Scorched

by Britt Ringel

  Lolz nodded. “Because of your ability. You see, the first pre-cog was discovered fifty years ago. He manifested at the age of nine and two months later, he was clinically insane. A month after that, he killed himself. The Society figured they had pushed him too hard during puberty while his brain chemistry was still changing. They weren’t about to lose you the same way, so they waited until you finished growing.” Her shoulders slumped dramatically and her head rocked from side to side. “And waited and waited. You didn’t enter puberty until almost fourteen and it took you until twenty for the doctors to confirm your brain chemistry was stable.” She shook her head and pursed her lips into a cruel line. “The rest of us didn’t get that luxury. We were tested, tormented, trialed and worse. But Pre-Cat stayed above it all.” The woman clucked at Kat.

  “Sure, your handlers examined you often enough and they kept track of every pre-cog vision you experienced naturally but they never pushed to find your trigger or help you refine control over the ability.” A corner of the woman’s mouth tweaked upward. “But a funny thing happened… or didn’t happen. None of your visions ever came true. The Society had entire teams dedicated to searching for definitive proof that just one of your prophesies had come to pass but they all failed. By the time you were finishing puberty, they decided that your trigger was too erratic and your events must be so far into the future that they’d just lost hope. Of course, like most late bloomers, you manifested a second power.” She smiled sweetly. “Just like me.”

  “What was it?” Kat asked quickly before Sadler could speak.

  Lolz gestured casually at Kat’s waist. “It was the second half of your tattoo. A-T. Apportation.”

  “What’s that?” Kat and Sadler asked in unison.

  “You had the ability to displace objects, Cat. The physics of it is a bit beyond me but it was explained that you could push an object ahead in time. I saw you do it to a box once but all that happened was it disappeared for a few seconds.” She rolled her eyes. “Frankly, some of our biokinetic and telekinetic members are a lot more impressive than you ever were.”

  Lolz glanced at Sadler before turning to Kat. “But they could never figure out why you couldn’t pull an object from the past to the present. They assumed it was because your abilities were oriented toward the future.” She snorted lightly. “Which is ironic but, given your abilities, the Society believed they could best leverage you in the field of infiltration. So that’s how you were trained. No security system in the world could stop you. You trained and worked with us for close to five years.”

  The agent nearest Sadler leaned back against the table casually, lowering his right hand to rest on the table’s edge, closer to his holster.

  “Don’t,” Sadler commanded. His gun, which had begun to sag from chest-level, rose as he straightened his arms.

  “Easy,” Lolz cooed at him. “No one here is going to shoot you, I promise.” The woman snickered before gesturing to the agent to stand fully upright and raise his hands again.

  “So what happened?” Kat asked. “Why are you trying to kill me?”

  “Sixteen days ago, we got our first hit from one of your pre-cog events. It rocked the foundation of the entire Society.”

  “Jesus,” Sadler muttered anxiously, still eyeing the agent. “What was it?”

  Lolz’s expression turned spiteful. “For all our resources, for all our power, the Society was looking in the wrong goddamned direction. Cat wasn’t pre-cognitive at all. She was post-cognitive.”

  “She predicts the past?” Sadler asked uncertainly.

  “No,” Lolz answered, shaking her head. “She saw the past. We didn’t even know that was a thing.” Her eyes fluttered over Kat. “First of her kind.”

  Sadler frowned. “Uh, don’t we all do that?”

  “No, we see the present and remember the past. Cat saw the past,” Lolz emphasized. She cast blue eyes to Kat. “And in that epiphany, she became an even more priceless asset to the Society.”

  “I don’t see how that could’ve been helpful,” Sadler stated.

  “Think,” Lolz said while tapping once on her temple. “Imagine an infiltration expert who could go anywhere and when she got there, she could watch and listen to the past. Anything that had happened in the past where she was in the present. She could sit in on an executive meeting just by being in the empty boardroom where it had occurred. She could observe the planning sessions of generals, discussions between corporate leaders.” The woman smiled perversely. “Cat could sit on the bed of any CEO in the world and know who’d been there and what was said. Even our own. Every dirty, little secret would be ours.” Her smile had morphed into a rapturous grin.

