Vacant

by Alex Hughes

  Tommy looked up from a comic book, his eyes red. He was startled and defensive, but he didn’t want to show it. “What is it?” he asked, sitting up, leaving the comic book up, a picture of a woman in 1940s costume fighting a darkly shaded guy with gears on his arm.

  “This is Adam Ward,” she said. “He’s a telepathic bodyguard, like the other bodyguards. He’s promised not to scare you again—and if he does, you come find me, okay? But otherwise you’re to let him guard you, at least until this situation is over. I need to work now.”

  Tommy’s face went through dismay and fear before settling on something I couldn’t quite read . . . his blank face perhaps. “Can’t you just stay with me for a while?” he asked quietly.

  “Not right now, honey. I need to work,” she said. Then, without any other explanation, she left.

  Which left me and Tommy a few feet from each other, neither one of us precisely happy with the situation.

  I didn’t know how to handle this. I had been counting on Parson to help me get on Tommy’s good side. I had to get on Tommy’s good side. The vision . . . well, it just couldn’t happen.

  Tommy looked back out the door, after his mother, and I felt his loneliness. I couldn’t just keep standing here, so I tried the one thing in front of me.

  “Why don’t you tell me about the comic book?”

  “It’s the tenth one in the series,” he said, like I was an idiot for not knowing. “The Cat Avenger.”

  “Well, I’ve never read The Cat Avengers,” I said. “Is it good?”

  “The Cat Avenger,” he repeated.

  “Is it good?” I repeated.

  He nodded, but I could feel his loneliness again. He really wanted his mom. It had been a terrible day and he wasn’t sure it was over yet. He didn’t know—and I didn’t either—why she couldn’t come sit with him.

  I walled up my worries, all of them, into a small area in the back of my head. If I spent too much time thinking about them in front of Tommy, it wouldn’t be good for either of us. I needed to be the guy he could trust if everything went wrong. That was what a Minder did, and that was what I needed to do now.

  I sat down on a chair not too far from the bed, close enough to be there, far enough not to crowd him. “Look, I’m sorry about earlier.” I hated apologizing, but in this case, he deserved an apology. “I should have done a better job with that. I didn’t mean for—well. You’re going to be a telepath, in a few years, and that changes things. I should have been more careful.”

  Now I had his attention. “I’m going to be a telepath?”

  I nodded. “Your brain has already got the beginnings of a good Ability going. Give it a few years and you’ll be Guild, probably.” I wasn’t sure why they hadn’t found him through the school screenings already, but probably he’d been absent that day.

  “Like on TV?”

  “A little bit like on TV,” I said. “But real telepaths aren’t the big guys you see on TV. They look like everybody else. But they can do cool things.”

  Tommy thought about that. I moved in a little closer in Mindspace and found him surprisingly open, sharing his thoughts with no filter—at least for this moment. He was thinking about some movies he’d seen and the comic book character he was reading. It would be pretty cool to have powers like that. “If I’m Guild, I’ll have lot of friends and people around all the time, right?” he asked.

  “Most Guild people do,” I said. “But you have to be a friend to make a friend too. It’s not guaranteed.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  He probably knew that from school already, but I didn’t want to hand him a blank check. The bigger question was what he’d seen from my head. “You want to talk about what you saw?” I asked.

  “Not really,” he said, and stared at me.

  Okay. I tried it a different way. “Look, what you saw is just one possible future. I’m here to make sure it doesn’t happen that way. We’re all here to make sure it doesn’t happen that way.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “You want me to leave the room now, don’t you?”

  “Maybe.” He looked down.

  I sighed. “I need to be within a hundred feet of you to make sure nothing bad happens, like your other bodyguard. If you want me to go into the hallway, I will, but if there’s some kind of alarm I’ll need to come back until the problem goes away.”

  I expected him to tell me to go, but instead I got a sense of fear and danger from him then, a wobbly memory of the morning. “You’re really a bodyguard?” he said, very quietly.

  “For your mind, yes. And there’re three agents out there who’ll jump in to help if I can’t.” Four, maybe? Plus other minds around the house? I’d have to meet everybody eventually to sort them out.

  “And you’re really going to protect me?” Tommy asked.

  “I am.” I meant it as a promise, a real promise, the kind you didn’t break without bleeding.

  He thought about that for a long while. “Okay,” he finally said.

  “Okay?” I asked.

  “You can stay around for now,” he said.

  “Thanks.” It wasn’t the rousing endorsement I’d expected, but it would work. As I sat there, I monitored the situation around me and tried not to watch the clock. I also worked—hard—not to worry about Cherabino or about the vision in front of Tommy. But it was work.

  * * *

  Half an hour and some talking later, Tommy had settled down with the next comic book in the series and I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to use the restroom, so I went outside into the hall.

  I found Loyola outside waiting for me.

  “How is Tommy holding up?” he asked.

  I looked behind me, to make sure the old wooden bedroom door was closed behind me, and then lowered my voice anyway. How was I supposed to know? “I don’t think the attack’s hit him yet. I don’t know if it will. His mom’s not being very supportive.” And I had my own issues, which I was sure were communicating their own tension to Tommy.

