Memory Maze

  “Seems like you could use a little help,” she offered.

  From the depths of his chair, he said defiantly, “I meant to do this.”

  Even in his state of agitation, Jax knew he looked like an idiot. But instead of making fun of him, Felicity sprung him from the chair. Whatever else happened, he had to be grateful to her for that.

  She sat cross-legged beside him on the grass. “What’s wrong? Dentist wearing you out?”

  He clenched his jaw and remained silent, determined not to appear any more ridiculous by building on his idiotic fabrication.

  If he expected her to mind her own business, he’d picked the wrong girl. “You know, I’m worried about you,” she said earnestly.

  “I’m fine. I’ve just been having some weird … dreams.”

  “Me too!” she exclaimed. “Just last night I dreamed I was a turtle. You know what I think it means? I have this hard protective shell on the outside, but deep down I’m really soft.” She regarded him expectantly. Obviously, he was now supposed to share something in return.

  “I was trying to save this guy who was drowning.” Jax had no desire to spill his guts, but he also lacked the strength to make up anything better. “I woke up before I found out what happened to him.”

  She was intrigued. “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know.” He was surprised at how good it felt to talk about it out loud. He’d been sitting on so much lately that it was building up inside him like steam. Now, at last, he’d found an outlet for some of that trapped pressure. “But here’s the thing: I think I’m supposed to know.”

  “Supposed to know?” she echoed.

  “It’s hard to explain. I never saw him before, but he looks kind of familiar. I guess that doesn’t make much sense.”

  “Maybe it does,” she reassured him. “I once read that dreams can be old memories that the waking mind suppresses because they’re too painful.”

  Jax was skeptical. “I think I’d remember it if I pulled some drowning kid out of the ocean.”

  “It’s not the drowning part,” she insisted. “It’s the kid himself. He’s important to you. That’s why it seems like you should know him when you don’t. What does he look like?”

  Jax shrugged. “Pretty normal, I guess. Short, light brown hair, kind of skinny, medium height.”

  She grinned. “So far you’re describing yourself.”

  He digested this comment. “I suppose so, but I definitely wasn’t rescuing myself. I’m not that nuts. Yet.”

  “You’re not nuts,” she soothed. “But keep thinking about that guy. When you figure out who he is, you’ll have the meaning of your dream.”

  “Maybe I should lift my blinds and leave the light on,” Jax suggested sarcastically. “Then if I talk in my sleep, you can read my lips.”

  Even in the dark, he could see her flush. “Message received. I’ll leave you alone. See you at school tomorrow.” She headed back over the fence toward home.

  She was still watching. He was certain of it. First thing in the morning, she would greet him with: “So, you stayed up till two twenty-seven and nineteen seconds last night. Have you figured out your dream yet?”

  That was the kicker. He hadn’t been obsessed with the identity of the drowning kid before, but now he was — exhausted and sleepless — thanks to Felicity.

  He lay back, staring at the stars. That was another difference between New York and Haywood. You rarely saw any stars over Manhattan because of the lights of the city, but out here a clear night was a planetarium show. He could make out the whole zodiac the way he’d learned it in science. There was the ram — Aries — next to Taurus, the bull. And then the twins — Gemini. He could see only one of them at the time because of a lone puffy cloud obscuring the other brother.

  An odd thought occurred to him. The teen from his dream. Similar to Jax, yet a stranger. A brother?

  But I don’t have a brother!

  Felicity’s words came back to him: Dreams are sometimes old memories that the waking mind suppresses because they’re too painful.

  That was crazy! He just had brothers on the brain because of Avery and Oscar.

  His sessions at the mansion had stirred up so many of the billionaire’s memories. What if the effect had backfired, unearthing this long-forgotten brother from the depths of Jax’s mind?

  Impossible. Don’t you think you’d know if you had a brother? Why would Mom and Dad hide something like that from you?

