Persistence of Vision

by Liesel K. Hill

  “No. But at first you’ll only be able to summon a trickle of energy, even imagining a massive force. It takes practice. If you imagine a trickle, nothing at all will happen. You ready?”

  She nodded.

  “Take a deep breath, open your eyes, and aim for the cra—”

  Before Maggie could do more than open her eyes, a shockwave of some kind hit her. The force of it threw her backward into Karl and crushed the air from her lungs. At the same time, a skull-splitting crack came from the far wall, and Maggie was sure the mountain would come down around them.

  More crashing noises were coming from all around her. These were smaller than the first but still loud, and they kept happening for several minutes.

  Karl pulled Maggie back toward where Joan and Clay had been standing. The smaller crashes became fewer and farther between then stopped all together. Maggie looked up.

  The air was caked with dust that was just beginning to settle. Maggie was crouched against the wall with Karl hunching over her. Joan and Clay were in much the same position a few feet away—crouching low against the wall, arms covering their heads.

  “You all right?” Karl asked.

  She nodded shakily.

  “Clay? Joan? You two okay?”

  Clay’s answer seemed muffled for only being a few feet away. “Yeah. We’re both fine.”

  Maggie heard Joan’s muffled voice but couldn’t make out what she said.

  Karl helped Maggie to her feet as the dust cleared, then went over to help Clay and Joan.

  Maggie opened and closed her jaw at staggered intervals, trying to get her ears to pop. When she succeeded, her hearing came back full force. Only then did she look up to find the other three staring at her in astonishment.

  “What?”

  Karl leaned in close to Joan, but Maggie heard what he said. “I’m not crazy, right? She couldn’t do that before?”

  Joan shook her head emphatically. “You’re not crazy.”

  “Who couldn’t do what before?” Maggie asked. “What was that?”

  Maggie wouldn’t have thought Karl’s eyes could get any bigger, but they did. Clay and Joan also stared at her in shock, but then Joan broke into laughter.

  “She feels different,” Clay said. I didn’t notice it until now, but when I focus on her, I can tell a big difference.”

  “I noticed it before,” Joan said when her chuckling subsided, “but I didn’t think much of it. I thought it was a result of her memory loss.”

  “Could this be a result of her memory loss?” Karl wasn’t recovering from his shock.

  “I don’t see how,” Joan said.

  Maggie sighed, confused and bored. She was learning that these people explained things in their own time. She turned, looking around the cavern. A huge, jagged crack ran along the far wall from the top right corner to the bottom left. The fissure it left was several inches thick.

  The smaller crashes she’d heard were crates falling. Only the outer ones had fallen. The ones near the center of the stack had been blown to bits. Pieces of them littered the cavern amidst a fine, powdery dust, which she suspected had also been part of the crates; some of them had been pulverized.

  “Maggie, do you still have the conduit stone?”

  Maggie held her hand up to show Karl. The cords were still draped over her hand, but the stone was gone, and the ends it had been connected to were charred.

  Karl sighed. “I suppose we couldn’t expect such a small stone to survive a blast like that.”

  “You gonna explain what happened?”

  Karl cocked his head to the side, looking like a dark, shell-shocked pigeon. “It was you, Maggie. You made that blast.”

  Maggie stared at him, blinked, and stared some more. “What?”

  Karl looked at her steadily, but Joan was still chuckling behind him.

  “But…I didn’t feel anything. The shockwave must have come from somewhere else.”

  “What do you mean you didn’t feel anything?”

  “If I had harnessed that kind of power, shouldn’t I have felt it? Shouldn’t it have tingled through my body or something?”

  Karl looked confused, but Clay was shaking his head. “No, Maggie. You are calling the energy, directing it. If you felt it in the way you are thinking of, you would be the conduit stone. This energy is obeying you, not being focused through you. You call it, direct it, and see its results. You don’t feel the energy itself.”

  “But how can you know what you’re doing if you can’t feel the energy?”

