

Mind.Net

by

Patrick J. Worden

http://pworden.com

Copyright 2009, 2011 Patrick J. Worden

Smashwords Edition

http://www.smashwords.com

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is dedicated to my ladies, Jen and Gwen

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil

is that good men do nothing."

-Edmund Burke

Ψ

It looked like the same old club, the same tired scene. Sara could see that from the moment the bouncer checked her ID and waved her through to the dark interior.

It wasn't really the same, to be sure. She'd never been here before, although John, her off-again-on-again boyfriend, had been several times. He stood beside her as they lingered near the entrance, surveying the crowd and catching glimpses of the band going through its soundcheck, up on the distant stage. John gave her a weak smile, trying to tell her in his unspoken way that yes, it was dingy and smoky and noisy...but it really wasn't as bad as it looked.

But it was, actually. It was _exactly_ like it looked. It looked and smelled and felt the same as every other club she and John frequented. From the smoke in the air to the beer slopped on the floor; from the punk and metal bands on stage, to their tattooed and leather-clad fans down in front...it was all the same.

Sara looked down at herself and grimaced. She was the same, too. Same leather skirt, same fishnets, piercings and bangles...she was the same as every girl here, every girl at all the clubs. It was a sad, unintended sort of anonymity.

She slipped her arm through John's and they made their way toward the stage, through a dense crowd where everyone looked just like them.

_Miles above, an entity – a consciousness – watched and waited. Of course, "above" wasn't entirely accurate. Direction was..._ tricky _here, where the consciousness operated. But "above" was a good vantage point for watching and waiting, and it was close enough a term to describe where the consciousness had positioned itself. "Above" was where the consciousness chose to watch...and wait._

But the consciousness wasn't alone. It never really was, but now in particular it sensed...an intruder. A malevolent one.

" _Don't lurk, Dargon. Come out where we can see you," the consciousness said. (And "said" wasn't accurate, either. If direction was tricky, then modes of communication were thoroughly opaque.)_

For a while, nothing stirred. But at last a darkness rose from the clouds and approached the consciousness.

" _What are you looking for?" the darkness asked._

The consciousness barked a laugh. "Why do you ask us questions you know we won't answer?"

" _We'll find out anyway. We already know more than you think we do."_

" _Perhaps. But in that case you don't need our help, do you?"_

" _You're recruiting, aren't you? Aren't you? Don't answer me, then. No need to. We already know. You're recruiting."_

" _Then that's all you know, isn't it, Dargon? If you knew more, you'd stop us."  
The darkness swam about, agitated. "We'll kill them. Recruit whomever you like. We'll kill them all."_

The consciousness abandoned its vigil and turned to the darkness. "Is it battle you want, Dargon? Do you want to do battle with us, right here and now?"

The darkness withdrew a bit.

" _No, you wouldn't. Your kind doesn't like to lose."_

" _I wouldn't lose_! _" the darkness snapped._

" _No, but you wouldn't win, either. And that's just as bad."_

" _We will win," the darkness insisted. "We will."_

" _You don't know that anymore than we do. But we'll fight you Dargon. We'll fight you to the end."_

At two a.m. the house lights came back up and the crowd began shuffling toward the door. The final band of the night, an insipid local deathmetal four-piece called "Satan's Sodomy," was scurrying about the stage packing up gear. Sara and John, ears still ringing, moved slowly with the crowd, away from the stage.

John was giving her that look, the one she called _smart-ass-face_. "Was it that bad?" he asked.

"What?" Sara gave him a mockery of smart-ass-face right back. She sat her empty beer bottle on a nearby table that was awash with empties. John did the same. Many of those empties were theirs. "I didn't say anything."

"You didn't have to." He put his arm lightly around her shoulders as they made their unsteady way to the door. "I don't know how the hell I could hear you sighing in front of those amp stacks, but I did."

"I wasn't sighing." The lie was almost automatic. Then as they stepped around a sprawled body with a mohawked head – the gender wasn't apparent from above – she pursed her lips. "Well if I did, it was because of crap like this. Where else can you find so many unconscious twenty-somethings on a Tuesday-freaking-night?"

John glanced back at the passed-out punk and shrugged. "So we'd rather do this than feed the corporate maw. So what? And Jesus, Sara...if you hate it so much, why do you keep coming out?"

"Beats the hell out of me," she mumbled. And then they were silent as they left the club and walked to the streetlit corner.

It was an uncomfortable quiet, one that John finally broke. "So you're looking for a new scene? Why don't you check out that fair?"

She looked up at him. "What fair?"

"Oh come on. You saw those fliers – there must have been a hundred of them in there. 'Psychic Fair, this Thursday.'"

"You think I need a psychic? For what?"

"You read the flier. I _saw_ you read the flier, Sara. ' _Psychic novice screening_ ,' or whatever the hell it said. ' _Find your own latent psychic powers_.'"

"I don't believe in that crap." This time, she couldn't meet his eyes.

He laughed. The light changed and they crossed the empty street. John's apartment was on this block. By unspoken arrangement she'd be staying there tonight.

"I don't believe in that crap either. But who's the one that always knows who's calling before the phone even rings, Sara? Who's the one that always knows what the next song on the radio is going to be?"

She giggled – just a little, but it was her first real laughter of the night. "Lucky guesses?" she asked.

"Could be, I guess. Could be. Or maybe you've got the hoodoo, the gift, the touch – whatever you call it. Your psychic novice screening will tell." And he put his arm around her tightly and held her close. This too was a first for the evening.

"Yeah, so...maybe I was thinking about going."

"You want me to go with?" They stopped now, in front of his apartment building. They turned to face each other.

"No, I...I think I'll go by myself. Just to check it out, you know?"

"Yeah," he laughed again and kissed her forehead. "Okay by me. I don't believe in that crap anyway, remember?" He turned to open the door, and they climbed the stairs, holding on to each other as they used to, as they didn't so much anymore.

ψ

She's floating.

She's floating up, gently yet inexorably. She doesn't look back down, but she knows that if she did, she would see her unmoving body, still lying in John's bed.

She floats higher, and through the ceiling, and through floors and roofbeams and treetops and the dark sky, effortlessly.

Higher still now, she realizes she's seeking something, must find something. There's a conversation going on, somewhere up in the soaring reaches, a conversation between the light and the darkness. And she must hear it. She must know what they're saying.

But something tugs at her, pulls her back earthward. She finds herself spiraling toward the ground, toward a wooded expanse cut by a slow meandering stream. And it's daylight now...she can see a figure kneeling, down by the streamside. She realizes now that it's the figure she's drawn to, that she's spiraling down to. And then she knows who that figure is. It's John.

A young John, just a boy. But it's John, to be sure. And he's kneeling – over the stream, leaning into it.

He starts, sensing her presence. He turns slowly, his eyes meet hers. There's no recognition there, just annoyance at the interruption...and hot, dark anger.

And as she looks over his shoulder, she sees the limp, drowned puppy that John had been holding under the black water.

She opens her eyes.

She bit back a gasp and willed her body to relax. She was coiled like a spring and bathed in sweat.

She pulled back the covers and swung her feet to the frigid wooden floor. She sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, listening to the hums and creaks of the mostly sleeping apartment building, and to the mostly silent street outside. She felt John stir a bit behind her, but could tell from his breathing he was still asleep. She rose and turned, looking at him. He was on his side, his back to her, the blanket at his waist. She could see the scar on his back, just below his shoulderblade, the one she'd never noticed before. The one they'd fought about, just before falling to sleep.

Still naked, not caring, she padded to the window. She stared down at the brashly lit street, ringed with the white glare of streetlamps, blank darkness beyond that. There were a few cars she could hear, a few blocks away in different directions. But nothing on this street, just unmoving silence.

Already she was forgetting the dream she'd just had, the one that had shocked her awake. It was about John, she knew that much. And that it had frightened her. Then she remembered suddenly that she dreamed often of John, and often woke frightened and confused. That was something she remembered only at night, it seemed, and forgot each morning.

They'd gone straight to bed, but by then the distance between them was already returning. They had a brief bout of tired, drunken, almost embarrassed sex – saying nothing all the while. They turned from each other and were nearly asleep....

That's when she noticed the scar. She reached out, touched it, traced it with her finger. John shivered. Then she asked him about it.

And then came the same, familiar fight, the one they'd been having as long as they'd been seeing each other. The one that always ended unresolved, with sleep and nightmares.

ψ

"Put down the dress, girl. Put down the dress and walk away." Megan pitched her voice to carry no further than Sara's cash counter, next to her own. They both stifled giggles.

Their only customer, the target of their laughter, was plump and bleach-blond, and busy pawing through black latex dresses of varying tightness and plunging necklines. She was easily a size sixteen, Sara judged. There were no size sixteens in the latex dress racks.

At last she turned away, moving toward the t-shirts festooned with Manga cartoon characters and inscrutable Zen koans. Once her back was turned, Megan and Sara exchanged crooked grins and laughed again.

"And...?" Megan prompted, picking up where an earlier conversation had left off. "What about after the show?"

"We went back to his place," Sara said as she went about straightening the bracelets and necklaces hanging from their small cardboard displays by her cash register.

The store was Hott Spott, a mall-bound closet of club clothes and jewelry, with an emphasis on leather, silver, hemp and whatever was trendy that week. Like every store in the mall, its clientele was small and dwindling, almost by the day.

"Mmm," Megan closed her eyes. "She went back to his place."

"You're a perv. A perv, Megan. We got into a fight. As usual."

Megan turned back to a pile of t-shirts, spilling from an overturned box on her counter, and resumed folding them. "What do you guys fight about, anyway?"

"What difference does it make? What does anyone fight about?" Sara leaned back on the racks behind her and slipped her hands into the pockets of her glittery Hott Spott apron. "It's not like he's Mister Right..."

They finished together..."He's Mister Right Now."

"So what was that you were saying about a psychic party?" Megan asked.

"Psychic fair," Sara corrected. Then she laughed. "Whatever that means. There were posters all over the club. John said he saw the same posters at Anna Louise's, the night before."

"Anna Louise's? That's that club downtown, isn't it? You mean he went out without you?"

Sara grimaced. "He's welcome to. The every-night thing is a little much for me."

"But not for John, I guess."

Sara began to speak, then stopped as a middle-aged man, laden with shopping bags, stepped into the store. He looked slowly about, scanning the racks and shelves, mouth getting more and more agape. He backed away, back into the mall.

"No, this is _not_ JC Penney, sport," Sara said. Then – "John wants to go to a different club every night. Then he wants to come home, jump my bones, then go to sleep. He gets up in the morning, goes to some bullshit minimum-wage job – then starts the whole ugly thing all over again. In between he's figuring out how to save the world from capitalism, and bumming forty bucks off me for weed."

Megan raised an eyebrow. "Damn, girl. That sounds bitter."

Sara sighed. "The adorable pothead-lefty act gets old. It really does."

Megan folded the last shirt, then turned and began setting them in piles, in the racks behind her. "Okay. So you started talking about John again. So what about the psychic party?"

"Psychic fair," Sara corrected again. She snorted. "Well whatever it is, it's at the Armory, on 62nd. All day tomorrow. Want to come?"

"No way. That stuff scares me."

Sara rolled her eyes. "That stuff scares you? This from the chick who checks her horoscope a dozen times a day?"

"That's different and you know it. Horoscopes...they just get you through the day. They're like a grandmother who has advice for everybody." They both laughed at that. "But that psychic stuff? I don't know, Sara...that just seems like messing with things we're not supposed to mess with."

ψ

Thursday's sun rose swollen and red, hanging leaden over the eastern sky. Sara was awake, at her own apartment this time, well before dawn. She lay in her bed, unmoving, and watched the first hesitant rays break through her window and crawl steadily and slowly across the old, fading carpet.

She rose, and stepped carefully across the bedroom floor. Quiet walking came to her almost unconsciously now. Her downstairs neighbor, Mr. Simon, was seemingly deaf to everything except noise from above. Let her step heavily just once, or turn her TV or stereo volume from the lowest setting, and Mr. Simon was on the phone to the landlord, complaining about the "damned crowd of noisy kids upstairs."

She slipped on a ratty bathrobe, so old and familiar she had no idea how long she'd had it or where it originally came from, then squeezed into her tiny bathroom. She brushed her teeth, and then peed. She thought about taking a shower, and decided that as it was her day off, she'd indulge in a bit of morning sloth.

In her kitchen now, she craved a cup of coffee, even the wretched instant that was all she could afford. Then she remembered that she was out, had run out yesterday, and had neglected to buy more. She sighed, then put on a kettle to boil. Tea again, she thought. That pale substitute for coffee.

The psychic fair was today. She was puzzled at her own anticipation of the event. She realized then that she'd made no other plans, had no tasks lined up. It was if she had cleared her calendar – such as it was – for this one happening.

It was at the Armory, in the warehouse district, on the southeast outskirts of town. It was still called the Armory, even though the National Guard had vacated the place decades ago, because 'the Armory' was the kind of name that stuck. These days, it was used for low-key conventions, performances by bands no one had ever heard of, and other gatherings that defied categories. Like the psychic fair.

It'd be a long bus ride; Sara thought of this as she sipped her tea. Probably a good hour or so, with at least two transfers. She sighed. She rode the bus nearly every day – a short hop of just a few miles to go to work, or a longer jaunt to John's place. It was still a chore, though, one she did not relish. The bus had an atmosphere all its own, primarily created by its riders. They were poor, almost without exception, and usually angry about something. Sara, as impoverished as her fellow riders, usually just felt a vague anger, directed at nothing or no one in particular. Or maybe it was directed, just a bit, every time she looked out the window and saw commuters in their own cars, with their unappreciated solitude.

"Well let's do it then," she told herself. She drained her tea and headed back to the bathroom for a shower, then a change of clothes, and then on with the day.

A little before noon, bus number eight slowed to a squealing stop at the only bus stop on 62nd Street. Sara alone got off. The street, old and industrial, was nearly deserted – most of the buildings were boarded up and falling down.

The Armory was a block away. She could see a few cars in the front parking lot, a few more driving around to the larger lot in back. Sparse groups were milling about the entrance, a few individuals were going inside. A long, hand-lettered banner proclaimed " _First Annual Psychic Fair – Believe the Impossible_!"

"I'll believe it when I see it," Sara muttered.

Inside, she found nearly exactly what she had been expecting. Dozens of card tables, covered with black felt or brightly colored paper, staffed by garishly dressed men and women, mostly middle aged. Recovering hippies, Sara labeled them. On their tables she saw the wares of their trade – tarot cards, crystals of various colors and sizes, palmistry charts. Signs and posters offered free readings and sessions. Several such readings were in progress; the psychics whispering intently, their patrons listening with rapt attention. Sara wandered about, up and down several aisles, and saw nothing that sparked her interest. A few psychics beckoned her over, offering their services. Each time Sara smiled politely and shook her head.

She'd nearly given up, had nearly decided the trip had been a waste, when she saw the sign for novice psychic screenings. It was small, unobtrusive, designed and printed on someone's desktop computer. It included an arrow at the bottom, directed down a brief flight of steps.

She found an ad hoc room, created of nothing more than hastily propped-up plywood, barely large enough to hold a long folding table and a couple of chairs. A young-ish woman, probably a bit younger than Sara and looking for all the world like an eager graduate student, looked up and smiled as Sara entered.

"Am I your first customer?" Sara asked as she lowered herself into the closest chair.

"Well, 'customer' isn't the word I'd choose; but yes, you're my first visitor today." She leaned across the table and offered Sara her hand. "I'm Trudy Davis."

"Hi, Trudy. Sara Kincade."

Trudy nodded, then reached into a box under the table. "Do you think you might have extrasensory abilities, Sara?"

"Well," Sara looked down at the table. She folded her hands in her lap. "I guess that's what I'm here to find out."

"That's just fine," Trudy said. "We'll start with a simple test, one that researchers have had a lot of luck with." She set a deck of oversized cards in front of her. "Have you ever seen cards like these?" She lifted the top one and showed it to Sara. One side was plain and white, the other featured a black five-pointed star in the middle. "There are five different symbols. I'm going to pick a card at random, I'll look at it...and you just tell me what you think it is. Okay?"

It was a disappointment.

After thirty cards Sara had given up, murmured an apology to Trudy, and left the little plywood room. By her own count, she'd guessed correctly only six or seven times – less than what she could have expected through pure chance.

Outside the room, at the base of the short flight of stairs, she stopped and took a deep breath. Beyond explanation, beyond reason – she felt close to tears.

"This is fucking silly," she whispered to herself.

"Nothing silly about it," came a feminine voice behind her.

Sara turned, expecting to see Trudy Davis. Instead, it was an older woman, perhaps thirty, with short-cropped red hair, in a prim brown turtleneck sweater.

"You're Sara? Sara, I'm Marla. Would you please step back in here? I'd really like to talk to you."

Sara hesitated. She nearly fled up the stairs, and out the Armory.

Instead, without speaking, she followed Marla back into the little plywood room.

Trudy Davis was gone, there was no trace of her. The long folding table was covered now, with black felt similar to so many of the tables upstairs. In its center stood a lone candle-holder, with a slim white taper candle.

"Please have a seat, Sara." Sara took the same chair she'd just vacated. She still hadn't said a word.

"That test...it didn't go as you expected, did it?"

Sara looked up. "I don't know what I was expecting."

"That's not true." The woman who called herself Marla leaned forward and smiled at Sara. "I think you know exactly what you were expecting."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Sure you do," Marla said. "You've always been sort of...intuitive, isn't that true?"

Sara met her eyes at last, but said nothing.

"You seem to know things, before they happen. Don't you? And you size people up quickly. That's true too, isn't it? When you meet someone, you look into their eyes and know right away if they're good people or not."

Finally, Sara laughed aloud. "So that's my secret super power, is it? I'm a really good judge of character."

Marla didn't join her laughter. "I don't know what powers you have, Sara. If any."

Sara bit her lip. "Well, that test I just did with Trudy says I don't have any powers at all."

"Yes, the flashcards." Marla reached into the pocket of her gray wool slacks, and came out with a disposable lighter. "The flashcard test has been around for decades. It's very useful for detecting some abilities." She leaned in and lit the candle on the table. "But it doesn't detect all of them, Sara.

"Have you ever stared at a candle flame?" Marla smiled. "That's a rhetorical question. Of course you have. Everyone has. But did you ever notice the way the flame flickers sometime, and other times it's still?"

"Well...yes," Sara said. She found her attention pulled to the candle. It was difficult to look away.

"Did you ever wonder why? Why the flame does that?"

"Wind?" Sara guessed. She was still staring at the flame.

"It could be wind," Marla said. "It very well could be. But there's no wind in here, is there? And that flame – it's flickering right now, isn't it? Why?"

Sara forced herself to look away from the candle and up at Marla. "You tell me."

"It can be many things, I think. And one of those things, for lack of a better term, is will power."

Sara frowned at her, but was silent.

"Look, the flame has gone still. Make it flicker, Sara."

"How?"

Marla's voice became terse. "Start by looking at it and not at me." A pause. "That's better. Just relax. Relax and stare at it. And decide that you want it to flicker."

"I don't...I don't know how to do that." Sara was staring at the flame again, transfixed.

"How do your move your arm? Or your leg? You don't think about it, do you? You don't say to yourself, 'I want to move my leg now.' You just will it to be, and it happens." Marla was speaking very softly, very slowly. "That's all you need to do now."

The candle flame began to flicker.

Sara blinked. "Did I do that?"

Marla smiled again, broadly. "I don't know. Did you? Make it stop."

Sara turned back to the candle, stared at it, let her vision blur and her body relax. Almost at once the flame stopped sputtering and became perfectly still. Sara drew in a breath sharply.

"I think...I did that."

"I think so too." Marla moved the candle to the side and reached both hands across the table, toward Sara. Sara hesitated, but then put her hands in Marla's. "I'm positive, Sara, quite positive...that you have certain rare gifts."

"What kind of gifts?"

"Nothing there are names for. Just a strong mind and powerful will. And the aptitude for using them."

"But what does that mean?" Sara's eyes were wide.

"It means you've reached a crossroads. And there are decisions you need to make." Marla rose, letting go of Sara's hands, then stepped to the plywood doorway and looked out, to the left and right. "I'd like to make sure we're alone," she explained.

She returned to the table and sat back down. "You can do whatever you like, Sara. With your abilities, you can have whatever you want. What is it you want most?"

Sara shrugged and laughed. "God, I don't know. I want to pay my rent and not worry about money. I want to ride in a car every now and then instead of a goddamned bus. I want..."

Marla leaned close and peered into Sara's eyes. "You think you'll lose your job soon, isn't that so? And you're afraid of what will happen after that."

Sara paused, just a beat, to draw in a sharp breath. Then she said, "So you're psychic, too? Is that it?"

"Something like that," Marla said. "I can tell some things about you. I can tell, for instance, that you're not particularly ambitious." She saw Sara's frown. "I don't mean that as a bad thing. In fact, quite the opposite."

She waved a distracted hand toward the stairs, toward the Armory floor beyond. "You saw the readers and advisors out there, yes? You can do that, surely. I'm fairly certain that you have abilities beyond just about everyone here today. So yes, certainly, you could set up a little shop somewhere and offer readings for fifty, maybe a hundred dollars a session. How does that sound?"

Sara was flustered. "I don't know. I've never...never thought of doing any such thing."

"Of course you haven't," she looked deep into Sara's eyes again. "That's not you, that's not your path.

"What else? Well, you could set up your own psychic hotline; still not your path, but you could make millions. That'd take the sting out of it, eh? Or you could make millions more playing the stock market. You wouldn't be the first of us to do so."

"Jesus. I don't know what to make of any of this."

"I know." Marla sat up straight. She seemed almost businesslike now. "There are more of us than anyone suspects, Sara. We're everywhere. And some of us...well, some of us have become quite rich, not always in the most honorable ways.

"I'm a pretty good judge of character, too. And I judge that sort of thing wouldn't make you happy. Oh, you might feel a bit better about things when you buy your first car, when you move out of your shitty little apartment. But you wouldn't be...fulfilled, that's the word. You would not find fulfillment."

Sara grimaced. "Fulfillment? God, this is a sales pitch after all, isn't it?"

"Not really. Well, maybe it is, but I'm not selling anything you can buy with money. And actually, Sara, it's not my decision to sell you anything. I'm just here to talk with you, to find out what kind of person you are, and to see if you want to join us. It'll be up to others to extend the invitation."

Sara's brow was deeply furrowed. "Join who? Listen...I'm _this_ close to getting the hell out of here. Just start making sense."

Marla's grin lacked humor. "What I'm trying to tell you is that there's another way, something else you can do with your gifts. There's a...network of us, gifted people just like you. And we work together, and we help people, and we try to make the world a better place."

"That sounds crazy."

"It probably does. But you don't have to rely on how things sound, Sara. Look at me, look into my eyes. Am I lying to you?"

Sara did as she said. "I don't think so. I don't think you are."

"Don't think, Sara. You don't have to. You can know. Now...am I lying to you?"

"No. You're not."

"Good." Marla slid a white card across the table. It had the look of a business card, but it was blank except for a single phone number. "And that's all we can say for now. The network I told you about is going to...meet. To talk about you. In about a week one of us, probably me, is going to contact you. We'll let you know then what our decision is, and what the next steps are.

"In the meantime," she nodded at the card, still on the table, "call that number, day or night, if you need anything. And I mean anything. You're no good to us if you're worrying about paying the light bill. And before you ask, if our decision is no, don't even bother calling the number. It'll stop working that same day.

"Now Sara, you _are_ going to lose your job." Sara recoiled at that and Marla smiled. "Yes, it's true. The owner of that mall is about to be indicted for racketeering, and the mall will close shortly thereafter. That shouldn't worry you. You're a psychic, after all. I told you just a couple of ways you can make a living. You'll think of a dozen more before you get home today."

Marla took Sara's hands again, holding them tightly. For the first time, she smiled at Sara in a way that was warm and friendly. "Or, if you join us, you won't have to worry about it at all. You'll never have to work again."
Two

Days became a blur, a sleepwalk.

Sara rode the bus without noticing, went to work without caring. The dying mall – in its dying neighborhood – buzzed increasingly with grim rumors about the owner. The community of workers, meeting as they did in the food court for whispered lunches, or similarly hushed talks in the smoking areas, preached a chorus of gloom.

Sara scarcely took notice. She just got through her days in that constant fog of waiting – of waiting for she knew not what.

She didn't see John, in that waiting week, but she spoke with him twice on the phone. A phone was a luxury, an absolute luxury, that she lavished upon herself – but for those unexpected times of non-payment disconnection. In between those she used it sparingly – not out of choice but of circumstance. Conversations with John were brief, sometimes stilted, often contentious. Less frequently, more in a minimalist spirit of filial duty, she might call her mom and dad. Likewise, they didn't seem to call her more often than birthdays and holidays, no more than obligation dictated. Enjoying, as they were, a hard-wrought retirement in the sun and near the surf. Beyond that, the phone rarely stirred.

Just two brief conversations with John, the first was when he reported he'd quit his job at the computer store – something about the 7 a.m. starting time being completely unreasonable and unacceptable. A day later, he found something better, just-right hours, unloading trucks for a department store.

She simply listened and acknowledged. Either of those phone calls would have generated arguments just a week earlier, both of them knew that. That it didn't this time confused John and depressed Sara. It made them both hurry off the phone.

She stared at the phone a few times, probably most nights that week actually, and thought about the phone number printed on the plain white card. The card remained in her purse, where she'd slipped it, because she was already far too tempted to make the call. Staring at the phone brought temptation enough.

And the many times that she reached for the phone, came close to making the call, she laughed at herself for thinking that leaving the card put away would somehow stop her. She remembered most of the digits, just from glancing at it once. She knew she could remember the rest with just a wince of concentration.

She didn't try, though. And she couldn't say for certain why she resisted. Never a great lover of introspection, she just tried not to think about it.

Ψ

On the sixth day, Marla appeared at Hott Spott. Sara met her eyes and said nothing.

"Not exactly busy here," Marla said. "So no problem taking a walk, right?"

Sara hesitated. But then she turned to the other cashier station. Her co-worker for the day, a newbie named Sharon, had heard Marla. Sharon just nodded and shrugged, giving both gestures a bored and resigned air.

They found themselves in the gray tiled concourse, walking amongst the plastic potted ferns and the overflowing ceramic trash bins.

"I guess I should be impressed – you didn't call us. All week, you didn't call. Or is that a message of some kind? Trying to tell us something?"

"I don't know." Sara eyed her feet as they walked.

"Trying to assert your independence, maybe? Or just saying that you don't believe us after all?"

"I don't know," Sara said again. "Why don't you read my fucking mind?"

Marla stopped, faced her. "We'd like to ask you to join us. That's a joint decision, made by a lot of people you'll never meet. But they know a lot about you, and they want you to join us."

Sara gave a tight, tired grimace. She closed her eyes. "Not that I mind asking you the same freaking questions over and over or anything, but... _who_ is asking me to join _what_? And _why,_ and _what the fuck do you want from me_?"

Marla reached for Sara's arm, Sara shrugged away. "Those are fair questions, okay? Fair questions, and I'm not dodging them because I don't want to answer them. It's just that they're not as easy to answer as you might think." She gestured at a wood bench, in the center of the concourse. "Let's just sit, okay?

"We, the group, the ones I keep telling you about...we don't have a name or a meeting hall, or any of that crap you've been imagining." Sara looked up at that. "Yes, and we spend a lot of time in each other's minds. Get used to it.

"We're just a network. That's what we usually call ourselves, and it's apt in a couple of ways. No, nothing I'm going into just yet. This is going to take some patience on your part. More patience than you're used to giving.

"As I told you before, we're all...abled. Gifted. All in our own ways. And, as I told you, we try to use those gifts to do some good."

"How?"

"Influence. We can be very influential."

"More cryptic bullshit."

"Yes, but you know you'll find out more as you need to know more. I can feel you trying to read my mind, Sara. So you've already found out that much at least, yes? That first we need to train you, to refine you. Then we bring you in all the way, and you can start helping us."

"What is it you think you're going to do to me? Or I'm going to do for you?"

"We'll show you how to get control of that flighty mind, for beginners. That little foray into my head just now was sloppy, at best. That's the first time you've ever tried something like that?"

Sara eyed her shoes again. "I think so. I guess so. Sometimes I hear people...thinking, I guess? I guess I hear them thinking, and I think I mostly tune it out."  
"You have to. We all do. It'd drive you insane otherwise. I have something for you." Marla unzipped her purse, and handed a slim hardbound book to Sara.

"Meditation?" Sara was examining the cover. "Relaxation techniques? What the hell?"

"I take it you've never tried meditation? No? Your loss. But start now. Tonight. Read the first chapter when you get home, and do the exercises at the end."

"Whatever." Sara lowered the book, placed it in her lap.

"I'm serious. This is the start. Today is the beginning. And that book," She nodded at it. "That's where you start. Listen...

"There's a war going on. We're on one side of it. The other side does everything it can to win, and so that's what we have to do, too."

"War with who?"

"It's very nearly what your boyfriend – John? It's John, isn't it? Yes, well, it's very nearly what John thinks, what he reads about on his conspiracy websites and tells you about when you're barely listening."

"Leave him out of this."

"Okay. As you wish. But the things he's told you about corporations and the government and religious leaders – that's very close to the truth."

"Jesus. Jesus, come _on_."

"We're holding back the tide. That's really all I can tell you. We're holding back the tide, because if we didn't...we'd lose this country. And you wouldn't like the people who'd take over."

"My God, Marla. I just – I can't believe I'm here. Listening to...and your fucking name isn't Marla. Is it?"

Marla smiled, with warmth. "Got that, did you?"

Sara closed her eyes and rubbed them. "You're honest. I get that much. Other than lying about your name – you're honest and you believe in what you say. So how the hell do I know you're not just some whackjob and I'm the dumbest shit in history for listening to all this?"

"I asked a question just like that. The man who brought me in told me that time would tell, one way or another."

"Comforting. Thanks bunches."

"So here's what happens now. You start training your mind. That starts with that book." She nodded at it again. "We'll stay out of your way, mostly, for awhile. We'll show up occasionally to give...pointers. And direction. But the training is really up to you – it's a self-taught course. One you already have a hell of a headstart in.

