The glowing red numerals on the clock beside his bed shifted to 4:24 a.m. The subtle change in room lighting would have been nearly invisible to him only a few months earlier, but now the slight shift in intensity pulled his gaze to a spot an arm’s length past the foot of his bed, just below eye level. There was nothing there, just a general sense of wrongness about that point in space.
As Mark focused his vision at that spot, the clock numerals changed once again. It happened so quickly that he could almost believe he had imagined it, but he hadn’t. Mark played the scene back in his mind. In that instant when the light had changed, the smallest of glints had reflected back at him, as if from a tiny bubble of dew at the tip of a blade of grass.
Swinging his legs out from under the covers, Mark rose from the bed, keeping his eyes locked on the tiny pinpoint of wrongness as he moved slowly toward it. Whatever it was, it was damn hard to see, even with his enhanced neural pathways processing the data. Reaching a spot only a couple of feet away from whatever it was, Mark stopped.
Despite the dim light, he could now see the distortion more clearly. There was nothing there except for a pinpoint that blurred his vision of what lay beyond. There was no sign of whatever might be causing the distortion.
Mark circled the spot slowly, positioning himself so he could look back through it toward the glowing clock on his bed stand. There it was, suspended in the air. A tiny pinpoint of nothingness, ever so slightly twisting the light that passed through it.
Something about the oddity hanging there in the air raised the hair along the back of Mark’s neck, sending a little shiver down his arms. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a natural phenomenon. Of that, Mark was certain.
Leaning in so close that his eye was less than an inch away from the disturbance, Mark focused his consciousness, letting every one of his neurally enhanced senses dance across it. No sound issued forth, but the air in its vicinity seemed different, as if it had acquired texture from the thing’s proximity.
Although it was so small that it would have been invisible to most people, the center of the pinpoint looked different, almost like a pinhole into another place. As Mark moved in closer, trying to understand what he was seeing, a vision of another room resolved itself in his mind. From his limited perspective, he could see only a fraction of the place, just enough to see that it was cluttered with strange cables and equipment, the scene lit with a dim gray, shadowless light.
Ever so slowly, Mark moved around the pinhole, his view of the strange room changing as he did. Something moved at the corner of his field of view, but when he shifted to get a better angle, it was gone. Suddenly, something blocked the other side of the pinhole, completely obscuring his view of the room beyond. Mark inhaled deeply, struggling to slow his racing heart.
There, staring back at him from the far side of the distortion, was a dark brown human eye.
73
Darkness draped this small section of the quiet White Rock residential neighborhood. It pushed up against the houses, the streetlamp that normally pushed back at it having burned out two nights ago. It flowed in close, snuggling, tasting the shadowed corners like a lover nibbling at an enticing earlobe.
Raul watched the two houses, his gaze lingering on the house on the right before turning his attention toward the other. For the last several weeks, he had worked around the clock to bring two more of the microscopic power conversion cells online. He had intended to make use of that power much earlier last night, hoping to catch a view of Heather in her bath.
But Dr. Stephenson had picked that time to pay Raul a visit, one that had lasted through the evening and well into the early morning hours. As annoyed as Raul had been at the interruption of his plans, Stephenson's conversation had been intensely interesting, so interesting that it had altered Raul’s thoughts about his future.
After Dr. Stephenson had left, Raul considered waiting for another night to look in on Heather. Given the power consumption caused by the creation of and use of the worm fiber, it would take him several days to recharge, even with his new power cells. To proceed was completely illogical, but he had waited so long to see her that he couldn't bring himself to wait, not even one more night.
Now here he was, his worm fiber pinhole positioned just past the end of her driveway, about to change his mind. Even if he did look in on Heather, it would only make things worse, seeing her lying in her bed, bundled up in covers, a nightmare of frustration. Raul directed his gaze to the left.
Mark Smythe, the jock who imagined himself as Heather's protector. That was his house.
Anger surged through Raul's brain, the feeling transmitted around the neural network within the Rho Ship and then returned to him, its edge honed to razor sharpness. An old enemy was near, one who enjoyed a physical proximity to Heather that Raul was currently denied.
His perspective shifted as he willed the worm fiber forward, passing through the wall of the Smythe house then upward into the hallway upstairs. On one side of the stairway, a single closed door awaited, while in the other direction three doors led into rooms, two on the left side of the hall and one at the far end.
Certainly, the master bedroom would be the one off by itself, that direction offering nothing of interest to Raul. His attention focused on the door at the far end of the hallway. That would be the one. Raul was sure of it. The athlete would have been the dominant of the two children, naturally acquiring the better bedroom at an early age.
The worm fiber moved in that direction, slowly now. It passed through the door and into the room beyond, Raul's awareness taking in every detail of the dimly lit room.
Bringing the fiber to a stop just beyond the foot of the bed, Raul shifted the light amplification of the scene, letting his altered perceptions change the image until it appeared as light as if the midday sun were directly overhead. Unlike squinting through a tiny pinhole, the unique capabilities of the alien computing system allowed him to view the scene from any angle, a clear projection into his mind.
