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“That’s impossible,” he said. “No one can control these readouts.”

I wanted to offer to draw him a puppy with it, but I wasn’t sure I really could, and I didn’t want to push them that far. Playing with them was entertaining and kept my mind off my stress and worry, but I didn’t want to get to the point where they would hurt my mom.

One of the men backed into a stainless steel cart and a tray of instruments crashed to the ground. I jumped, and the shapes I levitated shot in all directions, hitting people, walls, and equipment. The blocks took on a mind of their own, crashing and ricocheting like pinballs. The bank of windows above us shattered, and the people behind it scattered, taking cover.

I hit the ground during the melee and wound up staring through the table legs at Clark, who was trying to take shelter under his chair. I’d have found it funny, but I was too busy trying to be small in the midst of men shouting and running, glass breaking, and machines exploding in fireworks of sparks. I’d come almost full circle to my database programming class a few days ago. It was pathetic and disturbing on an enormous scale.

Something sparked behind me and a scorched scent and acrid smoke wafted through the air. I took a cue from Clark and used my chair as a shield and peeked behind it to find the equipment hooked to my sensor cap taking offense to the cone and trapezoid blocks embedded in its front panel. I ripped the cap off and threw it aside before it could fry my brain or even worse, my hair.

Something clamped down on my arm. Sarkis knelt beside me, blood pouring from a head wound and the beginnings of what looked like a magnificent shiner.

“Stop this now, or your mother—”

“I didn’t do this on purpose,” I said. “My little gift doesn’t do well when startled. It’s not my fault your man over there is a klutz.”

He gave my arm a shake for good measure then shoved me away from him. The blocks had settled, some of them stuck in walls, some in equipment, some just sat bloody on the floor.
I knew I liked those blocks.

“Get her back on the bed and strap her down,” Sarkis said as he grabbed the table and heaved himself into a very unmanly ducking crouch.

The few men who were still standing looked at one another, waiting for someone to move first.

“Now,” Sarkis bellowed.

Two of the younger men, obviously low on the totem pole and expendable, came forward and hoisted me off the floor. They had me fastened to the bed so fast my head spun from the movement.

“Get this place cleaned up,” Sarkis said, holding a lab coat to his head wound. “Dial that drug pump to maximum and get her back to her room.”

I pretended to go to sleep when they adjusted the drug pump. They disconnected me from the rest of the broken equipment and wheeled me to my room. The two of them locked my bed wheels and left me alone. Clark wasn’t with us; he may have still been under the table for all I knew. His absence meant I didn’t get hooked back up to any monitoring machines for the time being.

Good, time for some reconnaissance
.

As soon as the men left, I called to Horse, and sweet hay-breath bathed my face. I popped out of my body on the second try, happy to see that my golden cord was bright and substantial. I tried running. It worked, sort of. My legs went faster than I actually traveled, like in a dream, but it was still faster than when I walked. I ran down the halls, stuck my head through my mom’s door, and found her alone, huddled in her bed. Satisfied that she was okay, I turned back to Horse.

“You knew where my mom was. So do you know the layout of this place?”

Horse nodded his enormous black head.

“Is there a back way out of here? Somewhere I could sneak out with my mom?

Horse turned and trotted down the hall. I ran after him. After several turns, he stopped at a substantial-looking metal door. I walked through it and found myself in a dank stairwell that I knew would smell musty if I had my real nose with me and could smell anything. Feeble fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed, throwing shadows and yellowish haze over industrial cement stairs, two short flights with a landing in the middle per floor. Peering down the small square of empty space in the center of the flight sections, I counted three more floors below. Looking up, I couldn’t see the top. Horse stuck his head through the door.

“How far down are we?” I said.

He pointed his nose to a sign on the wall that read B-12.

“Crud,” I said. “It’s a good vitamin but sucks as far as 12 flights of stairs to climb. I don’t know if my mom can make it.”

And we would probably be on the run from Sarkis’s henchmen. Not to mention the ones that would most likely be stationed up top waiting for us.

“I’ve got to see what’s at the top,” I said and started up the stairs.

I climbed two floors before I noticed Horse floating up through the cement stairs next to me. I stopped and put my hands on my hips.

“Really?” I said. It didn’t expend much energy walking up the stairs, but it was slow.

“Can I do that?” I said.

Horse just stared at me while floating with his belly facing toward me.

“That’s not a no or a yes,” I said. “Does that mean it depends?”

He nodded and snorted.

“On whether I can figure it out. Right?”

Again a nod, and he floated up to the next level.

I jumped but just landed back on my feet. I willed myself up and even flapped my arms, but I still stood flat on the floor. Horse whinnied from above.

