Henry. He was supposed to blow over the guards. Yes. I waited, lethargic, as an urgency bubbled up inside me, waking me up to what was really happening. I sat up straighter, listening.
Come on, Henry. He was the key here. He was the one who had to turn, who had to dig deep and find it in him to do the right thing to do for his friends—if that’s what we were—for his country, for himself.
Alert now, I called for him. “Henry!”
Silence—just like Cord had predicted.
As I crawled across the floor, the concrete scraped my knees. When I reached the door, I sat on my knees, panting, waiting.
The following seconds unfolded in slow motion. More shouts and scuttling outside. Eventually I climbed to my feet, using the wall for support, and with my chest heaving, I considered my own mortality. I could either wait for something to happen to me—or I could move forward with confidence and control.
I stood on the precipice of a chasm between freedom and failure, between being led to my fate or charting my own.
Three guards stood outside a steel door in the dark. Three guards.
It was me! Henry hadn’t made this happen in Cord’s premonition—I had.
I closed my eyes. I had never thought I would be able to control my psychokinesis. I thought it controlled me. I had always assumed that if I embraced my supernatural abilities, I would lose my status, so I became pliable throughout my life, fearful of what I could become. I never considered that I could become powerful.
The stars flickered and then swarmed into a ball of resolute intention. Could I actually control this beast inside me? Yes. With one slow punctuated bolt of energy, the door flattened down as if an invisible truck had plowed it over. The three guards turned to look at me with gaping mouths. In a blink, they each flew back and slammed into the concrete wall behind them.
Stunned, I gazed at their slumped bodies on the ground. The smoke leapt into my lungs, and I knew it was time to run.
24
Katerina
The helicopter hovered and bounced like a spider on a string, kicking up dust as its landing skids touched the ground. The Americans filed out of the aircraft and I followed behind. They hadn’t bothered to put a weapon in my hands. I leaned into Major Patterson to yell into his pockmarked cheek.
“There’s a manhole over there! But the other entrance is in those hills!” The soldiers broke into two groups as planned, running low to the ground, as the helicopter climbed up that invisible spiderweb in the sky and flew away.
Unarmed, up against the people I’d betrayed, I knew this was a huge risk. But I couldn’t stay away. I followed the men over the tumbleweeds and tufts of grass and up the hill to a low-lying butte that ran across the terrain for miles.
We ran crouched over the crusty ground and rocks, silent, pointing. My heart pounded. Those psychics were inside, hopefully alive, and if they didn’t live, I could not bear to live with myself. They were not my enemy. They were my friends.
If we didn’t find them, if I was wrong about this, or if people died, then I would lose everything I loved. I wasn’t going to let them die.
25
Charley
Anton gripped my arm just as the sound of three successive bangs reverberated throughout the cement enclosure. Smoke clogged my throat, burning my lungs. The darkness made us blind to each other, and I did the only thing I knew best to do. I leaned up to him, pulling his head toward me.
“Your daughter will be okay. I’ll make sure of it. But you have to let us go.” My voice sounded raspy and my intent was pure desperation. “She’s worth it.”
And that was not a lie. It was the truth. My hand covered his, and I could feel that his love for her was greater than any political doctrine or job. It flooded his bones, and I knew he was going to let me go.
He did release me, and my heart hurt, knowing he was going to be captured—that part I couldn’t tell him. I ran like a zombie down the hallway, my arms outstretched, blindly looking for anything in my way. I slammed into a body and heard the feathery exhale of a grunt. Familiar. Julia.
I held my map, wishing I had some superpower to see drawings in the smoke and dark. “How the hell do we get out of here? The place is on fire!” I screamed.
“Aunt Sabrina must’ve started it,” she said before pushing me forward down the hallway. I stumbled into something hard—another person, but this time, firm hands grabbed me tight. A guard. I cried out.
