“You haven’t given me a chance, Aislen.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but had nothing to say to that. Had she really given him a chance? She realized she hadn’t. She hadn’t been open or honest. She had never given him anything of herself that he could use to earn her trust. Until she gave him something, she wouldn’t know if she could trust him.
He held up his hand. The keys to his car dangled from his fingertips. “Take me to the garden.”
She contemplated the keys, then his face again. The anger that was so evident earlier wasn’t there, just an earnest plea. She snatched the keys from his hand and walked over to his car.
“Do you know how to drive a stick, young lady?”
“Guess you’ll have to wait and see,” she said as she slid into the driver’s seat.
They drove in the requisite silence, Aislen whipping down the city side streets, toward the perimeter of town, taking the long way so she could open the Mustang up and let her fly. She’d never driven a car with more than four cylinders or 140 horsepower. It was invigorating. She glanced at Troy a couple of times to see if she could catch him white-knuckling it, but he was as chill as a dill pickle on the Fourth of July.
When they arrived at the gate, Aislen shifted the Mustang into neutral and let it coast into the dirt lot as quietly as possible, not wanting to disturb the serenity of the gardens with the roar of the monster.
She got out of the car and tossed Troy the keys with a defiant grin. He caught them and slipped them into his pocket.
She paused for a moment. Why she had decided to bring him here, she didn’t really know. This was her special sanctuary, where she came alone to think things through. She didn’t know how to have defenses here; it was only a space where she could let everything go—where she didn’t have to hide.
Troy stood there, patiently watching her, waiting for her next move.
This is his chance to prove himself, she thought again and she started walking down into the garden, leaving him to follow.
She didn’t want to talk. She didn’t want to diminish the space by playing tour guide. Although it was much more spectacular in the full flush of summer, the sedate quality of it now, in its desolate dormancy, was equally special and deserved reverence as well.
She followed the pathway, taking her time strolling past the ponds, stopping every so often to glance back at Troy. He was taking his time as well, keeping his distance, kneeling beside the pond to engage a small turtle, and stopping to watch a great heron trying to play statue in the tall grass.
He had only asked that she take him to the gardens, but if he talked to Gen, Aislen knew what he really wanted to see was the shrine. After confirming that he was adequately respectful, she kept moving toward the sound of the river, and disappeared through the shrine’s red doors.
She removed her shoes, lit two sticks of incense, and went around the room lighting all the candles she could find. A warm glow illuminated the shrine, and its artifacts came to life. She took a seat on the grass mat in front of the altar, closed her eyes, and waited for Troy to arrive.
She suddenly felt extremely vulnerable and just as she began to think that it was a mistake to let him this far in, the door behind her creaked open. She held her breath.
Troy removed his shoes and began walking softly around the perimeter of the room. He took in the artifacts one by one, contemplating the prayer flags and the glistening, brass gong. He picked up the padded mallet and leveled it at the gong. Aislen winced, preparing for a harsh clamor, but a deep, mellow tone shimmered from it. The ring lingered long and clear, resonating around the room in ripples, embracing them within it.
Troy moved next to the banner of the mythic, dancing creature and studied it for a long time.
“Do you know what this is?” He said, looking over his shoulder at her.
She shook her head.
“It’s called a baku. They are usually carved into the wood columns outside the shrines to ward off evil spirits.” He walked over and sat down beside her on the mat facing the altar and the banner. “They are considered supernatural beings that protect the sleeping and they devour nightmares.”
She looked at him with wide eyes, then back at the banner.
“I am venturing to say that this little place you discovered is a Chinese version of a sleep temple.”
“A sleep temple?” She looked at Troy again.
“Um hm. They were common in ancient Egypt and Greece. People went to them when something was disturbing their peace of mind. A priest or priestess would induce them into a trance with chanting or drumming, the patient would dream or have a vision, and then the priest would analyze the vision for them.” He smiled at her. “Did you know that about this place?”
She shook her head again, looking back around the shrine. Her whole body began to tingle with the revelation of it.
“Do you believe in synchronicity, Aislen?”
“What’s that? Fate?”
“No. Fate is the idea that there is a course of events that is going to happen, whether you like it or not...a destiny you cannot escape. Do you believe in fate?”
A chill tickled up her arms. “I didn’t use to. I used to believe that what happened to you was only what you did for yourself...if you wanted something, you had to make it happen. But that was yesterday. Today is way different, I don’t know what I believe anymore.”
“Well, what you believed yesterday, is called causality. You create a cause and an effect happens. Hindus call the effect karma.”
“Then what is synchronicity?”
Troy turned his body so that he was facing her. “Synchronicity is...well, synchronicity seems like a little miracle—meetings and happenings aligning up without intention. Say you create an event—like coming here, to this shrine, when you are stressed—and then another event happens that you didn’t intend, but it has significant meaning and powerfully relates to what you created—like not even realizing that this is the perfect place for your kind of troubles.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Jung.”
“Hung?”
