It had been three weeks before Jessa and her friends found anything at all notable in the surveillance footage. By the four week mark, they had six different files that showed Emmeline Victor at some point on her walk home the day she was attacked. And by the fifth week, it seemed that everybody except Jessa had lost some element of interest in the process, although they were all happy to hang out at her house while she stared at the netpad screen, making her way through the video files.

It was a particularly lovely late April day and the five teenagers sprawled themselves around Jessa’s bedroom, despite Mrs Baxter’s repeated suggestions that they go out and enjoy the sunshine.

“Are there any other Lynch-y things we can research in the meantime?” Annora said.

“I think we’ve exhausted all our resources on that,” Maggie replied. “And although it’s History stuff, not Mystery stuff, I’ve genuinely enjoyed the biography project we’ve been doing for the last couple of meetings.”

“Yeah that’s been cool,” said Tonia. “You did FDR, right, Mags?”

“Yep. I wish we studied more American history in lessons.”

“Maybe we can work that into History Club next year,” said Flynn. “What do you think, Jess?”

No reply.

“Never mind, then,” Flynn shook his head and passed the ball to Annora.

They’d been intensively practising telekinesis at lunch time by playing psychball at the table, and even Maggie and Annora were at a point where they could comfortably hover a light ball above their hand and submit it to another player.

“Turn your hand a little as you pass it, that’ll help,” said Flynn, who was trying to teach the girls how to put a spin on the ball when moving it.

“It’s too hard!” Maggie slapped her hands down. “Jessa, can you do this spin thing?”

“Mmm?” Jessa didn’t look up from the screen.

“Flynn’s spinning thing with the ball, can you do that?”

“I, umm…”

“Jess, maybe you should take a break from—”

“Holy crap.” Jessa froze.

“What is it?” they all turned to look at her.

“Holy CRAP,” she said again. “Get up here right now.”

Her four friends piled around her on the bed so they could all see the netpad. Jessa pulled back on the bar at the bottom of the screen to rewind. She tapped the centre, and it began to play again.

It was a pretty empty residential London street. A couple of cars drove down the road. Nothing of note, it seemed. A lady holding a baby emerged from a doorway and climbed into a Ford Focus.

From the angle of the camera they could see her strapping the baby into a car seat, before fastening her own seatbelt and pulling away.

“What are we supposed t—”

“Shhh,” Jessa interrupted urgently, “just watch.”

Thirty seconds later, a figure emerged and walked into view. Clothed in a heavy winter coat with the hood up, Emmeline was barely recognisable if not for her trademark auburn curls that escaped around the sides of her hood, and the Winsbury school logo emblazoned on the front of the binder she held in her arm.

“There she is… now watch…” Jessa’s voice dried in her throat.

Emmeline walked toward the bottom of the screen, and then stopped. She stood perfectly still except for the strands of hair flapping around her face in the wind.

And then she vanished.

“Wait, what?” Jessa’s four friends looked up at her, shocked and confused. “Rewind it.”

“She just… disappeared…” said Maggie.

“She literally disappeared… I mean… for real?” said Tonia. “I don’t get it.”

“That’s not possible. Right?” Maggie tried to process what she was seeing. “I mean, that’s not possible.”

They watched the video again and again, but it never became any more than perfectly clear. There was no mistaking that the video plainly showed Emmeline Victor disappearing into thin air.

“We need to get this to Mr Fletcher,” Jessa said, handing the netpad to Maggie. “Can you send this to him?”

“Not directly, but I can send a link. Hold on.”

The familiar -dink- of a sent message followed shortly. The five students sat quietly, waiting for a response, and sure enough, an incoming call from Mr Hugo Fletcher came very quickly.

“Meet me at the Agency.”

#

They crunched up the gravel pathway to the door that Mr Fletcher had left unbolted for them. Accompanying him was the young northern lady who had attended the previous Agency meeting.

“You remember Rachel,” Mr Fletcher said, and she gave them a gentle wave of hello.

Any semblance of a welcome smile instantly disappeared from Hugo Fletcher's face. “I need to know, has anybody else seen this video?”

“No, we saw it and sent you the link right away,” said Jessa.

“Good. Well, we just watched it a few times, and Rachel noticed something interesting.” He rewound the video projection onto the whitewashed wall and played it again from the moment right before Emmeline vanished.

