by K. M. Ruiz
Lucas took a careful step forward, letting the rusted support ramp that linked the road and the entrance take his weight. The metal creaked, the sound a grating echo in their ears, but it held. He assumed the government had replaced it a few times over the years. Lucas looked over his shoulder. “Threnody.”
“Front and center, yeah, I know,” she said.
Quinton had her by the elbow as they walked across the ramp slowly, trying not to jar her too much. Jason was right behind them while everyone else waited on the road. Threnody leaned heavily against Quinton, staring at the control panel.
She swallowed thickly. “I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I’ll be fast enough.”
“I can have Kris turn off the pain,” Lucas said.
“No. I’ll lose myself that way.”
“Then I’ll anchor you.”
Stepping forward, Lucas carefully pressed one fingertip against her temple. Threnody flinched from the pressure, skin still sensitive. She needed a biotank, but he didn’t have one here to put her in. Lucas closed his eyes and concentrated on pulling his telepathy together. He hadn’t lied about his ability to recover. That still didn’t mean it was easy. Psi shock made it difficult to focus, and Threnody’s mind was disturbingly quiet when he dipped into it.
We fixed your body, but I forgot about your mind in the aftermath, Lucas said, his words ghosting over the shadow of her thoughts. I wasn’t in any shape to fix it.
Meaning?
You blocked out a good chunk of what happened in Buffalo and your mind is still reorganizing those memories.
Psions don’t forget.
This isn’t you forgetting. It’s you rebuilding. We just need you to do it faster. I think if you have those memories as a template, you’ll know how far you can push your power.
He bypassed her shields, coiling his telepathy around the pulse of her personality, thoughts, and memories buried deep beneath the shock of trauma that still lingered. He dragged Threnody’s mind into full awareness, steadying her as she reconnected with the memories of her fight at the power plant.
The pain wasn’t something Lucas could block, and it drew a ragged sound from her, like an animal’s. Quinton closed his eyes, holding himself perfectly still even though he obviously wanted to shield her from Lucas’s implacable drive and their current desperate need.
“Thren,” Quinton whispered.
She didn’t seem to hear him, face screwed up in pain, hunching in on herself when she should have been resting in Alpha shuttle.
Threnody, Lucas said. The doors.
She remembered lightning. He felt the protest in her thoughts, in some distant, primal memory that came from the mind knowing the limits of the body, but she was a Stryker and Threnody knew how to follow orders. She knew the cost of disobedience. She was here with Lucas because of it.
Blue eyes cracked open, dark with pain. Breathing harshly, she lifted one hand to the panel. Faint sparks popped around her fingers, tiny electric lines emerging from her skin. She was mere centimeters away from touching it when she stopped, hand curled like a claw.
“It’s not enough,” she panted. “I don’t have enough power in me to do this.”
“You will,” Jason said.
Threnody’s breath came in shallow, painful gasps as she pressed her hand against the control panel. Threnody was a Class III electrokinetic, and her power was the only option in light of the failed hack. Electricity sparked along the tips of her fingers. The surge she was readying wouldn’t be enough to do the damage they needed to fry the system before the alarm triggered.
Jason fixed that. Fixed her.
He saw how her nerves were still a mess, synapses unable to talk correctly to each other, electrical impulses dying before they bridged the distance between nerves. He let his power bleed into her body. The connection was there, her body knew it, she just couldn’t find it on her own.
Microtelekinesis coursed through her instantly. The shock of the shutdown and reboot lasted for half a millisecond, if that. The results were all that mattered. Threnody’s power snapped together inside her body, her baseline stabilizing. Electricity ripped through her limbs and out of her skin, surging through the control terminal with a blinding burst, the same way it had surged through Jin Li in Buffalo.
Jason and Lucas withdrew their power. Quinton was the only one holding Threnody up as she shuddered through the aftereffects.
The doors jerked in their casing, unlocking. Lucas telekinetically pulled them apart, breaking through decades of built-up ice and debris. Cold, stale air filtered out of a place no one had walked into since the government’s SkyFarms Inc. agricultural towers first went online in the last major cities.
Lucas strode into the ancient seed bank and didn’t look back.
[FOUR]
AUGUST 2379
THE HAGUE, THE NETHERLANDS
The ache in Ciari Treiva’s gut had nothing to do with nerves or emotion.
It was a physical reminder, one the Class III empath hadn’t fixed before leaving Toronto. It grounded her in a way she knew nothing else could. As the officer in charge (OIC) of the Strykers Syndicate, it was imperative that Ciari maintain her health. Like every other Stryker, she didn’t own her body—the government did. And what better way to prove that ownership than to appoint a psion as the liaison between the government and the Strykers Syndicate?
“This is not going well,” Keiko Nishimoto said. The Class II telekinetic and chief operating officer (COO) for the Strykers Syndicate kept a sharp eye on the set of quads stationed in the hallway with them. “We’ve been waiting for hours.”
“The morning session for citizens comes before our punishment,” Ciari said quietly. “Erik likes having an audience.”
