“Afternoon, Mr. Hill.”
It took Eli a moment to remember that he was Mr. Hill, and then he smiled, and nodded at the woman behind the front desk. Serena was better than a fake ID. He hadn’t had to present any ID, in fact, when they checked in. Or a credit card. She did come in handy. He didn’t like being so dependent on someone else, but he managed to twist it in his mind, to assure himself that while Serena made things easier, smoother, she was sparing him effort that he was more than capable of exerting, if necessary. In this way, she wasn’t essential, only terribly convenient.
Halfway to the elevator, Eli passed a man. He made a quick mental profile of the stranger, half out of habit and half out of a gut feeling of wrongness, a kind of sixth sense acquired over a decade of studying people as if they were all spot-the-difference pictures. The hotel was expensive, sleek, the majority of its clientele in suits. This man was wearing something that might pass for a suit, but he was massive, tattoos peeking out from his pushed-up sleeves and collar. He was reading something as he walked, and never looked up, and the woman behind the desk didn’t seem concerned, so Eli shelved the man’s face somewhere in mental reach, and went upstairs.
He took the elevator to the ninth floor and let himself in. The suite was pleasant yet sparse, with an open kitchen, floor-to-ceiling windows, and a balcony-aided view over Merit. But no Serena. Eli tossed his satchel onto the couch and sat down at the desk in the corner where a laptop sat on top of a daily paper. He woke the device and, as the Merit Police database loaded, pulled the folded drawing from his pocket and set it on the desk, smoothing its corners. The database gave a small chirp, and he entered through the digital back door Officer Dane and Detective Stell had set up for him.
He then scrolled through the folders until he found the file he was looking for. Beth Kirk stared at him, blue hair framing her face. He stared back at her for a moment, and then dragged the profile into the trash.
VI
TEN YEARS AGO
LOCKLAND UNIVERSITY
ELI was sitting in the school-sanctioned single apartment, eating Chinese takeout from LIDS, when the report came on the news. Dale Sykes, a custodian at Lockland University, had been involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident while walking home from work the night before. Eli speared another piece of broccoli. He hadn’t meant to do it. That is to say, he hadn’t set out in his car with the intent to kill the janitor. But he had unearthed Sykes’s rotation schedule, and he had gotten in his car at the same time that Sykes clocked out of his once-a-week night shift, and he had seen him crossing the road, and he had sped up. But it was a series of circumstances lined up in such a way that any one of them could so easily have shifted in a matter of seconds and spared the man’s life. It was the only way Eli could think of to give the janitor a chance, or rather, to give God a chance to intervene. Sykes wasn’t an EO, no, but he was a loose end, and as Eli’s car drove over him with a thud-thud, and that moment of quiet filled Eli’s chest, he knew he’d done the right thing.
Now he sat slumped in a chair at the kitchen table while the story played out on-screen, and looked over his Chinese food at two stacks of paper. The first was made up of his own thesis notes, specifically early case studies—Web site stills, testimonies, and the like. The second stack held the contents of Lyne’s blue folder. Eli’s theory on the causation of EOness was there, but Lyne had added his own notes on the circumstances and factors used to identify a potential EO. To near death experiences the professor had added a term Eli had heard him use before, Post-Traumatic Death Disorder, or the psychological instabilities resulting from the NDE, and another one that must be new, Rebirth Principle, or the patients’ desire either to escape the life they had before, or to redefine themselves based on their ability.
Eli had crinkled his nose at the second one. He didn’t like recognizing himself in these notes. He had a good reason for reading them, though. Because what he’d felt when he drove over Dale Sykes was the same thing he felt when he tried to end Victor’s life. Purpose. And he was beginning to figure out what that purpose was.
EOs were an affront to nature, to God; that he knew. They were unnatural and they were strong, but Eli would always be stronger. His power was a shield against theirs, impenetrable. He could do what ordinary people couldn’t. He could stop them.