Vacant

by Alex Hughes

  “That doesn’t sound very fun,” he said. Maybe his mind was a bit like that, he thought. Especially at school, or around his mom. Things came in and he couldn’t stop them.

  “On a good day, when the sun is shining and people are happy, it can be very fun,” I said. “But a large part of what the Guild does in its entry classes is teach people how to seal up the walls, put siding in and a little armor, and put in big doors and windows that are strong enough to let the world in when you want and shut it out when you want. It can be a lot of work. But it puts you more in charge of your own space, your own head, your own mind. And it lets you understand the world better if all you’re hearing isn’t noise.”

  He thought about that. I let him. It was a big idea, a big model on which to view the world.

  “Other people have houses too?” he asked.

  I nodded, trying to decide how much to ask.

  “Sometimes they don’t lock their doors.”

  I nodded again. “And you see in without meaning to.”

  “Yeah.”

  I waited for him to ask whatever question was wandering around in his head.

  “My mom thinks about stuff a lot,” he said quietly, but in the tone of voice like something was wrong.

  “Does she?” I asked quietly. His mind was turned inward, closed, so unless I wanted to go rummaging around—not ethical in a kid that age even as a Minder—I had no way of knowing what he was thinking. Had I been so worried about myself and my problems that I’d missed something major? A stab of guilt hit me then.

  “Yeah,” he said. “She has a lot of—of things I’m not supposed to talk about.”

  “Like what?” I asked as casually as I possibly could.

  He looked up and focused then. “I’m not supposed to talk about them.”

  “Is she hurting you?” I ventured. I wasn’t one to push, but if there was abuse or danger going on and I’d missed it . . .

  I got a flash of hurt then, from him. “No.” She didn’t hit him or anything, not like Michelle at school, whose parents hit her. “She says work stuff . . . she says I’m not supposed to know about that stuff and she could get in trouble if people knew that I knew.”

  “Knew what?” I asked.

  “Dead bodies and stuff,” he said, in the matter-of-fact voice nobody but a ten-year-old could pull off. “And stuff for her cases, and stuff about bad guys and cops and . . . stuff.” He waved his hand. “She is under a lot of pressure. I’m not supposed to worry people.” This last was said in the tone of voice of someone repeating something another had said a million times.

  “I see.” I waited patiently for him to talk more. Often people would tell you anything you wanted to know, just to fill the silence. Or adults would anyway. I’d never seen evidence kids were all that different.

  He sat there for a long moment and said nothing. Then: “Are you going to teach me the house thing or not?”

  “Sure,” I said, and clamped down on my concern so he’d feel that I was normal again. I was worried about him, though. There was something not right here, something . . . off. And I hadn’t spent enough time with him to figure out what it was.

  I took a breath. He’d have to come to trust me on his own, I guessed. I hoped. In the meantime, a lesson cost me nothing, and it made me more present in his life.

  “Let’s start with building you a sliding door,” I said. “Something really basic that gives you control over who comes in your house.”

  He nodded.

  “With your permission, I’d like to walk into your mind—just the beginning, just the little foyer area. It’s easier to show you what to do than to try to describe it in words,” I said.

  “You knock first,” he said.

  I shrugged, and pictured a doorframe on the outside of his mind, and me standing there with a fist upraised. I knocked, gently, the sound pictured strongly enough he’d be able to experience it clearly.

  Come in, he said in a happy tone. He’d gotten what he wanted the first time just by asking. He was vaguely smug about it.

  I stepped in, just in, as I’d promised. His mind was a tangle of thoughts laid about the edges of an open clear space, boxes and bales of thoughts in no apparent order, but all tied up with twine. I’d never seen so many disorganized piles in my life. Still, I was here to show him something specific.

  And earn his trust.

  Now, I started, the most important thing about telepathy is picturing something very clearly, so clearly you believe it. Let’s start with a floor for your house.

  Okay . . . , he said.

