by R S Penney
Keli was breathing, and even though she was in obvious pain, she seemed to be stable. Which meant there was nothing else Anna could do here. She had to go after the telepath before he hurt someone else.
Anna got to her feet.
Pressing her back to the corridor wall, she inched her way to the intersection and peeked around the corner. She had a very brief glimpse of Adren standing at the end of the adjoining hallway before he raised his gun to aim at her.
Anna ducked back around the corner just before just before a bullet zipped across the intersection and hit the wall where both corridors met. The confusion assaulted her again, but she was prepared for it this time, and so was Seth.
The fog made it hard to concentrate, but she could maintain her focus if she tried, and Seth seemed to be doing a better job of shielding her. At least she didn't lose track of where she was and what she was doing. It wasn't perfect, but it was something.
Anna spun around the corner, firing.
Her shots went wide – damn brain fog – flying over Adren's shoulder to strike the wall behind him with a flash of blue sparks. The man lifted his own weapon to retaliate, then thought better of it and threw himself sideways into a stairwell door. He was gone in half a second.
Anna blinked the fog away. She pressed a palm to her forehead, groaning in pain. “Damn it…” Now she had to chase him.
Anna scrambled up the corridor, feeling very disoriented and very much aware of Seth's apprehension. Really, she couldn't blame the Nassai for his caution. If this telepath could render a Keeper ineffectual…
Slamming her shoulder against the stairwell door, she stared down the first flight. Her head was clearing, but the aftermath of that struggle left her so tired. She paused and braced one hand against the wall. “You have to keep going,” she told herself. “You let him get away and someone dies.”
Down the stairs.
She rushed down one flight and the next and the next, rounding each landing with perfect balance. When she reached the ground floor, she stepped out into a hallway very much like the one above.
Adren was barely visible, ducking around a corner that led to the front entrance. She really didn't want him getting outside. Who knew what kind of damage he could do out in the open.
Anna chased him.
Feet pounding on the carpet, breath rasping in her throat, she gritted her teeth and shook her head. “Keep running, you bastard!” she hissed. “Keep on running! I'll hunt you down like a damn bloodhound!”
She rounded the corner.
Halfway up this next corridor, a bank of elevators stood opposite the front entrance, and Adren was pushing his way through the glass door, glancing back at her with one last sneer of contempt. Her brain fuzzed momentarily as he tried to slow her, but Anna fought through it with a little effort.
Throwing his will against the young Justice Keeper who just refused to die, Adren stepped through the door to find a barricade of police cruisers along the curb. Four in a line with uniformed officers aiming pistols over the hood and trunk of each vehicle. He saw three egg-shaped security drones floating above the road, each one in standby mode.
A woman of average height with long dark hair stood in the middle of this crowd, her face as hard as a boulder as she stared him down. “Drop your weapon and you won't be harmed,” she promised him.
Adren focused.
The woman shrieked, slapping a hand against her forehead. She fell to her knees and passed out. Several officers tried to pull triggers, but Adren wouldn't let them. Their bodies were his now. He couldn't control all of them simultaneously, but he didn't have to. There was a build-up of anticipation just before someone fired a weapon. He only had to squelch each one individually, and there were never more than two or three at a time.
One drone pointed its weapon at him.
Desperately, Adren threw himself sideways just before a bullet hit the ground with a flash of blue sparks. He focused on one officer, ordering that man to tap commands into his multi-tool and call off the drones. Those things were designed to incapacitate, not to kill. They would not loose a dozen bullets all at once.
In those brief moments, when his mind was fixated on that one individual, his hold over the others weakened. One officer got off a shot, but it went wide, striking the door behind Adren with just enough force to chip the glass. Not enough to shatter it.
The drones powered down.
Adren sighed.
