We passed over miles and miles of forested wilderness, the shadow of our small insectile helicopter skating over the tops of the trees like those little bugs that can float on water. Just as it seemed as though the bush would never end, I spotted something small and dark with sharp edges nestled in the forest. The sunlight reflected off tall square windows and flashed in my eyes making me blink. A modern looking building came into focus as we neared, and the blacktop helicopter pad which it was clear we were headed for. The building looked as though it had been constructed out of dark gray modular blocks of sheet-metal. Whenever they’d needed more space, they’d simply tacked on another room, the way schools added portables to their parking lots.
Off in the distance I caught a glimpse of a large patch of deforested earth. I squinted to get a better view, thinking I could see earth-movers and the tiny forms of men moving about the bare ground. But as the helicopter landed, the patch disappeared behind the trees and out of view. The helicopter landed gently on the pad and powered off. The whirring blades began to slow. A figure appeared in my window as a man in a suit jacket and jeans approached the helicopter. The small door to my right swung open and he was there was there to help me down. We smiled at each other. I thanked the pilot, he saluted me with a deadpan expression. I got out and followed the man to a set of steps leading down to a terrace.
“I’m Andrew Banks,” said the man, holding a glass door open for me. “You can call me Banks. Everyone else does. How was your flight, Miss Kara?”
“Amazing,” I replied, passing into an air-conditioned hallway lined with plain gray doors. “I’d never been on a helicopter before. You guys travel in style.”
“Yes, we know how to do it right.” Banks nodded politely to a woman in a dress suit carrying a brown kraft box as she passed us. The box looked heavy. She looked at me with some curiosity but didn’t say anything. Banks held a keycard up to the electronic panel on one of the doors, a clicking sound could be heard. He opened a door and held it for her. I saw stacks and stacks of identical boxes, all the labels on the fronts extended for a long ways until they dissolved into shadow. The woman thanked Banks and slipped inside with her burden. The door clicked shut behind her and we continued our walk.
“So, you’ll take me to Jod- Miss Marks?”
“Not today,” replied Banks. “You’ll meet with Hiroki Emoto today. He’s one of our scientists.”
“Oh. He’ll do the testing?” That made some kind of sense, that a scientist do it rather than a businesswoman. “This is a satellite office, right? Where are your headquarters?”
“Like most big tech firms, we’re headquartered in Silicon Valley, but we’ve got satellite offices all over the world.” What appeared to be a boardroom opened up before us. A tall row of windows displayed the endless trees surrounding the building and I caught a squirrel leaping from one tree branch to another as we passed a glass table lined with plush looking black leather chairs. A big screen panel glared down from behind the head of the table and the logo of The Nakesh Corporation, with its bright red double triangle reflected above and below in the centre of the screen.
We turned down a second hallway, went through a set of double doors and suddenly there was activity. Professionally dressed people (why they bothered to dress up, when this whole set up was in the middle of the bush was beyond me) walked this way and that, each of them on a mission. A few of them were in fatigues and looked as though they did the majority of their work out of doors and with their hands. They stood, heads bent and talking with their nicely dressed colleagues. No one noticed me in my jeans and plaid button up shirt, trailing along behind Banks.
“Miss Kara, this is Hiroki Emoto,” said Banks.
I stopped abruptly, realizing with embarrassment that I’d been gawking everywhere and not watching where we were going. Before me stood a slim neat man with blue-black hair and those gorgeous cheekbones. “Hello, Miss Kara. Welcome to Field Station Eleven.”
“You were in Libya!” I blurted, happy to see a face I recognized.
He gave me a close-mouthed smile. “Yes, I was.” He held a hand out. “Wonderful to see you under better circumstances. Call me Hiroki.”
I shook his hand. “You too. And call me Petra.”
“You know each other. Good. I’ll leave the two of you then,” added Banks, and strode away.