“Don’t laugh at me,” I said to the ceiling.

Moth appeared and landed on the stair rail.

“Any tips?” I asked him.

“You are thinking as a corporeal body,” Moth said.

“What am I supposed to think like?”

“An astral being.”

It was my turn to snort.

“That was real clear,” I said. “You should write electronic equipment manuals.”

“You are more than you believe. Open your mind to your true self.”

“If you say ‘snatch the pebble from my hand, Grasshopper,’ I’m going to lose it,” I said.

Moth just stared at me with his fake wing-eyes. I let out a breath even though I was pretty sure I didn’t need to breathe.
Hmmm
 
. . .

“I just think I need to breathe because my corporeal body does,” I said.

Moth remained silent.

“So I’m walking because my corporeal body has to if it wants to get from point A to point B.”

I stopped breathing with no ill effect. I was right.

I looked up and thought of myself floating up to the next level and almost screamed when I rose. I passed B-1 and reached G-1 in moments. I hoped the G in G-1 meant Ground. My feet touched down on the landing. Floating was convenient but disorienting. Walking, even if I didn’t need to, was more familiar and stable.

I walked through another industrial metal door to a rough-walled cement tunnel with grime-covered red emergency lights every twenty to thirty feet. Horse and I traveled the hundred feet to the end of the tunnel and another door. This door showed signs of rust, and the cement in front of it was stained from water damage. After passing through that door, I stood outside in a gulch surrounded by pine trees. Dusk-muted colors threw the undergrowth into stark relief.

Horse reared on his back legs and whinnied so loudly birds took flight from their roosts on the branches.

“Can I float out here, too?” I asked him.

He launched and hovered ten feet off the ground.

“Show off.”

I looked skyward and thought of floating. I didn’t think it was working until I looked down and found myself seventy feet off the ground. My arms flailed and my ghostly body somersaulted a few times before I finally stabilized by grabbing my gold cord. Once the vertigo was gone, I let go of the cord and floated freely.

A tall long hill stretched out on one side of me, the ends too far out to see. The gulch I’d walked out into ran at the hill’s base. Pine trees crowded the gulch, but thinned out the farther away from it they got, making me think that at some point during the year, there was water running through here. I floated up a little more to peek over the hill for signs of somewhere to run to for help.

The light was quickly fading, but what was left showed nothing but scant trees, scrubby vegetation, and a single dirt road leading up to the other side of the hill. Since Sarkis’s compound was under the hill and only one road led to it, it had to be the road we’d traveled on to get here. No other signs of habitation existed other than a faint glow far off past where the road disappeared on the horizon.

As escape scenarios went, all of this kind of stunk. If I could get mom and I as far as the gulch, we’d just have to follow it until we hit something. But which way? I tried to open the part of me that absorbed energy and felt it tingle remotely through the cord attached to my body.

“Okay, that’s not going to work,” I said to Horse. “I don’t suppose you can tell me which way the closest non-bad guy humans are?”

Horse simply floated and stared.

“Yep, that’s what I thought.”

Leaving my body unattended for too long didn’t seem wise. Plus I wasn’t sure how far the cord would reach without snapping or going all translucent on me again. I’d just have to bring my flesh and blood body and my mom out here and try to feel energy to figure out which way to go. Our chances out here were far better than in there with Sarkis and his goons.

I willed myself down to ground level. Horse followed.

“So,” I said to Horse, “are you always with me when I do the astral projection thing?”

He popped out of view for a few seconds then popped back.

“Aha, so that’s a no.”

I stroked his head and scratched behind his ears.

“I’m glad you’re here.”

He whinnied low and rubbed his face on my hair. I hugged his thick neck and felt safe next to his sturdy body. It took every ounce of my will to let him go. We backtracked through the tunnel and stairs, and made our way to Mom’s room. She lay in bed again, covered in the same fashion as before.

“Mom?”

“Marlee, is that you?”

I almost laughed. I’m an only child. We were locked in a mad scientist’s underground facility. I called her Mom. Who else would it be?

“Yes, it’s me.”

“Should I stay covered up like last time?”

“Yes. That’s fine. Listen, I’m going to come to get you in a few hours. When I arrive, you have to be ready to run with me. No questions. Just do what I say.”

“Okay, honey.”

I don’t know why I added the last part. She always did what she was told, no matter who told her unless she thought it was going to make my father angry. Then she dug her heels in like a mule. That thought made me doubt my earlier assumption on how Sarkis kidnapped her.

“Mom, how did Sarkis get you to come here?”

“He said you were hurt.”

