by Minton, Toby
The simple act of ignoring something had an inherent pitfall, one her active mind stumbled into way too easily when it got distracted. Thinking about the fact that she was ignoring something inevitably made her think of that something. The second she thought about it, back it came to the forefront, loud as ever. Focusing on ignoring a constant annoyance was like trying not to think of a white elephant after someone says, "Don't think of a white elephant." No mean feat.
Max's music grew louder as she stood to take her bowl to the galley sink. Thinking about how well she was ignoring it had cost her. He was playing something aggressive and powerful in his mind now, something that reminded her of Thresh, one of her favorites from her Slav metal obsession days in college. Again she wondered how much of his "distraction" was pulled from her own memories.
His control was unbelievable. Max could fan a person's thoughts out in front of his mind like a deck of cards and choose the one he wanted without getting overwhelmed by the others. His mind was simply…breathtaking.
Kate focused on the scrape of her chair as she slid it back under the table, the sound of her shoes on the polished floor tiles, her own breathing. The music faded back to a more manageable level.
She rinsed her bowl and left her dishes on the dirty rack. Coop had the duty today. She usually washed her own dishes anyway—her hands twitched to do so now—but she had a more pressing task, one she'd avoided long enough.
Today's test wasn't just about blocking out a distraction. It was about multi-tasking. Today she wasn't on defense only. Today she was both hunter and hunted.
I hear only what I want to hear, she said to herself.
Kate walked back across the room to Mos's table and pulled out the chair across from him. Only what I want to hear.
Mos watched her sit, one of his eyebrows lifting into a sharp angle. When he finished his bite, he set his knife and fork down and eased back in his chair.
She'd always thought of Mos's face as kind, a fatherly or sweet uncle sort of face. Other people found his shaved head, carved physique, and strong features intimidating, but Kate never had. Until now.
"We doing this?" he asked, carefully crossing his arms across his chest. His shirt was tight and smooth across his abdomen under his arms—no bandage bulge anymore—but the wound was still bothering him. Kate could read the pain in the tightness around his eyes, in the clench of his jaw when he moved.
Kate nodded and started to shift her focus. Still ignoring the music, she opened herself to the other sounds, both external and internal. She followed Max's instructions to the syllable, stepping through the procedure exactly as he'd described it, exactly as he'd demonstrated.
One by one she cycled through the sounds, considering and rejecting each one, shifting her focus from one to the next in her search.
I hear what I want to hear.
Mos was thinking of a color. Kate knew not because she could hear what he was thinking. She knew because Ace had assigned one to him. She'd assigned a color to everyone at the base. To pass this test, Kate had to pick the colors out of their thoughts. Unfortunately, she was having a shaky start.
She couldn't hear anything from Mos. Not a thing. She'd eliminated every other sound in the room along with every stray thought in her head, but she was left with nothing. She must have missed something.
Back to the beginning, she told herself. Just like debugging code. Take it line by line until you find the problem.
Kate took a deep breath and relaxed her mind, opening herself up to everything. A mishmash of sound and sensation flooded her brain, the thunderous racing beat and grinding guitar of her favorite Thresh track rising above the rest.
Nice try, Max, she thought, feeling a smile pulling at her lips. But you won't stop this girl. I never met I firewall I couldn't penetrate. This is no different.
She focused on the next loudest sound and the music faded to the background. She worked the sounds one at a time, taking her time on each to make sure she knew exactly what it was and where it was coming from.
This time she found two bugs in the code, two sounds that weren't coming from the room. But they weren't coming from Mos's mind either. Max again. He was running through dialogue for his next project, using character voices that weren't his. The voices were nothing alike—one boyish and gushing with angst, the other older and infinitely more monotonous as it ran through complex formulas and calculations. She knew both had to be Max though. The voices didn't feel like Mos.
She was getting better at this. Much better. But not good enough, clearly. Mos's mind might as well have been a blank wall.
Mos had gotten bored and gone back to eating at some point during Kate's failed assault. He glanced up at her as he scraped up the last of the runny yolk with his last hunk of steak. His high protein meals looked disgusting to Kate, this one especially, but Mos swore they were key to a fast recovery. Kate couldn't argue with his results.
"Having trouble?" Mos asked.
"I can do this," Kate said, more to herself than Mos. That didn't stop him from answering.
"Damn right you can. Get in there, girl." He leaned back in his chair as he chewed his last bite, looking relaxed and content to sit there as long as it took.
Kate felt a flush of gratitude climb her neck. She wanted to jump up and hug him, but she kept her seat and prepared to start again.
Red.
She blinked. It couldn't have been that easy.
His color was red, Max repeated, his voice clear and strong in her mind. You weren't going to get it. Go to the hangar.
Blunt as usual. That was Max. Kate didn't mind though. She found his brutal honesty refreshing, even a little appealing. There were no games with Max—no guessing what he was thinking or feeling. His open nature was part of his charm.
"Thanks, Mos, but Max says I blew it," she said, pushing back her chair. "Wish me luck with my next victim."