“This way to the lab, Petra,” said Hiroki, leading me through another set of double doors and down a long glass hallway that linked two modular buildings. We were suspended over the tops of trees and I gaped down through the glass under my feet, watching the tips of the Pine trees pass by.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course,” said Hiroki as we made our way through the halls.
“Is there some reason I haven’t been able to contact one of my friends from the dig?”
Hiroki frowned. “Not that I know of, why?”
“No reason. Just haven’t been able to reach someone I really wanted to say goodbye to.” I didn’t say more to Hiroki, but I was actually quite upset. Over the last week, I had called Jesse once a day, with no answer. I only had the service of a simple landline, I had never splurged on extras like voicemail. If he had called while I was away, I wouldn’t have known it. I tried not to think that he was just going to vanish from my life, the way everyone else I had ever cared about had, but the thought was like a ghost in the corner of every room.
“You have an amazing office,” I said, clearing my throat and pushing thoughts of Jesse out of my mind.
“Thank you,” Hiroki replied. “We like it. No distractions. And our new chef is a master of filet mignon,” he added over his shoulder. “Not like the last guy.” He gave an exaggerated shudder.
The elevated glass hallway ended and we took stairs down to ground level where a set of metallic double doors barred the way.
Hiroki took off his glasses and peered into a glass square shining a dim blue light. A bell went off and a panel near his belly button lit up. He pressed a thumb to the lit pad and a loud click told us we could go inside. “Welcome to my lab,” Hiroki said with no small amount of pride. “This is my playground.”
The doors swung open and I gasped at the space that was unveiled before me.
***
It looked like something I had seen only in sci-fi movies. The central space was huge circular room half-surrounded by a screen taller than any human. A few people in lab coats moved about, talking with one another, working on computers, or bent over one of three circular tables, one of which was throwing up a blue holographic image slowly rotating on an invisible pedestal. The space was dark, presumably to allow the screen and holograms to stand out.
Yellow arrows were painted on the floor of the hallway ringing the circle in the centre, and several blacked out glass doors led off to goodness knew where.
“What do you do here?”
“We’re scientists. We do science,” said Hiroki with a smile.
“Uh,” I wanted to make a joke about that being obvious but the professional and extremely high-tech atmosphere had me a bit tongue-tied.
“TNC Has dozens of projects going on at any given time throughout the world, all of them rooted in a common goal.”
“What that?” I asked, following him as he walked the hallway which skirted the domed lab.
“Improving the quality of life for humanity.”
“Oh. That sounds good and very broad.”
He chuckled. “It is. This is one of four labs of its kind. We are sent all manner of assignments from any one of these multiple projects. We execute the directive and hand off the results to a team leader at either headquarters or whichever Field Station the objective came from. All of it passes through HQ where it is documented and if need be, the findings shared to benefit relevant projects.” He led me into a cool private space with two chairs facing one another, a small coffee table between them, and a few closed metal shelving units. A single glass window looked out into the lab. “Which brings us around to why you’re here.”
I looked around the small room with disappointment. The room was dull in comparison to what was on the other side of the wall. “Miss Marks tells me you have ways of testing my abilities?” Nerves twisted in my guts and my hands suddenly felt cool. What to expect?
“That’s right. Why don’t you take a seat? We’ll have a little chat first.”
“Okay.” I sat on one of the chairs and crossed my legs at the knee. A recollection of sitting in Noel Pierce’s office only a few short months ago sprang to mind. My nerves calmed a little when I thought of this as just another meeting with a therapist.
“Do you mind if I record this conversation? Just for me. It’s easier than taking notes and allows me to focus just on you.”
“Sure. Okay.”
“Thanks.” Hiroki put a small black device on the coffee table and took a seat across from me. “I’d like you to talk me through when you first noticed that you had abilities other people didn’t have.”
As I talked, Hiroki listened calmly and quietly, he never judged or betrayed any surprise as I told him about how I figured out that I could pick up the thoughts of others, how I had been able to move small objects with my mind. He led me with similar questions that I had answered for Noel over the years, but Hiroki’s questions didn’t probe quite as deeply into my emotional state. He was more interested in the chronology of my life as it related to the development of my abilities, and how I had come to discover what I could do, and how it felt physically inside my body. We talked through my love of archaeology and my job at the museum and how it led up to the position on the dig-team. And finally, inevitably, we reached the events in Libya.
