Crystal Choice: The Second Novel in the Projector War Saga

by K. A. Excell

  I wiped the compulsion away and arched an eyebrow at Tolden. “Are all neurodivergent gatherings like this?”

  Tolden looked over my shoulder at the group men. “Well, at least they aren’t faking their good looks. Most gatherings have a few noisy teleprojectors. They’d have more, but projectors are pretty rare. Even these boys can’t be more than a PS 2—and that’s when they pool their power together. Most of the compulsion comes from skill. They must spend quite a bit of time working together, to pull off that kind of amplification.”

  I shrugged. Noisy teleprojectors were useful, in their own way. It meant the people around them would chalk a certain amount of intrusion up to the projectors they knew were there—which meant this Company agent wouldn’t identify me unless I got sloppy.

  I spotted Tabitha on the other side of the group talking to a short, curvy blonde with dark lipstick and imitation diamond earrings. Tolden was right about her mind being locked up tight. I focused like Ms. King had been teaching me and moved up from my resting frequency. Ordinarily, I spent my time around the PS6 bands, but projection strength was really more of a description of how many mental frequencies someone had access to than which mental frequency someone spent most of their time on. Before my biocard, I spent most of my time at the PS1 frequencies. I read emotions, sometimes thoughts, when I focused on someone’s eyes. Now, I was starting to be able to control my own frequency dial.

  I found the operative’s frequency and slipped inside her mind—careful to leave myself a tether to my body so I didn’t get lost. I sifted through her thoughts, past the mundane conversation Smith was having and down to her mission.

  She was a watcher—set here to wait for someone different. Someone like the man I saw earlier? I tried to go deeper, only to stop. The Company agent’s internal thoughts were shifting frequencies—a trick used to sort an intruder’s thoughts from her own. Any thoughts that didn’t shift when she changed her internal frequencies belonged to someone else. Some neurodivergents habitually shifted their thoughts like this just to be sure no one was inside their mind—but this was different. Her mind spun in a rainbow of colors, jumping from red, to violet, to electric green. She knew something was wrong.

  I spun a line out to Tolden’s mind. ::I don’t have much, but she’s getting suspicious.::

  Understood, Tolden thought. Go as deep as you can, but don’t tip your hand. Remember, you’re not just a telepath, but a projector, too. Try to calm her fears.

  I gave him a mental nod and withdrew—having my attention in more than two spots was still hard when I was this deep into a mind. I turned my attention back to the Company agent’s rainbow of shifting frequencies. Slowly, so I didn’t disturb the oscillations, I matched the frequency and sent her just a little bit of safety mixed with boredom. The thoughts vibrated into her mind at the right frequency. She accepted the thoughts. The colors around me evened out as she relaxed. I moved in deeper.

  She was assigned to watch the man I’d spotted earlier, alright. She needed to find who, at the Agency, he was speaking with. There was a—

  Someone slapped my shoulder, jerking my attention away. “Get out of there, 32!” His thoughts screamed the same thing so loud I jumped and put my hands over my ears.

  I withdrew as quickly as I could, then stood there blinking at Tolden while I reviewed the footage my eyes had recorded while I was inside the Company operative’s mind. What could have possibly made him jerk me out with so little warning? A moment later, a shield—the same one that had snapped around the man earlier—covered her mind. I swallowed hard.

  “What was that?”

  Tolden frowned. “She’s wearing a shielding device. The Company must have found an engineer that could complete the design.” Frustration oozed from him on the higher frequencies most normal telepaths couldn’t hear.

  “I was already inside, though. I could have gotten the information we needed!”

  He shook his head. “Unlike natural shields, her device generates a two-way wall. It would have severed your link to your body and trapped you inside her mind until you could figure out how to get out—that’s if you were powerful enough to break through in the first place.”

  Staying completely outside my body for long had deadly consequences. I swallowed. Don’t be inside a mind when they decided to shield—got it.

  I shifted my attention back to the matter at hand. “I got some info from her.”

  Tolden nodded. “Good. Anything immediate?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then I’ll debrief you downstairs. What about your other assignment?”

  “I haven’t started that one yet. I got kind of distracted.”

  “Well, then you’d best get started. I’ll be waiting in the briefing room when you’re done.”

  My eyes widened. “I completed the mission. Now you want me to finish a school assignment? That’s hardly the most important thing.”

  “Do you want to tell Ms. King that?”

  I pulled up an image of the teacher and swallowed hard. No, I definitely did not want to tell her that the school assignment that I had picked after refusing the last one wasn’t important enough for me to complete.

  Instead, I shoved down my frustration, turned around, and set my blue lines loose on the crowd. Time to figure out who was making an anonymous donation.

  Chapter five

  Tolden was waiting in the briefing room when I finally got done with the crowd at the fundraiser upstairs. Despite my exhaustion, I could feel the unease radiating from him.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked as I rubbed my temples.

  He turned so I could see the worry lines in his face. “The shield.”

  I frowned as I recalled the shield that had suddenly separated me from both the man with the badly tied bowtie and the Company agent.

