I’m scanning all over the restless crowd, a frozen-still Sammi, the wide-eyed jackers—suddenly, the static-field of the jackers’ helmets cuts out.
Exposing their mindfields.
The orbs dive.
I jolt as some make contact, slamming into chests and backs, sending mind-blasting energy through jacker-bodies. But some orbs miss their targets—Sammi must have surged them. They careen wildly over the helmeted heads of the nearby readers, who duck and cringe. The orbs rise up for another pass.
Come on! I can’t link that or I’ll distract her.
Half the jackers are down, writhing on the ground. The rest are crouched, trying to take cover, but it won’t matter if Sammi doesn’t find the kill switch. The orbs rise and dive again, buzzing fast and slamming into the cowering people below them, but instead of sticking to their bodies and zapping them, the orbs smack into helmets and arms and legs, then tumble to the ground.
She did it.
Then my phone buzzes.
Thousands of phones buzz.
It’s so loud, everything jolts to stillness as people look around wondering what is happening now. Then they start pulling out their phones—even my Secret Service guard is yanking his from his pocket—and Juliette’s vid montage starts to roll. Her father’s face with MINDWARE CEO COMMITS MURDER stamped across. A fast clip of a jacker being mind-tortured in the Jacker Detention Center. A roll of account ledgers, bank accounts and fund transfers—the dark money paid to fund the orbs. Then another jacker tormented. And another. Bodies flashing by too fast to see, and then… the orb in Tiller’s hand. A vid plays of him shoving it against a jacker’s temple and shocking him… to death. The next clip is the body being rolled into the prison morgue.
Holy crap. They have everything on Tiller.
And that’s my signal.
I stuff my phone in my pocket, wrap my mindfield around the Secret Service guard’s helmet, grit my teeth through the nauseating contact with its anti-jacker shield… and yank it apart. He doesn’t even realize it until I’m in his head, jacking him to walk back behind the cover of the steel wall, where no one can see, and sit down.
Then I knock him out.
The crowd is just now reacting to Juliette’s vid—murmurs and angry shouts are rising up. The helmeted reader kids are split between moving forward to check out the fallen jackers and edging back toward their parents. The orbs are still dispensing mind-killing juice to the original jackers that were struck, the ones Sammi couldn’t stop, but there’s nothing I can do about that right now.
I reach out to the Obedients backstage. I only need a light touch on each, so I try grappling the slippery mindfields of all thirty at once—I’ll either kill all of them or free them all at once. Except for Wright, who’s still hiding among them in plain sight. I close my eyes, focus completely, and tug, gently, gently… all thirty let loose at once and spin. My eyes pop open, the screams of the Obedients rising faintly over the rumbling of the crowd. Oh crap. I search quickly and find Anna and restore her mindfield to the map I have memorized. Renell is next. But then suddenly, some are dropping—and winking out of existence. What? I scramble to search the other minds for anyone I know, anyone I recognize, but I simply don’t. And they keep going dark. And that darkness is pulling me in… someone is killing them.
Dammit! I drop them all into jacker configurations, but blank ones, erased of any memory or idea of what’s happening because I just don’t have their mindmaps. Or any time.
The distant screaming stops.
Then I hear the gunfire. Pops like fireworks, only I know they’re not.
I search—the Obedients are down, fallen during their resurrection, and a half dozen helmeted heads hover above them. I surround one helmet and yank—it’s just a reader inside, so I knock him out. More shots ring out, so I grab two at once, yank, and then two more. Then the last. They’re all out.
The shooting stops.
I struggle for breath, bracing a hand against the wall as nausea hits from taking out six helmets so fast.
