GHOST HOPE
The PSS Chronicles: Book Four
RIPLEY PATTON
First published in the United States in 2016 by Ripley Patton.
Copyright © 2016 by Ripley Patton
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including the condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Cover design by Scarlett Rugers of The Scarlett Rugers Book Design Agency
Cover © 2016 by Ripley Patton
Edited by Lauren McKellar and Rachel Barnard
Typesetting and Formatting by Simon Petrie
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016908479
ISBN 978-0-9884910-7-6
Publisher’s website: www.ripleypatton.com
DEDICATION
This book is for me because I did it. I invested seven years of my life writing this story, some of them incredibly difficult years, and the story did not fail me the way good story never does.
OTHER BOOKS BY RIPLEY PATTON
The PSS Chronicles:
Ghost Hand (Book One)
Ghost Hold (Book Two)
Ghost Heart (Book Three)
Novellas:
Over The Rim (Young Adult Fantasy)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Acknowledgements
About the Author
1
OLIVIA
Someone was standing next to my bed, looming over me.
I threw off my blankets, rolled to my feet, and wrapped my ghost hand around his throat before he knew what hit him.
Even in the dark, I could still see the bulge of Mike Palmer’s eyes by the gentle glow of my PSS.
“What the fuck?” I growled, feeling strangely disappointed that my life hadn’t truly been in danger. For the last week, Mike, Samantha, Grant, Passion, my mother, and I had been holed up in an old dilapidated house on Burnside Street in Portland, Oregon, and it hadn’t stopped raining since we’d arrived. Mike claimed that was normal for Portland in early November. He said we’d get used to it, just like we’d get used to living with the two college dropouts Mike claimed were members of the infamous hacker group B-Ominous. Supposedly, their computers were hard at work scanning the internet for any signs of a CAMFer or Hold resurgence, and we just had to wait. But the rain and the waiting were killing me. I had too much time to think, too many quiet moments to dwell on my captivity at the hands of the CAMFers or replay the look on Marcus’s face when he hadn’t remembered me. I felt like I was going crazy and I needed something to happen. There had been a time when I could have counted on Mike Palmer to spice up my life with a little arson or double-agent intrigue, but that time had come and gone.
“What do you want, Mike?” I sighed, letting go of his neck.
“I wanted to check on your PSS,” he said, eyeing my hand. “See if there was any flickering while you slept.”
“Nope,” I said, sitting down on the edge of my bed. “No more turning on and off. I told you, it’s completely back to normal.” I was actually quite relieved. It had felt almost like a betrayal of myself, being able to switch off my PSS.
“Good,” he nodded. “I think that means it’s stabilized.”
“You think?” I raised an eyebrow at him. I was getting tired of guessing how PSS worked and what it could do. What I wouldn’t give for some cold, hard facts.
“Yes I do, and I also wanted to give you this.” He held something out wrapped in a paper towel and tied with a bread bag twist tie. “Happy birthday,” he added.
“Aw gee Mike, you shouldn’t have. As in ‘you really shouldn’t have,’ because it’s the middle of the night. In my room. And it’s creepy. Plus, my birthday isn’t until next week.” How did he even know when my birthday was? Then again, he had been spying on me for the CAMFers most of my life. Mike probably knew way more about me than I wanted to contemplate.
“Just open it,” he said, presenting the gift to me again.
“Fine.” I took the thing from him. It was surprisingly heavy for its size. I tugged at the twist tie and the paper towel fell open. I stared down at the rock in my hand. The rock inscribed with my father’s name and the dates of his lifespan. The rock I’d pulled out of my own psyche to save myself and everyone I cared about.
“Where did you get this?” It wasn’t possible. I had given it up. Used it to cause a cataclysmic displacement.
“In the cave in the desert,” he explained. “When I went back in looking for signs of Kaylee, it was right where you’d been lying, pressed into the dirt. I found these too.” He stuck a hand in his pocket and pulled out the dog tags Marcus had made from Passion’s blades, holding them out to me.
“They came with us,” I said, taking the tags, holding them alongside the stone and brushing my fingers over both. “It must be because we’re connected to them. And that’s why your matches came with you. But shouldn’t this rock be inside Grant’s cube? I used them together.”
“I did a thorough search,” Mike said, shrugging. “If the cube had been there, I would have found it. But don’t worry. It just means your power is unpredictable, like Kaylee’s. That’s why the two of you scare the CAMFers and The Hold so much. They can’t control what they don’t understand.”
“Yeah, well, neither can I,” I said, setting the tags and the stone on my bedside table. “Hey, wait a minute.” I turned back to Mike. “You’ve had these since the cave and you didn’t tell me?”
“The timing wasn’t right,” he said. “But now I have to go and I’m not taking them with me.”
