Secret Legacy (18 page)

Maddie took Jarred’s hand and was instantly filled with his unquestioning support. As one, they stepped behind Metting. Their new position created a circuit through Metting to Sarah, filling her sister with a swell of unity. Purpose. Strength.

“We’re here,”
she promised her twin.
“Whatever you need, Sarah. We’re here.”

She sensed her sister’s gratitude, then caught the image of her own and Jarred’s colors flickering around Sarah and Metting. Through Richard, they all sensed the council’s surprise at the power surge they’d generated. The old men’s curiosity. Then something so close to satisfaction, Maddie gritted her teeth.

Metting’s Brotherhood finally had the Temple Legacy willingly at their beck and call. Maddie could feel the council’s smugness. Sarah could, too, and it was pissing them both off. But her twin was also pushing down the impulse to retaliate, gathering her emotions, drawing on Maddie’s and Jarred’s power, for a different purpose.

She was pushing outward, relying on Metting’s knowledge of the Brotherhood’s inner workings to identify the location of each elder. Tampa. Reno. Seattle. San Diego. Denver. Saint Louis. Boston. She touched on every elder’s consciousness, scanned their environment, then left as quickly as she’d arrived. But not before Maddie sensed
Sarah tagging each mind with a marker that would allow future tracking and location.

“Impressive,” Jacob said. “But in effective. Now that Colonel Metting has taught you cognitive marking, be assured we’ll negate the possibility of your locating us in the future. Adjustments like these are common within the Brotherhood as principals grow into their legacies.”

“Moving would be wise.” Sarah smiled. “At least from your Seattle and Denver locations. The center’s tracking your operations at both sites. Would those be the regions where your two Watcher teams were exposed?”

No response.

“You’ll find psychic filtering devices just beyond both locations,” Sarah added, “within a two-mile radius. Colonel Metting just helped me identify them. He’ll be able to show you where.”

Two of the elders gave simultaneous orders to operatives beyond their transmissions.

“We’re looking into your recommendations,” Jacob said.

“You do that.” Sarah’s voice stayed strong, confident, even though Maddie could sense her shock at what she’d accomplished. “In the meantime, use me. Use my dream. Get whatever information you need to stop the center from gaining control of another legacy. All I’m asking for in return is a chance to get Trinity away from them before you attack.”

“The Brotherhood needs the Temple twins”—Metting kept his gaze pinned to the council—“as partners. I’m suggesting a collaboration where our powers grow in tandem. It’s how our order was created to function two
centuries ago, when a small group of legacies banded together to help others who were failing. The Temples’ powers are growing beyond our ability to limit without eliminating them. But if we accept the twins into our order, guide them as Watchers, we’ll have a fighting chance to stop Dream Weaver.”

Everyone in the room stilled, waiting for the council’s decision.

“So be it,” Jacob finally proclaimed. “You have until tomorrow to prepare a mission team, Colonel. Ms. Temple, you have one last chance to access your dream programming. This time with Watchers stabilizing your search, while they reconnoiter your projection’s matrix for the exact location and purpose of the center’s testing on whomever Trinity turns out to be. The council will be forming an infiltration team to send in as soon as we have a target. Welcome to the Brotherhood, and good luck. You’re going to need it.”

Welcome to the Brotherhood . . .

Sarah had been sitting motionless on the bunk in her sleeping quarters for hours. She’d all but sprinted from the conference room and the council’s decision, and Richard and her family’s support, and Maddie’s questions. And she hadn’t moved since.

Not that she could really hide from any of them. They were still in her mind, their concern and strength challenging the shields she’d slammed back into place so they couldn’t touch her emotions. She could feel Richard giving her space. Everyone was waiting for her to pull herself together and step back into the confident persona
she’d projected to the elders, so she could face the morning planning meeting for the mission back into her psychotic nightmare.

“Help me
. . .
”
Trinity begged.

“Help her,”
the wolf’s ocean voice agreed.
“You’re finally ready to see what we’ve become
. . .
”

“Stop it!”

Sarah pushed off the bed. More than ever, her family’s and her legacy’s survival depended on her staying lucid and free of the dream’s pull. But she could feel herself falling back into it, Trinity’s cries blending with the wolf’s laughter, the wolf’s voice dissolving into a little girl’s desperate begging. It was the same swirl of confusion and deranged demands she’d sensed in Lenox, unraveling Sarah’s sanity into the same manic state.

It was as if the more powerful she grew, with her and Richard’s psychic energies more deeply merged, the less stable her hold on reality became. How was she supposed to wait patiently through the night for the disaster this mission was going to turn into? She was becoming death all over again—exactly what Ruebens had programmed her to be. Why couldn’t anyone else see that?

“You’re finally ready
. . .
”
her nightmare called to her, in both Trinity’s and the wolf’s voices.

“Stop it!” Sarah yelled into her silent quarters.

She headed for the door, snagging her jacket as an afterthought, suddenly desperate to disappear into the cold night waiting for her beyond the bunker’s walls.

The elevator was just a few feet away. She should call Richard. Or Maddie. She should be leaning on them and accepting the help they’d give her and believing in the unified front they’d just sold the council. She kept
moving instead. The council had accepted her as a Watcher. Which gave her unrestricted access to the facilities and its grounds. She could already feel the freezing forest waiting for her outside, and her place in it.

She had to pull herself together before the morning. She had to get her head back to the place where she could face Richard and believe all the things he’d promised. She needed to lose herself for a while in the feel of running away from everything and everyone she could hurt far too easily. She needed the night’s darkness, which felt more real to the broken pieces of her than the promises she’d made.