  In the next twenty minutes, we built mental models over and over, letting him find the pictures that would communicate best to him. And below the surface, I monitored the structure of the changes he was actually making, and I corrected, gently, when something was wrong.

  At the twenty-first minute, I put a stop to it. He was sweating in the real world, and starting to tire in the mental one. I helped him surface back to reality.

  “Time for bed,” I said. “It’s going to be an early morning tomorrow.”

  “Aw, do we have to? I was just getting good at the house thing.”

  “They’ll be plenty of time for more lessons later,” I said, and ushered him toward his room.

  As I moved back out into the house to check in for the night with everyone else, my body was tired but my mind was wide awake. I didn’t know what secrets the judge held, but whatever they were, they bothered Tommy. And that made me worried, in a whole new way.

  * * *

  It was after ten p.m., very dark, with the outside streetlight pooling stripes of light on the ancient wooden floor of the back hallway. I sat on a thick cushion on the floor, staring at the phone. I’d grabbed one of the handsets from the main room—there were no fewer than three—when it had become obvious the rest of the household was going to bed. I was looking at the phone, oddly scared of it, oddly nervous about calling Cherabino after all this time of not knowing. She’d be okay, right? They had to see the truth and let her keep her job. It was the only possible reality that made sense, but I knew with a horrible certainty that politics wasn’t about making sense. I didn’t know what she’d do without her job. I just didn’t know.

  Tommy was asleep in the room behind me, the door shut to protect against noise. I was out in the hallway with a small pallet set up. Not ideal, but doable, at least for tonight.

  At least I could do my job. I closed my eyes and scanned the area around the house, getting to know every mind, every current of Mindspace, within my range. Jarrod was asleep in a guest bedroom, the judge in the room next door. Loyola sat, cleaning a gun, in the front room, thinking tired thoughts and trying to plan. Two more minds, one outside curled up in a car seat, the other inside, sleeping underneath a basement window they’d considered one of their biggest security risks. Plenty of people around. Tommy would be fine, I told myself. But that vision still haunted me.

  I widened my senses, as far as they would go, and looked carefully at the space around the house, as far as I could sense. The neighbors next door were fighting, quietly, over money. A hungry dog poked through an overturned trash bin across the street. A man stood, smoking, in the cold at the end of my range. Odd to smoke outside this time of night; I moved in carefully for a better look.

  I pulled back after a moment. He was worried about losing his job, and unwilling to talk to his wife about it. There was no threat; he wouldn’t be moving from that general area, and might hit up a donut shop in an hour or so.

  After that, I moved back to check on Tommy, whose mind was dreaming disturbed dreams about trains and crashing thunder and a monster made out of shoes. He was deeply asleep, though; I nudged his mental pattern toward calm and called that good enough. It would either stick or it wouldn’t, and I was unwilling to do more. We were connected too much as it was.

  I opened
my eyes in the hallway, which seemed even darker for the time away. The phone was there, staring at me. My body and my Ability were exhausted; I wasn’t used to this, and I was short on sleep anyway. I sat there, looking at the phone but not calling, for a long time.

  The vision stuck in the back of my head, the smell of the moldy straw, the scream of terror. I hadn’t known Tommy long, but the more I talked to him, the worse that fear sounded, the worse my own fear of the vision became.

  Swartz said the only way to deal with fear was to face it head-on. I picked up the phone. It rang.

  I left a message on Stone’s voice mail, telling him where I was and that they could expect another payment in the next few weeks from me. Gave a number.

  Then I hung up and stared at the phone again, and couldn’t quite bring myself to call her. I shook my head and pulled out the file on Sibley, the guy who’d almost killed me a few months ago. He was every bit as dangerous as I remembered, with a penchant for killing for hire with an odd serrated cord he had special-made. When, of course, the client didn’t want the death to look natural.

