The clunky, beat-up SUV somehow made it all the way back into town. They rented a nondescript sedan and headed out of town in the direction Grace indicated. David drove. Grace hunched in the passenger seat, stiff as a crash test dummy, fighting desperately to hold on to the knowledge of her grandfather's whereabouts. With each passing moment, she felt the information slipping away from her.
She leaned sideways to glance at the speedometer. It read sixty-five miles per hour.
"Drive faster," she hissed.
David floored the accelerator. The car lurched forward, and she watched the speedometer surge upward.
Without looking at David, she murmured, "Thank you."
"You're welcome."
She chanced a sideways look at him and caught his amused expression. "What's so funny?"
"Nothing."
"Hmm." Spotting a T intersection up ahead, she said, "Turn left."
David braked with caution and veered left onto a paved road with two narrow lanes and virtually no shoulder. They'd left Reston a couple hours earlier, abandoning civilization to drive deep into a wilderness populated with towering pine trees and little else. Though they passed the occasional overgrown two-track driveway, they saw no other signs of human occupation.
Still, David followed her instructions without question.
She relaxed her death grip on the edges of her seat. Glancing at David sideways, she asked, "Are you always going to do whatever I say?"
He chuckled. She supposed that substituted for a response. She supposed she knew the answer to the question anyway. Until today, David had done almost nothing that she told him to do. He was following her orders now because he recognized that she'd acquired some extraordinary, if temporary, knowledge that they needed right now. She shouldn't count on him bending to her will on an everyday basis. Not that she would really want him to. Life would get pretty boring if he always acquiesced to her.
The paved road petered out into gravel. Grace instructed David to make a couple more turns, onto two-track roads that got bumpier and bumpier. As she began to seriously consider duct taping her teeth to her jaw, the trees opened out into a little clearing. The two track dead-ended at a rough-looking cabin nestled amid the trees. The windows were boarded up. A generator hunkered alongside the cabin, apparently powered by a nearby propane tank.
David parked the car near the cabin's front door. After climbing out through the car's nonexistent windshield, Grace walked a few yards away and bent her head back to stare up at the trees. There, high above, a small satellite dish sat mounted to the top of a tree.
Inside the car, Sean started to climb into the front seat, heading toward the open windshield. David, halfway out of the car, leaned his head back in to whisper something to Sean. The boy nodded and climbed into backseat again. David strode toward Grace.
"Well?" he said.
"The windows and doors are electrified," she told him. "Do you know how to turn off a generator?"
"Yes. You're sure there's no backup power source?"
"Positive."
David marched toward the generator. Within a few minutes, he accomplished his task and returned to her side. The cabin looked the same. No lights had been visible before, thanks to the boarded-up windows.
"Guards?" David asked.
She shook her head. "A male nurse with a gun. He would've seen us coming, but I, um … convinced him otherwise."
David's eyebrows rose. "From a distance?"
She gave him a sheepish smile. "Uh-huh."
He looked impressed and a little mystified. She felt mystified too. When she'd manipulated someone's mind before, it had taken an enormous amount of concentration and willpower. Today, the same task had taken almost no effort and she accomplished it from quite a distance, without even thinking about it really. She simply knew it needed to be done and did it. Of course, the level of thought projection required was swiftly eroding the last of her enhanced power. Soon it would slip away from her completely — along with the vast, eerie knowledge she'd obtained.
David strode up to the front door, twisted the knob, and thrust it inward. A thirtyish man dressed in a flannel shirt and blue jeans leaped up from his chair. He didn't even think to reach for the gun strapped to his hip. Grace made sure of that. The final effort triggered a sharp, though not intense, pain behind her eyes.
Rushing forward, David grabbed the nurse's gun and forced the man to sit down again. The nurse glared at David with a mixture of confusion, anger, and fear. David stared back at the man with such intensity that the nurse squirmed in his seat. Then, as if someone had flipped a switch inside his brain, the nurse slumped against the wall and his eyelids drifted shut. He was asleep. And, Grace knew, someone had essentially flipped a switch in the man's brain. It hadn't been her, though. David had taken care of the task. He'd put the man to sleep, exactly like he'd done to her once.
Grace stepped across the threshold into the cabin. They stood inside a narrow entryway that dead-ended to the right, but to the left, it opened into a dimly lit room. She could see a sliver of the room beyond. David led the way, swinging rightward into the room. Grace walked a couple yards into the room and froze.
