The Delphi Effect (The Delphi Trilogy Book 1)

  And even though they leave the curtains drawn when they do go, I’m under no illusions. We’ve been monitored every second since we entered this place, and as soon as they get to the computers, they’ll be monitoring us again.

  I take advantage of the few seconds of possible privacy to hug Deo again. “Did they hurt you?”

  “No. Threatened me, that’s all. Said they’d made you an offer . . . if you’d come in, they’d let me go, but you refused. Which I knew was a lie. The worst part was Dacia. She grabbed my arm and asked me all kinds of bullshit questions. Stuff about Molly. Stuff about everyone in your spook menagerie. I knew what she was doing this time, with her head-buzz routine, but it didn’t make it any easier to stop her.” He shrugs, looking embarrassed. “I don’t think we have any secrets left.”

  “Hey, I had a session with her, too. It’s not your fault.”

  “Maybe. But it is my fault we’re in this mess, so stop pretending it’s not. You’d never have been at the U Street shelter if I hadn’t called you. If I’d just gone back with Carla, you’d never have picked Molly up.”

  Carla is Deo’s mother. Every few years, she decides to enter Deo’s life again. That decision usually coincides with leaving her abusive husband, Deo’s stepfather, whose approach to family relationships begins and ends with his fists. Her bravado usually lasts a few weeks, then Carla convinces herself that Patrick has really changed this time. That he’ll be good to her and good to Deo, too. He just needs to scrub that eyeliner off his face and act like a real boy. Then maybe Patrick wouldn’t get so angry at him and they could be a family again.

  It’s exactly like Molly’s mom crawling back to Lucas each time. Minus the drugs—but there are different kinds of addictions.

  Different types of blindness too, I guess. I’ve been so caught up in my own guilt that this stupid curse of mine picked up Molly. I never even noticed that Deo was feeling guilty about pulling me into this situation.

  “I . . . think it might have happened anyway, D.” The dramatic roll of his eyes suggests that he gives that idea a big fat zero on the old plausibility meter, but I can’t really elaborate on why I think I’d have ended up on the Delphi radar at some point. Not here, not with Cregg listening. And we’ve got other issues to worry about aside from our collective guilt burden.

  Looking back at Lucas’s three victims, the first thing that strikes me is the garbage bags. I don’t want to see their bodies, but I know Cregg is right about their spirits being here. I felt the change when we walked in. Whatever fragments of their consciousness that exist are hovering in this room. I remember Molly saying that she stuck with her body for a long time. And it just feels wrong for these people to see their remains being treated like garbage.

  “Did you look at them?” I ask Deo. “I mean, did you see the bodies . . . afterward?”

  “Yeah. My eyes . . . well, they were shut when he fired the third bullet, because I was pretty sure number four had my name on it. But then, when I realized he wasn’t firing again, I looked.”

  “How bad is it?”

  He gives me a WTF face. “They’re dead, Anna.”

  “I know that. I just mean, is it . . . graphic? As much as I don’t want to see them, the garbage bags . . . well, they feel disrespectful? And I may need some visual backup if they don’t believe they’re dead.”

  “I’ve seen worse,” he says. “I mean, not in person, but . . .”

  That doesn’t exactly make me feel better. Deo has been known to watch some pretty gruesome stuff.

  “Are we talking CSI or Tarantino?”

  “In between. But a little closer to CSI.”

  “Let’s do it, then.” I step toward the body closest to me. I didn’t see this person before he was shot, but the body is large enough that I’m pretty sure it’s a man.

  Deo grabs my arm. “No, just stay back. I got this. I’ve already seen it once, and . . . I don’t want you close to all three of them at once. I’m going to . . .” He pulls in a shaky breath. “I’m going to move the chairs a bit farther apart before I uncover them. And you need to work on diverting power to shields, if you know what I mean.”

