September, 1983 — Surrey, Engnd

  Ed Martell noticed it immediately. He was the first one to arrive at Schuster Lab that morning. He’d been the st to leave the night before. They had chosen st night to run dark-field measurements on all their equipment. Aric had promised not to throw off their readings by using his powers, and Ed had arrived a bit earlier than usual to check and see if he’d kept his word.

  But it wasn’t the background noise logged by the instruments that caught his eye.

  It was the rge sheet of white paper pinned to the wall, the consteltion drawn at its center holding his gaze.

  At the top, someone had written in neat, florid script:

  Delphinus — our own little consteltion.

  Beneath it, the consteltion stretched wide: four bright stars forming a diamond, with four more trailing behind in a crooked tail. To Ed, it looked more like a kite than a dolphin, but the feeling behind it was unmistakable.

  Each of the eight stars bore a name, written in Carol’s careful hand:

  Aric

  Edith

  Carol (with a small smiley face beside it)

  Delphine

  Alex

  Hank

  Carlos

  Dr. Martell

  Along the margin, another note appeared, penned in Carol’s pyful style:

  Small but stubborn. Hard to find unless you know where to look — but once you see us, you’ll never forget.

  Just underneath her note Carlos’ ornate script appeared with its own contribution:

  Team Delphinus: Now with 100% more unexpined phenomena!

  Ed smiled to himself.

  Hard to argue with either one of those.

  October, 1983 — London, Engnd

  “Are you nervous?” Aric asked her.

  “A little. I’ve never seen you do it before. I’m not sure what to expect.”

  His face broke into that smile that she knew so well. “Don’t get your hopes up. There’s not much to see. Not compared with that afternoon on the roof.”

  She read the reports of mass healings. Group spontaneous remissions, or some such bel. This would be different. An urgent call to help a patient that was going to die if something wasn’t done soon. Conventional treatment had failed. Edith had no idea what Aric was about to do, but she knew it wouldn’t be conventional.

  “Diffuse rge B cell lymphoma,” Aric had said while he read the request in Dr. Martell’s office. “Sounds bad.”

  “It is bad,” Dr. Martell said. “Ruth Lawson says it’s very bad. What do you think? Can you help her?”

  Aric was pretty sure that he could. That wasn’t what was bothering him.

  This was how it had started in West Germany — one incident, the capstone to a night of celebration after returning to Schweinfurt after a two-month deployment.

  Nick Tiscarro, drunk and ughing, stumbling into the street, into the path of a slow-moving Opel.

  Aric hadn’t stopped to think. He’d acted on pure instinct.

  Nick’s screams of pain had cut off mid-breath as a soft glow spilled from Aric’s hands, knitting broken bones and torn muscles.

  It was easy afterward to dismiss what they’d seen — drunken rambling, tricks of light from the headlights, wild stories told second hand in the barracks.

  But the second incident had been harder to ignore.

  The third, harder still.

  That quiet string of impossibilities had eventually led Ed Martell to him.

  “How did they even find me to ask?”

  “From the woman in New Waldon initially, according to Dr. Lawson,” Ed expined. “You wore a university t-shirt. She naturally thought you were from the medical school. She sent them the request. Dr. Lawson had to look you up in the directory.”

  The woman in New Waldon. The mother of three with breast cancer. The one he’d healed.

  She was the stone dropped into still water, and the rings from it were traveling outward.

  Aric wasn’t surprised, he’d just hoped that their progress would be slower.

  Most people didn’t believe such things. Faith healing. Miracles. The ones that did—the ones that were desperate for any cure, any hope at all, clutching any straw they could find—would follow any clue until it led them to him.

  Nick hadn’t been the first, just the first in Europe. The first had been a friend of his who’d been hit by a car much more seriously. Aric’s body and mind had acted on their own that day. It had come as naturally as breathing and had required as little effort. Everyone —his parents, John’s, the driver, the police— had called it a minor accident resulting in no injury, though none of them could expin how John’s bike had transformed into a twisted, mangled corpse, one hundred feet from where the accident occurred.

  Aric wasn’t sure if he really believed that there was a God.

  Sure, he went to church. He prayed.

  But it was a one-way conversation.

  It was when he healed people, or animals, that he felt...something.

  Maybe it was God, whispering: This is why I made you.

  Whatever the truth was, he couldn’t turn away from it.

  Healing called to him the way a convent calls to a woman meant for another kind of life.

  And now, once again, the world was coming closer.

  They entered St Mary Abbots Hospital and were asked to wait. Eventually, a young woman arrived and they began to follow her as she talked about the patient. Another mother of three. Beloved wife. Edith paid polite attention but made no attempt to remember any of what she heard. When the elevator let them out onto a floor that looked more like offices than medical facilities she began to feel that something was not quite right.

  But it’s not like he’s going to perform surgery. So I guess an office is as good as anypce else.

