by Lauren Sabel
Operation Firepoker was a government operation focused on locating materials for use in military weapons. It is highly classified, and it appears that all possible leads to this operation have been eliminated.
Eliminated. Shivers tremble through my body. I scan the rest of the article, but that’s the only mention of Operation Firepoker. What could this have to do with my mom, or even Monty?
My phone vibrates in my hand, and I jump halfway off my chair.
Yep, w/ full tank, Jasper’s text says. Everything okay?
No, I write. I press Send, and then pause before texting: Can you come pick me up?
I hear the rattling of Jasper’s motorcycle on my fourth attempt to scrub the numbers off my arm. I’ve already taken a picture of my arm for when I scrubbed it completely off, but it turned out that permanent marker is called that for a reason. I towel my arm off, push my sleeve back down, and dash downstairs. Mom’s coming in the doorway with an armful of groceries.
“Be back soon,” I call behind me.
Out of my peripheral vision, I see Mom watching me climb onto the back of Jasper’s motorcycle and wrap my arms around him. Jasper hands me his helmet, waits until I’ve strapped it on, and then squeezes the gas lever.
“Thanks for coming,” I say, when my mom’s worried face fades into the distance. “Can we go somewhere private? I need to view something, and I don’t want to risk going back to the office.”
Jasper nods and turns onto Fell Street, heading east toward Berkeley. I squeeze my legs around the motorcycle’s shiny black body, thinking about what Mom’s string of numbers refers to, and why Mom has information that’s valuable enough to deny the public access to it. I grip onto Jasper’s waist as he turns a sharp corner, and the smell of salt water washes over me. What did Mom get herself into, and what does it have to do with Monty Cooper? I know I shouldn’t view again without Indigo’s permission, but if Mom is involved in something dangerous—where all the leads have been eliminated—and she thinks it’s worth lying to me about, shouldn’t I find out what it is?
“What’s going on?” Jasper yells back to me as we pass the giant sculpture of Cupid’s arrow in Rincon Park.
“You know that paper Monty wrote on?” I ask, and he nods. “I found it, and there were some numbers . . . and I googled them, and I sort of ended up on a private database,” I say. Then the ground falls away beneath us, and I hold my breath as we drive over the Bay Bridge. Hundreds of feet below, waves crash against the black lava rocks, spitting white foam into the air.
“So what does it mean?” Jasper yells.
“I’ll tell you when we get there,” I yell back. But truthfully, I’m not sure what it means. I just know that this feels like a deep secret I’m uncovering, and if there’s one thing I understand, it’s how dangerous secrets can be.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Jasper’s apartment takes up an entire floor of a building, and it has windows overlooking Telegraph Avenue. It’s super spacious, especially since the only pieces of furniture in the huge living room are a black leather couch, a mini-fridge, and a giant flat screen with an Xbox.
“Do you work the same job I do?” I ask.
“Rent control,” he says. “Took the lease over from a friend.”
“Lucky you.” I sit down on the couch and glance at his selection of Xbox games spread all over the floor, most of which are all violent shoot-’em-up games. “Can we start?” I ask anxiously.
“Give me a second.” Jasper turns down the lights, picks up the games off the floor, and grabs us sodas from the mini-fridge. He drops onto the couch beside me and hands me a soda. It’s so sweet it makes my teeth hurt.
“So what are these numbers we’re viewing?” Jasper asks.
I push up my sleeve to show Jasper my arm. “I found them in my mom’s room. It’s what she exchanged with Monty,” I say. “And he wrote down Operation Firepoker. Heard of it?”
Jasper shakes his head. “Why don’t you just ask your mom about it?”
“I tried,” I say, “but she lied. She claimed she didn’t know Monty and hadn’t been to Berkeley in years.”
Jasper whistles under his breath. “Now it’s time for other methods? Like breaking into her mind?”
“I don’t want to, but I’m worried that she’s gotten herself into something dangerous.”