Another thud, and I knew Julia’s mind must’ve thrown him into the wall. Holy smokes! My mouse of a friend had huge powers packed into that little body. We stumbled through a maze of hallways until we literally felt Minnie’s soft edges and heard Samuel’s sharp voice. “Hey!” he said.
“Oh my Lord!” Minnie said. “Why the hell did we cut the lights now?”
“I think by doing it, Samuel unlocked the other exit,” Julia said, though she didn’t sound too sure. It seemed to me that the only thing Samuel had done was cause more confusion and slow our exit from a burning hole.
“Where’s Cord?” I asked, suddenly panicked.
“He should be here,” Julia said. “He was right there, down the hall from you. You haven’t seen him?”
I shook my head though I knew she couldn’t see me. I pushed them ahead down the hall, toward the exit, and turned back to find him.
I made my way down the hallway amid thick smoke. To find fresh air, I crawled on hands and knees, the only light coming from the flashing flames down another corridor. Squinting through watery eyes that burned, I rounded a corner to where I thought his cell might be.
“Cord!” I yelled, praying he heard me. Over and over I called for him. Coughing, yelling, stumbling. I heard a thudding noise in response. I scrambled toward the sound and stopped at the steel door. He was still in his cell. Oh my God.
I banged on the door, crying his name. “I’ll get you out!”
Blindly I searched for a guard who might be slumped lifeless on the ground. I have to find one of those goons. But the smoke made me dizzy, and I felt as if I might slip away, melt into the heat of the air, disappear altogether. My hands clamped onto a beefy body, and I ran my fingers across his pants and shirt until I found a metal ring. I felt the jagged edge and the jingle of the keys.
Panic raced through me, a ticking time bomb on life, as I scrambled to yank the keys off his belt. It was stuck. “Please. Please. Please.”
The banging in Cord’s cell began to slow. Holy crap. I yanked on the keys more frantically. Finally, I took a deep breath and focused, just enough to slip the belt between the layered metal loops, unwinding it and eventually freeing the keys from the guard.
Euphoric, I scurried across the ground, feeling for the door. On my knees, I touched the burning metal. My cough became uncontrollable, and I pulled my shirt to my mouth while I tried each of the keys. One. Two. Three. Four. My head felt as if it was a flat tire, and I nearly tipped over. I plugged the final key into the lock, and with all my effort I turned it, heaving my shoulders to get the strength needed.
Click.
With one last effort I pushed the door in, and with a heavy squeak, it opened. I collapsed onto the ground, and my lungs closed up around me, sealing in the dark, smoky air.
26
Julia
We flew around the corner at breakneck speed until we came to a dead end. I reached out blindly and touched scalding-hot metal. I cried out, holding my hand.
In the dim light, the clouds of smoke escaped in small wispy layers near the floor. “It’s a door!” An aluminum garage door, to be exact.
Men’s foreign shouts, staccato and angry, cluttered the air. I couldn’t tell, but it sounded as if they were coming from behind us.
“I messed up the electrical box and yet here we are. Still in complete chaos,” Samuel said.
“Look!” I pointed. “That’s the exit, and I’m gonna bet you disabled the locking mechanism.”
“I think you did it, Sammy!” Minnie said.
U
sing the edge of my t-shirt to protect my skin, I bent down, pulled on the door, and it rolled up. Fresh air rushed into my lungs, and bright sunshine flooded down from above. We squinted in the light and stumbled up the ramp. A hand extended down to help us out—about a dozen uniformed people huddled around the exit.
They ushered us several yards away from the exit, and Katerina made her way through the crowd to hug me tightly.
Katerina? My mind had been running on high alert, and finally it ran out of gas: so many questions, but no energy to ask. I coughed over her shoulder, my legs giving out like bending branches. I sunk to the ground.
“Where’s Charley? Cord?” she asked.
“Charley went back to get him,” Samuel said.
“How’d the fire start?” a male voice asked.
“My aunt,” I said. My aunt. “She’s in there!” I turned, looking back at the door. “Help them!”
