Maddie sensed Sarah tagging each mind with a marker that would allow future tracking and location.

  “Impressive,” Jacob said. “But in effective. Now that Colonel Metting has taught you cognitive marking, be assured we’ll negate the possibility of your locating us in the future. Adjustments like these are common within the Brotherhood as principals grow into their legacies.”

 
“Moving would be wise.” Sarah smiled. “At least from your Seattle and Denver locations. The center’s tracking your operations at both sites. Would those be the regions where your two Watcher teams were exposed?”

  No response.

  “You’ll find psychic filtering devices just beyond both locations,” Sarah added, “within a two-mile radius. Colonel Metting just helped me identify them. He’ll be able to show you where.”

  Two of the elders gave simultaneous orders to operatives beyond their transmissions.

  “We’re looking into your recommendations,” Jacob said.

  “You do that.” Sarah’s voice stayed strong, confident, even though Maddie could sense her shock at what she’d accomplished. “In the meantime, use me. Use my dream. Get whatever information you need to stop the center from gaining control of another legacy. All I’m asking for in return is a chance to get Trinity away from them before you attack.”

  “The Brotherhood needs the Temple twins”—Metting kept his gaze pinned to the council—“as partners. I’m suggesting a collaboration where our powers grow in tandem. It’s how our order was created to function two centuries ago, when a small group of legacies banded together to help others who were failing. The Temples’ powers are growing beyond our ability to limit without eliminating them. But if we accept the twins into our order, guide them as Watchers, we’ll have a fighting chance to stop Dream Weaver.”

  Everyone in the room stilled, waiting for the council’s decision.

  “So be it,” Jacob finally proclaimed. “You have until tomorrow to prepare a mission team, Colonel. Ms. Temple, you have one last chance to access your dream programming. This time with Watchers stabilizing your search, while they reconnoiter your projection’s matrix for the exact location and purpose of the center’s testing on whomever Trinity turns out to be. The council will be forming an infiltration team to send in as soon as we have a target. Welcome to the Brotherhood, and good luck. You’re going to need it.”

  Welcome to the Brotherhood . . .

  Sarah had been sitting motionless on the bunk in her sleeping quarters for hours. She’d all but sprinted from the conference room and the council’s decision, and Richard and her family’s support, and Maddie’s questions. And she hadn’t moved since.

  Not that she could really hide from any of them. They were still in her mind, their concern and strength challenging the shields she’d slammed back into place so they couldn’t touch her emotions. She could feel Richard giving her space. Everyone was waiting for her to pull herself together and step back into the confident persona she’d projected to the elders, so she could face the morning planning meeting for the mission back into her psychotic nightmare.

  “Help me . . .” Trinity begged.

  “Help her,” the wolf’s ocean voice agreed. “You’re finally ready to see what we’ve become . . .”

  “Stop it!”

  Sarah pushed off the bed. More than ever, her family’s and her legacy’s survival depended on her staying lucid and free of the dream’s pull. But she could feel herself falling back into it, Trinity’s cries blending with the wolf’s laughter, the wolf’s voice dissolving into a little girl’s desperate begging. It was the same swirl of confusion and deranged demands she’d sensed in Lenox, unraveling Sarah’s sanity into the same manic state.

  It was as if the more powerful she grew, with her and Richard’s psychic energies more deeply merged, the less stable her hold on reality became. How was she supposed to wait patiently through the night for the disaster this mission was going to turn into? She was becoming death all over again—exactly what Ruebens had programmed her to be. Why couldn’t anyone else see that?

  “You’re finally ready . . .” her nightmare called to her, in both Trinity’s and the wolf’s voices.

  “Stop it!” Sarah yelled into her silent quarters.

  She headed for the door, snagging her jacket as an afterthought, suddenly desperate to disappear into the cold night waiting for her beyond the bunker’s walls.

  The elevator was just a few feet away. She should call Richard. Or Maddie. She should be leaning on them and accepting the help they’d give her and believing in the unified front they’d just sold the council. She kept moving instead. The council had accepted her as a Watcher. Which gave her unrestricted access to the facilities and its grounds. She could already feel the freezing forest waiting for her outside, and her place in it.

  She had to pull herself together before the morning. She had to get her head back to the place where she could face Richard and believe all the things he’d promised. She needed to lose herself for a while in the feel of running away from everything and everyone she could hurt far too easily. She needed the night’s darkness, which felt more real to the broken pieces of her than the promises she’d made.

