Legacy (31 page)

Trevor pulled me close.
Do you want to get some sleep? I’ll shield your dreams. I have to stay awake, anyway.

I tucked my head against his neck, feeling his warmth against me, strong and comforting.
Thanks. If you wake me in a little while, I’ll take a turn and keep you from ripping the van apart.

He kissed my hair.
Deal.

I tried to settle in to sleep, but Ann’s anguish from the next bench plucked at me, keeping me awake. Her thoughts were so close—loud, raw, and painful.

Trevor felt my distress.
Need me to send you calming thoughts?

My tired smile didn’t reach my eyes.
Thanks, but it’s no use
.

“Ann? Can you shield, please?” Trevor asked her quietly.

I felt the single tear slide down her cheek. Her turbulent emotions crystallized in crimson shards.
Maddie, it’s YOUR fault! You didn’t take down Isaiah fast enough! You should be the one lying here, not Zack! Not my Zack!

Trevor’s thoughts hardened and he dropped the shield he’d been keeping around our minds.
You don’t know what you’re talking about, Ann
.
I know you’re upset right now, but do NOT take it out on Maddie. Do you know why Zack is still alive at all?

The sparks burned Isaiah.

I popped the shield back around Trevor and me
. It’s okay, Trevor. She doesn’t need to know.

She does.
He pulled down the shield. My jaw dropped—since when could Trevor control a shield that
I
had put up around us? Trevor sent Ann the mental play-by-play of the seconds in which I distracted and then fried Isaiah before he could finish delivering the killing blast to Zack’s brain.

Ugh. I didn’t want to re-live it. I didn’t want Ann’s shock rolling through my mind. I was so tired of death. I’d killed six people now.
Maybe after the tenth I’d get a free pizza.
I had a heck of a body count for someone who was still too young to even buy beer.

I closed my eyes. I didn’t feel guilty about Isaiah’s death. He’d harmed so many people, and he’d been about to kill Zack. I think the military or the police had a term for something like that—a “clean kill.”

I don’t really feel clean, though.

Ann churned with confusion. She didn’t know how to respond to the images Trevor had sent her. She’d been thinking some pretty cold things at me, but I knew how she felt—both from experience and from her overflowing thoughts. And it wasn’t as though I was the poster child for anger management, after all. When Zack woke up, she’d feel better and she’d probably apologize.

If he woke up.

The thought chilled my gut. We still didn’t know what was causing this coma-state in G-positives. Trevor’s had occurred when he’d stopped bullets while half-drugged. Mine had happened when I had been attacked by Isaiah—like Zack—and I’d been unconscious for nine days.

Zack might be out for a while.

What if the damage he’d suffered was worse than what I’d experienced? Why did this happen to G-positives?

Now Ann felt even worse—we’d added guilt into the mix. If anything, her emotions were even stronger now, making it even harder for her to concentrate on shielding.

So much for sleeping.

At this moment, I just wanted to be somewhere peaceful and quiet with Trevor, possibly sitting lakeside and feeding each other grapes, or lying on a beach in Aruba. Maybe we needed to take a vacation.

Trevor gave me a tender smile as he pulled a shield around us.
A vacation sounds great. Something like this?
He pictured us under the grass umbrella in our dream-spot, floating grapes to one another. It didn’t block out the thoughts coming from Ann, but it helped. I closed my eyes and snuggled closer to Trevor.

Yeah, that seems perfect.
Two sets of arms tightened around me. In Trevor’s double-embrace, I felt so safe, like everything would work out in the end. Coleman and the other charms would get the videos suppressed. Zack would wake up. We’d find the person who’d been leaking intel to Isaiah. Everything would go back to normal—normal by Ganzfield standards, at least.

With Isaiah gone, all the new arrivals could return home. Trevor and I could go to college next fall. Maybe we’d even stay at that creepy house over in Hanover and go to Dartmouth.

Freedom. Choices. Home.

Real beds—no sleeping bags. A real shower, not that pathetic little trickly one in the trailer we’d been using for the past few weeks. I drifted to sleep in the anticipation of simple pleasures.

“You weren’t kidding about how strong he was.” Zack rubbed his forehead with a shaky hand.

I laughed. “Are you actually here, or is this a dream?” The fact that I was speaking out loud was a pretty big tip-off, though. We sat in Williamson’s office at Ganzfield. I was behind his desk—in Williamson’s chair—a place I
never
sat when Williamson himself was on the property.

I thought about it. “Yeah, but not consciousness. I can only hear conscious minds. Ann can feel your mind right now, but it’s not responding to anything.”

“So, where is my consciousness?”

“It’s not a ‘thing’ that comes and goes from your head. It’s an activity level. Certain areas of the brain generate energy, and I sense it.”

“So, is something blocking or overloading those areas in my brain right now? Is that why I’m out?”

“It would have to be a part of the brain that was connected to both conscious brain activity
and
reacted to dodecamine. Oh. OH!”

I snapped my head up as I popped awake from the dream. Cool air hit the dampness on my face from where my forehead had rested against Trevor’s neck.

Striatum!
I thought, feeling my energy return with the thought, waking me like a jolt of caffeine.

Sounds like the name of an indie band.
Dormant feelings of jealousy stirred at the edges of Trevor’s mind. He didn’t like that I was dreaming about Zack.

My lips twitched at that.
Please! When I dream about Zack, we discuss neurology. When I dream about you—
I flashed a rather steamy image to him, one that involved satin sheets and far less clothing.

Trevor pinked up and closed his eyes with sigh.
Good answer. That wasn’t the real Zack, right? Ann was in our dream once.

