by K. C. Archer
“Last time I checked, even breaking in to the FBI building is a federal crime. As in five years to life,” Pyro said.
Molly shook her head. “You’re forgetting something. We won the McDonald challenge. Teddy gets a personal tour of the San Francisco FBI building.”
“So technically, we’re not breaking in at all,” Teddy said.
Jillian shook her head “Either way, it’s wrong. If we get caught, we’ll go to jail.”
“Not jail,” Pyro said. “Federal penitentiary.”
“So you’d rather, what, forget this whole thing?” Teddy asked. “Maybe you can do that. But I don’t want this place to turn into the next Sector Three. And if I can do something to help a psychic—” She still wasn’t telling them the all the reasons she needed to do this. She felt for her parents’ picture in her pocket.
“Help a criminal, you mean,” Pyro said.
“No,” Teddy said. “A psychic who was treated as a weapon, not as a human. That doesn’t bother you, Pyro?” She directed this line of reasoning at him, since his ability could easily be turned destructive. “It doesn’t make a difference to any of you that we’ve been misled by the guy who’s teaching us Empathy 101? He broke his cardinal rule—he tampered with evidence to benefit the outcome of a case.”
At that, Pyro fell silent.
“Aren’t there legal ways to get the information?” Jillian asked. “Couldn’t we use the Freedom of Information Act and formally petition—”
“That could take years, and that’s if we ever see it at all,” Teddy said.
“Putting in the request would also reveal that we know something we shouldn’t,” Molly added. “That could end up being even more dangerous than what I’m suggesting.”
At that, even Jillian fell silent.
“No,” Pyro said. “So, Clint lied. Everyone lies. I can’t risk my whole career for some washed-up crazy assassin in prison. Not happening.”
Teddy ran her fingers along the edge of the picture in her pocket, hesitated. Another secret. This one, something private, a part of her that she had only started to understand. Something she wasn’t ready to share. Her friends didn’t have the same things at stake. But if it was going to convince them, maybe this information would help. Teddy removed the photo from her pocket.
“This is Yates,” she said, putting it on the table and pointing a finger. “And you recognize Clint.” She looked up to make sure she had everyone’s attention. “And these are my birth parents. This picture was taken at Sector Three, where they met. Yates told me that my father was murdered because he resisted the government’s demands. And my mother is out there still, hiding from the people who were responsible for it. You know that blood samples went missing this year. They belonged to three individuals with specific genetic markers. Individuals whose parents were both psychics who had trained at Sector Three. Yates believed they were specifically targeted by his organization.”
Teddy looked around the room. Jillian was still twirling her hair; Pyro was shifting back and forth on the balls of his feet; Molly had begun to pick at her sweater again, her confidence gone as suddenly as it came; Dara was rubbing her hands together; and Jeremy was staring at Teddy, unblinking.
“Just drop another bombshell, why don’t you?” Dara said.
Teddy looked down at the photograph. Had her parents known when she was born that she’d be psychic? “The three blood samples that were taken belonged to Brett Evans, Christine Federico . . . and me.”
Pyro stood, his eyes flashing dark. “When?”
“What?” Teddy said.
“When did you find out?” He stared at her, his facial features hard. The flame tattoos on his neck had flickered to life.
“A little after Halloween, I guess.”
“Teddy, you could be in danger,” Jillian said.
“You’ve known for months and you didn’t tell us.” Pyro ran his hands through his hair. “I knew you had trust issues, but this . . . Jesus. Something could have happened to you.”
Hearing it from him made it feel that much more real. “I know,” she whispered.
Again the room fell silent. Teddy was surprised that Jeremy was the first to speak. “Well, I guess we’re breaking in to an FBI computer.”
“What?” Dara said. “You’re joking, right?”
“I mean, it seems like the only logical option,” Jeremy said. “Teddy is in trouble. She asked for our help.” He stood up.
Teddy was surprised that it was Jeremy jumping to her defense first. She looked between him and Molly, but Molly was only nodding along to Jeremy’s words.
“The boy makes a point. I guess I’m in, too,” Dara said.
“I’m already in,” Molly said.
“Look at what’s been happening around here. Three blood samples were stolen. Two recruits went missing. Teddy’s saying she could be next,” Jillian said.
Pyro still looked like he was going to set something on fire. “You’ve kept this to yourself for too long, Teddy.”
If she didn’t know better, she would have said that he looked almost hurt. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know if I could trust you.” She saw the fire in his eyes turn dim. “We need you,” she said.
He waited. They all waited. In the moments of silence, Teddy considered the man she’d dismissed as a player. She’d been the one to see only what was on the surface. Everything he’d done and told her about himself—his dedication to his partner’s family, his inability to leave Molly behind—had shown him to be deeply loyal. Someone who could love fiercely. Someone who, once he found what he wanted, wouldn’t be that willing to let it go. She had been the one unable to let him in. Maybe it wasn’t Pyro who had set the terms of their relationship but her.
His body tensed and he squared his shoulders, his decision made. “Of course you need me,” he said.
“Is that a yes?” Dara asked.
