He singled me out for every humiliation. I was the practice dummy during hand-to-hand combat for the entire squad. I ran extra miles. I did push-ups until I was facedown in the mud. I hit my bunk bruised and bleeding every night, long after lights-out, usually because I was finishing some punishment detail, and then woke before reveille to see Leary’s face as he shook me out of bed to start the cycle again.
Before long, everyone else in my unit picked up on this hostility, and they reflected it back. I didn’t blame them. Anyone who made even a small gesture of friendship in my direction found himself punished along with me.
I’d seen this sort of reaction before. There are people who respond to my talent instinctively and violently. It sets off some primitive warning system, deep down in their brain, that lets them know I’m invading their privacy just by existing. Leary wasn’t anything close to sensitive, but he’d spent time in combat, and he had a pretty well-honed sense of survival. It was like he smelled something on me. Maybe he had some kind of evolutionary defense against people like me, a built-in alarm that went off when it detected someone who could intrude into all his dark places.
Whatever the reason, he knew right away there was something different about me. And he hated it.
I tried my best to stay out of his head. I figured I could survive whatever he threw at me, then I would be out of his life after ten weeks. Getting inside his thoughts would only make things worse.
That was the plan, anyway.
Then, near the end of Blue Phase, the section right before graduation, Leary pulled me aside one night after dinner. He took me into a nearby restroom, which is what he called his conference area. This wasn’t unusual. He’d scream at me for a while and order me to clean toilets or pick up litter on the parade grounds in the dark. I could handle it. I thought the end was in sight.
This time, he was quiet. No screaming. With a grim, clipped satisfaction, he told me that my scores were inadequate for advancement. I wasn’t ready to move on to individual training. I’d have to repeat basic. With him.
My self-control crumbled. Rage shot right through me, along with disbelief and, I admit, a strong need to wail like a toddler. I wanted to know why he just kept picking on me. I let my guard down in that moment, and peered inside his head.
I saw it all clearly. He’d falsified my scores to keep me in basic. He’d do it again, and again, and again, if he had to, until I dropped dead on the parade ground. He wanted to grind me down into nothing. He wanted to break me, reduce me to a beaten animal. It had to be him, personally. And he didn’t even know why.
But I did. I blew past all of his thoughts about me, and saw the reason that he feared me, that he feared any kind of exposure.
I got only glimpses. I didn’t have the kind of control I do now. He was nineteen. A private in Vietnam. A smell of burning flesh, mingled with nuoc mam. A young woman, almost childlike, a black wing of hair over half her face, bright red blood covering the rest. Leary’s hands, shaking, spattered with the same bright red. A burst of sudden dark shame, mingled with an unhinged joy. For a brief moment, he and his friends had become animals—worse, they had become monsters.
The massacre was never officially recorded. His superiors buried the bodies, and Leary began to bury the memories. But they always lurked, in the back of his head with the real secret, the one he’d barely admit, even in his darkest moments: He felt no guilt. He liked it.
I saw that was why he had stayed in the army for life. Jesus might have required some kind of repentance to forgive him, but the army didn’t. It took his greatest sin—every horrific, vicious second of it—and embraced him for it, drawing him closer than ever. From that moment on, the army was his god.
I came back out of his head, reeling, and we locked eyes for a moment.
Until that point, I had never consciously projected into another person’s mind. I didn’t know how. There were probably times when my thoughts radiated out to anyone nearby, but it was a weak signal, like the sound of two calls overlapping on a cheap phone.
At that moment, however, I was linked with Leary. I peered right into his mind, and then I sent back all the fear and disgust and contempt at what I found there. For that split second, my thoughts washed into his, crashing into that small place he thought was his and his alone—and he knew. He knew that I’d seen.
Without another thought, he tried to kill me.
I’d been beaten before. As a kid. On the playground. By foster parents. That was amateur hour. This was the dedicated work of a professional.
He grabbed my ears and dented the steel mirror above the sink with my head. He punched something below my sternum and I stopped breathing. I lifted an arm to defend myself and he twisted it into a spiral, breaking it so fast I heard the snap before I felt the pain. In a moment, I was on the floor, feeling my ribs crack as he kicked me.
I cast out desperately with my mind, hoping to find someone on their way to help, or even someone on their way to take a leak. All I got from the small crowd outside the door was fear. Nobody wanted to interrupt. No one was even sure if they should. There might have been an urge, in one or two of the people listening to him beat me, to find someone of higher rank to break it up.
But by the time one of them managed to overcome his indecision, I’d be dead. Leary meant to murder me. I could feel his hatred, burning like the heat from an oven. And I felt something I’d only seen in his memory before: that same unhinged joy he felt in Vietnam, his pure unalloyed delight that he was about to kill something with his bare hands—again—and no one would be able to stop him.
I don’t know exactly what happened next. Only that I’ve never done anything remotely similar since.
The last thing I remember clearly is one of Leary’s big leather boots coming for my face, blotting out the light from the lamp. He was old-school, so he laughed at what he called our “tenny-runners,” the lightweight desert BDU footwear. He still wore steel-toed combat boots.
