Every night, right before he fell asleep, he made sure to check on Jaguar.
His empathic touch always remained light, and cloaked. Just a brush of his consciousness against hers. Enough to know she was alive and well, and enough to see whatever protocol she happened to be breaking with her current assignment. This gesture bordered on the intrusive—a sort of Peeping Tom discourtesy—and he wasn't sure if she could feel his contact. If so, she'd never said anything in objection. Of course, he could justify his actions on the grounds that she had a propensity for trouble, and he had to be able to back her up when she went out on one of her shaky limbs. Or, he could say that she was such a strong empath, he wanted to make sure she wasn't playing with the darker sides of the arts. Both justifications held some of the truth. Neither one told the whole truth.
He'd gotten into the habit when she first came to work for him. As all Teachers had to, she'd gone through the testers' hands when she was hired, and they'd reported a high level of e-wave activity, indicating more than one psi capacity, along with aberrant neurophysiological response in the autonomic system, primarily in reflex arc synaptic time. Then the report had broken from its officialese to comment that the subject had a pronounced capacity to block incoming waves, and if other capacities were present, they could not at this time be fully defined.
Their equipment had gone flooey.
Alex had her tested again when she was transferred to his zone, with the same results.
Jaguar's only comment to him, when he questioned her on it, was that the damn machines never worked in the first place.
She was right. They were notorious for missing specific psi capacities and psychological or emotional subtleties. Alex agreed with Jaguar that it was a mistake to try to fit an art within the framework of a linear science. But on the other hand, he saw her trying to hide a grin, and knew she'd had a hand in the equipment's breakdown. Apparently among her empathic gifts was a talent for screwing up technology.
He'd asked permission to make empathic contact with her, in lieu of further testing, and she'd said no. Absolutely not. When he asked for her reasons, she said simply that she didn't want to, and it wasn't a job requirement. Alex let it ride, though he wanted to know more of her specific capacities, and more of her experience in the Serials. All Teachers were required to share that information with their supervisors, because the traumas they carried might affect their ability to deal with prisoners, make them more suited for certain kinds of criminals, less suited for others. Jaguar had given the bare facts—she'd been living in Manhattan, being raised by her grandparents because her mother had died in childbirth and her father was unknown. Her grandparents had been killed. She had escaped and gone to live with friends of the family in New Mexico.
She'd never allowed more than the surface contact that a private conversation required, never told him more than that. Yet she could walk into his center as if she'd been doing it all her life, and find his central point of fear from the Killing Times without breaking her stride.
A perfectly beautiful woman. A perfectly beautiful betrayal.
She'd found that memory as if it was her own, and used it to throw him off balance, which indicated to Alex how threatened she felt. Two cases at once might be too many for her after all. Two cases, and Nick all over her.
Alex was worried about that. Nick wasn't responding to the messages on his belt sensor telling him that the charges against Jaguar had been dropped for lack of evidence. He would know that meant Alex was backing her. He'd be able to read between those lines. He was on rest leave and not required to report in right now, but surely he would want to know what was going on with his charges.
Maybe he did know. Maybe he knew more than Alex did.
He wondered how much empathic contact there had been between Nick and Jaguar during their work together. How much did she teach him, and how much did he know on his own?
Most of the empath Teachers chose not to use their talents on a regular basis. Some were still nervous about being found out, because although the existence of psi capacities was now admitted as scientific fact, actually using them was still a touchy political issue. Less so here than on, for instance, Planetoid One. And certainly less so here than on the home planet, but empaths didn't like having too many people know who and what they were.
Beyond that, it was difficult to bear the experience of getting that close to someone else's shadow side, which is what Teachers were usually looking for in the interchange.
It took some learning, some ritual training, and that was difficult to come by. Not many ritual elders survived the Serials long enough to pass on what they knew. After the first year of violence, vigilante groups had formed, calling themselves Safety Squads. They'd run through cities with nerve gas, homemade biobombs, whatever they could get. And they targeted one specific group of people.
They decided since so much of the killing was ritual, ritual leaders must be at fault. Priests and nuns, those who wore the side curls of the Hasid, those who wore crystals or feathers, were marked. At one point they decided that sage-green clothing was the color of the empath, and went after anyone wearing a dress or shirt in that shade. And in fact they targeted well. Although the idea that psi capacities were a scientifically provable fact was new then, those who were beginning to explore them tended either to be part of a traditional religious community or part of the new wave of philosophies that included relearning Native American ways, or Eastern philosophies, or both. And those who supported what they called Earth-Based Ritual wore sage-green clothing, to identify themselves. They were easy targets.
The Safety Squads ended by killing themselves with their own inexpertness in handling the weapons they chose. But while they were at their work many empaths died, and many more were left with genetic damage that would plague them and their children and their children's children. The ritual leaders responded by putting their lives on the line, going out into the streets to care for the injured, bury the dead, do whatever needed to be done. It was a time that contained as much courage and grace as it did horror.
Alex had avoided the worst of it. His family bred and trained racehorses, and lived well outside the range of the city terror. They would listen to the news without being able to really comprehend what was happening in the cities, except when they felt the ripples of chaos affecting them personally. Shipment of the feed they needed was late more often than usual. Races were canceled. Jockeys were killed.
