But chaos reigned above as medical personnel swarmed around the guards. Some had donned gas masks, thinking there had been an attack that caused the mass fainting. Some set up a perimeter to keep patients and visitors away from the security desk.
Our shuffling group neared the loading dock doors, and I peered through the window to see a military police jeep come to a screeching halt behind the linen service van.
Oh no.
Two camouflage-clad guards with large, shiny black guns hopped out of the jeep and stalked toward the loading dock. I didn’t know if they were jackers or not, but I couldn’t take the chance of probing them to find out. I threw my hands out to stop our group in its tracks and edged backward, praying the guards hadn’t seen us. We shuffled down the hall as fast as a group of barefoot kids and two unconscious changelings carried by adults can go. We stuck out like a troupe of clowns at a funeral.
I shoved open the cancer ward’s doors, retracing my steps through the hospital. Maybe we could make it out the front to Kestrel’s car. There was no way I could fit all the changelings into one car, but maybe we could steal another ride. But we had to move fast. The heavy footsteps of the guards pounded in the corridor behind us, but they passed by the cancer ward and kept going.
We stumbled through the double doors and past the elevators out to the lobby. I jammed to a stop again, with changelings bumping and jostling into me. There were a half dozen armed guards and two jacker agents charging through the lobby. Before I had a chance to think, they spotted us, and eight weapons targeted our heads. Their shiny barrels were narrow and lethal. These were not dart guns. I suddenly remembered I had a gun in my hand and reflexively pointed it back at them.
At the same time, an intense pressure pounded my head. The jacker agents had shoved me back into my own head, and the six changelings were struggling to fight them off. The nurse, orderly, and med-techs slowly came out of their daze, and started to put the two changelings they were carrying on the floor.
The agents crept toward us, guns still aimed at our group of barefoot children.
“Stop there!” I held my gun straight out, hoping they couldn’t see the tip of it shaking like a leaf in the fall breeze. They paused, still trying to jack into my head. After a moment, they seemed to realize that they couldn’t, so they switched tactics. The orderly straightened up and lunged toward me. I danced out of the way, and struggled to jack into his mind, ordering him to stay down where he had stumbled to the lobby floor. He staggered and then collapsed on the floor as two changelings grabbed hold of him. I mentally wrestled with the two agents as they jacked into the nurse’s and the med-techs’ minds. The nurse teetered in her white-soled shoes, uncertain whether she should attack me or have a seat, but the med-techs rushed at me. The other four changelings, still struggling under the assault from the jacker agents, latched onto them and pulled them to the floor.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” I screamed across the lobby, still keeping my gun trained on the lead agent’s head. But I wouldn’t shoot, I knew that. And the agent seemed to know it too.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the janitor, still standing by the gift shop. I didn’t have to reach into his mind to know he understood. He knew who we were, and that we were hopelessly outgunned. Outjacked. He held my gaze for a moment, then dropped his eyes to the floor and turned his back on us.
I looked back to the agent and a triumphant smile had crept onto his face. To him, all of this was containable. Once the agents had us under control, they could wipe the minds of everyone here, mop up after they had returned us to the experiment room in the basement prison below. We would disappear, like Simon and all the others in the camp. And no one would come looking for us, because no one would even know that it had happened.
My hand with the gun twitched and a red haze of anger clouded my mind. I wanted to shoot the lead agent before the changelings and I lost the mental and physical wrestling match we were locked in. Make him pay for everything the Feds had done. Pay for the experiments. Pay for killing Simon. If I killed him fast enough, maybe I could shoot the other agent as well. Then it would be easy to jack the reader guards long enough for us to escape. But it was much more likely that I would end up with a bullet in me, like Simon. Bleeding out on the hospital floor was no different than bleeding into desert dust. Dead was dead. Worse, some of the changelings might get shot too. Even the patients and visitors, frozen in fear at the periphery of the lobby where they had shrunk back as far as the room would allow, might be caught in the cross fire.
