The Astral Traveler's Daughter

by K. C. Archer

  She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Yeah, I get it, you’re so much better than me. Very subtle.

  She watched as he reached for one of the mangled shell casings and wrapped his fist around it. Then he settled back in his chair with his eyes closed. Following his lead, Teddy picked up the scrap of leather, clutched it tightly, and closed her eyes.

  Nothing but her own rapid breathing and random unconnected thoughts skittering around her brain. A monkey playing pinball had more self-control. Teddy opened her eyes to say as much but stopped herself. Henry was already deep in trance. A quick glance around the room confirmed that the rest of her classmates were as well.

  Dammit.

  She looked at the clock. She didn’t have time to joke around. Her future rested on her ability to get some sort of read on these objects. When five more minutes had passed without any psychic glimpses, Teddy begrudgingly reached for the envelope of photos. Just to put her mind in the right place, she rationalized. She shuffled through images of the crash site, the cache of confiscated weapons.

  And then she reached a surveillance photo of a man standing beside the ultralight.

  Teddy reeled in shock as her heart slammed against her chest. The photo slipped from her fingers. She quickly picked it up again and studied the man’s face. Dark hair, dark eyes, medium build. Unibrow scowl. The man from the photo Yates had given her. She was absolutely sure of it. She’d spent hours staring at that face.

  Her mind raced. Somehow Yates had influenced which case she’d been given. But how? Then she thought of how simple it had been for Dara to trick the woman who monitored the file room into stepping away, allowing Dara to sneak in and grab Molly’s file. Yates could have easily performed a similar maneuver, mentally influencing one of the civilian staff who traveled on and off the island to switch the file boxes around, ensuring that Teddy got the Polson case. After all, this was a man who’d manipulated prison guards at San Quentin. Who’d knocked out the sentries at Sector Three with a hard stare. Switching a couple of file boxes would have been child’s play for him.

  Teddy examined the photo with new urgency. She retraced the furtive conversation she’d had with Yates. She’d told him about the two psychics breaking in to Eli’s apartment. The gene therapy that Whitfield and Eversley were developing at Hyle Pharmaceuticals. In response, Yates had passed her the photograph. He’d told her that astral travel was the key, and then he’d said, Study this. Then you’ll understand what you’ll need to do.

  With a renewed sense of purpose, she tightened her grip on the leather scrap and felt for the necklace in her pocket. She focused her thoughts. John Polson’s plane had crashed in the Nevada desert shortly after takeoff.

  Show me what happened.

  Still nothing. She took another breath. Wondered what Yates knew. If this case did have something to do with her mother, Teddy wasn’t sure she wanted to know what had happened. But no, she’d asked for this. No turning back now. She closed her eyes and tried to center her energy, expelling the hesitation hovering at the edges of her thoughts.

  Show me.

  To her astonishment, a subtle warmth started to tingle at the center of her palm. But it wasn’t the hand squeezing the leather scrap. It was the hand in her pocket, the one wrapped around the necklace.

  She sank into bottomless blackness, as if someone had turned off every light in the world. Panic seized her as recognition set in. She was about to enter a full-fledged OBE. She hurtled down that small, invisible tunnel.

  Not here. Not now.

  Information hit Teddy’s senses all at once. Sights, sounds, smells. And the smell was . . . rank. Probably coming from the garbage piled on the sidewalk less than a foot away. She squinted and gazed upward. Midday. Blinding light and horns blaring. Traffic. She looked up to see buildings—skyscrapers, their mirrored surfaces reflecting the enormity of the city.

  Her astral travel had brought her to New York City.

  She squinted into the sun, clocked the street sign above her. Broadway and Forty-Seventh Street. It didn’t make sense. Polson’s plane had exploded in the Nevada desert. But rather than generating a psychometric impression from Polson’s scrap of leather, Marysue’s necklace had catapulted her here. Teddy walked to a corner, looked through the glass of a Village Voice newspaper box. The date on the front page: October 27, 1998.

  Why is that date so familiar?