Wright. I forgot her in the madness. She’s cowering by the fallen. I quickly knock her out, spin her mindfield back into a reader configuration. Even as I’m mentally occupied with that, what I see with my eyes makes my heart stutter. The orbs are reanimating—what? The ones Sammi didn’t disable are rising up from the inert bodies they attacked. Up on stage, Torquin is livid, arguing with his Secret Service agents, shoving away the helmet they’re trying to put on him and jabbing a finger at the concrete plaza. I look to see what—
Sammi. She’s among the helmeted kids, but two of Torquin’s agents are shoving through the crowd to get to her. Juliette and Scott are a dozen feet away with the unhelmeted readers—Juliette’s straining to go to Sammi, but Scott’s holding her back. The orbs swoop away and up, readying for another attack, and Sammi’s laser-focused on them, even as the agents close in.
I link in fast to her head, Sammi, get out!
The agents pull their weapons and shout for her to stop.
Readers scream and scatter.
Sammi doesn’t move. In her head, she’s shoving the orbs away from jackers, surging them and breaking their shields, jamming in the kill switch code. One orb slips by her surge field and slams a jacker, but she brings it down before it can zap her. Then another and another.
A shot cracks the air.
No!
Sammi’s body jerks back and falls to the concrete.
The agents run up, weapons trained on her, shouting for her stay down.
She doesn’t move, but I can feel her mindfield… she’s still battling the orbs, even as she fades.
Sammi, no, stay with me. Let the orbs go! I’ll take them.
Stop them, Zeph. Her thoughts grow confused. The pain is clouding everything. Stop them.
I yank out of her head and focus on the orbs. I can’t surge them like Sammi, but I can catch each orb isolated and break its machine-driven AI jacker-field, just like in Jackertown. I crack through one, then another, then another—I’m whittling them down, but I can’t catch the last two before they slam into more jackers, taking them down. And while the orbs are discharging, I can’t get near.
Then I realize everything else has gone to hell.
Anna and Renell have led a charge of Obedients out from backstage, and they’re brawling with the Fronters and the CJPD off one side of the stage. Readers are tangled between, bodies for jackers to commandeer and human shields for the Fronters. I’ve lost track of Wright, who’s now a reader in this mess. Dead or mind-wiped jackers litter the ground around the Thinkers statue. The live ones are fighting the Secret Service guarding them and winning—the guards are outnumbered ten-to-one. Their helmets come off, and they go down. Sammi lays bleeding out on the ground. Scott has taken out the agents who shot her by wrestling their helmets free—jackers must have done the rest. Juliette is standing over Sammi’s body, protecting her from the panicked mob of readers, trapped between the Fronters and CJPD pushing through from the perimeter and the core of jackers in the center, who are jacking the mob to protect themselves.
It’s utter mayhem.
Torquin’s trying to shout above the chaos, but even his mic can’t overcome the deafening roar of panic. His two remaining Secret Service agents are physically manhandling him, hauling him offstage.
Stop them, Zeph.
Sammi didn’t mean the orbs.
I lurch toward the stage, sending my mindfield racing ahead. I take down one agent—breaking his helmet shield and jacking him out—he falls like a slab of meat to the stage floor. The other panics, whips out his gun, and shoves the president behind him, but in all the chaos, he can’t track me. I break his helmet and jack in—he falls flat on his back, gun tumbling from his hand. Torquin has a helmet on now, but that’s obviously not stopping me. I haven’t even reached the steps to ascend the stage, and I’ve got Torquin’s helmet broken and his mind wide open.
I jack the President of the United States to calmly walk off
stage. Then I hustle up the steps and meet him there. We’re hidden from the civil war raging a few yards away.
Torquin clutches his chest as I slow down his heart. “No,” is all he can gasp, but I hear his thoughts. Begging for his life. Offering me the world. He grasps hold of a steel beam, one of the girders holding up the soaring sails of the bandshell.
I get in his face. “You made this happen! It didn’t have to go this way! None of this did!” I’m screaming in his face as I slow his heart. Rage is too tame a word for what this man is forcing me to do—stealing everything from me by giving me no choice but to stop him. Torquin, if I let him live, will destroy everything. There will be no chance for peace. No hope for a future, not for jackers. Just endless death and hate and the torture of innocents.
I dive deep into Torquin’s mind, scouring his memories, just to see him squirm.