“You have to go? What the hell does that mean?”
“Come on, Olivia, we both knew this was coming. I shouldn’t have stayed as long as I have. Kaylee is out there, and my cover was never blown thanks to you and what you did at the dome. If the CAMFers or The Hold have her, I need to find her and get her away from them. And if they don’t, I have to get to her first.”
“Okay,” I glanced down, looking for my boots. “I’m coming with you.” This was the answer to all my problems. I could go with Mike to find my sister and fight Holders and CAMFers again. I could get out of my own head, not to mention escaping the constant r
ain and my overly-protective mother.
“Nope. Not gonna happen,” Mike said firmly. “You’re gonna stay here and hold down the fort. If I find Kaylee, I’ll let you know and I’ll do my best to bring her back. But I can’t make any promises. You know that.”
Of course he didn’t want me tagging along. The reason he had to go find Kaylee was because I’d messed up his first rescue attempt by randomly displacing everything and everyone at the compound. Our group, those of us who’d woken up in a cave in the middle of the Oregon high desert, had managed to walk back to the highway and hitchhike to Portland. But we still had no idea what had happened to everyone else. Hell, we had no idea what had happened to the entire compound structure. The B-Ominous guys had shown me satellite images of where it had once been in a valley on the Warm Springs Reservation. All that remained was a crater the size of a stadium. Yeah, I’d done that.
“So, you’re leaving now?” I turned to look at the glowing red numbers on my alarm clock. “At 3:32 am on a Saturday morning? You’re trying to avoid my mother, aren’t you?”
“Exactly.” He nodded.
There was only one thing my mother was more passionate about than repairing our relationship, and that was finding my sister. If she knew Mike Palmer was leaving on that very mission, she’d want to go. “She’s going to be pissed,” I warned him.
“She’ll get over it. She has you to worry about, and she’ll be extra distracted with your special day coming up.”
“Oh, God, please tell me she’s not throwing a party,” I groaned. “I asked her specifically not to.”
“You won’t get that information out of me,” Mike said, grinning wickedly. “I’m a highly-trained double agent, remember?”
Shit. She was throwing me a party. “Please,” I begged. “Take me with you.”
“Not this time, kiddo,” he said, his face going all serious. “You have work to do here. You wiped the CAMFers and the Hold off the map, but something has to fill that void and people are going to look to you for what to fill it with.”
“No one’s going to look to me,” I scoffed. “Maybe to Samantha, or Marcus, wherever he is, but not to me.”
“Well, we’ll see,” Mike said, clapping me awkwardly on the shoulder. “I’ll keep in touch through B-Ominous as much as I can. And all of you can stay here at the house as long as you need to. I’ve got it covered financially.”
That was generous of him. Then again, he sort of owed me a house since he’d burned mine to the ground. My mom had also given up her practice and my dad’s entire art collection trying to find me after I’d run away, which left us with very few resources and nowhere else to go. Passion was pretty much in the same boat. And Samantha refused to make contact with her parents, even if we could locate them, which, so far, we hadn’t been able to. The Hold and CAMFers seemed to have gone underground since the displacement, though I wasn’t fool enough to believe either was gone for good.
Of all of us, Grant was the only one who still had a home and a family to go to. He’d called his parents to let them know he was okay, and I’d even gotten to talk to Emma. Still, I hadn’t heard Grant mention going home or back to college in Indy. I had a sick feeling he was lingering to see if I had feelings for him when I finally got out of my funk. If I ever got out of my funk.
I looked up to see Mike already at the door, his hand on the knob.
“Hey,” I said and he stopped, glancing over his shoulder. “Be safe.”
He nodded and slipped out into the hallway, closing the door silently behind him.
I sank down onto my bed in the dark, feeling the panic rise up in my chest. That was all I ever felt anymore, a terrible, indefinable fear. My mom was convinced I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder because of what the CAMFers had done to me. She’d never understand none of that had been worse than losing Marcus. The thought of him is what had kept me alive. He was the first person I’d really loved since losing my father. And now, not only had he forgotten me and what we’d had, but I didn’t even know where he was.
Sometimes, I found myself wishing the displacement had been something else—like an explosion or a raging fire. At least if I’d died, I wouldn’t have to feel this constant agony over what had happened. And, despite being a licensed psychologist, my mom couldn’t help me. She couldn’t diagnose or prescribe meds for her own daughter. It would be unethical.
But I guess it was perfectly all right to traumatize me by throwing an eighteenth birthday party I didn’t want. Crap. I was never going to get back to sleep now, and Mike’s sudden departure had made me curious about his hackers. Had they made some discovery he hadn’t told me about? Had they found a clue to my sister’s whereabouts?