“Can you explain to me what happened in the cave, please?” Hiroki shifted in his chair. “Wait, would you like a drink? I’m parched.”
“Yes please.”
Hiroki got us both a glass of water as I talked him through how I had fallen into the cave and discovered the two stones embedded in the walls, and how the depressions I stood in disappeared. How I had gone into some kind of state when the moonlight filled the cave and lifted off the ground.
“But you didn’t do the levitating?” Hiroki interrupted.
I shook my head and laughed. “No, I don’t know how to levitate.” I blinked. Maybe I did. I had never tried.
“Interesting,” he handed me a glass of water and sat down across from me again with his own glass. “Go on.”
“I saw a vision,” I said and paused. Swallowing some water. I felt somewhat protective of the vision and hesitated to share it, even for the sake of science. But it was too late.
“Can you describe the vision for me please?”
“It was a man standing in an oasis,” I began. “He had light gray eyes, a lot like mine. He had dark kind of curly hair and dark skin.”
Hiroki lifted the cup to his lips slowly, staring at me from across the top of his cup of water. “Mmhmmm.”
“I thought maybe,” I took a deep breath, “maybe he was my father. The father I never met.”
Hiroki’s face did not change save for a small widening of the eyes.
“I think I asked him who he was.” I closed my eyes, trying to bring the specifics of the dream back. “But he only said one word. Really slow, like he was trapped in a slow-motion reality.”
“What word was that?”
“He told me to run.”
I jumped and opened my eyes as Hiroki began to cough quite violently.
“Are you okay?” I asked, alarmed. “Wrong tube?”
He nodded his head, his eyes watering. Still coughing, he banged on his chest with a fist. He took a frantic sip in between hacking coughs. “So,” he choked out. “Sorry.” His voice was a mere rasp. He coughed some more.
“That’s okay. I hate when that happens.” I grabbed his nearly empty cup and fetched him some more water. “Here you go.”
He took it, flashing me a grateful look, his face pale, and guzzled the whole thing. “That’s a bit better. Excuse me please.” He cleared his throat and his voice sounded better. “What else do you remember about the vision?”
I sat in my chair again, shrugging. “That’s it, I think.”
Hiroki’s eyes narrowed. “What do you think he was telling you to run from?”
I gave a short laugh. “At the time I had no idea, but after what happened, well it’s obvious. Don’t you think? You were there. You saw the aftermath of what happened.”
Hiroki nodded, and if I wasn’t mistaken, he seemed relieved. “You think it was the militants he was warning you about.”
“What else? They tried to blow us all up.”
“Does make sense,” murmured Hiroki. “Can you explain to me how the desert glass broke?”
“Oh.” My face heated at the memory. “I’ll always feel bad about that.”
“Why?”
“It was an artifact!” I replied. “Who knows how long it had been there and who put it there. The historical value will never fully be understood.” I shook my head. “It’s an archaeologists nightmare.”
“How did you do it?”
“It’s a bit hard to explain,” I said with a frown. “I can feel a kind of rhythm from things when I put my hand on them. It’s not obvious, you know. More subtle. But its there. I felt the rhythm of that glass and I,” I paused, searching for the right words, “matched it with my own rhythm.”
Hiroki stared at me, waiting.
“Crack,” I said, adding a hand movement to illustrate the explosion. “It blew to smithereens.”
“You were not injured in the blast?”
I shook my head.
“What happened after that?”
“Jesse found me and helped me out of the cave.”
“And the next supernatural thing that happened was the rock you lifted?”
I had a fleeting thought about making out in my tent with Jesse and my mouth quirked. I would have called that supernatural, at least it felt that way, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t what Hiroki meant. “Yes,” I answered, simply.