"When we think you're ready, we tell you everything. Politics, religion, the whole ugly truth.

"Nobody's forced to do anything. If you agree with us, once you hear it all, we'll show you how to fight for our side. If you don't agree...you owe us nothing."

"You'd just let me walk away?"

Marla chuckled. "Versus what? Bullet to the head? Didn't I tell you we're the good guys? Sara – we've got a pretty good idea of what makes you tick. Same goes for anyone asked to join the network. We wouldn't extend the invitation if we weren't fairly sure you'd accept it. So far, everyone has."

"But if they wanted out?"

"We'd let 'em go. You'll have to take my word on that."

Sara sighed. She was still for a moment, then rose suddenly. "Okay. Anything else?"

Marla rose to join her. "Just this. I probably won't see you for awhile. Someone else, another contact from the network, will take over. He'll get in touch with you when he needs to speak to you. He'll do so in a public place. No phone calls, no home visits."

"How will I know him?"

"The first time he wants to talk to you...he'll ask you for a cigarette. You'll say you don't smoke. Then he'll hand you a half-pack of Marlboros. That's your man."

Sara stared. "That's some of the silliest bullshit – "

"That bullshit is called security and it can save your life. After your first meeting, he'll tell you when and where to meet next."

"But that...thing about the cigarettes. It's stupid. I don't smoke, but he hands me a pack of cigarettes? And why the hell would he ask me for one, when he's got – "

"It's so you remember it and you're on your toes when you meet him, and not drifting off into space as you're wont to do. And it's also unlikely to happen with a legitimate stranger, isn't it? Safe to say it won't happen by chance?"

"Jesus. Okay, whatever."

"Whatever, again." Marla put her hand on Sara's shoulder. "I'm serious, dead serious, when I say these things can save your life. You'll understand better later, but...for now, there's one other thing you must do for me.

"Whenever you meet with one of us, me or anyone else, you must...check our backtrail. Yes, I know you don't understand that. You will. Just...look at us. _Look_ at us, when we're first walking up to you...and check our backtrail. Look behind us, where we've been, who we've seen...and see if we've been followed. _We_ might not know it, but you'll be able to see. And if someone is following us, just get out of there. Don't say hello, goodbye, or kiss my ass. Just get out of there and don't look back."

ψ

Sara puzzled over the encounter, every bit of it, and drifted through her day, and onto the bus, and on to home.

She turned the key in the lock of her apartment door, and pushed. The door moved, but with difficulty. Something was slowing it.

Sudden dread gripping her, she reached in and flipped on the lightswitch by the half-open door, and peered around it. A thick white envelope was on the floor, sticking out from beneath the door bottom.

She pulled the door back a bit, releasing the envelope. She reached down, hesitantly...then she changed her mind and pulled back. Instead, she stepped around the door, closed it behind her and locked it.

Then she picked up the envelope. It wasn't sealed, the flap was just tucked in...

Hundred dollar bills. A sheaf of them, too many to estimate. More than she had ever seen in her life.

In the back of the envelope, behind the bills, was a piece of notepaper. She pulled it out.

Scrawled in black ink, in bold, capital letters:

READ THE BOOK, SARA
Three

She quit her job. The cash in the envelope turned out to be a little more than six thousand dollars; not enough, really, to stake a new life upon. But she quit her job anyway.

Which was just as well. The day she came into Hott Spott, to tell the manager she was leaving and to say goodbye to friends, the announcement was made at last. The mall owner was going to jail, the government was seizing his property...and the mall would be shuttered for good in just days. Megan was crying, as she hugged Sara and wished her well, while simultaneously cursing herself for shedding tears over a job like Hott Spott. The newbie, Sharon, was also cursing – loosing a string at invectives at her own luck, for landing a doomed job in the mall's waning days.

A meticulous planner and budgeter, Sara charted a plan for making the most of her cash windfall. Without too much extravagance, and as long as she kept her current low-rent apartment, she figured the money would last four or five months, at least.

In the back of her mind, she wondered if there'd be more. She wondered if other bulging envelopes might appear under her door by night.

She decided not to count on that. She decided to budget the cash carefully, and see what the coming months would bring. When the money began to run low, she could always start looking for another job.

There was one extravagance she felt she owed herself, though.

The only car sales lots in her neighborhood were of the buy-here-pay-here variety. She knew she couldn't afford a new vehicle, and she knew likewise that she wasn't up to the bargaining and tap-dancing that new-car buying required. The lots in her neighborhood, though, had the prices right there in the window, in colorful peel-off, stick-on letters six inches high. And one of those lots, just down the road from her building, had a smart red Camaro, parked in front and displayed for maximum street exposure. She'd been noticing it every time the bus took her by for several days.

"That Camaro," she said to the salesman as she walked into the little office. "The red one out there. Twenty-seven hundred?"

The salesman dialed up his broad, friendly grin. "We can put you in that Camaro today, sweetie. How much ya got down? Put down five hundred, and we got a payment plan..."

But Sara was pulling hundred-dollar bills from her purse, stacking them on the peeling veneer of the salesman's desk. "Twenty-seven hundred," she concluded. The salesman gaped.

But he recovered quickly. "Great. That's great. Um...how about insurance? You need insurance? I got a friend..."

Sara was looking at him. "Your friend charges a lot of money. Too much, really. And he gives you a little...finder's fee? Yeah, a finder's fee – for sending people to him. I can't afford your friend, but if you know where I can get coverage for a decent price...."

The salesman opened, then closed his mouth. He was quiet for a moment, looking down at the thin yellow carpet. Then – "Okay. We can get you set up. Yeah. We can do that. Say...you're name isn't Donna, by any chance?"

"Er, no. I'm Sara."

"That's a shame. No, wait. I didn't mean anything by that. It's just...you ever listen to NPR? No? There're two guys on there, brothers, that do a show about cars. Anyhow...they say if you see a girl driving a red Camaro, chances are her name is Donna."

Sara smiled at that. She had no idea what an NPR was, but the salesman – now that he had dropped his hardsell façade – was growing on her.

"Okay, listen Sara. We'll get you taken care of." He was pulling the various and varicolored forms from his desk drawer. "I know a few discount insurance guys. They can help you. We'll get some plates put on, and...you do have a driver's license, don't you?" Sara nodded. "Yup. I bet you got it in high school, haven't driven a car since, but you keep renewing it cuz you knew you'd buy one someday. Right?"

Sara laughed and nodded again.

"Alright. Let's get started on the paperwork."

"Thank you, Earl."

An hour later, after Sara had driven her Camaro off the lot and waved goodbye to Earl, he put his feet up on his cheap veneer desk and sighed contentedly. He hadn't turned much of a profit off that deal – a helluva lot less than usually, in truth. He surely could have taken her to the cleaners – he knew that. And the business needed that, he thought. Business was crappy lately – had been ever since gas prices began climbing from the 'outrageous' level, toward 'downright thievery.' People weren't buying used cars, so when a mark walked in, well, Earl had the obligation to fleece them as best as he could.

And this girl would have been ripe for the fleecing. She hadn't tried bargaining...hadn't even asked for a test drive! He could have easily unloaded any of the back-lot lemons on her, for a price that would have made P.T. Barnum weep. But he hadn't, hadn't even come close. Hadn't even thought about it, really.

Earl didn't have much of a family. Just a string of ex-wives, a couple of brothers and sisters scattered around. No kids. But if he ever had a daughter...why, he'd want one like the girl who'd just driven off his lot. _That's_ why he was so happy to help her, he decided.

He crossed his feet, and looked down at his desk. He remembered then that his nameplate, with its simulated oak and brass, was still missing. It had been missing for weeks. (Sara could have told him it was between the desk and the wall, where it had fallen.) And then he remembered that he had never introduced himself, nor had he given her a card. He sat up slowly.

"How the hell did she know my name?" Earl asked the empty room.
Four

Sara also began, tepidly, to teach herself meditation.

The book was a challenge initially. She began reading it that first night, but didn't try any of the exercises until days later. She found she had to warm to the subject first.

The opening chapters were exasperating. They were trying to teach her how to breathe, for chrissakes. She _knew_ how to breathe.

But when she skipped ahead, when she tried to move directly into the later chapters...she found she couldn't understand them.

Resigned, she started from the beginning.

And she was surprised to learn that the breathing lessons – and the sitting lessons and the relaxation techniques that came after – these actually had value. They were instructions for doing things she'd been doing all her life...instructions for doing them better.

Her favorite was the relaxation process she learned early in chapter two. The book called it, 'contract and release.' It was simple – just tighten up every muscle in the body; grit the teeth, clench the fists, curl the toes... _every_ muscle. Then...slowly...release. The result was total relaxation. She found herself relaxing muscles she didn't know she had – that had been contracted since she'd been born, probably.

When she finally got into the actual meditation – this was chapter four – it wasn't like anything she'd been anticipating.

Her preconceptions had been formed by movies, she guessed, and by old pictures she'd seen over the years, like the ones of the Beatles sitting with their swami.

So she was surprised to learn that there was no chanting, no tortured cross-legged posture. Just a tranquil sitting position – the book counseled against meditating while supine but Sara tried it anyway. The book said that when doing so, one was apt to drift off to sleep. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it wasn't meditation. Sara found this was not a problem for her; she could hold the meditative state as long as she wished...and then she could let herself sleep if she so desired. And when she did, she found it was the most relaxing, most restful, most restorative sleep she'd ever experienced.

Meditation, she learned...was just a calming period for the mind. If she'd been more computer savvy, she probably would have called it a 'reboot.' It was simply taking the time to let the mind rest, to let it play, even. She thought at first that she should blank her mind, should try to think of nothing. She was annoyed at herself every time she failed – which was, of course, every time she tried.

It became clear, then, that blankness was an unnatural, undesired state of mind. Blankness would offer her mind no benefit.

But the relaxation, the calm, the free reign to let the mind wander as it would...this was meditation. And she came to see that it was what her mind had been yearning for, all these years.

Ψ

On a warm sunny day, in the early days of June when summer was still a novelty...Sara tooled her red Camaro into the parking lot of Target, in the strip of uninterrupted stores and fast food restaurants near the center of town. She had the tee-tops off, open to the wind. And wasn't _that_ a pain in the ass, teaching herself how to remove the tops. The owners manual was missing; this was something Sara, even with her limited experience, suspected to be par for the used-car course. But with just a bit of trial and error (and swearing; plenty of that), she got the twin tee-top panels loose and stowed, and was ready to enjoy a day as she never had before.

First, an aimless drive; no destination, just pleasure. Then to the strip, and into Target's parking lot, and around the side, and to the loading docks in the rear. A crew of handlers was there, gaggled around the open rear end of a tractor-trailer. Mostly men, a few women, nearly all of them were in their twenties and thirties. They were smoking and laughing, all of them ignoring the pile of boxes stacked near the back of the truck.

When Sara saw some of them opening lunch sacks, and peering inside, she knew she had timed her visit perfectly.

She crept to within twenty feet of them, completely ignored, then laid on the horn. She pulled herself up, to a sitting position on the top of the backrest, torso fully out of the open rooftop. The gaggle was staring at her.

She spotted John, in the rear. He was one of the ones just smoking, not lunching. When he saw her, his jaw dropped.

"Excuse me," Sara called. "Would you all mind sending over that sexy boy, the one right there?" She pointed to John. The gaggle hooted and cheered. John blushed and walked the gauntlet, and received several ironic claps across his back as he did so.

He recovered his cool by the time he reached her car. He smiled, hands in his pockets, and said, "Well hello stranger. Steal yourself a ride?"

"Freshly jacked. Got time for a drive, blue-collar boy?"

"Always time." He walked round the rear, and to the passenger side. He attempted the vaulting entrance, the one he'd learned from too many detective shows; he leapt over the door, down through the tee-tops. He failed miserably, and landed badly.

The gaggle was _overjoyed_ by that, doubling over and howling with laughter.

John pulled himself right in the seat, next to Sara. "That always looked so goddamn easy on TV," he said. Sara laughed, threw it in gear, and opened the throttle.

"So are you gonna come clean and tell me where you got the car?" John shouted to be heard. They were on a rolling road, along what appeared to be fallow farmland, surprisingly few streets off the strip. Sara was letting the speed limit be damned, wind was roaring through the cabin, and they were taking the short hills like thrill-park rides.

Sara glanced to her right, over her sunglasses. "You gonna lecture me about coming clean?"

A crossroads appeared ahead, beyond that a smaller business district. Slower speed limits. Sara grunted her dissatisfaction.

John took advantage of the wind drop, reached into his pocket, and brought out a rolled-up plastic baggie. He unrolled and opened it. Sara frowned at that. As they coasted up to the next stoplight, she leaned over and peered clinically into John's eyes. "For pete's sake. You're high already."

"Yeah. Work's a challenge and I need that extra edge. Want some?" He was pulling a rolling paper from its cardboard and creasing it.

"No thank you. And great fucking idea doing that at a stoplight."

"I ain't worried. The man hassles us, you'll just outrun him. Won't you, Bandit?" The light changed and they moved forward.

"What time do you have to get back there, anyway?"

"Who fucking cares? Let's roll, baby." John sprinkled careful pinches of green into the paper.

Traffic cleared ahead; Sara looked again over her sunglasses, to the front this time. She grinned when she saw that the road opened up, into more rolling farmland.

She floored it. The wind roared back in and John's pot was scattered.

He stared at her in disbelief. "Oh, you skank," he said. She laughed from her heart.

She wound her way back to Target. The gaggle was back to work, unloading boxes, and didn't notice them.

John put his hand on hers, which lay on the armrest. She smiled. He said, "You're really not going to tell me where the car came from?"

"You have your secrets, I have mine." She blew him a kiss.

"Okay." He leaned in and gave her a real kiss, just a little one. "Thanks for the ride, doll. Now do you want to tell me what you've been waiting to ask me?" She cocked her head at that. John said, "Don't worry, you're still the psychic in the family. I just know my girl, is all. Now what's on your mind?"

"Computers." She said promptly.

"What?"

"I'm thinking about getting a computer. I want you to help me pick what kind."

"Um. Okay. I can't get you the hook-up anymore, you know. They had me working completely unreasonable hours. But...you want desktop, laptop, Mac, PC...what?"

"Huh?"

"Never mind. I'll explain later. You are picking me up, right? Now that sugardaddy's bought you some wheels, the least you can do is pick me up. That's my price for helping you."

"Okay. About six? Okay. Now get your ass back on the clock. You're no good to me out here, I need a working man."

"Yeah, you need something. Bye, babe. I love you."

"I love you too."

John stood smoking, as he watched Sara drive out of Target's parking lot, back onto the strip and out of sight. And he remained there even after she was gone, silently staring off into the distance. He didn't turn when a voice from behind addressed him.

"John? Jesus, man. You'd better get back to work. Greg's pissed as hell."

"Yeah, I bet he is." John threw down his cigarette and at last turned around. "My opinion hasn't changed. He can still kiss my ass." With that, he walked slowly back to the loading bay.

Five

It happened one night, when she was in meditation, in the not-recommended supine position.

She was in her own bed, on her back, drifting into a fuzzy/clear place where she had just the dimmest awareness of her own body, yet a sharp, intimate awareness of her own mind.

No goals, no questions to answer. Just drifting. Delightful drifting.

And when the time seemed right, when she felt she'd drifted far enough, she chose to abandon the fuzzy/clear, and to go to sleep.

Except...she didn't.

She went _up_ , again. Like the night at John's place. She went up from her body and into the sky.

It was different this time, though, because it lacked the dreamy quality. She was, in fact, perfectly conscious of what was happening.

In the span of that moment – she remembered other flights, other nights of flying from her body. The night at John's, certainly...and many, many others, stretching back to little-girlhood. She remembered all those nights of drifting up, stretching toward the clouds and toward the voices that hovered just beyond hearing.

_That conversation_. She remembered _that_ conversation, that cacophony of voices, the one that always seemed to be just a little higher, a little further away. Since she was a little girl, she'd been striving to hear it. Had been _meant_ to hear it.

Things tugged her, though, calling her back down. They were mostly things of her own making, she knew this at last. Her own voice, she was throwing it like a ventriloquist, whispering deep fears and tinny pleadings.

It's too HIGH. Come back down.

There are OTHERS. They're watching.

Come back down.

We have no business here. This isn't our place.

Come back down.

Somewhere just below that, in a range of communication where words are unknown and emotions rule, came urgent calls from the part of her that wanted to swoop low, to spy, to unlock doors or look through keyholes.

To look for John, in other words. To learn the things about him that were hidden from her.

That house was down there, she knew. The house with the meandering stream in back, where John was a boy with angry eyes and no compassion. Where he was surrounded by strangers.

That was a trap. It always had been...but now she knew it beyond doubt. With her newfound clarity, Sara knew that swooping low was a trap she'd always laid for herself. To stop herself from flying _high_.

And as soon as she knew that – or recognized it, anyway – she was instantly up high, dizzyingly high. And the conversation was right in front of her, the voices that had always been lost in noise...they were clear.

Sara, it's Sara. It's Sara. _She's here._

The voices pulsed, like brief lightning, from a dense cloud that danced in front of her. The voices pulsed from all parts of it, changing, sounding like men and women, old and young...coming from everywhere.

And with her newfound clarity, she recognized fleeting voices in a way she knew she never would in the dreamy state. And so she heard the woman who called herself Marla (who wasn't Marla), and the girl who called herself Trudy (and she wasn't really named Trudy).

This is it, Sara. The Network, this is it. Nothing more than this. You've found us, the Network.

Sara found her own voice, or its mental equivalent, and sent out the questions that had been haunting her. All of them. It was a wordless plea for answers, one she'd been holding inside forever, it seemed. As long as she'd been aware that she was different, at any rate...and that was another way of saying forever.

Her transmission was met with a flood of soothing emotions. The soaring cloud that was a network of minds, was sending indulgent comfort and placating whispers...and below that was a drumbeat of deferment... _be patient Sara, too soon, too soon, patience. Be patient and answers will come._

The clarity wavered. Its edges became indistinct. Dream like.

She was finding sleep, she knew. Slipping from trance to sleep even as her vision was transforming into a dream.

The cloud spoke sharply, then. Sara thought it might have been Marla's voice.

_Dreams_ instruct _, Sara. Ignore them at your own peril._

That sounded like something her mother might say. Indeed, it sounded like something Sara might _ignore_ her mother saying, as she ignored the dreams themselves.

And with that, she found herself beside her mother, in the garden, in the springtime when her mother would come alive again just as the world outside did. Her mother would shrug off winter and pull on her gloves and dig deep into the soil. And little Sara, at her feet, would sometimes ignore or sometimes just roll her eyes at the homespun advice and peasant wisdom that mother would absentmindedly dispense as she dug or weeded or watered.

"I'll listen now, mama" Sara heard herself say.

_Good._ Mother pulled her hand from black loamy soil and held it out, in front of Sara's eyes. Soil and compost and dark organic things clung to mama's slender fingers.

You get dirty when you must, Sara. You get dirty when you must, and you get clean when you can.

Ψ

"Try it now. Dial tone?" John's muffled voice came from below the folding card table, pressed into service as a computer desk, in the tiny alcove off Sara's kitchen.

Sara lifted the telephone receiver and listened. "Yup. Dial tone. So what'n hell does that have to do with my computer?"

"I told you already." John pulled himself upright, and used his foot to tuck a tangle of wires back against the baseboard. "I've told you a few times, as a matter of fact. You listen for a few seconds, then you get the glazed look...the one you're getting right now. And then I'm no longer talking to Sara, but the shell of Sara." He grinned while he arranged the computer tower and monitor and keyboard.

"Uh huh. So the computer is plugged into the phone? Or..."

John sighed. "The phone is plugged into the computer. The computer is plugged into the phone _line_. That's where the magic comes from that makes the little man inside..."

"Oh for fucks sake." Sara crossed her arms. "Quit pretending like this is such a burden to you, and just admit you're loving it. Me buying a computer is like relationship insurance for you." They glared at each other for a second, then grinned together.

"This does bind you to me, doesn't it darling?" John leaned against the card table, still smiling at Sara. "You're either stuck with me, or you're forced to find some other computer geek. And I warn you, you're not likely to get this lucky again, geek wise." He sidled toward her. "Few men with my powers are this charming, this cool, this versed in the ways of a woman's..."

She laughed but pushed him away. "Easy, hero. You haven't earned any candy yet. I haven't even seen proof this stupid thing works."

"Right." He turned back to the computer and flipped power switches on the tower and the monitor. "What you have here, rookie, is a desktop IBM clone running 512 megs of ram with a 16-gig hard drive. This is not lightning fast, mind you, nor state of the art. It's not bad, though, and certainly not bad for a starter kit.

"What else? You got a 56k dial-up, which I begged you not to get. Broadband, I begged you. Get DSL or a cable modem, but you said..."

"Cable's for porn." Sara said.

John snorted. "Yeah, well, that's still available by dial-up. Sara, really...dial-up is a relic of the last century. Let me set you up with high-speed."

"It's the same internet, right? Isn't that what you told me? I can go to the same places and do the same things with either one, phone or cable. And phone's half the cost? Easy choice."

"It's a tenth of the speed, too. Dial-up _crawls_ , Sara."

"So what's the freaking hurry? I'm sitting on my ass in my dining room. Who the fuck cares how long it takes to surf...or whatever it is you do."

John opened his mouth, then closed it. Then he said, "As long as I've been screwing around with computers, that's the first time I've heard that particular argument. Okay, you win." He glanced at the screen and hit a few keys. "Don't worry, it won't usually take this long to boot up. This is all first time set-up stuff."

Sara lowered herself into the chair set by the card table. "So where do I go? On the internet, I mean. What do I look at?"

"Where ever you want to go. And look at whatever you want to look at. Okay, babe..." he hit a few more keys. "This is all set up. The web awaits. Want me to connect?" Sara nodded and John hit the enter key. A loud dial-tone sound came from deep within the tower, followed by the squealing and growling of the modem. "Seriously, the web is unlimited. If you can think of it, there's a webpage for it. What do want to see?"

"How about...well, what about that stuff you're always telling me about...the government and big business and the religious... _front_?"

John was frowning at her. "The religious _right_. And I'd've bet my life you never were listening to a word of that." He looked at his watch. "Shit. I better get to work."

"Want a ride?"

"No thanks, babe. I'll bus it, you stay here and play with your new toy." Sara started to protest. "Really, it's okay. Surf for awhile. You can pick me up tonight if it makes you feel better." He leaned around Sara, and began tapping at the keyboard again. "Quick web-browsing lesson first. And I'm saving the addresses of a few of those sites... conspirators-dot-com and freedom watch, for starters. And here, check this out...this is the true gateway to the world wide web. Miss Kincade, meet Google...."

She walked him to the door, kissed him sweetly goodbye, and watched him walk down the hall toward the steps. She had nearly closed the door when she noticed that he'd stopped, and was standing motionless with his back to her doorway.

"John...?"

Without turning, he said – "There's a lot of new stuff going on with you, Sara. I don't know what any of it means, but like you said, we've both got our secrets."

Sara, still gripping her half-closed door, started to answer but she stopped herself.

"Well, I can live with that. It ain't a perfect relationship, but I can live with it if you can. I guess what I mean by that is, I love you."

"I love you too, John."

"A little awhile ago, I was thinking that same phrase you said. _Relationship insurance_. That's what I was thinking when I was setting up your computer. And then you said it."

"John – "

"I'll stick with you, because I think we're pretty good together. And I'll deal with these new things in your life that I don't know about and I don't understand. Just...don't do what you did today. Don't pick things out of my mind then pretend like you know them because we're soul mates or something. That kind of dishonesty I can't handle." Still without turning, he walked down the steps.

Sara sat at her card-table-cum-computer-desk, and the hours disappeared.

She wasn't completely ignorant of computers, not nearly as much as she portrayed to John. She hadn't touched one in years, but she'd taken some relevant classes in high school, had used the desktop systems in the school library for term papers and the like...the internet had changed somewhat in the intervening years, but not enough to confound her.

She began, naturally enough, by visiting the sites that John directed her to. The first was Conspirators.com – a huge, multi-page monster dedicated to the in-depth examination of every conspiracy theory circulating the net.

That meant a _lot_ of conspiracy theories, Sara quickly found.

She waded through articles on crop circles and alien abductions, Bilderbergers and Freemasons.

Her bullshit detector signaled relentlessly, as she read about many of these theories. Just a little voice, somewhere deep inside, told her that a lot of these were pure fantasy.

She remembered something Marla told her, that first time they'd met at the psychic fair. Marla had mentioned something about Sara being a reliable judge of character, able to size people up quickly and accurately.

Sara supposed that was so. It was something she'd always done, without ever thinking about it. And the same seemed to apply here, on the internet. She was sizing up conspiracy theories in exactly the same way.

She decided to trust her bullshit detector.

Take crop circles, for instance. The pages devoted to this phenomenon boasted scores of pictures, of breathtaking, swirling designs imprinted into the wheat fields of England and the U.S.

Sara hadn't known much about crop circles; she'd heard the term, perhaps. But not much else.

Yet when she saw the first picture, she knew. She was suitably impressed, of course, and she could appreciate the effort that went into its creation. But she saw the crop circles, all of them, as works of art. Works of _human_ art.

The anonymous authors of the crop-circle articles were having none of that. They allowed that yes, perhaps _some_ crop circles were the products of stalk-stomping pranksters...but the rest were left by aliens, or time travelers, or by Mother Earth herself.

Sara's bullshit detector begged to differ.

And so it went...she'd skim over articles, and more often than not she'd find them suspect. Then she began to find articles about corporate conspiracy. And her bullshit detector went silent.

It was hard reading, and not a little difficult to follow. It hinged on politics and economics and current events. None of these were Sara's strong suits. She wasn't a follower of the news, knew nothing of politics...and as for economics, well, when one is earning six dollars an hour, one cares only about the immediate economics of rent and food.

So she got the gist, the big picture, even if the details were a bit beyond her.

It went something like this: a handful of the more powerful corporations, no more than fifty of them or so, had allied with a few large churches and religious organizations...and had thrown their considerable weight behind certain politicians. This had been going on for decades, apparently, but it had recently borne fruit. The puppet politicians were finally in office, throughout all branches of government and in every state – and this made the corporations and the churches powers behind the scene.

And what were they gaining by it? In the case of the corporations, it was clear enough. Record profits, disappearing regulation, dwindling tax burdens....

With the churches, though, what advantages the churches might be gaining, this was less obvious. The anonymous authors actually seemed to be _skirting_ the issue, almost as if they were afraid of it. In fact, it seemed as if they were terrified by the unspecified implications.

Sara didn't know what to think of that. But her bullshit detector wasn't making a peep.

She reached a point when she realized that she needed to know more – that she had to verse herself in the current events that she'd ignored for so long.

She navigated back to the site John had shown her, the one that he'd called the gateway to the web. It was a mostly blank page, with a single box in the middle to input text.

"Google," it said, across the top of the screen.

"Whatever the fuck _that_ means," Sara mumbled.

Whatever it meant, it was simplicity itself and it really was the gateway that John had promised.

She acclimated herself to the arcane rules of web searching fairly quickly. The first couple of tries were washouts, but she was learning fast.

She started by typing into the little box, _Where can I learn about corporate profits?_

The machine hummed, and returned a page full of answers. She smiled...until she scrolled down.

There were, Google informed her, some seven hundred million websites that include the word, " _Where_."

"Shit," Sara said.

She tried again. She typed in just, _Corporate profits_.

The results were much better. Still several million entries, but at least they were on subject. Most of them were news articles, most of those from business publications.

She bit her lip, trying to think how she might narrow her search even more. Then she recalled one specific corporate industry mentioned again and again in the pages of Conspirators.com.

She typed in, _Oil company profits._

Google reported a couple hundred thousand hits, ranked by relevancy.

She clicked on the first, having learned from the Google blurb that it was a recent article from a major financial magazine – one she'd heard of, if never read.

She came away with a clearer understanding of the power and wealth at the command of these companies. There were only a few of them, perhaps seven or so major ones, if the article was to be believed, but they controlled a breathtaking percentage of the wealth of the world.

Perhaps most interesting, and most in accordance with the on-line conspiracy theories, was the profit performance of these companies in recent years. Despite a global energy crisis, despite unprecedented shortfalls in supply and distribution, all of the oil companies were enjoying record incomes – more than ever before, by an order of magnitude. They were reaping so much profit, the article's author proclaimed, that they were having difficulty finding ways to dispose of it.

And even this article, penned for the sake of investors in a staid, conservative magazine...even this article mentioned the unprecedented political clout the oil companies had gained, throughout the world but especially in Washington. The politicians mentioned as particularly oil-friendly, up to and including the current and former presidents, had all also featured prominently on Conspirators.com.

The article was providing enough verification, emanating from a source that in Sara's view was as unbiased as might be found, that she felt it important she should read it all. And more or less, she did. But it was long, more than 30,000 words, most of them devoted to subjects that had been utterly invisible to her all her adult life. Her attention began to wander and she began to skim.

Until she skimmed over one particular paragraph, blinked, then read it again more carefully.

Completely contrary to what

actuaries have been saying for decades, the warnings of the geologists are finally gaining attention throughout the industry. Peak production for all the world's oil fields has come and gone. And although technically oil reserves are only half depleted, that remaining half is proving to be more difficult to extract than ever predicted.

She read it a third time, to be sure the paragraph meant what she thought it did.

And then she got an even bigger jolt from the next passage.

To the industry's credit, it has beyond all doubt turned lemons into lemonade. It is employing regional tactics such as labor reductions and aggressive pursuit of government concessions to delay, as long as possible, any blow to the bottom line. The reality of dwindling supplies and lack of refining capacity not only hasn't adversely impacted shareholder value, those shareholders have seen their investments soar.

Sara was still for a long while, peering at the screen but not reading it, chewing on her lip and thinking about what she'd learned...and how it tied in with the things she was coming to suspect.

She sat there so long, without touching the keyboard or mouse, that the web browser decided she must have left the room or otherwise wandered off, leaving a neglected connection.

A box appeared on the screen, seeming (in Sara's eyes) to accuse her of being " _idle_."

