We're grown men, already trained, yet you're talking about a child trying to cope with impossible demands."
"It should have driven her over the edge," Lily agreed. She held up the notebook. "I've discovered a private sanitarium in Louisiana that the Whitney Trust owns. It is run by the Sisters of Mercy. And it has one patient--a young woman." She looked at her husband. "Her name is Dahlia Le Blanc."
"You aren't going to tell me your father bought out a religious organization," Raoul "Gator" Fontenot protested. He hastily crossed himself. "I won't believe nuns could possibly be a part of Whitney's cover-up."
Lily smiled at him. "Actually, Gator, I think the nuns are fictitious, as is the sanitarium. I think it's really a front to hide Dahlia from the world. As the sole director of all the trusts, I was able to dig fairly deep and it seems she's really the only patient, and aside from the Trust picking up all her bills, she has a sizable trust in her own name with regular deposits. The deposits coincide with entries seemingly indicating my father had become suspicious she was being used as an operative for the United States government. Apparently he allowed her to be trained and then when he realized it was too difficult for her, he moved her to the sanitarium and, as always, when things went wrong, he left her without following up." There was an edge of bitterness to her voice. "I think my father tried to create a safe place for her there, just as he created this house for me."
Ryland bent his head to Lily's, his chin rubbing the top of her sable hair. "Your father was a brilliant man, Lily. He had to learn about love, it wasn't shown to him as a child." It was a refrain he reminded her of often since it had come to light that not only had Dr. Whitney experimented on Lily, removing the filters from her brain in order to enhance psychic ability, she wasn't his biological child, as he'd led her to believe, but one of many children he'd "bought" from foreign orphanages.
There was another silence. Tucker Addison whistled softly. He was a tall, stocky man with dark skin, brown eyes, and an engaging smile. "You did it, Lily. You actually found her. And she's a GhostWalker like all of us."
"Before we get too excited, I think you should watch some of the other training tapes I found. Each of these is labeled Novelty." She signaled to her husband to press Play on the machine to start the video running.
Lily found herself holding her breath. She was certain the child Novelty and Dahlia were one and the same. "According to the records, Novelty is eight years old here." The child's hair was thick and as black as a raven's wing. She wore it in a clumsy braid that hung to her waist in a thick rope. Her face was delicate, matching the rest of her, and the thick hair seemed to overpower her. "I'm certain this is the same child. Look at her face. Her eyes are the same." Lily felt the child was hiding from the world behind the mass of silken strands. She looked exotic, her origins Asian. Like all the missing girls, Dr. Whitney had adopted her from a foreign country and brought her to his laboratory to enhance her natural psychic abilities.
In the video, the little girl was on a balance beam. She didn't walk carefully. She didn't even look down. She ran across it as if it was a wide sidewalk instead of a narrow piece of wood. She didn't hesitate at the end of the beam, but did a flip off of it, landing on her feet, still running without breaking stride. She was far too small to leap up and catch the bars over her head, but she didn't seem to notice. She launched herself skyward, her hands outstretched, her small body tucked as she connected with the bars and swung over them with ease.
A collective gasp told Lily the men were all watching. She let the tape play through. All the while the little girl performed amazing skills. At times the child laughed aloud, bringing home to them the fact that she was alone in the room with only the cameras catching her incredible performance. Lily waited for the end of the tape and the reaction it would bring. As many times as she viewed it, she could not believe what she was seeing.
The child went up and over a two-story-high cargo net and then raced across the floor toward the last obstacle. A cable stretched across the length of the room, sagging in the middle, several feet above ground level. Novelty stared at the cable as she ran, concentration apparent on her face. The cable began to stiffen and by the time she leapt onto the steel wire, it was woven into a thick rope, with no sag whatsoever in the middle, allowing her to run lightly across it to the end and jump off laughing.
There was another silence when Ryland switched off the tape. "Can any of you do that?"
The men shook their heads. "How did she do it?"
