The Twelfth Insight - James Redfield [75]
“Yeah, why?”
She was still staring at something behind me. Whirling around, I caught sight of the silhouette of a lone figure standing on the huge boulder farthest from us. There was no mistaking that shape. It was Anish.
For a long moment we were frozen, and then Rachel looked at me and said, “Listen. None of us will make it unless I try to reach him. Go on, get everyone out of here.”
Without moving, she focused on the leader, and he turned and looked right at her, their gaze palpable in the night. Several others from our group noticed and stopped to look, but Coleman knew what was happening and pushed them on. I yelled at several people closer to me, telling them to get out.
“I’m not strong enough yet,” I heard her say, and I turned in her direction. It was already too late. Anish waved his hand, and instantly a flurry of bullets rained down toward us from everywhere, hitting the dirt and the rocks. One hit my pack so hard it knocked me backward into one of the big boulders. The fall dislodged the feather Rachel had given me from my pocket, and it landed on my face.
I grabbed it instinctively, even as I struggled to see in the dust and confusion. Suddenly, I felt Rachel’s arms around me, pulling me to my feet.
“This way,” she urged.
I realized at some point she had let go of me, and as I stumbled along, my head finally cleared. Surprisingly, I now had perfect clarity and was feeling no fear or anger at all. In fact, my emotional state had inexplicably returned to Agape. The night sky was radiant with moonlight and the rocks were more luminous than ever. I had regained my perception.
Rachel was ahead of me, walking briskly now, and I was able to keep up with no difficulty. I noticed that her body was moving along with unusual fluidity and grace, her clothes looking shiny and reflective. She led me straight to the spot where Coleman, Tommy, and I talked earlier, looking down on the guardhouse. Then she took another, hidden route past the soldiers and farther up toward the summit.
As we walked, I wondered how she knew about this hidden trail. Had Tommy or his mother told her about it earlier?
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Just up ahead a bit farther,” she said.
The sound of her voice was different somehow and shocked me. I was experiencing it as much inside my head as outside. I slowed up and stopped, suddenly disconcerted. She noticed and came back toward me.
“We can go slower if you like,” she said. “It just takes a little getting used to.”
Her face was now more luminous than ever.
I sat down with a thud and realized my pack was still on my back.
She sat down with one easy move without using her hands, something I’d never seen her do before. And unlike when we were at the circle, her face was totally upbeat now, without a hint of sadness.
“You know where we are, right?” she asked.
“What?”
“We aren’t in Kansas anymore.”
“What are you talking about?”
She leaned in closer. “Remember I told you that I read the Tenth Integration?”
“Yeah.”
“It says if we follow the Synchronicity, we will be able to learn from those in Heaven in a direct way, and that will elevate us into the next level of consciousness.”
I nodded for her to go on.
“I never finished telling you about my mother,” she began. “I hated her for making a controller out of me and was racked with guilt when she died before I could talk to her. Then, maybe because I was thinking about what I should have said to her, I began to notice little things happening. I would be shopping for shoes and see a pair that looked exactly like the ones she wore. Or I would pass a soap store and smell the fragrance of the very soap she used. At the oddest times, I would hear her favorite old songs.
“And then one day, without anything pointing out the way, I just decided to tell her how I felt out loud, as though she were there. Immediately, I began to intuit what she might say back to me, only I realized it wasn’t something I would necessarily have been able to guess. That’s when I realized that I was having a real interaction with her.
“The idea of communication