There was another silence. Tucker Addison whistled softly. He was a tall, stocky man with dark skin, brown eyes, and an engaging smile. “You did it, Lily. You actually found her. And she’s a GhostWalker like all of us.”
“Before we get too excited, I think you should watch some of the other training tapes I found. Each of these is labeled Novelty.” She signaled to her husband to press Play on the machine to start the video running.
Lily found herself holding her breath. She was certain the child Novelty and Dahlia were one and the same. “According to the records, Novelty is eight years old here.” The child’s hair was thick and as black as a raven’s wing. She wore it in a clumsy braid that hung to her waist in a thick rope. Her face was delicate, matching the rest of her, and the thick hair seemed to overpower her. “I’m certain this is the same child. Look at her face. Her eyes are the same.” Lily felt the child was hiding from the world behind the mass of silken strands. She looked exotic, her origins Asian. Like all the missing girls, Dr. Whitney had adopted her from a foreign country and brought her to his laboratory to enhance her natural psychic abilities.
In the video, the little girl was on a balance beam. She didn’t walk carefully. She didn’t even look down. She ran across it as if it was a wide sidewalk instead of a narrow piece of wood. She didn’t hesitate at the end of the beam, but did a flip off of it, landing on her feet, still running without breaking stride. She was far too small to leap up and catch the bars over her head, but she didn’t seem to notice. She launched herself skyward, her hands outstretched, her small body tucked as she connected with the bars and swung over them with ease.
A collective gasp told Lily the men were all watching. She let the tape play through. All the while the little girl performed amazing skills. At times the child laughed aloud, bringing home to them the fact that she was alone in the room with only the cameras catching her incredible performance. Lily waited for the end of the tape and the reaction it would bring. As many times as she viewed it, she could not believe what she was seeing.
The child went up and over a two-story-high cargo net and then raced across the floor toward the last obstacle. A cable stretched across the length of the room, sagging in the middle, several feet above ground level. Novelty stared at the cable as she ran, concentration apparent on her face. The cable began to stiffen and by the time she leapt onto the steel wire, it was woven into a thick rope, with no sag whatsoever in the middle, allowing her to run lightly across it to the end and jump off laughing.
There was another silence when Ryland switched off the tape. “Can any of you do that?”
The men shook their heads. “How did she do it?”
“She has to be manipulating energy. We all do it to a much smaller extent,” Lily said. “She’s able to take it a step further and at little expense to herself. I’m willing to bet that she’s generating an antigravitational field to levitate the cable. It could be done by psychokinetically converting the underside of the cable into a superconductor, and applying the Li-Podkletnov technique of spinning the nuclei in the atoms of the underside to generate a sufficiently powerful antigrav field to lift it. And that would explain how she just danced across it as if she were floating!” Lily turned to look at the men, her eyes alight with excitement. “She was floating! Her own weight was reduced to almost nothing by the same antigrav field.”
“Lily.” Ryland shook his head. “You’re doing it again. Try speaking normal English.”
“I’m sorry. I get carried away when I’m excited,” Lily admitted. “It’s just so incredible. I’ve been scouring the research literature, and what’s amazing to me is that she’s doing with her mind what a couple of scientists are only beginning to be able to do in labs: generate antigravity. Only she does it much better, and she seems to be able to generate antigravity whenever she likes. She turns it on and off in a way that the scientists aren’t even close to at this point. Plus scientists, and I as well, would give anything to know how she is doing it at room temperature. They currently need to lower the temperature to several hundred degrees below zero in order to create their superconductors.”
“Antigravity?” Gator echoed, “isn’t that just a little far-fetched?”
“And what we do isn’t?” Nicolas asked.
“Well, actually I thought it was impossible at first, too,” Lily conceded. “But if, like me, you’ve watched these tapes several hundred times, you begin to notice little details. Here, let’s rewind it to where she’s crossing the cable. Now let’s watch it in slow motion. See? Right there when the cable starts to straighten out?” She touched the screen to indicate where they should look. “Look here, at the ceiling above the cable—see that electrical wire connecting the two overhead lights? Look, it’s moved up, about half an inch! Do you see that? And then it falls back right when Dahlia jumps off the other end of the cable. That’s exactly what you’d expect to see if there was an antigrav field extending upward from the cable.”
Lily pointed to the image of the young girl frozen on the screen. “Look at her, she’s laughing, not grabbing her head in pain.” She pushed in another tape. “In this one, she moves locks so fast, at first I thought a machine had to be involved.” The tape showed a huge vault with a complex lock system. The bolts slid so fast, the tumblers spun and clicked as if a large pattern was predetermined. The camera had focused completely on the heavy door so that it wasn’t until they heard a child’s laughter as the door swung open that they even realized Dahlia was there, opening locks with her mind.
Lily regarded the men. “Isn’t that incredible? She never even touched the vault. I considered a few theories—clairaudition for one, but I just couldn’t account for the sheer speed with which she opened the vault. Finally it hit me. She was directly intuiting and taking pleasure in the state of lowest entropy in the tumbler-lever system of the vault!”
Lily looked so triumphant Ryland hated to crush her joy. “Sweetheart, I’m so excited for you. Really, I am. It’s just that I didn’t understand a damn thing you said.” He looked around the room with a raised eyebrow. The other men shook their heads.
She tapped her finger on the table, frowning. “All right, let’s see if I can come up with a way to explain it to you. You know those movies where the burglars put their stethoscope up against the safe as they’re turning the dial?”