Alliance

  “So the Knights tried this before,” said Brooke. “Genetically altering students.”

  “That’s right,” said Will. “Nepsted and Hobbes were the first Paladins.”

  “Paladins 1.0,” said Elise.

  “The only ones that survived, anyway,” said Will.

  “So they rebooted that program as the Paladin Prophecy,” said Elise, drumming her fingers. “Fifty years later.”

  “Once research and technology made it more feasible,” said Will. “And, since we seem to be part of it, let’s hope less obviously dangerous.”

  Will reached over and knocked wood. The girls did, too.

  “Why’d they do it, Will?” asked Brooke. “Did he know? Did he tell you?”

  “No. Personally I think the Prophecy’s part of whatever pact they’ve made with the Other Team. Creating soldiers, maybe, to fight on their side in the coming war.”

  “But we don’t know that for sure, right?” asked Brooke.

  “That’s the next thing we need to find out—why the Knights pushed the button on this,” said Will.

  “At least now we know where the idea for what they did to us came from,” said Brooke.

  “And ‘us’ includes everyone from Courtney and her class,” said Elise, “to Lyle and God knows who else.”

  “That’s right,” said Will. “If I had to guess, what they want, probably, is for us to play ball like the others and join their side.”

  Brooke went pale and sat down, looking like she was going to be sick.

  “Presenting the new and improved Paladin 2.0,” Elise said in a phony commercial announcer’s voice. “Still in the beta testing stage, but so far no crippling side effects.”

  “Did you say Courtney was invisible?” asked Brooke.

  “Not exactly,” said Will. “We saw something moving through the air before she appeared. Ajay thinks she may have some way of bending light around her.”

  “She’s bent, all right,” said Elise. “Her brother’s a blunt instrument, but Courtney’s a stainless-steel sociopath.”

  “We’ve been talking about what’s happened to me, too,” said Brooke, glancing at Elise. “Those things I didn’t know I could do when we were down in the tunnels.”

  “What’d you come up with?” asked Will.

  “For starters, she’s what they call a medical intuitive,” said Elise. “She can sense people’s physical condition with amazing precision using some kind of hands-on diagnostic ability.”

  “You can also heal, using touch, your hands,” said Will. “The two fit together if you think about it. Is that what it felt like to you?”

  Brooke nodded, looking at her hands. “I don’t know how. It happened so fast. I could sense what was wrong—with both you and Elise. I could see it in your bodies, where the weakness was, and once I had the intention, I directed energy there that helped. I can’t pretend to understand how. I don’t even feel like I can control it.”

  “It’s new to you,” said Elise. “We felt that way, too, at first. Control’s something you have to develop or train, like we did.”

  “There’s something else, too,” said Will. “I sensed it when we were trying to get the key out of that cylinder. That’s why I asked for your help. And if you think about it, this fits with your other abilities because it also involves touch.”

  “What?”

  “If you use that—whatever you want to call it, healing energy—you seem able to amplify whatever power another person has.”

  “And that … is kick-ass,” said Elise, giving Brooke a high five.

  “She’s right,” said Will. “That might even be your most powerful way to use it. You’ll just have to experiment and see.”

  “You can handle it,” said Elise, patting Brooke’s shoulder. “We know you can.”

  Brooke seemed overwhelmed. She got up and walked over to the window, looking out at the campus below. Will glanced at Elise.

  Is she going to be cool with this? he asked.

  Were we at first?

  Not at all.

  Fact: we were freaked out like our hair was on fire. Give her time.

  “At least I don’t have to feel left out anymore,” said Brooke with a crooked smile.

  “That’s right, girlfriend,” said Elise. “You can hoist your freak flag like the rest of us.”

  At least this is bringing them back together, thought Will. That’s got to be a good thing. Just as long as they don’t start talking about me.

  “Should we show him?” asked Brooke, looking up at Elise.

  “Yes. Come over here, West, we’ve got some 411.”

  Elise led him across the room past a large square canvas laid out on the floor. It was covered with a huge circle of intricate lines and subtle shades, in swirling, symmetrical patterns. When he looked closer, Will realized that it was made entirely of dozens of different colors of fine-grain sand.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “A mandala. Sand painting,” said Elise. “A new form I’m playing around with. I had a dream about it a few nights ago.”

  “Really,” said Will, intrigued. “This looks amazing.”

  “Glad you like it, but that’s not what we need to show you,” she said.

  On an easel in front of a smaller couch, Elise and Brooke had their notebooks set up and expanded to the size of a small television.

  “Add your notebook,” said Elise. “You can copy it onto your drive while we show you what we found.”

  Will set his notebook on the easel and it merged with the others, expanding the composite screen by a few more feet. All three of their syn-apps appeared on-screen, awaiting orders.

  “Show Will what we found on Henry Wallace,” said Elise to her syn-app.

