by Gennita Low
“Ah, fuck! My foot! Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
The voice grew less distinctive, but it wasn’t too hard to guess that each staccato-like enunciation was the same cuss word over and over.
“I’m seeing it through your eyes now,” Hades said. “Total darkness. It’s cramped.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” she said, dryly. “I feel heavy. Like, if I were here in person, things would be on top of me. Maybe I’m buried.”
“Do you think you’re in a coffin?”
Oh, shit. She hadn’t thought of that. Ugh. Coffin equals dead body. On top of her. Her mental self recoiled as if snake-bit. She started gagging. She thought of the confined space holding her prisoner. No air. Immediately she started hyperventilating. Her hands automatically reached out to claw at her containment, but there was nothing there. She began to choke, flailing around.
“Elena! Calm down.” He gave the order tersely, anticipating her panic, speaking with a measured steeliness, as if he could impose calm into her by sheer force of will.
But it was difficult to concentrate when one was fighting for one’s life. Helen could feel her rising panic stifling the reasonable voice in her head. She was buried and her mind was telling—ordering—her to get out of there. Now.
He continued calmly. Firmly. “Remember what you told me. It’s like the illusion of drowning when you’re underwater. Your mind thinks you can’t breathe because it seems so real, but it’s an illusion. You aren’t there. You’re here, with me, in my arms. Think of me, Elena, not in that coffin, but with me, in our VR space. You’re holding your breath here, and you need to take in air now. Now, Elena.”
Helen squeezed her eyes closed, paying attention to his voice even as fear threatened to overpower her. She wasn’t buried. Deep breath. She concentrated on Hades but couldn’t call his face up. The enveloping darkness seemed to have taken away all her senses.
“No, I’m still here. I’m seeing the same darkness too. Your fear is so real to you, you’ve projected it into our VR space. I’m actually seeing your remote-viewing target in virtual reality, Elena. Take another breath.” There was a pause and she could feel his curiosity of what was happening at his end. The cool remoteness that was so uniquely Jed seeped through her fear.
Jed. Not Hades and that sinfully sexy body she’d designed. What Helen needed now was the man behind the program, Jed McNeil himself. The man with that calmness that took in every emergency and deflected them like a shield. She mentally reached for that iron stillness and wrapped it around her. The sense of safety enveloping her was immediate and exactly what she needed. And behind that watchfulness, she felt his concern and his preparation to end the session.
“No,” Helen said, taking several breaths. “Don’t activate the trigger, Jed. I’m okay. Just give me a few moments. I need to really concentrate on that voice up there, that’s all.”
“Maybe he’s trying to open this coffin you’re in. There’s a reason why you remote viewed here, Elena.”
Helen jerked. Of course. “Hades, they’re tracking the same list we have from a few months back. This is the location of the first weapon there, the most recent one. The explosive trigger or whatchamacallit,” she breathed. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. They didn’t bury the weapons…you told me the CIA airdropped them, right? In crates. Crates that were marked as U.N. aid. I’m in a crate.”
That explained why she felt that she couldn’t stand up or move around. And the sensation of things piled up. She was under a cache of weapons. No dead body. She breathed out a sigh of relief. Somehow a crate was so much easier to deal with than a coffin.
“A crate can be a coffin.”
“Oh stop being so darn matter-of-fact,” she snarled, embarrassed now that she wasn’t that afraid any more. She didn’t like the idea of him knowing that she had given in to fear. “I panicked, so I’m sorry about that. It won’t happen again.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about. Normal reaction, Elena. It’s my job to anchor you, remember? Now you have a job to do.”
She scowled. He was a manipulative bastard, getting her defensive to distract her and succeeding with just that snotty tone. She turned her attention back to the voice outside the crate, grounding herself.
