by Brandt Legg
Fred was sweating. “I don’t know where she is.”
I didn’t want to read him; because we shared a soul it was possible he’d be able to learn too much about me and the Movement. “Then I’m going to drop you through that table on the count of three. Are you ready? One . . .”
“But I don’t know!”
“Two . . .” I jostled him a bit.
“Wait, wait . . . please.”
I stared up at him impatiently.
“They’ll kill me if I tell you.”
“That sounds like a personal problem. Three!”
“Okay, she’s at Quantico,” he screamed.
I let him drop a few feet before stopping. “How long has she been there?”
“Since May,” he whimpered.
“Where was she before that?” I didn’t want him to later recount what period I’d been interested in.
“She was held in Los Angeles for several days following her capture, then transferred to Petersburg.”
“Florida?”
“No, the federal prison in Petersburg, Virginia.”
“I see in the reports she has been subjected to torture. Is she okay?”
“It’s not torture; it’s heightened interrogation methods.”
“Don’t give me that bureaucratic double-speak. What do you people call murder? Enhanced retirement?” I tossed him back toward the ceiling, then let him plummet to within inches of the glass and rolled him onto the floor. He didn’t stop screaming for several seconds.
“What do you call what you just did, Ryder?” He asked through gritted teeth. “That’s as much torture as anything.”
“You seem fine. But we can try again if you don’t answer the question.”
My head suddenly felt blisteringly hot. Experience told me to get out now. The glass of the picture window shattered, slicing into my arms and back as I leapt through. The whistle of the incoming missile spurred me to Skyclimb even before I hit the grass in his backyard. The explosion’s flash and fire knocked me from the roof of his neighbor’s storage shed. Badly burnt, I stood unsteadily.
The sound that had haunted me for years – approaching helicopters – broke through the ringing in my ears. I fled the Outview and landed back in my body in the bunker.
Amber screamed.
40
“I’m okay,” I told her.
“You’re a burnt, bloody mess,” she said. “You’re smoking!”
She helped get me out of my smoldering clothes and into the tiny shower. Everything hurt. Amber pulled shards of glass out of my back and arms, then administered Lusans while I recounted my experience.
“Fred Means is dead, I felt the change,” I said. “Just before the explosion, I saw the clock. He died thirty minutes after I got there, it was the same time as when he choked to death on the carrots. Do you realize the power of that? Does that mean he would have died no matter what? Are there a thousand ways we each may die on our given day?”
“I’ve studied that a lot over the past two years. It is possible to change the date of our death but it isn’t easy. It is linked to the time of our birth and every major incident in between,” Amber said quietly, as she moved the Lusan over me. “Our death isn’t just our destiny, it affects every other person in our life. Changing it is a monumental task; you could spend a lifetime trying to alter your death.”
“Death is just waking from the dream,” I said, “or the nightmare, if you’re in a place like Carst.”
“So Linh’s at Petersburg right now?”
“Yeah, do you know it?”
“When I was with Yangchen, we worked with the group in the Movement that tries to locate high-level prisoners – mystics, top Movement officials, Booker’s associates, people like that.”
“People like Linh.”
“Yeah, and I saw research on a bunch of the facilities. They’ve taken most of the federal prisons near large military bases and turned them into holding interrogation incarceration centers, or HIICs. Petersburg is an important facility because of its proximity to DC, Quantico and the huge bases around Norfolk, but we didn’t think they were equipped to hold mystics there.”
“Linh’s not a mystic.”
“Her soul powers are of mystic level. And how long until she actually becomes one?”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“You can’t go after her.”
“Amber, you know me well enough to know I have to.” I sat up and moved the Lusan onto my scorched and bruised legs. “I’d come for you.”
“But you shouldn’t. I wouldn’t want you to. Do you think Linh wants you to risk your life to come and save her?”
“No. I don’t think she wants me to, but she expects me to . . . she knows I’ll come and you would know it too.”
She nodded. “I’m coming.”
I was ready to argue but there was no room for disagreement in her eyes.
“Okay, we need a plan.”
The following day, with Rose’s help, we were in a rental house owned by an unknown Booker corporation. His property management firm rented twenty-one homes in Virginia Beach, along the oceanfront, between 66th and 75th streets. In addition to having a fabulous ocean view, our house was less than a block from the Association of Research and Enlightenment – the Edgar Cayce Foundation. Cayce, perhaps the most famous prophet since Nostradamus, had lived in the first half of the twentieth century. His foundation accumulated and operated one of the great metaphysical libraries until Omnia shut it down during the first crackdown. Like a grand New England resort, Cayce’s original building sat abandoned on the hill overlooking the coast. The more modern structure, located a few hundred yards below, housed the famous library and was occasionally used by Omnia researchers, but was otherwise empty and guarded only by a few soldiers in a checkpoint on Atlantic Avenue. Omnia had not discovered the portal located in the original structure.