“Tell me how you did that, please.”
“I don’t know if I have the words for this.”
“Just do your best. Afterwards, we’ll see if we can figure out the science component. I’m hoping to be able to assign some proper technical terms to what you can do. If we can categorize your abilities, we’ll be able to help you understand them better.” He folded his hands over his knee and waited.
“Okay,” I breathed out a sigh. “When I saw that it was falling, I knew that I could do something about it, does that make sense?”
“It does,” agreed Hiroki, nodding his head. “We have other supernaturals who say the same thing, that they acquire a certain knowledge of their ability without fully understanding where that knowledge came from.”
I nodded, making a mental note to ask him more about these supernaturals later. “So I slid underneath it and pushed out a kind of power-”
Hiroki slid forward to the edge of his chair, eyes more alight now than they had been. “From where? Which part of your body?”
“Uh, all of me, I think.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“This power had a pulse, I could hear it in my head and feel it in my body.”
Hiroki was nodding and stroking a thoughtful hand across his mouth.
“It was enough to hold the stone until they were free of the danger. Then I rolled out from underneath it and let it fall.”
Hiroki sat and was quiet for so long that I began to squirm. His expression was so hard to read.
“Everything okay?” I finally asked.
“I’m trying to strategize how to proceed with you,” he said, gazing at me and speaking very slowly. “I’ve never seen anyone like you. Most supernaturals have one specific skill or ability, most often over an element or a sub-category of an element, the way Ibukun does.”
“You tested Ibukun?” I sat up in surprise.
“Of course. I’m not allowed to talk about her with you unless she’s given her consent, though. Aside from in the most general of terms.”
“She has control over a sub-category?”
“That’s right. In her case, she has the ability to manipulate metals. She’s been classified as an Inconquo, which is a sub-category of Earth.”
“How many sub-categories are there?”
“A lot. But I don’t want to get off track. I want to keep the focus on you. As I was saying, with most supernaturals, I can categorize them as an alpha or a beta. You defy both of these categories because your abilities transcend what I would otherwise label as an Air Elemental.”
“A Euroklydon?”
“That’s what the ancients called it, yes. Frankly, I have never worked with one before and my assumptions about their abilities as a group were way off base. You have multiple aptitudes which, up until now, I’ve seen in multiple supernaturals but never in one.” He rose from the seat. “I think that’s enough talking for now. I have a good idea of your history. I’m sure we’ll have to sit down again as things progress. Shall we begin the practical component of your testing?”
I got to my feet. “Sure. Okay,” I said uneasily. “What does that look like?”
“With your permission, we’ll have a doctor give you a routine exam. She’ll take blood and saliva samples to determine heritage and any anomalies. Is that okay with you?”
Curiosity rose up in me like a hulking thing with huge eyes. “Yes. I’m really curious about that myself actually.” Maybe I would finally learn more about my parents this way.
“I can imagine,” Hiroki said with a smile. He opened the door for me and I stepped out into the hallway. We walked halfway around the circular centre lab and entered what looked like a fairly average doctor’s examining room, complete with the boxes of latex gloves, a computer and desk, an examining table with the paper covering, the step stool. “I’ll leave you here for a few moments while I notify Dr.Desisa that you’re here.”
I waited less than a minute for the aforementioned Dr.Desisa to appear, a petite red-headed woman who was all brusque business and no bedside manner. She had me sign a consent form and conducted a very no-nonsense exam which took less than ten minutes. She extracted blood and had me spit into a vial. She labelled everything and asked me pointed questions about my health.
“How long before the results come in?” I asked, rolling down my shirtsleeve over the band-aid in the crook of my arm.
“You’ll have them this afternoon,” she said. “I’ll give them to Dr.Emoto and he’ll pass copies on to you.”
“That’s fast.”
She gave me a small smile for the first time since she’d walked in the door. “We take care of our supernaturals,” she said, peering at me from overtop of her bifocals. “You’re very lucky to have been discovered by TNC and some other less desirable organization. Mr.Nakesh does a lot of good for people all over the world.” Jody and Ibby had both mentioned Devin Nakesh, the billionaire investor who owned TNC.
