Jackers and readers: we’re like lions and lambs. Forget the parable, I tell myself. They don’t lie down together without someone ending up as lunch.
I hurry away from her and toward my next class.
I successfully avoid Tessa for the rest of the day. I’m a sufficiently large enough jerk to her that I don’t think she’s going to offer to show me her art again. Or let me walk her between classes. I tell myself this is for the best… about a hundred times on the long walk home.
I linger behind the crowd, so the sidewalks are empty and I don’t have to link to anyone. The skinny suburban houses are filled with mindreaders, but the building ordinances keep the identical gray-and-cream-colored homes spaced far enough apart that the readers don’t have to listen to the thoughts of their neighbors. Or the moody high school kid walking down their sidewalk. For me, it’s a chance for some clear head space. The wind ruffles the leaves, and an occasional autocab rumbles by, but it’s mostly quiet. A squirrel makes a temporary racket by hurtling through the blanket of fall leaves that have dropped with the cooling Chicago weather.
By the time I reach my house and use my passkey to get into the garage, I’ve nearly convinced myself that I’m some kind of hero for being a jerk to Tessa and keeping her out of my life. I pass through the kitchen and see a muffin massacre on the table—Olivia, my eleven-year-old sister, plowed through the snacks pretty fast in my absence. Which makes me wonder how long I dragged my feet on the way home: Olivia usually arrives the same time I do.
“Hey, Livvy!” I shout. “Where you at?”
I listen for her response as I toss my backpack on the couch. No answer.
I go scouting for her. I’m supposed to watch Liv after school, until Mom and Dad get home on the train from their corporate jobs downtown, but Marshall wants me to come in today, so we’re going to need a different plan.
“Liv!” I take it up a notch. There’s no excuse for her not to answer, other than she thinks she’s too big for babysitters. Which means she’s good for keeping it a secret when I skip out on babysitting duty. Mom and Dad are both mindreaders, but Livvy hasn’t gone through the change yet, and they won’t be able to read her thoughts. Which Liv and I work to our mutual advantage as much as possible.
“Livvy, I’m serious, where—” I round the corner to the living room and stop in my tracks. She’s working the living room holo game like mad, dancing as she fights through hordes of tentacle creatures. She must have the wireless buds in her ears, because when she sees me she nearly jumps out of her skin and lands back on the couch like she’s having a heart attack.
I can’t help cracking up.
She pulls the earbuds out. “Oh my god, Zeph! You scared me to death!”
“I scared you?” I glance at the pile of tentacled splatter-corpses on the screen. “You’re fighting hideous creatures from the deep, but you’re scared of me?”
“You’re much uglier.” She sticks her tongue out at me.
“Thanks, champ.” But I smile. She’s about as big as a midget, but she’s got all the attitude I could hope for in a little sister. And she’s one of the few people I don’t have to jack. We talk out loud. We keep secrets from everyone else. I’m seriously dreading the day she goes through the change and becomes just like the rest of them.
Livvy pauses her game with a flick of her wrist. “You gonna play? Alien Tentacles Invasion. I modded it to play pre-Change, but standard play is mindware interfaced. We can do both.”
“You know, someday Mom’s going to figure out you hacked the game console. Besides, don’t you have homework today?”
“Nah. I finished it in gym.” She shrugs.
Which is possible; Livvy’s smart. But she’s also a slacker when it comes to school. I give her a skeptical look, but I’m not going to press it.
“Listen, can you do me a favor?” I ask. “I need to go meet some guys. Can you tell Mom I was here, playing Reader City all afternoon with you? I’ll get back before she comes home.”
“What’s in it for me?”
I choke. “What? Seriously, Liv?”
“I’m thinking I deserve something for my trouble.”
I shake my head. “When did you become Uncle Harlow?” He’s the crazy uncle who’s always wheedling some favor out of our dad.
“There’s an expansion pack I was thinking about: Tentacles II.” She gives me her best fake-winning smile.
“Mom doesn’t even want you playing Tentacles I.”
“Precisely.”