  It was Joan that answered this time. “You’re thinking too tangibly, Maggie. Conduit stones allow a person to call up any amount of energy they need for a specific purpose. You don’t see the energy. You see the need. Then you call the amount of energy needed for your specific situation.”

  Maggie frowned. “But how did I…” She motioned to the catastrophe behind her.

  Karl stepped forward. “I’m not sure. We use conduit stones because most of us aren’t capable of pulling more than a small amount of energy to our fingertips at any given time. The energy we gather is used in our specific talents. If Marcus is going to Heal a room full of people, he’d need a conduit stone. On his own he can only call a small trickle of energy to him, and that won’t be enough for what he needs.

  “The first time people use conduit stones, they can usually only do small things. I expected you to barely brush the crates at first, then nudge them, then hit them, and then gradually work up to knocking them over.”

  “But I did more than that?”

  “Obviously. But Maggie, you didn’t pull all this energy through that little stone.”

  “I didn’t?”

  “No way that small a stone with so many imperfections could have focused this much energy. This is energy you called to you without aid. And we’re pretty sure you couldn’t do that the last time we saw you.”

  “What the…”

  The three of them turned to find Marcus and Doc standing in the doorway. They were canvassing the mess.

  “We heard a crash,” Doc said. “People down below thought the mountain was being bombed. What on earth happened?”

  Karl’s expression turned smug, and he gave an exaggerated shrug. “Clay pissed Maggie off.”

  Clay looked up in surprise, giving Doc and Marcus a deer-in-the-headlights look. Then a smile slowly crept across his face. He turned his palms to the roof and shrugged.

  Chapter 14: The Deceiver

  Twenty minutes later, Maggie sat on an examination table in Medical. Marcus stood around her with the rest of the team. Doc was scanning her to make sure she was unharmed and to look for some clue as to where all her power had come from. When he finished, he frowned.

  “Any ideas, Doc? At all?” Maggie asked. Her voice sounded scared, even to her. She glanced at Marcus, who was looking at her with sympathy. He slid his hands up and down her arms.

  “I’m not even detecting traces of the power,” Doc answered. “Are we sure it came from Maggie?”

  “I felt the energy when she wielded it, Doc,” Marcus said. “We all did. None of us can draw energy of that magnitude. It could only have been her.”

  “The question is,” Karl said, “how on earth are we to teach her to harness it?”

  The fact that Karl sounded rattled did nothing to calm Maggie’s stomach.

  “Are we certain she didn’t have this ability before?” Joan asked.

  “Don’t you think we would have known about it?” Karl asked. “Wouldn’t it have manifested itself before? It took her all of five seconds to nearly destroy part of the mountain. How could we have not known about that?”

  “She didn’t have it before. I’m certain now,” Clay said. “She feels different.”

  Maggie frowned. “Excuse me?”

  Karl chortled.

  Clay’s mouth went up a bit at the edges, but he turned kind eyes toward Maggie. “I haven’t spent much time with you yet, Maggs, but you know my role in the prophecy is Conce
aler?”

  “Yes.”

  “In order to Conceal anyone, I have to know what their brain chemistry feels like. You’ll understand what I mean as you learn to use your neurological muscles again. You’ll be able to tell who someone is by what their neural energy feels like—to send your mind out and feel the energies of the others around you and identify them by it. Just as our names or faces or…smells—”

  Karl guffawed again.

  “—can let others know who we are, so too do our neural energies. I must know the energies of the people I am to Conceal, or I can’t do it.”

  “So you don’t Conceal everyone in this mountain?”

  “Think about it, Maggie.” Doc interjected gently, “If Clay could Conceal each and every one of us, we wouldn’t need to hide in the mountain. It takes energy and skill to conceal people. Most people who have the talent can only do it for a few people at a time—themselves and their families. The remarkable thing about Clay is that he can do it to a much greater extent than anyone we’ve ever come into contact with. The prophecy calls not only for one with the power to Conceal, but for a Concealment talent with a vast magnitude, which Clay has.”