  “It’s technology we’ve been trying to develop for years, but somehow we don’t have it. Meanwhile, they still don’t have access to our biocard technology, but they somehow have mobile shields?” He took a deep breath. “It’s not really a worry for today—although I have to wonder what happens when we have to step in and shut the Company down. They haven’t overstepped their bounds yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”

  We’d had to bring in individual Company operatives that had gone rogue, and they tolerated that. From what Mr. West had told me, they knew they didn’t always recruit the highest quality people—but they were desperate for Psionics. They cut their operatives loose when their operatives stepped out of line. I’d even heard rumors that the Company had kill lists for operatives that became so much of a threat they couldn’t be allowed to roam free. But even that showed how different the Company was from the Agency. We subdued and imprisoned problematic Psionics. The Company killed them.

  Tolden’s question of what happened when the Agency decided the Company couldn’t be allowed to operate any more was invalid. The Company itself hadn’t done anything wrong—only the individuals that worked with it. The numbers across my vision showed that his situation had only a two-point-four percent probability with known factors.

  But Tolden had proved to be a very practical kind of person—so why was he so worried? What was I missing?

  “Has the Company been becoming more aggressive?” I asked.

  Tolden crossed the room so he was standing in front of me. He must have sensed how tired I was, because he angled away so that, while we could still see each other, there was less chance of stray eye contact. “When I joined up almost ten years ago, we spent all our time going after independents. Occasionally, they were independents who were contracting with the Company, but most of the time they weren’t affiliated with anyone. They were just bad people who had figured out a power that made them too dangerous to be left out on the streets. In the last two years, though? Tac 47 has spent over half their time reigning in rogue Company teams. InDep has redirected nearly
all its assets to keeping an eye on the Company, and we have increased the number of Strike teams so there is exactly one for every single known Company base—just in case we need to take them out. When we find another base, we gain another Strike team soon after.”

  I factored that information into my calculations and sighed. Tolden was right. Looking at the Agency’s response, war with the Company was inevitable. The question wasn’t if it would happen, but when.

  “Martial Academy is going to be ground zero, when something happens.”

  Tolden nodded. “And all of the students are going to get caught in the crossfire. That’s one of the reasons we’ve been strengthening our position here. We need to be able to protect you kids.”

  “Is that why I was given the fundraiser assignment?” Did Ms. King ask me to persuade the donors into giving us more money because we were increasing our arsenal? Did we need the extra funding that badly?

  Tolden shrugged. “Ms. King has been rushing your training because you’re already a full agent. But even now, you barely know how to use your telepathy. There are a dozen things you need to master before you will ever be a fully trained telepath’s equal. Tac 47 got called in because we were the Flex Tac team on call when Smith found the Company operative where she wasn’t supposed to be. What was she doing there, anyway?”

  I pulled up the recording of what I’d seen and felt while I was in the Company operative’s mind for a quick review. “I didn’t get very much. She was supposed to watch for a guy bleeding thoughts. I got a glimpse of him, but she obviously didn’t. I only got partial images from her. The shield came up before I could get anything useful.”

  Tolden sighed. “Oh well. I’ll note it down in the report, anyway. Good try, 32. Maybe we’ll get lucky next time.”

  I shook my head. “Why did you send me in instead of doing it yourself? You’re a telepath, right? And you know all those tips and tricks you were talking about.”

  Tolden gave a whisper of a smile. “Yes, but you need the experience. Canvassing rich people who might notice if you go deep, but probably won’t say anything because we’ve been using this event as a training mission since it started—is very different than working with a Company operative who might start shooting if something goes wrong. It was a controlled situation, so I made a judgement call. Even if you’d gotten trapped inside that shield, Black was waiting just out of sight. He would have been able to sedate her fast enough to disable the device.”

  So it was a different kind of training mission, but still training. I frowned. “When are we going to get a real assignment?”

  Tabitha said that Tac 47 was who the Agency used when something really big happened, and they needed people who they knew wouldn’t mess up—but the most dangerous mission we’d had since Houston was just barely, upstairs in Martial Academy. We’d had guard-duty a few times to help transport supposedly dangerous criminals to more permanent holding facilities like the one in D.C., but they had been so sedated that they hadn’t even stirred. I’d just sat in the helicopter there and back again, bored out of my mind. The only other call outs we’d had were to support Strike teams who had called for reinforcements. Steele had done some fancy drone flying, Black had tossed some more weaponry down as resupply, Tabitha had set up as a sniper—just in case—and I had done exactly nothing. It was like they were treating me with kid gloves.

  Tolden’s eyes narrowed. “We go where the director tells us to go. When Ms. Green thinks we’re ready to handle something a little bigger, that’s what we’ll do. You have to realize, though, that a team with a permanent teleprojector is equipped to make some very dangerous situations a lot safer. That means that we will spend more time than you might like doing prisoner transport. If you need to, you can force someone back to sleep. That may not seem like a lot, but it’s a great skill when you’re in a tin can flying over Lake Michigan next to a serial killer with telekinesis.”

