by Fiona Quinn
I smiled. Perfect. I had tried to find him through Margot, and that had been a dead end. But now he was coming to me.
When Mushkila hung up, she made a command, and her unit grabbed their guns up. “We can help,” I said. “Just tell us what’s needed.”
“There’s fresh tea in the pot. Make yourselves comfortable.”
I watched as Mushkila, then each of the women dropped into a channel dug into the dirt. It allowed them to walk through the village ruins in a low crouch without exposing their heads.
“We’ll be back, Inshallah,” she called. God willing.
Chapter Thirty-Five
For some reason, the blue bedsheet hanging across the door to a room that opened to the sky gave the space a sense of security.
When I walked to the other side of it, I felt exposed, maybe a little vulnerable.
I thought, with Mushkila’s unit gone, this might be my opportunity to contact Miriam and Doc. I wanted a plan before we got down to the nitty-gritty of our mission to find the possible Kaylie. I also needed to get in touch with Sophia.
Iraq was seven hours ahead of Washington D.C. and nine hours ahead of Wyoming.
It was strange to think that it was only seven-thirty at home. I’d wait a bit before I reached out to Sophia.
Searching for a quiet corner to have that conversation with Doc, I crawled through an opening. It looked like people had hacked through the walls so they could move freely from one building to another without being exposed in the street. Perhaps it was a means of escape as the bombs exploded their homes.
It wasn’t yet sunrise in Wyoming. I called anyway.
Doc seemed already caffeinated when she answered her phone.
“I’ve met up with my team. I thought I’d give Gator and Striker a quick overview. I think it would be good if we can get Miriam together on a conference call, to go ahead and get that part of the intervention checked off our list. If our luck holds, we’re going to be ramping up for a mission here soon.”
“Fine. I’ll call Miriam and get a secure conference call set up. I’ll text you the code to get in. Do you think twenty minutes will be enough time to get Striker and Gator briefed?”
“There’s not a lot to tell. Indigo was a madman and stitched me to Angel won’t take twenty minutes.”
“Not a lot in terms of words that need to be said. Absorbing it, though.”
“Gator already has a clue on some level. You said he was in your space during our conversation back at the airport. Striker’s going to have a harder time with this.”
“If I get the call set up, and you need more time, signal, and we’ll hold. Easier for us in the comfort of our homes than with you in the rubble.”
“Probably true.”
I signaled Striker and Gator that I needed to chat with them. They followed me through the hole to the private space where I’d left my bag. We sat on chunks of wall, and then I began, “So, are you ready for me to blow your minds?”
***
“This is our etheric medical team meeting.” Doc took charge. “We’re talking over an encrypted system, and no recordings are being made, so let’s feel comfortable discussing what is a most unusual topic.”
Striker looked over at me. Even though I’d explained this to him, he was having trouble wrapping his mind around it.
Weren’t we all?
“When we come together again, I’ll be functioning as the psychic surgeon,” Doc said. “Miriam will, in effect, function as a surgical nurse. Miriam, in the ether, you’ll be monitoring Lexi. Gator, your job is to guard the etheric space. Miriam, you’ve taught him the technique?”
“I didn’t have to. That one comes naturally to him,” she said.
Striker was holding my hand so tight I had no circulation. After I told Gator and Striker about what I had read in General Elliot’s files, what Herman had transcribed, and what Doc had found, he grabbed hold of me with an iron grip.
I’d put up with it for as long as I could.
“Right,” Doc said. “I’ll tell you what, let’s set the color of the energy around us to a soft pink. I can feel the space getting too charged. Calm is best. And while we’re at it, let’s also take a moment to ground and be present in our bodies.”
I closed my eyes and went through the grounding rituals I’d used throughout my life—my Kitchen Grandmother Biji, who taught me yoga, Mrs. Wang, who taught me Buddhist rituals, Spyder, then Miriam. And before them, my parents. Meditation, and connection to my higher self, had been a lifelong practice that had served me well. The practice protected me from Indigo being able to lace my thoughts with malevolent seeds to twist me into his pawn.