  She pivoted to avoid a collision with a pedestrian but grazed him in the shoulder and felt like she’d stuck her hand out a car window on a highway. The pedestrian recoiled briefly, offering a confused glance in Teddy’s direction before walking off. It wasn’t like bodies meeting on the physical plane—but the man clearly had felt something.

  She remembered Clint’s lesson. Only travelers could identify other travelers. And this man wasn’t one.

  Teddy looked around. A yellow cab pulled to the curb; the ad on top of the taxi was for Blockbuster Video, trumpeting the release to VHS of the hit movie Titanic. Down the block, she saw a man pushing against the current of the crowd, head tucked low, brown leather briefcase in hand. Hair neatly parted, suit neatly pressed. Derek Yates.

  For a second, Teddy felt frozen in place, but then she remembered he couldn’t see her. He wasn’t a traveler. She began to weave her way toward him. What was Yates doing in New York in 1998? She watched as he stopped at a bench on the corner. She followed his gaze. A man on a pay phone hung up his call. Nodded. He was similarly dressed in a suit, but large and bulky in the shoulders. The kind of guy she wouldn’t want to see coming toward her in an alley. Out of place among the midtown commuters.

  Something was happening. She rubbed the necklace in her pocket. New York City. October 1998.

  It had something to do with Dara. A warning, maybe? She tried to flip through her mental Rolodex of Dara’s proclamations. The surveillance photo, that she remembered. The first of Dara’s warnings about the past—that had happened back in their apartment in San Francisco, over the summer. She had stumbled against a cabinet. By Dara’s feet, a newspaper. The New York Times. October 27, 1998.

  The PC bombing.

  Fighting a sense of paralyzing dread, Teddy turned to look up at the building in front of her. She had to do something to stop it, but what? Alert the authorities. Set off a fire alarm to clear the building occupants. But no. She couldn’t alter the past under any circumstances. Those were rules she couldn’t break. When she turned back to the bench, Yates was gone. All she saw was the back of a woman dressed in a black wool coat, dark hair twisted in a tight bun, the leather briefcase Yates had carried now in her hand. In one of the building’s glass panels, Teddy could make out the woman’s warped reflection.

  Marysue Delaney.

  Teddy watched in horror as her mother stepped toward the building, breezed through a revolving door, then disappeared inside. Teddy tried to convince herself that what she was seeing wasn’t real. Wasn’t true. Her mother couldn’t be part of the bombing. There must be some explanation, something she wasn’t seeing. Her brain spun through rationalizations, trying to bridge the gaps to make the events before her something different from what they appeared to be. But she couldn’t. She clenched her fists, willing her OBE to end.

  It didn’t.

  Marysue exited the building and walked away from Teddy, heading uptown. As Teddy watched, the mirrored panels swelled as though the building itself had exhaled. The dark glass shattered. Teddy caught the faint whiff of almonds in the wind, and she was sure it wasn’t from the Nuts 4 Nuts guy on the corner. The explosion knocked her off her feet, propelling her backward onto the rough concrete sidewalk.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  TEDDY WOKE TO SOMEONE TUGGING on her foot. Not gentle tugs, either. Pulling like the person was intent on removing her ankle from her leg. She parted her lips and croaked, “Hey, knock it off.”

  “Settle down, young lady,” a brisk voice replied. “There’ll be no dirty shoes in my beds.”

  Teddy began to object that her shoes
weren’t dirty, but she caught herself. That wasn’t really the point. The point was, where was she, and how did she get there? Another fierce tug accompanied by a grunt, and her combat boot slipped from her foot and thudded to the floor, where it joined its partner. Teddy flexed her newly liberated toes. At least that felt good. As for the rest of her . . .

  The back of her head hurt like a mother. Wincing, she ran her hand over a lump the size of a golf ball. Her eyelids felt glued shut. Just prying them open required all the strength she could manage. Ignoring the protests of her aching body, she slowly leveraged herself into a sitting position. She was lying in bed, fully clothed.

  She blinked as the figure hovering at the foot of her bed slowly swam into focus. The woman was dressed in nurse’s whites. A halo of strawberry blond curls framed her face. Nurse Bell.