Instead of being asleep, Mark Smythe sat at the head of his bed, his legs crossed in a deep meditative posture. The jerk thought he was Bruce Lee or something.
A gradual change moved over Smythe's features. The muscles around his eyes tightened, his gaze sweeping the room as if he was looking for something. Hard as it was to imagine, Smythe seemed to have somehow sensed the presence of the worm fiber and was actively searching for it.
But that was impossible. The distortion itself was no larger than the point of a pin. Nobody's eyesight was good enough to see that from ten feet away, even in broad daylight. Especially not in a dark bedroom. But, despite all logic to the contrary, Smythe's eyes locked directly on the pinhole.
Swinging his legs off the bed, Smythe arose, moving straight toward the fiber. At a distance of a couple of feet, he paused, circling slowly around Raul's viewport, his gaze never wavering from the lock it had on the target.
Raul adjusted his own viewpoint, increasing the zoom on the face that leaned closer. Amazingly, Smythe seemed to be trying to see through the worm fiber from the other side. If he could see the pinhole then perhaps he could get a glimpse of what lay beyond.
Raul moved, letting the stasis field sweep him toward the spot where his end of the worm fiber hung amidst the machinery. So the bastard was trying to see him. Fine.
Raul leaned in, moving his one remaining eyeball within an inch of the worm fiber, his anger boiling through the neural net.
View this, bitch.
Raul held the pose for a full ten seconds before initiating the command that dissipated the localized gravitational distortion. He continued to stare at the spot long after it had gone.
Smythe. What was it with that guy? Applying every bit of the neural network that now augmented Raul's brain, he forced himself to calm down, focusing his thoughts on his enemy.
For the longest time Raul had known there was something unusual about Mark Smythe. It was amazing he hadn't analyzed it before now. Smythe had shown oddities
that went beyond being just an amazing high school athlete.
Coordination was one thing, but Raul had seen the guy slam the captain of the football team up against a locker and hold him there with one hand. At the time, Raul thought that Doug Brindall had let Mark get away with it to avoid a suspension for fighting. But now, thinking back on it, a different conclusion presented itself. Smythe had been the one holding back. The power in that grip was enough to snap the quarterback's neck, and Doug had known it.
What had the tabloids said about Smythe? Something about his being an alien. That was ridiculous. But he was a freak, and his dad worked on the Rho Project, something that Raul knew a bit about.
But how much did he really know? While he was now a part of the alien ship and had access to the functional portion of its neural network, that didn't mean he knew much about the rest of the Rho Project. Despite last night's enlightening conversation, there was no doubt that Dr. Stephenson was keeping many things from him.
The nanite research was one piece of the puzzle. Certainly, other people had been subjects for that testing. It only stood to reason that Smythe must have undergone some additional type of modification.
A new wave of anger swept through Raul’s neural network. So Dr. Stephenson thought his other pet pupil was good enough to let out in public, made into some freakish superstar athlete, while Raul was having his legs amputated and being locked away in the ship.
Well fuck him. Fuck them both.
The stasis field lifted Raul up toward the ceiling, to a spot where he could survey the entire room, a thin smile splitting his lips.
If it meant he had to bring more of the ship back online to be able to reach out and touch them, then that was exactly what he was going to do.
74
It was a subtle change, barely noticeable, even to Mark's enhanced synapses. One second the tiny disturbance was there, hanging in the air three feet from his bed; then it was gone. Without having to look around, he knew it had departed. As strange as his room had felt only a moment earlier, the space now radiated normality.
If he hadn't been able to replay the events in his mind, Mark might have thought that he had just experienced a waking dream. But the aberration had been all too real, a tiny window to another place. Mark had peered through it, although his glimpse had been severely limited by his narrow field of view. With such a small, short look, he didn't have any idea what the purpose was of the equipment he had seen, nor of the strange cables that snaked around it.
Mark did know one thing. Someone had been watching him from the far side, and he had to assume that their view was superior to his.
Walking to the window, Mark looked out across the fifty feet of lawn that separated the side of his house from Heather's. The sky had lightened to the point that the predawn contrast made the ground look darker than before.
Outside, the darkness seemed to thicken as he watched, moving between the two homes like a living thing, coiling around Heather's house, seeking entrance. The burned-out bulb of the nearest streetlamp provided no opposition to the encroaching blackness.
Mark shook his head to clear the illusion. Unable to shake the morbid sense of dread that assailed him, Mark grabbed his sweats from the back of the chair, dressing quickly. He left the room and made his way silently downstairs, then out the front door into his driveway.
The eastern sky was much lighter now, laced with streaks of pale lavender where it touched the mountains. A car moved along the street headed toward the main highway, its headlights sweeping past his house in twin beams that pushed at the shadows. Then it was by, its twin red taillights flashing brighter at the stop sign before disappearing around the corner.
