“What Elliot’s saying,” Diaz continued, “is that he needs to test you, thoroughly, to find out exactly what your skills are. I’ll be doing the same thing for my new integration levels, before I go out there—before I put anyone at risk.”
“We’ve already got a team of Forties on the street, looking for Devon Caine—that’s Littleton’s partner’s name,” Bach told them.
“Sir, I’ve had a taste of this guy Caine’s emotional grid,” Mac said. “Because of that, I can find him faster.”
“You know him?” Shane asked her. “Caine?”
“No,” Mac said. “But I know what he’s capable of.”
Diaz saw that Shane didn’t understand and added, “We’re pretty sure that Devon Caine raped and murdered a girl in the same South Boston garage where Nika Taylor was originally brought after her abduction. Mac was able to read the past emotional disturbance—both from the dead girl and from the killer. Who we believe is Caine.”
“Jesus,” Shane breathed, looking hard at Mac.
Who wouldn’t meet his eyes more than briefly. “Yeah,” she said. “That sucked. But at least now I can use it to help us locate him.”
“How does that work?” he asked. “I mean, do you just drive through the streets, hoping you get a hit? Or can you feel him from here and …”
“I have to be in close enough range,” Mac explained. “But randomly driving through the streets?” She shook her head. “That’s too inefficient. Although, if we hadn’t gotten this lead, I would have started doing that. But now that we know his name, we can dig through his file and get a sense of the neighborhoods where he’s lived, the places he hangs out … And then I drive through those neighborhoods, trying to get a whiff of him.” She looked back at Bach, who was nodding.
“Let’s get Mac stabilized and tested as one of our highest priorities, so we can send her out there,” he said.
“And if she doesn’t stabilize?” Elliot posited. He turned to look at Mac. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but what if you can use your connection with Shane to elevate to a whole new integration level that you can control? What if part of the power he opens up for you is an ability, absolutely, to find Devon Caine? What if, with Shane’s help, you can just close your eyes and tell us where the bastard is?”
“That’s expecting a lot, Dr. Zerkowski,” Bach pointed out somewhat sternly, “from something that you have no idea is truly linked.”
“It is linked,” Elliot insisted as Shane watched Mac, who was clearly still thinking about what Elliot had just said. What if …?
“I understand that you want it to be linked,” Bach said.
“And that doesn’t mean that it’s not, sir,” Elliot countered as Mac turned to look at Shane—and the look she gave him was so similar to the way she’d looked at him in the bar in Kenmore Square, right before she’d stood up and brought him home, that he momentarily stopped breathing. Was she really considering …?
Jesus, she was.
“You’re right,” Bach conceded. “But I urge caution.” He, too, had made note of the way Mac was looking at Shane, and he repeated, “Dr. Mackenzie. Caution.”
She looked at Bach and even nodded, but Shane knew that this was a woman who was rarely cautious. “If this meeting’s over,” she announced, “I’ll walk Laughlin back to his room.”
Bach was sighing as he shook his head, and Shane stood up, fully expecting to be dismissed. But he had a question he wanted answered before he left. “What’s the status on Edward O’Keefe—the old man?”
“He’s still in ICU,” Elliot reported. “He suffered a massive coronary, and he should be dead, but he’s not. The medical team’s doing their best to keep him that way.”
“This meeting’s not over. There’s more to discuss,” Bach said, and waited until Shane sat back down. “It’s possible that Nika Taylor is the most talented Potential we’ve ever encountered.” He got their full attention with that, but then added, “Even though we’ve never come across anything like this before, I’m virtually certain she’s reaching out to her sister. Making contact via projection into Anna’s dreams.”
As ridiculously whoo-whoo as that sounded to Shane, it was obvious that neither of the other Greater-Thans nor Elliot were on the verge of laughing. In fact, Diaz and Elliot exchanged an almoststartled glance.
Mac, too, was intrigued. “Anna’s been dreaming about Nika?”
“Vividly.” Bach said.
“Are you sure it wasn’t just a nightmare?” Elliot asked. “She’s under a lot of stress.”
