Mind Game (2 page)

Dahlia turned her head and looked directly at the doctor through the one-way glass. “Why does that man stare at us all the time? What does he want?” She sounded more adult than child.

“He wants to see if you can do anything special,” the nurse answered.

“I don’t like him.”

“You don’t have to like him, Dahlia. You just have to show him what you can do. You know you have all sorts of wonderful tricks you can do.”

“It hurts when I do them.”

“Where does it hurt?” The nurse glanced at the glass too, a small frown beginning to form.

“In my head. It hurts all the time in my head and I can’t make it go away. Lily and Flame make it go away.”

“Just do something for the doctor and you can spend all evening with Lily.”

Dahlia sat silent for a moment, still rocking, her fingers curled tightly in the blanket. Behind the one-way glass, Dr. Whitney sucked in his breath and scribbled across the page of his notebook hastily, intrigued by the child’s demeanor. She seemed to be weighing the advantages and disadvantages and making a judgment call. Finally she nodded, as if bestowing a great favor on the nurse.

Without further argument, Dahlia placed her tiny hand over one ball and began to make small circles above it. Dr. Whitney leaned close to the glass to study the lines of concentration on her face. The ball began to spin on the floor then rose beneath her palm. She moved the ball along her index finger, keeping it spinning a few inches above the floor in an amazing display of her phenomenal ability to control it with her mind. A second sphere joined the first in the air beneath her hand, both balls spinning madly like tops. The task appeared almost effortless. Dahlia seemed to be concentrating, but not wholly. She glanced at the nurse and then at the glass, looking nearly bored. She held the balls spinning in the air for a minute or two.

Abruptly she let her hand fall, clapping both hands against her head, pressing her palms tightly against her temples. The balls fell to the ground. Her face was pale, white lines around her mouth.

Dr. Whitney swore softly and flicked a second switch. “Have her do it again. This time with as many balls as she can handle. I want the action sustained this time so I can time her.”

“She can’t, Doctor, she’s in pain,” Milly protested. “We have to take her to Lily. It’s the only thing that will help her.”

“She’s only saying that so she can get her way. How could Lily or Iris take her pain away? That’s just ridiculous, they’re children. If she wants to see Lily she can repeat the experiment and try a little harder.”

There was a small silence. The little girl’s face darkened. Her eyes grew pitch-black. She stared fiercely at the glass. “He’s a bad man,” she told the nurse. “A very bad man.” The glass began to fracture into a fine spider’s web. There were at least ten balls of varying size on the floor near the child. All of them began to spin madly in the air before slamming again and again against the window. Glass fragments broke off and rained onto the floor. Chips flew wildly in the air, until it appeared to be snowing glass.

The nurse screamed and ran from the small room, slamming the door behind her. The walls swelled outward with the terrible rage on the child’s face. The door rocked on its hinges. Flames raced up the wall, circled the doorjamb, bright crackling orange and red, spreading like a storm. Everything that could move was picked up from the floor and spun as if in the center of a tornado.

Through it all, Whitney stood watching, mesmerized by the power of her rage. He didn’t even move when the glass cut his face and blood ran down into the collar of his immaculate shirt.

Dr. Lily Whitney-Miller snapped off the video and turned to face the small group of men who had been watching the tape with the same mesmerized enthrallment the doctor in the film had exhibited. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was always hard to watch her father behaving in such a monstrous fashion. No matter how often she viewed the tapes of his work, she could not equate that man with the one who had been so loving to her. “That, gentlemen, was Dahlia at age four,” she announced. “She would be a couple of years younger than me now, and she’s the one I believe I’ve located.”

There was an awed silence. “She was that powerful at the age of four? A four-year-old child?” Captain Ryland Miller put his arm around his wife to comfort her, knowing how she felt when she delved into the experiments her father had performed. He stared at the picture of the black-haired child on the screen. “What else do you have on her, Lily?”

