Whisper: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Novel (Spectra Book 3)

by Lan Chan

  “No way,” Zeke and Bianca said at the same time. He raised a brow at her and she smiled.

  “Why is there so much noise?” Lily’s voice called from outside the door. “It’s bedtime!”

  “Go back to bed,” Rich told her. “Willow’s just had a nightmare.” For a moment I heard nothing and then Lily spoke.

  “Somebody get me a sample of Second Sight. It’s taking too long for the Psi-Ops to come up with an explanation.” Her footsteps then retreated back to her room.

  Rich made a sound between a groan and a sigh. I pointed out the improbable: “We don’t know whether the Psi-Ops aren’t involved in the bust.”

  Rich’s shoulders stiffened.

  “She has a point,” Oz noted. “That’s not our only problem. While Fake Spectra was in the shaft, I tried to probe her and there was something very familiar about her mind.”

  “Yeah,” said Zeke. “It felt almost identical to Wills.”

  “How is that even possible?” Bianca asked.

  I rubbed my temple with the ball of my palms. “I don’t know. But I think it’s about time we found out. Don’t you, Rich?”

  “We can’t sanction a Hyper raid knowing that the Psi-Ops have a mission in progress that we’re undercutting,” he said. I almost opened my mouth to protest, thinking that he was going to go all Boy Scout on me. “But tomorrow’s Sunday and I can’t control what you do in your time off. Whatever it is, you’ll be doing it as private citizens, and if something happens, you’re not going to have Hyper to hide behind. Think about that before you go rushing off.”

  He glanced at Oz meaningfully before leaving. Bianca gave my arm a squeeze before she too had to finish getting ready for work. I sat in bed with Oz, Adam, and Zeke staring at me.

  “I’m going tomorrow whether it’s sanctioned or not,” I said.

  Adam’s smirk told me there had been no question about it. “We can’t all go. Four Hyper agents rolling into Ballarat for no reason is going to set off alarm bells.”

  “I’m supposed to be assisting the Psi-Ops with a stakeout at the Docks,” Oz said.

  That made me think of Fake Spectra. “Did you see the listening device she used at the beginning of the meld?”

  He nodded. “Not many people could get access to that kind of tech.”

  “Collins could. She was also there with me when we looked over the contents of Moore’s fridge.” It was the beginning of a theory. I thought of her dark hair that she always seemed to need to tame. Physically, Collins fit the image of Fake Spectra.

  Oz’s blue eyes grew troubled. “You really think the esper could be her?”

  “What a great way to keep an eye out for the supply of S2,” Zeke noted. “How come you didn’t notice it was her in the dream.”

  I bit my lip and glanced at him. “Because Fake Spectra isn’t an esper.” It took him the barest second to register what I was saying. That Collins was a Whisper just like me but that somehow the S2 had amplified her latency and turned it into a tangible power.

  “Collins is a gamma level TK,” Oz reminded me. “You said the minds on Second Sight were flimsy.”

  “I was an alpha level EK until a few months ago,” I shot back. Though now I was biting the inside of my cheek. I hadn’t had much cause to probe Collins but the one time I had, her telepathy had seemed solid compared to the minds of other people on Second Sight. Then again, my mind felt pretty solid too. The whole thing was giving me a headache.”

  “She’s our best lead so far,” Zeke said.

  Oz held up his hands to stop us from jumping to conclusions. “Hold on. Even if the girl is Collins, so far she hasn’t done anything illegal except try to use contraband tech.”

  “If it’s Collins then it means she could still be in that air-conditioning duct,” I noted.

  “Shit,” Zeke said. “You’re right. She’d be pretty well concealed.”

  “We should leave now.” I made to get out of bed. The sudden movement caused a wave of dizziness to flood through me. I settled back down again. “Or maybe after I eat something.”

  “Adam’s right,” Oz said. “We can’t all go.”

  “Three of us shouldn’t be a problem,” Zeke said.

  Adam cocked a brow at him. “You have a field exam in the afternoon.”

