Dr. Mako read his thoughts. “It will be an interesting first few days. But you’ll learn to cope.”
“What about my parents?” Jax prodded. “You have to take out that suggestion!”
“In time, Jackson. In time.”
The first vision came in gym class during a volleyball game. It was faint but unmistakable — his own talking head in a pop-up on a computer screen. There was no sound, of course, but if he concentrated, he could almost read his own lips:
… vote for Trey Douglas …
Wham! The ball came screaming in at light speed, hitting him full in the face. The impact was so powerful that his nose was still bleeding in the nurse’s office twenty minutes later.
Tommy spotted him a fresh T-shirt. “What happened, man? Why didn’t you put your hand up?”
Jax hesitated. “It was blowback.”
“Still?”
Jax shook his head. “Again. I made another clip.”
“Why would you do a stupid thing like that?” Tommy demanded. “Especially after what happened last time?”
“I had no choice.” He told Tommy about Dr. Mako’s threat against the Opuses.
Tommy was round-eyed. “And you believe him?”
“I have to! Look at what he did to the guy on the bridge. And he admitted that he bent you to get you to sing his praises and then wiped your memory of it.”
“You said being color-blind makes me a tough nut,” Tommy challenged, still not entirely convinced.
“Only to me. All hypnotists are different. No one really understands the science of why it works.” He tossed his blood-soaked T-shirt in the garbage and pulled on Tommy’s. “Think of the subjects at Sentia. The hypnos get them to run on treadmills, and jump up and down, and do a bunch of harmless stuff. But we could just as easily have them pushing each other off roofs or down stairs, or even shooting people in the head. From a mesmeric standpoint, there’s no difference. It’s just the details of what you tell them to do.”
“This is really messed up,” Tommy decided. “Maybe you should go to your folks. At least let them know they’re in danger.”
“That’s the worst thing I could possibly do,” Jax said despairingly. “They’d run to the cops, who couldn’t help even if they believed the story. Best case scenario, the police would think we were wackos. Because if they take us seriously, they’ll question Mako. Then he’ll know I’m behind it, and he’ll activate the suggestion that’ll kill my parents.”
Another jolt of blowback sent Jax reeling.
“Watch your nose, Opus,” Tommy advised. “That’s my last spare shirt.”
Jax recovered enough to glare at him. “Your wardrobe problems are breaking my heart.”
“Listen, man,” Tommy said seriously. “I get that you think there’s no way out of this. But if you somehow come up with a way to fight back, I’m in.”
Jax was rattled by visions several times that day, including once in science, when he overturned a beaker of acid on his sneakers. Disturbingly, the incidents seemed to be coming closer together as the day wore on. He had a mental picture of the computer virus spreading — his face appearing on screen after screen, planting the suggestion inside unsuspecting voters. Worse than the blowback itself was the undeniable truth that he was tampering with a free and fair election — and possibly helping a ruthless person like Dr. Mako gain a scary amount of power.
He staggered through his schedule, the toe of his sock poking out of the hole in his shoe, his complexion pale, his forehead beaded with sweat. Several teachers asked if he was sick. Jessica Crews offered to come over after school and bring him soup. By eighth period, he was back in the nurse’s office, a thermometer sticking out of his mouth.
“It’s probably just stress,” the nurse concluded when his temperature came up normal. “You kids are under a lot of pressure these days. Things were a lot simpler when I was your age.”
Jax had to agree.
He found no relief at home. The visions were virtually back-to-back, and the PIP images were pretty much constant. At times they overlapped, two or three at once, filling his field of vision with so much input that he could barely see well enough to walk around his own apartment. How was he supposed to live like this? You’ll learn to cope, Mako had assured him. But how would he know? The director himself had said that no one had ever been able to hypnotize remotely before. This was totally uncharted territory.
