Devil's Advocate (The X-Files: Origins #2)(52)

As impossible as that seemed as a concept, Dana felt as if suddenly something did happen, that her mind and perception opened in a way she had never before experienced. The room became very bright, but not in a glaring way. No, this was like she could simply see everything with ten thousand times more clarity, and with great insight into what she saw. The closest candles were no longer merely wax and flame. They had each become so much more, because she could see their components and differences. There was a swirl of things making up the wax of each one. She could see and identify every element, every component, no matter how subtle. Beeswax and tallow from animal fat, chemicals from the Coccus pella insect, boiled fruit from a cinnamon tree, extracts of tree nuts. Blended together to exacting specifications. She suddenly knew that the candles were insoluble in water, had low reactivity, low toxicity, and changed from solid to liquid because of thermoplasticity. She knew this, but Dana was positive she had never been told that nor had she read about it. However, those facts, and so much more, were there in her head. As if they were obvious, as if she should know such things. She went a level deeper, and when she turned to look at a paraffin wax candle closer to where Sunlight sat, she abruptly knew that it contained the hydrocarbon signature, CnH2n+2.

When she inhaled the incense, she could actually see the sage and cedar plants from which that stick of incense got its form. She could see components of makko from the Persea thunbergii tree, and Xiangnan pi, made from the bark of the Phoebe nanmu tree, and jigit, a resin-based binder used in India. And more. Microscopic components, molecular structures, chemical signatures. All of it. The information flooded into her mind and was recorded there. She knew—absolutely knew—that she would retain that information forever. Somehow. Impossibly, but definitely.

“Accept the truths your mind’s eye perceives,” said Sunlight. “Absorb it and be it. The organic brain has limits, but the soul-mind is capable of infinite awareness and infinite retention. Be the infinite, Dana. Allow no limitations. In the world of spiritual source energy, there are no restrictions, no boundaries. We all want to eclipse the limited view of what the world thinks we are and reveal who we truly are. Understand that and be that truth, Dana. All truth is yours to own, to share. Swim in it, Dana.”

And so she swam.

Soon the room itself fell away, and Dana felt her spirit body rise through the ceiling and into the air above Beyond Beyond. Even though she could still feel her limbs, she somehow knew that this was only a lingering illusion, because her true self was a luminous ball that glowed with bright golden light. She looked into the sky and saw that it was crisscrossed by a network of crystalline rods, as if reality itself was but a dream within a lattice of silica and diamond. It was beautiful and she wanted to weep, but when a sob broke from her, it came out as a shout of pure and unfiltered joy.

She could hear Sunlight speaking, but she was no longer in the same room with him. Dana wasn’t even sure she was on the same planet. His words were soothing, guiding, but the language was now meaningless. Not actual words but more like a breeze that stirs a tide. She rode along on that tide, going farther up and out until Craiger was a patchwork of tiny houses and farmed fields. And then higher. Maryland blended into a landscape smear of green and brown and blue. Higher still until the earth, the whole world, spun below her, a smoky blue gem laid on a vast piece of black velvet on which ten billion diamonds were scattered. Crystal dust was cast across the fabric, and Dana realized that it was the Milky Way.

There was no pain, no doubt, no fear, no worry, no anxiety, no trepidation, no concern, no trace of negativity.

There was nothing but peace.

Nothing but an ever-expanding awareness that brought with it the understanding that she—Dana Scully—was as important a part of the universal All as everything else. As important as the warming sun. As important as the dark matter that held the universe together. As important as love. As important as life.

She floated there, high above the earth, and became aware of something behind her. She turned, expecting it to be the moon.

And it was.

Not some dead, pitted chunk of debris caught in synchronous orbit with the earth. It was somehow alive.

Alive.

She flew toward it, laughing aloud despite the airless vacuum of space. The mountains of the moon, crenellated edges of vast impact craters, looked lovely as she flew across them. Sunlight’s voice was fading, fading as she flew beyond his control, beyond his reach, making this journey her own.

Far below she saw something gleaming like metal, and she realized that it was something left behind by one of the Apollo missions. She saw Surveyor 1 and 2. She saw the lunar rover from Apollo 15 and the Apollo 11 LM-5 Eagle descent stage. She saw the flag that had been planted by the first human beings to step onto the surface of another world. She looked for the footprints, but they had become obscured. There was debris, though. Proof that humans had been here. And that made her laugh, because she was a fifteen-year-old girl, and it had taken her moments to soar through space to reach this point. No rockets, no space suit. Nothing but her will and her mind.

And then something moved on the dusty surface of the moon.

Dana turned her awareness to see what it was.

There was something on the edge of a large crater, poised on the rim, touched by the sun and gleaming with silver fire.

It was triangular and huge. Hundreds of times bigger than any of the debris left behind by NASA. It did not sit cold and inert, as the other machines did. Instead there were lights blazing on each of the three points. Bright white, and these were the first lights she had seen that hurt her to look at. They were too bright, or … maybe bright in the wrong way. In a way that was not harmonious with her spirit-sight.