I frowned and focused back to feel Zack’s mind.
No, he’s still out...I think.
I tilted my head over the edge of the seat to double-check. After all, with his shielding ability, Zack could’ve been wide-awake and considering charm-plans for world domination or something and I wouldn’t have been able to tell.

The dream remained clear in my memory. Maybe it was my subconscious mind figuring things out. Maybe it was a little push from a Higher Power. Heck, maybe it was Zack—unconscious and communicating through a strange new channel now open to him. The basal ganglion was the part of the brain affected by dodecamine. It was the “seat” of our special abilities, the way that speech was localized in Broca’s area. A part of the basal ganglion—the striatum—played a role in conscious thought, even in G-negatives. I seemed to remember that it was strongly affected by intense stimuli, too.

Ah, neurology.
Maybe all those hours that I’d spent reading Williamson’s books hadn’t been wasted.

Perhaps the problem was in the striatum. Something in that structure might be keeping Zack from regaining consciousness. Could it be some kind of seizure? Wouldn’t the healers feel it?

Hannah’s thoughts came to me from the back row; she wasn’t asleep. Instead, she was going over and over what she’d done with Zack, trying to figure out what she was missing.

Hannah?
I startled her. Some people never seemed to get used to me being in their heads.

After a recovering pause, Hannah framed a thought back to me.
Yes?

Did you notice anything out of order with Zack’s basal ganglia? Maybe in the striatum?

Ann’s attention pricked up at the mention of Zack’s name.

Hannah frowned in concentration, her thoughts methodically running through the assessments and healing she’d done with Zack
. I didn’t feel anything wrong in the striatum.

Can you check again?

“Why?” Her defensive hackles rose at the thought she might’ve missed something.

Would you believe I had a weird dream?

Grey skepticism filled her.
I guess there’s no harm in checking.
She climbed awkwardly around to the middle seat. Momentary lights from a passing car illuminated her and she turned her face away from the glare.

Ann watched with guarded desperation as Hannah placed her hands on either side of Zack’s head. She said a quick prayer before sliding deep into Zack’s brain, locating the part of the basal ganglia known as the striatum.

I frowned.
It’s too big
. I shielded my immature, size-doesn’t-matter comments before Ann could catch a whiff of them and get mad at me again.

“That’s normal in enhanced G-positives. It’s one of the effects of dodecamine.” Hannah’s voice was quiet, so as not to wake the sleeping people around us. She suddenly frowned and focused more intensely.
That’s strange.

“What’s strange?” Ann asked before I could even get the thought out.

“It feels…I don’t know. Wrong. Like there’s something there…I can’t really get…”

I tried to make mental contact with Zack, like I had when I’d gotten through his shield. I couldn’t feel anything, even when I attempted to use Hannah’s ability to guide me in.
Pathetic.
Why was I the only minder who couldn’t sense unconscious minds? Well, my mom couldn’t either, but she didn’t really count.
Ann?

What?
She still wasn’t sure how she felt toward me.

Can you focus in on the striatum?

Huh?

Like this.
I showed her the memory of focusing in when I zapped a charm’s Broca’s area.

I don’t know much about neurology
. Apparently, Williamson had reserved his special course of study for the brain-frying girl.

Gee, I felt so special.

Okay, but can you follow in on Hannah’s focus?

What are you trying to do?
Trevor frowned.

Wake Zack up.

Won’t he wake up again on his own?

I looked at Trevor.
I don’t know. Maybe. He might be wired differently from you and me, or the damage might be more severe. But if you could’ve had me awake for those nine days—

A rush of sympathetic understanding washed through our shared connection as he glanced at Ann.
Try it. Those were the worst days of my life.

Ann looked lost.
Just follow in to where Hannah’s looking,
I told her
. You ended up in one of our dreams. I think you might be able to do this, too.

I looked at Hannah.
Keep visualizing the striatum
.
We’re going to try something.

I felt Ann’s mind shift as she focused in. She seemed to flow into the parts of Zack’s mind, feeling tentatively through different sections. I’d never felt an unconscious mind before—it was like a dark cavern in which strange shadows flitted along the walls, only to vanish when I turned to look at them. There was no emotional texture, no sense of person-hood.

Weird.

Ann closed her eyes, concentrating more fully. The worst of her anxiety seemed to fall away as she felt the energy of Zack’s mind with her own.

There!

I sensed her connect to the striatum. I zoomed in more closely with her, feeling the exact place that seemed wrong. An electric, twitchy energy, like the killing energy that’d pulsed through me—and had pulsed through Isaiah—was contained within the structure of the striatum.

Hannah vaguely sensed that something wasn’t “normal,” but she had no idea what it was or how to fix it. Healers could call up the body’s own healing mechanisms, but this coma-like response to ability overload wasn’t normal. Did that make it something that the body didn’t know how to repair?

I frowned.
If I can pulse energy into someone’s mind, can it be drawn out the same way?

In response to that thought, Ann gave a sudden, mental “push” to the overloaded place we could sense in Zack’s brain.

And the world went purple-white with pain.

CHAPTER 14

I gripped my head and screamed but no sound came out.

Trevor’s arms tightened around me as the pain shot through his mind, as well. The van lurched as it bounced off the guard-rail and back across the two lanes of the highway. It scraped against the side of the overpass bridge and tipped sickeningly as we ran off the road. The seatbelt brutalized my side as Trevor fell against me. One of his invisible arms held me—he’d flung the other across Drew and Ellen, soccer-mom style. An agonizing crack in my chest competed with the molten-lava that poured through my head.