As terrible as Jax felt, he struggled to maintain the appearance that he was 100 percent okay. He couldn’t let his parents see that he was suffering. He would never be so reckless as to tell them about the blowback, obviously. Still, the more they looked into what might be wrong with their son, the greater the chance that some word of it might get back to Dr. Mako. The director might misinterpret that as Jax betraying him. So he smiled a lot, which made his face contort into a hideous leer. He even hummed a little tune, which was risky. He’d never hummed much before. Would his parents notice the change in behavior?
“Someone’s in a good mood,” his mother observed.
“Aced my English exam,” he lied, forcing a grin that would not have been out of place on someone who was being stretched on the rack.
Dad was at his laptop, searching flights to Florida for spring break. He was grumbling about airfares and schedules when, suddenly, Jax heard his own voice coming from the small office.
Frowning, he peered over his father’s shoulder. His eyes, larger than life, stared back at him, morphing from violet to aquamarine.
“… You will remember nothing of me or this message. Life will continue as usual. But the next time you operate the lever of a voting booth …”
Jax knew that his video message was making the rounds — the blowback alone proved that. But seeing the clip on the family computer as Ashton Opus browsed travel sites brought home the universal spread of the virus. And this was just day one! The election was more than a week away. How bad was this going to get?
“Dad —?” he ventured hesitantly.
His father didn’t hear him. He was bent, his attention riveted on the huge eyes on the screen.
I just hypnotized my own father.
It was his dad’s worst fear, rooted deep in his childhood with Opus parents. Jax searched his mind for the mesmeric impression that came from his father, but it was becoming impossible to pinpoint a single PIP amid the fog of blowback.
The message concluded and the pop-up disappeared from the computer, revealing flight schedules to Miami and Fort Lauderdale.
A shiver ran across his father’s shoulders. “Oh, hi, Jax. I didn’t see you standing there.”
“Have you been looking for flights all this time?” Jax cleared his throat carefully. “Nothing else came up?”
“Just the fares,” Dad replied sourly. “Remind me never to travel on a school break. Talk about extortion. There ought to be a law.”
“Maybe there will be,” Jax suggested. “We’ll elect a new president this fall. Who do you like in the primary?”
Ashton Opus did not even hesitate. “Oh, Douglas, definitely. And not only because we met him at Sentia. He just seems like the kind of man you pull that lever for.”
The visions slackened around midnight, which gave Jax some hope that he’d be able to sleep. But it was not to be. He’d drift off for ten or fifteen minutes before some night owl — or someone in another time zone — would run into the video. The PIP would worm its way into a dream as if it belonged there. A garage door would open, a TV would switch on, a curtain would sweep aside, revealing two glowing, floating sprites — his own eyes. As with a real dream, he’d be able to go with it for a while, becoming increasingly aware that something was not quite right. And then he would awaken to a storm of blowback that would leave him shuddering.
As the week progressed, his time in school became a complete waste. He retained zero information from any classes; he barely heard his teachers. It was all he could do to keep his head upright as he sat there pretending to listen.
Simultaneous visions blurred before him. It was impossible to keep count of how many. Having so much going on in his brain and in front of his eyes brought on waves of nausea, and he suffered pounding headaches. If it hadn’t been for Tommy, he probably wouldn’t have been able to navigate the halls.
On Friday, Jax caught a ride home with his father, and threw up all over the glove-leather interior of a quarter-million-dollar automobile. The Opuses had him at the pediatrician within an hour.
For all the misery that he was enduring, the loneliest part was that he didn’t dare tell his parents what was happening to him. They’d insist on going to the police, which would expose them to grave danger from Dr. Mako. He couldn’t look at them without thinking of the lethal post-hypnotic suggestion the director had implanted in them. It was as if Mom and Dad each carried a bomb with a hair trigger. Any wrong move by their son would certainly get them both killed.