Katerina let go of me and dashed into the building. I was coughing uncontrollably now, so hard I felt I could hack up my insides, and my head felt so vacant, it was as if my brain had turned to liquid and slid out my ears. A surreal movie played out: two people cradled me, then jostled me onto a stretcher, applying an oxygen mask over my face.
After a few minutes, the fresh air unlocked my lungs, and I focused on Sabrina. I imagined I was in the facility beneath the ground once again, with her inside that tiny closet-office where I saw her last. I thought of her drawn face. The dark hair and her thin hands. I focused so intently, I felt as if I had taken my last breath on earth and vaporized into a million little molecules in the air. The dark. The light. The hazy feeling of being sucked in and out of a sticky web of reality and imagination.
And then, I was there. Inside the burning laboratory, amid flames and smoke and darkness. I stood next to Sabrina. She had curled up in the corner, as if the smoke and flames had melted her into a ball. “Aunt Sabrina,” I whispered.
She blinked and looked up.
“Get up!” I shouted. “Please get out!”
Her head lolled on her neck and she whispered, “It’s too late.”
“You were my hero.” Emotion distorted my voice. “A fighter. Get up!”
“I don’t know what I’m fighting for anymore,” she said, looking directly at me. “I have been here so long … crimes. I … don’t know how I’d start … again. Out there.”
Where would she begin if she got out of this burning hole? Perhaps she would be released and forgiven after a decade of being held hostage and being brainwashed. She had to at least find out.
I pointed at Katerina, who ran through the burning building towards her with wavering steps, a cloth held over her mouth.
“There’s Katerina! She’s trying to help you.”
Sabrina didn’t move.
“Go!” My voice was a distant roar. Fury and helplessness twirled circles around me, yet I knew the sound Sabrina heard was nowhere as loud as I wanted it to be. Fading, like a faint radio signal.
Sabrina wove fingers through her hair, pinched her chin to her chest. “Sorry. I … don’t know what’s… right.”
“No!” This was the worst superpower ever. How helpless to be there, amid the flames and the scuttling, yet able to do nothing. The dancing fire blocked her way and I watched the flames bear down on her. I wanted her to duck her head, wanted her to dart through the flames and past the threshold of the door.
Instead, her body sank slowly to the side, a deflated balloon. The smoke had gotten to her. I wanted to shake her. I screamed her name, but she didn’t look up.
I floated to Katerina, who hunkered low with a cloth to her lips. “Sabrina, come to me! Please, my friend!” she said.
“Katerina, turn back!” I said.
She looked right through me, just as everyone else saw through Sabrina in remote viewing in San Francisco. Only Sabrina and my psychic friends could see me amid these flames.
I moved to Henry’s cell, where he hovered in a corner. His arms covered the metal that wrapped his head like a halo. “Henry.”
This was pointless. I couldn’t unlock his door. I couldn’t remove that device. I couldn’t help him escape. I could only console him before his imminent death.
His perennial smug expression had disappeared, revealing a frightened kid. He carried a lifetime of vulnerability and sadness that, like liquid cement, had hardened into concrete bitterness. “What’d you want?”
I thought about it for a long moment. “I forgive you.”
He swallowed and squinted in the thick smoke. “I didn’t say sorry.”
Something squeezed me like a python, and I briefly wondered if the smoke in there was actually affecting me while remote viewing. He bounced in my vision, and I felt pulled to the ceiling. I didn’t have the chance to respond to him when he finished the thought. “But I am. I’m sorry.”
Like before, my vision warped. A radio being tuned. I felt weaker than I ever had before during remote viewing. This time I felt as if I had been plunged underwater. I couldn’t breathe. Something crushed my chest, that invisible python squeezing tighter and tighter.
The smoke. It had to be the smoke. It had choked my aunt, and it would strangle me too. A momentary question stretched before me: If you die in remote viewing, do you die in real life? Is it like dying in a dream?
