by Jenn Lyons
reliably get off-world in one piece. When we were far enough out, we jumped out of the Sol System. It wasn’t too long after that this place was hit by the comet. It is highly unlikely any of the others still on the ground survived.”
He didn’t say anything to that, just stared at me, then turned to look at the jungle, at the large impact crater. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe me: this was pretty convincing proof that something had gone wrong here, but it was a lot of shock to process so quickly.
“What made this Kaimer School so dangerous that the Sarcodinay would do this to cover it up?”
“Oh, that’s easy: they were training High Guards.”
I might as well have told him I was a Kantari on holiday for all that he believed me. He snorted and started to laugh, clearly waiting for me to continue my comedy routine with the one about the Keeper, the Thralnadian, and the Meshikath walking into a bar. When I didn’t laugh, or smirk, or wink at him to let him know I was pulling his leg, his expression sobered. “But why would-?” I could see the moment of comprehension, as his eyes went wide and he realized what I was actually saying. He forgot to finish asking the question.
“They were training us to be High Guards, Campbell. You asked me where I picked up the kind of training that would let me take your men out like that? Blame the Sarcodinay. They were very good teachers.”
“That’s crazy. Why—” He shook his head. “The High Guard are unstoppable killing machines. Look how much damage you’ve done. Why would the Sarcodinay train their enemies?”
“Oh come on, Campbell. We weren’t supposed to be enemies. We were supposed to be grateful children who went to our rooms when we were told. Think of how frustrating we are for the Sarcodinay. We look Sarcodinay, but we’re not. We don’t behave. We’re rebellious. We’re chaotic and undisciplined. The Sarcodinay Empire has existed for thousands of years because the Sarcodinay can be controlled. Literally. The High Guard, their telepaths, keep any dissent sharply curtailed, except their telepathic powers don’t work on humans, do they? And you can’t even send in High Guard as spies or infiltrators, because Sarcodinay can’t pass themselves off as Human. They’re too damn big. So what do you do? If you are the Sarcodinay and trying to keep your little pets under lock and key?”
“You make something you can control.” He looked like he’d just swallowed one of the local jungle insects and it wasn’t quite dead as it wriggled down his throat.
“Exactly. Don’t use Sarcodinay. Sarcodinay stand out. Use Humans. Humans blend. So the Sarcodinay can’t use telepathy on us to force us to be loyal, but that’s okay, because they can’t use it on High Guard anyway, can they? The primary requirement to make it as a Sarcodinay High Guard is psychic ability. That makes them hard to mind control, and the most likely to realize they’d been tampered with. So logically, High Guard would have to be subject to intensive—but traditional—indoctrination when they’re children. They probably didn’t even need to change much to use the same techniques on us.”
“Nobody just gets up in the morning and decides they’re going to move like that, huh?” He raised an eyebrow and tried to smile, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Even if I hadn’t just told him about the people who had immediately died here, that throwaway comment about megacity ELEVEN.two had shaken him. He was well aware of the number of people a standard megacity held as a matter of course: it was an integer with a lot of zeroes on the end.
“But if you’ve spent years of your childhood doing nothing but perfecting your combat skills,” I told him, “it begins to make more sense.”
“You told me the kind of damage that Anguiano took without even slowing down. Are you telling me that was part of High Guard training here?”
I exhaled. “No. No, it wasn’t.” I saw the look on his face and snapped: “You wanted a place to start, a connection that ties all the dead together. I’m telling you that it starts here. Lorvan ran this school, Shaniran’s people brought in supplies and kept us off the grid, Kelhelion’s agents brought the kids here. They are all connected by Kaimer. In fact, of all people involved in this so far, the only people that I cannot guarantee you have a connection to Kaimer are Stephanie Xian and Miguel Anguiano, but I would certainly be willing to place a wager on them being graduates.”
“Jessie Malloy?”
“Was in my class. He escaped on one of the other shuttles.” I squatted down next to the edge of the crater and began looking at jungle leaves. A number of them were misshapen—even without the hard radiation of a fusion reaction, the shock of the explosion and the residual energy of the kicked-up debris had been enough to mutate much of the local flora.
