She turned slowly and placed her back against the wall, staring at the ceiling.
“What do we do now?” Jackson asked.
Eleanor looked at him, and as she did, a tremor rocked the room—a violent shaking unlike anything they had experienced until that moment. A tiny crack appeared in the ceiling above them and showered the room with dust. The lights flickered on and off, bathing them in momentary, intermittent darkness. Eleanor pressed her hands against the wall behind her and bent her knees, lowering herself toward the floor a few inches at a time. The shaking lasted for only a few moments; then the lights stopped flickering and the room fell silent.
Eleanor considered Jackson’s question, which was the only thing she could think of amid what threatened to become overwhelming panic. It proved to be an anchor. The answer that came surprised her. “Whatever the hell we want,” she said gruffly and stood away from the wall. “This is getting way out of hand.”
“I agree,” Jackson said, exhaling. They both looked at Riley. After a few seconds, he nodded firmly in agreement.
“Let’s get out of here,” Eleanor said.
Not requiring a further word of instruction, the three rushed into action, moving to their respective computers. The sound of tapping filled the room as they began inputting commands, beginning the shutdown sequence.
“Done here,” Jackson said.
“OK, good. Nice going,” Eleanor said. She could feel the energy between the three of them as they drew closer than they ever had before. They had secretly prepared for this eventuality, but Eleanor was sure her comrades never suspected they would have to follow through on an escape plan—and neither did she. Secretly, though, she suspected that, on some level, she had always known it would come to this. “I’ll be done in a moment.”
“I need ten seconds,” Riley said.
“No problem,” Jackson answered.
Eleanor finished shutting down her system on a more permanent basis than she was used to every night. She turned and looked up, addressing the AI. “Jeffrey, download all data pertaining to the subject we discovered today to my own personal cloud. Make sure it’s secured. I want to continue having remote access once we leave. Can you make arrangements for that?”
“You do not have the proper clearance to request that task, Eleanor.”
Eleanor’s jaw clenched as she glared at the speaker system embedded in the roof. “Override clearance. Use decryption algorithm Ellie dash four two six.”
A curious beep came from the speaker above, as though the system was caught in a momentary lock. Both Jackson and Riley stopped what they were doing and watched the speaker, their brows furrowed in surprise. Riley had been tapping commands into his console, and for a few seconds during that tense time, his fingers hovered above it, trembling. Then the AI spoke again. “Command request accepted. Override complete. All data pertaining to the subject has been copied to your personal cloud.”
Eleanor let out a sigh of relief and went to the corner of the room, where her emergency backpack was stored in a locker. She entered the four-digit code and the caged door swung open. Reaching in, she took the small pack and placed it over her shoulders. It contained just enough provisions to survive for a few days, as well as various methods of summoning help via the internet and other, less obvious means. These packs had been prepared in advance in case they had to leave the facility during an emergency and remain hidden. Eleanor took one of these packs now because she was finding it extremely difficult to predict how the Committee would react to them leaving their post. Screw it, she thought as she pulled the side straps to the front and fastened them. There’s no way I’m staying here.
When she turned back around to look at the other side of the room, she saw that both Jackson and Riley had finished shutting down their computers and were walking toward her. They each took one of the remaining two packs from the locker. Eleanor waited for them to secure the packs around their coats. When they had, the three of them faced each other. They nodded in unison and headed for the door, with Eleanor trailing behind them.
“Jeffrey, turn off the lights please,” she said. The lights flickered off almost immediately. She heard the beep of the security panel as Jackson passed his wrist over it. This was followed by the click of the door as the lock opened. Now, as Eleanor turned around, she could see into the corridor, which was composed of bare gray concrete. She watched as Riley stepped straight out and Jackson took a look over his shoulder to make sure she was following.
She paused for a moment and looked at his partially silhouetted frame in the darkness. Then she approached him, and he backed out farther to make room for her. She stood in the doorway, keeping her hand on the door, and Jackson helped her hold the extremely heavy frame open. Turning around, knowing the door was not going to shut on her—a primal fear—Eleanor glanced around the darkened room and knew she was doing the right thing; the sooner she was out of there, the better.
As though the hand of fate itself reached out to her that very moment, another shudder rocked the small building. A deep trembling came from somewhere in the distance, rocking the very earth below them and sending a vibration through Eleanor’s feet and into her body. She immediately felt Jackson’s hand on her shoulder, steadying her. Some of the weight of the doorframe came down on her hand, so she pushed back hard against it. One of the desks heaved and the computer that sat on top of it slid off the front, crashing to the floor. Wasting no more time, and needing no further confirmation, Eleanor addressed the AI one final time. Somehow, she knew it would be the last communication she would ever have with the Committee.
“Jeffrey, shut down power to the monitoring station.”
“Sleep mode?” the oblivious AI responded.
Eleanor knew that the artificial intelligence systems the Committee used were far more advanced than what they had here. Jeffrey was but a shadow of the resources they had access to, so she felt no remorse in leaving the system behind.