“So I hear,” I said. “I’d like to meet him someday.”
“If you sign with TNC, you will,” she said, standing and picking up the tray with my samples in it. “He makes a point of sitting down with every supernatural he hires. He’s very personable.” She leaned in. “And handsome,” she whispered with a wink.
I blinked. “Oh?” Her cheeks actually flushed, which took me back. It was the first time she’d appeared human and not robotic.
She put a finger beside her nose. “But you didn’t hear that from me. I couldn’t handle the teasing.”
“Your secret is safe with me,” I whispered back.
She nodded and opened the door for me. “Dr.Emoto is waiting for you.”
***
Hiroki led me to a large quiet lab with long stainless steel tables and expensive looking equipment set up throughout the room. Shining clean empty workspace stood ready and waiting for a technician or a scientist to do their work. The space was large enough that at any given time at least a dozen people could work in the room, but either the room wasn’t in use today or Hiroki had kicked everyone out because it was as quiet as a morgue.
“I’ve had my team set up a space for us to work in,” Hiroki said as we wove through the tables to a space at the back of the lab where a couple of chairs and table had been placed and a long low shelf holding more equipment sat within reach. “Hopefully everything we’ll need will already be assembled. Have a seat.”
I sat in one of the chairs and Hiroki grabbed a blue hand-held device with a digital screen, and a wine glass from a cluster of them and sat across from me. “I’d like you to take this glass, and see if you can tell me the frequency it vibrates at.”
I took the glass. “Okay, but do you have something I should hit it with to make it vibrate?”
“No, I want to see if you can feel it first. If you’re wrong, we can try making the glass sing so you can hear it.”
I nodded. I closed my eyes and held the glass gently in my fingers. Within moments, I could feel a fast hum under my skin, in the same way I had felt the Libyan glass in the cave. I opened my eyes. I can feel it, but I don’t know how to ascribe a measurement to it.”
Hiroki frowned. “Okay, fair point.” He leaned back and grabbed a small meter. “Hold this.” He handed me a small metal node on the end of a cord attached to the meter. “Set down the glass so you don’t break it, and replicate the signal into the receiver, if you can.”
I set down the glass and took the receiver, closing my eyes. Tapping into my own frequency, that hot pulse of life that was always there in the background, I sped it up to match the same quick pace I had felt from the glass. There was a beeping sound from the meter and I opened my eyes. “What does it say?”
“Two kilohertz,” he said, a satisfied look on his face.
“Was I right?”
He nodded. “That was child’s play for you, wasn’t it?”
I smiled. “It wasn’t difficult.”
He set down the meter and picked up a small rock from the shelf behind him. He handed it to me. “Can you levitate this for me please?”
I opened my palm and held the rock on my hand, focusing on it. Giving the rock a mental lift, it rose from my hand and sat in the air a few inches above my skin.
“Are you able to take your hand away without dropping it?”
This was something I hadn’t tried before. Slowly, my eyes on the levitating rock, I removed my hand. The rock stayed, spinning slowly.
“Interesting. And not scientifically possible by any law I’m aware of,” said Hiroki. He reached behind himself again, grabbing another slightly smaller stone. “Leave the first one there, and repeat with this stone, please.”
I did so. Now we had two rocks floating above the low table, sitting in mid-air and rotating slowly like space junk.
“Can you make them orbit one another?” Hiroki put his elbows on his knee and peered at the stones, fascinated.
Giving both rocks a simultaneous push, like flicking a top with my fingers, the two stones spun around one another, the distance between them staying ever constant. They spun quickly, then began to slow.
“Remarkable.” Hiroki straightened. “Now,” he clasped his hands together, “are you able to set them spinning indefinitely?”
Keeping my eyes on the stones, I gave them a mental command to stay at the speed they were at, rather than to slow down and let the energy dissipate.
