CHAPTER 18 — COLLECTIVE
They left the arboretum shortly afterward and went to one of the recreation rooms with a television. Ciara was in there, and she smiled as they entered. She was a tall girl with a beautiful, oval face and olive complexion. Jane sat next to her while Morris and Mike sat on the sofa to their left. Jane extended her hand and introduced herself. Ciara told her that she was from San Francisco. Her father had been away when people, Lucas among them, had come to her house in the middle of the night and taken her. She told Jane how she had sought the company of other people with telepathic ability and how they used to convene late at night at a park near her home.
“There was one guy,” Ciara said now, looking down. “Danny was his name. I just wanted to help him. I had an idea that something was wrong, but I just couldn’t see what it was. I kind of knew that the day would come when he would do something to get us into trouble.” She smiled at the memories despite the clear regret in her voice.
“I was communicating with people all over the globe—Italy, Russia, China, you name it. I was able to talk to them. There weren’t many people who could reach as far as I could, though. Imagine the first few people with dial-up internet,” Ciara said, laughing. Jane smiled at this comparison. “There were maybe a hundred of us who talked regularly, but it was growing by a couple a month. Every now and then, one or two would drop out, and we knew it was because they had been taken to a place like this.”
“What did he do? Danny, I mean,” Jane asked.
Ciara sighed. “He was always edgy, like he was troubled by something. I think he had a desperate situation in his family, but for some reason I could never see inside his mind. I’d get brief glimpses now and then—he was always anxious. Whenever we’d all hook up and hang out, I would sit with him and try to talk to him. But his telepathic ability was immense. He could shield his mind like nobody I’d ever met before. If he didn’t want you in, you weren’t getting in…and that was that.” Ciara exhaled deeply.
After a moment, she continued. “This one night we were at the beach and…” She paused again, her voice turning solemn as she spoke. “He did something stupid. We were all aware of the fact that we could be detected, so I was always careful, even when I was communicating over vast distances.”
“What happened at the beach?”
“I knew he had immense psychokinetic ability. I’ve heard about what you did with the car when you were young, Jane, but…he had even more ability than that. Much more.” Her gaze drifted to the side as she seemed to consider the immensity of what she was referring to. “Anyway, what happened was, he walked out to the water and started lifting it. We all followed him and looked out. It started as just a small globe at first, then he kept drawing more and more water into it. At first we were cheering; we thought it was amazing. But after about a minute, it was six feet wide and growing. That’s when I started to panic because he was crossing the threshold. There’s no way to summon that kind of energy without drawing attention to yourself.”
“Then what happened?”
“Well, we were standing there looking at this floating, rippling ball of water, and the tide of our emotions started to shift. After a moment, we were shouting at him to stop, but he wouldn’t. By the time it was twenty feet in diameter, he raised it upward and over our heads. I remember looking at him then. He wasn’t even breaking a sweat, and he had this terrible smile on his face. My immediate instinct was to run but…I couldn’t help myself. So I stayed.” Ciara’s lips curled into a half smile, though there was still sadness in her face as she recalled the memory.
“What did he do with it? The water?”
“Well, some of us had already run by that point. There were four of us remaining, including him and me. He lifted it over us and raised it about a hundred feet. Then he just let it drop. It fell on us like rain and I have to admit, I laughed like crazy. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen in my life, but when the water stopped falling, the spell broke and we panicked.” She sighed and paused for a moment, staring at the floor.
Jane heard Mike and Morris talking animatedly in the background as Ciara took a second to gather her thoughts.
“We started running,” she continued, “and Danny trailed behind, in that same uncaring way. He wasn’t running like we were—he was walking. At that point I knew we would be caught and taken. But I have to say, I didn’t have the same definite feeling about him.” Her brow furrowed momentarily and an expression of distant wonder spread across her face. “We scattered into the night, and I went home. I shut out my telepathy and turned off the lights, as though it would have made any difference. I was asleep when they came five hours later. I woke up in the dark to find three people standing over me in our living room. I tried to run, but they shot me with a tranquiliser gun, and I was out in ten seconds. I collapsed on the kitchen floor…I think.” She pulled her legs up and rested her chin on them. “I don’t know what happened to Danny. I know they would have had a difficult time taking him in. In fact, I feel sorry for anyone who goes looking for him. Even if they use a tranquiliser gun, he could still do serious damage.”
