Mind Game (3 page)

Lily regarded the men. “Isn’t that incredible? She never even touched the vault. I considered a few theories—clairaudition for one, but I just couldn’t account for the sheer
speed
with which she opened the vault. Finally it hit me. She was directly intuiting and taking pleasure in the state of lowest entropy in the tumbler-lever system of the vault!”

Lily looked so triumphant Ryland hated to crush her joy. “Sweetheart, I’m so excited for you. Really, I am. It’s just that I didn’t understand a damn thing you said.” He looked around the room with a raised eyebrow. The other men shook their heads.

She tapped her finger on the table, frowning. “All right, let’s see if I can come up with a way to explain it to you. You know those movies where the burglars put their stethoscope up against the safe as they’re turning the dial?”

“Sure,” Gator said. “I watch that stuff all the time. They’re listening for the tumblers to click into place.”

“Not exactly, Gator,” Lily corrected. “They’re actually listening for a
drop
in the amount of sound. You’re hearing clicking with each number you pass, and then you hear just a little
less
clicking when one of the tumblers has fallen into place. That’s why I first thought of clairaudition, which as you know, is like clairvoyance, seeing things at a distance in your mind, but this would be hearing things at a distance in your mind.”

“But you don’t think that’s what she’s doing?” Nicolas asked.

Lily shook her head. “No, I had to throw that theory out. It doesn’t explain her incredible speed. Plus, I found out that the vault in the videotape—like most safes made since the 1960s—has all kinds of safeguards like nylon tumblers and sound baffles that make them pretty much impenetrable from lock-picking of this sort.”

“So Dahlia doesn’t do it through sound,” Nicolas said.

“No, she doesn’t,” Lily agreed. “I was stumped for a while. But in the middle of the night a much simpler explanation occurred to me; she literally ‘feels’ each lever falling into place. But there’s more. I think she has an emotional distaste for entropy in systems that gives her speed.”

“You’ve lost me again, Lily,” Ryland said.

“Sorry. The second law of thermodynamics says that the amount of entropy, or disorder, in the universe, tends to increase unless it is prevented from doing so. You can see the second law in action everywhere. A vase breaks into pieces. You never see a bunch of pieces assemble themselves into a vase. Left to itself, a house always gets dustier, never cleaner. And tumblers, because they’re spring-loaded, always spring
out
of place, not into place, when left to themselves. That’s the second law of thermodynamics in action—disorder keeps increasing if things are left to themselves. The closest I can figure it is that Dahlia is a part of nature that runs
counter
to the second law. In other words, she loves order and despises entropy.”

“That’s true of a lot of people. Rosa is a nut about the house being tidy,” Gator said, referring to their housekeeper. “And her kitchen has to be just so. We don’t dare move anything around.”

Lily nodded. “That’s true, but with Dahlia it runs much deeper. Because she’s psychic, she actually takes pleasure when she intuits the tumblers falling into place. It’s because she’s doing her lock-picking at the level of feeling and intuition, motivated by pleasure—that gives her speed. Think of how quickly we take our hand off a hot stove when we start to feel pain, or how the knee jerks up when you hit it with a hammer. These are reflexive responses; they don’t involve any thinking, which is a good thing for that hot hand, because thinking is much slower.”

“I can open small locks,” Ryland admitted. He glanced at Nicolas. “You can too. But I admit, I’m definitely thinking about it. I have to concentrate.”

“And neither of us can open locks on that scale or at that speed,” Nicolas commented. His gaze remained riveted to the screen. “She’s amazing.”

“I’d have to agree, Nico,” Lily said. “So as near as I can tell, she’s psychokinetically moving the tumblers into place in the same kind of reflexive fashion. It doesn’t get slowed down by her thinking mind; she’s getting
instantly
rewarded by a jolt of pleasure from her nervous system every time she moves one of the tumblers into place. And when all the tumblers are in place . . . well, that’s why she laughed with such exuberance when the door swung open. That was the real rush for her.” She swallowed and looked away from them. “I’m that same way with mathematical patterns. My mind continually has to work on them, and I get a rush when the patterns all click into place.”

Nicolas whistled softly. “I can see why the government would want her working for them.”