"She has to be manipulating energy. We all do it to a much smaller extent," Lily said. "She's able to take it a step further and at little expense to herself. I'm willing to bet that she's generating an antigravitational field to levitate the cable. It could be done by psychokinetically converting the underside of the cable into a superconductor, and applying the Li-Podkletnov technique of spinning the nuclei in the atoms of the underside to generate a sufficiently powerful antigrav field to lift it. And that would explain how she just danced across it as if she were floating!" Lily turned to look at the men, her eyes alight with excitement. "She was floating! Her own weight was reduced to almost nothing by the same antigrav field."
"Lily." Ryland shook his head. "You're doing it again. Try speaking normal English."
"I'm sorry. I get carried away when I'm excited," Lily admitted. "It's just so incredible. I've been scouring the research literature, and what's amazing to me is that she's doing with her mind what a couple of scientists are only beginning to be able to do in labs: generate antigravity. Only she does it much better, and she seems to be able to generate antigravity whenever she likes. She turns it on and off in a way that the scientists aren't even close to at this point. Plus scientists, and I as well, would give anything to know how she is doing it at room temperature. They currently need to lower the temperature to several hundred degrees below zero in order to create their superconductors."
"Antigravity?" Gator echoed, "isn't that just a little far-fetched?"
"And what we do isn't?" Nicolas asked.
"Well, actually I thought it was impossible at first, too," Lily conceded. "But if, like me, you've watched these tapes several hundred times, you begin to notice little details. Here, let's rewind it to where she's crossing the cable. Now let's watch it in slow motion. See? Right there when the cable starts to straighten out?" She touched the screen to indicate where they should look. "Look here, at the ceiling above the cable--see that electrical wire connecting the two overhead lights? Look, it's moved up, about half an inch! Do you see that? And then it falls back right when Dahlia jumps off the other end of the cable. That's exactly what you'd expect to see if there was an antigrav field extending upward from the cable."
Lily pointed to the image of the young girl frozen on the screen. "Look at her, she's laughing, not grabbing her head in pain." She pushed in another tape. "In this one, she moves locks so fast, at first I thought a machine had to be involved." The tape showed a huge vault with a complex lock system. The bolts slid so fast, the tumblers spun and clicked as if a large pattern was predetermined. The camera had focused completely on the heavy door so that it wasn't until they heard a child's laughter as the door swung open that they even realized Dahlia was there, opening locks with her mind.
Lily regarded the men. "Isn't that incredible? She never even touched the vault. I considered a few theories--clairaudition for one, but I just couldn't account for the sheer speed with which she opened the vault. Finally it hit me. She was directly intuiting and taking pleasure in the state of lowest entropy in the tumbler-lever system of the vault!"
Lily looked so triumphant Ryland hated to crush her joy. "Sweetheart, I'm so excited for you. Really, I am. It's just that I didn't understand a damn thing you said." He looked around the room with a raised eyebrow. The other men shook their heads.
She tapped her finger on the table, frowning. "All right, let's see if I can come up with a way to explain it to you. You know those movies where the burglars put thei
r stethoscope up against the safe as they're turning the dial?"
"Sure," Gator said. "I watch that stuff all the time. They're listening for the tumblers to click into place."
"Not exactly, Gator," Lily corrected. "They're actually listening for a drop in the amount of sound. You're hearing clicking with each number you pass, and then you hear just a little less clicking when one of the tumblers has fallen into place. That's why I first thought of clairaudition, which as you know, is like clairvoyance, seeing things at a distance in your mind, but this would be hearing things at a distance in your mind."
"But you don't think that's what she's doing?" Nicolas asked.
Lily shook her head. "No, I had to throw that theory out. It doesn't explain her incredible speed. Plus, I found out that the vault in the videotape--like most safes made since the 1960s--has all kinds of safeguards like nylon tumblers and sound baffles that make them pretty much impenetrable from lock-picking of this sort."
"So Dahlia doesn't do it through sound," Nicolas said.
