Final shadows, p.7
Final Shadows, page 7
Annabel considered that. Warm and comfortable in her bed, where nothing had ever hurt or scared her. She lay there and gently stroked soft black fur, and thought for a while.
This time, I didn’t wake up because I was afraid.
I know.
I woke because I was sad.
Yes.
Why did someone want to hurt them like that? The babies?
There are bad people in the world, Annabel. You know that better than most.
I know. But the babies weren’t big enough to cause trouble for anybody, were they? They didn’t have chores they didn’t do right, or talk back, or eat too much. There was no reason even for a mean person to hurt them like that.
You don’t worry about that now. You need to sleep. You need to rest, Annabel. To grow stronger. To not be cold or hungry or afraid anymore, because you’re safe now. Safe with them. And you always will be. That’s important. For both of us.
She trusted him implicitly, because he had saved her. He had brought her here, where she was safe and warm and maybe even loved.
Smiling, Annabel snuggled a bit deeper into her soft bed, and felt Pendragon snuggle with her.
* * *
• • •
Murphy, seemingly unaware of having dealt quite such an unwelcome shock, was going on calmly, “But that plan was derailed too, wasn’t it? Only this time it wasn’t because Wolfe made a mistake. This time it was us. This time it was Brodie. And it was no mistake. Once Tasha met Brodie, once he pulled her out of that little maze test of yours, a connection formed between them. They began to bond.”
They had not really talked much about Duran’s “maze test,” he and Murphy. All she knew—all he thought she knew—was that it was a test, a kind of artificial psychic construct placed temporarily in the mind of a psychic or someone he or she was reading, planted deep below the subconscious. To the psychic, it looked and felt like a maze, a dark and confusing one. The larger the maze, the more “connections” the psychic had made with others through their abilities.
Tasha Solomon’s maze had been, according to Astrid, the psychic Duran often used, huge. Which indicated extraordinarily powerful psychic abilities and possibly offered some indication of how many minds she had touched with those abilities.
Duran didn’t know if Murphy knew that. He believed she knew only that the construct was a fairly benign test to find out if a psychic could be brought willingly over to Duran’s side. At least from him that’s all she knew. He had no idea what Tasha Solomon might have told her.
“We’ve already discussed that as well,” Duran said mildly.
“Yeah, we have. And we both know that the maze is only one of your little tests. That you and your people are constantly devising new ways of testing the limits of psychic abilities. And trying to match psychics at more than the physical level, so they may be closer to forming a connection to each other. That you’re, perhaps, even curious to find out if psychics on your side can form a permanent, unbreakable bond with another. I’m curious, Duran. Have you tried your little maze test with them? With psychics who’ve been on your side for a while—willingly or somehow forced to be?”
He didn’t allow her scorn to disturb him. Much. “And why would I do that, Murphy?”
“Well, the more highly developed psychics on our side, whether born or triggered, seem to form those deep and permanent bonds with someone else more quickly when they’re tested in some way. Faced with unexpected and unusual external—and internal—pressures. This whole war of ours tests them, of course. And some have responded to those external forces by bonding with a partner. But at least with Tasha Solomon and Brodie, it seemed to happen more quickly in that maze of yours.”
“That was unusual,” he said immediately.
Murphy smiled. “Was it? Yeah, maybe. You dropped her into that maze so quickly after we’d made contact. I told you that. I told you it was too soon to test her when it was still so new to her, when she was spooked and unsettled.
“But maybe I was wrong about that. So hard to find absolutes in this world of ours, isn’t it? I mean, Brodie wasn’t even psychic. Never read as psychic. Not even a latent. And yet . . . something happened between him and Tasha at their very first meeting. Maybe it wouldn’t have without the maze. Maybe. But . . . a connection was made. An unexpected bond formed between two people.”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“Well, given that, and given the experience Tasha described, your maze seems at least a possible way of deliberately forming a connection between two psychics. What we’ve been talking about. Those very special bonds that seem to bump those two psychics right off the top of your Most Wanted list.”
“I never said that.”
“You didn’t have to. We’ve found lots of psychics over the years, especially the last ten or so. Even bonded psychics. We hid them, or told them what to do to protect themselves. And, of course, we’ve kept in touch, made sure they remained all right. So we have a lot more data.
“And we have some very bright people to really study that data. Like Tucker Mackenzie. Someone who shares that very special bond with his very psychic wife. He was curious. And, of course, concerned for her safety. Even though they’ve taken all possible precautions, just as others who go public have done. You know all about those.”
Duran inclined his head slightly.
“But I was wondering something else. I mean, you used Astrid with Tasha. You use her a lot in your maze tests. With male and female psychics. And she hasn’t connected with any of them, has she? Never formed a lasting bond. Nothing more permanent than a few scatterings of . . . bread crumbs.”
Duran was silent.