So at the pediatrician’s, he did what he had to do. He hypnotized Dr. DeSilva, and when that PIP superimposed itself over all the others, Jax spat out the tongue depressor and whispered, “I have a twenty-four-hour flu. It’s nothing to worry about. And do you happen to know how to get the smell of barf out of a Bentley?”
He was gratified when the diagnosis came back. “Nothing to worry about. Just a twenty-four-hour bug. And for the car, I suggest a solution of white vinegar and water.”
That fooled Mom and Dad for a while. But they knew how long twenty-four hours lasted, and days were going by with Jax getting worse instead of better. His skin was the color of parchment, and his eyes resembled Christmas tree ornaments, green irises surrounded by bloodshot red. The video had gone completely viral by that point, because there was rarely a moment where Jax wasn’t weighed down by twenty, fifty, possibly even hundreds of PIP images. More proof: The opinion polls were showing Trey Douglas widening his lead over the hapless Governor Schaumberg. The election was the following Tuesday, and the experts were predicting a Douglas victory by a wide margin. Jax hadn’t been to Sentia since the day he’d recorded the video clip, but he could almost hear Dr. Mako chortling with glee over the success of his scheme.
He should have been in bed, but he had to convince his parents he was getting better, so he forced himself to go out, volunteering for errands he never would have done if he’d truly felt fine. He couldn’t get past the fruit market, where a dizzy spell sent him reeling into a pyramid of cantaloupes. In the end, Tommy had to take care of the post office and the library while Jax sat on a bench, holding a wad of damp paper towels to the back of his neck.
“Dude, is this ever going to end?”
Jax gazed at his friend through bleary eyes. “The election’s over on Tuesday.”
“Yeah, but the Internet goes on forever!” Tommy pointed out. “Maybe you should go to Sentia and ask Dr. Mako for help.”
Jax regarded him sharply. “Why? Because he’s devoted his life to New York City education and is an inspiration to every single one of us?”
“No, he’s a rotten jerk, but he might know how you can live through this!”
“I wouldn’t ask that guy for help if I was at death’s door,” Jax said stubbornly.
Tommy was worried. “How do you know you’re not? What happens to people who can’t sleep, and they don’t eat because they can’t keep anything down?”
“They puke in Bentleys,” Jax replied sourly. “And let me tell you, my dad’s boss had a few things to say about that.”
“I’m serious, man!”
“You promised to get me to school the next two days,” Jax reminded him. “I don’t care if you have to carry me. My folks can’t know that I’m not okay. Once the election’s done, they’ll pull the video. It might not happen right away, but surely the visions will taper off.”
Monday was a nightmare. A hurricane of blowback raged all around him. He was aware of the school — the students and teachers — but it was as if he were a scuba diver, an alien visitor to a silent, murky world. If he hadn’t had Tommy propping him up, he wasn’t at all sure he could have managed to put one foot in front of the other.
Election Day dawned with a mixture of triumph and dread for Jax. He could see the light at the end of the tunnel — it would all be over soon. Yet he knew that the coming hours would bring the heaviest maelstrom of blowback yet. He made it through the morning in relatively good condition. He still couldn’t keep food down, so he was weak with hunger. But he’d discovered through trial and error that drinking water kept him hydrated and a little more focused. At least he had the strength to make it up the big staircase to his sixth-period English class.
“Not bad, Opus —” Tommy began.
That was when the wave hit. Jax was far beyond individual PIPs at this point. What he felt was the ebb and flow of a current of disorientation. He knew an instant of vertigo and reached out for his friend to steady himself. Only Tommy had stepped to the other side of him on the landing. Jax was now draped over Rachel Herschiser, girlfriend of Butch Rockman, who was doing the eighth grade for the third time.
“Hey!”
The girl was ripped away from Jax, leaving him teetering on the brink with no one to hold on to.