“Your mom sounds like a real rebel.”
I shake my head. “Not at all. More like a real flake. A lovable flake,” I add.
Jasper nods in understanding, and hands me a pen and a piece of paper. “When I was working in New York, I had to break into people’s minds all the time,” he says. “I used to imagine their breath first. I’d listen to it until I found a gap in it, you know, like a thinking gap, of sorts, and then . . .” He looks up. “What? It’s not like I’ve ever done this to you.”
“You better not have.”
He rolls his eyes. “Trying to help here.”
“Don’t look at me like that. You did suggest planting images into each other’s dreams.”
Jasper raises his eyebrows. “And did you do it?”
“Maybe. Did you?”
“Maybe.” Jasper gestures for me to close my eyes, but I keep them open. Something about Jasper brings out my stubborn side. “So like I was saying, once you find the gap between your mom’s breaths, push into it until you get into her mind.”
“Easy as pie,” I say sarcastically, but I shut my eyes anyway, trying to ignore the fact that I promised Indigo I’d never do this to anyone I love.
This is different, I tell myself.
I shove away my doubt, and settle deeper into the couch, taking a few deep breaths myself. Then I focus on Mom. I imagine the sound of her breath, the in and out of air through her lungs, the rise and fall of her chest. It takes a little while, but eventually, whatever part of my brain is psychic somehow transitions from just imagining her breaths to actually observing her breathing. It feels like I’m inside her breath. I sit this way for some time, just letting the rhythm of her inhales and exhales become a part of me.
After a while, I start to see what Jasper means. There’s sometimes a small gap between the inhale and exhale, like the slit in a barely open window. I let a few more breaths go by, and then I seize my chance.
I push. I push and push and push . . .
. . . but no matter how hard I push up against Mom’s mind, I can’t get in.
“Damn it!” I curse, opening my eyes. I’m not sure how much time has gone by, but the room is considerably darker. Jasper’s gotten more comfy on the couch.
He shrugs. “So try another way,” he says.
I take a deep breath and attempt to relax. I shouldn’t have expected it to work on my first try anyway. “Okay. I’ll try focusing on these numbers, as if they were in a sealed envelope.” I lean back on the couch and close my eyes. “I’m ready whenever you are.”
“Ready,” he says.
I don’t imagine getting off a boat into the sea. Instead I focus on the numbers on my arm while he talks me into the vision.
“These numbers signify something in the real world,” Jasper says calmly. “Just follow them until you find out what.”
It happens quickly.
I’m on a ship, my head beside a cylindrical beam of light.
I plunge my fingers in, and they melt and streak away from me. A feeling of both searing heat and bitter cold washes over me. I jerk my hand out, and my arm goes back to normal. Amazing.
“Focus on the numbers,” Jasper guides me.
Where are the numbers? They’re not here, so I force myself to turn away from the light and follow it off the ship, out into the sky. It parts around me as I whiz past the clouds, past an airplane, past a flock of birds, until I join dozens of other light beams in the sky.
“Wow,” I hear myself say.
As I move across the sky, my body spreads across the length of the beams. I can see a million of me, as if I’m looking into an infinity mirror, like I’m everywh
ere and nowhere at the same time.
“Calliope,” I hear Jasper call, but it’s so distant from these beautiful lights that I’m flying through space with that I turn away from it. When I do, though, I remember Indigo’s warning about getting too far in. He warned me about this: full body bi-location, or, as he called it, perfect site integration.
“There are some visions that take you too far out of your mind,” Indigo said. “Don’t let yourself get stuck out there.” And now, staring at the dazzling beam of light, I know that it’s happening to me: I am going out of my mind. But still, even though I know I need to pull out of the vision, the lights are so beautiful I can’t look away.
“What’s your location?” Jasper asks.