Keiko ducked her head, hiding her grimace from the security cameras embedded in the walls. She had teleported Ciari to The Hague as ordered. They’d been told to wait outside the courtroom doors in the Peace Palace, which held the International Court of Justice, called the World Court by most people on the planet.
To be kept waiting after the rush to arrive wasn’t a surprise, simply annoying. They had no right to argue about anything, not when the neurotrackers implanted in their brains could kill them so easily. Every Stryker who didn’t die in the field or from overuse of his or her power died with the flip of a switch, victim of a government termination order. Perhaps the wait was psychological on the part of the World Court, but the two Strykers accepted it as part of the job. The government’s dogs, as they were so often called, could do nothing but obey.
They weren’t the only ones going about their business in the hallway. Aides, lobbyists, and politicians walked the halls, most of them hurrying past the two women without a second glance. Most humans, registered and unregistered, didn’t trust psions. Too many people had died at the hands of rogue psions since the Border Wars ended for trust to ever be more than political lip service.
Despite their disease and danger, psions were useful, lucrative, and rare enough in the world’s surviving gene pool that the government kept them around for business and security reasons. Contracts brokered with the Strykers Syndicate pulled in a lot of money, and the government wasn’t willing to give up a ready source of income.
The World Court beat obedience into their dogs. The failure of government indoctrination and the escape of formerly subordinate Strykers were the reasons why Ciari was here.
The door to the courtroom finally opened an hour later and a legal clerk stepped into the hallway. “The World Court will hear your case.”
He didn’t look at them. Out of fear or disrespect, Ciari didn’t know. Probably both. The Peace Palace was owned and operated by humans, by the only government that had survived the Border Wars. Psion power, unless explicitly permitted by the World Court, was illegal here. Bioware nets spanned the brains of all the politicians and registered humans who could afford the technology, constantly monitoring for outside manipulation. Any deviation from the baseline resulted in
psion deaths. When it came down to it, though, the World Court didn’t need an excuse to kill their dogs.
Ciari and Keiko stood, tugged their uniforms straight, and walked into the public courtroom. The grand, rectangular place had old wood paneling and stained-glass windows that had survived the relentless bombings. Ancient, beautiful crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling. The rows of seats between the door and the long bench set high on a raised dais beneath the windows were full. So was the balcony that extended halfway into the room.
Open session, Ciari thought as she and Keiko walked down the center aisle. This won’t end well.
They came to a stop between the tables of opposing parties at the front of the courtroom; both were empty. Arrayed before them along the judicial bench were fifteen seats filled by the most powerful humans on the planet. The occupant of the center seat was the only one who mattered to Ciari.
Erik Gervais, president and justice of the World Court, stared at her. Ciari met his gaze without blinking. The faint narrowing of his brown eyes showed annoyance, but only to her. Erik had built his life around political aspirations that required him to be unreadable for the sake of legal neutrality. But the government was never truly neutral, especially when it came to their dogs. Years of reading the microexpressions of bureaucrats and politicians had saved Ciari’s life many times where psion power would have gotten her killed instantly. She wondered if that skill would be enough this time.
“Sirs,” Ciari said, dipping her head in rote respect to the fifteen judges before her. Keiko did the same.
The crowd around them wasn’t completely silent. Registered humans, the elite of society, shifted in their seats. The rustling of personal items and the soft buzz of cameras from reporters sitting in the press box filled the air like static.
“Are you prepared to give your report?” Erik said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then begin your statement. If we like what we hear, we might be persuaded to show leniency.”
Ciari didn’t blink at the threat. It meant nothing to her. She lived with a death switch in her brain; words were merely sound.
“A month ago, we lost four Strykers in the Slums of the Angels. They were in pursuit of a rogue psion targeted for retrieval. We believe the target took them. When we carried out your orders to terminate the Strykers, the results from the neurotrackers were inconclusive. The baselines spiked as human on the security grid through bioscanners.” Ciari paused for a moment, letting the information sink in. “We have no witnesses to the events in the Slums. Human bodies were eventually retrieved from Russia with the missing neurotrackers. When that same target from the Slums appeared in Buffalo, I initiated a full-scale field transfer of Stryker teams to deal with the threat.”
“You’ve had two years to retrieve or terminate this rogue psion,” Anchali said. The vice president of the World Court was its oldest member and one of its shrewdest. “Transferring that many Strykers to Buffalo was a mismanagement of resources and a failure on your part.”
Ciari met her gaze as calmly as she had Erik’s. “Other rogue psions were on the ground in Buffalo aside from the target. I felt it prudent to take action against them.”
She was careful to refrain from numbers, from names. The public knew about rogue psions. They didn’t know about Warhounds unless one believed in the stories downloaded into pirate streams. Truth could be found in those conspiracy theories, even if most people didn’t have all the facts.
“So you initiated a full-scale field transfer, taking Strykers off prior contracts and sending them to Buffalo without authorization?”
“It wouldn’t be in anyone’s best interest if the target slipped away during such a blatant attack on the government,” Ciari said. “My orders are to protect. We did.”
“And yet, the target still escaped,” Erik said.