Angel wasn’t a meditator, but I had never met anyone who lived so solidly grounded before. He, like Striker, and the other men on Strike Force, were formidable by nature, living from a place that my Kitchen Grandmother Biji would call their lower chakras, where their focus was survival. They needed to stay solidly in their bodies to get their jobs done.
None of this woo-woo stuff for them.
Though, it was interesting that all the elite warriors I’ve been close to have acknowledged to me a certain sixth sense when it came to survival. Gator, Deep, they all had stories of near misses when they felt a tickle on the back of their necks that made them duck, a sponginess in the air that kept them from putting their foot on a tripwire. I’d have to talk to Doc about that later. Right now, I needed to let my monkey mind calm.
Center…
Once my breath came steadily, and without effort, I filled my aura with pink light as Doc told us to do. As soon as that energy started to swirl, I felt the affinity with the others—a connection.
I opened my eyes.
“Good,” Doc said. “Much better. Back to our briefing. I’m the surgeon, Miriam focuses on Lexi’s well-being, Gator guards the etheric space from anyone or anything that wants to take advantage of Lexi’s vulnerable state. And Striker, you’ll guard the physical space from outside the tent. That way, we know no one will interrupt. And frankly, your worry energy will be less intrusive.” Doc chuckled. “Striker, you seem to be flummoxed by this set of circumstances. You’re not alone. Stop squeezing Lexi’s hand.”
Striker loosened his grip and pulled me to the side to sit between his knees, then dropped a kiss on my cheek and whispered a sheepish, “Sorry.”
“Two dogs are here in the ether, sniffing at me,” Doc said.
I smiled. “Beetle and Bella, they’re protective.”
“I don’t mind them being here. They’re lying down now, just keeping a close eye. Fine then. Good girls.” She crooned over my computer connection, then flipped her voice back to business-at-hand. “Once we’re in trance, I want everyone to communicate in the ether only. While it’s possible to speak in the mundane, it pulls us from behind the Veil and into our bodies. Unless it’s an emergency, clairaudient or clairvoyant messaging only, please. The comms lines will stay open, though, just in case.”
There was a murmur as everyone agreed.
Striker tensed. Communicating using the sixth sense meant he’d have no idea what was going on, but he wasn’t selfish enough to insist that we talk so he could hear. Striker loved being out of his element and challenged by circumstances.
Except for the woo-woo stuff.
“Lexi, I did another check before I called in. I was a little confused. Let me clarify, Angel is dead?”
“He died in an explosion two years ago.”
“I’m pulling those images and sensations back up. Angel feels so alive to me… I’m wondering what this could mean. It’s…I honestly have never experienced this before. Indigo certainly did a piece of work on you two. I knew Allan Leverone, Indigo, for years. A kinder, more benevolent soul just cannot be found easily. But he was working day in and day out trying to improve our ability to function in the ether, and that created mental health issues like it did for everyone on the Galaxy project. After the program shut down, and what they did to him and his poor family—killing
his wife and son, damaging his daughter’s brain, Tabitha becoming obsessive as an effect. And Allan’s guilt. He would have given her the moon if he could. It’s understandable that when Tabitha locked her obsession on Striker…”
Doc was quiet for a moment.
I had a weird push-pull when it came to Indigo and Scarlet. I appreciated Indigo’s early work and sacrifices. Then he did a one-eighty. I could certainly feel pity for Scarlet and her brain trauma from being poisoned. But she shot Striker in her certifiably crazy attempt to make him love her. When that didn’t work, she sedated and kidnapped him. She could easily have killed him on the physical level. But her attack on the etheric level? That I had no pity for.
“Good Lexi, I see I stirred the pot for you. That makes things bubble up. You have such good control over energy, sometimes I have trouble seeing even with your permission.”
Silence fell.
