Secret Legacy

by Anna DeStefano

  The same as before, Trinity was fixated on the images she’d created on the wall. The mural had been crudely drawn, but the disturbing complexity of its content made up for its lack of finesse. There was a dark sea that perfectly depicted the malevolence of their nightmare. An endless tunnel. The horrifying door. There was a forest within the swirling water, too, filled with a flurry of colors that spoke of need and want and running and belonging. Every edge was jagged. Every color too dark. The manic energy of the brushstrokes had been painted by an unsteady mind.

  The wolf was still there, a demonic caricature howling into the ocean, overseeing it, stalking the edges of every horrible event of the last year of Sarah’s life, waiting for his chance to go in for the kill. But above it all, beyond the madness, was the seascape Sarah had just left. At the top of Trinity’s mural, the sun was shining dawn’s glory across perfect sand and docile currents, and brilliant colors were curling into the harmless spray each wave made as it found its way to shore. And it was that picturesque scene that Trinity had washed in crimson.

  The future that Sarah longed to create had been all but obliterated by the symbolic wash of too much destruction. Too many battles that had been lost to minds that wanted death instead of redemption. Too much promise had been consumed by deceit. Too many dreams had been lost to nightmares, so the wolf could control a legacy that had been born in death.

  “They’ve controlled you from the very start, haven’t they?” Sarah asked the hollow-eyed little girl, trying to understand what this vision and all the others were telling her. “They’ve controlled your mind and believed no one would ever come looking for you outside Ruebens’s nightmare. Except you’ve been trying to break free of the wolf’s hold from the start, just like I did. That’s how you found me in Lenox—how you found the memory that would bring me to you. It’s why you haunted that place and waited for me all those years, even though you were certain I’d never come. It’s why you protected me in the ocean projection. Your mind’s never been completely theirs. A part of you never gave up on your own dream of being rescued.”

  Her daughter wouldn’t look at her. It was as if Sarah were gazing at the empty shell of her child. She had no sense of the angry, lost energy she’d felt from Trinity before. But there was no hint of Trinity’s light, either.

  Sarah dropped to her knees.

  “Don’t give up.” She took Trinity’s hands. “You have to keep fighting to break your mind away from them. It’s not too late. There’s still time.”

  There was no response.

  No flicker of emotion.

  But the mural began to move. Seething clouds rolled slowly over the wolf’s ocean and the forest Trinity had drawn within it—symbolizing, Sarah somehow knew, that the coming battle between the Brotherhood and the center was building. Sarah could sense Trinity’s focus anchored on that conflict, beyond the vision. Her center handlers were preparing to stake their claim on the psychic realm, and to destroy the Watchers who’d sworn to stop them. They would use Trinity to do it.

  “I can feel the dark things they want you to do.” Sarah squeezed Trinity’s hands. “I’ve always felt them, even though I stayed away too long. I’m here now, and you helped me find you. You helped me dream of this place again.”

  “I’ve been waiting for so long,” Trinity had said in their Lenox vision. “I knew you couldn’t stay away forever. And I had to see if you were really real . . .”

  “I’m real,” Sarah insisted. “And I know you don’t want to do what the center’s trained you to do. Not all your cries for help were the wolf’s programming, or you wouldn’t still be here waiting for me. You don’t have to fight them alone, Trinity. Let me in, and I’ll help you.”

  The shadows cloaking the room shifted. A warning sound, a wounded animal’s growl, rumbled from the little girl’s throat. Her daughter’s crimson cloud continued to ravage the shoreline at the top of the mural, blocking their view of the peaceful shore Sarah had come from.

  “I had to know,” Trinity had said before, “if it was true, what he said. How much you’d hate me . . .”

  “I don’t hate you,” Sarah insisted. “Let me help you break away from this place. Talk to me, Trinity. I won’t let you give up.”

  The way Richard hadn’t let Sarah go, no matter how hard she’d fought him. His unspoken love had been hers, it had saved her, long before she’d let herself want it.

  “He said if you found me,” Trinity had said, “all you’d do is run . . .”

