The axis legacy, p.18
The Axis Legacy, page 18
When she woke, she didn't remember much, only that she had once again seen Emmaline. Though this hadn’t been a visit to the little house in the woods. Not like when she saw Emmaline and she had believed that she was actually there with her sister. This was just a dream memory.
But once again Emmaline had carefully told her, “It’s all connected.”
Unable to roll over and go back to sleep, Eleri showered and got dressed, brushed her teeth and combed her hair, and managed to walk into the central area of the suite only to find Donovan sitting at the table. The look on his face was concerning. “What?”
“Have you read the emails yet?”
Her eyes went wide. He had to be talking about the emails they’d decided to ignore last night. He was sitting there at his laptop clearly sifting through something.
Eleri shook her head, though it had to be pretty clear from her reaction—and his—that she hadn't. And that she needed to.
“They traced some of the adoptees from the Weatherby agency.”
“Okayyyyy . . .” She drew the word out, waiting for him to say more. Because that, in and of itself, shouldn't have put that expression on his face.
But then he turned his laptop around to show her and she understood.
43
Donovan couldn't even process his surprise. There were a number of names on the list that he didn't recognize, but the fact that there were names that he did know made it all the worse.
“Christina?” Eleri asked, almost incredulous. She took a few steps as if walking would make the pieces fit. “Christina was adopted?”
“Yes, but this isn’t just a list of people who were adopted. It’s people who were adopted through the Weatherby Agency,” Donovan said, feeling his stomach roil.
He knew that Eleri was reacting the same as he had, her thoughts tumbling as she tried to find a workaround for why this couldn’t be true.
“Christina is on the list the analysts put together of people who were adopted out as children from the Weatherby agency.”
“It was only open for just over a decade. It didn’t occur to me that we would know people who’d been there.” She looked out the window for a moment, her gaze not focusing as she muttered, “small world.”
Donovan didn’t think that was it. “Well, that’s because there are two other Weatherby agencies. Christina’s adoption wasn’t in Corcoran. The analysts found another agency in Kentucky—”
“Why does that last name look familiar?” Eleri had leaned forward, sharpening her gaze and her brain and was reading the list off his laptop.
“Because that's Noah’s father,” Donovan said.
“Noah?” She pulled out the hard chair at the little table and plopped unceremoniously down into it. The expression on her face showed that she didn't care what her body did, she just needed to let her brain turn it over for a moment.
However, Donovan had a while with the material before she came out and he was a few steps ahead of her. “We can tell Noah what we learned.”
He tossed it out like a gambit, to see how she would respond.
She didn’t move, her thoughts taking over the whole of her being.
“And Christina.”
“We can't until she checks in,” Eleri pointed out the obvious, showing she was still listening.
“You’re right. If we write back to the email she sent, it will probably compromise her.”
“I guess there's no need to tell her now. Not right now,” Eleri said. “She's either known already or hasn't for the whole of her life. A couple of weeks isn't going to make a difference.”
Donovan liked that Eleri simply assumed Christina would be back in touch within a couple of weeks. That this would all just blow over. He wasn't sure he assumed the same.
“But with Noah . . . it was his parents who came from the Weatherby Agency?” She jumped back in, still trying to put the pieces into their right places. Donovan wasn’t sure there were right places for this kind of shit information.
“Let's ignore that we know some of these people right now.” It was a decision he’d come to while she showered. What would be the best way to break it to them? Should he and Eleri even be the ones to do so? He didn’t think he was really qualified to give that kind of news. In the past he’d answered juries when directly asked about an autopsy, but the person it pertained to was long since dead in those cases. He didn’t have the training to handle the living.
Maybe there was a staff psychologist available. Maybe there was someone—anyone better—and that would mean Donovan wouldn't need to tell his friends these things. So, like Eleri, he voted to simply postpone it.
“Let’s keep our gaze on the case and the bigger picture. These kids coming through the Weatherby Agency seemed to have particular powers—”
“But did they all?” Eleri asked.
“I don't know the answer to that yet. The analysts didn’t include talents, just names.”
He watched as Eleri’s eyebrows popped up, telling him what she thought of the analysts knowing about talents and the people in the NightShade division. “Maybe it wasn’t all of them. Only some of them seem to be enough trouble to get dispatched.”
A fact which Donovan was still assuming on some level had to be Langdon Carpenter, though that assumption was cobbled from pure fog. He had nothing to support it except his gut feeling and the knowledge that the man was a complete piece of shit.
He tried to stay focused like he’d told Eleri to do. “Look at this.”
He pointed to his laptop again. There were pages and pages of material—dossiers, dockets, and records the analysts had sent. It had taken him quite a while to scroll through them all, and he hadn’t gotten to do more than just scan them for the most important information, though the analyst’s write up in the beginning had been stunning enough to stop him dead for a while.
