Dahlia Black Read online

  The media largely ignored the event. Even though it was horrific, it slipped under the radar in the chaos of the Elevation, just another in a long line of similar attacks. The President has talked about some of them before but not all of them. I think her administration likes to downplay that aspect of the Elevation. It doesn’t exactly jive with her conception of us being so wonderful that the Ascendant want to bring us to a new world to celebrate our specialness or whatever.

  There was one person who came by shortly after the massacre. The people I interviewed told me he was with the government. He seemed pretty shady but was nice enough and didn’t go prying where he shouldn’t. He only gave his name as Simon. I found one thing I’d heard he said a bit odd. He told one of the perpetrators that he had “done something similar once and that every now and then the world needed to be cleansed by fire.”

  * * *

  I. The history of Beth Corrado that Jean-Pierre presented me with was partially fabricated. I suspect he’d been duped and, despite his research, was unaware of Corrado’s real backstory. Rather than fleeing the city because she felt persecuted, Corrado, a patent attorney, was running from a failing marriage and a serious prescription drug addiction. Her husband left her, taking the kids, after police found Corrado in an intersection, passed out behind the wheel of her SUV, with her kids in the back seat. Elevation Camp was less about finding a place for the Elevated to feel free than about Corrado finding a spot to pull her life together. Though it’s a more dramatic story, she chose the fabricated history because, just as not all sins are equal, some sinners are more attractive than others.

  II. Though it’s little discussed today, the US sent several thousand National Guardsmen to the Michigan-Canada border. There was a standoff that lasted several days between the National Guardsmen and approximately 1,500 Canadian Elevated. While the Canadian government struggled to address the Elevated population, large numbers of people suffering from the Elevation streamed down to the border crossing at Detroit–Windsor Tunnel. The standoff ended peacefully.

  III. As was the case in Europe, there were many anti-Elevation images floating around the Internet. With the collapse of most of the larger social media sites, these doctored images were spread via text message and email. The one Jean-Pierre describes is certainly unpleasant, but there were many more, even worse images doing the rounds. I saw some linking Elevated people to notorious serial killers, others that suggested the Elevated were pedophiles, and a particularly gruesome series that tried to paint the Elevated as Satanists and Jews out to ritually sacrifice blond-haired, blue-eyed Christian babies on a Luciferian altar.

  40

  JON HURTADO

  SILVER SPRING, MD

  APRIL 6, 2026

  We’re on a patio on the top floor of a building on Georgia Avenue in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland. It is a gloomy day and the cloud ceiling is quite low.

  Though it is hard to make out the details of it from our vantage point, Jon assures me there’s a tall brick building a mile distant. He chose this location for our meeting because he said we’d get the best view of the particular floor of the brick building, but, alas, the weather is simply not cooperative.

  Regardless of the clouds, it is a beautiful day.

  The half-light brings out the color in the trees and gives the foliage a vibrancy that a bright, sunny day would flatten. We stay awhile on the patio, drink coffee, and make small talk about traffic—Jon tells me that the other day he drove from Kennedy Airport to Princeton, New Jersey, in twenty-eight minutes, and this was during rush hourI—before Jon gets to why he brought me to this place.

  He points across the way to the brick building lurking in the mists, making sure to describe a corner window on the sixth floor. Outside of the fact that it is on a corner, he says, this office is indistinguishable from any of the others.

  Well, that is to say the physical properties are indistinguishable. What he found inside was quite the opposite.

  Even when I worked with the CIA, I didn’t feel like a spy.

  What I did was quiet. I worked at a desk and typed on a computer. Nothing I worked on threatened the life or security of another human being. I wasn’t even firearm trained. It wasn’t until the Pulse, the Elevation, that I suddenly had to become the agent that I never thought I’d be—the kind who breaks into offices, hacks security systems, rifles through drawers, and then runs off into the night.

  It sounds sexier than it was.

  An anonymous informant led me to this location. How this person pinpointed me was never clear: the tip came in via an encrypted email and I never knew if they were male or female. I assume it was via the publicity Dahlia had, and my name had been mentioned a few times in connection with the Disclosure Task Force even though, as you know, I wasn’t part of the team. Regardless, I wasn’t exactly an easy person to get ahold of.

  Who sent the email?

  I have a few guesses.

  Sending someone like me an email is a dangerous thing. It’s not just the tools that I have access to but my understanding of how they work. Still, this thing came through some pretty heavy-duty encryption and it was a bear to get any information at all. But I did. I know it was sent from California and I know that the person who sent it was working at an academic institution. The other thing I happen to know—and this wasn’t gleaned from the data behind the email but by its contents—is that this person knew Dahlia. How? The anonymous emailer mentioned seeing Dahlia’s Pulse Code data before she gave it to me. That narrows it down.

  Long story short, I think it was from Frank Kjelgaard.

  Maybe he was working with the Twelve and had a change of mind?

