Ascendant Saga Collection: Sci-Fi Fantasy Techno Thriller by Brandon Ellis (easy to read books for adults list txt) 📕

looked at her hands for the fiftieth time, convinced her mind played tricks on her. No longer scarred from burn trauma, they were smooth, young looking, matching her mid-thirties age. The drugs they had her on had interesting effects, especially with vision. For an instant, she’d black out. When she came to, her fingernails were back. This happened over and over. Everything would go dark. She’d awake, the scars on her face gone.

The drugs messed with her mind.

She closed her eyes, wanting to fall back asleep. “Why am I here?” she muttered. “Why are you doing this to me?”

They never did tell her why they needed her, just that they needed her. Was she to fly a ship they couldn’t understand? She had the aptitude for figuring out unknown crafts. Or, was it what she had been telling herself shortly after she arrived here—she was being punished, experimented on. Ultimately, she’d die.

Yes, that was the truth. She had failed. At what? She didn’t know.

The man she had come to know as Donny watched her from another room, split by a single window. He clicked on the intercom and leaned into a microphone. “Can you look at the box across from you again? Tell me what you see inside.”

Like last time, she looked at the box that sat across from her and against the wall. “I just see a metal box.”

“Look more closely.”

She did and her concentration became more focused. For a brief second, a static sound encapsulated her ears and a shiver ran up her body accompanied with goose bumps. She caught movement inside the box and saw a rabbit illuminate, then fade.

“This time it’s a rabbit. Last time, a tennis ball,” she said, her eyes fluttering open and shut. “Can I go back to bed now?”

A strong whiff of ammonia entered the room. Rivkah sat more upright. She fanned her nose to get the smell to go away. “Please stop doing that.”

Donny clicked through the intercom. “It’s for your own good, Miss Ravenwood. It’s to wake you. We don’t want you nodding off. Now, lift the box.”

Rivkah slid off the table and stood, walking to the box.

“Stop,” interrupted Donny. “Sit back down on the table and lift the box.”

“How do I...” she waved a dismissive hand. Weary, almost out of it, her speech slurred. The drugs were beyond an irritation. “You keep giving me hallucinogens.”

Donny cleared his throat. “Listen to me, Rivkah. You’re experiencing a detox from the therapy we used to get your body fully optimized. We haven’t given you any drugs.”

Liars.

She flared her nostrils and eyed the metal box, intensely focusing, then pictured it lifting off the ground. Again, the static in her ears. The fuzzies up and down her body. The goose bumps. And her abdomen contracted. She blew outward at the box and it complied and hovered for several seconds, then made a tin-like sound as it landed back on the ground. She pointed to it. “You see? You have me thinking I’m lifting it with my mind. What drugs do you have me on? Can I just go home? I won’t be of any nuisance to you anymore...whatever it is I did.”

A doctor walked into the room, then held smelling salts under her nose. She jerked back, wiping her nose, then pushed the doctor away. “Stop that.”

He handed her a glass of water. “Drink this down.”

The water was cool and refreshing. She drank the rest of it and handed the glass back to the doctor. Everything was clearer, her body more alive.

“Do it again, Rivkah.”

The voice was different. She turned. Someone else sat on the other side of the window, one with chiseled muscles and graying hair at the temples. “Hello, Colonel.”

“Looks like you’re feeling better, Rivkah. Can you focus one more time?”

She wanted to flip him off. “I guess.”

Slade pointed to the box. “Focus on the box and lift it.”

Rivkah’s gaze fell to her feet. “Slade, why am I here?”

“To help us, Rivkah. We need a pilot, one as good as yourself. But now we’re finding that you’re a main piece in a strange puzzle. So we need to study you. Not my first priority, but nonetheless, it has to be done.”

“What puzzle?”

“Hold on.”

Slade leaned over and talked with Donny. Donny nodded and spoke back. Slade shook his head, and flung more words Donny’s way. Donny agreed. At what? Rivkah had no clue. Evil pricks.

“Let me start with this. We looked at your DNA. You share something that we’ve only seen in one other person. We don’t know how it got there or why, yet we know the abilities it grants you.”

Rivkah blew hair out of her face. “Spill it.”

“Something in your DNA triggers your pineal gland. In fact, it opens your pineal gland, allowing you to do...incredible things.”

“You’re full of shit.”

Donny took over the microphone. “Slade tells us that while you served in the SSP, you didn’t have any of these special abilities. Correct?”

Rivkah nodded. “Get to the point.”

“Your pineal gland is more open, more evolved, than it was when you were in the SSP—”

“What does this have to do with trying to lift a box with my mind?”

“Let me continue, Miss.”

“Captain,” she said. “My name is Captain Ravenwood.”

“Indeed. Captain. We’re learning as we go, but we’ve determined that a pineal gland as open as yours can affect the laws of gravity in different ways.” He motioned toward the metal box. “Lift it.”

Rivkah rolled her eyes. “Alright.” She focused on the metal box and something in her heart stirred, her mind sharper. She pictured the metal box lift a few feet in the air and as she pictured it, the box rose two feet off the ground.

She gasped, hand over her heart, her fingers splayed. This can’t be happening. “How did...” She stood, pulling the electrodes off her skin, dropping them on the floor, her eyes vacant, her mind lost. “No more of these drugs.” She pinched the needles in her arm and slid them out of her skin, casting them aside.