The Astral Traveler's Daughter

by K. C. Archer

  “No. The base remains heavily guarded—even more so since our visit. They’re bringing supplies and construction materials into Sector Three.”

  “So what’s different?”

  “The people I’ve been monitoring are no longer overseeing the work. They’re here in San Francisco.”

  The ferry whistle blew, indicating that boarding was under way. Teddy shot an anxious glance at the pier. Fine if she got away with sneaking off-island. A total shit storm if she missed the last ferry back and her absence was noticed.

  “You shared the Hyle report with Clint?” Yates asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Let me guess,” he said, not bothering to hide the contempt in his voice. “He assured you he has the situation under control. That there’s nothing to worry about.” Yates stepped away from her. Studied the ferry as though considering boarding it himself. “Clint doesn’t understand. He doesn’t have the full picture. We must stop whatever’s happening at Hyle. I have to tell him face-to-face.”

  Teddy laughed. She couldn’t help it. “Are you insane? If Clint knew that you were here, that I was talking to you—” She stopped abruptly. Caught her breath. “He’s determined to put you back in prison. He’s pretty much made that his life’s work. Finding and arresting you . . . and Marysue.”

  “Is that so?” A ghost of a smile touched Yates’s lips. “It may be hard for you to believe, but we weren’t always enemies. For a while, we were actually friends.” He shook his head. “Perhaps that’s impossible for you to imagine.”

  Actually, it wasn’t. Last year, Yates had given Teddy a photo of himself with Clint and her birth parents. The four of them relaxed and happy, their arms wrapped around one another in an expression of affection and unity. The way she felt about Pyro, Jillian, and Dara. They were like family now. What could possibly occur that would drive them to hunt one another down?

  “Explain it to me,” she said. “Tell me what happened. Earlier, you said you came to San Francisco because they were here. Who are they?”

  “I’m sorry, Theodora. That’s a secret I can’t burden you with yet.”

  A blast of the horn signaled the ferry’s final boarding call. It was her last chance to get back to campus before curfew. The engine rumbled and fired to life. Teddy shouted to the crewman to wait. Yates kept pace with her as she strode toward the ferry.

  “Your astral travel, Theodora. That’s the key. You must master that skill. If what you’ve told me is true, our time is running out.”

  They reached the boarding plank. Teddy hesitated, one foot on the plank, one foot on the pier. “Astral travel? I don’t understand—”

  “On or off!” shouted the impatient crewman. “We’ve got a schedule to keep.”

  She turned back to Yates. “How do I find you?”

  “You don’t. I’ll find you.” He reached into the backpack he carried and removed a yellowed manila envelope, smudged and glossy with the patina of age. He passed it to her. “Don’t worry. I’m not leaving you empty-handed. Study this. Then you’ll understand the part you’ll play.”

  “On or off!” the crewman shouted.

  Teddy walked up the boarding plank. She turned at the rail, intending to call out another question to Yates, but he had disappeared once again into the crowd.

  * * *

  Pyro looked at the envelope. Picked it up and gave it a shake. “That’s all he gave you? You sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” Teddy snapped. “That’s it. One photo.”

  It was late, well after midnight. She, Pyro, Jillian, and Dara were gathered in her dorm room. They sat with their heads bent over the photo. Like the envelope that held it, the photo was worn with age, the corners rubbed round, the image faded. She watched as Dara lifted it, tilting it so the light reflected off the glossy surface.

  The photo showed an unsmiling man in his early forties standing beside a storage building made of cinder blocks. Dark hair, dark eyes, medium build. Coarse, heavy eyebrows that formed a near-unibrow as he scowled into the distance. Barren desert stretched for miles in the background. The photo was slightly grainy. Likely a surveillance shot.

  Dara said, “Whoever he was, he passed over. Shortly after that photo was taken. It happened fast. Like one second he was there, the next second he was gone.”

  Teddy nodded, accepting Dara’s psychic read without question. In the weeks that had followed Professor Dunn’s introductory lecture on psychometry, there had been two stars in his class. Ava, the medium. And Dara, whose death visions had transmuted into an ability to touch an object or study a photo and know whether the person in question had crossed over.

