Revolution: Book Three of the Secret World Chronicle

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Miss,” the security guard said, the standard speech when a cheater had been caught. “I am afraid you are going to have to come with me.”

  Rachel knew better than to object or argue. Casino security’s word was law in Vegas. Making a fuss was guaranteed to get you thrown out and banned for life. If she went quietly, there was a chance she could wiggle out of it. Or at least, only end up getting banned from this casino, and not every casino in Vegas.

  Now Verd spoke into the radio. “Take her to the special office.”

  The way this was supposed to go was that the suspected cheater would be taken to the security area, questioned, and perhaps if they denied everything, video footage would be shown to them. Most times, unless they made a big deal out of it, any money they had won would be confiscated and they would be told not to come back. If they raised a fuss, well . . . that was when the Vegas cops got called, unless there was no way of actually proving that cheating had taken place. Most casinos didn’t care if a cheater went to another casino so long as it wasn’t one in their franchise. But the penalty for denying everything if nothing could be proved was generally getting your face sent to every casino in town. Facial recognition software then ensured that you could never work your scheme again.

  Of course, Rachel was going to get a very different sort of treatment.

  * * *

  They left her in a chair in the center of the office, completely alone for about thirty minutes. This was to allow her time to wonder in how deep a vat of shit she really was. When Verd saw her start to sweat, he sent the manager in.

  “You’ve been really careful, Miss Hiller. But you finally waltzed onto the wrong dance floor.”

  “How do you know my—”

  “We’ve had suspicions,” he interrupted, “about your little scam. You’ve made quite a living for yourself these past few years, for hardly any effort. Isn’t that right?” He paced in front of her, making a show of inspecting his fingernails. “But no one is lucky forever. The house always wins, one way or another.”

  “What do you—”

  “You cheat, Miss Hiller. It took us quite a while and a lot of analysis, but the numbers don’t lie. Your mistake was that you never, ever lost. You’re a metahuman.” He smirked. Rachel started to look alarmed. “You’re using telekinesis to trip the relays. We can probably prove it, but we don’t have to. First, we are going to teach you a little lesson. Then we are going to send your videos and pictures to every other casino in Las Vegas, and in Reno, just so you don’t think you can move down the road in a couple of hours.”

  “You can’t do this!” She was panicking now. “I-it’s illegal!”

  “Illegal? Everything was illegal at one point or another. That’s never stopped the house from making money on it, Miss Hiller.” He took off his jacket, setting it on a nearby table. “So, the question is; how many fingers do you want to walk out of here with? I’m an accommodating man.” He took a step towards her, a grin creeping across his face.

  When the manager was less than a stride away from her, his radio squelched. He plucked it from his belt in annoyance. “Yes? I’m in the middle of something.” Something unintelligible to Rachel came through the speaker, but she could see that the manager’s demeanor had changed drastically. He shifted uneasily, looking back to her. “Wait here.” Replacing the radio on his belt, he scooped up his jacket and hurried out the door, slamming it behind him.

  After what seemed like an eternity to Rachel, but was in fact only two minutes, the door opened again. She was terrified, shaking like a frightened rabbit, choking back pitiful sobs. She didn’t dare look at who had walked in. A handkerchief suddenly dangled in front of her face; she was startled into silence for a few moments. Warily, she looked up. A man in a very expensive-looking suit stood in front of her, smiling; not the same shark smile that the manager had, but one with genuine warmth and compassion.

  “Good afternoon, ma’am. My name is Dominic Verdigris III. I noticed you out on the floor; I have a keen eye for talent, you see. Once I saw your predicament, I decided to step in.” He chuckled, mostly to himself. “You could say I have a certain . . . pull with the management here. Anyway, I think I might have a proposition for you that would be mutually beneficial for both of us; you get to keep all of your fingers, and both of us get rich. Does that sound good to you?”

  At this point, anything that didn’t involve a beating and being forced to move across the country sounded appealing. But as with all things—there would be strings attached, and she’d only get thrown to the wolves again if this man thought she was something she wasn’t. “I’m not a telekineticist,” she said, wiping her eyes.

