Текст книги "Illusion"

Автор книги: Фрэнк Перетти

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

“Where’s Kessler?” said one.

“We’ve paged her. But the subject took the stairs and then security lost her.”

“She’s probably long gone by now.”

“Wouldn’t that be better?”

The elevator dinged. She looked through the door window in time to see two doctors—at least they were wearing white coats—get into the elevator.

Before the big steel doors swung shut she caught a glimpse of a dark hallway bathed in hellish red light.

Well, this was quite enough for one day. She hurried up the stairs, one flight, two flights, three, four. She reached a landing with a door and went through.

Oh, wow, main floor, back in the hallways. A sign on the wall directed her toward the lobby, and she went back the way she came. A left turn at the next intersection should take her past the gift shop, then to the lobby and out of there. She reached the intersection, turned left—

And almost collided with a lady doctor, her sandals squeaking on the floor as she braked and almost toppled.

Try to bluff?“Oh, sorry, excuse me.” Smile, try to pass by—

But her eyes went to the doctor’s face as if the face had pulled them there, and just in time to see the doctor do a double take and turn pale, her professional demeanor melting away. “Oh, my God!” She backed toward the wall, putting a hand behind her to touch the wall and steady herself.

Mandy felt her own reaction, an ache of foreboding. “You—you’re Dr. Kessler! From the ER!” It still astounded her that she knew.

Dr. Kessler’s other hand went over her heart as she stared Mandy up and down, wagging her head in what looked like disbelief, maybe horror. Her jaw was trembling. She fell against the wall as if all her strength had gone out of her.

Mandy was stupefied. She was supposed to be running from trouble, but all she could do was stand there. A doctorafraid of her? “Are you all right?”

And then the disbelief in the doctor’s face gave way to a profound look of pity, the most tragic face Mandy had ever seen.

“What’s wrong? Do you need a … doctor?”

Kessler covered her face a moment, then shook her head in an unexplainable fit of remorse. She looked at Mandy as if trying to find words, but finally just waved her along. “Go on,” she whispered, “go on!”

“Are you sure—”

“Get out of here!”

Mandy hurried, looked back—the doctor was still resting against the wall, head down, a hand to her forehead.

She made it to the lobby and slowed to a brisk but normal-looking walk, making a beeline for the front doors. She came by the reception desk, smiled at Nancy—

A hand grabbed her right arm. “Hold up there, girl!”

“What—”

It was Bill the male nurse and …

Tyler the security guy, grabbing her other arm. “Take it easy now.”

Her first reaction was natural, to squirm and try to break away, but their hands were clamped on her, digging into her, and she couldn’t move. It hurt. From somewhere she found the self-control and civility to ask, “Please let go of me.”

“Not till we’ve cleared up a few things,” said Tyler.

So here she was again, held against her will and painfully so by two insensitive brutes—like Johnny the cop and Dr. Angela’s apes Bruce and Dave and the sneaky Samaritans Clarence and Lemuel—and once again, she was being held and manhandled in a hospital.

“Let go of me,” she said, and it was a warning.

Of course they didn’t. They started forcing her along and she knew they would take her down another long hallway to another door that would lock behind her.

Any thought of doing the right thing, any consideration of being reasonable and compliant, flickered out like a candle in a gale, and in their place flashed a burning, visceral rage. She growled, clenched her fists and eyes, reached from the depths of her rage into unseen places and times, and drew back to herself any and all parts of her that were free and could fight.

It happened fast. It was noisy and alarming. Nancy screamed and cowered behind the reception desk. Everyone else in the lobby froze, and some ducked. Mandy remembered making some kind of shrieking animal sound, and before she drew another breath she was coming at Tyler and Bill from every direction, fighting mad, ready to show them how it felt to be grabbed, dragged, manhandled, and hurt. Both came off the floor and sailed several yards before landing, Bill on the floor, Tyler slung over a couch in a sitting area. A lamp next to the couch shook, then slid, then sailed in Tyler’s direction.

It stopped, in midair.

Mandy was looking at herself looking back. The Mandy she was had just come in the front door, neatly dressed, wide-eyed and curious, looking at every little thing until she saw herself.

The lamp crashed and rolled on the floor before it ever reached Tyler.