  Maggie leaned her head toward her right shoulder, thinking. She wasn’t aware she was doing it until she saw Marcus smiling at her. She had the uneasy feeling it was because of her movements. She straightened her neck and focused on the conversation.

  “How many can you Conceal at once?” she asked Clay.

  “Twenty or thirty. But at that number only for a short time—one, maybe two hours. I can do it longer if there are fewer people, but distance is also a factor. It’s easier to Conceal two people standing right next to me than two people who are a mile away.

  “I had to Conceal you many times when you were with us before. I knew the feel of your neural energy very well. When I saw you in the command center, it was the first time I’d been around you since you came back. I noticed a difference then, but I didn’t think much of it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Yeah, Clay,” Karl chimed in, “why not?”

  Clay shrugged. “I thought it had to do with her memory loss or simply with the fact that we haven’t seen her in so long. A person’s life experiences can change their brain chemistry. It wasn’t a big difference I felt, and I thought that some small changes were to be expected.”

  Karl still looked skeptical.

  “Trust me, if I’d known she’d gained abilities of this magnitude, I would have said something.”

  “Abilities of this magnitude?” Maggie blurted out. “Why do people keep using that phrase? I’m not even sure I understand what I did.”

  Marcus gave her a pained look and rubbed her arms some more. He opened his mouth several times but then clamped it shut, not saying anything. The other team members were doing much the same thing.

  “It’s like I told you before,” Karl offered. “You reached out into the universe and pulled energy to you. You focused it for your own use. What’s amazing is the amount of power you pulled to you. Even with a conduit stone, most people couldn’t have summoned that amount of energy.”

  “And I couldn’t do that before?”

  Doc shook his head. “Not that we’re aware of, no.”

  “What could have caused my abilities to increase like that?”

  Doc laughed without humor. “I have no idea, Maggie. If you’d asked me this morning, I would have told you that such a thing was not possible. As far as I know, a person is born with certain abilities. Their individual talents can be honed, but this is almost like…”

  “Like what, Doc?” Marcus asked. It was the first time Marcus had spoken, and they all jumped as though they’d forgotten he was there.

  “I don’t know. Like nothing I’ve ever heard of before.”

  Doc fell silent, and Maggie realized Marcus was scrutinizing him, as though trying to figure out what Doc was thinking. Of course, Marcus had known Doc much longer than Maggie, so if he thought Doc knew something then…

  Maggie watched Doc out of the corner of her eye. Suddenly, Doc’s eyebrows shot up—he’d thought of something. He threw furtive glances at each member of the team, gauging whether they’d noticed. When he saw Marcus watching him, he jumped, then put his eyes on the floor. Maggie was the only other team member who’d noticed the exchange.

  “Doc.” Marcus’s voice was wary. “What aren’t you saying?”

  The others looked at Doc, and he sighed. “We don’t know anything for sure, but…”

  “Tell us anyway,” Maggie said. “Doc, if you can shed any insight on this…” She placed a hand on Doc’s forearm. “Please?”

  Finally Doc nodded. “I was thinking that I’ve only known of three people in my entire life who possess abilities of that magnitude.”

  General shock registered around the group.

  “Three?” Joan asked.

  “Who?” Karl folded his arms across his chest.

  “Two of them are gone. David”—Doc’s gaze slid to Marcus—“had the potential, but of course never realized it.”

  The others turned empathetic smiles toward Marcus. David had been Marcus’s brother’s name. Marcus said he’d died when Marcus was just a teenager. Still, the team’s reaction made Maggie think there was more to it.

  “Who else?” Marcus seemed eager to prod the conversation on. Maggie made note of the fact that he didn’t want to talk about his brother.

  “There is a man whose abilities come close,” Doc was saying. His name is Nathaniel Strellend.”