He was nineteen by the time the new President—someone who provided real leadership instead of making speeches from his safe house in D.C.—called for a draft, and began utilizing the army for domestic service. He'd enlisted, and ended up in Manhattan, cleaning up the mess after the Safety Squads. It was here that he first found someone to help him learn to name and use his empathic abilities.
Sophia, an old Russian woman. He'd extricated her cat from the hands of an angry teenage boy, out to kill anything he could because he'd seen too many of his friends die. The boy called her a witch. She said he was right. She showed Alex a gap-toothed smile, and said he was a witch, too.
Alex got her out of the city, transporting her, along with a truckload of other older people who had managed to survive thus far, to one of the churches that had opened its doors as sanctuary to the homeless, the frightened. He visited with her as often as he could, and she taught him a lot. Then he began teaching himself.
He read Jung and Estes, learned the theories Jonathan Post propounded in Unparticular Magic, a mixture of the pragmatic and the mystic, predicting the onset of the Serials based on the author's belief that society had lost all sense of the spiritual and the ritual as a positive containing space for shadow and for light. When that happened, Post said, ritual behavior would play itself out in dangerous ways—murderous ways. He predicted that serial and ritual killing would precede a social breakdown, and that increases in acts of domestic terrorism and pointless random killings would follow.
And at some point the violence would
reach critical mass, invading the population like a metastasized cancer. But by then any attempts at warding off the blow would be too late.
He had been right, but nobody listened.
The killing spree burned itself out in more than ten million dead just in the United States, and the survivors bearing the mark of that time in too many ways to count.
Clare had survived. Nick had survived. Both were scarred, perhaps beyond repair.
Jaguar had survived, but what did she have to do to stay alive?
Alex assumed that Jaguar had learned the empathic arts from her grandparents and their people, and was already practicing in a childlike way when the Serials began. That would make her even more susceptible to a lingering, chronic shadowing, similar to the kind of shadow sickness found in those who didn't observe the proper ways of making empathic contact. She would be permeable to the evil of the Serials in a different way than someone who wasn't an empath, or so young.
How had she survived, and what had she done to protect herself? Perhaps her grandfather taught her ways before he died. He had been a powerful leader of his people, both he and his wife of the rapidly dwindling Mertec tribe, spiritual and ethnic cousins of the Maya. They'd assimilated into a number of Pueblo tribes, and into mainstream culture so thoroughly that most of them didn't know where their blood ran from. But Jaguar's grandfather held one of the first UN seats for Native Americans. He had a reputation as a man of vision, and a man of peace. Alex knew he carried the arts of his people, and that his granddaughter still used them.
He hoped she was using them wisely. He hoped that whatever was bothering her about Nick had nothing to do with that.
Tonight, he found her and established a light sensory contact. Enough to see and listen in as she worked her case in the House of Mirrors.
Jaguar was laughing through her eyes, Alex could see Clare laughing as well. Then she was—what was she doing? A tingling interrupted the flow of consciousness, almost tossed him out of the empathic space, and he focused.
She was establishing empathic contact with Clare. For a moment he was tempted to jump in and see what she saw. Then he pulled back. He couldn't join her in that. She'd notice immediately, and it would probably destroy any chance she had of getting somewhere. He could only guess from watching her and Clare's face shift expression where it was they walked together.
Jaguar's face smoothed out, and—a tear? A tear? Was she crying?
"Now what?" he murmured into the quiet of the night.
"So I thought, if you know how to make a French braid, we could—" Clare stopped speaking and watched Jaguar watching herself stretch in the image-lengthening mirrors of the central room. "You're not with me tonight," she noted. "What is it?"
Jaguar turned to her and smiled. "What?"
"I said," Clare repeated, "you're distracted. Why?"
Jaguar let her arms reach out as high as they would toward the ceiling, then drop to her side. She hadn't been listening. Not paying attention. That was dangerous, and it was Nick's fault, damn him.
"I've got a few other cases on my mind," she said. "Did you want to do something with your hair? Is that what you said?" She had been spending quiet time with Clare, trying to build a relationship that established trust and boundaries. Like all dangerous animals, Clare had to be made to feel safe, and to know who was in charge.
Clare nodded and walked over to her, put a hand on her shoulder. "You work too hard. You should relax more." With her other hand, she indicated the thick white rug that covered the floor. "It's soft and clean, and if you lie down, I'll give you a back rub."
"I think," Jaguar said, "I'll pass."
"You're not afraid of me, are you?"
"No. But I'm not stupid either. You're an assassin by profession. Granted, the odds are very slim that you've been able to get any weapons in, but you still have your hands, which are beautiful and I would imagine very strong." This was a good opportunity to try for the alpha-female role. She'd use it.
She put her hand on the hand that held her shoulder and gripped it tightly, feeling the automatic tightening of Clare's grip in response. She squeezed further, watching Clare's face in the mirror as it concentrated.
Nothing too heavy registered yet. Just an increase in focus. An attentiveness beyond what was necessary. With a swift, imperceptible movement, Jaguar slipped her free hand around and ringed Clare's neck with it. With another flick of her wrist, she released the red glass knife she kept at her wrist, and pressed it against the carotid.