Mandy was crouching like a cat, panting, disheveled. She’d just decked two men twice her size and was ready to do worse and she would have … which scared her. She stared at who she was then, shocked at who she was now. How in the world did she get from thereto here? Sense and civility returned—whipped and ragged, but they were there, along with a healthy dose of shame and embarrassment. “Oh, boy, are you in for a ride!”

She made sure Tyler and Bill got the message—they were obviously in pain as they looked up at her, not moving—then walked up to her earlier self. The words didn’t come from memory; they burst from her as if foreordained. “Don’t let ’em do this to you, you hear me?”

She could hear hurried footsteps from the hall, see Bill and Tyler stirring. She brushed past herself and headed for the door.

“Let her go!” came Kessler’s voice. She looked back to see Bill and Tyler get to their feet. “Let her go,” Kessler repeated, and they remained in place. Kessler met her eyes, but only to watch her leave.

Kessler did not want to talk to Ernie Myers. She dreaded what she would learn, loathed what she would have to do with it. But the others were waiting.

She leaned over Ernie. “You look like you’ve seen someone, Ernie.”

He was ready to confess. “Yeah, yeah, I did. But it wasn’t a hallucination! I saw her. She was standing right there. She tried to zap me again!”

“Who?”

“The ghost, the Tinkerbell girl.” He spilled it. “Yeah, I saw her on the job. She was this ghost kind of thing, all dressed in pink and sparkles and she just came out of nowhere and when I touched her she, she zapped me, she did all this to me! And I’m not crazy, I swear to God!”

“It’s okay, Ernie, it’s all right. Did she have a name?”

“Uh, yeah. Mandy. She said her name was Mandy.”

Of course.

Ernie brought out a section of Sunday’s newspaper. “And I found her, can you believe that? I’m not crazy, I really found her. She was asking about the Orpheus Hotel, so I checked the paper. Take a look!” He folded the newspaper to the page and handed it to her, pointing at an ad featuring a sprite young magician opening at the Orpheus. “That’s her! Mandy Whitacre! That’s the gal I saw! Man, she must be really good. I’d just like to know why she zapped me and broke my collarbone.”

Kessler straightened. No surprises here, just confirmation. “I’m sure she could have explained it all to you.”

“Yeah, well, she’ll explain it all right, she’ll explain it to my lawyer!”

Her heart sank. No surprise there either.

chapter

38

Well, she hadn’t had any visitors yet.

Mandy sat in her dressing room trying not to botch her mascara again, hoping she would never hear an authoritative knock at the door. There was a cop right there to handcuff her for that afternoon’s Dumpster escape, but he didn’t say or do anything that wasn’t part of the act.

Her hand still shook a little.

Girl, you havegot to remember the rules: don’t be a danger to yourself or others. If Kessler hadn’t stepped in and stopped those guys …

She whooshed a sigh. Oh, the things she was about to do to Bill and Tyler and that lobby. It was God’s grace that she didn’t.

But she really could have, and that was why she was shaking. Call it an answer to prayer– hoo boy, what an answer!—but ever since that visit to Clark County Medical Center, a realization had come together piece by piece, growing from a hmmm?to an aha!to a big-time life changer over the course of the afternoon: all the weird “delusions” she’d been having weren’t delusions. They were weird and otherworldly, scary at times, mysterious, and hard to control, but one thing they were not and delusions were, was false. The Clark County Medical Center wasn’t a bunch of nightmarish flashbacks but a real place she had visited, if not in body, in fact, countless times. She’d seen real things, been real places, met real people, learned real names. She’d talked to Ernie Myers from a supposed delusion and she’d talked to him in the real world, and in the real world he was mad at her for doing something to him from her delusion, which told her the delusion was as real as the real. She was never making any of this stuff up, she was really going there and seeing it.

Just like her visions of the ranch, the white paddock fence, the driveway, the three aspens, the house, the barn, all of it. She’d seen those things because they were really there and somehow, some way, she’d been there to see them before really being there. The Mandy she saw coming out of the hospital was the same Mandy she saw coming in—now, how that worked she hadn’t a clue, but both Mandys were she, and both were real.

She beckoned to Maybelle, who sat with her friends on their perch in the corner. Maybelle fluttered, alighted on a lipstick, and brought it to her. The dove got a treat and returned to the perch.

