Turnabout

that Nicholas has the power to remove memories from the minds of others. That's what we're going to do to you.» Glaring, Lucinda said, «You don't have that kind of power.» «Maybe not all by myself,' Isabel said, nodding toward Kyle. «But in case you haven't noticed, I'm not all by myself.» Lucinda's eyes widened in something that looked very much like fear. Kyle felt Isabel's hand on his shoulder and heard her voice in his head. Go ahead, Kyle. I don't know what I'm doing, he thought, wondering if he'd ever get used to having conversations inside other people's heads. Still, he did his best to reach out with his thoughts just the same. In his mind, Isabel was there, and they walked together in darkness. Ahead of them were lights, flashing by. They walked closer to the moving lights and saw that it was as if they were looking through a train window, out at the world speeding by outside. Except that everything seemed to be moving backward. Then Kyle saw the events of the last several minutes quickly rewinding, and entirely from Lucinda's viewpoint. As though he had temporarily taken up residence in her body, he observed in silence as she walked backward from the sleeping car, unscrewed the silencer from the barrel of her gun and put both back into her purse, and watched as Kyle exited the lounge car. Suddenly, Kyle seemed to be back in his own body, standing beside Isabel in the darkness. «You met her in the lounge?» she asked, obviously having just witnessed everything he had just seen/experienced. «Didn't Liz tell you to stay away from the woman in blue polyester?» «She came over to me,' Kyle protested, feeling slightly overwhelmed by this bizarre, almost out-of-body experience. He watched as Isabel or the mental representation of Isabel that stood beside him in this strange mindscape raised an eyebrow, clearly skeptical about his protestations of innocence. She abruptly adopted a more serious demeanor. «Is there any way to go to a specific memory, or do we just scroll backward until we hit on it?» He shrugged, or his ectoplasm did. «Hey, I'm afraid this new superpower of mine didn't come with a user's manual. Until the last few days, my closest brush with the paranormal was a few dreamwalks courtesy of my own private Psychic Friends Network. Isabel Evans was the one who took me on those trips, if I remember her name right.» Isabel returned his shrug. «Fair enough.» Though he was still almost completely at sea about how his new abilities worked, Kyle decided it wouldn't hurt to try to use them to help her in any way he could; he might even impress her a little bit in the process. He felt his brow furrow as he concentrated. How did you find us? he thought, conscious that he was thinking within a psychic space that he had somehow constructed from his own thoughts, as well as from the memories of an alien woman. The background around them changed, and he was once again seeing/experiencing Lucinda holding the pentagonal device, which she pointed toward the second level of the train, where earlier Isabel and Kyle had been eating lunch. The white lights on the device were blinking in a fast, repeating sequence. The ruddy-faced man the Skin who had turned to dust after attacking Isabel was beside Lucinda. Then, the pair walked backward, exiting the train and the train station, entered a car, unparked it, and drove backward away from the train depots garage. Lucinda was holding the device the entire time, studying the changing patterns of lights in its center. «They caught up to us at the Fairfield station,' Isabel said. «That thing must be some kind of tracking device.» She turned to Kyle. «Is that how they keep finding us? Where did these gadgets come from?» Kyle pushed his thoughts further toward Lucinda's memories, trying to cleave through them as quickly as possible. He felt her mind rebel against his intrusion, felt her memories rip like crepe paper bunting as he moved through them. He tread as carefully as he could, and felt horrible that he was using violence even violence on an abstract plane such as this was anathema to his Buddhist sensibilities but he knew that innocent lives might depend on his finding out the truth about the aliens who had dogged them just as much as the Special Unit had. And then he saw it, and heard Isabel gasp as she did as well. Lucinda was standing in a parking lot, looking at the pentagonal device, whose white lights were flashing quickly. It beeped as well, as though sounding an alarm. And then Lucinda was running backward, putting the device into her purse; next she was inside a store, closing her purse and putting her groceries back on the counter. She took her check back from the clerk and dated it: May 15, 2000. Isabel looked at Kyle in surprise. «That was the day we activated the communicators.» «And?» Kyle rolled his hands, mimicking a snowball rolling down a hill. «I wasn't there. What happened?» «I was in the cave in the desert, with Max, Michael, and Tess,' Isabel said. «We activated the communicators after Nasedo left. We saw a message from Max's and my mother. She talked about our destiny as the Royal Four.» «Well, those communicators must have caused something else to happen too, considering all the close encounters we've all had over the past couple of years,' Kyle said. «That must explain how some of the aliens who've attacked us have managed to find us,' Isabel said, nodding. «These devices must be tuned in to our bodies somehow. Or our brain waves. Or something.» Kyle nodded. «Or maybe it's your