But what I see there…hidden in the depths…
I step back.
Blink. Twice.
I speed up Torquin’s heart. He gasps for air, then groans as I dive deeper into his mind…
There’s a camp—an internment camp. It’s dusty and cold, upstate New York, and it’s for these new freaks of nature, the mindreaders. A man goes to visit his twenty-year-old daughter at Camp Zero—she’s been there for two years. The man is tall and powerful. He’s the Senator from New York, and he has a secret. A secret he must share with his daughter but only if she can keep it—he’s afraid her wide-open mind will tell the world. They practice. For hours. Days. Months. She keeps a small secret. Then a larger one.
When she’s ready, he tells her.
The secret cannot die with him, and he’s not sure how long he’ll live. People who know have been dying—by hanging, by jumping off bridges, by bullets in back alleys. Only those directly involved or with clearance, knew. That it wasn’t pollution that undid us. It wasn’t the slow accumulation of pharmaceuticals that built up concentrations of a strange psychoactive drug in the water supply, and eventually the bloodstreams, of the planet. We didn’t poison ourselves into becoming mindreaders. The reactive compound—the one that triggered a genetic change in every human on the planet within five years—was developed in a secret DARPA lab in Chicago. The release into the waterways may have been accidental—the scientist in charge was found hanging from his rafters—but the coverup was entirely orchestrated.
At first, they thought it could be contained. Then, they thought the results—the mindreaders—could be quarantined. But nothing could stop the spread because once something’s in the water… it goes everywhere. And when the second-level mutations occurred—when jackers appeared within the mindreading population only a decade later—the effort to suppress went into overdrive. Because if the world discovered what jackers really were—if the truth of the first spill were known—then humanity would tear itself apart. Jackers had to be denied, hidden, sent to secret camps, and above all…eliminated. Secret testing, decades of research—that was the plan all along. To reverse the effects. Stop the evolution. Contain the threat.
Before it sent humanity back to the dark ages.
So the Senator from New York told his daughter. She became a savvy investor in MINDWARE technologies, building an empire to secure her mindreading family. Her son grew up to be a famous and well-loved Mayor of New York. She told him when he ascended to office. The Mayor had a son—a boy born into one of the wealthiest, most politically-connected families in New York. He was elected to one office after another, a rising star from a political dynasty. And when he was tapped for the Vice Presidency and took the family name to the White House, his father told him the secret that four generations of Torquins had kept.
Then another madman and another spill upended everything. The inhibitors unlocked a second wave of mutations—the destabilization long feared had finally arrived. Everything that was done—bombing the club, the assassination of Julian Navarro, the experiments, the Obedients, the orbs technology—all was in service of containing the threat and keeping the secret that would tear the world apart.
I don’t need to know any more.
I pull out of Torquin’s head. I’ve cracked open his deeply guarded secret. One he has yet to pass on to his own children, too busy trying to keep alive the mystique of the mindreading “superior way of life”—the mythos used to justify the destruction of jacker minds. Of people who are no more responsible for their DNA and their abilities than Torquin himself.
His face is ashen.
“Stand up.” My voice is rough. When he doesn’t move fast enough, I repeat it. “Stand up!”
He does, clutching the riveted beam of the wall. “You can’t kill me, Zeph. I—”
I don’t have time for that. “You’re going to tell this to everyone,” I say, breathing the words through my teeth. “Now.”
“We can’t. Don’t you see? Now that you know—”
“What I know is that you’re killing people to protect a ninety-year-old lie. And that ends today.”
The man is still clutching the beam, shaking his head.
I’m angry, angry deep in my core, but I see it—a path out of the nightmare. It rushes a lightness to my head. “I’m not going to kill you, Torquin.” My voice is shockingly cool. “But the chaos you’ve feared is here.” I sweep a hand toward the stage. “And guess what? You created it. So here’s the thing—you have more than one secret. I know you orchestrated the assassination of the president.”
