“I think I might know where Evelyn and Ivan are,” Cho intoned.
“And you’re only telling me now?” Braintree exploded. “Every minute they’re missing, their lives are in greater danger!”
“I — I only just figured it out,” Cho stammered.
The old man frowned. “Figured out what?”
“You know — you hear things. People talk…. The word on the street …”
That was when Braintree noticed that Cho’s black-and-yellow spandex wasn’t as pristine and perfect as he remembered it. The tight-fitting fabric was torn in a few spots along one leg, revealing glimpses of scraped and bleeding skin.
Still riding slowly at the back of the pack, Braintree peered intently into his companion’s eyes. It should have been an easy takedown for such an experienced hypnotist. But he was unable to penetrate his sandman’s mind.
There could be only one explanation.
He’s already bent — and by someone strong!
“Dennison, listen to me —”
The old man never got to finish the thought. Cho jerked the handlebars, steering his own bike into the rental. The front wheels kissed and Braintree’s head slammed against a muscular shoulder. The impact knocked him off the bike — he hit the grass and rolled. Cho jumped the curb and came after him.
“Dennison!”
The cyclist’s expression registered zero recognition. He was deeply hypnotized. There was no way to identify the mesmeric mechanism at work inside him, but there seemed very little chance it was anything harmless.
As Cho bore down on him, the old man snatched up a fallen branch and jammed it into the Trek’s front wheel. The spokes locked up instantly, and Cho was tossed off the bike. He landed hard on his back and lay there, dazed.
Braintree fought away the impulse to rush to his injured sandman. Cho was bent, and it would be dangerous to engage him when he was under an enemy’s power. Besides, that enemy was still around, probably close at hand. The top priority was to warn the others. The old man let fly a piercing two-fingered whistle, the signal to scatter.
A hulking black Cadillac Escalade lurched onto the grass on a direct collision course. The old man leaped back onto his bike and took off. The SUV roared after him, closing the gap in a handful of seconds.
Braintree could feel engine heat emanating from the giant front grill. Were they actually trying to kill him? That made no sense. Dead, he’d be useless to them. He was their sole connection to Jax.
His only hope was to find a place where he could fit but the Escalade couldn’t. And then he was looking right at it — a wooden footbridge across a gulley, far too narrow for the broad, heavy SUV.
He rattled over the bridge. Behind him, his pursuers pulled up in a spray of turf.
Braintree did not slow down. He cycled through stone gates and was perplexed to see a polar bear regarding him in a bored fashion.
I’m in the Central Park Zoo!
He kept on going, knowing that Fifth Avenue was not far away. If he could make it to the crowded Manhattan streets, it would be easy to melt into the vast city and disappear.
“Hey, you!”
An outraged voice reached him. He turned to see a uniformed zookeeper blocking his way, palm out, cop-style. “You can’t bike through the zoo! You need a ticket to be in here!”
“Sorry about that.” Braintree hopped down and hypnotized the man with a single dizzying stare. “Listen to me: The temperature is one hundred ten degrees,” he said quietly. “You are sweltering in unbearable heat….”
Wilson and DeRon had to jog to keep up with Dr. Mako’s long, determined strides.
“I think we’re supposed to go in through the front entrance,” DeRon panted.
“We’re not here to see the penguins,” Mako snapped without slowing his pace.
“We’ll find him,” Wilson promised confidently. “How far could an old geezer get?”
Sentia’s director came to an abrupt halt. “This particular old geezer,” he said in resignation, “is extremely resourceful.”
Wilson and DeRon followed his gaze to the sea-mammal pond. There was a young man in his underwear, sitting amid the otters, pouring cool water over himself with his zookeeper’s hat.
Not far away, on Fifth Avenue, an older gentleman dressed in the uniform of the Central Park Zoo climbed into a taxi.
The driver noted his attire. “Hey, you work at the zoo! I used to love going there when I was a kid!”
“It’s a mesmerizing place,” Axel Braintree agreed.
