The remote viewing chair felt like a coffin wrapped in old leather, and Lily wondered if her father had felt the same way the last time he sat in it. She ran her fingers over the worn armrests where his hands had rested, and she could almost feel the ghost of his grip still pressed into the material. Director Vance stood behind a thick glass window on the other side of the room, watching her through a microphone and a camera and a dozen other instruments that measured brain waves and heartbeats and things that did not have names yet. The room was cold and gray and smelled like metal and dust, but Lily did not shiver because she had learned long ago that fear was just a signal to pay closer attention.
A young technician named Chen came in to attach the sensors to her head, and his hands were shaking so bad that he dropped two of them before he got the third one right. Lily looked at him with her sharp brown eyes and told him to relax, because she was not going to bite him unless he gave her a reason to do so. He laughed nervously and stepped back quickly, and she could see in his face that he had heard the stories about her, the fights with Dr. Harrow, the expulsion, the cult, all of it. She did not care what he thought, because the only opinion that mattered now was her own, and she was done trying to make scared little men feel comfortable around her.
Director Vances voice crackled through a speaker in the ceiling, telling Lily to close her eyes and take three deep breaths before she began the viewing. The voice was cold and professional, but Lily heard the tiny crack underneath it, the sound of a woman who was desperate and trying hard not to show it. Eleven days of oxygen left for four astronauts stranded on a planet that had already killed two survey drones and one unmanned lander before they even got there. Lily closed her eyes and took her three breaths, and she let the darkness behind her eyelids become a door instead of a wall.
She had been remote viewing since she was a little girl, long before she even knew there was a word for what she could do. Her father used to play a game with her where he would hide an object in another room and she would close her eyes and describe it perfectly, right down to the color and the scratches and the dust on top. He told her that she had a gift that was stronger than his own, and he made her promise to keep it secret from everyone except him, because the government would try to use her if they found out. She kept that promise for ten years after he died, but now the government had found her anyway, and she was sitting in his chair, doing his job, chasing his ghost.
The first target was the astronauts themselves, because nobody on Earth even knew if they were still alive after the last transmission went silent three days ago. Lily reached out with her mind, past the walls of the facility, past the mountain, past the atmosphere and the moon and the cold slow drift of the planets beyond. She felt the vast emptiness of space pressing against her consciousness like deep water pressing on a diver’s chest, and she almost pulled back from the pressure of it. But she remembered her fathers voice telling her that the secret to remote viewing was not strength but surrender, not pushing but allowing, not fighting the dark but becoming part of it.
Then she saw them, four small sparks of human light floating in the black ocean between the stars, and she knew they were still alive because their lights were still burning. The astronaut named Commander Reyes was the brightest one, a woman with short gray hair and a face like carved stone who was not going to let her crew die without a fight. The others were dimmer but steady, a young pilot named Diaz who prayed constantly, a scientist named Okonkwo who had left three children back on Earth, and an engineer named Petrov who was already injured and bleeding from a cut on his forehead. Lily held them in her mind for as long as she could, memorizing the shape of their fear and the taste of their hope, and then she let herself drift back to her body with a gasp that made Chen jump.
Director Vances voice came through the speaker again, sharper this time, asking Lily what she saw and demanding details right now. Lily opened her eyes and looked at the glass window where the director stood, and she smiled a small and terrible smile that made Chen take another step backward. She told Vance that the astronauts were alive but scared, that Petrov was hurt, and that something else was on that planet with them, something that was not human and not friendly and not done hunting. The silence that followed her words was so complete that she could hear the buzzing of the fluorescent lights above her head, and she knew that she had just confirmed their worst fears.
Vance asked Lily what she meant by something else, and her voice had lost some of its cold professionalism and gained a tremor that was almost human. Lily closed her eyes again for just a moment, and she saw the shadows moving on Xylos-4, shadows that had no source of light and no reason to move except that they wanted to. She told Vance that she did not know what the things were, but they were old, older than the planet, older than the stars, and they did not like having visitors in their home. The astronauts had landed in a place that was not empty, and now the things that lived there were waking up and getting hungry.
