by Aric Davis
“You were blind?”
“I was indeed, though my great-grandmother said I could see in other ways, and she was right,” said Mrs. Martin. “I didn’t know it at the time, but my second sight was the only thing keeping me alive.”
Mrs. Martin rolled up her sleeve and pointed to a row of blue numbers, and Cynthia leaned over to get a better look.
“Is that a tattoo?”
“It is indeed,” said Mrs. Martin. “I got that when I was just a little bigger than you, believe it or not, after I was put in a camp with my mother and great-grandmother.”
“Like a summer camp?”
“No, honey, not like a summer camp at all,” said Mrs. Martin with a sad look on her face. “Quite the opposite, in fact. It was a place where bad people were putting people like me. They made us work, but sometimes they killed us, too. Everyone there had their number tattooed on their arm because that was all that we were to them—just numbers.”
“Where was the camp?”
“In Germany. It was called Dachau,” said Mrs. Martin. “Someday you’ll learn all of this in school, and if you remember this conversation it might strike you as a little odd that you knew someone who was there, but you do: your old friend Mrs. Martin almost died there. Of course, back then I was no Mrs. Martin, I was just little Ora Rabban, and I never should have survived the inspections on the first day. They were getting rid of handicapped people, you see.”
“You mean, like, killing them?” Cynthia whispered.
“I do, regrettably,” said Mrs. Martin. “I know that all of this probably sounds like some awful fairy tale, but it’s all true, unfortunately. A bad man made a whole country angry, and they wanted a scapegoat, so that’s what they found in me and others like me. Giving up your rights is like marrying a man, Cynthia. You need to make darn sure it’s for the right reasons, or you’re apt to carry a heavy load. Germany was like that back then. It was a heavy load for all, but especially for the Jews.”
“Why were they killing people?” Cynthia asked. She believed Mrs. Martin, but killing someone was a serious thing. It was something that always made the news and always made Mom sad and Dad angry. Why would a whole country just start killing people?
“Because they needed someone to blame so that everyone else could stand strong,” said Mrs. Martin. “That, however, is a lesson for another day. You should know this about me, young lady: I am a notorious rambler when the mood strikes me, and I am definitely struck. It’s been a long time since I talked to a weaver.”
“A weaver?”
“Yes, just like yourself and a great many other people as well,” said Mrs. Martin. “Not many are as strong as me, and certainly not many are even close to you, but they are out there.” Mrs. Martin dunked a cookie in milk, took a bite, and smiled. “A weaver is a person who can see those little threads you’re getting accustomed to seeing, and weaving is the act of manipulating them.” She smiled. “I’m getting ahead of myself again. Back to my story in Dachau: I had no idea I had this power, mostly because I was blind and I could not see the threads in the air around me. What I could do, however, was manipulate those threads to make people look at me not as someone to take pity on but as someone to love. The guards there had orders to find people like me and get rid of them, but they left me alone. Everyone loved little Ora back then, but I had no idea it was because I was altering the way they saw me. I was a prisoner, but they still loved me, even as they—I’m sorry, Cynthia. I get worked up talking about my mother and great-grandmother. I need to remember how young your ears are.”
“It’s OK,” said Cynthia, not entirely sure if she really thought that it was. “Were they killed?”
“They were indeed. If I would have known how I was surviving the selections, I might have been able to help them, too, but I had no idea what I was doing. I was just a little girl, and at the end I was a little girl with nothing. What God gives he can take away, and though God saw it fit to take my family—all of my blood except for an aunt and her husband—I did find my sight just a few weeks after our camp was freed. It was a bitter prize.”
“Why were you able to see?”
“I was never entirely blind,” explained Mrs. Martin. “I couldn’t see, not like I can now, but a couple of eye surgeries fixed me right up. You should have heard me screaming in the hospital. Not only could I see, but I could also see—”
“The threads, right?” Cynthia asked. “You went from seeing nothing to seeing everything, but also the threads. I didn’t scream, but I thought about it, and I’ve always been able to see. It had to have been horrible.”
“It was awful,” said Mrs. Martin. “Awful and wonderful, all in one big lump. I was happy to see, but I would have happily traded it all to have my family back. I have had many happy times in my life—right now being one of them—and that should have been one of the happiest, but instead it was one of the saddest. I saw all different colors of thread, but you need to remember that I was in a hospital near the end of a war. I saw a great many of the bad colors, and there was nothing happy about that.”
“You looked scared earlier when I said that my dad’s were purple,” said Cynthia. “Is that a bad color?”
“Any of them can be bad, Cynthia. That’s just the nature of the situation. Humans are an odd lot, even the ones we care for a great deal, but yes, in my experience there is nothing good about purple, not when you see it like that.”
“What does it mean?”
“Everything, my dear. Everything and nothing,” said Mrs. Martin. “Do you have any other questions, or should I explain the colors?”
“Just one. What are the Mooreea?”
“The Moirai, sweetie. The sisters,” said Mrs. Martin with a frown. “Let’s talk about colors first, and if you still want to know, later we can talk about the Moirai.”
