Sovereign

Entry 32: Sanders' Journal - 03/16

Today has been...something else. I'm confused, scared, angry, confused...and despite everything that's happening with me, I can’t stop thinking about Norman.

How did Edwin let this happen? How did I let this happen? I can't help feeling like this is somehow my fault.

We’ve always known his premonitions could have adverse effects but never to this extremity. Of course we’ve all found out that our paranormal abilities came with side effects but we’ve always been careful. The brain isn’t something you push to extremes, you teach it things, slowly. Edwin was supposed to be watching him for me. Wong was supposed to keep him sane. I can’t do anything for him from here, and I cannot leave, not now; not with things devolving this quickly into chaos.

Heath laid accusations against me. And he insinuated things. Things that shoot so far out into "where the hell is this coming from" territory that they start to make sense. Just like Heath to back up even insinuations with facts and respond with brute force while somehow managing to keep details sketchy. Things got very weird during my last interview with him, and . He forbade me from casual contact with anyone in the bunker, relegating me to contact with J.Trotter, the android that mad genius Kojiro created along with the people from Rosenkreutz. Then he accused me of lying about who I was, ‘what’ I was. Of course I was incensed; who does he think he is calling my integrity into question? Then he taunted me to get me to use my telepathy.

And when I did, I couldn’t turn it off.

It was nothing like I had ever felt before. I am not exaggerating. I felt like a spider in the middle of a very wide web, and that web was Heath’s mind. Sitting in the centre, all I needed to do was send a ‘vibration’ down one path of his brain and every connection and association to that path would open up to me, even the buried memories, the severed thoughts, half-forgotten images, Smells, sounds; my God I could feel everything. All I needed was an in, a single thought to latch on to and travel down into the deepest recesses of his mind. He couldn’t shut me out, he tried but there were so many associations in his brain, everything was connected to everything else; pictures tied with faces, faces tied with emotions, emotions tied with other memories. As soon as he shut down a thought, my ‘vibration’ merely veered into an associated thought and sped on.

I saw his wife and his twin daughters. I never knew he had a family.

I didn’t tell him but through his connections I was able to access snatches of his wife’s memories, which he probably stored in his own mind through his telepathy. Either that or I connected to her through his nex pathways. This scared me, because she’s been dead for nearly a century. I saw them during the war, the Second World War which separated her from Heath by Gestapo. A camp, specially created by Nazi scientists. Hundreds of other third and fourth generation Nephilim all gathered around and held prisoner, in dense steel cages engraved with symbols I couldn't make sense of. I saw a Null so adept that food had to be delivered to the camp from farms three kilometres away because plants wouldn’t grow within his sphere of influence. I saw his wife get dragged away from his daughters to get interrogated for the location of Les Evangelius, the faces of the frightened teenage girls screaming for their father, Heath's own experiences in a torture chamber, a mix of other thoughts and images related to confinement and torture, and then blinding white light seared every single connection I had. But before I lost it all, I got a glimpse of Landsteiner, doubled over and bleeding from his ears. Heath thinks I got to see so much because I used an advanced form of autosuggestion, where I convinced the used’s brain that they want to offer me information. It’s a pretty reasonable theory, but it’s false. What I did in that interview was nowhere near passive. I was angry, so I dug deep.

Yet it's mind-boggling just how much information I got from the image of a lavender flower. Telepathy isn’t supposed to work this way. Telepathy gleans thoughts off a person’s conscious mind or forcibly inserts the user into the subconscious of the victim. You shouldn’t be able to work on both fronts at the same time, let alone control them. I took over the mind of one of the most adept Nephilim in the United States and he couldn’t shut me out. And I can see Emma Hodge, angler extraordinaire, invisible to all but Anomalies. I somehow managed to subconsciously adapt and overcome Landsteiner’s control; a feat since he can control Emma, who is for all intents and purposes a god-killer. In spite of how crazy it sounds, the evidence stacks up.

Heath thinks I’m an anomaly. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. I've already given myself a headache from trying to figure out whether or not that's true. But whatever this thing is that I have uncovered, I need to learn to control it. If I can really navigate through thoughts with the efficiency that Raphael insinuated, it could help me get Norman back. I have considered many concepts to explain what happened in that interview with Heath but only one word seems adequate. A word I’d never use in conjunction with myself: Nexes.

And if I'm right, then from everything I have seen and researched thus far, there is only one person who understands what I have experienced, who can teach me what I need to know. And that's Henry Delaney.  

I saw a memory of Delaney before Landsteiner shut me out of Heath’s head. It was an image really. Delaney was shackled, his wild hair sticking everyway in unkempt clumps, his eyes bloodshot and rimmed with blackened puffy skin. He seemed completely disinterested in the scene before him. There was another man, who even in Heath’s memories remained shrouded to me but I knew instinctively it was Dr. Moses. Moses was a respectable distance away from Delaney but even then…

That was why they didn’t want to put him in a room with me. They think he has snapped, gone off his marbles. They think he is dangerous and were afraid to put what they thought was a naïve, possibly incompetent investigator from Internal Affairs within his reach. Heath was probably disconcerted by the prospect of having to explain my lifeless body to Edwin and the rest of the guy’s over at J.Hoover. I guess he doesn’t think I’m small and harmless anymore. So I’m getting my day alone with the elusive Henry.

Though Crystal is the one I wish I could get my hands on.

I’ve been going through the reports again and seeing things that should have been obvious to me. The first rule of profiling: look for abnormal behaviour. No matter what was thrown at them, Crystal was always the calmest person in the room. In the face of Angler twins, Wendigos, Colloses and every other anomaly, she just grinned through it all before obliterating them. Then Promeno, sending her regards through a seemingly suicidal Portifer no less. There are still so many gaps in this narrative, like how she disappeared. For an organisation so meticulous with its record keeping, no one has been able to just come out and tell me how she died. That is, if she actually died.

Hopefully, the final mission reports will fill all that in for me. Or Delaney. After all, he was the only one who saw it happen. With what I know now, I can’t even imagine what that must have done to his psyche. They were connected on the most advanced of telepathic levels, their brains linked right down to neural synapses. It must have felt like losing a part of himself. I’m supposed to interview a nex user who has lost a part of himself. Haha.

I’m worried. I’d be stupid not to.

I can only imagine the damage I could have done to Heath if I was continuously using my Nex-pathy. Yeah, I coined a name for it. Delaney has had seven years of practice and a dead partner. Plus, more than just my neck is riding on me getting Delaney to trust me. Norman is depending on me and I need this case finished so I can get back to him. If Delaney is as unhinged as I deduced from Heath's memory and somehow goes beserk during our conversation, I have no idea what would happen. Would I stand a chance? What if he's so far gone that nothing he says makes sense? Is it possible that I could access his mind and get what I want directly? So many questions.

You know what, screw it!

Let him come, he owes me answers.

- Z.