She glances at the spot where Heidi had lain on her floor less than ten minutes ago. “Turns out, she may be a little too advanced for her own good.”
Moments later, a tall solidly built older man dressed in all black materializes in the center of the meditation room, which is now brightly lit by recessed canisters in the ceiling. He touches his fingertips to the graying hair at his temples and focuses on the ground beneath his black steel-toed work boots. After a moment, he raises his head and folds his arms across his chest. A tuning fork shaped scar stretches from just beneath his left eyeball to his jawline.
Mona works the strings on a last set of miniblinds, then drags a dusty drapery across for good measure. She turns and wrings her hands but greets him in a calm voice. “Thank you for coming, Darius.”
“Based on the cryptically little you told me, it didn’t seem like the right time to send a subordinate.” He presses his lips into a flat line that might have been a failed attempt at a smile. “Who is this?” He gestures at Clarissa.
“I’m a scout, sir,” she pipes up, obviously awed by his presence. “I identified her as a potential novitiate and brought her in myself.”
Darius spears her with a gaze. “So why aren’t you retrieving her as we speak?”
Clarissa turns questioning eyes to Mona. She’s been wondering the same thing herself.
“This new enigma is out of range for Clarissa’s Jump abilities,” Mona says tightly.
Darius’s eyebrows shoot up and Clarissa’s mouth drops open. “I have a range of more than one hundred miles,” Clarissa says, her voice a mix of pride and accusation, as if Mona has made some sort of a disrespectful math error.
“I’m well aware of your abilities,” Mona says curtly.
“So tell me about this girl,” Darius commands in a no-nonsense tone.
“Her name is Heidi Rivers. Seventeen years old, gray caste, winds fiberglass bobbins in this sector north of the ship canal.”
“Tell me something I couldn’t get off a datasheet myself,” Darius growls.
Mona folds her arms across her chest. “There’s little else to tell. I didn’t delve too deeply into her mind because I honestly saw no point to it. Her neural pathways didn’t bear any of the hallmarks of the gifted, and when I probed, well…”
“Well what?”
“She’d just been through a bad breakup,” Mona says, cutting off eye contact and staring at a corner of the room. “It consumed her entire frontal cortex. I didn’t believe there was anything else there. Certainly not ability.”
Darius clears his throat and the room falls into an uncomfortable silence that he finally breaks. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
Mona glances at Clarissa, as if to tell her to stay quiet. “I’d introduced the manipura shakra,” Mona begins slowly, “and there’d been no noticeable change in her respiration or muscle tone, so—”
Darius cuts her off. “No, I want to hear about this encounter from the absolute beginning. Starting with how you met her.”
Mona makes an exasperated sound and tucks a lock of her curly hair behind her ear. “Go ahead, Clarissa,” she says.
Clarissa jumps in eagerly, excited to have Darius’s full attention. “I was identified during second grade screening and attended the Bozeman Center for Spatial and Temporal Studies. I received my undergrad at Templeton and I’m pursuing my master’s in diagnosis. My thesis is on misidentification and errors in early childhood, so…”
Darius holds up his hand and she cuts herself off abruptly. “I didn’t ask for your life history,” he seethes. “I asked for the one who Jumped farther than your mediocre range by accident.”
Clarissa swallows hard, obviously grinding her teeth. “I obtained a position in Sector Seven as a gray caste worker. It was a cover for my thesis project. I’d hoped to identify people who might have mild gifts that had been missed on screening. I met Heidi at the bobbin factory and initially didn’t think much of her, but after she broke up with her boyfriend, she was despondent. Never left her room. I have the keycard logs to prove it. And yet…she didn’t miss a shift.” Clarissa licks her lips. “I asked Mona for permission to bring her here, to put her through a battery of novitiate tests, like a second grader would have received, but under individual supervision by a Minder, using sound as a catalyst.”
“And, unlike a second grader, without the knowledge of what you were doing.”
Darius sends Clarissa a withering glare, then transfers it to Mona.
