The White List

by Nina D'Aleo

  “My partner almost died,” I said with quiet fury.

  Omen raised dark, arched eyebrows and said, “You remember. Interesting.”

  “No, it’s really not,” I shot back. “Dark is in hospital, my family are in danger. Interesting is not the word I’d use. Tell me why I’m here or move aside so I can leave!”

  Omen’s eyes lingered on mine as though he were searching for something, and in the darkness of his pupils I saw an image manifest. It was the form of a girl dressed in red, his partner: the Rose.

  “They’re saying you killed her and four other agents,” I told him.

  Grief, torture unmistakable, clouded Omen’s expression, just for a second, then it was gone and he was blank, hollow. He smiled at me in a way that had nothing to do with humor and everything to do with insanity. It prickled the hairs on the back of my neck.

  “Do you believe them?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what to believe,” I told him. “Everyone is lying. Rocco said you would help my family. I need to know they’re all right.” My voice trembled slightly and I clenched my jaw down refusing to break.

  “They’re fine. For now.” Omen said, his stare burning into me. “And you can go to them, but first you’re going to tell me what you think we are.”

  “You’re walts who have broken-thru with mutated symptoms,” I said.

  At my words, Omen’s eyes darkened again, a storm spreading over the sky. “walts with mutated symptoms,” he repeated to the group of people.

  I felt the hostility in the room rising. It grew and intensified until it started to burn. I stood up, knocking my chair back. I had to shield my face. It felt as though I was standing too close to a fire. I gasped.

  “Stop!” the young guy from the pantry cried out.

  “Omen!” Rocco stepped in. “She’s not the enemy.”

  His words worked like an extinguisher. The heat quickly subsided and Omen regained his control.

  “Sit,” he commanded me.

  Without any foreseeable non-painful options, I retrieved the chair and sat down.

  “Despite your unfortunate choice of words,” Omen said, pacing behind me, “you are correct … Did you ever think this was possible?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. My hands were trembling. “I thought breaking-thru always causes massive instability.”

  “It does,” Omen said. “But only temporarily.” He stopped behind me and I could feel his eyes watching. “I know you’ve been questioning the Chapter … for a long time. And you’ve always used non-lethal force during LIAs, am I right?”

  “Zero fatalities,” I murmured.

  “You knew,” he concluded. “You just didn’t want to know.”

  Omen turned to his laptop and pressed a button and I watched as my conversation with the General at my house replayed before the whole group. I saw myself saying, “Sir, how am I supposed to do nothing? I can’t. They could have killed him, they could kill others—and I know for a fact that C11 doesn’t care how many people die as long as their objectives are achieved. I can’t be part of that any more—murdering innocent people—I didn’t sign up for that! I won’t do it! I want to fight against people like them—not be one of them!”

  Omen turned back to me and said, “They’re not the only ones who can watch people, and we’ve been watching you.”

  “Why?”

  “For the reasons I just said, Silver—try to keep up.” Omen lips twitched.

  I understood his contempt was more about his state of mind than anything to do with me, and that I needed to keep calm and tread very carefully not to set him off, but my heart was thudding fast and I could feel every second passing. What was happening to my family?

  I glanced up at Rocco at the back of the room and saw he was watching me carefully. He gave me the slightest nod and I clenched my hands to stop the shaking and said, “How are they not watching us now?” Everyone in the room except me were walts, and should have been under constant surveillance.

  Omen gestured to the young guy from the crime scene and said, “Marco, explain to Agent Silver—keep it simple.”

  My anger began to boil, but I kept my mouth shut.

  Marco gulped, his eyes darting nervously. He stammered when he spoke. “We’ve been masking the … the … break-thrus with a corruption virus, then splicing old footage into their system so they don’t realize it’s happened …” He swiveled his laptop so that I could see multiple screens of C11 footage. He was saying the walts had been breaking-thru and that he and Omen and the others had been making it look as though they hadn’t, that the symptoms had spontaneously resolved. But I knew it would take some kind of unimaginable genius to hack the Chapter’s system … someone more advanced than any of C11’s technologists, who were a gathering of the most elite in the world. Marco looked like just any other baggy-pants, baseball cap teenager.