  Elise’s syn-app gestured to Brooke’s, who turned on an old-fashioned movie projector. That activated a video file that filled the screen. Junior sat down to watch, while Brooke and Elise’s syn-apps took turns narrating still photos and newsreel footage that appeared.

  “Henry Wallace was born and raised on a farm, 1885, in Iowa. He graduated from Iowa State, where he studied botany and agriculture and became close friends with a graduate student named George Washington Carver. He made another great friend there, a fellow undergrad who shared his interest in education: Thomas Greenwood.”

  Early film footage appeared of young Thomas Greenwood shaking hands with Wallace as they toured the grounds of the Center where the quad was under construction.

  “Wallace served as a private advisor to Greenwood when he founded the Center, and continued in that capacity for many years. During that time, Wallace not only created new, more productive crop hybrids, but he also developed scientific methods of advancing agriculture yields, all of which made him a wealthy and celebrated businessman.”

  Now they saw Henry Wallace in Washington, meeting with President Roosevelt and other officials, and then footage of both men at Roosevelt’s first inauguration.

  “In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt named Wallace as the United States’ eleventh secretary of agriculture. Roosevelt liked and trusted him so much that seven years later he asked Wallace to serve as the thirty-third vice president of the United States.”

  Footage of Wallace being sworn in at Roosevelt’s third inaugural appeared.

  “What is this, the History Channel?” asked Will impatiently.

  “Hang on, here comes the meat,” said Elise.

  Film of snow-capped mountain ranges followed—strange, thought Will, they almost looked like the Himalayas—with Wallace taking part in a mountain-climbing expedition.

  “The controversial aspect of Wallace’s story involves his unusual spiritual beliefs. In the 1920s, Wallace became involved with the Theosophical Society, an early New Age movement. Their central belief is that all of human history, including our evolution, has
been secretly directed by a group of highly evolved supernatural beings. These beings supposedly live in the remote reaches of the Himalayas in a mystical valley called Shambhala where they’re known as the Hierarchy of the Masters—”

  “Stop!” Will nearly shot out of his seat. “Where did you find this?”

  “The Library of Congress,” said Elise’s syn-app as the video froze on the expedition footage.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Brooke.

  Will looked around, a little wild-eyed. “This isn’t the first we’ve heard about this.”

  “Which part?” asked Elise.

  “Shambhala came up before, on Ronnie’s secret message, as Shangri-la, remember? And this Hierarchy …” Will paused. Could it possibly be … ? “Do you have anything else on it?”

  The two syn-aps looked at each other. “No. But one source suggests that Roosevelt didn’t disapprove of Wallace’s spiritual interests—and in fact may have shared them to some degree. That’s the only other reference to it. The rest is about Wallace’s political downfall.”

  “Show me,” asked Will.

  More video appeared, all newsreel footage, and Elise’s syn-app continued narrating: “Wallace served just one term as vice president. In 1944 he was forced off the ticket by members of both political parties, who claimed Wallace was unsuitable for the office. He was replaced by a little known senator from Missouri, Harry Truman. When President Roosevelt died a few months after his inauguration in 1945, Harry Truman became president.”

  “So Wallace missed becoming president by only a few months,” said Will.

  “That’s right,” said Elise, looking concerned by his interest. “Could that have something to do with the Knights or the Paladin plot?”

  “Not sure,” said Will. “What else do you have on Wallace in the Himalayas? When did he go there?”

  “Early 1944,” said Elise’s syn-app. “He led an extensive expedition through the region for over two months.”

  More footage appeared of Wallace leading a sizeable group through the high snowy peaks; it ended with a sequence of the vice president being greeted by some Tibetan monks in a high mountaintop lamasery.

  “Hold it there,” said Will.

  The image of Wallace and the monks froze on-screen. As Will studied it, his mind swam with ideas that threatened to overwhelm him. “This happened while Wallace was still in office?”

  “Yes,” said Brooke’s syn-app. “Apparently as some sort of diplomatic mission that the president approved. Something to do with agriculture.”

  “Whatever it was for,” said Elise’s syn-app, “this mission seems to have played a large part in why the opposition forced Wallace out before the election later that year.”

  “What does this all mean, Will?” asked Brooke.

  “Start by asking … what was going on in America in 1944?” Will said.

  “The end of World War Two was approaching,” said Brooke. “Less than a year away.”

  “The Manhattan Project,” said Elise, her eyes lighting up.

  “That’s where I went, too,” said Will.

  “A crash program to secretly develop atomic weapons,” said Elise. “In ’44, they were only a few months away from being tested.”

  “Which Wallace must have known about,” said Will.

  Brooke was nodding. “After we’d used them in the war and the arms race began, Wallace said on record that atomic weapons represented the greatest threat to the planet in human history.”

  “And so a few months before they test the first bomb,” said Will, thinking as she paced, “Roosevelt sends his vice president to the roof of the world on a phony diplomatic mission.”

  “But why?” asked Brooke.

