Ken grabbed her arm. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “This isn’t good, Nessa. Now the Gods are going to know Telepaths exist.”
“Couldn’t Miami figure it out from your first clash?”
“He saw a skin-tight teek shield that didn’t look like much, and my attitude,” Ken said. “His frustration at not being able to cow me did the rest.”
Nessa nodded. She felt wonderful. Hell, she felt nearly orgasmic. “Flattening him was a blast,” she said. “I haven’t been able to cut loose in years.” Her earlier mental chaos storm had vanished. She could think again.
“I know,” Ken said. “It’s like I’m floating on air.”
Nessa looked at Ken. “You are floating on air,” she said, and tried to pull Ken back down to ground level. “I guess we both needed the mental exercise.” She pointed, where a car had come to a stop. She let Ken walk her over to it and open the back of the sedan up for her. In her reflection in the door window she looked a fright: wet matted hair strewn everywhere, blotchy dirty face, and dark circles under her eyes.
She made sure the car’s driver didn’t see them. “We need to go down to the Keys, at least to Plantation Key.”
“You’ll let this poor slob go?”
“Ke-en. Of course I will, after he takes us back to our hotel and we pick up our rental car. That should be safe once we’re out of Goddy’s sight,” Nessa said.
“Won’t Miami just find us again?”
“The only reason he found us in the first place was me,” Nessa said. “I got that from his mind as I waxed his eustachians. He didn’t know we were even in his territory until I had my fit. I’m not impressed with these Gods at all.”
Ken nodded. “Miami must have figured out something from my earlier confrontation with him. From what, um, right sock said, it sounded like Miami had a nasty attack ready to use on us. I also have a hunch Miami picked up from whatever you projected in your fit that you were another special type, the same way I am. These Gods learn fast, Nessa. We’re going to have to be on our toes.”
“Shut up,” Nessa said. She didn’t like anyone knowing about her sock moments. Even Ken.
A gentle prod to the driver and they sped off.
The driver let them out in front of the Palm Beach and Nessa sent him on his way, dropping a wad of seawater soggy ten, five and one dollar bills on the front seat beside him. “You sure we don’t have time?” Ken said. He grabbed her around the waist and breathed heavily into her ear. She felt the bulge in his pants against her back.
“I thought you were the cautious one.”
“I love you,” Ken said. Nessa melted back into him for a moment.
“Love you too,” Nessa said, only a little horny from the fight. More like a no-headache afterglow. “But business first.”
Ken sighed. “So what’s the plan?” He didn’t let go of her. His hands crept up toward her breasts. She intercepted them before they reached their targets.
“We grab our stuff, check out, and go, big boy.”
“Right. Like sneaking away’s going to solve everything? Just because Miami’s a God doesn’t mean he can’t use more mundane methods to track us,” Ken said. He loosened his grip on her. “You might want to wash your face and put on some new clothes.” She needed a shower, but dealing with her hair afterwards took hours, which they didn’t have. She decided to just brush the sand out of it and call it a day.
“Good idea,” Nessa said. “Then I’ll go check out. We wouldn’t want any of the staff here remembering our faces.”
They cut over to the turnpike and headed south, away from the coast. The car hummed its soothing rumble as the miles passed.
“We’re going to need to get help,” Nessa said. Ken drove.
“What sort of help?”
“People to keep me sane. Sane-er,” Nessa said. She hadn’t suffered through anything as bad as the earlier mental shit-storm in years. At least one she remembered. Stress, most likely. “Two dozen would be good.”
“Two dozen? You’re talking a full-fledged entourage, a large one,” Ken said. “We can’t do that. We’d be endangering all of them. Like before.”
“I know,” Nessa said. “That’s why I didn’t mention it earlier. But we can’t have me breaking down every day, like I have been. We’re going to have to do it.”
Ken sniffed. “I thought the hunches were my trick and yours were only subconscious.” Ken’s hunches, his wild precognitive insights, were one of his best tricks. She didn’t always appreciate his best trick, but only his teek topped his hunches in her mind. He could toss cars around with abandon and destroy buildings, his favorite, with his teek.
“Huh?” Nessa said. She didn’t want to go into the details about her hunches again.
“Like you’ve decided we’re going to have to keep going after we talk with this new replacement to Opartuth.”
Nessa chewed her lip, and took Ken’s hand in hers. “The chances that Opartuth’s replacement created the 99 Gods are quite small. And don’t forget about Uffie.”
“Uffie. Right. I didn’t want to mention this, but I don’t have high hopes for your collaborator,” Ken said. “If she ran afoul of a God as nasty as Miami, she’s most likely dead.”