Anyway, this changed everything. Seeing things that weren’t real was crazy. Seeing things that turned out to be real wasn’t. Thinking she could move things from somewhere else was crazy, but really moving them from somewhere else wasn’t. Just ask Clarence, Lemuel, Preston Gabriel, Bill, and Tyler, and most every audience she’d ever had—to name a few. Until today she’d gone with it and figured it was just part of her crazy world, something she would never understand, much less discuss. Now she still didn’t know what it was—a gift, maybe?—but she knew it wasn’t crazy.

As for thinking—knowing—she was Mandy Whitacre, if all the other stuff was real, then maybe her being twenty years old in 2010 when she was born in 1951 was real, too. Sure it was. She just hadn’t figured that part out yet.

Anyway, all the trouble aside, today’s Dumpster escape went off without a hitch because slipping between dimensions, “interdimming,” to pull off a vanish, escape, levitation, whatever she needed, wasn’t so scary or difficult anymore. She was getting a handle on it—pretty much. Now, if the trouble would just stay away …

Well—she touched up her rouge– maybe you’re not crazy, so try not being dangerous. Behave yourself and be glad you aren’t in jail!

The nine-o’clock show had a great crowd, a nearly full house.

Les and Eileen, along with their friend Clive, all from Westport, Connecticut, were as entertaining as Sarah, Clive’s wife, the one Mandy levitated. Mandy allowed them to walk all around and under Sarah and even wave their hands over the top of her to feel for wires, and they were having such an amazed, flabbergasted, and hilarious time of it the routine was scoring big points and gold stars with the audience. What made the illusion even more fun was the fact that Sarah, unlike most pretty girls who get levitated, was not in a hypnotic trance but fully awake and as giddily mystified as her husband and friends were.

Nearly excellent, thought Dane, sitting near the back. Incredible timing, inventive effects and gags, great pacing, perfect misdirection and hand placement, lots of Vegas-style pizzazz, but where was the wonder? He couldn’t see it in her eyes or hear it in her voice, not like before. Maybe the town was getting to her. Or …

He could see Seamus Downey standing in the back, watching—or patrolling. Downey seemed pleased enough, but with a strange lord-of-all look in his eyes that Dane had seen before and never liked. So this was the man in her life now? That could explain a lot.

What a feeling—or feelings: pride in the great progress she’d made, gladness at her success mixed with regret at the loss of her unique sparkle, sorrow at the chasm now between them, and a longing to be with her, at least to be friends again, to steer her a bit, maybe bring back what she’d lost since … The memory of that day would forever haunt him.

He’d come in the hope of speaking with her, but now that was looking like no small task, especially with Mr. Downey the Great and Powerful lurking about. He’d thought of finding someone in management and using his name to get through to her, but seeing her on that stage made her seem so unreachable and him so much a stranger, what could he say?

He could try congratulations, kudos, small talk, and then– oh, this should be easy—the question of who she really was, and how would he segue into that? He might comment on the stage name she’d chosen and how she’d come by that name, and whether that tied in with all the other facts about her that lined up perfectly with the girl he met some forty years ago.

And where from there? Oh, this should be a cakewalk.

The show went great considering what a day she’d had, but as soon as she closed the dressing room door, uncapped a bottle of water, and dabbed the sweat from her face, the highs of the performance ebbed away and the trouble loomed in her mind. Maybe, maybe, Ernie Myers would forget about her, maybe he wouldn’t see her picture in the paper even though she told him she was looking for the Orpheus Hotel; maybe the hospital wouldn’t be that interested in her even though she decked two of its employees.

There was a knock on the door. It didn’t sound like a police bust. The voice was quiet and courteous. “Miss Whitacre?”

“Julio?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She opened the door to Julio the bellman, all by himself. He’d brought a small envelope. “Thanks, Julio.” She offered him a treat-size Hershey’s bar from a dish on her vanity. He snatched it up, gave her a wink, and let her be.

The envelope contained a note. She unfolded it and read, “ Saw you near the elevators the day of my accident, would like to speak to you regarding what you saw.”It was signed by Doris Branson, the hotel manager. Branson included her phone number.

Mandy rested against the wall and let her lungs empty. Accident? What a day. First Ernie, and now her.

The good news could be, if Doris Branson saw her near the elevators while she was interdimming there, that was one more confirmation that something real was going on, a second witness. The bad news could be, if Doris Branson had an accident right after she saw Mandy, the same as happened to Ernie, that could mean that Mandy and all her interdimming had something to do with it, and what if it did? Double trouble.

