by K. M. Ruiz
[TWENTY-SIX]
SEPTEMBER 2379
AMUNDSEN-SCOTT SOUTH POLE STATION, ANTARCTICA
“That’s a lot of hyposprays,” Quinton said. “Are you sure it’s going to be enough for everyone?”
Rows of silver hyposprays stretched out down the long table, each calibrated to give twenty doses of the virus-carrying nanites before needing to be discarded. Quinton picked one up, holding the thin object in his hand. It didn’t weigh much, didn’t look as if it had the power to change a person’s life, but that’s exactly what Lucas had created. Korman didn’t care to see the value in something that would save psions, not at the expense of the human bondworkers he had tested it on. Quinton didn’t let himself dwell on the process, just the results. As horrendous as the process was, it was still saving people.
“It’ll be enough,” Lucas said without looking up as he packed them into carrying cases. “Your job is going to make sure you use them all.”
“I thought we were just dropping them off and breaking Threnody out?” Kerr said.
“I would bet my Syndicate’s entire bottom line that Erik is pushing up the launch, which means we need to work on convincing your Strykers that they need our help.”
“You ask for the impossible a lot of the time,” Samantha said as she closed one carrying case and reached for another. “It’s very annoying.”
“You want to know what I find annoying?” Matron said, glaring at Lucas. “The way you keep killing off my scavengers. Fahad’d been around a long-ass time. He deserved to see the end.”
“He wasn’t your scavenger and he wasn’t as loyal as you think. You’re lucky it wasn’t me who killed him. Kristen was actually quick for once,” Lucas said. “Her version of nice.”
Matron opened her mouth. Lucas shut it for her, telekinesis wrapped around skin and metal. He stared at her across the worktable in silence. Matron closed her eyes, hunched her shoulders, and got back to work. One packed carrying case later, Lucas retracted his power.
Jason came into the crowded workroom five minutes later, dragging Kristen behind him telekinetically. The younger girl knew better than to fight his hold, but the second he freed her, she invaded his space again.
“You want me to fix your daughter?” Jason snapped at Lucas. “Keep your sister out of my fucking head.”
Lucas rolled a hypospray between his fingers, staring at them. “I sent you to get the rest of the hyposprays, Kris. Not to touch things that aren’t yours.”
“Little, itty-bitty thing is a Serca,” Kristen said. “I just wanted to say hello.”
Whatever else Kristen might have said, Lucas cut her off before the thought was even half-formed in her mind. The empath’s head snapped back from his telepathic blow, mind cracking a little beneath her brother’s strength. Lucas let his telepathy drift through the growing stain of insanity that was creeping back into his youngest sister’s mind, familiar holes that were beginning to open all over again. He could sense the places that Jason’s stolen pattern had once filled and which were slowly dissolving. Kristen’s mind wasn’t meant to hold sanity.
She couldn’t be fixed; he had always known that.
I never blamed you, Kristen said, her voice soft and achingly sweet in the maelstrom that was beginning to churn once again through her mind.
It wouldn’t have mattered if she did.
“Keep a closer watch on her,” Lucas said to Samantha.
“She seemed fine” was Samantha’s irritated reply, not looking up from her current task.
“That’s never a guarantee.”
Scowling, Samantha left her spot and went to drag Kristen to the far side of the table.
Jason watched them get settled with the last of the hyposprays that needed to be packed and shook his head. “Please tell me she’s not coming with us.”
“I’m not leaving my sisters here.”
“Take Samantha. Leave Kristen. She’s insane.”
“Everyone always underestimates her because of that.” Lucas looked over at him. “You did, remember?”
Jason didn’t bother to argue that fact. “Korman doesn’t have any hyposprays left. He didn’t trust Kristen to tell you that this is everything we’ve got to do the job.”