  “If I was so valuable,” Kat asked, “then why kill me?”

  Lolz’s grin dropped between heartbeats. “Because the corks were no sooner off the champagne bottles when someone realized that your powers had been fully developed for the last five years and you had unfettered access to the compound for at least that long.” The malevolent smile slowly reappeared. “Dirty, little secrets, Cat. Only you had all of ours, and that made you far too dangerous. Our greatest asset became our greatest liability.”

  “How did she escape?” Sadler asked.

  “They called her into the lab for a routine trigger test,” the blue-eyed devil recounted. “All standard procedure, nothing to see here… Except that once she was fully sedated, they were going to push enough poison into her body to kill fifty Pre-Cats.” Lolz’s shoulders began to shake. She covered her mouth with a delicate hand as her light giggles turned into spastic laughter for several seconds. When she finally recovered, she shook her head at Kat and smiled regretfully. “Heinrich Wagner really shouldn’t have briefed his assistant in the same lab before you came in. When he started your sedation, the medical recordings indicate that you had a post-cog event. A moment after that, you apported the examination chair’s restraints and then, well… Doctor Wagner and Jill Anderson might have been great scientists but they weren’t very good in a fight.”

  Lolz absorbed the look on Kat’s face and relished in it. “That’s right. You killed them both and then used Herr Doctor’s passcode to hop onto the net and bring up a map of the corporate region. You wrote something on a slip of paper and summoned twenty autocabs to just outside our campus.”

  “And she ran,” Sadler finished. “To an out-of-the-way, flea speck of a town.”

  “Not at first,” Lolz corrected with a touch of admiration. “Cat was always one, cool customer.” Her expression twisted distastefully. “First, she dremelled out her subdermal wafer.” She shuddered and admitted, “Even from the security footage… that was hard to watch.” After a moment, she continued in a strained though soothing voice, “Then, she calmly dressed her wound, walked to an emergency cabinet, withdrew a Scor-Thirty-B… and scorched herself.” Lolz blinked in disbelief at Kat as she laughed. “We’ve tested the device on students who never manifested just to see the effects before they were ‘expelled’ but you were the first, true psi-positive to be scorched. Congratulations!”

  Sadler glanced at Kat while keeping his aim true. “Why would you scorch yourself?”

  “Tess,” she replied in a half-whisper.

  Lolz raised her eyebrows in genuine surprise. “You remember her?” She glanced at Sadler. “Tess is another telepath in the Society. We can’t all be special snowflakes, right, Cat? Tess is also a sensitive. She’s pretty adept at detecting psi-potential, in fact she helps with labels when students reach puberty. Cat probably thought that becoming psi-null would keep Tess from sensing her.”

  “Did it work?” Sadler asked.

  Lolz shrugged. “Both Peecho’s team and my own were sent to this little slice of Hell before they tried using her.”

  “So where do we go from here?” Kat asked. “All I want is the doctor.” Her eyes tracked briefly to Reynolds.

  “I don’t care about her,” Lolz confessed, “but you won’t be leaving this building alive.”

  “
One thing bothers me,” Sadler stated.

  “Just one thing?” Lolz teased while flashing a magnificent smile.

  “Kat, this woman can form some kind of a telepathic bond with a person, right? One person.” He paused briefly. “So, if she isn’t using it on you and she’s not using it on me... who is she linking to right now?”

  Lolz’s face fell. “Aww, you’re ruining the surprise.”

  Chapter 34

  Sadler scrambled to his right, wrapping an arm around Kat’s waist while charging toward the end of the conference table. He forced her toward the front of the room as the double doors behind them burst open.

  Kat heard thunderous reports from the doorway as she rushed toward the podium. On the run, she swept her pistol over the doors and fired wildly to push the new arrivals back into the hall. Next to her, Sadler fired blindly behind him. “Don’t hit Maggie!” she screamed as they separated at the head of the room. She threw herself forward and slid behind the podium. Sadler ducked behind the sturdy base at the front of the conference table. They both peered carefully from behind their cover.