I look around, and there are countless satellites moving like a swarm of metal dragonflies around me. The light beams slowly filter through them, slowly coming closer together until they are almost parallel, and then they meet at a large satellite with a logo etched into it.
“I’m at the EarthScape satellite,” I say.
“What are you doing there?”
“I don’t know,” I respond, and then I start to get sucked into a metal tube that is attached to the satellite. It looks just like the telescope in the science museum, but a lot bigger. “I think I’m entering a telescope,” I say, and I’m swirling around inside with all the light beams. They slowly merge into one . . . and I’m shot out as a single, blindingly bright laser beam.
“Callie!” Jasper yells.
My eyes pop back open. Jasper’s on the couch next to me, closer than before. He’s turned the lights back on, but even so, it’s impossibly dark in the apartment compared to all that light I was just in. All that light that I just was.
“I was in outer space,” I say. “There were these laser beams, and they were meeting at a satellite, and there’s a telescope attached, and they make this bright white beam—”
“Slow down,” Jasper says, and waits while I bring my breathing back to normal. “Maybe we should stop.”
“No! I have to go back in!” I insist, but Jasper’s already standing up, turning on the lights, and picking up a video game off the floor. “Listen to me.” I get up from the couch and stop him from sliding the game into the console.
Jasper turns and looks at me, and his eyes are wary. “You can’t go back in,” he says. “I saw that look. You were . . . gone.”
“There’s something going on. Remember the tidal wave I saw, the one that killed that kid?” I ask, and he nods. “This has something to do with it.”
“But a laser beam can’t cause a tidal wave,” Jasper says.
“I know.” I’m stumped. Jasper turns away from me and pokes the power button on the TV remote. Techno music pumps through the speakers, and a shooter in camo clothing is pointing a gun directly at me. “Just help me go in one more time,” I insist.
“Fine.” He puts the TV on mute. “But I’m pulling you out after a couple of minutes. Understood?”
I nod. Jasper dims the lights, and then follows me back to the couch. “Count me in,” I say.
“One minute. That’s all you get.” When I close my eyes, he’s still looking warily at me. “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”
At six, I get off the boat into the ocean; at three, I settle a few feet from the ocean floor; and by one, I’m inside the powerful laser beam.
“Wow,” I say.
“What’s wow?” Jasper asks. “What’s going on?”
I am shooting across the blackness of space, and even though I’m going the speed of light, my movement feels slow and deliberate. I get farther out, until I see what I’m shooting toward: a large black rock hurtling through space. As it moves, I see the blurred line of numbers trailing behind it.
“Mom’s numbers are some sort of trajectory,” I exclaim.
“A trajectory of what?” Jasper asks over my vision.
“Of an asteroid,” I respond. “A big one.” I suddenly feel suction from below me, and the air gets hard to breathe. I try to back up, but I can’t, and I—inside of the bright laser beam—collide with the black rock. Pain rockets through me. This must be what it feels like to be crushed alive.
“Calliope, come back,” Jasper says.
I feel my mind teetering over the edge as the laser beam pushes the asteroid in a different direction.
“Callie!” he yells.
My nose starts to sting and run. I see the black rock become a ball of fire as it crashes through the atmosphere, passes the clouds, and smacks into the big blue ocean. Where it hits, a wall of water rises up out of the sea.
I quickly scan the surroundings to find out where in the ocean this happens, but the vision starts to tremble and tear apart. Then there are hands on my shoulders, shaking my body back and forth.
“Callie? What did you see?” Jasper’s voice snaps me out of it, and I jolt awake, my eyes watering, blood dripping from my nose.
“It’s coming,” I gasp, “and fast.”
When I finally shudder my way completely back to reality, my cramped hand is frozen around the pen. On the paper, I have drawn what looks like a whirlpool with a straw coming out of it. It’s strikingly similar to the drawing from my first day with Monty.
I try to unclench my fist, but even though I know I’m safe here, I can’t seem to unlock my fingers from around the pen. Jasper puts his hand around mine, and folds each finger back until the pen drops out of my hand.