She looks chagrined. “That was clearly a mistake.”
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty, isn’t it?” Darius says dryly. “Good god.” He huffs, his nostrils flaring, then hikes his messenger bag up on his shoulder, crossing the room to the small office alcove.
Mona holds a finger up, pointing it at Clarissa in a warning motion. “Stay here. Don’t even think about Jumping out.” She taps her temple. “I’ll know.” Mona turns in a swirl of multicolored fabric and follows Darius into the office, shutting the door behind herself.
Darius stands next to a metal five-drawer file cabinet and drums his fingertips on the top, making a hollow metallic noise. It’s clear from the expression on his face that he’s annoyed. “So you went into this identification sound bath knowing this Heidi person had exhibited signs of giftedness and yet had not been identified by markers or any real inspection of any kind. And you ran the program anyway?”
Mona folds her arms across her chest. “Like I said, her neural pathways were completely unremarkable. None of Heidi’s avenues seemed to be open. I even put a drop of lavender on her forehead to keep her in corporeal, and it was strictly as a precaution. An unnecessary one, I thought.”
“She teleported while lavender suppressed?” Darius asks in an incredulous voice.
“Yes.”
“She must be incredibly gifted.”
“That or she has no sense of smell.”
Darius lifts his eyes to the ceiling, unamused. “And it happened on the ajna shakra, I assume,” he says.
“Yes.”
“What note did you play?”
“B flat,” Mona answers, staring at the floor.
“You played a B flat on an unknown entity?” Darius snaps, his voice rising again. “What were you thinking?”
“She was lavender suppressed! And I told you she needed it.” Mona lifts her chin in the air, ready to defend herself, but she knows it’s too little too late.
“God.” Darius pulls the palm of his hand over his face before balling his fist at his side. “Please tell me you tagged her with a locator.”
“I’m not an amateur, Darius. Of course I did.”
“So where is she?”
“I…I don’t know yet,” Mona admits, her eyes darting all over the office.
“Excuse me?”
“The pin I placed in her ear had a one-hundred-mile automatic homing radius. I honestly thought it was overkill giving her a tracker that powerful. But when I tried to ping the device, it doesn’t appear in range. So I can only assume she traveled farther than one hundred miles.”
Darius’s mouth drops open and he pulls in a sharp, hissing breath.
Mona continues quickly. “I activated the long-range functionality program on the locator and it’s still running, crunching the numbers and triangulating her coordinates. All we can do is wait for it to finish. Wherever she traveled to, we should have an agent somewhere in range who can retrieve her. Silver lining, with a Jump that far, I’m sure she’ll be confused and disoriented and there’s a good chance I’ll be able to erase the entire incident from her memory. We can send her back to the bobbin factory and keep her under surveillance until we decide what to do with her.”
“Fine. This is messy and we’ll have a hell of a debrief meeting on this, but I agree. We pinpoint her location, collect her, and unwind this mess. I’m going to call one of my postulants to observe and assist; we might as well make this a teachable moment.”
Darius flicks on his satellite phone a
nd begins to tap buttons with his fingertip while Mona settles at her console and refreshes her GPS tracking program.
Darius transfers the phone to his other hand, holds it to his ear, and waits a moment. “Hello Lars—” he says before Mona’s gasp cuts him off.
“Hang up!” she screams.
“What?”
She leaps to her feet, snatches the sat phone out of Darius’s hand, and slaps it until she disconnects the call.
“What on Earth, woman?”
“You can’t call anyone,” Mona says, her eyes wide, her breathing heavy. Her pulse throbs visibly in her throat.
“Why not?” Darius’s eyes narrow. “Where is she?”
The muscles in Mona’s neck visibly contract as she swallows hard. “Region Four.”
Darius sucks in a breath and doesn’t blow it out. “Tell me she’s nowhere near The Citadel.”
Mona’s fingertips trail down her cheeks, leaving red marks. “Near it? I wish. No, she’s not near it. She’s smack dab in the middle of it.”