Lily stiffened. “She’s still a child who deserved a childhood. She should have been playing with toys.”

Nicolas turned his head slowly, looking at her with his cold, black eyes. “That’s exactly what she appears to be doing, Lily. Playing with toys. You’re angry with your father and rightly so. But he tried to do for this child what he did for you. Your brain had to work on mathematical problems and patterns all the time; this girl required a different type of work, but she obviously needed it just as much. Why wasn’t she adopted out?” His voice was flat, almost a monotone, but it carried weight and authority. He never raised his voice, but he was always heard.

Lily repressed a shiver. “Maybe I’m too close to the problem,” she agreed. “And you very well could be right. She does seem to be able to do all this without pain. I’d like to know why. Even now, with all the work I’ve done, the exercises to make myself stronger, I still get violent headaches if I use telepathy too much.”

“But maybe you weren’t a natural telepath. You have other talents that are amazing. When I use telepathy, it doesn’t bother me at all,” Nicolas said.

“Lily, you said the tapes of the child were difficult to watch,” Tucker pointed out, “but she seems fine in that one.”

Lily nodded. “The tapes involving operative training were difficult for me to watch. The one you’re about to see really covers both her tremendous skills and how dangerous she can be—and the cost of her gifts.”

The hallway depicted on the screen was very narrow, an obvious maze set up to represent various rooms in a house. A dozen other rooms were seen as smaller images along the left side of the screen. A small, black-haired woman came into view, stalking silently along the wall. She took several steps into the maze and stopped. She seemed to be listening or concentrating internally. The watchers could see a large man crouched behind a curtain in one of the rooms and a second man in the beams along the ceiling waiting in ambush almost directly above the first man.

The woman was tiny, her black hair straight and shiny, swept back in a careless ponytail. She wore dark clothes and moved with graceful, fluid, stealthy steps. When she stilled, she seemed to become part of the shadows, a vague, blurred image, so slight as to be a part of the wall. The watchers blinked several times to keep her in focus.

“She’s able to blur her image enough to trick anyone watching,” Ryland said in awe. “That would be useful for us to learn.”

“The focus and concentration required is incredible,” Lily pointed out. “But it’s costing her. She’s rubbed her temples twice, and if you look closely at her face, she’s already sweating. She obviously can feel the emotions of those waiting to attack her. I observed her training in martial arts. She was reading the mind of her opponent, anticipating everything he did before he did it. She utilized her psychic abilities as well as her physical ones.”

“She’s not armed,” Nicolas pointed out.

“No, but she doesn’t need to be,” Lily assured.

They watched the woman called Novelty continue unerringly to the right room, not even bothering to check the various empty rooms between her and the two men waiting to ambush her. She trusted her instincts and her highly evolved psychic senses.

“She’s so damned small,” Gator said. “She looks like a child. She can’t weigh even a hundred pounds.”

“Maybe,” said Lily, “but watch her. She’s lethal.”

The woman moved with confidence until she was against the wall nearest where one man crouched behind the curtains covering the opening to a closet. “She’s laying her hand against the wall, almost as if she’s feeling for something,” Lily said. “Energy perhaps? Could she be that sensitive? Could a human being’s energy pass through the wall in sufficient force to allow her to feel his presence, or is she reading his thoughts?”

Novelty stepped back from the wall in total silence, but remained staring at it for several minutes, slowly sweeping her gaze upward as if she could see the ceiling in the other room as well. The walls slowly blackened. Smoke poured into the hall. Angry flames leapt through the wall to the inside of the room and raced up toward the ceiling, reaching hungrily for both men. Almost immediately the entire room was engulfed in flames, which triggered a sprinkler system. It was the only thing that saved the two ambushers from a terrible death.

“She generates heat,” Ian McGillicuddy said. He was a giant of a man, with wide shoulders and a heavy muscular body. His dark brown eyes were fixed on the screen, watching the flames in awe. “I wouldn’t mind that particular gift.”

“Or curse,” Nicolas interjected.

Ian nodded. “Or curse,” he agreed.

The young woman slipped from the house and moved back into the trees, pressing both hands to her head. She sank to her knees, fell backward, and went immediately into a violent seizure. The cameras remained focused on her as blood trickled from her mouth. In several seconds she lay unmoving on the ground.