At his silent command, two officers who stood right in front of him turned to face one another, each man pointing his pistol at the other's head. Adren could feel their terror. He savoured it. As soon as the other cops saw what he had done to their colleagues, they gave up any notion of firing on him. Less than fifteen seconds since he had come through the door, and he was already in complete control.
The door opened behind him.
“Stay perfectly still, Operative Lenai,” he said, sparing a glance over his shoulder. “We wouldn't want a mess all over the road.”
The tiny Justice Keeper stepped forward with her mouth agape, her face losing all of its colour. “What did you do?” she whispered. “Release them.”
Adren felt a grin come on, then turned his gaze back upon the frozen officers. “You are thinking that maybe you should shoot me,” he said. “Stun me and release those men from my control.”
Lenai was silent.
“Go on then,” he urged. “Try it. Before the motor impulse travels from your brain to your fingers, I'll have ordered these men to pull their triggers.”
Lenai growled with frustration. The bloody alien that she carried in her body was like a cloud that prevented him from accessing her thoughts without considerable effort, but you didn't have to be a telepath to figure out her next move. Adren chuckled. “Now, you're thinking that maybe you can use one of your fancy Time Bubbles,” he said. “Give yourself those extra seconds you need to put a bullet in my back. The instant you do, I'll feel your mind vanish, and I'll tell Jonas and Kalen down there to fire. We'll just have to see which one of us is faster.”
“What do you want?” Lenai mumbled.
Squeezing his eyes shut, Adren laughed and shook his head. “And there we have it,” he said. “The point of this entire exercise, the acknowledgment that I am going to do what I want, and there is nothing you can do to stop me.”
“Get to the damn point!”
With lips pressed together, Adren bobbed his head from side to side. “Hmm,” he said, wrinkles forming in his brow. “Why should I? Isn't it clear to you, Lenai? Your little powers are useless against me.”
“What. Do. You. Want?”
“You're going to let me go,” Adren replied. He toyed with the idea of ordering her to lay down her life in exchange for those of everyone here, but you had to be cautious when making demands. Ask too much, and your enemy became desperate. Push too hard, and they started to fight back.
Now that he had secured her surrender, he didn't want to give Lenai motivation to start fighting again. “Set your gun down, have the officers do the same, and let me walk out of here unaccosted. Oh, and if you're thinking about shooting me in the back when I go, I might not be able to read your thoughts, but every cop on this street is an open book to me. If I get even a whiff of anticipation…”
“All right,” Lenai said. “Go.”
Adren flashed a smile, then nodded once for emphasis. “Excellent,” he said. “I look forward to our next meeting.”
Chapter 9
The seething tempest of rage inside Anna calmed itself when she drew aside the curtain in the hospital's emergency room and found Keli sitting on the bed. The woman's grimace might have made you think that she had been punched in the stomach, but other than that, she seemed fine.
Anna felt her eyes drop shut with fatigue, breath exploding from her lungs. “You're all right,” she said, stepping forward. “I've been worried sick for the last four hours. Adren got away.”
Keli looked up at her with deep dark eyes, then nodd
ed slowly. “I'm all right,” she confirmed. “Your doctors put me through any number of brain scans, though they're not sure what to look for. Your people have so little experience with telepaths. But I can tell you that I feel fine.”
“Well, at least we have that much,” Anna mumbled. “What exactly did he do to you?”
“He amplified my abilities.”
Anna dropped into a metal chair with hands folded in her lap. “That's it?” she asked. “No visions of your worst nightmares? No traumatic memories. He just amplified your abilities?”
“Most telepaths have to actively focus to hear another person's thoughts,” Keli said. “But the experiments that heightened my abilities also changed me…They made it so that I hear everything. All the time. Unlike other telepaths, I have to focus to think through all that background noise.”
“And he turned up the volume.”
The other woman turned her head, squinting at the wall as she considered that. “In a manner of speaking,” she answered. “Telepaths can work together to boost the clarity of their perceptions. Adren left me open to the thoughts of everyone in that building. It was too much for me.”