Not surprisingly, the Amazon was riddled with portals and Rose was able to communicate over the astral as to the best ones to get Amber and me to Virginia. She cautioned us on the risks, but was partial to Linh and worried less about my death than Spencer and Yangchen did. We arrived in darkness and easily slipped through some old gardens to 68th Street, then cut across a deserted Atlantic Avenue, and were in Booker’s house in time to see the sunrise over the ocean. A motorcycle flew over one of the small dunes that separated us from the beach. It nearly crashed in a spray of sand before the rider, dressed in black, righted the bike and swerved into our driveway beneath the deck. The man had a guitar in a soft black case strapped to his back. He lifted the dark helmet off and looked up at me grinning.
“Flannery, Rose said you were in town,” I called down.
“Yeah, I’m playing at a music festival not far from here. I’ve got a new song for you,” he said, disappearing from the driveway and reappearing next to us on the deck.
“How did he do that?” Amber asked.
“Amber, this is Flannery; he’s a crazy, weird and talented mystic.”
“So, he’s like all the mystics,” Amber said. “Weird and kind of crazy.”
“No, he’s a special kind of crazy,” I said.
“Amber, do you love music?” he asked.
“Yes, of course.”
He smiled. “And do you love to dance?”
“Who doesn’t?”
Her answer obviously pleased him. Flannery took his guitar out and began to play. “This is a new song I’ve been working on, I hope you like it. Don’t tell me if you don’t. I’ll know on account of your not saying how great it is, so if you do like it, don’t forget the part about telling me how great it is.” He winked.
Amber couldn’t take her eyes off him as he sang in a mesmerizing voice of changing times, lost freedoms and nature under the strain of human greed. The lyrics were brilliant and devastating but the upbeat melody created a beautiful song. We were silent when he finished.
“You didn’t like it?” Flannery asked, dejected.
&nb
sp; “We loved it,” we said in unison.
“But you didn’t dance. It’s better when you dance. I’ll play it again. Will you dance this time?”
I held out my hand to Amber and we danced on the deck as warm salty breezes blew away the remaining coolness of the night. It was the type of song that pulled emotions from the deepest parts of you. I swear there were four more instruments playing along with his guitar. For those moments, lost in that music, all the problems and pressures of my life no longer existed. I twirled and spun Amber as my feet caught the rhythm and his lyrics carried me away.
He sensed my bliss as the song ended. “Nate, you might even listen better than Dustin. Music . . . power to change the world.”
“I wish it were that simple.”
“Never underestimate the power of a song.”
We discussed the planned jailbreak during breakfast. “I’ve got quite a few friends locked up at Petersburg,” Flannery said. “Sadly, I’ve got friends in half the prisons in the world – most of them don’t deserve to be there.”
“We welcome your help, but we’re only going in for Linh. I don’t want any distractions.”
Flannery shook his head. “You’ve never been in prison, have you, Nate? That’s a rhetorical question. I can tell you haven’t. Once people have been locked up they acquire a certain look, a kind of distant stare that’s barely noticeable unless you recognize it. And there’s a constant, yet subtle, tension in how they hold their shoulders.”
“Sorry if you’re disappointed, I’ve managed to avoid prison,” I said, with a chuckle.
“It’s okay, you’ve got other things going for you, but the reason I brought it up is because if you’d been inside, you would know that distractions are exactly what we want.”
“What do you have in mind?” Amber asked.
“Amber, I’m glad you asked. I was thinking maybe you and I could get some dinner this evening. I know this great little vegan place at the end of the boardwalk, then maybe a walk on the beach under the stars and I’ll write you a love song.”
Amber laughed. I shook my head.
“Where does beauty like yours come from?” Flannery asked. “I became a musician so girls like you would fall in love with me.”
“It worked,” Amber said, smiling.
“Okay, okay. Can we get back to the plan . . . rescuing Linh? Remember?” I said.
Flannery passed Amber a slip of paper. “Call me.”
Amber unfolded it. “It’s blank.”
He winked. “Just think of me and I’ll be there.”
“Fine, I’ll go alone,” I said.
“Nate, relax. Don’t be so serious all the time. Life is for living.”
“Exactly. I want Linh to be living.”
“Let me spell it out for you. I’ll talk to a few of my friends, they’ll spread the word to the right people, and by late this afternoon the entire prison will be in full riot-mode. We’ll drop in as it erupts, use Solteer on every guard we encounter, totally mess with their reality.”
“I’m good at Solteer,” Amber said. “I’ll put some to sleep and have the rest seeing all kinds of terrifying images.”
“I’m thinking we can Gogen the entire electronics of the place to open every cell and exterior door,” Flannery said.
“So Linh will be swept out with hundreds of others? I like it.”
“Right, then we head straight back here and escape into the Cayce portal before they even realize it was about Linh,” Flannery snapped his fingers twice. “It’ll be legendarily smooth.”
It wasn’t.
41
A serious problem arose when we discovered there were no known portals anywhere near the prison. Flannery, in an ostentatious mood for Amber, produced a fancy black Porsche. Normally a two-hour drive to the prison, we made it in under an hour after an impressive display of Timefolds, TVC and his Atomizing which was a combination of manipulations of space with Gogen and energy with Vising.
“You’ve got to teach me that Atomizing,” I said, as we blurred through traffic with pulsating g-forces.
“I showed you at our first meeting. The camera, remember?” Then he looked back at Amber through the rearview mirror. “I asked Nate if he could have any physical object in the world and he chose a camera.”