As the cab made its way through the traffic to the garage where the Avenger was parked, the president of the Sandman’s Guild took out his phone and called the eighteen other participants in the day’s meeting.
All his sandmen had made it to safety — all but one.
There was no answer from Dennison Cho.
The mirrors stayed up in the sitting room outside Avery Quackenbush’s bedchamber. The sessions using the new technique were what Jax’s former best friend, Tommy, would have called “über-intense.” Jax’s involuntary trip through the billionaire’s vast museum of experience continued, growing more frightening with each passing day. Most of the recollections were about Oscar — Oscar in trouble, Oscar in danger, Oscar doing something crazy and needing to be bailed out. Judging by what Jax encountered, the tycoon spent half his life feverishly trying to rescue his sibling from every risky situation the younger sibling could get himself into. Avery Quackenbush had been, in every sense of the word, his brother’s keeper. And, in some corner of his mind, he still was, even though he was now ancient and Oscar was no longer alive.
The thing was, all these frantic rescue attempts were doomed to failure. As it had played out in the snow cornice on K2 and the pile of brawling fans at the English soccer match, Oscar never seemed to be there to be saved. Avery never reached Oscar as the younger brother was pistol-whipped by Russian border guards. He couldn’t find him in the wreckage of the California mudslide that took down two houses. Jax felt the scorching heat of the forest fires that surrounded the tiny hunting lodge. He descended the helicopter’s rope ladder to a roof patio that was already partly ablaze.
“Oscar!” he shouted. And up to the pilot. “I have to find my brother!”
“You’ve got thirty seconds!” came the reply. “If the flames get too close we’re all dead!”
The roof felt hot under his feet. When he opened the trapdoor, fire shot out ten feet over his head, scorching his eyebrows. He was too late! The platform trembled and collapsed, dropping him into a house that was already burning. There was no way anyone could survive this.
“Oscar!!” he wailed, looking around desperately. He could see no one — dead or alive — in the inferno. The anguish came then. Jax had experienced it many times before on these journeys, yet that never seemed to prepare him for the next onslaught. Grief and utter failure. A soul-shattering sense of guilt and loss. In his own twelve years, Jax had never known an emotion approaching its power.
I was lucky. When the moment came to save my parents from that subway train, I succeeded. But what if I hadn’t? If the unthinkable had happened in that tunnel, is this what I’d have felt?
The last thing Jax remembered before his surroundings blurred and he was slingshot to another place was the bottom rung of the helicopter’s rope ladder hitting him in the head. Weeping, he climbed on and hung there, but the forest fire was already gone and he was on a bridge watching his brother go over the side at the end of a bungee cord.
Perhaps even worse than the content of these awful memories was Jax’s complete lack of control of his own destiny as he bounced through space and time. Normally, a hypnotist never lost his grounding in reality — whatever might be going on mesmerically, he himself was sitting or standing in a specific spot, running the show. Now he was blowing in the wind, at the mercy of the gusts and currents of ninety-six years of life. Scariest of all, there was no escape hatch or ejection seat. No mechanism for him to disconnect from it all ?
?? to disengage from the roller coaster and go back to being Jackson Opus again, even as unsettled as that had become lately. True, it always happened eventually. Some gut-wrenching memory would launch him back to his chair, gasping, trembling, and holding on to the arms, waiting for his racing heart to settle down. But like the rest of it, there was no control. He was a passenger on this wild ride, which meant that the driver’s seat was empty. And there was no way of telling where the runaway vehicle would end up.
Nor did the consequences stop when he left the Quackenbush estate. Jax carried the images home with him. They reappeared in his dreams, where they seemed every bit as real as during the sessions. After spending his afternoons trying — and failing — to rescue Oscar, he spent his nights doing exactly the same thing in horrific nightmares. Again and again, he woke up screaming and thrashing in sheets damp with sweat, struggling to reach someone who wasn’t there.