CHAPTER 19
Jessica could have had as many as she wanted, but she only wanted four. They were the four best computer geeks she could find, all culled from the Hartford area, given security clearance—a necessity, as much as it tested Howard’s patience—and then told some small parts of some very big secrets. The TRC had researchers who worked with computers, even some who could easily have been considered experts, but these new nerds knew the ins and outs of the real final frontier, the gallery of lost souls and hidden identities that made up current Internet users. Jessica barely understood or used the web herself, but she knew that for those who could navigate its landscape, it was a tool whose power was beyond measure. The goal of Jessica’s elite geek corps was simple: use this tool—and anything else they could think to ask for—to flush out TKs.
To that end, Jessica’s analysts were combing both the black hole of the web and all available records of modern events for anything that might signal TK interference, either through a computer or from across a room. There were a few incidentals found in the first couple of days—occurrences that might possibly fit the profile, based on some of this often less than legal probing—but so far nothing had panned out. Still, Jessica’s geeks—Geoff Miley, Rick Cambridge, Pat Evans, and Brinn Bobrovsky, all pulled off of Y2K prep squads and with impressive pedigrees that Jessica barely understood—were working hard, and that was all she felt she could ask of them. Rabid for results as Jessica was, putting too much weight on a person doing an impossible job seemed counterproductive.
About four days in, her approach began to bear fruit. Thanks to unlimited access to federal and local law-enforcement data, along with the fledgling Internet media, her four were getting leads.
Brinn was enamored of the case of two men suspected of a trio of murders in Mexico. The last time they’d been seen was boarding a plane to come stateside. They’d been spotted in the airport and actively pursued by security. Sure, the authorities south of the border could have done a better job—grounding all of the damn planes until they’d hunted down the pair, for starters—but after watchi
ng the videos, Jessica came to doubt any airport in the States would’ve had better luck holding them. Everything seemed to fall magically into place to allow the two Americans to escape—and Jessica didn’t believe in magic.
There had been no news of the duo since they’d landed in Des Moines, and Jessica figured things were going to stay that way. If one of the two men really was a TK with homicidal tendencies helping his buddy jump country to country on some sort of murder tour, they’d pop back up with even more crimes under their belts. If they disappeared or got busted in the next week or two, they were just a couple of run-of-the-mill scumbags—still dangerous, but not worth the TRC’s time, especially during the current manhunt.
There was another case in Wisconsin—some idiot who won a few million bucks in table games at a pair of Indian casinos over by Lake Michigan. The twist that made it interesting was that he’d left a dead wife at home before heading off on his spree. Geoff and Rick followed that one like a couple of ghouls, poring over FBI docs well above their security clearance but far below Jessica’s, but the trail ended in a bloody puddle after a week when Mr. Lucky, the cops on his trail like a pack of Glock-toting bloodhounds, finally ate a bullet to put an end to the game.
The man was dead and so there was no way to be sure of his possible abilities, but Geoff still came away certain he had been the real deal, his double casino run too spectacularly lucky not to have been orchestrated by some TK puppet master tugging at the dealers’ strings. Jessica wasn’t having any of it, though. The guy may have been crazy as a homicidal bedbug, but his winning streak had been just that—or at least it hadn’t been driven by a TK. A real TK with an ego big enough to kill would never be cornered like that for so long, she explained, and if he was, he’d go down fighting.
Pat found what he felt looked like his own bent-work as he pursued what started as a smattering of details surrounding the death of a young man named Vincent Taggio, a recent teen suicide from a well-respected St. Louis family. The more Pat worked the idea, the more tantalizing tidbits came out—and then, a couple of weeks after Vincent’s death, his dad, Paulie, turned up dead, too.
And then all the shit came out.
Paulie wasn’t just the well-regarded patriarch of his family but also a dues-paying member of the family—the Chicago Outfit, Our Thing, or whatever they were calling it these days. In what could hardly be a coincidence, it also came out that just before Paulie’s death, someone had emptied La Cosa Nostra’s coffers to the tune of half a million bucks. Judging by his untimely demise, Paulie himself—undone by grief in the days following his son’s shocking death—was judged the prime suspect. But the reality proved to be that all of the money taken from the mob’s very discreet Cayman accounts was removed before Vincent sent himself swinging. The simple fact of the matter, as Pat told Jessica, was that young Vincent had transferred the money from one account to another and then killed himself.
Why in the world would someone do that? Who would steal half a mill, dump it somewhere untraceable, and then do the one-footed dance?
No one had a good answer for that, but the two players involved were dead, and as Jessica had insisted from the start, TKs were survivors. They wouldn’t accomplish a goal and then run from the victory, nor would they die a normal death. If Paulie were a TK, he’d have bent the men sent to kill him and then walked out singing “My Way.” If Vincent were a TK, there might have been a rope, but it wouldn’t have been around his neck.
Another dead end then, but Pat kept the file. He was no bender, but he knew a twist when he saw one, and despite Jessica’s assurances, there was something broken there.