  The double doors and nearby wall were decorated with perforations and splinters from Kat’s fire. Lolz and an agent had found shelter behind the overturned metal table at the back of the room. The second agent was a crumpled, red mess on the floor.

  Kat could hear Sadler hyperventilating as he repeated, “I killed him… I killed him…”

  Lolz took a hasty shot with a small pistol that missed Kat’s podium and struck the screen behind her. The glass exploded into shards that tinkled to the floor.

  “I thought you didn’t have a gun!” Kat said loudly from behind her podium. She fired two more shots through the double doors. The guards in the hallway seemed in no rush to make a death charge.

  Lolz’s playful voice carried over the echo of the reports. “Only said I don’t like guns, never said I didn’t have one!”

  “Sadler!” Kat whispered forcefully.

  The man closed his eyes and blew out a breath in a keening wail. His hands began to tremble fiercely as his body stiffened. The Jamison in his hands fired once as his fingers convulsed. The shaking spread to his entire body and soon, he curled into a ball behind the front support of the conference table.

  “It’s just you now, Cat,” Lolz told her gleefully from across the room.

  Kat looked at Sadler in horror. His body jerked grotesquely as he suffered the painful effects of the telepath’s overload. His eyes were squeezed shut and his head rocked back and forth violently. He had bitten his tongue and blood was running down his chin as pathetic noises escaped his scarlet lips. The grisly sight filled Kat with revulsion… and rage.

  She snarled fiercely and swung around the podium while channeling her aggression into a ferocious push. She felt the psionic pressure coil inside her between heartbeats and unleashed it with the fury of a storm. The metal table ripped brutally out of the timeline.

  Beyond the Jamison’s front sight, Kat saw the astonished look on Lolz’s face. Blue eyes met brown as the telepath’s lips moved to form words but a hailstorm of flechettes ripped through her body before they could be uttered. The impacts didn’t jerk the woman nor did they throw her backward. Instead, the ballistic shards shredded the tender flesh they touched and painted a horrific, crimson mural on the back wall. Lolz’s body collapsed to the ground like a discarded doll.

  Kat continued to pull her trigger, walking her fire to the stunned agent beside Lolz’s ruptured body. Two seconds and three shots later, he joined his team leader in oblivion. Kat relaxed her index finger to allow the trigger to reset when gunshots from the doorway accompanied a spray of wood chips over Kat’s face. She ducked as she fired again in the general direction of the doors. Once fully behind the podium, she hefted her pistol. It was running low on ammunition.

  Two rapid barks from Sadler’s pistol filled the silence. “Kat,” he asked unsteadily. “Are you okay?”

  Kat’s ears popped painfully as the metal table returned. She gritted her teeth and growled through the agony. “I’m going to take their wall, Sadler. You ready to fire?”

  “I guess…”

  Kat took several breaths in succession and placed her free hand to the side of the podium. The last time, she promised before beginning her push. Unlike her focus on the metal table, it took considerable effort to wind up the energy in her head. She pushed with her free hand to help her mind bundle its strength. As the pressure grew, she aimed it at the length of the conference room’s wall. She released a strained grunt as she forced her will over the room.

  The double doors, along with five meters of wall on either side, vanished. Two guards stumbled into the room after the walls they were leaning on disappeared. Kat brought a shaking Jamison up toward the nearer threat even as Sadler’s pistol bayed death. A wave of flechettes consumed both guards.

  Ringing in Kat’s ears replaced the reports of their gunshots. Despite the carnage they had inflicted, she kept careful aim over the hallway. “Wait,” she said, louder than was necessary in the eerie calm.

  Seconds passed. The room was an overpowering cocktail of acrid smoke and gore. Kat steadied her breathing and braced for the onslaught. Between eye blinks, the damaged wall and doors popped into existence. Kat groaned at the torture in her ears but kept her aim steady. The blood streaming from her right ear gnawed at her concentration. She finally succumbed to it and wiped irritably at her cheek with her reaction hand.