Well …

She’d just have to call Doris and face the music, whatever it was. It probably would be painful, but what else was new? She might learn something more about her very strange world, so the pain might be worth it. To put a smile on it, maybe Doris would end up on her side and talk to Ernie, then maybe they’d all talk, then maybe … she didn’t know.

Dane waited through the show, suffering and enjoying, and stood to applaud when Mandy struck her final pose. When the curtain came down and the lights came up, he searched through the heads and shoulders to find an usher, anyone—other than Downey—he might ask about having an audience with—

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. An unintended brush, of course; the place was swarming. There was an usher at the main door. He could ask him—

The tap came again. Probably Downey. Dane steeled himself and turned.

“Pardon me,” said a middle-aged man in wire-rimmed glasses. “Am I addressing Dane Collins?”

Dane was looking at a miracle and made no effort to hide his awe. “You most certainly are.”

“I’m pleased to meet you, sir, and glad I caught you.” The man extended his hand. “I would use an alias, but you already have my name: Jerome Parmenter. Before you have your talk with Miss Whitacre, may we have a word?”

chapter

39

Parmenter couldn’t talk with Dane anywhere at the Orpheus, not in a hotel room, not in the casino, not in the lounge or in the restaurant. They had to find someplace safe, neutral, secure. Dane suggested the house where he was staying.

“No,” said Parmenter, “everyone knows you’re living there.”

“What do you mean, ‘everyone’? Who’s ‘everyone’?”

“We’ll talk about that.”

“So how much do you know about me?”

“Not here.”

Dane thought of going to Christian Faith Center. By now it was after ten, but the church might still be open. Parmenter thought that would work. Dane called Pastor Chuck, who met him at the front door and gave him a key to lock up. Parmenter remained in the car until Dane could make sure no one would see him, and then went inside.

They settled for the Preschool Department, a large room painted in bright, primary colors with biblical murals on the walls, Scripture posters, pictures of Jesus, Moses, the disciples, the lost sheep, the boatful of fish, and finger paints of Jesus, sheep, fishing boats, and an empty tomb. They sat down on child-size chairs at a child-height table in a corner filled with plastic toys. It looked awkward, even a little silly, but Parmenter felt safe here. He visibly relaxed.

“Good. Good enough.” He faced Dane, hands on his knees, his knees elevated because of the tiny chair he sat on. “Thank you for giving me this time, and most of all, thank you for choosing to talk with me before talking to Miss Whitacre. I’m sure you’ll see it was the right choice.”

Parmenter produced a laptop computer from his briefcase, set it on the table, and flipped it open. He reached for a child’s wooden block and set it on the table as well.

Dane recognized the computer. “You were there at McCaffee’s.”

“Oh, you bet I was.” He pulled a small device that resembled a GPS from the briefcase and set it atop the toy block. He switched the device on, then tapped at the computer keys, apparently responding to whatever information the device was sending. “And I’m going to answer all your questions if I can, but I suggest we cover things in order, and in small doses. You’ll understand once we get into it.”

A few more taps on the computer, and then he took the block and held it out. “Here. Hold this in your hand.” Dane extended his palm, and Parmenter set the block on it. “To get through the introductions, I know who you are and where you live and what you do for a living, so there’s no need for you to tell me. As for who I am, you obviously know or you wouldn’t have made such a lasting impression on Dr. Kessler. I can tell you my age—I’m fifty-seven—and I could list my credentials and diplomas and bore you to death or I could get right to the important stuff. So hold the block up so you see where it is and also”—he indicated the block’s former location on the table—“where it came from.”

Dane felt like a volunteer in one of his stage routines, but he was not expecting a magic trick.

“Lucky for us,” said Parmenter, eyeing the computer screen, “Mandy Whitacre is inactive at the moment, probably asleep in bed, so we’ll be able to squeeze in and do this. Don’t blink. You ready?”

Dane’s eyes were open.

Parmenter tapped the enter key on the computer.

The block vanished from Dane’s hand and instantly reappeared in its former location on the table.

Dane was impressed but not surprised. He’d already seen this phenomenon several times.

Parmenter looked at the block on the table, then at Dane. “Okay, you saw what happened?”

Dane nodded. “Interdimensional displacement?”

The scientist lit up. “You’ve been reading about me!”

“And this is how she does it.”

