Tory left, much calmer than she’d arrived and everyone sat. Gina looked a little worse for the interlude. Jim knew healers often gave their own energy to help others. Mind healing was rumored to be even more draining.
“Are you okay, Gina?”
She looked down at her plate, then nodded. “I’ll be fine. The food will help.” She began to eat steadily, and Jim let her be. She’d need strength for the questioning ahead.
“What do you think, guys?” Jim sent the private telepathic message to his command staff. One by one, they gave their opinions of the woman and the situation while she ate quietly.
“She’s hot. And she has skills,” Pierre said. Jim had noticed the appreciative way the French Canadian watched Gina move. “So far, she hasn’t spoken a single untruth. Her aura is pure and as powerful as any I’ve seen. Beautiful really.”
“Her emotions read true too. Her response to Tory nearly broke my heart. And Tory’s response to her healing was amazing to feel. The girl is truly gifted, though I tend to believe her when she says she’s not a specialist in mind healing. She felt genuine regret at not being able to do more,” Max, the empath of the group, reported. “And I think she’s attracted to you, boss. She gets nervous every time you look at her. It’s feminine nerves, not the nervousness of a liar.”
“Her telekinetic push was sloppy. That of a novice,” Larry reported. “She does have some power in that direction. I think she was using it when she fought you. Probably in conjunction with her martial arts skill. Some can use it to sense proximity and that kind of thing. Takes a lot of focus to learn to use telekinesis that way, but it can be done.”
“All right. Stay sharp guys,” Jim warned his top men. “I knew her when she was a kid, but not well. I trained with her father and brothers for a year. They were master martial artists, and she learned everything they could teach her. Don’t let her size or gender fool you. She was going easy on us in the cavern. She could take any one of us down if we underestimate her.”
“I thought I recognized her,” Max said. “She was on the U.S. Olympic team, wasn’t she? Won a gold medal and had her picture on the cereal boxes there for a while.”
“Yep. Little Gina Hanson, black belt extraordinaire. She won the medal for tae kwon do. Her dad taught all kinds of mixed martial arts in his dojo. Don’t expect her to play by the rules if you get in a fight.”
When she’d cleaned her plate and sat back, she did look better. Jim watched her closely, as did his men.
“Are you guys through talking about me?” She dared them all with the saucy challenge and the others grinned while Jim merely raised one eyebrow in her direction.
“Yeah, I think we’re through for now. Are you telepathic at all?”
“A little.” She broadcast the thought to everyone in the room. “Like I said, I have a lot of small talents, but no real specialty. I get a vision every once in a while. They’re not usually very strong. I can move things with my mind, but not very accurately. Not like Larry over there.”
“How’d you know his name?” Jim asked with suspicion.
Chapter Six
“Your name is really Larry?” The surprise on her face was easy to see when Larry nodded in response to her question. “Jeez. I was calling you three Moe, Larry and Curly in my mind since you didn’t bother with introductions.” She laughed at her own joke, and the men joined in to varying degrees.
“My three stooges are Max, Larry and Pierre,” Jim clarified, pointing to each as he introduced them. “Back to you—what else can you do?”
Her attention shifted away from the men and back to Jim. “I can talk telepathically over short distances.” She sighed, looking at her hands. “I guess the thing I’m best at is healing, but even there, I’m not great. Nothing like my dad or brothers. They were truly gifted.”
“How about we start at the beginning. We all probably saw news reports of you with a gold medal around your neck. Where were you when the crystal bombs started to fall and what did you do after that?”
“Man,” she pushed her chair back and got comfortable. “You really want to delve into ancient history, huh? Okay. Well, let’s see. I was in California, doing a publicity tour for the presidential children’s athletics drive when the bombardment started. I called my dad and managed to talk to him for a few minutes before all hell broke loose. I’d had a dream a few hours before it started while I was sleeping in my hotel room. I don’t really remember the specifics of the dream. I woke knowing I had to get to higher ground. I got in the rental car—I didn’t even check out—and ran for the hills. I warned my family back East using my mobile phone, but I was only able to tell them that something was coming and to take cover. I didn’t know what was coming. I’d never felt anything so strongly as the urge to run. I told them I loved them.” Her voice caught. “And that I’d be in touch again when we were all safe.” She looked at her hands through the retelling. Every man in the room could feel her sorrow—empathic or not. “The crystals took out the satellites and cell towers and the earthquakes and tsunamis did the rest. I never talked to my family again. I made it up into the hills just in time.”
She was quiet a moment, and Jim let her have the time to regroup. They all had painful memories of that time. He didn’t want to intentionally cause her pain by reopening those wounds, but he needed to know.
“I kept driving as long as I could. I found a gas station or two along the way to refuel as I got deeper and deeper into the mountains. I just knew I had to keep going. Eventually I had to take cover, and my rental car was demolished by a huge crystal shard. I went on foot then, trying to stay clear of the path of destruction. I wandered for days—maybe weeks—before coming upon other humans. We walked together for a little while. Then some of the men turned ugly. I was the only woman in the group. I knocked the snot out of two of them and took off on my own. That happened a few times. I lost track of time. I was drinking out of streams and eating berries and leaves. My strength was pretty low when I saw my first Alvian.”
“Did you fight the alien?” Jim asked, wondering how that confrontation had gone. Gina didn’t look tough on the outside, but he knew she had skills few human men could match.
“Not at first. He watched me like a bug. Like he’d never seen anything like me before. It pissed me off, but I was so weak. He spoke a little English, which I thought was weird, but was glad for at that moment. He gave me water and something to eat, then when he called his companions out of cover and tried to have them take me into custody, I went ballistic on them.”
“How many?” Larry asked.
“There were five of them. It was the weirdest thing. After their initial group response, the leader called some commands to them in their language and they came at me one by one, like they were testing my limits. Each one tried a different tactic—a different style of fighting. I felt like I was back in my dad’s dojo, taking some kind of elaborate test. And these guys could fight. They were as good as my dad or better.”
Jim knew that was really saying something. “What happened? Did they finally wear you down and capture you?”
“Oh, they wore me down all right. I was weak to begin with. By the end of it I wasn’t captured so much as adopted. The leader was the Zxerah Patriarch. The fighters were his students. These guys weren’t interested in capturing humans. They’d gone out into the wilderness with the express purpose of finding some and seeing what we were like. It was pure fate they ran into me first. And I do mean fate. These guys are like highly skilled Tibetan monks. That’s the closest analogy I can come up with. Even that doesn’t fit completely. The Zxerah are a secret clan of Alvians that have existed for centuries in complete anonymity. The only Alvians that know they exist for sure are the Alvian High Council and those they allow to have contact with the Patriarch and his people. The Zxerah spend their entire lives training and teaching fighting skills to other warriors. When they go out among the Alvian army, they’re introduced simply as advanced teachers. Nobody knows where they come from or where they go, and the Council keeps it that way.”