by K. M. Ruiz
“Lucas,” she whispered, staring blankly down at his unconscious form and the slow rise and fall of his chest. Jael needed to transport him to the Strykers Syndicate immediately, but she wasn’t sure if any telekinetics were left who had the strength to teleport.
A shadow drifted over her and Jael looked up, staring at Jason and Quinton. Jason had his arm slung over Quinton’s shoulder, letting the other man take most of his weight. An ugly rip was torn through his uniform and skinsuit, blood having saturated the area, but his chest seemed whole. The grief they exhibited rubbed against the raw places in her own mind. Quinton was staring down the street with a dead look in his eyes, seemingly unaware of his surroundings.
“It’s over,” Jason said, eyes bloodshot, voice raw and wounded. “Threnody detonated the bomb. Kerr made sure Nathan and his Warhounds couldn’t leave the explosion radius before everyone else teleported out of range.”
Jael closed her eyes, her mind still searching for Lucas’s. “And the people already in space?”
Quinton spoke, but he didn’t sound like the man Jael knew. “Let them die out there.”
PART NINE
Tabula Rasa
SESSION DATE: 2128.09.28
LOCATION: Institute of Psionics Research
CLEARANCE ID: Dr. Amy Bennett
SUBJECT: 2581
FILE NUMBER: 881
The doctor kneels before the girl, one hand gripping the cascade of wires that hangs from bruised skin. Those bleached-out violet eyes seem sunken and they no longer look at the camera. They look elsewhere.
“Aisling,” the doctor pleads. “We can’t survive like this.”
The girl is still and quiet, one hand clutching a white card. After a long moment, she unclenches her hand and lets the card fall to the floor. “Thank you,” she whispers.
The doctor picks the card up, turns it around to see the shape on the underside. “We don’t want your thanks.”
“I know.” The girl smiles and leans forward, the effort making her gasp. She presses a kiss to the woman’s forehead, like a benediction when it isn’t, not in her prison cell. “I wasn’t thanking you.”
The doctor drops the card to the floor and reaches out to help the child lean back in her seat. Behind them, the machines click and hum and whine, a nonstop sound that has been a constant companion to them both.
“What do we do?” the doctor whispers. “What do we do next?”
“Anything you want, Lucas.” Aisling smiles, eyes wide and glazed and looking at things no one else can see. “Anything at all.”
FORTY-SEVEN
OCTOBER 2379
TORONTO, CANADA
It never changed.
Jael wondered about that, the first time she went down into the static of Lucas’s mind to try to anchor a psi link. She gave up analyzing it on the tenth try. The vibrancy was gone, the brightness normally there on the mental grid missing. Nothing remained but an echo, a negative imprint that she couldn’t hold on to.
Not a memory, exactly. Not really a dream. Just the seam of his mind and the spaces in between that he’d fallen through. Just that last, drawn-out moment before the permanent end he hovered over, unable to let go, because psions were incapable of forgetting. Dying quick was always preferable to dying slow. Bleeding out in the mind happened like this, in increments. Searching for Lucas was like trying to find one clean drop of water in an ocean of toxic mistakes. Impossible without belief, without help.
Jael stared across the medical bed where Lucas lay, at a hollow-eyed Samantha, who swayed on weak legs, Marguerite standing worriedly behind her.
You won’t find him, you know, Samantha said, the psi link between them quivering on her end as she struggled to hold on to something that only Jael was generating. Not how he was. I don’t know why you brought me in here.
I’m not expecting to find sanity in his thoughts, Jael said as she curled a hand around Lucas’s lax one. I’m only interested in what’s left behind. We need your brother.
Samantha hunched her shoulders, the rigid line of her body bending into a brittle curve. Do you, Jael? You need something he no longer is.
Samantha could feel him, here in his mind, damaged as they both were, when all the times that Jael had tried before she only felt that vast, echoing emptiness; only seen a flatline on the EEG and supporting machines, despite the heart beating in his chest. Jael had been in and out of both their minds for weeks on end, struggling to find the pieces of two shattered personalities and coming up achingly, bitterly short.
