Intangible

by C. A. Gray

  Intangible

  Piercing the Veil, Book 1

  C.A. Gray

  www.authorcagray.com

  Copyright and Disclaimers

  Intangible

  By C.A. Gray

  Copyright 2013, C.A. Gray

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  No Portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, audio recordings, facsimiles, photocopying, or information storage and retrieval systems without explicit written permission from the author or publisher.

  Published By:

  Wanderlust Publishing

  Tucson, AZ

  Cover Art By:

  Jayme Kelter, Copyright 2013, Klarite Photography

  All Rights Reserved

  http://www.klaritephoto.com/

  FREE eBOOK

  THE LIBERTY BOX (Book 1)

  Kate Brandeis has it all: a famous reporter at the age of twenty-four, she’s the face of the Republic of the Americas. She has a loving fiancé and all the success she could wish for. But when she learns of the death of a long-forgotten friend, her investigations unravel her perfect memories, forcing her to face the fact that she’s been living a lie.

  Jackson MacNamera, trained from a young age in the art of mind control, returns to the Republic for his mother’s funeral. Within a few hours of his arrival, authorities collect Jackson and take him by force to a room ironically called The Liberty Box, where he must choose between surrendering his thoughts to the new Republic, or fleeing for his freedom.

  Kate, bereaved and confused, finds her way to a cave community of refugees, where Jackson seems to offer her an escape from her grief. The two forge an uneasy bond, and in the process Jackson learns that Kate has some insight which may help the hunters in their attempt to free other citizens from the tyranny of the Potentate. Against the expressed wishes of the Council, the hunters plot a series of daring raids, attempting to prove that not only is freedom possible, but that the citizens are not too far gone to desire it. But with the odds so stacked against them, can the refugees succeed in their rescue missions right under the Potentate’s nose?

  Also by C.A. Gray:

  Invincible: Piercing the Veil, Book 2

  Impossible: Piercing the Veil, Book 3

  The Liberty Box: Book 1

  For Dad, whose love of physics inspired me in the first place.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you first and foremost to the Lord my God, who guides me every step of the way.

  A huge thank you to my mom, who let me use her maiden name as my pen name (Cynthia Ann Gray!), who served as my primary editor as I wrote this entire series, who let me bounce ideas off of her and helped me brainstorm, and even came up with a number of major plot points that I never would have thought of, but which turned out to be just perfect. I love you, Mom.

  Thank you to my brother and sister in law, Jeff and Keilee Deville, for all their love and support, as well as an early pair of eyes for reading and editing. (Keilee even managed to hook me up with a seasoned editor - for free!)

  And speaking of said editor, a huge thank you to Keith Clayton for his spot-on and very generous advice!

  Thank you to Jayme Kelter, for your fabulous photography skills!

  Thank you to Denise Ganley, who helped me through the early stages of researching the publishing business, when I hadn’t a clue what I was doing - and always had plenty of time to reply to my long-winded emails! Thank you also to the rest of my writer’s guild from Tempe, and especially Audrey Brockhaus for organizing it. Your encouragement, ideas and editing was invaluable.

  Thank you to Menna Bevan, my British counterpart! It’s been over a decade since I lived in England, and your eye for “British-isms” was even more necessary than I first realized!

  Thank you to Chanda Hahn, who was kind enough to write back to me when she was a bestselling author even though I was a nobody, and who offered me her invaluable advice on publishing and marketing.

  Thank you to Charlie Lehardy, who kindly helped me with my website and formatting issues, and last-minute edits.

  Thank you to Cara Williams, Ann Eberhardt, Keith Dixon, and Rudo Sibande for reading my manuscript when it was still rough, and offering your suggestions and ideas to improve it.

  Prologue

  So this is how I’m going to die?

  The thought formed in Peter Stewart’s mind in essence if not in actual words as the silver Land Rover hurtled through the air, upside down, and headed straight for the windshield of the Jeffersons’ BMW. Instinctively Peter turned to look out the window on the passenger side, and he saw just a flash of a face standing on the side of the road, with a jagged scar across the right cheek and a vivid expression of pure terror.

  Brock sat in the front seat next to the driver. Lily Portman, the new girl, and Cole, Brock’s younger brother, were in the back seat beside Peter. He could not possibly have imagined a more unlikely group of people with whom to die. In that split second, he thought of his dad’s face – his sellotaped glasses and lopsided grin. He’d never see him again. Then –

  Just at the moment when impact should have occurred, the entire scene vanished.

  Peter blinked, his heart still pounding, and looked around. All he knew for sure was that he was in a very bright place: it was a meadow, peaceful and quiet, with a pool in the middle. A rainbow radiated from the surface of the pool, and he felt himself compelled irresistibly toward it. As he approached, it grew larger.

  Am I dead? he wondered. Is this heaven? But he didn’t see the others – he was alone here. Then he saw that the others were in the rainbow – and they were still in the car. He recoiled: the rainbow showed him horrific, brutal images of the accident. The crushed front seat of the BMW obscured the driver completely beneath the wreckage. The other four were very clearly dead. He fought the nausea threatening to overtake him.