They waited as Pyro seemed to measure his words, the outcome. “You think I’d let you punks go without me?” He stood. “But we’d better not get caught. Federal prisons are fireproof.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
IN THE HEIST MOVIES TEDDY had watched with her dad—the ones that usually took place in Vegas—schemes fell in place pretty quickly. Plans were established, materials gathered, key players recruited, locations scouted, and the mission executed. What movies never portrayed was the waiting. The Misfits soon realized that heists demanded an excruciating amount of waiting. And Teddy Cannon? Not the most patient person in the world.
The visit to FBI headquarters was scheduled at the end of the semester. Which left Teddy with weeks of pretending like everything was normal, weeks of classes where she acted as though nothing had changed.
Instead, she focused on the plan. Went over every step in her head, went through every location, every variable, every possibility. Jeremy would transport them to and from San Francisco on his boat. Dara and Molly would camp in a hotel room on the top floor. While Molly ran the tech portion of the break-in, Dara would facilitate communication between the teams. Jillian—with all the birds of San Francisco as backup—would stay on the ground as their eyes. Pyro would provide ground transport, surveillance, and muscle, if they needed it. Which Teddy hoped to God they didn’t.
But the whole plan hinged on her. She needed to enter the FBI offices, log on to Nick’s computer, and leave the premises before any FBI agents noticed that the team had broken about a dozen laws right under their noses.
The first obstacle to overcome: mental influence. If the plan went sideways, she might need to convince someone to keep quiet. And for that, she needed Jeremy.
Jeremy waited outside of Fort McDowell, hands in his pockets. Teddy still found Jeremy difficult to predict. At times, he seemed overanalytical; at others, completely disinterested. His support had surprised her, but she had to stop worrying about the team. She had to embrace this new thing called trust—no, she had to surrender to it.
“Hey,” she said.
“Remem
ber,” he said, “I told you I wasn’t any good at this.”
They walked to an empty room on the top floor of Fort McDowell. These rooms reminded her of the study carrels in Stanford’s library—not that she had gotten far in her coursework there.
Jeremy pulled two chairs over. “It’s like what we do with Dunn,” he said. “Except you don’t ask, you demand. I hate that part. It makes me feel sick.”
Teddy took a deep breath. Her eyes scanned the room, settling on the window behind him. She’d ask—no, demand—that Jeremy open the window.
“Ready?” he asked.
She’d never been inside Jeremy’s mind. It looked different than the inky blackness she waded through in others’ minds, which was navy in some places, black in others, like velvet. The inside of Jeremy’s mind felt like negative space, pitch-black and dense. Open the window, Teddy said. She felt bile rise in the back of her throat.
No, Jeremy said.
Open the window, she repeated. Her voice echoed around in her head and his. She tried to focus on the command, but her thoughts wandered back to the night weeks earlier when Jeremy, cross-legged on the floor of her dorm room, had been the first to agree to help.
She blinked, and she was standing there again in her mind’s eye, watching her friends watching her. The images came fast and furious now. Without an organizational technique, without a house, she had no way to control her astral telepathy. It was just like what had happened with Molly in Dunn’s class. Teddy lost her breath trying to keep up: Jeremy as a kid, in his mother’s arms, reading a book; Jeremy watching the Twin Towers fall; Jeremy crying in his bed, alone; Jeremy teaching himself to ride a bike; Jeremy studying with tutors, papers scattered across a desk; Jeremy, always alone; then Jeremy embracing Molly on the shore of Angel Island; Jeremy, with the other Misfits in the dining hall; Jeremy on his speedboat, crossing the bay—
And then a wall, smooth and cold, slammed up in front of her eyes with such force that Teddy fell off her chair. Teddy’s skin felt arctic, and not because she’d successfully commanded Jeremy to open the window.
“I think you’ve got the general idea,” Jeremy said. His voice was shaking. Teddy couldn’t tell if he was upset or angry.
Teddy pulled herself up. “Jeremy, I didn’t mean to—” He’d been trying to help her, and she’d screwed everything up.
“What’s going on in here?” a booming voice asked. Clint Corbett stood in the doorway of the small classroom. Immediately, Teddy surged her wall into place.
“I reserved the room, Professor Corbett,” Jeremy said. “We’re finished, anyway.” He grabbed his bag and left without giving Teddy another glance.
She’d been avoiding Clint for months, and now here he was, feet away. The distance between them felt like miles. They were separated by everything he’d refused to discuss: the theft, her parents, Sector Three. She might as well have been standing on the other side of Angel Island—or even back in Vegas.
“You haven’t been coming to class,” he said, though his question—why?—remained unasked.
Teddy had expected Clint to be angry. To be on her ass about ditching. She was practically daring him to kick her out of Whitfield. Yet he hadn’t. She gripped the wooden desk. She was so angry with him.
“Maybe we should both sit down. And you can explain yourself.”
“I don’t think that I’m the one who needs to explain myself,” she said, releasing her grip on the desk. She took the photo out of her pocket; she’d been carrying it around since the day Yates had handed it to her in San Quentin. She laid it on the desk.
“Where did you get this?” he asked, slack-jawed.