It was too much. I couldn’t risk getting them all killed.
I turned my gun sideways, my finger off the trigger, and held both hands up in front of me, the universal sign of surrender. The agent’s smile curved higher.
An image of Raf floated through my mind. I should have kissed him when I had the chance. I wondered if his lips were as soft as they looked or if they would sear mine like Simon’s always had.
Now I would never find out.
That’s when I realized I still had the phone in my other hand. With the push of a button, I could expose Kestrel, the Feds, and everything they had done to us. I could stop them from taking me and the changelings back down to the basement, to disappear forever. But if Kestrel knew I had blown the cover on his experiments, he was sure to make my dad pay for it. And I would be spilling the biggest secret of all, the one my family had spent their entire lives keeping. There would be no pretending, no hiding among readers. No normal life for me, for any of us. Ever again.
The lies would stop.
With my eyes still locked on the lead agent, I linked into the phone’s mindware and dialed Maria, giving silent thanks to whoever invented the speakerphone option.
“Thank God, Kira! It’s about time you…” She cut herself off, probably taking in the scene, which I was now streaming to her.
“Are you getting a good signal, Maria?” I asked.
The speakerphone drew the sharp attention of everyone in the room. The smile on the agent’s face died.
“Yes.” Her voice was cautious, slow.
“I have a tru-cast story for the Trib. It’s about an agent of the federal government who threatened to shoot a group of children in a hospital. Are you getting all this?”
“Yes, I have a very good visual on the gun.”
The agent’s gun wavered. I didn’t have to link into his mind to know what he was thinking. Did he want to be on a tru-cast, trying to explain why he was going to shoot down a group of innocent children in a hospital? Did he want to be responsible for that?
“These kids were being held in a basement prison, right here at the Naval hospital,” I continued for the benefit of Maria’s tru-cast and for the agent whose gun was still pointed at my head. “They were being held for no other reason than having a special ability, a new ability to link into other people’s heads. Just because they have an ability we don’t understand, doesn’t mean they deserve to be in prison. To be experimented on. It’s like the old days when the first readers were discovered. What did we do? We put them in prison. We tortured them with experiments. Well, we’re doing it again, to these kids, today.”
I swept the phone around, so it had a good shot of my face, and the changelings sprawled on the floor behind me. I took a jittery breath for courage. “My name’s Kira Moore, and I’m just like them. I was kidnapped by the FBI, brought here, and then sent to a prison with hundreds of other kids just like me. For no other reason than who I am.” I panned across the changelings, slowly. I could only imagine what it must look like to Maria, barefoot changelings in their hospital gowns, still holding onto the med-techs and the orderly to keep them down while mentally wrestling with the agents to control the readers’ minds.
“I’m taking these kids out of here, back home to their families, where they belong.”
I rotated the camera back to the lead agent and I could see the decision had settled into his face. This was above his pay grade. “This is Kestrel’s mess,” he sai
d, loud enough that it could be captured on my phone. I was pretty sure he did that on purpose. “Let him clean it up.” He slowly lowered his gun. Louder, he said, “A simple misunderstanding, I’m sure.” The second agent looked warily at him, but he lowered his weapon, and the guards did the same.
The agents left the changelings’ minds and everyone slowly stood up, faces not quite sure. The guards and agents stepped aside, making a path for us to walk out the front door.
For a moment, I was terrified it was a trap. But if they took us down now, it would all be on camera. I linked into the nurse, orderly, and med-techs’ minds, our unwitting accomplices in the escape. Please. Help us. I would let them decide. If they didn’t want to help, I wouldn’t force them. Somehow, between the changelings and me, we would manage to get the two unconscious kids out the door. I wasn’t exactly sure where we would go from there, but if nothing else, we could walk. We just needed to get off base property before the agent changed his mind about letting us loose.
The orderly lifted one changeling over his shoulder, and the nurse and two changelings managed to pick up the other. The med techs hung back, edging their way back to the elevators. I didn’t envy them when Kestrel found out what had happened.
