mindjack 04 - origins

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  Ava fluttered her eyelids closed, and I noticed that her eyelashes were almost invisible against her pale skin, like hand-spun threads of gold from a fairy-tale.

  “Yes,” she said in a whisper. “She’s older, a grandma. She’s fond of knitting and the Cubs. And…” Ava paused, then opened her eyes to focus on Julian. “She worries about you, Julian. You remind her of a grandson she had, then lost. He was a dreamer too.”

  Julian’s eyes widened and his lips parted as if he was going to say something, but the words got lost before he could form them. I didn’t care for that look at all—he was buying this hook, line, and sinker.

  “Julian,” I said in a low voice. “This is a parlor trick.”

  Julian snapped out of his trance, and I slid a sideways glance to Ava. Again she looked hurt, and it made my stomach clench. I didn’t like how she got into my head, how I noticed every little change on her face, how uncomfortable she made me. Maybe that was her real ability. I couldn’t tell, but I didn’t trust her five ways to Sunday.

  “She could say that about anyone,” I added. “Maybe she plucked it out of your head.”

  Julian’s eyes narrowed at that, finally. “Well, it’s certainly easy to check.” He pulled a slim, silver phone from his pocket. He must have jacked into the mindware to dial, because he simply held it to his ear and a moment later spoke into it. “Hello, Myrtle. How are you?” He paused. “Would you humor me for a moment and tell me what you’re doing?”

  Ava had a patient I-told-you-so look.

  Julian smiled. “You know I’m not a Cubs fan,” he said to the phone, “but I’m sure I could find a use for one of your hand-knit scarves.”

  “She’s afraid you’re going to let Anna use it to clean guns,” Ava whispered, so that she wouldn’t be heard on the phone.

  Julian frowned, holding Ava’s gaze. “Myrtle, I have a new recruit who thinks she can read your mind.” He paused. “Yes, the one who contacted you. Would you mind thinking of a number for me, but don’t say it.”

  “Sixty-two,” Ava said. “Wait, no. She changed it to the square root of negative three.”

  Julian’s eyebrows hiked up, and even I was taken aback by how fast she had said the response. Like there was no hesitation. Like she had read the mind of a woman three streets over as quickly as the thoughts popped into her head.

  “Okay, Myrtle. Tell me.” Julian nodded, as if he never doubted it. “Thank you, Myrtle. No, that’s all for now.” He clicked the phone shut, his gaze still trained on Ava’s. He stepped closer to her and put a hand on her shoulder. I pushed up from the doorway, not sure why that alarmed me so much.

  “That’s an impressive ability, Ava,” Julian said. “One I’m sure we could use in the battles ahead of us. But you must be very popular with that skill. Why have you decided to come to us?”

  Finally, he was asking the right question.

  She peered up into his eyes. “Sasha thinks you’re fighting for something important. That you’re the hope for the future of all of us.”

  “Is that so?” Julian flicked glance at me and my face ran hot. If he gave me one of those smirks of his, I swear I would walk out the door. But he didn’t. In fact, he didn’t seem to register my embarrassment at all. Was he just checking on my instincts? I was beginning to feel like there were way too many people inside my head: even I didn’t want to be there, much less have anyone else snooping around.

  “The future belongs to us,” he said to Ava. “Humankind is evolving and mindreaders were just the first step. Eventually, jackers will be the dominant species, but only if we fight for it. Only if they don’t destroy us before our numbers make our dominance inevitable. It will take a revolution to change the world, but every revolution has a seed that is its beginning. A start that could be easily snuffed out, if not grown with the right people at the right time.”

  She soaked up every word. I had heard it before, but it still pulled at me. That was Julian’s true talent: he found the right words for the right person, the thing that appealed to them on a basic level. Maybe he cheated and used his instinct handling skill. I couldn’t be sure, any more than I could tell if Ava was still inside my head, reading all my doubts.

  “There are a lot of the wrong people out there,” she said. “How do you know? That they’re the right person?”

  “I ask them what they’re willing to fight for.”

