by K. M. Ruiz
It’s human nature. Or so it has been said for thousands of years.
Bishop Santos jerked around in response to the voice that echoed in his ears—amused, with a faint English accent—but he didn’t see anyone in the vast emptiness of the cathedral.
I never did understand why people would believe in something so limited.
It took Bishop Santos several long moments to realize why that voice seemed so odd as he reached up to touch the side of his head. He wasn’t hearing it in his ears, but behind his eyes, in the middle of his brain. Brown eyes darted from side to side, squinting through the sparse brightness that the lights provided.
“Who’s there?” he called out, voice rough from years of breathing pollutants.
No one was in the nave. Bishop Santos would have bet his eternal soul on that. Between one blink and the next, a tall young man appeared in the front pew, long legs stretched out in front of him, one elbow propped on the back of the pew so that he could rest his head on his fist. He was dressed all in black, claiming no cartel color when everyone always claimed a side down here on the ground.
Bishop Santos didn’t know how the young man had made it into the cathedral without someone discovering his presence. The doors were locked and alarmed for a reason, and he didn’t like the faint, mocking smile on the stranger’s face.
“The cathedral is closed today,” Bishop Santos said. “I don’t know how you got in here, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“You can ask all you like. I need to be here.”
Bishop Santos bit the underside of his lip, unable to deny that request. Some distant instinct told him he should, but the warning was ignored. “If you’ve come for confession, you missed the designated day. Tuesday is when the booths are open, and they are booked through the end of summer.”
“I have nothing to confess, at least not to you.”
“Everyone has something to confess, my son.”
That smile got wider. “Your sense of morality is severely misplaced. You’re wasting your time trying to convert me. Your God isn’t what I believe in. Your God isn’t why I am here.”
Bishop Santos watched as the young man pushed himself to his feet and brushed past the bishop on his way up to the marble altar and the table that sat in the chancel on the small dais. He stood there, back to the bishop and the empty cathedral, and stared up at the larger-than-life crucifix for a long moment. Then he picked up the metal tin on the table that housed the thin, expensive wafers used in Communion, pulled a few out, and ate them. The shock that Bishop Santos knew he should be feeling never came. The stranger turned around to face him again.
If this is all you have to offer your followers, no wonder they prefer cartel drugs.
Bishop Santos wrestled with the uncomfortable feeling that something wasn’t right. Only when his eyes latched onto that smile, to that mouth that had not moved to speak, did he realize that he could still hear the stranger’s voice.
I need this place, this last surviving Los Angeles landmark, for something far more important than evening Mass. Dark blue eyes that Bishop Santos knew should mean something to him didn’t blink and he could not look away. Just think. You’ve spent a lifetime praying for your God to send his son to save you.
The stranger poured all the remaining Communion wafers on the floor and ground them into dust beneath his bootheel. He spread his arms wide.
Here I am.
His mouth didn’t move and still he talked. Bishop Santos flinched. He could feel the blood drain out of his face as the stranger’s voice filled his mind.
“Demonio,” Bishop Santos whispered in a voice that had never shook in the face of countless guns, countless bodies, and countless threats in all his years working in the Slums. But it shook now because understanding wasn’t coming to him. He didn’t know if this was a test from his Lord or from the devil himself.
Demon? I’m no demon, human.
Bishop Santos blinked, or thought he did. One second the stranger was on the dais, the next he was standing before the bishop, intruding in his tiny bubble of personal space. He tried to run, but found that the only order his body obeyed was one the stranger gave. Bishop Santos watched as the young man raised a hand, palm to the ground, then slowly lowered it again. Bishop Santos’s knees bent of their own accord and he slammed down onto the floor in a kneeling position. Crying out in pain, he looked up with panic-stricken eyes.
“Please!” he gasped out. “I don’t—”
Understand. Yes, yes, I know you don’t. Just like all the children you fucked didn’t understand how you could betray their trust. One long-fingered hand reached out to touch the bishop’s wrinkled face, tracing over the lines of age. You are something I will never be, Bishop Santos. You should be thankful for that. I know I am.
Knowledge finally came to him, too late to mean anything in the face of a disease and a power he had always preached as unholy. “Psion.”
They say your life flashes before your eyes when you die. It doesn’t, not really. It was only the neurons in Bishop Santos’s head forcibly overloading. Just his mind exploding in a novalike burn that rippled across a small pocket in the mental grid, hidden beneath strong telepathic shields.
Maybe he thought about the years he had lived, the people he had led, the God he had served. Maybe he thought about the precious pool of pure, clean water he’d bathed in before being vested with a bishop’s robe years ago. Maybe he thought about a lot of things—things that didn’t matter any longer—but Lucas Serca made him forget.
Lucas Serca made him die.
Bishop Santos didn’t feel a thing when he fell to the steps leading up from the nave to the chancel. Nothing was left of his mind, no life was in those unseeing eyes. His heart still beat and blood still ran through his veins, feeding a body of cells that had nothing to live for anymore.