Nestled against the far wall, covered with a blanket, lay a human-shaped lump. The gray-haired man beneath the blanket sat up, yawned, and smiled at her.
"Grandpa," she whispered, afraid to say the word too loudly for fear she would wake up from the dream. But this wasn't a dream. She knew that with a certainty that came not from her brush with the Golden Power, but from her heart and soul.
Tears stung her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. Edward McLean looked relatively healthy, though a little disheveled and in need of a shave and haircut. David hurried over to Edward and helped the older man to his feet.
Grace ran toward the men. She flung her arms around her grandfather and hugged him fiercely. When she stepped back, dropping her arms to her sides, he reached out to pat her shoulder.
"I gather it's over," he said to her. "JT is — "
"Gone," Grace said.
"And the flash drive?"
"I mailed it to myself, to keep it away from JT and his goons. But once I get it, I'm going to destroy it."
David cleared his throat. "Maybe you shouldn't."
She glanced at him sideways. "Excuse me? People died for that damn thing. It needs to be thrown into an erupting volcano so no one else can get their hands on JT's research. It's too dangerous."
"David's right," her grandfather said. "You shouldn't destroy it. JT established multiple research sites around the world, which means he may have been holding more innocent people hostage."
"And there's Tesler," David said. "He escaped. Meaning he's free to torture those others."
"The information on the flash drive is our only means of finding them and Tesler." Sighing, Edward ran a hand through his hair. "It was our research — mine, Christine's, and Mark's — that helped JT find, capture, and terrorize these people. It's my responsibility to set things right."
Grace shook her head. "You didn't know what would happen. And you didn't willingly hand over your research to JT and his minions."
"It doesn't matter. I still have to fix this."
She bit her lip, and in a matter of two seconds, she made up her mind. A quick look at David told her he'd guessed what she was thinking and he agreed wholeheartedly.
"Okay then," she said, squaring her shoulders and lifting her chin. "David and I will help you. After all, you'll need a couple of psychic weirdos on your side."
"I prefer extrasensory perceptives," David said.
She made a face. "You made that up, didn't you?"
He smirked.
"Well," Edward said, "I'd prefer granddaughter and grandson-in-law."
He shoved a hand into his pants pocket and brought out a sparkly object, which he proffered to Grace. She took the object. It was a gold ring capped with a small diamond.
Her grandfather winked at her. "I've been holding onto that for you."
Grace closed her hand around the ring, shielding it inside her palm. "Can we get out of here please?"
David led them out of the murky room and down the short entryway. At the threshold, Grace hesitated. She looked back at the nurse slumped in his chair.
"What about him?" she asked.
"He'll wake up in a little while," David said. "When I was shutting down the generator, I saw his car parked out back. He'll be fine."
"Maybe we should call the cops and get these bastards arrested."
"We can't explain anything that happened. No one would believe it and we have no evidence to support our claims."
"The facility … "
"JT may be dead, but his company is still alive. Even if they didn't know what he was up to out in the desert, I'm sure they'll come up with a reasonable explanation for everything. Corporations love to obscure the truth and subvert the law."
She frowned. The pain behind her eyes was growing into a headache.
David took her hand and squeezed it. "We stopped a homicidal madman. I'd say that's a pretty good day's work." He nodded toward her grandfather, who now stood beside the car. "And we saved a very important life."
She felt the frown relaxing into a smile. He was right.
David led her toward the car. Halfway there, she tugged his hand to stop him.
He turned to face her, his brow furrowed.
She held the ring out to him. He took it, and bowing his head, muttered, "You don't want it anymore."
"No, that's not it." She grinned. "I love you too."
His head jerked up. He stared at her in shock for a few seconds, and then his lips parted in a grin that matched hers for giddiness.
She held out her left hand. He slipped the ring onto her finger.
A thread of fear pulled tight inside her. "What if I never get my memory back? I can't even remember how we met — "
"I can tell you anything you want to know." He touched her cheek. "And we can make new memories."
She opened her mouth to protest, but she didn't get the chance. He pulled her into his arms and kissed her with a passion and enthusiasm that burned out all her anxiety and melted away her headache.
They got in the car and drove away. In the rearview mirror, the forest swallowed up the little cabin. Everything it represented dwindled away along with it. The past receded into the distance as the road ahead became clearer, brighter, and smoother. She was no longer speeding headlong into darkness. Now, she rode into the light. Into the future. Into the unknown.
And for the first time in her life, that didn't bother her at all.