A Touch Of Lightning (COMPLETED!)

Chapter 37 Treacherous Links

       

Chapter 37 Treacherous Links

Ahleena didn't move, her body held so unnaturally still that he couldn't even detect the motion of her heartbeat.

"Maybe she doesn't even have a heart! Maybe we should rip open her chest and find out." A dark, wounded voice whispered in the back of his mind. He pushed it away, still trying to rationalize what she had done to him even as he began to surrender all control to the fury within.

"I have been teaching you how to live without your Weaver. I've been keeping you alive. But I am not a Weaver. Not yours, not anybody's. I think Carmen may be your Weaver. We need to transfer our mind-link to her before your power goes full Alpha. She is what you need, she will keep you from tearing yourself apart." Ahleena spoke quickly, fiercely, inside his mind. Her will pressed into his unravelling mind with the force of an avalanche, forcing him to listen, to absorb what she was truly saying.

In telepathy, there weren't really words. It was a pure form of communication, linking the patterns in two minds and letting the thoughts of one flow to the other. The message sent perfectly followed the thoughts of the other, unfiltered, untainted by reservations, and wholly the truth. And if the one speaking was extremely focused, they could send entire images. Like letting someone see exactly what you were thinking, or even what you knew.

Now, as Ahleena told Callin about the Weavers, she linked her memories and knowledge to him. Saturating his mind with a flow of knowledge so deep, so fast, it nearly overwhelmed him.

He found himself on his knees, gazing off into nowhere, trying to catch up with all she had told him. Trying to understand the implications. Trying to get the burning, animal rage inside back under control.

He could smell his own blood in the air, and burning points of pain spread up his forearms, across each shoulder, and down his calves. Letting him know his razor-tipped bone spurs were about to erupt from beneath his skin, letting him know his bone armor was about to go into defensive mode and truly unleash the destructive power lashing about just below his conscious thoughts.

Ahleena herself didn't know her own past, beyond what little her parents had told her before they had died at her hands when she was still just a child. Callin was so stunned by this unexpected flow of information that he barely processed that fact, that the haunting image he had seen in her dreams was not just a nightmare, but a real memory. It was an aspect of her past she simply included in this transfer of knowledge as if it were just some inconsequential bit of info, like the same as explaining what county her first house was in. It was given as a fact, but he still received no other information on why she had killed them, or why she had been so consumed with endless guilt immediately afterwards.

He saw that she didn't know much of her past but she did know more about the labs and what they had been trying to do. Before she had escaped she had read a document that outlined the labs experiments on children with telepathy, telekinesis, and psionic powers. That document was simple, almost just a block diagram, but it explained that the labs had learned that the children's powers manifested themselves in two integral ways. There were Flayers and Weavers.

This wasn't exactly new information to him, but now she was using this telepathic link to explain it more detail. And to explain how the labs viewed the two different psionic powers.

The labs had learned that the Flayers needed to be linked with a Weaver in order to survive, or else when their power evolved, or went Alpha, they almost always ended up killing themselves, and often anyone too close when it happened. Somehow, the Weavers could bond with Flayers and together, the totality of their power was far greater than individually. And the Weavers kept the Flayers in control of their powers, keeping them from ripping themselves apart. Unlike the Flayers, the Weavers could survive on their own, although many seemed susceptible to crippling depression, anxiety, or uncontrollable rage. If they were linked with their Flayer, they were much more stable.