Crystal Choice: The Second Novel in the Projector War Saga

by K. A. Excell

  The fight to bring Houston in still seemed like it happened yesterday—maybe last week. I could hardly believe it had been almost a full semester.

  ::Well believe it, Farina, and move on. You’ll have plenty more missions like that before you’re through.:: Ms. King’s mind voice echoed in my head a moment before she strode through the door. She wore a floor length black dress that shimmered as she shifted. It didn’t have the same wave pattern as Tabitha or my dress did—but it wasn’t normal fabric, either. My lines started analysis without prompting, but came up empty. I archived that analysis branch and returned to the original evaluation of Ms. King. Her hair was done up behind her and studded with pearls. Her eyes were shadowed with makeup that accentuated her deep brown eyes, and there were heels on her feet that made her already tall form tower above me. Tabitha looked like a dwarf when she came over. I was just short.

  I brushed off the incongruity of the situation. Me, feeling short? I was six feet tall!

  “Oh, don’t worry about it so much, Farina. I’ll make sure you get some heels, too. The question is whether you’ll be able to walk in them or not,” Ms. King said.

  “She can handle some kitten heels. We’ll have to train her in the taller ones,” Cal said.

  I shrugged. “I’m just not used to being short.”

  “Well, all the girls at the fundraiser tonight will be in heels, too, so you’d better get used to the feeling. Come on, you’re almost late for your hair appointment.”

  Tabitha grinned, and grabbed my hand. “Oh, he’ll have a field day with your hair. I can’t wait to see what he does with it!”

  I stared at her dumbly. How could Tabitha be so excited about the smallest things? My hair? It was a thing to be cared for and kept out of the way. The only reason I hadn’t cut it by now was because I didn’t trust Mom with scissors, and we could hardly afford a hair appointment.

  Maybe this new stylist person would cut it for me?

  I dismissed that thought as I caught the picture of a man, brown hair close cropped around his ears, with unnaturally tailored eyebrows and a nose ring. He had a statistical resemblance to those models on the cover of magazines, too—once I’d reverse-engineered the image editing, anyway. Tabitha was right. He was going to love having access to so much long hair—which meant he was hardly going to solve my hair problem. Had I unwittingly wandered into a model agency?

  I must have said at least part of that out loud, because both Tabitha and Cal laughed.

  “Most of our agents can get by flaunting the rules of society. As long as they do their jobs, we don’t care—in fact, we embrace it. We give them the training they need to communicate, help them when they fall short of that, and make sure they can succeed at their job. Agents on the Flex Tac block don’t have that luxury. You need to understand how to act in all situations—whether you’re at a bar, or a fundraiser for big donors. Fortunately, not all neurodivergents have mathematics specialties. Some actually perseverate on fashion-driven communication,” Cal said.

  Ms. King nodded. “Quite. Now come along, girls. Don’t keep our stylist waiting.”

  The styling appointment proved to be far less intensive than the dress training had been. Mostly, he talked about proper hair and skin upkeep, made some recommendations on makeup, and showed me how to apply the basics. I sat in the chair and let him use his brushes, and sprays, and sparkles. When I finally got the chance to look at the mirror, I gasped. I wasn’t Crystal anymore, I was someone else. Someone with long eyelashes that shielded narrow green eyes, proud arched eyebrows, and luxurious, shimmering hair that curled around my face and lengthened my neck. Powder dusted my skin all the way down to where it met the crimson top of the dress, smoothing my complexion and blending the colors with what he’d applied to my face. I sat taller, with a sultry look that contrasted sharply with the gun in my thigh holster. A quick analysis showed that he hadn’t changed anything except the hair—but the optical illusion was enough.

  I wasn’t sure whether I should be happy or furious that they’d taken me and turned me into some rich princess.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not permanent,” Ms. King said. “But there are certain societal expectations when you go to a party like this. The first is that you fit in physically with the rest of the crowd.”

  Tabitha was bouncing in her chair with excitement. She knocked a strand of hair loose, and it fell over her eyes. The stylist rushed to fix it, and I got another lungfull of hairspray.

  “What’s our mission?” Tabitha asked when the air had cleared enough to breathe again.

  Ms. King grinned. “Agent Smith, there are going to be a mix of individuals in attendance. I want you to figure out which of them work for—or with—us, and which work with the United States Armed Forces. If there are any other players there, you should make a note of it as well. Additionally, I would like a rough count of the Psionics present. Agent Farina, you need a little more practice with your compulsion. Figure out who is on the edge of donating more money than usual, and use your gifts to gently convince them to donate more. Martial Academy—and the Agency—can use all the funding we can get.”

  I thought about the assignment as we followed Ms. King back to the school. It felt kind of...dirty. Like I was going to be stealing. I understood that we were being trained to manipulate people, but making them give us money? Even if they were already planning on donating, it didn’t feel right.

  As we approached the dining room—where the fundraiser was being held—I stopped.

  “Ms. King?” I asked. Ms. King turned to look at me. Her face was carefully neutral. “Can I have a different assignment?”

  “Is there a problem with your current one?”