“I’m aware of that,” Bach said with a nod. “But whatever she experienced, there was projection involved. Even though Anna received the images while she was asleep, it wasn’t a dream. It was too chronological. Too linear. The theory I’m leaning toward is that these projections are unconscious—that Nika is unaware of what she’s doing. And I don’t think it’s by mistake that Anna was asleep when she received the projections, either. I think the two sisters have a connection that’s more easily accessible when Anna’s experiencing REM sleep. FYI, that’s where we came up with the name Devon Caine. And it was a positive hit—Devon Caine was the larger man who abducted Nika.”
“Seriously?” Mac asked, her skepticism apparent. “Anna had a dream, and suddenly we’ve ID’d Nika’s kidnapper? That sounds pretty freaking fishy to me, boss. Did you take her word for it or—”
Bach cut her off. “Anna’s definitely not working for the Organization. You’ve met her.”
“Or she’s an Eighty-Nine or Ninety and has us all duped,” Mac said.
“No.” Bach was absolute. “I ran additional tests on her. She’s integrated at only ten percent. She’s who she says she is. Also there’s … more. About the projection from Nika.” He cleared his throat. “It wasn’t just Anna who experienced it. I had the exact same dream—this was before we found Littleton. I was out in Newton and I was burning out, so I took a combat nap.”
“While Anna was all the way back at OI?” Elliot confirmed and Bach nodded.
“My best guess,” Bach said, “is that Nika subconsciously picked up on my earlier telepathic connection with her sister and somehow managed to send the same images—the same cry for help—to me.”
“Damn,” Mac said. “A double projection, across dozens of miles … Who is this girl?”
Across the room, Diaz and Elliot were exchanging another long look, and Diaz nodded.
“Sir,” Elliot said to Bach. “It’s possible Stephen can help. We haven’t had time to run tests, so I left it out of our report, but … We just found out that Stephen’s been, um, sharing his dreams with me for several months now. He’s able to project images from a dream state—from his apartment to mine. True, it’s not as far as OI is to Newton, but … He’s also been practicing a form of wake-initiated lucid dreaming that he calls controlled dreaming.”
“I can choose what I’m going to dream about before I fall asleep,” Diaz explained. “I’ve learned to retain some degree of control over my unconscious mind.”
Bach was nodding as Elliot continued, “If Nika really is as powerful as she appears to be, and her connection with her sister is so strong … It’s entirely possible that, with Stephen’s help, through this type of projected and controlled dreaming—”
“We can use Anna’s unconscious mind to reach out and make contact with Nika,” Bach finished for Elliot. He stood up. And this time the meeting was over. “Let’s do it,” he said. But then, as if he’d just made note of the time, he reached for the comm-station on his desk and typed in a quick message. “Anna was going to meet us for the end of this meeting—I’ll have Ahlam bring her over to the sleep lab instead.” He sent the message, then looked pointedly at Mac as he headed for the door. “Maybe we won’t need you to find Devon Caine.”
Mac nodded, glanced at Shane. “But having a Plan B,” she said, “is always useful, sir. Until we find the girl, I’m going to do whatever it takes to be ready.”
Bach stopped a
nd looked back at her, even as the door opened, seemingly of its own volition. “At least be honest with yourself,” he told her quietly. “That’s all I’ve ever asked of you.”
Mac’s chin went up. “I always am.”
Bach didn’t look convinced as he went out the door with Elliot and Diaz behind him.
Which left Mac and Shane alone in Bach’s office.
She looked at him. “Come on, Laughlin. I’ll walk you to your room.”
Anna followed her escort—a dark-haired teenage girl who’d quietly introduced herself as Ahlam—into a room in the R&D building that bore a sign saying “Laboratory Seven.”
It looked more like a hospital room than a lab, with a door leading to a small bathroom off to one side, and an array of equipment on the wall around a bed. Although the bed was not your standard, narrow hospital-issue, but rather a generously proportioned and comfortable-looking queen-sized, complete with a sturdy wooden frame, thick blue comforter, and big, fluffy pillows. A small sitting area nearby added to the obvious attempt to make the room more homey.