  “I have a feeling that Semicorp isn’t going to get its security deposit back,” Sadler said as he inspected the wreckage from behind the conference table. “How long do we wait?”

  “Lolz said both teams,” Kat recalled. “Peecho’s team in Rat’s alley and her team here. We saw two guards at the front doors, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Those two must be the ones she was stalling us for. I think that’s it. I think we won,” she said hopefully. “Keep covering the door just in case. I’m going to check Maggie.” She rose and walked to the conference table, careful to pass behind Sadler. Reynolds was still breathing. Miraculously, she had not been hit by stray fire but flecks of splintered debris covered her. The woman moaned lightly.

  Kat gently slapped Reynolds’ cheek. “Maggie, Maggie,” she said urgently. The doctor’s eyes opened to narrow slits. “Open your eyes, Maggie. Open your eyes,” Kat demanded relentlessly while shaking the woman’s shoulder. “Maggie, you need to open your eyes.” She pulled at the doctor’s legs to swivel them off the table.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Sadler asked.

  “Drugged,” Kat answered. “Maggie, open your eyes,” she persisted.

  It took Reynolds over two minutes to sit up on the table. Five minutes after that, she was standing but only with support from Sadler. He started the slow process of helping Reynolds walk to the door as he asked, “Back the way we came?”

  Kat was at the door, watching down the hallway. “Yeah, we need to get your handheld.”

  Fifteen agonizingly slow minutes later, the three were in Sadler’s aircar headed for his apartment complex.

  Chapter 35

  “Careful,” Kat urged as she held open the front door to Sadler’s apartment building while searching nervously for people inside.

  Reynolds had regained slightly more awareness and walked with Sadler’s assistance at a marginally faster rate than she had managed at the convention center. The threesome called an elevator and quickly entered the car when it arrived.

  “Second floor,” Sadler said. “It’s a left out of the elevator. Apartment two-oh-two.”

  “Which one is Tabitha’s?” Kat said and immediately regretted asking. After all we’ve just been through, how can I still be jealous?

  “Uh,” Sadler temporized, “Two-oh-three.” He witnessed Kat’s sour reaction and quickly added in defense, “I moved here first.”

  The elevator doors retracted and he stuck his head out. The hall was deserted. “Good, nobody. I shouldn’t be surprised c
onsidering it’s one in the morning on a Wednesday.” He eased Reynolds down the hall.

  Sadler had to rebalance the doctor in order to free his right hand. Once he swiped his wrist over the door controls, the lock whispered a soft click and Kat pushed his apartment door open. Sadler carefully walked the half-conscious doctor to his couch and gently lowered her to the cushions. Reynolds was prone seconds after that, back in her own dream world.

  Kat inspected the living room. It was cozy but not small. The floor was covered with short, white carpeting that matched the couch and chair in the room. An entertainment center lined the far wall that featured a mounted screen. Around a corner, a half wall separated the living room from a modest kitchen. Beyond the kitchen was a short hall leading to the back rooms.

  Her eyes scoured the living space for pictures. There was one on the end table near the couch, probably a family gathering judging by the faces. She felt herself smile when she declared the living room Tabitha-free. She also felt a little guilty at her distrust.

  Sadler moved to the kitchen as he said, “Doctor Reynolds obviously has the couch. You can take the bedroom and I’ll sleep on the floor out here.” He filled a glass with water from the sink and pushed it on the counter toward Kat.

  She stared at the sparkling liquid in the clean glass. It had taken him less than five seconds to produce the crystal-clear water.

  As he watched her, a ghastly expression crossed his face. “Oh, wait a minute! With your… ability, maybe you shouldn’t spend the night in my bedroom.” He began to blush furiously. “I promise you it’s over with Tabby but, still…”

  Kat glowered at him and blew out an exasperated breath. “Fine, let’s put Maggie on the bed and I’ll take the couch.”

  Sadler winced at the suggestion and tugged at his shirt collar uncomfortably.

  Kat’s shoulders slumped. “Really?” She placed her hands on her hips and continued to torment him. “I suppose the kitchen counters and the shower are out as well.”