Free Twist (Book 1): The Abnorm Chronicles-Twist by Kevin J. Anderson Page B

face.
    Adam turned in his wheelchair. “Now, how many fingers am I holding up?”
    “Three.”
    “Exactly. And you realize that you’re looking behind your own head?”
    Cooper thought about that. “So when you look out the window, you can see off a reflection of glass and get additional details?”
    “It’s more than that, Agent Cooper. Ingrid, could you get me the pad of sticky notes from the coffee table?”
    She brought him the pad and a pen, and Adam scrawled something with his bandaged hand, then rolled back to the bathroom. He asked Cooper to bend down so he could affix the note between his shoulder blades.
    “Now, step two,” Adam said. “Give me that hand mirror, but stay there.”
    Adam rolled back out to the living room to where he had a clear line of sight on Cooper in the bathroom, then held up the hand mirror, angled it properly. “Now, look in the mirror in front of you and tell me what the note on your back says?”
    Cooper was intrigued. His gaze bounced from the bathroom mirror to the hand mirror. He squinted, tried to focus. “You’ve got sloppy handwriting. It says . . . ‘Like This’? I was afraid you were going to write ‘Kick Me.’”
    Adam put down the hand mirror. “Now you get it. I squint just like that to make out the details. Squinting is how I zoom, like with binoculars. It allows you to bring things into focus . It allows you to change the shape of your eye so you can see at different distances. That’s what I do, except I don’t have to think about it. My brain does it naturally for me.”
    Cooper twisted around to pull the sticky note off his back , and Adam turned to the window and called for Cooper to join him. “Look out there and tell me what you see.”
    With Dr. Wolverton beside him—she seemed just as interested in Adam’s explanation—Cooper looked out. “Street scene, pedestrians, cars, trees. The apartment building across the street. What sort of detail do you want?”
    “The windows,” Adam said. “Seventy-five windows in Chloe’s apartment building. And each of those seventy-five windows holds a certain reflection. They serve the same purpose as the hand mirror.” When he rattled off the math, Cooper knew he had done the calculations many times already. “My building also has five apartments per floor, but we have seven floors. So we have a hundred and five reflective surfaces.”
    Cooper was amazed as he began to grasp the extent of what this man could do. “Just like the hand mirror, you’re looking from reflection to reflection.”
    “Exactly. Now, some quick numbers. Each window in Chloe’s building,” he pointed across the street, “contains the reflection of the hundred and five windows in this building. With seventy-five windows over there, each reflecting a hundred and five different views, that’s seven thousand eight hundred and seventy-five different lines of sight that are created every time I look over there.”
    Dr. Wolverton raised her eyebrows. “That’s a lot to keep track of.”
    “Now imagine how many windows each reflective surface on the Lion’s Regency is reflecting. Then add in all the car windshields and mirrors, glass bottles in the gutter, puddles on the sidewalk.” He looked up at Cooper.
    “I follow you,” Cooper said. “I really do.” The magnitude of Adam Lee’s pattern-assembly gift was unlike anything he had seen before.
    Adam seemed to be fully engaged in his explanation, to Dr. Wolverton’s obvious pleasure. “But that’s not all. There’s also wind speed.” Adam leaned his head over, glancing down toward the sidewalk. “Right now, based on the movement of leaves on the trees, the wind is about two point seven miles an hour. The wind hitting every single pane of glass creates different frequencies, creates oscillations. No matter how solid or how thick it is, it’s a minute motion. And all of those minute motions let my senses triangulate.”
    Though he had expected an impressive scope of the