"No, she doesn't," Lily agreed. "I was stumped for a while. But in the middle of the night a much simpler explanation occurred to me; she literally 'feels' each lever falling into place. But there's more. I think she has an emotional distaste for entropy in systems that gives her speed."
"You've lost me again, Lily," Ryland said.
"Sorry. The second law of thermodynamics says that the amount of entropy, or disorder, in the universe, tends to increase unless it is prevented from doing so. You can see the second law in action everywhere. A vase breaks into pieces. You never see a bunch of pieces assemble themselves into a vase. Left to itself, a house always gets dustier, never cleaner. And tumblers, because they're spring-loaded, always spring out of place, not into place, when left to themselves. That's the second law of thermodynamics in action--disorder keeps increasing if things are left to themselves. The closest I can figure it is that Dahlia is a part of nature that runs counter to the second law. In other words, she loves order and despises entropy."
"That's true of a lot of people. Rosa is a nut about the house being tidy," Gator said, referring to their housekeeper. "And her kitchen has to be just so. We don't dare move anything around."
Lily nodded. "That's true, but with Dahlia it runs much deeper. Because she's psychic, she actually takes pleasure when she intuits the tumblers falling into place. It's because she's doing her lock-picking at the level of feeling and intuition, motivated by pleasure--that gives her speed. Think of how quickly we take our hand off a hot stove when we start to feel pain, or how the knee jerks up when you hit it with a hammer. These are reflexive responses; they don't involve any thinking, which is a good thing for that hot hand, because thinking is much slower."
"I can open small locks," Ryland admitted. He glanced at Nicolas. "You can too. But I admit, I'm definitely thinking about it. I have to concentrate."
"And neither of us can open locks on that scale or at that speed," Nicolas commented. His gaze remained riveted to the screen. "She's amazing."
"I'd have to agree, Nico," Lily said. "So as near as I can tell, she's psychokinetically moving the tumblers into place in the same kind of reflexive fashion. It doesn't get slowed down by her thinking mind; she's getting instantly rewarded by a jolt of pleasure from her nervous system every time she moves one of the tumblers into place. And when all the tumblers are in place . . . well, that's why she laughed with such exuberance when the door swung open. That was the real rush for her." She swallowed and looked away from them. "I'm that same way with mathematical patterns. My mind continually has to work on them, and I get a rush when the patterns all click into place."
Nicolas whistled softly. "I can see why the government would want her working for them."
Lily stiffened. "She's still a child who deserved a childhood. She should have been playing with toys."
Nicolas turned his head slowly, looking at her with his cold, black eyes. "That's exactly what she appears to be doing, Lily. Playing with toys. You're angry with your father and rightly so. But he tried to do for this child what he did for you. Your brain had to work on mathematical problems and patterns all the time; this girl required a different type of work, but she obviously needed it just as much. Why wasn't she adopted out?" His voice was flat, almost a monotone, but it carried weight and authority. He never raised his voice, but he was always heard.
Lily repressed a shiver. "Maybe I'm too close to the problem," she agreed. "And you very well could be right. She does seem to be able to do all this without pain. I'd like to know why. Even now, with all the work I've done, the exercises to make myself stronger, I still get violent headaches if I use telepathy too much."
"But maybe you weren't a natural telepath. You have other talents that are amazing. When I use telepathy, it doesn't bother me at all," Nicolas said.
"Lily, you said the tapes of the child were difficult to watch," Tucker pointed out, "but she seems fine in that one."
Lily nodded. "The tapes involving operative training were difficult for me to watch. The one you're about to see really covers both her tremendous skills and how dangerous she can be--and the cost of her gifts."
The hallway depicted on the screen was very narrow, an obvious maze set up to represent various rooms in a house. A dozen other rooms were seen as smaller images along the left side of the screen. A small, black-haired woman came into view, stalking silently along the wall. She took several steps into the maze and stopped. She seemed to be listening or concentrating internally. The watchers could see a large man crouched behind a curtain in one of the rooms and a second man in the beams along the ceiling waiting in ambush almost directly above the first man.