“Yes, I feel that we are exactly where one of the weapons is,” she said. “It’s in this crate. Someone outside is pushing on it very hard. It’s someone speaking English and because he’s cussing like a pro, I’m guessing he isn’t Macedonian. Or we aren’t in Macedonia. Can’t verify, Hades. I can’t go through the crate and not change the universal agreement. If I do, we lose trail of all the other weapons those guys were trying to locate through their remote viewer.”
Location was so hard to pinpoint. In the first experiments, her monitor, who usually knew the universal agreement, guided her “tours”, making her describe the target area in detail. She never knew the location till she was back from the ether. They’d hand her the envelope that had the universal agreement written inside and then they’d wait for the “outbounder”, the person outside the loop, to call back to verify and confirm what she saw. As she advanced, she learned that the universal agreement was just that—there really wasn’t any need for an envelope containing coordinates or names—and just focusing on one would get her to the agreed target. When she finally became the lone viewer left in the supersoldier-spy program, they’d tested her with further targets, some top secret, that couldn’t be verified except by satellite photos.
All those earlier assignments seemed so easy compared to what she and Hades must now accomplish. Her monitor was as blind as she was, and without an outbounder, she had to depend on his experience to find a way to verify. It was hard, very hard. But she sat there in the dark, biting her tongue, ignoring the impulse to escape the feeling of confinement, and waited for further instructions.
“Is that man on the outside still shouting and trying to move the crate? Is he really trying to open it?” Hades asked.
Helen tried to gauge the different muffled sounds. “He did turn the crate over before he started cursing non-stop. He sounds a bit calmer, actually. I’d guess he’s talking to someone but I can’t hear any other voices.” She paused as her surroundings started shaking, and like earlier before, her head began to spin dizzily, reacting to the sensation of freefalling upside down in total darkness. She fiercely reminded herself that the sensation wasn’t real, shaking off the urge to escape outside.
Following instinct, she pushed her senses outward, reaching for God knew what. Ever since she was a kid, there was a part of her who could “sense” things, a part inside her that somehow manifested itself into a voice that would warn her if she was near danger. She had long ago stopped questioning the feeling, trusting the voice when it ordered her to move out of the way, or to run the other way, or to pay attention to what appeared to be harmless. It was just a voice in her head, nothing more, until now. She’d never consciously tried to exert the sense before, didn’t even know she could do it.
Then, without warning, something inside burst out and there was a loud popping, like air pressure in one’s ears when a plane took off. It happened so suddenly that she couldn’t think of anything for a minute. It was no longer dark, yet she knew she wasn’t outside the crate. She didn’t know what had just happened, but she could feel what she couldn’t see, the outside of the crate. She let out a long breath of awe. “Hades—”
“Shhh. I’m feeling it. Whatever it is, I’m feeling it.” And there was wonder in his voice. He paused, and she could feel his curiosity and his will combating it. “Later. We’ll talk about this after the session. I don’t know if you realize that you’re not wholly in the crate right now, Elena.”
Duh. Since she was the one here in the ether, shouldn’t it be her explaining the phenomena?
“Care to explain where I am then, Mr. Know-it-all?” she asked, and refused to admit that she was doing so because she wasn’t truly sure herself, even though she suspected the answer. “What
did you see from your end?”
“I felt you trying very hard to stay inside the crate. Usually, when you reach a target, you’re free to move out and about, to explore for details, but to do so now would break the universal agreement because those men were after more than one weapon. There was a floating sensation that expanded and then you moved forward—or I felt you move forward because it was dark and I was about to say the trigger code to get you back into the race car—but you were too fast and then suddenly, you stopped. You stopped just before you were out there, Elena. You’re actually, for lack of a better explanation, stuck in one side of the crate.”
Helen reached up and patted her face. She felt about the same. His explanation sounded so ridiculous she couldn’t help saying something ridiculous back. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you string so many sentences together. You should talk to crates more often.”