I heave a sigh, like I can’t believe the hard bargain she’s driving, but I have to work to keep the grin in check. Besides, I have a pretty big stash of unos in my room. Marshall pays me every once in a while, and it’s not like I spend my money on dates or anything.
“Okay,” I say, like I’m totally giving into her. “But if Mom finds out, we’re going down together.”
“Deal.” She digs her fallen earbuds out from the couch cushion, pops them in, and goes back to fighting holographic aliens.
I shake my head, fish out my phone, and call up an autocab. When I joined Marshall’s Clan, he gave me a tally card loaded with cash so I could get to the warehouse when he wanted me. Works for me—it’s easier than taking the bus. When the autocab arrives, I program the autopath and ease back in the seat for the ride. It’s pretty short—Marshall’s territory in the Northwest Suburbs isn’t that big. His warehouse headquarters is an abandoned consignment store with storage in back. It’s not large, but then, it’s not like anyone lives there. And the fifty or so jackers he has in his Clan don’t usually all meet at the same time. For security, he says, but I think he just likes to keep us separate in case we want to conspire against him.
The jacker at the back door knows me and lets me in. There are a lot more people inside than when I left this morning. Which immediately makes me suspicious. And nervous. They’re all mid-twenties guys, muscular, a few with tattoos. There’s one girl in a heavy trench coat, also mid-twenties. They’re like a small mindjacker army, probably two dozen in all, and they’re scattered around the storage area, in clusters of twos and threes, in between the racks of clothing and stacks of furniture left behind when the store closed.
I do my best to play it cool and stride right up to Marshall. He’s talking with a guy almost as big as he is, and I vaguely recognize him as one of Marshall’s right-hand men. I think his name is Jackson. They’re not talking out loud, but they’re obviously having a conversation—which throws my alarm level up another three notches.
Jackers don’t mind-talk unless they’ve got something to hide.
“Hey,” I say, interrupting whatever they’re discussing. I’m hoping I can get in and out of whatever’s going down here as fast as possible. “Marshall, my kid sister needs me back home. How about I come back tomorrow, and we can do whatever you need then?” I throw a quick glance at the other jackers around the room. My arrival hasn’t stirred up too much interest. Then I realize they’re having wordless conversations, too. My heart’s beginning to thud audibly in my ears.
“Have you seen the news, Zeph?” Marshall asks, his face grim.
What? I blink. “Um, no. Been at school all day, then came straight here.” I glance again at the other jackers. A few have handheld screens, obviously watching some tru-cast. “What’s up?”
Marshall and Jackson exchange a glance, and probably a linked thought or two. Sweat starts to break out at the back of my neck.
Marshall folds his arms and stares down at me. He’s trying to intimidate me. Not a good sign. “What did you do to that girl this morning, Zeph?”
“Sarah?” I ask, my throat getting thick. “I told you, I don’t know. I mean, I just locked her, like you asked.” Something’s gone wrong. Really wrong. I glance at the tru-cast-watching members of the Clan. “Why? Did the operation go sideways? Is it on the news or something?”
Marshall frowns. “No, that’s something else.” He shakes his head, frowning at his feet and chewing his lip. I’ve nev
er seen the guy nervous before, not like this. It unnerves me.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
He sighs and lifts his chin to Jackson, who’s been watching us this whole time, holding back. Now Jackson takes off for the front of the storage area, toward the defunct storefront. Marshall grabs my undivided attention by putting a beefy hand on my shoulder. I try not to cringe under his touch.
“Look, Zeph, you’re a good kid,” he says. “But you did something to that girl, and if you know what it is, you need to come clean and tell me right now.”
Holy mother, help me. “I swear, Marshall, I’ve never seen anyone pass out like that. I mean, is she okay now? Did something happen?”
“You could say that.” He sighs. “We sent her on this gig, just a simple corporate job. She was only supposed to jack the guy with the biometric ID, get into where they lock up their codes, tap it, then get out again. The only reason we needed a keeper at all was in case they had a jacker on security somewhere. Our customer didn’t want any possibility of it being tracked back to him.”
