Aurora told her she was Awakened; something they had never heard of and had no preparation for dealing with. Her confidence rushed back. They had hovercars, maybe she could ask them for a ride to get Esteban and bring him here.
Wait, no… He’s technically an escaped con. I can’t ask the police for a ride.
The door squeaked open, letting her into a modest-sized room with a few desks and holo-terminals. A momentary sense that she wandered amid a dream came on. This place looked as though she had walked into a portal leading from ‘primitive world’ to real life. Air-conditioning rendered the plastisteel floor frigid. She scrambled to the nearest desk and leapt up to sit on the edge. After brushing dirt from her sole, she started to put a sock on, pausing as a man in black approached.
His uniform clung, hinting at every contour in his chest. No one could accuse him of being a bodybuilder; he didn’t even have Esteban’s size, but his toned, athletic frame held her attention long enough to create guilt. She tried to look him in the eye, but found herself studying the lines of his jaw. His nose was prominent but not overbearing, a compliment to dense black eyebrows and a neat mass of thick hair. He looked like the kind of man who might appear in holo-adverts for Egyptian tourism.
“I was hoping to see you soon.” He smiled. “I’m Officer Ahmed, but you can call me Dave.”
She left her sock half on and shook his offered hand. “Kate.”
“Something wrong with your socks?” He smiled.
“No one gave me shoes. I didn’t want to ruin them walking on dirt and crap. It’s so cold in here.” She pulled it the rest of the way on and crossed her legs the other way before dusting off her left foot. A weak tremor ran through her brain. “I’ve never felt cold before. Are you doing something to me?”
“Sorry. Lieutenant Franck hates how hot it gets out here.” He gestured to a small doorway. “I’m just reading your emotional state. After the way you blew into town, I”―he chuckled―“was not expecting you to be happy.”
After tugging the second sock on, she walked where indicated, into a small interview-style room. A plain silver table had a chair on each side and a loop ring for handcuffs by one of the chairs.
“Don’t be concerned.” He slid around her. “You’re not being detained. Walking into town planning to kill someone is a far cry from actually inflicting harm. We haven’t quite become the ‘thought police’ yet.”
She stood stiff as a board in the doorway until he sat. Her fear diminished―too fast. She narrowed her eyes.
“No, that’s not exactly ethical, but I don’t want to waste more of your time than procedure requires.”
Kate lowered herself into the chair, leaning as far away from the eyebolt as it allowed. “So this isn’t personal?”
“I wanted to be the one to interview you,” he said. “It’s not what you are probably thinking. I was intrigued by the emotions going through your mind the other day. I got the feeling you were in need of a sympathetic ear.” He fell silent until she looked up at him. “This is an initial assessment interview. Anything you say here stays within Division 0. You are a pyrokinetic, and you have raised some questions.”
“What happens if I don’t want to answer them?”
Officer Ahmed flashed a ‘trust me’ smile. “People like us are in an awkward place in society. While the majority of psionics want only to live their lives in peace, a few who use their gifts for criminal purposes make us all look dangerous. Our goal is to protect psionics from the wrath of public opinion as much as we protect the public from the individuals who get out of hand.”
Kate shivered, gathering her arms tight around herself. “What are you saying?”
“Want me to turn the A/C down?” Ahmed shifted as if to stand.
“No… I like shivering my ass off.”
He stood.
“I’m serious. I’ve never felt cold before. You can leave it.”
“Never?” He eased himself down.
Kate looked into her lap. “Are you making me trust you?”
“No, but I can if you want me to.” He winked.
She found his stare boyish at the same time unsettling. “How much did Althea tell you?”
“Almost nothing. The girl’s been unconscious as long as you have. Whatever she did to you took a lot out of her.” Officer Ahmed fiddled with a screen embedded in a gloss black forearm guard. “Our sensors did register your skin temperature varying from six to seven hundred degrees. Hold up your foot, please.” After a momentary confused look, she raised her leg and let her heel thunk onto the table. Ahmed held his forearm out, still watching the screen. “Okay, that’s good.”
