Available Darkness Season 2

Harbinger’s cause.
    He was led to the second floor guest rooms where he hadn’t set foot for several years, except for during a minor remodeling job three years earlier. He was placed in the room at the end of the hall, farthest from his bedroom. The room’s window was painted black, a clearly hurried mess, with black paint dripping stains along the wooden sill and hardwood floors. While Duncan noticed the mess, he didn’t allow it to worm its way under his skin since his house was filled with far worse atrocities than spilled paint.
    His laptop was set up on a small desk, waiting for him.
    Duncan sat and lifted the lid.
    “Remember,” Jacob said, “do as instructed and nothing more. Do not attempt to send a message to anyone or I will turn threat into reality.”
    Duncan signed into the Agency’s database, while Jacob probed his brain, searching for any sign of betrayal. He could feel the monster skittering through his mind, reading his thoughts. Duncan tried to bury his revulsion, but Jacob kept digging, as deep as he wanted.
    Fuck you.
    “And fuck you, too,” Jacob said aloud, delighting in his demonstration of power. “Here,” he said, handing Duncan a piece of paper filled with neatly printed numbers in the Old Language. “You can read this, correct? Get to work.”
    Duncan began typing in the numbers, retrieving names of people he didn’t even know existed, and who had never raised so much as a blip on the Agency radar, lest their names would have been flagged. As he pulled up each name and address, he asked Jacob if he wanted to record any of the details.
    “Not necessary,” Jacob said. “I never forget … anything.”
    As Duncan typed, he felt Jacob’s presence in his head, almost as if the man were pressing on his brain like a full bladder. Duncan decided to experiment, compartmentalizing a thought as if imagining it in a hidden box, then waited to see if it would register. The tricky part in compartmentalizing was that the mere act would often tip the infiltrator off to what you were doing, even if not to the precision of your thought. Tell someone not to think of an elephant, and all they can see are large floppy ears, the color gray, and two long tusks. Trying to disguise the act of concealing a thought was much the same way. You had to think the thought and then quickly think another on top of it, almost, forcing yourself to forget it. And then there was the act of thinking through a series of thoughts while covering those with other thoughts — a task which had taken Duncan decades to master.
    I know your weakness, Jacob, and I will use it against you.
    Duncan kept typing, thinking of the names and numbers he was pulling from the database, waiting to see if his secret thoughts were properly concealed from Jacob. He’d never been up against anyone with powers like Jacob. Nor had he masked a thought for longer than 10 minutes before the mental exhaustion tripped him up.
    Jacob continued staring at the computer screen while probing Duncan’s mind.
    Duncan typed in the final number, and noticed the name attached. “Hope Barnett.”
    Her? How can it be?
    The errant thought flew into the wild before Duncan could capture it back and toss it in the box.
    “Is that John’s Hope?” Jacob asked, slithering down past Duncan’s shoulder like a snake. “Where is she?”
    “I don’t know,” Duncan lied, trying to bury what he did know, and her protected identity before it slipped into Jacob’s head.
    Do not think it, do not think it.
    Hannah Quinn.
    Too late.
    It was almost as if Jacob reached into Duncan’s mind and plucked the name away before he could hide it.
    “Ah, she’s changed her name, eh? And the Agency hiding her? Is that why it says ‘location unknown?’ Tell me where she is,” Jacob commanded, narrowing his eyes as he burrowed deeper into Duncan’s head. If Jacob dug too deep, he might discover Duncan’s brewing plan. And if he did that, Hope was lost, both John’s Hope and humanity’s hope .
    “I don’t know, it says ‘location unknown’ because we don’t know,” Duncan said in a commanding tone crafted to push Jacob’s buttons. “Now get out of my head.”
    “You are my pet, and I will do as I wish,” Jacob smiled, edging himself deeper into Duncan’s brain.
    Duncan’s eyes seized on the pen and pencil holder. He reached out, grabbed a pencil, gripped it hard in his right hand, then drove it deep into the middle of his left. He screamed, but not