  “I’m here to stay,” Sarah promised her daughter, remembering Maddie’s pledge to do the same, when Sarah had been lost. “I’m never going away again, no matter what happens. Tell the center I’m here. Maybe they already know. Tell them you have me. Deliver me up on a silver platter. I don’t care. My mind’s not moving from this reality, from this place where you wanted me, until you come with me, Trinity. So if you really do want me dead, then get it over with.”

  The next sound Trinity made was so soft, so close to a little girl’s whimper, Sarah knew for the first time what being a mother was like. Hearing her daughter’s pain hurt worse than Trinity’s screams ever had.

  “Leave me alone,” the child on the bed said, still staring at the wall.

  Her voice was so soft. So vulnerable. The cynical edge from their nightmare was gone. The brittle hatred that had led Trinity to strike out against Maddie and Richard and the other Watchers she thought Sarah wanted more was fading. Trinity was more shadow than flesh here. More lost.

  “You can’t be alone anymore,” Sarah said. “Like it or not, I’m a part of you.”

  “You hate him.” The wolf in the mural howled, his voice taking on Trinity’s growl from earlier.

  “Yes,” Sarah agreed. “But I love you.”

  “Shut up!” Trinity scrambled off the bed, moving to the other side. The dimness around them lifted even more, revealing the fear in her blue eyes. “Why are you here?”

  “I’m here because I’m stronger than Ruebens thought I’d be. I’m not fighting alone, the way he wanted me to. The center’s plan for you, for us, is failing. Look . . .”

  The clouds representing the center’s assault on the Brotherhood no longer consumed the mural. As they retreated, more of the manic flourish of color and brush strokes beneath were revealed. Crimson still stained Sarah’s idealistic shoreline and dream sunrise, but the images beneath the bloodred haze were stronger, too, more vibrant, while the wolf’s picture began to fade. He was still growling, but they could no longer hear what he was saying.

  The painting was evolving beyond Trinity’s control.

  “Stop it.” The little girl stomped her foot, her fists clenched into tiny balls. “You can’t be here. You can’t—”

  “I am here, right where you’ve dreamed I’d find you. My memories of this place have been here with you from the start.”

  Sarah looked back to the bed separating them, her head pounding. An image of herself as a child materialized, her hands covered in all the colors from her dreams. The bright colors that were coming to life in Trinity’s mural.

  “Stop it!” Tears glittered in her daughter’s eyes. “You’ll ruin everything.”

  “No,” Sarah said. “We’ll fix everything. Together. But some things need to be ruined first, so we can see what’s really there.”

  Sarah was finally connecting with her child, with the secret legacy that she’d run from. And their psychic energies were mingling, beginning to paint the same pictures, even if their emotions were still disconnected. The childhood image of Sarah in the middle of the bed pushed to her knees. She stood, her legs shaking as the mattress sagged. The little girl looked to Sarah, then to Trinity. She lifted her color-soaked hands to the mural.

  “No!” Trinity scrambled onto the bed and grabbed the child’s hands before Sarah’s childhood image could spread more color on the wall. “Go away. Leave me alone. It’s all I have left . . .”

  “It’s not real,” Sarah’s childhood image said. She str
ained to reach the mural. “You’ve never been real. If you stay here, you’ll be—”

  “Nothing,” Sarah said, conquering the last of the paralyzing fear that had controlled her life since she was a child.

  Sarah had let herself become nothing in the darkness of her coma. That nothing had primed her to fall under the control of Ruebens’s Dream Weaver programming. It had been where she’d connected with her daughter’s energy inside Trinity’s nightmare. Fear of who they were and the psychic legacy they’d inherited had become a maze still threatening to trap both their minds forever.

  The mural was a reflection of each thing Trinity’s powers had achieved. Of course Trinity was desperate to protect it. But to the child, none of it had been real beyond her mind. The center had made certain Trinity felt like nothing beyond their commands. She hadn’t been allowed to dream beyond her programming. She wasn’t supposed to know how to feel anything but what she’d been brainwashed into feeling since she was a baby. But both were happening now, through her growing link to Sarah.