All of which could be counted up in carrying cases full of a virus and the hope that they wouldn’t get shot on sight when they teleported to the Strykers Syndicate. Lucas pushed away from the table, taking in everyone’s attire. “Change out of your skinsuits. If things go badly, I don’t want them to have a hint of where we’ve been.”
“If things go badly, we’re all fucked,” Quinton said, leaving the room.
Jason left with Kerr, the two heading for the room on the far end of the station they’d been sharing since their arrival. The pair stripped out of their insulated skinsuits and dragged on a set of mismatched street clothes that left them shivering a bit in the low warmth of the station. Power was gained by way of three old generators, only two of which Matron’s scavengers had managed to get up and running. They had heat; it just wasn’t enough without skinsuits to stay warm continuously.
“Think Threnody’s still alive?” Jason said as he yanked on a shirt.
“Lucas isn’t worried,” Kerr replied as he laced up a pair of boots. “Which means she can’t be dead.”
“I’d hate to be in Quinton’s shoes right now.”
“You hate what we’re doing anyway.”
“Can you blame me?” Jason looked over at Kerr as he grabbed the jacket hanging off the chair. “I don’t care if Lucas thinks he’s going to save everyone. I don’t trust his methods.”
Kerr leaned forward on the bed where he was sitting, resting his elbows on his knees. “Maybe you should try. He’s got a way to save us, Jays.”
“At too high of a price.” Jason tapped the side of his head. “You’re not in my head anymore. Feels fucking weird.”
“It’s worth it. You know that.”
Worth it to not have his shields skidding out from beneath his control, to not be at risk of an insanity driven by a storm of the world’s thoughts. Telepaths were born to read minds, but they craved a silence they would never get. Kerr had only ever found silence behind Jason’s natal shields, and now those, too, were gone. Both of them were exactly what they were supposed to be, but that didn’t make their lives any easier.
“All the times when you were in my mind, did you ever know what I really was?” Jason asked.
“No,” Kerr said with a shake of his head. “I couldn’t get very far past your shields. I only got far enough to readjust my own and hold them to the pattern that you had. I never knew you were a microtelekinetic, the same way I never knew I had an empathic power. Hell, I never knew your kind of power even existed.”
“You and me both.”
The two looked at each other, separated now by so much more than the space between them. The severing of their bond was still a wound in both their minds. For Kerr, it was the constant reach for something that was no longer there. For Jason, it was the emptiness in the back of his mind that used to be filled with the hum of someone else’s thoughts. He never felt that anymore unless Kerr produced a psi link, but the connection would never again be the same.
“I never said thank you,” Kerr said, looking Jason in the eye. “For how you kept me safe and sane.”
“Yeah, you did.” Jason gave him a faint, bittersweet smile. “Too many times to count.”
“Sometimes I never meant it.”
“The times you were screaming in my head and wanted me to kill you before you went crazy? I know, Kerr. And I don’t blame you for giving the bond up. You didn’t need it anymore. You got your mind fixed. That’s all you ever wanted, and I’m not a shitty enough person to hold that against you.”
“I never wanted to leave you like this.”
“Fuck that, man. You can’t get rid of family.”
Jason had been the volatile one growing up, always ready to defend Kerr in the face of derogatory comments a
nd dismissive attitudes from their fellow Strykers. Jason didn’t care that his shields made him an anomaly back then, and he counted the black marks in his old record for fighting for Kerr like honor badges.
A knock on the door brought Kerr to his feet. The door opened and Quinton leaned into the room. “Hey. You two ready?”
“We’re ready,” Jason said.
The three of them headed back to the workroom, finding Lucas and his sisters already there. Matron was leaning against the table, having sorted the carrying cases into five stacks. Kristen pouted when she wasn’t handed any.
“What about you?” Quinton asked the scavenger. “You’ve been with us since Buffalo. Aren’t you coming?”
“Been with Lucas longer than that and I ain’t always with him when he goes running off,” Matron said.
“You make it seem like I’m the reckless one,” Lucas said as he tossed an apple from one hand to the other.