We shuffled and limped past the crowd of readers and guards and agents. I held my phone out toward them, like the weapon of truth that it was. I didn’t turn my back on them until everyone was through both sliding glass doors at the entrance. Once we were outside, we stood still for a moment, the changelings shivering as the cool night air swept past their bare feet.
I surveyed the few cars in the parking lot, wondering how long it would take us to jack into one and whether any of the changelings knew how to drive. I could barely drive, and we would probably be risking someone’s life by putting any of the changelings behind a joystick. Maybe I could program an autopath for them. At least I knew where we had to go next.
As I was about to step off the curb, a delivery van came careening around the corner of the building, pulling quickly up to the front. The driver was the linker janitor from inside. I don’t know how or when he slipped away, but he must have made it to the loading dock. The linen delivery driver was nowhere to be seen.
“Need a lift?” he said with a grin. Relief flooded into me, and my knees barely held me up.
Maybe we would make it after all.
chapter THIRTY-FIVE
The truth magistrate touched me with his leathery hand and examined me with his watery eyes.
I tried not to shiver.
Maria had cleared out the castroom floor, and half the changelings were passed out while the other half chomped on vending machine food. But Maria wanted me on camera as soon as possible to explain what we were and what we could do. It was the middle of the night, but our story would probably be playing for days.
I linked my thoughts to the camera crew to keep them calm. Demonstrations would only freak people out. The truth magistrate sat across from me, sincerely believing he could get my true thoughts by holding my hand and asking probing questions. The cameras were trained on us, and a boom dangled over our heads to pick up our thought-waves and translate them into a scrolling scrit at the bottom the tru-cast. I linked into the mindware interface to make sure it captured my thought responses.
Is your name Kira Moore? the truth magistrate asked.
Yes.
His brow creased, probably expecting a rush of emotions. Of course he wouldn’t get anything from me unless I jacked it into his head, and I was determined not to do anything but link.
Are you sixteen years old?
Yes.
Do you live on Manor Road in Gurnee, Illinois?
Right now, I’m living in a castroom in the Tribune Tower. That got a twitter of mental laughter from everyone in the room.
Were you born in 2090? This question had more edge. If I was born in 2090, I would be twenty years old, not sixteen. I could jack in any answer I wished, and it would seem like a true thought. But that wouldn’t help.
No.
Do you believe you can control other people’s minds?
Yes. This visibly shook him. There were no thoughts or emotional responses from me that would indicate lying.
Have you ever been diagnosed demens? Okay, that one irked me.
No. Although I might be demens for outing myself as a jacker. More laughter.
The magistrate’s glasses rode up. Are you controlling my mind right now?
No. Which was true. I had already explained that I could tell him anything and jack him to believe it, but that I would only link thoughts to him. Whatever he decided was his own choice.
Can you control my mind?
Yes. He paused and contemplated asking for a demonstration. I didn’t want to, but if he asked, I would.
Instead he asked, How long have you been able to control minds?
About six weeks.
I imagined Raf waking up in the morning and seeing me on the tru-cast at home. I was glad I had already told him everything, so he wouldn’t hear how long I had been lying to him on a tru-cast. If only I had trusted Raf from the beginning, maybe I would be with him now, holding hands and looking into those deep brown eyes, instead of crammed into a cubicle with a leathery old man and a camera crew. Which was almost as bad as it sounded.
The truth magistrate’s questioning went on at length, and eventually he was satisfied. Or at least unwilling to admit that he couldn’t tell my true thoughts from my sims.
Maria’s people interviewed each of the changelings as well, and their faces cycled on all the chat-casts and tru-casts. We had nowhere to go, so we stayed in the Trib Tower while we waited for the changelings’ parents to see the tru-casts and come forward. There wasn’t much in the way of beds, so we slept on the floor, the changelings piled up like puppies.
