Page 19 of I Dream of Danger (Ghost Ops #2)

Elle closed her eyes, thought back. Unlike dreams, her Dreams didn’t recede quickly into forgetfulness. Mostly they were images and they lingered. “Dark,” she said softly. “So it must have been night. Everything was strange and different. The shapes of things, the alphabet.”

“The one you studied?”

Elle nodded. “Mongolian.” She shivered. Her soul or whatever part of her travelled had gone far, far away. She felt lost, disoriented. Completely outside herself. The weakness in her legs was bad enough, but there was also a hollowness inside her chest, as if her internal organs had disappeared.

The disorientation was complete. It hurt to move, but still she lifted her head, trying to focus on her surroundings. As she looked around, everything seemed new. A lab she’d worked in every single day for the past year, and it looked odd, foreign. Different and slightly unreal.

Elle closed her eyes as the room started to revolve, opening them when she heard Sophie’s voice.

The protocol called for at least two researchers to be present during debriefing but they were down because three hadn’t shown up.

“And you were?—”

“In a facility. A military facility. It looked like a research station.” In reporting, she started to come back into herself, the world filling out, becoming a little more real.

“I saw the symbol of the Mongolian Defense Force—their Army. And there were the red-and-black flags of the Mongolian Republic on flagpoles.”

Sophie was tapping on her tablet. “Okay. Were you following a particular person?”

“Yes. A very broad-shouldered man, of medium height. In a gray-and-green military uniform. He had three stars on his collar.”

“We’ll look that up,” Sophie murmured.

“Well, he was obviously a commanding officer. He led his men to an attack on the facility. They came in through a river or a deep sewer. I couldn’t tell.

When the alarm sounded, they ran through a lab.

But they didn’t stay in the lab, they ran out a door on the other side, then made straight for an armored door.

They must have been testing hazardous material behind the door because the lab had negative pressure.

The soldier’s uniforms flattened against their backs as air rushed in.

The man had the code. When it opened, he waited while his men rushed in.

There must have been twenty soldiers with him.

When everyone was in, he closed the door. ”

“Did you see what was behind the door?” Sophie asked.

“Oh yes.” Elle’s voice was soft. “A huge piece of machinery. A rail gun. It looked like it might actually be functional.”

Sophie’s mouth made an O. “A rail gun,” she repeated slowly, and Elle nodded.

Rail guns were the holy grail of military research everywhere. They were electrostatically charged rails that could hurl projectiles at up to 7,000 miles an hour. It had very few moving parts, and run by electricity, it eliminated explosives, thus rendering it invulnerable to enemy detection.

The idea of rail guns had been around for over a hundred years. It was an amazingly complex piece of machinery, but the first power to develop one would have a powerful weapon that could launch devastating attacks thousands of kilometers away and yet remain undetected.

Elle met Sophie’s eyes. Both of them had suspected for some time that the research they were carrying out was for military purposes. They’d set up a secure e-mail system to communicate to each other their suspicions. This was more or less confirmation of that.

Elle had been sent on a military reconnaissance.

It was clear to both that they had to pretend they didn’t understand the significance of what Elle had seen. They had to get away and discuss this privately.

Elle yawned massively, fists thrust in the air. “Sorry,” she said, a sheepish smile on her face. “Really tired.”

“What do you need?” Sophie put a hand to her shoulder. Elle was usually famished and thirsty when she came back from a trip of a couple of hours. Now she’d been gone six.

“As usual, I’m hungry and thirsty,” Elle said, as cover. Food and drink were the last things she wanted. “And I want to go home. Rest.”

“Sure. I’ll go get you some more water.”

Elle wasn’t hungry or thirsty, she was depleted. And she had to go to the bathroom. She took care of her physical needs in the small bathroom adjoining the lab, washed her face then looked at herself in the mirror.

She looked exhausted, as if she’d run a marathon after a couple of sleepless nights.

Her skin, naturally pale, was ice white, lips faintly blue.

The harsh overhead light played tricks on her face, turning her light-blue eyes the palest of hues.

The mirror showed a ghost, even her eyes drained of color.

Was it worth it?

Yes.

Probably.

Maybe.