I heard a distant voice, bodiless. “Cardiac arrest.”
27
Charley
Cord’s dark hair. That’s all I saw at first. Then the rest of him came into view. His brown skin with angry red cuts. He leaned over the cot.
It sounded like we were inside a giant humming vacuum cleaner. Then I figured out we were inside of an Army helicopter. Not far away, Minnie, Katerina, and Samuel sat upright on a bench with oxygen masks over their mouths and headphones over their ears. Medics leaned over Julia, who was also lying on a cot.
“She okay?” I asked, pulling off my mask.
“We was scared, but they think so,” Cord said, still leaning over me. Soot dotted his brow and cheeks. I remembered trying to get him out of that room in the fire, but I didn’t remember how or if I’d been successful.
“Didn’t I save you?” I asked.
“Yeah, and I went and saved you back, though,” he said with a chuckle. He wove his fingers through mine, and I felt that same shiny silver ribbon of his aura.
“Where’s Henry?” I asked.
Cord chewed his cheek and bounced his foot.
Henry hadn't gotten out. I knew it was karma—the guy had loads of bad stuff headed his way—but still, I knew him. I had slept with him. And now he was gone. My head pounded.
“Missus Carrillo went and called your parents,” he said.
“Crap.” I sat up onto my elbow. “Are they on their way to get me?”
He paused, bit his lips, and looked out the window. The sunlight made his irises look like golden marbles. “They say you should take a bus home.”
A defeated laugh escaped me, and I flopped back flat on the cot. Of course.
“Your mom wants you to call, though,” he said. The thump-thump of the helicopter blades overpowered his voice. Samuel and Minnie didn’t make eye contact with me, and Katerina gazed out the window.
The melancholy mood formed a knot in my gut. “I’m sorry I got all tangled up with Henry,” I said.
He nodded and looked at his feet.
“It was wrong,” I said. "I wish I would have … I just wish things had gone differently.” He didn’t look up.
“Do you forgive me?” I asked, squeezing his hand.
“I saved you, right?”
My laugh pinched my lungs, and he leaned forward and hugged me. When we separated, our heads were an inch away, I felt his warm breath on my lips. The air felt charged in the small space between us. He leaned closer, slowly, and kissed me. Hesitantly, at first, his soft lips moving over mine. It was all I needed then.
I sat on the bed inside the dark motel room in Grand Forks, where SRI had put us up for a couple days—conveni
ently located near an Air Force base. It was pretty posh there, and Cord and I called it “sucker money,” intended to keep us all from suing.
When we landed, I talked with Katerina, too, and got a glimpse of what she went through, how she switched sides.
In the motel lobby, I had hugged her tight and hoped she would be treated right for doing the right thing, for making such a huge sacrifice for all of us, and for America.
In my room, I twisted the paper with Cord’s address into my pocket before picking up the phone and calling myself a taxi. After I hung up, I paused with the receiver in my hand, gazing at the numbers on the rotary dial. Mom asked me to call.
After a few rings, Margie answered over the commotion of the lunchtime rush at the diner. When she heard my voice, she immediately called for Mom.
“Dear God, Charlotte,” Mom said when she took the phone. I imagined her standing near the cash register, a hand on her thick waist. That deep line folding between her brown eyebrows.
“Hey, Mom.” I held my breath through an awkward pause.
“I know all about this business you were tangled up in. It’s time to come home.” It wasn’t a question. It was an order.
“Did you get the money I sent?” I gazed at my sneakers.
“Yeah.”
My throat felt tight. I heard Dad’s booming voice in the background, yelling something about a broken dish.
“Can I talk to Dad?” Glutton for punishment.
She paused. “He’s still angry with you.”
At me? “Oh. How about Cindy?”
She sighed loudly. “Hang on.”
A second later my sister picked up. Maybe she’d be relieved to hear my voice.
“Hey,” she said. Angsty teen Cindy.
I bit my lip. “How are you?”
Extraordinary Lies Page 30