  Then somehow she would find the courage to return to the bunker and fight for the light and the truth that were waiting somewhere within her dreams.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “They suspect?” the voice said.

  “They know.” The entire Brotherhood was in flux, including the relocation of every elder, days earlier than their scheduled rotation, to new more secure locations. “It will be even harder to breach the twins’ conditioning from now on. Sarah Temple’s been made a Watcher.”

  “We don’t need to break down their condition further, do we?” the voice asked. “They’re coming to us this time.”

  “And you’re coming for the Brotherhood.” He cursed soundlessly. Years of training blocked his emotional response from being detected by anyone within the bunker, or anyone tracking him on the other end of the transmission. “That wasn’t part of the deal.”

  “Our only deal was your compensation in return for information that secures the Temple Legacy for our purposes,” the voice said. “What happens beyond that is none of your concern. Sarah will be allowed access to the dream’s matrix again. Her mind will fracture. Our control will be solidified. We’ll take things from there.”

  The Watcher heard his own death in the pronouncement.

  He accepted once again the necessity of betraying his brothers, even though the recon team had been attacked and other legacies had been exposed while the center implemented unforeseen facets of the offensive he was helping them wage. He had to stay focused on his own objectives—to negate Metting’s misguided recklessness and the center’s power play for the Temples’ gifts.

  Everything was in place for him to help the Brotherhood fulfill its responsibility to stop mercenary entities like the center, which were determined to exploit the psychic realm to create weapons out of peoples’ minds.

  The council was primed to go on the offensive, something that wouldn’t have happened without Sarah Temple’s rogue programming and escalating instability. The elders would see to it that no further damage was done through her mind. The Brotherhood would complete its transition into a governing presence, rather than remaining the traditionally passive entity Watchers had always been.

  He had to see this through to the end. Just one more day. His plans were unraveling, the center was getting far closer to breaching Brotherhood security than he’d ever intended, but it was just one more day before this was over.

  “When does it begin?” the voice asked.

  “Tomorrow. Noon,” he said, committing the final unforgivable breach of his oath by revealing the precise moment that Sarah Temple’s mind would be at its most vulnerable. “Mission prep commences in the morning.”

  “The details of which you’ll be ready to provide should we need them?”

  “You won’t need them.” Which made his role conveniently obsolete.

  He could feel his contact smiling.

  Biting back another curse, he broke the link and lay back on the bunk in his sparse quarters. Quarters that should be subject to regular communications sweeps by Metting’s diagnostic routines.

  But his center contact had provided undetectable algorithms, a virus that he’d introduced
into the bunker’s network that scrambled transmissions he made on a preset frequency. It was state-of-the-art covert technology, the mechanics of which he’d detailed in his personal log so the Brotherhood could test for similar breaches, as well as develop their own response. Details an e-mail to Metting would deliver tomorrow after the Temples’ minds were silenced.

  His betrayal would be over then, every dark bit of it. It would be a warrior’s end once his motives became clear to those who would first condemn him.

  The inevitability of his actions had been set the moment the Temples’ destructive legacy wasn’t terminated along with Tad Ruebens. And tomorrow he would honor the oath he’d lived by since he joined the Brotherhood. He would preserve the integrity of the psychic realm. He would stay this deadly course, right up to the moment he could extinguish the minds of Sarah and Madeline and Trinity Temple.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Richard waited in the night’s cold shadows, in the woods whose ragged edges had helped Sarah unknowingly shape his raven image. This had been his nightmare landscape first, long before Ruebens’s programming led Sarah to project the specters of Richard’s past into her own dreams.

  In her early Dream Weaver projections, ripples of his forest memories had become a premonition of the Brotherhood’s showdown with the center. While listening to her descriptions of Ruebens’s dreamscape, Richard had instantly recognized traces of the most painful period of his life. She’d unknowingly plucked the memories from his mind, more in tune with him from the start than he’d realized. They’d connected deeper than he allowed any other person in his life.

  “You don’t let anyone see the truth,” Sarah had said when he’d confronted her about hiding from her own memories. “You show people whatever you need them to see, to get what you want.”

  But Sarah Temple did know him. She had from the start.

  And now he could feel her running to the same woods, into the heart of his long-ago nightmare, making it part of her reality.