"Nice to know I'm good at something." She leaned back on the cot, bringing her legs up under her, her bandaged hand cradled in the curve of her arm. Alex half expected her to start licking it.
"What happened?" he asked.
"I was followed," she said.
"By whom?"
"Nick."
"I had him checked. Hasn't left his house all night."
"He followed me."
Alex tapped his foot, and she turned a Cheshire-cat grin on him.
"Is something wrong?" she said.
"Of course there is."
"I'm alive," she mentioned, by way of good news.
"And I doubt that you deserve to be."
"Well, if that's the question, let me know when you figure out who has the answer. How've you been?" she asked amiably.
"Fine. Bored, without any reports from you," he said. It had been a week since she sent anything through to him. "How's it going with Adrian?"
"Right on target, as usual. He's about prime for intervention."
"And you?"
"Me?"
"Are you about prime for intervention?"
She rolled over on her back and lay staring at the ceiling, saying nothing. The sound of footsteps could be heard coming down the hall, and Alex waited until they stopped in front of the cell.
"Have her right outta there for you, Supervisor," the guard said, turning a massive key in the lock. "You'll need to sign some papers."
"Send them to me. I'm in a hurry."
"I was told—"
"Send them to me."
The guard shrugged and left, and Alex swung the door wide open. Jaguar slowly lifted herself from the cot and stood, stretched, walked over to him, past him, and out the door.
She would have continued down the hall, but he stopped her by putting a hand on her shoulder and turning her toward him.
They stood and stared at each other, still saying nothing. His hand, unconscious of his intent, began massaging her shoulders lightly. Then he picked up her bandaged hand and let it rest in his, examining it.
"Does it hurt?" he asked quietly.
She blinked in surprise. She had prepared her defenses, but not for this. His kindness and her own fatigue made her more vulnerable than anger ever could. She wished she had more of Clare's coolness right now. That absence of passion—of any emotion at all—would seem like such a blessed relief.
"Nice of you to ask," she said at last, keeping her tone light. "After putting me on two cases at once and ignoring the maniac who wants to hang my hide as a personal trophy on his wall."
He let go of her hand and frowned at his own instead. "Jaguar, Nick didn't leave his house tonight."
"He followed me, Alex. Either you believe that, or you can go ahead and call me a liar."
"I could call you tired, Jaguar. And I could pull you from the Rilasco case."
"What does that mean?"
"It means, I'm concerned about your capacity to handle two at once, especially with one of them as difficult as Clare."
"No," she said sharply. "You will not pull me from Clare."
"Why not?"
"Because there's not another Teacher on this Planetoid who could get as far as I have, and you know it. She's not—as she was described by the testers."
"How do you describe her, then?"
"Reflexively," she said cryptically, and flashed him a brief smile.
"How helpful," he said. "So explain the discrepancy between Nick being at home and your contention that he followed you."
"I can't. Not yet. I'm speculating that something's affected—" She glanced up and down the hall, then continued, quietly. "Alex, could Adrian's implant have an effect on empathic space or capacity? It's never happened before, but I know there's a new kind in use. What's in those things anyway?"
He narrowed his eyes at her, suspicious that this was an attempt to deflect his attention from the issues at hand. She looked entirely serious, and he considered the possibility.
"I'm not sure how it could be, Jaguar," he said. "They're just a combination of conductive metals and a chemical coating sensitive to changes in the transmitter. They operate on the same amplification system that the testing equipment for psi capacity operates on."
"Superluminary transfer of information," Jaguar said. "I know that. Transferring information across either space or time separations at a speed equal to or greater than light. That's why the psi testing is so crappy. You can't conduct along something as complex as the cerebral cortex with transmitters designed for three-line variables. They just can't account for the webbing of energy involved."
"Jaguar—you've been reading."
"I learned how as a child, Alex, and have been practicing regularly ever since. And the superluminary stuff interests me. It's related to the empathic arts. An attempt to explain them in a way that satisfies the requirements of quantum physics. Like the human energy field."
"No offense meant. I'm just never sure what goes on inside the complexity of your own cerebral cortex. At any rate, implants work because they're only utilizing one or two neurological pathways. With psi testing, they're overreaching the limits of technology."
"And what about taps—like the one you wanted to put in me."
"They're a little different. Not much. There's an amplification requirement that you don't need for implants, and since it's supposed to pick up verbal interactions, they have to be sited differently, pick up on a three-line rather than the one line of the implants."
"Do they work?"
"For the most part. Of course, with your tendency to blow things up, I'm not sure how long it would have lasted in you, but that's a different matter."
"Stupid," she said. "Trying to do with technology what the human mind can do all on its own, thank you very much. Superluminary transfer of information—technobabble for telepathy, though they won't admit it. But what're they made of? Plastic? Crystal?"
"Actually, mostly pyrite, I think. The new ones, anyway. And the taps. The old ones were transistors, but they broke down so frequently that—"
"Pyrite?" she asked.
"Yes. A naturally occurring ore found in—"
"Fool's gold?" she asked.
"Of course, they have to distill out any of the complementary ores. And it has to be the right kind of pyrite."
