Secret Legacy (22 page)

“There is no meaning to any of this without your input.” Jeff’s tone was clipped, his energy toxic, while
he baited her. “You convinced the council you were ready to become an active part of this mission instead of another misfiring variable we have to work around. I suggest you convince yourself you’re ready, Ms. Temple. Because these men are about to put their lives on the line to protect your stubborn ass.”

“I am ready.” Sarah’s nightmare screamed. She glared at Jeff. “I’m ready to save Trinity, not to be dissected like some lab experiment.”

“Warriors prepare to prepare,” Jeff said. “You’re being treated like a warrior here, not a specimen. Secrets within a team get people killed. We need your memories, even the ones you don’t want to go back to, so the team can build a shared understanding of what each piece of your dream might become once we project together. You need them to help you understand the symbols that will lead you to Trinity.”

“You want me to tell you that my mind works rationally.” Sarah glanced to Richard, miserable. “You—”

“I want you to tell me the truth you’re still running from,” Jeff pushed. “Stop protecting yourself from us, like we don’t already know what you’re capable of. These men are veterans in the fluid work of telepathic missions. We’ve been trained in Dream Weaver techniques, and we know your history with Ruebens. But no one’s as intimately familiar with your mind as you are. We need to know everything you can remember from every dream you’ve ever had. You’re a Watcher now. All hell’s about to break loose in your mind. Which means the men on
your
team are quite possibly dead, if you don’t stop pouting and get to work.”

“Pouting?” Sarah’s nails bit into her skin, drops of
blood trickling from the tiny cuts she was making on her hand.

Richard sent his consciousness deeper into hers, discovering cloud images battling her panic, rather than the rage he’d expected. Sarah was fighting for control. She was resisting the impulse to lay into Jeff. She was reaching for the new chance she still couldn’t quite believe was waiting for them beyond her nightmare.

He added his own energy to the relaxation routine he’d taught her—his confidence that she could do this. She stared at him only for an instant before her focus returned to the others. But everything they’d shared, everything that connected them, had filled that one endless moment.

“Tell them why the colors are so hard for you to talk about,”
he projected to her.
“Trust them to understand. Trust yourself to handle remembering.”

Sarah looked down at the damage she’d done to her hand.

Her troubled past shifted closer.

“The colors aren’t a threat,” she said to the team, wincing as she let her mind drift back. “They’ve always been there to guide me, not hurt me. For most of my life they were the only things I was sure I belonged to. They were the only things that never went away.”

Jeff’s powerful body relaxed with her first genuine contribution to the discussion.

“We expect your dream relationship to existing themes and symbols to shift as today’s projection plays out,” he said. “That’s how the center got to you at the house. New variations will no doubt arise in the ocean’s shifting matrix. Even with our help stabilizing the matrix and
Colonel Metting anchoring the team’s link to you from this lab, you could easily lose your identity to the dream. The center knows which buttons to push. Once they feel your psychic energy searching for Trinity’s, they’ll come after you in unexpected ways. They’ll use something you’ve grown to trust. Something you’ve told yourself is harmless. Safe. Nonthreatening.”

“So . . .” Sarah reached for her sister’s hand. “Nothing’s safe now.”

“Color’s been your safe place your whole life?” Jeff asked.

“They . . .” The past’s hold on her escalated. “They’ve surrounded the people and voices in my visions. All my life, they’ve told me who’s who. Whether there’s acceptance or danger. They’re why no matter how much everyone was concerned, the ocean dream always felt safe to me before this last nightmare.”

“Because in the lab we kept you where the water was shallow,” Madeline said. “There was nothing in the shallows but the bright colors that you’ve always loved. Amethyst. Turquoise. Sapphire. The colors you scribbled all over your wall when you were a little girl.”

“My wall?” Sarah asked, the lab suddenly spinning in a dizzying whirl. Her bedroom wall . . . The wall her angry, little-girl image had been staring at in the Lenox daydream. “But . . . there were no colors on it in my vision at the house . . .”

