Crystal Mind: A novel in the Projector War Saga

by K. A. Excell

  I counted the forms, but there were only two.

  “He got away.”

  Tabitha’s head jerked up. “Are you sure? How do you know?”

  I blinked the image away and rested my head against the back of the car seat. “I just do.” Attempting to explain the way my brain worked wasn’t easy on a good day when I could think unimpaired. I couldn’t do it now, while I was dancing around every possibility of using my blue lines.

  “I see,” the person in front said. There was displeasure there—not in his voice. Somewhere else, in the air floating around him? The throbbing in my head spiked as buzzing filled my ears. “So what am I going to tell your instructor when we get back to Martial Base? It was your solo assignment—I can’t pad it for you.”

  Tabitha paled. “I didn’t correctly estimate how much his telepathy would increase his range, so he heard me. I wasn’t careful enough, and so—”

  “You almost got killed.”

  Tabitha looked down at the ground. “Yes, sir.”

  He grunted. “Well, at least you know where you went wrong. That will give you points with Ms. King.”

  He turned back to me. “And what exactly was all that about back there? Where did you come from, and what is that device on your hand?”

  I frowned at the plasma pulser, still on and operational. Wordlessly, I flipped the ring that would move it to stand-by mode and then closed my fist. “Tabi—Smith was in trouble, so I came to help.”

  The car screeched as he slammed on the brakes. He put one arm over the passenger seat back as he turned to look at Tabitha.

  “You’re telling me you asked a Turnip for help? While you were on your solo assignment?”

  My face flushed and I shifted forward in my seat. “She didn’t ask for help, but she had three cracked ribs and a gash in her shoulder. I wasn’t about to let her bleed out on the street when I could help.”

  He turned to me. “You’re messing with a world you don’t understand—” then, half to himself, “How am I going to explain this security breach to Medina?”

  Tabitha was shaking her head. “I’m not sure—”

  “Not sure about what? You put a civilian Turnip in the line of fire! You knew who you were dealing with. How long have you been studying for this assignment? How long—Nevermind.”

  “She’s not a Turnip.”

  The words were quiet, but the man froze. “What?”

  Tabitha lifted her chin. “She’s not a Turnip, sir. Houston said it after she stepped in back there. He thought she was with us—reasonable given that she is in the recruitment class at Martial Academy.”

  He relaxed just a bit. “She’s a recruit?”

  Tabitha nodded. “New—but Burton thinks she’s unlocking herself.”

  “Burton hasn’t even managed to complete her graduate assignment yet.”

  “But she is observant, and she’s been around as long as I have,” Tabitha argued.

  The man shook his head. “This is a mess.”

  “What mess?” I asked. Recruitment class? They had to be talking about Ms. King’s Social History class, but graduate assignments? Turnips? Why was Tabitha following Houston in the first place? Who was this man? And, above all, why was my stepping in a problem?

  Houston was going to murder Tabitha or, if not murder, the beat her within an inch of her life. Yes, it was dangerous. Yes, I could have died, but I didn’t. The chills from using the pulser weren’t life-threatening, and whatever emotional trauma had happened to turn me into an automaton was just life. I’d gone through worse.

  Tabitha sighed. “You know Ms. King recruited you for the Social History class, and you know we run tactical exercises and do other things way beyond the scope of the school. That’s because Ms. King is a recruiter for Beta-One. It’s an agency for neurodivergents—people whose brains were formed differently. Most of the time, those differences aren’t severe enough to do more than impact how people interact with society. In some, few circumstances, people can develop abilities.”

  I closed my eyes and leaned back against the car seat as the man started the car.

  “So when I saw the rocks lift off the ground in that alley?”

  “Houston and that man he had with him were both telekinetics. They lift things with their minds.”

  No wonder I hadn’t found anything supporting them. Houston must have lifted them with his mind.

  I shook my head as images—things I’d seen but had thought impossible—flitted through my mind. The first of those was the shimmering that had happened while Tabitha was trying to warm me, but it was followed by an image of Houston standing there in the hallway. Had West used some sort of power to hide me? Had I used some sort of power to hide myself?

  “You’re a telekinetic, too, aren’t you?” I asked.

  She nodded. “There are telepaths, too. Tolden is a pretty strong telepath,” she motioned at the driver. “Houston was a mediocre one at S4 or S5.”

  The flashes of thoughts, and the feelings, and what I saw when I looked in people’s eyes suddenly made sense.

  I could see all those things, not because I was reading some hidden language in their eyes, but because I could see into their minds. “And me?”

  Tabitha frowned. “Tolden, can you read her?”

  The man at the wheel shook his head. “Some Turnips have strong walls, though.”

  “Yes, but the strength of a telepath’s walls is generally proportional to how strong a telepath they are, or how strong a teleprojector.”

  “A teleprojector—or a projector telepath—is a telepath who can not only read others’ thoughts, but can put their own into someone else’s head. Only the strongest telepaths can be teleprojectors.”

  I frowned as I tried to sort the information and place it so I could remember it later. “So this Beta-One is an agency for telepaths, teleprojectors, and telekinetics?”

