“Look at it this way,” said the main technician, apparently about to prepare the process, tapping icons and moving dials. “You’re about to go where…well, very few have gone before.”
“And none have come out.”
“Maybe this is your chance to change all that. Either way, it’s time for new blood. Time to restart the program.”
The vehicles crossed the bridge, bearing down hard and fast toward the cottage.
The lead technician blinked, smiled and stared again into the camera. “With you, my boy. No better candidate, so what do you say?”
Orlando absently reached back across the convoluted pathways that had already become like familiar highways…and flicked the light.
He stayed another fifteen-point-seven seconds, just long enough to ensure the Humvees had ground to a stop, then turned and made their way back.
One more thing. He had to do something unexpected, something he could do to help the others, if not himself. Access the phone grid, zero in on the other psychics…find Victoria and the nearest phone…. Access the nearest wireless phone in her vicinity, and text out a simple message. Just a note only she — or someone with her powers — would understand. Maybe it would help. Maybe there was hope…
Confident that the additional one-point-three seconds it took to send the message didn’t raise any alarms, he made his way back.
An instant before Orlando was reeled into his body for one last bittersweet and swift reunion, before being expelled again, this time, into something even he was not prepared to experience, he heard the last ominous words:
“Welcome aboard, Custodian.”
21
Phoebe ran, cursing her stupidity. After her previous vision of the old man, the bald and chilling vagabond character who was or wasn’t there, and who had warned her they were coming, she had done her best to hide.
However sometimes, as she learned from ancient wisdom, the best place to hide was in plain sight. She stopped in the Georgetown public market for a coffee and to sit and hopefully blend in with a crowd.
In her zeal to focus on her objective she must have taken off her sunglasses for a moment, and somewhere the damn street cameras had caught her profile, even under the baggy sweatshirt’s hood. Not long after she finished her coffee and had found her objective, they had found her.
Whether it was indirect information fed from somewhere nearby, or a newfound Spidey sense of incoming danger, she had just enough warning. And now she was running through the crowd, weaving around and between vegetable stands and a merchant selling DVDs and sunglasses, shooting past the fruit stands and around the heady delicious smells of a food truck.
Damn it, damn it…
She ran, wishing she could have snagged a ball cap or something and done a quick change behind the truck.
Cheaters. She was aware of pot calling the kettle something, but still, no fair finding people who didn’t want to be found.
Running for her life, a backward look showed that her jogging skills just weren’t up to par. Most of her life she would have been thrilled just to be able to walk, having been confined to that wheelchair for so long, but today, her healed bones and muscles just weren’t up to the sprinting challenge against six well-trained (and well-armed) agents in black suits — despite their lack of appropriate footgear.
The cool air whipping at her face, cars honking as she darted across a street, in and out of traffic, she passed a bank and realized (hello, back on camera!) she’d never make it. She was not even sure where ‘it’ was, only that she had seen something. It was strange, she had been concentrating, willing her mind to relax and soar, free-associating with anything that might provide an answer.
Perhaps it was always there, since Afghanistan and those caverns, in the back of her mind, the one objective she had been fearful to pursue.
These ‘Custodians’. Where were they now, and why — if that one had helped her once and promised her some kind of ultimate destiny he had foreseen (because he seemed to be outside of time and space), then where was he? Where were the others? Had she just seen the same one again, just minutes earlier, giving her that warning? Or was he still moored to a deep cavern somewhere or wandering lonely frosted mountain peaks? They had had a base in Shasta, where she had again received cryptic help before the shelter had been destroyed. Everest was rumored to contain one, and they’d been seen at other mystical places, usually observing, never interfering…
But she knew that wasn’t always the case. In fact, she had been told that at least one had broken with that tradition and turned to the dark side, for lack of a better term. Helping the enemy, working toward mankind’s annihilation — or at least keeping civilization and progress back. Maybe even Boris was one of them — or had their help in some way.
She needed to find the others, had to turn to them for help, but when she had been remote-viewing just now, instead of the usual feeling of zeroing in, weaving around the site until it started to take focus for her, this time something had just flashed into her mind.
Spiked was more like it.
Definitely wasn’t like the mirage-realistic quality of Boris’s implanted sights. This was more like a beacon had popped into her head, directing her like a GPS signal. Prompting her to run in this direction. Not much farther. She could almost still see it in her mind.
Why am I running toward something that so obviously could be a trap?
Someone screamed and brakes hissed and a man yelled to her to stop.
Oh yeah. That’s why.
She sprinted as fast as her weary legs would take her, grateful for the burst of caffeine she had managed to down at least, but still — there was the alley.
Even if she made it, what then? Could it be worse than what was chasing her?
Of course it could.
A dozen questions and scenarios mixed in her adrenaline-fired thoughts, and still that beacon pulsed and flashed, urging her forward.
She could hear the footsteps gaining behind her, couldn’t risk looking, just ran and turned the corner—
Oh no.
Dead end.
A dumpster, some garbage cans and a back door to some diner. Two black pigeons taking to the air, flapping toward her.
She ducked, skidded to a crouch as they screeched just over her head—
And the air stilled, the noises stopped. The footsteps died.
She turned her head, expecting to see the stone-faced agents lording over her, guns drawn. Instead, she stared in shock at the back of a wall, dark and stained, speckled with graffiti — mandalas of the sort she’d seen in Nepal and in countless books of her brothers’.
She stood, noting now the painted birds, a pair of them in flight just about the height of her head.
“That won’t fool them long,” said a voice at her back. “Now, let’s talk…”
“You went looking for me,” said the man emerging from behind the dumpster. He wore a ragged green army jacket, a thick wool hat pulled down tight over his forehead, baggy black sweatpants with a Redskins logo, and dirty old boots, mud caked all over them. As he approached, the wrenching smell of the dumpster seemed overpowered by the fresh scent of an underground waterfall, pure and cool.
Phoebe felt a tingle all the way down her spine as she met his eyes. “You. You’re…” She saw him and he seemed different. Not sure now if this was the one she had seen in the cavern or not. The lines in his face, the pallor of his skin.