  “How you gave yourself a concussion falling from a chair, I’ll never know,” Nurse Bell said.

  Teddy was in the infirmary. A glance around the room confirmed it. She scanned her memory, looking for an explanation as to how she got there. She didn’t remember falling from a chair. She’d been in Dunn’s class, working with Henry on their project. One she hadn’t completed because her mother’s necklace had launched her back in time to New York City.

  Marysue. The C-4. The explosion.

  Her throat swelled shut and tears welled. She furiously blinked them back. She wouldn’t allow herself to be weak. Not after what she’d seen.

  Clint, Pyro, Dara, and Jillian had been right all along. The truth settled on her like a physical weight. In Teddy’s mind, Marysue had always been on the edges, maybe standing watch, clearing the way—not the person responsible for the attack. Her mother had been the one to actually carry the bomb inside the building.

  Teddy had to tell someone where she’d been. She threw back her sheet and tried to stand but couldn’t. Her legs gave way and she collapsed back onto the bed, feeling like she’d been flattened by a semi.

  Nurse Bell clucked her tongue and lifted Teddy’s wrist to check her pulse.

  “How long do I have to stay here?” Teddy grit out.

  “You need a little rest,” Bell pronounced. She deposited a can of ginger ale and a few packets of saltine crackers on Teddy’s bedside tray.

  Teddy choked back a morbid laugh. As if saltines and ginger ale could fix her problem.

  Nurse Bell frowned. “Your eyes are unfocused. Is the room spinning?”

  “A little.”

  “In that case, Dr. Eversley should clear you, just to be on the safe side. Not like you kids get sick much, anyway. Might as well enjoy the rest.”

  Eversley? No thanks. The morning had been rough enough. Teddy didn’t plan to stick around and allow herself to become one of Eversley’s test subjects.

  Nurse Bell turned away and paused with her hand on the privacy curtain that sectioned off Teddy’s bed from the rest of the room. “Open or closed?”

  “Open.”

  Easier to escape that way.

  Bell nodded and consulted her watch. “I’ll be back to check on you in precisely thirty minutes. I expect to find you here. Do not make me come looking for you. I have two students with broken bones and one with food poisoning. I don’t have time for foolishness.”

  With that, she thrust back the curtain to reveal the adjoining bed, which, to Teddy’s surprise, was occupied. A young guy lay flat on his back, his eyes closed, a compress settled over the upper half of his face. He wore a white cotton tee and torn, faded jeans. His feet were bare.

  He didn’t move or indicate in any way that he was aware of Teddy’s presence. But the moment the door closed behind Bell, he said, “So. Nurse Ratched’s confining you here against your will, too, huh?”

  “Looks like it,” she replied, sparing him another quick glance. She didn’t think she knew him, but it was hard to tell with the compress covering half his face. Maybe a first-year recruit. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t in the mood for talking. Her mind was too occupied with the events she’d seen. Yates. Her mother.

  The bombing of the office building in New York City, fall 1998. She remembered the newspaper clippings she’d amassed over the summer. Twenty people had been killed, among them eight suspected members of Al-Qaeda who had targeted U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The other twelve fatalities had been innocent victims in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that was how the PC worked. Collateral damage was acceptable so long as the job got done.

  She cursed Clint. He may have taught her about Pilgrim’s Tunnels, but he hadn’t taught her how to protect herself, mentally, physically, or emotionally. Spontaneous astral travel was causing more than a couple of bumps and bruises. And there was something else that troubled her. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  “I’m Miles,” he said.

  She sighed, reluctantly drawing herself out of her grim thoughts. “Teddy.”

  “Teddy?” he said. “As in bear?”

  She snapped her head in his direction, causing the room to spin again. She hadn’t heard that joke since probably third grade. “As in call me that again and I’m putting those boots back on to kick your ass.”

  He laughed. “Easy, Rambo. I’m just really bad with names. I do a word-association thing to help me remember. Habit.” He removed the compress and rolled onto his side to face her.

