Free Souls (Book Three of the Mindjack Trilogy)
Page 24
When I found out that Ava had suffered the same loss of long-distance viewing that I had, it felt like someone had ripped a chunk out of me with an ax. I wanted to fix her, offered to do it even before I knew that I could. She refused, insisting I help the changelings first. But I needed to fix her more than anyone else—beyond Julian, who thankfully didn’t need my help, and my dad and Xander, who were only weakened and already finding their place in the JFA. Ava finally agreed to let me heal her once I had worked through all the changelings who Kestrel had experimented on.
Even that would take me years.
Meanwhile, she seemed happy to serve as Julian’s personal assistant, and Julian certainly needed someone to keep all his appointments straight.
“Doing another chat-cast?” I asked Julian and Ava both, wagering that Julian wouldn’t know.
It was Julian who answered. “No,” he said, putting on his serious face. “I’m holo-casting into the Senate floor today. They want an update on the treaty negotiations between Illinois as a Free Jacker State and the Federal government. We’re the model for the other states that are considering treaties, so we need to get it right. They also want another report on the effects of the inhibitors.” I finally noticed that Julian was wearing his most-starched high-collared shirt, the one with the boardroom ready tailoring, along with the trim pants he wore whenever he was doing official business.
I smoothed down the wrinkles that our fevered kiss had pressed into his shirt, feeling a little guilty. “Didn’t you just send a report to them with all our knowledge about Kestrel’s research?” I asked. “What more do they want?”
“They want me to tell them that the inhibitors will only affect Illinois.”
“But that’s not true.” Julian wouldn’t lie to them, especially not about this. “The demens are changing all up and down the Mississippi. What do they think? It’s just happening by accident?”
“No.” He sighed. “Eventually they’ll have to recognize what’s happened. But the less…” he searched for the word, tapping his fingers on his chin, “threatened they feel in the meantime, the longer we have to build peace while we wait for the effects to be fully felt.”
I nodded. “Sounds like you’ve got it under control.”
Sasha had crept up behind Ava and wrapped his arms around her. “Yes, the senator has everything under control,” Sasha said with more than a little sarcasm. “Unless he’s late, in which case he has to deal with Ava’s wrath. And I wouldn’t recommend that, my friend.”
Ava gave him a dirty look and shrugged him off. The rest of us were trying hard not to smirk.
“Well,” said Julian, “I had better get going then. If I leave Ava to hand-hold a bunch of mindreading senators and their assistants, they’ll have her voted into office by lunch, and I’ll have to find a new job.”
Ava rolled her eyes and tapped her foot expectantly.
Julian threw me a look full of promise that made me tingle down to my toes. I nudged his shoulder to interrupt that look before it set my face on fire with embarrassment. “Go make your speech, Senator.”
He grinned and turned away with Ava, heading to the main chat-cast room in the back where Hinckley had set up a permanent studio.
Sasha watched them go, then tilted his head toward the door of the privacy room. “How are the rooms working out?”
“Perfect.” I looked him over. I couldn’t see any change in his dark eyes, but then I didn’t really expect to. “How are you?” I asked.
“Never better.”
“I’m serious, Sasha.”
“So am I.”
I stared at him. He crossed his arms and leaned against the doorframe.
“The offer is still open,” I said. “And I’m getting better at the finer detailed repair work. I’m pretty sure I could do it.” With my mom’s help, Ava had gathered up and brought the scattered bits of Sasha’s mind back into coalescence. Then the inhibitors hit, and in his weakened state, they had a bigger impact than they would have normally. He could still jack, but his scribing ability had been destroyed. At least he could still hover protectively over Ava, and I welcomed that now that she had lost her abilities. But it didn’t seem right for him to lose so much.
“No offense, Kira,” he said with a small smile, “but I don’t want you in my head.”
“No offense taken.” I paused. “It’s just that—”
“Kira.” He pushed up from the wall, suddenly serious. “It’s better to let the monster sleep.”
In the hands of someone lesser, Sasha’s mind could be—and had been in the past—a weapon of mass mental destruction. But Sasha was like my mom: he deserved the power.
“You’re not a monster, Sasha,” I said softly.