Vance told Lily to take a break and eat something, because the first viewing always drained new remote viewers more than they expected. Lily shook her head and said she was not hungry, and she was not tired, and she was not going to stop until she found a way to bring those people home. The truth was that she felt more alive than she had felt in months, because for the first time since Marcus died, she had a purpose that mattered more than her own pain. She stood up from the chair and stretched her arms above her head, and she saw Chen staring at her with a mixture of fear and awe that reminded her of the way students looked at Dr. Harrow before they realized he was a fraud.
Dr. Harrow had been her professor at the university, a man with a white beard and a red face and a temper that exploded whenever someone challenged his precious theories. He had hired Lily to be his research assistant on a project about dimensional veils, which was just a fancy way of saying he wanted to tear holes in reality and see what fell out. Lily had read his equations and found seventeen mistakes in the first three pages alone, mistakes that would have caused the veil to collapse inward instead of opening outward, sucking everything in the room into a place where physics did not work anymore. She tried to tell him, nicely at first and then not so nicely, but he would not listen because he could not accept that a dropout girl knew more than a tenured professor with fifty published papers to his name.
The final fight happened in front of the whole department, with Dr. Harrow screaming that Lily was a reckless and dangerous fool who was going to get someone killed with her crazy ideas. Lily screamed back that he was the one who was going to get people killed, and she threw his precious equations on the floor and stomped on them with her boot for everyone to see. The department head called her into his office an hour later and told her that she was expelled effective immediately, and that she should consider herself lucky if she was not arrested for destroying university property. She walked out of that building with her head held high and her middle finger raised at the statue of the founder, and she never looked back even once.
Now she was in a secret government facility, using the very skills that Dr. Harrow had mocked and dismissed, and she was the only person on Earth who could save four lives. The irony was not lost on her, and she thought about sending Dr. Harrow a postcard from the facility just to rub it in his stupid bearded face. But she had bigger problems to worry about, like the shadows on Xylos-4 and the eleven days of oxygen and the fact that she had no idea how to fight something that did not have a body you could punch. She walked over to the glass window and pressed her palm against it, and she saw Director Vance flinch slightly on the other side, because Lily had a way of making people flinch without even trying.
Vance opened a door and came into the room where Lily stood, and for the first time they were face to face without any glass between them. The director was taller than Lily expected, with sharp cheekbones and eyes that had seen too much death to be surprised by anything anymore. She told Lily that the remote viewing was just the first step, and that the real challenge would be figuring out how to use the information to actually rescue the astronauts from so far away. Lily asked her what she meant, and Vance explained that there was a device, a prototype that had never been tested, something that could open a small temporary veil between two points in space if the remote viewer was strong enough to hold it steady.
Lily felt her heart skip a beat when Vance said the word veil, because that was exactly what Dr. Harrow had been trying to do with his flawed equations and his fragile ego. She asked Vance if the device was based on the same principles as the dimensional research at the university, and Vance nodded slowly, watching Lily’s face for her reaction. The government had been funding Dr. Harrows work in secret for years, using his public research as cover for their own classified projects, and they had built a working prototype that he knew nothing about. Lily laughed out loud when she heard this, because it was the funniest and most tragic thing she had ever heard, a fraud being defrauded by the people who were supposed to be his sponsors.
Vance led Lily down a long white hallway to a different part of the facility, a part that required three different key cards and a retinal scan to enter. The air changed as they walked deeper underground, becoming heavier and warmer, and Lily could feel something humming through the floor beneath her boots. They stopped in front of a massive steel door that had warning signs all over it, signs that said things like DANGER and RESTRICTED and DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION. Vance typed a long code into a keypad, placed her eye against a scanner, and pressed her thumb onto a biometric reader, and the door slid open with a hiss that sounded like a snake waking up.
Inside the room was the veil device, and Lily stopped breathing for a moment because it was both beautiful and terrifying at the same time. It looked like a giant metal ring standing on its edge, big enough for a person to walk through, covered in wires and lights and crystals that pulsed with a soft blue glow. The hum she had felt in the floor was coming from this ring, a deep vibration that she could feel in her teeth and her bones and the roots of her hair. Vance told her that the device could open a temporary door between two points, but only if a remote viewer acted as the anchor, holding the door steady with their mind while someone or something passed through.
