There were so many things I needed to tell him, I didn’t even know where to begin. I was a jacker. No, I was a mutant jacker. The FBI was after me and I couldn’t go home and the world had gone demens because kids like Laney were being experimented on and jackers like Simon were dead. I sucked in a breath and tried to control the sobs, and slowly the warmth of Raf’s arms calmed me. I laid my head on his chest and pressed my ear over his heart. Its beat was strong and a little too quick.
I linked back into his mind, and his thoughts were a jumbled mess—happiness that he was holding me, anger at whatever trouble Simon had gotten me into, confusion about what to say and do to help me. I ached to soothe his mind, but anything I told him would do the opposite. So I lingered for a moment, resting against his chest and gathering my courage to tell him all the truths I had been hiding for so long.
Finally, I picked my head up and leaned away from him so I could see his face. I’m not really a reader, Raf. I’m something different.
His eyebrows arched slightly. Well, I can read you again now. Does it just fade on and off like that?
No. I don’t read minds at all. I control them. It’s called mindjacking… I stopped at the incredulous look on his face, and then anger flashed across his mind.
Is this some kind of joke? he thought. His arms had loosened their hold on me, and I missed the feeling immediately.
The joke was on me. No. I really can control minds.
Raf dropped his arms away from me. What kind of game is this?
It hadn’t occurred to me that Raf wouldn’t believe me. Before, at the warehouse, he had understood, but then he had seen it in action. I reached down to the living room and jacked Mrs. Santos to bring Raf a glass of water. She jumped up from the sofa and hurried to the kitchen.
This is no game, Raf. I wish it was. I’ll prove it to you.
Okay…
I just told your mom to bring you a glass of water. She’s on her way. Her footsteps were coming lightly up the two flights of stairs. We both turned to the open doorway. She won’t see me, because I control what she sees and hears.
Mrs. Santos’ thin frame appeared in the doorway, and I jacked her to ignore me. She stepped quickly past me to hand Raf the glass of water. Her eyes had the purposeful look of someone whose actions were being commandeered, and her thoughts were the endless loop of a jacked mind. And Raf could hear that. Bring Raf some water. Bring Raf some water. Some water…
Raf stared after her as she left his room. His face had lost some of its color. He backed all the way to the bed again and shakily set the water down on the end table. His fear was a bitter taste on my tongue. All of a sudden, I wasn’t the girl he had always known and loved. I was some kind of monster instead.His thoughts made me cringe. Raf was more right than he knew.
Stay away from me, he thought as he edged around the bed to put even more distance between us.
Raf, I’m not going to hurt you…
He clenched his hands to his head. “Stay out of my head!” The harshness of his voice made me step back. I pulled out of his mind, mostly because his thoughts were slashing through my heart. That he should have known there was something wrong with me. That he should never have trusted me.
“Raf, please…” The words stopped in my throat. He didn’t trust me, and why should he? I had done nothing but lie to him all along. He didn’t remember when I had finally told him the truth and that I was sorry. He didn’t remember any of it.
The shiny wooden floor blurred as the tears returned to my eyes. I shuffled toward the door, but the doorway seemed to sway, so I held on to the doorjamb for a moment. I stumbled over the threshold, and my feet seemed to catch on the hallway carpet. I gripped the stair rail with both hands so my unsteady legs wouldn’t send me tumbling to my death.
When I was halfway down the steps, Raf called out behind me. “Kira, wait!”
I froze and slowly turned to look up at him. Mrs. Santos had heard him, so I commanded her to ignore any sounds from the third floor and redirected her to the soap opera. Raf teetered at the top of the stairs. I held my breath and waited for him to speak.
He bit his lip. “You can control me. Make me do what you want.”
I nodded, but didn’t say anything.
“But you’re not, right now, right?” I shook my head, still holding my breath. “You could hurt me. But you’re not. Why?”
I let out an exasperated breath. “Why would I hurt you, Raf?”
