Alia fights against Yuri’s strength while the two fly away from Clay’s house and presumably in the direction of Dr. Thomas Eakran.
“You want to die?” Yuri yells. “You see how high we are don’t you?”
In the chaos of their altercation, Alia had lost her connection to her preternatural senses and she can’t really see anything but the black spot on her vision. She’d felt the sensation of the two lifting off the ground and taking flight, but apparently Yuri had achieved a dangerous altitude very quickly and she has no choice but to trust him and to calm her struggle.
“You don’t seem like yourself,” Yuri says loud enough that she can hear him over the sound of the wind whipping past them.
“Oh, so now you acknowledge my personhood,” Alia screams angrily.
“Whatever, this shouldn’t take too long.”
Alia feels their speed increase and she is scared. Then they descend and when she feels her feet on the ground, she kicks Yuri as hard she can, but she connects with a hard metal.
“You can’t see me can you?” Yuri says. “I’m suited up Alia, stop wasting your energy. We’re already here now anyway, and if you blind like it seem like you are, then it ain’t gone be easy for you to make it back to North Carolina on your own.”
“Where are we?” Alia asks, but almost as soon as she says it, her view of the world corrects and she can see the Institute for Brain Function across the street from where she and Yuri stand in a wooded area. And then she feels a familiar sensation, a pleasant one that she had not felt in a very long time.
It’s about time! she hears Aile say in her mind. She is a patient of Dr. Eakran in the IBF basement and has been for as long as Alia was. The two are like sisters and their connection has always strengthened Alia’s connection to her preternatural senses.
I’ll see you soon I guess, Alia responds.
Where have you been?
We’ll catch up soon, I’m sure of it, and thank you Aile. You don’t know how much I needed you.
Alia doesn’t let on that her senses have returned and she lets Yuri continue his delivery to Eakran. She leans into the ruse and exaggerates her disability. She is confused that he doesn’t take her to the front entrance and instead the two seem to walk away from the building. And then Yuri stops at a clearing in the woods and he seems to engage an invisible panel that opens a black door in space. Alia is intrigued; she assumes that it is a secret entrance to the basement and when they descend a steep and dark stairwell that leads to a lighted planform complete with a golf cart to make the trip in the dim tunnel, she knows that she is right. They ride for about five minutes and then stop when Giovanni, Eakran’s bodyguard, emerges. He seems to be very angry and disappointed to see the two of them.
“I thought you were the doctor. Why are you here?” Giovanni asks, he is very angry.
“I brought her,” Yuri points to Alia and Giovanni’s expression changes to one of awe.
“Oh, Alia! The doctor will be so happy to hear this. This will definitely bring him out of his mood! Come with me.”
They continue through a doorway and then they emerge in the back of the basement laboratory of Eakran. Alia recognizes it, it has not changed at all.
She hears Giovanni on the phone with Eakran, eagerly telling him the news that she has arrived and Yuri sits nearby with an eye on her. She makes eye contact with him and then winks, an indication that she had witnessed everything since they had landed and he seems to understand. He gives her a weak smile and he shakes his head.
“We are eager to see you,” Giovanni says after he ends the call. He turns to Alia and Yuri. “He’ll be here soon. We can all wait here.”
Here is the main room of Eakran’s lab and Alia sees what she presumes to be the elevator door that leads up to the ground floor. The main room is large and there are at least two cadaver tables, and four long tables with sinks and built-in burners and flat top heating surfaces. There are various glass tubes to complete the scene, some with mysterious liquids, others with oddly shaped contents that Alia is glad to be ignorant of. She eventually sits down next to Yuri; Giovanni practically ignores them and he seems to wait at the entrance from the secret way that Yuri had brought her into the basement.
“So you was faking the blind thing,” Yuri says in a low voice. “I shoulda known. You always got a trick up your sleeve don’t you?”
“What you get for bringing me here?” Alia says, ignoring his question that she knows is rhetorical. Yuri is happy to paint her as constantly conniving because he needs to view her as his enemy, he had made his choices and he is being very predictable.
“What you think? Why you think I can fly? That nigga made me Superman.”
“So what now? You got another mission or you go back to your life doing…what do you do again?”
“You really don’t know what I do? Why I was staying with that dude across the street from your house?”
“You sell drugs?”
“I sell him drugs. Why you so curious all of a sudden?”
Alia smiles and something about the look on her face sends chills down Yuri’s spine. There is a twinkle in her eyes and Yuri notices them milky white in the center, like they both contain ghosts.
“I just need to know where to find you once I leave here. I’m sure you’re gonna leave before me, you better thank whatever God still looks out for you that you get a head start, because I wasn’t lying Yuri. I will give you nightmares.”
“He’s here!” they both hear Giovanni yell, and then the door from the secret entrance opens and Eakran is there with the woman Maria and the man Darker. She’d met Maria before she was transferred from the IBF to a secret government facility in the Pacific Northwest, and she had encountered her and the man Darker about a year ago. Alia isn’t sure if they will remember this encounter; time had been reset by the mysterious being known as Pomp, and when he had done this previously, only Alia seemed to remember the events that had seemingly been changed by Pomp’s reset.
Eakran, Maria and Darker stand still at the entrance, staring at Alia with a sense of wonder for different reasons. Eakran has always been fascinated by Alia and he is happy to see her again, though the new Eakran is worried that their history will make this reunion fraught. Maria and Darker do indeed remember the events that had been reset by Pomp, though they do not understand the phenomenon as Alia does and they wonder if she can explain it because she had been resistant to the effects of Maria’s temporary ability to stop time.