“Fundamentally, yes. To qualify myself in your eyes, I have just shown you the core explanation for Mandy Whitacre’s magic, and I’m not betraying a confidence. I invented it. Shall I break it down for you?”

“You have my undivided attention.”

“To put it simply, I set the block on the table, then determined the exact spatial coordinates, exactly where it was, at”—he consulted his computer—“eleven thirty-eight P.M., January thirtieth, 2011. I then moved it to another location, your hand, at approximately eleven thirty-nine. Then the fun part: I sent it back to where it was and how it was at eleven thirty-eight. Where it was and how it was, the exact state it was in a minute earlier. It’s crucial to understand that.”

“And how did you do it?”

Parmenter sucked in a whistle, then sighed it out, trying to come up with an answer, Dane figured. “It’s a combination of time and space travel, although the crucial difference is, the block didn’t travel through time, time traveled through the block.”

Dane had read the articles Preston’s people had found. He vaguely understood. “The parallel railroad tracks.”

“Yes, yes! And here’s a practical way of looking at it: I suppose you’re familiar with how to restore a computer to a prior state? Your computer gets snarled up or crashes because you’ve hit the wrong key at the wrong time, and the only way to fix it is to have it revert to exactly the way it was a day ago or a week ago, or whenever it was still working, before whatever went wrong went wrong.”

“Right.”

“Ever done that?”

“Yeah. A few times.”

“Well, that’s similar to what we just did with the block. It was on the table for a moment, then, in the course of time, about a minute, I put it in your hand. Now … the key difference here between reversion—that’s what I call it, reversion—and time travel like you see in the movies, is that the block didn’t travel back in time. What happened was”—he searched the ceiling for how to explain it—“this computer is linked with our Machine. I fed the Machine the data from the block, the Machine replicated a secondary timeline”—he gave his hands an erasing wiggle, frustrated—“well, we put the block on a parallel timeline …”

“The other railroad track.”

“Yes! Right! Then, without shifting the block itself in relation to our timeline, I shifted the secondary timeline it was on backward by one minute. So even though the block is still here with us, in our present, in our space”—he reached over and flicked the block with his finger just to make the point—“it is actually existing in a timeline that is one minute behind ours. The block is, and always will be, one minute younger in relation to us. If the block were a conscious entity, it would think it never left the table, but it would be wondering where that last minute went. Very simple.”

“Oh, yeah. Very simple.”

“So, to recount the story that goes with this”—he put the block back with its friends in a toy box—“I got to thinking about the practical, humanitarian use for such a discovery. Imagine someone getting cancer or being injured, and medical science having the ability to place them on a new timeline and revert them to a point and place in time before they got sick or before they had the accident. They could continue their life from that point and bypass the illness or injury.”

“Bypass the illness or injury? Not just go through it all over again?”

Parmenter drew an extra breath before answering, “That’s why we put them on a secondary timeline, a whole new route through time so they don’t retrace the old one.” Dane was figuring it out and Parmenter could see it in his face. “Yes, you see where this is going.”

Dane had been preparing himself, trying to imagine such a possibility while trying not to hope. Even now, he dared not speak it.

“It’s not all roses, I’ll tell you that now, but to continue the story, some friends and I managed to build a small machine that could revert things and we experimented with blocks of wood like this one and other small objects. We stepped on a toy car, then put the broken pieces in the Machine and watched the car put itself together again. We crushed a can and then reverted it to an uncrushed can. That was exciting. We thought, Wow, with a big enough machine we could take an old car and erase all the miles off it, or a wrecked car and unwreck it. Great in theory, a little shaky in the practical application.

“But anyway, we got around to reverting rats—hope you won’t find this offensive, but we injured the rats in various ways and then put them in the Machine, and voilà! The rats went back to the way they were before we hurt them. We went bigger and tried monkeys. Same thing.

“But”—he waved his finger in the air, signaling an important point—“we also did maze and memory tests on the lab animals, and sure enough, their brains also reverted. The rats learned a maze right before we injured them, and then we reverted them and they weren’t injured anymore, but they couldn’t remember their way through the maze either. The monkeys could perform tasks, but when we reverted them to a condition prior to learning the tasks, they didn’t remember what they’d learned. They were younger, too, because reversion means everything reverts: any injuries, any bodily changes—haircuts, nail trimmings, weight loss or gain—and memory. So for all practical purposes, the rat, the monkey, the human subject wakes up behind the times. It’s kind of a Rip Van Winkle effect: they’ve lost a minute, an hour, a few days, depending on how far they were reverted.”