  He was cute. And he obviously liked old Sylvester Stallone movies. He was long and lean. Olive skinned with dark blue eyes and shaggy dark blond hair. She was caught off guard by how good-looking he was, and she instantly felt bad for noticing. “What are you in for?”

  “Just the mother of all migraines,” he said. “They tell me it’s not fatal—though sometimes it’s so bad I almost wish it was, you know?”

  Teddy didn’t know. But that definitely put her own aches and pains in perspective. As difficult as astral travel was, she couldn’t imagine pain so intense that death would seem like a release. “That’s awful. Have you always had them?”

  Miles shook his head. “It’s my new medication. One of the side effects, I guess. But it’s brutal.”

  Teddy murmured sympathetically, even as she wondered why a recruit was on any medication at all. Symptoms of psychic power were often misdiagnosed and “cured” with everything from homeopathic remedies to full-strength antipsychotics. When she’d first arrived at Whitfield, she’d gone cold turkey, ditching the epilepsy medicine she’d been prescribed for years. But she knew better than to ask Miles what he was on or why he was taking medication. She’d hated it when people had given her the third degree about her condition. It wasn’t anyone else’s business.

  Eager for a change of topic, she glanced out the window. She spotted Hollis Whitfield standing outside the clinic, deep in conversation with Dr. Eversley. Teddy went cold. They looked serious—agitated, even. Teddy wondered if they were talking about Hyle Pharmaceuticals. She leveraged herself out of bed and went to the window. If only she could hear what they were saying.

  “What is it?” Miles asked.

  Teddy turned to see him grab a pair of glasses from the bedside table and slip them on. Vintage round wire frames. Impossible for anyone except John Lennon to pull off. And Miles, apparently.

  He stood and moved across the room with small, cautious steps, as though not quite convinced that his legs would carry him. He stopped beside her and peered out the window at Whitfield and Eversley. “Those guys? You in trouble or something?”

  “Not at the moment, but give me time.” Turning, she gave him a vague warning: “You’re new around here, so I’ll give you a tip—stay away from both of them.”

  He frowned. “Why?”

  “Well, the one in the lab coat, that’s Dr. Eversley. Nurse Ratched’s boss. He seems like he’s got our best interests at heart, being a doctor and all, but I’m not so sure.”

  “And the other guy?”

  Right. Whitfield. What did Teddy really know? Not enough to justify scaring some green recruit. “That’s Hollis Whitfield, our
commander in chief. He’s the money behind everything. He generally keeps a pretty low profile, like he’s watching it all play out from the shadows. I dunno, something about him just gives me the creeps.”

  “Geez, you make him sound like a movie villain.”

  Hey, if he thought this was a joke, fine. No one could say she hadn’t warned him. “Maybe,” she allowed with a shrug. “All I know is that he’s richer than God. And sometimes you put money and power together and . . . no checks, no balances, no accountability. Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want.”

  Miles opened his mouth to reply, then went pale. His knees buckled, and Teddy was certain if she hadn’t caught his elbow, he would have collapsed to the floor. She helped him back to his bed where he sat down, holding the edge of the mattress for support.

  “You all right?” she asked. Stupid question. Obviously, he wasn’t.

  “Just need to breathe for a second,” he said.

  Teddy watched his chest rise as he drew in deep lungfuls of air and then slowly exhaled. She recognized the pattern and remembered that the breathing techniques they’d learned from Dunn could also be incredibly effective in managing pain. After a few minutes, he was once again able to stand, brushing her off when she moved to help him.

  “I’m fine,” he said with a note of frustration. “Actually, I’m going to see if I can find the dear nurse and ask about my medication. I missed my last dose, which is probably why this happened.”

  “Maybe I should go with—” Teddy started. If she accompanied him, maybe she could find a way to casually eavesdrop on Whitfield and Eversley.

  But Miles shook off the offer. “I don’t want you to get in trouble because of me. You have orders to stay in bed. I don’t. I’ll be fine.”

  Damn.

  In that case, could he hurry up and go already? Because there was only one other way to catch what they were saying. From the window, Teddy watched Eversley pull a piece of paper out of his briefcase and show it to Whitfield.