His eyes narrow. “You have no proof—”
“Oh, but I do.” I fling my mind out over the chaos. Wright is somewhere in the madness, but knowing her, far from any actual danger. I find her cowering backstage. I jack in and command her to come up front. “You see, Wright isn’t actually an Obedient. I lied about that. And she’s well aware that you wanted her “disposed of.” She’s got everything on you, Torquin. Everything.”
I don’t have to be in his head to see the exact moment he realizes his time is up—everything about him goes slack. Even his eyelids droop.
“So,” I continue, “either you go out there and tell the truth—that readers are nothing more than a government experiment let loose in the world, just like jackers—or I’ll have Wright tell the one secret you really can’t afford to have out.”
He doesn’t respond, almost like his brain has been short-circuited by an orb, not merely the consequences of his own hideous actions. Then he lifts his gaze to meet mine, and I can see the tumblers in his mind clicking, working through all the possible ways of escape, but I know there’s only one.
He must know it, too.
A small buzzing sound flies past my ear. I swat at it before I realize—it’s a drone cam.
Torquin sees it.
“Are you ready, Mr. President?” I ask for the camera. Because I’m definitely going on stage with him to make sure this all goes down right.
He pulls in a sharp breath and gives a single, decisive nod—as if he’s still the one in control, and he’s just now ready to return to the stage.
The camera drone follows us out.
The chaos continues to reign in the pavilion, but more people are on the ground now—injured, possibly dead, it’s hard to tell. Wright is waiting in the wings on the far side of the pavilion, frozen in place, looking terrified and bewildered.
I link into her mind.
Why am I standing here! I should just—
Wright. I cut through the panic in her head. Come join us on stage. It’s not a command, just a suggestion, and she stays in place.
I don’t want to—
It’s time for your tell-all. I need her to do this voluntarily. Don’t make me regret keeping you alive.
Her glare could cut diamonds, but she marches stiffly out onto the stage.
The president has something to say, I link to her. And I want him to say it. So let’s just pretend we don’t know he orchestrated a coup, all right? She’s getting within thought-range of the drone cam, so I remind her, Smile for the camera.
The p
resident is trying to get everyone’s attention. “Everyone, please. Calm down and stand down. I’m the President of the United States, and I’m giving you a direct order—stand down.” None of the Secret Service are still standing. Senator Simpson is nowhere to be seen. Some of the CJPD hear the president and pull back—there’s a group of three that keep pressing on, brawling with a trio of jackers. And the Fronters are ignoring him completely, going full melee in the center near the Thinkers statue with the thirty or so jackers and ex-Obedients that are still standing. Readers are hunkered down everywhere, huddled in groups, trying to stay out of the war zone.
I focus on the CJPD first, cracking their helmets and knocking them out. As they fall, the jackers back off. While the president’s shouting for peace, I go for the Fronters next, taking them out, one by one. It’s making me sicker and sicker, but I keep going. Eventually, their numbers are down enough that the rest panic—they try to flee, but the jackers overwhelm them. I spy Anna in the lead. I can’t link into her head, so I tell Renell instead. Go easy on them.
He whips his head around, looking for me.
Up on stage, I link, clutching my stomach as nausea rolls through it.
Got it, he replies then shouts at Anna and the rest. They ease up on the pounding and just wrench helmets off the remaining Fronters and knock them out.
I’m afraid I’m going to be sick. I hold onto the president’s shoulder to stay upright. He gives me a look of alarm like he thinks I’m going to physically attack him or something.
Instead, I just take his mic.
It’s the small thin-tubed kind that adheres to your coat.
I hold it close to my mouth, still clutching the president’s shoulder for support. “Everyone needs to just calm the hell down.” The noise level is already dropping, now that the fighting has stopped. Now it’s just moaning from the injured and crying from the terrified. “Everyone just stop.” My voice booms out over the pavilion. The original thousands that had gathered before have mostly fled. I can still see stragglers lurching along the pedestrian bridge that soars away to the left, but the only people left in the pavilion are those readers and jackers who were stuck in the frenzy near the stage.
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