“Splendid!”
“Is it?” I smiled, bemused at Hiroki’s enthusiasm. “Seems like a bit of a useless party trick to me.”
“Oh no, Petra. This is truly magnificent, believe me. I have never seen another supernatural who could do this. There are those with aerokinesis, there are those with telekinesis, but I have never seen a supernatural who could give a command like you and then basically leave the proverbial room and the energy stays in motion. It’s,” he shook his head, “well, to be honest, it’s downright baffling. But I’ve become used to that feeling in this line of work.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t sure what to say to this. It still seemed a bit of a useless trick to me. What was the point of leaving something floating in the air while I went and had a nap or did my laundry?
“You can let the stones down now.” He took the blue hand-held device he’d grabbed earlier and flicked it on so that the small digital screen lit up. “I’d just like you to close your eyes and fluctuate your frequency if you can. It doesn’t matter how high or how low. This device will let me pick it up and watch. This is more for the record than anything else.
“Sure,” I obliged by closing my eyes and tapping into that rhythm deep inside, the pulse that seemed to fill every cell and my blood with life. Like a rolling of the tongue, I pushed my inner frequency up and down at random, but noticed that there was a point where it always seemed to want to go back to, a place where I felt the most at peace.
“Very good, that’s enough.”
“Okay, I doubt this is going to work but I’d like to try it just to rule it out,” said Hiroki, setting the small metal box with a white readout screen and needle position to zero.
“What is that?” I peered at the white face, reading the measurements. The needle was positioned all the way to the left side of an arch of dashes. Numbers on the dashes marked from zero to five-hundred. Words directly below the arched readout said ‘counts per second’. I squinted at the measurement units. “What does mR stand for?”
“This is a simple Geiger-Counter. It’s old by now, but it works. It measures radiation.”
My eyes widened and I blinked up at him. “You think I’m radioactive?” My hands felt suddenly cold and clammy and my stomach dropped into my pelvis where it squirmed. The idea of radioactivity was extremely uncomfortable. I had never been good in science, but I knew that exposure to too much could cause cancer.
“No, I don’t think you’re radioactive. But I’d like to rule it out.” Hiroki sat across from me. “And to answer your question, mR stands for Roentgen. It’s the measurement of energy produced by Gamma radiation within a cubic-centimeter of air.” Hiroki must have recognized the stunned look on my face. “It’s alright, Petra. If I thought you were dangerous I wouldn’t be sitting here in the room with you, I’d be behind safety glass.”
I nodded. “Okay.” Still didn’t really feel better.
“We know you can produce waves, we’ve proven that already. You can receive them somehow, without them affecting you the way they would other matter. And you can send them. Radiation is simply the result of waves. There are different kinds, some dangerous, some not so dangerous. We usually categorize radiation in ionizing and non-ionizing.”
“Let me guess, its the ionizing kind that is dangerous.”
Hiroki nodded. “That’s right, and those can be broken down into yet another three categories based on how they pass through solid matter such as paper, aluminum, or lead. But we’re getting into the weeds. We’ve already established that you can produce sound waves, what I want to know is can you produce radio waves. All I want from you in this moment is to try and move this needle, just a little bit.” He positioned the small cone on the end of the coil toward me and positioned the face of the Geiger counter where we could both see it. “Whenever you’re ready.”
I held my palm toward the Geiger counters detecter and focused on tuning in to the pulse inside me. I gave the pulse a mental shove toward the detector, the way I had done with the glass. Nothing happened. The needle lay dormant. I glanced at Hiroki. “Maybe if you explained to me the difference between sound waves and radio waves, it would help?”
Hiroki took off his glasses and folded them and tucked them into his pocket. He shifted forward. “Alright, yes. It is a bit complicated but I’ll try and break it down for you. You’re right, if you don’t understand the difference there is no way you could produce or manipulate a wave. And the two really are very different.” He thought for a moment, drumming his fingers. “Ok, very basically, sound waves need a medium to travel through because they are what are known as longitudinal waves. If you picture a single line of oscillation going up and down,” he moved his finger through the air to illustrate what he meant, “this is the most basic way of understanding how a wave moves.”