I got up and slipped out into the upstairs hallway, skirting past my mom’s bedroom, then the room Mike and Grant had been sharing, and finally Passion and Samantha’s room. The bedrooms had just sort of fallen out that way, which was good. I didn’t want any of them to know how often I woke up from my nightmares, sweating and biting back screams of terror.
As I descended the stairs to the main floor of the house, the skunky aroma of pot wafted around me. We hadn’t seen much of the hackers. They slept in the basement apartment during the day and worked at night, and for that I was grateful. My mom was having enough trouble with the whole sharing-a-house-with-strangers-thing as it was. Personally, it didn’t bother me. My standard of living had changed considerably since spending two weeks in a cement cell being tortured.
When my bare feet hit the cold tile of the kitchen, I scurried across it and slipped through the dining area to the hackers’ lair, a room that had once been the front parlor of the house. It didn’t have a door, just an open archway, and I thought I’d just stand there a moment, spying on the hackers and their nefarious activities unseen.
The glow of six computer monitors and the glint of a joint were the only things lighting the room as the two young men tapped away on their keyboards, headphones on and oblivious to the world around them. The closest monitor was scanning satellite pictures, flipping through them so fast it was just a blur of color, though every once in a while it would pause and process an image for a second longer.
The monitor next to that was doing some kind of map scan in infrared.
Another screen revealed a rousing game of League of Legends, and I experienced a flash of extreme gratefulness that I hadn’t caught anyone watching porn.
Suddenly, the guy closest to me turned, caught sight of me, and practically jumped out of his skin.
“Whoa. Fuck!” he said, dropping his joint as the other guy swiveled toward me too, both of them pulling off their headphones as they turned.
“Hey, Olivia,” the second guy said, smiling warmly. “What can we do for you?” If I remembered right, this was the one named Chase and the other one went by the nickname T-dog.
“Sorry I startled you,” I told them both. “I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d see what you were up to.”
“No problem,” Chase said. “Why don’t you pull up a chair?”
“Really?” I grabbed one and rolled up between them.
“You wanna smoke?” T-dog asked, looking on the floor for his joint. He had dreadlocks and a black Apple logo, morphed into a skull and crossbones, tattooed directly over his Adam’s apple.
“No thanks,” I said. “My mom would kill me.”
“How about some Cheetos then?” he asked, pulling an open bag from behind his computer monitor.
“Sure,” I said, reaching my ghost hand into it and snagging a handful.
“You ever smoked a Cheeto?” T-dog asked me.
“Nope. Can’t say I have.”
“Don’t,” he said, “It ain’t good.” His eyes followed my ghost hand, transfixed, as I raised the Cheetos to my mouth. PSS had that effect on people. Especially high people.
“Your hand is awesome,” he said. “I’ve never seen PSS up close. Can I touch it?”
“T-Dog, man,” Chase scolded, “Don’t
be a—”
One of the computers started beeping frantically, the one that had been scanning satellite pics. It had stopped on an image and was flashing GPS coordinates in the corner of the screen.
“We got it,” T-Dog said excitedly, turning to the monitor. “We found the dome.”
“45.8431 degrees north, 119.4381 degrees west,” Chase read. “We’re in luck. That’s Oregon—about 170 miles northeast of the point of origin, and the compound appears fully intact, dome, sub-stories, and everything.”
I stared at the blurry grey-green screen, wondering how they could tell any of that.
“Holy shit,” T-dog exhaled, glancing at me. “You moved an entire complex almost 200 miles and nothing fell apart? What about soil displacement? If that thing landed fully intact in a new location, what happened to the dirt that used to be there?”
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling like an idiot. I was as amazed and mystified as he was by what I’d done.
“Maybe she displaced the soil to somewhere else,” Chase said. “Tee, zoom in and enhance the resolution.”
My eyes were glued to the screen as the image magnified and came into focus.
I’d never actually seen the CAMFer compound from the outside. I’d been drugged when they’d taken me in, and I’d spent most of my time there on the lower levels. I had been in the dome portion once, and I knew the basic layout of the compound enough to tell that the thing on the screen was definitely it. The terrain around it, on the other hand, was like nothing I’d ever seen. There was a grid of lighter gray lines on a field of lumpy brown rectangular berms all spaced evenly apart and encompassing the entire aerial satellite image. Whatever it was, it was huge.
“What is that?” I asked, my heart dropping into my stomach. “A cemetery?”
“Hmm, no.” Chase frowned, typing something into his search engine and scrolling down a list of articles. “That”—he said, scanning some text—“is the Umatilla Chemical Depot, once the largest cache of chemical weapons in the world. Thankfully, it was decommissioned a few years ago and all the chemicals were destroyed.”