His quiet chuckle made her laugh out loud. It was, she knew, a sort of hysterical reaction to this new sensation, of being and not-quite being. When she’d gone through “solid” things before—doors, walls, even steel—she hadn’t stopped in the middle of the “thought”. Those acts were done without the thought of ever being “stuck” inside because it’d been instilled in her during training that she, her physical body, wasn’t in the ether. It was her projection of what she was “seeing”, a way her brain was trying to understand the experience. She’d accepted the explanation. But now, she wondered whether there was actually more to the “phantom body” being her brain’s projection. Because she could actually feel her crateness, the flatness of the surface, the dimension. She could—
“Hades? I sense the writing on my…the crate’s sides.” She concentrated on reading the strange letters, taking a few seconds before realizing that it was Cyrillic. It was awkward, as if she were reading something written on a tee shirt she was wearing, that was how real it felt to being part of that crate. She said each letter out loud, trying to make sense from her angle.
“Serbian and Croatian. Food Aid,” Hades translated for her. “This is what Hawk’s looking for. One down. You ready to leave?”
Best words she’d heard all trip. “Yeah. We have to hurry. Whoever is out there has found something to pry the crate open. If I tumbled out, that’s the end of our little trip.”
“Checkered flag, Elena. Go back to the race car and continue to the next weapon those CIA agents were after.”
Helen saw the checkered flag the moment he mentioned it. It served as her guide post, the mental trigger a monitor assigned to his remote viewer to get her back to her physical self. Without it, a novice remote viewer could easily get confused or lost in the ether. She moved toward it and there was a sucking sound, like she was a suction cup stuck to a surface. She felt slightly giddy, her mind still reeling at the realization of what she’d just done, as she felt herself departing the location. She stumbled in the direction of her waiting car, still feeling the pull of the crammed space behind her.
A soft, thready moan. A creak. “Cam…Cameron?”
Helen froze at the whisper, her hand on the car door. There was so much fear in that voice. That kind of total darkness could drive a person mad.
“Get in and go, Elena. Checkered flag.” His order was quiet but firm.
“Did you hear that? There’s someone in that crate,” Helen breathed. “A woman.”
“And someone’s trying to open it. He’ll help her. Get inside the car, Elena. You can’t do anything. Checkered flag.”
Helen reluctantly obeyed. Who was in there? How did she get in a CIA-dropped crate? She gave a sigh as she started the car up and put it into gear. She hated leaving unsolved mysteries just when they got interesting.
Chapter Fourteen
Time to bring her back. Jed readjusted the controls. It’d taken longer than he’d thought. Those CIA bastards were really pushing their remote viewer, giving him such a broad universal agreement. Following it had taken Helen and him, as the passenger, on the trail of more weapons than he’d anticipated. He had better get more vigilant in his care of his remote viewer, or she might suffer whatever was hurting that other one at Stratter’s.
He opened his eyes, making a quick check on her vitals. Although she hadn’t mentioned it, she was getting tired. The mind could only take in so much and Elena’s had been absorbing a lot. He did a mental countdown of all the extraordinary experiences. Some form of psychic attack. “Borrowing” some other universal agreement and basically getting a free ride. That strange experience in the crate, whatever that was. He had no words for it right now and hadn’t had the time to mull over it. Elena needed his fullest attention as she wasn’t done with her joyride yet. Then the unexpected mother lode of them all—the discovery of some of the other missing weapons on the list.
The CIA moles were definitely trying to recuperate their losses from the last few months. They must be desperate. Usually, when the top-ranked moles were exposed and the fallout was still happening, many of them would lay low, waiting for the next lull in carelessness. There must be something very important, some projected plan that must be done at a certain timetable, for them to risk their being found out. Desperation often led to desperate acts.
Excitement and triumph pushed at his concentration, the need to dissect and analyze contesting the need to focus on the job at hand. Closing his eyes, Jed willed himself to “listen” in on Elena’s feelings and impressions. Their connection was still strong, but exhaustion could play a part in breaking that. He could feel the mental stress like a buzzing distress signal between them. One mistake, loss of concentration, and they’d no longer be in sync and she’d be out there alone. He wasn’t going to let that happen.