Then somehow she would find the courage to return to the bunker and fight for the light and the truth that were waiting somewhere within her dreams.

“They suspect?” the voice said.

“They know.” The entire Brotherhood was in flux, including the relocation of every elder, days earlier than their scheduled rotation, to new more secure locations. “It will be even harder to breach the twins’ conditioning from now on. Sarah Temple’s been made a Watcher.”

“We don’t need to break down their condition further, do we?” the voice asked. “They’re coming to us this time.”

“And you’re coming for the Brotherhood.” He cursed soundlessly. Years of training blocked his emotional response from being detected by anyone within the bunker, or anyone tracking him on the other end of the transmission. “That wasn’t part of the deal.”

“Our only deal was your compensation in return for information that secures the Temple Legacy for our purposes,” the voice said. “What happens beyond that is none of your concern. Sarah will be allowed access to the dream’s matrix again. Her mind will fracture. Our control will be solidified. We’ll take things from there.”

The Watcher heard his own death in the pronouncement.

He accepted once again the necessity of betraying his brothers, even though the recon team had been attacked and other legacies had been exposed while the center implemented unforeseen facets of the offensive he was helping them wage. He had to stay focused on his own objectives—to negate Metting’s misguided recklessness and the center’s power play for the Temples’ gifts.

Everything was in place for him to help the Brotherhood fulfill its responsibility to stop mercenary entities like the center, which were determined to exploit the psychic realm to create weapons out of peoples’ minds.

The council was primed to go on the offensive, something that wouldn’t have happened without Sarah Temple’s rogue programming and escalating instability. The elders would see to it that no further damage was done through her mind. The Brotherhood would complete its transition into a governing presence, rather than remaining the traditionally passive entity Watchers had always been.

He had to see this through to the end. Just one more day. His plans were unraveling, the center was getting far closer to breaching Brotherhood security than he’d ever intended, but it was just one more day before this was over.

“When does it begin?” the voice asked.

“Tomorrow. Noon,” he said, committing the final unforgivable breach of his oath by revealing the precise moment that Sarah Temple’s mind would be at its most vulnerable. “Mission prep commences in the morning.”

“The details of which you’ll be ready to provide should we need them?”

“You won’t need them.” Which made his role conveniently obsolete.

He could feel his contact smiling.

Biting back another curse, he broke the link and lay back on the bunk in his sparse quarters. Quarters that should be subject to regular communications sweeps by Metting’s diagnostic routines.

But his center contact had provided undetectable algorithms, a virus that he’d introduced into the bunker’s network that scrambled transmissions he made on a preset frequency. It was state-of-the-art covert technology, the mechanics of which he’d detailed in his personal log so the Brotherhood could test for similar breaches, as well as develop their own response. Details an e-mail to Metting would deliver tomorrow after the Temples’ minds were silenced.

His betrayal would be over then, every dark bit of it. It would be a warrior’s end once his motives became clear to those who would first condemn him.

The inevitability of his actions had been set the moment the Temples’ destructive legacy wasn’t terminated along with Tad Ruebens. And tomorrow he would honor the oath he’d lived by since he joined the Brotherhood. He would preserve the integrity of the psychic realm. He would stay this deadly course, right up to the moment he could extinguish the minds of Sarah and Madeline and Trinity Temple.

Richard waited in the night’s cold shadows, in the woods whose ragged edges had helped Sarah unknowingly shape his raven image. This had been his nightmare landscape first, long before Ruebens’s programming led Sarah to project the specters of Richard’s past into her own dreams.

In her early Dream Weaver projections, ripples of his forest memories had become a premonition of the Brotherhood’s showdown with the center. While listening to her descriptions of Ruebens’s dreamscape, Richard had instantly recognized traces of the most painful period of his life. She’d unknowingly plucked the memories from his mind, more in tune with him from the start than he’d realized. They’d connected deeper than he allowed any other person in his life.

“You don’t let anyone see the truth,”
Sarah had said when he’d confronted her about hiding from her own memories.
“You show people whatever you need them to see, to get what you want.”

But Sarah Temple did know him. She had from the start.

And now he could feel her running to the same woods,
into the heart of his long-ago nightmare, making it part of her reality.

He’d given her space after the conference with the council, but he would be running with her tonight. Because he understood this moment as no one else could. She’d need freedom to work through her doubts and fears. She needed movement. More venting, like their sparring in the gym. It was good that she was rejecting the isolation that would have deepened her confusion. She was searching for answers rather than accepting defeat. And he was going to be there to guide her this time, just as before. He’d be there from now on, for as long as she’d let him.

The last twenty-four hours had left Sarah exhausted. Additional physical exertion would drain her even more. But the risk to tomorrow’s mission would be worth it, if he could help her accept the very darkness that was terrifying her, shadows she could use to create more than danger and pain once she learned to harness their power.

A rush of energy reached him.

Sarah’s panic.

Her denial.

He’d already disabled the sensors that would have alerted command that the bunker’s side entrance was breached. Sarah slipped out, dressed in a black knit shirt and fatigues, the color and the moonlight spotlighting her porcelain complexion and deep auburn curls. She peered through the dimness surrounding her. Richard could sense her need to find something, be something, anything besides the dangerous mind she still believed she couldn’t stop.

He could feel her confusion at encountering no challenge
to her exit. The anomaly didn’t slow her for long. He felt a streak of relief as she raced into the woods that had seemed both familiar and terrifying to her a month ago, when he escorted her through them to the bunker. She wasted no time looking back. The need to keep moving flowed to him from her mind. She focused only on taking the next step, then the next breath. On relishing the night’s chill as it stung her already-cold skin. Sarah was lost in the moment and the peace of running from her destiny.