The Dragonfly Effect

  “Not them!” Jax exclaimed. “They can chase us anywhere!”

  Undaunted, Kira pulled the big stallion alongside the trio. She locked eyes with the first officer, hypnotizing him quickly. Jax and Stanley clued in and took care of the other two. Moments later, there were four horses galloping across Manhattan, stopping traffic as they crossed the avenues. As they made their way to the east side, several more cops on horseback joined their procession, only to be mesmerized by the three young mind-benders. By the time the group reached the heavily guarded United Nations complex on First Avenue, Black Quack and his riders were invisible at the center of the cluster of mounted police officers.

  Jax checked his watch. 8:51.

  “Nine minutes!” he hissed.

  From the midst of the mounted unit exploded Black Quack, bearing his three riders. The length of his stride and the grace and sheer power of his movement proclaimed that this was much more than an ordinary police mount. He cleared the barriers and closed the distance to the UN entrance before anyone could take a step in his direction. Haughty and magnificent, he streaked past the fluttering flags of one hundred ninety-three member states and discharged his young passengers just under the wire.

  Armed security guards ran to block their way. But the three newcomers were thoroughbreds of a different variety, wielding mesmeric powers that even few hypnotists could match. They bent them all, one at a time, leaving them dancing, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, jogging in place, conducting an imaginary symphony, doing push-ups — anything that came to mind in this mad rush. They worked with a speed and efficiency that was nothing short of amazing.

  No, thought Jax. Not amazing. Desperate.

  8:56.

  Free at last, the three sprinted down the marble corridor and burst into the General Assembly. At the sight of the vast, soaring chamber, with its towering gold monolith, Jax took a small step backward, stomping on Stanley’s toe.

  “Ow!” hissed the eight-year-old in a hushed tone.

  Every seat was full, every delegation complete. Jax recognized faces he’d only seen in newspapers or on TV — presidents, prime ministers, kings. How could he expect to be heard in this place where every other voice represented an entire country?

  But none of them can stop what’s about to happen!

  As the three ran down the side aisle, the secretary-general himself rose and approached the podium. He paused, waiting for the chamber to come to order, and was joined by someone else — a tall man with a hawk nose and burning eyes under a single black brow.

  Elias Mako.

  The two men spoke briefly. After their conversation, the secretary-general backed away, and it was Dr. Mako who climbed the green-carpeted stairs to the dais.

  Mako bent the secretary-general of the United Nations!

  Jax, Stanley, and Kira reached the foot of the rostrum just as Mako stepped to the microphone. A security guard blocked their way, his hand on the butt of his pistol.

  Kira fixed the man with an intense stare, mesmerizing him quickly. “You are eating M&M’s using chopsticks.”

  Instantly, the hand left the weapon, manipulating invisible sticks in the air.

  That was when Mako looked down and saw the three young mind-benders at the foot of the stairs. It was 8:58. Two minutes from now, the world would be an unrecognizable place. This was literally their last chance.

  Knowing there was no other way — knowing it was a horrible risk — Jax met the terrifying gaze of his former mentor. Never before had he been able to hypnotize Elias Mako, but maybe things were different now. They had to be.

  The instant their eyes locked, Jax felt the jolt of the man’s strength. It wasn’t just the power — Mako himself had admitted that the talent Jax had inherited from his Opus and Sparks ancestry was probably stronger. But the experience and sheer ruthlessness of the man could overwhelm even a greater natural gift. He wielded mesmeric ability the way a great warrior handled a sword or battle ax — the weapon didn’t have to be special for him to cut you to pieces.

  Jax mustered every microvolt of hypnotic attack that was left inside him after a sleepless night on horseback and hurled it at Elias Mako. The man flinched as if he’d been struck. Jax pressed his advantage, his face distorted with the depth of his effort.

  Their minds locked — the irresistible force and the immovable object, a monumental struggle of might against might.

  Jax experienced a ray of hope. Was that a PIP? Or was it the hallucination of someone who needed to see one, and needed it badly?