  “Shit. I forgot. I can resit.”

  “No, you can’t. I pulled in a favour to get them to allow you to sit it early. I can’t ask again.”

  Placing a hand on Zeke’s arm, I felt his muscles bunch. “It’s okay. I’ll be fine on my own.” The link flashed with his uncertainty. Overlaid with that was his concern about my ability to function in the same space as the anti-psi rods. And then on top of that was a little pocket of fear about what had happened to Gabe. I should have questioned whether it was healthy for Zeke’s first proper role model to be an underworld criminal, but right now it was all I could do to temper my own hysteria.

  “You’re not going to be on your own,” Adam said.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve spent Sundays doing worse things.” True. Between the trip to Ballarat and another babysitting job with Abigail, I would still choose Ballarat.

  20

  By six o’clock the next morning, we were flying down the highway towards Ballarat in Adam’s all-terrain vehicle.

  Neither of us spoke for the first half an hour. I was still trying to stuff my face with a hot dog and two candy bars. Every now and again, Adam side-eyed me, distaste curling his lips.

  “You’ve got mustard all over your right cheek,” he said five minutes later.

  I swiped at the offending area. “Yuck. I didn’t even notice.”

  “I see that.”

  His tone made me slow down a little, but not by much. It wasn’t until I was halfway through the first candy bar that he reached over and stopped me from taking another bite.

  “You’re going to throw up if you don’t let yourself swallow.”

  I scrunched my nose up. “I’m hungry.”

  “No, you’re not. Nobody’s that hungry.”

  He was right. I wasn’t eating because I needed the energy. I was eating because I was anxious. The longer we waited to leave, the more time whoever had set off the explosion had to do whatever they needed to do and get away with it. I wasn’t even sure if Gabe had made it out of there but calling the Rendezvous and Julian had resulted in dead ends.

  I set the unfinished candy bar back in the glove compartment along with its twin and took a drink from my bottle of water.

  The highway towards Ballarat was flanked by unruly scrub broken every once in a while by the rusting body of an aeroplane or a combine harvester. Most of the farming was now done in hydroponic labs closer to the border of New South Wales and Victoria. Everything else we couldn’t get was imported from New China at exorbitant prices. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t the greatest idea to sell off some of our most fertile land to another government.

  My left leg began to shake involuntarily. I replayed the image that the esper had shown me in my mind over and over again but the memory of it was fuzzy thanks to Adam’s softening.

  I turned to him, watched the way his left cheek twitched behind his sunglasses, and knew that he noticed my scrutiny. “So that thing you did in my head this morning. Is that something you’ve always been able to do?”

  If I didn’t know any better, I could have sworn that a part of his mind clamped shut. It manifested in a shrug. “Part of illusionism is about replacing what the target mind is already seeing with aspects of your own thoughts. I simply took away some of the sting of what happened to you and let you come to the logical conclusion that the pain you were feeling was all in your head.”

  “I felt it for real.” My arms crossed over my chest in a gesture of defiance.

  “You felt it the last time we were in Ballarat and your mind brought it back to the forefront this morning.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not it at all. Does Rich know you ca
n do that?”

  He shrugged and glanced in the rear-view mirror as a way of buying time. “Rich knows enough.”

  That was about all I was going to get out of him. As much as I had come to trust him, there was a part of me that circled back to the black notice on his Psi-Ops file. Once upon a time, if I’d been asked whether illusionism was a power that could be a threat up there with telekinesis or electrokinesis, I would have laughed. Now I was almost afraid to delve any deeper into exactly what Adam could do to a mind that could tear it apart completely. No wonder illusion parlours were so addictive.

  “Can we go over what we’re going to do once we get to Ballarat?” I asked.

  “We’re not going to know what we can do until we get close enough to the site.”

  He was right about that too. I didn’t like the idea of just letting things ride and not being prepared for what could happen. Despite being a little short with him lately, I suddenly wished that Oz was here. Adam was adamant that we were here strictly for information gathering and to pick up the Fake Spectra if she was still unconscious.

