Chapter Thirteen #2
“Yes, I feel we’re exactly where one of the weapons is,” she said.
“It’s in this crate. Someone outside is pushing on it very hard.
It’s someone speaking English and because he’s cussing like a pro, I’m guessing he isn’t Macedonian.
Or we aren’t in Macedonia. Can’t verify, Hades.
I can’t go through the crate and not change the universal agreement.
If I do, we lose trail of all the other weapons those guys were trying to locate through their remote viewer. ”
Location was so hard to pinpoint. In the first experiments, her monitor, who usually knew the universal agreement, guided her “tours”, making her describe the target area in detail.
She never knew the location until she was back from the ether.
They’d hand her the envelope that had the universal agreement written inside and then they’d wait for the “outbounder”, the person outside the loop, to call back to verify and confirm what she saw.
As she advanced, she learned that the universal agreement was just that—there really wasn’t any need for an envelope containing coordinates or names—and just focusing on one would get her to the agreed target.
When she finally became the lone viewer left in the supersoldier-spy program, they’d tested her with further targets, some top secret, that couldn’t be verified except by satellite photos.
All those earlier assignments seemed so easy compared to what she and Hades must now accomplish.
Her monitor was as blind as she was, and without an outbounder, she had to depend on his experience to find a way to verify.
It was hard, very hard. But she sat there in the dark, biting her tongue, ignoring the impulse to escape the feeling of confinement, and waited for further instructions.
“Is that man on the outside still shouting and trying to move the crate? Is he really trying to open it?” Hades asked.
Helen tried to gauge the different muffled sounds.
“He did turn the crate over before he started cursing non-stop. He sounds a bit calmer, actually. I’d guess he’s talking to someone but I can’t hear any other voices.
” She paused as her surroundings started shaking, and like earlier before, her head began to spin dizzily, reacting to the sensation of freefalling upside down in total darkness.
She fiercely reminded herself that the sensation wasn’t real, shaking off the urge to escape outside.
Following instinct, she pushed her senses outward, reaching for God knew what.
Ever since she was a kid, there was a part of her who could “sense” things, a part inside her that somehow manifested itself into a voice that would warn her if she was near danger.
She had long ago stopped questioning the feeling, trusting the voice when it ordered her to move out of the way, or to run the other way, or to pay attention to what appeared to be harmless.
It was just a voice in her head, nothing more, until now.
She’d never consciously tried to exert the sense before, didn’t even know she could do it.
Then, without warning, something inside burst out and there was a loud popping, like air pressure in one’s ears when a plane took off.
It happened so suddenly she couldn’t think of anything for a minute.
It was no longer dark, yet she knew she wasn’t outside the crate.
She didn’t know what had just happened, but she could feel what she couldn’t see, the outside of the crate.
She let out a long breath of awe. “Hades—”
“Shhh. I’m feeling it. Whatever it is, I’m feeling it.” And there was wonder in his voice. He paused, and she could feel his curiosity and his will combating it. “Later. We’ll talk about this after the session. I don’t know if you realize that you’re not wholly in the crate right now, Elena.”
Duh. Since she was the one here in the ether, shouldn’t it be her explaining the phenomena?
“Care to explain where I am then, Mr. Know-it-all?” she asked, and refused to admit she was doing so because she wasn’t truly sure herself, even though she suspected the answer. “What did you see from your end?”
“I felt you trying very hard to stay inside the crate. Usually, when you reach a target, you’re free to move out and about, to explore for details, but to do so now would break the universal agreement because those men were after more than one weapon.
There was a floating sensation that expanded and then you moved forward—or I felt you move forward because it was dark and I was about to say the trigger code to get you back into the race car—but you were too fast and then suddenly, you stopped.
You stopped just before you were out there, Elena.
You’re actually, for lack of a better explanation, stuck in one side of the crate. ”
Helen reached up and patted her face. She felt about the same. His explanation sounded so ridiculous she couldn’t help saying something ridiculous back. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you string so many sentences together. You should talk to crates more often.”
His quiet chuckle made her laugh out loud.
It was, she knew, a sort of hysterical reaction to this new sensation, of being and not-quite being.
When she’d gone through “solid” things before—doors, walls, even steel—she hadn’t stopped in the middle of the “thought”.
Those acts were done without the thought of ever being “stuck” inside because it’d been instilled in her during training that she, her physical body, wasn’t in the ether.
It was her projection of what she was “seeing”, a way her brain was trying to understand the experience.
She’d accepted the explanation. But now, she wondered whether there was actually more to the “phantom body” being her brain’s projection.
Because she could actually feel her crateness, the flatness of the surface, the dimension. She could—
“Hades? I sense the writing on my...the crate’s sides.
” She concentrated on reading the strange letters, taking a few seconds before realizing that it was Cyrillic.
It was awkward, as if she were reading something written on a tee shirt she was wearing, that was how real it felt to being part of that crate.
She said each letter out loud, trying to make sense from her angle.
“Serbian and Croatian. Food Aid,” Hades translated for her. “This is what Hawk’s looking for. One down. You ready to leave?”
Best words she’d heard all trip. “Yeah. We have to hurry. Whoever is out there has found something to pry the crate open. If I tumbled out, that’s the end of our little trip.”
“Checkered flag, Elena. Go back to the race car and continue to the next weapon those CIA agents were after.”
Helen saw the checkered flag the moment he mentioned it.
It served as her guide post, the mental trigger a monitor assigned to his remote viewer to get her back to her physical self.
Without it, a novice remote viewer could easily get confused or lost in the ether.
She moved toward it and there was a sucking sound, like she was a suction cup stuck to a surface.
She felt slightly giddy, her mind still reeling at the realization of what she’d just done, as she felt herself departing the location.
She stumbled in the direction of her waiting car, still feeling the pull of the crammed space behind her.
A soft, thready moan. A creak. “Cam...Cameron?”
Helen froze at the whisper, her hand on the car door. There was so much fear in that voice. That kind of total darkness could drive a person mad.
“Get in and go, Elena. Checkered flag.” His order was quiet but firm.
“Did you hear that? There’s someone in that crate,” Helen breathed. “A woman.”
“And someone’s trying to open it. He’ll help her. Get inside the car, Elena. You can’t do anything. Checkered flag.”
Helen reluctantly obeyed. Who was in there? How did she get in a CIA-dropped crate? She gave a sigh as she started the car up and put it into gear. She hated leaving unsolved mysteries just when they got interesting.