  “It’s been looking like spontaneous resolution of symptoms,” I said and Omen nodded. “But you’re a …” I didn’t want to say walt again. “You’re ‘one’ and if they’re seeing old footage of you now, won’t they realize what’s happening?”

  Omen smiled again and tapped the side of his head, “They can’t see me at all—I’ve completely dropped off their grid.”

  “You can do that?” I asked.

  “I can—yes,” he responded.

  I stared down at the carpet, trying to gather my thoughts. In a way this moment felt so stark and real—and inevitable—but in another it felt like I was dreaming.

  I looked back up to Omen, “Obviously they’ve just been telling us what they want us to believe. So what is the truth?”

  “The truth?” He laughed at me, and I heard a few echoes from the others. “What is the truth—Silver?” He made my name sound like a joke.

  “Clearly I don’t know,” I replied carefully. “But I want to.”

  Omen rubbed his face with both hands and laughed to the ceiling. “She wants to know.” He took a second then glanced toward Rocco and said. “So tell her.”

  The former agent stepped back and Rocco moved to the front of the group. The two men stood in sharp contrast to each other: Omen disheveled, wild and raw, electrifying, terrifying; and Rocco cool and controlled, an ineluctable deadly force, frightening in a whole different way. Omen was volatile, but it made me think that maybe his emotions could be used to distract him, whereas Rocco’s manner brought to mind a soldier who could hunt someone down with endless patience and undivided purpose—for as long as it took. Rocco started to speak to me. It sounded as if he were delivering a military briefing.

  “Shaman syndrome is not a disorder, it is a chromosomal evolution of man. In layman’s terms: caveman, human, Shaman. The original paper by Whitman explored this notion, but that was never released, and the discovery was handled by vested interests. We were the potentially powerful minority and we posed a threat. When other attempts to suppress our abilities failed, the coalition of governments conducted experiments and discovered that we could only be controlled by another Shaman with a stronger mind.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

  “How do you think people are being re-capped?” Omen spoke up. “How do you think they are capped in the first place as newborns?”

  “I assumed it was a scientific formula or procedure,” I said.

  Omen curled his lips as though his body was about to physically reject my naivety like a seafood dinner gone wrong.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, my frustration breaking through. “You know what it’s like being an agent. I haven’t ever been past front desk on Medical Level.”

  “Newborns are capped and adults re-capped in the exact same way.” Rocco stepped in. “A Shaman of a stronger mind takes power over them. It’s not what you might think of as mind control—the person retains her will and logic, she just can’t access her abilities. And when a Shaman breaks through it means they have evolved and surpassed the power of whoever capped them—they have moved up in the Order
—the Shaman ranks. Capping is not an exact process. It’s not natural for the structures of our brain. The closest comparison I can make is running high-voltage electricity through the mind. It can go wrong—and it does on a regular basis.” Rocco handed me an envelope.

  I opened it and took out a stack of photographs—dead babies, comatose children, adults in wheel chairs, institutionalized, bed-ridden, brain-dead. I saw a photograph of the young walt we’d taken in from the strip club. He was dead, eyes glazed, lips blue. I thrust the photos back at Rocco, trying to deny to myself that I’d seen them, but the images were burned into my brain. I tried to speak calmly.

  “So within the Chapter, there are … Shaman … who are self-aware, and they’re controlling the capping of all the others. But if the agency has let some Shaman out to work for them, then why don’t they let everyone out?” I asked.

  “Same reason they started trying to control Shaman in the first place,” Rocco said. “They’re afraid we’ll try to take over the world.”

  “Who knows about this?” I asked. “Upper management? Does the General know?”

