“I got forwarded the season one DVDs. I watched the first couple episodes.” He grew more thoughtful, less official. “The polar bear at the Cleveland Zoo, that was interesting. That’s 1500 pounds of apex predator you’re dealing with. And you went in there without so much as a stick of wood between you and it. Just because it was having OCD issues? That takes either a big pair of balls or a serious case of stupid. And I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“That’s a start, I guess,” she said. “Is that particular episode why I’m here? You figured since I did that, I wouldn’t spook easily with these prisoners of yours?”
“I imagine it was factored in.” The gravel that lined the path crunched underfoot for several paces before he spoke again. “If you don’t think of yourself as psychic, what is it, then? How does it work?”
“I don’t really know.” Kerry had always dreaded the question, because she’d never been good at answering it. “It’s been there as far back as I can remember, and I’ve gotten better at it, but I think that’s just through the doing. It’s a sense as much as anything. But not like sight or smell or taste. I compare it to balance. Can you explain how your sense of balance works?”
He cut her a sideways glance, betraying nothing, but she saw he didn’t have a clue. “Mine? You’re on a need-to-know basis here, remember.”
Very good. Very dry. Escovedo was probably more fun than he let on.
“Right,” she said. “Everybody else’s, then. Most people have no idea. It’s so intrinsic they take it for granted. A few may know it has to do with the inner ear. And a few of them, that it’s centered in the vestibular apparatus, those three tiny loops full of fluid. One for up, one for down, one for forward and backward. But you don’t need to know any of that to walk like we are now and not fall over. Well … that’s what the animal thing is like for me. It’s there, but I don’t know the mechanism behind it.”
He mused this over for several paces. “So that’s your way of dodging the question?”
Kerry grinned at the ground. “It usually works.”
“It’s a good smokescreen. Really, though.”
“Really? It’s …” She drew the word out, a soft hiss while gathering her thoughts. “A combination of things. It’s like receiving emotions, feelings, sensory impressions, mental imagery, either still or with motion. Any or all. Sometimes it’s not even that, it’s just … pure knowing, is the best way I know to phrase it.”
“Pure knowing?” He sounded skeptical.
“Have you been in combat?”
“Yes.”
“Then even if you haven’t experienced it yourself, I’d be surprised if you haven’t seen it or heard about it in people you trust — a strong sense that you should be very careful in that building, or approaching that next rise. They can’t point to anything concrete to explain why. They just know. And they’re often right.”
Escovedo nodded. “Put in that context, it makes sense.”
“Plus, for what it’s worth, they ran a functional MRI on me, just for fun. That’s on the season two DVD bonuses. Apparently the language center of my brain is very highly developed. Ninety-eighth percentile, something like that. So maybe that has something to do with it.”
“Interesting,” Escovedo said, and nothing more, so she decided to quit while she was ahead.
The path curved and split before them, and though they weren’t taking the left-hand branch to the prison, still, the closer they drew to it, darkened by rain and contemptuous of the wind, the greater the edifice seemed to loom over everything else on the island. It was like something grown from the sea, an iceberg of brick, with the worst of it hidden from view. When the wind blew just right, it carried with it a smell of fish, generations of them, as if left to spoil and never cleaned up.
Kerry stared past it, to the sea surging all the way to the horizon. This was an island only if you looked at it from out there. Simple, then: Don’t ever go out there.
She’d never had a problem with swimming pools. You could see through those. Lakes, oceans, rivers … these were something entirely different. These were dark waters, full of secrets and unintended tombs. Shipwrecks, sunken airplanes, houses at the bottom of flooded valleys … they were sepulchers of dread, trapped in another world where they so plainly did not belong.
Not unlike the way she was feeling this very moment.
As she looked around Colonel Escovedo’s office in the administrative building, it seemed almost as much a cell as anything they could have over at the prison. It was without windows, so the lighting was all artificial, fluorescent, and unflattering. It aged him, and she didn’t want to think what it had to be doing to her own appearance. In one corner, a dehumidifier chugged away, but the air still felt heavy and damp. Day in, day out, it must have been like working in a mine.
“Here’s the situation. Why now,” he said. “Their behavior over there, it’s been pretty much unchanged ever since they were moved to this installation. With one exception. Late summer, 1997, for about a month. I wasn’t here then, but according to the records, it was like …” He paused, groping for the right words. “A hive mind. Like they were a single organism. They spent most of their time aligned to a precise angle to the southwest. The commanding officer at the time mentioned in his reports that it was like they were waiting for something. Inhumanly patient, just waiting. Then, eventually, they stopped and everything went back to normal.”
“Until now?” she said.
“Nine days ago. They’re doing it again.”
“Did anybody figure out what was special about that month?”
“We think so. It took years, though. Three years before some analyst made the connection, and even then, you know, it’s still a lucky accident. Maybe you’ve heard how it is with these agencies, they don’t talk to each other, don’t share notes. You’ve got a key here, and a lock on the other side of the world, and nobody in the middle who knows enough to put the two together. It’s better now than it used to be, but it took the 9/11 attacks to get them to even think about correlating intel better.”
“So what happened that summer?”
“Just listen,” he said, and spun in his chair to the hardware behind him.
She’d been wondering about that anyway. Considering how functional his office was, it seemed not merely excessive, but out of character, that Escovedo would have an array of what looked to be high-end audio-video components, all feeding into a pair of three-way speakers and a subwoofer. He dialed in a sound file on the LCD of one of the rack modules, then thumbed the play button.
At first it was soothing, a muted drone both airy and deep, a lonely noise that some movie’s sound designer might have used to suggest the desolation of outer space. But no, this wasn’t about space. It had to be the sea, this all led back to the sea. It was the sound of deep waters, the black depths where sunlight never reached.
Then came a new sound, deeper than deep, a slow eruption digging its way free of the drone, climbing in pitch, rising, rising, then plummeting back to leave her once more with the sound of the void. After moments of anticipation, it happened again, like a roar from an abyss, and prickled the fine hairs on the back of her neck — a primal response, but then, what was more primal than the ocean and the threats beneath its waves?
This was why she’d never liked the sea. This never knowing what was there, until it was upon you.
“Heard enough?” Escovedo asked, and seemed amused at her mute nod. “That happened. Their hive mind behavior coincided with that.”
“What was it?”