  Will didn’t want to share it just yet—it still sounded nuts, even to him—but based on what he’d just learned, the only explanation he could find struck dangerously close to secrets of his own:

  Agriculture might have been the public reason, but if Henry Wallace was working as some kind of go-between to the Hierarchy, what if he was an Initiate himself, just like I am? Maybe his trip to the Himalayas involved Wallace’s role in the ongoing battle between the Hierarchy and the Other Team.

  “He was worried, for good reason,” said Will. “Worried that this weapon could fall into the wrong hands.”

  “Maybe he was worried that it already had,” said Elise, nearly reading Will’s mind.

  “You mean people in the government?” asked Brooke.

  “People in the Knights,” said Will, with a glance at Elise. “Who had already infiltrated government. Dig deeper and I’m pretty sure we’ll find that the forces who ruined Wallace’s career were carrying out orders from the Knights of Charlemagne.”

  “Why?” asked Brooke.

  “The next year he misses becoming the thirty-fourth president of the United States by a matter of weeks,” said Elise, sitting down to think.

  “And a few months later the United States drops two atomic bombs on Japan,” said Will. “Weapons with the greatest destructive capacity in human history.”

  “We’ve got the chronology down,” said Brooke, “but what does it mean, Will?”

  Will hesitated. Eventually he’d have to tell his friends about Dave and the Hierarchy and his connection to them, so he might as well ease into one corner of the picture.

  “From what he did here, we already know Henry Wallace opposed the Knights of Charlemagne,” said Will. “When he helped save Franklin Greenwood and stopped Abelson’s experiments, he threw himself into the front lines of a battle that’s been going on against the Other Team forever. The same battle that destroyed that city we saw a mile underground. The same battle we’re fighting now.”

  Elise and Brooke looked at each other with rising alarm.

  “If that’s who Wallace was fighting against,” asked Brooke, “who was he fighting alongside?”

  Will took a deep breath. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it might have been … this group called the Hierarchy.”

  “The superevolved quasi-mystical beings who hang out in the Himalayas?” asked Elise skeptically.

  Will gestured at the image of Wallace and the monks at the lamasery. “Well, it seems pretty clear he went there to meet somebody, doesn’t it? And come on, agriculture in Tibet? That had to be a cover story. I mean, these guys with the robes and beards don’t exactly check out as lobbyists from the local corn exchange.”

  “So what was he doing there, then?” asked Brooke evenly.

  “It might sound crazy, but carry the logic,” said Will. “If there really are ‘beings’ like this and you’re trying to help them save the planet, doesn’t it make sense to warn them that this kind of weapon had been developed? A weapon the Other Team would welcome, by the way, because it encouraged our self-destruction, making it that much easier for them to come back and take over.”

  “TEOTWAKI,” said Brooke.

  “So they had to prevent Wallace from reaching real power he could use to destroy them,” said Elise.

  “That’s why they took him down politically,” said Will.

  One other startling thought tumbled into Will’s mind: What if the connection between Wallace and Thomas Greenwood was even stronger than we know? Maybe my grandfather, Thomas Greenwood, was an Initiate, too.

  As if something just as unsettling had occurred to him as well, Will’s syn-app, Junior, stood up on the screen and signaled him urgently. “Will, someone is trying to reach you.”

  “What do you mean, are you getting a text or an email?”

  “No, nothing like that,” said Junior, pacing nervously. “This is different. Someone’s trying to reach you directly.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I can feel it,” Junior said, looking alarmed. “Can’t you?”

  Will stopped, closed his eyes, a
nd tried to sense what Junior was describing—imagining something like when he’d heard Dave’s voice while they were down in the tunnels—but he couldn’t come up with anything.

  “No, I can’t.”

  “This is important.” Junior put his hands on either side of his head, as if physically in pain. “You need to try harder.”

  Will glanced at Elise and she was thinking the same thing he was: Let’s try together.

  He felt her mind reach out for his, and their thoughts swirled around each other like live currents of electricity. As the currents merged, their eyes met and Will knew she was adding her power to his and letting him direct it. He reached out for Elise’s hand and when she gripped it, the power intensified again. Will pushed the edge of their combined mentality outward, past the physical boundaries around them, searching and probing to find whoever might be trying to contact him.

  Will closed his eyes and became aware of a sound like a voice calling out from a great distance, but it was small, muffled, and he couldn’t make out any words. Then he felt another pair of hands settle on top of his and Elise’s and opened his eyes; Brooke had added both her hands to theirs, eyes closed in concentration, and the power flowing through the three of them went nova.

  The air around them warped and danced with power. The reality of the garret seemed to weaken, objects warping, walls shifting and swaying. Suddenly a shaft of light shot through the space, piercing the mandala on the nearby canvas.

  Pulled by some power in that light, the sand on the canvas began to lift into the air, angle into a vertical axis, and spiral around, the mandala animating to life with its round border intact but its shape shifting within like a multidimensional kaleidoscope. Out of the swirling patterns a recognizable shape emerged.