“So… did the lock not hold or something?” I’ve never had that happen either, but something was definitely off with Sarah. Maybe her mind field shifted back after a while.
“No, it held.” Marshall scrunches up his face like he’s still trying to figure it out. “Only when she went to jack the guy, she didn’t really jack him. She… did something else. The guy’s mind is scrambled now. He’s in some kind of coma. Sarah kind of lost it, on camera, in the corporate headquarters.”
“Holy crap.” Panic is reaching up and strangling me now.
Marshall nods. “Yeah. It’s a mess, Zeph, and I don’t like cleaning up messes.”
I swallow. “I swear, I don’t know what happened. Maybe if I can talk to her, I can figure out what—”
“The FBI got her.”
“What?” My eyes bug out. My outburst attracts attention from the others, so I struggle to rein it in. “Couldn’t you pull her out or something?”
Marshall’s rock-hard look makes me shrink back. I shouldn’t be questioning him, not like that.
“They got to her before we could.” He lets that sink in. Being caught in the Feds’ net is bad. Really bad. Epic, one-way-ticket bad. But I’m not sure if Marshall reaching her first would have actually been better. Either way, I screwed up, and there are all kinds of people paying the price, not least Sarah. Whatever I did somehow scrambled her head on the inside, instead of just locking it up on the outside. And now the Feds have her… I close my eyes and turn half away from Marshall, rubbing my hand across my forehead. I honestly have no idea what went wrong.
And that scares the crap out of me.
“You got something to tell me, Zeph?” Marshall’s voice is hard, like a stone he’s going to break me with if I don’t come up with the right answer.
I suck in a breath and turn back to him. “I honestly wish I knew what happened, Marshall.”
He squints at me, but I think he believes me. Maybe. “Well, whatever you did to Sarah, how about you make sure it doesn’t happen again?”
I nod, a bit too vigorously. Something past my shoulder catches Marshall’s eye. I twist to see. Jackson’s bringing a kid in from the storefront. A scrawny kid. This kid makes my little sister Olivia look big.
I throw a panicked look to Marshall. “What’s this?”
Marshall’s rock-hard look doesn’t flinch. “This is your next job, Zeph. Don’t screw it up.”
The bottom drops out of my stomach. I look back to the kid as Jackson marches him over. I can hardly believe he’s old enough to be a jacker or a reader—most don’t change until at least thirteen or fourteen. It can happen younger, but this kid looks like he’s in elementary school. Twelve at the most. Or he’s really small for his age.
Either way… I’ve never locked, or unlocked, a changeling before, and now… I don’t even know if I can do it right anymore for an adult.
My stomach ties itself in a knot so tight, I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.
“C’mon man.” I’m pleading Marshall to let me out of this. “He’s just a kid.”
“He’s not just a kid,” Marshall says, his voice as hard as his muscular arms, which are now flexing in agitation. The kid is seated in a chair Jackson brought for him. He’s so scared he’s not even crying, he’s just shaking like a mouse. “He’s part of that Molloy Clan.”
“I thought those guys were all taken by the Feds.”
“They were—except for this one.” Marshall juts his chin to the kid. “And that other one who’s been on every tru-cast for the last hour.”
I narrow my eyes. “I don’t understand. What’s on the news?”
Marshall grimaces, looks at the kid like he’s got the secrets to the universe trapped inside his head, then lets out a sigh and waves over Jackson, who brings his handheld with him. The screen is small, but it’s easy to see the stylishly dressed tru-cast reporter posing for the camera. Red lines of text scroll across the bottom, her captured mindwaves rendered into words for her mindreading audience. She’s saying something about mindjackers.
Holy… what? Mindjackers are on the news?
My heart rate kicks into overdrive. I jack into the mindware interface on the screen and rewind the program. The metallic taste of the interface tastes especially bitter as I search for more details. I freeze the tru-cast when it pops up an image of two FBI agents, guns pointed at the camera, which shakes slightly, like it’s a handheld. The Feds are in what looks like a hospital lobby, and the words scrolling along the bottom obviously don’t belong to them. Someone else’s words are narrating the image.
