This was just the accelerated version of that very same path.
So Mac took a deep breath and grew her hair long and lush, and made her lips pouty and full. She gave herself boobs that would’ve made Shane weep with joy. And that really was enough to disguise her. A woman’s body was still too often the only thing most people bothered to notice.
Mac took her boobs and went inside the drugstore, to the ATM, but the damn thing had a limit to how much she could withdraw from her account in the course of a single day. Even though she’d never done anything like it before, she managed to short the fucker out so that it burped wads of cash at her—close to sixteen thousand in the new five-hundred-dollar bills—nearly her entire savings. She left the store with it, dividing it into two piles—one of which she handed to the distraught mother, walking away without a single word.
It took her a bit longer to find the old man and once she did, she had to tap on the window of his car to get him to roll down the glass. He was crying, and the wave of loss and pain that hit her was so much like the emotion she’d felt last night from Bach, that she just stood there staring at him like an idiot.
Was it possible that the seemingly unmovable Joseph Bach had lost someone that he’d loved as much as this man had loved his deceased wife …?
And the real irony—the real stop-her-in-her-tracks, slap-in-the-face truth about that was that she was freaking jealous of them both. She wanted what they’d both once had. Yes, they’d lost it, but you can’t lose something that you’ve never experienced. And Mac thought of Shane, and of what he’d never mean to her—of what he could never have meant to her, even if she said to hell with her conscience and spent the next two years with him in her bed, every night.
The old man wiped his face as he peered up at her with watery blue eyes that were magnified by his old-style glasses. He spoke in a quavering voice, “May I help you, dear?”
He wanted to help her—this man who had less than nothing.
He lived in his car. Mac could see that the backseat was packed with his belongings—including a teapot with roses painted on the side, and a pink cardigan that was probably new back in the 1980s—and she realized that even if she gave him twenty thousand dollars it wouldn’t be enough to truly help him.
Still, she held the money out for him. “Get your car fixed.”
His eyes widened as he looked at it, but then he looked up at her again, and shook his head. “I can’t take that,” he told her. “You’ll make better use of it than I will. I’ve already called … some friends. They’ll be here to pick me up in about an hour.”
But Mac could see the brochure for Johnston, Lively, and Grace Drug Testing Labs on the passenger seat next to him, and she knew he was lying. He had no real friends—at least not at JLG.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “Go to JLG? They’ll treat you like a lab rat. When they say lockdown they mean it.” She tossed the money across him, onto the seat beside him, atop that brochure. “This way, you still have some options.”
It was then, as she was turning to walk away, that he said, “It doesn’t matter anymore. Not for me. But you still have time to make the right choice.”
Mac turned back to look at him, and he was holding out her money.
“Love,” he said, as if he were answering a question that she’d asked him. “The only real right choice is love. It’s worth any risk. And it’s well worth the pain. I had her for sixty-three years. Over twenty-three thousand days. Can you even imagine …?”
She looked into the old man’s eyes and shook her head, thinking about the single night she’d spent with Shane—a night that, by comparison, didn’t even count, because love wasn’t involved.
And she found herself thinking, then, about her father, about her little brother Billy, about Tim …
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Mac said, and turned and walked, and then ran to her bike, and got the hell out of there.
Elliot was still in the examination room finishing up a set of prelim-tests on Shane Laughlin when he got the message that Mac and Diaz were on their way back in, and that Diaz had Rickie Littleton in his possession.
Bach also sent a quick text: “Already here, escorting Ms. Taylor back to her room, on my way,” which was good since Elliot needed a visual aid. All of the former SEAL lieutenant’s test results were coming out remarkably unremarkable, and Elliot was pretty certain that the man had erected a very large block of disbelief that was inhibiting or counteracting any natural talent that he may have had.
The brain worked in mysterious ways.
So Elliot popped out into the hall, hoping to catch Joseph Bach before the pair of Fifties arrived and they all vanished behind a locked door with their suspect.