I fixed on that boot. If it hit me in the face, I was done. I knew it. My skull would crack, and my brain would bleed, and everything I was, or ever could be, would die right there.
It was nothing conscious. It was, I think now, the only attack I had left. My final defense.
I lashed out with everything I had inside, everything I’d ever contained, every wound I’d ever suffered in silence. The abandonment I’d felt before I could form words. The abuse at the hands of people meant to care for me. The paranoia and suspicion from the other kids forced into proximity with me. I gathered all those years of fear and rage and pain and hate from the place they burned in my mind, and unleashed them in one primal, silent scream.
The boot never connected. I heard Leary sink to the floor, like he was sitting down for a rest, but I couldn’t see him. One eye had already shut, and I couldn’t move my neck. I lay there, curled in a ball for what seemed like a long time. It was very quiet.
Someone finally opened the door to check on us. I heard a voice say, “Holy shit.”
I slid into unconsciousness.
WHEN I WOKE up in the infirmary, I was handcuffed to the railing on my bed. Not strictly necessary. My head felt like a cracked egg, with the yolk dangerously close to slopping out. One eye was still swollen shut, and I could barely move without pain lancing through every part of me.
There was someone waiting for me. A young guy, in anonymous BDUs, no name tape, no rank. He noticed I was up, and left the room without speaking to me.
I might have blacked out for a little while again. The next thing I knew, there was another man sitting next to me, older and heavier.
“You back among the living, son?” he asked.
I blinked and focused on him as best I could. He was wearing the same black BDUs as the other guy, and his hair was sloppy and slicked back. But there was no question he carried some kind of rank. It was like a soft cushion of authority all around him.
It wasn’t just hard for me to see. It was hard to read anything. The man was b
asically a blank to me. That was a little frightening.
It took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t just him. I couldn’t hear any of the usual mental babble from anyone.
I found out later I had a concussion from where Leary used my head to dent the mirror. The pain made it hard to think too. The medical staff had decided to ignore the doctors’ orders for painkillers. The pain and the head injury had shut my talent down. It was both amazing and terrifying. I suddenly knew what it must be like to wake up blind or deaf.
I wanted to lie back and enjoy the silence for a while, but the man in black kept staring at me, waiting for me to respond. I didn’t know what to say. Without my talent, I had to rely on the same clues as normal people. I looked him in the face. He had the kind of regular-guy good looks that instantly inspired trust. I could see him behind a desk in a bank in Iowa, telling some elderly couple not to worry about the mortgage payment. You could fool a lot of people with a face like that.
“Who are you?” I asked. Not exactly brilliant, but it seemed like a pretty safe question.
“You want to tag a ‘sir’ on the end of that question, Private?” he shot back. There was a gunslinger drawl tingeing his voice like the smell of BBQ and horse manure.
I used my one good eye to take a long scan over his no-name, no-rank uniform. “Why should I?”
The stern look on his face vanished as he broke into a grin. “Well. Good to see you didn’t have the shit completely beaten out of you.”
I rattled the cuff against the railing. “Am I under arrest?”
“Not at all, son.” He snapped his fingers and an MP, waiting in the hallway, came running to unlock my wrist.
“Think you’re up for taking a walk?” he asked.
It didn’t really sound like a request. And I was curious. Most of the time, I knew what was coming because I could see inside the minds of everyone who got close to me. For the first time in my life, I didn’t know where this conversation was going or where it would end. This was like being a visitor to an entirely new country. I figured I should see the sights while I could.
So I lifted myself cautiously, waiting for something to rupture or pop. There was pain everywhere, but I managed to swing my legs out of the bed and stand without falling over.
“That’s good. On your feet, soldier,” the older man said.
“Who are you?” I asked again.
“You can call me Cantrell,” he said, and offered his hand. I took it, and he hauled me the rest of the way up. “Come on. Want to show you something.”
The MP offered to accompany us, but Cantrell waved him away. I was no threat. I dragged myself along like an old man, leaning on my IV for support. Cantrell walked confidently down the halls, and I quickly got lost.
He talked the whole time. He began lecturing me, as if we were just picking up a lesson from an earlier conversation, right where we’d left off.
“You know, a lot of people think the military is where you send your subnormal sons and high school dropouts,” he said. “And sure, we got our share. Smart people don’t usually volunteer to dodge bullets on a regular basis. But the military is actually highly invested in intelligence. I mean both kinds: what you know and what you learn. Some of the greatest innovations in history have come from the military. Because any army that doesn’t think ahead is going to be nothing but a bunch of corpses in uniform before you know it. Which, unfortunately, is where we happen to be right now. See, we thought we won the only war that mattered. The commies folded up and left the table. Boy, let me tell you, we thought we had it all figured out. One world under America, with our only rival finally put down for the count. We were busy taking a victory lap. Then those Arabs”—he pronounced it Ay-rabs—“crawl out of the sand and fly a plane into the Pentagon. We didn’t expect our next big threat to be a medieval religion that promises a virgin to every dipshit willing to strap on a suicide vest. We never saw it coming.”
He paused to open a set of double doors to the intensive care unit.