  He looked again and realized that the scene took on an eerie red hue, as if viewed through a pair of tinted glasses. At first he thought that was because of the blood, but the upholstery was red too, and the trees –

  He took a step back and saw the rest of the rainbow again. Cautiously, he moved toward orange, and the accident again blossomed into view before his eyes… but this time, the impact occurred slightly to the left of the previous one. Peter bit his lip, concentrating hard, trying to understand how reality could shift with each color, as if it were a physics problem to solve. He looked at Cole. He was still dead, but he bled from a wound in his cheekbone this time instead of just above his eye, like in the red version.

  Peter stepped back again. Infinite variations existed in the rainbow between red and orange, each showing the impact at a slightly different angle. From his perspective on the bank of the pool, each ephemeral view of the accident was like a thousand shimmering possible realities inside a kaleidoscope. Peter searched through the colors of the rainbow frantically, looking for one, just one, which might offer some hope…

  He found it buried somewhere between blue and violet. In that image, the Land Rover sat on the side of the road. Lily gasped for breath and Brock clutched the sides of his seat, but they were all otherwise all right. It looked as if the accident had never happened. Without thinking, without any idea what he was looking at, Peter somehow knew what he had to do: he aimed at the precise place in the pool where that shade of blue-violet emanated, and he dove in.

  Instantly he was back in the car, his arms outstretched. Sweat poured from his brow, and he trembled from head to
toe. The silver Land Rover hovered over the BMW, suspended in mid-air.

  “Well, set it down then!” Cole shrieked.

  The statement jarred him. What did that mean?

  That was the moment Peter realized he was the one holding up the Land Rover. His lips started muttering something without his permission, but he could not tell what they said; the words were unfamiliar. As he spoke, the car reversed its trajectory and landed on the side of the road, in exactly the same place it had started.

  Except for the hammering of their hearts, it was as if the whole thing had never happened.

  But really, it had just begun.

  Chapter 1

  Two days earlier

  Well, this is boring, Peter thought.

  He had just finished setting up his work bench in chemistry class for the day’s titration experiment. The students around him dripped sulfuric acid into sodium hydroxide, trying to turn the latter solution pink, indicating that it had neutralized.

  He had done this experiment in his back yard when he was seven.

  It took a long time, as he recalled, and the payoff of a pink solution at the end really wasn’t that exciting. He scoped out the classroom to see if there was anything he could do instead that might feel less like a waste of time. Unfortunately for Peter, Mr. Collins had figured out long ago that as long as Peter was in the class, it was absolutely vital to lock up all chemicals not strictly necessary for the day’s lesson.

  So, as usual, he would have to improvise.

  With several glances over his shoulder to make sure Mr. Collins’ back was turned, Peter opened all the drawers, looked under the sinks for any chemical he could use, even some sort of cleaning solution… nothing. Then he felt something in his jacket pocket, and withdrew a half-eaten Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bar from lunch the day before. He stared at it for a minute with intense concentration. This could have potential…

  “No eating in lab,” said Tiffany Bristol bossily, eyeing him from the next lab bench over.

  “I’m not planning on eating it,” Peter said slowly, only half-paying attention to her. Then a flash of insight lit up his face, and he couldn’t resist staying out loud, “Aha!”

  “What are you doing?” she asked suspiciously, and crept over to spy on him.

  Peter remembered seeing a prepackaged scalpel blade in his bench drawers. He retrieved it, fitted it to the scalpel blade handle, and deftly began to carve a slit into a piece of perfectly good plastic tubing.

  “You’re damaging school property!” Tiffany said, horrified.

  “Shhh,” he hissed. “It’s just plastic tubing. Nobody will even notice it’s gone. Besides, this is gonna be brilliant. Just watch!” He attached one end of the tubing to the inverted beaker containing the sulfuric acid and dragged part of it onto the lab bench, and deposited the other end into the sodium hydroxide beaker a few centimeters away. “I saw this old television episode once,” Peter explained excitedly, “where a guy plugs a sulfuric acid leak using a chocolate bar. The sulfuric acid breaks down the chocolate into elemental carbon, and it gets sticky enough to make a plug for the leak.” As he spoke, he unwrapped the chocolate, positioned it beneath the break in the tubing, and rotated the acid spigot to the ‘on’ position.

  But, he rotated the spigot a little too far, and the acid didn’t drip, like it was supposed to. It poured. The black-topped lab bench turned white everywhere the stream touched it with an angry, steaming hiss. Tiffany leapt back, too late: the sleeve of her lab coat started sizzling, and the fabric began to dissolve before her eyes. She started screaming, “Get it off! Get it off!”

  Mr. Collins appeared beside her in a flash, his face puce, and his mustache trembled. He shoved Tiffany under the emergency shower and pulled the triangular handle. The amount of water that dumped from the ceiling onto Tiffany’s head was so absurd it seemed almost like a practical joke. When it finally stopped, she wasn’t screaming anymore, but she glared at Peter underneath her sopping bangs, looking like a drowned rat.

