A storm was building inside the hall. Jess could sense it coming, a feeling like going deeper underwater.
Wasserman's hand had left his throat and now clutched at his bulging eyes. Blood trickled between his fingers.
"No," Jess said. "Sarah, stop it. You're going to kill him."
Wasserman's feet left the floor. He rose as if lifted by a wind. His head was thrown back now and his limbs were quivering. Blood dripped from his face and was sucked away by the quickening air. His head snapped once to the right, then back again, and then he was tossed lightly to the side and discarded.
A low cracking sound came from under the floor. The tiles shuddered, groaned in protest. Every window in every door blew outward in a rain of flying glass. Jess touched moisture on her face, drew her bloody fingers back. The pounding in her head was fast and furious. Her vision faded, came back again in yellows and reds.
Sarah headed for the stairs at the end of the hall. The door slammed open, twisted on its hinges. She climbed the steps and disappeared out of sight. Tendrils of gray fog slithered after her.
She's not going to be able to stop.
Jess struggled to her feet. Every step was an agony of thudding pain. Moans and squeals of protest rose up all around her as the building took on weight, felt the squeeze of unseen hands.
A shot rang out. Someone screamed from the upper levels. Two more shots in quick succession. The world crashing down around her, Jess ran for the stairs. Her brother's face came as clear to her as if he had been standing at her feet. You will not get away from me this time. Not again. She repeated it to herself as she took the steps two at a time, as she emerged into a hailstorm of destruction on the upper floor. Great cracks ran along the walls, Wasserman's door gone, his office turned upside down; three more bodies on the floor, a lot of blood, more guns lying useless against the wall. Papers, wood, and bits of concrete still settling in the wake of Sarah's passage.
Something was wrong. The air had lost its energy all at once, as if a charge had been released. Jess spotted two men in attack gear and rifles peering out from behind doors at the other end of the hall, at the smaller body lying facedown a few steps away.
Then she heard a puff and felt a fist hit her in the right shoulder, and darkness welled up and slipped over her head, taking her down deep with it.
--36--
She awoke to silence, blackness arching overhead into seemingly limitless distance. Her head felt stuffed with cotton, her tongue swollen thick as a sock in her mouth. For a moment she thought she was back in her childhood bed once again, waiting for the sound of the key in the lock at the front door. Then something changed, but in her muddled state she didn't realize immediately what it was.
Finally she was able to focus enough to find meaning in the face peering down at her.
Ronald Gee smiled, his eyes glittering in the light cast from a distant portion of the room. "There you are," he said. His voice seemed to cup and then release her. "Better take it easy. You were hit with a pretty heavy tranquilizer. We were starting to wonder if you were coming back."
"Let me up," Jess said. Her voice sounded different in her ears. A stranger's voice. She tried to lift her arms and could not. Something was very wrong. Gee was not doing anything to help.
"We don't have long," he said. "She'll know you're awake in a moment. I just wanted to say I'm sorry."
"Why on earth--you? You're in on this?"
"It's all part of the overall scheme of things," Gee said. "I don't expect you to understand right away. Dr. Shelley can explain things better than I can. But I want you to know that nothing bad has to happen to you. We can all get what we want out of this. I know it sounds crazy, but it's the truth."
"Where's Sarah?"
"She's safe. You should know that, if you really consider it."
She did. Sarah was there with her, somehow; she didn't know quite how or why she knew, but it was true.
"What about Shelley?"
"She's got loads of money, all that money from her family steel business, billions, she's bankrolled Helix, the entire operation. And she found you. You're a special case, you know. People like you are almost impossible to find. We searched for years."
"People like me?"
"You're a carrier, Jess. We've done a lot of research on this. Autism can be a symptom, you see, it can be traced through generations, through families. Your brother, he was a carrier, and probably your mother too."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
Gee smiled. "See, I told you I wouldn't be very good at this. What I mean is, you've got the psi gene. It's just been dormant. Oh, it's nothing like Sarah's, I don't mean that. You're not at that level. But you've been in a deep sleep, and we're waking you up. Dr. Shelley's been dosing you with the dimerizer we developed. Slipping them into your drinks, your food. We've gotten the little factory dusted off and chugging away. Can't you feel it, Jess? I know you can."
For a moment he seemed to loom over her in his excitement, and she clenched her eyes shut tight, and then blinked three times. His face with its horrible goatee was still there, but it had retreated a bit, and his grin looked a little less like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.
"I don't believe you," she said, but she did, even at this very moment she believed every word. That coffee in the Cave, the oily rings floating across the surface. . . my God What have they done to me?
"I'm sorry I had to pull the wool over your eyes. I really am. But you were supposed to be brought in gently. Look, I'm just a cog in the wheel here. If it had been up to me, I might have done things differently, but it doesn't matter what I think."
A terrible thought occurred to her. "Not Patrick too? Or Charlie?"
He shook his head. "Patrick's oblivious of anything more than two inches beyond his own nose. So wrapped up in that silly group. Shelley knew about your friendship with Charlie, she knew about Charlie's connection with Patrick. It was all set up to happen the way it did. Patrick and I talked about women once or twice, I suggested he make a couple of recent phone calls to put himself back into Charlie's thoughts, you know, old flame and all, and she steered you our way. Neither one of them knew the full truth."
"Why, Gee?" she whispered. "I don't understand."
"Because we needed you," another voice said. "I need you."
Dr. Jean Shelley stepped forward into the light. She walked with difficulty, seeming to favor her right leg. All the elegance and gentle grace was gone, and left in its place was this pale, haggard shell.
"I don't have much time," she said. "I have to do whatever I can now, or it will be too late for me. But everything I've told you is true. We needed someone fresh, someone special. Someone who could connect to her like her mother could have, if she were well. We checked into your medical background, school records, intelligence tests. You had some blood taken during a physical, we got our hands on that too. It became clear, with your family history and the test results, that you are a psi carrier. We needed you to make a bond with Sarah, so that when the time came . . ." She shrugged. "You could help us. Help me."
"Help you do what?"
"Convince her to do the right thing. Do you understand? She needs a friend, a mentor to guide her. This ability she has, it's too big for one little girl to hold. We've pushed and tweaked and encouraged it to the point of ignition. The brain is a muscle like any other, and she's been building it up without any sort of regulator. But the company's gotten what they need from her, the scientists have done their thing, and now it's my turn. And you're my safety valve."