Gyrus

Chapter Nine: Desperate Attempts

Something had happened with Wong and the trance session he put me in. I felt disoriented, like I'd been woken from a deep sleep. Wong was shaking me and screaming loudly, asking if I was alright. I felt something tug at the back of my skull like a childhood memory but I couldn't make any sense of the murky images that were playing inside my head. I sat up from the recliner and shook my head to clear the thoughts. Wong mumbled an apology and left me there, saying something about needing to check up on the girl we'd rescued from the warehouse. I called after him to wait up but he must not have heard me because he continued walking in the direction of the tower. I tried standing up and the world swam around me, so I waited for ten more minutes before I got up and left for the tower, closing Roberto's door gently behind me.

By the time I got to my room, I was exhausted. Every single noise seemed amplified and even the smallest attempt at forming a thought sapped me of strength. Trying to force the premonitions was a very bad idea. Edwin was by the door waiting for me, his brows furrowed.

"What's wrong with you?" I asked.

"Not here," he replied, dragging me inside and bolting the door behind me.

"What the hell is going on?" I asked again, raising my voice this time so Edwin knew I was serious.

I'd just come out of a hypnotic spell; my patience was wearing thin. Edwin suddenly put his hands around my temples and I felt woozy for the second time in one day as he invaded my head with his memories. Edwin's telepathic communications were completely different from this all-access pass to his mind. The former felt like a nagging in the back of your head, single bursts of thought alien to your own that you only noticed because they sounded nothing like you. The latter was more like a tidal wave of alien images and sensations that felt like an epiphany you were never supposed to have. We were still hazy on how it worked, but Roberto postulated that he suppressed the parts of the brain responsible for thought, leaving the mind vacuous, and then filled the vacuum with his thoughts or memories while the mind compensated to interpret the influx of information in the best possible way. I saw his thoughts like a movie reel. Apparently, a lot had happened while I was away.

Edwin had been practicing with his mental skills, testing the circumference of his telepathic reach with Marian when he encountered a strange mental energy. That's the only way he could describe it. Someone was using so much mental energy that it flared up like a beacon and attracted his attention. He cut his psychic link with Marian and sent a psychic tendril of thought up to the top of the tower where the flare was coming from. It was from Zoe, one of the girls they'd rescued from the warehouse. Edwin thinks the only way he managed to piggy back into her head and read her thoughts was because she was so focused on whatever she was doing that she didn't even notice his small intrusion. He found her memories very quickly and his first scan through them terrified him. The Zoe girl was no amateur. He thought she's the most powerful telekinetic he'd ever seen, even stronger than most he'd heard of on television. She was so adept at telekinesis that she could use her mind to lift tractors and somehow manage delicate tasks like calligraphy, absently controlling the pen like she was using her hand. For some reason she had stopped using her telekinesis over the last year, the reason why he couldn't tell. She had somehow obscured that as well, which made him suspect she had basic level telepathy as well. He could have broken through the mental barrier hiding those thoughts but he didn't want her to notice so he scanned her recent memories instead. It turned out she had no memory of the last five months. She had no idea where Alyssa was. The stream of memories stopped abruptly, she'd suddenly turned her attention to him and shut him out, swatting out his tendril of consciousness like a fly. I winced, from Edwin's memories; it felt like a blow to the head.

Edwin took his hands off my temple and held my shoulder to steady me. I didn't even realize I was swaying.

"I need to talk to her." I said. "I need to find out why she's lying."