As the car’s headlights receded, the sense that the darkness was a living thing flowing back between the houses returned stronger than before. Mark turned toward the McFarland house, making his way toward the gap he had observed from his window. Unlike some of the newer residential areas, no wall separated the two houses.
An unofficial lawnmower boundary was barely visible, its location changing from week to week depending on whether Mark's dad or Heather's had been the last to operate their riding mowers. Mark paused at the grass boundary.
To his eyes, the darkness hid nothing, merely providing a different spectrum than daylight, a detailed grayscale image lacking the warmth of the daylight colors. Standing here in the grass, looking out across the lawn at Heather's house, the dark feeling acquired a name: fear. Not for himself, but for her.
He moved around behind the McFarland house, letting his feet take him where they would. With every passing second, the sky lightened, fading the predawn shadows into the background. Heather's back lawn, like his own, ran back about fifty feet from the house before descending steeply into the rocky canyon below. There was a point just before the edge where the lawn refused to venture, the abundance of pine needles making the soil too acidic for growth.
When this neighborhood had first been built, the trees had been cut back away from the houses, so that now only one huge pine remained, rising up outside of Heather's window, just around the far corner of the house. Mark moved toward it, his thoughts involuntarily turning to the Rag Man. Odd. Maybe it was because this was the tree he had climbed to kidnap her from her room.
It didn’t really matter. That bastard wasn’t going to threaten anyone, ever again. Jack Gregory had seen to that.
As he moved behind the McFarland's back deck and rounded the corner, Mark glanced up at Heather's window. Her bedroom light was on. Not surprising. Heather had always been an early riser, and even though she was sleeping again, the antipsychotic drugs had not changed that.
Searching for anything that might have elevated his concern to its current level, Mark spun in a slow circle. Nothing. Not a God damn thing out of the ordinary.
Yeah right—nothing but a tiny hole in the fabric of the universe materializing in his bedroom. That was damn sure enough to freak anybody out.
Now that he thought about it, it was a miracle he wasn't running around waving his arms and screaming, “Oh my God! We’re all gonna die!”
Not that most people would believe him. Heather would. But he wasn't going to tell her, at least not yet. She’d been through so much lately he wasn’t about to lay more stress on her. Besides, whatever it was had been looking at him.
Something like that had to have its origins in the Rho Project. But why would they look in on a high school kid? Maybe Jennifer had been right about his attracting too much attention to himself. Whatever it was, Mark wanted to have a theory before he discussed this with the two girls.
With one more glance up at Heather’s window, Mark turned back toward his house. At least for now, this was his problem and he would figure it out on his own.
75
Jennifer sat on Heather’s right, looking out the school bus window intently enough to make Heather wonder whether the scenery along the route to Los Alamos High had changed. Mark sat by himself two rows up. That was probably a good thing. She didn’t want to talk to him right now. It had been a long time since she had been this mad at anyone, and for it to be Mark that she was angry with was a new experience, one that she could have done without.
Heather had awakened on the first day of school with that special thrill of anticipation that this day always gave her. What in the world had possessed him to bring her down like this?
Heather had known for a while that Mark was less than thrilled with the idea that her parents had her on antipsychotic meds. Until this morning, he had never directly challenged her on the subject. But whatever good sense he had shown heretofore had evaporated as they waited for the bus. He’d actually had the nerve to say that her mom and dad were drugging her out of her mind and that she was crazy for knuckling under to their wishes.
If she hadn’t been quite so mad, Heather was sure she would have been reduced to tears by the verbal assault from someone she loved so dearly. She wasn’t going to let that happen, though. Mark wasn’t the one s
uffering from the horrifying mental fugues that had been ripping apart her reality, leaving her trembling with fear that she might completely lose her mind. He had no right to judge her or her parents. No right.
A sudden jolt as the rear tires of the bus climbed up over the curb as it turned into the high school, brought Heather’s thoughts back to the present. New bus driver. Heather hoped the bumpy entrance to the school grounds wasn’t a sign of things to come. In response to her mental question, the image of her old Magic 8-Ball toy came to mind, the answer swimming into view through the blue liquid beneath its lens.
“Don’t count on it.”
Without bothering to dwell on the unpleasant thought, Heather allowed herself to be swept from her seat, carried along by the excited throng toward the entrance to the high school entryway, and then into the hallway beyond. When she glanced around, Mark was gone, as was Jennifer. So much the better. All she wanted right now was some sense of return to normality, something that the bustling high school hallway promised to deliver.
First-day activities consumed her: class schedules, new teachers, book issue, locker assignment, assembly. Most of her classmates seemed genuinely happy to see her.
Only Paulette Carlton and her troupe of snobettes got in her face.
“Look what we have here,” Paulette exclaimed with an expert flip of her long, blond hair. “A certified, national science contest award winner. Nation’s biggest cheat.”
The other three girls, all members of the cheerleading squad, laughed loudly as they passed by in Paulette’s wake, Heather’s scowl lost on their backsides. Watching them from this angle, Heather could understand their popularity with the boys: lots of waggle and vocabularies that didn’t include the word no.
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