The Ethereal Vision

CHAPTER 14 — TRINITY

  They went to eat lunch then, and Jane noticed once again how the others stared at her as she entered the cafeteria. She smiled at them tentatively, again feeling the strange connection flowing between them. There was a warmth to this feeling, but her hands still shook slightly as she held the tray and walked past them. She breathed deeply at the thought of introducing herself to them, knowing it would have to wait a bit longer.

  She and Morris sat alone at the same table in the corner of the room. Jane hadn’t paid much attention to what was being served; she looked down at the plain chicken breast covered with some kind of basic tomato sauce. Perched next to it was a mound of mashed potato.

  “Not bad,” she said. Morris laughed out loud and she smirked in response.

  “Sorry, Jane,” he said, looking down at the food. “I just wasn’t expecting company.”

  “You’re forgiven,” she said, “this time.” They smirked again and began to eat. The sounds of chatter that permeated the room were more animated than they had been at breakfast. Jane looked around at the faces, now able to put names to some of them. She was glad for this as she returned their stares and even smiled at some of them. She turned back to Morris then, noticing the guard in the opposite corner of the room. He had been standing somewhere else at breakfast, and Jane had been too preoccupied to pay him any attention then.

  Morris told her his name was Rodriguez. He was dressed in a formal black suit; around his waist was strapped a sophisticated-looking weapon. Jane could only guess that it was some kind of advanced Taser, and she had the definite impression that she would be on the floor in a second if she were to take a shot from it. He turned and looked at her, and she turned away from his fierce gaze, their eyes having met only for one second. She shook off the terrible feeling that the brief eye contact evoked in her and looked back to Morris.

  “You know, either way, it’s nice to be able to talk to somebody about…all this,” she said.

  He looked at her, seeming confused for a moment, then realisation spread over his face. “Yes, I know the feeling,” he replied.

  “Did your parents ever talk to you about it? Or ask you about it?”

  “No,” he said flatly; again, she could sense the hesitation. He reached for his glass and took a drink of water.

  “When did it first show itself?”

  “When I was five.”

  “Five? What happened?”

  “I was playing, they said, in their living room. They had left me alone with the television and some toys. They heard me laughing hysterically, and so they came back into the room and found that the reason I was laughing was because toys were levitating around me.”

  Jane couldn’t help but smile as she began to laugh. “I’m sorry. That’s just funny.”

  He was smiling too. “I know,” he said, but then a look of resignation came over his face. “I ran away when I was fifteen.”

  She had been about to take a bite of chicken when she stopped and looked up at him. He was staring at her.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing really. Just a terrible sense that I didn’t belong. They’d seen enough, I thought: enough glasses slipping off the counter, enough shattered windows, enough of all of it. I didn’t feel comfortable there anymore. I didn’t want to bother them.”

  “So you’ve been on your own for…how long?”

  “Two years.”

  She kept her head down and glanced up at him from averted eyes. “It must have been difficult.”

  “Yeah,” he croaked, then looked out towards the arboretum.

  “Where did you go?”

  “Anywhere—everywhere. I took busses to different states. Tried to stay where it was warm. I had some money saved, so I used it to stay in hostels. When the money ran out, I had to dive into the power to find ways to survive. I never took more than I needed to, though.”

  “How did you get caught?”

  “It’s a story. I’ll tell you some other time. It’s enough to say for now that I got in with the wrong crowd.”

  Although she wanted to know more about what had happened, she decided not to press him further.

  “You’re seventeen too, right?” he asked.

  She nodded. She decided it was time to change the course of the conversation.

  “So, tell me more about the dampening field. What do you think it’s doing to us?” she asked. She could see the look of distant desperation come across his face.

  “I don’t know. It can’t be good, though. When I think about it, it makes me feel sick that we’re being exposed to it.

  “Yeah. It doesn’t feel good, like a tiny headache lingering in the background,” she said.

  Morris looked up as someone approached their table from the other side of the room. A young man with black hair sat down next to Jane.

