‘Er, nothing. I mean, it’s just a turn of phrase. She’s a young woman who’s been recovering from a traumatic experience. They’ll have to take her medical history into account.’
‘You’re lying.’ Emmy took a step toward her rival. ‘You know, don’t you? You know that Lucy is pregnant.’
When Dr Starks’s expression showed no signs of surprise at the revelation, Emmy knew she had been aware of the pregnancy all along. She turned to Charlie, who immediately shook his head.
‘I didn’t tell her. I told nobody.’
‘What did you do?’ Emmy asked Dr Stark.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ replied Constance.
‘Stop lying. I know it was you who called in the government spooks. What I want to know is what else you’ve done.’
When Dr Stark did not reply, Emmy decided to take a more proactive approach. She returned to her desk and accessed a security recording from the hospital.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Constance. ‘You won’t find anything there.’
‘Do you really think that I wasn’t keeping an eye on my girl at all times?’ replied Emmy. ‘I installed this camera myself. In case somebody tampered with the internal one.’
She brought up the footage from the day Lucy was undergoing her sleep therapy. She played it back at increased speed, slowing it back down to normal when Dr Stark arrived in shot. As soon as it became apparent what Constance was about to do, Emmy shut off the playback to spare her lover’s dignity.
‘Why?’ asked Emmy. ‘This makes no sense.’
She turned around and saw that Dr Stark was no longer there.
‘Shit!’ she cried out. ‘She’s done a runner. We have to go after her.’
Charlie grabbed Emmy by the arm, preventing her from going anywhere.
‘Forget about her,’ he said. ‘We have a far greater concern to deal with. I think I know why Constance did this.’
‘What do you mean?’
Charlie walked to his desk and sat down. He looked defeated. His face was pale.
‘I never told you about this because I thought it would never be a problem. Back in Tibet, General Tao had been conducting certain experiments.’
‘I already know all about this,’ said Emmy. ‘I was there, remember?’
‘No, you only know part of the story. The general’s experiments weren’t just limited to the diamond dogs and the super soldiers. I later found out that he’d attempted to create a radioactive hybrid using in-vitro fertilisation. They could never get the process to work. The radioactive eggs always infected the mother. In every instance the women died during the first trimester.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’
‘I didn’t think it was important. I only found out myself after Tao had been killed and the experiments were shut down. It was not something the government in Beijing wanted anybody finding out about – particularly their new research partners.’
‘Why would anybody restart such a sick program?’
‘I’m guessing because they thought they could get it to work. Lucy is immune to the effects of the radiation, and as such, she may be able to carry an infected embryo to term.’
Emmy was shaking. After all of the negotiations; all of the assurances, she had been lied to again.
‘They must have been planning this all along. It’s why they pressured us into taking Dr Stark back. Lucy’s eggs – they must have harvested them when she was in the coma and then...oh God, I can’t even think about any of this. I have to find her before they do. I have to get that thing out of her.’
Chapter 31
‘You still don’t know where she is,’ said Charlie.
‘Yes, I do,’ replied Emmy. ‘Now I know what that thing is inside her, I know exactly where she’ll have gone. She’ll be looking for answers and that can lead her to just one place.’
‘Jackson’s Hill.’
‘Exactly. If we move quickly, we may get to her before they do.’
Charlie was reluctant, but agreed to help regardless. To mask their actions they bypassed the main computer from recording the mission in the same way Emmy had when performing her elicit experiment with Dr Stark. They then disconnected the lab’s security cameras for added protection. When finished with their work they would easily be able to splice in a loop from an earlier session.
Once in her astral form, Emmy went straight to the old observatory. It was the first time she had been back since passing through the wormhole with Jimmy. The atmosphere tingled with radioactive activity. More so than she remembered. Something had disturbed it. Lucy’s presence alone would not make such an impact. This was something much more powerful.
She shifted her consciousness to the outside of the building. There was a strong animal presence here and they too seemed agitated. It was like something had stirred up their psychic instincts. Emmy recognised the staccato movements of a kangaroo and remembering Lucy’s history with the animals, she willed herself toward it, melding its consciousness with her own.
Sharing the mind of a human was disorientating enough, but getting inside an animal’s brain was beyond anything she had ever dealt with. The memories were vivid but not ordered in any way that she could make sense of. All of the information was right there in front of her, but she still needed the key with which to unlock it.
Animal psychology was far from her area of expertise, but she did at least know that they were ruled by their instincts. They would use their emotions to organise their memories. Emmy simply had to find the relevant emotion the animal would associate with Lucy. She had an idea what emotion that would be. It was the same emotion that Lucy herself had described feeling during the encounter; wonder.
Emmy projected her own ideas of wonder and awe, whilst also concentrating her thoughts on Lucy. It did not take long for images held in the animal’s memory to begin to bleed into her own consciousness. The double filtering first by human intelligence and then by the limitations of an astral view meant she saw only fragments of what the animal had. She was unable to discern anything connected to her lover.