  She nodded, as if that made sense, her eyes lit with the same spark of hope I felt when Julian offered me the one thing I needed: a reason to keep going. But I knew why I desperately needed that hope. I had a lot to atone for. Dark secrets that Julian still couldn’t guess at.

  What was she hiding?

  “Ava,” I said, my voice thick, her name feeling strange on my tongue. She whirled to face me. It took a moment for me to speak when she was looking at me with those bright, happy eyes. “Sorry, but I can’t believe you’re walking in to sign up for a revolution out of the goodness of your heart.”

  The corners of her mouth turned down. My hand crept up to rest on the grip of my gun. She was having way too much effect on my emotional state. Something was wrong with that. Maybe she was having the same effect on Julian too.

  “Plus it’s hard to believe that your Clan just let you go,” I said. “After all, you claim you can’t fight off a jack, so how could you leave, if they didn’t want you to?” A problem I knew entirely too well. “What are you hiding?”

  She left Julian’s side, her movements so smooth that she seemed to glide over to me instead of walking. My heart pounded unevenly as she arrived next to me.

  “I have nothing to hide from you, Sasha,” she said. “And it’s only fair. I’ve been in your mind. You can reach into mine and see.”

  My heart missed a beat, and I glanced at Julian, who looked surprised but intense. He wasn’t going to stop me this time.

  I swallowed and pushed through her soft mind barrier. It gave no resistance at all, almost like a changeling’s or a mindreader’s. Her mindscent reminded me of strawberries baking in a sun-drenched field. She showed me an image of herself, swallowed in a Clan of men. Rough men. Jackers that were brutish, both physically and mentally. Then the image shifted, to those same men breaking into her home and jacking her mother, blond and waifish just like her, into glassy-eyed compliance.

  They threatened to hurt my family, Ava thought. I’m not sure how they found me. I never told a soul that I was… different. But when jackers were revealed to the world, I think someone must have suspected. Someone I knew told someone else and eventually they found me.

  They forced you to join their Clan? I asked.

  She played an image of their rough hands grasping her, forcing her to leave her mother behind. And to serve them. Spy for them. Find other jackers for them. She had edged closer, and I had a hard time drawing in a normal breath. I couldn’t have torn away if Anna had come out of the back with a knife.

  How did you escape?

  I found you, she thought, and I realized that maybe it was possible to leave. Possible to find someone who would protect me. Once I knew I had somewhere to go, it was easy to leave. She flashed a scene of herself, creeping past sleeping bodies in the dead of night. She paused by the dark shadow of a jacker splayed on a cot, snoring. Even in the weak streetlight falling through the windows, I could see his face: eyes closed, black hair tossed by sleep, a light scar drawing an X across his right eyebrow. A scar I recognized, having been there when he first got it.

  Arlis.

  I stopped breathing.

  He was my Clan leader, she thought. And, once upon a time, he was yours too.

  A pulse of fear jolted me. She’s here to bring me back. The thought came fast and without control, tripping on my sudden flash of terror. She must have heard it, because she reached out a small hand and laid it on my chest, over my heart. I flinched away from her touch, like it might burn me.

  No, Sasha, she thought. I’m here so you can save me.

  I yanked out of her head
. My mouth had run dry and I couldn’t form words. I looked to Julian for help, but he was silent, his eyes wide, watching the two of us.

  She was telling the truth; she couldn’t lie to me, not while I was in her head like that. She wasn’t here to take me back to Arlis—she was seeking sanctuary from him. She wanted me to keep her safe from the man who had taken me as a boy and turned me into a monster. There was no way I could say no to that. No way I could send anyone, least of all someone as vulnerable as Ava, back into his hands. No way I could let him do to her what he had done to me.

  It would be almost as bad as going back myself.

  Julian’s expression shifted in a heartbeat, transforming into a wide smile. “I think we would very much like you to join our Clan, Ava.”

  I sucked in a ragged breath, my lungs working again, glad Julian had spared me from forming words to say the same thing.