His parents pleaded with him to abandon his after-school visits to the Quackenbush estate. “This is affecting you very seriously!” his mother quavered one morning after a particularly violent and restless night. “Have you seen yourself in a mirror lately? You’re pale and drawn! You look like a raccoon with black shadows around your eyes!”
“You guys don’t understand!” Jax protested.
“Why?” his mother shot back. “Because we’re not hypnotists? Because we don’t bend minds or whatever hocus-pocus you think you do?”
Jax was impatient. “You know it’s real. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t.”
“I’m still figuring out the times hypnotism must have been used on me,” Mr. Opus added. “Like when I quit that garage band that turned out to be Def Leppard. I wasn’t thrilled that my parents used their powers to mess with my life. But I can’t remember them ever putting their own health in danger.”
Even Braintree got in on the nagging: Jax’s health was suffering; his grades were in free fall; he was sleeping for only a few hours a night, rarely more than twenty minutes at a stretch before some terrible dream would cast him awake again.
“Your parents and I have decided that the only solution is to terminate your sessions with Mr. Quackenbush.”
“We’ve been through this already,” Jax replied wearily. “We need the money. If we have to stay hidden forever, it’s our only chance at any kind of decent life.”
“I don’t want money,” Monica Opus said stubbornly, “I want my son back.”
“Well, as long as you get what you want,” Jax snapped.
“You’ve just illustrated our point,” Braintree noted. “You’re changing. The kid I knew would never have talked to his mother that way.”
“Sorry,” Jax mumbled. “But it isn’t just the money. I have a chance to help somebody — maybe save a dying man. How can I just walk away?”
“It’s sad that Mr. Quackenbush’s health is failing,” Dad told him. “But let’s face it, Jax. He’s ninety-six! Not many people get that kind of time. He has no right to ask for more if it comes at the expense of a twelve-year-old boy with his whole life in front of him.”
Jax tried to explain. “The dreams that wake me up at night — they’re stressful because I’m trying to rescue my brother —”
Ashton Opus lifted two inches off his chair. “Your brother? You don’t have a brother!”
“In the dreams, I’m Quackenbush, and he has a brother!”
Braintree looked grim. “I warned you that this level of mesmeric connection can have unpredictable side effects.”
“Not being able to save somebody — it hurts. A lot.” Jax spread his arms. “Don’t you see? I have a chance to save Mr. Quackenbush. In real life — not memories or dreams! I have to do this, no matter what happens. I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t see it through.”
The worst part was that Braintree was every bit as against him as Mom and Dad, maybe even more. He blamed Jax for endangering not only his own safety, but also his place in the hypnotic world. To hear Axel tell it, Jax had a responsibility to become some kind of Super-Sandman who would protect the world from unscrupulous mind-benders like Mako.
“You take care of Mako,” Jax said shortly. “I’m busy.”
“I don’t have the ability,” Braintree replied honestly. “But you will. This horrible thing that is taking over your mind only speaks to how strong your gift is. No ordinary hypnotist could establish a link that borders on the melding of two minds. What we’re seeing is nothing less than the great powers of Opus and Sparks coming together. But instead of strengthening you, it’s tearing you apart.”
The Opuses exchanged horrified glances. The only thing worse than what was happening to their son was the awful reality that they had handed it down to him.
“This is partly my fault,” Braintree admitted. “Perhaps the fact that your powers have eclipsed mine has tripped my circuit breaker. And I’ve been distracted by the disappearance of my sandmen. But that’s no excuse.”
It was too late. Jax was beyond being directed and mentored. His silence said more than a twenty-minute speech. He was determined to stick with Quackenbush until the end. Why couldn’t Mom, Dad, and Axel see that? What could be bad about helping somebody the way Avery had tried again and again to help Oscar? That kind of devotion had to be the purest, most natural thing in the world.
If I had a brother like Oscar, I’d do anything for him.
What could Mom, Dad, and Axel have against that? Was there something they weren’t telling him?
What were they hiding?