"Well screw you for that," she told it.

Then it began counting down, apparently threatening to terminate the connection on its own, unless Sara acted.

"Hell with it." She let it count on down.

Just as it reached zero, the phone rang – insanely loud in the tiny apartment; Sara had forgotten she'd set the thing down on the card table, right there at her elbow, hours before when John had been setting up. She gasped and recoiled at the shrill, ragged noise.

She picked it up quickly, listened without saying anything.

"Since you're the only person I know who has a dial-up modem," came John's voice, "it completely slipped my fucking mind to tell you the most important reason to get high-speed. Dial up ties up the phone line."

"Oh, shit," Sara said. "Are you off? Is it time to pick you up?" She swung around in her chair, looking for the clock on the far wall. She was alarmed to find that it was so dark in the room she couldn't see it.

"Yeah, that was a little while ago, honey. I'm home now."

"Shit, shit. I'm so sorry, baby. Shit."

John chuckled. "No sweat. Not _too_ much sweat, anyway. We both know I'll probably bring this up from time to time, guilt value and all."

"I just...Jesus, what time is it, anyway? I've been sitting in front of this goddamned box all day."

"Same thing happened to me first time I got left alone with a live internet connection. I hope you're looking at different sites, though. There's a clock right in front of you, genius. Slide the mouse all the way to the bottom of the screen."

She did. "Holy shit."

"So now maybe it's time to walk away from the cyber-crack and go to bed?"

She giggled. "Yes, daddy."

"Good." John yawned. "Wanna tell me about your surfing adventures first?"

"No. Not yet, anyway. Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow, I will pick you up _and_ drop you off. I promise."

He laughed a little more, his voice tired. "Well, we'll see, won't we? Okay, bedtime, then." He paused. "Sara? I hope it's helping. Whatever you're into, I hope the computer and stuff is helping."

"It is, honey. All of it is. Thank you."
Six

Sara searched, in her lucid, soaring way. She searched the high reaches for the speaking cloud, the Network of minds. It was not to be found. She gave up and slept then, with exhausted disappointment.

Late in the afternoon, in the day following her fruitless search, Sara watched the sun drop slowly as the trees cast long, low shadows across the leafy floor of the park.

A park, that's what the city called it, but in Sara's opinion a park should consist of more than gravelly walking path flanked by a few decaying benches, covering a sparse half-city block.

But it was the only park available in these immediate environs, so that was where she found herself – sitting on a splintery bench, watching the orange sunset over the treetops, and over the dull gray buildings beyond.

This was the outing she'd been promising herself, all this waking day, as she tried to pull herself away from the computer and out into the sunshine. A walk, a drive, _anything_ , just out of the apartment.

It hadn't quite worked out that way – she spent several gritty, unwashed hours right out of bed in front of that thing...then a quick shower, lost in thought all the while...and then hours more, searching and reading and occasionally tapping keys. She could only tear herself away when she realized she'd missed all but the last rays of the sun. She hurried then to the little park across the street.

She had started her morning with Google. She used it to test out John's declaration that _everything_ can be found somewhere on the 'net. She tapped in things at random like _tigers_ and _gardening_ and _medicine_ , and was amazed at each turn by the results.

She was some length into this when she got the insight, worthy in its belatedness of a self-inflicted slap to the forehead, to type this in Google's text box:

psychics.

She was not surprised when the return reported hits high in the millions.

She looked at many of the pages, read a few of them, bookmarked many more; not a few of them were encyclopedic in length. She also quickly found herself wandering, not terribly far, but noticeably so, off subject. Thus _psychics_ led to _paranormal_ to _wicca_ and _magick_. This was a tree, she found, with a huge number of branches.

Those last branches, the ones into modern witchcraft and magick (with a " _k_ "), were intriguing if only for something she noticed on the first page she visited.

The page was called "Cassandra's Book of Shadows," and was apparently some lone kitchen witch's on-line labor of love. Sara's bullshit detector wasn't saying much, but she was nonetheless filled with doubt. The page was rich with dark colors – black and purple, with a background image of a hugely imposing harvest moon. These elements seemed fitting to Sara, given the subject matter, but the page was also crowded with sparkling letters and small animated pictures of twirling dancers and blinking cats. It looked like a young girl's diary come alive.

She might not have delved far, given that tepid first impression. But her interest was piqued by one of the early entries in the page's table of contents: " _So you want to be a witch._ "

Sara didn't want to be a witch, particularly, but she was curious what Cassandra might have to say to those who did.

Cassandra's advice turned out to include a self-improvement curriculum. The largest parts of that were the same things Sara had been learning from the slim hardback volume Marla had given her – breathing, relaxation, meditation, the works.

That sparked a hunch. Sara began looking for websites relating to other religions, to the global range of religion, in fact.

This turned out to be another well-populated corner of the web; religion as a category comprised a notable percentage of the internet's totality. So it took a while, with ever-narrowing searches, for her to find what she was looking for. When she did, however, she found her hunch confirmed.

_Many_ religions – perhaps most of them – relied heavily on various forms of meditation. Most didn't call it that, but that's what it was. Even the concept of prayer, as known to Muslims, Christians and Jews, was clearly a form of meditation.

All of these religions were equally valid, to Sara's thinking, or at least their practitioners deserved for that to be so. And each of their application of meditation was as valid and as useful as each other's, and, well, as valid as her own.

Ψ

That knowledge, and those searches, and the uncounted hours she'd spent at the keyboard were what occupied Sara's mind as she sat on the bench and watched the sunset – without ever really seeing it.

She did notice, however, a thin crowd of fellow park visitors, wandering slowly about the walking paths singly and in pairs. One in particular caught her attention as he passed; a tall man who looked to be in his forties, walking by himself with his hands thrust deep into his pants pockets.

If most people exude some soft, vague sense of themselves, in a way that Sara was always sensitive to but only recently aware of...then this man was positively broadcasting.

He didn't like women. Not at all. He glanced fleetingly at Sara, and disliked her in an instant.

His boss was a woman; this is what he was thinking about as he passed Sara. And he _loathed_ his boss. He loathed every woman that looked like his boss, or reminded him of his boss...he loathed nearly all of them, every one he met.

That was enough for Sara; as far as she was concerned, the man had just volunteered for experimentation.

Earlier, as she was exploring the boughs of the internet that branched away from the "wicca and magick" categories, she stumbled across a sub-set that seemed to be called, "chaos magick."

Fascinating stuff, and not nearly as dark as the moniker might suggest. Not exactly easy to define, based upon her brief introduction to the subject, but as near as she could tell, chaos magick was simply a utilitarian approach to magick (and magick – with a " _k_ " – required its own pained efforts at definition); if wicca was focused on spirituality, then chaos magick was more interested in results.

She thought of this now because of an article – a memoir, really – that she'd run across on one of the chaos sites. In it, a practitioner (who claimed the clunky title of " _chaos magickian_ ") detailed his introduction to the craft, and the training he'd undergone.

She wasn't surprised to recognize the training – much of it, anyway – as similar to her own. Meditation, visualization...it was all there.

But then the magickian relayed an anecdote – one that Sara's bullshit detector didn't cast doubt upon – about something he did some weeks into his training. He said that he was on the street somewhere, and out of curiosity, he focused his mind on the retreating back of a random pedestrian...and then with all his might, he sent out the mental equivalent of " _Hey, you_!" And then he watched as the unknown pedestrian stopped and spun his head about in startled confusion.

Sara thought of this as she watched the tall man walk away with his hands in his pockets.

She stared at him, she slowed her breathing, she shut out all the world except that narrow circle of vision centered on the tall man's back.

Then she furrowed her brow, and with a small grunt, she _pushed_. Something sharp and ethereal seemed to radiate from the center of her forehead, just above her brow, and it sped toward her target.

The tall man seemed to stumble; more accurately, he was thrown forward, as if struck in the back by some great unseen force. He would have hit the ground, probably would have ate the dirt, but he managed to grab a low-hanging branch and hold on.

He looked around, not at Sara but at his immediate surroundings; he looked at the ground in front of him, searching for a rock or a root or anything that might have tripped him...then he cursed and spat, and walked on.

Sara sat, wide eyed, and watched him until he disappeared around a bend.

She'd been so focused that she was completely unaware of the stranger's approach. She jumped and gasped when a soft voice whispered to her from just behind...

"That's a dirty trick. And uncalled for."

She turned. She stifled another gasp when she saw the man who whispered to her.

She didn't mistake him for her father; the resemblance wasn't _that_ close. But they could be brothers, fraternal twins even. He had the same balding crown, the same stocky build, the same – _exact_ same – sparse white mustache. It was disconcerting. Sara stared and said nothing.

The man smiled. "I'm supposed to lay some silly bullshit on you. Some silly bullshit about cigarettes."

Sara's eyes went wider. She bit her lower lip, as she did when she was nervous. But she remained silent.

"You know, Marlboros. Marla says I should ask you for one. And I've got a half-pack right here to give you." He laughed.

She found her voice. "You're... _him_."

The man laughed again, harder. "I'm him." He walked round the bench and sat next to Sara. He carried a small paper sack – it looked like a lunchbag – and he sat it on the bench between them. "David McMartin. Go ahead and dig around, you'll see that's my real name." He offered her his hand.

She took it and smiled at last. "I'd nearly forgotten all about you. About waiting for you to contact me, I mean."

He nodded. "I know. And I shouldn't have done that just now – making fun of security procedures. That's just not _done_...but I couldn't help it." He yawned and stretched. "Marla will be pissed beyond belief."

Sara was quiet a moment. She had questions for David – reams of questions. But she didn't know where to start.

He took the initiative. He nodded toward the walking path, in the direction where the tall man had disappeared. "Please be careful about doing things like that."

Sara looked down at the scraggly grass around her feet. "I was just...hell, I guess I don't know what I was doing."

"You were...experimenting. I was going to say _screwing around_ , but that's the word in your head: _experimenting_. And you thought you were justified, because the guy's an asshole. Right?"

Sara had lies ready, then she realized the folly of that.

"Yeah," she said simply.

"Well, asshole or not, you could have killed him. Probably not, not this early in your training, but...accidents happen." He turned his head again to the direction the man had walked, and closed his eyes. "He's fading. I'm not getting much. But...it was a woman thing, right? The guy had something against women?" Sara nodded. David put his hand to his temple and seemed to concentrate harder. Then he opened his eyes and looked up at Sara. "What if he had an excuse?"

"What do you mean?"

"What if his mother – she was a single mother and he was an only kid – what if she used to burn him with a spoon she'd heat up on the stove? What if she threw him down the steps when he back-talked her, and kept him locked in the cellar for _days_?"

"Oh my God. Is that...was that his – "

"Everybody has a past, Sara. And even assholes have reasons _why_ they're assholes. That's the kind of thing you've got to think about before you... _experiment_. Before you screw around."

Sara slowly looked up from the ground and met David's gaze. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry to me. This is between you and your conscience. If you think you can live with it, hell, knock over every asshole you see." He smiled gently. "The lecture is almost over, honey. One last thing I want you to think about...what would you have done if you'd picked up something _really bad_ from that guy?"

"Like what?"

"Suppose he was planning on going back to work tomorrow, and shooting that lady-boss of his right between the eyes? What would you have done?"

Sara blinked. "Jesus. I don't know."

"Well think about it, please. Because sooner or later you're going to pick up something very much like that. And you'd better know what to do when it happens."

Sara was quiet then, as she stared down the empty path. Then she asked him, "Has it happened to you?"

"Oh, yes." He was looking down the empty path, too.

"And? What did you do?"

"Sara...this is about you, about your development. Not mine." She was staring at him, not saying anything. He sighed. "All right. First time something like that happened – actually it was a guy who bumped into me at the grocery store. The bastard was raping his girlfriend's daughter, every night. When he bumped into me, I saw him doing it, each and every goddamned time." He ran his fingers through his thin, graying hair. "And you know what I did about it? Not a fucking thing."

"Why?" Sara asked him. He just looked at her, offering a sad, thin smile. Sara nodded slowly. "Because...because you didn't know _what_ to do, and..."

"And?"

She closed her eyes, bit her lip. "And...your job. You worked for...Jesus Christ, you worked for the CIA?"

"NSA. Close enough. And if I got myself involved in that nightmare, well, the agency wouldn't've looked too kindly on that. They've got – at least they _used_ to have – some pretty effective ways of dealing with do-gooding viewers."

"Viewers?"

"Remote viewers. That's government-speak for psychic. We don't have a lot of time, Sara. You want back-story, I know." He nodded toward the paper sack sitting on the bench between them. "It's in there, some of it anyway. Answers to at least some of your questions. Some of your questions – hell, some of everyone's questions – can't be answered."

Sara looked at him, saying nothing, just jutting her lower jaw out in a comically pouty way. _Answers, NOW_ was what her look was saying. David chuckled at that. "Fine. In a nutshell – forty-some years ago I was recruited by the National Security Agency as a remote viewer. Every damned branch of government, or all the intelligence agencies, at least, used 'em. My job, after three years of training – was to sit in a car outside embassies in DC, or sometimes in foreign capitals, and just sort of eavesdrop, you know what I mean? Of course you do.

"Anyway...they didn't like do-gooders. They didn't like viewers who called attention to themselves. So...if I'd done what I wanted to, if I broke that rapist bastard's neck – or stopped him, stopped him somehow...if I hadn't just run away like a goddamned coward..."

Sara closed her eyes again. "They would have taken you to a...a _compound_... somewhere, and..."

"And shoot me full of something to keep me nice and docile. And then they'd re _-_ educate me. Re-education, Sara, is every bit as sinister as it sounds.

"So I had a pretty good reason for doing – or not doing – what I did. My conscience should be clear, wouldn't you say? But you know what? Whenever I close my eyes, I see the face of this little girl I never met."

She laid a hand on his arm. "David..." it was the first time she'd used his name, but it felt natural, accustomed.

He smiled and patted her hand. "Don't fret for me, girl. I'm fine." Sara could scarcely keep from blanching at that; it sounded _precisely_ like something her father would say. David didn't seem to notice. "The point I'm trying to make is...fate dealt you some responsibilities, when you got the stuff you got. _How_ or _why_ you got the stuff, how any of us got it, that's irrelevant now. Just know that you're now in the position where..."

Sara finished. "Where sometimes I get involved in other people's bullshit. That sucks, David."

"It surely does, Sara. But here we are."

They were both silent a while, watching the now-deserted path fade into the gathering darkness.

The questions, all those remaining questions, roiled about Sara's head. Aware that David was likely sensing them, she just turned to him and cocked her head.

He chuckled. "Yeah," he said. "But not now, okay? Pick up the sack and take it with you. I promise answers are in there."

"A sack-full of answers." Sara didn't quite roll her eyes. But she picked up the sack anyway. There was something solid and flat and rectangular in there; she resisted the temptation to open it and look inside. "Why can't anyone just be straight with me?" she asked.

"In this case, it's because we've already violated security procedures by being together too long." He stood up and turned to face her. Sara remained seated, holding the paper sack absently in her lap. "We're pretty careful. All of us are. But every now and then someone slips up, and that usually means that somebody dies. You didn't check my backtrail, did you?"

Sara frowned, then remembered Marla's instructions. It seemed so long ago. "I still don't understand what that means."

"Get up," he said bruskly. She did so. "Now look at me...but try to look _behind_ me."

That didn't make much sense, but she tried to do as she was told. She looked up, into David's eyes (and realized just then – without any real surprise – that he shared her father's hazel eyes, and his six-foot frame); she gazed at him, but she also _reached_ out with her vision, behind and beyond him.

And she saw a thin, ghostly yellow cord form behind David, trailing back and undulating out of the park.

She gasped, and the cord disappeared.

"Try again," David said.

She did; the cord returned, almost at once. She willed herself to follow it – she sent out some small part of herself, of her consciousness, perhaps, and followed the cord at blinding speed. She followed it as it meandered out of the park, down the block, up streets and down alleyways...until it terminated at the door of a brownstone walkup nearly a mile away.

"Jesus," she breathed.

David smiled. "Yep. Does it look okay?"

"Well...I guess so. I mean, I don't know what to look for."

"You'd know," he told her. "If something was wrong, you'd know." He looked around the park again, and checked his watch. "We've really got to cut this off, Sara. You saw my apartment, right? Just moved there. Yes, that's right: I'm here to keep an eye on you. So I'm nearby, and we'll talk often. But we cannot...we _will_ not get complacent.

"We use these security procedures because we are hunted. You've already read a bit about the conspiracy, haven't you?" Sara didn't bother nodding; she was beginning to get used to this instant sharing of information. "Well they know about us, too, my dear. And they are by God looking for us. Our best defense is anonymity – living in the middle of dirty gray cities, in dirty brown apartment buildings...doing what we're doing, in other words. Because this sure as hell ain't where you'd look for a bunch of airy-head psychics trying to save the world." They both chuckled. "The rest goes with it, the stuff you call silly-ass security bullshit, and you'll damn well make a habit of it. Like checking each other's backtrail."

Sara asked, "Did you check mine? When you saw me sitting there?" Then she laughed and waved the question away. She knew the answer.

David was nodding. "Right. So let's make a point of keeping our get-togethers brief, okay? And not _too_ frequent."

David gestured, and they began walking along the path, toward the city street outside the park.

"You know where we'll do most of our meeting, don't you Sara?"

Sara nodded, and pointed straight up in the air. "Up there."

He laughed, with gusto. "Goddamn. You are an apt pupil. The aptest." He suddenly cocked his head, then looked at her. "I remind you of someone?"

Sara kept her eyes to the front and said nothing.

"Okay, okay. But goddamn again. The wall you just threw up in your mind...I've never seen anything like it." They had reached the park entrance, with its viney arbor arching across the gravel walk. The street stretched away, in each direction. The sidewalk was nearly deserted, although the street still had its share of straggling rush-hour commuters. They stopped walking; Sara stepped a pace or two onto the sidewalk, but David gently pulled her back into the gloom under the arbor. He was looking up and down the street, slowly scanning the area.

"Do you trust John, Sara?" He asked at last. Sara looked up sharply. "Yeah, I know. Marla said you don't like talking about him, but...do you trust him?"

Sara chewed her lip while she considered. "I do. I do. I know almost nothing about him...he won't tell me about his past, I don't know anything about his family..."

David said kindly, "There's a difference between what he tells you, and what you _know._ "

"Yeah." She spoke slowly, picking her words carefully. "I pick up stuff from him when he's sleeping. Something...something bad happened to him when he was a little boy. And I think it...almost made _him_ bad. Almost made him...Christ, I don't know."

"Dangerous?" David suggested.

She glared up at him. "He's okay now. Whatever it was, he's gotten past it. Yes, I trust him."

David nodded, then he gestured at the sack in Sara's hand.

"Then give him that. It's a computer disk. It's got some software on it to make your computer a little more...secure. John will understand. And there are some files on there with those answers you've been promised. I'll...leave it up to you to decide how much of this you want to tell John, and whether you want him with you when you read the files."

For the first time, Sara looked genuinely surprised. "I'm _allowed_ to do that?"

David shrugged. "Security's paramount, but...we balance security with sanity, you know? And we've found that our sanity is best preserved if we have someone – someone we trust – that we can confide in. If you trust John – if you're _sure_ you trust him – then that's good enough for us."

Sara thought about asking David who _he_ turned to, who he confided in...then she realized that simply thinking about the question was enough to allow her a glimpse, a peek into David's mind...

_Her name had been Melinda, she was beautiful and graceful and when she laughed David's heart would melt and he'd smile up at the sky and thank whoever was listening for depositing her, a serendipitous gift, down the hall in his Washington apartment building. And they met in passing then dated and romanced and one day he told her everything. And she saw his moral emptiness and the hole his NSA job was cutting into his soul...and she urged him to run. And he ran but not fast enough,_ they _got to her before he could, and_ they _beat her and_ they _took her to_ –

With anguish, Sara severed the link she hadn't meant to make. She looked up at him, in shame and hesitation, to see if he knew what she had just gleaned. One look at his face was enough to tell her that he had.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and rubbed them. When he opened them he was all business again.

"You looked for us the other night, right?" he asked her. "You looked for the Network? Yes, well...we don't get together every night, because the opposition has its own...viewers, for want of a better term. They look for us up there, too. So we try to avoid them...we use a little trick to randomly decide when to get together." He nodded at the sack in her hand. "That'll explain how, in a file called 'meetup sched'. You'll laugh your little butt off when you see how we do it."

She giggled at that in spite of herself. _God_ , he sounded like her dad.

David smiled, and then he sighed. He leaned a bit out of the dark cover of the arbor, and pointed to his left, up the street. "That's you." Then to his right. "And I'm this way. Go home, Sara."

Before she could stop herself, she hugged him. He was a bit startled, then he relaxed a bit, and he patted her on the back. As she held him, he looked about, in every direction. "This isn't what I'd call good security, sweetheart."

"Yeah," she let him go and stepped back. "You go home too. I'll see you," she briefly rolled her eyes skyward. "Up there."

# Part II
Seven

Doctor Deeks smiled as he stepped into the warm sunshine. It was a sunny and beautiful day. The oppressive heat of high summer hadn't arrived yet, the cherry blossoms were still brightening the banks of the Potomac, and Washington DC remained, for a few more short weeks at least, a rather pleasant place to be.

With that in mind, Doctor Deeks decided to walk – or _hoof it_ as he liked to say. He'd _hoof it_ the three short blocks from the non-descript door he'd just exited, located in an unmarked alley behind the George Washington University Medical Center...to an equally non-descript office building off 22nd Street, in the heart of the K Street lobby empire.

On the way, he glanced to his right, down Pennsylvania Avenue, and saw the dome of the Capitol peaking above the twin rows of trees that seemed to march down the thoroughfare. He grinned, as he always did, showing all his teeth...and he actually _winked_ at the Capitol – although no one could see that behind the thick, dark glasses he wore.

_They think that's where the power is,_ he thought. And then he quietly laughed.

He walked past the bank of elevators, and went right for the stairs. The office he sought was just one floor up, on the mezzanine – a good vantage point if you wanted to watch the comings-and-goings of the entire building.

The stenciled lettering on the glass door said, _Family Base, LLC_. Which revealed very little, of course. Deeks pushed through the doors, and marched briskly through the ornate lobby, and past the receptionist without looking at her. She started to protest, until she saw who it was. Then she just frowned with distaste, and said nothing.

He opened the door beyond the receptionist's desk, and stepped in without knocking. The bald, portly man behind the wide oak desk, busy writing longhand on a yellow legal pad, glared up at this intrusion with deep annoyance. When he saw who it was, he just grumbled inaudibly, and used the butt of his pen to point at the chair on the other side of his desk.

Deeks smiled and nodded, then turned to close the door behind him. He chuckled when he found that the door was already shut, pulled closed by some unseen mechanism.

_Now here's a man who values his privacy_ , Deeks thought. He sat himself on the extreme edge of the chair he'd been directed to, and waited.

The portly man, Gerald Fallon by name, tried to finish the sentence he'd been writing, and found that the line of thought he'd been following was gone. He pushed the legal pad aside, leaned forward onto his desk and addressed his visitor.

"Well?"

"Good morning to you too," Deeks said. Fallon continued to stare at him, so Deeks continued. "He's dead."

"As expected. Did you get anything before that?"

Deeks nodded. "Oh, yes. Full frontal-lobe scan. _All_ mirror neurons were activated."

Fallon asked, "Does that mean what I think –"

"Yeah. A telepath got to him. Probably more than once, but he claimed not to remember anything when we regressed him." Deeks paused. "We didn't _mean_ to kill him, but..."

"Best that way," Fallon said absently. "Any complications from that, you think?"

"Well," Deeks crossed his legs, which brought a frown to Fallon's face. Fallon didn't say anything, but he thought Deeks looked _prissy_ like that. "He already had whistle-blower protection."

"No problem there. We'll have someone on the Hill take care of it. Won't be missed."

Deeks nodded, agreeing with the solution, but he asked, "Is this guy worth all this? He was nobody."

"He walked away from a plum job, in a growth industry, to be a _fucking_ informer, about _fucking_ pollution controls." Fallon pronounced _fucking_ with a note of revulsion, as if he didn't want to use vulgarity, but had no choice. "It's part of a pattern."

Deeks gave a slight shrug, and spread his hands. "Telepath do-gooders. They've been around a while. So what?"

Fallon's glare was withering. "We're too close now."

"Okay," Deeks sighed. "So you want to roll them up?"

" _You_ roll them up," Fallon said. "They're your fucking problem."

Deeks grinned again. This was a familiar argument. "I inherited that program and you know it, Gerry. Everyone was using telepaths, back then."

"Well that stops now."

"What about Gonzalez?" Deeks asked. Fallon grimaced. Gonzalez was a touchy subject.

"Keep Gonzalez doing what he's doing. But the minute – _the fucking minute_ – the others are rolled up, you roll him up too. You hear me, Deeks?"

Deeks was smiling and nodding. "Certainly, certainly. Abominations before God, are they?"

That was enough for Fallon. He threw his pen down. It bounced from the desk and onto the floor but Fallon didn't notice. "Get the fuck out of here. And don't you _dare_ come back to this office again. Use proper channels, Deeks. Or _you_ get rolled up."

Eight

It was Sara's own fault, really. She hadn't called first, had instead simply shown up. And high on the list of life's unwritten rules is the one that contends that if you show up unexpectedly, you're in no position to complain about what you find upon arrival.

In this case, she drove slowly up John's street and saw him from half a block away, even in the quickening dusk. He was sitting on the concrete stoop in front of his apartment building, strumming an acoustic guitar.

Sara _knew_ , right away; probably because she'd been close to him for the better part of five years, and she knew his ways. But the nearer she approached, the more convinced she became that _anyone_ would know. One glance at him, and anyone could tell:

He wasn't just high. He was _appallingly_ stoned.

He noticed her at last, as she drove past him and slowed to turn into the building's parking lot. He grinned maniacally, held the guitar with one hand on the neck, high above his head, and _pumped_ it, up and down, like a rock star connecting with his crowd.

"Ba- _by_!" He shouted, timing the syllables with the pumping of the guitar. "Ba- _by_ _DOLL_!"

"Jesus," Sara whispered. She drove into the parking lot behind the building.

She found a space, and reached to shut off the engine. She thought better of that when she saw that John had followed her around the building and was approaching the open drivers-side window. He was still carrying his guitar.

"Hello, my sweet," he said as he stood by her door, swaying just a bit from his left to his right.

She looked up at him, taking in his squinting, bloodshot eyes, and the foolish smile that seemed irrevocably plastered on his face. She felt a twinge of irritation, but she tried her best to will it away. It was his day off, after all (he usually gave her a vague run-down of each week's work schedule). And, whether she liked it or not, he sure as hell _looked_ happy. She'd never reach the point, she was sure, where she'd be anywhere close to approving of his habit. But she could, if she wanted to, be more accepting.

"Hi, sweetie," she said. "Having fun?"

He nodded. "Writing a song," he said. "Writing a song for _you_."

"Thank you, hon. Can you take a little break, though? Can you come with me for a while?"

John frowned. "Well, see...I'm trying to write the bridge. And it's a really complicated bridge..." then he widened his eyes, and looked at his guitar in horror. "Oh, my _fuck_. I forgot the bridge already. Shit, shit." He closed his eyes, and began nodding his head, trying to regain the unheard beat.

"Honey...honey...John!" He opened his eyes at that. "John, I need you to buckle down for me, okay? Can you _please_ work on the bridge later, and come with me now?" She smiled prettily at him, knowing that this almost always worked. It did.

He laid the guitar across the back seats, not noticing that it came to rest upon a paper sack that Sara had taken possession of just an hour before. He settled into the passenger seat and started to fasten his seatbelt.

"So what's up?" he asked.

Sara put the Camaro in reverse and began backing out. "Well," she began. "I think it's time I start telling you...a lot. I've got a lot to tell you."

John was looking at her, concern evident on his face. And he didn't look a bit stoned anymore. "Okay..." he said.

Sara pulled back onto the street in front of John's place, and pointed the Camaro in the direction of her own.

"Remember that psychic fair I went to a couple months ago?"

It was about a twenty-minute drive, give or take. She didn't hurry, and she talked the whole time. John listened, saying nothing. Occasionally, a question would arise in his mind...but Sara would sense it before it was spoken, and offer clarification. If John noticed this, he didn't give any sign.

When they arrived at her place, the story was more or less complete. She abbreviated a couple parts, left others out entirely (particularly the warnings of conspiratorial danger she'd received from Marla and David). But by the time she shut off her engine and pulled the key from the steering column, she had just about brought John up to date.

They sat in the stilled car for a moment, both of them silent and thoughtful. John at last raised his first question.

"Do you believe it?"

Sara replied to that with this conversation's first outright lie. "I don't know," she said.

"I think _they_ believe it," she continued. "And I want...to follow this where it leads, and see what happens." The truth was that Sara believed in the Network, and all she'd been told by Marla and David...and she considered herself fully committed.

She lied to John, she knew, for the sake of simple expediency. John was a doubter, and it would be in his nature to doubt a fantastic tale such as this until irrefutable proof slapped him in the face.

She short-circuited that, with her lie. By casting herself as unsure – but willing to invest the time and effort to seek proof one way or the other – she knew that she and John could bypass that confrontation, and move into the next phase. That next phase, of course, was the reason she'd brought him here.

So it was a little, expedient lie. But that did nothing to assuage Sara's guilt for telling it.

"What are you thinking?" she asked John. They were still sitting in the car, in Sara's parking space, neither of them making any move to get out.

"That you have provided, once again, a major buzzkill," John said. They both smiled at that. "Why did you tell me?" John asked. "Why now?"

"Well...I couldn't keep it from you forever, could I?"

John chose to take that as rhetorical. "What's the real reason?" he asked. Sara began to protest that, so he held up a hand and said, "Okay. The _other_ reason?"

Sara paused, then gave a little shrug. Then she jerked her thumb over her shoulder, vaguely gesturing toward the back seat. "They gave me something for the computer today. In that bag back there. Something to make my computer more secure, whatever that means. David – the guy I met today – said you'd know how to load it."

"I see. Again, I'm put to work." John turned in his seat, and contorted himself to reach over the center console and into the back. He found the sack under his guitar.