  “How?” Teddy pressed. “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m picking up a lot of shock. Disbelief. Horror. An accident, maybe.” Dara shrugged and set the photo down. “I’m sorry, Teddy, but that’s all I’m getting.”

  “Right before Yates gave me the photo, he said astral travel was the key. What did he mean? The key to what?”

  Pyro grunted. “Typical Yates. More riddles than answers.”

  No.

  That wasn’t true. Yates hadn’t been trying to frustrate her with riddles. He was under the misguided impression that by withholding names and information, he was somehow protecting her. He was doing what he felt was right. The way he’d abandoned them in Sector Three but stuck around to make sure they got out okay.

  Jillian paced about the room. “What about Eli? Are you sure he wasn’t hurt?”

  “He’s fine,” Teddy reassured her for what felt like the twentieth time in as many minutes. “He wasn’t even there when they broke in.”

  “Teddy was there when they broke in,” Pyro reminded them. “Alone. What if they’d been armed? What if she’d been hurt?”

  “But I wasn’t,” Teddy said.

  “You could have been. This thing is getting out of control.” Pyro stood. Nodded as though he’d come to a decision. “At this point, the only thing to do is pass that photo on to Clint.”

  “Give it to Clint?” Teddy studied him in disbelief. “And how am I going to explain where the photo came from?”

  “Simple. You tell him the truth.”

  “The truth? Tell Clint I went off campus and had a meeting with Yates? Are you kidding me? Do you want me to get kicked out of school?”

  Pyro’s eyes flashed with anger. “You’ve forgotten I was a cop, Teddy. Don’t think for a minute you can pull that crap on me.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means you’re twisting the truth around to suit your own agenda. Here’s the truth: you went off campus to pass a message from Jillian to Eli. Bad, but not bad enough to get you kicked out of school. Yates surprised you at the pier and passed you the photo. End of story. So you face Clint in the morning, give him the photo, confess the whole thing.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  She felt her teeth clench. She relaxed her jaw, forced a reply. “Won’t.”

  Because if she did what Pyro suggested, Clint would make it impossible for her to ever see Yates again. And at the moment, Yates was her only source for information. For what had happened in the past and what was happening in the present, both. She couldn’t afford to shut that down.

  “This isn’t a game anymore. You could get hurt.”

  “What if Yates is right?” she said. “You all saw Sector Three. What if something like that is happening again? Don’t we want all the information we can get, regardless of the source?”

  “Regardless of the source? I think you’ve forgotten something. Yates was PC. And like it or not, so was your mother. She probably still is. If you want to pretend that doesn’t matter, that’s up to you. But don’t ask the three of us to play along.”

  Shaken, she glanced at Dara and Jillian for support. Instead of meeting her eyes, they were busy studying the patterns in the carpet.

  Only Pyro met her gaze. Normally, she associated Pyro with sexy,
smoldering heat. Sometimes she forgot he’d had a career in law enforcement before joining Whitfield Institute. At the moment, however, the cool detachment with which he regarded her said he was all cop. Maybe always had been.

  And that was the problem. Pyro, like Clint, viewed the world in black and white. Teddy loved all the opportunities the gray spaces afforded.

  He studied her, his expression showing no sign of softening. “There’s no in between here, Teddy. You’re either with Yates or you’re against him. I think it’s pretty clear what you’ve decided.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED her argument with Pyro, two things happened. Well, one thing happened—their classwork became more demanding—and the other thing didn’t. Teddy wanted it to happen, but with each passing day, it seemed about as likely to occur as a date with Ryan Gosling or winning the lottery or discovering that, yes, subsisting on ice cream and hamburgers for the rest of her adult life could be healthful. Specifically, she was waiting for an apology from Pyro. Or some acknowledgment that he understood where she was coming from. Instead, they exchanged cursory words only when the situation demanded it.