He just needed the maestro for a brief show-and-tell—maybe pick Shane up and move him over to the other side of the little room, along with a quick demonstration of what Elliot, who’d clearly spent too many hours watching his father’s DVDs of Star Trek, still thought of as a mind meld. It was mind-blowing—extremely fantastic and a little scary—to experience the sensation of Bach tiptoeing through one’s head. It wouldn’t take more than a few seconds of that to take Shane’s nonbeliever status and give it a quick one-eighty.
Thinking about that kind of mental power brought Elliot back to the wall of images he’d experienced a few hours earlier, when he’d tried to help Stephen Diaz up from the floor. He was still fairly positive that Diaz had had no idea he was broadcasting those thoughts. Although, to be honest, it was hard for Elliot to believe that Diaz was having those thoughts in the first place. And it wasn’t the fact that he was gay that was so hard to swallow. Neither was the idea that he was attracted to Elliot a problem. Okay, maybe that was a little mind-bending—a little holy crap. Okay, it was a truckload of holy crap.
But still, really, it was the idea that Diaz might be thinking about something other than a serene rose petal suspended mid-air, or the powerful ripple caused by a single raindrop moving across the Atlantic Ocean that was shocking.
As Elliot opened the door and stepped out into the hall, Stephen Diaz was right there, mid-stride, outside the exam room. And even though Elliot had tested himself again and again and again, and was completely convinced of his status as a lowly fraction, it was almost as if he had conjured Diaz up, just by thinking of him.
“Oh, hey,” Elliot greeted him. “I thought you were only just on your way back in.” He checked his phone for the status of the message Diaz had sent and … “Oops, there’s that dang time delay again. It took … twenty minutes this time, for your message to come in. You nearly beat it back here.”
Diaz had stopped walking, although he glanced almost longingly down the hall in the direction he’d been going. “Infrastructure decay,” he said, shaking his head in disgust. “It’s getting worse. I’ve noticed it, too.” He cleared his throat. “We’re going to have to work on getting ourselves a dedicated satellite.” He couldn’t quite hold Elliot’s gaze and he looked down the hall again and even pointed a little. “Long night. I was getting … something … to eat?”
“And … we don’t have people who’ll do that for you?” Elliot asked.
Diaz smiled briefly, ruefully, and Elliot’s heart actually sped up. “Busted,” he admitted. “The guy I brought in … I didn’t want to have to help move him from the car to the holding cell. The temptation to snap his neck was a little too strong. I was really just giving myself a time-out.”
Now Elliot couldn’t help but think about the way he’d found Diaz, sitting on the floor in the corner of that darkened exam room. Had that been a time-out, too?
Across the hall, Diaz’s body language got even tighter. He was perceptive enough to know just where Elliot’s thoughts had gone, even without telepathic assistance.
And Elliot didn’t have to be a Greater-Than to know that if he mentioned that earlier incident at all, Diaz would run away. So instead he said, “I’m doing some preliminaries on a promising new Potential, but I�
��m thinking he might be experiencing a significant block, due to massive disbelief. I was hoping to grab Dr. Bach to do a little demo, but as long as you’re here and looking for a distraction …?” He gestured toward the exam room door.
“Oh,” Diaz said, looking again down the hall, as if wishing he had the power to be rude and just walk away. “Yeah. Sure.”
“It’ll only take two minutes,” Elliot reassured him, leading the way back into the room where Shane Laughlin was pretending that he hadn’t been messing with the comm-station on the wall.
“Oh, it’s you,” Diaz said as he shook Shane’s hand, and Elliot introduced the two men.
Elliot was watching closely, and Shane wasn’t flung against the far wall the way Elliot had been earlier when he’d touched the Fifty.
So … maybe that power had been Elliot’s. And wasn’t that a ridiculous theory, since he was as un-special as they came.
“I, um, saw Lieutenant Laughlin come in,” Diaz told Elliot, a tad self-consciously.