“I’ve found more tapes. These are of a young woman being given advanced training as some kind of field operative. I’m convinced it’s Dahlia. My father’s code is different in these books, and the subject under training is referred to as
Novelty White
. I didn’t understand it at first, but my father called each of the missing girls he experimented on by the name of a flower. Dahlia is often referred to as a novelty. I think he interchanges the name
Dahlia
with
Novelty
in these experiments. These tapes cover preteen and teen years. She’s an exceptional young woman, high IQ, very talented, tremendous psychic ability, but the tapes are difficult to watch because she is wide open to assault from the outside world and no one has taught her how to protect herself.”

“How could she possibly exist in the outside world without being taught shields?” one of the men sitting in the shadows asked. Lily turned her head to look at him, sighing as she did so. Nicolas Trevane always seemed to be in the shadows, and he was one of the GhostWalkers who made her nervous. He sat in such stillness he seemed to blend in with his surroundings, yet when he went into action, he exploded, moving so fast he seemed to blur. For part of his childhood he was raised on a reservation with his father’s people, and then he spent ten years in Japan with his mother’s relatives. His face never seemed to give anything away. His black eyes were flat and cold and frightened her almost as much as the fact that he was a sniper, a renowned marksman capable of the most deadly and secret of missions.

Lily bowed her head to avoid looking into his icy eyes. “I don’t know, Nico. I have fewer answers now than I did a few months ago. I’m still having trouble making myself understand how my father could have experimented on children and then again on all of you. As for this poor girl, this child he virtually tortured, if I’m reading these notes correctly, she was eventually trained as a government operative, and I think it’s possible they’re still using her.”

“That’s not possible, Lily,” Ryland objected. “You saw what happened to us when we tried to operate without an anchor. You said your father had tried using pulses of electricity on all of you. You know the results of that. Brain bleeds, acute pain. Strokes. It just isn’t possible. She’d go insane. The experiment Dr. Whitney conducted opened all our brains, leaving us without barriers or our natural filters.

We’re grown men, already trained, yet you’re talking about a child trying to cope with impossible demands.”

“It should have driven her over the edge,” Lily agreed. She held up the notebook. “I’ve discovered a private sanitarium in Louisiana that the Whitney Trust owns. It is run by the Sisters of Mercy. And it has one patient—a young woman.” She looked at her husband. “Her name is Dahlia Le Blanc.”

“You aren’t going to tell me your father bought out a religious organization,” Raoul “Gator” Fontenot protested. He hastily crossed himself. “I won’t believe nuns could possibly be a part of Whitney’s cover-up.”

Lily smiled at him. “Actually, Gator, I think the nuns are fictitious, as is the sanitarium. I think it’s really a front to hide Dahlia from the world. As the sole director of all the trusts, I was able to dig fairly deep and it seems she’s really the only patient, and aside from the Trust picking up all her bills, she has a sizable trust in her own name with regular deposits. The deposits coincide with entries seemingly indicating my father had become suspicious she was being used as an operative for the United States government. Apparently he allowed her to be trained and then when he realized it was too difficult for her, he moved her to the sanitarium and, as always, when things went wrong, he left her without following up.” There was an edge of bitterness to her voice. “I think my father tried to create a safe place for her there, just as he created this house for me.”

Ryland bent his head to Lily’s, his chin rubbing the top of her sable hair. “Your father was a brilliant man, Lily. He had to learn about love, it wasn’t shown to him as a child.” It was a refrain he reminded her of often since it had come to light that not only had Dr. Whitney experimented on Lily, removing the filters from her brain in order to enhance psychic ability, she wasn’t his biological child, as he’d led her to believe, but one of many children he’d “bought” from foreign orphanages.

There was another silence. Tucker Addison whistled softly. He was a tall, stocky man with dark skin, brown eyes, and an engaging smile. “You did it, Lily. You actually found her. And she’s a GhostWalker like all of us.”

“Before we get too excited, I think you should watch some of the other training tapes I found. Each of these is labeled
Novelty
.” She signaled to her husband to press Play on the machine to start the video running.