Then, after he opened it – "Uh, Sara...you didn't look in here, did you?"

Sara, alarmed, said, "What? What is it?" John passed the sack to her.

Sara peered in, saw a slim computer-disk case. And next to that was a bulging white envelope. The flap had come loose, and a thick wedge of green bills was visible.

"Holy crap," Sara said.

John laughed. "Yeah, I agree. I guess I'm a little more convinced now."

John pressed a small, blue button on Sara's computer tower, and the CD-tray slid open. He slipped the silvery disk into it, and closed the tray.

"Is that what that's for?" Sara asked. John glanced at her, his eyebrow raised. She nodded at the CD tray and continued, "I thought it was a cup holder."

" _What_? Come on." John was looking at her with frank disbelief. Sara kept a blank face for as long as she was able, then burst into laughter. John just shook his head.

"I think I'm getting played like a two-dollar banjo," he said.

The disk drive spun up audibly, and after a few moments a single icon appeared in the center of the screen. The text below it, where a file name usually appears, brought a brief intake of breath from John. It said:

README.JOHN

"This is getting too fucking _weird_ ," John said. He moved the cursor toward the icon, then stopped and told Sara, "You know, this could just be the most elaborate scheme ever for getting you to download a virus."

Sara was a little unsure of the terminology, but she got the gist. "And he slipped ten grand in the bag to _really_ tempt us. Right?"

"You've got a point there." He double-tapped the mouse button, and opened the file.
Nine

"Deeks, Robert Michael." He pronounced each syllable of his own name with equal emphasis and perfect diction. And still the machine yapped shrilly and denied entry.

Deeks gave a long-suffering sigh, then hovered closer to the microphone jutting from the electronics console. "Dir-ty cock-suck-er," he said, with the same exaggerated enunciation. The console yapped again.

It was the sixth time he'd failed to satisfy the voice-recognition algorithm. Six was usually enough to summon security. Deeks waited patiently, leaning against the console that that had been refusing to recognize his voice, more often than not, for the last ten years.

The console that bedeviled Deeks was deep underground, in a Cold War-era bunker complex, hidden beneath an electrical sub-station in Georgetown. The console, outfitted with electronics that were the height of 1970s engineering, controlled a thick steel door, recessed into the wall just to Deeks's right. It was the kind of door, it and hundreds of its twins across the country, that were left like lonely sentinels to keep watch over old, obsolescent secrets.

Footsteps preceded the guard's arrival, echoing sharply down the rounded, florescent-lit service corridor. Deeks saw that the guard was accompanied by a maintenance man, lugging a tool kit. The security team, it seemed, was just as aware as Deeks of the decrepitude of the installation's equipment.

"Sorry, Doctor Deeks," the guard said. "Tim'll get it straightened out." Deeks just nodded. Tim unslung his tool kit, and got to work.

Within moments, the console gave a cheery chime, and the steel door began to swing open soundlessly. Deeks stepped through.

The room inside was a stark contrast to the secure antechamber where the console was located, and indeed to the entirety of the bunker complex. The old complex, which had once housed a bustling DoD/CIA/NSA joint operation with all the trimmings, was now mostly a mothball-ridden records depository. There were corridors and even entire levels that no one had visited in years.

But this room...this room was different.

"Hi, Darren," Deeks said from just inside the entryway. The door swung shut behind him, just as silently as it had opened.

A grunt came from the floral-pattern couch that incongruously took up most of the room. A small TV stand was in front of it, a brightly colored oval rug beneath it. All around it, the concrete walls were covered with a faux-oak paneling that, Deeks often thought, went out of vogue back when the Brady Family was still together under one roof.

The TV was giving off a staccato series of chirps and bangs and shouts. Gonzalez had a new video game, Deeks decided. That was good. It would keep him happily occupied for a few more weeks. And a few more weeks...that was probably all that was needed.

Darren Gonzalez inhabited the middle of that couch – the deep sag in the cushion declared that he inhabited it often. He was pudgy, not just in the middle but everywhere, and the dirty t-shirt and stained sweat pants he wore looked as if he wore them most days.

"Feeling okay, Darren?" Deeks asked. He hadn't moved from his spot by the door. Gonzalez, for his part, hadn't looked up from the flickering screen in front of him, nor had he acknowledged Deeks's presence other than by that single grunt. He held a video-game controller in both hands, and his thumbs were a constant blur as they moved across the buttons and pads. These were the only movements he made.

"I mean," Deeks continued, "food okay? Getting all the games you want? Do you...want a girl?" He gave a sly grin with that last one, but Gonzalez never noticed it.

The TV gave a raspberry sound, Gonzalez glared at it and tossed the controller aside. "Fuck this," he said. Then he looked up at Deeks. "What? What do you want?"

"I was asking if you're – "

"Yeah, yeah. Fine, everything's fine. What do you want?" Gonzalez stretched out a bit, and found the TV stand to be in his way. He gave a petulant little kick, and it rolled back on its casters until it thumped gently against the paneling behind it. Gonzalez looked up at Deeks again, and belched.

Deeks took that as an invitation of sorts, took a few steps into Gonzalez's subterranean living room, and set himself on the overstuffed arm of the couch.

"Don't you think I should check in on you every now and then, Darren? I'm sorry I don't get down here as much as I – "

"Want me to kill somebody?" Gonzalez interrupted again. He gave Deeks a lopsided grin.

"No. No, Darren. Not just now." Deeks was disturbed to find that Gonzalez was unsettling him, even after all this time. _He's never shown any telepathic tendencies,_ Deeks reminded himself. _He cannot read minds_.

Gonzalez frowned and looked back at the cock-eyed television, now running the video-game demo over and over. "They haven't had me kill anybody in _months_ ," he said. "What a fuckin waste."

Deeks nodded sympathetically. It had been _years_ , actually, five to be exact. But Gonzalez wouldn't know that. The handlers down here were careful to keep all time-keeping references – calendars and clocks, especially – out of the habitat.

"The others are still a priority, I'm afraid," Deeks told him. "Have you had any luck with them?"

Gonzalez sighed loudly and rolled his eyes, and gave his arms a huffy flap to emphasize the point. "That isn't what I'm good at! I've told you and told you – "

"I know, Darren. I know. But this is very, very important. And you've had a lot more luck in finding them than anyone else had." That was a lie, of course. Deeks gave silent thanks, for the thousandth time, that his mind was safe from probing down here.

"We've had the best viewers in the world looking for these people, Darren." No reason not to stroke his ego a bit. "And you're the only one who has ever gotten close to them." Deeks slid down onto the seat of the couch and put his arm congenially around Gonzalez. He was being squeezed painfully between the couch-arm and Gonzalez's girth, but he gave no indication of that. "So what do you have for me?"

Darren, the viewer who wasn't a telepath, gave a shrug that seemed to reveal just a bit of shame, and looked down at his lap. "I haven't found them lately. But I look! I look for them almost every night. I can hardly ever find them." He pursed his lips. "I think they're still recruiting."

"Yes," Deeks gave him a pat on the shoulder. "That's good." Nothing new there, alas. It had been weeks since Gonzalez first reported the evidence that the others were actively recruiting new telepaths.

He rose from the couch, noting as he always did that a bit of the odor imbued in the couch was staying with him, in his clothes. "That's _very_ good, Darren. You keep looking. And if you find anything new, you let Mr. Johnson know right away, okay?"

Darren was picking up his video-game controller again, and looking at the cock-eyed screen. He made no effort to straighten the TV stand. "Johnson doesn't work here anymore," he said absently.

Deeks blinked. _Shit_ , he thought. He'd forgotten that. "Yes, of course. Mrs...ah, _Sheely_ looks after you now, yes? Well, you just let Mrs. Sheely know right away if you get anything new." Gonzalez said nothing; he was absorbed in his video game once again.

Deeks stepped quietly to the steel door, then turned and watched Gonzalez for a few minutes. The man was fascinating; a case study in...well, a case study in _something_ , Deeks thought, if any such studies could ever be published. _How to turn a 40-year old man back into a teenager_ , maybe that was it.

Without turning, he gave a discrete rap with his knuckles on the door behind him. The guard, still waiting outside (they were _all_ leery about trusting the electronics in this place) pulled the door open for him.

"How's he doing?" the guard asked him after the door was secured again. Tim the maintenance man was gone; it was just the two of them.

"He's fucking nuts," Deeks said.

The guard nodded. "No change, then." They both laughed at that.

"Is Sheely still checking on him every day?" Deeks asked. This technically remained his operation, but...it was an operation dying under its own inertia. Deeks found himself visiting less and less often. Sheely and the skeleton security staff that remained on this post were all that were left of a once busy (and heavily funded) remote-viewing project.

"Yeah, more or less," the guard said. He nodded at the steel door. "I think that fat bastard creeps her out. Let's just say she isn't exactly enthusiastic about it."

Deeks could understand that. Still, he'd have to remember to have a word with Agent Sheely. Complacency just wouldn't _do_.

Deeks set that aside for now, and gave a smile and a nod to the guard. He said, "You know, if that fat bastard ever took a disliking to you, you'd be dead in a week." He began walking smartly down the service corridor toward the elevator.

The guard, who never had any idea _why_ Darren Gonzalez was kept down here, stood in wide-eyed silence. Suddenly ill at ease (for the first time in his long tenure at this facility), he kept looking from the retreating back of Doctor Deeks, to the gray steel door that guarded one of the doctor's many secrets.

Ψ

In darkness that was interrupted by flickering candlelight and violent lightning flashes, with a soundtrack of pane-rattling thunder-crashes and driving rain, Sara Kincade and John Wasner spent a night, perfectly post-coital, riding out a raging _bastardo_ of a storm (John's term), and its accompanying power failure. Hours uncounted they spent in that darkness (and all the nearby clocks would be of no help in this regard; even when the power cut back on, all they'd have to offer would be the constant-blinking falsehood that it was twelve o'clock). The last of those many hours they lounged in Sara's bedroom, John splayed across the bed; Sara reclined on the floor, propped against the side of the mattress (where her own gymnastics had landed her). They smiled and caressed their way through the first rush of after-sex glow...then settled into hours upon hours of conversation.

The storm had blown up while they were still sitting side by side, in the little alcove off Sara's kitchen, staring in tandem at the soft blue glow of the computer monitor. They'd read the README.JOHN file; John had downloaded, but not installed, the four security programs David had provided...and they had just begun delving into the disk's directory of text files, the ones that David had promised would supply some answers, at least.

Throughout that, they both vaguely noticed the freshening wind outside, which was quickly followed by a light rain...which in turn became a heavy downpour.

About the time of the first lightning flash, John uneasily suggested to Sara that perhaps they should shut down the computer until the storm had passed.

"A power surge can really screw these things – " he cut himself off as the first brown-out hit, bringing the lights down to a dull amber glow and causing the computer to reboot itself. Two more followed in quick succession; Sara and John sat unmoving, both of them looking up at the ceiling in that inexplicable way people do when the power is interrupted.

Finally, it gave out altogether. The apartment was bathed in darkness, and all that unnoticed humming of background electricity disappeared. All that remained were the sounds of their own breathing, and the symphony of the storm outside.

Sara rose, found some mismatched candles in a kitchen drawer, and went about providing a bit of light in the gloomy little apartment. She set a couple of them in the kitchen, more in the living room...and because she already had some idea of how she wanted to while away this blackout, she saved three scented candles for her bedroom.

John, who was uncommonly bright for an under-achieving slacker, nevertheless tended toward the obtuse about such things. He missed the clues Sara was sending, and went to watch the storm through her tall living-room window. He stood there quietly, hands in his pockets, his mind a-swirl over the little bit of the computer disk they'd been able to review.

Sara was just as moved by the scant answers the disk had given...but she was even more moved by the darkness and the storm. Direct action was called for. She stepped behind him, slipped her arms around him, and lightly kissed his neck.

Then she told him, "Thunder makes me horny, dumbass," and kissed him again.

The first words spoken in the aftermath, when they were still mussed and sweaty and gasping, were apropos of nothing.

"How come we don't go out anymore?" Sara asked.

John shrugged, but Sara couldn't see that in the dark and from her vantage point on the floor (and she ended up there because of her insistence on trying something _new_. When it didn't quite work, they both collapsed in laughter and decided to let things lie).

"I guess I figured you were done with clubbing," John told her.

"Are _you_?" she asked. She turned so she could see his face.

"I guess so. I mean, I haven't gone out without you, if that's what you're asking. Haven't gone out since that one night..."

"The night we saw those fliers," Sara said. "When all this started."

"Yeah," he said. "And you know what? Haven't even missed it. You think that means I'm growing up?"

Sara smiled and leaned back, tossing her head and draping her hair across his chest. "I don't know I'd go that far yet," she said. Then she turned to face him again, and reached for his hand. "But I do think that things are getting better for us." She pulled his hand close and kissed it. "In fact, I think things're pretty damned nice."

They were quiet an indeterminate while, both of them lost in scurrying thoughts that ranged from their relationship to the storm outside...but the elephant in the room remained Sara's new life, and the contents of the computer disk.

Sara broached it. "So who's the enemy?" She pulled herself back onto the bed and beside John. She propped her head up so they could see each other's eyes.

"What do you mean?" John asked.

"Who should we fight? Who is it that's asking for, I don't know..."

"A psychic comeuppance?" John said with a grin. Sara gave him an elbow for that, so he continued, "Your buddy David answered this question, didn't he? On the disk?"

"I'm asking you."

"All right," John rubbed the stubble on his chin and gathered his thoughts. "This means talking politics, you know. Something we've never really done before."

"Yeah, well...things've changed, haven't they?"

He nodded at that, then pondered her question. "Well, you've got the unholy trinity, don't you? You've got big business – multinationals, big oil, that ilk – backing the politicians most likely to sweeten things up for them...who also tend to be backed by the craziest of the conservative churches. The ones that want to bring back stockades and scarlet A's for us sinners."

Sara frowned and shook her head. "None of that is breaking news. It's all been going on forever, practically."

"Yeah, but things are different now. There used to be rules they followed, even in the big game. There were lines you didn't cross, or the strong arm of the man came down on you."

"Right," she agreed, "and –"

"Honey, they _are_ the man now. Or they've got the man working for them, which is close enough.

"Listen, you try not filing your 1040 next year, see what happens. Meanwhile, there are CEOs paying less taxes than _you_ , because they're hunting buddies with the fucking congressmen who write the tax code. And if you think they get the sweetheart treatment on their personal taxes, take a look at how their corporate taxes are shaking out. A _lot_ of these companies don't pay taxes at all."

Sara considered this. "Okay, well...I can't say that I like that, but...that's how it's always been, isn't it? 'He who has the gold' and all that?"

"Of course, yeah...this has always been a country where wealth equals power. Hell, not just here; that's how the whole world works. But one of the beauties of _this_ country, at least, was that there used to be a somewhat level playing field. That basically, everyone was equal before the law...and everyone had more or less equal opportunities to get ahead. Things have changed, though...and one of the reasons for that change – the _main_ reason, maybe – is that this group, call them the Group of Three if you want, they rewrite the rules to favor themselves. And screw everybody that disagrees with them."

"So what do they want?" she asked.

"What they want is absolute power." John said. "And what makes them so dangerous is the length they're willing to go to get it." Sara tried to interject but he raised a hand. "Synergy. You ever hear that term? They work together and all the partners get what they want. That's the theory, anyway. So that's why they pool their resources and their efforts."

"Okay. I can see the corporations doing that. But what about the churches?"

"It's not all churches. Just like it's not all corporations. It's a few very wealthy, very conservative religious groups, from a wide variety of congregations. And they're...look at what they're doing – what their politician friends are _helping_ them do. They're getting science taken out of schools, and religion put in." He shook his head with indignation. "I mean, _damn_. I've got nothing against learning the Bible...but send 'em to Sunday school for it, you know? What the hell kind of country are we gonna have, when an entire generation thinks the world is five thousand years old and lies at the center of the universe?

"And it's worse than that. What they're working toward...what they're too damned close to achieving...is basing our entire society on biblical law. What kind of craziness is that? The same book that tells them that homosexuality is an abomination – and let me tell you, Sara, no subject gets their teeth gnashing like that one – but the same book also says that working on Sunday is a capital crime. That touching a woman when she's on the _rag_ is a capital crime."

"Really?" Sara asked.

"Scout's honor. Would they abide by that? Would they really be that harsh? Probably not, I'd guess. But who gets to choose? Who decides which of the Ten Commandments gets enforced, and when, and by who? They do, of course.

"Listen, I've got no beef with religion. Really, I don't. It has its place in society. But these people, I think, are trying to put themselves in _charge_ of society. That scares me."

Sara nodded slowly. "But how much damage could they really do?"

John laughed, with no humor. "Do you know that some of 'em – some megachurch pastors and some of the televangelists – are actively trying to shut down the Middle East peace talks?"

"Why? Isn't peace – "

"Isn't peace their business? You'd think so, wouldn't you? But from their point of view...there can't be peace in Israel."  
"Why not?"

"Because the Book of Revelations says so. It says there has to be a war there for Jesus to come back."

Sara's eyes widened. "They're...they're trying to..."

"Yeah. They're trying to jumpstart Armageddon. But dammit, even if they're not _that_ crazy...even if they're just trying to turn this country into a nation under Christianity like Iran is a nation under Islam...they still have to be stopped. Because if they have their way, people like you and me become enemies of the state, just because we don't believe the same things they do."

"You know –" Sara said, then her breath caught, and John's did too, as the fiercest thunder of the evening shook the walls around them.

Her voice was just a bit lower after the thunder's echo rolled down the street. It rolled, then faded, leaving the metallic sound of pouring rain. Sara said, "I think you're giving them far too much credit."

John grinned at that, at Sara's soft challenge. "Oh really."

"Look around you, John. Nothing has changed. We're no closer to having this national religion than we ever were. Titties are still in the movies, aren't they? Titties are still in video games."

"Titties on the internet," John supplied.  
"There too," she said. "So where's the Christian militia? Where's the big white tide coming to change America? People are still people, and they're still doing the same sick shit they always do. A bunch of preachers aren't going to change that."

John considered, wanted to reply, but found no ready answer. He laid back on the bed. After a beat Sara did too, pulling close to him. They were quiet for a moment.

"Fair enough," John finally said. "But they bear watching, will you grant me that? They take themselves pretty fucking seriously, so...maybe you and your buddies should too."

"I'll take that under advisement." She said. She paused, then she laughed at herself. She rolled over and looked at John, and laughed at him too. Then she began biting him on the shoulder.

"You ask me for my _advisement,_ " he was squirming under and away from her, trying to avoid her teeth. "And you give me shit. Listen – " he said as he tried to keep her at bay. " _If_ I'm right that these guys are the enemy – if they're the ones asking for your comeuppance...then I'd concentrate on that three-way partnership if I were you. I'd concentrate on its weaknesses."

Sara stopped biting, rolled onto her belly beside him and propped her chin on her hands. "What do you mean?"

"I mean I don't think it's a perfect alliance. They're all in it for different reasons. The corporations want profit, the churches want social engineering, and the politicians...well, they just want to stay in power. That's your opening, I think. That's where you hit them – in the places where their goals _diverge_. I'm just not sure how you go about doing that yet."

Sara considered that, then sighed and rolled onto her back. John slipped his arm around her. "Okay," she said at last. "But let's leave all that for tomorrow, okay?" She looked past John to the rain-slicked window on his side of the bed. She watched the silvery streaks trace their slow paths down the glass.

"Right now, all I want to do is listen to the rain," she said.
Ten

The rain had stopped by morning. But enough had fallen overnight, soaking everything, that by mid-morning the sun had created a thick, muggy haze, a cloud of oppressive humidity.

John rose first. He wandered out of the bedroom, out of the apartment, down the stairs. It was a long-held practice of his to greet each morning, weather permitting, by stepping outside and drinking in the sunshine the way other people drink coffee.

He yawned as he walked past Mr. Simon's door (who was watching through his peephole, and who was _appalled_ by the sight of the bare-chested youth clad only in jockeys) and stepped outside. Then he was instantly awake, wide-eyed and nearly gasping. The air was thick and wet and hot. John felt as if he could have boiled in it.

He hurried back inside, fast enough for Mr. Simon to elect not to call the police after all, even as he gripped the receiver and dialed the first nine. Mr. Simon listened, frowning, as John jogged and huffed up the steps, and he decided to let it ride...this time.

_Damn crazy-ass half naked kids._ He peered through the peephole again, just to make sure no further delinquency was going on in the hallway...then with some reluctance he returned the phone to the cradle.

John checked on Sara – more by listening for her soft snoring than by actually looking in on her – then he booted up the computer to see how it had fared the storm.

He scanned the hard drive, found everything in order. Then he stared for a moment, a long moment, at the four icons that sat blinking on the low-right corner of the screen.

_Blinking_. They were actually blinking at him. They'd started doing that the night before, about a half hour after John had click-and-dragged them there from their space on David's disk. The README.JOHN file made it very clear, pretty much from the beginning, that John was expected to install those four security programs right away, immediately if not faster.

Part of John's reticence in complying was caution, of course; he was a naturally cautious person. But mostly it was plain irritation at that whole 'expectation' part. He'd been reacting badly to the expectations of others all his 24 years. These strangers, then, should expect no better of him.

So he didn't hurry to perform the installs that the Network demanded, and if Sara noticed she didn't give any sign. He had to suspect she was well aware of his little rebellion...he was resigning himself to the fact that she was missing very little these days. Particularly stuff in his head.

Either way, fuck 'em. He click-and-dragged the little icons, labeled security_install-01 through -04, onto Sara's desktop, and he left them there. They began blinking a short while later, and John was quite sure that now, a good twelve hours later, they were blinking faster. Much faster.

"Bite mine," John told the icons, and the network behind them.

But he double-clicked security_install-01 anyway, and watched it go to work. Boxes and windows began appearing and disappearing, programs began loading and expanding, data was pouring onto the registries John was monitoring. He frowned, leaned in and ordered up a DOS command window. He wanted to see source code.

He didn't see much. It wouldn't _let_ him see much. But he saw enough to allow a little grudging admiration.

Stacked firewalls, a series of random-switching proxy-server networks...not to mention encryption out the _ass_. John had to admit that the Network had just made Sara's cheap little desktop the most secure, private, downright _anonymous_ box John had ever seen.

And of course, he hadn't even yet gotten to install-02 through -04.

John Wasner: please load the 'security_install' programs first, in the order provided. Please provide Sara with any advice or guidance you think necessary for her to operate her system with these new programs. Important: convey to Sara the need for password security; the security_install suite will provide a password-management application with strict rules for frequent password update. Sara must understand that her password will be the one weak link in this secure system – impress upon her the need for password discipline.

That was the sum total of the README.JOHN file.

John and Sara had read it together, both leaning forward to stare at the screen. Sara didn't say much; John didn't either, for that matter, but he was steamed nonetheless. The terse, familiar tone of the note, the way they (whoever ' _they_ ' were) presumed to understand the dynamics of their relationship – that Sara would likely to be cavalier about passwords and that it would be up to John to set her straight – it was all annoying, to say the least.

That they were probably correct about all that – this did nothing to lessen the annoyance.

There was one other file on the disk, other than the security installs; unlabeled, full of numbered subfiles. Most of these contained short text documents, some encrypted, some not. The first one, logically enough, contained an index of all the others. They scanned the list quickly, both of them sensing that the storm outside could halt their search at any moment. As they scrolled down the screen, Sara would occasionally tap the screen at a particular entry, and mutter a bit, marking the item in her mind as something to return to. She did so for HISTORY and METHODS and THE OPPOSITION and FINANCE.

In the end, they just read one long text file, in METHODS, and some of THE OPPOSITION. Sara began laughing, and would only shake her head when he asked why, as she read METHODS. John was reading along beside her, but damned if he could see what was so funny. It was under a heading called _Meetup_sched_ , and was a strange set of guidelines as to when and how the Network convened itself.

The _how_ was glossed over, with vague references to 'elevated projection' and 'concurrent communal trance.' John suspected he grasped the broad parts of _how,_ and it was weird enough that he didn't care to know much more. He glanced to his right, to Sara as she read the same passage, and saw her nodding absently, accepting without question. When he frowned, she glanced sharply at him, then she softened almost at once. As John sat wondering what _that_ meant, she just shrugged and turned back to the screen. After a second, John did too.

_When_ was what cracked Sara up, bringing a great belly laugh and even little tears to her eyes. All the screen said was that the Network – or the individual members of it, Sara henceforth included – were to log on every weekday and Saturday to the website of the Virginia state lottery (URL helpfully included). They were to check the daily "Pick-3" game results...and then to add all three of the winning numbers together...and if the result was a prime number, the group was to gather together in the aether above, or where ever and however it was they convened.

John had to allow that the Network's use of the Virginia lottery was clever, generating a prime number, thus a meeting, more or less every four or five days, more or less at random.

And with just another glance at her, John could see that despite Sara's gales of mysterious laughter, she was having trouble recalling from those long-ago mathematics classes what, exactly, a prime number was.

He decided to try something.

Doing his best to think clearly and strongly (and how, for pete's sake, did one do such a thing? John knew he was winging it here), he tried to put a thought, a sentence, at the front of his mind...

A prime number is any number that can only be divided by one and itself.

Sara slowly turned her head from the screen in front of them, to John. She looked into his eyes.

_One and Two and Three and Five and Seven. Not nine, but eleven and thirteen...  
_ Then he formed a picture in his mind, a sketch, really, of symbols and ideas...he had no idea if she was getting any of this....but he showed her a computer, _her_ computer...logged onto Google, typing _prime numbers_...then a web page loading, showing a dense block of numerals, the first _thousand_ or so prime numbers, displayed for her convenience...

And then he saw her blink slowly, at that same dragging pace with which she turned to look at him...and she smiled, just as slowly...and he heard clearly, so clearly, a voice in his mind, _her_ voice, naturally...

Thank you, honey.

Eleven

Darren settled into a crossed-leg posture, on a fat cushion in the center of the floor. This was in the second-largest room of his subterranean habitat, one that served as both a bedroom and meditation chamber.

He tried to relax, which was always hard to do, and he tried to let his mind calm and settle, which was just as challenging. The whole process usually took hours.

The reasons for that were complex, as complex as the psyche of a boy-man who'd been raised in the tender embrace of the secret government.

A major reason, though, was that he _hated_ this task, this assignment, and he hated it all the more because it was the only one his masters had for him these days.

He slipped then, as he often did, from the calm searching state, the _soaring_ state that he had nearly grasped...to an angrier one. As usually happened, an image of Doctor Deeks came to him, vivid and three-dimensional. Darren could tell at once this was a _live_ image, real-time, as opposed to the fantasy montages that his mind was just as capable of producing. No, this was real, it was a darkened bedroom somewhere nearby, one Darren had often seen in circumstances just like these. He had no idea where Deeks's bedroom was or what the house that surrounded it might be like...but he knew every square inch of this room.

Deeks was sleeping, alone and utterly still, flat on his back. It was how he always slept. Darren Gonzales, twelve miles away and fifty feet below Deeks, was at last still and calm, not unlike the doctor, but cross-legged, eyes half open, breathing slowly. A slight smile was on his lips.

But his mind was with Deeks in the dark bedroom. He watched for a while, like always, and then as always he felt himself reach out, and into Deeks's body. He couldn't remember wanting to do so, or causing it in anyway...it just happened. This too was what always occurred.

What Darren saw was a ghostly fist, _his_ fist, moving silently through the bedroom, to the sleeping Doctor. He saw it reach into the Doctor's chest...and felt it grasp at slippery red muscle.

This was a highly symbolic representation of what Darren was doing; even he knew this. He knew it because Deeks, among others, had discussed the process at length with him. The agency had in fact designed the process on his behalf, the entire script, based around the considerable knowledge they possessed of how his mind worked and what his abilities were.

What he really was doing was slipping inside Deeks's brain. Not his mind; the agency was correct about his lack of telepathy. Darren's ability was more primitive, the connection of one biomechanical motor with another. He reached inside the brain, and then...just a _tapping_...a brief electrical pulse to fire select neurons.

He couldn't think in those terms, so they taught him to visualize a fist, squeezing a heart. But he knew he was really stimulating the hypothalamus, raising the Doctor's blood pressure.

His unconscious smile turned to a frown as he realized he must stop. He released the heart and left Deeks's mind. He'd been so _close_ this time...just a twitch, just another soft _tap_...

...and Deeks would hang on for five days or a week, grunting and gasping and hovered over by perplexed physicians...and then he would die.

The agency didn't think it possible, but Darren knew exactly how many times he'd performed this process. He remembered each and every session, remembered every face, despite the agency's best effort at regression scrubs. Those were _easy_ to beat. They used to hold multiple hypnotic scrub sessions every time his abilities were used...but he beat them every time. He was able to remember and savor every detail of each of his kills.

And also unknown to them was that he would return to the victims, every night, from the time of his initial attack until they died. This was easy too, once the first fatal connection was made. He rarely knew their names, had just looked at some photographs (and the agency, when assigning a hit, would also tell him how far away the victim was, and in what direction. Darren had no idea why this helped, but it did). The initial search could take a while, but he always found them. And once he had been inside them, he could always find them again.

So every time, he watched them each night as they withered and died. He knew he was under constant observation, even if he couldn't see the cameras, so he knew he couldn't sit cross-legged on his cushion for these return visits...the agency would suspect at once what he was doing. So he taught himself an alternative, with some difficulty. It was difficult because since he was 14 the agency had taught him everything he was supposed to need to know about meditation and psychic trances. But he persevered and taught himself to enter the trance lying on his back, in bed, appearing to sleep. (Sara Kincade would soon be inside Darren Gonzales's mind...and she would shudder when she divined this episode, so eerily similar to her own self-taught meditation.)

Darren had not enjoyed one of these forbidden nocturnal jaunts for many years now. Power had shifted, Washington changed, old projects died...and no one, it seemed, had much stomach for psychic assassination anymore.

He left from Deeks's room, then, and found himself back in his own. He snorted with disgust as he opened his eyes and looked around. The trance was broken; he would have to start all over again.

Eventually, after many more hours and as many false starts, he slipped back into the meditative state. He let himself drift upward...and found himself high in the dark night sky.