  I pounded the hammer, slamming the nail into place with far more power than necessary, driving it in with the first beat, but hitting it a few more times to make sure. The sound deafened me, multiplying a thousand times in the close confines of the bathroom. These new silica fiber dryboards could take the abuse, as long as I didn’t miss the nail, but I might need to get some earplugs. The more I thought about that idea, the more I liked it.

  “You enjoy working on things,” Ava said from the doorway, making me jump and miss the nail. “You like building things, instead of destroying them.”

  A neat circular dent in the dryboard stared at me. I pushed off my knees and rose up until I towered over her. I slowly took the two nails out from where I held them between my teeth.

  “You know,” I said, “I’d really rather not hear your analysis of all that time you were snooping in my head.”

  She had the decency to blush and stare at her feet, which were narrow, thin like the rest of her. Almost as small as a child’s. A confusion of guilt and anger heated my face. Why did she have such an effect on me?

  “I’m sorry.” She peeked up at me. “I forget that you don’t know me. That happens sometimes. I can’t always keep straight what I’m supposed to know from what I actually know.”

  “How about you just forget everything you know about me?” Even as I asked, it sounded ridiculous in my own ears.

  She cocked her head to the side, giving me a quizzical look and tapping her chin. “Who are you again?” Then she beamed a smile and stuck out her hand. “Hi! I’m Ava Trinkle. Nice to meet you.”

  Her outstretched hand hung in the air, fingers lined up and floating. I waited a beat too long, then switched the hammer to my left hand and shook hers with my right. It was like taking hold of a dove, feather soft and weightless. I took care not to crush it.

  “Sasha Rimbali,” I said. “And I’m not particularly pleased to meet you…” When her blond eyebrows drew together, I smiled a little. “Under these unfortunate circumstances,” I finished. Her smile flashed again, blinding me with the delight behind it. It was far too easy to make her smile. It felt like skating out over thin ice, all while knowing it would crack and swallow me whole. Far too much like losing control. And that was a very dangerous feeling for me to have.

  I dropped her hand and gripped the cool steel edge of the sink as I leaned back against it. “So, Ms. Trinkle. You get captured by a ruthless Clan, sneak out under the cover of darkness, and join up with another Clan filled with extreme jackers and dangerous talents you don’t even understand.”

  She hiked up her eyebrows.

  “Ok, you might know a little about what we can do, but still. What makes you think one of us won’t sell you back to Arlis at the first opportunity?” I’d sooner hammer my own head, but she didn’t know that. Or maybe she did.

  “I trust you, Sasha,” she said. “You’re not the kind of person who would do that.”

  “You have no idea what I’m capable of.” I wondered how she could trust me when she had seen at least some of the things I had done. “And you’re far too trusting. You need to watch that, or you’ll find yourself in trouble so deep even we can’t get you out of it.”

  She gave a tentative smile, and a half beat later I realized what I had said. “Not that we’re your babysitters,” I grumbled, somehow making it sound worse. I waved my hand at the hammer-sized hole in my dryboard. “I have work I need to do.” I hoped she would take that as a hint to leave.

  “Can I help?” she asked.

  I blinked, not expecting that response. “You know how to swing a hammer?”

  “Well, no,” she said, biting her lip. I sucked in a breath as my insides did some kind of dance in response to that. “I’m fantastic at painting, though.”

  “I’ll let you know when we get to the painting stage.”

  She grinned and slipped out of the doorway, casting a last look over her shoulder as she went. I waited until she was gone before I quietly let out the breath I was holding. Then I lined up another nail on the dryboard, ignoring the hole for now, and pounded more fiercely than before. If she stuck around full-time, I would need a lot more construction work that involved pounding on things.

  A handful of minutes and two dryboard panels later, Julian stuck his head in the doorway. I rolled my eyes and took the nails from my teeth. It was like Grand Central Station in here.

  “You have a minute?” Julian asked.

  I gestured to the dryboard, meaning no and knowing that it wouldn’t stop him.

  “So, do you want to tell me about you and Ava?” he asked.