“See here, how Emmeline stops next to this white van. She’s in between the house and the van. And notice how she's level with the front door, not the window of the house. That means nobody inside would be able to see her. She’s hidden. Now watch what happens a couple of minutes after she disappears.”

They all watched intently as the scene continued to play before them. If not for the time stamp in the corner of the screen that counted away the seconds, it would have seemed like an unmoving picture, as everything in the frame remained stoic and motionless for almost seventy seconds, at which point the van pulled away from the kerb and out of sight.

“The van drove away,” said Jessa. “What does that mean?”

Rachel and Mr Fletcher shared a knowing glance.

“I think Emmeline was in the van,” Rachel said softly, and the teenagers responded with blank faces. “My guess is that this is an example of telelocation. It’s an extremely advanced form of telekinesis that can actually move an object from one location to another.”

“Are you serious?” Maggie said, wide-eyed. Rachel nodded.

“My speciality is Psychokinetics, which is centred on studies of parapsychology and telekinesis. And I've heard of some literature, mostly ancient, that speculates on some advanced parapsych abilities, for instance, telelocation.”

“Ancient parapsych literature?” Maggie’s bottom jaw dropped slightly.

“Yes,” Mr Fletcher said. “And naturally, you’re all much too young for me to feel comfortable sharing all this with you, but it’s too late now, you’re already in it. And to be honest, we need all the help we can get. So we’ll start at the beginning.”

“Felix Aurelius was an ancient parapsych,” Rachel spoke in her gentle accent. “Diviner, astrologer, future-seer, and healer, he was very widely regarded in his time, although that was mostly because people put a lot more faith in prophecy back then. His first major publication was something called the Hundred Quatrains, which were a series of short verses that each stood as a prophecy for the future. But then, as history tells it, he started getting some ideas that led him to be taken over by some supposedly darker powers. Then he started writing these manuals about increased abilities, much of it theoretical, of course, but there were some supposedly first-hand accounts of things he’d learned to do.”

“What kind of things?” asked Flynn.

Another glance between the two adults.

“For starters, he wrote that he could telelocate. He also said he could directly communicate with the dead,” Rachel said. “In one of his manuals he detailed ways in which he believed a parapsych could separate their consciousness from their body and move around undetected by other people.”

“That can’t possibly be real,” Tonia derided.

“It does sound unlikely,” Flynn agreed.

“It sounds like magic,” said Annora.

“It’s not,” Mr Fletcher said, scratching the side of his face through a light layer of stubble. “It’s just parapsychism. But unfortunately, we don’t know what the limits of parapsychism are.”

“Do you think Silas has those kinds of abilities?” Jessa looked directly at Mr Fletcher.

“I’m not sure. Research has shown that telelocation is possible, although it takes a very powerful parapsych to be able to perform it. And to perform it on a person? Well, that’s a whole other level of power. I’ve never heard of someone actually doing that before.”

Rachel adjusted the black hairband that reached around her crown. “I think you guys are right about Silas Lynch, and based on my own research I’ve come up with another theory about him.”

“What is it?” Jessa asked.

“I looked into him a little, and I started thinking about the circumstances of Lynch's death. Throughout his childhood, it seems he had an affinity with fire. I can’t tell if his interest was driven by his inherent pyrokinetic ability, or the other way round. But I know for sure that he had a strong connection to fire energy. I began to think that if he was really that powerful a pyrokinetic, it could account for his survival of the fire as a child. Perhaps he was able to use his abilities to protect himself.”

“So based on that, you think that when his cult turned on him and tried to burn him alive, that he was able to keep the flames at bay?” Jessa finished the thought.

“Exactly."

“And if he could telelocate…” added Flynn.

“That’s how he was able to escape,” Tonia said.

“And that’s why his death wasn’t verified…” Maggie said thoughtfully.

“Because he didn’t die,” Annora finished.

Jessa nodded. “See, we knew he didn’t die, we just couldn’t figure out what did happen to him.”

Jessa blinked her gaze away from Mr Fletcher and into space, feeling her brain grow heavy with questions. Her eyebrows drooped, cinching in close to one another as a deep furrow dug into her forehead.

“But,” she said, translating her worry into words, “if Silas Lynch is capable of these parapsych abilities that we didn’t even know were real… what else can he do?”