Dahlia Black by Keith Thomas

Author:Keith Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/Leopoldo & Co.

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I. What the boy described seeing was most likely COPD, a condition commonly attributed to smoking though genetically acquired in some cases, encompassing emphysema and chronic bronchitis.

II. Sadly, Carter Loisel passed away from an Elevation-related cerebral aneurysm five months after his ER encounter.

22

KIARA MCCAIN, MD, MPH, NEUROSCIENTIST AND EPIDEMIOLOGIST

AUSTIN, TX

JANUARY 15, 2026

My flight to Austin was a rough one.

The plane passed through several storms, and the turbulence had a handful of people on the flight vomiting. I picked up my rental car and made my way downtown, over the Congress Avenue Bridge, where a nightly display of emerging bats used to charm thousands of tourists, to the Perry-Castañeda Library on the University of Texas at Austin campus. It is a large, white stone building with low-slung ceilings. Inside, the architecture is clean—a lot of light, woodwork, and earthy tones.

I meet with Dr. McCain in a vestibule on the third floor.

As the Elevation first spread across the globe, medical professionals were still scrambling not only to explain what was going on with the people turning up in their emergency rooms but also to determine if these bizarre cases were linked. Dr. McCain emerged as an early proponent of the theory that what physicians were seeing was indeed novel—that it wasn’t a chemical exposure issue or a viral outbreak; that the changes manifesting in the brains of the affected were “built-in”; they were due to physical changes—alterations in the very substance of the brain itself.

Though she left her medical practice three years ago, Dr. McCain continues to occasionally consult on cases for the state of Texas. Today, her passions are her children—she has five, aged three to fourteen—and watercolor painting. Dr. McCain is African American and tall, with chunky glasses and a tight ponytail.

We called it the Elevation.

I believe the name came from a researcher in Nevada, someone on Lance Guttman and Raj Cheema’sI team. I think it was something of a joke at first. They saw some of the people that had been coming into the ERs, claiming ridiculous abilities, and kidded that maybe these people were the next step in human evolution. They were Elevated.

The name, the idea, it stuck.

A lot of us think of the little boy who had, quote, unquote, “X-ray vision,” the old woman driving in circles who could hear a well beneath the street, but they were only the more media friendly of that first wave.

This was happening in every city and town in the United States.

Parents were walking into emergency rooms with children who were seeing things, hearing things, feeling things they couldn’t—magnetic radiation, ultraviolet colors, the ultrasonic songs of mice.II

There were videos popping up online by the dozens.

I received thousands of case reports in just twenty-four hours. Somehow my office became the in-box: doctors, researchers—they saw something they couldn’t explain and sent it in here. The high school girl endlessly scribbling mathematical formulas on her classroom whiteboard; the pilot who’d tried to fly his plane through a mountain; the older gentleman, a

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