“You have no idea the shit that hit the fan on September twelfth. For years, we thought we understood hijacking and terrorism. We thought there were rules, even though we called it unconventional warfare. Point is, war changes all the time, and we have to change with it.”
He stopped outside a room with a glass wall. Inside was a bed and a bunch of machinery dedicated to keeping a dead man alive. Monitors for heart rate and breathing and oxygen, all beeping and pinging softly, all hooked up to the still figure under the bedsheets.
Leary. His eyes were open, staring at nothing. Tubes ran into his mouth and nose. There wasn’t a mark on him, but he still looked like a body ready for viewing at a funeral.
Cantrell paused his speech to let me get a good, long look.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“Now that is an excellent question,” Cantrell said. “The short answer is, nobody can tell. The doctors say there’s no trauma or injury. He doesn’t have any wounds. You didn’t land a single punch, son—which is nothing to be ashamed of, you were totally out of your league here. I read this guy’s service record. He’s been winning Advanced Combatives competitions for longer than you’ve been alive, against guys with a lot more training than you. But you’re up and walking around, and he’s the one sucking his meals through a straw.”
I kept staring. For a moment, there was only the sound of the machines.
“See that little screen over there, to the left?” Cantrell stood very close and pointed. My eyes followed his finger. I saw. It was another monitor, a green screen with a steady line scrolling past. “That’s his EEG. Measures brain activity.”
“I know what an EEG is.”
“Good for you. See how flat it is? All those other screens have squiggly lines, going up and down. But that one ain’t moving. Doctors say his brain activity has ceased, except for the basic functions—breathing, pissing, and shitting. Other than that, nothing. He can’t even remember how to swallow. He’s a vegetable. They don’t know if he’s ever going to recover. They don’t know what caused it.”
Cantrell paused to let that sink in. He remained right next to me, speaking practically into my ear.
“But I think you and I both have a pretty good guess,” he said.
I was too shocked by what I saw to wonder how Cantrell knew what I’d done. I looked at Leary’s dead eyes and knew he was gone. That somehow I’d extinguished everything in him, every thought, every idea, every memory. Like bricking an iPhone. Erasing a hard drive.
Only this was a human being, and I’d simply wiped his mind clean.
“I didn’t mean to do it.”
“Oh hell, I know that,” Cantrell said. “You think I’m angry at you? You think anyone blames you for this? I could give a damn if he spends the rest of his life shitting into a diaper.”
I was tired and in pain. I couldn’t read Cantrell’s actual intentions. I was stumbling around in a dark room, hitting my shins on chairs and tables. It was unsettling and irritating. So I just asked him straight-out. “Then what do you want?”
Cantrell grinned like this whole world was a joke and only he knew the punch line. “I want to know if you can do it again.”
HE TOOK ME to the hospital’s cafeteria. It was empty. One guy in scrubs came inside while we got coffee. He saw Cantrell’s black uniform and immediately turned around and left. Didn’t even break stride, just spun completely on one heel and back out the door before it closed.
We sat down at a table. “Something not a lot of people know about 9/11,” Cantrell said, picking up where he’d left off. “We knew who the hijackers were.”
That was still news at the time. “You’re kidding me.”
Cantrell shrugged. “Classified right now, but you’ll start hearing it in the press soon. We knew their names. Where they were. We had the plane tickets. We had reports of these guys at al-Qaeda training camps. Hell, we even had reports from the flight schools that they attended. They didn’t want to learn any
of the parts about landing.”
“Why didn’t anyone stop them?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Intelligence is the kind of stuff that only looks obvious in hindsight. Our last war was H-bombs and stealth bombers and spy satellites, and then these camel jockeys come along with box cutters and turn three planes into guided missiles. We never saw it coming, because we don’t think like they do. We can’t, because we live in the twenty-first century, and they’re still stoning people to death. We can look right at what they’re doing and not see the patterns. We had the data. We had reams of it. But nobody saw the future the way these boys did, because nobody could get inside their heads.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
He scowled at me. “I’m going to write that off to the concussion. Your whole life, you’ve known what people are thinking. You’ve been able to figure out what they’re going to do before they do it. You’ve always known when someone is lying to you. You’ve always known if someone was going to try to hurt you. And you’ve always known just where somebody else will hurt the most too.”
“How do you know all this about me?”
“Like I said. Facts are easy, once we find you. Besides. You’re not the first one I’ve seen.”
“First what?”
“A reader. Someone who can flip through other people’s thoughts like a book. This is why we need you. We can listen in on every phone call made in the United States. We can track money from the Swiss bank accounts of every terrorist organization in the world. Our satellites can look at the exact spot where Osama was hiding two weeks ago. Hell, I can tell you what Saddam Hussein had for breakfast. And it still don’t mean shit. Because all that data is nothing without context. Without human emotion or motives or thought, all you have is facts. We don’t need to know what people are doing anymore. We have machines for that. We need to know what they’re thinking. That’s where you come in.”
That was the first time I’d heard a name for what I was. Or that there might be more people like me outside of comics and movies. Still. It was a lot to take in. I was nothing but tired. My head throbbed.
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