He chuckled, “No, silly, Carl Jung. He’s the psychologist who first described synchronicity—among many other things you would probably be interested in given your current situation.”
“What situation?” she said, her voice taking on a defensive tone. Here it comes, she thought, as she prepared herself for the name of the disorder the he was going to diagnose her with.
“Your dreams, Aislen. Jung was a pioneer in the area of dreams.”
“Oh.” She was caught off guard and a little ashamed that she had assumed he would label her.
“Jung was really big into lots of ideas that you would probably call crazy.” He was teasing her now. “Dreams, synchronicity, alchemy, astrology, mythology, the collective unconscious.”
“They taught you this in school?”
“Yes...he was actually a pretty big part of my education. And one of my favorites. Jung had his own personal experiences with visions and hearing voices, and he worried he was becoming schizophrenic. But rather than fighting it...he embraced it. He began inducing what others would call hallucinations, but what he called his ‘active imagination’ and he journaled the whole thing in a red leather bound book he called, go figure, ‘Red Book’. He filled it with amazing illustrations and descriptions of the spirits he said visited him.”
Aislen sucked in a sharp breath.
Troy stopped talking, watching her carefully. She sensed he was giving her space to talk, but she didn’t want to.
“You know, my profession may seem to be all about analyzing, diagnosing, medicating, and controlling the brain, but did you know that psychology literally means ‘study of the soul’? Yeah, we are trained to assess and treat mental disorders, but that doesn’t mean all of us have abandoned our roots. It is really closer to philosophy than biology. I studied Plato and Aristotle, along with other radicals such as Wilber and Grof.”
He paused and looked down into her eyes. “When I told you yesterday that you could trust me with what is bothering you, I meant that. I am not here to invalidate, judge, label, medicate, or institutionalize you, Aislen. I am here as someone who cares about you and would like to help. If you’d let me.”
Aislen looked up at him, then at the baku hanging on the wall. Its brown eyes twinkled at her. She looked back at Troy. They both were telling her she was safe.
“So you would be a synchronicity then?”
He smiled, then reached up and took her face in his hand. “Yes. I would be your synchronicity.”
He bent down and kissed her, his lips pressing fully into hers. The fingers of one hand moved up into her hair, as his other hand moved down her back and pulled her closer to his chest.
Her body surged with warmth and electricity and she could feel the tension and energy coursing through his arms. He moved away from her lips and pulled her head back, placing hot kisses down the length of her exposed neck, then pushed her lips back up to meet his. Just as she thought they were going to slide right on into second base, Troy pulled away from her, gently setting her back in her place on the mat.
He looked at her, his eyes dancing with intensity, taking her in while she caught her breath. He reached up and brushed a stray curl out of her eyes, traced the side of her face with his fingertips, then held her by the chin.
“Will you tell me about the dreams, Aislen?”
CHAPTER 26
After thirty-six hours of working in the viewing arena nearly non-stop, Raze felt like a caged animal, experiencing the DT’s that only came from the lack of moving his body. In desperate need of release, he ran from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate, blasting his iPod and tuning out everything in existence.
He barely noted the other humans. He passed them by as if they were merely boulders in the flow of his river, inanimate objects not worthy of a first thought.
He relegated the stray agitations of Demesne, the Womb, Infinium, and all the loose ends of the Project into a quarantined compartment of his brain and focused only on his body: the timing of his breath, the burn in his lungs, the impact as his feet met with the pavement, and the contracting and expanding of his quads, hamstrings, buttocks, and calves.
When he reached Fort Point he turned around and started his run back toward the warehouse. A brisk, January breeze was blowing in from the Pacific, pressing hard at his back but he could feel a thin thread of heat laced within it.
As Queens of the Stone Age began to riff in his ears, the warm rays of the sun fingered down his spine in time with their four on the floor rock rhythms sending a shudder of electricity through him.
Without warning, the opaque fabric that Raze purposefully wove to keep himself disconnected from the world dissolved. He stopped mid-stride as he was suddenly overwhelmed with sensory input.
A border collie leapt in the air to snatch his Frisbee from flight, simple delight alight in the face.
A father lifted his tow-headed boy onto his shoulders to better see a pod of dolphins playing in the swells.
A young couple strolling on the path stopped to gaze at each other. He spontaneously kissed her on the forehead. She lifted onto her toes to kiss his lips. His lips moved, ‘I love you.’ Hers responded, ‘I love you, too.’
The world was flush with life, yet each moment stilled in freeze-frame.
Raze inhaled deeply as his breath caught up with him. He could smell the brine in the air and taste its salt on his tongue.
He noticed clouds hovering over the city skyline creating a violet and silver halo and he was reminded of her—of Aislen—and of the liquid violet and silver field they created when their energy merged together on the dance floor the night before.
The vision of her trespassed his mind as easily as she had into Demesne: the copper flow of her hair, the shimmer of her body in the lights, and the fire in her eyes. She had invaded him like a virus. He felt drawn to her like a moth to a flame. But she was supposed to be the moth and he, the flame. She was the one who was supposed to burn, yet he felt her fire incinerating his core.