A curtain could be pulled around both the bed and the sitting area, in an attempt to cocoon it from the scanners and IV tubing and various wires.
Anna doubted that would help. Particularly since there was an obvious mirrored one-way observation window on the wall that couldn’t be blocked by the curtain.
“Please wait here, Miss Anna,” Ahlam told her, in her charming British-tinged accent. “Dr. Bach is on his way.”
The girl quietly closed the door behind her, leaving Anna alone in the room.
She wasn’t quite sure why she’d been brought here instead of over to Bach’s office, where he and his Fifties were holding that meeting. But on the walk from the barracks, Ahlam had not been forthcoming.
The comm-station in the room was locked, so Anna couldn’t resume her research while she waited—not that she’d had any luck so far. Or maybe she’d had too much luck. She’d already compiled a list of thirteen men, about the same age as the knife-wielding man she’d seen in her dream, who’d had disfiguring accidents sometime in the past thirty years—and a lack of funds to pay for corrective surgery. But she’d only just scratched the surface of Google hits. There were plenty more news articles to search.
Not to mention the fact that she’d focused on injuries received here in the Boston area. It was entirely possible that their man had received his scars in Miami. Or even Baghdad or Mumbai—a thought that led her to search for the records of former military personnel from the Boston area, who’d been injured in one of the past decades’ many wars. The current corporate government was particularly lax in providing veterans care. Plastic surgery wasn’t considered essential treatment.
Nor was mental health care—and it had seemed obvious that the scar-faced man had needed that as well.
Anna had just re-aimed her search in that direction when Ahlam had knocked on her door.
Now she sat on the edge of the bed and considered tapping on the mirrored glass and asking whoever was watching her to contact Bach and get his permission to turn on the computer.
But then she heard voices in the hall, and as she got to her feet, the door opened.
“… biggest possible problem,” the big, darkly handsome man named Stephen Diaz was saying with great intensity as he and Joseph Bach and Elliot came into the room, “is my limitation when it comes to telepathy. I’ve got a connection with Elliot, it’s true, but it’s also really new and I haven’t tried establishing a similar link with any other non-Greater-Thans.” He noticed Anna standing there. “Ms. Taylor.”
Bach was already smiling a greeting. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” he said.
She shook her head and murmured, “No,” and Bach glanced at Diaz and said, “We’ll all just do our best.” He looked back at Anna, gesturing toward the grouping of chairs, indicating that they should sit. “Please. And … may I?”
As she sat, she felt that now-familiar bump at the edge of her mind and she nodded, even as he added, “It’ll be faster and easier to explain what we intend to do, if I can just …”
And just like that, Bach’s warmth was back, and Anna understood almost instantaneously that Stephen Diaz had had experience with something called controlled dreaming, and that he was going to attempt to enter Anna’s mind and use those techniques to try to establish a long-distance telepathic connection with Nika.
Diaz had never done anything like this before, but Nika’s ability to project what she was seeing and feeling into Anna and Bach’s dreams was new territory, too.
And even though Anna was what Bach called a Less-Than or a ten-percenter, he believed that her bond with her sister was unusually strong. He also believed that Nika’s fledgling powers—even untrained—were massive.
So Diaz would use this controlled dreaming to implant within Anna’s mind a dream in which she’d explain all she’d learned about Greater-Thans and the Obermeyer Institute to Nika, with the intention of this dream being ready and in place should Nika reach out to Anna again while she was sleeping.
In this dream, Anna would at least reassure Nika that help was on its way.
At best, maybe—through Anna—Diaz and Bach could help Nika learn to control and develop her powers so that she could help them locate and rescue her.
It was a long shot, but Anna was already nodding her consent. Let’s do it. Let’s try it.
But Bach’s explanation wasn’t over.
In order to do this, you’ll need to be asleep, because the unconscious mind is always more … Bach paused. Adaptable.
And malleable? Anna asked.
Yes.
