Thirteen single-spaced pages. Laura Fletcher ran a hand through her dark curls and stared down at the report on her desk. Seven years' work, and all of it fit on thirteen pages. "U.E.O. LEVEL 1 SECURITY CLASSIFIED," its seal ordered. She touched the raised circular seal in the center of the page. As she traced over the familiar trident logo, she continued to read. "Project Blue Moon: Synthium and its effects on parapsychological phenomena."
Laura and Clay had worked on the project together; though he had managed most of the data collection, she had been the one to write up the results and verify the work. Now it lay here, unfinished. Not much work left--just an addendum brought on by the incident aboard seaQuest.
The report was one of the items she'd inherited from Marshall. He didn't have many possessions, just some clothes, official papers, and a couple of photographs. It all fit into the two small crates that she'd been storing at the foot of her bed. Clay's cyborg enhancements allowed him to store all the information he needed in an internal memory module, so he didn't need many mementos. Laura was unsure what to do with the crates. She was torn between building a shrine and lighting a bonfire.
They were inanimate objects--useless, orphaned scraps of a life that had ended abruptly. But these bits of cloth and paper haunted her. Their presence was a reminder that she had acted too late to save those seaQuest kids. She had acted too late to save Wendy from Clay's obsession with synthium and the U.E.O. She had acted too late to save Clay himself. Somewhere beyond death, he was laughing at her, staring right though her with his dark, dark eyes.
That was the problem with being a strong psychic. Laura's powers allowed her to see an aura on almost every object. When you touch something, you interact with it. You leave a trace of yourself behind, and it leaves a touch of itself with you. These items that had been Clay's, they still contained too much of him. Their look and their smell, the way his residual energies echoed thought--fragments: these qualities only intensified the unreal sense of his presence. It felt more like madness than grief.
Laura had opened her eyes to Clay's obsession on board the seaQuest. Perhaps it had been the unfamiliar setting that had made her see that he wasn't a hero. For years, she had worked with Clay--or worked for him, more accurately. She'd been his student, his lover, his nurse, his enabler, his disciple.
He'd never lied to her, or anyone else, as far as she knew. Laura knew what he would have said: You fool. You saw in me only what you wanted to see. Up to the very end, he had practically shouted it out loud: I'm using you! He had used her, and Wendy, and Piccolo, and those two civilians on the boat. For what? Some blue moon and a chance to humiliate the U.E.O. And she had supported him--why? Out of a petty schoolgirl crush, hoping that one day she'd earn his respect and approval.
Now he was gone. Her whole life was gone, yet simultaneously it felt as if her life was really about to begin. A life of co-dependency had ended, and Laura felt very lonely, very guilty, and very free.
“Doctor Fletcher? Doc, are you all right?” The voice of John, a student secretary, interrupted the reminiscence. Blinking, she brought herself into the present. Something had recently upset him; his aura was jagged and spiked.
“It's okay.” She rubbed the back of her neck with one hand. “What is it?”
“You should check your mail. The dean's council is about to scapegoat you. That spineless milksop is going to take the side of those U.E.O. bastards.”
She sighed. Too many of Clay's students held this attitude. They believed that a small band of U.E.O. conspirators had killed him. “We are the U.E.O.” She held up the report and pointed to the CLASSIFIED label. He snorted and walked out.
He had a point. The top brass was going to want a fall guy for the seaQuest incident. With Clay dead, Laura was the likely target. Her level 1 clearance would probably be revoked before the weekend. If she was lucky, maybe she could retain her professorial position at Chatton. Who was she kidding--if she was lucky, she wouldn't go to prison for being an accomplice to kidnaping and terrorism.
Laura had a lot of work to do, and she didn't have much time. “John,” she called after the secretary.
“What,” he responded both with voice and a snappy mental jolt.
“Close the door and hold all my vids for the next hour.”
She tapped the flat panel on her desk. “Ready,” responded the computer.
“Take dictation.”
“State format,” it flatly intoned.
“E-mail, encrypted, level 1.”
“State recipient.”
“Lucas Wolenczak.”