The Enlightened (Mind Dimensions #3)(33)

I’m almost ready to enter the men’s restroom when something catches my attention. Something orange. Something that makes me do a double take.

There is a bald, orange-robed figure a few feet away, heading in my general direction.

It could just be a regular Buddhist monk, I tell myself as my heartbeat skyrockets. It’s not necessarily one from the Enlightened Temple.

But then I spot another one behind the first monk I noticed. And a few feet away, I see yet another. Worse, when the nearest one sees me looking at him and his friends, he drops his leisurely pace and starts running toward me.

I’m in deep shit.





Chapter 12





I phase in, and the ambient noise of the airport disappears. Something else is missing. It takes me a moment to realize my poor bladder isn’t demanding anything from me anymore. Not until I phase back out, that is.

I walk over to Eugene and pull him into the Quiet.

“Darren,” he says. “What are you doing? I’m like right here, mere feet away—”

“We’ve got a problem,” I say. “Make that a big problem.”

“What’s going on?”

“The monks from the Temple are here. See that guy in the robe there, and the other ones?”

“Oh, shit,” Eugene says. “What do you think they want?”

“To take me back, make me and Julia do what I refused...”

“Tvari,” he says furiously, switching to Russian.

“Yeah, whatever you just said.”

“But—”

“I can’t miss my flight. Can you help me with this?”

“You insult me by even asking,” he says. “Let’s find the others.”

We find Mira at the nearby grocery stand. She’s holding an apple and is about to pay for it. I pull her in and give her the rundown.

“Let’s Read them,” she suggests. “That should tell us how many there are and whether Caleb is with them.”

“Shit, I didn’t think of him,” I say. “He could be a real problem if he’s here.”

“Right, which is all the more reason to do as Mira suggests,” Eugene says and walks toward the monks.

“I don’t think we’ll have any luck with this one,” I say. “I recognize him. He’s the very one I tried Reading before, but all I got was the white noise from his meditation.”

“It’s worth a shot,” Eugene says. “Maybe one of us will have better luck?”

Mira walks up to the monk and touches him. She looks as if she’s concentrating, and her expression becomes serene. Then she looks annoyed.

“No go,” she says. “All I get is what Darren described, a sort of emptiness.”

She then notices the piece of paper the monk is holding, grabs it from his hand, and reads it.

“Right. According to his boarding pass, he’s flying to Detroit,” she says. “And I’m the Pope.”

“Let’s try Reading those two.” I look at the other two monks standing in the distance. Decision made, I approach the younger one, saying, “I’ll try this one. You go for that one.”

This monk is also holding a boarding pass. This one is to Houston. They must’ve bought random tickets just to get through security. I wonder why airport security doesn’t flag people who say, “I’ll take a ticket to anywhere please. Oh, and random tickets to I-don’t-care-where for my brother monks.” Asking these monks what they’re up to would make a hell of a lot more sense than forcing old ladies to take off their shoes.

I put my hand on the monk’s shaved head, noticing as I do that he’s barely out of his teens. After a moment of concentration, I’m in.





*





We’re wondering what’s so special about the guy we’re following. The Master didn’t say. He just said the excursion might do us some good, but we think this might be the rare case when the Master is wrong. Keeping centered is incredibly hard with all these people around. The noise, the smell of junk food and perfumes—it’s all overpowering.

I, Darren, realize this monk is distracted from his unreadable state of mind by the day-to-day life of the airport. Or he’s just not as good as the others at keeping his defenses up, being younger and less experienced. Whatever the reason, it works to my advantage, and I dig deeper.

“Let’s split up,” Caleb, the outsider whom the Master seems to respect for some reason, says. “Let’s cover this whole airport. If you see him, stall him, and use this.” He hands every one of the brothers a burner phone that’s programmed to call him.

I, Darren, disassociate. Things are bad. First, the Master is the monk nearest me, and I get the impression that this monk is called ‘Master’ due to his fighting skills and not just his meditating prowess. What’s worse is that Caleb is here. And just to top it off, many more monks, all from the Temple, are surrounding the airport.

I know I should get out of the monk’s head and figure a way out of this mess, but curiosity overtakes me. Inside this young monk’s mind is something useful.

These monks’ fighting style.

I try to feel lighter, enough to go back just a few days.