by K. M. Ruiz
“In the morning, I’ll make you breakfast. But only if you go to sleep.”
“Pancakes?” the girl asked, knowing she usually got her way.
“Pancakes. With chocolate chips.” An expensive dish, about as expensive as the wine Sharra drank. Cacao plants were grown in only one SkyFarms cluster somewhere in Brazil. Only the very rich in the Registry had ever tasted chocolate. Lillian had a terrible sweet tooth.
Lillian smiled up at her mother, her small teeth shiny and white in the light coming from the hallway. Then the girl squeezed her eyes shut and flopped on her side, pretend snores coming out of her mouth. Sharra leaned down and pressed a kiss to her daughter’s cheek, careful not to breathe. She didn’t want her daughter knowing what a drunkard her mother was, not yet at least.
She left Lillian’s room, but didn’t immediately retreat to the one she shared with Erik. Half a bottle of wine left in the kitchen still needed to be finished. Waste wasn’t tolerated, even in the households of registered humans. When she finally made it to the kitchen, she found the wine being poured down the sink.
Sharra jerked to a shaky halt on her high heels as she glared at the man standing in the kitchen. In her drunken state, he could have been a hallucination, but even when she was sober, he’d always been real, even when she wished he weren’t.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded in a low, frantic voice.
“Erik won’t wake up,” Nathan said as he set aside the empty wine bottle and turned to look at her. “He never does when I’m here.”
“You don’t know that.”
“When I put someone under, they stay under, Sharra.” Nathan came over to her and wrapped a hand around her upper arm, guiding her with learned politeness to the nearest seat. Stiff with panic and fear, Sharra followed like a wooden puppet and sank into the chair. “You need something a little stronger than wine.”
A small crystal tumbler appeared on the table in front of her. An eyeblink later and a bottle of aged Scotch joined it. Sharra stared at both as if they were bombs.
She swallowed back bile. “What do you want?”
“I got what I wanted from you years ago.” Nathan smiled at her, the expression as cold as his voice. “Right now, I’m more interested in what Lucas wants from you, if he wants anything at all.”
“I don’t speak to your children, Nathan.”
“They’re half yours, or don’t you remember what it cost to get where you are today?”
Sharra closed her eyes, the wine in her stomach souring into something that wanted to crawl up her throat. A woman of her stature, with a life lived on a mountain of lies. A woman with her name in the Registry, a ring on her finger, and five children to her name. She didn’t care about Nathan’s. She only cared about her daughter.
That didn’t mean her children wouldn’t come looking for her, and Nathan knew it.
“He hasn’t been here,” Sharra said, opening her eyes. “Why would he? I’ve nothing he could possibly want.”
They had their father’s eyes, but her straight nose, shades of their blond hair. The rest was all a mixture of DNA—hers and Nathan’s, and whatever was in her human genome that could make Nathan’s psionic attributes breed true. She was useful, and Sharra knew from personal, painful experience that being useful was the only way to survive. Her current position—her marriage, her human daughter—were the results of producing four embryos for the Serca family. In return, she’d been promised certain survival.
Nathan stared at her from where he stood, tall and perfect in his business suit, with power at his fingertips that Erik could never hope to harness. Psion power that no one ever saw because Nathan was a master at being just human enough that no one looked beyond the veneer.
“I’ve kept your secrets,” Sharra whispered bitterly.
“Because you can’t speak a word of them to anyone. We made sure of that,” Nathan said. “You will notify me if Lucas comes calling. I will know if you don’t.”
Sharra reached up instinctively to touch the side of her head, thinking of the bioware net that spanned the entirety of her brain and how fucking useless it was in the face of psionic power.
Nathan’s smile was slow and dangerous as he noticed the motion of her hand. “When has that ever stopped me before?”
It hadn’t, and the systems that monitored the bioware nets for those on or related to those on the World Court never showed psionic interference. Nathan and his Warhounds were amazingly adept at circumventing human technology when they needed to.