Nessa shook her head and watched the road ahead, her mind elsewhere. “She’s not dead. She’s been in pain, and in danger, but she’s not dead.”
“You can reach into her mind all the way to Africa?” Ken acted nervous. He didn’t like it when she showed her real spooky tricks.
“Kinda sorta. She’s linked to me, so I know a little of what she’s going through, no matter where she is.” Nessa smiled. “An entourage. Hadn’t thought of things that way. I’d like to have a bunch of fawning admirers to take care of the crap.”
Ken glanced over at her. “Get that gleam out of your eye. This isn’t the time for one of your harebrained schemes.”
“Why not? We’re over the line already by what we’re doing. Why not go for the whole hare?”
“It’ll just get us in trouble,” Ken said. “We don’t have the money for an entourage.”
“Well, I’ll bet there’s got to be some rich people somewhere who are being pressed by the 99 Gods and willing to donate money to someone opposing them,” Nessa said. “I’ll find them and prod them a bit. Money won’t be a problem.”
Ken cleared his throat in an over-dramatic fashion. “Has that ever worked?”
Nessa sighed and leaned over to put her head on Ken’s shoulder. “Just because the trick didn’t work in the past doesn’t mean it won’t work this time.” She always had hope, in moments like these.
“What if we kept it under a dozen and lived off the land?” Ken said.
“Not enough people. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless we get some Telepaths for our entourage. I know one in Chicago and one in New York City.” Nessa let the ideas percolate through her mind. “One Telepath will provide more stability than any three normals.” She paused. “Or we could get Mindbound. Mindbound people provide over twice as much stability as normals on the average. Some are even better than Telepaths for that.”
“Mindbound!” Ken said. “Now you’re asking for trouble.”
“Trouble?”
“You can’t control the Mindbound, Nessa. Some of them you can’t even read. That used to bother you.”
“It still bothers me sometimes, but I’ve grown,” she said, and sighed. “I’ve discovered a few things about us over the years to change my mind about the Mindbound.” She didn’t want to talk about it. Mindbound others were the crème de la crème of mental stability support, at least when they weren’t doing the Scoobie Doo mystery investigation crap.
“Such as?” Ken followed her verbal prod with a telepathic prod as well.
“Well…” Nessa hesitated, and Ken began to knead her shoulders with his teek. Unfair! “I think being telepathic is part of every human, every animal. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be able to read thei
r thoughts and put thoughts into their heads. Because us human types have language, our minds are set up to communicate with each other and it gives us an edge over the other animals.”
“Uh, okay,” Ken said, continuing to knead her shoulders. “Mindbound?” His teek backrub didn’t seem to interfere with driving the car.
“I’m getting there, okay?” Grumph grumph grumph. “We’ve all got these subconscious information flows, going from one person to another, only they’re so minimal we don’t notice unless we look. I can see what, um, a friend of mine…”
“Friend?”
“Okay. My right sock. Hmph. My right sock calls this ‘propagating coincidences’. Me, I think of this as all these language-using minds creating a big pond and these subconscious information flows are the waves.”
“Mindbound, Nessa?”
“A little lower and to the left,” Nessa said, leaning into Ken’s teek backrub. “Ummm. Yes. Well, you know, when Telepaths like you and me do things, we create big ripples in the pond. If the wind isn’t blowing hard and creating big waves, the ripples we create cause lots of coincidences to occur. When I started looking, I realized that the stronger Mindbound and Psychics create ripples that are just as big.” A Psychic was a Telepath who only worked unconsciously and sporadically. They were the fools who ended up on daytime talk shows and in testing labs, not Telepaths. “And Mindbound are all over the place. Eklutna had a dozen of them.” Mostly because she had attracted them, but she didn’t want to talk about her attraction trick.
“And?”
“Mindbound people help me keep sane because I can’t casually read their minds. Everyone else in a community, at least the people I interact with, starts to look like echoes of my own mind over time because of the ripples I make. The Mindbound don’t, which is why I wouldn’t mind having an entourage of them.” Some normals naturally resisted her ripple effect as well, but they were as rare as Telepaths and Psychics. They had to survive multiple traumatic experiences to teach them proper stubbornness and firmness of mind. Mindbound, although rare, were more common than any of these others.
Ken shook his head. He didn’t speak for many minutes, as downtown Miami passed on their left. His teek backrub ended almost lasciviously. “That’s your call, as this is all outside of my area of expertise. I can’t sense the difference between Mindbound, Psychics and normals without putting a lot of work into it.”