  And then the PIP was there — for real — and Jax had won. He’d done it. He’d overpowered the founder of Sentia — and just in the nick of time.

  “You are very relaxed….” he began.

  “I believe you have that backward,” came Mako’s quiet voice from above him.

  It happened with the swiftness of a cobra strike. The picture-in-picture image was gone and a sharp-toothed carnivore was tearing away the layers of protection around Jax’s brain. In terrified awe, he realized that he’d fallen into a mesmeric trap. Mako had allowed him partway into his mind, baiting Jax into letting down his defenses. And the beast had pounced.

  Fueled by panic, he struggled to extricate himself, but only seemed to fall further under his adversary’s control.

  “It is you who is relaxed,” Mako said in a soothing tone.

  No! Jax intended to scream it out loud, but for some reason, his brain wasn’t connected to his tongue. Or maybe he’d simply changed his mind. What was so bad, after all? He was relaxed. In fact, he felt fantastic. He couldn’t imagine why he’d ever thought Elias Mako was the enemy. Mako was his teacher and his friend, the person who had discovered and nurtured Jax’s talent. Whatever this kind man was doing, he had Jax’s best interests at heart.

  “The only thing that will make you feel even more wonderful,” Mako went on in a mellow tone, “is to take the pistol from that security man, hold it to your temple, and squeeze the trigger.”

  Nothing had ever seemed more reasonable to Jackson Opus. He was on his way to a perfect, blissful state. There was just one little task he had to perform first….

  He reached for the holster and put his hand on the grip of the gun.

  Horrified, both Kira and Stanley seized Jax’s hand, keeping it away from the weapon. But Jax seemed absolutely determined to grab the pistol. The guard continued to manipulate his unseen chopsticks, completely unaware of the three-way tug-of-war for his sidearm.

  “Is he crazy?” Stanley panted. “What’s he doing?”

  “He’s not crazy; he’s bent,” grunted Kira. “Mako’s trying to kill him!”

  Enraged, Stanley let go of Jax’s hand, ran out, and interposed himself in the sight line between Mako and Jax. He glared up at the only parent he’d ever known, packing all the hypnotic punch of the mysterious Arcanovs, mixed with his own personal anger.

  Mako staggered back. It was taking most of his mental energy to maintain his hold on Jax. He had nothing left for this eight-year-old powerhouse. It snapped the mesmeric link with Jax, who stumbled briefly. Kira steadied him.

  A murmur began in the General Assembly. Of course, none of the three thousand delegates were aware of the titanic hypnotic struggle in progress at the front of the chamber. They were simply wondering why this speaker hadn’t picked up the gavel to begin the historic session.

  Reeling, Jax caught a glimpse of a digital time readout. The glowing chronometer was at 8:59:24. He ran to Stanley and spun the boy around.

  “I can beat him!” Stanley hissed.

  “You can’t,” Jax said urgently. “But together, maybe the two of us can.”

  Stanley stared at him in bewilderment.

  “Back at the horse farm, we were in each other’s minds!” Jax fumbled to put his plan into words. “We have to combine our power like that — and turn it on him!”

  Their eyes fell into synch in a connection that all but crackled with electricity. It was the second confrontation of these two mi
nds, each carrying its centuries of mesmeric ability. Yet there was something very different about this moment. At the farm they had been opponents, and their conflict had driven each into the dark memories of the other. But here they were united toward a single, crystal-clear purpose.

  For Jax, the General Assembly winked out for an instant. He sensed, rather than saw, two orbs of pure energy colliding. The merging was violent — explosion, eruption, flares of white heat. But when it was over, the pool that remained pulsated with limitless power.

  “Now!” exclaimed Jax.

  Moving as one, he and Stanley climbed the stairs and unleashed on their nemesis the greatest reservoir of mesmeric force that had ever existed. Jax was aware of a rapid-fire detonation of hundreds of images. It was almost like blowback. When he was finally able to identify it, the truth was nearly as shocking as the event itself. He had experienced, in a few blazing seconds, the entire life of Elias Mako from birth till now. It was as if they had opened his mind and sucked out the contents.