  “You don’t have to be afraid.” Sarah approached the struggling little girls on the bed. “I’m here now. You don’t want the darkness you were born into. You never have. And you know I’m the only person outside your world who can get you out. Let me help you.”

  Sarah climbed onto the bed. Her fingers now dripping in amethyst and greens and a prism of blues, too, she grabbed the children’s clasped fists and pressed all their hands to the mural.

  A rainbow of colored light shot outward from the point of contact, illuminating the churning sea and its windswept forest, enhancing every image with deeper clarity. The horrible door became the dazzling, transparent portal Sarah had just passed through. The nightmare’s tunnel dissolved under the light’s attack, disappearing completely. The wolf snarled mutely at the truth bubbling up from the ocean’s floor, then he and his hateful sea were gone completely.

  “You’re ruining it,” Trinity cried.

  “You called me for help,” Sarah and her childhood reflection said in unison. “That makes this my vision, too.”

  “I don’t want you here.”

  Sarah looked through the shimmering door in the mural. Early-morning sunlight glared from a shoreline she could barely see. Her new dream was waiting, no storm clouds in sight.

  “The center doesn’t even know I’m here, do they?” she asked. “You’re shielding me from your handlers. You’re protecting me, just like you did in the dream. Otherwise, someone would have tried to stop us by now.”

  “I hate you!” Trinity shouted.

  “You hate what you’ve become. That’s what you’ve been trying to tell me. You want to be free of this place.”

  That darkness of what Ruebens had tried to create in both of them hadn’t been able to destroy Sarah’s connection with her daughter. There’d always been a new beginning waiting for them here, where Trinity’s dreams remained childlike, untouched, and waiting to be saved.

  “If you hate me so much,” Sarah said, “why is our light changing your mural?”

  Sarah continued to press the little hands she held to the painting’s shifting face. The illumination from their touch spread toward the sunrise vista at the top of the painting. Trinity’s crimson cloud softened to a rosy hue, then closer to a transparent pink, revealing more of the beautiful images beneath.

  “Let me go!” Trinity screamed.

  “Never,” Sarah and her childhood image both said.

  “I’m not—”

  “You’re loved,” Sarah insisted. “You’re part of the light on the other side of the door. It’s a dream that Ruebens never touched. It’s the future you wanted, when you called to me for help. And it can be real, Trinity.”

  “No.”

  “The rest of the painting is disappearing. None of it matters now, except that it brought me here to be with you.”

  “You . . .” Trinity stopped fighting. She squeezed her eyes shut. Impossibly large tears leaked from their corners. “You never came.”

  “I’m here now. And I’m not alone. Neither are you. Not anymore.”

  “They’ll hate me.” The hitch in the child’s voice begged Sarah to tell her she was wrong. “Your Watchers—”

  “They’ll help you. They’ll help me fix the damage the center’s done to your mind.”

  “They’ll never believe me.” Trinity slumped against the wall. “I killed—”

  “The men you hurt aren’t dead. Neither is my sister. In fact, she’s waiting for you there in your painting, where the forest meets the sea.”

  “She’s afraid of me.”

  “She’s afraid of me, too.” Sarah smiled, because she trusted her twin to stay by her side, regardless. “I’m afraid of what we’re all becoming. But that won’t stop me from dreaming. Not anymore. I’m going to keep dreaming and fighting for the light and the promise our legacy was created to be. You should see it, Trinity. It’s a beautiful place.”

  “I . . . I can’t see it.”

  The child squeezed her eyes shut. Her crimson stain over the ocean vista wavered. The remainder of the mural blinked out, disappearing completely.

  “That’s right,” Sarah praised. “The nightmares are other peoples’ visions. Let them go. Let me show you how to build your own dreams. Let me take you to a place where you won’t have to be scared anymore. You won’t have to hate what you’re becoming.”