His face twisted, and I knew his thoughts without peering into his head. I had already hurt him. By choosing Simon, by not trusting him. By leaving.
“I… I never meant to hurt you, Raf, I swear it.” My voice was cracking but I pushed on. I had to get it all out, while I had the chance. Before he sent me away for good. “I was trying to protect you. There are others jackers, like me, and some of them are dangerous. I didn’t want you to get hurt, so I lied. But I shouldn’t have. I don’t want to.” My voice was rising as the hysteria climbed out of my chest. “All the lies are causing all the problems. I want it all to stop, Raf. That’s why I came back!” I was nearly shouting by the time I was done. I stopped and tried to get control of my ragged breathing.
“Will you tell me truth?” he asked. “All of it? Without that…” He stumbled over the word. “…jacking thing that you do?”
I nodded so hard my brain wobbled inside my head.
“Okay, well, come on up. We can, um, talk in my room.” He backed toward his room, not taking his eyes off me and keeping his distance, like I was a wild animal that might strike at any moment. I didn’t care. I was so elated, I nearly floated up the steps. Back in his room, he carefully sat at the head of his bed. I perched at the end of it, waiting.
“So, how does this jacking thing work?” he asked.
I took a deep breath and told him everything. How I discovered I could jack when I accidentally knocked him out. How Simon found out and convinced me he was the only one I could trust with my secret. How he lured me to the warehouse and tried to get me to join his Clan of criminal jackers.
Raf’s eyes grew wide when I told him how I had saved him from the Clan, but we had been caught by Agent Kestrel. I explained that Kestrel had stolen his true memories, so he didn’t remember any of it. He was looking pretty shaken, so I stopped there.
I edged toward him. He watched me closely, keeping his back braced against the headboard and his legs folded underneath him. I stopped moving. “I can’t give you your true memories back,” I said, “because I wasn’t the one who erased them. But I can show you what happened that night. If you want.”
“You’d have to get into my head to do that, right?” he asked.
“Yes. If you don’t want me to, that’s fine.”
“No. I want to see it.” He tensed, as though it might hurt. I scooted closer and took his hand, relieved when he didn’t flinch. I could have jacked the images into his head from the next street over—I just wanted an excuse to touch him again.
I replayed what I could remember of that night. Knocking out the Clan members was etched in my mind, but Raf pulling me out of the warehouse was kind of fuzzed out. I clearly remembered the warmth of his hand on mine and his forgiveness like a warm blanket after an endless time in the barren cold.
When I was done, I pulled out of his mind. His face pinched in as he puzzled through it. “So, Agent Kestrel erased my true memory of this. Made me think you had run away with Simon?”
“I hope to make him pay for that.” That earned me a smile that filled my entire body with sunshine. I wanted to tell Raf everything—every ability I had and every horror I’d seen. But I needed to be careful. I could only tell him things that Kestrel already knew. Raf would be even more helpless to keep secrets from Kestrel than my dad.
At least I could be honest about the lying.
“Raf, there are some things that I can’t tell you. Not many, but some.” I talked faster. “It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just that Kestrel might find out—and
that would be bad. For a lot of people.”
“Okay. I was never any good at keeping secrets anyway.” He smiled again, and I became very aware that my hand still held his. Raf had always told me how he felt, even though he didn’t have to and it probably hurt him when he did. My face ran hot with embarrassment for all the lies I had told, when he had never been anything but honest with me.
I pulled away and twisted my hands in my lap. “I’m sorry I wasn’t honest with you before, Raf.”
“Hey.” He edged closer. “Everything’s going to be all right. Just tell me what you can.”
And so I did. All about the horror that was jacker camp and Laney and breaking out. I went light on the details there, so Kestrel wouldn’t learn anything new. I told Raf how Laney had been kidnapped, and they were experimenting on her, and how I hated leaving behind the other changelings like her in the camp. I didn’t tell him how I had vowed to help them, if I could, because I didn’t want Kestrel to know.