  I do. I take a few deep breaths, close my eyes, and focus all of my energy on my walls—both front and back—as I listen to the scraping of metal chair legs when he moves the bodies across the floor.

  Then comes the rustle of plastic, and a few muttered curses from Deo.

  “Okay,” he says. “Just . . . you might want to stay in front. The back is a little . . .” He doesn’t finish, but he doesn’t need to. I get it.

  It’s not as bad as I’d feared. There’s blood—a lot of it—but the shots are relatively clean, all three to the right temple. Mostly I feel sad. And furious that anyone would even consider the murder of three innocent people in order to test me. Both the girl and the third person at the end, the guy I didn’t see when Lucas opened the door earlier, appear almost peaceful. The guy with the dreads, who is the oldest of the bunch by about a decade, is in the worst shape. I think he may have struggled.

  I move toward the girl first, but Deo stops me.

  “The guy at the end. Jaden Park. Or maybe Parks. He said for you to grab him first.”

  “What?” I ask, in a low voice, even though I’m pretty sure Cregg has equipment that could hear a pin drop in here.

  Deo matches my whisper. “He knew what was about to happen. Everything. When we were here alone, before Lucas came back, he told us everything. Said Lucas would shoot the three of them, but not me.”

  The guy appears to be in his early twenties. Average height, slightly above-average weight. Mixed race, I think. Maybe Asian and African heritage. And from what Deo’s just said, he also had a little something extra that you’d never guess from looking at him. You’d think the ability to see into the future would be a useful talent, certainly a much more useful talent than my own. Yet Cregg ordered him killed—ordered him killed almost certainly knowing that he would see it coming. But how would this guy know about me? Could he foresee what was coming even after his death?

  “I didn’t exactly believe him until I saw the gun,” Deo said. “And I still thought Lucas was going to shoot me. The older guy—Jaden called him Will—he started freaking out as soon as they brought him in, but he never spoke, just kept trying to yank his arms free. I’m thinking maybe he was mute. The girl, though . . . I think he called her Roxana. It was so weird. She smiled when that Jaden guy told us. At first, I thought maybe she didn’t believe him either, but looking back . . . yeah, she did. Then at the end, right before Lucas walked in, Jaden looked straight at me and said to tell Anna to pick him up first.”

  Okay, then, Jaden. I guess you’re first.

  I crouch next to him, placing one hand on his knee, and visualize pulling one small brick from my front wall.

  The force of his psyche coming through that tiny space is so strong that it hits me physically. I think I’d have fallen backward if Deo hadn’t been there to catch me. Picking Jaden Park up is easy. The tough part is getting that brick back into my wall. It’s like closing the door against a windstorm, because there are others out there.

  And not just the two whose bodies are next to us.

  There are dozens.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Jaden Park’s thoughts fill my entire head. At first, they aren’t coherent. Mostly confused, random sensations. But then they start to take on form.

  Cold.

  Head hurts.

  Then he laughs. Not a full laugh, just a short ironic chuckle.

  My head most definitely should hurt. So . . . I guess you’re Anna?

  Yes.

  This is the first time I’ve been staring at someone’s body while I heard their voice. The first time I’ve ever actually seen the body of someone I picked up, aside from those ghostlike glimpses I catch sometimes in the mirror. I’m not really sure what to say to him. Sorry you were shot? That somehow doesn’t seem adequate when I’m pretty sure he realizes I’m the reaso
n he was shot.

  He picks up the stray thought.

  Sorry works for me. But you didn’t shoot us. From what Will told me, you and your friend could be next, so you don’t need to be apologizin’ to any of us.

  So . . . he’s not mute then? Will, the guy with the dreads?

  No, he’s mute . . . or was mute, I guess.

  He seems sad to see the other man’s body, so I look down at the floor again.

  But he could write. And if it was only you and Will, and you kept your thoughts kinda quiet, he’d write what he was thinkin’ too, not just stuff he pulled out of your head. Especially if he’d known you a while, like he had me. We’d been roommates for three years. He’s learned to filter me out.