"The kind found in abundance near Leadville, Colorado?" she asked.
Alex stopped speaking, and narrowed his eyes at her. "What?" he asked.
And she shut up like a clam.
He saw her close down swiftly, surely, and what appeared to be permanently.
"Jaguar," he said, "what?"
The eyes she turned to him were veiled, and under the veil was a brightness that could have been triumph. The certainty that at last you understand. The fierce pleasure of the hunt, which she tasted in her wild soul like no one else he knew. But she wasn't one to share her prey, once caught. He wasn't sure if that was just distrust, or if it was an animal instinct in her, guarding the meat until she could chew it at her leisure, and alone.
"You're going to tell me, aren't you?"
She lowered her eyes, and raised them, catlike in their neutrality. "Tell you what?" she asked.
"I've gotten nothing from you all week, and I want to know what's going on. I want the works, and I want it fast. Don't," he said. "Just don't argue with me."
He raised two fingers and pressed them to her forehead.
She didn't pull away from him, but he could feel everything in her close. All of it, closed down, shut tight, marked clearly do not enter.
Her eyes flashed anger at him, and he pulled away, held his hands at his sides in tight fists.
"If you want a report," she said coldly, "I'll give you one."
He felt cold himself. Her secrecy and hiddenness, her capacity for silence, were becoming a real problem. How could you get anything done if the people who worked for you engaged in them as much as the people who were working against you.
He step
ped back from her and pointed a finger in her face. "Jaguar, this is bullshit, and it's got to stop. I know you've made empathic contact with Clare, and I know Rachel's doing research for you that I'd call questionable at best. You think your silence creates safety, but it doesn't. It just makes the work more difficult."
"And do you tell me everything you're up to?" she shot back at him. "How about the way you watch me when you think I can't tell? The contact you make every night. You don't tell me that. You just go ahead and cover your ass. And who's left to cover mine?"
So she'd felt his contact. Score a point for her. But he had a play of his own to try.
"Is that your fear, Jaguar? Is that what's left for you from the Serials?"
"What business is it of yours?"
He could feel the hiss and spark of her anger. She never spoke about that to him, or to anyone. Never let anyone see or know what had happened to her, beyond the fact that her family had been killed. She reached into her pocket, and when her hand emerged, he could see it held a dried leaf of mint. She consulted it, shook her head, then raised grim eyes to his.
"You want to know what I did in the Serials?" she asked, dangerously quiet, smiling her perfectly beautiful smile. "I'll tell you if it means so much to you. After my grandparents were killed, I lived in the streets. I took up with a boy I met at the curb. A boy named Aaron. We found an alley with a vent that we'd crawl into and sleep in all day. At night, we hunted."
Alex kept himself quiet. He'd asked for this, now he'd have to take it. But he had a feel in his mouth like he was holding a very bitter pill at the back of his tongue.
"We hunted," Jaguar continued, "for food. Any food we could get. Aaron got really good at catching rats. He'd catch them, and wring their necks very fast, like this." She made a twisting motion with her hands, stepping closer to him as she did so. "He had these gold monogrammed napkins—I don't know if they were leftovers from his family or what, but he'd wrap the rats in them and bring them back to me, so we could skin them, eat them."
"Jaguar," Alex interrupted, "I saw this. I saw children doing this when I was in Manhattan."
"Good," she said, "then it doesn't shock you to hear it, right? Right? And I can tell you the rest—that one week we had no luck catching anything, finding anything. Then Aaron came back to our vent and unfolded his little napkin for me, but this time it wasn't a rat inside. It was a hand. A small hand. Young. Cut clean away at the wrist. I didn't ask him where he got it from. I was ... hungry."
She paused, searching his face for a response and finding none. He could find none in himself, either. Nothing to say to this. Too much to feel.
"But when we crawled back into our vent hole and went to sleep, I felt sick. Sick to my stomach. I woke up, and I saw Aaron, looking down at me in a new way. A way he'd never looked at me before."
Alex swallowed hard, closed his eyes. Hungry. The children left on the streets were hungry.
"I left the next night," Jaguar said. "Pointed myself west and walked. I was walking so fast I almost put my foot on a live wire, but some cop from a rescue crew was there, and he picked me up before I fried myself."
She stopped speaking and waited for him to say something. Anything at all. He watched his emotions swirling wordless inside him, breathed deeply, reminding himself that he'd asked for it. He'd asked for it.
"I was—I guess I was thirteen by then. Living on the streets for over a year, and surviving it. I'm telling you this because the cop who picked me up was someone you know."
She paused, then spit the words out at him. "Nick," she said. "Nick Lyola."
Nick. Nick had rescued her?
A tight knot formed in his belly. Nick rescued her, and now he was filing charges against her. She was enraged at him. A tight and twisted knot, almost impossible to untangle.
He looked around, thinking fast, thinking in circles that went nowhere. More knots, inside him. They were surrounded by the ancient machinery of entrapment and torture. Manacles, balls and chains, prison cells. Knots of history and hate and longing and fear.
