She wanted him to make the last connection: that she had realized her birth parents were psychic.
He didn’t—or at least he didn’t voice it. His gaze flicked to the screw on his desk. “You need to focus on the task at hand. Your parents’ genetic makeup doesn’t have any bearing on what you’re doing in this room.”
Teddy released her frustration with a sound that was part groan, part growl. All right, so maybe what Clint was saying was true.
“It’s not a roller-coaster ride, Teddy. You’re building a foundation here, remember? Just lay one brick at a time.”
His words didn’t cool the simmering impatience that coursed through her. She had lived her entire life oblivious to her past. Now that she was finally beginning to understand it, she wanted know everything immediately. Now. Yesterday.
Teddy glanced at the screw on Clint’s desk. A screw that was so important he had it encased in glass. He really did believe in the power of small things, small steps.
“Fine. Let’s try something new,” Clint said. He pulled a Ping-Pong ball out of his desk drawer. “A plastic ball filled with air wants to move.”
Teddy raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, I know. It has no brain, no central nervous system. It can’t want anything. I’m simply saying that an object in motion tends to stay in motion. The physical properties of a Ping-Pong ball offer almost no resistance to energy. It doesn’t matter whether that energy is psychic or physical force. The ball simply acts upon that energy and moves.” He threw the ball, sending it skittering across his desk. “Now you try.”
Teddy reached for it.
“Not with your physical body. With your astral body.”
Is he crazy?
“First of all, how? Second of all, what does that even mean?”
“Imagine your astral body extending through your physical body to push the ball.”
Teddy took a deep breath. She centered herself, drawing upon Dunn’s meditative techniques for focus. She reached out to the Ping-Pong ball the same way she’d reached out to Clint’s mind a moment ago. She pictured a shadow of her hand stretching forward, a shimmer of fingers wrapping around plastic.
Nothing.
“Try, Teddy.”
“I am.” Again she willed the ball to move. It just sat there. Clint kept telling her to try harder, to summon her power. She did, again and again—with no result.
“You really, really want the Ping-Pong ball to move. But all that wanting it to move—and resulting frustration when it doesn’t—is about you wanting the Ping-Pong ball. Just move the Ping-Pong ball. The Ping-Pong ball does not take directions. Does that make sense?”
“No.”
“Look, Teddy.” Clint shifted in his chair and tried again. “You’ve made it a battle of wills. You versus the Ping-Pong ball. The Ping-Pong ball doesn’t care about you. Just move it.”
Teddy took a moment to consider what he’d said.
Stop thinking. Just do it. Nike should start marketing to psychics.
She rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine. I’ll try one more time.” Teddy took a deep breath and imagined her astral arm reaching out of her body, pushing the Ping-Pong ball across the desk.
It wavered.
Clint scooped the ball up from the desk. “The end goal of this exercise is to draw upon both your telepathic and telekinetic ability. Today it’s a Ping-Pong ball, but one day it could be a bullet.”
Teddy couldn’t imagine moving a bullet. An object in motion with its own speed and force. “Like in The Matrix?”
Clint laughed. “Yes, like in The Matrix. But there’s a whole principle of astral quantum physics behind it.” He held up one hand. “First, telepathy. When you reach out to someone’s mind and encounter his astral body, you access all his thoughts, memories, and feelings out of order, right? You see time in a nonlinear way. As you develop your skill, you may start to see the future, memories that haven’t even occurred.”
“I guess,” Teddy said, remembering what it was like when she went into someone’s head.
“What if you can extend this philosophical principle from telepathy to telekinesis? If you treat time as nonlinear on the physical plane, too? You could free yourself from the constraints of time itself, potentially change how you experience time—meaning you could actually change its speed. That combined with the ability to move an object . . .” Clint trailed off.
“Means that I’d be able to slow down time in order to bend a bullet’s path.”
“Exactly.”
A knock on the door interrupted them. She checked the clock. Their two-hour tutorial was already over, and another student stood in the hallway, waiting to meet with Clint.
Before Teddy turned to leave, Clint tossed the Ping-Pong ball in her direction. She caught it with one hand.
“One brick at a time,” he said.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
EVEN THOUGH WEEKS HAD PASSED since Halloween, Boyd seemed to take the theft personally. And in turn was personally trying to ruin the first years’ lives by ensuring they could never walk again. After a merciless cycle of lunges, squats, and walkouts, they now were running laps on the track. “Faster!” she yelled.
Teddy tried to block the sergeant’s shouts, not an easy feat when the only other sound was the heavy breathing of the recruits surrounding her. Her lungs burned; a cramp pierced her side. And she still had two more times around the track to go.
She finished the course in the middle of the pack—not great but good enough. She put her head between her knees, gulping air as Boyd tore in to the recruit who stumbled in last.
Molly, as usual.
They had barely spoken since the events of Halloween, but watching Molly crumble as Boyd yelled at her made something inside Teddy soften. She opened her mouth to tell Boyd to lay off, but the sergeant seemed to sense even potential insubordination. She whipped her head around to face Teddy, as if daring her to speak. Teddy remembered the first day