“No,” she responded. “Total shut down. Cut your connection to the Committee network and disconnect redundancy systems.”
“Disabling the connection to the main network requires level four clearance or higher.”
“Override. Use algorithm Ellie dash four two six.”
“Accessing.” A moment passed. In the darkness, Eleanor could hear only Jackson’s breathing in the hallway behind her.
“Program active. Override initiated. Task complete. Disconnecting from the main network and shutting down redundancy systems. Warning: A hard reboot will be required if this command is not rescinded within one minute.”
“Cancel that. Carry out my command immediately.”
Knowing what was coming, Jackson let go of the doorframe and quickly stepped back into the hallway. Eleanor let go as well and watched the heavy door fall toward them. With a solid clank, it locked into place. They heard a series of heavy, automated locks turn, sealing it tight. She stood staring at the door for a few seconds longer than necessary, knowing she was silently saying goodbye to a part of her life that was gone forever. Where she would pick up from here, she had no idea, but her first port of call would be to visit her sister in San Diego.
“We’ve got to go now, Ellie!” Jackson said from behind her.
Wasting no time, she turned to him and nodded. Their gazes remained locked for a second as they shared a moment of silent understanding. Then they both turned toward the end of the concrete hallway that led to a single double door made of thick steel. Jackson approached the security panel and ran his wrist over it. The panel beeped, and then the thick double door swung inward, filling the hallway with the sound of heaving metal.
A gust of cool wind rushed in as the three of them stared at the dusty brown earth just five feet from the interior. Another minute tremor shook the ground beneath them, and with that prompt, they wasted no time in stepping forward and leaving the monitoring station behind. The door closed behind them, and they continued moving across the cra
cked brown terrain, following an escape plan which they had roughly devised on a previous occasion.
First, they moved toward a thick wooded area two hundred feet in front of them. When they were twenty feet away, the three turned and glanced back over their shoulders. From the exterior, the closed double door was bathed in shadow and appeared black. They were reminded that, from the outside, with no evidence to the contrary, the small facility could have contained anything.
Eleanor took a breath, turned around, and headed for the thick conifers directly ahead, happy about what she had done, but scared at the price she would pay in the future for abandoning the Committee. She knew what it was capable of, and she dared not think about the fact. She was tremendously glad to have Riley and Jackson’s footfalls close behind her. Then they were walking by her side. She received no indication that they were leaving her company any time soon. Her lips curled into a smile as, with every step she took, a sense of freedom flooded her awareness. When they entered the forested area, she looked up at the trees and took delight at the sight of them. They were beautiful, swaying gently in the light breeze. It felt as though she was seeing them for the first time.
***
Daniel was standing at the entrance to the walkway that ran alongside the Golden Gate Bridge, though it wasn’t Daniel at all. It was Zatera, and he was completely unprepared for the tectonic effort Daniel himself would soon make to regain control of his body. He looked up at the vast structure. The sky was strewn with pink clouds, which contrasted beautifully with the brown earth and the ever-moving sea below. To him, on some level, it was like a painting. His brow furrowed in confusion as he wondered from where such a thought had come. He dismissed the strange idea and walked through the gate, beginning to traverse the bridge.
When he was a third of the way across, he glanced up at the giant support cables lining the structure. As his gaze passed over them, they swayed, creaking under the influence of the psychic energy that leaked from his mind. He smiled, as no matter where he looked now—out to the water, to the cliffs on either side of the bridge, or into the distance at the city beyond—he could feel it all to an extent that no human had ever experienced before. Zatera knew he could affect it all on a grand scale, but it slipped his focus that some of these ideas were coming from Daniel’s own mind—his essence—from the place into which he had been cast, and from where he had already begun his fight to regain control.
As he walked onward, the bridge rocked slightly under his feet. The occupants of the vehicles and the other pedestrians seemed oblivious to the effect he was having on the bridge, though one woman in a nearby vehicle did glance up with a concerned expression as one of the giant slanted cables swayed slightly.
He continued onward, drawn by the pull of the city as though it were a pool of gravity.
***
Max was flying over the state of Arizona, scanning the psychic spectrum for the person the entity had selected, but he was having difficulty locating him, and he knew why: This individual was fighting Zatera’s control, and he was doing a surprisingly good job. The interaction of both their psyches, as the young man—whomever he proved to be—fought to maintain control of his own mind was producing a kind of interference that made it nearly impossible to locate his presence. All Max could do was hone in slowly, following a rough trajectory he knew would take him to a place near his location.
He stopped above a rest station in the middle of the desert, and a cloud of dust blew up around his feet as he touched down on the dusty ground. He continued scanning, reluctant to admit that Daniel had now become the most likely target. His brow furrowed slightly at the thought, and he glanced at the surface around his feet. At least, he thought he knew. The young teenage male in Tokyo had not been strong enough to resist the will of Zatera’s mind—a mind Max knew all too well—and he was already en route to the newly formed structure off the coast of New York. Max couldn’t do anything now to break the entity’s hold over him. However, if he could just get to Daniel in time…
Glancing around, Max saw that he was at the back of a small building. He took a left around the side of it and approached the front corner. From there, he stopped and watched. He noticed a few patrons. Some were charging their vehicles, some were returning with small bags, which he knew they referred to as groceries, and some were just standing around, bathing in the sunlight. After a few moments, some of them began staring at him. He glanced down at his clothing and pursed his lips. He hadn’t considered that it might attract attention, but the patrons slowly resumed what they were doing, appearing to forget about him.