“How about forty years?”

Parmenter hesitated to answer.

Dane calmly asked again, “How about forty years? Can you revert someone forty years?”

Parmenter thought for a moment, then nodded his head with chagrin. “Now we’re getting to it. Somehow we did, but we don’t know how it happened, so at this point we can’t repeat it and, on the downside, we don’t know how to fix it.”

Dane’s mind was racing, only beginning to process what little he had heard to this point. A mountain of memories, events, and questions waited to be reworked into an entirely new schematic by which all the impossibilities would be possible. It was more than he could handle in days, much less minutes.

Parmenter could read all this in his face and chuckled nervously. “This is why I said we’d have to cover this in small doses.”

But Dane wanted it all, as long as that might take. “Please continue.”

“All right. Anyway, picking up where I left off”—Parmenter was delighted with himself—“not a bad play on words! That’s what we’ve done with objects, with lab animals, and with … well, you see the similarity. They go back to a particular point and pick up where they left off.”

“Yeah, right, so … ?”

“Right, right, to get to the bottom line, or near bottom line … we secured government funding, and let me tell you, that was the beginning of sorrows right there. The military people leaped at the prospects—I mean, they were frothing at the mouth. Think of being able to uninjure soldiers and send them back into battle perfectly fit and with no memory of ever being shot. You could recycle the majority of your casualties and just keep them rolling through your war over and over again and then, of course, the boys and girls could all come home as fit as when they shipped out. What a dream, a compelling dream! We couldn’t turn away, we couldn’t slow down, we had to achieve that—which meant we had to ignore … tromp on … certain moral issues. But isn’t that the way it goes?”

Dane kept telling himself it was all important and he should hear it. But he couldn’t keep his impatience from showing.

“Sorry,” said Parmenter. “There’s just so much … but getting to it: we procured government funding, which enabled us to build a full-size Machine that could revert human subjects, and our first was a soldier, a volunteer who’d been wounded in Afghanistan. It worked. More on that later, I know you’re impatient to hear… . Anyway, we did have a few other human subjects with various injuries and”—he searched the ceiling for his thoughts, wiggled his fingers nervously—“the secrecy of the whole thing, that’s what made it all so difficult. The experimental subjects couldn’t know what we were doing or, of course, the word would get out, and we were advised, we all knew, that a—well, the military referred to it as a strategic asset, and a strategic asset like this would only be an asset as long as only one nation—ours, obviously—had it. There was no way on earth or in hell that we could let any other government find out we even had such a thing.

“But that’s why we’re in such a pickle now, why everything is so complex and tangled up… . I’m sorry, I know I’m going on and on.”

Dane drew a breath and said, “I have all the time you do.”

Parmenter looked about the room, trying to find the next point to launch from. “So, I’ll say it, I’ll admit it, we were hasty. Pressure from the military, pressure from the government, all sorts of hassles over funding and who was in charge and … and there were the moral aspects we could never agree on, still can’t agree on, but that’s a matter to discuss later.

“But we did have human subjects, civilian as well as military, which brings me to our mutual acquaintance, Dr. Margo Kessler. I won’t say it was her exclusive territory, the whole thing has just grown so large and so unmanageable, but … we needed human subjects who’d been injured and could conceivably be reverted in such a way that they wouldn’t know they’d been reverted. I know, it sounds so impossible, and I think we’re finally accepting the fact that it is. But can you imagine, we actually had the first few sign consent forms, and then, after reversion, they had no memory of giving consent to anything or even experiencing anything and we, we just decided to leave it at that. Why tell them? Secrecy was the priority, right, and now we had human subjects who had no idea what we’d done to them. It was a gift, it was perfect.

“And Kessler was one of our … scouts. She saw injured people every day, she had the means to check their backgrounds, family ties, suitability, and when she found someone we could revert without a high risk of discovery, she forwarded them down to us. To put it succinctly, they came into the emergency room injured, we took them down the hall, down an elevator into our own version of an ICU, reverted them, they woke up with no injuries and no memory of an accident, and we sent them home after a day’s observation, just telling them how lucky they were to escape without a scratch. And they bought it. All they knew was what we told them.” He took a breath. He was getting visibly nervous. “You see where this is going… .”