I told him how the guard killed Simon, and he died bleeding in the desert, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Raf’s hand stole over mine when I paused and fought through the tears, not wanting to cry over Simon in front of him. When I had composed myself again, I wondered how I had ever doubted that Raf was the one I could trust.
I pressed on and told him how I’d been on the run, trying to stay invisible. The less Kestrel knew about the visit to my family, the better, so I left that out. And I didn’t tell him about my extra range or fighting off the gas—nothing that would show me to be different from any other jacker. Although Kestrel already knew some of it.
Raf was nodding when I finished. I was empty in a good way, like things that I had kept inside too long were finally out.
It made me light-headed.
“So, what are you going to do now?” Raf asked, his face wrinkled with concern. I had an urge to touch his forehead and smooth out the worry lines. But I kept my hand in my lap, not sure if he wanted my touch.
“I’m not sure.” I gave him a sheepish smile. “Actually, I have an idea, but I can’t tell you.” While I was explaining it all to Raf, a plan had slowly formed in my head. I would need some help to get the changelings freed from the camp, but that wasn’t the dangerous part, if you didn’t count the demens idea of going into the city late at night. Finding Laney would be the tricky bit, where things could go south in a hurry.
The less Raf knew about my plans, the better. For his own safety and to have any hope of pulling it off.
He refrained from asking me for more. He trusted me to tell him if I could. It was so much more than I deserved, but it was exactly what I needed.
That, and a change of clothes.
Raf let me use his shower and borrow his mom’s clothes. Mrs. Santos’s frilly red shirt and black skin-tight pants weren’t exactly my style. But they fit and weren’t caked with Arizona dust. Add in the Cubs hat and the oversized jacket, and I looked ridiculous. At least I was clean.
We stood at the top of the stairs to the front door, awkwardly wondering how to say goodbye. Mama Santos had gone to bed, never realizing that I had been in her house. Raf pressed a wad of unos into my hand.
I stuffed the bills in the pocket of his shirt. “I’m good.” There was very little chance I was coming back. Even if all my plans worked out, I couldn’t return home. It was too dangerous—for me and for everyone I loved. After I was through doing what I could for the changelings and Laney, I would go away somewhere. Start over. That was the best possible case—the worst being any number of ways I could get caught and sent back to the camp.
Besides, I owed Raf too much to take his money as well.
His face twisted. “Why won’t you let me help you?”
I decided to smooth away his worry lines this time and hoped he didn’t mind my touch. I wanted to kiss him but was afraid it might be too much. “You’ve already helped me so much.” Just having a plan and spending time with Raf had left me with a strange sense of elation. It was hard to contain my smile.
“Will you come back soon?” The longing in his eyes made my breath catch.
I wanted to say yes, but I didn’t want to lie to him anymore. “If it’s possible. If it’s safe.” At least that much was the truth.
“That’s a lot of ifs.” He gave me an uncertain smile.
“I want to, Raf.”
He nodded, but the worried look was back. I reached up to hug him and then scurried out the door before I lost my nerve to leave him at all.
chapter THIRTY-THREE
The vacant T-94 train car reminded me that the city at night was literally for the demens.
Once I arrived at Union Station, my transfer ticket put me on a bus, but I wished I had taken Raf’s unos so I could pay for an autocab instead. The bus to Tribune Tower was like a Halloween spook ride come to life. It was on autopath, probably because they couldn’t pay anyone to drive it.
Only impoverished fuzzheads or the demens lived in the crowded slums of the city, where the apartments were seldom up to range codes and people heard their neighbors’ thoughts in their sleep. The fuzzheads were usually harmless—the obscura dulled the part of their minds that received thought waves, but it also fuzzed out any other coherent thought. It was the demens that could be dangerous, with their brain chemistry permanently altered by the barrage of thought waves.
