Michelle sat on the swing watching the sun set, empty after her long cry. In the school parking lot, a trickle of cars arrived for the recital, then turned into a steady stream, discharging family members and the public. Something pulled at her, and she decided to attend, or perhaps, didn’t decide to leave. Either way, she stood and walked to the building.

The crowd shuffled into the McJames School auditorium, square groups of chairs in each corner of the room, all facing inward to a clear area in the center. Confused at the arrangement, Michelle drifted with the crowd and seated herself in the second row of a section off to the side.

She looked over the smiling faces, mostly white with a scattering of shades of brown here and there. The friendly informality of small-town life pervaded, murmured pleasantries punctuated by the occasional hearty greetings and embraces. The mood was clearly upbeat, even a little excited, which struck Michelle as odd for what was essentially a school play by disabled kids. She’d sat through many of Adam’s events before, impatient and squirming with embarrassment when she was younger, bored and distracted later. The vibe here was different. Some relatives of students carried flowers and gifts.

She saw teachers and aides greeting friends and family members. It occurred to her that in a small community like this, the teachers and assistants must all be relatively well known, sisters, mothers, brothers and cousins of all the law abiding, upstanding residents of Rexburg, Idaho. So how did her suspicions fit into that? Is it what Mrs. Sherfy said, or something else? Michelle had three anomalies to reconcile: what she just learned, her gut reaction, and what her eyes reported. All three were wildly divergent, and she could not harmonize them.

Mrs. Sherfy turned to her and smiled warmly. Michelle noticed dark circles under her eyes and other indications of chronic stress. Still, the smile was genuine and reassuring, almost apologetic. She pushed through the crowd and grasped Michelle’s half outstretched hand.

“I’m glad you came. I hope you enjoy the performance. Adam really loves his part.” She paused, then squeezed Michelle’s hand. “It’s going to be okay.”

As if on cue, the crowd hushed, and the students filed in. Michelle took her seat. Some students carried simple musical instruments: triangles, tambourines, hand drums. A teenage boy was led by an assistant to a piano off to the side. All of the students wore plain solid colors, bright and clean, hair neatly combed, some of the girls with braids or bows. Some fidgeted and rocked, the only outward manifestations of agitation, but remarkably little given the size of the crowd. Michelle sensed an undercurrent of excitement and sat up straighter in her chair.

She spotted Adam standing along the wall, his hands by his side, staring at an invisible spot somewhere on the floor in front of him. Connie’s word was right: serene. Michelle took a deep breath and relaxed.

The piano started with a beautiful lilting introduction, then transitioned into a rhythmic chord progression, looping up and down, with a melody interwoven. The children in the middle, mostly the older kids, began moving in a circular dance, simple movements, at first fragmentary, but increasingly better synchronized. Along the walls, the children holding instruments began striking or shaking whatever they held, also disjointed initially, but gradually finding a shared rhythm. Many of the students held little lights that winked on and off, different colors. Michelle couldn’t tell if they randomly blinked, or the children controlled them.

At first, the movements seemed random and disorganized, then slowly a dance emerged, though occasionally a child would move out of sync or stumble, but then they’d recover and step back in. The children on the sides swayed, some together, others on their own, the motions undulating around the room. Michelle glanced around and saw the rapt attention of the crowd, faces calm, contented smiles and slightly unfocused gazes, soaking it all in. She turned her attention back to the dancers.

The rhythms exerted a hypnotic effect and she felt her focus slipping, vision widening, senses expanding. It was then that she sensed the first flickering pattern, a ripple of movement through the room, in response to the sounds, an interplay between disparate parts of the group, evanescent structures shimmering and refracting, flashing through the assembly, breaking up and forming anew, repeating. She caught herself with a start and tried to focus, to see it clearly, but it vanished, replaced only by her observations of individual motions, this girl shaking her hand, that boy tapping his fingers on a drum, but the sense of the whole, the synergy, gone. Frustrated, she looked around the room again, and the crowd seemed even more serene, some gently swaying to the music.

The intuition surfaced unbidden – don’t fight it. She took a deep breath and turned back to the dance, now consciously submitting to the sensation, and quickly regained the soft focus, dissolving into the gestalt, like when she saw the image of the T-rex toy in the classroom. She felt her consciousness simultaneously shrink and expand, a small point of awareness, embedded in something larger.

The patterns reemerged, unintelligible, but clearly a level of meaning superimposed on the individual actions around the room – movements, noises, colors, all shifting and combining. Michelle struggled to maintain the balance between opening herself to the perceptions of the patterns, while simultaneously attempting to discern their meaning. Each time she tried too hard, they slipped away, and then she’d relax and they’d reappear. Finally, she let go and submitted to the experience, lapsing into the tranquil torpor shared with the rest of the audience.

Rhythmic repetitions appeared, some localized to specific groups of dancers, others rippling across the whole group. Some movements, some colored lights, and still others sounds – rhythms, chords and melodies. She noticed, even felt, recurrent themes interacting with particular movements, a wave of raised hands, fluttering fingers, a turn of the head, a tip of the body; others were sequences of lights triggering movements, which then prompted musical changes.