  “I’ve noticed that too,” Loyola said, and then visibly held back another sentence. I was curious, so I peeked. He thought the judge treated her son more like a pet than a child, and violently disapproved. It wasn’t his place to say anything, though.

  His eyes narrowed, as he guessed I was looking at his mind. “Best thing you can do for Tommy is to be there and be consistent. As much as possible anyway. Neither one of us is his mom, but worst thing in the world is to be alone at a time like this.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I was most concerned with his safety, and again, I had to pee. I needed to wrap this up.

  “Tell me what happened. Earlier. When he freaked out.”

  I pushed down irritation. I was still new, and I still had to explain myself. Hell, I always had to explain myself. “I made a mistake,” I said. I caught him up on roughly what I had told Jarrod. It wasn’t a secret, exactly, though it didn’t make me look good either. “You have questions?” I asked.

  He asked a couple, and I answered them.

  I summed up, in the hope of ending the conversation: “It’s just additional information at this point, something for us to take seriously but not to worry about much. We’re already on protective duty. It’s not like this information changes any of that.”

  His thoughts about that were cautious, like someone placing his feet carefully in a darkened room. “How likely is it that we’re dealing with the events of the vision?” he asked. “How much can we plan in advance and head this off?”

  That was the question, wasn’t it? I damped down impatience and decided on honesty. “I have no idea. The future is mutable, or it usually is. I think it’s likely . . . judging from my previous experience here, we’re much better off taking slow moves to change things than aggressive action. Aggressive action can backfire.”

  He huffed. I waited, but
he said nothing else, and his brain was just churning over what I’d said from a few directions, discomfort and speculation mixing with my words. And I needed to go.

  But I’d also been gone from Tommy for several minutes now, and I was supposed to be the Minder. So I took a quick look at Mindspace, behind me, to check on Tommy.

  I got a much clearer view, much faster, than I would otherwise expect. Probably the connection between us meant I could monitor his mind more easily than the average. Tommy was facedown on his bed, working through the comic book, engrossed in the story. He didn’t notice I was there, which was both good and bad.

  Since I was open to the house anyway, I took a look at the surroundings, making sure I could account for all the minds. Everything seemed normal, so far as I knew—but then, in the front room behind me, I felt the bodyguard’s mind shimmer in and out of reality.

  “Crap,” I said.

  “What?” Loyola asked, annoyed, but I was already moving down the hall in her direction. I entered the main room.

  Yeah, she was slumped over on the left in that bowl-shaped chair, hand drooping to the floor, color ashen. The bandage on her arm was covered in blood. But it was her mind that bothered me. Did she have internal bleeding?

  “Jarrod,” I said to him. Jarrod, I said into his mind directly.

  “What?” He looked up, frowning at me from the board over on the right.

  I gestured. “Tanya’s going into shock. Somebody’s going to have to drive her to the hospital. If that’s me, we need to pack up the kid and go now. She can’t wait.”

  I added a little strength to her mind, not enough to stabilize her, but enough to help her last a little longer. It would buy us another few minutes.

  Jarrod sighed and got up. “One thing after another,” he muttered under his breath. He headed out to the porch, me following.

  I blinked in the light of the setting sun.

  “Mendez,” Jarrod said, and she turned around.

  “What?”

  “I need you to get Tanya to the hospital, ASAP,” Jarrod said. “Check on the other bodyguard while you’re there. Take Sridarin with you.”

  Mendez thought dark thoughts about the woman being the one on hospital duty, but out loud she just said, “Yes, sir. Emergency?”

  “Looks like it.”

  The other mind I’d felt came up the front steps. He was a young guy, maybe twenty-one, of Indian descent, and he moved with the quick-footed grace I associated with soccer players. He and Mendez pushed past me immediately; they had Tanya up before I was back in the room.

  “I’m fine,” Tanya mumbled as they half carried her out of the house. I felt her mind fade in and out again, and I added another shored-up piece to her mind. Then I opened up to the house again. Loyola was joining the others up front, the judge was on the phone in her office upstairs, and Tommy was out of his room and looking for me.

  I checked in and then locked myself in the bathroom to take care of my bladder. And worry, a little, where Tommy wouldn’t hear me.

  * * *

  A few minutes later, I met Tommy in the hallway, barely in the front room, senses fully open. His feet creaked on the old wooden floors, as did mine, as did everyone else’s who was moving all too quickly to respond. A chorus of creaks everywhere; it was distracting.

  I needed to pay attention to the mental space, not the physical noise. With everybody involved with the emergency at the front of the house, I needed to pay attention to every single fluctuation in Mindspace in case this was a setup. How anyone could predict that Tanya would go into shock at this exact moment, I didn’t know. But it was my job to be paranoid. And I was worried, more worried than ever, and feeling very paranoid.

  “Is Tanya okay?” Tommy said.

  “Let’s go to your room,” I told him, “away from the windows.” My tone was probably too intense, and I didn’t try to hide my concern for Tanya, but I added a determination to prevent any problems well before they started.

  I reached out and touched his shoulder, pushing him gently in the direction of his room.