  I shuddered as the first spires of the anti-psi rods came into view. “Here we go again.”

  Adam put his foot down on the gas. The green lights twinkling around the band at the top of the four equidistant rods said that they weren’t armed.

  We passed the checkpoint with flying colours thanks to yours truly tampering with the readout on the scanners and Adam masking our faces from the minds of the officers in the control booth. The airspace overhead was like a hover drone superhighway. I spent the few seconds we were in proximity searching the captured information for anything remotely resembling a getaway car or potential target but there wasn’t so much as a blip.

  Traffic was sporadic to and from the place at this time of the morning, and aside from the typical trucks coming in and out delivering goods, there wasn’t much to see.

  I gave Adam directions to the buildings from memory. As we got closer, Adam slowed the car to a crawl as we drove past. The buildings all around were equally nondescript with blackened windows and a general untidiness.

  There was no graffiti or illegally discarded junk like other deserted buildings in Melbourne, but it wasn’t exactly up to the usual standards of Hoffman either. For all intents and purposes, this sector appeared abandoned. I saw why when Adam put the car into neutral just down the street of our target building. There was a big billboard that said the sector was due for an upgrade. In test facilities like this, it usually meant an experiment had gone terribly wrong at some point.

  “How long do we wait?” I asked Adam.

  “Long enough to know whether it’s safe to go inside. Can you reach in and see what’s happening? I’ve tried but there’s still residual telepathic energy.”

  That was the thing about psi-bombs. They didn’t affect non-espers, but like normal bombs, they left residual telepathic radiation. I tried to send out a probe but it too was blocked. I shook my head at Adam.

  “No go. It’s weird but the feedback doesn’t feel like it does from a bomb. I might be able to get a drone to fly in closer, though.”

  Reaching out to the nearest few drones, I re-routed their command pathways to include swooping much lower than their intended flight plan. They spun past the broken window and I transmitted what I saw to Adam. The floor was still covered in broken bottles of S2 which were now scattered like hail on the carpet.

  There were no dead bodies left lying around. Cautious relief saturated my chest. Maybe Gabe had made it out somehow.

  “Can you get the drone to fly into the building?” Adam asked. I knew where he was going. It wouldn’t be difficult to command the drone to do my bidding but getting a visual into the air shaft was going to be the problem.

  The drones might be advanced but they didn’t have the visual acuity to see through the tiny slits of the vent. I advised Adam of this but tried it anyway. All the while, I was distantly aware of the thrumming of what felt like anti-psi static but gentler. As suspected, the drone flew up to the vent but it couldn’t get a close enough visual.

  Rifling through the drone’s features, I found that there was a photographic surveillance feature. I deployed the camera and it flashed over a dozen times in the span of a few seconds. The images were disrupted by the lines of the air grate but the flash illuminated the dark. From the images the drone presented back at me, there was nobody hiding or unconscious behind the grate.

  Deleting the pictures, I wiped a section of the recording time before releasing the drone to fly back to its original surveillance path.

  “She’s not in there anymore.”

  Adam nodded. “Maybe we can pick up some physical clues from anything left behind in the room.”

  Leaving the car where it was, we trekked on foot towards the building. The sun was creeping over the horizon, casting the street into warm light. It was one of those mornings that promised a beautiful day. A couple of streets down I heard the sounds of people beginning their commute to work. The warning horn of the freight train that delivered people and goods to Melbourne sounded before it rumbled over the tracks closest to where we were walking. Everywhere else, the world was waking up.

  Adam and I were the only two people on this street, though. He kept a close inspection of the wider area, making sure that anyone who saw us wouldn’t take special notice. I swept the closer perimeter, trying to detect whether there was anything suspicious happening. I was just thinking that whoever had set off the bomb was long gone when my probe grazed against a deceptively empty feedback.

  Having grown up with Aunt Jenny, I knew the dull emptiness of a Void mind even if I couldn’t read it. The space around them seemed to pucker and bend as though they were sucking in the psychic energy. It was the complete absence of stimuli that set me off. My arm came out to stop Adam from moving forward any farther. I felt his shields slide shut.