Lily walked around the ring slowly, running her fingers over the crystals and the wires, and she saw immediately that the device had the same flaws as Dr. Harrows equations. She pointed to a cluster of crystals on the left side and told Vance that the alignment was wrong, that the resonance frequency was off by a factor of seven, and that the whole thing would collapse in on itself if anyone tried to use it as it was. Vance stared at her with an expression that was half disbelief and half hope, and she asked Lily how she could possibly know all of that just by looking. Lily shrugged and said that she was ten times brighter than Dr. Harrow, and that the government should have hired her instead of him in the first place, and then maybe her father would still be alive.
The mention of her father made the temperature in the room drop by several degrees, and Vance looked away for just a second too long. Lily grabbed her by the arm and squeezed hard, and she asked Vance what she knew about the night her father died, because the deal was that Vance would tell her everything. Vance tried to pull away, but Lily was stronger than she looked, and her fingers dug into the directors arm like iron claws. Vance finally nodded and said that she would tell Lily what she knew, but that the truth was worse than any story Lily had imagined in all the years since her father disappeared.
They walked to Vances office, which was small and messy and full of old case files that should have been burned years ago. Vance closed the door and sat down behind her desk, and she motioned for Lily to take the chair across from her, but Lily stayed standing because she did not want to be comfortable for what came next. Vance opened a drawer and pulled out a thick folder with her fathers name on it, and the sight of his name typed on that plain brown folder made Lilys eyes fill with tears that she refused to let fall. Vance said that her father had not died in an accident, and he had not died from a mistake, and he had not died alone, because there were three other remote viewers on the mission with him, and all of them died too.
Lily asked what killed them, and Vance said that word again, the word that Lily was starting to hate more than any other word in any language. Veil, Vance said, they were trying to open a veil to a different dimension, and something came through that should not have come through, something that did not have a face or a body but had a hunger that could not be satisfied. The thing killed the other three remote viewers in seconds, but Lilys father fought it with his mind for almost an hour before it finally took him too. Lily asked what happened to the thing, and Vance said that they had managed to close the veil and trap it on the other side, but they were not sure if the door was locked forever or just waiting to be opened again.
Lily stood in that messy office with her fathers file in her hands, and she felt the weight of ten years of lies pressing down on her shoulders like a mountain. She had always known that the government was hiding something, but she had never imagined that the truth was this strange and this terrible. The shadows on Xylos-4 were the same kind of things that killed her father, she was sure of it now, ancient hungry things that lived in the spaces between dimensions and waited for fools to open doors they should have left closed. She closed the file and looked at Vance, and she said that she was going to save the astronauts, and then she was going to find a way to burn every last one of those shadow things out of existence, starting with the one that murdered her father.
Vance did not argue with her, because she could see in Lilys eyes that arguing would be pointless and probably dangerous. Instead, she handed Lily a key card that would give her access to the veil device room whenever she wanted, along with a small apartment in the facility where she could sleep and eat and be alone. Lily took the key card without saying thank you, because she did not feel thankful for any of this, she felt angry and sad and hungry for revenge in a way that scared even herself. She walked out of Vances office and down the hallway to her new apartment, and she locked the door behind her and leaned against it with her eyes closed and her heart pounding.
The apartment was small but clean, with a bed and a bathroom and a tiny kitchen that had probably never been used by anyone. Lily sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled out her fathers remote viewing journal from her bag, the one she had kept hidden for ten years through moves and breakups and near evictions. She opened it to the last page, where her father had written something in shaky handwriting just hours before he died, words that she had read a thousand times but never fully understood until now. The words said, They are always watching from the other side, waiting for someone to open the door, and Lily, if you are reading this, do not ever let them in.
But Lily knew that she might have to let them in, or at least get close to them, if she was going to save the astronauts from the shadows on Xylos-4. She could not fight the things with guns or bombs or any weapon that existed in the normal world, because they did not have bodies that could be cut or burned or blown apart. The only weapon that worked against them was the human mind, trained and focused and strong enough to push back against their ancient hunger. Her father had fought one of them for an hour before he lost, and Lily was his daughter, which meant she had at least an hour in her too, maybe more if she was lucky and stubborn and reckless enough to survive.