  He was a cold killer, a sharp killer, someone who enjoyed the control of the death. I’d felt his leavings in Mindspace on several crime scenes, and I’d met him in person. He’d strangled me, cutting off my air just to play with me, just to play with his prey. If things had been different, I would be dead now, by his hand, seeing that intensely controlled face as my last sight. Even now, when I thought about him coming after me, I felt a chill go down my spine. I was afraid of him, legitimately afraid of him, and getting involved with this case and putting myself in the line of danger was idiotic.

  But on the other side of that wall was a kid, a perfectly normal prototelepathic kid, who didn’t deserve to face him alone. Unfortunately I hadn’t figured out yet how to stop that vision from happening, and odds were, I was running out of time. It was a knot in my gut that never let go, a tension that didn’t leave me.

  I got up and put on a coat, going out to the back stoop for a cigarette of my own, watching the drizzle of the day fall slowly to earth and the smoke billow in the cold air. It was strange not to be in Atlanta. It was strange to smell the faint salt of ocean in the air, and see gnats in clouds. It was strange to feel the ancient oaks, almost minds, settled into Mindspace. And most of all, it was strange to be without Cherabino. She would know what to do right now, I thought. She would have something for me to do, some lead to trace down, some possibility to keep this thing from happening. She’d tell me we could handle it, and we would. We always did.

  But I wasn’t there for her now. I wasn’t there to help her handle whatever it was, and that ate at me. It hurt. And worse than that was the absence I felt, the missing piece she left in my life, not being beside me.

  There were days I spent every waking moment with her, and slept near her at night. There were days we passed each other in the department with a nod, too busy running from one thing to another to even speak. But mostly, even before she’d agreed to date me, even before Swartz had told me to ask, it was her. She was part of the warp and weft of every day, or she had been. Even recently, when I’d been doing so much volunteer work with Narcotics Anonymous, she’d been there nearly every day. For her to be gone now— Well, I felt alone. Adrift.

  I’d have to handle this one myself, and that terrified me.

  I stubbed out the cigarette in a planter already full of butts and went back into the house. I could ask, at least.

  I settled on the cushion and dialed. It rang three times, and I prayed she hadn’t left her home phone off the hook completely. I couldn’t take that. I wouldn’t be able to hear her voice, and the silence would be the worst, the confirmation that whatever was going on was destroying her. Cherabino only took her phone off the hook when it had been a train wreck of a day, a bad day on the level of not just deaths, but bad deaths. Deaths of kids, or worse. She always seemed so strong—she had to—but the closer I’d gotten, the more I’d discovered it was an act. She cared deeply, and sometimes that caring hurt. Even so, she’d do anything for her job, for justice. It was one of the things I admired about her. The phone rang, again, and it hurt me I wasn’t there.

  She picked up. “Hello?” Her voice was irritated. It was like heaven.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “I was starting to think you’d fallen down a well. Do they not have phones down there? I almost went to bed already twice.”

  I blinked. A year ago that tone would have put me off, or made me go on the offensive. But not now. I understood her too well, and I was too relieved to hear from her. “This is the first time I’ve been able to get away,” I lied. Simpler than listing the times I’d tried to call her. Then, cautiously: “I’m sorry I left without saying good-bye.”

  She made a hmrph noise. “Work comes first. It always does. You left a message. How’s the FBI treating you? Can you talk about the case?”

  “You’re not mad at me?”

  “Why would I be mad at you?” she asked, in a reasonable tone of voice.

  I paused. This was not at all how I’d expected her reaction to go. “Um, I have no idea.”

  “Well, then.”

  A silence came over the line, and my worry came back.

  After a moment, I offered, “The FBI seems a lot like the police department, without all the red tape. Or, at least, if there’s red tape I’m not the one dealing with it. At the moment I’m watching someone.”

  “Watching?” she asked, with a frown to her voice.