They approach her and they all sit at one of the long lab tables. Eakran addresses Yuri first.
“I guess you did what I asked. I will remove that device from your head if you would like to be free of it. I will apologize for forcing it on you. It is a tool of great power, but ultimately it is a leash that I hold on you. I have been capable of ending your life with the push of a button since I inserted that device into your brain, and I did it when I was a different man. I have disabled the self destruct mechanism, I am no longer able to kill you, but I am still willing to remove it if you desire.”
The room is quiet. Yuri looks around to everyone in the room and their faces are largely blank as though none of them are shocked by the news. Alia is a little taken aback that Eakran had admitted all this and apologized, but she is not surprised to hear any of it.
“I’ll keep it. You need anything else?”
“No Yuri. I’ll find you when I have time. I suspect that our business together will be changed in the near future.”
Yuri nods and he stands to leave. As he heads to the exit of the secret passage, he remembers Alia’s words from before and he looks back at her. He sees a twinkle of light in each of her eyes, they flare up at he stares at her and she looks more angry than he has ever seen her.
Alia watches him leave.
“I’m sorry for everything, Alia,” Eakran says. “I’ve ceased all experimentation on my patients and I am administering cures and releasing patients where appropriate. Your friend Elia was discharged just a few months…”
Alia turns her rage on Eakran. “You will release everyone in this basement before I burn it down.”
“You don’t want to do that,” Maria says. “He is telling the truth. He was torturing people before, in the name of scientific progress, but ever since this guy came back to life, he’s been different. Do you remember meeting us at Eakran’s house?”
“I do, I’m surprised to hear that you do.”
“What happened exactly?” Darker asks.
“It was the guy with the wings, Pomp, I think you knew him as John. He’s my brother, but not really, just if you ever see him walking around, he’s my problem so call me. Is that why you remember? You know him? Have you seen him?”
“No,” Maria says, “not since that night. So what did he do? Change the past?”
“I think of it as a reset, like he can erase all the time he was here.”
“That’s crazy,” Darker says. “Is he an alien too?”
“He’s something else, and I won’t pretend like I understand all of it, but I know it don’t feel good to experience something like that with no explanation. It’s better to be able to forget. You probably remember because you just got back from the dead. I wonder why you remember?” She looks at Maria.
“I don’t know. But thank you, I appreciate you telling us that.”
“I want to talk to Aile,” Alia says to Eakran.
“Of course.”
Everyone is oddly accommodating to Alia, but she trusts the woman Maria. Even though she seems to side with Eakran, she never looks at him the entire time they interact and it seems that Eakran is always looking to her for her approval of the things he says to Alia.
She follows Eakran down the hallway where the patient rooms are located and she is surprised that most of the doors are wide open.
“It’s not a prison anymore,” Eakran says just as Alia stops at the open door where Dr. Frederick Cousins is sitting with a patient. Eakran stands behind her and they both stare at Cousins speaking with a man with visible scars on his head where he’s had brain surgery more than once. “I stopped my experiments, I promise you that.”
When Cousins hears them, he turns and smiles at Alia.
“Good to see you again,” he says with a wave. Alia wasn’t in the basement at the time, but she is aware that Eakran had killed the partner of Dr. Cousins, a woman named Dr. Donna Moss, and Cousins had been held as a prisoner to cover up the murder. She is surprised that he seems to be working for Eakran again.
“Aile is right in here,” Eakran says and indicates to the room right next to Cousins. “I’ll leave you two alone.”
Alia and Aile hug like long lost sisters. There are tears and Alia apologizes that she had left her behind.
“Where is Elia now? Eakran said he released her.”
“She’s with one of her son’s,” Aile says. “He tried to release me too but I was afraid you’d come back here and be disappointed that we’d both left. You won’t believe the change in that man. He’s acting so different these days.”
“So it’s true?”
“Yeah, he’s actually curing people. I’ve seen it.”
“Is he doing something for you?”
“We’re trying to prove the existence of ghosts together,” Alie says with a smile. “I can see ghosts apparently. My sister and some of my distant relatives are here now.”
It’s a shocking coincidence that one of her closest friends is so intimately acquainted with ghosts considering what she had encountered during the mysterious journey into her consciousness.
“You must find your friends and discover the mystery of the afterlife. The source of your powers are there. The spirits can help restore you to what you were.”
The scene replays in Alia’s mind, the large field and the screen that appeared from nowhere. The furry face with the horns had spoken the words very clearly and knowingly and Alia knows that she is where she needs to be.
“I was blind before I came here,” Alia explains. “Being close to you brought me back. You give me strength Aile and I need you to tell me everything you know about the spirits.”
Aile can see the determination on Alia’s face and she is eager to help. “Whatever I can do.”
Three floors up, in the laboratory of Dr. Sylvia Hansberry, the nurse known as Wendy is busy analyzing the brain scan data of her patients who had suffered lobotomies at a time in medical history when the procedure cruelly robbed victims of their sense of self. She had been working to restore as much function to their damaged brains as possible, and she had recently returned from MUSC where she studied brain stimulation techniques. She has been assisting Dr. Hansberry with the implementation of the treatment and she is reviewing results to see if any progress has been made.
Wendy is like Aile, she is able to see ghosts, but she is not able to see beings of the Quinspace. And even if she could, she might not have noticed the spider that jumped onto her shoulder. It hardly looked like spider, but the sketchy outline of one, and it skittered up her neck and then ran deep into her ear.
Wendy felt a tickle in her ear and she absently dug a finger into it as she continued her work.
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