Open Minds

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  “If I make it,” I said, “I’ll call you and answer all the questions you like.”

  She slowly slid me her card. She obviously didn’t approve, but I didn’t need her approval, and I already had Kestrel’s address.

  I tucked her card in my pocket and left.

  ~*~

  I didn’t want to deal with another bus ride, but taking an autocab to Lincoln Park would cost real money. An all-night store next door to the Trib Tower made Simon’s beer-stop seem upscale. I stole a disposable phone and jacked the attendant to load a tally card with real unos, hoping the cameras didn’t get a good shot of me. After memorizing Maria’s number, I threw her card away. If I got caught again, I didn’t want them tracking back to her before she had a chance to do the tru-cast.

  After hailing an autocab with the small, silver phone, I swiped my tally card to pay for the fare and programmed an autopath to Kestrel’s address. Turned out he lived in one of the rehabbed brownstones that had been brought up to range codes by reducing the number of occupants and restructuring the floors so there was additional space between them. That kind of rebuilt housing didn’t normally come cheap, but then Lincoln Park was still in the city, surrounded by crammed apartments and wacky neighbors. Maybe it was affordable on an FBI salary. I guessed Kestrel didn’t worry about living with the demens since he was a jacker.

  I rubbed the fatigue from my eyes and scanned the ten levels of the apartment building. Only five were occupied, and Kestrel was asleep on the top floor in a light, scattered dream state. I was tempted to run a few nasty guilt-inducing dreams through his mind. Instead, I jacked him deep into unconsciousness, so he wouldn’t wake until I was ready. I convinced the bellman to accompany me to the tenth floor and unlock Kestrel’s apartment, erasing the memory from his mind once he was back in the elevator.

  I hesitated at the open front door. Since Kestrel couldn’t get into my head, he couldn’t control me mentally. Yet I wasn’t strong enough to simply extract Laney’s location from his mind without help. And physically, I was still a sixteen-year-old girl up against a grown man, and I didn’t like those odds.

  I carefully stepped into the tiny apartment. Apparently, an FBI salary didn’t buy you much floor space, even in the city. I checked that Kestrel was safely unconscious in the bedroom as I poked around his apartment. Maybe I could jack into his e-slate for information about Laney, if I could find it.

  The apartment was immaculate, and I couldn’t find anything at all related to his work. He must keep his e-slate in his bedroom. And maybe his gun. I edged my way back to the bedroom. He was still breathing the deep, slow breaths of the unconscious. I switched on the light, knowing it wouldn’t wake him.

  The bedroom was likewise spotless. I searched the walk-in closet, lined with identical navy G-man jackets and white, collared shirts. I was about to give up when I found his gun holster and cuffs hanging on the door. I took them down. Maybe I could use the gun to threaten him. Make him to tell me where Laney was without fighting him in his head. The hefty gun was cold and simply looking at it was making my hands sweat.

  Maybe not. Plus, I didn’t want him to get ahold of it and shoot me.

  I searched for a place to hide the gun where he wouldn’t find it, but where I could still grab it if things went badly. I pulled open a dresser drawer and started to stuff it under some t-shirts. Something dark and heavy was buried there.

  Another gun.

  I pulled the large-muzzled weapon slowly out of the drawer. It was a dart gun.

  Kestrel may not be afraid of the demens, but he seemed to fear jackers. Which made sense, given all the ones he had sent to the Camp of the Flies.

  I quickly checked all the other drawers and the nightstand by his bed. He didn’t have any more weapons stashed away. I buried his holstered gun deep in the bottom dresser drawer and dragged Kestrel across the bed to handcuff his limp arm to the bedpost. Dart gun in hand, I perched on the edge of the dresser facing him.

  Time to wake up.

  I jacked into Kestrel’s mind to bring him up from that deep unconscious state. It took him a minute to come to. He squinted at the lights shining behind me. When he realized he was cuffed to the bed, fear pulsed through his mind. He pushed me out of his head, and the pressure of his mind built on mine.

  “You!” he hissed, and I wasn’t sure if he was angry or frightened. I didn’t care.