  Was willing to sell them out now? Or even more: maybe he saw the writing on the wall and knew the Elevation couldn’t be stopped. Could have been guilt. Could have been maneuvering. Doesn’t matter now.

  Anyway, the email contained an address.

  The address was the corner office in that building across the way. The message was how to get into that office as well as what to look for when I made it inside. As you can see, this is as nondescript a slice of downtown office building space as you can find. And where’s the best place to hide something you don’t want anyone to find? In plain sight.

  The emailer claimed that this office belonged to the Twelve.

  I tell Jon of my research into the Twelve and we compare notes, finding that we’ve heard much of the same story—though he’s eager to tell me the additional information that he’s uncovered.

  Right, so the Twelve was effectively a CIA special activities division, a covert action group developed to mitigate an “attack” by an outside force unassociated with any known governments or terrorist groups.II That’s as vague a mission statement as you can find, and folks that I knew within the CIA who’d heard about the Twelve always just referred to them as “the deep-state killers.” As far as I knew, the Twelve were working to subvert foreign powers and overthrow governments. Turns out the government they were going after was our own.

  So I broke into that office.

  It was in the middle of the night and the place was pretty secure. I’d scouted it out beforehand and had what I needed to get in. Took me a few minutes longer than expected, but I’m a bit rusty.

  The office was a bit of a mess. Clearly, the folks working there weren’t worried about appearances. My guess is they weren’t getting many visitors. This was the kind of place people went to get stuff done—a working and storage space. I was able to hack the computers, dig into the paper files. Didn’t take me long to realize I’d hit a jackpot. Just like my anonymous informant had suggested, this was one of the Twelve’s bases of operation; they were very real.

  And they were up to some insane shit.

  The files I saw, it was clear they’d been actively suppressing research and investigation into alien contact for decades. A lot of what I saw didn’t exactly make sense. Now, looking back and knowing what we know, I get it: the Pulse traveled back in time and someon
e associated with the Twelve had picked it up earlier. I saw files about the Pulse—the same code—from the 1970s. They only had tiny snippets of it, not like the more complete version that Dahlia had found, but it was incredible what the Twelve had done with just a few lines of Ascendant code.

  I want to say they weaponized it.

  They set up a lab in New Mexico and subjected people—most of them were terminal cases from prisons or mentally handicapped folks they’d swept up from God knows where—to their reconfigured Pulse. It was like the Elevation but not quite. The code was altered ’cause they’d filled it in with their own math—and bogus math at that. Think about it for a second: these maniacs were purposefully giving people the Elevation and then sitting back and watching what happened.

  They knew about the Pulse, the Elevation, decades ago.

  Instead of telling the world about it—instead of trying to advance science and medicine—they were testing it on people. I don’t know why. Maybe it was truly to weaponize the Elevation, or maybe it was to study it and understand it better. That’s where the videos that I saw came into play. In the computer files was a good fifty-plus hours of video documentation of their experiments. They were disturbing to say the least: a girl with two spines; a man whose muscles had locked up so bad, he couldn’t move a fraction of an inch; a child that appeared to have been turned inside out . . . Terrible stuff. War crime kind of stuff.III

  And the Twelve certainly weren’t happy with what they discovered, because for the next thirty years they pulled out all the stops to keep people from talking about it. Scientists, astronomers, biologists—anyone who stumbled across what they’d found—either had to come into the circle or faced death.

  And these guys assassinated a good dozen people.

  The most recent was Dr. Cisco and several of her colleagues.

  So I made copies of everything I could. Spent a good two hours in the office. When I was finished, I torched the place.

  I was careful; I didn’t know how far the Twelve’s reach really went, so I sent the files to people I could trust.

  One of them was Dahlia, of course.

  She owed me a sushi dinner.

  * * *

  I. Pre-Elevation and -Finality, that same trip would have taken at least an hour and a half. However, I also suspect he was doing at least double the speed limit.

  II. Jon’s rattling off some jargon here. What he’s essentially saying is that the Twelve was outside the reach of normal governmental oversight. What they did they did in the shadows but fully financed by the taxpayers of the United States.

  III. Though Jon is fairly clear in describing what the Twelve were doing, many of the records he claimed to find that day are lost. I have been unable to verify a lot of this information, but, regardless, much of it is corroborated in the interviews and research I have conducted. While Jon says that the Twelve “weaponized” the Pulse Code—and it’s an ever-effective bit of imagery—I’m not convinced that this was the goal of the Twelve’s work with the code. I suspect they were much more interested in altering the code to figure out how it functioned, sadly resulting in numerous unwitting subjects being altered in horrible ways. Perhaps the Twelve had considered making the Pulse Code a tool of war—a sort of computer age chemical weapon—and it went wrong? But my gut tells me it was much more likely that they had gotten hold of something they didn’t understand. Rather than bringing it into the light to find answers, get more eyes on it, they buried it. And then they attempted to make sure it never appeared again. The Pulse had been sent once and forgotten, but—despite the Twelve’s best efforts—the second time it appeared it would change the course of human history. As was intended.