And yes, it made sense that Diaz would have noticed Shane Laughlin. Kind of hard not to. Elliot thought of himself as a fairly good-looking man, but standing beside both Diaz and Shane, he felt both dweebish and nearly invisible. And simultaneously flabby and skinny—which came with the knowledge that it was both time to hit the gym and time to accept the fact that he should never bother going to the gym again, because why make the effort?
Shane nodded coolly as he greeted Diaz. “You were going someplace in a hurry. With your … friend.”
“Shane’s former military and still a little suspicious of us,” Elliot told Diaz, leaving Mac out of it, since Shane had done the same. Although that use of the word friend was certainly interesting.
He hit the button that turned the med scanners on, using the keyboard to call up Diaz’s profile, too—no point in announcing it, though. While it wasn’t standard to scan Greater-Thans who were participating in an experiment, Diaz was still looking tired and as if he were under some kind of physical strain. Long night was an understatement.
And even though both men were in motion and fully clothed, Elliot could still program the computer to make a partial or jot scan—which, here at OI, included a readout of their neural integration levels.
Diaz was smiling at Shane. “You ready for a demonstration?” he asked.
“What the fuck …?” the Potential said. He took a step forward, but then jerked to a stop. “What is this?” He then said something more, but his words were muffled and indiscernible, as if he were trying to talk with his lips tightly shut.
“First I bound your arms,” Diaz told him evenly, “then your legs, then I gave you a mental gag. I’m going to release you now. You need to relax, stop fighting me and regain your balance, or you’ll fall over. Ready?”
Shane nodded, his eyes almost wild with a mix of disbelief, frustration, and what on another man might have been fear. And maybe it was fear. Elliot had been used as a training dummy a time or two hundred. Being bound and gagged by telekinetic power was not for the claustrophobic or faint of heart.
“On one,” Diaz said. “Three … two … one.”
“Holy shit!” Shane fell forward and would have landed hard on his knees if Diaz hadn’t caught him. He turned to Elliot. “How the fuck did you do that?”
“Typical,” Elliot said to Diaz with mock disappointment. “Blame the guy who runs the fancy equipment.” He held out both of his hands as he turned to Shane. “I’m not doing anything. Didn’t touch the comm-station. Didn’t give the computer a vocal command. It’s all him.” He gestured toward Diaz with his head.
Now, with Elliot’s empty hands still held out in full view, Diaz used his power to pick up Shane, and deposit him over on the other side of the small room. Not as impressive as moving him across one of the main meeting rooms, but still astonishing to the former SEAL.
“I bound you before I picked you up,” Diaz told the Potential, “because the initial reaction to being moved like that is to flail, and I didn’t want to dump you on your butt. Be ready to really relax this time, because I’m going to release you on three … two … one.”
This time Shane only wobbled slightly. He’d caught on fast, but he still wasn’t completely convinced. He opened the exam room door. “I want to see you do that again, out in the hall,” he challenged Diaz, who followed him out and did just that as Elliot reviewed the information on the computer from both men’s jot scans and …
Okay, that was weird. Shane hadn’t budged from seventeen percent integrated, which was exactly where he’d started. His reading hadn’t changed at all, out to three decimal points.
Instead Diaz was the one who’d popped. He usually scanned at anywhere from forty-eight to fifty percent. His scan from earlier tonight had had him at a higher than usual fifty-point-nine-two-five. But right now? He was showing an amazing fifty-eight. Fifty-eight-point-four-three-nine, to be painstakingly precise.
Elliot was just about to call Diaz back into the room—he’d recalibrated the equipment and was going to give the Greater-Than another scan—a full this time—when the overhead speakers began to trumpet an alarm.
They ran drills every month, so he easily identified the three-blast pattern. His “What the heck …?” was meant as more of a rhetorical question.
But Diaz answered as if he were serious—or maybe he was responding to Shane’s questioning look. “Intruder alert. Compound’s going into lockdown.” He came over to Elliot’s computer and all but hipchecked him aside, working the controls himself, overriding the medical file with one from security.