  Mako wobbled for a second and crumpled to the floor, boneless.

  Jax jumped over his enemy’s unmoving form and reached for the microphone. As he grasped it, he caught a glimpse of the chronometer just as 8:59:59 changed to 9:00:00.

  Halfway through the most important action he would ever take, Jackson Opus stopped. So did fully half the delegates in the General Assembly. Outside, on the streets of New York, life ground to a halt. Around the world, hundreds of millions of people were suddenly frozen in time. The worldwide catastrophe he’d nearly died trying to prevent was happening.

  Jax understood none of it. He was perfectly content as he stood motionless, obeying the post-hypnotic suggestion from FreeForAll. He did not think about the trains thundering into stations, their engineers bent and shut down; the ships with no captains; the cars and trucks with no drivers. He did not consider the patients waiting for doctors who would not be coming; the babies screaming for parents who could not hear them. Mammoth power plants operated without oversight; large factories were unmanned. Soon the accidents would start — the explosions, meltdowns, fires, floods. Every pot on every burner in every home on earth was a potential inferno. Yet the police or firefighters or first responders would be just as incapacitated as the rest.

  Jax was oblivious to it all. He knew only the mindless calm contentment of someone following a mesmeric command.

  And then an eight-year-old voice beside him howled, “Dragonfly!” and life began again.

  When the General Assembly reappeared around Jax, the chronometer read 9:00:04. So the global Aurora was on — but only four seconds in! There was still a chance to undo this before the damage got out of hand. He himself was living proof of that. Stanley had brought him back with a single word.

  He looked out into the ocean of TV and video cameras, microphones, handheld devices, and recorders. It was supposedly the largest media audience ever. Jax sure hoped so. The message he had was short, but it needed to get to every corner of the globe.

  “Dragonfly!” he bellowed. “Dragonfly! Dragonfly! Dragonfly!”

  Beside him, Stanley joined in the chorus. The battery of UN interpreters translated the word into every language known to humankind.

  It wasn’t enough, not nearly. What about people walking on streets, sleeping, out of range of media? Who would save them? He could never do it himself. The task was too enormous — every bit as vast as the awful abuse of hypnotism that had started this mess in the first place.

  All at once, he had the answer.

  He stared out into the cameras into the widest audience in history. “Relax and look into my eyes…. Do it now…. Nothing has ever been so important. Say ‘dragonfly.’ Shout it out loud. Scream it from your windows and rooftops. Bellow it through bullhorns and loudspeakers. Wake up your neighbors, your friends, total strangers. Don’t stop until everyone around you is awake and well!”

  He fell back, exhausted, pushing Stanley up to his place at the microphone. Stanley began his own version of the hypnotic message in an attempt to reach anyone Jax might have missed. By the time he was finished, cries of “Dragonfly!” were ringing out all over the General Assembly. Reporters, delegates, and heads of state joined together to spread the magic word.

  Kira ran up to join them on the podium, her face pale with dread. “Do you think it worked?”

  Jax looked around. “It worked in here. But here isn’t the whole world. We have to check outside.”

  Stanley’s eyes traveled to the fallen Mako. “Is he dead?” he asked in a small voice.

  “He’s still breathing,” Kira observed, “but that’s about it.”

  “Leave him for the police,” Jax said dismissively. “I hope they give him all the care and compassion that he gave us. Come on, let’s see what kind of shape the city’s in.”

  They retraced their steps out of the chamber, raced up the corridor to the exit, and stopped short, horrified, under the flags of one hundred ninety-three nations.

  “Oh my God!” breathed Kira.

  In the minutes before nine AM, Flight 865 circled low over the New York metropolitan sprawl.

  “Good morning, passengers,” came the captain’s voice over the PA system. “We’ve begun our descent into New York’s LaGuardia Airport….”

  In row 22, Monica Opus turned to her husband. “I still feel silly about this. I’m sure Jax is absolutely fine.”

