by K. M. Ruiz
“I’ve got a proposition for you,” Lucas said. He leaned back against the table and gripped the edge of it with both hands as he looked at Threnody.
“We don’t negotiate with Warhounds,” Threnody said automatically.
“I bet I can change your mind. I won’t even need telepathy to do it.” Lucas turned an indulgent smile on her. “Let’s even up the odds, shall we? You’ve got five seconds.”
In reality, it was more like two. Threnody blinked and nearly missed the arrival of three Warhounds as they teleported into the middle of the cathedral. Threnody felt Lucas’s telekinesis disappear and she moved instantly, the other Strykers doing the same, because to stand still meant certain death, and shock at the revelation of Sercas as psions wasn’t enough to cripple their responses.
Jin Li immediately tossed a dozen small, round electric surge anchors in Gideon’s direction. The Class II telekinetic caught them with his power and scattered them around the cathedral with a thought, wires linking all of them together. Jin Li twisted the surge anchor in his hands, activating it and all the others. Electricity flowed through the device, powered by Jin Li, a barrier that was a dangerous extension of himself. The surge net took that power and multiplied it ten times over until the entire place burned with it, electricity crawling across the floor and walls and high, arched ceiling, looking for conductors.
Jin Li’s power found it in bodies.
Jason struggled to bring up a telekinetic shield, but he was still suffering from being yanked unexpectedly out of a teleport and wasn’t quick enough to block the first wave completely. It shocked through him like lightning, curling through his nervous system and brain. His control skipped just out of reach and his shields wavered.
Hands grabbed his arm and shoulder, dragging him behind the precarious safety of a pew. Kerr focused his power on Jason, looking into those bloodshot hazel eyes, and snarled, “Shields.”
With Kerr’s help, Jason wrenched his power back into place, managing to slide his telekinesis around them both. The sudden absence of electric burn left both of them gasping for breath and reaching for their guns. Together, they took aim at Jin Li. Neither of them were surprised when all the bullets missed. A distraction only, and not a threat; both sides had telekinetics to shield against bullets.
Across the aisle Threnody had her hand pressed firmly to the back of Quinton’s neck, her power regulating both their nervous systems against Jin Li’s attack. She was still recovering from the last time she had pulled this maneuver in Johannesburg against Jin Li and it was a strain, her power barely able to cope.
“Jason,” Threnody said. “Get a shield around Quinton.”
She could handle Jin Li’s power on her own. Quinton was a drain on her reserves that she couldn’t allow. Seconds later, she felt invisible power hardening between her fingers and Quinton’s neck, a telekinetic barrier that would let him live. She pulled away, blue ribbons of electricity arcing from fingertip to fingertip, sliding up her arm and through her body. Quinton took aim with his gun at Samantha and fired, the weapon the only thing Jason wasn’t shielding. When the gun was wrenched out of his hands, nearly breaking his trigger finger, Quinton realized that Gideon didn’t much like people targeting his twin.
Jason looked up, eyes sweeping over the cathedral’s interior to visually tag everyone’s position. His inspecs were dead in his eyes from the electrical surge, leaving only the human spectrum for him to work with, and eventually even that threatened to shut down as a massive telepathic blow pounded against his mental shields. The surprise that leaked from Samantha into his mind when they didn’t break wasn’t comforting.
You can’t keep those up forever, Samantha said as she began to bear down on his mind.
They keep themselves up, Jason shot back even as he dialed back on the strength of his telekinetic output to focus on the telepathic strike that was carving mental canyons into the outer edges of his mind. Canyons that were then filled by Kerr’s power, a burning challenge that Samantha was forced to reckon with.
Get the fuck out of his mind, Kerr said.
The twins had spent their entire life learning how to wield their powers simultaneously in a merge, like the dual psion they resembled, but weren’t. Kerr and Jason didn’t have the twins’ expertise, but that didn’t mean they weren’t up to the task of protecting themselves against a pair of Class II psions. It just meant they would be the first to falter.
