“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.”
“The focus and concentration required is incredible,” Lily pointed out. “But it’s costing her. She’s rubbed her temples twice, and if you look closely at her face, she’s already sweating. She obviously can feel the emotions of those waiting to attack her. I observed her training in martial arts. She was reading the mind of her opponent, anticipating everything he did before he did it. She utilized her psychic abilities as well as her physical ones.”