Inheritance (23 page)

You aren’t focusing
, Eres told her.

Reese realized that Eres had sensed everything she had thought about Amber. Her first instinct was to deny her feelings; to cover them up somehow.

You cannot lie
, Eres thought.
You can close your consciousness to others, but you can never lie. Not during
susum’urda
.

I was not lying
, Reese objected.

Eres guided her out of
susum’urda
, and then Reese felt the teacher somehow compel her to open her eyes. It was like being roughly shaken awake from a deep dream state. Eres dropped Reese’s hand, breaking their connection, and said, “When you are in
susum’urda
, your body will always reveal the truth. The physical actions that occur when you experience an emotion continue regardless of whether or not you want them to.”

“What?” Reese said, confused. She was disoriented by the sudden ending of
susum’urda
, and she had the uncomfortable feeling that Eres was disappointed in her.

“When you feel fear, for example, your body undergoes a series of physical actions. Your heart races, you might sweat, adrenaline might be released. All of these things will happen regardless of whether or not you’re able to control your external reactions. You might be able to hide it externally, but it’s still
happening internally. You were trying to hide your emotions internally, but that is impossible. You were applying your human desire to hide your emotions, but in
susum’urda
, the person you are connected to can sense all of your internal, physical reactions. You can’t hide. You can only close off the connection.”

Reese’s gaze flickered self-consciously to David. He was watching the two of them with his forehead furrowed, as if he were trying to figure out what had happened.
I wasn’t trying to hide
, Reese thought at Eres. The teacher did not seem to hear, so Reese tried again, not wanting to speak out loud.
I didn’t realize you were seeing everything. I wasn’t ready for you to see everything.

“Do you understand what I said?” Eres asked. “If you wish to close the connection, you may.
Susum’urda
is an intimate experience; you don’t need to have that with everyone. But you must understand that you cannot lie while you are having
susum’urda
.”

Reese realized, suddenly, that Eres had not heard her thoughts. Maybe Eres couldn’t hear her thoughts at all unless they were touching. Reese tried again.
Can you hear me?
But Eres’s expression did not change, and Reese felt no affirmation from the teacher. “I understand,” Reese said. “I wasn’t trying to lie. I just wasn’t ready for what you were doing.”

Eres gave her a thoughtful look. “I see. Well. I think our lesson is finished for today. I hope you’ll both remember what I told you. I look forward to next week.”

On the ferry home, Reese and David went up to the top deck, leaving David’s dad down below with a tablet loaded with Dr.
Brand’s research. Outside, the wind gusted against Reese’s face as the boat left the dock. She leaned against the railing, gazing across the water at the hills of Tiburon in the distance. As David came to stand next to her, she told him,
I don’t think the Imria can do what we can do. Eres Tilhar couldn’t hear my thoughts when we weren’t touching.

Are you sure?

I’m sure. I tried to communicate with her this way, but Eres didn’t react at all.

I tried too, but I couldn’t tell for sure if Eres heard me
.

Reese glanced over her shoulder; there was no one on the upper deck but her and David. “What do you think it means if the Imria can’t do this telepathic thing?” she said out loud. “They gave us our abilities—why don’t they have the same ones?”

“Maybe their DNA doesn’t work in us exactly the way they thought it would. How would they know for sure, anyway? They’ve never been successful with this adaptation thing before us.”

Reese looked out across the water. If the adaptation procedure had changed them in a way the Imria hadn’t expected, what would happen when they began adapting other human beings? “Do you think we should tell Eres about our telepathic stuff?”

“I’m not sure.”

She glanced at him. “Why?”

“They have so much power over us. They know so much that we don’t. This is the only thing they don’t know.”

She thought back. “Lovick and CASS don’t know, either. They think we have the same abilities as the Imria.”

“Nobody else knows,” he said in sudden realization. “We never told Sophia Curtis. We never got that far because Jeff Highsmith stopped us. They all think we have to be touching someone to know their thoughts.”

“We didn’t tell anyone about the crowds thing either, did we?” She tried to remember what had happened the day the gunman had been arrested at Fisherman’s Wharf. She had been overwhelmed by the emotions of the crowd, but she didn’t think anyone had really understood why. At least, nobody but David. “Did you tell your parents? The last time I talked to mine about our adaptation, I’m pretty sure I only told them about the touching thing.”

“No, I haven’t talked to them about it since we got back from Nevada, and I couldn’t figure out how to explain everything without sounding crazy, so I didn’t tell them about the telepathy stuff.” His gaze on her sharpened. “Are you sure you didn’t tell anyone? Not even Julian?”

She tried to remember all the conversations she’d had with Julian about the adaptation. “I don’t know,” she admitted finally. “I might have said something. But I think it’s okay. Julian won’t say anything. I know he won’t.”

David nodded. “All right. So we keep this to ourselves for now.”

A tense excitement gripped Reese. Could she and David finally have an advantage, however small? “Right. We don’t tell anyone else.”

“Not until it’s absolutely necessary,” David said.

The thought of what their government might do with two telepaths—even if the telepaths didn’t really know what they
were doing—was deeply unsettling to Reese. “On Monday, Mr. Hernandez is going to make us report in. What are we going to tell him?”

“We can tell him what Eres taught us, can’t we? If we’re only keeping our telepathy a secret, we might as well tell him the rest.”

“Okay. I guess that makes sense.” She turned around so that the railing was behind her and she could see Angel Island receding in the distance. Half a dozen seagulls lifted off from their perches on the pilings in the harbor, their white wings a blur of motion as they took to the air. She had gotten so used to not seeing birds around the city anymore that the sight of this flock was startling.