The next morning, a couple of adult jackers came to Maria with their stories. They submitted to the truth magistrate, too, which made me laugh. They must have been hiding in plain sight, like all the jackers that had avoided the camp. After a while, I stopped watching the repeats of the tru-casts, including my video tell-all at the hospital. It creeped me out seeing my face over and over.
For lunch, Maria had some pizza delivered. Thirteen-year-old changelings could eat an unbelievable amount, although twelve-year-old Xander ate more than three of them put together. I was munching on a bite of rapidly cooling pepperoni with extra cheese when pictures of the camp came up on the screen. I stopped mid-chew. I knew Maria had sent a cameraman out to the camp, but I didn’t know they had pictures already.
Breaking Tru-Cast blared in red under a picture of the camp, and Maria’s report scrolled along the bottom of the screen. Open-air trucks, piled with the limp bodies of prisoners, caravanned across the hard-packed desert road. The images were blurred, like they were taken from a long way away, and Maria’s words talked about a new kind of person—a jacker—who could control people’s thoughts.
The inmates weren’t moving. My eyes pricked. I told myself they had to be gassed for transportation or the jacker prisoners would overwhelm the guards. And the Feds wouldn’t kill them, not while they were necessary for Kestrel’s research. But then Kestrel was probably still sleeping off the gas in his apartment.
The pictures made my stomach clench. I set the pizza down. After only a few images flashed by, they started to repeat. The changelings were transfixed by the screen. I didn’t have to link into their minds to know those photos were giving them flashbacks.
I shuffled over to Maria’s desk, where she was busy sending a scrit on her phone.
“You got pictures.” My voice was just a whisper.
Maria faced me. “My photographer only transmitted a few images before they stopped him.” The distress in her voice chewed a hole in my stomach.
“Oh. Maria, I’m so sorry…” What did they do to him?
“He’s okay,” she said quickly. “He woke up in Albuquerque. Until I showed him the pictures, he didn’t know why he was t
here. He didn’t remember any of it.”
Maria was surprisingly calm, given that my prediction about the mind-wipe had come true. I swallowed. “Do you think they’ll come after us?” The changelings had flopped on the stubbled carpet, entranced by the tru-cast, and a few reporters worked stories at their desks.
“No. They can’t wipe the minds of everyone in North America, Kira. The story is too big for the Feds to pretend it didn’t happen.”
“But the photographer—” I waved at the looping pictures on the screen.
“He’s getting another camera and heading back out there. They’re going to have to release the prisoners, Kira. You did a great thing, coming to me with this.” I hoped she was right. I hoped the Feds couldn’t make all of us simply disappear, that it would be too coincidental to cover up. Her phone vibrated again, and she turned away to mentally answer it. This was probably the tru-cast of her lifetime, but the pictures were making it hard for me to breathe. In all the chaos of rescuing the changelings from the hospital, I had shoved thoughts about the Camp of the Flies aside. But I hadn’t forgotten.
I remembered the stifling heat. Holding hands in the truck with Simon. My feet pounding across the desert. Simon’s blood on my hands. The walls of the castroom pressed in on me. I fled to windows at the far edge of the room.
My hands pressed against the cold window panes, and I breathed clouds of moisture onto the surface. The city of Chicago blurred under my gasping breath. I closed my eyes and touched my forehead to the cool glass until my stomach started to unclench. Footsteps pattered behind me.
“You okay?” asked Laney. She put a small hand on my shoulder.
I managed a smile. “Yeah. Just, you know, hard to see it again.” Some babysitter I was, leaving the changelings to fend for themselves with those images on the screen. I took a deep breath and tipped my head toward them, huddled together. “Let’s go see how everyone else is doing.”
Laney tucked her hand in mine and led me back to the group. The changelings were dealing with it better than I was and they quickly lost interest in favor of the pizza. As the pictures cycled again, I noticed a shock of red hair in one of the trucks. If Molloy was still alive, he was certain to be planning my murder in several painful ways.
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