Nearby, Threnody had emptied an entire clip at the Warhounds, the bullets going everywhere except into bodies. Ejecting the empty magazine, she looked over at Quinton and said, “Burn it the fuck down.”
He didn’t answer her in words. The air down in the Slums was heavy, thick, and hard to breathe at the best of times. It trapped heat and caused the temperature to rise higher than the regulated environment in the city towers of Los Angeles. It was already sticky hot in the cathedral, mere degrees cooler than the suffocating heat that burned outside.
Quinton made it hotter.
He couldn’t create fire, but he could control it, use it, make it grow. Quinton clenched his hands into fists, the biomodifications in his limbs releasing the natural gas from biotubes in his arms. He snapped his fingers, the metal tips sparking the gas into fire that crawled through the air and expanded around where he stood. The red-orange flames flickered in the air until it was like an inferno that he sent roaring down the middle aisle of the cathedral toward the Warhounds.
Gideon’s telekinesis saved the Warhounds as fire engulfed them. It blinded them from any physical attack even as Gideon reached out with his power and grappled with Jason’s to get to Quinton. Quinton’s attack still bought them seconds, precious time for Threnody to lunge for the nearest electric surge anchor, get her fingers around it, and slam her power through its electrical field. The surge net broke beneath her power, circuits frying as she overloaded its limited system faster than Jin Li could counteract it, bringing down the barrier separating the two groups.
In retaliation, Jin Li targeted her first, as he had in Johannesburg, electricity sparking across his fist as he aimed for her face. She knocked aside his first attack and dodged an elbow to the throat, Jin Li’s blow connecting with her shoulder instead. They fought their way down the aisle toward the back of the cathedral, a pitched battle that was as much fists as it was power. Threnody was fast, but Jin Li was faster, and he caught her in his grip, slamming her up against the wall. His hands were around her throat, just as they had been the last time when he almost killed her. Right now, he meant to rectify that failure.
Threnody planted her hands against his chest, fingers digging into the bare skin near the hollow of his throat, and shoved her power into him before he could off-load into her. She needed to stop his heart if she was going to kill him. She almost did.
Electricity ripped through both of them, frying their nervous systems and pushing their hearts to the breaking point. Their screams mingled over the roar of the fire, over the rush of blood to her head as telepathy that wasn’t Kerr’s swallowed her mind.
Come with me, Lucas said. You know you don’t have any other choice.
Threnody gasped for air as her skin got hotter and hotter, her nerves seeking to burn right out of her body. The world bled colors brought on by extreme stress from Jin Li’s power, a disconnect caused by a nervous system out of whack, synapses not firing correctly. The neuroplasticity of the brain freezing up, just for a nanosecond.
She didn’t answer him.
You can die here or you can die when the government flips the switch to fry your brain through their collar. Or all of you can come with me and live. Make your choice, Threnody Corwin.
What do you want?
The same thing you do—a chance.
Threnody saw bleached-out violet eyes inside his mind, the image of a little girl in some sterile white room frozen in his memory. A cascade of orders, of actions, that couldn’t be a hallucination, not when it came from Lucas Serca, of all people.
The sho
ck of that shared memory propelled Threnody to say, Yes.
Or maybe it was Jin Li’s hands choking the life out of her that made her reach for a way out.
It didn’t matter.
They disappeared. Lucas teleported out of that cathedral with four Strykers, leaving behind his siblings and Jin Li to the quiet darkness of a broken place of prayer.
PART TWO
RETRIEVAL
SESSION DATE: 2128.01.15
LOCATION: Institute of Psionics Research
CLEARANCE ID: Dr. Amy Bennett
SUBJECT: 2581
FILE NUMBER: 1
She sits alone at the table, young and small, with feet that do not touch the floor. Paper drawings are scattered across the tabletop and the floor around her. She has stayed silent for over three hours, the chrono marking time in a corner of the feed, amused by the pad of drawing paper and the crayons provided her. Only now, when she is out of paper, does she go still. The machines she is connected to click and whine like a disharmonic orchestra.