Richard’s mind filled with the flash of the vivid hues Madeline described, illuminating the decaying, empty bedroom they’d found in the Temples’ crumbling old house. He was seeing a little girl with dark auburn hair sitting on a pink bedspread, staring at a wall consumed
by swirls of color and emotion, instead of the black-and-white images Sarah had described from the vision. He was feeling the little girl’s fear of what she’d painted, what it meant. Her compulsion to cover every flat surface of the room with the same mania. She needed to drown in the colors, breathe them, until the voices she didn’t understand stopped hurting.

He absorbed the memory from long ago, shielding it from everyone but Sarah and Madeline, encouraging the twins to dig deeper. Their minds flowed with his until the truth finally bubbled to the surface.

“Oh, my God. I’d forgotten. The colors on my bedroom walls protected me from the madness.” There was shame in Sarah’s whisper, but relief, too, as a piece of the past her mind had run from fell back into place. “That’s why the daydream seemed so familiar. That’s the memory the projection connected with. Mom got so mad when I kept painting the walls, that summer I was six, no matter how many times she covered up the mess I made. It felt like those colors were saving me. They helped me believe that some day all of this would end and it would stop hurting, and I’d stop being something people were afraid of.”

The room grew still as the team identified with the loneliness, the isolation, of Sarah’s story. None of the Watchers were normal. None of them had been accepted. None of their secrets had been truly safe until they’d found the Brotherhood.

Madeline tilted her head to the side. “Colors were guiding you in the ocean dream, too,” she said. “They comforted you at first. They helped you swim deeper,
taking you toward Trinity’s voice. Then the colors you were following disappeared into the darkness.”

“Actually, some of them were still there.” Jeff had a laptop balanced on his knee. Each Watcher held a similar compact unit, the devices wirelessly connected to Richard’s dream database. Jeff called up a report. “You saw at least one color near the door you said barred you from Trinity’s location. Reds. A spectrum of reds. They were—”

“Ugly,” the twins said in unison.

“Angry,” Sarah added. “Like they were warning me.”

“Or they were repelling you.” Jeff typed their comments into the computer. “You said you couldn’t break through. Did the colors stop you? Or did you just give up because reality didn’t turn out as lovely as you’d dreamed it would be in your little-girl fantasies?”

His sarcasm sent a flash of energy sizzling from Sarah. Richard directed it away from Jeff, toward himself. Jeff caught the pain Richard couldn’t fully mask. His gaze jerked back to Sarah’s. He tried to swallow. The motion caught halfway down his throat. He coughed, not taking a full breath until Sarah glanced an apology toward Richard.

“I don’t expect anything to turn out the way I dreamed it anymore.” Self-loathing filled her. Fear of the madness that drove her to strike out.

“You’ve been dreaming of colors and cries for help since you were a child?” Richard asked, buying Jeff time to catch his breath.

“Yes,” Madeline answered for her sister.

“Since you were kids?”

“Since my mother told me to stop remembering my dreams,” Sarah said. “Because they weren’t real, and I’d only make things harder for everyone if I didn’t stop talking nonsense all the time.”

“Good.” Jeff cleared his throat. He turned his chair around, favoring his injured leg, and sat back for the first time since the meeting began.

“Good?” Sarah swiped at the moisture collecting in the corners of her eyes. “I’ve been a freak my entire life, and it’s getting worse now, whether I’m dreaming or not. And that’s good?”

“It is, as long as your team knows about it.” Jeff’s smile offered acceptance, if Sarah would let herself take it. “As long as you trust us while you work through it, instead of fighting and failing alone. And clearly, you’re capable of doing that, since I’m still breathing after being an unbearable ass. And you’re still in control enough to answer questions after you stopped short of strangling me. I’d call that damn encouraging mission prep.”

“You . . .” Sarah sputtered. “You were baiting me? You were pushing me, to see if I could be trusted with your team’s lives?”

“No,” Richard corrected, “to see if you could trust them with yours. And I assure you, you can.”