  He thought back to the family’s decision to leave New York and go into hiding. Come to think of it, the decision to give up their whole lives and careers had been made awfully easily. Had that been done to protect Jax, or to protect this secret: that he had a brother somewhere — a brother he absolutely must not find out about?

  This is insane! Mom and Dad would never deceive me like that.

  The thought had barely occurred to him when he realized it was 100 percent wrong. For twelve years, Dad had concealed from him the fact that he was descended from a long line of powerful hypnotists. That had to be at least as big as this.

  He felt the lawn chair spinning underneath him. If this was true, everything Jax thought he knew about his life might be a lie. And everyone he thought was on his side could well be an enemy.

  He was going to have to start from scratch, to learn what was real and what was not.

  “Mom,” Jax asked at breakfast the next morning, “how come you and Dad only had one kid?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she replied, refilling his cereal bowl. “We talked about a bigger family, but I suppose we were selfish. I could blame New York a little for that. We were both so wrapped up in our careers….” Her voice trailed off, a distant expression in her eyes.

  The explanation didn’t ring true to Jax, but it wasn’t yet time to confront his parents directly. Until he understood exactly what they were doing to him and why, he didn’t intend to let them know he suspected anything.

  Dad echoed Mom’s sentiments when Jax asked him separately — ambitious careers, small apartments, and a wonderful son who seemed to fill their lives. “And I suppose it was in the back of my mind — you know, my family history. I hadn’t even heard about Mom’s ancestors then. The more kids I had, the greater the chance that one of them would end up —”

  “Like me?” Jax could not keep the bitterness out of his voice.

  “Hey, none of this is your fault. We’d do anything for you. That’s why we’re all here.”

  It brought another thought to Jax’s mind: This long-lost brother of his — was he a hypnotist, too? He was every bit as Opus and Sparks as Jax. Was that why the family had jettisoned him? And they’d hung on to Jax because his power hadn’t shown itself until he was older? He felt the weight of it pressing down on him. All night he’d tossed and turned, praying that he was wrong about this. Yet the more he thought about it, the more the pieces seemed to fall into place.

  The one player he wasn’t sure of in this drama was Braintree. Where did the founder of the Sandman’s Guild fit in? Did he know about the deception, or was he completely in the dark? There was no question that Axel had saved the family, even putting his own life on hold to help them escape Sentia. But where did his loyalty lie — with the Opuses or with Jax? And after all, Braintree knew more about hypnotism than anybody alive, except maybe Mako. Was it possible that there could be another Opus-Sparks mind-bender who had escaped Braintree’s notice?

  Not likely.

  The thought that followed was even scarier: Did Sentia know about this lost Opus? It certainly hadn’t taken Mako long to zero in on Jax. Not much in the mesmeric world escaped the director’s notice.

  The questions kept piling up, with no indication that he would ever find an answer to any of them. It was nothing less than a complete upending of Jax’s universe. Day was night; up was down; friend was foe. And the people he thought he knew were actually strangers, most prominent among them, himself.

  School might have been the only thing that kept
him from going off the deep end. The regular routine of English into math into science into social studies distracted his mind from the endless loop of mystery, anger, and suspicion. Without it, his brain was a computer programmed to calculate pi to the final digit that would never come.

  After school, he continued to visit the mansion for his sessions with Quackenbush, which were becoming even more chaotic and unpredictable. Some of this might have been due to the billionaire’s health, which had taken a turn for the worse. According to Dr. Finnerty, the relaxed state brought on by the hypnotic experiences between the mirrors had failed to slow the Catastrophic Systemic Shutdown. It may have been good for the patient’s mind, but it was no help for his poor, wasted body.

  “Is there something I should be doing?” Jax asked anxiously.

  The doctor shook his head sadly. “Decline from CSS is more like a stairway then a ramp. A patient will maintain a level of health for some time, and then drop suddenly to the next step. Mr. Quackenbush has just gone through one of these descents. There was nothing anyone could have done to prevent it.”

  “Just because I’m dying doesn’t mean I’m deaf,” came a raspy voice from the doorway.