  “Minding.” I paused. That wouldn’t help. I tried to figure out how to explain it. She got grumpy sometimes until she understood something. “Remember when we had that threat against you in the Bradley case? How I followed you around so nobody could attack you telepathically?”

  “Of course I remember you following me around. I still don’t know what Minding is, though.”

  “Um. Well . . .”

  “Does it work with the fishbowl analogy?” she asked, into the pause.

  “Sort of. More of a spider at the center of the web, maybe. I sit at the center of the web, and if I feel a vibration on the edges, I go out to see what it was. If it’s a threat, I either shut it down myself or call for reinforcements. That’s what I did, guarding you then.”

  “Oh.” Another pause. I could hear her breathing, lightly, something surprisingly comforting in the dark hallway. Just having her here, even over the phone, meant the world.

  I tried to figure out how to ask for help, which Swartz said I needed to do more of. How did I put what I needed into words?

  But before I could, she said, “I’m glad you called. It’s been a hard day. A terrible day.”

  “What happened?” I asked. It was something to say to keep the conversation going. And I’d been so worried about her. “Are you okay?”

  “Well.” She sighed. I could almost see her shaking her head. “It . . . they’re escalating my inquiry. It starts tomorrow. I said I almost went to bed . . . the truth is, I can’t sleep.”

  “That’s fast.”

  “I know.”

  “You didn’t do anything. You don’t have anything to worry about. Plus, your lawyer said she had a plan.” I said it quickly, forcefully, like I believed it. I had to believe it. But I couldn’t see her, I couldn’t read her, I couldn’t tell how she was, not really.

  “That’s what she says. But they’re lumping together the incident from early in the week in with the visit to Fiske’s house. They’re calling it a pattern. They’re calling in the captain and Internal Affairs and now they’re bringing in the county commissioner. Branen was right. This whole thing happening on the anniversary . . . well, it’s bad. They’re leaping to conclusions. It’s in the paper.”

  Crap, that was bad. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, a syllable that just sat between us. “No, they’re saying I beat a guy
to death. Of course I’m not okay. And for me to end up as the poster child for police brutality . . . well, it’s ludicrous. The lawyer agrees with me, and she thinks the truth will come out. It’ll be bad, but the truth will come out.”

  “It has to,” I said. “You need me to testify, you say the word.”

  “You can’t leave Savannah.”

  “Yeah,” I said. It was a sad sound, a sound of regret.

  “I’d really like you to be here,” she said quietly.

  I closed my eyes, guilt hitting me. “I can’t. I . . . want to be there, I promise you.” But the vision and Tommy and all the rest . . . I couldn’t live with myself if I left and then he died.

  “I understand work,” she said, but her voice was hurt.

  “Whatever you need, you tell me,” I said. “I’ll find a way to do it from here.”

  “I need Branen not to believe I did this thing. I need this stupid hearing not to be happening.”

  She might as well have asked for me to grab the moon out of the sky and hand it to her. In some ways, that would be easier. I literally had no influence on any of that.

  So, not knowing what to say, I said nothing. And neither did she. The silence lasted what felt like forever.

  “I’m sorry.” Apologizing hurt, but for her, I’d walk over glass. “I really am.”

  She sighed again. “Me too. Me too, okay? But I’ll figure it out. The lawyer doesn’t want you at the hearing anyway.”

  “What’s her plan?” I asked.

  After a long pause, she said slowly, “She’s pushing for an extension, and turning their character voucher requirement on its head. She’s got twelve people willing to testify that I make good decisions in the field.” Her voice was stronger now. “Not just Michael. Some of the other detectives, the beat guys. My training officer’s even coming out from retirement to be there. And she’s going to be ripping through their nonevidence and their witnesses like crazy.”

  “So the department’s taking it personally. That’s good for you,” I said, though what the hell did I know? “You’ve got the highest close rate in the department, and everybody knows you’re doing three jobs for the salary. You prove that, with the budget crunch, they can’t afford to lose you.”