“Not anymore.” The smile was back, and he patted the door to the privacy room. “You should go help someone who needs it.”
He brushed past me, and I turned to watch him go. Someday I hoped to convince him to let me fix him, but for now, he seemed to be telling the truth about being happier this way. In the meantime, he was right. There were other people who needed—and wanted—the kind of fixing that I could do.
I took a breath and smoothed down my clothes, trying to drape on the reassuring doctor-persona for my next patient. Another changeling with dead spots in her brain, some of which were put there by Kestrel, some by me. Dead, broken pieces that I was going to stitch back together one-by-one, making right all the wrongs that had been done before. The inhibitors hadn’t killed any jackers, but they had pushed us into the next era of human evolution.
Only it wasn’t evolution. It never had been.
Accident.
That’s what Vellus called it. A hundred years ago, someone else—like me—had put something in the water that triggered the first wave of mindreaders. Was it an industrial accident? Did the government try to create mindreaders, then accidentally flush their experiments down the drain? The cover story—the one that everyone in the world believed—was that it had happened spontaneously, an unforeseen result of our carelessness with the cocktail of all our anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, and just plain aspirin that we allowed to pollute the water.
What was the truth?
We would never know, just like the people who came after us would never know what really happened that day at the water pumping station. Maybe they would remember that a madman, Kestrel, had poisoned the water and then taken his own life. It was as good a story as any. Or maybe they would come to believe, as Julian had all along, that it was fate, or evolution, or the cosmos telling us that it was time for us to change into something new. After all, jackers had started popping up in the population long before Kestrel brewed up his genetic inhibitors to stop them and accidentally sent us to the tipping point.
I understood the drive Kestrel and Vellus had to put the genie back in the bottle. Who knew what would happen now, what the long-term consequences would be? I certainly didn’t know what the future held, any more than I did before. But one thing I knew for sure: you couldn’t bottle up something once it was set free, whether it was chemicals in the water or people changing into something new.
I put a smile on my face, pushed the door open, and went to see my next patient.
If you enjoyed Free Souls,
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For more Mindjack fun, check out the
Mindjack Origins Collection
Want more Julian? Wondering how Sasha's ability really works? Looking for EXCLUSIVE DELETED SCENES from Free Souls? This collection is for those craving a bit more of the characters and drama of the Mindjack series.
Includes
Mindjack Novellas
Mind Games (Raf's story)
The Handler (Julian's story)
The Scribe (Sasha's story)
TWO EXCLUSIVE DELETED SCENES
from Free Souls
(published nowhere else!)
PLUS
mindjack flash fiction
an conversation between Raf and Julian
jackertown slang
Buy Mindjack Origins Collection Now
Coming soon…
The Mindjack Trailer
(January 2013)
a live-action trailer
directed by award-winning director
Beth Spitalny
with a 20+ member cast and crew
Check out the Mindjack Trilogy website
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find all of Susan’s stories here
Finishing a trilogy is like completing a book, only more so: more tears, more startling the cat by laughing out loud at your own words, more warm rush of satisfaction when the story reaches its end. With this book, it was particularly important to me to write the ending that the series deserved; I hope that my readers will agree that I achieved that goal. And while it is tough to part with characters I love, Kira’s story has been told, and other characters beckon with theirs.
My first thanks go to my readers. Your reviews and facebook posts and chapter-by-chapter tweets as you read the books inspired me and reminded me why I write in the first place. Thank you for your amazing support in spreading the word about the trilogy, something that’s vital for any author, but especially critical for an indie one like me.
Once again, my fantastically talented cover designer, D. Robert Pease, has made a gorgeous package for the book. Thank you, Dale, for lending your artistic talents to my work, and for being a great friend as well. Thanks to Anne of Victory Editing for compensating for my severe lack of understanding when it comes to hyphens, as well as my comma abuse. Any errors that remain are mine alone.