There was no way out of the punishment she could hear in Erik’s voice. Ciari could never admit that she knew the identity of that seemingly unknown target. All Strykers who held the OIC position and those of the company’s highest officer ranks obeyed a hidden law, and it had nothing to do with human legal wrangling. The Silence Law gave and took, but above all, it saved. Some might argue that the cost was too high, but Ciari never had.
Despite everything that was going on, she wouldn’t betray her people. Her life wasn’t worth theirs. She stayed silent.
Erik leaned forward slightly and rested both hands flat against the old wooden tabletop. “You are not justifying your case, Ciari. Silence is not an acceptable defense.”
She could have spoken for days straight and it wouldn’t have mattered. The judgment had been decided prior to her being summoned before the bench. This was merely a formality and a showcase of control.
“We announced the presence of rogue psions in the city as required by law,” Ciari said. “It served to explain the large numbers of Strykers on the ground and resulted in the deactivation of the electrical grid. We thought the reduction in power would help us flush out and corner the target.”
Travis Athe raised a single finger. “It didn’t.”
Ciari shook her head. “No, sir.”
“How could you think that frightening human citizens was a good idea?”
“We acted in accordance with the laws in order to save them.”
“That is debatable.”
“Is this a debate, sir?”
“You overstep yourself, Ciari. Much as you overstepped yourself in Buffalo.”
“We did what we thought was correct in the face of rogue psions and an unknown threat. We only ever had the well-being of humans in our thoughts.”
It was a lie, they all knew it, but one every Stryker learned to tell.
“Your actions produced failures that resulted in this mess,” Erik said. “That is unacceptable.”
Ciari couldn’t argue that statement. “We did what we could with the information we had. It was my decision.”
“Do you stand behind your decision?”
Ciari looked him straight in the eye. “Yes.”
In a world full of deadzones and toxic gene pools, with a population barely at a million and a quarter strong, Erik created order with the strike of a gavel. The World Court’s efforts over the years had resulted in hundreds of secretly built space shuttles waiting to be filled in the Paris Basin, poised to leave the planet for a distant promised land. Earth meant nothing to the elite descendants of those who survived the Border Wars and managed to clean up their DNA by the fifth generation and join the Registry.
Erik embodied that mind-set, as did everyone else seated in judgment before her. This fact hadn’t changed in all the decades the World Court had been in power.
“You’ve been such a model psion to those beneath you in the Strykers Syndicate over the past eleven years, Ciari,” Erik said.
“I train my people as you require me to, sir.”
“And therein lies the issue. They are not yours. They have never belonged to you. We own them, as we own you.”
Ciari expected the pain, the flip of that switch. For one crystalline moment, she thought she could feel the hum of the neurotracker implanted in the back of her head as it processed the order for punishment. Perhaps she did, but it was drowned out by the searing agony that burned through her brain, pressing against the interior of her skull and spiking down her nerves.
She screamed when it became too much, too hot, knowing that to hold it all in would just drag it out longer. The sound of her voice echoed in her ears. It was the only thing she heard, the only thing that made any sense as she writhed on the floor, both hands clutching her head, incapable of making the pain stop. When it became too much, when it seemed as if the agony were too big for her skin to contain, Ciari clung to the self-inflicted pain in her gut to differentiate between the real world and the threat of insanity that began to crawl through her mind.
I want, Ciari thought through the fiery feeling of having her brain torn apart. I want you—
She tas
ted blood on her tongue, smelled metal all along the inside of her nose and mouth. She swallowed air and couldn’t breathe, her nerves following the dictates of a machine and not her own body.
It went on and on and on.
[FIVE]
AUGUST 2379
LONGYEARBYEN, NORWAY
“What the hell is Cinnamomum verum?” Kerr said. He held up a silvery foil packet to the fluorescent lights bolted to the ceiling of the vault, squinting at the faded text printed over the front of the packet.
Jason telekinetically added another box of seed packets and clear glass vials to the top of a pile. The entire stack teetered precariously near the entrance to the storage vault they were ransacking. “Hell if I know.”
“Cinnamon,” Kristen piped up from where she had climbed one of the storage racks and was methodically handing boxes down to a scavenger for loading. When he didn’t move fast enough for her tastes, she dropped the boxes on the floor. “Spice out of Sri Lanka.”
“Right,” Quinton said as he hefted a box onto a gravlift. “What’s Sri Lanka?”
“It was an island country in the Indian Ocean. Rising sea levels swallowed half of it. The Border Wars destroyed the rest.”
“Huh.” Kerr turned the packet in his hands from side to side, wondering what the seeds would look like. “Guess whoever built this place had the right idea. You know, I never did believe those conspiracy theories on the pirate streams about the government hiding supplies. Wonder if anything else they talk about is true.”
“Most of those people are dissidents repeating false information,” Lucas said. “They don’t know any better.”
Quinton eyed him. “You said most. What about the rest?”
Lucas smiled slightly, but his only answer to Quinton’s curiosity was “You don’t need to worry about the rest.”
“If we can’t trust government history, and pirate streams don’t have the entire truth, how do you know all this stuff?” Jason said, warily eyeing Kristen where she clung to a metal shelf.