  “You guys both look like you’re having a lot more fun than is allowed in here,” he said, exuding a cheerfulness that made Jane smile immediately. “I’m Michael,” he said, extending his hand to Jane.

  She took his hand and shook it firmly. “Nice to meet you, Michael. I’m Jane.”

  “Are you the girl who lifted the car? From Ireland?”

  Jane looked at Morris and pursed her lips into a thin smile. Somehow, he had found the time to communicate this information already. Or else Michael had found it out by some other means.

  “Yes, that was me. When I was very young. I was seven years old and my parents and I were driving home from the countryside. My dad…” She stopped talking and almost gasped as the pain once again surfaced. It was old now, though, like ancient scar tissue. She was about to reach into her pocket for the crystalline butterfly, but realised she had left it in her room. She regained her composure quickly and moved on. “My dad misjudged a turn and drove us right over a cliff.” She stopped again as the memory began to fill her mind. “I caught the car—somehow—I don’t quite know how. I don’t remember. But it was dangerous. It took a toll on my body.” She hadn’t been prepared to go into that level of detail about the accident and now wished she hadn’t.

  “That’s amazing. Have you ever been able to replicate that level of ability?”

  “No, actually I kind of cut it off after that. There was…” She hesitated and thought of Max. She had almost told him without even thinking about it. It had seemed so natural to think about him previously, as though he existed on this plane, in this world, just like everyone else. But he didn’t. She resigned herself to waiting longer before discussing things like that any further. She had told Morris, but she felt a growing comfort with him, and it had seemed natural to tell him. “There was an awareness in me, I suppose, that it was dangerous. Lucas showed up at our house a few days afterward.”

  “He went to Ireland?” Michael asked, shocked.

  “Yes. He came to our house, and I’m pretty sure he went to examine the road where the car went off.”

  “So…” Michael’s brow furrowed and he looked at the two of them, astonished. “Why weren’t you sent to the Paris facility? Surely that would have made more sense?”

  Morris looked to his side, thinking. “I heard something once about somebody being expedited from Europe for some reason or another—somebody with Vision, somebody dangerous. So I guess it does happen. Mike’s right, though; I would have thought they’d take you to Paris.”

  “I know there’s a facility there,” Mike added. “Aside from the fact that rumours have pointed to Paris for years, Ciara heard one of the guards talking about it a few weeks back.”

  Morris was shaking his head slowly from side to side. “I think it’s crap,” he said. “I bet he jumped through some serious hoops to extradite you from Europe. Which only lends credence to the idea that they’re after something. Like you said, Jane, dozens of books now have been written about psychokinesis. Why drag us here under these pretenses? Rehabilitated? I mean what kind of crap is that? You don’t need rehabilitation, do you?”

  Michael raised his eyebrows
and looked at Jane.

  She looked at Morris, thinking. “No, I don’t, and yes, I agree,” she said quietly. She kept her eyes on the table in front of her as she spoke; she knew what he said was true.

  “They have been behaving differently lately,” Michael said.

  Jane looked at him. She had an enormous sense that he was a good person, and just like Morris, she trusted him immediately. He was shorter than Morris, about five feet ten. He had short black hair and exuded slightly less physical confidence, but his face was built strongly. He seemed to have a more comic edge. She had the immediate impression that he was gay.

  “So what can you do most, Michael? I mean…”

  “You mean, which talent do I have to the greatest extent?” he asked, smiling at her.

  “Michael here has a good mix in his blood,” Morris began. “A good amount of psychokinesis, but he has one unusual trick that none of us can replicate…yet.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?” Jane asked.

  “He calls it bending light.”

  “Really?” she asked, her curiosity piqued. She had not yet considered that anyone may have grown or adapted the simple mental functions beyond their basic forms.

  “Yes. It happened by accident one day, then I researched the properties of light so I could understand it better. Have you ever heard of gravitational lensing?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well,” Michael continued, “it describes how a massive object can distort the light from an object behind it. See, light rays follow the curvature of spacetime. I create the gravitational force in front of the object with psychokinesis and then distort the light rays, effectively making it invisible. That’s more of a metaphor than an explanation, though, and it takes a lot of concentration to pull it off. Sometimes I can’t do it, and it doesn’t really look convincing; it just ends up looking like a blob of light.”