David said, “And we have to agree on when to reveal it.”

“Yes,” she said, her gaze still on the flying birds.

“Reese.”

There was something in the tone of his voice that made her look at him. “What?”

“What was that about with Eres Tilhar at the end?”

“Nothing,” she said, surprised by the change of subject. She saw a flash of disappointment in David’s eyes. She rushed on: “It was too much for me, that’s all. It was too intimate. I didn’t want Eres to know everything about me right away.”

He moved to stand in front of her, hands in his pockets. The wind was at her back now, and it blew her hair forward over her face. She tried to comb it back with her fingers, but it didn’t stay in place. He reached out to tuck a lock behind her ear, and the trail of his fingertip over her skin made her shiver. She caught his hand in hers, and she immediately felt the tension inside him.
He was anxious about what she wasn’t telling him, but he didn’t want to push her. She was filled with a combination of relief and shame.

He closed the space between them and kissed her gently. She wanted to pull him closer, but underneath the spark that lit inside her, she felt something else: a thin, wavering sadness. David stepped back, breaking contact, and gave her a brief, hollow smile. “We have to restrain ourselves, right?” he said.

She stared at him, uncertain. “Yeah,” she agreed finally. “Right.”

On Sunday afternoon, Reese’s mom drove her to UCSF Medical
Center to meet David and his dad. It was a very different experience from the exam she had received against her will at Blue Base. It took all of ten minutes. She didn’t have to get undressed, and her mom stayed in the exam room with her. There was a poster of the circulatory system on the wall, like something out of a biology classroom. A nurse in blue scrubs came in to take her blood and swab the inside of her cheek with a Q-tip. She was accompanied by a gray-haired doctor who introduced himself as Dr. Alan Nadler.

“How long will it take to sequence our DNA?” Reese asked after her blood was drawn.

“Not long,” Dr. Nadler answered. “It can be done in a matter
of hours these days, but we’ll need more time to analyze it and compare it with normal human DNA. We’re hoping to work fast, but we’re still in the process of assembling our team and we want to make sure nothing is contaminated. We hope to have preliminary results in a couple of weeks.” As the nurse finished up, Dr. Nadler took the samples from her and placed them in a locked case. “I’ll be overseeing the process from my office here at UCSF.” He removed a card from his pocket and handed it to Reese’s mom. “You can contact me if you have any questions.”

Later that night, Reese was sitting on the couch with her laptop, reading an article about the Imria—“Vatican Believes Imria Are Children of God”—when the landline rang in the kitchen. She heard footsteps, and then her mom’s muffled voice answered the phone. Reese scrolled through the story; the pope had declared that Akiya Deyir’s statements about the miraculous resemblance between humans and Imria proved that God’s hand was at work. During Sunday mass in Rome earlier in the day, the pope had said, “God is great, and there can be no greater proof of this than the fact that He has created another people also in His image.”

“Reese, do you know where Julian is?” her mom asked.

Reese looked up. Her mom was standing in the archway to the living room, phone in hand. “No,” Reese said. “Why?”

Her mom put the phone back to her ear. “She doesn’t know, Celeste.”

“What happened?” Reese asked.

“Julian’s late,” her mom said.

Reese glanced at the time on her laptop. It was almost ten
thirty. She hadn’t talked to Julian since school on Friday, and even then it had been only perfunctory. They still hadn’t made up from the fight they’d had earlier in the week. She had no idea where Julian could be on a Sunday night. “It’s still early,” Reese said, but her mom wasn’t paying attention.

“Why don’t you give him another hour or so,” she said into the phone. “It’s not the first time he’s been late.” A pause, and a worried expression crossed Cat’s face. “I know. But there are police everywhere these days—and those soldiers. I’m sure if he ran into any trouble with the protesters, you’d know by now.”

Reese closed the laptop and went to the windows, peeking through the curtains at the street below. She saw the sedan where her government agents were sitting across the street, but otherwise the block was quiet. Every once in a while protesters or tourists still swung by her house to snap photos, but the primary demonstrations took place across from Kennedy High School and at Fisherman’s Wharf. The rest of the city was crawling with cops and the National Guard.

“Call me when you hear from him,” Cat said. “I want to know as soon as you know. Bye.” The phone beeped as the call ended. “Honey, are you sure you don’t know where Julian is? He didn’t tell you anything?”

“No,” Reese said. It wasn’t strange for Julian to be out somewhere, but it was strange for his mom to be worried about it. That meant Julian probably wasn’t answering his phone. Reese went back to the couch and opened her laptop again. The screen still showed the article about the Vatican. As her mom went back to the kitchen, Reese pulled her own phone out of her pocket.
She sent Julian a message:
Where are you? Your mom called my mom to find out.

While she waited for him to text her back, she opened a new tab in her browser and searched for
Corporation for American Security and Sovereignty
. She had looked it up after the meeting with Charles Lovick and had found nothing, but she wanted to try again. This time she focused her search on blogs, real-time feeds, and the news. Still nothing. As a last-ditch effort, she went to the Bin 42 forums and searched for CASS there. Several posts were returned that used the words
corporation
,
security
, or
sovereignty
, but not all at once. The closest thing she could find was a theory about something called the Majestic 12, which was a committee of twelve men supposedly formed during the Truman Administration to investigate the crash at Roswell. Unfortunately, the follow-up comments revealed that the alleged government documents that proved the existence of the Majestic 12 were now believed to be a hoax.

She closed the screen and picked up her phone again, but Julian still hadn’t responded to her text.