  Karl nodded. “I know who you mean. But I wasn’t aware he could do…that.” No one else registered familiarity with the name.

  “Strellend is an individualist, but he’s also a loner.” Doc said. “We see him every now and again when he passes through. He knows where we are, knows all our secrets and even trusts us. He just prefers to live on his own.”

  “Why would anyone choose to live alone out there rather than take advantage of the safety Interchron provides?” Maggie asked.

  “I’m not sure. I’ve known him a long time, but he’s a private man. I suspect that something terrible happened to him in the past at the hands of other people, and he simply doesn’t trust anyone anymore.”

  Maggie’s eyebrows went up. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.” She saw Marcus smile to himself again.

  “He’s a decent man and has offered me his help more than once,” Doc went on. “Only a handful of people know of his powers. He prefers to live quietly and doesn’t want to get involved in causes such as ours. I think we should send a team out to find him. If he’s willing to come here, he could teach Maggie in ways none of us can. In fact, he may be your only hope of learning to control your abilities. The amounts of power the rest of us deal in are so miniscule in comparison with yours that any instruction we try to give may prove useless.”

  “I doubt that,” Joan said quickly. “I think all abilities follow the same basic concepts. We can teach her the basics to start, but Doc is right.” She turned to Maggie. “It would be a limited lesson.”

  Maggie nodded but didn’t feel any better.

  “Well,” Karl said, “I can round up a team and send them out to find him. But will he come back with them?”

  “I doubt he’ll be jumping for joy at the prospect,” Doc admitted. “Your team will have to convince him. But if they drop my name—say that it’s me asking for a favor…” He shrugged. “He’s a reasonable man. If he doesn’t have anything pressing, I don’t see why he wouldn’t come.”

  “Who’s the third?” Doc turned a questioning look at Marcus. “You said you knew three but two were gone. Who is the other one that’s gone?”

  Doc averted his eyes. “Well, I—”

  “Out with it, Doc. No secrets among the team, remember?”

  Doc sighed. “You may all despise me for this, but…well, it was Colin.”

  “Colin?” Karl sounded like Doc had just announced that the sky was green.

  �
��Colin couldn’t tap into that kind of power,” Marcus said. “We were all good friends. We’d have known if Colin could do anything like that.”

  “Yes, actually, he could. He just hid it well.”

  “Hid it?”

  “Yes. As you know”—he included Maggie in his sweeping look—“Colin was the Deceiver, which meant that he could close off portions of his mind to others. This was important in infiltrating the collectives because he could maintain his individuality without them knowing.

  “Once, when he was injured, I found out that there was a part of himself he was hiding from us. It was just after he saved your life in the Grand Canyon, remember Marcus?”

  “Of course.”

  “He was hurt badly enough to need days of recuperation, even after you Healed him. He was in Medical sleeping. While doing a brain scan, I felt something I’d never felt before. It was a wall—a barrier of some sort—in his mind. I should have left well enough alone, but my curiosity got the better of me. I pushed through it. I found that he had the ability to call on vast sources of energy—much like what Maggie did today.

  “He awakened when I broke through his barrier and was not pleased that I’d found out his secret. He made me swear not to tell anyone.”

  “And you did?” Joan sounded incredulous.

  Doc held his hands up. “Please listen. I asked why he didn’t want anyone to know about this ability. He could do so much good with it. He told me he didn’t want the responsibility it engendered. Colin was a pacifist. He didn’t like violence, didn’t want to take part in it in any way. He knew the collectives were evil and understood the need for a certain amount of force but was unwilling to inflict it.

  “That was why his ability suited him so well: he was useful in ways that meant he wouldn’t have to inflict violence on anyone else.” Doc heaved a deep breath. “He feared that if people knew how much power he could draw, they would ask him to do things he was uncomfortable with.”

  “What a crock,” Karl muttered with disgust.

  They all looked at him.

  “What? Colin could have single-handedly defended all of Interchron with powers like that.”