Antarian genes they're tuned to.» Isabel considered that for a moment. «Wouldn't that mean that our New York duplicates would have been tracked too?» «Do we know that they haven't been?» Kyle said. «Good point. Why don't you ask this Skin woman about that.» Kyle pushed again, but didn't find anything this time. «I think we've about tapped her for information,' he said, hoping that his inquiries hadn't permanently injured her. A moment later, he and Isabel opened their eyes, and they were back in the train's sleeper car. Lucinda looked as if she had been whacked in the head with a hammer. But her eyes were open, if barely focused. «Damn you, Vilandra!» she spat. «You'll betray everything and everyone around you, no matter how many lives fate grants you! But Kivar won't stop either. He'll keep sending more of us after you as many times as it takes. And finally, one day ' Kyle saw Isabel's jaw clench, and she blinked once. Lucinda's body abruptly tumbled into a pile of gray ash, spilling all over the chair and floor. Her empty blue polyester suit collapsed like a deflated balloon, and the electrical cord that had tied her hands dropped limply behind the chair. «Did you do that?» Kyle asked, unable to keep the shock out of his voice. Isabel turned toward him with eyes like storm clouds. «Kyle, this is war. She would have killed you, and who knows what they wanted to do with me. Michael is right. We cannot keep running. We can't keep showing mercy to our enemies. There may or may not be any more Skins on this train, but who knows how many of them or other aliens, like the ones who kidnapped those girls in Stonewall are tracking us right now? Not to mention the Special Unit.» Kyle considered arguing with her, but the barely restrained fury behind her eyes persuaded him not to try. Instead he turned and looked for something he could use to sweep up the mortal remains of their two Skin attackers. Later Isabel found Kyle sitting up in the trains observation lounge, where he was looking out into the night through the large window. No one else was in the room since there was so little to see on this leg of their voyage to Boston via Chicago, particularly at night. «There you are,' Isabel said. «Took me a while to find you.» She felt a pang of remorse for having been so rough with him earlier, after the encounter with the Skins. «Why didn't you just use our psychic link?» Kyle said dryly. «I'm not sure how to activate it,' she said, sitting down near him on the padded bench. «I think you have to want it to be activated. Or start it somehow.» «Like I keep saying, I'm kinda new to this whole 'alien powers' thing,' Kyle said. «I didn't expect to become a charter member of the Psychic Hotline after I graduated from high school.» Isabel smiled, then reached forward to grab his hand. «Hey, I'm sorry about earlier. I didn't mean to go all Buffyversus-evil on you.» He squeezed her fingers, then withdrew his hand. He offered her a slight smile. «It's okay. Maybe I'm just freaked out because your robe didn't cover very much when I was trying to save your life.» Isabel felt herself blushing, and she glared at Kyle. «Ahhh, I try to make peace, and you try to embarrass me. You'd better watch out, Kyle Valenti. I might dreamwalk you and find a way to make you absolutely terrified of nubile, seminude women.» They sat silently for a while, sneaking looks and smiles at each other. Was this a flirtation? Suddenly, Isabel felt another stab of guilt. Jesse. Kyle was the one who finally broke the silence. «Let's try Jesse.» Isabel raised an eyebrow, wondering if Kyle had tapped into her thoughts again. «Try Jesse how?» Kyle snorted. «Get your mind out of the gutter, Isabel. Let's try contacting him. Use me as your psychic superhighway. It'll be good practice, and;might even make me feel more positive about using these new powers of mine.» Isabel nodded. She looked into Kyle's eyes, then closed hers. She reached out toward Kyle with her mind, but saw nothing but darkness. And then suddenly, she was spinning, traveling down a corridor of multicolored lights, spiraling toward an almost dazzling brightness. «Jesse?» Isabel saw him sitting in the seat of a smallish plane, one of whose jet engines was visible through the window. Jesse was leafing through a stack of manila files that sat in his lap. «Jesse?» He looked up and straight at her, surprise on his face. «Isabel? What? How are you here?» «I'm not,' Isabel said, looking around the plane's compact cabin. She actually felt as though she were standing in the aisle beside him, and ducked her head to avoid bonking it on the ceiling. And she noticed that Kyle was apparently standing beside her as well, although Jesse had so far shown no sign of noticing his presence. «It's a long story,' Isabel told Jesse. «I'm here courtesy of a friend's emerging new powers. But I'm really not here I'm actually on a train headed toward Chicago. After that, I'll be on my way to see you in Boston.» Jesse looked surprised. «When did this happen?» She opened her mouth to answer, and he interrupted her. «Wait, you can't see me in Boston. I'm flying to Los Angeles.» «Why L.A.? And why now?» Isabel looked around at the surroundings. The only other person in the plane's cramped cabin was a roundish woman who reminded her a bit of one of the lawyers from The Practice. She seemed oblivious to Isabel's presence, and to the fact that Jesse was having an animated discussion with her. «The Special Unit came after me. And I'm not the only one, Isabel. They… they picked up your