It’s like the old days when the first readers were discovered, the text is saying. My mind is whirling. Did somebody out mindjackers on camera? Who would do that? What jacker in their right mind would expose themselves, not to mention the rest of us? As if in answer to that question, the camera swings to show the face of the girl holding it. It must be the camera on her phone. The text identifies her as Kira Moore, but she looks a lot like Tessa—pale skin, pink in the cheeks, long brown hair, only this Kira girl has blue eyes that are blazing in anger. She shifts the camera to capture a bunch of kids in hospital gowns sprawled on the floor behind her, fighting with guards of some kind.
I was kidnapped by the FBI, the text along the bottom is saying, brought here, and then sent to a prison with hundreds of other kids just like me. For no other reason than who I am.
I mentally nudge the screen to stop. I don’t need to see any more. My brain is stunned into a kind of suspended animation, where everything slows down, all sound disappears, and there are only my thoughts banging around inside my head.
This girl just told the world about us. The world. Now everyone knows we exist. From now on, everyone will look slant-eyed at their neighbors, wondering if they’re jackers. In one, brief, clarifying moment, I can see it all unfolding: neighbors turn us into the FBI, who lock us up. Mobs of frightened readers demand the police root us out and hunt us down. Then the experiments begin. The torture. The fight to figure out what we are, so they can stop us. So readers can feel safe again. It’s everything every jacker has been afraid of since the moment we first knew what we were.
How dare this girl put everyone in danger by revealing us to the world?
I slowly hand the screen back to Marshall. My hand is shaking a little, so I make a fist of it to keep it still.
“This girl,” I say, my voice thick. “She’s part of Clan Molloy?”
“That’s right,” Marshall says. “At least, we think so. They were all taken down at once, and no one’s seen them since. But this girl on the national tru-cast? Her school is in Clan Molloy territory.”
“What about this one?” I ask, gesturing to the kid in the chair. He’s still shaking, but he’s gone pale now as well. “Is he part of the Clan?”
“Same territory.”
I frown at him. “What’s he say about it?”
“That’s what we want to
know,” Marshall says. “He’s not a keeper, but he’s got a pretty hard head. I want you to crack it open, so we can see what’s inside.”
My stomach twists so bad I nearly gag.
I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that this Kira girl has outed mindjackers to the entire world, making my life, and every jacker’s life, a lot more dangerous. As if it weren’t dangerous enough. And now… Marshall wants me to unlock this kid.
It’s bad enough when I lock someone down—but that’s nothing compared to unlocking them. The brain resists it. Hard. The jackers who come back to be unlocked tell me it feels like I’m literally cracking open their skull with a claw hammer. At least they signed up for it voluntarily. Some opt out and decide to just stay locked. But for the ones where it’s involuntary… Marshall’s only asked me once to unlock a mind that didn’t want to be unlocked. And that was because he was going to drill inside it with five of his friends.
That’s the kind of thing that leaves a person with just pieces of a mind afterward.
I stare at the kid. His eyes are like those oversized ones in Tessa’s picture. The one where she’s being tormented by the other readers, because they’re just plain evil. Only now I’m the one who’s going to do that… and this kid isn’t going to survive to draw pictures about it later to remind himself how strong he is.
He’ll be lucky to survive it at all.
I nod to Marshall and take a seat in front of the kid. But I know, deep in my gut, I can’t do this. My heart wants to pound up through my temples and out of my head. I have a sick, dizzy feeling, like things are spinning out of control around me. I take a shuddering breath and try to tick through what I know. Just the facts.
The world knows about mindjackers now.
I’m a mindjacker.
My family is not.
This kid is going to die if I unlock him.
Marshall is a thug and a jacker.
Marshall knows where my family lives.
If I walk away from this, I’m on my own.
Being on my own just got a lot more dangerous.
mindjack 04 - origins Page 18