Lucas stared down at the man lying at his feet. He had never understood the religious, how they prayed for a way out of hell, but couldn’t be bothered to find it themselves. The idea of mindless service to a higher power was anathema to his way of thinking—Sercas ruled, they did not serve. Tapping into his power, Lucas finished what he had started.
Telepathy had turned off the bishop’s mind; telekinesis stopped his heart.
If there was a heaven, maybe the bishop was there.
[THREE]
JULY 2379
SLUMS OF THE ANGELS, USA
The shuttle came in over the Pacific, cutting across air traffic with priority clearance, dropping down out of vertical. The pilot adjusted the shuttle’s vector as it approached the landing docks that stuck out like sharp spokes along the sides of every remaining city tower that made up Los Angeles. With a rush of air, the buzz of gyros and buffers, the shuttle settled firmly into the anchoring arms of a restricted docking cradle at the top of the tallest city tower. It locked in with a shudder and the anchor lights went from green to red.
No one disembarked.
On a midlevel work zone in the tower below, three people appeared in an all-white room, the faint crack of displaced air muffled by soundproofing.
“I hate cleanup duty,” the man in the lead said irritably.
Jin Li Zhang was someone who couldn’t be ignored. In his early thirties and close to the end of his short life as a Class II electrokinetic, Jin Li was tall, with black hair and brown eyes. He wore black BDUs similar to the style that Strykers used, designed that way to promote confusion between the government-controlled psions and the Warhounds, rogue psions secretly owned by the Serca Syndicate.
Jin Li chewed on the cigarette clamped between his teeth as he walked down the hallway, the cigarette nearly burned down to the filter, smoke blending into the air around him. The first office he found was empty; the second was not. Two people looked up as the door slid open. Recognition came hard and fast, and the one sitting behind the workstation stood up on shaky feet, all the blood leaving his face.
“Sir.” The man swallowed. “I wasn’t aware
you were coming.”
Jin Li drew in a lungful of smoke and let it out slowly, wisps of it twisting behind him as he approached the workstation. The man and his assistant, a woman in a neat business suit, scrambled to get out of Jin Li’s way.
“You had your orders to keep us appraised of the situation,” Jin Li said as he tapped command codes into the system that overrode every security feature present, shutting it down. “You didn’t. We don’t appreciate failure.”
For a moment, the only sound in the room was the businessman’s loud, ragged breathing. Finally he said, “It’s difficult to track someone in the system who has the ability to hide from bioscanners.”
Jin Li’s mouth curled up around his cigarette. “I hate excuses. Come here.”
It was painfully obvious that the man didn’t want to obey. Sweat had broken out all across his face in a bright sheen, pupils dilated wide from fear. Repeatedly licking his bottom lip, the man took a few scuffling steps forward until he was within arm’s reach of Jin Li.
Jin Li wrapped his hand around the man’s bare wrist and forced him to his knees. Electrokinetic power burned through human nerves with frightening ease. The man screamed, the sound choking off only when Jin Li released him.
“You were supposed to get a lock on the target. You didn’t. The Serca Syndicate requires obedience and results from its employees. You’re going to have to work on that,” Jin Li said, glancing over at the man’s assistant.
The woman took a few steps back, face pale and eyes wide. She let out a little shriek when she ran up against someone she hadn’t known was there.
“Humans,” a disgusted soprano said. “You’re really only good for breeding and menial tasks.”
Jin Li spared a glance for the person who was leading this mission. The tall, slim teenager standing beside the woman in the middle of the room was dressed in the same streamlined BDUs as he was, her attention focused firmly on her father’s best enforcer.
Samantha Serca was eighteen years old, beautiful, and extremely powerful; attributes courtesy of her genes. Her dark blond hair was pulled back away from her face, opaque glasses hiding the dark blue eyes that were the signature trait of the Serca family. No amount of gene splicing could legally re-create this deep, solid shade of blue outside her family. Anyone who followed the founding family of the Serca Syndicate would know who she was by her eyes alone. Which was why for this endeavor she wore the glasses and strips of synthskin lined with translucent bioware over the facial recognition points of her bone structure.
Standing a step behind her, with hands gripping the buckles of his flak jacket and wearing an identical pair of glasses, was another teen with the same distinctive eyes, the same dark blond hair. Twins; but Jin Li had always liked Gideon Serca more than his older sister. Gideon preferred killing over conversation most days of the week, and as a Class II telekinetic, he was very, very good at it.
“When they initiated a bioscan through security checkpoints in the Slums, they found jack shit and gave up,” Jin Li reminded Samantha. “We got that report from HQ on the flight over.”
She shrugged. “I’m not surprised. Lucas is almost as good as Nathan when it comes to reading as baseline human on the grid. You’re not a telepath, you can’t scan for him.”
Samantha, however, was a telepath, a Class II with the genetics and training that made her capable of tracking their current target. Jin Li’s lip curled up, but he stood his ground when she closed the distance between them, her attention focused on the man kneeling before the electrokinetic. The arrogance in the way Samantha held herself was impossible to ignore. So was the strength of her power when it slid into a static, human mind that didn’t have the capability to handle such a strong telepathic intrusion.