  Mr. Collins rounded on Peter. “I don’t even want to know what you did,” he said in a barely controlled whisper, and extended his left arm fully toward the door, index finger jabbing into the air like an exclamation point. “Out!”

  “But –” Peter protested, and looked back down at the chocolate bar. Sure enough, it had congealed into a sticky, gooey mess, and the acid was now flowing through the repaired tubing straight into his fuchsia solution at the other end. But Mr. Collins was not impressed.

  “Now!”

  Fifteen minutes later, Peter stared glumly at the empty maroon leather chair in Mr. Stone’s office, still waiting for his punishment. She should have minded her own business, he thought bitterly. Then none of this would have happened. But he knew it probably wouldn’t have mattered. After three years of secondary school, Peter’s offenses had become so commonplace that the teachers often sent him to the headmaster’s office just to get rid of him.

  Peter really didn’t mean to be difficult. He wanted nothing more than to be just like all the other kids, but he simply didn’t understand how to fit into the complex social hierarchy that was secondary school. He was “special,” according to his father Bruce, although when he said it, the word “special” sounded like a euphemism for “awkward.”

  Boredom plagued Peter most of the time when he was at school. He didn’t much care for languages or history or any of that rubbish (as he called it). He did care about the maths and science curriculums, but he learned almost nothing from them. His dad worked as a physicist at the university, and Peter had taught himself most of the concepts his peers were just learning now by the age of seven. So, he had to invent ways to keep himself entertained… and he did. Regularly.

  He shifted uncomfortably in the hard wooden chair and glanced at the clock. He had been waiting alone in the office for almost twenty minutes. It used to be that the headmaster delivered his punishments swiftly in order to serve as a warning to other would-be rule breakers, but now even the headmaster was at a loss for what to do with him, and tended to drag his feet.

  Peter recalled his previous visit to the headmaster’s office only three days ago, when he had borrowed some liquid nitrogen and copper wiring from the chemistry lab, and tried to design a superconducting magnet in one of the sinks in the boys’ locker room. None of the teachers ever would have found out about it if he hadn’t accidentally shorted out the electricity in the entire building. After a very brief and spectacularly unfair exchange of words with Coach Hendricks, Peter found himself sitting in the strategically low chair across from Mr. Stone’s desk for the fourth time that school year.

  Today made the fifth… and it was not even October yet.

  “Ah, Mr. Stewart,” came a tired, colorless voice from the doorway. Peter turned to see the all-too-familiar elderly form clad entirely in brown and gray tweed, the very picture of an Oxford academic, though they lived in Norwich. “Done it again, have you?”

  Peter smiled and shrugged apologetically.

  “I spoke with your father after the last time you were here. I don’t suppose he told you about the solution I proposed?”

  Peter shrugged again. “He mentioned it.”

  “But you are not interested?” The headmaster seemed concerned, almost nervous, as he ran a hand absently over his coarse gray hair. His manner suggested that he was very eager for Peter to become someone else’s problem. “As I told your father, Peter, beginning your A-levels at the university several years early, for a boy of your – er, talents – seems to make far more sense than keeping you here and inventing a program track exclusively for you. It’s obvious that you do not consider the curriculum we offer at King’s to be sufficiently challenging.” Here his manner grew vaguely defensive. “Why would you wish to stay?”

  “My friends are here,” said Peter.

  Mr. Stone raised his eyebrows fractionally.

  “I have friends!” he protested. “Cole and Mr. Richards….”

  “Mr. Ric
hards is your maths teacher, he is not your friend,” said Mr. Stone sternly.

  Peter pursed his lips, looked at his shoes, and fought the childish urge to retort, he is. “Besides, I can teach myself what I like here as well as there.”

  “But – you would be surrounded by university students. All new friends! And you could enroll in university-level classes,” the headmaster continued, with too much enthusiasm. “I’m sure your father must have enough connections that he could get you a position in research in a physics lab, if that’s what you wanted, as well. Collins tells me you’re a whiz.”

  Here Peter sat up straighter. “Research?” he repeated. He hadn’t thought of that. How had he not thought of that? Of course his dad could pull some strings! A physics teacher himself and a senior investigator in theoretical topics like superstring theory and noetics, his dad’s recommendation (and his dad’s genes) ought to be more than sufficient.

  Mr. Stone looked relieved, and pressed his advantage. “Yes, think of it! You could indulge your academic curiosity to your heart’s content. A university level researcher at only fourteen years of age!” He nodded for emphasis, his double chin jiggling. “I’ll tell you what, Peter. I’ll place a call to Dr. Stewart and discuss it with him, and see if we can’t set up a transfer for you to the university mid-semester. You run along to class, and if all works out well, we should be able to have you out of here by next week at the latest!” A flicker of chagrin crossed the headmaster’s face, betraying that he’d been a bit more honest than he had intended to be. “Yes, well,” he said, and coughed unnecessarily. “Off you go, then.”