The sea was rough that day, towering waves crashing to the beach, a boiling wall of white water. There was talk on the radio about a big storm stalled offshore. Black clouds could be seen on the horizon, but overhead the sky was clear. A perfect day for surfers. There were quite a few out there, but it was easy to keep an eye on Oscar. He was the hot dog of the group — waving wildly, yelling the loudest, and taking the biggest risks. Watching from the sand, Jax was amazed that he wasn’t more worried. Probably because this was Avery’s memory, and Avery hadn’t been worried that day.
The wipeout was spectacular. All the surfers caught the wave, and the wave caught all of them, flinging them like pick-up sticks. For an instant they were gone beneath the violent sea. Then, one by one, they began bobbing to the surface. Jax did a quick head count. There had been nine. Now there were only eight.
He waited two more heartbeats. Oscar was nowhere to be seen.
Jax hit the sand running. His bare feet were pounding in the surf before he heard the chorus of whistles from the lifeguard chairs.
“Oscar!”
He hurled himself into the surf flailing his arms, desperately feeling for a fallen swimmer in the opaque water. Following his lead, the others began to do the same, combing the sandbar for any sign of the missing Oscar. The lifeguards hit the scene next, plunging in with their rescue float. Jax caught a glimpse of himself in a pair of mirrored sunglasses, and knew instantly that something was wrong.
The reflection was not Avery Quackenbush. It was him — Jackson Opus.
How was that possible in the billionaire’s memory?
There was no time to think about that now. “Hurry!” he pleaded. “Before the undertow takes him out!”
Another wave hit, driving Jax under. He forced his eyes open despite the sting of the salt. And there in the murky water, he spied his brother, unconscious and drowning, tossed by the turbulence. With a superhuman effort that physically hurt, he hauled himself upright and Oscar with him.
He threw his arms around his brother, and that was when fate delivered the second shock.
The young teenager he had just pulled out of the ocean was not Oscar Quackenbush….
Somehow Jax swallowed the cry of alarm that gathered in his throat. His thumping heart threatened to jump out of his chest as he sat bolt upright in his bed. The pounding in his ears was making him dizzy. He was so stunned that he could not even form the questions that whirled through his mind. Only monosyllables registered: What? Why? How? r />
His life may have been a blizzard of confusion, but until now he had always known what he was seeing: Quackenbush’s most intense memories distilled and recycled into Jax’s fever dreams. But the events at the beach hadn’t come from the tycoon’s life. That had been Jax himself reflected in those sunglasses.
His lips formed the final monosyllabic question: Who?
That hadn’t been Oscar he’d rescued. So who was it?
Suddenly, his own room seemed to be suffocating him. If he didn’t get out of here, he was going to start screaming and wake up the whole house again. He staggered into the kitchen as if his knees had locked up, only to find that the air was no more breathable in this part of the house. The back slider beckoned, and before he knew it he was out in the yard, gasping in the chill of the night.
He lay back on a battered lawn recliner, struggling to regain his even respiration. For so long his dreams had consisted exclusively of Quackenbush’s memories. Why had that changed? And if the beach scene hadn’t come from the billionaire, then what was it? It had started off as a classic saving-Oscar cliff-hanger. But the star had turned out to be Jax himself. And the surfer who’d begun as Oscar? A total stranger.
Or maybe not.
Jax couldn’t put his finger on it, but the more he thought about the teenager he’d pulled from the surf, the more familiar the face became.
No! Not possible! You’ve never laid eyes on that kid!
Strung out as he was, when the bushes rustled, he nearly jumped out of his skin. He sat up with such nervous energy that he managed to fold himself into the chair. There he lay, trapped and struggling, fully expecting to see Elias Mako and half of Sentia storming the property to murder him. Instead, he spied a petite figure clambering over the fence.
Felicity.
For an irrational instant, he reflected that he would have preferred Mako. Then a wave of shame washed over him. Here he was, trussed up like a lobster in a trap in the midst of the worst crisis he’d ever experienced. Of course it had to be Felicity.