  I shot him.

  He stared in horror at the dart that had stabbed him in the chest, right through his navy-striped pajamas. It only took a few seconds for the juice to pull him under. Not so fast, Kestrel. I reached into his mind and sped up his heart. As it pounded blood through his system, it cleared out some of the drug. His mind-scent was pungent and made me gag on the peppery smell.

  He awoke gasping for breath. Mentally hindered by the drug, he gave me a wild-eyed look and clutched his chest. He was convinced that I was giving him a heart attack. I figured now was a good time to ask.

  “Where’s Laney?”

  He couldn’t catch his breath to answer out loud. Don’t know anyone named Laney, he thought. With the drug inhibiting his brain, I could tunnel in and pull out the information I needed. I remembered the agonized look on Simon’s face when Molloy and Andre scoured his brain for the truth, and it wasn’t pretty. If Kestrel didn’t tell me soon, I’d do exactly that.

  “Where are all the inmates you perform experiments on?” I slowed his heart rate a bit, so he didn’t burn through the juice too fast. I needed him impaired if I was going to dig through his mind. Red splotches mottled his face, and his breathing slowed.

  He decided I didn’t have the stomach for killing. I’m not telling you anything, Kira. His hatred for me was like an acid stinging the back of my throat, and he struggled to push me out of his head again, but he was too weak. His eyes went wide and fear sped up his heart. I slowed it back down again, and he blinked, confused about what I was doing.

  You’re lucky I’m not a monster like you, Kestrel. Although it was surprisingly satisfying to shoot you.

  I’m not a monster, he thought. I send the monsters to the camp.

  Is that how you justify sending little kids to that place? You’re one of us, Kestrel. How can you think that’s okay? I was wasting time talking to him, but I couldn’t seem to stop. Part of me wanted to know how he could do this to his own kind.

  You don’t know what kinds of monsters are out there.

  Oh, I have a pretty good idea. And I’m looking at one of them.

  Surprisingly, he didn’t disagree, but the drug dose was fuzzing his thoughts. A picture flashed through Kestrel’s mind of his mother and father broken on the floor, eerily like Laney’s nightmares. Only this image was true, and the people were dead. Kestrel struggled to push me out of his mind again, his face twisting from the exertion.

  I supposed that image of his family explained something about Kestrel, but I didn’t care. I only wanted to find Laney. Tell me where you keep them, I commanded. A picture of a familiar hospital floated up through his mind. The Great Lakes Naval Hospital, where my brother and I were born. My stomach flipped.

  The hospital was enormous, filled with people and probably cameras. Not to mention it was on the base. Getting in would not be easy. I needed to know precisely where the prisoners were, if I had any hope of getting them out. Where? I commanded him again.

  Kestrel resisted much harder this time. I jacked deeper into his brain. He let out a moan but couldn’t stop me from sifting through his true memories to find what I needed.

  Kestrel walking down the stairs to the basement. There was a secure door, 1B, requiring the wave of a special passring he wore and entering a code. 0309. Someone’s birthday. No biometric IDs, so that would help. A hallway with holding cells and a room with double glass doors at the end. An experiment room. The smell of antiseptic choked me. A tray of needles and a girl strapped to a table. She had dark hair poking out of a cap on her head. Laney! A technician injected her with something. It was the secon
d dose they had given her. She was unconscious and didn’t flinch when the needle went in.

  I pulled out of the depths of his mind. They were already experimenting on Laney. I didn’t have any time to waste with Kestrel. I needed to get her out of the hospital now. If she was still there. If it wasn’t already too late.

  You can’t stop them, Kira, Kestrel thought. This is bigger than just a few changelings. The people in charge of this… they won’t stop until they get what they’re after, no matter what you do.

  Who were these people in charge, and what did they want? My mind flashed to the possibility that what they were after was me, the genetic link. But why? Were they just trying to stop more jackers from being made or born? Or was it something more than that? But Kestrel was stalling and I needed to get to Laney before it was too late.

  No? Then maybe I’ll just stop you. I pulled completely out of his mind and waited until he opened his eyes.