Well…That explained why he didn't use a similar tactic on Anna. It was the sort of trick that would only work on another telepath. Bleakness take her, she was so tired she felt like going to sleep right there. It was well past midnight here in Telsaran, and though Denabria was two time-zones west of here, her normal bedtime had come and gone over three hours ago. Couldn't they let her take one of the empty beds? Just for a few minutes?
Slouching in the chair with arms folded, Anna threw her head back and blinked. “I want you to take a few days off,” she said. “Recuperate from what you've been through. I can handle this case alone.”
“Physician, heal thyself.”
“What?”
“An expression I picked up from some of your Earther friends,” Keli explained. “I will be all right, Anna; exposure to a deluge of thoughts and emotions may be painful, but it will not hurt me. One little tidbit that you normals don't know about: telepaths can go several days without sleep and still function. I will be fine.
“In fact, I would prefer to channel some of this excess energy into finding this man and preparing his victims for whatever he does next. You, on the other hand, are on the ragged edge. You need rest.”
As if to undermine the protests that came to mind, Anna's mouth stretched into a yawn that she covered with one hand. “I don't have time,” she said. “We have to find this guy before he hurts someone else.”
“You are the leader of a team now.”
“Your point?”
Grinning with exasperation, Keli shook her head. “Delegate,” she said. “It's a skill you'll have to learn.”
It was good advice, though she hated to admit it. Oh, how she wanted her bed. No, actually, that was wrong; what she really wanted was Jack's bed with him snuggled up next to her.
Anna pressed a fist to her mouth, then shut her eyes and cleared her throat. “You're right, of course,” she said in a voice thick with sleepiness. “But there's at least one more thing I have to do before I go.”
She said her goodbyes and left the little area they had given Keli. As soon as she did, anger flared up inside her once again, which suited her just fine. If nothing else, her anger kept the fatigue at bay.
A green and yellow checkerboard floor stretched across the ER, where makeshift “rooms” along one wall were separated by thick white curtains. A medical scanning bot floated through the air, making a soft whirring noise as it passed.
In one section, where the curtains were drawn back, a doctor in blue scrubs scanned a little girl's arm with his multi-tool. “Just a slight fracture,” he said. “You're going to be just fine. We'll get you all patched up.”
The cushy chairs in the middle of this large, open area were empty except for one older fellow who sat staring off toward an examination room where they had taken his wife about ten minutes ago. Anna's heart went out to him.
She made her way across the ER to where she had seen the nurses take Detective Tremana. Each step stoked the anger within her until she felt like she was ready to spit bullets. Anna calmed herself. Jon Andalon sometimes told her that she was as blunt as a block of wood, but she had learned that yelling at people rarely accomplished anything useful. Best to play it cool.
She pulled back the curtain to find Bevi Tremana seated on the edge of a bed and staring into her own lap. The woman breathed out a sigh as soon as she noticed Anna. “I suppose you've come to lecture me.”
Stepping forward with hands clasped behind her back, Anna smiled and shook her head. “Oh, no! I'm here to congratulate you!” she said. “Disobeying orders, putting your people in unnecessary danger, impeding an arrest: I've decided there should be an award for screwing up this badly.”
“Operative Lenai-”
“I don't want to hear it, Detective.”
Bevi looked up at her through narrowed eyes, then sniffed to show her contempt. “Well, you're going to hear it,” she insisted. “I'm sorry that things went sideways, but I did what I thought was right.”
Pressing her lips together, Anna felt her eyebrows shoot up. “Oh, you did what you thought was right,” she said. “Why didn't you say so? That changes everything!”
“You think this is funny?”
“Do I look like I'm laughing?” Her words came out colder than she had intended, but Anna decided to go with it. This woman needed to be taken down a peg. “I gave you orders for your protection. I told you the instant you got within range of a telepath, all of you would be at his mercy.