  “What do you mean, me and Ava?” My shoulders tensed.

  “C’mon, Sasha,” he said. “You clearly have a shared history. If she’s going to be part of our team, I need to know what it is.”

  “We don’t share a history. We both had the same Clan leader, different times. The one that forced me to use my ability in ways that still give me nightmares.”

  “The one she ran away from?”

  I nodded. “He’s dangerous, Julian. We can’t send her back there.”

  “No, of course not.” He studied me for a moment. “Is that all? You’ve never met before?”

  “No.”

  He frowned but nodded, then dug his phone out of his pocket. An incoming call lit it up, and he mentally nudged it to answer. The holographic display popped up over the thin silver screen, floating a miniature head in the air.

  “Who is this?” Julian asked, his voice flat. “How did you get this number?”

  It took me a split second to realize it was Arlis. I jerked back, trying to keep out of the screen’s range. Julian barely noticed, he was so intent on the image hovering above his phone.

  “Mr. Navarro!” Arlis boomed from his tiny projection. “I’ve heard a great deal about you, son. You’ve taken our little community quite by storm.”

  I shrunk farther away from Julian and his phone, wedging myself into the corner I had marked for a future shower silo, but it didn’t have any doors yet to block Arlis’s view. The bathroom suddenly felt like a tiny box with nowhere to go. But Arlis didn’t seem to notice me.

  “And you are?” Julian asked.

  “Arlis Specter.” He used the same fatherly tone I remembered too well. “I have a small Clan, not too ambitious, just working the New Metro suburbs, trying to stay on the right side of the Feds. Not unlike you, I’m sure. And I’m hoping we might do a little business.”

  My head shook no, my breath frozen in my chest, but Julian focused on the phone.

  “Business?” Julian asked.

  “I believe you have something that belongs to me.”

  Julian’s jaw worked. “You mean someone.”

  “Yes, yes.” Arlis’s beefy cheeks bunched up, his smile all the more menacing for being the picture of grandfatherliness. It made me shudder. “She’s a pretty little thing, isn’t she?” His smile disappeared. “But I’d like her back.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen,” Julian said, which allowed me to take a breath again.

  “Well, now, maybe you can just put he
r on the phone,” Arlis said, “and we can have a little chat.”

  “That’s not going to happen either. She’s not interested in returning to your Clan.”

  “Look, Julian,” Arlis said. “I know the girl is valuable. I’m sure we can work out an arrangement to compensate you for your loss. This is just business. No need for things to get messy and involve the poor girl’s family. I’m sure she’d agree, if you’d put her on the phone.”

  Julian’s expression fell as flat as his voice. “Perhaps I’m not making myself clear. Ava is under my protection. Any move against her family will be treated as a direct threat to this Clan, and I assure you that you do not want that to happen.”

  “I don’t take kindly to threats, Mr. Navarro.”

  “It’s not a threat, Mr. Specter,” Julian said. “It’s a promise. Good day.” The phone went dark, Arlis’s holographic image winking out of existence. Julian looked to me. “I don’t think he saw you, Sasha.”

  I nodded then realized the steel nails were biting into my palm hard enough to bring out small trickles of red. I worked my hand to rub the pain away.

  “He’ll carry through on his threats, Julian,” I said softly. “He gets rather… obsessed with things.”

  Julian nodded. “I’ll send Henry out to her family, right away, to move them to somewhere safe.”

  “Good.” My heart still pounded and my breathing was just now catching up, leaving me feeling like I needed to gasp for air.

  Julian slipped his phone into his pocket and studied me. “Sasha… would you ever consider using your ability again?”

  “You’ve already asked that question,” I said tightly. “The answer hasn’t changed.”

  “What if it wasn’t used as a weapon?” Julian asked. “What if it was a tool to ensure justice? Think about it this way: you can take someone who is responsible for all kinds of wrongs and you can rewrite them into someone who can make up for those wrongs. You’re a scribe who can wipe the slate clean. Give them a second chance at salvation, a chance to turn their lives around before it’s too late.”