Tommy leaped to interpose himself between his friend and the big boy. “Take it easy, Butch. He didn’t mean anything by it —”
The shove had the power of a locomotive. Tommy staggered back, knocking Jax off the landing. Jax went down, striking every step along the way. It had to be a hallucination, but he saw — or thought he saw — the PIP images in his head being tossed around like the balls in a lotto machine. Then he hit bottom and saw nothing at all.
It was the most peace he’d had in a week.
Jax came back to himself in a place that definitely wasn’t I.S. 222. A sharp antiseptic smell penetrated the never-ending gale of blowback. White walls, stainless steel … a hospital?
He sat up in bed, tugging on the IV in his arm. That explained why, in spite of everything, he felt pretty good. For days, nausea from the hypnotic onslaught had prevented him from keeping anything down. But he could be given fluids and nutrition directly through the tube.
Maybe Butch Rockman did me a favor. There’s a first for everything.
Then he felt the back of his head and wished he hadn’t. An egg-size lump under a soft gauze bandage, and pain to spare.
At least it’s real, he reflected. Getting hurt was a reminder that, in spite of everything, the laws of science still applied to Jackson Opus. At this point, the bump on his head was practically the only thing anchoring him to the world.
He peered outside the blue curtain that surrounded his bed. Nurses and orderlies bustled around; gurneys rattled, and muted PA announcements could be heard. Jax was still in his school clothes, so he guessed this was Emergency. It was probably the best place for him on the day of the election, not that he could explain the nature of his emergency to any doctor.
He picked up the remote from the bedside table and switched on the TV that was mounted on the wall bracket. As he flipped channels, a headline in the CNN news crawl stopped his thumb.
Jax leaned back onto his head bump, which was agonizing even in contact with the soft pillow. No amount of blowback could distract his mind from the meaning of this news. Mako’s plan was working. And, he, Jackson Opus, had been the key instrument that had made it so.
With one lousy video you’ve destroyed a system that’s lasted more than two hundred years!
But what choice did he have, with his parents’ lives hanging in the balance? Of course, history was filled with stories of heroes who had made devastating sacrifices for the good of the many.
I’m no hero.
He couldn’t even comfort himself with the thought that, if he didn’t cooperate, Mako would find somebody else. There was nobody else. He’d been in a unique position to stop this freight train in its tracks. Instead, he’d poured on more coal.
At the time, he’d followed the only path that made sense in order to protect his family. In the proc
ess, he’d subverted nothing less than the American system of democracy. And now that it was over, were Mom and Dad any safer? No! Mako hadn’t removed the suggestion he’d implanted in them. They were in just as much danger as before. Maybe more, because now the director knew Jax could be blackmailed into anything in order to save the people he loved.
It almost tore Jax in two. He had more hypnotic ability than Mako. The director himself had said so. He should be able to overpower the man. But the one time he’d tried, he’d been slapped down like a pesky insect. His inexperience had held him back. And he’d never get any better, because the only person who could train him and develop his gift was Mako himself.
He was stuck. Nobody would ever take his side in this fight, because the whole world thought Elias Mako had devoted his life to New York City education and blah, blah, blah. There was not a single living soul who could see the director of Sentia for what he was.
When the answer came to Jax, it was like a sunrise bursting over the horizon, casting a glow even through the firestorm of hypnotic images that still battered him. There was one person who saw through Mako. Axel Braintree knew from the start that Mako was ruthless, dishonest, and dangerous. He’d tried to recruit Jax to be his spy at the institute. Jax had been stupid enough to rebuke him. Not anymore. Right now, the president of the Sandman’s Guild was Jax’s only hope.
“Oh, you’re awake.” A white-clad nurse burst in through his curtain. “You took a nasty fall. How are you feeling?”
“Pretty good,” Jax lied. He swung a leg over the side of the bed. “In fact, I’m really anxious to get back to school —”
She pushed him back down with a hand that was gentle yet firm. “School will get along without you. Now” — she maneuvered the bed tray in front of him and dropped a thick sheaf of forms onto it — “I have some admissions paperwork for you to fill out.”