Bile rose up inside him. He wanted to rip her out of his flesh—purge her from his system. Yet, at the same time, he did not. The contradiction tore him apart. Raze howled with rage and broke into a sprint, keeping that pace all the way back to the warehouse.
Years ago, Destiny had knocked on his door and Raze had answered. She came bearing gifts: wealth, power, prestige—every, good thing a man could want and Raze had embraced them. He wasn’t about to let that go. He wasn’t about to let Aislen untether him from the life he’d created.
He scanned himself back into the house. Still unsated, he went into his gym and beat the shit out of the 150-pound Hydrocore bag, pummeling and abusing it until he felt like himself again, flesh and blood, thews and sinews.
Finally spent, he took the stairs two at a time to the third floor, crossed the catwalk and went out onto his patio. He had a mission to complete and he needed to get right with it. He looked east, following the bridge across the bay, remembering the distances he had travelled to get to where he was today.
He had been a natural from the start, mastering the first five levels of the Operative Program in record time. At Level I, he learned how to acquire signal lines of locations around the world simply by tuning into longitude and latitude coordinates. He was able to provide accurate intel about the coordinate, whether it was land, water, mountain, or a man-made structure.
At Level II, he started to obtain five-sense data: what the location looked, smelled, sounded and felt like. At Level III he added emotional details; and at Level IV, Raze started gaining control of his viewing, actually moving his awareness through the target location as he gathered detailed intelligence, an etheric recon scout.
As a Level V operative, Raze was able to access and re-access any place on the planet, at will. The company used him exclusively for its most important missions, when sending a physical body to a location was impossible. Raze could sit in the lab in Palo Alto, while his astral body and consciousness freely roamed the globe, gathering priceless intelligence. Because of Raze, Infinium Incorporated was awarded an incredibly, lucrative contract as an intelligence contractor for the government. Infinium, in turn, rewarded Raze for his skills.
Raze moved into the next tier of the program. In Levels VI through X, he utilized the same techniques used for a geographic grid but applied them to moving, human targets. Rather than evoking signal lines from GPS coordinates, he acquired them by accessing the unique, frequency signature of an individual.
It wasn’t just about tracking people on the grid—hell, Infinium did that in its sleep. Through debit card transactions, cell phones, and Facebook statuses. It was about witnessing exactly what they were doing.
Raze could locate and watch any target, anywhere: the married politician fucking escorts during a crucial re-election campaign, bankers and corporate CEOs plotting the next bubble to pad their pocketbooks with, drug lords planning their deliveries and terrorists plotting their attacks. Raze was there, invisibly standing over their shoulders, witnessing their crimes, and intercepting their schemes. He reported his findings to The 8, so they could do, or not do, what they wanted about it. It was Raze’s job to make sure everything was going as planned.
Besides Raze, only two other men were known to have mastered the second tier, Thomas Reed and his son, Preston. But both of them had refused to move into to the next tier. And then—both of them disappeared.
Raze had no such qualms. He ventured into the third and final tier willingly.
It was one thing to control the masses—an easy thing. So elementary it was ridiculous. Human beings were maggots, easily corralled into flat, reality configurations and resistant to anything that lay beyond that net. Once inside the desired structure, the slightest nudge could either rile them up or put them back in line.
Infinium used various techniques to accomplish this, from low maintenance influe
nces such as Main Stream Media feeds, mindless television programming, cheap entertainment in smut magazines that played to the public’s fears and insecurities and led them to constantly try to fix themselves, and video games that separated them from Real Life altogether.
More insidious techniques were the use of extra low, frequency vibrations, electromagnetic pulse technology, prescription medication, and most effectively, education system programming. Blanketing the masses with frequency stimulators and thought modulators, the control agency could impose whatever dogma about Real Life that it wanted.
But every once in a while, a stray larva wriggled away from the pack, exploring and discovering that which the central governing agencies would rather be left alone. The truth. The frontier behind the velvet curtain.
Most of the time, those little larvae kept themselves in check. Human maggots need constant emotional and social reassurance. Having come from this hive mentality, the emerging pupae understood that if they started popping off with out-of-the-box ideas, they threatened the maggot mob and invited attack. They knew to leave well enough alone and kept their pearls of revelation securely within themselves.
It was the insect that no longer cared what the hive thought, that demanded its own buzz and tried to get others to see the Truth, that made a control operative like Raze necessary.
Scott Parrish was just one such cockroach. He had crossed the line and when remote techniques were not effective getting him back in line, Raze was called in for a more personal touch.
Blake was supposed to be collateral damage. That had been the mission. But then Aislen, a maggot with a skill, and Mathis, a maggot with a hunch, came along.
Now there was a new mission. Now there were three targets to be eliminated.
He went back inside the house and into his bedroom. He needed to see if Sergeant Maggot had figured out his ass from a hole in the ground in the game or if had given up and disposed of the console altogether, solving one third of his problem.
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