“Tell me.”
Victoria cleared her throat, then turned back around, holding up a few sheets of paper. She displayed the hastily-drawn sketches quickly as she talked. Describing a mountain range, likely in South America. A strange fortress-like grouping of giant stones, and a huge placid lake, beside which a modern building had been drawn with smokestacks and trucks beside it. One picture in particular, caught Caleb’s eye.
“I know that.”
“Thought you might,” Phoebe said, a little muffled. “But so do they…”
“The Gate of the Sun,” Victoria said. “Curt here recognized it from some Alien show on TV.”
Caleb suppressed a laugh. “So that plant, it’s producing the prescription drugs?”
“Owned by Eli Lily, we got that much.” Victoria scrambled for a sketch of a Lily. “I’m guessing someone over there can verify all this with the FDA, or we can check Lily’s list of drugs.”
“Why there?” Phoebe asked. “And why just that drug?”
“We also saw a man in red,” Victoria added. “Not sure if it’s just symbolic of a Japanese connection or something, but he’s dressed like a samurai and he’s overseeing the plant.”
Caleb scratched the back of his neck. Something about that picture she just showed him made him more than uneasy. “Wait, what’s around his neck?” He wanted to enlarge the view, but she did it for him, bringing the picture closer.
“It’s green,” he said. “And shaped… like a teardrop.”
His heart skipped a beat.
“Yeah,” Victoria said. “I focused on it a long time. And here’s where it got strange. I saw images coinciding — or conflicting — with our first objective.”
“The Emerald Tablet? Nan Madol?”
“Both,” she said after a hesitation. “I don’t know though, this is still new to me. To us. It could just be residual focus. OCD or something.”
“I don’t know.” Caleb had moved closer, and was now right up to the screen, tapping it. “I feel — and fear — your first instinct may have been right. And this…”
He felt a chill run up and then back down his spine.
“…it’s connected to the drugs. To the Tablet, to what’s happening and more.”
A cry from behind them.
Xavier groaned and tried to sit up, with Diana’s help.
“Missiles!” he shouted. “Coming. Soon, can’t stop them. Can’t…”
Diana stifled a cry herself as she was holding him. Her voice was high-pitched and full of terror. “I just saw it too! Cities burning. Mushroom clouds, oh my god…”
What the hell?
“Jesus,” Phoebe whispered. “Are we going from mass hysteria to full scale war?”
Caleb turned his attention to the screen on the right, which had been set up to view the bunker under the White House. The President was there, but pacing, the screen a little jumbled with movement and activity of others in the cabinet, and aides and military agents trying to hold the peace.
“Something’s so wrong…”
“Besides Xavier’s plague of imminent destruction scenarios?” Phoebe asked. “And medical drugs that might… what block the psychic powers, but turn the takers crazy?”
“No,” Caleb said, turning back to Victoria’s screen and pointing a trembling finger. “Not turn them crazy.”
“Then what?”
His eyes went wide as he turned back to the other screen and saw the President stop pacing, turn and face him.
“Damn I hate when I’m right.”
“Which is all the damn time,” Phoebe said. “What now?”
“It’s not turning them crazy, it’s a means of control.”
“Control?”
“The tablet — or that gem in this case. Similar to a certain artifact central to ancient Imperial Japan.” He took a deep breath, fearing—knowing—he was on the right path. “Worn as a necklace, it supposedly granted the rulers throughout history a means of control of their people.”
“Control?”
He turned to her.
“Through Possession.”
12
Xavier tried again and again to pull himself from the cycle of visual agony.
Death, on a massive scale. Not just his, but so many countless souls. Millions. Billions. A culling of the weak — or a ridding of the strong, he couldn’t tell. Just wiping the slate, making room from others.
This wasn’t annihilation. Just eradication and elimination.
A man in red.
Samurai.
Crimson garb, except for a touch of something sparkling and green around his neck. A power no one should have.
A command of the world’s armaments.
“Firing them at each other,” he mumbled in his half-crazed, fevered dream. Dimly aware of someone’s soft hands on him, trying to soothe him even though she herself was in the throes of her own psychic onslaught.
“X, it’s me. Diana…” Softer, a warm breath on his lips. “Let me help you.”
He blinked and blinked and shook his head, and still the visions clung like stubborn ants to the bottom of a shovel.
Suddenly Caleb’s voice cut through the din of explosions and screams in his head. “Diana! Agents, get him to the Star Chamber. I have a feeling something about that room will calm both of you, clear your heads. And Xavier?”
He tried so hard to focus. Heard his name, the urgency in his voice.
“We need you, now. As fast you can, focus on the Cuzco region of Peru, a man sometimes associated with a red samurai suit.”
“Huh…?”
“Break his control. Get into his head!”
Before Xavier could even ask one of a dozen muddled questions that order brought up, he was whisked to his feet, along with Diana, and ushered to the door.
Stumbling through the halls, smelling the fragrance of pine and mahogany, of old books and candles older still, he had flashes of ceremonies beyond these walls: of hooded men chanting; others lying amidst flickering torches and runic letters.
Before he could process these flashes, he felt a rush of cool air, found himself in a darkened room and saw what at first appeared to be a night sky.
“Stars on the ceiling,” Diana said, marvel in her voice, which sounded calmer already, and then he could see it: large panels set in the arched ceiling, appearing like windows to the night sky, even though it was daytime outside. A Maxfield Parish blue with calming stars. Two circular chandeliers, dazzling and beautiful, hung from the beams.
Concentrate.
Hands on his face, gentle fingers massaging his temples. Soft hair falling over the stars.
“Concentrate,” she said, “and let me help…”
Something passed between them, even before her lips found his. A sharing of thoughts and memories. A vibrational transfer of psychic energy maybe, but it was profound, and Xavier felt for a moment a release of the dread and absolute terror that had covered him like a shroud since the Long Island experience.
“I can see it,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Everything.”
He struggled, felt uncomfortable like being at a doctor’s office with an inexperienced nurse trainee jabbing at a vein to extract blood. It was working, but not so elegantly.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Again. “I should be the one to do this.”
“You can’t, and now I know why. See why you’ve struggled.”
Her eyes found his, and before her lips grazed his again, he had a moment flashing back to Nina, to her warmth; to nights she seduced him, or she let him think he won her over. She was the same, but more skilled at this extraction of visions, and he knew Diana could sense it.
She knew.
Knew everything. He felt it in her kiss — breaking away momentarily, a twinge of jealousy, and she had to be seeing and feeling so much right now. Overload. If she hadn’t already accessed his memories or seen his past. Their past.