“Bleakness take it all, he nearly knocked me out, and I have a Nassai to protect me. Ms. Armana is one of the most powerful telepaths this side of the Galactic Core, and she was left whimpering on the floor. We have the resources to deal with this threat, and yet we barely escaped with our lives. So what under the Companion's left ass cheek made you think your team could handle this guy with a few pistols and a few security drones?”
Bevi was as red as a ripe tomato, but her expression hardened with resolve. “I am sorry,” she said. “I thought I was helping.”
“It's fine,” Anna said, feeling dismayed. “Look, I'm not going to put a reprimand on your file, but from now on, follow my lead, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Thanks.”
The sun felt good on Rajel's skin as he stood outside the Telsaran police station in a light windbreaker and strange pants of some tough cotton. Earth fashions. Jack Hunter had suggested them; the local fabrication station had the materials to make them, and they were quite comfortable.
He slipped his hands into his pockets and strode forward with his jaw set, his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses but focused dead ahead. Projecting confidence was a skill he had learned in his youth.
The sliding doors broke apart to admit him.
Once inside, he found a wide lobby with two parallel hallways extending from the back wall. A soft whirring sound indicated that a hologram was active somewhere, but he couldn't sense it with spatial awareness alone.
A petite woman in pants and a sleeveless top stood face to face with a uniformed officer, nodding along as he spoke. Rajel recognized the silhouette as that of Cassiara Seyrus. Short and pretty with a cute button nose, she wore her hair in a pixie cut. Rajel had been told that it was pink – which was unusual – but that meant no more to him than blonde, or red or even blue.
The officer turned away and departed for the back of the police station, muttering to himself as he read something on a tablet.
Cassi rounded on him, a bright smile on her face as she approached. “Rajel!” she said in that perky voice of hers. “So, you got roped into this too, huh? Well, at least my misery can benefit from your company.”
He lifted his chin and blinked behind the lenses of his sunglasses. “I don't know about you,” he said, “but I've been looking forward to it. On Velezia, most cases involve stolen contraband o
r smuggled weapons. But a telepath running amok in a small town? That's something new.”
Cassi smiled but lowered her eyes, placing one hand over the back of her head. Was she embarrassed? “Right,” she said. “It is a new challenge.”
Of course…
Spatial awareness alerted him to the presence of maybe half a dozen people seated in chairs that ran along three of the four walls. This was their town he was talking about. An exciting new challenge for him was a nightmare for them.
“Come on,” Cassi said.
She turned her back and marched to the mouth of one hallway, stepping through at a quick pace. Rajel followed of course. It was a narrow corridor with windows along one wall – he could only assume that they looked into offices – and SmartGlass terminals on the other.
Near the back of the station, an open bullpen, where several officers sat at desks that faced one another, was filled with the murmurs of quiet conversation. One man was perched on the edge of his desk with feet resting on his chair, and his gaze followed Rajel as he passed.
Anna was leaning against the frame of one open door, frowning as she spoke with Detective Bevi Tremana. The other woman had fists on her hips, and her scowl was as ferocious as a Norvaldian blizzard. “And now, on top of everything else, we have a new victim,” she said. “Mr. Tendariel told me that he had never experienced nightmares like that. Adren strikes again.”
“Maybe,” Anna replied. “Or maybe they were ordinary nightmares.”
Bevi Tremana pressed her lips together, but her eyebrows climbed upward, leaving wrinkles in her forehead. “Seriously?” she snapped. “You're gonna play skeptic when we know that Adren was behind the other assaults?”
Anna's mouth twisted, and she shook her head as she forced out a breath. “Sure, it looks bad,” she admitted. “But we don't know for certain. We can't know until Keli scans him. So, let's avoid the conclusion-jumping.”
Shutting her eyes, Tremana visibly calmed herself and then nodded in response. “I agree,” she said, though the reluctance in her voice was palpable. “I arrange for him to sit down with Ms. Armana.”