“Better?” he asks in the gentlest voice I’ve ever heard him use.
I nod. Jasper’s now sitting so close that my hand brushes his arm, and I feel his arm hair tickle my palm.
“Lean your head forward,” Jasper says, and he strips off his blue sweatshirt and holds it against my nose. The blue cotton darkens into purple as blood seeps through the material.
“You don’t need to do that,” I protest through my blocked-up nose. “You’ll ruin your hoodie.”
“It’s washable,” he says.
When I feel the blood flow lower to a trickle, I take the hoodie off my face. Jasper turns it inside out and balls it up in both hands, while I scrub any possible blood off my face with my sleeve.
“So what did you see?” Jasper asks me.
I tell him how I saw a bunch of lasers combine at the EarthScape satellite, where they funneled into a telescope that was attached to it and became a super laser, and then how that bright laser beam pushed an asteroid toward Earth. His mouth drops open when I explain how I saw it land in the sea, and the tidal wave that rose out of it, and eventually, how it kills those people, including the little boy.
“What do you think we should we do?” Jasper asks.
“Besides alert the media, who would never believe the story of a psychic seeing a coming asteroid?” I say, shaking my head. “I’ll tell Indigo all of it. He’ll contact the people he reports to, whoever they are.”
Jasper’s face is angry when he looks at me. “You know what that means.”
I stand up and walk to the window. I’m well aware that telling Indigo about the numbers might reveal the whole story: Jasper and me breaking into the office, stealing the sealed envelope, following Monty, finding the asteroid trajectory numbers that my mom must have stolen from NASA, viewing outside of work to find out what the numbers meant. It might mean losing my job and making Jasper lose his, or worse. “I do,” I say sadly.
“But I was involved too,” Jasper says. “It’s not just you that’s going to get in trouble.”
“I know. But it’s my responsibility to tell him.”
“Are you going to tell him everything?” Jasper asks.
“If I have to,” I say, but I know I’m lying. I know that I’ll do everything in my power not to tell Indigo that my mom was involved. Although I still don’t understand why she would steal asteroid trajectory codes from NASA, or why Monty would want them, I know she must have a good reason. Maybe he’s blackmailing her? But with what? Jasper turns away, muttering “Fine” under his breath.
�
�Fine,” I say back. I’m dreading telling Indigo—breaking his trust in me, probably losing this job that means the whole world to me, and maybe unintentionally bringing harm to my mom—but from what I’ve seen in my visions, the tidal wave, if it’s the same one, is deadly.
But it may also be preventable.
I look out the window at the darkening sky, and I’m glad, for once, that I live in a place where I can’t see stars. What else would I see coming toward Earth?
When I get home from Jasper’s apartment, Mom isn’t there, and she isn’t answering her phone, either. I’m secretly relieved. Even though I know I should try to talk to her right away, I’m not sure what I’d say. Hi, Mom. Are you committing treason by sharing state secrets, which is punishable by death? Oh, and I only know this because I’m a psychic spy? Even if she believed me, she would probably just deny it, like she denied meeting Monty or going to Berkeley.
In the kitchen, Richard is sitting at the table, drinking his nightly cup of decaf coffee. I throw my backpack on the kitchen floor and slump down in the seat across from him.
“Hiya, kiddo,” he says, and pushes his coffee across the table to me.
I smile gratefully and take a sip. “Yum. Cold decaf,” I say. “Where’s Mom?”
Richard stands up and puts the coffee in the microwave. “End-of-semester faculty meeting she forgot about.”
I nod, realizing that I don’t believe her anymore. But I also don’t believe that she knew anything about the destruction this asteroid could cause. She’s not a killer. There has to be a good reason for her to give the asteroid trajectory numbers to Monty. But what? And what would he want with them? “Have you noticed anything strange about Mom lately?” I ask Richard.