  Twice Teddy came close to turning over the photo to Clint. Twice she decided against it. Not yet. Not until she knew more. Then she’d involve Clint. In the meantime, she’d taken to carrying Yates’s photo with her, tucked in the same pocket as the photo of her parents that he’d given her last year. Also in her pocket was her mother’s necklace. For the past month, it had remained stashed in the drawer of her bedside table. No longer. She needed every token with her now—for luck, for courage, for something.

  She stepped into Professor Dunn’s classroom. Since their first lecture on the subject of psychometry, Dunn had continued to expand on the process of using touch to garner psychic information. He’d outlined the physics and the metaphysics involved, explained the science behind the associative link that psychometric objects provided to psychics, and given them multiple theoretical approaches to the topic.

  Today, however, they were going to put those theories to the test. They’d either prove they were capable of using their psychic training to solve an actual case, or they’d fail. This was black or white, too. There was no in between.

  Dunn, dressed in a Ramones tee, stood at the lectern beside a towering pile of banker’s boxes. “Today,” he said, “we start work on your midterm assignment. You’ll be expected to use your newly honed psychometric ability to garner information on a cold case. You’ll be working in teams of two, which I will be assigning.”

  Teddy suppressed a groan. If she had to partner with Kate, or Ava, or worse, Pyro . . . she didn’t even want to think about it.

  Dunn continued. “I’ll be looking for proof of your work, detailed outlines of how you arrived at your evidence and what methodology was used, along with an essay explaining your reasoning and citing at least two scientific sources from the texts we’ve discussed.”

  At this, Teddy groaned aloud, as did the rest of the class. If someone had told her learning to be a kick-ass psychic crime fighter meant taking science classes . . .

  “Atkins, you’ll be with . . .”

  As Dunn scanned his list, Teddy silently said a prayer to whoever was presiding over the astral plane.

  “Costa.”

  Thank you, whoever you are, Lady Spirit Mother Empress Holy One Above.

  “Cannon . . .” Dunn said, making eye contact with Teddy. “Cummings.”

  Cummings. Henry Cummings. Golfing, my-daddy-is-richer-than-your-daddy, meet-me-at-the-club-later Henry Cummings?

  Teddy knew he was a clairvoyant with a preppy pedigree, and an Alpha, but she didn’t know much else about him. Other than he annoyed the hell out of her. But he wasn’t Pyro. At least he had that much going for him. She ventured a glance in Henry’s direction, noting his look of horror. Jerk. At least she’d had the courtesy to hide her dislike. She straightened in her seat. The end of November couldn’t come soon enough.

  “You’ll have the rest of class to go over your cases,” Dunn explained. “By the close of this session, I’ll be collecting an initial psychometric impression that will go toward your final grade. Cases have been preassigned, taking your abilities and interests into account.” He moved through the classroom, handing out boxes. Once he reached Teddy’s desk, he hesitated. Then he set down a dusty brown box with the name Polson scrawled on the side.

  Dunn looked at the clock. “Time starts now.”

  Henry swung his head, signaling that she should come to him.

  Nuh-uh, buddy, that’s not how this is going to work.

  She gestured to her desk, indicating that she was the one who had the files.

  Henry sighed and stood up. He brushed off the chair beside her and sat down. “If we’re going to work together,” he announced, “we should begin by setting some ground rules.”

  “Ground rules?”

  “Listen, we both know you have a certain reputation. Let me say it right up front. No tricks, no sneaking around, no crazy stunts. You seem to get into trouble a lot, which is something I’d rather not do, if possible.” He crossed his arms over his neatly pressed Whitfield polo shirt—who ironed a cotton polo?—and stared at her.

  Teddy felt her temperature rise. Did this freckle-faced frat boy just tell her she had a reputation? There was only one allowable response. She opened her mouth to snarl a reply but caught herself just in time. Wessner was in the audience. Test number one, she surmised: her ability to work with an obnoxious colleague without immediately resorting to verbal or physical abuse, no matter how badly said colleague had it coming.

