She reels off a few more demographic questions, several of which aren’t relevant for me, since I have no idea what level of education my parents achieved. Then Bellamy puts the clipboard aside, peels off the first card in the deck, and slides it toward me. There are five colored circles on a gray background—red, blue, yellow, white, and black.
“In this test,” she says, “you will be asked to predict the color of the card before I draw it. Please respond with one of the colors in front of you. Do you have any questions?”
“I’m supposed to guess?”
“Focus on the card and make a prediction. What is the first card in the deck?”
“Blue.”
She draws the top card, looks at it, and puts it facedown in the open drawer next to her. I have no idea whether I’ve guessed right or wrong. Then she taps the deck and I make my next prediction. “Green.”
Bellamy huffs and taps the card in front of me. “Not one of the options. Please focus and try again.”
“Oh, sorry. Yellow?”
She puts that card facedown on top of the first one, and we move on. Occasionally she puts a card in a second stack, but most of the cards follow the first two.
When we complete the deck, Bellamy counts the shorter stack—which I suspect are my correct guesses—and jots something down on her clipboard. Then we do the whole thing again.
After that round is finished, she shuffles and slides the deck to me. “Now, I want you to draw a card and focus on the color. After I make a prediction, place the card faceup on the table.”
I comply. If she gets one correct—about one-third of the time, which seems a bit unusual—she pulls the card toward her. At the end, she writes something on the sheet and then pulls out another deck of cards. Shapes, this time.
“Couldn’t they just automate this?” I ask. “Seems like it would be pretty easy to have a computer program . . .”
“They could automate some of them. But several experts think that the machinery blocks . . .” She stops, apparently realizing that she’s been conversing with me as though I’m a human being. “It works better this way.”
Personally, I think these so-called experts have been reading too many Dresden Files books, but I keep that opinion to myself.
She taps the card on top of the deck.
“Star.”
And so it goes for the next hour and a half. Shapes, then numbers, then words. Then we move on to something that sounds a lot like remote viewing. I’m supposed to let my mind go blank and think of a location, then draw what I see.
I take the sheet of paper and pencil. “Just so you know, I can’t draw. Even my stick figures are unrecognizable.”
“Do your best. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”
But even as I’m telling her that my drawing abilities are crap, I have the sense that it’s not necessarily true. It used to be true. But I have this new memory of Molly and Taylor, sitting in someone’s kitchen, sketching a bowl of fruit. Molly’s good. Maybe even better than Taylor.
Another memory to shove inside the invisible fortress. At this rate, I’m going to need to add a few rooms. So many of Molly’s memories seem to be of things she did at the Quinn house.
As I stare at this blank sheet of paper, the only locations that come to mind are the house in Havre de Grace and the ruined building that was in the last sketch Taylor showed us, the one with the columns. I’m definitely not in that building, but the lack of windows or exits has me wondering whether I might not be below it. And who knows—Deo could be somewhere else entirely.
I’m tempted to draw that building, if only to shake things up a bit. But that might build expectations I’d never be able to match a second time.
So, with two minutes to go on the timer, I do a crude sketch of the outside of Bartholomew House. Home sweet home. It’s definitely not the location I’m seeing in my head, but they won’t know that unless they’ve found a way to read my mind without the Pop Rocks sensation I had before.
And they could be doing precisely that. Just because I had a warning with Dacia Badea doesn’t mean—
Bellamy comes back in. “Finished?”
I nod and push the sketch toward her. She adds it to her clipboard, her face completely blank, as usual. I’m tempted to ask her if that’s part of her job description. The ideal candidate will have a monotone voice and a face incapable of displaying human emotion.
“You have a little over an hour before someone picks you up for the second set of tests. We’ll stop by the cafeteria and you can grab some lunch to take back to your room.”
After Bellamy hands off the clipboard to the woman at the monitors, we turn down a different hallway. It’s quiet, just like last time, until we reach the end, where I start picking up sounds off to the right. They get louder when we turn, but it’s not a boisterous noise. It sounds a bit like a classroom doing group work . . . the low-level hum of many voices that are supposed to be keeping the volume down.