Crud. She’d done it for me no matter how angry my dad would get for her sudden disappearance. And it would be just like her to simply leave without a thought to anything else.

“Okay, mom. I don’t know when I’ll be back, but remember to be ready to go.”

“What if I’m in the bathroom?”

“What?”

“You know, when you get here. I won’t be able to go with you right away. You won’t leave me will you?”

“No, Mom. I’d never leave you. Just go as quickly as you can if you have to go. Okay?”

“Okay.”

On the way back to my room, I tried to remember if my mom had always been so passive and helpless. I spun through a mental Rolodex of scenes I remembered from my childhood. In the end, I realized the answer was yes, and that I’d always felt responsible for her. When I reentered my room, I had to file those thoughts for later. Clark stood next to my bed, affixing leads to new sticky pads on my head and chest, and one of the bottom-of-the-totem-pole guys that wheeled me out of the testing room earlier stood in the corner, a stun gun in his hand like the one’s they carried on
Top Cops of LA
. Clark turned to check the placement of some of the sensors. The movement revealed another stun gun protruding from his lab coat pocket.

I’d really freaked them out earlier. Their little test rabbit had grown fangs and ten-inch claws. My smile surprised me. I actually enjoyed their fear, enjoyed intimidating them. I’d never intimidated anyone in my life. Who knew, I might actually be able to pull this escape thing off.

The situation wasn’t impossible. The monitors now attached to my body were inconvenient, but I could work around them. My cord was lighter again, not as see-through as before but not as substantial as earlier. That meant I’d need more energy. I’d also need a way to fool them into thinking I was still here to give me and Mom a decent head start and a chance of getting away.

I stared at the camera in the corner, and a plan started to unfold like a treasure map in my mind. It was risky, but it just might work.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

E
SCAPE

I waited for Clark to move so I could get into my body. No telling what would happen if I passed through him.

He got my body hooked up with numerous sticky sensors on my head and chest, with a little lighted clip on my finger for God knew what, and he finally stepped away from the bed. I lay down in my body but kept an astral eye on the room.

Clark stood at the cluster of machinery attached to me, tweaking knobs and writing readings down on a clipboard. Satisfied with whatever he saw on the readouts, he slid the clipboard back into the pocket at the end of my bed and started to walk away. I thought about my father and every rotten thing he’d done to my mom and I over the years. My reward came in the guise of alarms screeching from the machines and Clark jumping like he’d been goosed and running back to my bed.

He ran like a prissy girl. I fought to keep a smile off my face. He checked the leads and sensors, turned more knobs, and even shut one of the machines off and back on again. When he pulled the walkie-talkie out of his lab coat pocket, I let the memories of my dad go and my readings came back to their normal “girl in a drug induced coma” levels.

Sarkis’s voice crackled through the walkie-talkie in Clark’s hand, and he jumped again before answering it.

“What the hell is going on in there?” Sarkis said.

“Don’t know, sir,” Clark said. “Maybe she’s having a nightmare.”

“Brush her eyelashes. See if she flinches.”

I astral projected just in time before he brushed his finger over my eyelashes, and felt like dancing a victory jig when my eyelids didn’t flinch.

“She’s out, sir,” Clark said.

I hopped back into my body, and homed in on the camera in the corner and turned it upward.

“Damn it, we just lost visual,” Sarkis said.

“The camera is pointed to the ceiling,” Clark said. “Have Williams readjust it.”

The camera motor whined, and it moved back to focus on my bed.

“We’ll keep an eye on her from central monitoring,” Sarkis said.

Clark hung around for a few more minutes, then left.
Time for more fact gathering.
I exited my body and followed him down several halls to what used to be an open nurse’s station. Surveillance equipment lined the built-in counters. The area resembled everything else I’d seen of the underground facility so far. Faded, peeling paint. Flickering or inoperable light fixtures. Chipped linoleum tiles. This place had to be an abandoned research facility from another era. The government had probably decommissioned it after Sarkis’s funding dried up over three decades ago after the Vietnam war. He’d been lurking here like the cockroach he was, torturing people in the name of science, ever since.

Sarkis stood behind three men in ratty office chairs, watching several monitors each. Most of the rooms on the monitors contained test equipment. Two held animals in cages and my heart went out to the furry little bunnies, mice, rats, and monkeys. Other monitors showed video feeds from rooms like mine with a banner of patient vital readings running along the right side. I sidled in and peeked over their shoulders. Three other rooms held occupants besides my mother and me. Two were middle-aged men sporting shackles connecting their ankles and a chain connecting one shackle to a huge eye bolt in the wall. Both men were unkempt—ZZ Top beards, dirty clothing, wild hair. One man paced the floor, waving his arms in the air and shouting something that the muted speaker spared me from hearing. The other man crouched in a corner picking at his toenails. Gross.