"You don't need luck, Kate." Mos stood and picked up his plate. Then he met her gaze and held it. He didn't need to say anything else. His eyes said he believed she could do anything, as did the smile he gave her before he turned to take his plate to the sink.
"I don't know about that," she said, turning toward the door. "I think I have to go into Coop's mind next."
Mos laughed loudly behind her. "God help you."
Kate smiled to herself as she stepped into the hall and headed for the hangar. She wasn't upset at her failure with Mos. Maybe she should have been, but her positivity was hard to shake at the moment. The last few days had brought too much hope back into her life for a minor setback to get her down. She and Nikki were talking again; she wasn't losing her mind, like she'd feared for so long; the rest of the team was back to treating her like her old self; and, most important, Michael wasn't gone after all, not completely.
Kate doubted anything could get her down.
She spent the walk to the hangar listening to Max's music. He switched to classical as she walked, filling her brain with something full of triumphant horns backed by dancing strings and percussion that sounded an awful lot like explosions. She let herself enjoy the rise and fall of the music until the hangar door came into view.
By the time she crossed the threshold and stopped at the top of the steps, she'd pushed the music to the background again and was already starting to pick through and disregard the mundane sounds echoing in the large bay.
Coop and Gram were working on the new assault shuttle—the stolen assault shuttle. It was a pretty piece of equipment, a second generation PAK SU AG-60, Russia's best answer to the smaller and more affordable Chinese-built Q-17 suppressors. The AG-60 didn't have the agility of the Q-17, but it was a fair match for speed and could carry twice the personnel and ordinance. If you believed Corso, maneuverability all depended on the pilot anyway, so the AG-60 was a major score, if they could get away with using it.
A number of AG-60s had made their way into private hands before the takeover, but without the right modifications a registered military shu
ttle would get flagged the first time it hit a major port.
Coop was hard at work on the cosmetic side—painting over the stripped official markings. Gram had his hands, and Kate's hacking rig, in the real work—reprogramming the nav system with the bogus history Kate had pulled together for its freshly forged transponder. The heaviest piece of work would come later when Kate would have to hack into the listed ports to plant corresponding records. That part would take a deft touch, not to mention time, but as long as they kept the shuttle hidden in the meantime, they'd be in the clear.
Kate took her time walking toward the shuttle. Gram had his back to her, and Coop was preoccupied with his painting. Neither of them noticed her for a minute. She used the time to push aside the sound of Coop's sprayer, the light tap of Gram's fingers on the keys, the hum and putter of the compressor.
Coop finally spotted her and lifted his mask to the top of his head. "Well, well, well. Look who's finally up. Morning, sunshine."
Gram looked over and gave her a wink and nod. "Good morning," he rattled. Then he glared at Coop. "That thing's not going to paint itself."
"Don't mind him, darlin'," Coop said with a grin. "He's just being his usual dark self. Not bright and sunny like me, if you get me." He gave her a wink of his own.
"Shut it. Spray," Gram snapped. "Leave Kate to her business."
They knew why she was here, and they were handling it just like she'd anticipated—Gram with coarse affection, Coop with well-intentioned bumbling. She considered starting with Gram since his mind promised to be easier to understand. The idea of delving into Coop's thoughts made her shudder, but that's exactly why she decided to tackle him first. She loved a good challenge.
Both, Max said.
Kate blinked. No matter how many times it happened, she wasn't getting used to his voice sounding in her head like he was standing right next to her.
Listen to both of them, Max answered her unvoiced question, at the same time.
"Right," she whispered to herself. Good thing she loved a challenge.
Kate started from the top. She opened herself up to everything, then started shifting her focus, eliminating the sounds one at a time. She had more to work with this time, but only because the hangar was a trove of mechanical white noise. It took far longer to work through everything she could hear, and when she did—she was left with nothing. Again.
She heard voices, but only the same two she'd picked up from Max in the galley.
She took a breath and relaxed her focus, letting Max's music rush back in.
If everybody could do it, it wouldn't be worth doing, she told herself. Reboot, Kate. Start again.
You're done, Max said. Come to the command center. He'd been around his sister too long. He was picking up Ace's command tone.
I can do this, Kate argued. I just need more—
Green and yellow. Come to the command center.
Kate turned and strode from the hangar without a word to Gram or Coop.
Failed attempts weren't frustrating. They were a necessary part of the trial and error process. Sometimes the only way to find the right answer was to eliminate the wrong ones. She could stand the micro disappointments inherent in that process. What she couldn't stand was somebody blurting out the answer to a puzzle before she could solve it.
Kate was not a violent person. She believed any conflict she couldn't solve with reason, logic, or simple kindness was probably a lost cause. That didn't stop her from imagining giving Max a thumping for sabotaging her test, a fantasy she entertained most of the way to the command center.
She stopped outside the door and took a second to calm herself. Max was just trying to help, in his special way. She couldn't fault him for his methods, not when they'd been so effective so far.
Max wasn't alone in the command center. Ace was sitting across the tac table from him when Kate walked in. They were engrossed in a game of chess that had been going on for a while. Not only had Max been monitoring her thoughts, playing music in his mind, and plotting out movie scenes—he'd also been giving Ace a run for her money in what looked to be a stalemate match.