  He was scared, suddenly, horribly scared, his mind flashing back to the attack this morning all too vividly. I pushed the images down. I was scared too. It wouldn’t hurt anything to move through a defensive posture—even if nothing was wrong now, it might make him feel safer and me feel more practiced if anything else really did go wrong.

  Inside the room, I closed the door and turned to the window, which seemed too low and too vulnerable. “Here, help me move the dresser in front of the window,” I said. So we did that.

  Huffing and puffing, I stood back. Better, maybe. More warning. With the images of his attack echoing in my head with all his strong emotions, the danger seemed all too real to me now. I opened up my senses wide, and watched the car taking the bodyguard to the hospital leave the property.

  “Is Tanya okay?” Tommy repeated in a small, worried voice.

  “Tanya is in shock.” I turned to him. “They’re taking her to the hospital now. She should be okay.”

  “The hospital?”

  I thought about how to explain it. “When you lose a lot of blood or telepathic energy all at once, it throws your whole body out of whack. You can die.” Old lessons paraded through my head: the mental signatures of someone in Stage 2, where intervention was most effective, which Tanya perhaps had passed. Chemical charts of sodium, potassium, and acidity of the blood, which I’d been forced to learn as part of my teacher-training, both for blood loss and for Ability overwork. I was more familiar with the internal feeling that I’d reached my limits. They pushed you in advanced training, over and over again, for that reason. So you knew when pushing harder would hurt, but be okay, and you knew when pushing meant you could likely die. There were limits to the human mind and body, and while you could train for more endurance, for more strength, all humans eventually hit a wall beyond which they could not go. I wasn’t as familiar with blood loss, with physical damage, but in those cases it had to be the same. Beyond a certain point, you had to have help to survive. “She’ll be fine,” I said, as if by a force of will.

  “She’s not a telepath,” Tommy responded to me.

  I blinked, and paid attention again. I really had spent too much time around normals not to be expecting to be read at any moment. “No, she’s not. She had to have some bleeding inside. I don’t think the arm injury was enough on its own.” I tried to consider whether I could have spotted it earlier. “The hospital isn’t far. She seemed like she’ll do okay with IV fluids. Odds are she should be okay.” I didn’t know whether I was trying to convince him or me. I’d seen too many fellow students—and myself—come back from telepathic shock with a full recovery. But blood loss was different, and she hadn’t felt good.

  “Will Jason die?” Tommy asked, quietly, after a moment.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I looked around and finally settled for sitting on the floor. My knees creaked, but I made it. “There’re a lot of things I don’t know. I’ll try to claim them. But the folks at the hospital have this as their job. They see it every day, and they’re as good as anyone is at making people get better.”

  “That’s not an answer,” he said.

  “No, it’s not, I guess.” I cast about for something to talk about. I’d already struck out on the comic books, and I didn’t need to worry about Cherabino more, not right now. There—over there, the floating anti-grav boats I’d seen once before. “You going to show me the boats there?”

  He sat down, in that boneless way only children had, like his joints were made of rubber. “They’re just boats.” He was actually trying to read me now, and I let him.

  I felt Loyola coming down the hall. Come in slowly, I told him. He’s going to spook easily.

  I got a general feeling of agreement from him.

  “Speaking of, we’ll have to make contingency plans sometime toda
y,” I said. Then, in response to his thought: “Contingency means something that you don’t think will probably happen but you want to plan for it anyway, just to be safe.”

  “Like Tanya did with the car,” he said, flashing to drills he’d done to drop out of sight. In the emergency he’d done it. He was proud of that. But he’d been so scared. And although he was calming down now, he was still scared. Everyone else was moving so quickly, and they said Jason might die.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen to Jason,” I told him. “But he wanted more than anything in the world for you to be safe. That’s something I want, and Loyola wants, and all the agents are here to make sure of. It’s better to see the danger coming. In the meantime, we’re just going to have to do some drills like you did with Tanya, just in case. It probably won’t happen,” I said again, trying to reassure him.

  He seemed dubious, and I felt his low-level fear. I didn’t know how to help.

  A soft knock came on the door, and then it opened slowly. Loyola stuck his head in. “Is there a reason the dresser is blocking the window?” he asked after a moment.

  “It made me feel better,” I said.

  He came in. “Short of a robot army invading the area, I don’t think a dresser is going to make much difference.”

  “Robot army?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I like B movies.” He thought moving the dresser didn’t hurt anything either, and reacting to everyone else’s distraction was a good habit to be in. Maybe I was competent after all.

  I suppressed a sarcastic comment.

  “B movies are awesome!” Tommy said. “Jason lets me watch . . .” He trailed off.

  “Well, we’ll watch a few together, then. I’ll even make popcorn,” Loyola said, then paused. “If there’s nothing critical going on right now, how about you get started on your homework?”

  “Aw, do I have to?”

  “Just because you’re not going to school doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep up,” Loyola said.

  “But what about Adam? He said we had to do preparedness drills. Like in case something happens. Isn’t that better than homework?” Tommy’s mind wasn’t nearly as afraid now that the adults were acting normal.