4
Heidi
With a retching gasp, I bolt upright and throw my hand over my heart, which is pounding seventeen times faster than normal. My eyes closed, I take a deep, shuddering breath. That was the weirdest dream ever.
I squeeze my eyes shut just a bit tighter, run my hands through my hair, and raise my knees to my chest until my breathing slows down, then in one fluid movement, I open my eyes, throw my blanket back, and swivel, placing my feet on the floor.
My mouth drops open.
This isn’t my dormitory. I’m not enclosed by gunmetal gray walls. My sparse clothing is not lined up on wire hangers in a closet with no doors. I’m in a large, airy white room with arched doorways and clutches of potted palm trees scattered all over. My mouth still hanging open in silent astonishment, I twist around, looking at the bed behind me. And there’s a middle-aged man in it. He has a singular eyebrow and a thick, brown mustache that lies across his upper lip like the severed finger of a gorilla.
I strangle back a scream, and he chooses that moment to snort loudly in his sleep. He smacks his jaws together several times, a dribble of saliva sliding out of the corner of his mouth, and he rolls onto his side away from me.
A ceiling fan turns lazily overhead, moving hot, dry air across my skin. I look down at my arms. I’m still wearing my gray tunic. My bare feet poke out of the ends of my gray work pants.
It feels like no time has elapsed at all, but clearly, I’ve been passed out – or knocked out – for quite a while because I am definitely not inside the meditation studio anymore. And the light coming through the window makes it look like dawn is breaking. It should be late afternoon right now. What on Earth? Where am I? What happened to me?
It only takes a millisecond for the answer to come. I’ve been trafficked. It happens to gray children all the time. We’re not supposed to talk about it when someone disappears, but the rumors still swirl when boys or girls fail to report to primary instruction or their work assignments. I never thought it would happen to me. But it’s the only explanation for how I found myself in bed, at daybreak, next to some random stranger with obnoxious facial hair.
I take quick stock of myself. I’m still fully dressed in the clothes I wore to the meditation studio. These gray pants have the ragged edge where half the hem has torn away. I haven’t had a chance to requisition needle and thread to fix it. My body feels normal too. Certainly, if I’d been violated in any way, I’d know…wouldn’t I? Of course I would. I’ve heard what the girls say, talking under their breath after sneaking around spending unauthorized nights with upper caste boys.
I’ve got to get out of here. Quietly, I ease out of the bed and tiptoe across the chamber toward an archway that I think must lead into a hallway, and hopefully, an exit out of this place. I was right. It is a hallway, but now I hear voices approaching, speaking in a language I don’t understand
I press my back against the wall. When three men clad in deep red robes and foot-high, pointed hats stride around the corner and enter the room I can’t believe they don’t see me. One of them is staring at a satellite phone, holding it out in front of himself and yelling at it, and the other two have their faces turned toward the sleeping man. I choke back an audible gulp and twirl around the edge of the wall and into the hallway before anyone looks my way.
My bare feet skim along the ground, which feels dusty beneath my soles. Though the floors look clean, there’s a fine grit coating the surface that sticks to my feet and probably quiets my footsteps, so I’m grateful for it.
I remember that I took my shoes off and put them in a cubby before I lay down for my meditation session. I can only hope that those shoes are still in there. I’ve only been issued one pair of work shoes and I’d be hard pressed to get a replacement pair when I couldn’t explain what happened to the first set. But it’s not like I can go back for them! I can’t ever step foot in that place again. I don’t know what happened to me during those few minutes of meditation. My memories are so hazy, I’m pretty sure I must’ve been drugged. Mona must have slipped me something and then sold me to the highest bidder.
No, she helped me, my mind whispers gently, but I shake my head impatiently to discard the thought. That’s probably the drugs talking. Maybe right after Mona sedated me, she gave me a quick case of Stockholm Syndrome to go along with it, because I know what’s happening here.
I look down at my gray clothing, blessedly in place and free from new rips, tears, or stains. But somehow, I got out before they could hurt me.