Jane considered her response. “But you didn’t do anything dangerous.”
“Neither did you. It’s not about that anymore, Jane.”
“Yes, I think I know what you mean.” They looked at each other knowingly. “You think they want something as well, don’t you?”
“Yes!” Ciara exclaimed, clearly glad that somebody else was thinking the same thing she was. “In the months before they got me, I was losing contact with people rapidly—more and more every day—and most of them hadn’t really done anything wrong. It got to the point that we were losing more people through telepathic contact than we were gaining.” She paused and a terribly solemn expression stole over her face. “It got scary then.”
“Did Lucas take you into that room?” Jane asked, redirecting the conversation.
“Yes. They lowered the field, just a little. I took the opportunity to reach out into the surrounding area as much as I could to scan the facility.”
“What did you see?”
“Not much. The dampening signal was still strong, but I could tell that the best way out isn’t through the back entrance where the guards are standing behind the metal gates. It’s through the control room, past the employee section.”
“What’s beyond the employee section?”
“There’s a green area that stretches in front for about a hundred and fifty feet, and a ten-foot wall surrounds the complex with a single gate for an exit at the centre.”
As Jane considered this, Carl and Joel walked into the room and sat on the sofa behind them. Ciara turned to face them. “Hey guys,” she said, smiling.
Jane turned and looked at them, dangling her arm over the back of the sofa. “Good day?” she asked as a sarcastic smile spread across her face.
Carl looked at her and smirked. “Yeah, not bad,” he said and laughed.
“So how did you wind up in here?” she asked.
He looked down for a second, then back to her. “Well…I had made this friend online, Sherry. She was an ethereal too, but not as powerful. Not like us.” He looked around at them nervously and took a deep breath. “We talked for months, and then one day I said I wanted to meet her. So we picked a time and a place. I was on my way there, and it was dark. I was walking down a road by myself when something hit me in the shoulder. I turned around and there was a group of people way back behind me in the shadows. Then they were running towards me as I fell. That’s all I remember. I woke up here. They must have been monitoring our chats or something.”
“Bastards,” Joel said.
“Yeah,” Carl replied.
“What about you?” Jane asked, looking at Joel.
Joel hesitated for a moment as he looked around the room at their various faces. After a moment, he looked forward and began his story. “I was in a band in New York. I was lead guitar. We were actually kind of decent, but there was serious infighting. W
e were about to play a show, and I knew it was going to be our last one; we were splitting apart at the seams. The drummer, Charlie, and I got along fine. But Jessie, the lead singer, was a whole other story. Anyway, we went on, I was getting serious feedback, and he kept glaring at me during the show. I was getting angry, as you can imagine, and the power started leaking out of me. The house lights started to flicker. I heard something blow in the back and the whole place went dark. Thankfully, it stopped us from fighting. We actually ended up laughing after it happened, which is kind of ironic when you think about it.” Joel stopped and laughed for a moment.
“They finally managed to get some light in the place,” he continued, “and we were all hanging around waiting to find out what had happened. I knew I had caused it, though. I had never concentrated too much on the power. I knew I was an ethereal, but I didn’t care. I just wanted a career in music. Anyway, these guys showed up, and Lucas was with them. I had been talking to Charlie in the back, and when I saw them, I knew straight away that they were there for me—put it down to intuition, telepathy, whatever. The second they showed up, I ran for the side of the stage, but just as I reached the edge, I saw Lucas turn and look at me. I kept running and they got me in the alley behind the venue. I think it was a Taser; I don’t know. I heard a pulse of some sort and then a stinging sensation right in the middle of my back. I don’t remember anything after that.”
“Sorry,” Jane said.
“Thanks,” he replied and smiled at her.
“Hey,” Carl said. He was looking at Jane now. “You said something about a plan?” He glanced over to Michael and Morris. They got up and sat on the corners of their couches at the other side of the room, facing the group that had formed around Jane.
“Yes,” she said and nodded at him. She turned back to Ciara. “Ciara, when you were scanning the facility in that room with Lucas, when you looked through the metallic door, did you notice a small portable generator of some kind on the floor?”
Ciara thought about this and then replied, “No, I didn’t, actually. I went right through there because it just seemed like a standard control area—a bunch of computers and stuff. I continued on to see what else I could see. Why?”