  “I’m sure, too,” he agreed, a little too loudly, since all sound was muffled by his headphones. “And I’m also sure we can’t trust that feeling.”

  He returned his attention to the Direct TV screen in front of him. He was watching the big UN conference, which seemed to be off to a disorganized start. The secretary-general had backed off, and another man was at the podium. He looked vaguely familiar, but the camera wasn’t close on him. It was following some kind of disturbance off to the side….

  Suddenly, Mr. Opus grabbed his wife’s arm and directed her attention to the small screen. “Monica — isn’t that Mako?”

  But before she could confirm the identification, the man at the podium crumpled to the floor. Two boys scrambled up to take his place at the microphone.

  “Jax?!” chorused the Opuses.

  The captain’s voice cut in again as they felt the landing gear deploy. “Ladies and gentlemen, air traffic control has cleared us to begin our final approach at exactly nine AM, which is right about —”

  There was dead silence from the cockpit, but the Opuses wouldn’t have noticed anyway. Neither would most of the passengers. Nine o’clock had arrived, and three-quarters of the people on the plane had stopped dead — including Ashton and Monica Opus and both pilots.

  In the cockpit, the controls slipped out of the captain’s lifeless fingers, and Flight 865 began a sharp descent toward the New York City skyline. A handful of passengers cried out in dismay at the drastic drop, but most of them remained unmoving and unmoved, responding to Stanley’s post-hypnotic suggestion.

  Through his headphones, Ashton Opus heard a single word: “Dragonfly!” He awoke with a start into a scene of pure panic. Screams rang out around him. Yet most of the passengers and crew — including Monica — were frozen. The plane was in a steep dive. Through the window, Manhattan was at a forty-five-degree angle and coming up fast. Who was flying this thing?

  The stark answer: nobody. Beyond the cockpit door, the pilots were out of commission as their aircraft screamed toward the ground.

  And suddenly, Jax was close-up on the seat-back screen. What was he saying?

  “Relax and look into my eyes…. Do it now…. Nothing has ever been so important….”

  Mr. Opus was instantly captured by the mesmeric message. “Dragonfly!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs.

  Throughout the cabin, everyone who’d been watching the UN took up the call. The trigger word brought dozens of passengers and crew back to themselves.

  They awoke to a plane that was in a suicide plunge. Oxygen masks clattered down from above. br />
  “Ashton?” Mrs. Opus’s voice was full of terror.

  The man who had been manipulated by hypnotic commands his whole life seemed to understand that this one was a matter of life and death. He leaped out of his seat and barreled up the aisle, bellowing “Dragonfly!” all the way.

  Three flight attendants rushed to intercept him. He plowed right through them and began pounding on the entrance to the cockpit.

  “Dragonfly! Dragonfly!!”

  On the other side of the armored door, his howls reached the ears of the copilot. The trigger word startled him into a reality straight out of his wildest nightmares: New York City, hurtling up at him at terminal velocity. The nose of the plane was on a collision course with the United Nations!

  He grabbed the controls and yanked with all his might.

  The plane shuddered and did not respond. A commercial airliner was not built for stunt flying.

  He hung on because there was nothing else to do, pulling hard until sweat poured from his brow. He was close enough to make out the gravel on the UN roof.

  Flight 865 was going down.

  Tommy was in the cab of a tow truck, squeezed in between Brassmeyer and the driver, when nine AM hit. The driver went limp. His hands left the wheel and his head lolled back against the seat.

  Moving at thirty miles per hour, with Brassmeyer’s sedan dangling off the hook, the truck began to weave toward a ditch.

  “Watch where you’re going,” Brassmeyer snapped.

  No reply from the driver. They sideswiped an SUV and bashed a headlight against the pickup in front of them.

  “Hey, wake up!” the colonel barked.

  Tommy looked about in alarm. They weren’t the only ones out of control. All around them, vehicles were colliding like bumper cars at a carnival. Up ahead, a taxi plowed into a telephone pole. A school bus struck a truckload of chickens. Cages dropped to the road in a blizzard of feathers; birds scrambled everywhere.