Kate walked up the steps, her gaze drifting up to the display screens beyond the dueling Achterbergs. Ace had the internal camera feeds segmented across the three wide screens. The now-empty galley, Coop and Gram in the hangar, the empty gym, Gideon alone in his dim room working at his archaic desk.
"You haven't lost your touch, kid," Ace said, leaning back and stretching her long arms over her head. "I was hoping celebrity life had made you lose a step or two."
Max looked at his sister like she was speaking nonsense. He was good at that look.
"How did it go?" Ace asked Kate.
Kate shook her head, glancing up at the displays where Ace must have tracked her failure from one screen to the next.
"Perfectly," Max said.
Kate looked at him, expecting to see sarcasm or disappointment. His face, like his voice, held nothing but sincerity.
"I didn't get a single color," Kate said.
"No. You wouldn't," Max replied like he was telling her grass was green. "Not from them. They're not like us."
"Then why make me—never mind." She stopped for another calming breath halfway through. She'd gotten to know Max well enough to know questioning him was futile. What was done was done.
"What do you mean, 'not like us'?" she asked.
He cocked his head, but his eyes said she was the confused one.
"You mean genesis."
He nodded distractedly, his eyes drifting off over her shoulder as his mind went somewhere else. Part of him was still right there with her, she knew, but he was also paying attention to Ace, to the story he was writing, to any number of other thoughts. Max knew how to hone his focus like he'd been teaching, but unlike Kate, he didn't need to.
It's your conduit, he said in her mind, his eyes drifting back to hers. Now we know. "What's the last color?" he asked aloud.
He knew how disorienting that was for her, his switching back and forth, which is why he persisted. Getting used to her different channels was part of her training, the part with which she continued to struggle.
"Camera twelve," he said.
Ace rolled her chair sideways so she could reach the controls and dropped every security feed but one, filling the central display with the image of Gideon's room.
Kate's heart skipped a beat in its haste to speed up. She'd avoided reaching out to Gideon's thoughts so far, for one simple reason—fear. She was afraid of what she'd find in the mind of the man. Afraid of what she'd find in the mind of the creature underneath. She'd touched those thoughts before.
The night Nikki locked herself in the vault had been the worst. When the creature had first come to the surface, it was all rage and hatred, a boiling tempest of fury. Its screams had been so loud they'd pushed everything else from her mind, even Michael's voice, the one thing Kate had wanted to hold onto, even though at the time she'd believed it was stealing her sanity. The creature had calmed after a minute, but the cold, emotionless menace that replaced the fury was somehow just as terrifying.
The thought of reaching out to Gideon, the thought of even the briefest contact with the mind of the creature, made Kate's blood run cold.
"Are you sure I can hear him?" she asked, when what she really meant was, How can I make myself go there again? She knew hiding her fear from Max was pointless, however.
"You can," he answered both questions. You've been in his thoughts all day.
She almost argued, but she knew doing so was pointless. Max didn't say things that weren't true. The truths he saw weren't always obvious to anyone else, but that didn't make them any less true. If he said she'd been hearing Gideon, she had.
"Do it now," Max said. "I won't distract you this time."
Kate ignored her racing heart and opened herself up to the sounds around her. Eliminating the externals was quick work this time. There wasn't much to hear in the command center. She knew the hum and click
of the servers so well she automatically pushed it aside, and Max and Ace stayed still and silent.
The internal sounds were even easier to sift through. As promised, Max stopped the music assault and cut the younger voice from his story, leaving just the one voice, the low drone running through formulas.
Gideon. She should have known from the start.
Kate lifted her gaze to the display and focused all her attention on Gideon's voice.
I hear what I want to hear.
Gideon's voice filled her mind as the rest of the world fell away. On the screen he was motionless, staring at three tablets arrayed in front of him on his old wooden desk. In her mind, he was working quickly but methodically through a set of formulas that were beyond her comprehension. She recognized enough to know he was doing something with energy transfer, but that's all she could interpret. One thing she did know for certain was there was no hint of color in his surface thoughts. Not that she could understand.
Dig deeper, Max said.
Digging into Gideon's mind was at the top Kate's don't-ever-do list, as Max had to know. He had to know why as well. He could hear everything going on in her head, in the heads of everyone near him, in fact. He had to know about the creature buried inside Gideon. He had to know the consequences of unleashing that monster, yet he was telling her to dig. She'd trusted Max so far, and he'd done nothing but make her stronger. She had to trust him now.
She carefully shifted her focus from Gideon's voice to the negative space around it. Not to the silence, but to the areas where she felt sound should be. The distinction was subtle, but she'd encountered similar pockets of nothingness in her exercises with Max, areas of emptiness so solid they felt almost like…walls.
Gideon was shielding his thoughts from her, concealing all but his most immediate thoughts, and those were consumed with the complex calculations he was performing.
Now what?
Kate shifted her focus to Max, letting her sense of Gideon slip to the background.
How do I hear what he doesn't want me to hear? she thought. She glanced over and saw him nodding his head and getting as close to a smile as he ever came. He didn't raise his eyes from the chess board though.