Matron shrugged, rubbing at one shoulder where the metal cybernetics of her arm attached to flesh and bone. The cold made the connecting points ache. “You’ve always been reckless with everyone else’s life.”
Lucas only smiled at her. Matron bared her metal teeth in a responding grin. It wasn’t the first time that Matron wondered about the faith she was putting in him that wasn’t going to her God, but she wasn’t going to stop now. “I pray to God you’re doing the right thing here, Lucas.”
“Your God isn’t why I’m doing this. Remember what I told you when I pulled you from the swamps of Chicago?”
Matron snorted. “You think I forgot that? You promised me a garden if I did your dirty work.”
Lucas tossed her the apple. Matron caught it easily in one hand. “Keep sorting the seeds.”
“I know how to do my job,” Matron said, dark eyes wide and opaque, face full of a belief that wasn’t for Lucas, but for what he had the chance to make. “Don’t forget about us down here.”
“Never,” Lucas promised. He almost sounded as if he meant it.
Lucas wrapped his telekinesis tightly around his sisters and the other three. He kept the visual in his mind of a white room as he teleported them all across the world in a single ’port. Their feet hit the platform in the arrival room with a heavy sound. This time it was guarded, but Lucas wasn’t concerned about that. Beside him, Samantha let out a soft gasp as she recognized a familiar presence that had been missing from her mind since Buffalo.
Lucas slammed his telepathy up through half a dozen levels filled with psions and humans alike, leaving a burning path of pain on the mental grid in his wake. He slid into a cracked mind that was no longer familiar and looked through Ciari’s eyes.
[TWENTY-SEVEN]
SEPTEMBER 2379
TORONTO, CANADA
Gideon stared out the window of the suite, squinting through the polluted haze that lingered over everything. He was in a private level that the Serca Syndicate owned in one of Toronto’s city towers. It came with a perfect view of the city tower that housed the Strykers Syndicate, its top floors a government-owned prison on the outskirts of the main cluster. Beyond it, Lake Ontario was a dark swath of water against the landscape.
Toronto was nothing like Buffalo. The slums surrounding the city towers were mostly aboveground and sprawled over land that hadn’t suffered as badly as other cities during the Border Wars. Buffalo existed mostly belowground, in sealed bunkers and tunnels. That city’s towers were far fewer than the count here, limited in numbers because of the deadzone that took up most of New York State.
Gideon was glad for the differences. It made being in this part of the world bearable.
“Have you matched the psi signature yet?” he said. He could see the reflection in the plasglass of the three telepaths who were seated at the conference table, surrounded by datapads.
“No,” Warrick said, rubbing at his temple. “We have nothing in our database on who that psion might be.”
“There’s no match with our target’s records or the psi signature from Buffalo either,” Mercedes said. “I’m still willing to say it’s Jason Garret. It certainly wasn’t Lucas, and the way it registered off the scale? Lucas is strong, but this power tops his strength in a very specific way.”
One of the Warhound teams on surveillance duty in Toronto had tagged a strong, abnormal psi signature two days earlier on the mental grid. It originated from the Strykers Syndicate, and Gideon refused to believe it could be anyone else.
“I’m not hearing any answers,” Gideon said.
“Because there aren’t any, sir,” Warrick said. “Not with the information we have. The Strykers would have more than we do, especially since that psion was in their Syndicate.”
They should have initiated their visit yesterday, but Nathan had informed Gideon about the breach in the seed bank before they left for the Strykers Syndicate, which had delayed the visit by twenty-four hours. Gideon adjusted the tie knotted around his throat. He was wearing a suit for this endeavor. He would have preferred a field uniform.
“Feels like Kristen is in this city,” James said.
Gideon turned to give the telepath a sharp look. “I doubt Lucas would make it that easy to find him again.”
“It’s not your sister, sir. It’s her dysfunction that feels similar on the mental grid. Insanity has a particular spike to it.”