Lily found herself holding her breath. She was certain the child Novelty and Dahlia were one and the same. “According to the records, Novelty is eight years old here.” The child’s hair was thick and as black as a raven’s wing. She wore it in a clumsy braid that hung to her waist in a thick rope. Her face was delicate, matching the rest of her, and the thick hair seemed to overpower her. “I’m certain this is the same child. Look at her face. Her eyes are the same.” Lily felt the child was hiding from the world behind the mass of silken strands. She looked exotic, her origins Asian. Like all the missing girls, Dr. Whitney had adopted her from a foreign country and brought her to his laboratory to enhance her natural psychic abilities.

In the video, the little girl was on a balance beam. She didn’t walk carefully. She didn’t even look down. She ran across it as if it was a wide sidewalk instead of a narrow piece of wood. She didn’t hesitate at the end of the beam, but did a flip off of it, landing on her feet, still running without breaking stride. She was far too small to leap up and catch the bars over her head, but she didn’t seem to notice. She launched herself skyward, her hands outstretched, her small body tucked as she connected with the bars and swung over them with ease.

A collective gasp told Lily the men were all watching. She let the tape play through. All the while the little girl performed amazing skills. At times the child laughed aloud, bringing home to them the fact that she was alone in the room with only the cameras catching her incredible performance. Lily waited for the end of the tape and the reaction it would bring. As many times as she viewed it, she could not believe what she was seeing.

The child went up and over a two-story-high cargo net and then raced across the floor toward the last obstacle. A cable stretched across the length of the room, sagging in the middle, several feet above ground level. Novelty stared at the cable as she ran, concentration apparent on her face. The cable began to stiffen and by the time she leapt onto the steel wire, it was woven into a thick rope, with no sag whatsoever in the middle, allowing her to run lightly across it to the end and jump off laughing.

There was another silence when Ryland switched off the tape. “Can any of you do that?”

The men shook their heads. “How did she do it?”

“She has to be manipulating energy. We all do it to a much smaller extent,” Lily said. “She’s able to take it a step further and at little expense to herself. I’m willing to bet that she’s generating an antigravitational field to levitate the cable. It could be done by psychokinetically converting the underside of the cable into a superconductor, and applying the Li-Podkletnov technique of spinning the nuclei in the atoms of the underside to generate a sufficiently powerful antigrav field to lift it. And that would explain how she just danced across it
as if she were floating!
” Lily turned to look at the men, her eyes alight with excitement. “She
was
floating! Her own weight was reduced to almost nothing by the same antigrav field.”

“Lily.” Ryland shook his head. “You’re doing it again. Try speaking normal English.”

“I’m sorry. I get carried away when I’m excited,” Lily admitted. “It’s just so incredible. I’ve been scouring the research literature, and what’s amazing to me is that she’s doing with her mind what a couple of scientists are only beginning to be able to do in labs: generate antigravity. Only she does it much better, and she seems to be able to generate antigravity whenever she likes. She turns it on and off in a way that the scientists aren’t even close to at this point. Plus scientists, and I as well, would give anything to know how she is doing it at room temperature. They currently need to lower the temperature to several
hundred
degrees below zero in order to create their superconductors.”

“Antigravity?” Gator echoed, “isn’t that just a little far-fetched?”

“And what we do isn’t?” Nicolas asked.

“Well, actually I thought it was impossible at first, too,” Lily conceded. “But if, like me, you’ve watched these tapes several hundred times, you begin to notice little details. Here, let’s rewind it to where she’s crossing the cable. Now let’s watch it in slow motion. See? Right there when the cable starts to straighten out?” She touched the screen to indicate where they should look. “Look here, at the ceiling above the cable—see that electrical wire connecting the two overhead lights? Look, it’s moved up, about half an inch! Do you see that? And then it falls back right when Dahlia jumps off the other end of the cable. That’s
exactly
what you’d expect to see if there was an antigrav field extending upward from the cable.”

Lily pointed to the image of the young girl frozen on the screen. “Look at her, she’s laughing, not grabbing her head in pain.” She pushed in another tape. “In this one, she moves locks so fast, at first I thought a machine had to be involved.” The tape showed a huge vault with a complex lock system. The bolts slid so fast, the tumblers spun and clicked as if a large pattern was predetermined. The camera had focused completely on the heavy door so that it wasn’t until they heard a child’s laughter as the door swung open that they even realized Dahlia was there, opening locks with her mind.