  Then I shot him again. “That’s for stealing Raf’s true memories,” I said as his mouth dropped open. I shot the final dart into his chest. “And that’s for killing Simon.”

  Kestrel’s head lolled to the side as the drug took him.

  “It’s better than you deserve.” As he slipped into unconsciousness, I wiped my entire visit from his mind. Part of me wanted him to remember that I had been the one to shoot him, to make him regret what he had done to Simon and Raf. But I needed to buy some time to get Laney out, and it wouldn’t help if he woke up knowing where I was headed.

  I tossed the dart gun onto the bed. Dashing into the closet, I grabbed one of Kestrel’s jackets and a white dress shirt. I tugged the silver and blue passring off his limp hand and at the last minute, decided to wipe my prints off the dart gun and the other gun I had buried in the dresser drawer. I sprinted out of his apartment and took the stairs to the basement two at a time.

  Laney was running out of time.

  Cold frosted the air in the basement parking garage.

  I used Kestrel’s passring to unlock his tiny blue hydro car, and I slipped inside to change into his clothes, tucking my disposable silver phone into the pocket of his oversized coat. I kept the Cubs hat, wrapping my hair into a knot and tucking it up under the cap. Even with rolling up the sleeves, his coat was still way too big, and of course, I looked nothing like Kestrel. But if I kept the hat low on my face, I might not raise alarms on the base surveillance cameras.

  I linked into the mindware and set an autopath to the naval station. The adrenaline from my encounter with Kestrel faded on the way, and my eyelids drooped. The house lights blurred as the car wove through an endless stream of side streets. I forced my eyes wide-open again. Nodding off wasn’t a good idea.

  I’d given Kestrel a triple dose of the juice, like I’d gotten in the camp, but his body had already fought off half the first dart. When he woke up, the cuffs and lack of memory would slow him down, but he would surely notice his passring was missing. I cursed myself for forgetting to take his phone. He might piece it together and call ahead to warn them.

  In any event, I had to get Laney before they injected her with any more “medicine.” A midnight sneak-and-rescue wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had, but daytime on base property wouldn’t be any better.

  The hospital was right off the main drive, easy to find, and my dad had brought us on base a few times, mostly for trips to the hospital for broken bones (my brother) and appendicitis (me). But that was different than spiriting someone out of a secure prison in the basement.

  I switched to manual controls as I got close. The front drive looped around and ran past the main gate and a smaller entrance that led to the hospital. I turned into the guard station and hoped that a late-night visit by Kestrel wasn’t enough to draw the portly guard out of his comfortable shack.

  Keeping my head down so that the hat shielded my face, I waved Kestrel’s passring at the ID scanner and jacked an image of his smiling face into the guard’s head. The guard gave me an uncertain wave as the scanner flashed green. I reminded myself that Kestrel wasn’t exactly the friendly type and killed the smile. I took the guard’s wave as a pass to move on.

  The hospital stood a couple hundred yards past the gate, spotlights lighting up the white bricks and leaving the corners in jagged shadows. I clenched the joystick. The parking lot to the right was nearly empty and I managed to avoid crashing into the few cars there.

  The hospital was close enough that I could reach all fifteen levels from the car. I quickly located two guards that knew classified things happened in the basement—a reader at the front desk scanning a bank of camera images and a jacker guarding a corridor in the basement. The jacker’s mind barrier was the hardest I’d ever felt, like granite under my whisper reach. I jerked back when he had a glimmer of awareness of my presence.

  I wished I had saved one of those darts I used on Kestrel.

  Besides the guard, the basement held two medical personnel and eight inmates. The prisoners were all unconscious, with six sleeping under a light dose of the juice and other two under heavy sedation. They were all changelings, and I searched each one until I found Laney.

  I gently probed for those soft dead spots that I had felt in the returnees to the camp. Only her typical nightmares raged through her head as she slept. Whatever they had injected her with so far hadn’t done any major damage. I sighed in relief and nudged her dreams toward a happy park scene with her family. I projected myself into her dream and told her I was coming for her. Soon. I would check the rest of the changelings after I got them out.