  Rocco shook his head. “Some of them, such as the General, know that Shaman can break-thru without losing their minds and that some have enhanced skills other than strength, but no one knows the true extent except for the Shaman working for C11. They’ve been handpicked and are controlled by a person known as the Blood Horseman. He is the most powerful Shaman in the Order and he has embedded himself within the Chapter. He and his people control all the capping and re-capping of Shaman across the world. Only they know that there are Shaman working within C11, at least officially.”

  “The Blood Horseman,” I repeated. “Who is he?”

  “He’s a ghost,” Omen murmured, rubbing his face in a gesture of exhaustion.

  “We don’t know,” Rocco said. “Each of us has skills, some stronger than others, but he is strong in everything. He keeps himself well hidden. Omen is a close second to him in skill and power—not close enough to detect who he is, but close enough to stay hidden from him. He keeps us all hidden.”

  “What do you mean skills and power?” I asked.

  “Our senses are heightened beyond human capabilities,” Rocco said.

  “Show her,” Omen instructed. “Seeing is believing—for humans.”

  Rocco paused, his eyes moving over my face. I saw he didn’t trust me, but he still obeyed Omen.

  “We have acute eyesight,” he began. “X-ray vision.” He glanced at a guy in a red T-shirt sitting close to me and said, “Axe.”

  “A hard drive, some paper and a switch blade,” Axe recited, listing everything I had in my pockets.

  “Nightvision,” Rocco said. Someone at the back of the group turned off the lights and everyone’s eyes glowed blue-silver in the darkness. The lights flickered back on.

  “Extended range of hearing, infrasound, ultrasound—the ability to use sound as a weapon,” Rocco continued, his tone still regimental. “Willow.” He gestured to a girl with a crooked nose from an old break, and a long fringe of hair that almost covered her eyes. She seemed familiar to me, though I couldn’t immediately place her. She hesitated, but Rocco kept his gaze on her until she lowered her head and closed her eyes. A wave of sickness swept over me and a tremor racked my body. It passed and the girl, Willow, looked up and mouthed, “Sorry.”

  “Frequencies below twenty hertz can cause nausea in humans,” Rocco told me. “Useful in clearing a crowd. Go too low and it’s lethal—also useful at times. We have a heightened sense of smell,” he moved on. “We can detect pheromones and manipulate them to create emotions in others—anger, alarm, sexual arousal.”

  He pointed at a dark-skinned guy near the back. “Gallows.” The guy stood up, breathed in deeply and released a long sigh. My heartbeats thudded faster and I found myself gripping the edges of the seat in fear.

  “Enough,” Rocco said and the guy sat down. The feeling eased, leaving a lingering tremor in my hands.

  “Sense of touch. We can withstand pain,” Rocco told me. A girl with bright orange hair stabbed a knife through her hand and pulled it back out without flinching. The guy beside her touched her hand and the wound sealed over. “Cold and hot,” Rocco said. Another girl took a lighter and lit her fingertip, letting it burn. A pounding began behind my eyes. I wasn’t sure how much more seeing I could take.

  “We sense sub-fibers in all matter and can climb usually unclimbable surfaces. Exodus.” He nodded to a blonde in the front row. She jumped up onto the wall and scuttled across it like a lizard.

  “And these are just the basics that we’re all capable of,” Rocco said. “There are more complex skills such as rapid healing of ourselves and others, advances in the interoceptive senses—always landing on our feet when falling. Some of us can alter our appearance.” A man in the group grew an instant beard and changed his hair from brown to blond, then became the same color as the wallpaper from head to toe. “Camouflage,” Rocco said. “Contortionism.” Several of them twisted into horribly uncomfortable-looking positions. “Some of us have a heightened sense of motion.” The girl who had approached Rocco when we’d first arrived shot forward in a flash, slapped me hard across the face and darted back in a blur of color. She then held up her arms and her whole body hovered off the carpet. I rubbed my cheek and glared at her.

  “We have genetic memories. We don’t forget anything. And a few of us have extrasensory perception. We can use psychokinesis.” Rocco himself gestured and lifted everyone and everything in the room off the ground several inches then placed us back down. “Some of us are telepathic, some have retrocognition, some of us precognition. Some of us can see others who inhabit different levels of this world. Some can—”

  “Okay,” I cut him off. “I get it.”