  I nodded. Adrenaline aside, I was glad we weren’t spending every day trying to shoot things. If I had to kill someone, I knew I would never pull the trigger—and that could get some of my teammates killed. That aside, I had thought that now I was a full agent, I would be able to protect more people. Instead, I’d just spent every single weekend training.

  Tolden must have guessed at least part of what I was thinking, because he gave me a gentle smile. “Go home, 32. You did well today. I’ll see you back here on Monday, yeah?”

  I nodded and turned to leave, only to stop. “Um, sir? Where do I put the dress?”

  Tolden grinned. “Just leave it with Cal. She needs to fix it up so it doesn’t cause any sensory distractions for you in the field. She should have your street clothes, too.”

  Sure enough, Cal was waiting for me in the hallway, and had everything I needed. A few minutes later, I was leaving through Martial Academy’s front gate. I could still feel the crush of minds behind me with the party still in full swing. The fundraiser wouldn’t start winding down for another few hours, so it wasn’t surprising that I had the courtyard to myself. I took a few slow, deep breaths of evening air, then scanned the courtyard with something like wonder. A semester ago, these walls had terrified me. They were thick enough to withstand a siege, but the place they guarded was confusing. Who guarded combed sand and sakura trees—now just starting to bud—with six foot thick stone?

  Now I knew. Martial Academy wasn’t just a school, it was a haven for those with different minds. It was a place where others wouldn’t stare at us when we had sensory issues that neurotypicals would never understand, and where we could look out for each other. We could find our complements—like Tabitha and I. Tabitha spent her life watching the ground because her visual processing was just as bad as my auditory processing was. Together, I could see trouble before it found us, and she could hear it. Martial Academy was a safe place to learn about the world and begin to practice how to be a functional member of society. Yes, it was daunting and confusing, but it had also changed my life.

  I triggered the gate with a sigh and slipped through. It closed softly behind me as I started to walk down the street. I paused as I felt the surface thoughts of two strange minds near me. They were both partially shielded—but not the same way the man from earlier had been. These weren’t iron-clad walls, they were like frozen soap bubbles. I could see some of the colors from their thoughts—even figure out what direction they were coming from, but getting inside would be difficult. The shield shifted frequencies like it was possessed by a demon—in fits and starts, with an order even my blue lines couldn’t predict. What kind of mind could generate a wall like that? I jerked away suddenly as my thoughts flicked to the dining room full of rich, successful people. What if these minds were a threat? What if they held the same madness the person from earlier had? Should I go back and tell someone about them? I shook the questions away. If I went back to Tolden now, what would I tell him? There were minds covered by frozen soap bubbles loitering around Martial Academy? That was hardly actionable. I needed to get a closer look.

  I located the minds. They sauntered toward me, coming from the section of the street with the darkest shadows. I turned so I could see them, but they were hard to distinguish from the darkness because their forms didn’t quite fit anything my match program was designed to look for. I widened the search parameters, then gasped as I finally found them.

  The first one saw me only moments after I finally differentiated them from the shadows. He snarled and started to rush at me. The second followed only a moment later—and they were fast! I cursed my curiosity. Backup would be nice right about now.

  I didn’t need to direct my lines to compute the likelihood of attack. It hovered red in my vision at ninety-eight-point-nine percent.

  My chance of surviving that attack was three-point-two percent.

  That wasn’t possible! What could possibly skew the data so far in their favor? My exhaustion evaporated as I strung together the modules
I would need to face this threat. As part of the preparation, I pulled the data to reexamine it—the last thing I needed during a fight was my lines going all wonky. Then I shoved it to the back of the queue. It was time to fight. I could analyse the data later, if I survived this encounter.

  I clenched my fist to start the plasma pulser I wore on my hand as a matter of habit, and pulled my hands up to protect my head, then turned as another figure stepped out from the gate. “Boys, I know you’re in a hurry but you ought to stay civilized.”

  Ms. King’s mind flickered into existence behind me and I released the breath I was holding. The two people that had started rushing at me stopped and looked at her.

  Something passed between them and they slumped.

  “It is our apologies, girl.” The first one said and bent at the waist with a twisting gesture like an awkward bow.

  I looked back at Ms. King, whose eyes were as hard and impenetrable as flint. Her jaw was clenched, and she stood with balance distributed for fighting. “Go home, Farina,” she said.

  I didn’t argue. My heart tripped in my chest as I walked the opposite way down the street. When I was out of view, my restraint shattered and I broke into a run.

  What were those things? Their minds weren’t normal, and they didn’t fit with the neurodivergent data I’d collected at the party—but they were different from the man with the badly-tied bowtie, too! What had my blue lines seen that I hadn’t to give such a stark picture of my death? The numbers were clear. If whatever they were had decided to finish their attack, then I would have been dead. I’d never felt that helpless in my entire life! How could I defend myself against something like that?

  But why? Even my odds against Houston had been roughly 40-60.

  I queried my lines, but the only answer was a picture of a creature in handcuffs being escorted by a Strike team through the middle of the rotunda. Her face was globular and blurred beyond recognition, like my father’s when I tried to remember it. I examined my memories to see if I could remember a scene like that in the rotunda, but there was nothing.