This was a symbolic view as well, he supposed. And yet – in its own way, it was real. His consciousness, at least, was really here.

And so were the Others. He could sense that almost at once. In the distance was a shining presence, somewhat like a brilliant cloud, that was built of the minds he was tasked to hunt.

He observed from a distance for a while; unnoticed as far as he could tell. He couldn't tell much about them from here – no names or locations nor anything specific. But what he could sense was...contentment. Calmness, well-being. And above all else, love.

This fueled his rage and jealousy, and strengthened his resolve.

So he donned the persona he had built for this assignment – a dark, foreboding presence called ' _Dargon_.' He knew – or at least hoped – that the Others could glean nothing of Dargon other than its opposition to their cause. They couldn't tell if it was the projection of a single psychic, or a thousand. He knew they feared it, and he relished that.

With that thought giving him comfort, Dargon moved through the aether and approached the Others.
Twelve

Not long before, Sara Kincade had settled down for her own spell of meditation.

She was alone in her little apartment, John away at work. She'd logged onto the internet, as she'd done every night that week, and checked the day's results from the Virginia State Lottery.

All the rest of the week, the sum of the winning _Pick 3_ numbers was not prime. She confirmed that the first day, by following John's unspoken suggestion she found via Google a webpage listing thousands upon thousands of prime numbers, ordered from low to high.

Her memory, always sharp, had become even more honed in the weeks of her training. So she found that just by viewing that page once, she had a ready mental catalog of prime numbers. She could now visit the lottery page, add the numbers, and know at once whether or not she should seek the Network. Thus far, all the rest of the week, _nada_.

Today was different. She gave a sharp intake of breath, just as soon as the page loaded and the numbers displayed. _Prime_. She hadn't taken time to add them yet – well, she had, she supposed. But it came in an eyeblink, she simply saw the numbers and knew without conscious calculation she'd be linking up with the Network tonight. Linking up for the first time, really.

Meditation, the deep trance – these came easy to her now. She'd begun using mantras – intoning sounds or words until her own voice sounded distant and blurred. She gave her mantras a lilting, sing-song quality, without even realizing it. She'd found a haunting, harmonious voice she never knew she'd possessed.

She sang the numbers this time: Today's Virginia Pick 3. " _Three...one...three_ ," she sang. The words had no inherent harmony, and there was nothing about them that pleased the ear. And yet...Sara sang them, because it didn't matter _what_ she sang. Everything was a song, and this song carried her away. " _Three...one...three."_

The sky danced and the stars laughed and ALL the clouds, not just the gleaming cloud that was the Network, all of them invited and welcomed and loved.

She delighted in it, she swam through the night and loved it back. This was home, a home she always knew but never embraced; one that she never wanted to leave.

And then came whispers of friends...and those whispers found her because she was already connected to the Network; she was IN the Network...and these friends loved her and they warned her because they loved her...

The sky can be glamour. The reveling can be a trap. This had happened before, to many others, and they had suffered as a result, and no one wanted to see that happen to Sara. So enjoy the sky and swimming among the clouds...but be wary of the glamour and tarry not too long in the sky.

That warning came as instant knowledge. This was the essence of the Network – Sara knew this truth now too, and she knew it by the same channel. The Network was instant sharing of information, made possible by the most deeply elemental linking of minds.

And not just any minds...but the minds of thousands of psychics.

She felt all around her the presence of her brethren – bringing with them talents of breathtaking variety. And with that came experience and history and lifetimes of minutiae.

All that became Sara's in an instant.

Some of them were Remote Viewers like David, hiding from the government. Many more were foundlings such as herself, groomed and enhanced. All of them came with wisdom and experience and perspective – which now existed within Sara as if those experiences were her own.

She knew that the sharing was reciprocal, and that her mind was as open to the others as they were to her. It all melded, and became one, and formed the Network.

But within that Network, somewhere deep and visceral, there was a grim foreboding. Something strange was happening. Something that had never happened before.

Some unknown time later, a slight quiver came to Sara's lips – lips that had been utterly still for hours. Her breathing changed. She began to move...slowly and thinly at first, then with a bit more deliberation...but still with the shakiness that was infecting her like an illness. She opened her eyes; she noticed at once that her eyes felt... _strange_. There was a _newness_ to them that she couldn't understand. She dismissed that, for the moment, and rose unsteadily from the cross-legged position she'd been locked in since the start of her trance. She looked around her room – nothing had changed of course, but she looked nonetheless. It seemed as it often did in the post-trance glow that the room was the same, yet different. More vibrant somehow, more alive. This time, the transformation was even more pronounced and perhaps just a bit ominous.

It was late, a bit past ten. She walked, slowly and with distraction, to the kitchen to fix herself a cup of tea. Caffeine at this hour was crazy; it was something she almost never did. But she put the kettle on the stove anyway, and gathered a cup and teabag while the water heated. A cup of tea seemed necessary just now, if for no other reason than to occupy her trembling hands.

She thought back over the previous hours, the trance and her initiation into the Network, and all that brought with it...and the intrusion by the dark visitor, _Dargon_...and finally, her own transformation. As the hissing of the teapot grew unnoticed to a shrill whistle, she realized she couldn't simply mull these things over – and sleep was out of the question. She had to talk about it. And of course, there was really only one person she could talk to.

John's shift ended at ten. That meant he clocked out _promptly_ at ten, with zero desire to donate an extra unscheduled moment to the Target cause.

He'd already clocked out and was making his way to the back exit (the management having some issues with allowing the lowly stock-staff to co-mingle with the customers up by the front entrance)...and he was collared mid-stride, amidst the stock room's steel shelves and stacked boxes, by his supervisor, Greg.

At least, Greg's intention was to collar John. It was time for the 'talk' – the same talk he tended to have with John once a week, on average. (He wouldn't be surprised to learn that each of John's supervisors, throughout his checkered work history, also had conducted weekly 'talks'.)

John wasn't easily collared, though; he kept on toward the brown steel door, at the terminus of the stacks. So the talk took place on the move, as John trotted toward the exit, with Greg hurrying to keep up. John's end of the conversation – and this was standard for these talks – was a series of monosyllables.

"I like you, John. You know that."

"Yeah. Uh-huh."

"But we need – Target needs – a little more commitment. A little more extra effort from you."

"Sure. Yep."

"I'm not saying you're doing a _bad_ job..."

" _Noooo_..."

"But sometimes it doesn't feel like this is a priority for you."

"Yeah. Uh-huh."

They'd nearly reached the door – John had just about shaken Greg loose. He hadn't heard much that was said – didn't have to in fact, because the talks always followed more or less the same template. He was just focused on getting out the door, away from Greg, and on his way to the bus-stop down the block. An end of a shift was a joy, a daily pleasure, and John wasn't about to let Greg's hand-wringing spoil that.

He was just reaching for the door handle, still nodding and smiling at Greg...when a voice stopped him cold. It was assuredly _not_ Greg's voice.

Greg looked relieved, rapturous even, as John stopped his fast exit and turned and cocked his head.

"Good. Thank you. I'm glad you're taking this seriously. Now listen – I have some ideas as to how you can prioritize your work-goals, and get your – "

John was standing at the door, head still cocked, eyes almost closed. "Do you think you can stop your goddamned babble for a second?" he said.

Greg blanched and stared. "Wha-?" was all he could get out.

John started to answer that – then he realized his reply wouldn't help the situation. _I'm trying to listen to my girlfriend_ wouldn't much improve his standing in Greg's eyes.

But the sputtering and the glaring Greg was engaging in brought John back into the moment.

"Yeah, right Greg. You're right about...everything. And I'm on it, it'll all get better, promise. Bye!" And he was out the door.

That was all it had taken, that second of silence when he shocked Greg into ceasing his diatribe, for Sara's message to come through, loud and clear:

I'm just a couple blocks away, sweetie. Don't take the bus, I'm coming for you. I need to talk to you...

As John stepped into the night behind Target, he had just one clear thought in mind – clear enough, he supposed, for Sara to pick up just as loud, just as clear:

This weird shit is starting to seem almost normal.
Thirteen

It was just a short, single-lane gravel access road, overgrown and barely discernable from the thoroughfare it branched away from. Sara knew it was there, of course, even if she'd never seen it nor suspected its existence before tonight. She slowed down and began turning long before John was able to distinguish the narrow track from the darkness that surrounded it.

It was off the rolling farm road, just a few blocks from Target, on the way out of town and into the southwestern suburbs. Between the 'burbs and the business district that Target inhabited, there was little but the weedy, fallow farmland and a handful of forgotten gravel roads, like this one.

They stopped the car where the track widened, along a rusty, disused rail siding. It was a clearing just wide enough to choke out the weeds and brush, and wide enough to let some stars shine through.

_Because sometimes when you want to talk, you want to talk under the stars._ Sara shared that thought loud enough for John to hear.

As she slid the car into park, then reached for the ignition switch, John suddenly leaned forward and kissed her.

She smiled, surprised, and gave him a quick _what-was-that-for_ look...but he didn't need answer. She responded before he could speak.

"Yes, I'm okay. Everything is...well, everything's okay."

"Your entrance felt dramatic. Worried me," he said.

"No need." She reached down and opened her door. After a beat, John did too, but they both tarried in the car. "This isn't that kind of talk. It's...Jesus, I don't know what you'd call it. Just come sit outside with me, okay?"

They sat under a shaft of starlight, a narrow band of constellations that Sara could see and name as she tilted her head back. Cygnus the Swan, directly overheard, signaled the creeping onset of autumn. Lower, toward the west and closer to the obscuring haze on the horizon, she saw Ursa Major. John would know it by another name –

"There – the Big Dipper. Do you see it?"

"Yes." He answered slowly. He was hesitant, puzzled.

"The second star in its handle. This one." She took his hand and held it in hers, extending both their forefingers. She guided it upward and pointed. "The second star in the handle," she repeated. "It's really two stars. Can you see that?"

"Uh...no." He looked from the constellation above, down to Sara, perched beside him on the Camaro's hood. "How do you know that?"

She ignored the question. "Two stars. A binary system, one star revolving around the other. Mizar and Alcor, by name. So close together that from here, they look just like one star." She sighed, and at last looked back at John, into his eyes. "I can't see it either. Looks just like a single star to me."

"Sara..."

"If we had a telescope, even a little one, we'd see them both. We'd _split the pair_ , as the astronomers say." She looked at him a moment longer, her expression unreadable. Then she looked up again. "I've never split the pair. Before tonight I never knew there _was_ a pair."

"Sara, _what's_ _happened_ to you?"

For a moment, a long one, John didn't think she'd answer. She was quiet, staring up at the stars. Then she slowly turned her head toward him.

"I guess you could say I became an amateur astronomer tonight. Want to know why?" John wouldn't have answered that – he would have let the question hang in the air. Sara knew this, and continued without waiting for him. "Because Bill Mallard is an amateur astronomer. Has been since he was a kid."

"Okay...who the hell is Bill Mallard?"

"A telepath. From San Jose. He never worked for the government; he's a foundling like me. He's got pretty erratic abilities – telepathy and precog that comes and goes. Somewhat related to the sunspot cycle, interestingly enough. Of course, he didn't know that back when he first got into stargazing." She smiled sadly. "A coincidence."

John was looking at her, his eyes were dark. "I...I'm not understanding, Sara."

"I know, John. I just...I don't know how to explain this any other way."

He took her hand again, and held it. "Try telling me what happened. Did someone contact you tonight? Did you – "

"Met with the network. Yeah. Tonight was the night."

"So..."

"So...something happened when I joined them. When I joined _with_ them." She was quiet again. John resisted the urge to interrupt. He watched her close her eyes and chew her lip as she did when she was deep in thought. At last she opened her eyes and continued.

"There are twelve thousand members of the network," she said.

John raised a brow and gave a low whistle. "That many?"

"Well...no, not exactly. Eleven thousand, seven hundred and twenty-one. Coast to coast, and Alaska and Hawaii."

"Only Americans? Nobody overseas?"

"That surprises you?" she asked.

"Well, yeah. A little." That was true, but he had no idea why. He had just assumed, for no good reason, that the Network was international in character.

"We've talked about expanding outside the U.S.," she said, then blinked and corrected herself. "I mean, the Network has discussed that in the past, before they...recruited me. But then we – they – started getting involved with politics here, and..." she shook her head, and drew a ragged breath. "I'm getting ahead of myself again.

"Listen...there are eleven thousand, seven hundred and twenty-one members. And if you want, I could name them all for you. I could tell you _what they had for lunch_ _yesterday_ , if you wanted me to."

John frowned at that. "That sounds – "

"Bill Mallard is an amateur astronomer. He's got a little 2.4-inch objective reflector, one he built himself, set up on his second-floor deck. And now...I've got all this...I can tell you about quasars and black holes, now." She held his hand more tightly and stared at him, her eyes were almost pleading. "Yesterday I had no idea what a fucking quasar was."

"You got his memories," John said. That sounded lame, even to him. He could see she was flailing, that she was nearly breaking down, in fact. He wanted to help her, but...he just patted her hand, with clumsy compassion.

She smiled at him. Her eyes were wet but there was still gratitude there. "Yeah. His memories, plus a few thousand others...I can bake bread, now. Any kind you want." She laughed. "Or at least I think I can. I _know_ how to do it, but...you know how I am in the kitchen. Let's see, what else? I speak a few new languages – five, unless you count Portuguese, which I've only got a smattering of. And oh yeah..." She nodded toward the cabin of her Camaro. "I can tune this thing up, now, and change the oil, service the brakes. Nothing much more complicated than that, because..."

John finished for her. "Because there're just backyard mechanics in your group. No pros."

A tear broke from the corner of her right eye, and coursed down her cheek. "That's right," she said. John brushed the tear away, and pulled her close.

"So why are you so upset?" he asked.

"John... _eleven thousand, seven hundred and twenty-one_ memories."

He pulled back, far enough to see her face again. His eyes were wide. "All of them? You got – you have _all_ of them?"

Sara simply nodded.

"Is that...normal?" He instantly regretted his choice of words.

But Sara took no offense. She held both his hands, and looked squarely at him. The tone of her voice carried the import of her statement.

"Nothing like this has ever happened before," she said. "I'm unique. And everything has changed."
Fourteen

John was sitting on the ground now, the grass and weeds and pebbly dirt beneath his ass growing cold and wet with the early morning dew. He sat with his back straight against the Camaro's front-right tire – which was also growing noticeably chilled against his back. Sara was above and behind him; he couldn't see her from where he sat but he could still hear her softly breathing...and, he supposed, he simply _knew_ she was there, based on the new sensitivity that had become part of their relationship. So he knew without looking that she lay sprawled on her back across the broad red hood, her head slightly pillowed by the curve of the windshield, and that she was staring up at the dome of stars that slowly rotated above them toward the west. Hours had passed now, and a bare yellow glint of distant dawn was showing in the east.

He sat with his knees bent and his legs drawn up to his chest, his arms encircling and drawing his legs close. It was a ' _thinker'_ pose, he reflected, early in the evening when he first assumed it. Sara evidently heard that thought, and commented dryly that it was actually meditative posture, and that it was a common motif in early Egyptian sculpture.

He reminded himself that he had to get used to his girlfriend's new mind. She'd become an intellectual – a genius, really – overnight.

And he realized that he needn't bother vocalizing such thoughts. Sara knew what he was thinking.

So they spent hours, lost in their own thoughts as well as each others', in the silence that followed Sara's explanations.

He hadn't understood her melancholy at first. He couldn't see why the changes she'd undergone weren't a thrill, an exciting portal she'd passed through.

As she explained, though, and as her explanations were accompanied by unhindered tears that tracked her face, he began to see.

She hadn't _wanted_ to change. She hadn't wanted an expanded mind or new abilities that bordered on the miraculous. And she hadn't wanted the new strangeness that had overcame her eyes, the pulsing of colors that set in when she used those abilities – a change that John hadn't even noticed, until she pointed it out to him.

And now that all that had happened...she was scared.

eHe

Ψ

When dawn was fully risen, they both began to stir as one. Sara slid from the hood, and stood at the front of the car. John drew himself up, with stiffness and aching, from his hunched position on the ground.

They gazed at each other for a moment but the silence was still total. Enough talking had been done, all through the night before, to last them a great while. Issues had been discussed at length and many decisions had been made.

At least that was how Sara felt, although she knew John didn't agree.

John would say that decisions had been forced upon them.

As one, they opened the Camaro's doors and got in. Sara offered one quick, sad smile before turning over the ignition and reversing back down the narrow, gravelly track.

There was much to be done today, much they both needed to do. They both understood their tasks, so there was no more need to speak of them.

John would quit Target today – as innocuously and unnoticed as possible. He would try to be just as invisible when he broke his lease and moved from his tiny walk-up apartment. He would try to shed the life he'd known, while raising as few questions as possible. Anonymity, Sara impressed upon him, was key to their survival.

He'd be moving in with Sara. And he wouldn't need to work – the Network would support them both.

Sara noted and was resigned to the fact that John was already thinking of himself as a 'kept man.' His mind was bitter when it conjured those words.

As for Sara, she'd be contacting David McMartin today. She'd make arrangements for a steadier flow of more cash to be delivered to herself and John.

That was a request that she would have been far too embarrassed to make previously. But things had changed; David knew that as well as anyone and wouldn't balk. And besides – Sara knew now where the Networks funding came from. They played the stock market, unsurprisingly, through a handful of proxy traders and front companies. Their success lay in a periodic psychic trolling for inside information, which enabled them to sell short on overvalued yet failing properties. There was never any dearth of such companies, so there was never a shortage of Network income. It was enough, and then some, to support all twelve thousand of them.

Knowing that, however, and even knowing it for such a short time, Sara already had several ideas to streamline and safeguard the system. The proxy traders, particularly, were a vulnerability. Sara aimed to add another layer or two of protection.

Likewise, the courier system that delivered cash to the members was slow and outdated – it was a relic from the earliest days when David and others were on the run from the government. It needed to be replaced, or at least augmented, with various electronic fund transfer methods.

John asked her once, early in the morning hours as these plans were made, if David or any of the others might resist the changes she'd propose.

Sara just smiled, and didn't answer.

The truth was, Sara led the Network now. That was the reality that came to be at the moment the Network transformed her. Sara, David, the twelve thousand others all understood and embraced this. Any insights she had, they knew, were really just insights that belonged to all of them. Sara was the personification of their collective.

As she pulled back onto the firm pavement of the farm road, Sara gave a quick tap to the accelerator, letting the back tires spin and sending a spray of gravel behind them. Then the wheels grabbed traction, and she and John were on their way back toward town.

Ahead of them lay drastic changes and a strange new life. Not even Sara, a psychic of historic ability, could predict what that life might have in store.

# Part III

_Fifteen_

Sara is driving – way too fast if the posted speed limit is to believed. The t-tops are off, the Camaro's engine is growling, and its tires are chirping and squealing at the curves she takes without braking.

The road is Lakeshore Boulevard, aptly named. The black expanse of Lake Erie stretches to the horizon at her right. In the dark, it's indistinguishable from a far-off ocean, but for its lack of salt smell.

Sara has never seen the ocean, not with her own eyes. But she has seen it and touched it and tasted it through the memories of others. She has also sailed and swam in this Great Lake and all the others – or at least had experienced the memories of those who had. It was near real enough to offer an intimate familiarity with the lake air and breezes. And she also knows this road, knows it as well as she knows the one she lives on, and she takes these curves with practiced skill.

Some autonomic part of her consciousness is with the car, guiding it and navigating it. The greatest part of her mind is far away, though. As she often does on these solitary treks, she uses the time to ponder her unseen, unknown enemy.

Far away...perhaps in Washington but then again, perhaps not...a cabal is plotting. Their machinations are already in motion. Everyone could feel that. Something was on the horizon. Something horrible.

And behind the wheel of the red Camaro, Sara sits almost unmoving, other than quick and confident adjustments to the steering wheel and pedals. She seems calm and still...

Except for her new, strange eyes...eyes that glitter and pulse when her consciousness is elsewhere.

Ψ

Politics and religion and commerce merged and blurred and became a chessboard. It was Gerald Fallon's hand that moved the pieces.

He'd embraced that analogy for years now, as plans culminated and strategies moved toward their conclusion. In his mind he envisioned this vast game, where the stakes were absolute power, and he manipulated legions of pawns toward an end that only he fully grasped.

Several of those pawns were with him now, in his unassuming K Street office. A senator was here, and three congressmen, an army general and the president's chief of staff, and a few others. Each of them thought they were integral to Fallon's plan. Each of them thought they understood where those plans would lead.

Only Fallon understood that they were pawns, and expendable.

He forced himself from his reverie as he realized he'd let the arguments in the room drone on for far too long.

"Due respect, gentlemen..." all crosstalk ceased as he spoke. "We're long past the luxury of rehashing old decisions. Events are in motion." Fallon spoke with a strange, broken syncopation, one that was well practiced and that had been throwing his interlocutors off balance for decades. He leaned forward on his desk and offered a frown to the men in his office. "Is there anyone here who doesn't fully grasp the schedule we're on?" Not one of them stirred.

"Good," Fallon said. "Then back to the points at hand." He gestured abruptly at the senator and the congressmen. "Legislative cover. You've got the majority, so use it. No more debates, no posturing, no poll-watching. Eyes on the ball. The police powers act and the Posse Comitatus repeal have been bottled up in committee long enough. Move them out. Then the rest of our legislative agenda. Keep it moving.

"Intel," Fallon nodded now at a slim, pale man in a cheap suit, a delegate from the National Intelligence Directorate, who hovered near the door. "Bring your assets home." Cheap-suit nodded back at him. "Networks are in place here for you to begin monitoring. Talk to the Pentagon. You're taking over domestic ops from them." The general looked sour at that but kept his peace. "Make no mistake, gentlemen. We're shifting gears. A new phase has already begun. Right now we're just hurrying to keep up.

"Information." Fallon was waxing eloquent to all of them now. It was a speech he knew they needed to hear. "Information is what we require if we're going to survive what comes next. All of your people, all of your systems...I want them concentrating on one thing until advised otherwise: bringing me the information I need. I want to know who is my friend, who is my enemy, and who is going to jump with whom when the balloon goes up. I hope that's clear."

He didn't wait for them to respond. "One last thing. Some of you may have heard of an old intel op – a series of ops, actually, the ones they called the Stargate series." He watched their faces carefully. He could tell at once who was hearing that codename for the first time. "One of many misguided messes the agency got into in the sixties." Fallon frowned at cheap-suit, who shrugged in return. _I wasn't 'round then, Jack_ was what the shrug seemed to say. "At any rate," Fallon continued, "not surprisingly, there's been blowback. Some assets went off the reservation and started a...resistance movement, for want of a better name."

He leaned back again, a gesture that most of them recognized as a prelude to dismissal.

"The details aren't important right now, but this is. We need each of you, and your staff, to submit to an examination." The senator, among others, looked unhappy at that but Fallon silenced them with a glare. "It's painless, quick and absolutely necessary. The Directorate will take care of the details and schedule you all in." Cheap-suit nodded again. "You see, gentlemen, this resistance of theirs is surprisingly good at infiltration, even at our level. You can thank the agency for their ability to do that...but you can also thank them for our ability to detect when it's been done. So a strange little character called Deeks is going to take a peek inside your heads and see who's been in there." Fallon saw puzzlement only in the faces of the ones who'd never heard of Stargate. In the other eyes he saw fear.

"That's all then; thank you, and good afternoon." The pawns began ambling toward Fallon's door. "Eyes on the ball these days, gentlemen," he reminded them as they went. "Anyone who isn't helping us is going to be left behind."

A few minutes later, Fallon was instructing one of his people, another of the nameless sort, to carry a message to Deeks in person, along with a selection of new orders. The doctor would have all the resources he required for the completion of two urgent tasks: the probing of every senior member of the government-in-waiting (including and starting with the nameless messenger)...and the hunt for and subsequent elimination of the psychic resistance movement.

And oh yes, the nameless one was to tell Deeks: A certain senator, Deeks knew the one, seemed a bit too worried about being probed. Deeks should take a careful look there...but not until the legislative agenda was moved from committee. After that the senator wasn't strictly useful anymore...so Deeks should feel free to probe as deep as necessary. Go deep, the nameless one was instructed to suggest.

Fallon nodded and sent him away. The nameless one headed down the steps and out onto K Street, and from there towards the Capitol... carrying orders and messages, as he and others like him always did, that were not fit to be written.

Sixteen

Sara stood watching from her living-room window, looking down on the street two stories below. The sun was still shining, with the late afternoon light angling low to announce the oncoming dusk. She stood still, watching without movement, yet her impatience was plain.

She sent out a mental thread, seeking. She could feel the effort bringing that eerie change to her eyes; behind their closed lids they glittered brightly, and the colors of the irises pulsed in time with her own heartbeat. She'd never get used to that.

Where the hell are you, David?

And a response came, _Coming, coming._

Sara frowned, tilted her head and peered some more. David's thought had been diffuse, distant. Coming from... _that_ way. Down the block and still several minutes away.

_Shit._ Sara allowed that mental snort of exasperation to be broadcasted – but it wouldn't tell David anything he didn't know already. He knew she was impatient, just as she knew he was meticulous. Minimum security demanded, by David's measure, careful tradecraft. Part of that was walking long, circuitous routes, sniffing out tails.  
Sara remained unconvinced. She understood entirely, by now, the seriousness of the Network's situation...but she was of the opinion that members like David and the other first-gen government refugees could be a tad...melodramatic. She suspected that the long, convoluted walking routes, along with the hours-long, meandering cab rides, were performed more out of habit and maybe even a touch of nostalgia, than they were for their effectiveness.

But here was effectiveness. Spotting David, coming at last into a view a few blocks down the street, Sara lowered her head a bit and frowned with concentration. The ethereal thought-cord, the one visible only to Sara, launched itself and sought David. And finding him, it snaked back behind him – in time as well as space. It followed his backtrail, his long, winding and meticulous backtrail, back through the route he'd so carefully followed. Twists and turns and random-seeming switchbacks...Sara grunted her exasperation again, for David to hear. But in return she received from him a grin, a sort of mocking cheerfulness. Because he was seeing, even as she did, that his backtrail was clear. She released the cord, and her eyes returned to normal.

_I'm allowed in, then?_ David asked her. More mocking – she decided not to answer. As she saw him walk up the path to her apartment door, she turned toward the kitchen.

"David's here," she called. Just a groan came in return. John was in there, perched at the card table that still served as their computer desk...hunched over a computer that was decidedly _not_ the same as the one that had been there before.

She hazarded a quick, light probe. He was trolling the hackers' sites again, which fretted her. John had been careless, reckless even – after she'd first invested several thousand dollars and many hours of modifying to create the new, startlingly more powerful computer that John was now using. Her new grasp of technology, which was of course born of the experience of hundreds of others, had far eclipsed John's. He never spoke of that, nor betrayed any bitterness. Nevertheless, both of them knew that Sara could sense the sting of his jealousy.

The system she created, perhaps one of the most advanced privately owned computers in existence, was built around an Alienware shell she'd ordered online, through a dummy identity and post-office box prepared for just that purpose. She upped the processor's clock speed, maxed out the RAM, installed OS code she'd written herself, based on a Linux core. And with a nod to John, and an acknowledgement that he'd been right all along, she abandoned dial-up internet for DSL broadband.

The resulting system was a perfect vehicle from which to direct a secret, desperately hunted organization, one whose mundane communications and operations often occurred in cyberspace. Indeed, the system was a bit overkill, even for that.

For John, though, the system was pure fantasy, and an inviting playground. He'd long had the temperament of a hacker and the inclination to be a code pirate...what he'd lacked was the necessary gear.

Now that he had it, he went a little crazy. Sara was alarmed, when she realized he was probing banking, corporate and even government networks. She tried to find a way to allow it, to grant him this dangerous diversion...but the exposure to herself and the Network was too great. She had to tell him to stop.

The fight that ensued was epic – and culminated with John storming out and screaming a vow to never return. He did return, after a calming while, and a truce of sorts resulted. John would observe some necessary discretion with the new computer...and in return, Sara would deny him nearly nothing. The Network had by now purchased for him vast amounts of electronic gear, guitars and accessories, tech toys of all description. From the outside, their apartment still appeared to be a dreary, low-income hovel. Inside, however, it was becoming a high-tech, hedonistic manor.

David had voiced a hesitant warning. Certainly, the Network could afford certain indulgences – and Sara's worth warranted it. But many members, not just David, were starting to see John as a security threat.

Sara dismissed that, putting David off with vague assurances. But both of them, and indeed the rest of the Network, knew she shared their concern. It was a problem going begging for a resolution.

David and John had also finally met each other. Both were...polite, but the mutual distaste was as evident as it was uncomfortable to witness. Sara considered reverting to the earlier pattern of infrequent meetings with David in public places...but he had become her chancellor, of sorts, and she valued frequent consultations with him, in the physical plane as well as the aether above. At last she claimed a bit of primacy and _insisted_ on weekly conferences at her apartment – this in spite of David's protestations about security procedures and John's plain surliness. She endeavored to ignore both, and also the chill that enveloped the place when the two of them were together. But it was difficult.

All of that was in Sara's mind, now and pretty much always, and she was even more worried to find him hitting the hacker sites again. That was just a step too close to his earlier behavior.

She was still in his mind – lightly. But she broadened her presence, letting him become aware of it. Her eyes pulsed just for a moment. Then she withdrew.

_I'm watching you,_ is what that fleeting presence said to John. She heard him snort in anger, and disgust.

She sensed David was close now; he'd climbed the stairs and was coming down the hall. She brought herself back into the moment, trying to set aside the difficulties with John. Mostly, she succeeded. Things were accelerating in ways that she and David and all of the Network could not quite comprehend, and it frightened them all. So she forced herself to concentrate on the decisions she and David would be making today.

But part of her was still with John, wondering why things were going so wrong for them lately, wondering how to put them back right.

Alone now, David and Sara began their discussions. They stood silently by the window, the same one by which Sara had earlier stood her vigil, and they had a long, unvoiced conversation. They had developed the lazy habit of holding these discussions entirely by telepathy, even when they were alone as they were now.