Wait…I got out. But…I stutter step to a halt. Clarissa! Where is she? I need to go back. She must be held prisoner here somewhere and I can’t just leave her.
I turn around and begin sneaking back the way I came. I peek into each room I pass, but they’re all empty. After a few minutes, I find myself tiptoeing past the room I woke up in. It’s empty now too. That man, the one I was in bed with, is gone. He must know that I’m hiding somewhere in the castle. My nose wrinkles up at that thought. Castle? I’ve only ever read about them. Is that what this is? It’s certainly big enough.
Onward I press, but the place is weirdly deserted until I reach the widest archway yet. I press my back against the rough stucco-like wall of the hallway and sidle up to the archway. What I see beyond makes me do a doubletake. Hundreds of people seated in auditorium-style rows, all faced away from me, staring at a giant display screen of static. From the back, I can tell every single person is wearing a big set of headphones, like the noise cancellation-type that supervisors on my floor have access to.
“What the scat?” I whisper involuntarily.
As one, the entire hall swivels around, hundreds of eyes zeroing in, staring at me. Mouths drop open in synchronicity and together, they roar a single incomprehensible word. “Almutatafil!” As if on cue, every person in the room rises and points an accusing finger straight at me.
I whirl around and run.
5
The Studio
“This has gone from a catastrophe to a nightmare. We don’t have the luxury to catch, release, and surveil anymore. I’m calling in a Canceler.” Darius’s voice is tight and thin.
“No!” Mona exclaims. “You can’t do that.”
“I can do anything I want. I’m in charge here. You B-flatted this girl directly into the center of The Citadel, Mona! It’s an act of war, whether you meant it or not. Good lord, don’t you have any idea what could happen? We can’t just sit on our thumbs here, we have to erase the incident entirely.”
Mona puts her hands over her eyes and drags down, her face growing ten years older as her fingertips stretch her skin. “No. Bringing in a Canceler is not an option. I won’t have one performing their voodoo rites anywhere near me.”
“I don’t need your permission.”
“Actually, you do, if you want to use my studio. It’s been properly warded – I see to that daily. And you don’t have it. My permission, that is.”
“Then I’ll c
ancel her from another location.”
“You can’t. It’s been more than thirty minutes since she walked through the door of my studio. Even if you Jumped away, grabbed a Canceler, and Jumped right back, you couldn’t snatch her off the sidewalk; she’d already be inside my building. You know even the best Canceler’s limit is a half an hour. It’s one of the things that makes them practically worthless.”
Darius folds his hands on the desktop in an effort to project calm authority. “Mona, be reasonable. This is an international incident.”
She folds her arms across her chest and shakes her head curtly. “No. I’ll take my chances.”
Darius rockets to his feet, the illusion of calm over. “You’re not just taking your chances, you’re putting everyone at risk! The whole order!”
“I said ‘no,’ Darius, and I’m not changing my mind. I’m not going to let you turn that child’s brain into a boiled potato.”
“Why do you care so much about her?”
“Why don’t you?” Mona explodes, throwing her hands in the air. “She’s a novitiate who’s been living as a gray her entire life, and she Jumped to Region Four, Darius! That’s over seven thousand miles. While lavender suppressed! How far can you Jump in a single trip under optimal circumstances? A thousand miles? Maybe two? And how long do you need to recharge between Jumps? This child’s raw talent is incredible. Imagine what we could do with her! You’re worried she’ll start a war? We’re already at war, Darius. With talent like hers on our side, maybe we’ll end it.”
Darius narrows his eyes and considers Mona for a moment. He tilts his head. “That’s not your real reason.”
“Of course it’s not. But it’s a good enough reason for you to argue at council, should it come to that, but if I can get you to give up on your stupid Canceler idea because that’s not going to happen, and actually help me, maybe we can avoid the ugly scenario of a tribunal.”
Destination Unknown (Lumen Academy Book 1) Page 3