“Look at this occupation.” Donovan pulled up a file he’d flagged and tapped the back of his pen at the screen, probably a bad habit. After she looked at it, he scrolled to another, pointed at that occupation and another, and another.
“I don't understand. The occupations are interesting, but . . . I’m missing the pattern.”
“Did you see the corporation names?” he asked.
“Go back,” Eleri told him. When he did, she caught on. “We know this one. It's a shell for Miranda Industries.”
“Exactly. And there's another person from the list working at that same shell company. And there's another one over here.” Donovan scrolled and scrolled and scrolled again until he found it. “Here’s another similar job at a company I didn’t recognize, so I checked out the corporate documentation.” He pulled it up and showed her.
“Shit,” Eleri said. “Another Miranda shell.”
“Exactly. And that’s just the ones I found before you came out of the shower.”
“You think more of the companies these people work for will turn out to be Miranda covers?”
“I do,” he answered. Then he explained. “There are three NightShade agents on the list.” The third had been someone he didn’t know. “What are the odds of that being random?” He didn’t let her answer. “So yeah, I think there are a lot more Miranda Industries shells here.”
“Do you think Miranda is directly recruiting these people?” Eleri began pacing again, maybe trying to do one normal thing in the chaos of the information.
“I don't know if they're actively looking to recruit them or if they're coming across these people in interviews and finding that they're a really good fit.” He paused. Eleri hadn’t asked the question that he had been waiting on.
Her eyes darted to the window and back, she stopped her odd walk and turned to face him. She asked it. “Do you think Westerfield is recruiting from this pool?”
“I think it's got about the same probability as Miranda.”
44
Both their phones rang simultaneously, and Eleri was hard pressed to hide her sigh of irritation.
It seemed to be their usual, though unplanned, reaction for Eleri and Donovan to first look to each other before flipping their phones over. She felt her own relief and saw his as she spotted GJ’s name and not Westerfield’s.
How would she have a conversation with her boss, given her new suspicions? She hadn't even decided yet if it was a good or bad thing if Westerfield recruited agents who had specific abilities. If he knew of an available pool of people with the talents he needed, why would he not recruit from there? There didn't have to be anything nefarious about it.
Which was exactly the problem with everything about SAC Westerfield. There was never a necessity of any kind of malfeasance. But nothing added up to look very good in the end.
Donovan was already hitting the button on his phone. So she let him. He put it on the table between them, speakerphone on, and Eleri immediately said, “Hello!”
Walter called back and Eleri was glad to hear her happy voice, glad that Christina wasn't with them, that she wasn't speaking to someone that she held a secret from.
“So, Christina messaged us—” Walter started.
“Oh, us, too,” Donovan said.
Interesting. She'd sent individual emails, maybe hoping to keep them more under the radar. But they weren’t the only ones Christina had contacted. She was smartly building a web of people who would maybe be able to triangulate their information if she did truly go missing.
Walter continued, “And she also reached out to Jen.”
“Jen Crunk?” Eleri processed the name. Walter had to mean the researcher at the de Gottardi/Little farm. It made sense for Christina to reach out to the woman who was putting all the pieces together.
“Yep. And she and Jen managed to send an encrypted file. So, Jen has a copy of what Christina found.”
“That’s wonderful.” Then Eleri paused. “Have you seen it?”
“Yes.”
Huh. That was more than what Donovan had been sent.
“How many more pieces are they missing now?” Eleri wondered out loud.
GJ popped into the conversation then. “It’s hard to tell. We don’t have everything, which we know because there are still torn edges. We have one end piece and no idea how many pieces go in between it and the other end.”
“Are they having any luck deciphering it?” Donovan threw in. They were all anxious for more information. If Miranda Industries and Alesse Dauphine wanted it, then the safest bet was to keep it out of their hands.
“Well that's why we called . . .” GJ said. “This new piece clearly matches the edge of another piece. But on this piece, the writing changes.”
“What?” Eleri asked before thinking. From what she'd seen it looked like it was a continuous piece. So how would the writing change?
GJ was already answering. “The writing is the same—it’s the same language, Sumerian, copied onto the parchment. So the spell is likely older than the paper. But this writing is in a different hand.”
Eleri stopped moving as the information hit her. She blinked a few times. How had she not considered that? The ancient Sumerians or anyone who wrote on their stone tablets didn't only have a different language, they likely all had different handwriting. There was no reason that they would all have the same handwriting. It just wasn’t something she'd ever considered the possibility of before.
“There's more than one author on this piece?” she asked.
“It looks like it. And now that we can see where the change is, there’s even a slight difference in ink. Assumably, the writing occurred at a different time, by a different person. It may even be a different formula for the ink.” GJ’s voice held a shrug, but she’d considered far more than Eleri had. “We can now guess that the end piece that we have looks like it might even be by a third author. The writing there is more similar to the first writing, but there are some little details that we notice now that we are thinking about multiple authors.”
“What details?” Donovan just seemed curious, and Eleri wanted to know too.