“The pictures I’m seeing tell me that Indigo had concluded that he would do this experiment on Lexi and Angel. I can see here he likened his actions to Nazi medical experimentation and that what he was doing would damage his soul. He fully expected that doing this to the two of them would stop him from being able to function in his soul’s learning group and that this would be his last embodiment. Well, that’s some heavy stuff. And, as I told Lexi over the phone, that’s exactly what I saw happen to him.”
I thought about what I’d said in my session with my psychiatrist, Avril Limb, what you think will happen to you after you die is the construct of your reality in that near-death time period. Doc was just offering me an affirmation.
Angel was still in Hell. Only maybe that was more Indigo’s fault than Angel’s. I was anxious to see what Doc could do to soothe his soul.
I tuned back into Doc as she was saying, “His goal was to see what happened next. To see if it would help Tabitha with Striker. Okay, you and Angel were in the same learning group. Everyone here was. We get that. Angel would die when it was his time to die in the manner he was supposed to die, per his agreements before he entered this learning experience. What I don’t get is how he can be both alive and dead at the same time. He’s dead?”
“Yes,” Miriam and I said together.
“You know speculation in the ether is always a mistake,” Doc said, “but I’m going to throw out a hypothesis—he’s a ghost.”
Huh. Okay, that’s not one I’d imagined. I was being haunted?
“Let me fill that thought in a bit. Imagine if you would the illustration of the two bubbles that General Coleridge drew when he did Lexi’s task for remote viewing. Now imagine two bubbles floating side by side, not touching. If one was popped, it would disperse in tiny particles into the air. Poof. Gone. But when you blow bubbles from a bubble wand, and there are twin bubbles, one attached to the other, and you pop it—”
“Then the one bubble absorbs the second,” I said. “The two bubbles become one.”
“Exactly. Exactly my thought.”
I sighed, and Striker tucked me in closer to his chest.
“Disturbing,” Miriam said.
“That’s an understatement,” Striker responded. “How would Indigo even think to try something like this?”
“It seems that what happened in Indigo’s experiment on Lexi and Angel,” Doc said, “was influenced by a surgery on his dog.”
“Wait now. What? A dog?” Gator’s hand wrapped his chin, and he had his teeth clamped down on his index finger. It looked like an old-fashioned picture of a guy biting a stick in the olden days before painkillers.
“Indigo wrote in his lab notes that the vet had suggested a gastropexy when he had his dog spayed.”
“Spayed.” It was a breath on the back of my neck; Striker was putting together the idea of Indigo spaying a dog and then doing surgery on me. I didn’t think Indigo would have touched my reproductive organs. But if you asked me last week if I had my dead husband’s soul stitched to me like when Wendy Darling sewed Peter Pan’s wayward shadow to his foot, I’d have said that was preposterous.
Ridiculous.
Crazy.
“A gastropexy prevents bloat. Bloat happens when the stomach flips over and traps gas, making the dog die of sepsis.” She stalled. “Indigo died of sepsis. Isn’t that an interesting twist to the story?”
Not really, since I knew the sepsis was merely the vehicle for Indigo’s death. It was Spyder McGraw who made sure Indigo didn’t survive to be treated and released back into the world.
“Gastropexy,” Doc continued, “is easiest to perform on female dogs as they’re being spayed because they already have an invasive surgery. The vet also makes small incisions and tacks the stomach to the abdominal lining. This stops the stomach from twisting. It’s what gave Indigo the idea for how to surgically attach Lexi to Angel, their souls, not their bodies. He sewed their souls together.”
“What?” Miriam gasped.
“Indigo cut a small incision in Lexi’s soul and sewed her to Angel,” Doc said clearly.
There was complete silence.
“I’m going to give you all a moment to adjust to this idea,” Doc said.
“Lexi, that makes sense, don’t you think?” Miriam said. “If Indigo sewed you and Angel together, rather than moving on to his own afterlife, perhaps he became one with yours, and that’s why you feel him with you all the time. Why Doc and I pick up on his vibration when we look at you with clairvoyance?”
