He took a determined breath, braced himself for the hallucinations and removed the glasses. Deliberately he opened his senses. For a few seconds everything seemed normal. He could access his talent, whatever was left of it.

But in the next moment the apparitions began to coalesce at the edges of his vision. The ghosts whispered to him of the madness that awaited. His nightmares rose up in waves.

He could not afford to be running dangerous experiments on himself, he thought. He had to stay focused on saving his father. With a groan that was part disgust and part despair he started to put on the glasses.

“Wait,” Sierra said. “Please. What do you see?”

“What I always see when I take off the glasses for more than a minute or two. Nightmares. Ghosts.”

“Tell me about the ghosts.”

“They are vague, foggy images for the most part, but I can hear them. They are telling me the glasses are the only way to save my sanity.”

“Hypnotic suggestion,” Sierra said. “Not the first time we’ve run into it in this case. The man Matt Harper met at the Vault, the one we assume is Delbridge Loring, gave Matt a hypnotic suggestion meant to keep him from remembering any details of what happened that night.”

“You don’t understand,” North said. He looked at the glasses. “I was having visions and hallucinations before I got the glasses. They started soon after my team closed a case. That night I went to a club to celebrate with the others, went home to bed—and woke up the next morning to the nightmares and hallucinations. I thought I had gone insane overnight. Eventually the doctors concluded that I was going psi-blind. They gave me the glasses.”

“I don’t know how the first dose of poison was delivered, but I’m sure the crystals in those glasses are continuing to administer a low-level dose,” Sierra said quietly.

He stared at the mirrored glasses in his hands.

“Even if you’re right, there’s nothing I can do about it now. I’ve got a job to finish, and I can’t work with these hallucinations constantly clouding my vision. Hell, I can’t even drive this way, let alone try to control my talent. At least the glasses allow me to function.”

“Here’s the thing, North. There’s no way to know how much of that hypnotic radiation you can absorb before it destroys your talent and maybe does make you go insane. The more you wear those lenses, the worse things are going to get. I’ll do the driving from now on.”

“While I have visions and nightmares? I’ll be useless, maybe even dangerous.”

“You’ve been receiving a very low dose of the radiation through those glasses. Whoever infused the energy into the crystals was probably afraid to use too much heat, because it would have been detectable to a lot of people with talent. Sooner or later someone would have noticed and started asking questions.”

“So?”

“So the good news is that it is a low dose. It might not take long for the worst of the effects to wear off. In the meantime, you can practice trying to control the visions.”