“Don’t sulk, Marcheline,” Aisling says as she frowns at the camera. “I’m trying to help you.”
As if summoned by her voice, the door to the white room slides open and a doctor steps inside. The woman is thin and dark skinned. She ignores the camera.
“Hello, Aisling,” the doctor says. “Do you know who I am?”
Aisling tilts her head away from the camera, attention on the woman. “Hello, Dr. Bennett. I saw you months and months ago.”
“Did you? Fascinating.” The woman sits in an empty seat, places her documents and a deck of white cards in neat piles on the table. “Do you know why you’re here, Aisling? You’re here because you are a very special little girl.”
“Mama thinks I’m sick.”
“Your mother is concerned about you. She was right to bring you here.”
Aisling shrugs and slouches in her chair, something like resignation settling on her face. “You always say that, Doctor.”
Behind her, the high-pitched sound of the EEG machine is louder than that of all the rest, loud enough to force the doctor to cover her ears.
[FIVE]
JULY 2379
THE HAGUE, THE NETHERLANDS
The crowd of personal aides, lobbyists, military soldiers, and reporters jostled for view of the vidscreens that lined the walls of the International Court of Justice, known in the vernacular as the World Court.
The heavily fortified Peace Palace was an old building residing over the bunkers that had protected the only seat of power to survive the Border Wars. It was the world’s premier functioning government, the place that all remaining countries with viable populations looked to for guidance and obeyed in the face of continuous societal decline. Its fifteen justices held office for life, whereas they had once been restricted to term limits. In these trying times, so the saying went, justice needed a long eye.
It still wouldn’t be long enough to see the future. Humans didn’t have that power. Neither did the woman who strode down the main hall. She had been born a Class V empath, not a precog.
Her face—oval-shaped, with a straight nose above a full mouth and wide brown eyes—was well documented on news streams. It needed to be. As the officer in charge (OIC) of the Strykers Syndicate and one of the few psions that the World Court had allowed to go fully public, Ciari Treiva was not a woman most people were willing to tangle with. At forty-one years of age, she was the de facto leader of the government’s psions and had held that position for over a decade. It still left a sour taste in her mouth, even after all these years.
Ciari traveled light, accompanied only by a single aide. Keiko Nishimoto was the Strykers Syndicate’s only Class II telekinetic, a slim Japanese woman in her early thirties who was chief operating officer (COO) of the company. As Ciari’s direct subordinate, Keiko was just as well-known to the public. Both women wore the standard black-on-black BDUs of Strykers, though they carried no weapons. Ciari’s brown hair was pulled back in a slick knot, hands loose at her side as the crowd, immediately aware of her presence, fell away from her.
The government’s dogs didn’t come to the world capital all that often. Business with the Strykers Syndicate occurred behind locked doors. A stigma was still attached to doing business with someone who possessed unclean DNA.
Ciari had clearance, higher than most, that got her through the public domain of the Peace Palace to the restricted wing without so much as a pat down. She didn’t need one. If the current president of the World Court felt that she was a danger, he had the code that would activate the implanted neurotracker in her head and terminate her. Almost every OIC died by that neurotracker. The Strykers Syndicate didn’t offer retirement to its permanent employees. It only offered a grave. The threat of death didn’t mean that Ciari wasn’t incapable of independent thought. It meant she was better at hiding her contempt than most people for the man who effectively ruled the world.
When they arrived at their destination, the executive assistant who guarded the door along with a set of quads knew better than to keep them out and simply announced their presence through an uplink to the man they wanted to see.
“I didn’t summon you,” Erik Gervais said as he studied the hologrid displayed above his antique wooden desk, inspecs glittering in his brown eyes.
