The Reckoning: Quantum Prophecy Book 3 by Michael Carroll Read Free Book Online

snippets of her voice where she appeared to be using her mind-control. The idea was that they would compile pieces of Yvonne’s orders into a “wake-up” sentence for Mina. “It looks like Yvonne’s hypnotics can only work when they’re issued live. That definitely indicates that it’s more telepathic than vocal.”
    “So what are you going to do now?”
    “We’ve taken X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, ultrasound images…There’s nothing there. Short of performing exploratory brain surgery, there’s nothing else we can do. Not directly. This is where
you
come in, Danny.”
    Danny looked down at Mina. “What can I do?”
    “You can tell us everything about how you regained your powers.”
    “I don’t think I ever really lost them. I think it was the shock of what happened to my arm. I just sort of shut down.” To himself, Danny added,
That, and my vision of the future.
    “But the powers came back. If we can figure out how, then maybe we can trigger the same thing for Mina. You said that your powers returned when Renata was trapped in the computer room, after Dioxin’s men shot her, right? You’re sure there was nothing else before that?”
    Danny shook his head. “No.”
    “Façade said that during Dioxin’s attack you insisted on coming back here instead of going to the safe house. Why?”
    “I just didn’t want to be left behind. I thought I might be able to help.”
    “And why
did
you think that?”
    “Just a feeling,” Danny said, shrugging.
    Max absently fingered the scar on his neck. “That’s how it started for your father. He used to get ‘feelings’ about things, or he’d know something he couldn’t possibly have known. And then the visions started to come.”
    “Don’t ever talk about my father, Dalton. He’s dead because of you.”
    “I know, but…” He stopped. “Look, we’ve already had two cases of superhumans effectively losing their powers and then regaining them, and that’s you two.” To Renata, he said, “Your recovery can be tied directly to the power-surge from Victor Cross’s machine—”
    “You mean
your
machine.”
    “Right. But that’s not something we can replicate here. Even if we were to build another one, the power-surge was an unrepeatable accident.”
    He’s never even apologized for kidnapping me and Colin,
Danny thought. He glanced at the stump of his right arm.
    From the far side of the room, Warren called, “Renata? You’re next.”
    They looked up to see Butler pulling on his T-shirt as he left the room.
    As Renata walked over to Warren, Max said to Danny, “You’re still blaming me for what happened, aren’t you?”
    “Who else should I blame? You funded and ran the whole operation. Because of
you
I’m going to spend the rest of my life with only one arm.”
    “It doesn’t have to be that way,” Max said. He led Danny to his computer station, and called up a program. On screen, a three-dimensional model of a mechanical arm rotated slowly. “I’ve been making some modifications to Razor’s design.”
    Danny shook his head. “I don’t want to know.”
    Max didn’t seem to hear him. He tapped at the screen with the end of a pencil. “I was going to remove the third and fourth fingers to reduce the complexity, but there’ve been a few breakthroughs recently in reading and interpreting nerve impulses. We’ve built a whole array of sensors into the chest harness, and the software is clever enough to be able to differentiate between the nerve signals.”
    Despite his misgivings about the mechanical arm, Danny couldn’t help being impressed with the amount of time and money the government was spending on the project.
    “So all you’ll have to do is put it on, and within a few seconds you’ll be able to use it like it was a real arm. There won’t be any feedback, but when we really get a handle on the microminiaturization we should be able to build in thermal and touch sensors.” Max stuck his pencil between his teeth and typed a