  We’d decided against coming armed because it would be harder to explain why two Hyper agents were in Ballarat. If we were just two civilians on our day off, it would be less suspicious. That was why we didn’t get Oz to call ahead and alert Hoffman security.

  A half-dozen figures melted from the two buildings on either side of the one we targeted. From the way they stalked and the set of their features, they weren’t Academy or Psi-Ops. The one in front had a nose completely bent out of shape.

  Court, Adam transmitted to me. Goddammit! They’re Voids. I can’t get a lock on any of them. I felt his telepathy strain as though it was sand pushing against the tide. It just kept building up until there was enough power behind it to make my head ache but there was nowhere for that power to go. The man in front raised a shotgun at us. At this range, there wasn’t any doubt that it would take off our heads. Adam and I froze, though neither of us put our hands up. They circled around us and, pound for pound, just one of them almost outweighed both Adam and me.

  I didn’t like our chances of bargaining with them but that didn’t stop Adam from trying.

  “Why don’t we all calm down and put down the guns.” Guns. Plural. I counted five pointed in our direction, one a semi-automatic that looked like it belonged in a museum. I scanned their faces looking for signs of familiarity but I didn’t know any of them. The Kings kept espers for show. They kept Voids for the real dirty business.

  “Hands up in the air where we can see them,” the one in front spat. His voice was snivelly for someone with legs the size of my torso.

  “Now why would we do that?” Adam asked. He pointed up ahead to where I’d programmed the drones to circle around us, taking as many snapshots as possible. By now the pair of drones had caught each one of their faces and was transmitting them to the Academy.

  As it was, a siren sounded not far away. Backup was coming.

  The barrel of a gun was shoved into my face. Beside me, Adam tensed.

  “This doesn’t have to go any further,” I said. A shadow passed across the man’s eyes. Even without being able to read him, I knew he had no in
tention of making this easy. I reached for his gun telepathically at the same time the man behind him drew out a circular disc. Too late I realised what it was. Psi-bomb.

  The electricity reared in recognition. It attempted to strike out at the man carrying the bomb but his thumb was already pressing down on the trigger. Adam dropped beside me as I clutched my head at the sudden spike of pain that sliced through me. Then I felt the earth rushing to my knees before I blacked out.

  I knew too soon why Fake Spectra was no longer in the crawlspace above the air vent. It was because the anti-psi bombs affected Whispers to a lesser extent. As with most psi-feedback, the stronger your telepathy, the bigger the physical impact. She must have woken up and left well before we arrived. How had she managed to evade our captors? Had she seen what happened to Gabe? If my theory was right and she was in fact Collins, I needed to have a word with her. If I got out of this alive. One thing at a time.

  My head began to clear even before the vehicle I’d been stowed in came to a stop. The side of my neck radiated acute pain. Had my hands not been cuffed together with plastic manacles, I bet I’d feel the telltale bump of a syringe injury. Just to ensure that we were doubly unconscious, they’d drugged us as well.

  With the nanobots, drugs entered my bloodstream and flowed into my brain a lot quicker. It also burned out of my system faster. By the time the car came to a halt, I was mostly alert.

  A warm body pressed against my back as the car rattled along and the scent of cherries filled my nose. I heard Adam breathing steadily and the grip around my heart loosened. Allowing my eyes to open a fraction, I saw that we lay in the back of a van with windows that had been completely blacked out. A smidge of light filtered in through the plexiglass between the driver’s seat and the cargo area. Through it, I could hear indistinct voices.

  An automatic garage door opened and the van inched forward. The door slid shut and the van rolled into what I imagined was a subterranean parking area.

  I braced myself and tried to remain limp when the sliding door of the van opened. The light that slipped through was dim but enough to make out the features of the same men who’d attacked us. They grabbed Adam first. Forcing myself to keep still, I closed my eyes as a pair of arms yanked me forward and I was tossed over someone’s shoulder.