"If he saved you, why are you so angry at him?" he asked. "Or are you angry at him because he saved you?"
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"You're not the type to let anyone see where you're vulnerable. But Nick knows. Is that why you hate him?"
She drew her chin up, searing eyes piercing his. She heard the unasked question under this one. She knew he was asking if that's the kind of person she was, if he could trust her, if he could ever imagine he knew who she was at all.
She said nothing. She wasn't about to help him out of these ropes, these chains.
"Are you still sleeping with Nick?" he asked, unexpectedly, surprised at what he said even as he said it.
She tilted her head, and a slow smile spread across her face. "No, Alex," she said, "I'm not."
She did not say why do you ask? She didn't need to say it.
She already knew why, even better than he did.
"He couldn't do it, could he?"
"Well," Terence said, "he never was a very good em-path. I've got the alternative set up, though. We can go ahead with that."
"Perhaps we should use someone else for that."
"No. He's the most likely candidate, given their history."
The Looker sat at a picnic table in a park near the lake, his pale eyes protected by thick sunglasses that wouldn't stay up his thin nose. He shuffled his cards and sniffed.
"You're right. Go through it with me again," he commanded.
Terence did so, and the Looker laid out his cards, with four aces up.
He smiled at them, and turned dim eyes to Terence. "No," he said when Terence was finished. "Remove her."
"From the case? That's what I'm doing—"
"Not from the case. From the Planetoid. From this life cycle."
Terence ran his tongue along his upper lip. "It's not necessary, and I don't think you—"
"How much are we paying you for this?" he asked coldly.
"A lot," Terence said.
"And how much do we know about you? Don't bother—the answer is the same." He held a hand out to Terence in a conciliatory gesture. "We'll add a ten percent bonus for successful completion of the assignment."
Terence breathed in as much of the air as he could find in the room, then let it out, ran a hand through his hair. He wanted to avoid this. He was a numbers man. A records man. The Looker observed his gestures and spoke reassuringly.
"I understand your reluctance. I felt the same way once, when I first worked with Clare. But you must know that this is a matter of national security, and one life is ... nothing. You must also know that a failure to cooperate on your part could result in termination of your employment. Do you know what I mean when I say 'termination of your employment'?"
Terence swallowed through a dry mouth. He'd seen the experiments at the house in Denver. He knew where terminated employees ended up, what happened to them next. The Looker told him all the bodies there were from medical experiments, but that begged the question of who conducted the experiments that created the bodies in the first place.
"I see that you do," the Looker said. "So, you see, it's really a matter of self-defense, isn't it? You don't have a choice at all. It's not as if you're doing anything other than defending your own life, which is a perfectly valid reason for taking preemptive action in a situation such as this."
Terence frowned. Self-defense. The Looker was forcing him into it. When you put it that way, everything looked different. He felt his shoulders unknot some, his heart slow a little, and he tried to ignore the vague sense that he was about to cross some line. Once he did, there would be no return trips. But there was still the question of how to complete the assignment. On that, he didn't have a clue.
"I'm not sure ... how..." Terence fumbled for words. "She's got a pretty fine instinct for self-preservation."
"I'm aware of that. You'll have to think of something. I have another consultant here on the Planeto
id who can provide any assistance you require so that you don't have to be personally involved. All we expect is that you'll protect our interests, and that no harm will come to the subject we wish to recover. Can you do it?"
He turned over the options in his mind. No choice, he told himself. Strictly self-defense. Besides, getting rid of Jaguar would be doing more than one person a favor, when it came down to it. And there were a few ways he could think of, if he had a little help.
"I got a few ideas. I'll need your other consultant, though. I want him to get hold of her—"
"No need to tell me about it. You just take care of this, and we'll take care of you."
8
Her day with Clare was quiet, and she was grateful for that. They had lain on the floor in Clare's bedroom, sprawled across a white carpet, looking over dresses in a catalog that Clare had requested. Jaguar chose to keep today's interactions in this room, which had only three walls of mirrors and none of them set at odd angles. The simplicity of vision in here, in comparison to the central hall, was soothing.
"The long blue silk would be marvelous on you," Clare said.
"Actually, I think it's better for your coloring."
"Perhaps you're right. Then what about that green-and-gold number?" She pointed out a long dress, slit up the front, heavily beaded in emerald green with random bits of gold.
"Oh yes," Jaguar said. "That'd do it. Just fine." Clare was such a pleasant companion, she had to remind herself repeatedly that this woman was about as coldblooded a killer as she was ever likely to meet. That something was missing from her. Something stolen. Something that left her with an intact ego, and no connection to the pain of other people. Jaguar knew all this, and she knew it would take something more than she could give to fix it, but she still believed Clare was right about the green dress, and enjoyed the day.
She remembered spending similar days with Rachel, when she'd first arrived, crazy with anger at the way her Orthodox Jewish sect had treated her, treated all women, and in need of a gentle process to make her realize first the source of her anger, then the source of her fear. Jaguar had spent hours reading to her from children's books, watching her rant and rave, then, as she tired, stroking her hair, soothing her, singing to her.
THE FEAR PRINCIPLE Page 13