The woman was tiny, her black hair straight and shiny, swept back in a careless ponytail. She wore dark clothes and moved with graceful, fluid, stealthy steps. When she stilled, she seemed to become part of the shadows, a vague, blurred image, so slight as to be a part of the wall. The watchers blinked several times to keep her in focus.
"She's able to blur her image enough to trick anyone watching," Ryland said in awe. "That would be useful for us to learn."
"The focus and concentration required is incredible," Lily pointed out. "But it's costing her. She's rubbed her temples twice, and if you look closely at her face, she's already sweating. She obviously can feel the emotions of those waiting to attack her. I observed her training in martial arts. She was reading the mind of her opponent, anticipating everything he did before he did it. She utilized her psychic abilities as well as her physical ones."
"She's not armed," Nicolas pointed out.
"No, but she doesn't need to be," Lily assured.
They watched the woman called Novelty continue unerringly to the right room, not even bothering to check the various empty rooms between her and the two men waiting to ambush her. She trusted her instincts and her highly evolved psychic senses.
"She's so damned small," Gator said. "She looks like a child. She can't weigh even a hundred pounds."
"Maybe," said Lily, "but watch her. She's lethal."
The woman moved with confidence until she was against the wall nearest where one man crouched behind the curtains covering the opening to a closet. "She's laying her hand against the wall, almost as if she's feeling for something," Lily said. "Energy perhaps? Could she be that sensitive? Could a human being's energy pass through the wall in sufficient force to allow her to feel his presence, or is she reading his thoughts?"
Novelty stepped back from the wall in total silence, but remained staring at it for several minutes, slowly sweeping her gaze upward as if she could see the ceiling in the other room as well. The walls slowly blackened. Smoke poured into the hall. Angry flames leapt through the wall to the inside of the room and raced up toward the ceiling, reaching hungrily for both men. Almost immediately the entire room was engulfed in flames, which triggered a sprinkler system. It was the only thing that saved the two ambushers from a terrible death.
"She generates heat," I
an McGillicuddy said. He was a giant of a man, with wide shoulders and a heavy muscular body. His dark brown eyes were fixed on the screen, watching the flames in awe. "I wouldn't mind that particular gift."
"Or curse," Nicolas interjected.
Ian nodded. "Or curse," he agreed.
The young woman slipped from the house and moved back into the trees, pressing both hands to her head. She sank to her knees, fell backward, and went immediately into a violent seizure. The cameras remained focused on her as blood trickled from her mouth. In several seconds she lay unmoving on the ground.
Ryland swore and turned away. His gaze collided with Nicolas's. They stared at one another for a long moment of understanding.
Lily paused the tape, leaving the distressing picture of the woman lying in a heap on the ground. "What's causing this pain? I've checked through my father's notes and viewed the other training tapes. Every tape where she's left completely alone, she's able to perform all sorts of incredible and nearly unbelievable feats, but if there is a human being close by, she suffers tremendous pain and often passes out."
"Emotions swamping her?" Gator guessed. "With no anchor she's left wide open to all the emotions. The men in the room would have been scared and angry and feeling betrayed by their handlers. I would imagine they didn't like being put in the position of nearly being roasted alive."
"Maybe," Lily mused, "but I think it's more complicated than what we go through. I'm not certain she reads emotions, or at least not how most of us do."
Nicolas stared at the screen for a long time, studying the image of the unconscious woman. "She didn't sense the presence of her adversaries in the way we do, did she? It isn't emotions, it's something else."
"I think it could be energy," Lily said. "My father didn't understand about anchors, not really. When he first performed the experiment on all of us children, he thought we just had close friendships. He didn't understand that some of us trapped the overload of emotion away from the others, allowing them to function. Novelty, or Dahlia, is not an anchor--she needs one in order to function without pain. If you notice, in the majority of the training tapes, she's alone. They built a home for her, much like my home was built for me, and she was shielded from people. Dr. Whitney believed she could read minds in the same way many of us can, and he thought he was shielding her from emotions."