The Reach

--27--

She tried; oh, how she tried.

But back in her little apartment that evening, with the October wind whispering to get in and Otto pacing restless by the door, Jess could not think of sleep. Not now, not here, maybe not ever, with the feeling of Patrick's kiss still haunting her lips. She didn't know what to think of that, of him, of anything. When she closed her eyes the walls pressed in close and she couldn't breathe, could not find herself among the voices clamoring to be heard.

Finally she set up a blank canvas on the easel at the window, mixed her paints at the sink, turning yellows into reds, swirling and dipping, smoothing, finding her place. A rough bristle will do, she thought, tonight is calling for broad, bold strokes. It was necessary to clear her head. She wished briefly she could be up in the night sky, above the clouds and under the full moon. But this late the airport would be empty, planes tied down and covered for the night like slumbering metal beasts. And she knew from experience that the need was only her desire to escape, something she had to fight against, especially now.

Her mind was free to drift back in time. She had been left alone more and more often after Michael's death, as her mother searched for answers at the bottom of a bottle. An orphan of alcoholism. It made her more self- sufficient, but also took from her a portion of her childhood. She became the adult in a family of two. At times her mother would not come home at all, and she would have to fend for herself. It made her grow up too fast, kept her from forming a solid foundation upon which to build her life, left her with a shaken self-confidence, left her as an overachiever, a person who pushed herself to the dropping point and then pushed some more. If she had to run a mile for gym class, she would run two; if she needed a B on a test to get by, she would get an A. There were no markers for her performance, no limits set. So she set her own, always trying to prove something. That she was better than this life.

Understanding your weaknesses is the difference between a person who is led by life and a person who leads, Jess told herself. She bathed the canvas in a base of gray, a touch of lighter orange near the top to simulate the color of a coming dawn, as the 2:00 a.m. train rattled by down below. More paint, thicker strokes. White and dark playing off each other, creating shadows and light, texture and depth. The night she had returned from college her freshman year, Christmas Eve, filled with the hope of a new beginning; her mother on the phone, I've started going to meetings, I'm getting with the program. The tree was up and decorated for the first time in years. The living room was clean and bright and empty. Waiting on the sofa, angry, then worried, then finally hours later her mother at the door, slurring her words and stumbling, the sound of a man's voice. Get the fuck out of here, my daughter's home. . . .

So she knew. The point was, she knew something of how Sarah felt. Unable to trust, to ever feel truly secure. Sarah felt like the world was out to get her. And why shouldn't she? Jess searched for that common thread and clutched at it. She knew it was important to have a bond with the person you were trying to understand. You had to walk in her shoes.

And yet the differences were immense. At least she had been able to escape, to choose another life, to make her own decisions. Sarah had been a prisoner from the moment she could think. Her frustrations and her anger had built over years of barred windows and institutional walls.

And finally those emotions were manifesting themselves physically. The walls were coming down. Even now, after all she had seen, Jess found it hard to believe. But the proof was before her eyes, in shattered lightbulbs and a rain of stones and a piece of electronic equipment melted into oblivion; even Connor the bear, singed where Sarah had clutched him. She thought of the case of Esther Cox and her poltergeist, pots and pans flying off the walls, water boiling in pails, beds shaking and thumping up and down. Before she had believed it to be a clear case of psychotic delusion; now she believed otherwise. And what about Uri Geller, world-famous metal bender extraordinaire, who had been continuously denounced as a fraud and a cheat by the scientific establishment? Did she believe now that he too, along with countless hundreds of others, was the real thing?

Her painting was too dark. A storm was coming. Frowning, she dabbed white paint, lightening the clouds and searching for moonlight. The angles of shadow were wrong, the moon was not overhead, but behind . . .

The proof was in more than just those things too, she thought as she dabbed paint and searched for an angle of imaginary moonshine. Little more than a month ago Sarah had been a catatonic invalid, and now she spoke, thought, imagined, dreamed. You had something to do with that, Jess told herself, and from that thought arose pride, an unreasoning hope, and a long-dormant faith. It was one of those thoughts that came easily in the stillness of early morning. Where one impossibility exists, why not two? Hell, why not all of them? Why couldn't Patrick be right in insisting that they stood on the edge of a new era of mankind?

It was a lot of weight to put on the shoulders of a single little girl. Jess put down her brush, clenched and unclenched her hands, remembering the feeling of the charge inside her, how it had coiled in her belly and then leapt from her palms like a living thing. Was that how such a power felt? Like a muscle tensed and quivering for release?

Jess knew she had found herself again. She had put her feet back firmly on the ground. She could go on, she could finish this thing now without second-guessing herself. But there were so many questions left unanswered. What were Wasserman's real motives? And Professor Shelley. What was her role in all of this? There was something more behind Shelley's confession that she needed to get out.

Give me the word. She'll be free, I promise you.

No, Patrick, she thought, / won't do that. I won't entrust Sarah's life to another set of strangers that take her and disappear. But there were organizations that would listen to her case. The state licensing board, mental health charter, even the American Medical Association, if it came to that.

For a moment the feeling thrilled her, filled her with hope and a sense of coming struggle. She would have to go up against Wasserman again. She would have to be very careful.

But Shelley was still Sarah's court-appointed guardian, and that carried a lot of weight. And Shelley would have to do something when the truth was out in the open.

She would have no choice but to listen now.

--28--

Three men and a woman stood in a small room filled with electronic equipment and leather bucket chairs. The room resembled the cockpit of a submarine with a viewing window that opened up over a vast, black space that appeared as deep as an ocean trench.

At the moment, all eyes were on one of the flat-screen monitors bolted to the wall, where a flurry of activity had reached its end. The sound was low, but the quality was such that they had no trouble hearing everything.

On the screen, several technicians moved into view, eclipsing the figure on the floor save for one pale hand and part of an arm. They watched in silence as the hand flopped once, like a fish out of water, and lay still.

'That's better,' Philippa Cruz murmured, flipping through the pages of her chart and jotting down more notes. 'She's like a light when the {rower's cut. I think we've got something, right there. Run it back and play it again.'

The monitor blinked gray static before the camera picked up the little girl again. She was surrounded by a fine, white mist that made it difficult to see. At first this had been a very unsettling thing to witness. They knew now that it was caused by the rapid acceleration of subatomic particles and the wicking of moisture and heat from the air, which in turn caused an intense drop in temperature and condensation to form in the surrounding space.

Simple physics, Cruz thought. Just like anything else. There are no miracles, only science.

When discussing the phenomenon of the psi gene and its effects with others, Cruz had found it helpful to present it in terms of conventional versus microwave heat. Most people are at least somewhat familiar with how a microwave oven works when heating food. Conventional heating requires contact by an object with another warmer one, like a pan on a hot stove. Energy is passed between the two in the form of heat. Microwave heating does not require direct contact, but accomplishes much the same thing.

To put it another way, Cruz thought, to push someone, most people would have to reach out their hand and make physical contact. A person with an active psi gene could accomplish the same thing through a process that utilized wave energy.

There was much more to it, of course, so much that they still didn't understand. But they were getting closer.