Jael was a Class III telepath. She would never be able to reach far enough to find Lucas, but Samantha could. She could find him, when no one else had the ability to, because Lucas always led her to him. It took nearly a month for Jael to realize why, of days spent holding Samantha’s thoughts together while the telepath screamed her throat bloody and raw beneath makeshift mental shields that wouldn’t hold. Permanent shields weren’t an option, not yet, not until they found Lucas.
Samantha was as whole as Jael could make her, something far less than what the girl had been born to be. Jael could see the fragility in the blonde, in the tiny mental threads that held her together. All Jael’s work and all for nothing, the Stryker thought tiredly.
Jael pressed her telepathy against the edge of Samantha’s mind and the old scar of the mindwipe that had Lucas’s touch all over it. All over his sister. Samantha’s mind had never been her own. It had horrified Jael when she’d figured out what the scars pressed into Samantha’s thoughts meant, yet it also relieved her. Here was the shape of Lucas, in Samantha’s mind, the mold he needed to fill. Here was their salvation, as fractured as it was.
Jael stared at Samantha as their minds plunged deeper into the void that was seemingly all that remained of Lucas. Then she closed her eyes and Jael dug her telepathy into Samantha’s battered thoughts with precise pressure.
I’m sorry, Jael said, for what they did to you. For what I need to do.
Samantha’s screams echoed in the room, in their thoughts, bouncing off the jagged edges of a broken mind and against her shields, as Jael stripped Samantha of the mindwipe. The last piece of who she was—torn from everything that had made her into what Nathan and Lucas forced her to be. Jael cut the psi link between them, and Samantha, no longer anchored, slipped away, collapsing unconscious in Marguerite’s arms.
Jael wondered who Samantha would be, if she would be anything at all, when she woke up.
The pattern was in Jael’s thoughts now, a delicate thing that only a higher-Classed psion could possibly create. Borrowed, for now, as she spread the mindwipe through Lucas’s mind, the mental grid humming around her.
We need you, she thought fiercely as that pattern of himself Lucas gave up so long ago seeped back into his thoughts. Some errant shard of a forgotten whole sparked and sputtered in her power, forming into a knotted, twisted psi signature she didn’t recognize.
It always came back to that simple, selfish demand that drove humanity forward.
Need. Want. Some distant, half-formed idea of world integration beneath a clear blue sky.
Just some child’s impossible dream.
Lucas, please.
… Jael.
What seemed like hours later, when she opened her eyes and came back to herself in a medical room at the top of a city tower, Jael was greeted by the soft, rhythmic noise from monitors tracking the synaptic pulse of Lucas’s damaged mind, his hand weakly squeezing hers.
FORTY-EIGHT
NOVEMBER 2379
TORONTO, CANADA
“Here’s your weekly update,” Jason said as he handed over a datapad to Jael before easing himself into a chair. “The major fallout from Paris stayed inside that country’s borders. Winter winds will spread the radiation particles, but whatever damage it might do where it falls won’t rate much. The radiation is mostly going to hit deadzones.”
“I could wish that was the last time a nuclear bomb is detonated on this planet,” Jael said as she scrolled th
rough the report. “Somehow, I doubt it.”
“If it happens again, we won’t be around to see it.”
But they were seeing the political fallout and it wasn’t going to be easy to navigate a world where fear of psions might never fade.
“Oh, before I forget.” Jason pulled a small fruit out of his jacket pocket and set it on Jael’s desk. “That’s for you. Courtesy of Matron. Carried it with me when I brought in the latest shipment of seedlings.”
Jael looked up from the datapad in her hand and eyed the orange fruit as if it were something dangerous. “You sure she didn’t poison it?”
“That woman barely lets people near her garden. You think she’d knowingly allow poison?” Jason shook his head. “Try it. She said it’s called a kumquat.”
