Between the necessary interruptions for Wyn's business - emails, mostly - and the lengthy silences that passed between them as Wyn wafted around the apartment digging for documents to support his case, the afternoon passed.

Had nobody else ever called him back? Had he reached out to, say, Nadav and only ever heard of him again as an obituary in a Google Alert?

Wyn moved with real purpose between the kitchen, his room, and the sofa that Ari suspected served as his office. Again, a voice that was layered on top of Ari's own inner voice reminded him that Wyn could be a great actor. That voice couldn't provide a compelling motive for the act, though. Or an explanation for the way his hands had frozen over.

More importantly, he found he wasn't interested in hearing the voice's excuses. Hadn't he stayed up past lights-out at camp reading about MK Ultra by the halogen light falling through the window behind his top level bunk because it had gotten hard to sleep after the first summer? Hadn't he read with his ears cocked and his eyes making frequent trips to the window to scan for lurking shapes after the first time counselors in ski masks had burst into the cabin and herded all the kids out into the night?

It was, they’d been assured in the morning, ‘preparatory.’ It was a lesson.

Ari never understood. The lesson he carried away was different:

Adults do inscrutable and unjustifiable things to kids all the time.

And if he didn't believe some part of those stories, would he have stalked a vanishing vision of Maya down Church Street?

Ari swallowed. “You can just start, you know."

Wyn was belly-down on the couch, reaching into the space between it and the floor for God only knew what. Ari was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. From this angle, he could see that Wyn had bright white streaks on the soles of his feet, like scars. It was impolite to stare, though, and convenient enough to look away.

Waves of hair hung in Wyn's face when he popped his head back up. Behind them, his amber eyes scrutinized Ari. 

"I believe you," Ari said. He stepped backward into the kitchen. "Or, I guess, I believe you're not screwing with me."

Wyn slunk off the couch with the same energy a cat exudes when it's recovering from a fall off a narrow shelf. "Fine, have a seat and I'll try and paraphrase. There’s a fair amount of jargon that won’t make sense to you at this point, so I’ll avoid that where I can.”

Ari returned to the kitchen island, stooped over it so Wyn could sit across from him. It was Wyn’s place, he deserved the real chair. 

He could feel his pulse in his neck, suddenly. "What are your sources, anyway?"

"Transcriptions and some printouts from a contact I haven't heard from in some time. I've stopped trying to get in touch with them."

"Oh."

"As I understand it, information within the organization was very fragmented between different teams and individuals. I only had one reliable source with access to one set of data." Wyn settled in his seat and flipped over the stack of papers Caleb had delivered. "Still, I don't think I need to tell you they weren’t out to raise test scores.”

The air conditioning was biting Ari behind the knees again. “Okay, but what was it about?”

"As far as I can tell? Identifying and classifying people like us."

Ari figured that if Wyn knew why, he'd say. So there was no point in asking. His brain snagged, instead, on Wyn's use of the word 'us.'

Wyn had started writing while Ari's brain sputtered. Rather, he was drawing something. "I've been wondering," Wyn said. "Did your parents name you Ariel because they were particularly religious?"

What did it mean to be particularly religious? To send your son to Hebrew school? Mom hadn’t fought him when he said he wanted to quit. To take your son to mass? Dad had never tried. Ari had reason to suspect his mother’s religiosity hadn’t survived her first marriage in any meaningful way.

Still. 

"I guess, yeah. My Mom is. Was.”

Having been born in October, he'd just beaten out what his mother called 'The Fish Movie.' The Fish Movie had, as far as he remembered, never been rented in his house.

"What about you?" Wyn pressed. Still drawing. Focused on drawing. Drawing, it looked like, basic human shapes.

“No.” It was too much to explain, even to himself. He knew Bible verses because they were an ambient presence on inherited knick knacks around the house. He wore a hamsa because his mother’s father made it for him. That was all. “You?”

Wyn lifted his eyes from the paper to meet Ari's with a level, unimpressed glance. Ari felt seen and judged in his feeling needled at the question. "My stepfather tried to make it as a pastor. It didn't work out. I have no categorical attachments. Do you believe in the soul, or not?"

"Of course." The same defensive part of him that bristled at being grilled on his affiliation wanted to add that he doubted everyone at college who'd told him they didn't.

“Good. I wasn't sure how I'd convince you of that, if it came to it.” Wyn rotated the paper and pushed it to the middle of the island. His renderings of the three little figures were simple, but not inept. Iconographic. They lacked faces. "Afterlife?"

Ari forced himself to shrug. The same mounting tension that had his elbows and knees sweating made joking difficult to resist. "I haven't been."

A mutual understanding, or something Ari could allow himself to interpret as such, seemed to pass between them at that moment. The edges of Wyn's expression softened up, and some element of that tension dropped away. They were of like enough mind that holding the position of a defensive adversary was pointless.

"So, what we call the soul persists," Wyn began. "For whatever reason, through whatever mechanism. It's either separate or separable, and our relationship to that bifurcated nature is what Lepkoff were most interested in." He drew a kind of upside down, extra curly question mark shape over the three little people shapes. "They categorize that relationship in three ways: Projective, receptive, and repulsive."

Ari nodded. His head felt like a balloon tethered to his chair by the ribbon of his spine. Just bobbling in a wind of insane words and ideas. The emotion he was most aware of in the moment was relief, a sense of vindication tempered by a kind of perfunctory shame at being taken in by that relief.

Maybe Wyn had expected questions. Probably. It took him a moment to accept Ari's acceptance and proceed.

"Projective potential is probably the easiest to explain." Wyn drew an upward arching arrow from the center-most figure with the head of the arrow pointing at the curly cue spirit. He added identical swirls to the other two figures, within the confines of their bodies. "People like that can separate their consciousness from the immediate physical space of their bodies. This presumably happens to everyone at death, but those capable of projection can do it at will."

Against his wishes, Ari's brain supplied the word 'bilocation,' from some hidden store. Remote viewing. His brain also returned to him the intense sense memory of sitting in the glue-scented computer lab at his middle school at reading an article about that. It was like MK Ultra, but not.

Or like a near death experience.

Or like the soul wandering Earth as the body sleeps.

---

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