She put the journal back in her bag and lay down on the bed, staring at the ceiling and counting the cracks in the paint like she used to count stars with her father when she was little. There were twelve cracks, and she named each one after a person she had lost, her father, Marcus, her mother who died of a broken heart two years after her husband never came home, and nine others who had drifted away from Lily because she was too intense and too bright and too hard to love. She wondered if the astronauts would be able to love her after she saved them, or if they would just be grateful and then forget her name like everyone else always did. She decided that she did not care either way, because she was not doing this for love or gratitude or any of the soft feelings that broke your heart when they left you.
She was doing this because her father taught her that you never leave anyone behind, not if you have the power to bring them home. She was doing this because Marcus believed in her even when nobody else did, and she owed him something for that belief, even if he was gone now to a place she could not follow. She was doing this because the government thought she was dangerous and reckless and too smart for her own good, and they were right about all of those things, but they were wrong to think those were bad qualities in a fight. And most of all, she was doing this because the shadows on Xylos-4 and the thing that killed her father needed to learn a very simple lesson, which was that you do not mess with a remote viewers daughter and expect to get away with it.
Lily closed her eyes and fell asleep with her boots still on and her fathers journal clutched against her chest like a shield. She dreamed of a dark planet with a purple sky and black oceans, and she dreamed of four small lights burning against the darkness, and she dreamed of shadows that moved without legs and hunted without mercy. In her dream, she walked right up to the biggest shadow and looked it in the face that was not a face, and she smiled the same terrible smile that made Chen step backward and Vance flinch behind her glass. She said to the shadow, I am Lily, and I am my fathers daughter, and I am here to take my people home, so get out of my way or I will burn you down to nothing.
The shadow did not move, and Lily woke up with the taste of old hunger in her mouth and a fire in her chest that would not stop burning. She sat up in bed and looked at the clock on the wall, which said she had been asleep for only two hours, but she felt like she had lived a hundred years in her dream. She stood up and splashed cold water on her face from the bathroom sink, and she looked at herself in the mirror, at her sharp brown eyes and her messy black hair and the thin white scar above her eyebrow from a fight she had lost in high school. She said out loud to her reflection, You are going to save them, and you are going to find out what killed your father, and you are going to make those shadows pay for every tear you ever cried. Then she walked out of the apartment with her key card in her hand, and she went back to the veil device room to start fixing the equations that Dr. Harrow got wrong and the government was too scared to correct.
The facility was quiet at this hour, with most of the scientists asleep in their own small apartments, but Lily preferred the silence because it reminded her of being alone in her dorm room at 3 AM, solving problems that her professors said were unsolvable. She walked through the white hallways with her boots echoing off the walls, and she used her key card to open the three doors and the retinal scan to open the fourth, and she stood in front of the veil device with nobody watching and nobody judging and nobody telling her she could not do it. She pulled a marker out of her pocket and started writing her own equations on the side of the metal ring, correcting the resonance frequency and realigning the crystals and fixing every mistake that Dr. Harrow had been too arrogant to see. The blue glow of the device pulsed brighter as she worked, and the hum in the floor grew deeper and stronger, and Lily smiled because she knew she was right and the whole world was finally going to see it.
She worked through the night and into the morning, and when the other scientists came back to the room at 8 AM, they found Lily sitting cross-legged on the floor with marker stains on her fingers and a triumphant look on her face. The device was fixed, the equations were correct, and the veil could now be opened without collapsing or killing everyone in the room. Chen stared at the writing on the ring and asked Lily how she had done all of this in just one night, and Lily shrugged and said that she had been fixing Dr. Harrows mistakes for two years, so she had plenty of practice. Director Vance came running when she heard the news, and she looked at the device and then at Lily, and for the first time since they met, she smiled like a real human being instead of a government robot. She said, Lily, you might just save them after all, and Lily said, I know, that is what I have been trying to tell you since I got here.
**End of Chapter One**
How did this make you feel?