  “All of this the Horseman can do far better than any of us, except Omen—and he’s building an army,” Rocco said.

  “An army for what?” I asked.

  “For the annihilation of humankind. He’s got delusions of godhood.”

  “Not hard to see why,” I said.

  I hadn’t meant it as a joke, but heard a few chuckles and snorts of laughter, which Omen squashed with one savage glare.

  “He wants to bring about a new era,” Rocco said, his dark eyes fixed on mine. “The era of Shaman.”

  “Shouldn’t you guys be happy about that?” I asked. “You are Shaman.”

  “Happy to be puppets at the mercy of a madman, forcing us to slaughter innocent people? Would you be happy about that just because your leader was a human?”

  I got the point and shook my head.

  “We’re the resistance.” Rocco held up the photographs again and I recognized in one picture the dead Bushels in their tidy lounge room.

  “Your people?” I asked pointing to the victims.

  “Yes—they were,” Omen said.

  “The Horseman executed them,” Rocco said. “He and his soldiers are hunting us. My brother, Marco, was lucky to escape.” He nodded to the nervous young man we’d almost shot.

  “Okay …” I said. “I understand, but why am I here?”

  Rocco looked to Omen again. The leader nodded.

  “We need you to locate the White List,” Rocco stepped closer to me, “Chapter 11’s record of every Shaman. We need to free as many as we can to join the fight against the Horseman before it’s too late.”

  “What do you mean free?” My voice sounded distant to my ears.

  “If we rank higher than the Shaman who capped them, we can break the capping and wake them up,” Rocco said. “All our previous attempts to locate the list have failed. Every day he evolves further and gathers more power. Time is running out.” Everyone in the room, except Rocco and Omen, shifted anxiously.

  My mind was already working on the problem. In all my years as an agent I had never heard of the White List, but it made sense that something like that would have to exist; otherwise how would we know who to watch?

  “Where would they e
ven store something like that?” I asked. In the Chapter, as in most large organizations, information and orders dribbled down from the top. Omen had been more senior so it made sense he would know more. “In the Conference files?”

  “That’s where I looked first,” Omen said. He shook his head. “Nothing. It may be somewhere more obvious; it may be somewhere more hidden.”

  “The Horseman dug Omen out before he had a chance to refine the search further,” Rocco told me.

  “Did the Horseman kill the other agents?” I asked. It was an important question for me. If Omen had killed the Rose, his partner and girlfriend, it changed things.

  “Yes,” Rocco said, and I detected a slight tightening of his expression, before he could stop it. “And framed Omen.”

  He fell silent and I noticed all the others had as well. No one was moving. I couldn’t even hear breathing. I guessed Omen was verging on another breakdown. I dared a glance at him. He was completely frozen. He looked like a wax sculpture. It was one of the most eerie things I’d seen. Then he blinked, reanimating, and his focus went to me.

  “His soldiers are everywhere in the Chapter. He himself will be there watching, waiting for another attempt on the List,” he said.

  “He’s in Headquarters?” I said.

  “Where did you think he was?” Omen sneered.

  I had imagined he was elsewhere. Hoped, maybe.

  “I don’t want to point out the obvious,” I said, “but if he uncovered you and you’re almost as powerful as he is—what hope do I have—really?”

  “Your hope is that he won’t suspect you—you have a chance to fly under his radar.”

  “Won’t he just be able to read my mind?” I asked.

  “It’s not that simple and there are ways to distract attention and hide thoughts and intentions—even for humans,” Rocco said.

  “But why me?” I asked. “I only have low-level clearance—wouldn’t it make more sense to approach someone higher up—like the General? Don’t you have anyone else on the inside?”

  “No and we can’t risk it,” Rocco replied. “We’ve been watching you for almost a year. We knew you’d be sympathetic to the cause, but now that the agency has put a hit on you, we know for sure you aren’t the Horseman or one of his people.”