I nodded. “Easy enough.”
“Radio waves are electromagnetic in nature and can move through a vacuum. Radio waves are also much faster than sound waves, they can be broken up and polarised, where sound waves can’t. If you can imagine two waves, one electric, and the other magnetic, and imagine them oscillating together moving both this direction,” he moved his hand side to side like a snake, “and this direction,” he changed it to move up and down like a dolphin breaching in and out of water, “at the same time and in the same wave,” he held his hands out, “then you’ve understood it at a very basic level.”
I nodded, but it wasn’t the description of the wave movement that clicked for me, it was the fact that he’d explained they were electric and magnetic in nature that changed the way I thought about them. “Okay, let me try again.” This time, I closed my eyes and instead of thinking about my own frequency, I tuned in to the world around me. At first, I imagined that I might have to see if I could pick up on any electromagnetic energy that might be nearby and could make itself available to me to siphon, or direct. But as I thought about this, a small circle of heat began to grow in my right shoulder blade, almost like someone was holding a perfectly round hot pad against my skin. The heat increased and with it, the pressure against my body.
“Stop! Stop!” The sound of chair legs scraping against the floor and Hiroki’s panicked voice snapped me out of my stupor.
“What? What’s wrong?” I glanced at the Geiger counter but it was just as dormant as it had been before.
Hiroki was on his feet, his face the color of ash. He had a hand clamped over his mouth and he was staring at me. Abruptly, as though he’d suddenly realized how unprofessional he’d just acted, he dropped his hand from his mouth and sat down. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“What happened?” My pulse jumped at how freaked out he’d sounded. “You look sick.”
“Do I?” He fumbled at his back pocket, leaning to the side, and pulled out a kerchief to mop his face with. “You made the needle jump, and I just wasn’t expecting it.”
“It moved?” My brows shot up. “Really? I wasn’t really trying yet, I was just thinking…”
“What were you thinking about?”
“I was trying to see if I could pick up on anything electromagnetic from the space around us.”
“And how did that feel?” He twisted the kerchief into a knot in his lap, then dropped it with shaking hands, and reached for the glasses in his pocket again. He put them on his face off-centre, and then shoved them into place as though agitated to find himself not in control of himself.
“I didn’t feel anything at first, but then I felt a hot circle,” I put my hand over my shoulder to show him where.
“Really?” He cocked his head and frowned. “How odd. Um-“ He took his glasses off again and put them back in his pocket, clearly shaken. “Petra, I believe that is enough for the day. I don’t know about you but I’m exhausted.”
I nodded, but actually, I felt fine.
“We’ll need to do some additional tests at some point soon, but I’ll have to spend a bit of time strategizing them.” His eyes tracked to the Geiger counter and I realized he’d been avoiding my gaze.
I dropped my head to prompt him to look at me, searching for his eyes. “Mr.Emoto? Are you alright?”
With what seemed like a monumental effort, he raised his eyes very slowly to my face. What I saw there filled me with shame and turned my blood to ice in my veins. He was very, very afraid. I didn’t know if he was afraid of me, but he was most certainly afraid of what had just happened, which made my heart trip on its wheel and hammer in response.
As though he knew I could read him, he dropped his eyes and got to his feet. “I’ll take you to Banks, and he’ll deliver you safely back to Saltford. We’ll be in touch.”
And with that, I was perfunctorily walked to the lobby where Banks escorted me up to the helicopter pad. My mind was buzzing with questions about everything that had just happened, and I told myself that Hiroki would have some answers for me the next time we talked. I tried to imagine what life might have been like for me if I had been left to figure out my abilities all on my own, and the thought of it sent red-eyed rats of terror running up and down my spine. As strange as it was to be thrust into this new world of supernaturals and a corporation who employed and developed them, I was grateful that I didn’t have to face it alone.
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