Kate lowered her foot. “What was that?”
“Your body temp is a little under normal. That’s likely the air set to Antarctic.”
Two Officer David Ahmeds stared at her, one real and one a near-perfect reflection in the table’s surface. Being an object for men to gawk at was not a new feeling; having him look at her came hand in hand with the painful awareness she could be touched now. She closed her eyes and thought of how Esteban smelled. Ahmed didn’t leer, but his gaze felt uncomfortable nonetheless.
“So, tell me about yourself,” he said.
“You’ll shoot me in the head if I’m honest, and you’ll know if I’m lying.”
“Are you a serial killer?”
Kate laughed, a little too coldly for his visible comfort. “Not quite. I have killed, but I don’t get a thrill out of it. Most of the targets were other criminals.”
“Vigilante?” He cocked an eyebrow.
“No… I got involved with the Syndicate. I was like fifteen living on the street and he gave me a place to stay. It started with ‘I need you to do me a favor, Kate.’”
“I see.” He fiddled with a datapad. “Why don’t you start back a bit farther?”
“I don’t even know if I had parents. My earliest memories are of being inside a tank of goo in a lab. They let me out now and then for tests and experiments. How hot can I make this box, can I ignite this or that. They couldn’t find a way to turn off my constant heat, so they tried to kill me when I was seven.” Kate recounted her escape, and subsequent years living like a wood nymph. “I guess I was like fifteen or so when I got tired of being alone. I saw a big metal bird―I didn’t know what a shuttle was then―go overhead and followed the direction it had gone until I found the city.”
“East City?” he said, recording notes via a holo-panel.
“No, the other huge city on the east coast.” She smirked.
“Just clarifying it wasn’t one of the settlements in the Scattered Lands.”
“I was already in the Scattered Lands. That’s where Laughlin-Reed had their lab… but I avoided people whenever I saw them, which wasn’t often.” Kate shifted, crossing her legs the other way. “I wandered into the city. Some people tried to help me, but they ran off screaming when they burned themselves. I was ashamed and ran until I was alone again in an alley somewhere.”
He offered a sympathetic look.
She recounted her experiences with street gangs, and her none-too-gradual change from innocent nature child to nocturnal scavenger. “I got attacked every couple of days at first. I don’t remember how many I killed. Most survived though, maimed. Eventually word got around and they left me alone.”
“How long did you spend in the disavowed sector? What did you eat?”
“Rats, trash, whatever I could steal from CyberBurger.” She explained her encounter with the manager, and El Tío. “He had someone make me this bracelet that projected holographic clothes. I could go out in public without causing a scene. El Tío treated me well, and I’m not going to betray him now. All I’m going to tell you about that is I had to work for him.”
“I can imagine,” said Ahmed. “No one would see you coming. How many were there?”
“A few dozen.” She looked at the face he made. “You’re concerned that I don’t feel anything?”
“I am.”
&nb
sp; “It was a job. They were all dirty in one way or the other. Every one of them lied, cheated, stole, or killed. No one was innocent. Except that deer.”
Ahmed winced. “You feel more remorse over an animal you hunted, but nothing for contracts on human lives?”
“The deer never tried to hurt me.”
“Neither did Althea.” At the spike of guilt, he drew a breath. “Sorry, that just came out. I’m curious.”
“The only thing I’ve ever really wanted was to become part of the world. I lived my whole life at arms’ length. I was going west to find a man called Archon, who said he could fix me.”
“Who is this Archon?”
“Some kind of doctor with a funny accent. I haven’t met him yet, only a holo call.” She shivered, cupping her hands over her mouth and exhaling warm air into her fingers. “He thinks I’m some kind of special psionic that’s more powerful than normal. He’s in the west, so I tried to get there. This old man dressed like a priest came out of nowhere in the middle of the night. Something about him scared the shit out of me just from looking at him. At first, I tried to kill him, but he wouldn’t burn. He told me there was a demon, an abomination, who had disguised itself as a child. Whatever he was, he wanted me to destroy it to save these people. The closer I got to this place, the angrier I became. I don’t really remember the last two hours or so before I wound up kneeling in the middle of the street bawling my eyes out.”