And wasn’t this going to be fun? She was going to be incredibly vulnerable during this procedure. Stephen Diaz would have complete access to her unconscious brain. Her every fantasy, her every petty thought, her every fear, hope, desire … Her worst nightmares and memories … This stranger would have access to them all.
I’ll be in the room, too, Bach told her. Along with Elliot.
Anna nodded. As hard as it would be, she was going to do this. If it would help them find Nika, she’d do anything. But … I’m not sure I’ll be able to fall asleep in front of a crowd.
We’ll give you a drug to assist—if we get that far.
The very first thing they had to test was whether or not Diaz had the ability to enter Anna’s mind. He could, apparently, initiate a telepathic connection with a fellow Greater-Than. And he’d recently established a mental link with Elliot, but the two men were lovers—information that surprised her. She’d honestly had no clue.
Across the room, as Elliot was activating the computer he spoke quietly to Diaz. “You know, it’s okay if you call me a fraction.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want to call you that,” Diaz countered just as quietly.
“But it’s true. It’s a fact.”
“It’s derogatory. Besides, it’s actually a fact that we’re all fractions. No one’s a hundred percent integrated.”
“Still,” Elliot said, “I prefer it to Less-Than.”
“Yeah, but you’re not that, either,” Diaz said as he moved closer and put his hand on Elliot’s shoulder.
Anna must’ve simply missed it earlier, but now their connection seemed so obvious. Elliot glanced up and Diaz smiled down into his eyes—as if they were sharing some unspoken joke.
She turned back to Bach, who’d gently withdrawn his presence from her mind.
It was good that he had, because Anna found herself wishing that he was the one who’d have full access to the inside of her head. Taking a deep breath, she turned to Diaz and Elliot. “What do I need to do?”
Diaz straightened up and crossed the room toward her. “It’s more about what I need to do,” he told her. “I’m nowhere near as skilled in telepathy as Dr. Bach, so I apologize in advance for that. It’s also possible—likely—that I’ll need some kind of physical contact to bolster the telepathic connection, so …”
He held out his ha
nd to her as he sat down beside her, even as Elliot swiveled in the comm-station seat, so he could watch.
Anna found herself glancing at Bach, who nodded his reassurance, and again she found herself wishing …
But Stephen Diaz had already closed his eyes, and he didn’t open them as she put her hand in his. His hand was large and warm and slightly damp—he was nervous.
“It’s okay,” she told him quietly, as she braced herself for … What? She wasn’t quite sure, but she suspected the nothing she was feeling wasn’t right.
Still, she waited.
And waited.
“Stephen, don’t try so hard,” Elliot said quietly from across the room. “Your integration levels are dropping. Just try to relax.”
Diaz opened his eyes then, and they were filled with both anguish and longing as he looked directly at Anna and said, “God, I want to help find Nika, but I’m sorry. I don’t think I’m capable of doing this.”
“Let’s see if you can’t augment him,” Bach suggested—and he was talking to Elliot, who quickly pushed his chair and rolled across the room to put his hand gently on the back of Diaz’s neck.
The Greater-Than closed his eyes at Elliot’s contact and …
Anna felt it—just a whisper of movement—as if someone were mentally brushing past her, not quite touching, just stirring the air between them. Still, she said, “I can sense you, Stephen,” hoping that information would help him.
“Keep breathing,” Elliot murmured, moving in closer to wrap both of his arms around Diaz in an embrace, his head tipped against the bigger man’s. “You can do this—I know you can.”
And there it was again, that ghost of a whisper of a sensation. But even if Elliot was somehow augmenting Diaz’s power, it apparently wasn’t enough.
Anna turned to Bach. “Can you help? Is there any way you could combine your power with Stephen’s?”
“It’s never been done.”
“But we’re experimenting,” she reminded him. “So let’s experiment.”
Bach looked at Elliot—Diaz’s eyes were still tightly closed.
“We’ve tried—and succeeded—with the equivalent of a mental conference call with a group of Greater-Thans,” Elliot pointed out. “The biggest problem I could imagine comes from Anna’s inability to shield her thoughts. Her privacy will be compromised with both of you inside of her head. But as long as she’s willing—”
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