  Jax noted that the billionaire was established in a reclining wheelchair, rather than his usual upright one.

  “Don’t listen to this sad sack,” the billionaire said to Jax. “I have new word from my research team that the treatment is ahead of schedule. It’ll be ready inside a month.”

  Jax caught a look from Finnerty. The doctor shook his head almost imperceptibly. The meaning was clear: The patient didn’t have a month.

  The other main reason the sessions had become unstable was Jax himself. Just as Quackenbush’s recollections had seeped into Jax’s mind, Jax’s tumultuous thoughts had begun to affect their mesmeric connection. The roller-coaster ride was still about Oscar. But half the time now, the face of the younger Quackenbush brother was actually that of the boy in the ocean. As the afternoons blended one into the other, so the details blended in Jax’s mind — Avery’s brother, Jax’s brother. By the end of the week, this boy had a name: Liam. Liam Opus was as real to Jax as Oscar Quackenbush. And as the tycoon’s memory continued to paint a picture of Oscar, so did the details fill in about Liam.

  He was older, probably about fifteen. Why didn’t he live with his parents and brother? There could be only one explanation for that. He was at the place for a young hypnotist at the intersection of the two greatest mesmeric bloodlines in history: the Sentia Institute, learning at the side of Elias Mako himself. Jax was fuzzy on some of the particulars. That was probably because his mind had been sunk so far into Quackenbush’s memories that a degree of confusion had to be expected. It was just as Braintree had warned.

  For instance, Jax himself had studied at Sentia, but he didn’t remember meeting Liam there. Why not? And when Mom and Dad had “rescued” him from Mako, why hadn’t they rescued Liam, too? How could parents love one son and not the other?

  He was missing something here. But what?

  Jax knew he was losing his grip on reality in the swirl of Quackenbush’s recollections and his own dreams. His response was to cling to the one thing that seemed most important: Liam. His lost brother was growing by the day, assuming face and form and voice. And as Jax struggled to order his world to include Liam, his mind made the necessary adjustments to the basic building blocks of what he should have known to be true.

  For example, Elias Mako was no longer the bad guy. He was the good guy, who had taken in Liam Opus and was developing him as a mind-bender. Jax should have been with them, working side by side with his brother. But his parents had taken him away for their own inscrutable reasons. As non-hypnotists, they had needed mesmeric support in the plot. So they had brought in the Sandman’s Guild. Jax should have seen that from the beginning. Braintree was Dr. Mako’s sworn enemy, which automatically put him on the wrong side. For all this time, his parents had been complaining about their “exile” in Haywood. And the whole time, the banished one had been Jax.

  If the atmosphere in the little house had been tense before, it now vibrated like a guitar string. Jax’s communication with his parents had been reduced to a series of grunts. He felt he owed no more to people who were essentially his jailers.

  His parents and Braintree continued to stick to their story that all his problems would disappear if only he would give up his daily visits to the Quackenbush mansion. That earned the most dismissive grunt of all. Did they think he was so stupid that he would never figure out how he’d been duped and manipulated?

  Dad had taken to working late, and avoiding the house except to eat and sleep. Mom was tackling a six-inch-thick psychology textbook entitled The Difficult Adolescent Years. Like that had anything to do with what was going on!

  Axel Braintree was slowly coming to realize that Jax’s state was every bit as alarming as the disappearance of the sandmen in New York. His hypnotic expertise had warned him to expect some side effects as a result of Jax’s prolonged sessions with Quackenbush — uneasy dreams, interrupted sleep, even a tendency to identify with his subject. Yet this went far beyond that. Jax’s entire personality had changed. He was hostile. Worse, he had tuned everybody out, so it was impossible to ask him what was making him so angry. It was devastating his parents, who had already suffered a lot because of their devotion to their son. And it presented a practical problem. They were supposed to be hiding out here. How could they impersonate a normal Connecticut family when the entire household was completely melting down?