“It would also explain why Angel felt like he was in Hell,” I agreed.
“In general, Lexi, when you’re hearing things with clairaudience,” Doc asked, “do you hear specific information, or do you hear some interpretation?”
“Usually, children’s rhymes, to be honest. Then I have to interpret them.” I scrubbed my thumb into my thigh, wrestling with these ideas. “I’m, wow, really struggling with this idea even though it’s been days that I’ve been wiping steam from this mirror. It’s still not clear, is it? Right now, my mind is stuck on how innocent Angel is in all this. He was doing his life. We weren’t even supposed to have been married in the first place. Our relationship, our connection is some terrible science experiment.”
Silence.
“Then, Indigo happened. And even though Angel must have died when it was his time to die, for the last two years, his soul could have been tethered to this plane through me, against his will.” Saying the concept out loud didn’t help me to adjust to it. Didn’t make it any less fantastical. Or claustrophobic.
“It’s a hypothesis,” Doc said.
Chapter Thirty-Six
“You have a plan, Doc?” Miriam asked.
“I’ve called some healers I work with. I’ve done some studying on separating conjoined twins. I can try to do psychic surgery. I’ve got experience under my belt doing energetic surgery. I’m going to be honest. I’ve never attempted anything like this before. All my resources agree that what Indigo did was a huge violation of natural law. No one has worked with something like this before. I can’t foresee an outcome. It’s a choice that Lexi’s going to have to make. This is going to impact her no matter what decisions she makes.”
“And Angel,” I put in.
“Exactly,” Doc said.
“When you do the psychic surgery, he’ll be able to go on to rest in peace?” I asked, noticing I used “when” not “if.” Some part of me had already come to a conclusion. To be honest, I couldn’t go on living this way, so anything was better, right? I crossed my fingers for a burst of good juju.
Doc didn’t answer right away. Then offered, “One would hope.”
“Okay, let’s do this,” I said.
“Lexi, you need to weigh this some more,” Miriam said gently. “Doc said she’s never tried anything like this before. She doesn’t have any idea what the outcome will be. Everyone needs to understand that. We don’t know if you can survive it.”
“On a body level or a soul level?” I asked.
“Either,” Doc said. “Miriam’s right. You need to weigh this. You may
just want to let it be.”
“I can’t live this way,” I said emphatically. “Angel’s calling me to him. I can barely function. I certainly can’t enjoy and participate in life. I have to do this. I really have no other choice.”
“Gator,” Doc said. “I can see you both agree and hate this. So do we all.”
Striker drew me even further back against him as if he could use his body to buffer me from this. “Whatever you decide, Chica, I’ll agree with you.”
Striker. God, what if I didn’t make it through? What if my soul was shredded, and I wasn’t the same person that he loved?
“Lexi, we’re going to stay positive,” Miriam said.
“There’s another thing I need to ask you about,” Doc said.
Striker and I both tensed. More?
“What I can see about you and your psychic experience is that you have always been gifted with clairvoyance, clairsentience, and clairaudience. I get that you can sometimes smell things, and sometimes you can prognosticate. You have a very thin veil and get almost as much information from your essential senses as from your corporeal senses. And this increased and behaved, if you will, as you gained control through your study with Miriam.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Miriam, I can see your signature techniques here. Very nice.”
“Where are you going with this?” Miriam asked.
“When I did an etheric exam,” Doc said, “I see the attachment scar. Off to the side, there’s a tiny gash. It reminds me of a victim of a knife attack. The first strike is rarely a penetrating blow. It’s much more superficial. If I were guessing, Indigo started and hesitated. Decided and proceeded. We’ve talked about this, Lexi. With his initial incision, it seems he left you open. When you tried to get real-time information about someone who was desperate for survival, their spirit sensed help was near, and like a drowning person, they grabbed on to you. The thing about drowning people is that they lose their minds and often try to drown the person who is trying to save them by climbing on top of them.”