The man’s head snapped back, body twitching as Samantha sifted through his memories, looking for the faint scars that would signify psionic interference. She didn’t find any in his mind and released him, sliding her power into his assistant’s mind instead.
The woman stumbled from the pain, clutching her head and begging for Samantha to stop as the telepath dug deeper. Samantha found what she was looking for at the bottom of the woman’s mind, just a faint dip in her thoughts that a lower-Classed psion wouldn’t pick up. Samantha almost missed it. The only reason she didn’t was because Lucas had meant for her to find it, some hint of what he was doing, but not why.
Piecing the memory back together proved aggravating, not because it wasn’t difficult—it was—but because what she finally found only pissed her off.
The woman had been made to forget the memory Samantha pulled out of the recesses of her mind. The thing about memories was that they were fluid. The brain stored them over a person’s life, and unlike humans, telepaths spent their entire lives tearing through other people’s thoughts. Samantha knew how to find things most people forgot they even knew. She recognized the mocking tenor voice in that memory, recognized the face of the person she had grown up with. His idea of amusement was something she never appreciated.
It’s been a while, Sam. Let’s see if you have better luck in the Slums than you did back in London. You do remember London, don’t you?
Her first failure as a full Warhound at the age of sixteen was something she’d never forget, nor the punishment she received after she failed to keep Lucas from leaving. Samantha flinched away from her own memories. She couldn’t, however, escape the woman’s memory of her older brother’s knowing laughter, or of Lucas walking into this branch however long ago as if he owned it.
I left something behind for you. Find it, and you’ll know where to find me. You know I never like to make things easy for you.
Two years on the run, Samantha thought as she wrenched her power out of the woman’s mind, not caring about the permanent damage she’d caused. Two years when it was just her to face their father’s sadistic wrath outside the glare of press cameras, because Kristen was unregistered and unknown, and Gideon had become the favorite Nathan used now. Gideon wasn’t Lucas, despite her twin’s sycophantic tendencies. Lucas had a spine, something Gideon still lacked, but Gideon was becoming adept at being cruel.
Samantha was beginning to hate her twin more than was considered healthy by the empaths in her father’s Syndicate. She hated Lucas more for putting her in this situation.
“He’s in the Slums,” Samantha said, ignoring the seizing woman at her feet. “He stopped here first to make sure we would follow him through an implanted message. He left something behind in this branch. I want it found.”
“Lucas isn’t careless,” Gideon said as he shared a look with Jin Li. “We all know that. He hasn’t left anything behind in any of the rest of the cities he’s run through, so why start now?”
“He’s not careless, no. He just likes to play games. In that, he is very much like Nathan.” With a crooked, little smile, Samantha toed the dying woman’s body. “Have someone clean this mess up. She’s bleeding all over my floor.”
A puddle of blood was forming around the woman’s head as her body still continued to seize. Her boss was only capable of watching her die from his own position on the floor, mouth forming protests he dared not speak, but Samantha heard him anyway.
“How predictable,” she said as she turned on her heel and headed for the door. “He wishes he could kill us.”
The man flinched when Jin Li dragged his fingers over the back of his neck. Samantha never saw Jin Li move; she felt it when the human died, a sharp white shock against her shields on the mental grid as Jin Li took care of rectifying the man’s poor work ethic.
Nathan could get new humans to fill the vacancies in an instant, that wasn’t a problem. Neither was covering their tracks. The problem was that she still wasn’t sure what Lucas wanted or why he had left the Syndicate in the first place.
The psion in charge of this Syndicate branch was a Class VI psychometrist who went by the name of Jessica Frist. Samantha barely glanced at the screen detailing the woman’s company rank—director of this
pigsty—before she was palming open the door and walking inside. The spacious office was full of high-grade work terminals overseen by a slim woman. Jessica looked up from the vidscreens that surrounded her, inspecs glowing in her brown eyes, her face the only part of her not covered by a full-body skinsuit.
“Sir,” she said, gloved fingers going still against the controls.
“We’re cleaning house,” Samantha informed her. “You’ll get a new set of qualified humans by tomorrow. Their incompetence regarding the job assigned them doesn’t excuse yours. The report HQ forwarded us is unacceptable. You had better have something more for me.”
“We got a hit within the last thirty minutes in the grid,” Jessica said, discomfort and fear making her stutter ever so slightly. “I thought it prudent to stay and monitor the system before I uploaded a second report.”
“The humans said you hadn’t been able to find Lucas’s location.”
“This isn’t Lucas.”
Samantha’s mouth curled up viciously. “Strykers.”
“Yes.”
“This is our territory and they know it. Who’s on the grid?” Jessica handed over a small datapad and Samantha took it, studying the information. Shaking her head, Samantha put it down on the desk. “They just don’t know when to quit.”
“It makes for an amusing way to pass the time,” Gideon agreed as he came into the office. “The humans are dead. I teleported their bodies into the Pacific. Someone else needs to deal with the blood on the floor.”
“Sir,” Jessica said, inclining her head at the order.
Samantha focused on Jessica. “Take us to the servers. Lucas was here and I want to know why. You’re scanning that room for any evidence that can give us that information and you’re doing it now.”