“Well, we’ve figured out how the dampening field works,” Jane replied, looking at the various faces surrounding her. “And we think we might have a plan to disable it.”
Joel and Carl exchanged a shocked glance.
“Really?” Joel asked. “How?”
Jane explained in detail what she, Michael and Morris had discovered about how the suppression field worked.
“How did you find that out?” Carl asked.
Jane looked at Morris nervously.
“Ugh, that’s a bit of a story, but we’ll tell you later,” Morris said.
Jane winked at him surreptitiously.
“Okay,” Carl replied after a moment of hesitation, during which he glanced at the two of them.
“Do you think we’d have a chance of getting to the surface?” Ciara asked.
“Yes,” Mike replied.
“They have all kinds of weaponry, Jane.”
“I know, but we can’t let that stop us. If we can take down the main generator, we should be able to disarm them. Don’t you think so?” Jane asked, looking at each of them. Ciara seemed hesitant and unsure.
“Yeah, why not,” Carl replied.
Jane turned to him and thought that she could sense the same thing she had sensed from Morris when they had first met: he was a good person. Joel and Carl began to talk to each other about their plan as Jane returned to her conversation with Ciara. In the short span of time during which they had been talking, Jane had grown very fond of her. There was a gentleness to Ciara’s personality that comforted Jane. A warmth radiated out from Ciara, making Jane feel safe.
Michael, Morris, Joel and Carl had been involved in their own conversations. Now Morris called over to her.
“Jane.”
She turned and looked at him as he nodded towards the television. They all turned their gaze to the TV, which displayed the image of a news anchor.
“Turn it up,” she said. Ciara obliged immediately, turning the volume up with a quick gesture of her hand. Jane had a sinking feeling in her stomach as the volume went up and the sound of the reporter’s voice filled the room.
“The video, which is the first of its kind to reach the mainstream, has been viewed more than fifty million times online. It comes from a group that claims to have devoted itself to the eradication of people with ‘Ethereal Vision.’ It references several facilities around the globe, including ones at undisclosed locations in New York, Paris and Hong Kong. The person in the video, whose voice is completely unidentifiable, says that the facilities will be overrun if the ethereals, as they are referred to in the video, are not released to them. What they plan to do with the ethereals is not known. These facilities have heretofore been thought not to exist, but this video seems to provide even more convincing evidence that they do. The creator of the video claims to know the locations of these places and details about how they operate. Here is a small segment of the video. This is the only part we have been permitted to show on air.” The woman closed her hands and finished her piece as her image was replaced and the video played on full screen.
Jane gasped when she heard the voice, for it was a horrifying sound. It had been altered sonically to such a degree that it sounded drastically inhuman. But it was a human speaking the words. The video showed an amalgamation of clips that had been posted online over the years—videos of other people doing extraordinary things.
There was a young man walking through a cloud of fire and surrounded by a shimmering veil of light; it was some kind of strange reaction between the flames and his psychokinetic ability. He was using this to shield himself from the fire. It was a clip that Jane was familiar with, having watched it before. The inhuman voice spoke and filled the room.
“We know who you are, and we know what you want. If the captive ethereals are not released to us, we will release all information pertaining to your facilities to the public and will overrun your locations by force. Do not test us on this matter, or the consequences will be devastating.”
As the video ended, red lettering appeared on the screen, the colour of blood. It read Ethereal End.
The video cut away and back to the anchorwoman. Jane thought it was probably the greatest amount of shock she had ever seen a news anchor show on television. The woman composed herself quickly and continued. “So it would seem this radical group—Ethereal End—has issued a threat to these facilities.” The woman hesitated and touched her finger to her ear monitor. Her expression changed, from the pleasant demeanour of an anchorwoman facing millions of people to the stress of a professional worker dealing with various technical difficulties.
This expression lasted all of three seconds, then the pleasant, if somewhat perturbed, anchor was back. “It seems further comment on this video…” she hesitated again and took a breath. “At this time, we won’t be providing further commentary on this video.”
The woman continued speaking about another topic, but Jane could sense something else in her voice now: terror. Whatever had been said into that ear monitor, it had clearly been an indication to cut the report short. Had they decided that airing the clip was a mistake? Jane guessed the probability of that was high.
“Turn it down,” she said to Ciara, who obliged.