Further interactions with other kangaroos yielded the same result. If any of them had come into contact with Lucy, it had not made a strong enough impression on them to stand out in their memory. There seemed to be nothing of any help that she could take from attempting to read their minds.
She was ready to give up when she became aware of a stronger energy skirting the peripherals of the mob. This animal was not only huge but it possessed a much stronger aura than the others and glowed green with the intensity of the radiation it had absorbed.
Emmy willed herself to move in closer. The energy immediately reacted by backing away from her. She knew that a kangaroo’s vision was based on movement, so it should not have reacted to something that was essentially not there.
Without delaying another nanosecond, Emmy merged with the kangaroo’s mind. She could feel it trying to resist her, but she knew that she had the advantage. That advantage was that the animal did not understand what Emmy was or how she was able to transport her consciousness from point to point at will.
Each time she accessed a memory, the animal attempted to shut it down, trying to overpower the thought with blind, confused aggression. To Emmy it was like riding a bucking bronco and at any moment she might be thrown off.
She could feel her grip weakening, but when she found what she was looking for, the animal’s mind became still. Her initial assumption about wonder being the key had proven correct. The animal was so in awe of its encounters with Lucy that stimulating the memories put it in a trance-like state.
The memory began outside of the observatory. Emmy saw Lucy being chased down by a pack of wild dogs. When one of the animals managed to drag the girl down to the ground, Emmy thought she may already be too late, but then the memory split between two overlapping realities. It was just like how Jimmy had described to Emmy what happened during his visions.
The dominant image h
ad Lucy on the ground, fighting the dog away with frantic kicks, and the secondary, less clear image was of Lucy rising to her feet surrounded by the inanimate carcasses of the dogs.
Was this an enticement for the kangaroo? Jimmy often talked of how once he saw a vision he had to make it pass, so Emmy assumed that the kangaroo was compelled to slaughter the animals that were attacking Lucy.
The strange thing was that with each blow the animal delivered to the dingoes, the focal point of its vision was always on the human female. More than that, it was focused on a specific region of the girl.
At that moment, Emmy realised it was not awe the animal was feeling, but fear. It was terrified of the life growing inside Lucy. It was not consciously protecting her but simply following its psychic intuition, even at the expense of its basest instincts. Emmy realised that the kangaroo, like the dingoes, wanted Lucy dead, or rather it wanted the baby inside her dead, but it was also a slave to its unnatural intuition.
What she could not figure out was why the animals would want to kill an unborn child. Then she remembered what Charlie had told her of the Chinese experiments. They had been attempting to implant a foetus infected with psychic radiation into an uninfected surrogate. Essentially, they were trying to create a hybrid – all of the power of the infected combined with the clean health of the uninfected. The potential harm such an unnatural being could bring about was unthinkable.
She followed the current memory trail of the kangaroo through to its conclusion. It had led Lucy to a battered old army jeep, which Emmy recognised from the attack on the convoy. By some miracle, her lover managed to get the engine going and just before she drove off, leaving the kangaroo behind, she spoke. The words were unintelligible to the kangaroo and did not, therefore, figure highly on its hearing spectrum. Emmy could make out just one word “Dad”.
***
She was on a straight and flat road that stretched for thousands of kilometres. There were no other vehicles for miles around and the needle was maxed out at 180 kilometres per hour. Still, she felt as if time was running out. That the world was shrinking in on her.
As she continued to put more and more miles behind her, she allowed her thoughts to return to the vision back at the observatory. Its meaning was still unclear.
Had she foreseen the end of the world?
The entire landscape had been bathed in flames and the earth under her feet had crumbled as she walked. What else but the apocalypse could have caused such devastation?
She briefly took her eyes off the road in order to look down at her stomach. It was growing. This thing could only have been inside her for a few weeks at most, yet she had developed a bump already. If there was one thing she was certain of, it was that whatever was inside her was not human. At least not in any sense she was familiar with. It had to have something to do with those awful experiments of Emmy’s. As such, Lucy did not know if she would even be able to trust her lover. She only hoped that her father would have the answers she was looking for.
When she saw the sign for the turnoff to King’s Canyon, a sense of relief washed over her. She knew that she was nearing the end of her journey. One way or another, her troubles would soon be over.
She left the car in the main car park and then climbed the many steps to the plateau of the canyon. Ever since her childhood she had dreamed of visiting this place. Now she was here it made her feel detached from those memories. She belonged to a different world to the one occupied by the many tourists who passed her by. To her this was not a place to be marvelled at – it was merely the end of a long, arduous journey. A journey, which had begun the night her father died.
Emmy had not given her the specifics of where she scattered the ashes. It had been dark and at the time the scientist was on the run; harried and paranoid. She had merely tilted the urn and let the breeze do the rest. Lucy hoped that the exact location did not matter. If he was here, he would reveal himself.
He had to.
As she waited for that elusive sign, a helicopter passed overhead. Unlike Lucy, its occupants had now found exactly what they were looking for.