“Why don’t you simply kill us all?” Sharra asked, the alcohol in her system making her braver than she could ever be sober.
Nathan let his fingers stroke through her hair and Sharra drew in a strangled breath.
“Humans live long enough to be useful” was Nathan’s calm answer. “Our one evolutionary shortcoming is your gain.”
“You’ve lived nearly two lifetimes, Nathan.”
“Yes. Only because I’m killing our children in order to do so, but that isn’t a guaranteed cure. If I used my power even half as much as I order them to use theirs, I would be dead. And, oh, you would enjoy that, wouldn’t you, Sharra?” Nathan’s hands settled heavily on her shoulders, a weight that always pulled at her. “I will live long enough to see Mars Colony. I will live long enough to rule there in the open instead of here behind closed doors. I want that new world, not this mess our ancestors left us. I deserve better than that.”
Sharra closed her eyes and breathed through her nose. “I hope to God you die out in space.”
Nathan laughed, the sound low and amused, his breath blowing over the shell of her ear. “I want the latest launch information by the end of the week.”
“I don’t know if I can get that for you.”
“Then I suggest you find a way, as you’ve done all the times before, or your daughter will grow up without a mother. Or perhaps you will grow old without her.” He squeezed her shoulders. It felt as if he squeezed the life out of her. “When I tampered with Erik’s mind all those years ago to make sure he saw you and only you as a possibility for his wife, you knew the cost of that deal.”
She didn’t say, Erik doesn’t love me. She didn’t need to. Nathan picked the thought straight out of her mind with an ease that still frightened her, even after all these years of him doing it.
“I never promised you something as useless as love. You got safety. I get information. You have a week.” He pulled his hands away from her and she could breathe again. “Good-bye, Sharra.”
He disappeared in that disturbingly alien way that teleportation encompassed. Sharra shivered, suddenly cold, and hunched over in her seat. Pressing hands that shook to her mouth, she breathed slowly, trying desperately not to get sick there on her kitchen floor.
In the end, she chose Scotch over sleep, Nathan over her husband, because for all the vows they’d spoken at their wedding, she owed Nathan everything and Erik only the appearance of fidelity.
[TWELVE]
AUGUST 2379
TARRAGONA, SPAIN
Spain was a wasteland cut apart by deadzones and desertification that had swallowed half the country over a century ago. Madrid was a crater, bombed over and over again during the Border Wars, like most of the major and not so major European cities. Barcelona, east of Tarragona on the Iberian Peninsula, was nothing more than a wide bay of water, the newest coastline addition to the Mediterranean Sea.
Tarragona was half-underground to escape the radiation taint that fallout had spread across the country during the Border Wars. Nuclear winter had lowered the planet’s overall temperature, but only for a short time. Warmth eventually returned, and with it, massive, deadly storms that swept periodically over the world: hurricanes and tornadoes, sandstorms and derechos, monsoons and whiteout blizzards. Pollution was still a problem, climate change had altered the region even before society nearly blew itself up, and Tarragona had no city towers for registered humans, only segregated bunkers.
The m
ilitary-grade shuttle flew just above the low-hanging cloud cover in the night sky, lights off, stealth mode up and running. The engines were barely a hum in Samantha’s bones as she peered over the pilot’s shoulder through the flight-deck windshields. A hologrid shone in the air between the pilot and the navigator, a ground map with precise details of the maglev train gunning toward Spain’s largest surviving city. With a population around 146,000, Tarragona was second only to London in population in Western Europe.
“Speed?” Samantha said.
“Two hundred twenty and decreasing,” the pilot said as he lightly adjusted his grip on the stick. “Your orders?”
Samantha pushed away from the seat. “Descend. We’ll take it from here.”
The pilot nodded, attention already focused on the route his navigator was building. Samantha walked back into the cargo bay of the shuttle, letting the hatch close and seal shut behind her. She steadied herself as she felt the shuttle beginning to change its angle of flight for the descent, feeling a telekinetic touch brace her body and give her additional support. She nodded her thanks to the Warhound who had reached out to her.
