“Sure,” Gator said. “I watch that stuff all the time. They’re listening for the tumblers to click into place.”
“Not exactly, Gator,” Lily corrected. “They’re actually listening for a drop in the amount of sound. You’re hearing clicking with each number you pass, and then you hear just a little less clicking when one of the tumblers has fallen into place. That’s why I first thought of clairaudition, which as you know, is like clairvoyance, seeing things at a distance in your mind, but this would be hearing things at a distance in your mind.”
“But you don’t think that’s what she’s doing?” Nicolas asked.
Lily shook her head. “No, I had to throw that theory out. It doesn’t explain her incredible speed. Plus, I found out that the vault in the videotape—like most safes made since the 1960s—has all kinds of safeguards like nylon tumblers and sound baffles that make them pretty much impenetrable from lock-picking of this sort.”
“So Dahlia doesn’t do it through sound,” Nicolas said.
“No, she doesn’t,” Lily agreed. “I was stumped for a while. But in the middle of the night a much simpler explanation occurred to me; she literally ‘feels’ each lever falling into place. But there’s more. I think she has an emotional distaste for entropy in systems that gives her speed.”
“You’ve lost me again, Lily,” Ryland said.
“Sorry. The second law of thermodynamics says that the amount of entropy, or disorder, in the universe, tends to increase unless it is prevented from doing so. You can see the second law in action everywhere. A vase breaks into pieces. You never see a bunch of pieces assemble themselves into a vase. Left to itself, a house always gets dustier, never cleaner. And tumblers, because they’re spring-loaded, always spring out of place, not into place, when left to themselves. That’s the second law of thermodynamics in action—disorder keeps increasing if things are left to themselves. The closest I can figure it is that Dahlia is a part of nature that runs counter to the second law. In other words, she loves order and despises entropy.”
“That’s true of a lot of people. Rosa is a nut about the house being tidy,” Gator said, referring to their housekeeper. “And her kitchen has to be just so. We don’t dare move anything around.”
Lily nodded. “That’s true, but with Dahlia it runs much deeper. Because she’s psychic, she actually takes pleasure when she intuits the tumblers falling into place. It’s because she’s doing her lock-picking at the level of feeling and intuition, motivated by pleasure—that gives her speed. Think of how quickly we take our hand off a hot stove when we start to feel pain, or how the knee jerks up when you hit it with a hammer. These are reflexive responses; they don’t involve any thinking, which is a good thing for that hot hand, because thinking is much slower.”
“I can open small locks,” Ryland admitted. He glanced at Nicolas. “You can too. But I admit, I’m definitely thinking about it. I have to concentrate.”
“And neither of us can open locks on that scale or at that speed,” Nicolas commented. His gaze remained riveted to the screen. “She’s amazing.”
“I’d have to agree, Nico,” Lily said. “So as near as I can tell, she’s psychokinetically moving the tumblers into place in the same kind of reflexive fashion. It doesn’t get slowed down by her thinking mind; she’s getting instantly rewarded by a jolt of pleasure from her nervous system every time she moves one of the tumblers into place. And when all the tumblers are in place . . . well, that’s why she laughed with such exuberance when the door swung open. That was the real rush for her.” She swallowed and looked away from them. “I’m that same way with mathematical patterns. My mind continually has to work on them, and I get a rush when the patterns all click into place.”
Nicolas whistled softly. “I can see why the government would want her working for them.”
Lily stiffened. “She’s still a child who deserved a childhood. She should have been playing with toys.”
Nicolas turned his head slowly, looking at her with his cold, black eyes. “That’s exactly what she appears to be doing, Lily. Playing with toys. You’re angry with your father and rightly so. But he tried to do for this child what he did for you. Your brain had to work on mathematical problems and patterns all the time; this girl required a different type of work, but she obviously needed it just as much. Why wasn’t she adopted out?” His voice was flat, almost a monotone, but it carried weight and authority. He never raised his voice, but he was always heard.
Lily repressed a shiver. “Maybe I’m too close to the problem,” she agreed. “And you very well could be right. She does seem to be able to do all this without pain. I’d like to know why. Even now, with all the work I’ve done, the exercises to make myself stronger, I still get violent headaches if I use telepathy too much.”
“But maybe you weren’t a natural telepath. You have other talents that are amazing. When I use telepathy, it doesn’t bother me at all,” Nicolas said.
“Lily, you said the tapes of the child were difficult to watch,” Tucker pointed out, “but she seems fine in that one.”
Lily nodded. “The tapes involving operative training were difficult for me to watch. The one you’re about to see really covers both her tremendous skills and how dangerous she can be—and the cost of her gifts.”
The hallway depicted on the screen was very narrow, an obvious maze set up to represent various rooms in a house. A dozen other rooms were seen as smaller images along the left side of the screen. A small, black-haired woman came into view, stalking silently along the wall. She took several steps into the maze and stopped. She seemed to be listening or concentrating internally. The watchers could see a large man crouched behind a curtain in one of the rooms and a second man in the beams along the ceiling waiting in ambush almost directly above the first man.
The woman was tiny, her black hair straight and shiny, swept back in a careless ponytail. She wore dark clothes and moved with graceful, fluid, stealthy steps. When she stilled, she seemed to become part of the shadows, a vague, blurred image, so slight as to be a part of the wall. The watchers blinked several times to keep her in focus.
“She’s able to blur her image enough to trick anyone watching,” Ryland said in awe. “That would be useful for us to learn.”