I could remember watching Jessie as he was taken away, scared and worried but determined not to let it show. The striketeams had wanted to know who would be the most reliable, who would cooperate. Jessie was on the list along with a dozen other kids, myself and Paul included, who were flown straight out to a League world for debriefing.
I hadn’t realized then that I was deciding who lived and who died.
He let me look at plants for a few minutes, then cleared his throat. When I looked up, he was apologetic. “I’m sorry-“
“Think nothing of it.”
“But-“ he continued as if I hadn’t said anything. “If I’m going to be able to help you, you’re going to need to tell me everything.”
I blinked. “You think I’m holding back?”
He smiled, gentle and sad and resigned, a touch angry around the edges. “You are. We both know you are. You had all this training. You can kill a man with a strand of his own hair. I get that. They dropped a hunk of ice on this place to clean up the crime scene. I get that too. What I don’t get is how the first leads to the second. I know the transport arrives, but I think it makes a few stops along the way that you haven’t told me about yet.”
I stared out at the view. Next to me, Campbell sat down and kicked his legs off the edge, proving that whatever his failings, he couldn’t count fear of heights as one of them.
“In my career,” Campbell continued, speaking matter-of-factly, “sometimes people won’t talk. It’s not always for the reasons people think. Maybe the witness to the murder doesn’t want to say anything because he doesn’t want to admit he was with his lover when he saw the crime. Maybe the girl who made the not-so-anonymous tip on the smuggling ring became involved because she was buying liquor from them, and only later discovered what the smuggler were planning on doing with those bombs. Sometimes people are just trying to protect themselves or their families. Maybe they’re innocent of one thing, but guilty of something else, and it shuts them up better than a gag.” He shrugged. “Makes my job harder. It’s especially bad when I find out later I could have prevented some terrible tragedy if only I’d had some vital piece of information.”
I glanced over at the large man. “So you’ve got all these deadly, perfectly trained humans. How do you control them again?”
“Brainwashing you said, right?” He gave me the wary glance again, but waited to hear where I was going with the story.
“And Stephanie Xian was the wife of a League Councilman. What does that tell you?” I’m not sure why I couldn’t just bring myself to say it. Maybe the truth would be more palatable if Campbell worked it on his own. Maybe I just didn’t want to say something that would come off too much like a confession.
“That’s a deep undercover assignment. Not many could do that, let alone do that and then make a suicide run at a Sarcodinay Minister. For three to do it, and not...” He inhaled sharply and shook his head. “Tell me you’re not saying what I think you are.”
I almost made a crack about not being a mind-reader, but the words caught in my throat for some reason. I leaned close to Campbell. He smelled like sweat and soap, and I was disturbed at the implications when I realized just how pleasant I found that scent.
“I have no proof. None at all—except one thing, which I think you’ll agree is worthy of not wanting to talk about: after each killing, eithe
r witnessed or heard about later, I’ve remembered something. A triggered memory from the point of view of another person. The first one, chronologically, would have led someone to Lorvan. Lorvan’s lead to Shaniran. Shaniran leads to someone who isn’t dead—yet—but I don’t think we have much time and it won’t surprise me much if her killer turns out to be a former student who dies by their own hand with a smile on their face.”
“Sleepers,” Campbell whispered. “Buried psychological triggers.” He eyed me up and down uneasily. “No wonder you didn’t want to tell me about any of this.”
“The flashbacks themselves do not seem to be lethal. I haven’t felt any strange urges to kill anyone. They seem to be clues.”
“Like a serial killer’s calling card.”
“I think more like a trail of breadcrumbs that our assassin is following from one target to the next. Each person he or she kills leads them to the next person in the chain. Lorvan knew that Paul was potentially a sleeper, capable of being activated, and that’s why his guards killed him. They were protecting Lorvan’s flank in case Anguiano was a distraction.”
“But for the assassin to be following this trail of memories, they would have to have access to those same memories. So that means they need to have been exposed to the same mental conditioning as