The Enlightened (Mind Dimensions #3)(66)

So that’s what the lights surrounding me represented. He was absorbing my pattern. Spooky.

“You got it,” he thinks. “I’ll disconnect from you and leave you on your own.”

Something changes. The feeling of nothingness, of not being, becomes stronger. I didn’t realize how much Mimir’s presence was grounding me.

Through sheer will, I suppress my panic and focus on Thomas’s pattern.

I picture surrounding it.

I imagine merging with it.

It’s unclear how long it takes, but I eventually find myself closer to the pattern.

Yes, that’s the most precise way to explain it. I’m instantly closer, without actually moving toward it, like an electron in quantum mechanics. I jump without traveling the intervening distance.

I decide I’m on the right track and focus on his pattern some more.

Something happens much sooner now.

I find myself surrounding his pattern.

As I observe the light of the neurons that are now inside me, a familiar feeling surfaces in my mind. I recognize it as the state of Coherence—the now-familiar state when my mind feels focused and relaxed right before I Read someone.

And as soon as I enter this state, I enter Thomas’s mind.





Chapter 23





The pain from the knife entering our leg is overwhelming.

We rip a sleeve off our suit and improvise a quick tourniquet to stop the bleeding.

The smart thing would be to stay put, as movement increases blood flow and bleeding out would make us Inert, which is unacceptable. But Darren needs our help, so with all our remaining strength, we limp through the corridor, each step more agonizing than the next.

Multiple shots are fired close by.

Damn it. We need to hurry before Darren gets himself killed.

On the bright side, Darren is clearly still alive. If he weren’t, we would’ve been thrown out of his Mind Dimension.

I, Darren, disassociate. Reading from Level 2 is the same as Reading in the Quiet, with one notable exception. I’m Reading a Guide, which was previously thought to be impossible.

It’s a relief to feel grounded in a body again, even if that body belongs to someone else. Despite the excruciating pain in Thomas’s leg, I find it preferable to the nothingness of Level 2. I fleetingly feel bad for Mimir. He has to live on Level 2 for eternity. Then again, I strongly suspect he doesn’t mind. Thinking of Mimir reminds me that I might not have a lot of time. This interrupts my strong desire to Read deeper into Thomas’s past. As much as I want to learn more about my friend, I can’t risk becoming Inert. Not when I know exactly what I need to do. I let his present memory unfold, waiting for it to push me out of his mind.

We hear more shots. We walk faster, and as we do, we fight the lightheadedness that comes from severe blood loss.

We enter the alcove.

We see Darren reaching for a gun and Kyle going from loopy to alert. The bastard must’ve been faking. It’s too late to warn Darren.

We see Kyle motion to throw the knife and raise our gun to stop him. The gun feels like it weighs a ton. The laser sight hits Kyle in the eyes, and we get his attention.

“Don’t. Don’t do it, Thomas,” he says. “Don’t shoot. There’s something important I have to tell you.”

We don’t dignify his plea with a response. Instead, we allow our contempt to show on our face. After that quick indulgence, we focus all our remaining energy on pulling the trigger.

“I’m your father, Thomas,” Kyle yells. The meaning of his words sinks in a nanosecond before we’re about to pull the trigger. “You’re about to shoot your own father.”

Our finger slackens over the trigger.

A frantic chain of thoughts rushes through our mind.

This fits every clue we’ve uncovered about our roots. One of our parents is Asian, while the other is white—a fact we’ve verified through DNA testing, though it’s something we’ve known with a high degree of certainty just by looking in the mirror. From the United States census data, we learned that it’s more than twice as likely that our father was the white parent. When we looked it up, there were 529,000 white male/Asian female married couples as opposed to only 219,000 Asian male/white female ones. Furthermore, since we’ve only ever met white Guides, it stood to reason that our father was likely the one with powers.

We never investigated our parentage further than this for one simple reason: if our father didn’t want to claim us as his son, why the f*ck would we want to seek him out?

Then all of this takes a backseat to a whole new realization. If he isn’t lying, and every instinct tells us he isn’t, then we met our mother today. We met her at the hospital. And she was there because Kyle had tried to kill her.

Darren’s story hits us in a new light. Kyle raped our mother and proceeded to erase our existence from her memory. It was because of Kyle that she gave us up...

Belatedly, we realize we’ve allowed the f*cker to do exactly what he’d planned with that revelation. We’ve let our guard down. And now we see Kyle’s knife flying toward Darren.

This is our last chance. We have less than a second to act, and we hope it’s enough. Our finger squeezes the trigger.





*





I’m ejected from Thomas’s mind and back into the netherworld of Level 2. Maybe I should have called it something like The Darkness? Or better yet, Limbo or The Abyss? Of course, that’s a decision for another time.