They were alone because John, without much effort at pretense, announced he was going for a drive almost immediately after David arrived. He scooped up Sara's car keys and was gone.

That he was taking Sara's Camaro represented a small victory on her behalf. Soon after he moved in, he announced a desire to have his own set of wheels...and left it unspoken that he expected that desire to be fulfilled by the Network's coffers. On this matter, though, Sara was insistent. There was no reason why the two of them needed separate vehicles, she argued, especially when John was welcome to drive hers whenever he liked. And she reminded him once again of their forced anonymity. The low profile they needed would be ill-served by two cars in the parking lot, owned by a couple with no visible means of support.

That risk would be considerably magnified, she told John as he frowned and huffed at her, if one of those cars was a selection from his list of _acceptable_ purchases. The Porsche Boxster, for instance. Or the Lotus Esprit.

Sara won that battle, but the war was still being waged. John helped himself to her car keys more frequently than was necessary; it was a transparent effort to get under her skin. The effort was only partly successful, because there were times she was glad to see him go, if only for a while. And the fact that he invariably left when David came by...that was a relief, more than anything.

After he left, David raised an eyebrow toward the door he retreated through, and sent a thought-form to Sara.

It's getting worse between you two, isn't it?

Sara sighed, and stared down at the street without seeing it. _Things would be hard for anyone in our situation. We're doing the best we can._ She turned to look into David's eyes. _And for God's sake – don't say anything about it to him. That won't help._

David just nodded, and changed the subject. _Nothing new?_

Nothing. Dammit, nothing.

David exhaled a long, weary breath. He knew there had been no new developments, of course; there were no secrets nor surprises among the Network. But it was distressing nonetheless to hear Sara pronounce it so.

_Okay_ , he thought to her. _Okay. So we keep plugging away. We've got a list of congressional aides to hit up. And some mid-level guys from the corporations. We just keep hitting them until –_

_No,_ Sara interrupted. _No more business as usual. No more picking away at the lower echelons. We've got to hit them at the top._

Sara, we don't even know who the top is.

Sara nodded. _Yeah, but we'd better fucking find out, hadn't we? We're running out of time, David. You feel that too, don't you?_

David took a moment before answering. Then – _Yeah. Something's coming. Something's coming...soon._

_Exactly._ She turned to look at the street again. _Listen – we might get our chance, week after next._

_Shit._ He pulled her by the arm to face him. _You're talking about the WTO conference. Sara, you are NOT going there. No way._

She shrugged away. _We're not getting another chance like this. I'm not passing it up. If I can get close enough...and if one of them, one of the leaders is there...I can get in his head. We won't get a chance like this again. I have to, David._

David looked at her a moment longer, then turned away. _Goddam._ He'd just been thinking that there were no secrets among the Network...and now this. He'd had no clue, until this very moment when she chose to lower the barrier in her mind. Now he saw that Sara had been planning to attend the World Trade conference for weeks, had made arrangements, had discussed it at length with John – that it had been John, in fact, who suggested it as a way to get close to the leaders of the opposition. And she'd kept it all a well-guarded secret, all that time.

He realized now, at last, that he really had no idea how far this young woman's abilities might extend. He had no conception of her limitations.

_You know the others will never agree,_ he thought.

That's why I'm not asking permission. You know I'm right about this, David.

One of the conveniences of mental communication is its non-reliance on verbal forms. Sara, David and all the others _could_ (and indeed often did) limit their telepathic discussions to projections of language...but that limit was by no means absolute.

David sent her a montage – images, sounds, desperate emotions. He showed her loud and angry protests, he showed pushing and shoving and the harsh rain of police batons. He showed clouds of teargas and crowds of beaten protestors herded into pens.

And on the heels of that, he spoke – he used his voice for the first time since arriving that day.

"Oil has topped one hundred twenty dollars a barrel. Gas is three-fifty a gallon. In the last six months, all government entitlement programs have been cut, then privatized, then cut again.

"Sara, the country is boiling over, and that conference is going to turn into a bloodbath. You _can't_ go." But even as he said it, he could feel the solidity of her decision. He could sense how completely her mind was made up.

And she nodded. "The country _is_ boiling over. And that's why I have to go. Whatever is going to happen, David, is going to happen in weeks, not months. This could be our last chance."
Seventeen

Somewhere near the heart of the seething human mass centered on Cleveland's Public Square, a single drum began a rapid, driving beat.

A handful of other drums, scattered about the crowd, found the beat and echoed and amplified it.

The crowd itself, estimated by the police choppers overhead to number in the low tens-of-thousands, began stomping in time with the drums' beat...it began swaying as a unit with the rhythm, its thousands of signs and banners, held overhead, began to bob up and down in a great wave.

And the chanting, previously disjointed and diffuse with a hundred different slogans...suddenly became one, loud and clear, born on the crisp, early-Fall air:

" _Fuck the WTO...Fuck the WTO...Fuck the WTO..."_

Word was spreading throughout the crowd – and also by cellular phone and text messaging (civil protests had gone high-tech) – that a half-dozen private jets had landed in succession at Burke Lakefront Airport, mere blocks away. A cavalcade of limousines was forming up and making its way to the Convention Center.

New energy was injected into the crowd. Its chosen enemy was coming closer.

The armored and helmeted police corps knew this too. Shields and batons pushed ever closer to the crowd, in a vain attempt to herd it a bit further from the Convention Center.

This was the nexus, then. This was the deciding moment, as had been similar moments in so many recent protests and demonstrations around the globe...that would determine whether the gathering would remain peaceful (if boisterous)...or whether it would devolve into bloody violence. The decision was as much in the hands of the cops as it was with the demonstrators.

There remained a few cool heads on both sides. Even as the police line advanced, and the lead elements of the protest struggled to hold its ground, a few of the protest organizers were still desperately calling for non-violence. A few police commanders were quietly yet firmly restraining their most angry officers.

And for a while, this uneasy truce held. The protestors retreated a bit, away from the Convention Center. The police, in turn, backed off somewhat. In the front ranks, where cop met college student, a few wry smiles were even exchanged.

But then...the limos came.

Ψ

Gerald Fallon settled into the leather and stared without seeing through the smoky tinted windows. His limousine, along with a line of identical others, began rolling across the airport tarmac toward Marginal Road.

One hand was raised, tapping absently on the glass beside him. It was the sort of thing he did when his mind was far, far away.

He was unaccustomed to self-doubt. The feeling angered him, not least because he hadn't felt its sting in decades. He tried his best to push it away, to insist to himself that his doubt was misplaced. And yet...the suspicion persisted that he'd made a mistake by coming here. He tapped a bit faster on the window.

The limo convoy crossed the Shoreway, a highway of demarcation that hugged the Lake Erie contours, and inched closer to the dense tangle of tall buildings in the center of Cleveland's downtown. As it did, the raucous sounds of protest – pounding drums and shrieking whistles and a sea of shouting, babbling voices – grew in palpable intensity. The din seemed to rise from the ground itself, to travel through rubber and steel and flesh, to resonate in the guts and bones of the entire city.

Gerald Fallon looked straight ahead and tapped on his window.

Ψ

Sara was silent, standing on her toes and staring intently over the sea of protesters that stood shoulder to shoulder and front to back with her and John. She was deep in thought, absorbed in her search, so it was left to John alone to appreciate the irony of their situation: a 40-mile muscle-car commute, culminating at a sprawling, dynamic protest decrying rampant globalization and out-of-control corporate profits. This was a thoroughly modern phenomenon.

They'd crept through Cleveland's downtown traffic, made far worse this morning by the milling crowd, and spent half an hour searching outlaying streets for safe and accessible parking...then walked the final blocks to join the heart of the protest.

Standing now near the front of the crowd, just a few dozen feet from the nearest police baton, Sara could see the first of several limousines turning left onto Ontario and heading her way. Others could see it too, and the tempo of the chanting began to increase. The riot police tensed visibly and began using their shields to push the front ranks of the crowd back. Sara and John and everyone around them were jostled but they held their ground.

John had been chanting like all the others; first a garbled litany that began " _hey ho_..." with the rest lost in the tangle of competing voices. Later he joined in with the rising unity of " _fuck the WTO_." He lacked a protest sign (which he regretted and cursed himself for as soon as they'd arrived in Cleveland. He'd planned on making one ever since Sara agreed to attend this gathering; he'd even composed several snappy slogans. But he'd gotten stoned first thing that morning, and in a flash the plan was completely gone from his mind). Signless then, he kept both arms in the air, fists tight, pumping violently.

Sara scarcely noticed the jostling, or the shouting voices around her. John was yelling something at her, in between his chanting. He was grinning wildly and waving his arms, and he took a moment to shout something toward her ear. It was lost in the clamor, but she picked up the excitement in his thoughts: a wordless cry of joy, translating roughly to " _love this, love this, LOVE this_." More jostling came, as the police renewed their effort; a dreadlocked youth in front of her, who had been repeatedly pushed back toward her, turned and said something, probably an apology...but this too was inaudible and far from Sara's thoughts.

She was focusing – focusing her mind away from the tumult of emotions surrounding her and toward the fleet of limos slowly making its way toward the crowd. The overwhelming sense of the area was fear...this seemed to be emanating as much from the police line and the bystanders as it was from the protesters. And it emanated, likewise, from most of the limos; fear, uncertainty and a strong desire to be anywhere but here. She probed a bit deeper, to get the sense of these people...and found them to represent, at least in their own minds, a cross-section of the world's elite. Political elites, business and financial elites...and at least one representative of John's hated religious right. She could sense little more without a deeper probing, which she was tempted to perform but resisted until she found the ones she was looking for. She wanted to find the mind of someone in charge, someone who was directing the recent historic tides...but these men (and they were almost all men; wealthy and white and old...) betrayed no sense of control. They all seemed to fear current events as much as everyone else did. They all seemed as impotent in the face of sweeping change as she herself was.

One mind in particular was bleeding fear, like all the others...but also a deep anger. She narrowed her attention to this mind, and sensed at once it was within the third limousine, probably about four hundred yards from where she stood. And it was the religious leader she'd noted a moment ago...a former small-town Baptist preacher who'd moved to Washington decades before. His name was...Fallon. Gerald Fallon. It was not a name she recognized from her research, but something told her this was a man to learn more about. Her irises pulsed with color, but no one noticed.

The crowd around her was pushed, and it pushed back. A swearing cop swung a baton; a girl screamed and went down, the crown of her head already turning from blonde to crimson.

And Sara was still removed from all this. She bit her lip and closed her eyes and probed deeper into the mind of Gerald Fallon.

Ψ

The closer he came to the Cleveland Convention Center, the more Gerald Fallon's doubts grew and his anger rose. Chanting and shouting and a cacophony of drums surrounded him. Why hadn't he foreseen this? He'd known, of course, that gatherings like these invited protest; that'd been going on for years now. The gatherings were even rotated from city to city, so that as many police departments as possible could gain badly needed crowd-control experience. Cleveland's turn had finally come, although it seemed likely this would be the last such conference, for a while at least.

Protests never much bothered him because he knew that the ones in the street screaming for change were the ones most impotent, the ones least likely to foment change, the ones furthest from the reins of power.

He should be able to ignore these people, this _rabble_ , secure in the knowledge that one day soon they and their ilk would be dealt with, firmly and finally – some of them by the same riot police they now taunted.

But...the _drums_...and the _chanting._ He rubbed his eyes with a shaking hand and looked over the driver's shoulder. They were barely a block away now. A thin line of police was separating this limo and the others, from the seething mass. Would they hold? Or would the maddened crowd break through, surround the car, and...he pushed the thought away. It wouldn't happen. It _couldn't_ happen.

In just a few minutes, no more then five or ten, he'd be inside the Convention Center. The people he needed to speak with knew he was coming, and they'd be waiting. He could say the things he came to say, and ask the questions he needed to ask...and then he could be gone. He'd have to face the crowd one more time (just the thought brought a hitch to his breathing)...but he could get through that. In very little time he could be back on his jet, and away from this goddamned place. He could be back in Washington, among people he _understood_.

"Get a grip, get a goddamned _grip_ ," he muttered.

"Sir?" the driver asked. He looked back at Fallon in the rear-view, his eyebrow raised.

Fallon didn't bother answering, he just grunted. The limo inched forward.

Ψ

Fallon...Gerald Fallon. And Family Base LLC...and the Pentagon and Congress and the National Intelligence Directorate and....

Sara gasped, an exhalation that might as well have been silent in the chaos of this crowd. The connection was broken, and she was too stunned to regain it.

_I've got him,_ she thought. _I've got the guy at the center of it all_.

The pushing-and-pulling between the police and protesters suddenly intensified. Sara was nearly thrown from her feet, even as a few people around her were tussled to the ground. John saw her losing her balance and grabbed her arm, just in time. He shouted something to her, but the words were lost. She nodded, managed a smile, and sent him a mental thread, telling of what she'd found.

The message was received, but not processed. John's mind was slipping, joining the communal mind...the _riot_ mind. Still shouting wordlessly, he bent and picked up someone else's picket sign, lost or discarded or dropped. He didn't so much as glance at its message, just used it as a missile, arcing it up and over the compatriots in front of him, towards the police line beyond. As a weapon it was all but harmless, just bouncing almost unnoticed off a Kevlar helmet...but it spurred similar action, as dozens of others began throwing their signs – and also their water bottles and anything else close to hand – at the cops. The city of Cleveland had been proactive in this respect, removing earlier in the week all nearby trash bins and newspaper boxes, so there were few potential missiles or weapons in the area that could actually endanger the police. But the barrage infuriated them nonetheless.

That's when they started lobbing teargas.

Ψ

Fallon's limo turned into the underground parking garage just as the street began raging. Fallon turned and watched through the back window as long as he could. The crowd had begun throwing things, Fallon couldn't tell what, exactly...and then they began violently pushing at the police line. The police responded with teargas grenades and a more liberal application of their shields and batons. The lines were wavering on both sides, mixing and becoming indistinct. Thick white clouds of CS gas began drifting back toward the Convention Center. Fallon saw that most of the cops had gas masks (indeed, some protesters did as well) – but quite a few of the policemen did not. These inexplicably unprepared officers were gasping and covering their eyes, and pulling back from the barricades. Dozens or hundreds of protesters, most of them similarly stricken by the gas but apparently more motivated, took advantage of the break in the line and rushed forward, toward the Convention Center. The latter elements of the limousine procession, the ones not lucky enough to make it to the parking garage in time, were quickly enveloped by riotous humanity. Fallon could see the cars rocking violently, with shouting youth climbing on their roofs and hoods, kicking at glass.

And then the scene thankfully disappeared, as his limo slid into the darkness of underground. A steel mesh barrier lowered from the ceiling, cutting off the garage from the madness outside.

Fallon sat, unmoving, listening to his heart skip and trying to calm his hitching lungs. The stink of teargas was everywhere.

"Uh, Reverend Fallon..." the driver said hesitantly. Fallon just waved a hand and nodded. The driver had found them a spot deep inside the garage, near the elevators, by the handful of event organizers and uniformed security guards who were nervously monitoring radio communications and continually poring over documents on their ubiquitous clipboards.

One of the organizers, a sunny thirty-something brunette wearing a loud green blazer with an official-looking 'WTO' medallion on the breast, began jogging toward Fallon's car. Fallon composed himself, opened his door and stepped out.

"That goddamned mess outside," he began. The look in his eyes had stopped her words of welcome before she could speak them. She smiled grimly and nodded.

"Yes, Reverend Fallon. The police are...losing control of the situation, it seems. But don't worry. This building is secure and we have our own, um, security force here. We won't be interrupted. And by the way, I just wanted to welcome – "

"I'll be here less than an hour. I'm not driving through that again. Get me a chopper on the roof."

She blinked. "Yes. Well, reverend...I'm not sure the roof here..."

Fallon just cleared his throat and stared. She forced a smile and nodded.

"Yes, sir. Now, we did receive the list your office faxed. All the gentlemen you'd like to meet with have arrived – we were able to get them inside without being noticed. A few of them are in conference at the moment, but I'm sure – "

"Get them in a room, _now_. And just them, dammit. No secretaries, or deputies or anyone else. Just them. The rooms are secure?"

"Yes, sir. They're swept hourly."

"Good." Fallon ran a hand through his thinning hair. The shake in his hand was so slight, he thought, that no one could have noticed it but him. He hoped so, anyway. He walked toward the elevator, with the sunny brunette trotting along beside him.

"Is there anything else I can get you, Reverend Fallon?"

"A drink. A big goddamn drink. And don't forget my chopper."

Ψ

Sara and John were running now, a confused and stumbling sort of run which was mirrored in the stride of everyone around them. The others were a human blur, running in every direction and over every obstacle, except for the ones that were down already, and the ones being taken down.

The police were badly outnumbered, so they were concentrating their forces where they could, and in those spots they were aggressively engaging the crowd. Where they had jail buses and paddy wagons at their backs, they made as many arrests as they could – quick grabs of apparent leaders or ones who'd been seen throwing things...dragging these back to their secure lines, fast application of the zip-locking plastic handcuffs and then a toss into the van. Then back into the crowd for more.

John and Sara had made their way to East Sixth Street, just south of Ontario. There was some purpose to the direction they were following...they were trying to work their way back to Sara's car, and thence to flee the chaos that downtown Cleveland had become. The dozens of others around them, though, had little purpose other than to escape the drifting clouds of choking gas, the angry police, the human crush.

The police presence was thinner here, these few blocks away from the protest proper...and little attempt was being made to arrest protesters. Instead, they were practicing a policy of _submission_ , of grabbing whom they could, bringing them to the ground...and doing what they could to ensure they stayed down. For this they used their clubs, their knees, their elbows and their fists. Sara and John had already run past ten or twelve recipients of this submission policy, in their hurried flight from the Convention Center; some of the subdued were starting to stir, but most were just lying still in their pools of blood.

There was no time to stop, no time to help...it was simply time to _run_. So they held hands and ran.

In the midst of that, Sara tried to reach John, to touch his mind. As the chaos grew around them, she needed to tell him that their mission here, apparently, was a success.

There was no reaching him, though. John's mind had devolved to a primitive machine, as much intent on attacking, on destroying...as it was on escape. Communication was not a priority.

She didn't see the officer, or sense his presence. He'd come from their side, she guessed, running across East Sixth to hit them obliquely. She felt her arm jerk violently as John absorbed the blow and went to the ground.

She couldn't see the officer; could see nothing of his face or even the form of his body. His armor was that complete. The visored helmet and the black padded leather that covered him everywhere transformed him into something beyond human, something unrecognizable.

And his mind was like that, too. Sara felt no cognition there, no thought processes. His mind was as primitive as John's had become, taut with fury and a desire to _hurt_.

" _Motherfuckermotherfuckermotherfucker_ ," was all he said as he lashed at John, grasping to find purchase even as John rolled about on the sidewalk, trying to avoid the blows. The officer had lost his baton somewhere in the fray, although he hadn't consciously realized this yet. He didn't even know how he'd arrived in this area, four or five blocks from where his sergeant had posted him. Like so many this day, he'd simply been carried with the crowd.

He was down on the ground with John now, scrambling for purchase. One gloved hand was clawing at John's throat, the other curled into a fist and striking at John's head, his torso...at any part of him within reach.

For Sara, the world had slowed and narrowed. The blow that had wrenched her shoulder and brought John to the ground had also thrown her back, into the cold granite of the office building behind her. She stayed on her feet somehow and was frozen, pressed against the stone...unable to speak or help or turn away. She reached out with her mind, almost reflexively, but drew back when she felt the hate and violence seeping from both of them.

They were both grunting and cursing as they wrestled across the sidewalk. John's voice was coarse and unfamiliar, as the officer squeezed at his windpipe with that one gloved hand. John was taking the blows, barely feeling them and doing nothing to block them...instead flailing at the officer with his fist and feet and knees. He even tried to bite, although nothing but rough armored leather came close to his teeth.

"Stop it, _stop it_!" Sara had at last found her voice, but it was no use. Her words were lost among the sirens and screams and unintelligible shouting that echoed through the canyon of buildings.

John's t-shirt had ridden up during the scuffle and his writhing over the sidewalk. His bare back began to scrape across the concrete.

Something about the blood that began to flow from under him defeated Sara's paralysis and granted her new purpose. She stepped forward, even as John and the officer struggled and fought each other. She reached a hand out, toward the officer's helmet. She didn't touch him; she didn't need to. Her eyes pulsed and sparkled.

" _You need to stop this now,_ " she said softly. No one could have heard her – John certainly didn't. But the officer stiffened and stopped fighting. John kept flailing, but his blows went unnoticed.

" _Just go. Please, just go_ ," Sara whispered.

Wordlessly, without glancing at Sara or down at John, the officer rose. John's flailing had slowed, his kicking and punching petering out as his confusion grew.

The officer stepped over John, who stared, eyes wide. The officer walked away, southbound on Sixth, looking neither left nor right. The fringes of the riot still raged around him but he took no notice. He walked straight ahead, his mind blank.

Ψ

The sunny brunette silently stepped into the small, dark closet and waited.

If she had a sense of humor, she might have chuckled. People in her line of work rarely had much use for humor, but she could still appreciate the irony. The men on the other side of this thin wall were obsessive about security; all of them, not just Fallon, had asked her (some of them had asked repeatedly) whether the room had been swept for bugs. It had been, of course; she hadn't lied when she said the operation was performed hourly. Furthermore, she knew that several of them were carrying pocket EMF detectors, in hopes of finding any surveillance that might have slipped by the WTO's security apparatus.

But for all that, none of them suspected they were victims of a type of espionage as old as warfare, as old as political intrigue itself: the human eavesdropper on the other side of a porous wall.

The badge on her breast declared her an employee of the WTO, but that was decidedly not so. Exactly _who_ her employer was, was not easy to determine. A one-time CIA operative, who'd occasionally been loaned to NSA, her name was tucked away somewhere within the confused tangle that the National Intelligence Directorate's org chart had become. More to the point, National Intelligence's allegiance was increasingly ambivalent. The president was understood to be a fool and a figurehead, and congressional oversight had been a joke for a generation or more...National Intelligence was just another federal department more or less left to its own devices, and to the whims of the men at the top. Lower-level operatives, such as the brunette, came along for the ride.

The nameless group spearheaded by Fallon and his people thought they had NI's loyalty, bought with promises of power and position after the coming realignment. NI was noncommittal, but Fallon didn't know that. It was too early yet; this had been the decision of men like Doctor Deeks and his crew of intel worthies. _Something_ was coming, on that they could all agree. But whether Fallon's plan would be successful...no one could yet say. So NI withheld its commitment and watched to see which way the wind blew.

So it was for self-preservation, really, for himself and his organization, that Deeks had insinuated the sunny brunette into the WTO conference, with orders to keep an eye on Fallon and the international financiers who served him.

Or keep an ear on them, more accurately speaking. She allowed herself a twinge of pride for this simple, yet oh-so effective arrangement.

The conferees were occupying conference room 6A. None of them had noticed – or if they had, they hadn't cared – that 6A and its adjoining room (designated, unsurprisingly, 6B) formed a larger, contiguous room. A central divider, deployed electronically, separated them down the middle into their present configuration.

The divider was sound proof. But a small closet, set between the rooms near the spot where the divider sprung from the wall, was built of mere sheetrock and plaster.

She decided she'd waited long enough. If anyone in 6A had heard her enter the closet, they had given no sign of it. Time to go to work.

She slipped a small, collapsible device from her pocket and unfolded it. It looked like a stethoscope, and for all intents and purposes that's what it was. The bell-shaped receiver had been specially adapted by her agency's technical shop, however, to be far more adept at listening through walls and doors than flesh and blood.

Holding the bell against the closet wall, she could hear immediately that Fallon's meeting had gotten off to a bad start. Her reception was imperfect; most of the voices were badly muffled and a few were completely indecipherable. But the anger in all the voices came through loud and clear.

Someone – she thought it might have been the German finance minister – was pleading with Fallon, his voice high and desperate. "Call it off, just call it off," he was saying.

She could imagine Fallon calmly shaking his head. She couldn't quite hear his reply, but it had to be something along the lines of, " _It's too late._ " She couldn't agree more.

Someone else called him a fanatic, said that he and all his kind were fanatics. More agreement to this from the sunny brunette. But Fallon clearly had enough. His voice rose, almost shouting and dripping with anger...and the sunny brunette could mark his every word.

" _It's coming. It's fucking coming and everyone in this room knows it. Every goddamned one of you has known this was coming for decades."_

The oil, she thought. He must be talking about the oil.

" _Handle it however you want in your own countries. This is how we handle it here."_

Someone asked a question.

" _No. I'm rotating divisions off-shore, as many as I can. We don't want to rely on regular military. We're using private contractors for this."_

More accented mumbling – she couldn't be sure if it was a question or a statement.

" _Well what fucking difference does that make? Listen – "_

A pronounced thump. Was he actually pounding a fist on the table?

" _We're on-schedule and we're moving ahead. There's nothing any of you can say that's going to change that, and you're wasting my goddamned time by trying. You all know why we're here."_

There were replies to that, but they were all but inaudible. These men were beaten, resigned.

" _In thirty days this country is going dark, gentlemen. After that, you can all deal with your own problems. No more world policeman._

" _Our best guess is that within fifteen years the realignment will be complete. That's when we'll need you."_

Another question. The first part was muffled, but she caught "- have for us?"

" _Gold reserves. Petroleum stockpiles too, but I won't guarantee those'll survive the fighting. But the gold is safe."_

That's the carrot, she thought, no need to trot out the stick. That unmentioned stick, of course, was the nuclear arsenal that would be at Fallon's command.

"What happens after?" That was the World Bank director. Must have been seated next to the closet – his voice came through crystal clear.

" _We try to re-start the world economy. And we enjoy God's kingdom on earth."_
Eighteen

The Camaro fled south, away from the riot.

Sara had detached part of her consciousness, the part that could soar above the car and guide it, that could stay on guard for obstacles.

She drove, then, in an automatic way, not much bothering to watch the road. If this concerned John, he didn't show it.

Somewhere just north of the small suburban village of Cuyahoga Heights, she sensed a roadblock ahead. State troopers had sealed the interstate, looking for renegade Cleveland protesters.

She exited the highway, deftly avoiding the roadblock, and continued south on Route 21. Her soaring consciousness confirmed that the road ahead was clear.

All of this was done with little thought, even less deliberation. She was busy telling John about Darren Gonzales.

"He was just a kid," she told him. "Just a damned kid, sitting in a basement, playing games."

"I get that," John said. "A cellar-dweller with some talents, who liked fucking with the Network, right? So what's your point?"

Sara was staring at him, half-swiveled in her seat, steering with just one hand. "My point is that kid had the Network paralyzed for almost two years. They were scared to death of him." She tapped the brake briefly, then accelerated expertly through a banked turn, still without a glance through the windshield.

"Why?"

"Because they're afraid of their own shadows. Because..." she gestured aimlessly. "Because they've convinced themselves that some big, bad government assassin is stalking them. And this kid shows up, chasing them around the sky, making threats and pretending to be something he's not...they were terrified. He's the whole reason they started that silly-ass lottery thing, thinking they could dodge him."

"And then you joined them..."

"Right. And the kid shows up, like always...and I got pissed. I just plain got pissed. And I followed him down – followed his...mind, I guess you'd say. This is hard to explain..." John's brow was furrowed but he gestured for her to continue. She said, "I followed him down and found him sitting in his stupid little basement, with his stupid video games. And I almost fucking _cried_ , because this is what the Network had been afraid of for so long."

"Okay," John said. "And you scared him off, right? So..."

"John, they're _still_ afraid of him. They've all seen what I saw, they _know_ what Darren Gonzales – or Dargon, he liked to call himself – they know what he is. And I've told them and _told_ them that he's just a goddamned kid with a little bit of ability, who gets his rocks off by scaring us...but they're still telling themselves that he's some kind of boogeyman that the NSA sicced on them. And they think there's a dozen others just like him, waiting for a chance to kill them. They're scared to death, and nothing is getting done."

"So this guy you found today..."

"I could have _ended_ it today. And I fucking should have. Because as soon as I tell the Network about this, they're going to want to talk about it, and deliberate, and fucking debate it to death. And meanwhile that asshole is taking over the country." She glanced ahead, and John did too. He was startled to find the Camaro far beyond the outskirts of Cleveland, deep into sparsely populated suburbia.

"Sara..." he said slowly. "You know, caution isn't always a bad thing." She started to protest, he held up a hand. "I understand the urgency. You know I do. But...I just think you should be careful."

Sara frowned, started to answer but stopped as she saw that 21 ended a few miles ahead, routing back onto I-77. She detoured to the east, looking for another back road out of Cuyahoga County.

"I am careful," she said at last. "I'm as careful as I have to be, but –"

"Hey, look...I know my place," John interrupted. "I'm just the asswipe you keep around who spends your money and sometimes climbs on top of you." Sara snorted at that, but he continued. "Hell, I'm not even sure I believe half the stuff you and what's-his-name say."

"David," she said automatically.

"Whatever. My point is, even if half of it _is_ true, then maybe being cautious isn't such a bad idea. Take this Dorgon guy..."

"Dargon."

"Whatever again. You said yourself you were only in his head for a minute, right?"

"That's all I needed. I saw everything I needed –"

"Says you. He creeped you out, didn't he? I can tell by the look on your face."

"He was a creepy little fucker," she admitted.

"Yeah. And _that's_ why you dived out. Well shit, Sara, what if you missed something? The government ain't stupid, you know. And if David and the others are telling the truth about all the crap they've seen and done, then the assholes they used to work for probably have a pretty good idea of what you guys are capable of. So don't you think they could set somebody up that, shit, I don't know, just kind of _looks_ like a creepy teenage kid on the surface, but underneath that..."

"I was _inside_ his head," Sara insisted, but she looked unsure.

"Yeah, well...I'd poke around a little more if I were you. You said you could find him again, right? You should poke around more, and be sure. And this Fallon guy –"

"Him I got no doubts about," she said.

"I believe you. But what are you going to do about it? You said you could have ended it today, but what the hell does that mean? You're going to fill his head with ponies and sunshine, make him see the light? Jesus, don't you think those people look out for crap like that? Maybe all the talking and debating you're afraid of is exactly what –"

"When I said I could have ended it," Sara said harshly, through gritted teeth, "I meant I could have killed him."