  Tolden gave a short bark of a laugh. “We take all sorts of minds. We have people with impeccable hand-eye coordination, minds that work in tastes, smells, numbers, colors, sounds, or even emotions. Sure, we recruit mostly telepaths, projectors, and kinetics, but that’s just because they’re easier to detect.

  “Part of our other function is to train these special neurodivergents on how to use their abilities. You see, there are millions of neurodivergents in the world. Most of them will go their entire lives without knowing that they are different in such a radical way. Most of them, even if they have Psionic genetics don’t ever unlock themselves. They don’t discover their ability. Those who do, though,” he let out a long whistle and shook his head. “They have the potential to become real problems. Think Hitler. He was a low level projection telepath. He used the ability to plant thoughts and, mostly, emotions in others’ heads to rise to power and plunge the world into chaos for how many years? Imagine if every person with that potential was allowed to run free.”

  I’d seen the films on the holocaust and the World Wars. Still, how did one suppress an entire population of people with abilities like that? The only thing that came to mind was concentration camps. “So how do you prevent that?” I asked, quietly.

  Tolden hissed air out through his teeth. “First, we try to recruit promising neurodivergents. If they work out, we introduce them to the Agency, and they might find employment with us in data analysis, engineering, research and development, intelligence, tactical, or any of the splinter departments that upkeep our bases scattered around the world. If they don’t work out as possible employees or if they don’t want to work for us—after all, some wish only to live their lives, and that’s fine—we train them in the proper use of their abilities and insert a tracker into their arm. We erase any potentially compromising memories, and that’s that. As long as they don’t try to cause World War III, we leave them alone.”

  “Then there’s the third group.”

 
He sighed again and shook his head. “There are those who, like Hitler, want to use their abilities to build their own personal empires at the expense of world peace. Some cause wars, others turn terrorist but, regardless of what they do to cause upheaval, they need to be stopped. It’s the Tactical department’s job to stop them. Mostly, we sedate them and bring them in. Occasionally, harsher methods are required—but we try to limit that kind of thing.”

  I frowned. “You work as a prison for naughty neurodivergents.”

  “That’s right.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him as bits of information jumped out in my vision. “What was that you said about erasing their memories?”

  Tolden’s frown deepened. “There are very few projector telepaths of any real power in the world, but those who have a large amount of projection strength have the ability to delete memories. We don’t have to do it often, but it is possible.”

  A chill ran down my spine. “Why are you telling me all this?”

  Tolden pulled through a set of black wrought iron gates and kept driving around the back.

  “You’re in the recruit class, which means Ms. King thinks you’re suitable material to be employed by the Agency. You have only passed the preliminaries, so we don’t know for certain. If worst comes to worst, we can just delete your memories and it will be like this conversation never happened.”

  I swallowed.

  Tolden shrugged. “It is what it is. That said, Smith’s going to take the fall for this if it doesn’t work out, so I’d rather you have clean and pretty thoughts when I hand you over to the Projectors. If you don’t, you might as well try to cut and run so I can haul you in, because there is no hiding anything from the projectors.”

  Images of Zachary and Houston overlaid on my vision made me cringe. Still, I’d had a definite reason to do what I did both times. I had nothing to hide.

  Tolden tapped a button and a portion of the cement driveway slid open to reveal a ramp. He drove in, and the driveway slid closed behind us.

  My head still throbbed from information overload and how hard I’d driven my blue lines earlier, so I took a moment to find my safe-space.

  A few minutes later, I stepped out of the car.

  Chapter Twelve

  Tolden stood close to me as we strode through the front door. Tabitha limped off another way—presumably to find medical care, but I didn’t ask.

  My heart was in my throat and, in spite of Tolden’s verbal explanation that everything would probably be fine as long as I didn’t have anything to hide, I was still nervous.

  He didn’t take his attention off me once while we moved through the facility.

  Three rooms and three checkpoints later, we moved through a hall and into a huge, white rotunda filled with groups of people headed this way and that. A trio of people in white lab coats with clipboards stood talking in a circle while men and women in street clothes laughed and talked as they moved across the area. Occasionally, I could see people in black suits with straps securing gadgets I couldn’t name, except to say that every single one of them had a silver weapon of similar design to the weapon West had been cleaning yesterday visible on their belt. I started extrapolating from previous data and labeled the people in the black suits as agents from the tactical section Tolden had mentioned, and the ones in white lab coats as from research and development.

  My blue lines all jumped from even analysis to concentrated data in one corner of the rotunda as one group of people in those black suits emerged from a door two by two. They were formed around a woman in a long red dress that flowed with her as she moved. The fabric was all wrong, but my lines couldn’t tell me why. I stared at her a while as they marched through the rotunda. There was something about her form—she was too tall, too lean to be natural. I had only studied genetics in passing, but her figure didn’t fit with any comparative analysis I ran. Above all of it was the persistent flashing of ‘anomaly detected’ over my vision.