  Deo’s hand presses my shoulder. “You got something?” he asks, as he helps me to my feet.

  “Not yet. I’m just a little . . . dizzy. Maybe if I sit down for a few minutes. Close my eyes and see if I can clear my mind, open up some space. Could you get me some water?”

  “Sure.” He walks with me to the chair he sat in earlier. “Be right back.”

  Deo probably knows I’m talking nonsense. But I need some time to see what Jaden knows before I let Cregg in on the fact that I’ve managed to download the first half of his test. If I sit there like a zombie while we’re chatting, Cregg will probably put the pieces together.

  I close my eyes and lean my head back.

  How did you know this was going to happen? And why didn’t you try to stop it?

  As soon as the thought forms, I realize how harsh it sounds.

  Way to go, Anna. Blame the dead guy for letting himself get killed. That’s . . . really not how I meant it.

  It’s okay. Fair question.

  And when Jaden answers, it’s not like it was with Molly and the others, where things trickled in gradually. I didn’t even realize Molly was murdered for the first week or so. All that came through was that she needed to find Pa. Eventually, all of my hitchers seemed to figure out what was going on, that I could help them get out of the perpetual loop they were in. But at the beginning, most of them were kind of clueless.

  Jaden, on the other hand, knows exactly what I am and why he’s here. His story doesn’t come to me in dribs and drabs. More like it’s under pressure, whooshing out like whipped cream from the can.

  For as long as he can remember, Jaden has seen flashes from the future. When he was a kid growing up near Boston, they were short flashes of something that would happen within the next few hours or a day at the most. Kind of like déjà vu, but he’d remember things in full detail. Once he hit his teens, the flashes started to get longer and usually further into the future. Sometimes one a week. Sometimes one a month. It might have been an asset if he could schedule the flashes—who hasn’t wondered what would be on a biology quiz?—but they were random.

  You couldn’t change anything?

  Nope. Believe me, I tried.

  Everything anyone said or did in those visions, that’s what happened when the time rolled around. Including his own actions. He simply couldn’t do anything else. Occasionally, he’d predict something that would make his parents kind of wonder if his claim wasn’t true, but mostly he saw stuff like eating lunch in the school cafeteria, watching a video, or tae kwon do practice. When the flashes hit, he’d go into an almost catatonic state. His parents put him in a psychiatric center close enough for them to visit. And they probably think he ran off, because a few months later, he woke up in The Warren with all of the other Fivers and hasn’t been able to contact anyone.

  Fiver? That’s from Watership Down, right? The rabbit who had visions?

  Yeah. The name’s a good fit—we live in tunnels underground and they don’t let us out. Run tests on us like we’re rabbits. And most of the rabbits down here get visions like Fiver did. Not sure who named it, but everybody’s called the place The Warren as long as I’ve been here. Just not in front of the Fudds.

  For a second, I think he said fuzz, and that it’s some weird 1970s throwback name for the police. But then I get an image of Elmer Fudd, holding a taser instead of a shotgun, dressed in the khaki uniforms all of the employees wear.

  Yep. And we’re the wabbits.

  Jaden kept getting flashes after he arrived at The Warren, but at least now he wasn’t alone. Everyone else here had some kind of weird ability, so except for not being able to let his parents know he was alive, he was happier than he’d been in years. Until people started disappearing. “Transferred to another facility” was what the Fudds would say if you asked, but there are no secrets in this warren. It’s like a small town—everyone knows everything, and not just the stuff you tell them or the stuff they observe. What you’re thinking is fair game too, for wabbits like Will, and most of them aren’t mute. So all it took was a few of the Fudds knowing what was happening or even having suspicions. The info zipped through The Warren faster than a forest fire.