“Consider this visit one of preemption,” Ciari said, her soprano voice empty of all emotion as she walked into the office and approached his desk. Keiko remained by the door. “We need to talk, sir.”
Erik looked at her through the data on the hologrid before it winked out. The World Court’s president justice was a tall, lean man, whose black robes of office were perfectly tailored and only left his shoulders in the privacy of his own home. Like anyone who held a government position, or who could afford the cost in the private sector, his brain was wired with a bioware net that constantly monitored the baseline readings of his mind. Any psionic interference—if any Stryker would be foolish enough to do so—was tagged on the grid and the offending psion killed. If it was a Warhound, then that was another problem entirely, and the Strykers were expected to die for the humans they protected.
Unless legally instructed to, Ciari never directly touched Erik’s mind. His emotions, however, didn’t just exist on the mental grid. Emotion was physical as well as mental, and she tapped into the physical aspect that afternoon. She could read bodies as well as the emotions of a target, and for all that Erik was a judge well schooled in the art of a neutral expression, he couldn’t hide what he felt from a psion. Not completely, no matter the technology he had grafted to his brain. Ciari could read him; she simply didn’t have the freedom to twist what he was feeling into something useful to her without dying.
“Your predecessor was never one to give orders,” Erik said as he leaned back in the chair made for his specific contours alone, eyeing Ciari speculatively. “Perhaps you should follow in his footsteps.”
“I know my place.” Ciari’s mouth quirked slightly into something that might be called a smile if one was generous. The by-product of being an empath of any Class meant that she was a stone-cold bitch when it mattered and utterly ruthless when it didn’t. Emotions were her forte; that didn’t mean she had the luxury of succumbing to them.
“Really. Because I don’t see you on your knees.”
Ciari made a tiny throwing-away gesture with one hand from where she stood. “My loyalty is the same as it has always been.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Your docket today encompassed the Serca Syndicate and their proposed Act.”
“I don’t see how a case that has been pending for the past ten months merits you storming in here.”
“You ruled in their favor. That merits a lot of things.”
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d accuse you of professional jealousy. But then, your professionalism extends only so far as we allow it. You should remember that.”
The look in Ciari’s eyes was flat. “We Strykers obey the directiv
e of the World Court. That doesn’t mean we can afford to go about it blindly. What law you allowed the Sercas to author, and which you legalized, will affect how we do our job.”
“Please tell me that you aren’t seriously accusing one of the premier companies and families of being dangerous to the government?” Erik arched an eyebrow, the twist to his mouth condescending. “The same family that authored and helped implement the Fifth Generation Act, which set the requirements needed for a person to be accepted into the Registry with clean DNA? The Serca family was one of the first elevated out of the trenches of mutation after the fifth-generation benchmark passed. They continue to work toward the betterment of humankind, and I’ll be damned if you’ll belittle their accomplishments, so choose your next words carefully, Ciari.”
Ciari paid lip service to the order, but the silence lasted only a few seconds. “Allowing them an autonomy you’ve refused all others in this venture the World Court has spent generations hiding from the public view won’t end well. It can’t. You have a right to keep your secrets, and it’s our duty to guard them, but we can’t guard what we aren’t allowed to see. We need to know what the Serca Syndicate is working on in order to protect you.”
“Trade secrets are granted exceptions from the laws that govern us. The Sercas have more than earned their right over the years to retain the cornerstone of their company. What they intend to pursue is integral to the survival of all of us.”
“What about oversight?”
“It will be taken care of.” Erik studied her through slightly narrowed eyes, his calm tone belying the annoyance his microexpressions were projecting. “You don’t need to concern yourself with the how or the why, just that it will be done.”
Ciari’s own expression was remote and cold as she said, “By letting the Sercas dictate this human trial for however long it takes won’t result in the findings that you think will be uncovered, sir. Genetics, especially since the Border Wars, have never been easily harnessed or explained. I and those like myself are living proof of that.”