John stopped talking, turned and stared at her. He said nothing.

"I could have killed him," she said again. "And I still can."
Nineteen

It was the power amp again. The goddamned power amp.

David frowned at it, this newest component to his home theater system, then reached 'round to the back of the rack, to check the connections once again.

Here then was David McMartin's weakness, another one fed with cash provided by the Network's stock manipulations: David was an unrepentant audiophile.

He'd left his old system, a nice little Dolby 7.1, back in Tacoma when he'd been tasked to move here, to keep an eye on Sara.

Nothing bittersweet about that; half the fun of this hobby was building new systems from scratch. So he'd left the old system as a jaw-dropping surprise for his Tacoma landlord, then started designing this one almost as soon as he arrived.

This one was a 5-speaker configuration, a minor step backward from the Tacoma setup...but he found this room didn't really need much more. Speaker placement had been a finicky process, taking days' worth of trial and error...but in the end, he'd gotten it just right.

The power amp was the last to go in; he'd waited until he had sound-proofing in place, the sheets of acoustic baffles smuggled in a piece at a time to avoid rousing suspicion of the neighbors.

Once that was done, well, it was time to up the output. Fed Ex had delivered the new 225-watt Anthem power amplifier this morning. David barely had the door closed before he started ripping into the package like a kid by the Christmas tree...and had it wired into the rack just minutes later.

He noticed the low-frequency buzzing during the first test-drive, a recent recording of Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony – the gorgeous " _Pathetique_." He frowned, cursed, stooped to jigger some wires, and tried again – this time with Brahms's " _Hungarian Dances._ " And the damned buzz was still there.

Nothing else for it, then. He plugged in his soldering iron, and began unscrewing the Anthem from its rack mount.

An hour later, it was hard-wired and reinstalled. He stepped to the cheap fiberboard chest-of-drawers he kept by the TV, the only furniture he owned that was large enough to store his ample CD and DVD collection (which he _hadn't_ been tempted to leave behind in Tacoma). He pulled open the drawer that housed his box sets.

Brahms and Tchaikovsky were good for musical appreciation, perfect for pacing about, lost in the soaring notes.

But for system diagnosis, for checking sound fidelity at every frequency...there was really only one choice.

As the opening notes of the _Rheingold_ movement of Wagner's " _Der Ring des Nibelungen_ " began to swirl around the room, David allowed himself a smile. The sound was perfect.

It was either a superstition or an unbreakable habit, David wasn't sure which. Either way, it ate up time. Still, David found himself unable to do otherwise; when he played the Ring Cycle, he simply _had_ to listen to the entire opera.

So it was 17 hours later, give or take, when he removed the last CD and returned it to its case.

He was famished; the Ring Cycle didn't let him eat, didn't let him do anything but pace, and listen...and think. So that's how he'd spent all those long hours.

As he listened to the Rhinemaidens tormenting poor Alberich, causing him to forswear love, David's mind was with Sara – knowing she was on this desperate mission of hers. He'd begged her not to go to Cleveland, tried reasoning with her, even tried sternly forbidding it. All to no avail. He resigned himself, and simply prayed for her success. But some persistent inkling was telling him that things were going badly there. He couldn't tell if it was his preternatural link with Sara, or else a flash from his intermittent and unreliable precognition...but in any case, it frightened him.

As Brünnhilde was suffering Wotan's terrible wrath, David was thinking of John. The kid worried him, made him fear for the safety of them all. He tried his best to be accepting, to be friendly, even – for Sara's sake. He searched constantly for common ground, some way to create peace for this strange little family...but John's recklessness was forever quashing that. Something would have to be done, and soon.

And finally, as Siegfried lay dead on his pyre and as Götterdämmerung spread from the heavens to the earth, David thought of the terrible changes that were coming all too soon.

And along with that, with all of it, the deepest part of his mind was reliving the long stumbling path that brought him here – from the nameless existence of a telepathic cog, one of thousands toiling under likewise nameless intelligence functionaries. He'd envisioned a life of Bond-like excitement, when the NSA recruited him out of Army enlisted-life anonymity. Just a grunt, drafted for a war that was winding down and that he'd never see, he took an aptitude test because he was ordered to. He had no idea what they were looking for, and he had no idea at that point the ability they divined in him.

Next came months upon months of endless sessions in featureless training rooms, staring at blank writing tablets and being prompted, sometimes not so gently, to guess what was going in some adjoining room.

They never told him when he was right, but he supposed he was doing well. He was still there, after all. Dozens of others he'd spotted in hallways or cafeterias disappeared in ones and twos – the washouts, he guessed. He never knew where they went, but as time went by and his naiveté wore thin, he feared the worst.

By the time his training was done any illusions of glamour were dead. He became just one more drone, albeit a talented one. He spent years not living, really, just eating and breathing and doing what he was told. Until he met Melinda, that is, who'd reawakened him and paid for it with her life.

Today's dilemma, though, was indifferent to David McMartin and his musings. Today's dilemma had little to do with telepaths and intelligence agents and lost, wasted years. Today's dilemma was simply about energy: who had it, who lacked it, and what they'd all do when it ran out.

The oil, that was the crux of it. That goddamned silly black sludge, that rotted carbon shed from corpses dead for millions of years...somehow it ruled the world.

That was something that had been painfully obvious even to his inexperienced eyes, all those years ago. Even in coldest depths of the Cold War, he and others like him spent far more time eavesdropping on the Saudi consulates than they ever did the Soviet. And that perverse sense of priority didn't stop with the intelligence community; all branches of the military, foreign policy, even domestic law – it was all driven by the needs of the hydrocarbon economy.

Something else that had been obvious, even back then, was that the world was running out, and the men in charge knew it.

David looked again, bemused, at his new power amp. Its plastic housing? Oil. Delivery by Fed Ex? Oil again, thanks very much. Even the electricity that powered the thing – well, in this region the power plants were mostly coal-fed, but petroleum was still a lynchpin in that production chain. If the supply was cut – when the supply was cut, he corrected himself...no more power amplification. No more power anything, probably the same damned day. And David's hobby, just like everyone's hobbies, would fade into memory. Day-to-day survival would take its place.

And they knew this, had always known it. That's what infuriated him. They'd realized back in the seventies that the dipstick was signaling shallow reserves. And instead of tackling the problem head on, they'd hidden it.

And this, he thought, is where we find ourselves. They were scrambling to squeeze every last drop, pulling it from sand and shale, even from spills on the grounds of refineries...and all the while, trying to tell the world that nothing was wrong.

When the oil ran dry – and it was starting to seem as though that day was coming soon – people were going to die. Millions probably, perhaps even billions. Societies were going to crumble, civilization itself was going to totter...all thanks to an addiction barely a hundred years old.

And far from preventing that...far from looking for alternatives that might save them all...someone was using this as a vehicle to seize power. They were planning to capitalize on that chaos, to use it to reshape the world to their liking.

What that meant, David didn't know. All he knew was that there would be no place for him in that world. No place for him, or for anyone he cared about.

David looked about the apartment, which was growing dim with oncoming dusk. He glanced out the streaked, filthy window, looked without really seeing at the cars and the people below.

He sighed, long and long-suffering. Then he walked back slowly to the stereo rack, and selected the CD he'd tried to listen to, nearly an entire day previously.

And he lost himself, then, in the sad, mournful tones of " _Pathetique_." He sat, eyes closed...and listened.

And he thought once more of Sara. And he prayed again for her success.
Twenty

The current National Intelligence Director had held that position for just over two years now. And it seemed as though he was finally figuring out how things worked.

A week into his tenure he'd sent a lackey carrying a memo for Doctor Robert Deeks, _ordering_ him to report to the director's office, up on the fifth floor, central building of the sprawling Arlington campus.

Deeks had merely laughed, waved the lackey away, and had gone back to what he'd been doing.

The director was a political appointee, who came and went just like all the other appointees. Yes, appearances needed to be kept up – so the director had a nice oak office, way upstairs with a pleasant view; he got to brief the president and congress, and attend all those exclusive Georgetown soirées... .

But what, exactly, did that have to do with real intelligence work? With real _power_?

There were a select few like Deeks, who toiled in industrial-gray offices, tucked away in basements or out-of-the-way corridors...they kept no art on the walls, and they tended to dress themselves off the rack.

Because none of that stuff mattered, when you came right down to it. What mattered was DC's real currency: _clout_. Deeks had it, a few others had it.

The director? He had shit.

So Deeks relished receiving an e-mail from the director, _so_ politely worded, _requesting_ would he please come visit the director, whenever he had a moment?

Chuckling, Deeks pulled open his bottom desk drawer and reached for the black leather medical bag he kept there.

That he used a medical bag to carry his supplies was his idea of a joke – although few others would ever understand the humor. Just about everyone in the organization assumed he _was_ some sort of doctor...although none were sufficiently curious to ask exactly what kind. His personnel records were classified highly enough that very few others could learn that 'Doctor' Deeks wasn't an honorific, it was a nickname.

His colleagues from the old days would have known, his classmates from the academy and his early instructors...hell, these were the men who'd bestowed that moniker. But nearly all of them were gone now – long dead or purged, or both. So the genesis of his nickname was now his own little secret.

He stepped lively, out of his office and to the elevator down the hall, whistling and swinging the black bag at his side. A few co-workers bid cautious hellos, which he ignored. He boarded the elevator and headed up, toward executive country, still whistling way off key.

Every day, every experience was a culmination; this was the thought that was running through his mind as he rode the elevator – that was in fact on his mind almost constantly now. He found himself in the center of these historic events because, he knew, that was the course that had been charted for him, long before he was old enough to do anything about it.

His grandfather had been an OSS man, back during the Big One, serving at the side of Wild Bill Donovan. His father was an early NSA officer, in that agency's salad days, helping to build an organization that would one day become the most powerful of its kind.

Family legacies; that's how it worked: if you could arrange to be born unto the correct Eastern families, if you went to the right schools and joined the right fraternities...then a career in intelligence was your reward.

So you just sort of _glide_ through your younger days, not making any waves which might come back to haunt you. No drinking or carousing, certainly – the old man made that quite clear. And no girlfriends either. Too damned many complications. If you had any sort of, er, _needs_...well, the old man could show you how and where you found the most discreet of whores.

And then into the academy. Learn everything you can, the old man told you, so that's what you did. You take so many elective courses, spend so much time in the classified library, that the others start calling you "Doctor." It's not intended as a compliment.

But it pays off anyhow. And you really do earn the equivalent of several PhDs, if doctorates were awarded for things like interrogation, use of poisons and paramilitary operations.

You set off on the career the old man's laid out for you...lots of foreign service, naturally. Mostly consulate drudgery, of course, but the old man has also made arrangements for some field ops, real wet work...just to make sure you're not a pussy.

After the correct number of years you rotate back to DC, to be shepherded through _that_ part of your career. You have to marry the requisite witless debutante, on account of the cocktail parties you must attend...but soon enough you can administer the medicine that sends her off permanently to the mental ward, so that she's someone else's problem.

And at some point in there, the old man finally kicks off. You attend his funeral just to make sure the mean old bastard is really dead.

The ding of the elevator was loud enough, jarring enough, to elicit a noticeable jump from Deeks as he snapped from his reverie. Thankfully, no one else was around to see.

As the door slid open, he noted with annoyance that this was only the fourth floor, one short of his destination. He glared at the youngster in shirt-sleeves waiting outside, who very nearly stepped aboard until he saw who was in there. He quickly stepped back; Deeks grunted and punched the "5" button again.

The director, sitting at his desk, started to speak when Deeks strode in. He stopped when he saw the medical bag.

Deeks unzipped it, pulled out the thing that looked like a rubber shower cap crowned with a tangle of wires. He tossed it to the director.

"It's a lot easier if you put it on yourself. If I have to do it, it'll hurt like hell."

The director hesitated, but not long enough to be told twice. He tugged it down over his scalp and cinched up the chinstraps.

Deeks nodded, and removed a small electronic receiver from his bag. He selected the longest of the wires trailing down from the cap, and plugged it into the device. He sat himself on the edge of the director's desk.

He stared at the director for a moment, cocked his head and grinned.

"I never get tired of seeing this. You look ridiculous."

The director sighed. "This is necessary, right?"

"You bet. Everyone has to go through this; I just hadn't got around to you yet. I figured since you... _asked_ me to drop in, now would be as good a time as any."

The director was reaching a tentative hand up to feel at the shower cap; Deeks moved the hand away as he would a child's. The director asked, "How does it work?"

"It's just a simple frontal-lobe scan. We're looking at particular brain cells called mirror neurons. They react in a specific way if you've been probed or influenced by a telepath."

"I haven't been probed," the director said, almost reflexively. "I'm sure of that."

"Yeah, everyone says the same thing when they're wearing that cap. I should take your word for it, right?" Deeks snorted. "Listen, if they've been in there – " he waved a hand toward the director's skull, "you'd have no idea. They're very careful about that, about leaving fingerprints. If we weren't able to scan for mirror-neuron excitement..." he shrugged then held up the receiving device and gave it a cheery shake. "Ready?"

"I guess s-"

The director hadn't finished the final syllable before Deeks punched a button on the receiver.

The director's eyes went wide. He grasped for the edge of the desk but missed it, so he clawed at the air. His chest heaved and his legs kicked.

"Jesus...Jesus...make it –" his words came in gasps.

"Yup. Aches like a mother, doesn't it?" Deeks said. He leaned in close to stare into the director's eyes. "I can block the pain for you, but it takes a shot to the spine."

The director was still sputtering, but he gave something that looked like a nod. Deeks pulled a syringe from his bag, stood up and stepped behind the trembling director.

"Just a little pinch, as they say," and he plunged the needle into the top vertebrae.

Within a minute the director's breathing began to slow. Deeks had returned to his perch on the edge of the desk.

When he could speak again, the director said, "You could have warned me."

"I suppose so." Deeks said with a smile.

The director glared, fleetingly, then lowered his eyes. He looked up again and asked, "So what do they do in there? If they've been in there, I mean."

"Who, the telepaths? Probing and influencing, like I said."

"You also said they don't leave fingerprints, or try not to. So how do they..."

Deeks frowned. "Hard to say. Hell, I doubt even _they_ know exactly what they do, and how, and what the effects are. We've examined guys, of course – guys confirmed to have been probed. But frankly...none of 'em made it through the exam." He grinned. "Our results were limited, you might say. What I _think_ they're doing is sort of...whispering in ears, playing with people's conscience. Trying to get them to change their evil ways, I guess."

"Is that effective?"

Deeks shrugged again. "Jury's still out. The real danger is whether they're scanning memories, swiping secrets, that sort of thing. I've never been able to tell if they are, but it's a risk we can't take." He glanced at his watch. "It'll take another five minutes. What did you want to talk about?"

The director reached toward a paper that lay on his desk, but thought better of it as the wires that hung down from his head began to move about and intertwine. He eased back and simply pointed at the paper.

"That's the latest marching orders from Fallon. Have you seen it?"

Deeks squinted at the paper without picking it up. "Oh yeah. Pretty crazy, eh?"

"Well...yes. Crazy. Can he be serious about that stuff? You know him, don't you?"

"I know him well enough to know that yes, he's serious about that stuff. I wouldn't worry about it, though. We won't be involved. He'll use his own stormtroopers for that crap."

"But..." the director waved a hand toward the paper, in a helpless gesture. "He wants us to data-mine for that. _All_ of it."

"Hmmm," Deeks hadn't known that part. He picked it up from the desk and peered at it. "I guess you'd better do what he wants. Or at least go through the motions. Jesus, look at this: 'Abortionists.' He put that right there at the top of the list. Figures, doesn't it?"

"He wants names, addresses...dammit, what the hell does 'abortionist' mean anyway? Does he want doctors, nurses...anyone who's ever had one?"

"All the above, I guess. Shouldn't be too hard to extract."

"That's not the point," the director tried to sound terse but it came out a whine. He slumped back into his chair. "I didn't take this job to put together Fallon's enemy list."

Deeks smiled. "No, you took it to do what the president tells you. What's he say?"

"You know what he says."

"Yeah, he's Fallon's boy, isn't he? Listen –" he glanced at the electronic receiver to check the scan's progress. "Nobody's really sure if Fallon will pull off this little coup of his. If he does, well, I suppose we go along with him. But until we know for sure, just humor him. That's what I'm doing."

The director nodded a little, but still looked unhappy. "He also wants to know about the telepaths."

Deeks leaned back on the desk and laughed. "Sure he does. That's one of his pet obsessions."

"You've got that Gonzales character looking for them?"

"Not really. Something fried his brain, he's been a veg for a couple of months now. And that was just for show, anyhow. Fallon has people all through this place you know," Deeks gave an ambiguous gesture that seemed to encompass the whole building. "You should remember that, he's got eyes and ears all around here, and he's always watching. So yeah, I set up that little project with Gonzales, but it was just cover, for Fallon's sake." He grinned again, and leaned closer. "Truth is, we've had them pinpointed for quite a while now."

The director blinked. "Really?"

"Yeah. Well, most of them, anyhow. By good old fashioned data-mining, as a matter of fact. I just built a set of parameters based on what we knew about them, how they must be getting by – cash flows, internet and e-mail usage, that sort of thing. Then I turned on the Crays and watched what spit out. It's pinpointed at least half of their network by now, I think. The rest shouldn't be hard to find, once we roll those up. Whoops," he noticed a red light blinking on the electronic receiver. "You're all done. You can take that thing off."

The director mumbled a thanks and pulled the cap off. His hair stood up comically, which elicited a happy snort from Deeks.

"Am I clear?" the director asked.

"Don't know yet," he popped open the receiver's cover and removed a tiny silver data disk. "I'll run this through the diagnostics program, down in my office. I'll know by morning. If no one grabs you and hauls you off by the end of the day, you'll know you checked out." Deeks gave his familiar chuckle. "Oh, don't look like that. I'm kidding, mostly."

The director let out a shaky breath. "Great. Thanks a lot." As Deeks stood to leave, the director had a thought. "What about Fallon? Has he been through a scan?"

Deeks shrugged. "He's on the list. I'll get around to him."

Once he was on the elevator, alone again, Deeks frowned deeply. He was thinking about the director's final question.

Not surprisingly, he hadn't told the director everything. Not by far. But the juiciest unspoken tidbit had to be the indications they'd been seeing lately, that the telepath network had someone quite special working with them. Someone with quite amazing abilities.

Deeks had been honest in his nonchalance when the director had asked about Fallon. Scanning Fallon hadn't been a priority, because his role had always been so obscure. The network had no idea he existed, near as Deeks could tell.

But...what if they did? And what if this special telepath got to him?

Deeks nodded to himself, decisively. Simply can't risk it, he thought. He'd scan Fallon just as soon as he could.

Twenty-one

Sara was right. Her revelations to the Network sparked heated and extended debate. After hours of that, the matter remained unresolved.

She and David were sitting side by side, on Sara's living-room floor, deep in trance. Their postures were the same, as were their blank expressions. Even the rhythm of their breathing was the same.

John was in the kitchen, smoking a joint and singing falsetto to himself as he made breakfast.

It was the morning after the Cleveland trip – a morning that had dawned bitingly cold, with breath hanging in the air outside, in wispy trailing clouds. Autumn was announcing that it was here to stay.

David had left them alone the night before, which wasn't easy for him. He sensed they were back in town, sensed turmoil and anxiety...sensed enough of their emotions to know they needed some space. So he gave them that evening.

But in the morning, it was time to go back to work. He walked his long, circuitous route, through frigid air and sidewalk puddles crusted with thin, fragile ice...he walked to within blocks of their apartment then sent out a hesitant mental greeting. Sara answered it in a distracted sort of way, not revealing much enthusiasm. Not revealing much of anything, as a matter of fact. She checked his backtrail, and invited him up.

When she opened the door, his 'good morning' died in his throat. Sara was drawn, slumped, exhausted. She said nothing to him.

Instead, she revealed it all – a single upload of psychic data, one quick thoughtform package that described the entire previous day's events, and everything she'd learned.

David stayed silent as well; there was nothing he could say. He simply nodded slowly, walked in and sat down.

The Virginia State Lottery held a televised drawing every weekday and Saturday evening at seven. Depending upon the day, they might perform a drawing for the Mega Millions game, or Cash 5, or Win For Life. One constant, though, was the Pick 3 game, which was played every day but Sunday.

David checked those numbers the night before, as he had done for years. Dargon was gone, Sara had insisted to the Network, and he had never been a danger to begin with. The lottery system was unnecessary, she said.

But they kept it anyway. Some insisted it protected them from forces far more powerful than Dargon, others muttered darkly that she could be wrong about him and he might return one day.

All of them realized the true reason, even if they were reluctant to discuss it.

They didn't feel _safe_ yet. They still felt hunted.

The lottery system was no guarantee of safety, but it was something. Better than nothing.

Yesterday's numbers had been six, seven and two, equaling fifteen. Not a prime number. There would be no Network meeting today.

But they _needed_ to meet. And they couldn't wait ten hours for the next drawing.

David's abilities were limited by geography, one of those inevitable quirks that affected each psychic in their own unique ways. Like Sara, David could easily reach any mind with which he'd previously been linked...but that mind had to be within a perimeter of a mile or so.

Sara had no such limitations.

She settled into her posture, and David watched as she began to contact eleven thousand, seven hundred and twenty-one minds, with the message, _We need to talk_.

With a lucky sort of timing that comes only to the stoned, John was done cooking breakfast just as Sara and David were emerging from their trances.

Still bopping his head to the song he'd been singing, he handed Sara a small platter holding a slapdash fried egg stuffed inside a sliced buttered croissant. He was gripping an identical sandwich in his other hand, and taking frequent massive bites.

He was studiously ignoring David, who commented dryly, "None for me, thanks." That brought an ironic bark of laughter from John. He went back to the kitchen.

Sara was sitting still and blinking slowly, the rapid drumbeat of her pulsing irises finally beginning to normalize. A moment ago, in her trance, they had been strobing behind her eyelids like a lightning storm.

_You like?_ John sent the thoughtform from the kitchen. She nibbled the croissant.

"Burnt on the edges and frozen in the middle," she called.

"Bite me," he yelled back.

David watched this, bemused. Then he sent her the thought, _They're right to be cautious, you know. They're right to be afraid._

Sara frowned at him. "Fear paralyzes. And caution is going to keep us from doing what has to be done."

David started to answer, then shot a worried look toward the kitchen. He answered with his mind instead.

You're talking about killing a man. You're talking about repudiating everything we've...

"Goddamnit David, I heard the arguments." There was an edge to her voice. "And you heard just as well as I did that some of them agree with me."

"So it's a deadlock," he reached for the couch and pulled himself up from the floor, wincing as his knees creaked. "You know we've always operated by consensus." He stretched for a moment, then sat back on the couch. "Are you going to change that?"

She glared at him. And she became aware that John had grown quiet in the kitchen and was listening to them.

_Why am I the bad guy all of a sudden?_ she asked.

"Sara..." David began. He stopped when he saw her roll her eyes toward the kitchen.

_I don't think you're bad, and I don't think anyone else does either. I'm just not convinced that killing Fallon is going to change things. And I_ know _that killing_ anyone _isn't what we've been about all these years._

Sara didn't bother responding. David's arguments were the boiled-down version of what roughly half the Network had been saying for the previous hour.

The split didn't fall exactly along the _foundlings/government-escapee_ line, although it was close. Most foundlings, like Sara, read the situation as desperate, and were willing to contemplate almost anything. Most escapees, like David, were not.

But if anything, the schism could better be described as pragmatists versus moralists. The moralists were aghast that Sara would even suggest such an action. The pragmatists countered that if you could prevent a war with a single bullet, but didn't, _that_ was the true immorality.

But we don't know this will prevent ANYTHING...

Do we even have a choice? Don't we have to do something...

We can never justify this – it will make us just like them...

But...no, but...

Listen to me...listen...

And so it went. Viewed from afar, their shining cloud was livid, roiling with thousands of minds, all vying to be heard.

Sara alone could keep up, could decipher each projected voice.

David and all the rest could hear enough, though, to know that there would be no resolution to this argument today. The meeting of minds was not so much adjourned, as it was petered out.

And all across America, psychics in their thousands dropped away from their trances, sick with worry and conflicted to their core.

That conflict found a microcosm in Sara's living room, where one of the moralists and one of the pragmatists sat rehashing the arguments – sometime by thoughtform and sometime by voice – neither able to convince the other. Neither willing to compromise.

John wandered in from the kitchen. He'd rolled another joint, and stood leaning in the doorway, smoking. The sharp, earthy smell was filling the apartment now, causing David to wrinkle his nose and mutter, "For Christ's sake." John smiled, and blew a smoke ring in his direction.

David sighed, and stood up. _I don't know why we're arguing either, Sara. You're right – no one's mind is going to change._

That's right, so...

But I'm still asking you to wait. Don't do anything. Just wait...another couple of days.

"But why? What good is waiting going to do?"  
David stepped to the door, sparing one disdained glance at John. He reached for the doorknob, then turned.

"Because if you don't you won't just have a murder on your conscience. You'll also be all alone." He left without another word.

John looked from the door that David had just exited, to Sara. He lifted an eyebrow and started to speak.

Sara stopped him with a raised hand. She was still on the floor, in her meditation posture. Her legs were starting to grown numb.

To wait...or to act now...

She rubbed her eyes, then buried her head in her hands. _To wait, or act now._

But it didn't matter, either way. It was already far too late.

Ψ

It was always quiet down here, and peaceful...sometimes with dreams (only pleasant ones), and sometimes with just a blissful blankness. But always quiet and tranquil and far from the distractions that had plagued Darren Gonzales for all his miserable life.  
He was down here, in this darkness, because of _that_ _girl_. That horrible, horrible girl...who'd invaded his mind, and _screamed_ at him, and caused him to flee.

Darren fled down here, into the silent darkness, and here he stayed. Deeks and Sheely and all the others could do nothing to coax him from the darkness. And for a long delightful while it had seemed as though they'd given up trying.

But one of them was near now, Darren could tell. He could sense someone nearby, through tightly clenched eyelids and with ears that didn't want to hear. He tried to fall back down into his precious darkness, away from the interloper...and found with annoyance that he couldn't.

It was Deeks, he could sense that now. And Deeks was...he was pleading, stuttering, his voice was shaking and cracking...the man was terrified.

In spite of himself, Darren was intrigued.

He flexed some mental muscles that had been idle for months – that he'd intended to keep idle forever. He expanded his awareness (wary, always wary that _that girl_ would find him again...) and he took a peek around –

Well...isn't this interesting.

There lay Sheely, dead and growing cold. Thick, dark blood was pooled around her head, spreading about the floor just inside the bedroom doorway. Was she shot? Yes she was...there was the still-warm gun inside Deeks's pocket.

And Deeks? He was sitting on the bed, beside Darren...begging, cajoling Darren to wake up. He voice was starting to sound...defeated. He was admitting to himself that Darren was gone forever. He had no idea, Darren was happy to see, that he was awake and watching.

Slumped at Deeks's side, he was holding...something. What was it? Ah yes – it was a photograph. It was an old, balding man – angry-looking and just this side of fat. It was hanging at Deeks's side now, almost forgotten...but he'd been waving it under Darren's nose just a moment ago, begging him to look at it.

That was like the old days, the wonderful old days, when Deeks would show him a picture, and tell him in what direction the subject was, and how far...and then turn him loose to kill.

It'd been so long! Was that what Deeks wanted now? Was this an assignment? If it was, it was a desperate one – one that had Deeks frightened beyond measure.

And with that, Darren Gonzalez lay in his darkness, torn by indecision.

He could wake up, and look at that picture, and gauge the distance...and go off to kill as his longtime master so desperately needed him to do. Or...

He could lay here in his bed, in his feigned sleep, and send out his ethereal fist to grasp Deeks's heart one final deadly time. Or...

He could forget all this, and surrender to the darkness he'd come to love.

Unaware of the conflicted mind before him, Doctor Deeks sat on the tiny twin bed and stared with fading hope at the peaceful, slumbering face of Darren Gonzales. The stink of Agent Sheely's relaxed bowels was filling the room, reminding Deeks that he must soon leave this place, probably for the last time. Sheely's murder was just one more step in the decommission of this facility – like the guards Deeks had shot, and the maintenance man he'd garroted.

And now Gonzalez...who should be decommissioned as well. But Deeks was still gripped by the same impotent horror that he'd been feeling since shortly after he'd scanned Fallon, the day before. The horror that came upon him when he checked the results.

So he tried one more time. He held the picture up, to the softly snoring face...

"Darren? Please wake up, Darren. Look at this picture. Darren? Darren?"

Twenty-two

The beginning of the end of the grand experiment called American democracy came not with a bang, or even a whimper.

It came with a blackout.

It was Fallon's blackout, one he'd planned for decades. His forces engineered the cessation of electrical power all across the country, as the preliminary phase of the coup d'état that came close on its heels.

Speed was of the essence; the key to the plan was fast, coordinated action. Loyal field operatives and foreign mercenaries were already in place, ready to control highways and lines of communication, and to seize the most immediate of Fallon's enemies.

Most of the military was off-shore; those units that remained were confined to barracks until their fidelity could be assessed.

Television and radio facilities were captured, and made ready to broadcast the first of Fallon's communiqués as soon as power was restored. That restoration would not occur until the energy infrastructure was safely nationalized. Power would be rationed, and the remaining petroleum would be all but restricted. Imports would cease. A few modern electrical conveniences would be left behind. The Internet, for example. That was gone for good.

Liberal politicians, media commentators, and anyone else forecasted to resist the takeover were to be detained in the first hours. Most would be shot dead before dawn.

The lists of the condemned were prioritized; several hundred were arrested the first night, across a dozen cities. In the coming days, thousands more would follow. The coup would spread to smaller cities, followed by suburbs, followed by the hinterland. Within a week control would be total.

Fear and confusion would be Fallon's allies those first, pivotal days. He expected no organized resistance for at least 48 hours. By that time, the ranks of his original legions (numbering less than 10,000 in all) would swell with enlistees and military personnel found to be dependable. No set-piece battles were expected, but if they came he was confident he'd prevail.