“Given the life you’ve led so far, Kate, I can understand how you would be angry. It’s a dangerous thing to hide your loneliness under. Any empath could make it spill over and turn you dangerous. The old man might’ve been ‘The One.’”
“The one?” Kate blinked. “What one?”
“He’s a cult leader. Has a ‘church’ hidden somewhere out here in the Badlands. Psionic suggestive.”
“Human?”
Officer Ahmed nodded.
“It wasn’t him. If he was human, he’d be dead.”
“You’re so sure? Perhaps your entire meeting with him was a dream or hallucinatory experience.”
“No, I’m sure. I just don’t know what to believe. He said the girl was a demon disguised.” Kate looked down. “Althea’s not a demon. She―”
The door opened. A petite woman in Division 0 blacks walked in, dropped a pair of boots on the table, and left without a word.
“Be my guest.” Ahmed gestured.
With the eagerness of a child on her birthday, Kate grabbed them, shoved her feet in, and secured the four plastic fasteners down the side of each one.
“I trust they fit,” he said.
“You measured my foot.” She shifted her leg side to side, appraising the boots. “Sneaky.”
“Call it a deposit on your uniform. They’re standard issue… The locals don’t have much in the way of footwear aside from moccasins made of prairie dogs, or whatever the heck those things are.” He extended the datapad to her, pointing at an open square at the bottom of a blue screen with lighter blue text that looked like a list of clothing items and other random equipment. “Would you mind giving a thumbprint?”
“My uniform?” Her knuckles whitened on the chair. “Whoa… hold on. After what I just said about the Syndicate, you’re trying to recruit me? What’s the thumbprint for?”
“Just proof you were really here and we really had this interview. A procedural thing.” He smiled in a way that made her trust him.
She’d seen a lot of men smile while working for El Tío. None had ever seemed so genuine. She reached over and pressed her thumb to the glass, holding it as a thin green line swept up and down. A digital ghost of her fingerprint remained after she pulled back.
Ahmed leaned back and tapped a few more buttons on the datapad. “In the interest of public safety, and public opinion, Division 0 takes certain liberties. Of course, there will need to be a psychiatric evaluation and possibly a telepath verifying your story, but yes, we would love to have you. Naturally, if you are sworn in, you would no longer be able to ‘work’ for El Tío.”
“I’m not sure that’s going to be possible.” Kate studied her new boots, unable to look at him. What am I, in heat or something? “What about the corporation that ran the lab? They are after me.”
“What makes you believe you are hunted? Have you seen them since?”
This time, her shiver didn’t come from the temperature. “The man outside the lab where they made me… the way he looked at me.”
“Kate. Look at me. Your fear felt like a child having a nightmare; I think you may be overreacting to an early trauma. Let me see him.” Ahmed reached across the table and held her hand.
Her initial instinct to pull back gave way to an eager grip. Still trembling, she lifted her gaze and thought back to the man on the porch. Sensation spread around her brain, as if the hands of a ghost caressed it.
“Agent Perrin?” Ahmed lifted an eyebrow. He went wide-eyed at her memory of the orange flash. Recalling the lot full of injured soldiers led to a more recent eruption of the same fury―the house full of nibblers. “How…”
“I don’t really understand how I did that.” She clasped her hands at her mouth and exhaled warm air over her fingers. “Both times I was scared shitless and certain I was about to die.”
“I’ll post a memo that no one should play startle pranks on you.” He couldn’t quite bring himself to smile.
“The first time I killed someone, I was seven.” Kate frowned at her reflection on the table. “I didn’t think about wanting to boil the blood inside his body. It just happened. I hated him. I wanted him to go away.” Her gaze flicked up to Ahmed. “He was going to kill me. I was a little kid. A… project that didn’t work out.”
