Uncle Magnum and I had to go back out to pick up a home pregnancy test. Everyone assured me that they believed me, but they just wanted to be extra sure. Uh huh. I had a strong suspicion that my scanning ability was far more accurate than a kit from the pharmacy. I didn’t argue with them though. I hadn’t told them much about my people scanning ability and nothing at all about its medical implication. They didn’t understand just how impossible it was for me to be wrong when it came to spotting a pregnancy.
The positive test result made the baby real to them in a way that me just saying so couldn’t and resulted in a small celebration and planning session. I baked cookies while mom and dad figured out which of the extra rooms needed to be cleared out for the baby and they started on a list of things we’d need to get. All of my baby things had been given away long ago.
While the cookies were baking, I got a call from Howie. Through his network, he’d found a make-up artist that sometimes worked for the film industry.
“She did some work on the first Hunger Games movie when they were filming near Asheville and on the show Homeland. She can see you tomorrow morning, if you’d like. She charges by the hour and takes Bitcoin. She’ll send me the bill and I’ll cover it from your account.”
“You’re incredible, Howie. Before you hang up on me again, I wanted to talk to you about my investment with Gerry. Are there other people in your network that would need that kind of help? I’m sitting on quite a few gemstones. They’re better off being used to help people like Gerry who need start-up capital than sitting in a drawer.”
“I might have a few ideas about that. Let me ask around though and see what the best options are. We’ll want to take it slow so that we don’t flood the market with gemstones and devalue them.”
The next morning, dad drove us out to Asheville for mom’s make-up appointment. We all trouped into Danielle’s kitchen and mom explained that she needed to look five to ten years older for a job interview.
Danielle studied mom’s face carefully and then looked at the back of mom’s hands and her neck.
“How much time to you want to spend getting ready every day? If you have few hours every day, I can teach you how to apply a latex mask that will add some fine lines and a few wrinkles to your face. If you don’t have that kind of time or patience, I can teach you a few techniques that will give the impression of age, but won’t hold up to close scrutiny.”
Mom chose the ‘less is more’ option and Danielle kicked dad and I out while she got to work. With a few hours to kill, dad drove us to a nearby playground and parked away from all the other cars.
“Abby, I’d like to get a better understanding of your abilities and how they work. I know that you’ll continue going out as Roger and putting yourself in danger. Maybe if I knew more about your abilities, I wouldn’t have to worry so much.”
I let out a deep breath. I’d been afraid that he’d try to stop me from going out as Roger. This seemed much more sensible. “The key thing to remember about my abilities is that although I can do many things, they all derive from a field that always surrounds my body and the ability to manipulate that field. By activating the field and increasing or decreasing the amount of power I project into the field, I can move between reality and the sublayers of reality. When I superimpose two fields, I can move between reality and the layers of reality.”
“I don’t understand the distinction between a layer and a sub-layer.”
“It’s not easy to explain. Think of painting. If you want to make the color green, you need to mix the primary colors yellow and blue. Each of the primary colors is a layer and you combine to get a ‘green’ reality. When I go into a layer, my physical self is there and it takes no energy to stay there. Meanwhile, a sublayer is like a bubble of those layers that exists in reality. When I’m in a sublayer, I’m still in reality and can see a greyed-out version of people or objects or buildings. I can even listen to what’s going on around me. Being in a sub-layer requires effort from me, like I’m holding a gateway open. Another difference is that besides me, everything I bring into the layers is in stasis. I can negate the stasis by not bringing the object all the way into the layer, but that takes energy too. In the sublayers, anything I bring in can still be used normally. People seem to be the exception to that. In the sublayers, people don’t retain their consciousness. I don’t know why that is. Left in there for a long time, they would starve and if you cut them, they’ll bleed out.”
“Ok, but if all of your abilities derive from controlling your field, how are you able to know if a metal ingot is impure or see miles into the ground or know that your mother is pregnant?”
“I call that scanning. When I move between layers and reality, the field automatically scans the area that I’m shifting into so that I don’t shift into a solid object that exists in reality but doesn’t exist in the layer. For example, if I’m walking down the road in L2, where there are no cars, and I shift to reality, then there’s a chance that I’ll shift into a parked car. The field scans where I’m going to end up and it will shift me over so that I don’t end up meshed with the car. When I started projecting the field away from myself, I eventually learned how to scan everything within it. The information just appeared in my head. Over time, I’ve discovered that I can send out a field for miles in any direction and see what’s inside.”
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“One of the issues that I’ve run into occurs when there’s something in the field that I haven’t come across before. The field will tell me that something is there, but I won’t know what it is. In those instances, if I can figure out what it is, then the field will always identify it as such from then on. For example, Mark took me to see the geology display at the Roark Geology Center. I learned the names and properties of hundreds of minerals and rocks. Now my scans can associate that knowledge with the rocks that I scan and identify what’s there. The same thing happened when I first scanned a person. There were so many things in the body that I didn’t know.”