My critique partners aren’t just trusted story advisors—they’re fast friends and fellow journeymen and women in this business of creativity. A special thanks to Dianne Salerni for answering my frantic midnight emails with sage, rock-solid advice. Many thanks to Rebecca Carlson, Adam Heine, and Sherrie Petersen for reading that early draft: someday I’ll send you a manuscript that isn’t wearing a ragged bathrobe with no makeup and bed hair... but then I’d miss out on all your amazing advice. Thanks to Leigh T. Moore, Elle Strauss, Megg Jensen, and Rhiannon Frater for helping fix the stuff that still needed fixing, and much gratitude to Sheryl Hart for fitting me in, copyediting in pieces, and generally being a lifesaver. A tip of the hat to Lenny Lee for letting me borrow his name for a certain police negotiator.
Special thanks to my son Adam Quinn, who takes time from writing his own novels to critique mine—I think your notes are more entertaining than my story! To my sons Sam and Ryan: thanks for wanting to read Mom’s book, even if it has that icky romance stuff in it. And a final thank you to my husband, who still won’t let me dedicate a book to him, even though he deserves it. Maybe if I write a novel about robots, you’ll let me. Oh, wait…
Third Daughter
(steampunk fantasy romance)
Expected Publication: May 2013
For National Novel Writing Month 2012, I had ridiculous amounts of fun drafting this fantasy romance novel (you can check out my Pinterest board to get a peek at this east-indian-flavored steampunky world). I hadn't planned on writing this book until 2013, but my mom was interested in NaNo, so I told her I would do it if she did. We completed NaNo together—I'm super proud of her for taking the leap! I'll be revising Third Daughter in the first half of 2013.
for fans of the mindjack stories
Singularity Series
(young adult science fiction)
Expected Publication: Late 2013
The unnamed first novel of this multi-part series will revolve around a future world that is post-Singularity (the Singularity is the event horizon when computers become more intelligent than humans). I've plotted out the series, but won't start writing until 2013. I think these stories will appeal to fans of the Mindjack novels, with plenty of cool technology and future world dreaming, all told through the viewpoint of a legacy human boy.
Check out my Singularity Page
(for more information)
or
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Susan Kaye Quinn grew up in California, where she wrote snippets of stories and passed them to her friends during class. Her teachers pretended not to notice and only confiscated her notes a couple times. She pursued a bunch of engineering degrees (Aerospace, Mechanical, and Environmental) and worked a lot of geeky jobs, including turns at GE Aircraft Engines, NASA, and NCAR. Now that she writes novels, her business card says "Author and Rocket Scientist" and she doesn't have to sneak her notes anymore.
Which is too bad.
All that engineering comes in handy when dreaming up paranormal powers in future worlds or mixing science with fantasy to conjure slightly plausible inventions. For her stories, of course. Just ignore that stuff in her basement.
Susan writes from the Chicago suburbs with her three boys, two cats, and one husband. Which, it turns out, is exactly as much as she can handle.
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Table of Contents
cover
title
copyright
praise for FREE SOULS
chapter ONE
chapter TWO
chapter THREE
chapter FOUR
chapter FIVE
chapter SIX
chapter SEVEN
chapter EIGHT
chapter NINE
chapter TEN
chapter ELEVEN
chapter TWELVE
chapter THIRTEEN
chapter FOURTEEN
chapter FIFTEEN
chapter SIXTEEN
chapter SEVENTEEN
chapter EIGHTEEN
chapter NINETEEN
chapter TWENTY
chapter TWENTY-ONE
chapter TWENTY-TWO
chapter TWENTY-THREE
chapter TWENTY-FOUR
chapter TWENTY-FIVE
mindjack origins collection
mindjack trailer
acknowledgments
future works
about the AUTHOR
Table of Contents
title
cover
copyright
praise for FREE SOULS
chapter ONE
chapter TWO
chapter THREE
chapter FOUR
chapter FIVE
chapter SIX
chapter SEVEN
chapter EIGHT
chapter NINE
chapter TEN
chapter ELEVEN
chapter TWELVE
chapter THIRTEEN
chapter FOURTEEN
chapter FIFTEEN
chapter SIXTEEN
chapter SEVENTEEN
chapter EIGHTEEN
chapter NINETEEN
chapter TWENTY
chapter TWENTY-ONE
chapter TWENTY-TWO
chapter TWENTY-THREE
chapter TWENTY-FOUR
chapter TWENTY-FIVE
mindjack origins collection
mindjack trailer
acknowledgments
future works
about the AUTHOR