  “Look,” she said, “let’s just get to work, all right?” She elbowed the banker’s box toward him. Inside was a thick stack of manila folders, along with several sealed bags of evidence. “How does Dunn expect us to go through all of this in”—Teddy glanced at the clock—“an hour?”

  “He doesn’t expect that. He asked for a psychometric impression.” Henry pulled open one of the evidence bags. “Learn to follow instructions, Cannon. We just have to read the objects.”

  Teddy frowned. In order to use her abilities, she first needed a sense of the case. She dug through the files until she found what she was looking for: a case summary. She opened it, and her heart skipped a beat. Stamped at the top was the FBI logo, followed by the words Classified Material. She hadn’t been given any old cold case. She’d been given an FBI cold case. She bit her lip to stop an idiotic grin from spreading across her face. Granted, it was from 1995, and the file had been heavily redacted, but still.

  “John Polson,” she read aloud, scanning the portions of the report that hadn’t been blacked out. “Suspected small-arms dealer. Dealt mainly in semiautomatic assault rifles. Under FBI surveillance for providing weapons to drug cartels operating here in the U.S. Looks like most of his contacts were in the Southwest, just across the border.”

  “Nice guy.”

  “Transported the weapons himself,” she continued. “He flew an ultralight. Kept it low, was able to avoid radar detection.”

  “An ultralight?”

  “A one-person plane. Apparently, the plane crashed shortly after takeoff from a private airstrip in Nevada.”

  “Good riddance,” Henry said, rolling his eyes. “Tell me why we care what happened to this guy?”

  Excellent question. What about this particular case merited the investigation of psychics over two decades later? Teddy didn’t have an answer, but she was thinking hard. Probably not the arms-running connection; that case against Polson was watertight. That meant FBI investigators had questions about the murder and subsequent crash—which happened to take place at an airstrip about seventy miles outside of Jackpot.

  Which stopped Teddy in her tracks. She cast a look at Clint and Nick. Had she been assigned the case because it had something to do with her mother? The PC? If so, Dunn and Wessner were playing things pretty cool. A minute ago, they’d been watching her and Henry, seeing how they’d rea
ct to each other. But now they stood off to one side of the room, engaged in casual conversation, paying her absolutely no attention.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “the autopsy revealed that death was by gunshot wound, not the plane crash.”

  “Suicide.”

  “No,” Teddy said, continuing to read, “he was shot in the back of the skull with a small-caliber revolver. The trajectory of the bullet’s path ruled out suicide. But no weapon matching the gunshot wound was found in the cockpit or anywhere near the crash site. They didn’t find another body, either. Just Polson.”

  “The plot thickens.” Henry ripped open an evidence bag and spilled out the contents. “Let’s get to work.”

  He sorted the evidence. A bit of charred leather—something that once was a pilot seat, or a briefcase, or a shoe. Too small to know just by looking at it. A gold wristwatch, the glass face shattered. A hundred-dollar bill, smudged with ash. A scrap of heavy cloth, also smudged with ash. Assorted metal debris. And last of all, an assortment of shell casings, all of them high-caliber, twisted and misshapen from exposure to intense heat. The kind of heat generated by an explosion. None of which fit the weapon Polson had been shot with.

  Teddy scanned the items, then shot a glance at Henry. “You’re clairvoyant, right?” Kate was claircognizant, which meant she was able to divine knowledge without any clear source, but Teddy had never teamed up with someone whose psychic gift was the ability to see glimpses of the future.

  Henry nodded. “Yeah, but I’m developing my ability to see the past as well. Given how old this stuff is, that’s definitely going to be a challenge.”

  “Right.”

  Henry gave a small, nervous cough. “All right, then. Let’s get started.”

  “Wait.” Teddy tapped the stack of files. “Shouldn’t we read more about the case?”

  “Later. Initial psychometric impressions, remember? That’s all Dunn wants today.” At her hesitation, he removed an envelope from one of the files and tossed it toward her. “There are some photos here, if you need to give them a look. Personally, I prefer not to taint my mind with any images except the ones I intuit psychically.”