Alone in his office on K Street he watched as the streetlights blinked out, one by one. A profound darkness settled on Washington. The late-evening road traffic was sparse, but quickly grew congested, then came to a standstill as his roadblocks went up.

Blocks away, toward the Capitol, the first sporadic gunfire began.

Fallon stood in his darkened office, looking out on Washington. So far, so good.

The realignment had started early. He hadn't planned to take these steps for many weeks, at the earliest.

But...Deeks had insisted on performing a brain scan – and he'd been uncharacteristically subdued about it, nervous even. And he was even more so when he came back with the results, a day later.

Those people, those _things_ had been inside his head! He refused to believe it at first, had contemplated having Deeks killed for suggesting such a thing.

Doubt, then fear replaced that. Deeks couldn't tell him when he'd been violated...so he fetched his mind back as far as he could, he examined his thoughts and actions for anything that might have been influenced from beyond.

He couldn't be sure. That was the worst of it. It seemed as though he'd remained loyal to the God and the principles he believed in. But in the end, he couldn't be sure.

Uncertainty was unacceptable. So the timeline was moved up. The realignment was to begin immediately. The longstanding plan was implemented, with one amendment: those _abominations_ who'd violated his mind were to be rounded up at once, and slaughtered. Deeks, who had insisted for so long that he was unable to find them, nodded meekly and promised to comply.

So tonight the operations were begun. There was bloody work ahead, but it was worth it. It would result in a country abandoning its Godless ways, and returning to the values upon which it had been founded. Fallon would be proud to lead such a country.

Gerald Fallon looked down on a darkened city, a city that was soon to be his...and for the first time in many years, he smiled.

Ψ

Albert "Red" Dawson was in the rear cabin of his Gulfstream jet when the blackout came.

The Gulfstream was hurtling down the runway of Austin-Bergstrom Airport; take-off clearance had already been issued, and the runway was clear. But when the lights went out and the radio went dead, the pilot became nervous. His voice crackled from the intercom, "Uh, Mr. Dawson...something's wrong here..."

"Go, just go, dammit," Dawson answered. This was a getaway, and his getaway would not be delayed.

Red Dawson was the chairman and CEO of Mid-Texas Oil. Or he had been, he supposed. Things were different now, weren't they?

The Gulfstream lifted from the end of the dark runway, and climbed steeply. Dawson, his pilot and copilot were bound for Hawaii.

That meant he was leaving his family behind – his wife and two teenage boys. That was a heart-rending tragedy that couldn't be helped. Fallon's fanatics were watching his family, he knew, and they'd kill them all if they knew an escape was in the works. His thousands of employees were likewise left to their fate. MTO's wells and refineries were going to be seized – probably in no more than a day or two – and it was up to those employees to try as best they could to get along with the new management. Dawson supposed the same could be said for the rest of the country.

And the pilots? They knew nothing. Dawson planned to tell them once they landed in Hawaii...but then again, how long would it be until Fallon's revolution reached those golden shores? Dawson was going to stay there only long enough to grab what portable assets he could from his house in Maui, and then keep fleeing. Japan, maybe; he still wasn't sure.

Dawson nodded, his mind made up. He wouldn't clue his pilots in, not quite yet. Not until he reached his final destination. After that, they would be free to do as they wished; they could come back to the states to be with their families, if they liked.

He wouldn't recommend it, though.

Everything came down to a single, inescapable fact – one he'd been trying to deny for far too long. Fallon was psychotic.

Dawson and other captains of industry chose to overlook that. Fallon had connections, Fallon had power.

Fallon was useful.

So that damned regrettable alliance of convenience was formed. Dawson and the others convinced themselves that Fallon could be used and discarded. And why not? Profits were soaring – even as supplies were disappearing. The industry was growing stronger than it had ever been. Given just a few more years, the energy sector itself could have seized power. And, he thought bitterly, they would have ruled with far more equanimity that Fallon and his evangelical maniacs. Hell, they would have even solved the energy crises that had precipitated this whole mess. The hydrogen conundrum had been solved _years_ ago...they could have the world switched over to renewable sources in no time at all. Plans to do just that were in the desk drawers of every top oil executive across the globe.

Those plans were just delayed, that's all. Until the last of the oil profits were realized.

Dawson closed his eyes and sat back into his thick leather seat. Out his window, the blackened landscape faded to invisibility. The night sky went on forever.

They'd underestimated him. It was hard to admit, especially for a man who'd prided himself on his savvy and acumen for half a century. But all of them had made the same mistake – they'd underestimated Fallon. And they were paying for it.

Eyes still closed, still leaning back...he was thinking ahead. _Had_ Fallon won? This round, certainly...but had he won the war? Dawson computed odds, calculated assets and tried to formulate a plan.

Fallon was taking America, no doubt about that. There was little hope of stopping him. But someday...someday he might be vulnerable. There were forces beyond the American shores that might be raised against him. Perhaps...perhaps. He raised a hand and rubbed the stubble on his chin, as he thought of ways he might yet prevail.

Red Dawson's Gulfstream soared through the inky blankness, to an uncertain escape. He left behind a country beyond his recognition.

Ψ

Tamara Harrington was at home when the blackout came.

She still had difficulty thinking of the place as 'home'...it being the third cramped apartment she'd inhabited this year. But that's the manner in which the Network's telepaths lived, and this was as close to home as she was ever likely to find.

Tamara was a slim redhead, middling tall, with the sort of features that most people thought of as distinguished, rather than pretty. She understood and accepted this, and allowed herself to become the public face of the Network, on those rare occasions that a public face was necessary. Infrequent recruitment was one of those occasions, and it was in that role that she had not long ago lied to Sara Kincade, and introduced herself as Marla.

Often, in these times of solitude, she found herself willfully forgetting her own name, and thinking of herself as Marla. She could never be sure if this was some sort of latent schizophrenia brought on by living a secret life...or if it were as simple as the fact that she'd never really liked the name 'Tamara.' _Marla_ , she thought, was much better.

In any case, it was confusion she weathered alone. David was right when he told Sara that the Network's members were better off, were happier, when they had a partner with whom they could confide and share. Tamara had no one.

Tamara was a lesbian – and just saying words to that effect required courage that took a young lifetime to build up. She was what she was – she was _who_ she was, simple as that. She'd known, doubtlessly, ever since she cried over a girlhood crush on her fourth grade teacher, Miss Shempski. In coming years, as classmates grew older and paired off, she could only become more convinced.

But that was irrelevant, because she could never admit such a thing – not in a traditional Midwest family like hers. Her dad was a buttoned-down breadwinner, her mom was of the aproned stay-at-home variety. Her older brother and sister, Tim and Sandra, gave every sign of following exactly those same paths. So Tamara suffered in silence, even as the family wondered why she never seemed to have a boyfriend.

College brought some liberation, thankfully, and experimentation, and even a girlfriend or two. And it brought decision, and the courage to share it.

"Mom, dad...I'm gay." Her announcement wasn't quite that pointed, but it might as well have been. When they finally figured out what she was trying to say, she was invited to leave the house...and never thereafter invited to return. She hadn't spoken with them, nor Tim or Sandra, ever since.

Suicide almost came swiftly afterward, and it surely would have if she had not found a home. She found that home, or rather it found her, when she saw a crudely printed flyer tacked to a telephone pole. "Psychic Fair This Saturday," it proclaimed. "Latent ESP testing – find your own psychic powers!"

The Network saved her life, and for that she was willing to give it everything. That commitment was nearly enough to sustain her...but it rarely was enough to stave off loneliness.

Under the best of circumstances, a gay woman could expect every obstacle in the way of finding love and stability. When that woman lived a secret life, and moved house every three months...when she couldn't even tell you her _real name_ until she was sure she could trust you...

The result was that this woman, at least, found herself alone again, eating ice cream and watching _Jeopardy_.

Recent events, particularly telepathic conversations with Sara and all the others, crowded her consciousness and kept her from dwelling much on her isolation. This evening, it even kept her from paying much attention to Jeopardy, even though it was far and away her favorite show. Tamara was smart as a whip, making Jeopardy the perfect challenge for her. Being telepathic, she could even cheat when conditions were right. Sometimes, not always, she could pick up Alex Trebek's thoughts, hearing his questions (or rather the ' _answers'_ ) before he voiced them. She could even hear the solutions, the _answers-phrased-in-the-form-of-a-question_...but she tried hard to ignore those. She liked to win on her own merit.

But not tonight. Like everyone in her Network, her mind was a-swirl. She sat lounging on her couch, digging into a pint of Rocky Road, and stared without real comprehension at her glowing TV screen.

But then Fallon's blackout came, and Jeopardy blinked away into nothingness. Tamara frowned, looked about the room, and confirmed that all other appliances had likewise powered down. Without rising, she expanded her consciousness a bit, just to get a feel for the surrounding three or four blocks...and found that the power was out all around.

She frowned deeper, and wondered from where this sudden deep foreboding came.

Tamara was a telepath. That simple fact was another bit of her identity, as applicable and as important as her sexual orientation, and her thick red hair that looked nice when it was cut short but became unmanageable when she grew it out.

Telepathy was another thing that a traditional Midwest family wouldn't like to discuss, but that was okay because it never even occurred to her to discuss it. It was just something that was always _there_ , in the back of her mind, like a little whisper.

Her acquaintance with the Network changed that, as did the training that came with it. And for many years now, she had assumed that she understood her own mind, and was thoroughly aware of her own catalog of powers.

But that day, in the first moments of the blackout, she learned a bit more. She found, for the first and last time, that she possessed a primitive form of precognition – the kind that warned of the most dire of danger, in the most extreme of circumstances.

Not understanding, she ignored it, and instead chose to sit in trance, to try to reach the Network and to discuss this new turn of events.

And that was just one of the tragedies that came that day. Tamara's warning held no guarantee – even if she'd fled right then with just the clothes on her back, there was no guarantee that she would live until morning.

But as it was, she didn't survive the hour.

Ψ

When the blackout came, Sara wasn't surprised.

She had her own warning, but it was cursedly short. She had enough time to receive and process the message, to turn to warn John who sat playing a computer game...and then the eerie and profound silence fell on their little apartment once again.

"Aw, _shit_ ," John said. "You couldn't have given me a little more warning? I almost cleared that level – "

She shushed him in a distracted way, as she squinted her eyes and looked toward the ceiling. And he became silent because she'd never shushed him before. He rose from the computer table and walked slowly toward her, his eyebrows raised.

"Something's wrong," she said. "Really, really wrong."

Ψ

Doctor Deeks was hiding when the blackout came, sheltering himself amongst his secrets the way others might hide under a bed.

He was on Fort Dietrich, in Maryland, deep in a bunker the NSA operated there. The base above him was in turmoil; one Army general was dead, four others in shackles. A colonel was nominally in charge...but with one combat brigade close to mutiny and the rest in lockdown, his control was shaky at best.  
Deeks could ignore all that, because he was sure he was safe in here. The bunker was well enough supplied to sustain him for several months, if need be.

He was especially well supplied since he'd already killed the four-person staff that normally operated this place.

Of course, without that staff it was left to him to care for the patients this facility had been built to house. That shouldn't be terribly difficult, since they were all safely bedded away in medically induced comas.

There were six of them, all teenagers. Four girls, two boys. All of them genetic telepaths, but as yet operationally unproven.

This was all that was left of the Stargate Project – an operation that not even Fallon knew was still ongoing. It was Deeks's trump card, his final hedge against an uncertain future. At least he hoped that's what it was.

He planned to spare his generator, and sit in the dark for now. Tomorrow, or maybe the next day, he'd fire it up and start checking the short-wave. He'd monitor the situation on the surface from here. If it seemed like Fallon was winning, Deeks would emerge and accept the offer to become the new Minister of Internal Security. If not...well, Deeks wasn't exactly sure what he'd do. He certainly had options, though – including caches of gold bullion hidden in a dozen different countries.

But he was starting to think that Fallon might prevail...and he certainly had to admit he liked the sound of his new title. Deeks smiled in the dark, and he nodded to himself. He could never trust Fallon, he knew that. But with six secret telepaths at his command, telepaths that he could train to his liking...

He glanced over at the hospital beds, at the silent slumbering teenagers.

And he grunted, thinking about the short term. Six of them would be a pain to care for, all by himself.

Deeks came to a decision; he'd make do with four of them.

The other two would have to go.

Ψ

The blackout came, and David _knew_.

His stereo moaned off and out (he'd been listening to Mozart this time)...he was confused for only a moment. Then he was sure that the day he'd feared had come.

He got out of the apartment, as quick as he could. He wasn't sure why that was an imperative, but he wasn't questioning his instinct. The street was already filling with others stepping out of their darkened homes, into the chilly twilight. The meager traffic was reaching a kind of détente, in order to negotiate the ungoverned intersections. Neighbors were starting to chat with each other, many of them for the first time.

David slipped into this evolving milieu, and tried to make his way, as unnoticed as possible, to the little city park that was between his place and Sara's.

Her voice came to him when he was almost there...she was frightened, nearly hysterical.

It's everywhere David...the lights are off everywhere, and they keep calling me, and they keep disappearing.

Take it easy, Sara. I'm on my way. Who's calling you?

_Everyone_! _All the others – they're checking in, they're all scared. And then they just...blink out. Tamara, Joseph Kinder, Evelyn in Wyoming...oh my God, a thousand of them. David...they're gone. They're gone._

He stopped walking, and leaned against a tree. He tried to steady his hitching breath.

_Okay_ , he said. _Okay...this is it, then._

_I think they're killing them, David. We were too late...too late._ In his mind, she sounded like she was crying. She probably was.

We have to – we've got to deal with what's in front of us, honey. I don't think there's anything we could have done to stop this. And...there's nothing we can do for the others. Right now...we've got to get you out of here.

He cut through the park, along the little dirt path where, he couldn't help remembering, he'd first met Sara.

David was torn. He knew that now, more than ever, his careful tradecraft was called for. He knew that on a day like this he should walk for hours, cutting back, crossing his own route, doing everything he could to smoke out tails.

But Sara needed him, he knew that. So he compromised; he walked as quickly as he could through the park, even as the sun dropped below the horizon and the shadows all around him solidified to black. He switched back a few times, then emerged from one of the trailheads at the far end of the park. He headed straight for Sara's then.

Ψ

She was pacing, and shaking, and crying. She'd closed her mind to the calling of the others, because she couldn't stand to hear any more of them die.

She hated herself, then. She hated her arrogance and the idea that she could ever be the leader of such a group. She hated telepathy, and she hated her own mind.

John sat in the living room, on the edge of a little footstool, smoking and watching her. He was silent now, after a few earlier clumsy attempts to comfort her. She ignored him the first time, shushed him again the second...and on the third she had all but screamed, _Shut the fuck up_. So he watched her now in silence.

David's voice came, thankfully, and she stopped her pacing to listen.

I'm down the street. Check my trail. And Sara – check it carefully.

She peered out the window. She couldn't see anything, but she could feel him, walking slowly toward her apartment.

She tilted her head in that direction, and concentrated. And then she gasped.

The ethereal cord, the invisible connection that went from her to David, and then snaked out behind him...the one that had always before appeared yellow...it was _red_ today. And it pulsed with desperate warning.

And it revealed two followers some blocks behind him, lurking in the darkness but keeping him in sight.

_Don't say hello, goodbye, or kiss my ass. Just get out of there and don't look back_...that's what Marla – Tamara – had told her, a lifetime ago. She held onto the windowframe, and felt her knees go weak.

David had seen it too, he knew what she knew. After just a second's pause, he crossed the street, reversed direction, and walked back toward his pursuers.

I'm sorry, sweetheart. You're on your own. Don't try to help me. Wait a few minutes, then get out of there.

David...we can beat them. We can –

No. Just...no. I'm going to lead them away from you. Go north, okay? Head north, and just keep going. Sara – I'm sorry I can't be there to help you through this, but I know you can handle it.

Tears were streaming down Sara's face as she leaned against her window. _Please, David_ she thought. _Please._

Don't try to find me. If I...I'll find you, okay? When it's over, I'll find you. And no matter what happens...just know that meeting you was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I love you, Sara.

Sara stood sobbing, head against the glass, not feeling John's hand on her shoulder. Every now and then, she sent out a thought: _David? David?_

But he wouldn't answer.

They were making their way down the stairs, toward the front door. She found herself tiptoeing as they passed Mr. Simon's apartment, out of habit and probably for the last time.

When she wiped away her tears and told John that it was time to leave, he spared one look back, at the computer and his guitars and his myriad of toys. But her intensity and the way she looked at him told him there would be no argument. So he followed.

_Go north_ , David had said. She couldn't be sure what that meant. She wasn't even sure yet if they should take the Camaro, or walk or steal a car. She was sure of nothing, except for the need to _move_.

Past Mr. Simon's door (she could feel the old man watching through his peephole) she grasped the tall iron handle and pulled the door open.

Time froze.

It didn't really, of course. What happened next occurred in an instant. But it _seemed_ to freeze, as she pulled the door open and stared at the men standing there.

They were tall, imposingly tall. And broad like linebackers – but more probably, like soldiers. They were squeezed into incongruous suits, with the dark polyester jackets straining to cover their shoulders. One was dark, with brown hair, and the other was blond and light skinned. They looked nothing alike, yet something about them was very much the same. Both wore the same blank, almost bored expression. They betrayed no surprise when Sara threw open the door.

In that stretched-out instant, Sara tried to do too many things at once. She tried to scream a warning to John, she tried to bark out a question, or maybe a curse, at the men in front of her...and she tried to reach out with her mind to probe them, and perhaps even kill them.

But in trying all that, she succeeded in nothing. One of them – the blond one – lifted something silvery and held it before her face.

It was an aerosol can – lacking a label and thinner than anything sold in stores. He pressed the button.

Something sticky covered her face, filled her nose and mouth. She flailed, but only for a second.

And then everything faded as she swam down, into the inky silence.
Twenty-three

He caught her easily with one hand, before she hit the ground. John took a single step forward, and reached out to her. But he stopped when the dark-skinned one held up a gun that had materialized in his hand. The muzzle was an inch from John's forehead.

"You want to be real careful there, pretty boy," he told John.

The gloom of the hallway was impenetrable; Mr. Simon could see nothing but sporadic shadows. He could hear muffled voices that revealed nothing...but something was going on out there, and he didn't like it.

He threw open his door. "What in the Sam Hill is going on here?"

The black-haired one answered with his revolver. It spat once, exploding impossibly loud in the tiny hallway. A shower of blood and bone and gray matter flew out behind Mr. Simon, and then he was down in his doorway, and he was still.

John gave a small, shrill sound – but he was silenced with a stare.

The one with the gun used it to gesture at the open apartment door. He spoke to his partner. "What about in there? We got time..."

The blond was indecisive for just a moment. He looked once at Sara, hanging limply by the one arm he gripped. Then he looked into the apartment. "Yeah, all right," he said.

They went inside; the black-haired one pushing John and grinding the gun into his back, and the blond dragging Sara along, across Mr. Simon's body and smearing her with his blood. They didn't bother to close the door.

The blond stopped and looked around a moment, getting his bearings. Then he dragged Sara toward the door he guessed must be the bedroom.

"Keep an eye on that one," he said without looking back.

John was against a harsh white dividing wall, one that separated the dining alcove from the adjoining living room, where the dark-skinned man had pushed him. He watched the other one disappearing into another room, pulling Sara behind him. He blanched, reached out for her, and stepped forward.

"Oh my God. Sara...Sara," he called.

A thickly muscled forearm was ground into his throat. The black-haired man pushed him back into the wall and held him there. He held the gun to John's temple. "You just stand there and be cool, pretty boy," he said.

Then he leaned in, and his lips were almost touching John's ear. "You better hope your girlfriend don't get used up too quick," he whispered. "Otherwise we might have to finish up on _you_."

It was a sterile white bedroom, the kind in which an old man would sleep alone. And it was an ancient four-poster oak bed, surrounded by black-and-white photos of people long dead.

What happened there was the worst thing that ever happened to Sara, and it happened on a day that was already far too tragic to bear. The only mercy bestowed on her was her unconsciousness.

In the springtime her mother would shrug off winter and pull on her gloves and dig deep into the soil. And little Sara, at her feet, would sometimes ignore or sometimes just roll her eyes at the homespun advice and peasant wisdom that Mama would dispense as she dug or weeded or watered.

But not anymore. Sara had learned to listen.

" _I get dirty when I must, mama?" she asked._

Her mother turned from the fresh earth in front of her. She stared deep into Sara's eyes. "There's no time for that now," she said.

" _And I get clean when I can. Right, mama?"_

" _There's no time. You have to wake up, Sara."_

Little Sara frowned. She reached down and played with a clump of dirt. "I don't wanna."

Mama held her chin, and made her look up. "You have to wake up. He's raping you, Sara. And when he's done, the other one will start. And when they're both done, they'll kill you. They'll kill you both."

Little Sara sighed and looked westward, toward the setting sun. It was still warm and beautiful here, but far off that way, almost beyond her seeing, there were dark clouds gathering.

She looked back. "What about you and daddy?" she asked.

Mama's eyes dropped. She stared at the ground. "We'll be okay. They'll come for us, and they'll ask about you. They won't be gentle, but...we don't know anything. They'll let us go."

Sara stood up. She gave another look to the clouds to the west, then reached for her Mama's hand. "I'll come back for you, Mama. I promise."

" _I know, honey. But that's for later. For right now...just wake up."_

Sara woke up. But she gave no sign of it.

She willed herself to be still, even as the _thing_ on top of her grunted and growled and lunged.

She went into her own mind, into her own consciousness, in a process that was a bit like meditation except vastly more immediate, instantaneous, and that was a blessing because it removed her from the sensations of her body.

She'd never killed before. She was confident she could, as she once told John, but...she had never quite figured out how it would be done. She allayed that worry by telling herself that when the time came, she would somehow learn.

That's what she did now. She reached out, with hesitation, and touched his brain – the dumb living tissue, while carefully skirting his _mind_ , which hovered just over there, excited and wallowing in her.

And once there, in contact with it, she didn't know what to do...except to rend and tear and cause havoc.

His scream was like that of an animal, high and fierce. It brought her back to her body and to the present, but the damage was already done.

He threw himself backward, off of her, rivers of blood already flowing from his nose and eyes. He was still shouting wordlessly, the sounds beginning to bubble down into mumbles and then nothingness. He hit the wall and slid downward into a slump. His incongruous jacket bunched around his shoulders, and his blood dripped onto his naked legs. He died where he sat.

The other one, the one with the dark hair, had responded to the screaming and ran into the room. He was cursing as he watched the dying man slump and fall. He swung his gun toward Sara –

And then he stopped, because she was already in his brain...rending and tearing.

"John? It's okay now, honey. It's over, they're gone. John?"

She had cleaned herself up as best as she could, had gathered together her torn clothing, had stepped over the corpses that littered the apartment...and had found John standing with his back against a wall. His eyes were open, he was staring straight ahead, but there was no recognition there. There wasn't anything at all.

"John?"

She reached out with her mind, so very afraid to do so, so afraid of what she would find. And then she pulled back, and leaned into him with her head on his chest, and she sobbed.

John was gone now, and there wasn't anything left of him.

Ψ

It was called catatonia, which was something Sara knew because it was something Harvey Garfield knew.

Harvey Garfield was a graduate student in psychology, and a telepath, and a Network foundling. And he had died that day with a bullet in his brain.

But he had learned about catatonia, which meant Sara recognized it when she saw it.

John wouldn't – or couldn't – respond to anything she said, or anything that went on around him. But she found that if she took his hand, and _pulled_ , he would walk – in a frightening stiff-legged and stumbling way. She held his hand, then, and she led him.

Taking the Camaro would be madness, she knew that now. So they walked instead. Head north, that's what David had said. That's what they did.

They walked all that cold night, getting out of the city as quickly as possible and heading north on the most rural roads she could find. She avoided townships and villages, any population centers at all, sticking to silent dark roads where they saw no one else all through the night. She heard occasional gunfire, far off in several directions, and once heard a great distant booming that might have been artillery. All else was silent.

When morning dawned she thought of hiding, of finding shelter somewhere and waiting until darkness fell again. But when she saw that there was still no one else on the road, no one else around, she decided to keep walking.

Toward dusk she found her shoes were disintegrating, but she had no choice other than to ignore it, and continue on. It prompted her to check John's feet though, and she wept with great heaving sobs when she saw his feet were blistered and bloody, the skin of his heels nearly shredded. And then she cursed herself and dried her tears, and bound his feet as best she could with the rags that had been the sleeves of her blouse.

They walked through that second night, and by this time her stomach had shriveled and stopped growling. She tried not to think about food, but when she did she couldn't help wondering how she would get John to eat – _if_ she could get John to eat. But since they had no food, she knew there was no reason to worry about that now.

It was about four in the morning, she guessed, when they reached the destination she had chosen. It was the outskirts of the village of Eastlake – the village proper she avoided as she avoided all the others they'd come near. But Eastlake was close enough that she could see fires burning and hear what sounded like drunken shouting. She heard no gunfire but she expected that was merely a respite, not an absence.

The place she found, and that she circled around in the dark, examining anxiously, was a small private marina. Just a handful of docks, four of five of them, jutted out into Lake Erie. A dozen or so boats of varying sizes were tied up.

She took John's hand and led him down a small, gravelly embankment. They both slipped and stumbled several times, but she managed to keep them upright. She found level ground and made her way through the dark toward the nearest dock.

The sound of a shotgun shell being jacked into the barrel echoed across the water and stopped her in her tracks. A figure had appeared behind her, at the top of the embankment. She couldn't see much of him in the gloom, except that he was tall and skinny, wore a ballcap and was leveling a shotgun that slowly tracked back and forth, between her and John.

She nearly reached out with her mind, nearly touched his brain, when she forced herself to stop. _No. There's been enough killing_. She merely looked up at him and waited.

The stranger seemed to be waiting too, but she couldn't tell for what. After the longest while, he sighed softly and lowered his shotgun, then spoke.

"They shot the mayor yesterday, right on the steps of city hall." He sighed again and gave a gesture back toward the village. "We had two Jewish families in town. Just two of 'em. The Steins, they keep their boat here. It's that twenty-footer right over there. They burned them out, them and the Muskowitz's, burned their houses right to the ground. And they beat 'em up when they tried to get away, and they ran 'em right out of town." He turned to look for a moment at the village in which he'd been born and raised.

Then he turned back to Sara, who still stared at him, saying nothing. He gestured with his shotgun at a small fishing boat, tied up not far from where Sara stood.

"Take that one right there. Keep clear of the Coast Guard station just east of here, and watch out for the other one back west, on the other side of the city. And good luck." Without another word he turned and walked away, into the darkness.

It had a small outboard motor that droned on and on, and after many hours it took on a rising and falling pitch, an unreal undulation, that Sara was sure she was imagining.

The waters of Lake Erie were still black around them, indistinguishable from the sky above. But for the droning motor, the night was silent.

In the frigid hours of that crossing Sara steered north by way of Polaris. The stars were blotted out by thick cloud cover but she could soar above that, or her consciousness could, and she found Polaris and steered north.

And she spoke to John in the hours of that crossing, as he sat on the aluminum bench across from her and stared straight ahead without seeing. She spoke to him even though she knew he wasn't hearing a word.

She told him things she should have told him much earlier. She told him she loved him, of course, but other things as well. She admitted that she had probed him deeply in recent months, far more deeply than he ever suspected. She told him that she explored his past, and she learned all those things that he would never tell her.

"You wouldn't tell me because you couldn't remember," she said softly. She had one hand on the tiller and the other on his knee. "And that's okay – it was okay to forget. You were only three when your daddy killed your mommy. He would have killed you too if there weren't people there to stop him."

There was more to that story, but she couldn't bring herself to tell it. So she didn't tell him of the foster home he lived in, a big white house with a slow meandering stream in back. She didn't remind him of all the other foster kids who lived there, some of them as brittle as he, others not quite as bad. And she didn't speak of that puppy, the one the others had cooed over, the one he'd drowned out of some unrecognizable emotion, something akin to jealousy.

She just told him, "You were sick. And you had every right to be sick. But they were good people and they got you help and you got better. And you're going to get better again, John." And then she was quiet again, because she wasn't so sure about that last part.

False dawn was breaking when she saw a rocky outcropping of land, and she steered the little boat toward it. Just offshore, the aluminum hull scraped against the bottom, and came to a stop. Sara cut the motor, took John's hand and pulled him upright.

They had just stepped ashore when a man approached them, his boots crunching over the stone walking path that led down to the lake. Sara held John's hand and looked up at him.

His uniform was what caught her eye. It was starched and creased, and in this sparse light it appeared to be olive in color. Or khaki, perhaps.

A patch in the form of a flag was sewn onto his right shoulder. Three vertical stripes, of alternating red and white; in the center, a stylized maple leaf.

He looked past them, over the lake and at the far-distant shores of a still dark land. And then he looked back at them, and he spoke kindly.

"Refugees?" he asked.
Epilogue

One week later...

Traffic was still restricted, so Fallon's motorcade had the streets to itself. That didn't keep him from ordering the sirens to be sounded, though, and the clamor had people all along Pennsylvania Avenue staring at him as he sped by. They looked up from where they stood on the sidewalk, or out of office windows, and they all had a cautious, hunted look – the timeless look of people living under tyranny.

The motorcade pulled into the great circle drive of the White House. Fallon was content to make this his home for now – the former president was relieved to fade from the scene and back to the relative obscurity of his ranch. Fallon would govern from this building for now, but he had plans. Plans for a grand palace, and a new seat of government.

Maybe. Maybe.

He maintained his composure, his façade of assured strength as he and his entourage swept imperiously through the West Wing, past staffers who competed with each other to offer a _Good morning, Reverend Fallon_ or a _Welcome back, Reverend Fallon_.

He maintained that composure until the door of the Oval Office closed behind him, and then he collapsed into the chair that his doctor had pulled over to him. He slumped in it, shaking and moaning.

The others crept out, the doctor remained. He rolled up Fallon's sleeve, and wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around his arm.

He pumped it up, released the air, and listened intently with his stethoscope. Then he looked up at Fallon with alarm in his eyes.

"Two-fifty over one-forty. It keeps going up. I just don't understand..."

THE END

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