Open Minds

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  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.

  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 there. 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 sh
oved 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 the 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.

  With Maria calling for an investigation on the tru-cast, I could see why the Feds would have to shut down the camp. They could keep the dangerous jackers in jail, and I hoped Molloy would be one of them, but there was no reason to hold the jacker kids.

  Later that afternoon, Maria’s photographer returned to the camp, but it was empty. The Feds had moved the prisoners, but there was no word on the release of any of them. In fact, there was no word about the camp at all.

  Even though Maria tru-cast the pictures of the now-empty camp ringed with barbed wire and covered in camouflage, the Feds were denying that it had been a prison camp. I didn’t understand how a secret camp in the desert could be explained away, but they claimed the pictures were manufactured.

  Later that afternoon, the Navy made a great show of opening the basement of the hospital, only to find a warehouse of medical supplies. The scenes they cast, opening each of the cells and showing them filled with boxes of gloves and syringes, made me so angry I had to be alone in one of the cast cubicles for a while. Of course the government would hide what they had been doing. It made me clench my fists and kick the industrial carpet.

  I still had Kestrel’s vials of liquid with my name on them, but I couldn’t figure a way to use them to prove the experiments had actually happened. Did Kestrel take my DNA as a routine matter, genetically profiling all the kids that came through the jacker processing center at the hospital, or had he already started experimenting on me? Were the vials only my DNA or some kind of serum he already injected into me and that was why I was different?

  No. I was different from other jackers, but I had my Impenetrable Mind before I ever crossed paths with Kestrel.

  My video from the basement and my vials weren’t sufficient proof that any experiments had actually occurred. It was only a lab room and some vials of liquid.

  Without proof, the jacker kids I left behind at the camp were stuck in whatever new prison the Feds had constructed. No one would go looking for them because no one believed they existed. I’d had my chance to free them and I hadn’t. That I had saved some reader lives in Rock Point, Arizona, wasn’t much consolation when I imagined the horrors the changelings were enduring.

  Kestrel seemed to have disappeared as well. Despite the jacker agent’s whispered accusation at the hospital, the Feds were denying that an Agent Kestrel even existed. When Maria’s crew arrived at his apartment in the city, it had been scrubbed clean, as if no one had ever lived there. I didn’t know if he had fled, or the Feds were covering up for him, making him officially disappear so he would be free to continue his heinous experiments.

  Either way, Kestrel knew I had liberated the changelings and must have figured out who shot him full of darts and stole his passring and car. He wouldn’t forgive me just because I left his car unharmed in the hospital parking lot. And if he was still doing experiments, he’d want me back for that.

  I wished that I had wiped all of Kestrel’s true memories about me when I had the chance.

  At least my family seemed safe. I asked Maria to check on them, and she said the agents were no longer parked at my house. My family was also asking about me, wanting me to come home.

  I wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. Even if the Feds weren’t harassing my family openly, my dad was probably upset about me revealing the family’s big secret on a national tru-cast.

  There certainly were a lot of people angry about it.

  By the evening, the protests had started. Outraged readers, some of them demens by the looks of them on the screen, gathered at the entrance to the Trib Tower, protesting the dangerous mind control freaks the Trib was keeping on the 10th floor.

  I was having serious doubts about going public until the changelings’ parents started coming forward. Most had been jacked to believe that their children had run away or been snatched and were thrilled to have them back. The changelings couldn’t pretend to be zeroes or even readers, but they could go home. The Feds seemed more concerned with denying their involvement in secret camps and scandalous experiments than harassing kids.

  Maria coordinated with the parents, making arrangements for them to come get their children, which went well until Xander’s mom grabbed her fifteen minutes of fame by publicly stating she didn’t want him back. When Xander’s change came, he had accidentally jacked his abusive step-father and knocked him out. Soon after, Xander had been caught on camera jacking a mini-mart clerk to give him ice cream, and the Feds had picked him up. He was only twelve, and his mom was a worthless, raging alcoholic, if her performance on the tru-cast was any indication. Her rant fed the hate-groups protesting outside, and Xander became the poster-child for dangerous jacker kids. The protesters wanted him locked up. Because stealing ice cream definitely made him a danger to society.

  I told Xander he could stay with me.

  As the night wore on, the changelings got antsy from being hyped on the news all day and being cooped up in the castroom. I kept them busy practicing their jacking skills. They didn’t have much control, and I had to keep a constant eye on them.

  “Xander’s turn,” I called out, interrupting an argument that had broken out among the girls. Laney shushed them for me so I didn’t have to reach into their minds to get their attention. I didn’t do that unless it was necessary, trying to set a good example. The grumbles went round our jacker group in the corner, but they dutifully gave their verbal permissions for him to link in.

  I brushed their soft, still-forming minds. “Remember,” I said to Xander. “Only link your thoughts.”

  Xander linked into all seven minds and tried to gently send a thought to them. Who wants pizza for dessert? His words rang loudly, reverberating through all their heads at once. It was too much command, and they all echoed back, Pizza! Pizza for dessert!

  We already had pizza for lunch and dinner, so that wasn’t their free will speaking. I linked a thought to Xander. Easy there, changeling. If they were readers, they’d be hijacking the nearest pizza delivery van.

  Xander threw me a smile.

  Focus. And gently this time.

  Random thoughts about pizza still skittered through their minds. Who wants cheese curls for dessert? Xander linked in. It was almost too soft, only a whisper, but they heard it. Choruses of No! Gah, those are disgusting! overlapped each other. They were getting tired of the vending machine food as well. Xander’s back went rigid as he tried to process the seven different responses.

  I didn’t link my thoughts to him, not wanting to add to the cacophony in his mind. Instead, I strode over and put my hand on his shoulder. His eyes were unfocussed as he tried to navigate the raging mental conversation with the other changelings.

  At least he didn’t knock anyone out. He would slowly get it.

  Xander re
minded me of Simon and what he might have been like, if someone had been around to help him when he changed. The memory of Simon lying dead in the desert was seared into my mind, but my other memories of him were starting to return—the kisses and sweet promises, as well as the lies. I still wasn’t sure which ones were which. I wondered if he would approve of me outing jackers to the world.

  The next day the changelings’ parents started braving the crowd of protesters to come pick up their kids. Maria made arrangements for them to leave by hydrocopter from the roof, so they didn’t have to run the gauntlet with the changelings in tow.

  I explained to the parents what had happened to their children in the hospital. At least, what I could guess. The worst part was the two changelings whose minds weren’t quite the same anymore. They could jack, but they were often confused, as if the true memory part of their brain had been wasted away by whatever Kestrel injected into them. I had to explain to the parents that their children’s brain tissue was damaged, and there was nothing I could do to fix it.

  Afterward, I had to be alone for a while. I curled up in a corner cubicle and dreamed of a dozen ways that I could repay Kestrel for what he had done. A dart to the chest was far too good for him.

  One by one, the changelings left until only Laney and Xander remained.

  When it was time for Laney to leave, I shared her excited smile but I didn’t really want her to go. The sunshine of her smile when she jumped into her dad’s arms made me grin in spite of the small pain in my chest. Her dad shook my hand and her mom gave me a hug, then I beat a hasty retreat. I didn’t need a truth magistrate to see the love they had for her.