“The way the pen picks up at the end of a letter. The width or pressure applied to the page. Sometimes a slant to the writing. That kind of thing. That’s what makes Jen think it's not the same hand.” GJ paused and when no more questions came, she played a higher card. “It looks now even more like it's a spell to let magic loose.”
“Magic?” Eleri said before she thought about it. They’d had this conversation last time. It wasn’t the best word, but she had no idea what language they were translating from.
“Well, whatever that shit you do is,” GJ chuckled.
Walter added into the conversation, “I'm sure it's science now. But back then, it would have seemed like pure magic.”
“A lot of it still does even now,” GJ commented, and Eleri felt that comment was directed at her.
She couldn't explain the science behind what she did, though. Some of it made sense, but a good portion of it just seemed to be things that she knew. There were things that Grandmére told her would work, and they did. There was data Eleri could collect—if she did a certain spell, she got a certain result even if she didn’t know quite how it worked.
Whatever was happening, it was constant and consistent, but she had no scientific explanation of it. She was still at the level of some of the Ancients, throwing virgin sacrifices into active volcanoes in the hopes of appeasing the weather gods.
“It also looks now like the spell isn’t really to release the . . . skills—” GJ stumbled over the words. She was clearly trying to not say magic, “—into the world. But more like they were trying to open it onto the people present.”
“People present?” Donovan asked. Eleri could see he didn’t understand, and she could use a little more too.
“It’s not a worldwide spell like we thought. It won’t alter the whole world. It alters the people involved in the spell. They just wanted to bring it to the whole world. Also, it looks now like it says Children maybe generations.” There was an uplift, a question, at the end of GJs words.
Magical families, Eleri thought, like her own. Grandmére, Grandmére’s daughter, the first Emmaline—who had also disappeared so long ago—her grandmother. Then Nathalie, then herself and her sister. Because even if her mother didn't practice the craft, it was still there. Whatever she possessed had shown up strong in her daughters. And she had certainly been able to see the damage to Emmaline’s grave, though none of it was physical.
Now, Eleri looked over at Donovan, and she could see from his face that he, too, was checking his generational family history. His father was like him. His mother was not, but his brother was. Donovan didn't know how far back his family went, only what he could tell from his own skin tone, facial shape, hair color, and so on.
Eleri had often wondered if it would be worth doing a standard genetic test on him. But none of the wolves would put their DNA into the common pot. Lord knew, they would get linked and a registry of who and what they were could far too easily be made.
No, Eleri thought. The world had had registries of certain kinds of people before. Never again.
“Now here's where it gets really interesting . . .” GJ told them.
45
“I was still working the documents that you gave me from the Huron-Manistee buildings,” GJ started in.
Eleri nodded at the phone, not remembering that she was supposed to speak. That said a lot for her state of mind. Luckily, Donovan answered for them. “Right. You were trying to decode them.”
“And that's the problem,” GJ said, excitement coming through the line in her tone. “It's not code. It's language.”
“What's the difference?” Donovan asked, once again speaking what they both wanted to say.
“Code isn't language. Code is a way of transferring language in a way that hopefully no one else understands. No one speaks code.”
That made sense.
GJ went on, “Code is supposed to be hidden. Language is not. Code is a manufactured translation of a language that’s usually organic in origin. Also, the vast majority of our written languages are captured versions of our temporally challenged spoken languages. They're a way of recording words and ideas that are otherwise fleeting and transferable only to those present at the time who speak that language. Usually, traditions—and maybe spells?—have already been passed orally. And the oral language is usually in existence long before the written.”
“But we thought this was code . . .” Eleri prompted.
“Well, yeah. And part of it is code. That part looks like the same coding that we cracked from the last time we dealt with that experiment, and the documents the doctors left behind.”
Eleri shuddered. Donovan was a doctor. He may not do the kinds of things that she typically considered a doctor to do, but what those researchers had done in Huron-Manistee, and then later in Texas, had not been anything in the basis of human medicine.
“So how did you know it’s language then?” Eleri asked, surprised that Donovan hadn't usurped her question again.
“Because I saw what Jen sent. The translations and the parchments.”
Eleri had still been slouched in her chair, but now she sat upright as she realized what GJ was really saying. Her hands gripped the edge of the table as she leaned in and asked, “It's the same?”
That had to be the reason.
“It's the same,” Walter’s voice came in again. Even she was excited about the development. She'd held back and let GJ explain the science—GJ was the code cracker—but the excitement was universal.
“So that coding or language that was in the journals, it matches what's on the parchment? It's the same language?” Eleri asked again, slowly, just to be sure she had it right.
“Oh, it gets even better.” Walter was grinning. “You don't even have to be a code cracker to see it. There are portions in the notes that look like they just copied it. Word for word.”
“They were copies of what’s on the parchments?” Eleri couldn’t keep her mouth shut. Even Donovan was leaning in. They were going to bonk heads if they weren’t careful.