  Then two months back, Jaden got his final forward flash. Well, not exactly his final flash . . . because this one, unlike the others, kept repeating. He was in a room with Will, Oksana, and some kid he didn’t know—Deo, as it turned out. Then Lucas comes in with a gun. He skips the kid, but shoots Will and Oksana. And the last thing Jaden sees each time is the gun pointing at him.

  I got as far as him pointin’ that gun at my face. After that, same damn vision every time. I’ve had maybe two hundred of these in my life. But never the same vision twice. I had this one nine times. And I knew . . . if the visions were repeating, then I don’t go beyond that time. Couldn’t change it, so I decided to make my peace with it and hopefully make it count for something.

  But, if that’s the last thing you saw, how did you know about me? You told Deo that I should pick you up first.

  Girl, you been in The Warren—what? Two days now? Any secrets you had are long, long gone.

  My thoughts rush to my second wall.

  Yeah. Will’s circle said you had some stuff hidden. Not easy to hide anything from that crowd, so I’m impressed. They do know you got some allies on the outside, but they didn’t get that from you. Came from one of the Fudds. And that blonde nurse, Ashley. She has a sister here—at least, I think it’s a sister.

  Deo puts a bottle of water into my hand, startling my eyes open when the cool plastic hits my skin.

  “What took you so long?” I ask.

  I can tell from his expression that I’m talking crazy talk. That look, along with a tiny, almost imperceptible headshake, reminds me that my chat with Jaden isn’t exactly happening in real time.

  “Sorry,” I tell him. “Still a little disoriented. Give me a minute.”

  “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.” He grins and sits on the floor a few feet away. That’s one of the things I love most about him. Even if hell is breaking loose all around us, Deo can still manage to smile.

  My eyes briefly land on the door, and I remember that I can’t take my time. That they could come in at any moment and wipe that grin off Deo’s face, unless they think I’m putting forth a solid effort, and there’s not much I could do to stop them.

  You mentioned tae kwon do, Jaden. Were you any good?

  He seems a little surprised at the question.

  I didn’t suck. So . . . when I’m . . . gone, do you keep my skills? My memories?

  Your memories, yes. Things you know. Physical skills might take a little longer, if I haven’t developed the right muscles.

  What about the psychic skills? Because I’m pretty sure that’s what this test is really about.

  Of course it is. I feel like whacking myself upside the head for missing it. Why would Cregg go to these lengths to set up a test and require me to pick up not just one, but two dead people? Why, as Aaron wondered, would Cregg be interested in me when he already had someone who could read minds? When he himself could change them?

  He wants a combo. Someone who can read minds, see the future, pull a Jedi mind trick, and who knows what else. The abilities you need, when you n
eed them, all in one package.

  I’ve never carried a hitcher who was psychic, so I have no idea if those skills transfer. But if they don’t, I’m pretty sure Cregg will decide that I’m superfluous. Deo and I will be dead weight he should ditch. Like Molly. Like the three bodies in this room.

  Why did you want me to pick you up first?

  So I could tell you that you’ve gotta stop whatever’s been going on in this room. Twelve people have disappeared. None of the little ones . . . They seem to give them a lot of latitude, even the ones who are all kinds of trouble. But for the past few months, anyone over eighteen who’s . . . difficult to manage? They’re gone. Mostly the immigrant girls, but a few of the military brats, too.

  Military brats?

  Maybe three-quarters of the people in The Warren have parents who were in the military at some point. Almost all Army, too. Some were actually in the military themselves, but I think Will’s the last of that bunch. Anyway, Will and the others who can pick up thoughts from the guards say they keep thinkin’ about movin’ day. And lately, they’ve been thinkin’ about it a lot. Only . . . we’re split on what it actually means. Some think it really does mean movin’ to a different facility. But others think somethin’ else is going on. That movin’ is a . . . what do you call it?

  A euphemism?

  Yeah. That they’re plannin’ to kill everybody and be done with it. Maybe not the ones who make them money, but most of us. And the three of us here in this room? I doubt they’d consider us worth transporting.