  41

  FROM THE PERSONAL JOURNAL OF DAHLIA MITCHELL

  ENTRY #331—12.04.2023

  Jon and I had the dinner he’d promised a month ago.

  But I’ll save that for last.

  The Disclosure Task Force completed its work, we turned in our report—not that the President actually used it—and the Elevation has progressed to the point that a full 30 percent of the population has been affected.

  Even though I can, I try not to watch the news or read too much about what’s happening outside of where we’re being kept; even though our work is done, the President and her staff want to keep an eye on us. I guess we know too much at this point . . . Not as creepy as it sounds.

  Occasionally we get visitors.

  Nico and Valerie came the other day. They drove all the way, since flights are hard to come by and incredibly expensive; you wouldn’t believe how many pilots have become Elevated.I They’re not trusted with planes anymore.

  Seeing Nico was truly wonderful. We didn’t argue or discuss anything upsetting. He hugged me and sat with me, holding hands, and we talked about what was to come.

  The President called it the Finality—a name made up by a marketing person.II The concept might be accurate, but it feels too pat, too carefully constructed to mean something when it likely doesn’t. Nico cried. He didn’t want to lose me.

  Now it was my turn to comfort my big brother . . .

  I told him no one was sure what would happen.

  “It might not be like losing someone,” I said. “That’s the wrong word.”

  “How sure are you that anything is going to even happen?”

  I told Nico what I’d seen. The other place superimposed on this one, our world. I told him that even if I went there, I’d still be here. He didn’t understand how that could work, but I assured him that it would. “Think about it in terms of quantum entanglement,” I said. “There are photons that are entangled, meaning that changing the state of one will change the state of the other. This happens even if they are separated, with one here and the other at the end of the universe. Einstein called it spooky, but that’s only if you look at it as unnatural.”

  He wasn’t sure he got it.

  “Will the Elevated die?” he asked me.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s small comfort.”

  I wanted to say more about what I’d seen.

  And I wanted to tell him how it felt, what I imagined existed beyond those mountains, and the people I imagined were in that other city.

  I also wanted to tell Nico about the math that was flooding my brain. It wasn’t like anything I’d worked with before. Even the Pulse Code paled in comparison.

  If you think of math like music, the Pulse was a simple but beautiful melody—like Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major. The numbers in my head now, they’re Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor, endlessly intricate and exquisitely complex. It isn’t math that can be used here, in this world of hotel rooms, siblings, and lovers. It is math for the minds of the Ascendant—math that lives and breathes in that other place. It sounds overly poetic, I know. But it’s true.

  I don’t have the nerve to tell Nico I’m excited to see it.

  That this world, this bland hotel room world, isn’t for me anymore.

  Instead, I hugged him and asked him to see me again in a couple days. He assured me that he would. Before he left, he asked me if I thought I had reached phase 3. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I assumed I’d passed it already.

  Earlier tonight was my dinner with Jon.

  Yeah, it’s time to tell that story.

  He brought food into the hotel and we sat in the lobby, in a quiet corner as far from the front desk as we could get. The food was Thai. I was hungry and finished my entire dish of shrimp with pan-fried noodles and caramelized soy sauce. Jon sipped a Thai iced tea and a beer and picked at his food.

  He told me he’d been in Silver Spring, Maryland, earlier.

  Then he placed a flash drive on the table and pushed it over to me.

  “Do you remember what you said the night you gave me one of these?”

  I did and I smiled, thinking back on it.

  “Feels like a lifetime ago.”

  More than he could know.

 
Jon reached out and took my hand and squeezed it.

  “This isn’t the first time the Pulse has been picked up,” he said. “They did awful things before. They hid it because they were scared of its power. I want you to share this, make sure it isn’t buried like it has been for the past thirty years. The Twelve need to be put away. I don’t know who to talk to, maybe take it to the President, but they need to be held accountable. There are two of them. Simon Household was running the show and he had an assistant named Adalynne Wollheim. We need to find them.”

  I took the flash drive and pocketed it.

  “Jon,” I said, “it’s time to let this go.”

  He looked at me like I was crazy.

  “I want you to know that everything that happened—the fights, the bad thoughts, the pain, the disappointment, and the anger—I let it all melt away a long time ago. I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you since the day I left. And here we are, I’m about to leave, and I don’t see a way of ever coming back, but I want you to promise me something: You’ll move on. You’ll let me go like you’ll let your rage go.”

  “I can’t promise—”

  “Please. For me.”

  Jon squeezed my hand again, and for a fraction of a second I saw the other room. I was looking through him, into the distance. I was at another angle, but the field was there and the mountains were hazy along the skyline. The sun was low and the shadows were long. This time, however, I could hear it. There was a hum, like the beat of insect wings. It was rhythmic and lulling.

  “Dahlia?”

  Jon’s voice brought me back and the other place was gone.

  “Let’s get you back to your place.”