  What she saw when they entered a small conference room convinced her that something was wrong.

  The space had been cleared. In the center was a hospital bed, on which y a woman. She was dressed normally, not in a hospital gown. Beside her sat a man. Behind her were five people —one holding a microphone boom, and two operating a camera.

  Edith took in the situation quickly as her heart spiked and her emotions began to boil. She knew a trap when she saw one. But when she gnced at Aric his face was still calm.

  Edith recognized one of the faces standing behind the bed.

  “Hello, thank you for coming. I’m Heather Newsome from BBC Two. I hope you don’t mind us being present, and witnessing this extraordinary event, Mr...?”

  Edith pounced, like a lion protecting her cub.

  “How did you come to know about this?” Edith asked sharply as Aric stood quietly and smiled. She felt the humming that told her Aric was doing something but was not sure what.

  “Your friend has quite the reputation on the continent, Miss...?”

  The way she said reputation carried a degree of scorn to Edith’s ear, and she fought the instinct to punch the attractive woman squarely in the nose.

  When Edith spoke, the words were clipped. “What sort of reputation?”

  “The sort that leads to periods of incarceration,” a man said angrily from the group behind the bed. “A chartan. A fake. A faith healer that produces some mumbo jumbo and collects a fat fee.”

  The air was still humming, but Edith’s anger drowned it out.

  “How dare you, you odious little shit! Aric has never taken money from anyone. Never!”

  “Aric,” Heather Newsome said with a triumphant smile. “At st, we put a name to the face.”

  Goddammit! Edith thought.

  Aric stepped forward and extended his hand. His smile broadened in a way calcuted to have its usual effect on the television reporter.

  “Pleasure,” he said warmly as she took his hand. Her face grew noticeably red as she smiled back.

  “Please forgive my colleague. He’s from our legal department, and he’s paid to be skeptical.”

  “Not at all. It’s entirely understandable,” Aric said before turning his attention to the woman on the bed. She looked back at Aric as the man next to her took her hand. They appeared to Edith to be husband and wife. Father and Mother to three children.

  Behind the bed, the camera and sound crews were at work. Edith did not doubt that everything and every sound was being recorded.

  The reporter was still speaking. “You received our note. You know how serious it is.”

  Aric seemed totally at ease. “I’m told that it’s very serious.”

  Edith could see the cameraman adjusting his lens. Getting a close up of Aric’s face. “So? Can you help her?”

  Aric gnced at the woman on the bed one st time before giving Heather his full attention.

  His face did not change, his smile never wavered. “No. I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “Ha!” the man scoffed. “I knew it. In front of a camera, he’s disarmed.”

  Heather’s grin transformed from friendly to predatory as she pursued her prey. “Why can’t you?”

  When Aric replied his voice was even — and final. “Because she isn’t sick.”

  Then he turned his attention to the man from the legal department. He was loath to share anyone’s personal information. But he also didn’t like to be set up.

  “But there is something I can do for you.”

  Edith and Aric sat quietly as the tube took them to her family’s house in Fulham.

  “So that’s what you were doing all that time. You were scanning them.”

  “Yes. As soon as I scanned her and realized she was fine I knew it was a setup. I should have just turned us around and walked out. What I did was a serious breach of their privacy. I was angry, which is never a good idea for me. But I’m gd I did. He’d have been dead in a year if I hadn’t.

  Edith took his hand as she y her head on his shoulder. “But he already knew."

  Aric nodded. “That was why he was so mad. He thought I was a fake. That people were dying because of me when conventional treatment might have saved them. He associated with them, and his own condition, which really was untreatable.”

  “But not for you,” Edith pointed out. It wasn’t evil that had brought them there. It was fear — the fear of false hope, of chartans preying on the sick and dying. If she hadn’t known Aric, she might have stood with them.

  He hadn’t drawn power from the universe this time. Instead, he asked everyone in the room to stand in a circle around the man lying on the bed—the other two were just actors—and expined what to expect. Then, gently, he wove them together into a shared fabric and drew small amounts of energy from each. The fatigue hit them quickly once it was done, as the patient drifted into a deep, healing sleep. Their connection to one another lingered even after Aric and Edith had gone. It wouldn’t st long—but long enough to change them. Forever.

  “He’ll be OK now?” Edith asked. The cars began to slow as they entered Broadway Station.

  Aric took her hand as they exited the car. “His pancreas is now firing on all cylinders, so to speak.”

  “I’m gd.”

  Just the touch of his hand had caused her entire body to respond. She felt new life flooding into her, the same way it had into the man at the hospital.

  Word would keep spreading. So would Aric’s reputation.

  That was the real danger. He wouldn’t be able to hide forever.

  The world would find him eventually — and once it did, it would never let him go.

  She smiled and squeezed his hand before she spoke again. “Now, prepare yourself for a real challenge.”

  “What’s that?”

  Edith smiled. “Meeting my mum.”