“I dreamed about it first,” Teddy said. She cleared her throat, knowing she couldn’t mention Yates. If she did, Clint would surely intervene—transfer him, or burn the file, or something. She sent another surge of power to her wall. “And then it came in the mail a few weeks ago,” she lied.
Clint’s brow wrinkled. “No return address? No note?”
“No,” Teddy said. “But I know those are my parents. And that’s you with them.”
Clint sighed. “Teddy, this would have been a distraction.”
“You knew them! You knew my parents and you never told me!”
Of all the things that Clint had kept from her, this one hurt the most. If she had sat across from him in his Taurus in Vegas and he had said: I knew your birth parents, they were psychic, she would have told him to sign her up right then.
Finally, Clint said, “We were young when we first met. Younger than you are now—”
“Where?” Teddy said. “Where did you meet?” She wanted to see if he would put all his cards on the table.
“At a government training facility.”
“Do you mean a school like Whitfield or something different?”
“It was a high-security military facility. The primary purpose was to teach desert combat techniques to troops who would be deployed overseas.” He winced as if remembering something painful. “The psychic training was ancillary to the facility’s primary directive, genetic experimentation. There was little oversight, no real direction or control. No accountability. I think that was the venture’s downfall. Ultimately, it pioneered genetic research on psychics.”
“Sector Three,” Teddy said.
Clint’s eyes met hers. “How do you know about Sector Three?”
“Rumors floating around school.” She couldn’t tell him that Yates thought something similar might be happening at Whitfield. Another thing that Clint had kept from her. Another thing she was keeping from him.
He cleared his throat. “Your father was an enormously talented telepath. He passed that ability on to you. It doesn’t always happen like that. Psychic abilities skip generations and even manifest in people who have no family history.”
“And my mother?”
“An astral traveler. It’s likely that she’s the source of your astral power,” Clint continued. “In altered states, your mother’s astral body could visit other planes. Like dreams.” He leaned forward. “You said you saw this picture in your dream. Where?”
“A yellow house. I thought I might’ve— It sounds stupid now.”
“That’s where your parents lived on base. You were born there.”
She’d been dreaming of home.
Clint began with names, Marysue and Richard Delaney, names she knew already, thanks to Yates. He went on to describe the high-security military training base where they had met. The base located in a remote section of Nevada desert. It was comprised of three sections: Sector One was devoted to combat training. Sector Two was designated for psychic training; men and women with special skills had been gathered there to hone their innate abilities.
Clint explained that the researchers who had been brought in to administer the program had scoffed at the idea of psychic abilities. “They referred to us as fleas,” he said.
Teddy frowned. “Fleas?”
“You know, the old joke. A military scientist tells a flea to jump and records how high it jumps. He cuts off a leg, repeats the command, records the height of the jump. The experiment is repeated three more times, until the flea has no legs at all, and a final command to jump is given. When the flea doesn’t move, the scientist records the following: Flea without legs is deaf.” He shook his head. “They thought we’d end up the punch line to some military joke.”
Instead, the psychics—Clint, her parents, and the others there—had proved beyond doubt that extrasensory perception was not only real but could be actively cultivated.
It was inspiring, at the beginning. They were energized by the work they were doing. They thought they were the good guys, fighting for a cause. Then Richard and Marysue had married.
Clint stopped.
“What?” she said in a voice that was cracked and dry. She had been afraid to interrupt, afraid of losing a single detail of her parents’ story.
“At that point,” Clint finally continued, “two things happened. They
expanded the program to include another sector—Three. They recruited the best of our group to form an elite psychic corps. I was planning to join, but I had to go home and take care of my father in Las Vegas, and I accepted a position with the Las Vegas PD instead. I left the facility.”
“Did my parents join Sector Three?”
“Your father. Richard was better than any of us. The things he could do with his mind. He could crush a piece of metal in a blink of his eye.” Clint shook his head. “But it was more than that. He was a natural leader, the kind of guy who just drew people to him. Your father might have changed the world.”
“What happened to him?”
“I wasn’t there, Teddy. I left months before it got bad. There are only whispers . . .” Clint paused. “Sector Three changed him. I don’t know what happened inside those walls, but it wasn’t good. Richard became paranoid, obsessive . . . violent.”
That wasn’t what Yates had said.
“Your mother was pregnant with you. You were born on base. A few days later, your father led a coup against the officers in charge of Sector Three. Somehow he’d broken into the arsenal and stolen semiautomatic rifles, ammunitions, grenades, everything he needed to start his own private war—on a military base.” He shook his head as if still in shock about the outcome of events. “Naturally, they returned fire. Richard was killed.
“About a month later,” Clint continued, “at a little after three in the morning, I heard a knock on my door. It was your mother. She was frantic, Teddy. Nothing like the woman I knew. She shoved you in my arms and told me to take care of you. She said she’d be back for you as soon as it was safe.” He stood and moved to the window.
On clear days, you could see the brilliant orange of the Golden Gate Bridge from this spot. But today wasn’t clear. Great billowing drifts of fog obscured everything.
“And?” she said.
Clint turned. “And nothing. I never heard from her again.”