Dad grilled me for over two hours and I explained my use of multiple field to create a shield and how I could interact with fields in other layers and sublayers. I told him the story of how I’d come to realize that my field could read words printed on magnetic or metallic ink and retain everything that I’d scanned. I described how I started off by scanning my own body and about my experience working in the hospital and more recently with Sister Clara. His biggest shock came when I described trying and failing to save Evan.
“Do you really think that if Evan’s body hadn’t been already shutting down when you started that you could have saved him?”
“Yes. Even a day earlier could have made the difference.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because I was able to save Sifu Zhang. He had pancreatic cancer and he wasn’t going to last a month when he showed up. I convinced him to try an abandoned drug that I had access to and he got better.”
“You cured him with your field and pretended it was a mysterious drug. Smart. What did you really give him?”
“A vanilla milk shake from McDonald’s”.
Dad laughed out loud. I don’t think that I’d ever gotten him to do that before. I wonder if he was like this before mom disappeared too or if I’d just caught him completely off guard.
By the time we got back to pick up mom, three hours had passed, but looking at her as she came out of Danielle’s house it seemed that like mom had aged ten years. It wasn’t just her shorter hair with grey streaks running through it or the more mature outfit of a black turtleneck sweater and grey slacks. She held herself differently, more rigidly. Beside the more muted, yet heavier, makeup, Danielle had schooled her in using the subtle nuances of an older person’s body language. She looked like she belonged in a boardroom. I couldn’t believe the difference. Dad was kind of stunned too. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her.
“I’m going to go against my mother’s teaching and tell you that you don’t look a day under thirty-eight.”
“Aww. Bless your heart Josh, you say the sweetest things!”
I just sat in the back giggling at their silliness.
As we headed back home, I got an idea and asked dad if he minded taking a slight detour. Heading back to the Charlotte area via Stateville would only add about ten minutes to our trip. It was late Sunday morning and I figured that there was a decent chance of getting an extra jump on moving forward with mom’s reintegration.
Following my directions, dad turned unto a dead-end street and stopped at the end, in front of a two-story home. A couple were sitting on the front porch, enjoying the day and the remnants of their lunch. Before dad could ask me, again, who we were visiting, I hopped out of the car and walked up the path to the porch.
“Abby! What are you doing here?” John Buckler rose from his chair and came over to give me a hug. Despite being retired for years, he still kept himself in shape and he still towered over me with his 6’4” frame.
“I’d always heard that people shrink as they get older. You’re still giving me a pain in the neck just saying hello.”
John laughed good naturedly at my teasing and we were soon joined by Shannon Johnson for another round of hugs.
“I took the chance that you’d be here, John. There’s someone that I’d like you both to meet.” Motioning them both to follow, I led them back down the path and to the car, where mom and dad were standing just beside our car.
“Mom, I’d like to introduce you to retired police officer John Buckler and Ms. Shannon Johnson. Guys, this is my mom, Hannah.”
John and Shannon paused in shock as I made the introduction. John looked like he was seeing a ghost. Meanwhile, I could see the misplaced guilt in Shannon’s expression. I took her hand and squeezed it reassuringly. Mom broke the awkward moment by stepping forwards and thanking John for following us that day and trying so hard to find her all these years. Dad and I had told her the whole story yesterday.
John snapped out of his daze, shook mom’s outstretched hand. Wiping at his suddenly shining eyes, he invited us all in to sit and talk. On the way back to the house, I explained to mom and dad about how I came to she Shannon a few years ago, hoping to find some clue to tracking down mom. Dad stiffened a little when I told them that Shannon was Len’s mother, but I explained how helpful she’d been and how she’d had no idea what her scumbag, kidnapping, son had been up to.
We spend a pleasant half hour with John and Shannon, bringing them up to date on the saga of mom’s adventures. Mom stuck to our made-up story and confirmed John’s theory that there was a third kidnapper. She told them how Len and Karl had pulled up to the side of the road, next to a van and how she was ushered towards it by a third kidnapper. Just before she was forced inside, she’d put me down and told me to run. I’d run and the kidnappers were too busy shoving her into the van and trying to make sure that she wasn’t seen to chase after me. Their rush to get away from the area was probably what made them go through that red light and get hit by the truck.
Regarding her time being imprisoned, mom gave no details, saying only that she was trying to leave it all behind her and move on with her life. John asked about her rescue and I took over, explaining about Roger Willoughby and how he worked with the police and the FBI to take down human traffickers. John was surprised by this development and I gave him Captain Steven’s coordinates for him to find out more.
I breathed a sigh of relief as we got back in the car. We’d made it through the first steps of mom’s return. John had assured us that he would contact the appropriate department to get a report of mom’s rescue into the system and that we could start applying to get her reinstated as a living person within a few days. Hopefully, things would go just as well when we took mom to meet people that she’d been close to, like Harry and her parents.