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ran a bath and climbed into it, making the water as hot as she could stand. She watched as her skin reddened like lobster flesh, willing the unpleasant, burning sensation to drown out her emotional anguish. It didn’t.
You have two choices, she told herself, steam rising up and enveloping her in a thick, heady cloud. You can sink. Or you can swim.
You can control your own life. Or be controlled.
The footage she’d just watched had confirmed the man’s story about her scientific origins. Her mother and father really had tried to program her, like a computer. So she could be useful to ‘The Group’. Seriously. George Orwell couldn’t have made this stuff up. Ella’s parents had believed they had the right to control not just her mind and her body, but all her future decisions as well. Her ‘destiny’, as Ella’s father had put it. Clearly the Praegers had been brainwashed by ‘The Group’. And now, from beyond the grave, they wanted to send Ella off to be brainwashed too.
No. No way.
Ella had already resisted her grandmother’s idea of ‘destiny’ – a life of isolation and Christian piety up at the ranch, cut off from the rest of the world. It had been painful to break away, but Ella had done it. And she could do it again.
OK, so her brain had been messed with. That was a problem. But it was a problem she could fix on her own, without the help of the cult that had screwed her up in the first place. She could still lead a normal life if she chose to. The kind of life that Bob had, in the city, with a job and a family and friends. She could do it. Bob could teach her how to do it.
Except … the voices. The headaches, the nausea, the endless roar that wouldn’t ever switch off. They would drive her mad in the end. How could she hope to hold down a job, or a relationship, when at any moment deafening tangles of noise and pain could ambush her, bringing her, sometimes literally, to her knees?
She had to learn how to control the voices. How to master the unwanted ‘gift’ that her parents had given her. Because unless she could do that, no life she chose would be worth living.
Climbing out of the bath, dripping wet, Ella lay back on the bed and let the cool air of the room suck the heat out of her body.
However she felt about the man – however profoundly she hated him right now – he was the key to her future. Not because she owed a damn thing to him, or her parents, or their stupid Group. But because he might, just might, be able to teach her how to master the voices in her head. Or at least to introduce her to people who could. Maybe, just maybe, if those voices stopped, she might stand a better chance at interpreting the real voices of those around her. Of reading social cues. Of fitting in.
‘Where are you?’ Ella shouted out loud. ‘Where the hell are you, you son of a bitch?’
‘Close your eyes.’
Ella spun around, grabbing the throw rug from the foot of the bed, scrambling to cover her naked body. His voice was so clear, at first Ella thought he must be standing in the room. She looked around, her eyes darting to every corner of the hotel suite, but there was no one there.
‘You’ll hear me better if your eyes are closed,’ the man repeated.
Only then did Ella realize, with a sinking heart, that his voice was actually coming from inside her head. Unlike all the others, though, it was crystal clear, like a telephone call on a perfect, crackle-free line.
He’s transmitting to me?
Despite herself, she was fascinated. How the hell was he able to …?
‘Don’t try to answer me,’ he instructed her. ‘It won’t work. You can receive but you can’t transmit. Just listen.’
Perfect, thought Ella bitterly. So you’re in control. Again.
‘I’m glad you saw the footage,’ the man continued. ‘I expect you have questions.’
Just a few.
‘You’ll have a chance to ask them at training. It starts tomorrow at our upstate facility. They’re expecting you.’
Of course they are.
‘Find something to write with. The information I’m about to give you is important. Do not share it with anyone.’
Perhaps it was a blessing Ella couldn’t respond, as his dictatorial tone was really starting to tick her off. After about twenty seconds of silence, he gave her some map coordinates, which he repeated twice. Ella scribbled them down. There were just the numbers, nothing more. Then came a curt ‘goodbye’ and the man’s voice shut off, as suddenly as it had begun.
Feeling marginally less agitated than she had before, Ella climbed under the covers.
Tomorrow, she would see this ‘Group’ first hand. She had no intention of joining them. Of being brainwashed and corrupted the way her parents had been. And she certainly wasn’t going on any ‘mission’ for this bunch of lunatics. Instead, Ella would turn the tables. She would take what she needed from them, on her terms. She would make them teach her how to control and perhaps even switch off the ‘transmissions’ that were making her life so unbearable. To disable her ‘gift’. And, she’d extract more information about her parents, especially her mother. The least this cult could do after all the havoc they’d wreaked was to fill in the gaps. When she was done, she would leave, free of her headaches, free of her grandmother, free of her parents’ expectations, free of everything. She would begin building the normal, happy life she wanted. The life she deserved.
For the first time since Mimi’s funeral, Ella fell almost at once into a deep, contented sleep.
Daphne Alexandris turned to her husband Stavros. ‘Did you hear that noise?’
‘What noise?’ Stavros looked up from his iPad.
‘That … clattering. There it is again!’
The Alexandrises were sitting at opposite ends of the grand drawing room in their colonial mansion in Putre, Chile. A friend of Stavros’s had sold it to him for a song back in the days when Stavros had been riding high as Greece’s interior minister and Dimitri Mantzaris’s right-hand man. In exchange, Stavros had green-lighted some apartment developments in a slummy part of Athens, that might or might not have fully complied with Greek fire regulations. In any event, the house in Putre was an oasis of calm and peace, a place where Stavros and his wife could escape the pressures of Greek politics – or anything else they might need to escape. Set back from the ancient pueblo of the pretty mountain town, with the peaks of the Taapaca Volcano rising up behind it like benevolent deities, the mansion was at once luxurious and supremely comfortable, furnished with an array of priceless South American antiques. One could live like a king in Chile on reasonably modest means, and the Alexandrises’ means were far from modest. Good security, of course, was a must. But luckily they could afford that too.
‘It’s probably just foxes or possums,’ said Stavros, yawning. It was late, and he was no more than one more good brandy away from his bed. ‘Scrabbling at the trash. I’ll send Juanita out to take care of them.’
Reaching to his left, he rang a small silver bell on the table beside him, like a Victorian lord of the manor. Sure enough, the housekeeper arrived like a summoned genie.
‘Go and see what’s making that racket would you, Juanita? The noise is bothering Señora Alexandris.’
‘I don’t know how you can be so calm, Stavros,’ Daphne Alexandris hissed, her thin neck straining with stress so that the sinews bulged beneath the crepey, sixty-year-old skin. ‘What if it isn’t foxes? What if it’s her? No one close to Mantzaris is safe. You said so yourself. That’s why we’re