The third room held a young woman lying on a bed. The peeling yellowed label stuck to the top of the monitor read “Subject 899.” A tube protruded from her mouth. Still more tubes snaked out from under the dingy white sheets covering her. Wires, similar to the ones on my body, connected her to monitoring equipment around her bed, and an IV pole with a bag of clear liquid loomed over her. Unlike my IV setup, hers contained no drug pump. The vital readouts on the side of the screen showed her body functioning within acceptable limits, but the red-bordered box that showed her brain function held a flat line.

Keeping her alive while brain dead must mean they only needed her physical body, not her mind. So she must be a werewolf or other paranormal whose condition stemmed from DNA, virus, or other tissue-related origins. That would be me on that bed if my telekinesis wasn’t brain based. That might still be me on that bed if Sarkis took the same route he had with Aunt Tibby.

Sarkis put a hand on the shoulder of the man in front of the monitor of my room.

“Be extra vigilant with subject 928. We already have bidders on that technology if we can break it this time,” Sarkis said. “The payout looks to be three to four times anything else we’ve sold.”

Sure enough, a label proclaiming me “Subject 928” graced the top of my monitor. If the brain-dead woman was 899, did that mean they numbered subjects sequentially? The thought of Sarkis capturing and most likely killing over 900 people sizzled hot grease spatters of anger across my ghostly body. The man watching my monitor rubbed the back of his neck and looked behind him.

Clark arrived at the monitoring station. He jerked a chart from the recessed file bucket in the counter and flipped it open.

“And we could use the funds right now,” he said. “The equipment is falling apart faster than I can keep it patched. Subject 928’s room is a prime example. The machinery is fragile enough without her kind of electrical interference.”

His shoulders tensed as he read the file, and his head rose slowly. Sarkis glared at him. The other three men busied themselves, looking anywhere but at Sarkis or Clark.

“Sir,” Clark added. His body stilled with even his breathing suspended.

Sarkis held his gaze an uncomfortable moment more, then nodded and looked away. Clark resumed breathing and the ramrod posture of the other three men relaxed.

I noted the room numbers on the monitors showing the two male subjects and backtracked down the hall. After a few minutes of roaming, I had the gist of the numbering scheme and found my mom’s room, then went to the first room at the other end of the hallway. I walked through the door to find the pacing man from the first monitor. He ranted in French, waving his arms and punching at the air.

“Hey,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

He kept ranting.

“Hey, buddy,” I shouted, and he stopped mid-rant with one hand in the air.

He checked the speaker in the ceiling, and then scanned the room.

“Hello? Who’s there?” His voice and accent reminded me of Pepé Le Pew, and I fought a stress giggle. I wondered for the hundredth time if my telekinesis was responsible for my oddball thoughts at tense moments. I figured it was either that or a coping mechanism from growing up with my dad.

“I’m here,” I said. “On the other side of the door.”

He walked toward the door as far as the chain on his leg shackle would allow.

“You sound like you’re in the room.”

“It’s a weird, old building.”

He moved his head, trying to pinpoint the sound and ended with his green-gold eyes staring right at me as if he could see me. Weirded out, I moved to the left out of his line of sight.

“Are you real?” he asked.

“I’m real, and I’m going to get out of here. If I let you out when I escape are you going to hurt me?”

He sniffed the air and tried again to pinpoint my location.

“Who are you?”

“You don’t need to know who I am. I don’t want to date you. I just feel bad about leaving you here to rot. But I also don’t want my face eaten off, my neck bitten, or to spontaneously combust when and if I open the door.”

“Eaten off?”

“Oh good grief. Never mind,” I said as I sieved back through the door.

“No. Wait.” The chains rattled then clunked as he pulled them taught. “I’m sorry. I will not hurt you.”

I poked my head back through the door. The look of terror and abandonment on his face made me feel like a colossal turd.

“So why are you here?” I asked. Knowing what I was letting loose seemed like a good idea.

“Why am I—”

“Do you always answer a question with a question?” I stepped the rest of the way through the door and put my hands on my hips. He couldn’t see it, but I was pretty sure it carried through to my voice.

“I’m sorry.” His head was doing that homing-in thing again, trying to pinpoint my whereabouts.

“Stop moving your head around. It’s giving me the creeps.”

I knew instantly when I said that, it was a mistake. He jumped back almost tripping on his chain.

“You can see me,” he said. “You are in here. What are you?”

“I asked you first.”

“I . . . I . . .” He pushed his shoulders up and his back straightened. “I am a were-panther.”