  She looked around and saw that there was nobody in the cafeteria to take notice of what they were doing. Rodriguez, apparently bored by the tedium of his job, had turned to the window at the front of the hall and was looking across to the arboretum.

  “Can you show me?” she asked without thinking, then raised her eyebrows. “Sorry, I forgot. That’s not possible, right? Dampening field?”

  “Well, actually that’s why I came over to you.” Michael hesitated and looked behind him, then turned back to face them again. “Did you notice that thing when you walked in the room and everyone looked at you?”

  She looked over at Morris, a little nervous. She still wasn’t sure what to think about that. “Yes, actually I did. It was a little weird.”

  “Well, I felt it too. It was like, when you walked in the room something lifted inside me. I want to say, like, my spirit or my mood, but it’s not that. I could feel my ability coming back just a little bit, peering out through the dampening field.”

  “Why now?” Jane asked.

  He looked at Jane intently and seemed to hesitate over what he was about to say. “It’s something about you, Jane, I think. Maybe it’s something you can do that you don’t know about.” He looked down at the salt and pepper shakers. “Pass me that, will you Morris?”

  Morris gave him the pepper shaker and Michael placed it in his hand. He looked over his shoulder again in Rodriguez’s direction. When he saw that they were not being monitored directly, he turned back around.

  Jane watched as Michael stared at the shaker. He appeared to focus tremendously, and his eyes narrowed. As he continued to stare at the object in his hand, his eyes flashed minutely. A small gasp escaped Jane, for she had never seen anything like it before. The space around the shaker shimmered, reminding her of the metallic mirage one might see on a desert floor.

  Then the shaker was gone, and Michael’s hand was empty. Three seconds later the shimmer returned, and the shaker was there again. Michael exhaled, the strength of will having obviously strained him.

  “That was amazing,” Jane said, overcome with awe and excitement.

  “But ordinarily, that dampening field would stop me from doing it,” Michael said through laboured breathing. He looked at her. “I’m pretty sure it’s you, Jane. There’s something about you that’s shifted the balance in some way just enough for me to do that.”

  Morris chimed in. “I actually noticed something too. From the second you walked into the facility, I knew you were here. It was like I could hear a beacon, you know? I could feel it. And that signal we got last night when we were talking to each other? I’ve never been able to talk to anyone like that since I came here.”

  “You’re saying…I’m affecting this field that they’re generating?”

  “No, it’s not like that,” Michael replied. “I don’t think any of us could really do that. I think it’s more like you’re emitting something yourself—some kind of force that’s increasing our ability naturally, allowing us to peer up and out over the dampening field, maybe by just an inch or two.”

  “And that implies that if we were in your presence when the field wasn’t active, our natural ability would be boosted,” Morris added. He and Michael looked at each other and grinned.

  “Just to be clear, you’re suggesting that something in me…is making your natural psychic ability stronger?” Jane asked. She was in disbelief, but at the same time found herself silently acknowledging that something was clicking into place inside her. Had she known this about herself all along? She suspected that on some level she had.

  “I think so, yes” Michael said without hesitation.

  “Well, I’m glad I could help,” she replied. She and Morris laughed, and after a moment Michael joined them. “Were you ever able to hone that ability into something more?” Jane asked after a few moments.

  “A few times,” Michael said, “I stood in front of a mirror and built up the ability over time. By the end, I could render myself invisible for about ten seconds. It was tough, though; it took a lot of concentration, but I was getting better. I never showed these things around my family. I kept it secret, so it was tough to practice, but I did really want to know more about it.”

  “You know, there is a suggestion here, guys,” Morris said after a quiet moment had passed.

  “What’s that?” Jane asked.

  “They don’t know about you, Jane. They don’t know about this advantage.” Silence came over them again as this powerful information hung in the air between them.