Jael stared at the tiny, bite-size fruit before her with the healthy hesitation that a lifetime of wariness had gifted her. Eventually, she picked up the fruit and popped it in her mouth. The skin was sweet; biting into it was a different story. The taste shifted from sweet to sour on her tongue, the flavor shocking her taste buds.
She made a face and swallowed the pulp as fast as she could, spitting out the seed. “I don’t know about that one. You sure you didn’t mess up the seed growth somehow?”
Jason scratched the back of his neck, shrugging. “Maybe? Thought I had this tree down. I guess Matron will have to wait on her pears.”
“What in the world is a pear?”
“It’s another fruit. I think.”
Jael set aside her work, wishing she had a glass of water to wash away the taste. “Where is she putting that bush?”
“Tree. Pears grow on trees, and she’s thinking of putting some greenery into Kensington Gardens.”
“Kensington Gardens is full of transients. What’s she going to do? Order them to move?”
“If she wants us to clear it out, we’ll clear it out.” Jason slouched a little in his seat. “She’s just taking what’s owed to her. I’m willing to let her experiment, but winter’s coming soon and nothing grows in the cold.”
“Maybe wait until spring.”
“Maybe,” Jason echoed, tipping his head back to stare at the ceiling.
The silence in the office was heavy, but neither of them felt the need to break it. Nearly two and a half months since the world almost ended again, and things were still changing. There was an orchard in St. James’s Park that people visited, or talked about visiting. It was overseen by Matron and her scavengers, the group having appropriated a building abandoned during the riots. No one in London fought her on her claim that she owned that bit of land, not even the drug cartels. Matron was only human, but she had psions on her side, and that was enough to make anyone pause these days.
Jael ran a fingertip over the line of her teeth, the tartness from the fruit still stinging her tongue. The amount of new food that was growing in Toronto’s SkyFarms and others across the world was heartening, even if their stomachs couldn’t handle it yet. A lifetime of bland GMO food had prepared no one for the shock that came with taste. Adjusting to the new diet was going to take time. Her people had enough of it for now.
“Does it ever feel weird?” Jason said, his voice jerking Jael from her thoughts. “Sitting in this office?”
“Always,” Jael replied, trying not to hunch her shoulders. Leadership was always so much easier when someone else was doing it.
The door to Jael’s office slid open, causing Jason to twist around in his chair to see who it was. He stood up as Samantha’s thin figure stepped inside. The young woman crossed the office with measured strides, holding herself rigidly, as if she were afraid she would take one wrong step and break.
Samantha wore the soft, comfortable clothes those in recovery were given, though she no longer had a room in the medical level to call her own. Jael had upgraded her physical condition weeks ago to discharge, though Samantha’s mental state was still in doubt—she was still at risk for suicide. Jael thought a change of scenery would be helpful; better than being sequestered in a white medical room with machines that constantly showed what she was missing, even if her new room came with twenty-four-hour surveillance.
Psions didn’t mutate postnatal. Their Classification, however, could change. Samantha’s telepathy was, for the most part, nonexistent now. The merge and Jael’s psionic interference had broken her mind down to a Class IX, more human than psion, her telepathic reach no stronger than the softest whisper within her own thoughts. Samantha never used her power anymore, too aware and too prideful of what she had once been to accept what she had become.
Maybe it would have been better, more merciful, if she had died like Kristen. Jael hadn’t been able to save Samantha’s sister. If she was honest with herself, she hadn’t tried very hard. Kristen’s mind had torn itself apart during the merge, pain finally overcoming the empath’s power. There hadn’t been much left for Jael to save, and she didn’t regret letting the teenager die. Keeping Samantha from doing the same was a full-time job on some days.
Samantha flicked Jason a wary look. Jason, for his part, made sure his shields were locked down tight. “If you need to speak with Jael in private, I can leave.”