"You see?" she said. "It would be too easy." She released her hold, and Clare pushed herself away with a gasp.
Good, Jaguar thought. There is a crack in the veneer. Or else she was a consummate actress. She waited for Clare to speak.
"You're very good," Clare said. "I could have used you a few times on assignments."
Jaguar acknowledged the compliment with a slight bow. "I have you at a disadvantage. You're my prisoner and you don't know what I mean to do with you. For all you know, my job is actually to kill you."
She could see that Clare was paying close attention, her instincts heightened to respond to whatever might come next.
"Nobody ever talked about what went on here," she said. "Not even the two men I knew who came back from here."
"They didn't tell you?"
"They wouldn't. But they came back, so I assume some people do survive your programs."
"Most do. Even most of mine do," Jaguar added. "Even most of Nick's do. But I almost forgot, you know Nick."
Clare blinked at her, and walked toward a mirror, where she stopped and touched her reflection at the throat, where a red splotch was forming. "Nick?" she asked.
"Nick Lyola. You knew him as a police officer in New York. He arrested you long ago, for possession of cocaine. It was before the Serials, so you were ... just sixteen?"
"About. Juvenile offender. Stupid kid stuff. But Nick—oh yes," she said, caressing the red spot in the mirror, as if she were trying to rub it out, or soothe it, Jaguar couldn't tell. "I remember him now. He was a lousy fuck."
Jaguar laughed. "Something else we agree on," she said. But strange, that Clare should have been sleeping with someone like Nick when she was that young. If she was sleeping with him. If it wasn't all just smoke in mirrors. She could pursue that later, when they were braiding hair or manicuring their nails. Right now she had other lines to try.
"Clare, what did Patricks want with pyrite?"
Clare turned and tilted her head. "I don't think I've ever been injured before," she said. "All these years, and not a scratch. I've prided myself on that."
"I know," Jaguar said softly. "Tell me what Patricks wanted with pyrite."
"Odd, that the first injury should be from someone I like so much. Do you think it's by way of initiation? The bite of the jaguar, or some such rite?"
Jaguar decided to try one more time. "What did Patricks want with pyrite?"
"I've only killed two women," she said, "and I didn't really enjoy the jobs. They whimpered, at the end. I don't imagine you'd whimper, would you?"
"Only if it suited my purposes," Jaguar said, giving up.
"That's what I thought." She stood with her hand on the image of her throat in the mirror, stroking it. Soothing it. Jaguar walked up behind her and turned her away from the mirror. Clare smiled, and touched Jaguar's face.
Jaguar felt the opening of opportunity here. It was too soon to go in deeply, but a good place to make the initial contact. She pressed two fingers against Clare's forehead, waiting for the hum that indicated a flow of energy between them, allowing her access beyond the wall of ice, the slick mirror surface presented here.
Clare closed her eyes, tilted her head back. Jaguar had the impression she was waiting to be kissed, or killed. She couldn't quite tell which. It didn't matter.
"Have you ever met an empath?" she asked softly, whispering into her ear.
"Yes," Clare said. "Wait. Are you—?"
"See who you are," Jaguar sai
d. "Be what you see."
6
They walked together down the city street, arm in arm, on a day when the air was filled with heat and the smell of urine, of sweat, of exhaust from cars.
"This isn't yours," Jaguar said, turning to Clare and touching her on the forehead.
"No," Clare said, "of course not. It's yours."
"But that's not supposed to—" she began to say, and gunfire cracked to her right. She threw Clare down to the sidewalk, flinging herself over her, bracing them both against the side of a building.
Jesus. Get down. Stay down. Keep your head covered. Christ, what's a kid like you—
Beneath her, she could hear Clare laugh. "You know where we are, then? You know when we are?"
Jaguar lifted her head slowly. Looked up and down the street. Saw a man raising a meat cleaver over a small yellow dog that cringed and whimpered. A common kitchen cleaver. A common dog. Manhattan. During the Serials. The Killing Times.
"No," she said. "I don't want to be here."
He brought the knife down, and his laughter howled down the street to them.
"We have to—to leave here. We have to leave." Jaguar saw that the man with the knife was locked in struggle with a policeman who was trying to stop him, small-yellow-dog body lying mutilated on the street. One leg gone. Back split. Blood. More blood.
The men struggled for the knife. Raised and lowered it. Raised and lowered it. More blood. Always more blood. This time, the policeman won. Then he turned toward Jaguar. Turned toward Jaguar and Clare, cleaver raised.
"There's no way out, Jaguar," Clare said, matter-of-fact. Calm and cool as silver and ice. "You know that."
"I got out," Jaguar said. "I escaped."
Clare laughed. "Did you?"
Jaguar stood, and raised Clare to her feet. "I went that way," she said, pointing west. Due west. She knew nothing else, except that she once lived in the west with her grandparents, when she was very young, before her grandfather started working for the UN.
They had lived in the west, and she headed west, directly into a live wire. Directly into Nick.
THE FEAR PRINCIPLE Page 10