  My cheeks started to burn. Ms. King obviously thought this dishonesty was worth it in the long run, or she wouldn’t have given me the mission. This was my opportunity to prove that I understood her lessons. This was the application of my training.

  But stealing? From donors? “I just don’t think this is right. I know I’m just supposed to be nudging people into giving slightly more money than they were planning on giving—but these are Turnips, right? Aren’t they the ones we’re supposed to be protecting? Manipulating them just doesn’t feel right.”

  Her eyes hardened, and she looked me over. “I see. Agent Smith, you can proceed with your assignment. Check back with me before you leave.”

  Tabitha left in a hurry, leaving me alone in the hallway with Ms. King. I could catch the trepidation wafting from her—quickly cleared away by the excitement of the upcoming mission.

  “Agent Farina, you’re refusing an assignment for moral reasons?” Ms. King’s eyes seemed to drill into my skull.

  I ducked my head. “Yes, Ma’am.”

  Her lips curled into an icy smile. “I thought you might.”

  Of all the things I had been expecting her to say, that wasn’t one of them. I released a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding.

  “I recruit students who I think may have gifts, whether it is analysis, Psionics, communication, combat—understand, the gifts are what get you in. What separates us from catch-all organizations like the Company is that we also require our recruits to have a strong moral compass. When I met you, I knew you would never take another human’s life. You abhor violence, and that made you a prime candidate for the Agency.”

  I blinked. Had this been a test? The Agency recruited people with moral scruples, and Ms. King was checking to make sure I wouldn’t abandon mine because a superior had told me to? That didn’t seem very much like her. If I so much as revealed trepidation about doing something she’d asked, I would get a lecture on insubordination and the proper mindset for a student. If I was lucky, the lecture would stop there. Most of the time, she followed up her fifteen minute rant with an extra assignment to analyse command structures throughout history and then look at what happened when those command structures broke
down.

  Ms. King’s smile disappeared. “That said, you are expected to air any concerns during a mission briefing. There are very few things that can get you ejected from the Agency. Insubordination—or refusing to do as a superior tells you—is one of those things, along with misusing your gift and fraternizing with other organizations who hold different goals to ours.”

  A chill ran down my spine. Did that mean—

  “Now don’t go jumping to any conclusions, Farina. Most recruits get all this information during their second year in the Social History course, after they’ve been vetted and accepted as a formal recruit. In some cases, like Agent Smith’s, it is given during an external training course by their primary recruiter before they are funneled into my course. Your acceptance process was a little bit different, so you’ve been operating without that knowledge. That said, don’t let this happen again. Speak up during the mission brief, or don’t speak up at all.”

  I nodded. “Yes, Ma’am.”

  She sighed. “Now, what would you suggest I use as an alternative training mission?”

  I thought for a moment. “Martial Academy gets anonymous donations, right? What if I give you a list of those who are donating, but don’t want to be named?”

  Ms. King thought for a moment, then nodded. “But I want a complete list. Understand? You’ll have to talk to nearly everyone there. And Farina?” she met my gaze, projecting utmost seriousness. “They aren’t all Turnips. Some of the people here were trained by the Agency, even though they now work in the private sector. They don’t take kindly to Psionics rooting around in their mind.”

  In other words, I couldn’t just try a deep scan of the room to get the information she wanted. I had to be discreet—hence the earlier training.

  Chapter Four

  The dining room had been transformed into a ballroom. Everything had been cleaned, making an already difficult room nearly as impossible as the first time I’d entered it last semester. The swirl of minds mixed with the glare from newly applied polish and the scent of pastries and wine. The difference was that the modules I’d built for dealing with difficult sensory situations weren’t locked away because I was afraid of what happened when they got loose.

  I triggered the BYE-BYE module to clear all extraneous data, then pulled the SORT module to start dividing the important information from the data I could shunt directly to BYE-BYE. Ten seconds from the original overload, I was unfrozen and moving from the entrance toward a relatively clear wall my blue lines had highlighted as a good processing spot. My lines were faster now, too. They handled the important information, absorbed it, and dumped the rest with a tag that would keep my lines from picking them up a second time. Forty-three seconds after I found the processing spot, all the sensory data was neatly packaged in the back of my mind—freeing me to survey the crowd.

  The first thing my lines noted was the sheer amount of money in the room. Watches, jewelry—those were the typical signs Ms. King had told us about, but they weren’t alone. The man selecting a strawberry pastry from the buffet wore a tuxedo that was statistically similar to one Ms. King had shown us in class worth thirty-thousand dollars. The woman next to him wore a silver dress studded with diamonds. It had to be worth at least three times what the tuxedo had cost—and that was just one couple. Suddenly, I could see why Ms. King didn’t feel bad about conning just a little more money out of all of them. These weren’t the kinds of people that paid for schools. They paid for countries. Or, apparently, neurodivergent agencies. Suddenly I understood how R&D could afford to experiment with all their little toys.