  “You should cut your parents some slack,” he advised. “They didn’t ask for this any more than you did.”

  Jax’s answer was a surly, mumbled, “I’m late for the bus.”

  Braintree tried again. “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “I’d rather live.” It was just a growl.

  As Jax breezed past him, the old man stepped out in front of his protégé and fixed him with his best mesmeric stare. Braintree knew he was no longer as powerful as Jax. But he had to make one last-ditch effort to find out what was going on inside that handsome head.

  Caught off guard, Jax was unprepared to defend against the assault. In that instant, the founder of the Sandman’s Guild concentrated his considerable ability like a pinpoint laser in an attempt to see and understand as much as he could.

  The glimpse was brief, but it left Braintree gasping with shock. He would not have believed there could be so much chaos and confusion boiling around the mind of someone so young. He struggled to find a focal point in the turbulence, yet at that moment, Jax mustered his defenses and cast the intruder out. The force of it left Braintree staggering.

  “Don’t ever do that again!” Jax ordered, then stormed out of the house.

  The old man stood in the foyer, panting with exertion, trying to make sense of what he had seen. He knew as much about hypnotism as anyone alive, but nothing could have prepared him for the firestorm he’d encountered inside Jax’s head. No wonder the poor kid was so messed up. God only knew what it would take to restore his brain to normal — or if it could even be done after so much damage.

  He shuddered at the memory of the swirling turmoil. Out of the churning upheaval, a lone figure emerged. A young brown-haired teenager, not much older than Jax himself. Braintree did not recognize the boy. Still, it was clear that this person was a major force in Jax’s life. A name began to emerge: Liam.

  Who was Liam?

  Of the many photographs on the bulletin board, only one drew the attention of everyone who walked into Special Agent Gil Frobisher’s office. It was the screenshot of the boy called the Vote Whisperer. The intensity of the gaze and the deep purple eyes made it almost impossible to look away. Frobisher had made the case his top priority, if for no other reason than to get the haunting picture off his wall. It felt like an alien presence in the room. He’d even caught himself talking to it a few times.

  “Who are you, Jackson Opus, and what is this strange power you seem to ha
ve?”

  That question loomed so much larger than the alleged cyber crime the FBI was investigating. It wasn’t just that this boy had tried to influence an election, but the seemingly supernatural way he’d gone about it. Telling people to vote for Trey Douglas was one thing. The fact that they all went out and did it was quite another. The first was just advertising; the second was spooky.

  “How did you disappear off the face of the earth?”

  “He didn’t disappear,” came Wendy Lee’s voice from the doorway. “He moved to Connecticut.”

  With effort, Frobisher tore his eyes from the screenshot and regarded his partner. “What are you saying?”

  “He’s living under the alias Jack Magnus, and he’s a student at Haywood Middle School. The family’s new in town; there’s no record of where they came from, or even proof they existed before they got there.” She slapped a murky printout onto his desk. “Here’s his yearbook photo. Same kid, right?”

  Frobisher frowned. “Who wears sunglasses in a school picture?”

  “If you were trying to disappear, wouldn’t you cover those eyes? It’s him, Gil. Facial-recognition software says eighty-seven-percent probability.”

  Frobisher was already on the phone. “Get me the field office nearest to Haywood, Connecticut. We’ve got the Vote Whisperer!”

  Jax was surprised when he and Zachary were met at the door of the mansion by Dr. Finnerty.

  “I’m afraid this has been a wasted trip for you,” he told Jax. “My patient isn’t well enough to participate today.”

  “Will he be okay?” Jax asked in concern.

  “Of course I’ll be okay.” The billionaire’s wheelchair appeared in the doorway. “Push that sawbones out of the way, and let’s get started.”

  “I don’t recommend it, Mr. Quackenbush,” the doctor said seriously. “Your vital signs are very weak.”

  “I’m not dying until I’m good and ready,” the tycoon retorted, his voice both weak and belligerent at the same time. “I’ve got a vital sign for you: Exit.”