  The jacker guard in the basement was going to be a problem. And getting eight kids out unnoticed? I had no idea how that was going to work. Especially when two of them were knocked out. Besides, the eight of them wouldn’t fit into Kestrel’s tiny car.

  As I sat in the parking lot, pondering my options, the answer drove past my nose. A linen service truck rumbled by, headed away from the hospital. I jacked into the driver’s mind and ordered him to return to the loading dock, which was deserted. I put him under a command to fold sheets in the back of the truck, but I wasn’t sure how long that would last. All the more reason to get in and out quickly, before our ride remembered he had somewhere else to be. I hustled to the main entrance of the hospital where the camera-watching guard was stationed.

  People milled about in the reception area, visitors and patients waiting for their appointments or to see their loved ones. It was surprisingly busy for so late at night, but I guess sickness didn’t have a schedule.

  A janitor was cleaning the glass windows of the gift shop, and a guard and receptionist waited at a large, central check-in desk. I easily jacked the dozen people in the lobby to look the other way, but I nearly stumbled over my own feet when I linked into the janitor’s mind and he struggled unsuccessfully to push me back out. We locked stares for a moment before I pulled out of his mind and he slowly turned back to his window and resumed cleaning. I lightly brushed his mind, and it was soft like a changeling’s, even though he looked at least thirty-five.

  Linker. That explained why he hadn’t reacted to my feather touch before and I must have missed him. He seemed willing to ignore me, and I certainly didn’t need any extra trouble.

  I focused on the guard and receptionist. They needed to believe I was Kestrel, just checking in on the patients in the basement. That way I wouldn’t have to jack the camera guard all the time while I was busy rescuing changelings. If he saw me on camera, traveling through the hospital, and he thought I was Kestrel, he wouldn’t sound any alarms. It might buy me a little time.

  I kept my cap low and waved Kestrel’s passring by the scanner. When I jacked Kestrel’s image into the receptionist’s mind, I didn’t smile or wave and planned to brusquely stride past.

  But she smiled instead of waving me through. Late night, Agent Kestrel? There was a casual flirtation in her thoughts and a background hope that he might stop for coffee this time. I cringed internally and tried to figure out Kestrel’s most likely res
ponse.

  A tight smile seemed about right. Yeah. Never ends, does it?

  She flashed a brighter smile, not expecting that much. Maybe some coffee when you’re done?

  I put some warmth into Kestrel’s smile, but my stomach was a hard knot. Maybe next time. I’ll be a while tonight. She was only mildly disappointed. Luckily, the whole interchange had the effect of making the camera-watching guard avert his eyes and return his attention to the celebrity magazine on his tablet.

  I kept my pace measured, but quickly turned the corner to the central elevator bank. There were no stairwells. In the cancer ward next door, the minds of the attendants told me the stairs I needed were in the back corner of the hospital. That would work well for my plan to sneak the inmates out through the loading dock and must be how secret patients were usually transported in and out of the hospital.

  I pulled open the ward’s double doors and jacked minds to look the other way as I strode past curtained beds and medical equipment. To have any hope of taking on Granite Guard downstairs, I needed help. A nurse hurried past, making rounds and administering medications. I commandeered her and her tray of meds, but none of them were high-powered sedatives. She had the authority to sign meds out of the lockup, which I directed her to do. She estimated it would take several minutes for a syringe full of sedatives to take effect.

  I was really regretting not bringing the dart gun. I decided to commandeer a very large orderly as well.

  The three of us—the nurse armed with her syringe, the burly orderly, and me with my Impenetrable Mind—left the ward together. I hoped that Granite Guard wouldn’t sense me coming. The blank spot of my mind should be invisible next to the nurse and orderly, as long as he didn’t detect my presence in their minds. Kestrel’s passring got us past the scanner at the stairwell door, and we descended the metal staircase, our footsteps echoing loudly off the white concrete walls. I reached back to check that the camera-watching guard wasn’t alarmed by my unusual escorts. Then again, maybe Kestrel brought people down here all the time.