Michelle sensed patterns, losing them as soon as she thought she saw a connection, slipping into a wordless serenity, bathed in the flow of sensations. The interplay between sounds, images, and movements quickened, moments of call and response, flickering cascades, moments of stability emerging from the roiling synesthesia, brightening then disappearing, quickly replaced by another. The pace accelerated, adding scope and complexity, further overwhelming her sense of self, immersed in the bigger, faster awareness filling the room.

She gave up and allowed the impressions to wash over her, with a warmth of melting. Time disappeared and her consciousness merged with the larger emergent phenomenon manifesting in the room, the dancers and the patterns, the audience and their reaction.

Then it was over. The crowd sat silent, then began to stir as if waking, gradually rousing to scattered applause and murmuring. The same sense of relaxed serenity filled the room, everyone appearing to have just arisen from a restorative nap. Michelle felt like she lost time, like when she woke from the anesthesia after her wisdom teeth extraction, but it really had been less than thirty minutes.

In the milling crowd afterward, Michelle drifted around the room, calm and refreshed. She saw the little girl from the playground, and even though they did not make eye contact, the little girl approached.

“Adam is a showoff,” she said. Michelle absorbed it without response, still in a nebulous fog of contentment. “He’s a fast learner. I like him,” the little girl continued.

The content of the statements didn’t match the flat tone of her voice, but again, Michelle accepted the information. The little girl wandered away.

Mrs. Sherfy smiled at her from across the room, a wordless reassurance that was all Michelle needed.

She walked to her car and drove to the motel, completely content for the first time in a long while. The anxieties about the lab connection to the school disappeared. She took note of the unmarked police car tailing her discretely, just another piece of information, another hint she was on to something and had provoked a response, but her newfound calm allowed her to take note and adjust without fear.

She opened the door to her motel room and immediately sensed something amiss, a foreign scent, subtle signs of an intruder, a faint wrinkle on the bedspread where someone sat. Her placid calm from the drive congealed into an iciness, a familiar feeling when threats accumulated as she homed in on a story. The possibility of harm heightened her sensitivity and also urged her forward, driven to find the answer.

She moved carefully around the room, taking it all in. Her luggage appeared undisturbed. She never left her electronics unattended, so they were secure, but what else was in the room?

She surveyed the bathroom, not likely because of the difficulty with concealment and sound quality. Closets yielded no sign of tampering. Before tossing the bed and checking under the mattress, she looked closely at the small desk and smiled.

On one corner, a ring-shaped stain, evaporated condensation from a drink placed there. Fainter, a second superimposed ring.

Old mark from a previous guest? Maybe. She looked closer, running her hands along the edge of the desk, underneath the exposed surfaces, and found the defect, smile widening. She dropped to the floor on her hands and knees, noted the indentation in the carpet where the desk had rested before it had been moved and not put back exactly where it was.

Sloppy, sloppy.

She peered underneath and could barely see the spot where the laminate was peeled back to place the device.

She went out to the car, drove to the far side of the parking lot, past the unmarked cop car, and contacted Tink.

“My room’s been bugged. Can you secure my tablet before I go back in? Then let’s sweep and see what’s in there, and what you can find out. Can you pick up anything from out here?”

“No transmissions nearby. Sweeping local area. Nothing detected within 20 meters of current location. Activating detection on tablet. Ready when you are.”

Michelle circled the parking lot and reentered the room. Following her usual routine, she pretended to log in and check a virtual shell account, feeding the bug a stream of harmless sham data to probe its capabilities. She and Tink communicated on a secure, parallel virtual machine.

Tink flashed a stream of news feeds, while Michelle pretended to browse, all the while embedding their communications inside text to deceive any cameras there may have been installed.

Single transmitter, sniffing. In record mode only presently. Moderate sophistication, Tink streamed. How much should I feed?

Spoof some notes. Can you tell who placed it?

Running model trace. Generic COTS. Activate credentials for deeper probe?

No. Domestic or foreign?

Likely domestic. No unusual configurations. Passive.

Michelle pondered. On the one hand, she certainly wasn’t going to give up anything important or sensitive, but on the other, someone placed this with an expectation, and she wanted to meet that expectation to keep them complacent. Who knew she was here? Who knew her profession? The sheriff. The tail felt like the appropriate level of surveillance based on her interactions so far. But could be. She’d been wrong before. The motel owner? Not very likely. The school was out of the question. The lab? Already? They knew she was a journalist. Certainly a lot of technical expertise out there. But a federal lab, not even military? It felt very aggressive.

She finished messaging Tink, set up the security precautions, and logged off.

***

Outside, two different cars monitored her actions. The young deputy in the police car focused on the room, took notes of Michelle’s movements. The other watched the room and the police car. The man in the second car discretely made a call.

“She’s in her room. The cops are still here. I think she knows something is up.”

“Hang back. Don’t let the cops see you. Wait until she gives them the slip. She will. Then do it.”

Chapters 50 and 51