“Until Chicago,” he agreed. “When you traded cars, we lost you.”
“Sit down, Sarah,” Leigh invited, gesturing toward the chair beside Brodie’s.
She did, slowly, trying to think. To Brodie, she said, “The bug. The tracking device. It was yours?”
He nodded, sitting down. In answer to her obvious confusion, he said, “The other side doesn’t use electronic tracking devices, so far anyway. We don’t know why.”
Sarah thought it was interesting that he used the same phrase to describe their enemy that she and Tucker used. It was a fleeting thought, however. “But they were able to track us. They were there in Cleveland. And they got Tucker here in Portland when we’d been here hardly more than twelve hours.”
Grimly, Brodie said, “They’re very, very good. And they seem to be all over the place, certainly in every major city.”
Sarah was still trying to think clearly. “If they were with us all the way, why didn’t they move? Why didn’t they try to get me?”
It was Leigh who asked, “Why do you think they didn’t?”
“Tucker said…he thought it was because I could sense them near me. He said they’d only move against us in the middle of the night, while I was sleeping and unaware of them. And only then if they could do it without attracting attention. That was why we stayed in large hotels and kept moving in the daytime.”
Leigh nodded. “Very wise.”
“And they did move at night, last night while I was asleep. But I don’t understand how they were able to get Tucker. I know they weren’t in the room and I know he wouldn’t have left me alone.”
“Not in his right mind,” Leigh murmured.
Sarah stared at her. “You mean they…did something to him?”
It was Brodie who answered that. “Probably. One of the things we know about them is that they have some psychics under their control who are sometimes able to influence the minds of others.”
“Neil Mason tried to influence my mind,” Sarah said. “But I was able to…keep him out.”
Leigh nodded, unsurprised by the information. “We know of him. One of their tools, or was.”
“Was?”
“Gone,” Brodie said unemotionally. “We checked on him periodically; as of this morning, his house was empty and the neighbors have no idea when he left or where he went.”
“They don’t like failure,” Sarah murmured, chilled.
Leigh nodded. “And he failed. You were getting stronger by then, and when he failed, they knew they had missed their chance to convert you that way.”
“Why didn’t they try earlier? When I was still so confused and didn’t know how to resist them?”
“As nearly as we can figure,” Brodie said, “they use their psychics very sparingly, always trying more…conventional means first. We think it may be because when a psychic touches another psychic’s mind, it’s like opening a corridor between them, leaving both vulnerable. They seem to avoid that whenever possible, though we aren’t sure why. It may be another reason why they decided to tap into Mackenzie’s mind instead of yours.”
“Think. Seem. May.” Sarah heard the frustration in her own voice. “You don’t know much for certain, do you?”
“No, we don’t.” Brodie met her gaze steadily. “Can you tell us more?”
Her eyes fell. “No.”
Gently, Leigh said, “Not yet, anyway. But, Sarah, we believe you may be able to tell us a great deal about them. One day. When your abilities have had the time to develop properly.”
“And until then—what? Hide me away somewhere?”
“No,” Brodie said. “Hiding isn’t the best idea.”
Cait spoke up finally. “And in another week or two, you’ll be much safer from them.”
Sarah remembered the conversation she had overheard. “Six months since I woke up a psychic. Why six months?”
“Another thing we don’t know,” Brodie replied. “But it always holds true for the psychics like you, the ones who aren’t born with it but suffer head injuries or some other kind of trauma later in life.”
Leigh said, “In the life of every psychic, there comes a moment when full potential is realized. Control may be lacking, knowledge almost always is, but the ability is there. For a new psychic, a person who becomes psychic abruptly when all the other faculties are fully mature, the threshold seems to occur around the six-month mark. From the evidence we’ve seen so far, it appears that once that threshold is crossed, the other side finds it difficult—if not impossible—to convert a psychic. Whatever it is they want of us, we apparently become useless to them.”
“You become a threat to them,” Brodie corrected.
“We don’t know that,” Leigh argued. “Not for certain.”
Brodie let out a short laugh and looked at Sarah. “It’s another assumption of ours, based on the fact that we’re sure they continue to keep tabs on psychics long after they seemingly give up trying to take them, and because there have been several disappearances, possibly even deaths, of psychics we thought were safe.”
“Nothing was ever proven,” Leigh said.
“Nothing ever is,” Brodie retorted. “But there are some assumptions we’d damned well better make to keep our people safe.”
“I don’t believe we’re of any use to them once the threshold is crossed,” Leigh argued. “Those disappearances all involved psychics who were having trouble adjusting to their new lives; they probably just wanted to drop out of sight and did just that.”
“It would be nice to think so, Leigh—but I don’t. Whatever these bastards want with psychics, it doesn’t just end when you cross that threshold of yours. They’ve got something else in mind for you, I can feel it in my gut.” He laughed shortly. “I may not be psychic, but I know what I know. Taking new and inexperienced psychics is just step one of their plan. Step two involves the rest of you.”
Leigh seemed unwillingly impressed by his certainty, but shook her head a little. “I don’t feel that. And none of the others has felt it.”
“Maybe all of you are too close. Maybe it takes somebody without psychic abilities to see it.”
“Maybe.”
Sarah probably should have been disturbed by this lack of consensus among people who had fought the other side much longer than she and Tucker had, but instead it gave her an odd feeling of comfort. This entire thing was so bizarre, so inexplicable, that it felt wonderfully normal to watch and listen to people who couldn’t agree on the details—but were very clear on what the problem was.
“What about people like you?” she asked Leigh. “You’ve been psychic from birth, right? Why are you safe from them?”
“She isn’t,” Brodie said. “She just thinks she is.”
Leigh smiled at him briefly, then looked at Sarah. “Like many born psychics, I had nonpsychic parents who tried their best to make me—at least seem—normal. I was always encouraged to hide what I could do, to keep to myself the things I saw. I learned secrecy at a very young age.”
“So the other side wasn’t aware of you?”
“So we believe. When I finally did go public, so to speak, it was with my full potential realized. They never even tried to take me.”
But they had, Sarah knew, taken plenty of her friends through the years. That was why Leigh Munroe was involved in this. Not out of fear for herself, but out of fear for others.
Brodie leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he looked intently at Sarah. “They outnumber us, Sarah, but we’re growing. In strength and numbers. We’re getting organized, even if it’s loosely, and we’re fighting back.”
“How?”
“Marshaling our own strength. Gathering what few facts and little information we can lay our hands on, so that we may be able to expose them some day. Finding and protecting psychics, keeping them away from Duran and his goons.”
“Duran?”
Brodie nodded. “The head goon.”
Cait murmured, “Well, he isn’t really a goon.”