“No,” Samantha said, her voice raspy. The weeks she’d spent screaming in the medical level during her recovery had permanently ruined her once-pretty soprano voice. “I need the latest report on survivors. There’s a press conference tomorrow and I’m better at writing speeches than the people you’ve assigned to public relations.”
Jael picked up a datapad from the pile on her desk and pushed it toward the edge. “It’s right here.”
Jason took a careful step back, giving Samantha room to take the datapad and not feel as if he was invading her personal space. She took it and hugged it to her chest.
“Latest world population count puts us at over a million by about fifty thousand,” Jael said quietly. “Give or take a few hundred. The Registry only told us who was going into space, not who was left behind, and we lost tens of thousands in the riots. The census will take maybe another year or so to complete, but you can report on the rough findings. I think that will satisfy the public.”
“And the count for psions?” Samantha said, sounding as if the question was difficult to ask.
“Around six hundred or so, if we’re being generous. There’s talk of a child or two in the Americas that show signs of being psions.” Jael hesitated before saying, “Telepaths, according to the bioscanners. I’m sending out a team for retrieval.”
Samantha’s entire body flinched. She bit her lip, looking away from Jael and out at the view of Toronto instead. “We need those. There are so few telepaths and telekinetics left.”
“I know.”
This is all we’ve got, Jael thought as she watched Samantha turn around and head for the door. Just the remains and nothing more. We’ve got to make it worth something.
Keiko and Aidan were dead, as were nearly 85 percent of the Strykers’ telepaths and 50 percent of their telekinetics. The worldwide merge Lucas had led in the assault on Paris had decimated the Strykers Syndicate’s ranks. Empaths, pyrokinetics, electrokinetics, and psychometrists outnumbered the other two kinds of psions now, those that survived the riots at least. Prior to that, they had lost roughly 250 psions through the World Court’s mass termination. Whoever was brought back from the retrieval mission would never know the feel of a neurotracker in his or her head.
It was a start.
The door slid shut behind Samantha. Jason was kind enough to wait until she was gone before tipping his head in Jael’s direction as a silent good-bye and teleporting out. Jael sighed and leaned back in her chair, rubbing wearily at one shoulder. She ached in a way she never had before, body running through the last dregs of life in her cells. Jael knew the signs better than most; she just didn’t know how long she had left. Maybe a year, maybe less, maybe more.
“So much to do, so little time,” Jael murmured to herself as she got to her feet.
She was never
much good at leading beyond the confines of the medical level. Whoever succeeded her would have to be. The Strykers Syndicate couldn’t show weakness to the world, but neither could it show the same rigidity the old government had ruled with. It was a delicate balancing act, and she thought only one family could actually pull it all off. Pity the one they all needed wasn’t even born yet.
Jael left the office, nodding at the handful of aides working in the area beyond her doors. “I’ll be on the medical level if anyone needs me.”
She headed for the lift, rubbing at her temple, wishing the headache she had would go away.
FORTY-NINE
NOVEMBER 2379
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Jason crossed two continents and an ocean, arriving in London after two days’ worth of work back west. His feet hit the floor of the small arrival room with a dull thump. Toronto was five hours behind and still working through its late afternoon. It was evening here. Sighing, Jason stepped off the wooden arrival platform. The room was painted white, but even the paint job couldn’t hide how worn-out the place looked.
The door opened manually and he left the room behind, heading for the faint sound of people on the ground level. Matron and some of her scavengers were finishing their evening meal when Jason walked into the communal kitchen. The rest of her crew were still down in the southern hemisphere, cataloguing the seed bank on Antarctica. The shift change wouldn’t happen for another week.
Matron looked up from the conversation she was having with Zahara in between bites of stir-fry. “You’re back early. Jael like the fruit?”
“No,” Jason said.
“She just don’t know what tastes good.” Matron jerked her thumb in the direction of the tenement’s entrance. “If you’re looking for Quinton, he’s outside.”