“We’re descending,” she told everyone in the cargo bay. “Telekinetics, be ready for assault. Telepaths, you’re with me in merge.”
“How many Strykers do you think are down there?” Genevieve asked as she checked the clip in her assault rifle and slung the strap across her shoulder, bracing the weapon against her bent legs. The twenty-five-year-old Class III telekinetic was the best train hijacker in the Warhound ranks. Samantha still wished she had her twin by her side.
“Several teams, at the very least.” Samantha dragged herself back to her assigned seat and strapped into her harness. “Fuel transport trains always have heavy defenses.”
“Hungry,” Kristen said from beside her. The empath was strapped into her harness, fingers tapping out a soft rhythm against the armrests of her seat.
“Not yet.” Samantha pressed her power against her sister’s mind, skimming it over those jagged broken shields. “You feed on my say-so.”
“Sure, Sammy-girl.” Kristen’s smile got so wide that the corners of her mouth cracked and bled. “On your say-so.”
Which, in Kristen’s demented way of thinking, could be whenever Samantha opened her mouth or ’pathed out an order. Samantha offered her sister a sharp look and a warning telepathic probe before sliding out of Kristen’s mind.
It had taken five days to track the oil shipments coming through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean Sea and up to Europe’s southern shores. Previous generations had nearly depleted the Middle East oil supplies, but the regional governments in control at the time had placed trade restrictions on exports to save some of the fossil fuel for their own people. What the World Court had slowly been siphoning out of the surviving storage bunkers wasn’t headed anywhere except to the Paris Basin, to be transported to Mars, or so they thought.
Samantha clenched her hands into fists until her knuckles popped. Warhounds had stolen a quarter of those shipments over the past thirty years, ransoming it back to the government at ridiculously high prices. Her grandmother—may Marcheline’s sadistic soul never rest—had begun the credit buildup that the Warhounds would need for their bottom line once they got off-planet, and Nathan was continuing that effort. They would need that monetary leverage when all the functioning parts of society were transplanted to someplace better. Humanity, what they would allow of it into space, was worth its weight in gold.
The shuttle picked up speed as it descended. Samantha pushed those thoughts aside and focused on the scene around her. Genevieve and her telekinetics were out of their seats, held stable in the shuttle’s unsteady course by their own power as they pulled on the oxygen helmets attached to the small tanks buckled to their backs. They didn’t need safety lines, not when they had the option of teleportation and the anchoring grasp of telekinesis. The six telekinetics ranged from a Class V to a Class III. More than enough telekinetic power to grab those fuel tanks off the back of the train and ’port them out of human reach.
The only problem with that plan, Samantha mused as the shuttle took evasive maneuvers against ground-to-air missiles, was that the humans employed Strykers.
Open the cargo doors, Samantha ordered.
Wind whipped through the interior of the shuttle as hydraulics opened the rear cargo doors, the cabin pressure falling. The telekinetics were lined up in pairs at the very edge, gravity and air pulling at their limbs. Genevieve didn’t wait for Samantha’s order; she had more experience than Samantha at leading these kinds of missions. The telekinetics wrapped themselves in their power and jumped out of the shuttle, dropping in a controlled fall toward the speeding train below.
Samantha closed her eyes, struggling to breathe; easier to concentrate in darkness than the brightness of the shuttle. The roaring of the wind faded as the cargo doors closed back up, the pressure equalizing again. Samantha dropped her shields, slid her power into the minds of her fellow Warhounds, and started to build the merge.
This was something that the Strykers still didn’t know how to duplicate, or simply weren’t allowed to learn. The layered strength that came with three telepathic minds coming together meant that they had that much more power to draw from. Samantha took up the apex position in the merge and sent their minds skimming over the mental grid toward the bright spots that burned like fire.
“Leaving me out in the cold,” Kristen murmured from beside her.