Ryland swore and turned away. His gaze collided with Nicolas’s. They stared at one another for a long moment of understanding.

Lily paused the tape, leaving the distressing picture of the woman lying in a heap on the ground. “What’s causing this pain? I’ve checked through my father’s notes and viewed the other training tapes. Every tape where she’s left completely alone, she’s able to perform all sorts of incredible and nearly unbelievable feats, but if there is a human being close by, she suffers tremendous pain and often passes out.”

“Emotions swamping her?” Gator guessed. “With no anchor she’s left wide open to all the emotions. The men in the room would have been scared and angry and feeling betrayed by their handlers. I would imagine they didn’t like being put in the position of nearly being roasted alive.”

“Maybe,” Lily mused, “but I think it’s more complicated than what we go through. I’m not certain she reads emotions, or at least not how most of us do.”

Nicolas stared at the screen for a long time, studying the image of the unconscious woman. “She didn’t sense the presence of her adversaries in the way we do, did she? It isn’t emotions, it’s something else.”

“I think it could be energy,” Lily said. “My father didn’t understand about anchors, not really. When he first performed the experiment on all of us children, he thought we just had close friendships. He didn’t understand that some of us trapped the overload of emotion away from the others, allowing them to function. Novelty, or Dahlia, is
not
an anchor—she needs one in order to function without pain. If you notice, in the majority of the training tapes, she’s alone. They built a home for her, much like my home was built for me, and she was shielded from people. Dr. Whitney believed she could read minds in the same way many of us can, and he thought he was shielding her from emotions.”

“You’re getting all this from his notes?” Ryland asked. “How dangerous does he say she is?”

Lily shrugged. “He talked about the necessity of removing her from society several times, yet he continued to allow this training to take place. I studied the tapes as he must have, and she doesn’t attack unless she believes she is forced to defend herself. So certainly, during her teenage years, she’s gained some semblance of control over her abilities.”

Lily put on the remaining tapes, one after the other. She had watched them already, the heartbreaking scenes of the woman she was certain was the missing Dahlia doing martial arts, anticipating every move before it was made, defeating every opponent in spite of her small size and lack of weight, but inevitably collapsing in a heap of muscle spasms, with a retching stomach and blood trickling from her mouth and even her ears at times. She never cried out; she merely rocked back and forth, pressing her hands to her head before her ultimate collapse. The tapes depicted training that could possibly be used for undercover work, and each time the woman called Novelty ended up the same way, curled up in a ball in the fetal position.

Watching it made Lily sick. Once her father discovered Dahlia couldn’t work under the conditions they were expecting, he should have pulled her from the training immediately. Unfortunately, she always performed the given task before she collapsed. Remembering the earlier tapes of the stubborn and vengeful child in the laboratory, Lily wondered what they held over her head to get her to work for them when she was so clearly strong-willed enough to refuse.

Instead of watching the tapes she watched the reactions of the men. She wanted to send the most sympathetic after Dahlia. The woman had suffered trauma for years. She needed the safety of the Whitney home, with the protection of the thick walls and a compassionate and kind-hearted staff, all of whom had natural barriers so they couldn’t project emotions to the GhostWalker team. Her father had provided the safe house for her, and she had, in turn, chosen to share it with the men her father had experimented on.

Lily looked at their faces and for the first time felt the urge to laugh. Why had she thought she’d be able to read them? They hid their thoughts behind expressionless masks. They were well prepared by the military, each of them receiving special training long before they were ever recruited for duty in the GhostWalker squad.

She waited until the last tape had been played and the impact on the men was the most profound. Dahlia Le Blanc was the kind of woman most men would want to protect. Very small, very slight, with enormous sad eyes and flawless skin. She looked like a doll with her skin and eyes and wealth of jet-black hair. Lily knew Dahlia needed help, a tremendous amount of help, to adjust to living in the world again. She was determined to give Dahlia everything Dr. Whitney had failed to provide. A home, a sanctuary, people she could call family and count on. It wouldn’t be easy to convince Dahlia to come back to the very place where the original damage had been done to her.