His job was to keep her alert, to reassure her, and to engage her sexual interest so they didn’t lose their mental connection. Sharing pleasure with a woman like Elena was easy. She was responsive and seductive at the same time, and their minds opened to each other in recognition of their natural attraction.
Therein lay the danger. Because of what happened earlier—in that dark space, when she’d thought she was running out of air—she’d shared her fear with him and he’d almost forgotten his role. He’d wanted to reach out to protect her instead of calm her down with words. In the darkness, so merged with her mind and her fear, he’d momentarily fallen into the trap that he was there with her and could physically help her. That couldn’t happen again, he told himself. He must remember that he had to take her out of any danger with words, not with action, when it came to remote viewing.
He turned up the volume of the brain entrainment machine, the biofeedback sounding loud and echoey. With her gone into altered state for so long, he wanted to be very sure that he brought her out of it slowly. The mental image from Stratter’s, of that man curled up and obviously in pain, bothered him more than he cared to admit. He didn’t ever want to see Elena like that.
“Checkered flag, Elena,” he said, fascinated, as always, at how her whole body reacted to the mental trigger. Over here, in his arms, he could feel her physically tensing; in his mind, he felt the swirl of jumbled thoughts, some of which he caught, most of which scattered like so much dust. There was a part of her that fought his order, a reflex, he suspected, that was uniquely her. Relatively speaking, from experience, this type of mental trigger was very mild in comparison with others he’d witnessed. That was why he’d resisted being her trainer at first. He knew he’d have to do more. There was an independent streak in her, as well as her having been trained in NOPAIN, that would take more than a mental trigger to manage.
He smiled ruefully. Not that he’d resisted being her trainer that hard. He hadn’t figured out exactly why or what yet, but something about Elena Rostov made it more than the usual challenge for him. Her resistance was to be expected. It was his own response that surprised him.
“Hades, can you see them?”
He blinked away his thoughts. “See what?”
“The colors. They’re so beautiful. Can’t you
see them? I don’t even have names for some of the shades.”
He frowned. He couldn’t see any colors. She’d mentioned something similar before. Moving from bilocation back to the self felt like a rapid descent from a great height to him, nothing more. There were streaks of light here and there and if he concentrated too hard, it made him slightly dizzy because of the loss of sense of direction.
“No, I can’t see anything.”
“They call out to me, Hades. They make me want to stay and explore.”
A dreamy sensation invaded Jed’s senses. Not his. He didn’t like it at all.
“Elena, checkered flag,” he said, firmly. He caught her reluctance, a pulling away from him. She should be seeing the checkered flag in her vehicle and following it back to him. But what if she wasn’t looking? What if she was too busy looking at those damn colors?
“Elena? What are you feeling?”
“Like a sunset. The colors are just gorgeous and I’m in the middle of the magic!”
He didn’t feel good about this at all. She was definitely pulling away. He could feel it. Quickly, he opened his eyes and deliberately changed the virtual reality scenario. Something shocking to her system. Something to outrage her. Something to get her connected back to him. He was glad now that he had other ways to achieve this besides a stupid and inefficient mental trigger.
Sunset, she said. He’d better hope that their sexual attraction for each other would rival a magical sunset.
He pressed the controls, readjusting temperature and scenery. Unlike her one program of him as the blond and naked Hades, he’d a lot more freedom on his side. His virtual Elena could wear many different costumes. Or go naked, just as she’d made him. He’d created the programs mostly for himself since the idea of the virtual Hades was to give Elena a measure of control, but he’d discovered that snatching back that control when she least expected it—like when he showed her his fantasy of her wearing that gaudy piece with the tassels during the beginning phase of their session—caused the kind of outrage that got her attention solely back on him. And her response always made him push her a little further, which also completed the circle, requiring him to give his full attention in pleasuring her.