Murphy eyed him for a moment, then smiled again. “You’ve already tested your psychics. All of them, Astrid included. How many times do you send them down into that maze before admitting defeat?”
“You’re so sure the attempts fail?”
“Why, yes. I am sure. Because you still have no pair of bonded psychics.”
“Perhaps Tasha Solomon and Brodie are simply unique.”
“Oh, I believe they are. Though not quite in the same way I think you’d like to believe they are. And I also believe you’ve left no stone unturned in your quest to create bonded psychics on your side. Recently, at any rate.”
“It was not an original goal,” Duran said finally. He wondered if she kept circling back to that because it was more important even than he had realized—or because she wanted him to believe it was more important.
Either was possible with Murphy.
“Another unintended consequence, I would say. I doubt you had any idea that by tracking down psychics, driving so many out of hiding so they instinctively reached out to others of our kind for help and support, your own plan caused them to often make connections with each other. Connections, bonds, that your psychics simply can’t forge. Even in your maze.”
For the first time, Duran wondered if it had, indeed, been the fault of his people, the fault of their plan, that at least a handful of psychics, driven out of hiding or otherwise forced to reach out to others, had discovered a seemingly foolproof way to put themselves beyond their reach. And if that were so . . . then the longer this went on, the more psychics on Murphy’s side might pair, might bond—and become far stronger together than they could ever have been separately.
If it was even possible that his maze test aided them in that, even some of them, even just Tasha Solomon and Brodie . . .
He made a mental note to tell Astrid and the others to discontinue the maze tests immediately.
Murphy laughed softly. “Unintended consequences. There are more than . . . just a handful . . . of bonded psychics on our side, Duran. Quite a lot more.”
Duran knew she couldn’t read him. He knew that. But, somehow, Murphy found a way to drag his thoughts out of hiding, even while standing in the darkness. And that was a very disconcerting realization.
She was smiling. “The human will to live, to survive, is a remarkable thing, Duran. We don’t like feeling trapped. We don’t like feeling hunted. It drives us, quite often, to band together. To pool our resources. Marshal our strengths, our defenses. It drives us to achieve things we never would have believed possible.”
“It’s an admirable characteristic,” he said finally.
“But frustrating for you.”
“Perhaps.”
“Oh, I imagine it is. And more. Our will to fight for our freedom is just as strong. Which is why your torture techniques have met with so little success.”
She said it so calmly that for an instant Duran missed the import of just what she had said. Of course they know we’ve been taking psychics alive even when bodies are left behind to be falsely identified; they knew that, she knew that, long ago. But if they know what happens to some of them then, if they have even an idea . . .
Did they know how many had been lost?
Did they know how few of those unwillingly brought over to his side even survived?
SIX
In the same calm, almost offhand tone, she said, “Have your tamed and traitor psychics told you, Duran? Have they told you that the ones you take and torture, the terrified ones, cry out to us? When they’re being examined? When they’re being hurt in ways no living being should ever be hurt? That they’re able to reach us, reach our strongest psychics and sometimes even our weaker ones for quite some time? That we hear their screams? That some of us even feel their pain?”
He waited, silent.
“I imagine not. I imagine your tamed and traitor psychics, like Astrid, would really prefer that you not know how your captured and tortured psychics cry out for our help. How so many of them have even reached beyond those of us who knew about them to touch other minds and beg them for help as well. To draw even more allies to our cause. And in calling out, to us and to others, how much information they’ve managed to send us.”
“You would have moved against us,” he said, almost automatically.
“Duran. We have been moving against you. It may have taken us a few years to recognize the threat, to play catch-up, but once we know what we’re up against, we make our plans. And execute them. We get busy protecting our people, and our freedoms. Forge new alliances. Gather all our resources and find new assets. And we make our own long-range plans. We step back and take a good, long look at the Big Picture.”
“And what do you see?” He had to ask.
“What’s there. Why do you think I agreed to this little pseudo-truce with you?”
“Because we have a common enemy,” he said.
“Do we? Well, once upon a time, I thought you might be right about that common enemy. That was reason enough, I believed, to work under a flag of truce from time to time. To exchange information—even though I knew most of that information would always tip to your advantage rather than mine.”
“Murphy—”
“Now I’m not so sure about that common enemy. See, I’m beginning to believe that we would have been just fine, Duran. If your people had left us alone. If, even, you had just settled down here, integrated peacefully.
“Because psychics weren’t so common here before you came and started meddling. Psychics weren’t a threat to anybody. Like the odd Einstein or Mozart, psychics came along infrequently. One in a million, even less than that, and a high percentage of those never even knew what they might have been capable of, what was locked inside them. Most passed unnoticed, their potential never realized, their latent abilities unknown even to themselves. Oh, maybe we would naturally have evolved as a race of psychics, given enough time. That has been one of the theories advanced. But even if it happened at all, that wasn’t going to happen for millennia.”