CHAPTER 20
Darryl and Terry walked out of the airport and into the brutal shock of Midwestern humidity. The rental car that Darryl had arranged for them was just outside of the terminal, in a parking garage across the road, and Darryl wanted nothing more than to be in it and gone. Mexico had been a place of mistakes, and it was time to be done with that. Having a dead bank account—even if they still had many others—was an ugly thing, and there was no reason to think that they wouldn’t eventually be traced to Des Moines. Don’t think about that now. Get the car and go. Try as he might, though, Darryl couldn’t stop thinking about the mess they were in and just how much work it was going to take to get out of it.
They showed the Hertz attendant the receipt for their rental, and then Darryl and Terry were pulling free of the parking garage aboard a Ford F-150. Darryl hated driving trucks and hated that the cost was almost three times what a compact car would be, but he hated the idea of sliding off the road into a ditch and having to talk to the law about it even more. Making a quick stop for supplies was almost as nerve wracking as driving. As they purchased clothes, food, and a computer, he could feel eyes probing him, even though he never caught anyone actually staring at him.
Darryl was most nervous about checking into the hotel—if there was anyone who might be ahead of the news, it would be hotel managers and state troopers—but the sun was shining on them at the check-in desk. A large and loud troupe of grade school–aged cheerleaders and their parents were either on their way to a competition or had just returned from one, and they had clearly drawn the ire of the hotel staff. Darryl didn’t even need to probe, much less bend the woman who checked them in. In minutes he was walking back to the car with a pair of key cards in his pocket.
When they finally made the room, Terry unlocked the door with one of the key cards, and then Darryl slid the luggage dolly in through the door. No one had seen them park, nor had anyone laid eyes on Terry. The situation could go bad at a moment’s notice, but right now Darryl and Terry were as smooth as baby shit.
Terry unloaded the cart quickly, the only heavy items being the computer, and then Darryl walked the cart back to the elevator before heading back to the room. Terry was sitting on the bed watching the TV, and Darryl moved to see the screen.
“It’s not good, not at all,” said Terry.
Darryl sat next to Terry for a few moments, watching the talking heads on CNN discuss the murders in Mexico, flashing between pictures of the savaged and slain girls and an image of Terry that had been taken from a security camera at the last bar. Along with the airport security footage, there was a sketch of Terry that looked exactly like him. Darryl sighed, thankful they could at least stay in the Holiday Inn for a day or two, then walked to the computer and started unboxing it.
“What the hell are we going to do?” Terry asked as Darryl slid the heavy monitor free from the box and set it atop the table in the corner of the room.
“I told you before that there was going to need to be another tragedy to get this thing out of the news,” said Darryl. “I’m not sure what it’s going to be just yet, but I’m going to get us a tragedy. Something big, something mean.” Darryl swallowed thickly. “Like that Columbine thing this spring.”
Terry nodded and stood, the TV forgotten, and together the two of them worked to assemble the computer.
CHAPTER 21
1945
A week has passed since I was moved into the room where Katarina sleeps, and though I hate to admit it, life has been wonderful. I feel at times like I am doing something wrong, that I am one of those Jews who is given special privileges for telling the secrets of my fellow prisoners to our captors, but I have done nothing of the sort.
And yet I have been rewarded far more richly than any of those traitors.
I have a bed—my own bed—and the bedding is clean and washed every few days. There is heat from a little stove in the room that I share with Katarina, along with books to read on a shelf. We are fed thrice a day the same food the commandant eats, and I feel like I am actually gaining weight. It’s the most comfortable I’ve been in years, and it’s hard not to enjoy it, even with the misery going on around me. I could smell the ovens today, and I know what that means, but I was alone in the room and I just buried my head in my pillow and tried not to think a
bout it. Even all of that death couldn’t chase away the thought of how lucky I am, how wonderful it is to be warm and fed.
Of course, none of that is as wonderful as the rest of it.
Katarina calls what we do “weaving” because of the threads that she can see coming from people’s heads. I can see the threads, too, of course, just not the people beneath them. Not that that matters—all I need are the threads. We talk about all manner of things that deal with this weaving—what the colors mean, how to manipulate or ruin those threads, how to make someone align with your own thinking. Many of the things we talk about I’ve been doing for years without even knowing that I’m doing it! Katarina says that this is why I’m alive, and I believe that to be so. Without my abilities, why else would a blind girl be left to live when so many more fit people have been taken away and disposed of?
Every day there is a new lesson, and today was no different. Katarina has been teaching me about mapmaking. It’s a hard concept for me to grasp, but the more she explains, the more I understand.
“Think of it like this, Ora,” said Katarina, and I nodded, ready to try. “You can’t picture the courtyard, but can you tell me where the fences are, where the guard towers are, where the showers are?”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
Just because I cannot see doesn’t mean I don’t know how to get around the camp. I’ve been here for years, after all.
“Perfect,” said Katarina as she clapped her hands together. “Take my hand. I want to try something.”
I did as she said, but already I could feel my heart flutter. Katarina has never needed to touch me to do her weaving before, I was thinking, so whatever she is planning must be either dangerous or—