  I shook my head to clear the flashing words, but it didn’t help. The buzzing sound that wasn’t really a sound was back, beating at my mind. I pursed my lips and triggered the BYE-BYE module to force everything away so I could re-evaluate the situation. The woman’s head lit up blue as my blue lines synthesized new information with old. The buzzing in my head was this telepathic gift Tolden had told me about. This buzzing was also very different from the other buzzing I had heard during the tactical game in Social History. Something about that woman’s mind was disturbingly different. A second location lit up blue, and I focused on her fingers that caressed the chains on her handcuffs. She scanned the room, wary, but not afraid.

  I tried to recall everything from my earlier conversation with Tolden, about my telepathy. Could I use it more deliberately than trying to process this awful buzzing? I bit my lip as I remembered the things I saw in people’s eyes—and how I got stuck in Mom’s. Except, I wasn’t stuck in her eyes, I was trapped in her mind. If looking people in the eyes helped me read their mind, then perhaps it would give me the information I needed to fully understand what was so disturbing about this woman?

  I took a deep breath, then deliberately met the woman’s eyes. I froze. “That thing isn’t human.”

  I didn’t realize I’d said the words out loud until Tolden stiffened beside me. “Excuse me?”

  I motioned toward the woman in the red dress, now halfway across the rotunda. Her mind was strangely shaped—completely different than any of the pieces I’d picked up from accidentally reading others’ minds over the years. Just to make sure, I compiled every single video I had of meeting someone’s eyes, and ran a comparison analysis. This woman had a six percent resemblance to a normal person’s mind, fifty-six percent resemblance to a neurodivergent mind, and the rest went under the ever growing label of ‘abnormal conditions noted’. If neurodivergent minds were like mine and Tabitha Smith’s, then this woman was on a whole different level. Adding the abnormal musculature to the brain that evolution on Earth never could have created, the only possible explanation was that she was an alien.

  Tolden winced. “Yeah, well we can’t have all the luck in the world can we?” he said to no one in particular. He motioned for me to move along as the blue lines in my vision flashed red. I stayed rooted where I stood.

  “That agent—” if agent was the right word, “is half unconscious.”

  The person in question had his eyes locked on the back of the alien’s head with his arms folded to conceal the fact that he had no use of his right arm. I could see the blood, just a shade darker than the black tactical suit bleeding through. Then, as my focus narrowed down onto him, I could feel the waves of pain lapping at his consciousness. I hissed and withdrew with a half step back. That was one disadvantage of deliberately using my newfound abilities. If I was inside someone’s mind, apparently I could feel their pain, too. I filed that information away as the blue lines revised their estimate of how long he had until he passed out. The agent was swaying where he stood. The alien’s smirk widened.

  Tolden saw the agent stumble and then looked back at me with his growing frown. “Stay put, stay quiet and, if you value your memories, keep your thoughts to yourself.”

  The threat didn’t have any steel behind it, but I still resolved to do as he asked while he strode up to the man at the head of the column. I still had plenty of tools without this new mind-reading thing. I set half my blue lines to gathering any information I could about this place while I focused the other half on trying to follow Tolden’s conversation with the man at the head of the two columns. Unfortunately, Tolden was turned so I could only see the back of his head.

  The man at the front called the column to a halt as Tolden approached him.

  “Tolden, what’s going on?” he asked.

  There was a space, and then the man’s eyebrows narrowed. “Are you sure?”

  Tolden nodded and motioned to the injured agent.<
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  The blood drained from the man’s face. “We have to have a projector—it’s the only way to take this thing down. She’s not some run-of-the-mill neurodivergent, sir. The other half of my strike team is in the infirmary right now—and she took down three of them after we were in the chopper, with a syringe full of tranquilizer in her system!”

  There was another pause.

  The agent shook his head. “Nope, never. AnAd doesn’t know what to make of it and, frankly, I don’t care if she’s human or not. My job is to get her to Interrogation so Medina can have his spooks deal with her. Medical and R&D can figure out exactly what she is after we figure out what she was doing so close to Martial Academy. She’s never going to get to InDep if you pull my teleprojector, so no. I don’t care if you’re the Agent-In-Charge of the mighty Tac 47. Unless you have a better plan, my agent stays here.”

  Tolden looked back at me with speculation in his eyes. A moment later, the man looked at me, and then back to Tolden. “And she’s still locked? No biocard? Are you sure she’s not the more dangerous one?”

  There was a pause, and then the agent nodded.

  Tolden motioned me over, and I came. He looked at me straight on while the leader of the tactical team motioned the projector telepath out of line.

  “Alien? Seriously whacked-out human? We really don’t know. What we do know is that she’s dangerous. Now, that teleprojector you see there needs medical attention, but we need another projector to keep the prisoner in check. The only other one on-base at the moment is arm-deep in surgery, and the tactical projector isn’t going to be keeping anyone in check. He needs to get to the infirmary, and I need you to go with tactical team six. Watch the prisoner, and if she does anything—anything at all—that seems the slightest bit hostile, I need you to get as far inside her mind as you can and start screaming. Understand?”