“You can’t be certain,” he said.
“Can I not? We’ve been reaching out to each other, we psychics, remember? Especially these last few years. Sharing information. And it’s been . . . a bit of a revelation, what some of us knew.”
He was silent.
Murphy smiled, an odd, gentle smile. “We know when you came here. Your people. The first generation. You weren’t the first to visit us from another part of the galaxy; that’s been happening, if you ask some people, for thousands of years, possibly lots of races. But your people were the first to stay here in any kind of numbers. The first to truly settle here. The first coming. Such an intelligent way to handle an invasion. So quietly and insidiously, causing hardly a ripple in our society. At first. Settling in. Studying us. Even examining us, and crudely at times, especially in those early years.”
“Your people have . . . vivid imaginations,” Duran said.
“Yes, we do. And you learned to take advantage of that. You learned to take advantage of the very human tendency to create . . . wild conspiracy theories most of us never took seriously. But it was an excellent cover for you, for many of your actions. So you could learn about us. So you could discover, in due course, that some experiments, some combinations just . . . don’t work. That there would be no easy path for your people. That reaching your goal was going to prove costly in many ways.”
“Murphy—”
“And that whatever progress you could accomplish was going to take time. A lot of time. A lot of time and a lot of trouble—and a lot of failures along the way, bad ones. Sometimes the kind of failures you couldn’t keep quiet. Failures that caused your superiors to push you even harder for results.”
“That is my job,” he said.
“And has been most of your life. Something you dedicated yourself to, body and . . . soul.”
That last word was not . . . quite . . . a question. But it was a hint that Murphy, at least, questioned the existence of Duran’s soul.
Which bothered him a lot more than he wanted to admit.
“As you’ve dedicated your life,” he said. “To your cause.”
“Yeah, but my cause is protecting the often most vulnerable of my people from deadly predators.”
He knew he stiffened, hard as he tried not to. “And mine is to save my people from extinction,” he said coldly.
* * *
• • •
She looked at the long and, perhaps, still-growing list of people who had called so early on this slightly chilly June morning, people who had used the contact number given to them, sometimes long ago and sometimes for the first time.
Driven to call. To report. To ask what they could do.
Because of the babies. Because they had known what had happened. They had felt it.
“Bonded pairs,” she murmured, wondering if the murder of babies, deliberate or not, had been a catalyst the other side could never, surely, have imagined. Wondering if, out of the brutal crucible of that fire, something extraordinary had been formed.
A youngish man came into the room just then, his thin face serious, and stood before the old table she was using as a desk. “It’s confirmed, Madam Secretary,” he said quietly. “The Bishops are on their way straight back to Charleston, since they’ll report to Murphy. Our sources say a private jet, unmarked.”
“And in Charlotte?”
“First responders are there. House fire, the structure totally engulfed. They won’t be getting in for a while. No sign anyone escaped. We can know with a high degree of certainty that none of the women made it out alive.”
“I see. Jordan?”
“Yes, Madam Secretary?”
Mildly, she said, “I realize you intend only respect, and that old habits are hard to break. But we have discussed this. That title belongs in the past.”
“Yes, M— Yes, ma’am.”
“Thank you,” she said.
He nodded and retreated to another room.
She sat there awhile longer, thinking. Glanced at the clock on the wall that reminded her it was still before dawn. Murphy was likely still out, because she’d had things to do, as usual, in the dark watches of the night. Seeds to plant, if possible.
After a moment, she used the landline on her desk, the very special landline that would call another very special phone Murphy routinely checked every four hours.
The phone on the other end rang twice, then there was a tone, but no identification or invitation to leave a message.
She left a message, brief and to the point.
“Murphy, call in when you get this.”
* * *
• • •
Murphy shook her head, her gaze remaining fixed on the still, silent man standing before her.
“To save your people from extinction. But is that what you’re doing, Duran? I mean, I’m sure it started out that way. A long . . . long time ago. But all that time has passed. And you’re so far away now. From home. You’ve been so far away for such a long time. So I have to wonder. I have to wonder if you’ve asked yourself what’s been happening during all the time that’s passed back home, so far away, where there was surely an enemy. Once upon a time. But maybe not now. Maybe you’re too far from . . . home . . . to even know that enemy came and went while some of your people left to find help. Have you considered that, Duran?”
There was a long, long silence.
“Yes,” he replied finally, “I have.”
Softly, she said, “Then you must have wondered if there’s even anything to go back to by now. After all this time. More time passing there than here, if I understand the theory of relativity and the . . . difficulties . . . inherent in faster-than-light travel. Maybe an awful lot of time has passed. Back home. Maybe you’d better think about that a bit harder. Maybe you’d better consider . . . all the possible unintended consequences for your own people.”
She didn’t say good night or good-bye, she simply faded back into the darkness, and within seconds he knew she was gone.
Unintended consequences.