Samantha felt her sister’s bitten-down nails dig into the skin of her left wrist. She ignored the pain that skittered up her arm, the majority of it empathically created.
Ready to break, Samantha said into Genevieve’s mind, her mental voice echoed by the other three in the merge.
Genevieve’s answer was calm. Missiles are diverted.
Samantha couldn’t hear the explosions on the ground below; didn’t need to. She could hear the panic in the human thoughts of the workers that rode the train as clearly as if she were standing in the cars with them. Samantha felt her mouth curve into a smile, but it was a distant expression.
The merge spread like a net across the mental grid where they fought, telepathic power pressing down like a heavy load onto the Stryker and human minds below. Only when the Warhounds had their positions set did Samantha drop most of her shields, letting her telepathy ram into the minds they had surrounded.
The government had opted for a full squad of Strykers, eight teams, at a pair apiece. Sixteen Strykers of varied types, varied Classes, but none of them could counter a merge backed by her Class II strength. They didn’t have the resources available to them, just their orders, and those would get them killed tonight. They would still go down fighting.
Shit, Samantha said, tapping into Genevieve’s thoughts. They’re going to blow the train.
Getting desperate, Genevieve replied. That’s a fucking waste of perfectly good oil. We’re working on getting a grip on the weight. We need a few more minutes.
She was asking Samantha to buy them time.
Samantha did one better.
She reached with the strength of the merge for Kristen’s mind, her sister greedily reaching back. The jagged, deep holes in the empath’s power bit into Samantha’s mind with a viciousness that made her physically flinch. Kristen’s mind was a starved thing, twisted into swollen knots as her empathic power fed on itself in a continuous state of desperate survival. Samantha shunted Kristen’s mind through the merge, beneath their shields, the other telepaths helping her to control Kristen’s descent, as they forced the girl to obey their chosen course of action.
The merged telepathic strike, braced by Kristen’s malignant empathic power, broke through the Strykers’ defenses with a ferocity that left two Strykers dying immediately of critical psi shock. The rest didn’t have the ability to defend against Kristen’s need to feed, and the teen had never discriminated between the minds of registered and unregistered humans, nor the distinctive burn of psions who weren’t f
ast enough to escape. They all tasted the same to her.
The mental grid got darker, minds winking out as Kristen’s empathy fed on the emotions and thoughts around her. Her power simply ate through the defenses thrown in her way, transferring the foundations of her victims’ sanity into her own. Her sanity was makeshift, nothing more, and everything she stole would disintegrate within days, leaving behind yet another hole in her mind.
Samantha left Kristen to her fun, but kept fingers of her power at the edge of her sister’s mind even as she checked in with Genevieve.
Forgot how she wrecks everyone’s concentration, Genevieve said tightly. We need some shields, Samantha. These tankers are heavier than the last shipment we stole.
Can you ’port them? Samantha wanted to know even as she erected a telepathic shield between Kristen’s swath of mental devastation and the knot of concentration that was the Warhound telekinetics.
It’s a matter of distance and weight. Genevieve’s mind dipped heavily against Samantha’s, power burning through the psi link they shared as she tapped into her telekinetic strength. We’ll get it done before the train crashes.
We still need the maglev platform to remain intact.
Train still has to crash. Trust me. I know what the fuck I’m doing.
Samantha didn’t have any doubt. Looking through Genevieve’s eyes from where the telekinetic was crouched on top of the train’s engine car, all she could see was progress. The line of tankers following behind were slowly disappearing.
“Military jets are scrambling,” the pilot said over the comm system, splitting Samantha’s concentration. “ETA five minutes.”
Break away, Samantha ordered. We’re finished here. Genevieve, you’ve got five minutes before the government’s fighter jets are on you.
We can finish in two.
The shuttle banked hard, throwing Samantha against the straps of her harness and the seat with bruising force. She felt metal bite into the meat of her shoulders, the edge of her cheek. She could feel the shuttle pick up speed as the pilot sought to put distance between them and the jets that appeared on their radar.