“The prisoner we just brought in,” Diaz announced as he scrolled through the reports on the computer screen. “He jokered. He’s going one-on-one with Mac, downstairs. She needs help.”
Most newcomers wouldn’t have understood half of what he’d said, but Shane, despite his Alice-in-Wonderland status, followed completely. He got all Alpha male and naval officer and said, “Where is she?” and “I’m going, too.”
“No, you’re not,” Diaz said, tossing Elliot a “Keep him here,” as he headed for the door.
But Elliot reached to stop Diaz with a hand on the bigger man’s arm—and the world went weird. He was suddenly bathed in warmth, and his vision seemed sharper. Colors were brighter, but they had a slightly yellow hue, as if he were wearing those tinted glasses that fighter pilots sometimes wore.
Diaz froze. Elliot did, too—which was stupid. He’d stopped the Fifty because he had to warn him. Diaz needed to be told that he was suddenly integrated at nearly sixty percent, that his powers were enormously enhanced. He had to be made aware of this. If he used his ability to manipulate electricity to control the joker, he could well kill the man with his augmented talents.
Seriously? I’m at sixty percent?
Holy crap, was that …?
Yeah, and I’m reading your thoughts, too. Very clearly. Holy crap, indeed. That was definitely Diaz, deep inside of Elliot’s mind. I’m not sixty, I’m fifty-eight-point-four-three-nine.
Close enough.
No, it’s not. Two percentage points is … All right, I’m not gonna … You really think it’s … Shane who’s doing this to me?
Elliot did. His theory was that Shane had the power to somehow enhance or augment the Greater-Thans—the way he’d done with Mac, to help her heal herself and …
Mac really had sex with him? Okay, I don’t want to know that. Shit, he’s heading for the elevators.
Diaz pulled his arm away, and without the contact, it was all gone—the warmth, the tint, and Diaz’s powerful presence inside of Elliot’s head. The shock of the sudden withdrawal made Elliot grab for the comm-station’s keyboard to hold himself upright. He clung to it as Diaz used his power to bring Shane all the way back into the room, to place him on the examination table, and to lock the physical restraints firmly around the former SEAL’s arms and legs.
“Don’t you goddamn do this!” Shane was saying. “I can help! For Christ’s sake, let me help!�
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Diaz looked back at Elliot as he went out the door. “Lock this behind me,” he said, and then he was gone.
“God damn it!” Shane was practically foaming at the mouth and as Elliot turned to look at him, he could see the man visibly working to calm himself down. “Okay. Okay. Dr. Zerkowski. Elliot. Let’s be reasonable. I can help. Whatever’s going on, I can be an asset, with my training. So, look, we can make a deal. Unlock me and let me go down there, and I’ll do whatever tests you want me to do and …”
He kept talking, but Elliot had already turned back to the comm-station, because the thought suddenly occurred to him that Shane’s presence might be necessary for him to enhance both of the Fifties’ power.
Elliot quickly keyed in the command for the computer to find Diaz and to jot scan him from a distance. The results would be less than accurate, but it would be better than guessing and …
Crap, according to the computer, Diaz’s integration level was already down to fifty-three and continuing to drop.
If Elliot’s theory was right, Shane’s presence downstairs in security would not only boost Diaz’s power, but Mac’s and Bach’s, too.
And since this was a brand-new scenario—they’d never had to deal with a jokering addict here at OI before—Elliot wanted to give Diaz more than a mere home court advantage. And Mac and Bach, too, of course. He turned to the table and unlocked Shane’s restraints. “Come on,” he told the former SEAL. “Let’s do this.”
And they both headed for the elevators at a run.
ELEVEN
“This facility is in lockdown!” one of a crowd of ten guards shouted as Shane rounded the corner, with Elliot on his heels. The security team was positioned in front of what looked like a heavy steel door. “Containment shields are in place!”
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