Finally, there was the man who sat near the back and gazed out the window, a hollow look on his face. He was maybe around thirty, and pretty strong by the look of him. He moved gracefully but purposefully, the kind of movement she’d seen in farmhands and laborers who did their jobs well. His brown hair was cut short, his jaw had a couple days of stubble, and he wore a ratty woolen sweater, dungarees, and work boots. He was smart, though; Maggie could tell. Like the younger, shifty guy, he checked out everyone on the plane when he boarded, but in a dispassionate, analytical way, as if he were calmly gauging each person’s strengths and weaknesses to determine if they were a threat. She recognized the look well, because she’d done the same when she boarded. This one was guarded, pure and simple. There were no other emotions with him at the moment — merely alert and ready.
The plane began its descent with little warning, just a dip and a turn that Maggie barely noticed. She looked out her window and saw a massive dried lake bed the color of chalk nestled in one of the gray-brown valleys below. She stuck her face as close as she could get to the glass, looking for any indication of a nearby town or city, but the guards were up now, moving toward them cautiously.
“We need to ask you folks to put these on,” the one wearing sergeant’s stripes said. He held out pieces of black cloth. Blindfolds. “Security reasons.”
Gingerly, the young well-dressed man took one, followed by the old man; the former, Maggie could tell, got a whole lot more nervous, while the old man almost seemed amused. Finally, the big, competent guy took one with a grimace, and while he didn’t show it, she could tell he got a case of the nerves too. If Maggie was being honest with herself, the whole thing made her uneasy. Of all the places she’d visited around the country, all the flights she’d taken, blindfolds were an unwelcome first. What could possibly be such a secret?
But nonetheless, she took it and tied it over her eyes. They were shaped like sleep masks, like the kind Maggie’s mother used to have, padded and dark. They made it impossible to see, and without her sight, the pitching and bobbing were amplified as the plane made its approach. Maggie took a deep breath and focused her energy on figuring out how close they were to landing. She reached out with her ability, tracing the threads of emotion toward the cockpit, where she felt the pilot perking up and the copilot calming down. Maybe training was overcoming nerves? Or maybe he was just better at landing than taking off. Hard to say.
Then the nose of the plane started to rise, and the gears rumbled as the landing gear was lowered. A dip, a screech, and a pitch forward… and they were on the ground. That was all Maggie knew, though she was pretty certain they were near the dried lake bed they saw, because they hadn’t gone far enough to land anywhere else amid those mountains.
After a few minutes of rolling down the runway, the door on the side of the plane opened, and she heard boots on metal flooring. “Lady and gentlemen, each of you will be getting a hand. Please keep the blindfolds on until you’re told otherwise,” said a new voice, a young man who sounded very accustomed to being in charge. “This is for your own safety. Now everybody up! Sooner we move, sooner you get to see again.”
Maggie would’ve bet a dollar he was a Marine officer — but then, she realized, that was purely because of his emotional attitude and nothing concrete. But then, perhaps this ability of hers was concrete enough? Or was she jumping to conclusions? Some days, it was just really hard to tell what was popping into her head from her ability, and what was just an overactive imagination, fueled by equal parts anxiety and boredom.
Maggie stood and waited with her head down. She tried to pinpoint where everyone was on the plane. She could feel the young, shifty man’s tension, the old black man’s resignation, the big guy’s hair-trigger alertness. The cockpit crew and the guards escorting her fellow passengers were mostly bored or otherwise neutral, though there seemed to be a bit of idle curiosity among one or two of them. Made sense, given that none of the passengers would ever be mistaken for regular military. The man she pegged as a Marine, though — he was the one who grabbed her bag and took her arm gently to lead her forward, and he suddenly swung from confident to nervous, almost unreasonably so. He must have known what she was doing there, what she was — it was the only possible explanation. He’s scared of me.
Jumping to conclusions again, she thought. Not smart.
They made their way slowly through the plane and down the steps to the ground. There was tarmac underneath her boots — standard Army issue, far more practical than the shoes they originally tried to foist on her — and she was soon guided to a waiting jeep and gently placed in a seat by the still-nervous soldier. The emotional threads belonging to the old man — fatigue, curiosity, bemusement, worry — snaked toward her in gentle, pastel hues from the seat next to her. Her guide took the wheel, and she also felt another person in the jeep as they pulled away — probably a grunt, his emotions steady and generally nonplussed.
Soon, there was warm wind in her hair as the jeep sped off in what felt like a straight line — they had to be doing at least forty miles an hour, and it seemed their final destination was some ways off, as it took about three minutes by her reckoning before the vehicle came to a halt. They were well away from the runway — probably well away from the usual assortment of hangars and outbuildings she’d seen at other air bases.
“You can take those off now,” the officer in charge said. She did so and recognized him as the man she’d first met along with Danny at the mental hospital so very long ago. Anderson, his name was, dredged up from memories she wanted to forget from her time there. No wonder he was put out — he probably remembered her very well. On the bright side, her hunch was right, and she quietly enjoyed the little victory.
They were at a small cluster of buildings at the end of a very long road — far enough from the landing strip that she could barely make out anything from where they’d come from. The buildings here, though, were pure government prefab, corrugated metal and wood framing and canvas, and they looked pretty new, given the general lack of dirt and dust on them. There was a wood-framed watchtower in the middle of it all, with a couple of soldiers looking at them closely — weapons at the ready, though not aimed.
The layers of barbed wire fence surrounding the little encampment were, she had to admit, less than promising.
Maggie jumped out of the jeep and moved around to the other side to help the old-timer, who already had tried to get out of the car without his escort. He seemed strong enough but still had that uncertainty of movement that came with old age. But he soon stood and took in his surroundings before looking at her with a smile. “Thank you, miss.”
“Welcome, Pops.” She had to wonder: if this guy was a Variant of some kind, it had better be a pretty impressive ability, because otherwise he wasn’t going to be very useful to the government people. Then it struck her, as she took his arm, that maybe she should be more nervous than she was. But she wasn’t. Definitely too much time cooped up, she considered.
The two other passengers from the plane, having arrived in another jeep, were already walking toward one of the smaller buildings, surrounded by a couple of suits and a half-dozen soldiers. Maggie and the old man followed, only to find Danny Wallace waiting for them.
“Good to see you, Maggie,” the young officer said with a smile, offering his hand. “Good flight?”