He squeezed her hand. “I wish I could say I’d never heard stories like that before. Some of the kids in the dorm had their own parents try to kill them. Others were abandoned as young as five once their abilities manifested.”
“Are we all freaks?” Kate looked away. Aurora’s talk of Awakened made her feel like an outcast even among the unwanted.
“Not all.” He kept quiet for a moment. “Some of us have good families and joined Division 0 because we wanted to help others like us. The man you are afraid of looks like C-Branch. If he is, you are right to be concerned.”
She tried to pull away, but he didn’t let go. “That sounds ominous.”
“Military intelligence. I’d say they have a strange relationship with the law, but so do we.”
“They told me my genetics were based on a Russian girl named Myshkin, but I’m not an exact clone. The scientists were trying to make me stronger.”
Ahmed ran his thumb over the back of her hand. “I feel your confusion turning to sadness. Don’t feel alone―you’re not. We can protect you, even from C-Branch. If you’re on our roster, they can’t touch you. I am not sure exactly how that arrangement came to be. That sort of thing is way above my pay grade. You could have a future with Division 0. A real life. A purpose. You can make up for what you did with the Syndicate. That life could be left behind.”
“There’s a man I have feelings for…” Kate relayed the story of the caravan. “He’s got some legal problems, but he didn’t try to escape. Bernie was going to murder them all out of panic.”
He ran a finger over his lips, thinking. His face seemed too stoic. “It’s reassuring that this Esteban fellow accepted your gift. Non-psionics so often condemn us.”
“Althea’s father seemed to want me to stay in Querq for a while. I think I owe it to them for what she did for me. Can I bring Esteban here? You won’t try to arrest him, will you? If I agree to join, can you do something for his record?”
He let go of her hand. “I’m just a tactical officer. I can’t speak for the captain, but I can ask. Do you know what his crime was?”
Kate leaned back. “Something about using stolen parts for repair work on hovercars.”
“Oh,” said Ahmed. “Nothing violent. We can probably work with that.”
“So, w
hat happens now?”
“Well, at some point we’ll need to bring you to the city so we can properly assess your abilities. Depending on how that goes, it’s possible you could request a post out here. We’re fortifying Querq to protect Althea, mostly against corporate aggression.”
“Did you try to recruit her too?”
Ahmed laughed. “Yes, we did, but she wasn’t interested. She agreed to an assessment and to help us if we asked in exchange for providing material assistance to Querq.”
“So she joined but didn’t join.”
“That’s one way to put it.” Ahmed got up and offered his hand again. “Are you hungry?”
“Now that you mention it.” Kate scratched at her stomach. “It has been two days.”
ndless smears of white paint pulsed on the road, devoured by the front of an electric motorcycle. The faint sound of the in-wheel motors faded under the rush of wind in Kate’s hair. Less than fifteen minutes out of Querq, she shot past the culvert where she and Alejandra slept after the nibbler attack. She slowed, looking left at the blast radius. No sign of activity caught her eye. Either she’d burned them all, or any survivors had gone elsewhere. A shiver ran down her spine as the memory of that night came back. She turned away, wanting to leave that particular patch of desert nothingness behind.
Momentary hesitation paralyzed her as she forgot how to speed up. In a few seconds, she remembered a twist of the right hand would do it. She thought of Officer Ahmed and the previous day spent learning to drive. When she had asked for a ride, he had gone to great lengths to explain why he couldn’t fly her east without sounding disinterested. He had said something about off-the-leash AI combat-bots running around the northern central region with missiles and a bad temper. The government had sent them into the Badlands to clean up all the mutants decades ago, but they rebelled and built an old city once called Detroit into a deadly war machine.
At first, she thought he didn’t want her to leave. Before she could challenge him on it, citing the disappointed look in his eyes, he came up with the small, black bike. Division 0 had sent a handful of them to Querq for use by the officers when a car proved impractical or dangerous. When one last urgent stare failed to convince her not to go, he’d offered her a pistol and a backpack with rations and water. She grinned remembering the look on his face when she pointed out how much faster she would return if they took one of the patrol craft.
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