“Oooh, all professional on me and everything.” She paused, remembering Ken’s tendency to let his telepathy atrophy. “Subtle telepathy’s your strength, Ken, as far as telepathy goes. All you need to be able to pick this up are some examples. I’m good enough to teach you these days.
Ken sighed. “Sure. Whatever you say. About this entourage idea, though… Nessa, it’s going to keep all of our wits and tricks just to keep ourselves alive. Miami’s trigger happy and jealous of anyone else with abnormal power. We add any more people to the mix and we’re going to be attending funerals.”
Nessa shivered. “I know. We can’t trick them into joining us, either. That wouldn’t be right. Instead, we’ll have to tell them about the hazards ahead of time. However, they’re out there, scared stiff about the 99 Gods, people who would do anything to get rid of them. Even something as risky as helping us.”
“I’ll give this some thought,” Ken said. “I’m also not sure I’m happy with the idea of contacting other Telepaths. We don’t want to piss off any of the distant ones.” The world’s other top end Telepaths. “Uh, Nessa? You know we’ll have to warn anyone we recruit about our, ahem, little, ahem, mental problems, too.”
“Of course.” Every ointment had its fly, Nessa knew.
Plantation Key. Wall to wall resorts, rental condos, and palm trees. Shelly limestone rocks everywhere, built into everything. Summer lingered here, high summer, noticeably more summery than back north in Palm Beach. Ken got them a room at Plantation Harbor, a cheap one-story motel built from painted cinder blocks. The room stank of mold and mildew again, and this time the air conditioner, a window model, rattled loudly.
“Geez Louise,” Nessa said, looking around the room. “I thought this place was better from the road. We’ve got to get ourselves more money. This is ridiculous.”
Ken humped in the two suitcases and closed the door with his foot. “How’s the bed?”
“How’s the bed what?” Nessa said. She sat down on the bed. “Hard as a rock.” She sucked on another piece of chocolate, another bit from Ken’s stash. Nessa studied her hands. She swore they weren’t as visibly gaunt as they had looked back home in Eklutna. She suspected she had gained ten pounds, all Ken’s fault. He probably even thought the extra weight looked good on her.
Ken sat on the bed beside her. “I’d rather have a hard bed than a too soft bed,” he said. “I need to sleep. Unlike you, I can’t go indefinitely without it. First, though…”
Nessa turned her head and found Ken’s nose close enough to bite. Time to mate. “Oh, right.”
“At least it’s warm enough to go out in bathing suits at night,” Nessa said. They had walked down the beach to find a more secluded location. On the way they passed actual fields, grass and trees that weren’t palm trees. Nessa suspected the resorts had planted the palms for the tourists. Imported plants for imported tourists.
The grass and trees appeared to be more native.
“If we go any farther, we’re going to be trespassing on the yacht club,” Ken said. Stars glistened overhead and the waves lapped the beach with their slow nighttime pulse. A sliver of a moon hovered near the horizon and illuminated only the tips of the waves with an eerie pale glow.
“Oh, is that what that place is? This is far enough for me.”
She didn’t sense any human minds within a quarter mile, and at two in the morning, didn’t sense many people awake within a mile. She took Ken’s hand and dragged him out into the dark surf. Two foot tall waves splashed over her bathing suit, a momentary shock of cold, until she decided the water was warmer than the air and it was the air that cooled her.
“Sure there’s no sharks here?” Ken said, wary as always about the ocean. She continued to lead them deeper into the water.
“I told them to go away.”
“Right.”
“I did!” He never believed her. She tangled his feet together with some devious telepathy.
Ken didn’t notice.
“I didn’t know you could get something as mindless as a shark,” Ken said.
“I learned how to get fish and other little critters a few years ago,” Nessa said.
“Fish? You?”
“Uh huh.” She giggled. “Yes, a scheme. No, the scheme didn’t work. Just because I’d learned to kill and clean one fish turned out not to mean I could do it wholesale.” She paused. “Let’s also not talk about the looks people gave me when I stood at the shore and called the salmon to me.” She had such bad luck with her schemes.
“No, let’s not talk about that,” Ken said. “Instead…”
“You hear that?” Ken said. “Someone’s out in the water, whispering in some foreign language.”
e came to ask you about something we call the 99 Gods. Are you familiar with them?> Nessa held her breath.
“Damn,” Ken said. “You were right. They didn’t have anything to do with the 99 Gods.”
“Of course I was right,” Nessa said.
“Uh oh,” Ken said.
Nessa shook her head, dug her toes in the sand below her feet and found herself again.
Nessa interrupted. Ken grunted at the strength of her mental shout.
99 Gods: War Page 15