Looking up at the sky, Max focused hard and glimpsed a brief picture of Daniel in his mind. He was walking across a structure of some kind, with giant lengths of red-colored wire that ran up and down it in large concave arcs. It was a bridge. Max got one brief glance of the grayish sky, connecting through Daniel’s mind to his sight, but was then thrown from the brief vision. He winced and took a step back. He shook his head gently as he realized that Daniel had indeed been the target after all. The struggle between Daniel and the entity had become immense, and the psychic noise it generated prevented Max from keeping his psychic sight in that vicinity for longer than a few seconds. Still, he had gleaned something, and his eyes lit up at the possibility; Daniel was walking across a bridge of some kind. Max took a sharp intake of breath as he realized something. He had seen that bridge before.
Looking around, he scanned the patrons’ minds. One by one, he searched their memories to find the location of the bridge. He did so quickly, in the mind of the second woman. It was, as he had feared, in the city of San Francisco, and its name was the Golden Gate Bridge. Everyone in the vicinity was staring at him now, having detected something abnormal, but what that was, specifically, was just outside the reach of their understanding. He could tell that none of them had any psychic ability, but still, everyone had intuition, and these people knew that something was unusual about what had just happened. One elderly woman was standing across the space outside the station. She had placed a hand to her chest and was staring at him through strained eyes, taking shallow breaths.
Quickly, he reached into their minds and removed himself from their memories and their immediate sight. Having done that, he glanced around at the incredible vista of the brown desert on the other side of the road, where gusts of wind blew sand upward, turning it into small funnels that whirled across the earth. Then Max raised his arms to his sides at waist height, palms up, and rose off the ground. When he was five hundred feet in the air, he turned and glanced east, scanning New York and the surface where Zatera was working. Had he made the right choice? By the time the surface had been constructed on the ocean, Zatera had been drawing power from mystical sources that would enable him to stand up to Max’s power to a greater degree. If Max had gone straight for him and tried to eliminate the threat immediately, he would have been playing a gambit, for if he had lost, Earth would have fallen under Zatera’s control, and beyond that waited the Nexus. Max dared not think about the ramifications of that, because if he did manage to open the portal…
He winced at the thought, and then turned west, facing the direction in which he knew San Francisco waited, knowing for certain now that Zatera was attempting to control Daniel. Max assured himself that he had made the correct decision. If he could break Zatera’s hold over him, and perhaps find a way to empower him with new hope and some of his own knowledge about the worlds that waited beyond this one, his chances would be much greater. If push came to shove, Max could stand up to two of them, greatly empowered. Against three, he would be severely outnumbered, though he would never stop trying. He thought of Jane and her friends, and he worried about them. However, somehow he knew that Jane could handle herself. His brow creased as he thought about this. The Rose had given something to Jane. He knew that; he had seen it, but what would the cost of such a gift be? And would Jane ever be able to control the new power that had been endowed to her? As it was, Max didn’t
fully understand its implications, though a preemptive feeling was forming somewhere in the back of his vast mind. It spoke of an outcome that scared him. He glanced toward the sky as he levitated. If it comes to that, he thought, I’ll face my fate with courage.
He mused on the matter for only a few moments, for his mind worked far faster than a human’s. Truly, he didn’t know what plans the Presence had for this world, or why it had empowered Jane—for that’s what the fragment it had given her truly represented. However, he knew Jane was strong—growing stronger every day, in fact–—and he knew, for now at least, that she could handle herself and protect her friends if need be.
Resigning himself to this security, he reached forward. A surge of power built up behind him, and then he rocketed across the sky, reaching Mach speeds in a matter of seconds.
CHAPTER 7
CIARA’S STRUGGLE
As the car approached the outskirts of the city and headed inward toward Manhattan, Jane let her concentration drift, and the inner confines of the car felt physically distant. She could feel its motion, but that was about it. In her mind’s eye, she saw, on and off, some kind of rounded structure, which, from a distance, appeared to be made entirely of crystal. It was for the most part flat, but here and there it crested upward, as though the surface of an ocean had been frozen in place and transformed into this strange, frosted, gleaming white substance. As they approached the city, the image appeared in her mind with increasing frequency. The last two times she had seen the object, the large, circular surface had flashed with incredible light, as though some powerful energy was pulsing beneath it. In the third and final insight, which came to her as they entered the inner part of the city, she almost gasped, as she thought she saw the image of a young man turning and looking at her. His eyes had been brimming with blue light, and she had the immediate thought that if she were to look into them, she would be lost forever—ensnared by the power that beamed from within them.
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