The scrawny guy with the backward t-shirt and hollowed-out eyes seemed too fuzzed out to be dangerous. The gnarled guy with the tin foil hat and the baggy coat was almost certainly demens. But he stuck to mumbling in the back of the bus, and I stayed up front. It was the lady in the skin-tight pink pants who kept wandering the length of the bus that had me the most worried. She talked out loud to someone named Freddie and had very colorful names to describe his unfaithfulness.
After about ten minutes, she finally lunged for me, thinking I was her phantom boyfriend, and I had to jack into the craziness inside her head. She dropped to the floor like a stone. The rest of the demens on the bus barely noticed. I pulled out of Pink Pants’s head quickly, but the demens state of her mind left a strange peppermint taste that burned my mouth. I stood up near the door of the bus, as far from the rest of them as I could. I was staying out of their heads, if at all possible.
I gathered my oversized jacket tight around me, warding off the crisp fall air, and skittered off the bus at my stop. The black glass towers of the city still sparkled with the lights of late-night workers. The Tribune Tower’s limestone blocks loomed above me, a grand building from Chicago’s past, with ornate buttresses lit up and garish at the top. Windows on several floors above the arched entryway shone with promise. My plan would only work if one of those late-night workers was a hard-working reporter looking for a tru-cast.
Reaching inside, I found a single guard in the lobby. I jacked his attention firmly on the ball game, which wasn’t hard since the game was in extra innings. The revolving brass doors gave way to a flush of warm air that brushed off the cold of the street.
The guard’s large, black hands clutched a palm screen whispering the game. Security cameras glared at me from three different corners of the lobby. I pulled my cap down as I scurried past the guard, keeping my footfalls quiet through the metal detectors and to the elevators beyond.
The directory was a maze of names I didn’t recognize, but the reporters all seemed to be on the middle floors, in between the ground-level cast station and the executive suites above the 24th floor. I scanned the floors above me and found a couple of journalists on the fifth floor, some maintenance workers on floors seven and eight, and a lone reporter on the tenth floor, researching an article about pollution in the Chicago River. Dealing with one reporter seemed easier, so I punched the button for floor ten.
The tenth floor was only half-lit, in energy-saving mode. I wove through several darkened hallways before I found the reporter in a bright castroom with about two dozen workpods crammed together. She hunched in her chair and gazed at her screen, using mindware to sift t
hrough the Tribune’s archives.
I stepped quietly to her desk and skimmed her mind while I waited for her to notice me. Her name was Maria Lopez, and she had been a tru-cast reporter with the Trib for about ten years. When she finally realized I was standing next to her desk, she started so badly that she nearly fell off her chair.
Sweet Mother, you scared me! she thought, and then eyed me warily. Of course, she couldn’t read my thoughts, which instantly pegged me as a not-to-be-trusted zero. I linked into her mind quickly, because I didn’t want to lose her trust before I even got started.
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.
Relieved that I wasn’t a zero, she thought, It’s all right. I tasted her sour nervousness. Through her eyes, I looked demens, with my wacky outfit and the Cubs cap. My fellow bus travelers had probably thought I was one of them too. I resisted adding to the effect by laughing and took off my hat instead. Her shoulders relaxed.
Good. Because I have a tru-cast for you. I held back from jacking into her mind and making it a command. I wanted her to help me out, but only if she was willing. Otherwise, I would need to find someone else. It’s about people who can control minds.
Her eyebrows arched. She decided I was definitely demens, and she needed to call security. Well, maybe I could use that to make my point.
I think maybe you should leave, she thought, reaching for her phone.
You can call the security guard, but it won’t matter.
She directed her mindware phone to send a scrit to the security guard that she needed help with a guest on the tenth floor. She decided to keep me calm until he arrived.
Why won’t it matter? If you don’t mind me asking, she thought.
Because I’m one of the people that can control your mind. Her eyes widened slightly. She tried to keep her thoughts and face a calm mask, but her mind couldn’t help flitting around. Mostly wondering what flavor of demens thought they could control minds, and if that made them more or less dangerous. She shoved those thoughts to the back of her mind, still trying to appear calm. Oh? You can control minds? That’s very interesting.
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