  “I don’t want to.” But Trinity’s body was shaking, her fear escaping her shields and racing into Sarah’s thoughts through the connection of their intertwined fingers. “I can’t. They’ll be there. They’ll—”

  “They’ll love you, too.”

  Trinity’s eyes shot open. Dark currents of hatred replaced the anxiety Sarah had felt rolling off her. Sarah winced. Her skin burned from her daughter’s touch.

  “They’ll kill me!” Trinity’s tiny body barreled head-first into Sarah, shoving her away from the mural. “You’re all trying to wake me up, so you can kill me.”

  “Wake you up?”

  Sarah stared down at the tiny body still shoving against her, trying with less and less conviction to push her away.

  “You’re . . .” Sarah grabbed Trinity’s shoulders and shook her until the child stopped fighting. “You’re asleep. That’s how they control you, by keeping you asleep when they need your powers. Just like Richard first trained me in my coma. If you wake up, they can’t use you to attack the Brotherhood’s mission to invade the center.”

  “Leave me alone,” the child begged. “It’s a trick. I don’t want to die. They said if I wake up without them, I’ll die. They’ll—”

  “You’re not going to die, Trinity. The Watchers will come for you. They’ll protect you. But you have to wake up and stop whatever the center’s about to do. You have to tell me how to reach you.”

  “You can’t make me.” A new bout of fury blasted them. “You’re all trying to make me do things I don’t want to, and I won’t. I won’t do it anymore. Leave me alone! I just want to be alone.”

  Trinity shoved harder than before, knocking Sarah off-balance. Off the bed. Sarah clung to her child as they sailed through the air, crashing onto unforgiving tile instead of the fluffy carpet of Sarah’s childhood bedroom. Her senses were scrambling, melting. Her ears rang from impact while she blocked the razor-sharp nails of the little girl who’d landed on top of her.

  Trinity’s fear and desperation and exhaustion clawed at them, ripping at their skin. Colors consumed them, exploding through their minds until nothing was left but dazzling white. Blinding white. Searing light binding them together and filling the link they’d formed with every memory Trinity had pushed away. Each distant sensation and muffled voice and unavoidable demand that had been made on her vulnerable mind. All of them impersonal and remote and unattached, while a lonely child’s heart had begged for help.

  “I’m here,” Sarah said to her daughter. “I’ll help you. I’m finally here, and I’ll never leave you again. I promise, Trinity. Wa
ke up for me. You don’t have to keep sleeping or dreaming about anything you don’t want. Never again. I love you, honey. If you can’t believe anything else, believe that. Wake up, Trinity.”

  The seconds that followed while Trinity’s struggles grew weaker and weaker stretched on forever until the child finally collapsed, lying limp in Sarah’s arms.

  “Mommy?” a tiny voice asked, the light of Trinity’s nondreaming consciousness stirring to life within the vision.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “Explain yourself, Colonel,” Jacob said the instant Richard’s eyes opened.

  Richard shook his head, unclogging the memory circuits he’d designed his suppression meds to deaden. Jacob, not the elder’s hologram, was standing across Richard’s detention cell, his floor-length white robe billowing around him.

  “We’ve already tried that,” Richard said. “By now, you’ve obviously determined that Sarah and her sister and I might still be useful to the Brotherhood. What else do you need to know?”

  “How long has Sarah Temple been capable of projecting beyond your chemical protocol?”

  “Since the night Trinity’s nightmare first consumed her mind. Her legacy’s grown far beyond our control.”

  “And you? Surveillance detected psychic activity emanating from this location, as well as from Madeline and Sarah Temple’s cells.”

  “I’m part of who Sarah’s becoming. If you don’t trust her and her twin, you have no reason to trust me.”

  “At the same time, we detected no target for the projection.”

  “What?” Richard pushed himself up on his bunk, sitting with his head hanging, his eyes closed. Even the cell’s recessed lighting was too painful for his hangover to process. “How long . . . When did the bunker’s sensors detect Sarah’s projection with Trinity?”

  “Then she has gone after the child? And your mind isn’t still linked with hers.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Half an hour.”

  “But there was no answering surge at the center?”