“Strykers rarely keep dysfunctional psions. The government usually orders their termination at a young age. Most likely it’s someone injured from the fight in Buffalo.” Gideon walked over to the chair where his suit jacket was hanging and put it on. “Let’s go.”
They were doing this the human way, restricted from using Gideon’s ability to teleport. He knew what the Strykers Syndicate looked like; specifically, their arrival rooms for psions, but Nathan wasn’t quite at the point where he could risk their family’s secret coming out.
They left the suite of rooms for a shuttle that was locked into one of the landing docks that stuck out like spokes down the side of the city tower, just one of many used by the registered elite. The walk there took them down to a public level, past brightly lit department stores and restaurants, the hologrids that lined every wall showing news streams and not the usual adverts. Residential routes cut away from the public space, leading off to the lifts that would carry people to their homes.
The atmosphere was muted and tense. People walked by with their heads down, looking at no one as they went about their business. The group made it to their assigned shuttle walkway and entered the short, enclosed tube that extended to the shuttle’s hatch. Minutes after they strapped in, the pilot disengaged the anchor locks once given the all clear.
The flight to the other city tower and the Strykers Syndicate was short. Gideon had the pilot dock the shuttle on a lower level and the four disembarked, heading for a lift that would take them right to the top. A security system had already scanned their eyes and faces for identities, so when the lift came to a stop and the doors opened onto a sleek lobby, Gideon was greeted by a familiar woman.
“Keiko,” he said, stepping out of the lift and into the Strykers Syndicate.
“Sir,” she said evenly. “This is unexpected.”
“We have business to discuss.”
Despite being surrounded by psions and humans, only four people in this Syndicate knew the truth about the Sercas. Keiko wasn’t about to break the Silence Law. She didn’t argue Gideon’s order and simply led him to a lift farther inside that had access to the rest of the Strykers Syndicate’s levels.
Keiko took him to the administrative level. She took him to Ciari.
Gideon was surprised to see the other woman conscious. Considering the trauma that Erik had inflicted on her at The Hague, Gideon expected her to be well on her way to dying. Instead, Ciari looked decently recovered. She had Aidan and Jael with her, and while those two acknowledged his arrival, Ciari continued watching a news stream.
The World Court was standing before the cameras again, on trial themselves before public o
pinion in the face of irrefutable evidence that they still categorically denied.
“This should be interesting,” Jael said. It was anyone’s guess if she meant the current company or the current news as Gideon crossed Ciari’s office to take a seat before her desk.
“I’ve never cared for your interests,” Keiko said.
On the vidscreen, Erik was arguing his case, backed by the other fourteen judges that made up the World Court. Between the judges and the reporters was a line of quads with pulse-rifles, which said more about the situation than anything else.
“We who have held the title of judge on the World Court, all of the previous men and women who have presided here over the past two hundred and fifty years, have only had the world’s best interests at heart,” Erik said, his voice filling the office. “The Border Wars nearly destroyed Earth, making it impossible to live in all but the most desperate of places. Even now, we are a desperate people, but we have not lost the greatest part of our humanity. We have not lost our capacity to hope for a better life, for a better world.
“The Fifth Generation Act was just one of many plans implemented in order to help society distance itself from its horrific past. Five generations to cleanse our DNA, with the Registry securing the identities of those who succeeded. It had to be done, if only to separate us from the psions that the Border Wars created. The psions threatened and still threaten our own existence to this day, their disease a reminder of what is still at stake—our survival as a people, as humans.”
He paused for a moment before the cameras, taking in a deep breath. “Fewer of us are born every year with the ability to live healthy lives. Too many of us are born with genetic defects, caused from leftover radiation taint. Too many of us die young from disease. It is difficult, almost impossible, to heal everyone in the population. It takes time, but we have been trying.”
Someone shouted a vicious dissent from offscreen, but Erik didn’t react.