***
Emmy had considered checking in with Charlie, but decided against it because she knew he would only urge caution. Her partner had an uncanny talent for second guessing her and she feared he would succeed in talking her out of doing what needed to be done.
This would be her second visit to King’s Canyon. The first had been to scatter the ashes of Lucy’s father. During that time, she had been accompanied by the tulpa, which she had mistaken for the real Lucy. This time there was no doubt as to the authenticity of the girl from Adelaide. What was in doubt was her fate.
With experience and practice, it is possible to identify individuals when viewing the world from an astral perspective. Human consciousness has evolved to recognise patterns and each person’s energy signature possesses its own unique pattern. As soon as Emmy saw Lucy’s, she willed herself to be a part of it.
‘Lucy.’
There was no response.
Emmy resisted the urge to read her lover’s mind. Since there were no obvious changes in Lucy’s emotional state (emotions affect the colour of energy) it was likely that she could not hear Emmy in her thoughts. This level of communication was too complex. There was too much separation between the women. Put simply, they were occupying different worlds.
Emmy needed a way to link those separate levels of existence. She needed something that could coexist between the real and the ethereal. In all her experience astral travelling she had only encountered one thing to fit that description. The tulpa interacted with the physical world but it was created out of pure consciousness. It was also now an inseparable part of Lucy.
Emmy let her consciousness relax and in doing so she could feel the bond returning that she had once shared with the tulpa. The radiation inside her lover’s belly had restored the connection she had to it.
‘Can you hear me?’
‘Emmy, is that you?’
‘Yes. I’m astral travelling. I’ve come to help you.’
There was a brief silence whilst Lucy processed this new development.
‘I’m scared,’ she eventually said.
‘You’re going to be okay,’ Emmy told her, trying her best to project positive thoughts to her lover. ‘I can help you.’
‘Is my father here?’
‘No, he isn’t. He’s gone – I’m sorry.’
‘Then it’s over. There’s nobody that can help us.’
‘That’s not true. We can get you that help. I know what the baby is. We can take it out of you.’
‘You know?’ Lucy’s thoughts felt tight to Emmy, like a balled fist.
‘I didn’t at first. Dr Stark did it without mine or Charlie’s knowledge. Nobody at the complex knew, but none of that matters now. We just have to get you somewhere safe.’
For the first time since finding out about the pregnancy, Lucy could see the possibility of a way out. She desperately wanted to believe that Emmy really could help her. Then reality came crashing back as a helicopter rose up from within the canyon.
It was a monstrous machine. From its camouflage paintwork to the unnecessary gun mounts, it belonged more in a war zone than a National Park. When the pilot spotted Lucy, he angled the craft around ninety degrees, presenting an open side containing a small squad of armed soldiers.
Lucy looked around for somewhere to run and that was when she noticed more uniformed men approaching on foot. Every exit was blocked. They had her trapped.
‘They’ve found me,’ she said.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ replied Emmy. ‘They want the baby, not you. We’ll figure something out.’
Lucy thought of the vision at Jackson’s Hill. Could the life inside her really bring about the cataclysmic destruction she had seen foreshadowed? If so, she could not risk the military getting their hands on it.
‘I cannot let them take me,’ she told Emmy. ‘Not until we know more about why they want thi
s baby so much. We have to find out what it is that’s growing inside me. Can you do that?’
‘I think so. I mean, I can at least try.’
Emmy had used her previous connection to the tulpa’s energy to communicate with Lucy, but given that the unborn was infected with psychic radiation, she thought it would be easier to establish a connection with it directly.
She drifted down until she could feel the infected energy intermingle with her own. It overwhelmed her. It was far stronger than it should have been. She put this down to the radiation, but there was something else about it. Something familiar.
Everything went black and when Emmy regained awareness she found herself face to face with herself. It was like looking in a mirror except the reflection was from a different time. It still had her long brown hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. She was younger and more naive, more trusting.
‘You want to take a sample of my blood?’ she heard the younger version of herself ask.
She then watched on, through her grandfather’s eyes, as he extracted a sample of her blood and placed it into a labelled vial. He had four more receptacles, some he had already filled, others he had not. They were labelled with the names of her lab partner, the two American soldiers she had been working with and that of her grandfather himself.
The vision ended as abruptly as it had begun. She quickly re-established contact with Lucy.
‘They used my grandfather’s blood,’ she said. ‘The foetus is not only infected with the radiation, it also contains Jackson Fox’s DNA.’
As soon as she heard the name of Jackson Fox, Lucy knew what had to be done. There was absolutely no way she could allow herself to be taken. No way could she let the baby fall into their hands.
‘Can you stop them from taking me?’ she asked.
‘No,’ replied Emmy. ‘Without a strong power source there’s nothing I can do in this form. But don’t worry. Wherever they take you – I will find you. Even if I have to create another tulpa to do it.’
‘We can’t take that risk. I won’t let you become a monster for me. This thing they’ve put inside of me has to be destroyed. There’s no other way – I’m sorry,’
Diamond Sky Trilogy Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 81