  On a hunch, I directed my blue lines to search for abnormalities—things like how Tabitha always looked down, or how I had to wear leggings under my dress. Instantly, my vision was filled with a thousand unconfirmed dots. They were small things. Non-standard materials in clothes, glasses, and watches, small physical quirks like the man bouncing his knee as he sat at the bar across the room. I stored the information, then cross-referenced it with surface thought patterns. Half the blue dots confirmed some sort of non-standard brain formation. In a word, they were neurodivergent like I was. Every single one of them was better at controlling their quirks, but they couldn’t completely eradicate their behaviors. Some were larger, and likely required for proper neural function—like the woman who shifted her weight from leg to leg as she stood, as if she was dancing without music—but some were only given away by the way they responded when the air pressure changed. Neurotypicals didn’t notice when the airwaves in a room shifted.

  All of them had once had challenges like mine, and yet here they were, not just functioning in society, but funding it! I swallowed hard. Now I had to talk to them—and odds were that they had analysis tools a lot like mine. If I could pick them out like this, how many of them had already spotted me?

  Except that wasn’t the point, was it? The problem wasn’t that I was different—what was difference in a crowd like this? Three quarters of the richest people in this room were neurodivergent, so I wasn’t in the minority. I just had to blend in with the other neurodivergents.

  I started to approach an older gentleman who fit all the criteria for a conversation mark, when a line on my vision lit red. Something in here wasn’t right. I aborted my approach and focused on the new data. It was stranger than the massive number of neurodivergents crowded into this room. No, something in here was even more different than that. There was a mind in here that wasn’t—human?

  My vision blurred, and a program deep in my mind pushed that thought away. Where was the anomaly?

  There! I found the thoughts floating around the room that didn’t belong here. They were extensive for surface thoughts, and they left a trail to someone. I started to follow it—careful not to bump too many other minds as I did so. This place was full of urbane surface thoughts. If I lost this trail, it would take hours to pick it back up. I sorted the thoughts themselves as I tried to trace them back to their owner. On the outside, in the layer most people would see if they merely brushed up against him, he was searching for an Agency donor. That wasn’t at all strange, in this crowd where most everyone was an Agency donor. So why had my blue lines told me there was an anomaly here?

  I pushed deeper into his thoughts, then cringed back. Just below the surface, his thoughts were unconstrained madness. He was looking for an asset. The Agency donor would know where the asset was, and then he would use his claws to tear the asset to pieces. She would die screaming.

  My eyes landed on the source of the mad thoughts two-point-six milliseconds before crystal walls slammed down around his mind. I jerked my mental fingers away and stared at the man. He was tall and broad, in a tuxedo that bore traces of the same madness I’d seen in his thoughts. One shoulder of his jacket was shifted to the left, one of his cufflinks was copper while the other was bronze, and his bowtie knot was point-two-six inches too far to the right—giving it a distinctly lopsided appearance.

  He looked around, suddenly confused as the crystal walls around his mind finished settling. The thought trail I was following withered like a stem cut off from its root. Then it was gone.

  How could someone whose thoughts were so thoroughly disorganized pull up walls that quickly? He hadn’t even bothered to pull his surface thoughts inside—the consequence of which was that he’d lost his train of thought. While that phenomenon was simple enough for a Turnip to do several times a day, that was only because they had no idea they even had mental walls. For a telepath or teleprojector to pull their walls up, they typically had to give it some general thought. If he was a Turnip, then how did he have such thick walls? They were crystal hard, and thick enough I didn’t have a chance of getting through. Some Turnips had thick walls, so maybe they were natural. He certainly hadn’t seemed like a telepath from the thought trail he’d been leaving. Odds were that half the telepaths in the room had felt him searching for his asset.

  Someone tapped my sh
oulder, and I whirled around.

  “Tolden?” What was he doing here?

  Tolden flashed a grin. “Looks like training just became a mission.”

  I turned back to see if I could find the man with the badly-tied bowtie, but he was gone. I checked the timestamp on my vision. Eight seconds—not as fast as some of the people I knew, but to have completely vanished in that time? He evidently knew how to hide in a throng of people.

  “Crystal, come on. We have a mission,” Tolden said.

  And I had lost the target.

  I turned back to him. “I saw him. Now what are we going to do about it?”

  Tolden shook his head. “The target is female. There’s a woman here who works for the Company. Smith’s trying to find out what she’s doing here, now, but she’s only an S1, and this operative’s in mission mode. She’s not giving Smith much to go on.” Tolden motioned for me to follow him, so I did. The man with the badly tied bowtie evidently wasn’t our target, the way I’d assumed. I still archived the images of that man. He bore a statistical similarity to—

  My blue lines went wild, then froze. An instant later, my head was pounding. Where was I? I pulled recent conversation records. Right. There was a woman Tolden needed me to help with.

  Wait, a woman?

  The conversation records were clear, but the footage I’d been looking at contained a single male focus. What was so important about him? How had Ms. King—because she was surely the one who had found this Company woman—discovered a Company operative, and missed the man who had been leaving his thoughts all over the room?

  Tolden pointed to a spot at the bar, on the other side of a group of single men who were using their limited projection abilities to suggest—widely—that they had fantastic genetics, fast cars, and big, muscled chests, if any ladies wanted to come check them out. A quick peek at their thoughts revealed that most of their claims were true, but the telepathic manipulation was definitely a turn-off.