Jeff had opened the meeting, explaining their three-pronged plan: he’d have Watchers scouting the matrix for whatever could be gleaned of the center’s logistics and Trinity’s location, streaming their findings back from the dream to Richard’s lab; the team would protect the Temples while the twins’ minds searched for the little girl, the Watchers added power feeding the matrix and preventing Sarah and Madeline from being absorbed
into whatever the center was still doing with Dream Weaver; and the twins would once and for all prove their commitment to work fully, openly, with the Brotherhood.

“You have to accept that we’ll have your back,” Jeff said, “whatever you do in the dream. Whatever’s happened in the past.”

Sarah’s gaze swept the room.

Richard, too, cataloged every man’s reaction to Jeff’s challenge. Someone from the Brotherhood was leaking information to the center. Likely a Watcher chosen for this team.

Jeff could be sending a traitor into Sarah’s mind equipped with the information he needed to hand the center a final victory. Richard listened to his instincts and tried to feel which of his brothers couldn’t be trusted. But he sensed nothing out of the ordinary from any consciousness in the lab.

Jeff inched his chair closer to Sarah’s. “What aren’t you telling us?” he asked.

“The people I care about most in the world are going back into the nightmare with me,” Sarah said. “Do you really think I’d keep something from you that could protect them?”

She sounded sincere enough, but Richard could feel her holding back.

“You can do this,”
his mind promised her.

“I could lose you if I don’t stay in control,”
she projected back.
“Or Trinity or Maddie. You could all die, just like my parents.”

“We’re not going anywhere. No one here is going to let that happen.”

“Equip your team to counter whatever the dream will do,” Jeff said. “Trust us, even with what you think are the weakest parts of your legacy. You have my promise as a warrior, your team will be there for you when you need us.”

“You mean we have your personal assurance?” Jarred asked. “Imagine our relief, since a little over a day ago you were seconds away from shooting Sarah dead. Why should she trust you now?”

“Because every consciousness that follows her into tonight’s nightmare will be trapped in that altered state if she can’t disengage. We’ll all find ourselves at the mercy of her Dream Weaver programming if she doesn’t maintain control. We all want the same thing—successful mission execution and extraction of everyone from the nightmare, particularly Sarah.”

“And while Sarah’s beating the center’s psychic ass at its own game,” Madeline said, “what exactly will your men be doing?”

“For starters,” Richard said, “Jeff will know not to allow the colors that have been guiding Sarah through her ocean imagery to repel her from Trinity’s door.”

Sarah shivered.

It wasn’t the first time during the meeting that the mention of the child’s name had spooked her.

“Are you afraid to find Trinity?” Jeff’s gaze lifted from the gooseflesh rippling over her arm.

Sarah stared at her hands. Richard could feel the last of the fragile confidence she’d brought into the meeting give way to the guilt that had sent her running last night. Then the truth was there, whispering through their link,
smacking him between the eyes like a psychic sledgehammer.

“The red hues in the nightmare were reacting to your fear of what’s behind the door.” He grabbed Jeff’s laptop and scrolled through his database. “All this time, the colors haven’t been merely showing you other people. They’ve been reacting to your own emotions. In the nightmare, they led you to Trinity, then turned you away from her, changing and flowing based on what you were feeling . . . You didn’t fail her, Sarah. You just weren’t ready to push through the door.”

He brought up the records he’d entered after they emerged from Sarah’s vision in the gym, sorting the entries by color.

“When Madeline arrived,” he said, “she was trying to talk you into swimming away from the voice at the bottom of the ocean, and you saw a trail of—”

“Color behind her,” Sarah finished. “Amethyst leading toward the surface. Maddie’s always surrounded by healing colors in my dreams.”

“Healing colors?” Jeff asked.

“Bright whites and vivid hues.” Sarah smiled at her twin’s shock. “They felt wonderful whenever Maddie brought them to the shallow water we worked in. At first it was her colors I followed deeper into the dream. Amethyst, mostly. It was like having her with me, healing me.”