She was learning to direct her Dreams now, and not be directed by them. Overwhelmed by them. It was why she’d chosen neuroscience—to understand. And much as she considered herself a dispassionate scientist, a woman driven by a thirst for knowledge, she knew deep down why she was so driven.

To exorcise Nick.

Oh, good. There was just the faintest prick to her heart when she thought of him, not the massive jolt that thinking about him had caused over these long years since he’d abandoned her.

No, no. Not abandoned her. Abandoning something meant an implicit tie of responsibility, which Nick hadn’t had. Hadn’t in any way felt. Had made pains to avoid. So he hadn’t abandoned her, he’d just left to continue on with his life.

Of which she had no idea, thank God.

Since that horrible day in Lawrence, ten years ago, her Dreams of him had been few and far between and mere flashes, not watching his life as it had been before. Now, she mainly dreamed about him, not Dreamed. And even those were now rare.

Even obsessives lost sight of an obsession when there was nothing to feed it, she supposed.

She scrubbed all thoughts of him from her head as much as she could during the day.

And her life had kept her so busy it hadn’t been that hard.

He invaded her head at night, though, in her dreams. There, big as life.

So much a part of her mental landscape that much as she tried not to, every other man was measured against his yardstick, coming up short.

Ten years.

She’d accomplished so much since she walked out the door of her home that freezing winter evening so long ago.

It seemed she used up all her bad luck before, and it was finally time for the good.

On the long bus trip to the coast, she sat next to an elderly African-American lady, Cora, and they became friends.

Elle didn’t say what had happened, but Cora understood very well that she was running from something. Cora didn’t ask and Elle didn’t tell.

When they arrived at the bus station in the Castro, Cora’s son Darryl was waiting for them.

Cora demanded that Darryl give her a job and the use of a room right above the bar-restaurant Darryl ran in the Tenderloin.

Elle spent the next five years bartending and working for Darryl.

After the first week, he gave her a raise, saying he’d never met a harder worker.

Well, hard work was what Elle did. She’d done it for free before, and being paid for it felt like a bonus.

Darryl hadn’t always been a model citizen, and once he understood she had no real ID, he got to work with his contacts in the underground and soon she had legitimate ID as Elle Connelly, California resident.

She enrolled as a part time student in City College and aced all the courses, not realizing how incredibly starved she’d been of intellectual stimulation.

By the time she got her master’s in biology she had three offers of a full scholarship to Stanford.

Darryl always said that he was glad his momma lived long enough to see her graduate.

Cora had been there, beaming, in her wheelchair at the graduation ceremony.

In college she could no longer ignore her Dreams, and by the time she got to Stanford she had a professional interest in them.

There seemed to be an unofficial group interested in the neurological underpinnings of paranormal abilities, and to her astonishment, a huge multinational pharmaceutical corporation swooped in and funded an official research group.

A functional MRI scan showed that the research subjects shared certain commonalities

Like Sophie, Elle signed up as guinea pig and researcher, and found that many of the researchers had a hotspot in their heads, and abilities they’d learned to keep secret. But they were all very keen on the project and worked long hours, like Elle herself.

This was the fourth time she’d actually put herself into a controlled Dream state during the day, and each time it was utterly exhausting. Clearly, when she Dreamed at night, her body had time during sleep to recoup its energies. Blood tests showed a depletion in red blood cells after each Dream.

Sophie came back in, handing her another glass of ice water, casually touching her arm. Sophie didn’t touch people much. Elle had noticed that. And like herself, Sophie didn’t date much. Sophie’s hand on her arm was warm, unusually so, and she held on as Elle downed the tall glass of water.

By some trick, the warm hand and the cold water seemed to revive her. A little. Enough to smile at Sophie and pretend she was much better.

“Thanks.” She smiled, and the worry lines in Sophie’s face smoothed out. She lifted her hand and Elle immediately felt the cold.

She suspected Sophie was a healer, but understood completely if she wanted to keep it secret for now. But Sophie had the same hot spot in her brain that everyone else in the program had.

“You okay to get home?” Sophie frowned at her, her hand hovering, clearly wondering if she should surreptitiously touch Elle again. “Do you want me to drive you? I could pick you up tomorrow morning and drive you back in.”