Amber laughed. “Why not the Jadeo?”
“It’s not like that,” I said. “It’s making something new. So I could make a replica of the Jadeo but not the original.”
“Is that how you vanish and appear, too?” she asked.
“Same principle,” he said.
The prison guard towers were suddenly before us. Sinister razor wire, capping endless fences, glinted in the setting sun. I shivered, thinking of Linh in this place. It had once been an all-male facility housing about four thousand inmates. Omnia had converted it to hold seven thousand people. The sprawling prison surprised me with its size and fortress-like appearance.
“It seems so quiet,” Amber said.
“Look,” Flannery said, pointing through the windshield at a column of thick black smoke rising from the rear of one of the larger buildings. Two units over, more smoke appeared.
After leaving the car in the visitors’ parking lot, we Skyclimbed within a TVC. I strained with Amber on my back since she still couldn’t Skyclimb. The extra effort required to maintain a TVC left me a bit unstable and I crash-landed into an old painted-brick building. I took the brunt of the impact but Amber got banged up too. The sirens began wailing.
“We’ve got to hit the electronics now!” Flannery yelled.
Flames engulfed the side of an administrative wing. At least a hundred guards adorned in storm trooper riot gear marched ten feet away; however, we were still concealed within a TVC. Flannery squatted trance-like as he communicated with his buddies and directed their actions.
“I’ve got the locks.” The deafening roar of a thousand convicts surging free made my announcement unnecessary. Linh still had not surfaced on the astral and our only confirmation of her presence at Petersburg came from Fred Means more than a year in the future.
“Find out what the most secure unit is,” I shouted to Flannery. “That’s where they’ll have her.”
“Omnia’s mystics have to be blocking her astral view,” Amber said. “Does that mean they’re here?”
It was something we should have considered before we arrived. If their mystics were on site, then the break might be more challenging than we anticipated.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
I landed hard on my chest at least twenty feet from where I’d been standing. “Amber!” I found her bleeding badly. A twisted piece of metal gashed her leg. It would be impossible to get the shrapnel out without opening an artery. Amber looked from the wound to me. I saw the fear.
Flannery raced over out of the smoke. He somehow dissolved the metal and in the same instant had her leg tightly bandaged. “Lusans!” he yelled, as he dropped back into his trance posture.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.
The second Lusan flew out of my hands. I crashed into a dumpster. Amber bounced off a chain-link fence. Flannery hadn’t moved.
“It’s not our team,” Flannery yelled. “Omnia is detonating the bombs, it’s all been wired. They’re going to destroy the whole place . . . and everyone in it.”
I hadn’t felt Linh’s change and I believed Fred, which meant I had to find her now. There were too many buildings, too much fire and smoke, and a sea of screaming inmates and battling guards. My only hope was to leave. “You guys have to protect me,” I said, diving under a concrete bench. “I’m going into an Outview.”
“Nate, no!” was the last thing I heard.
Fred’s iPad lay on the coffee table. I heard him in the kitchen cutting carrots. Frantically, I searched for Petersburg – sixty-eight results were found. The sound of chopping echoed down the hall. After adding Linh’s name, the results narrowed to four. The second one yielded the information I needed – she was held in B-unit.
&n
bsp; “Don’t move, Ryder.” Fred was pointing a gun.
“Fred, listen to me. You and I have something in common. I don’t have time to talk about it now, but I’ll be back. Just don’t eat those carrots.”
“We’ve got nothing in common, Ryder. You’re a terrorist and I’m a patriot and you won’t be back because you’re not leaving.” He punched a button on his phone. “Just sit tight, the authorities will be here in a few minutes.”
“Fred, look into my eyes.”
“Nice try. I’ve spent the past couple of years studying everything about you and I know you’ve got an array of skills – hypnotism, telekinesis, ESP, morphing, shapeshifting, et cetera. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were the devil. But I’m not a religious man . . . I think you’re some kind of freak, a pitiful, misguided and very dangerous freak. And if you so much as blink wrong, I won’t hesitate to kill you. I’d do it now but I’m not much interested in becoming a national hero.”
No matter how long I was in the Outview, I would return to Petersburg within a minute of when I had left. It was impossible to separate myself from the urgency of rescuing Linh. Gogen didn’t even require me to blink. The gun and the cell phone flew from his hands to mine. Before Fred could react, he was pinned to the wall. I ran over and whispered into his ear.
“I know the NSA can hear everything that happens in this house but I don’t know if they can hear my whispers. It doesn’t matter, you’ll be dead soon anyway and not by my hand. But if you should somehow live through this day, you should join the Movement. You’ve traveled the world, you particularly liked Monaco and Egypt, you’ve got a couple of degrees, speak three languages and read constantly. But Fred, your view of the world is extremely limited. There is so much more, but your life has only contributed to holding humanity back. It has nothing to do with your work at the NSA; even if you sold cars, if you deny your own soul, you block the path to enlightenment for all.”
Gogen had him paralyzed so when I looked into his eyes for almost ten seconds, he couldn’t turn away. I left him in tears with the awareness of our soul connection.