“No shit? You guys come in panther, too?”

“No shit,” he said, but with his accent, it came out more like “No sheet.”

“Why don’t you just shift and kick these guys’ butts?”

He shook his foot making the chain rattle.

“There is silver in the chains. I cannot shift while it poisons me.”

“Oh, the old silver and werewolf thing is true huh?”

He made a face like he’d just eaten a stink bug.

“Were-panther. I am not a dog.”

“Sorry. So if I open the door and spring the leg shackles, will you turn furry?” The last thing I needed was to be running from heartless mercenaries, a lunatic scientist, and a were-panther with my traumatized mom in tow.

“Probably so, but you are not the one I will harm.” The lost puppy look from a moment ago morphed into an expression so malevolent, I took a step back.

“I’ll have my mom with me, too. Don’t hurt her either.”

“Your mother?”

“Ah ah. That’s another question.”

He raised his hand like a boy scout.

“You have my word.”

The camera in the corner whirred to focus on him.

“Put your hand down. They’ll see you.”

He put his hand down and glared at the camera.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Luke. And what is yours?”

“Marlee.” I said it before I thought. When was I going to learn not to share information? Sharing with Mike Williams is what I seriously suspected got me into this mess in the first place. I really stunk at subterfuge.
Cross off international spy on my career goals.

“When will you unlock the door?”

“I don’t know.” I had to devise a solid plan first. No more half-cocked, ready-fire-aim fiascos, which pretty much dominated my life as of late. “Soon. Just be ready.”

“Marlee. You did not tell me what you are.”

“That’s because I don’t really know.” To heck with confession being good for a person. Saying that out loud wound up being more depressing than just thinking it.

I left Luke’s room and found the two caged animal rooms on my way to the toe-picker guy’s room. I sieved through his door, but as soon as I got a close-up look at him, I wanted to cry. He looked normal on the monitor, but in person, the damage showed. The front part of his head had hair, but the back of his head was bald and bulged in misshapen masses like they’d taken the back of his skull off and not put it back on properly. He still sat in the corner with his knees up. No longer picking his toes, he now sucked on his left knee. Not a good sign.

“Hello?” I got no reply.

“Hello?” I said louder.

He flinched but didn’t stop sucking.

“Do you want to get out of here?” I asked.

No response. Crud.

Horse walked in the room and nudged me, scaring me half to death—or wherever I’d go if I died in this form.

“What?” I asked Horse.

He shook his head.

“You telling me this guy is a no?”

He shook his head again and tapped his hoof on the floor next to my cord—which was almost clear.

“Crud. Why didn’t you tell me?”

He pushed me toward the door, but I was already heading there.

I made it to my body just as my cord faded out of view. At the edge of the bed, I leaned over my body to lay into it when the cord fizzled into oblivion. Vertigo hit. My astral body floated off the floor and away from the bed. Frantic, I grabbed for the sheets, but my hand went through them and the bed. Horse reared up behind me as I floated halfway to the ceiling. As his hooves came down, they struck my back and pushed me into my body like a child hitting a runaway helium balloon. I slammed into my body, but it didn’t “snap” right in immediately as it had every time before. I lay in what felt like a meat shell for a full thirty seconds before my soul settled and slowly clicked into place.

My energy level was so low, I couldn’t control the monitors, and alarms sounded, their shrill wails echoing painfully against the concrete walls. Moments later, footsteps pounded to the door, the keypad beeped and Clark and another man rushed in.

“She’s crashing again,” Clark shouted.

Someone shut the alarms off. Clark leaned over me to open my left eye, leaning his hip against my hand. He gasped before I realized my body’s survival instinct had kicked in. The strange coldness enveloped my head as it had in the quad the night I’d met Rune, but this time, instead of pulling power through the air into my head, the cold snaked down my body through my arm, drawing power from where Clark touched my eye and my hand. His eyes bulged and his body shook.

“Jenkins, what’s wrong?” the other man asked. When he got no reply, he touched Clark and added to the human circuit. His power now flowed through Clark and into me. My body heated, and Zamora’s spot on my chest burned with raw power. After a few seconds, the transfer stopped and both men dropped to the ground.

A walkie-talkie crackled to life.

“Murphy, what the hell’s going on in there?”

Crap. Crap. Crap.
There went all my hopes of creating the perfect plan to get out of here. They had to know I was aware now. That probably meant different medicine or a brain modification.

I concentrated on the camera and flipped it around to wedge the lens against the wall. After tearing the wires off all the sticky pads connected to me, I jumped out of the bed and checked the two men on the floor. Relief washed through me at the feel of their weak but existent pulses.