Secret Legacy by Anna DeStefano

heartbreaking desperationin the chopper, when she begged him for the second chance he’d promised if she endured the recon mission. He shoved down the compulsion to spare her from how much worse things had to become if they were going to identify what or who was driving her breakdown.
    “Maybe hearing Trinity in the dream is a premonition.” Richard rolled the possibility over and over in his mind, needing more than mere logic to lead him to the right conclusion. “When she was on the run from the center, Sarah saw the rendezvous point for her showdown with Ruebens long before the confrontation occurred. Madeline decoded the dream’s symbolism and we terminated Ruebens and his team.”
    “Barely.” Jeff’s skepticism was a reminder of how close Richard had come to watching his men take out Sarah and Madeline along with the center’s director.
    “We can’t discount the possibility that Sarah’s mind is projecting the child’s image to warn us,” Richard said.
    “About what? That she’s dream-sharing with someone besides her sister? Someone pulling the same strings as Ruebens?”
    “If I don’t explore the nightmare that started this”—Richard was listening to his instincts now more than to Jeff—“we’ll never know what the center is gunning for.”
    “They want the twins under their control.”
    “Actually, the center wants the Temple Legacy, and I’m no longer convinced Sarah and Madeline are the only players in their sights.”
    Richard ran another search through the database that tracked every detail he’d gleaned from the twins’ accounts of their dreams. His second-in-command used hiscrutches to round the desk and watch him sift through observations that could be sorted by date, time, symbol, and theme.
    “You keep circling back to the child,” Jeff said.
    “We can’t afford to rule out the possibility that Ruebens set Sarah’s latest breakdown into motion before his death to secure the center’s advantage in controlling a piece of the legacy we haven’t found yet. Which means shutting down Sarah’s mind would eliminate our only link to reaching Trinity, if she truly exists, for the Brotherhood.”
    Richard’s fingers flew over his keyboard. A grid formed on the oversized touch screen, contrasting date-specific entries against the most common symbols in each dream and their frequency of appearance. He manipulated the image with his fingers, overlaying the report onto his sparse entries from tonight’s dreams. He tweaked the display, focusing on instances of voices speaking from Sarah’s ocean.
    The frequency of occurrence had increased at a marked pace, while other repeated incidents and symbols had come and gone from Sarah’s dreams with little or no pattern. Almost as if the voices and the cries calling to Sarah had been driving toward tonight’s episode. He closed his eyes and felt for the answers, trusting the data. He had to be sure, at the precise moment that he’d never been less confident that his instincts could remain impartial.
    As Sarah had become stronger and more stable, her results in the dream lab had grown more splintered. Her dream work became less predictable and produced fewer successful results as her primary focus becamegetting out of the lab and away from his probing questions. Richard had wanted to see her need for independence as a good sign. He’d agreed to her private sleeping quarters in return for her improved cooperation in their lab work. All of which had been documented in his daily reports to the elders, which were distributed to every Watcher in his chain of command. His weakening hold on Sarah’s mind would have been an easy extrapolation for anyone to make.
    The suspicion growing inside Richard knotted like a fist in his diaphragm.
    “Someone with access to the details of my work with Sarah is acting as a pipeline to the center,” he said. “They’re using my reports to track the appearance of the exact symbols they’d need to manipulate