  He chuckled again. “Of course you aren’t. Remember, I said I had an eye for talent. And I have a specific need of someone like you.” He extended his hand to her. “So, are you in, Rachel? May I call you Rachel?”

  Well, what choice did she have? She’d figured she was safe, and yet she’d been caught. She could move across the country and this might happen again, but without the White Knight showing up at the last minute. “All right,” she said, shaking his hand. After all, how bad could it be?

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  “Well, that certainly puts a kink in things, and not the fun kind.” Verd scowled. “Was there any damage to the device? What was done with the body?”

  “There was some damage,” Khanjar said, reading from her PDA. “Evidently there was thrashing, a seizure of some sort. And screaming. One of the techs is apparently somewhat traumatized. The body has been removed to the lab for autopsy.”

  “Unfortunate about the equipment.” His scowl deepened. “I put some of it together while—I don’t know, sleep-working or something. I had fallen asleep in the workshop and when I woke up it was done; haven’t been able to figure out how the hell I did it. See that the report on the autopsy comes to me directly, of course. Oh, and make sure the technician is taken care of; best care possible, with one of our doctors. If he can’t be discreet or made to be discreet with treatment, make sure he’s taken care of permanently. Whatever your fancy is on that part.”

  Khanjar nodded, tapped a few things on the PDA, and closed it. “Well. Do you wish to launch a search for a replacement subject?”

  Verdigris looked up from his desk, his thoughts obviously having drifted already. “What? No, no time for that. The search I ran found her to be our most stable and reliable candidate; no one else that I’ve found was as strong, for what it’s worth. We’re moving on. After I check the equipment, I’ll send it to storage.”

  * * *

  Verd closed up the last panel, irritated and frustrated. There was nothing wrong with the equipment. Everything checked out. Had it been the protocol?

  He had been attempting to use Rachel Hiller’s predictive ability to feel out not just the immediate future as it related to her, but potential futures, further out than a few seconds or a minute; days, months, years. The computers he had set up were supposed to interface directly with her own brain, to augment her in a variation of the whole brain-in-a-box idea. Or maybe more like the wet dreams of the cyberpunks. Essentially, to focus her ability and make sense of the inevitable jumble that would follow. Her predictive ability relied upon stimuli; if you gave her no stimuli to form patterns off of, she wouldn’t be able to see what was happening. The system he’d set up force-fed her stimuli. Part of it included an induced coma, a truly potent cocktail of nootropic drugs, and microelectric shocks.

  Something had gone wrong, though. From all of the evidence, it wasn’t the machine that killed her. It had been set to keep up with Rachel; the more information she could take, the more it would give her. Looked as if he would have to wait on the autopsy to tell him why she failed. Or . . . hmm. Didn’t he have a psion somewhere in the building? A telepath? He always made sure he had one on hand; utterly loyal, of course, with safeguards in place to make sure that his mind was sacrosanct. Maybe something got picked up.

  A quick check gave him the first bit of
good news he’d had; the tech that was traumatized was his telepath, so chances were good the psion got something. No leaving this to random questioners; he’d go down to sickbay himself and find out.

  But as soon as he cleared the door, the fellow literally shot off the exam table, flung himself across the room, and grabbed his arm. “You can do a wipe, right? I want a wipe! I’ll debrief, but after that, I want a wipe! You’ve got to do a wipe!”

  For a moment, Verdigris was stunned. Two security guards were right behind the tech, and pulled him off of their boss. Verdigris could see the pleading in the man’s eyes; if he was offered a bullet right now, he’d probably take it. He nodded slowly, and the tech broke down into long sobs.

  “She saw it all. She saw everything, everything at once! It burned her up, and it’s going to make me explode . . . then, there, now, all of it. She got everything, all in a few seconds . . . and she screamed. God, it was horrible, it just cut through everything, I thought she would never stop screaming and then she did . . .” The tech couldn’t manage coherent speech after that, just broken syllables mixed with sobs.

  Verd nodded at the medics. “Get him sedated and give him Procedure three forty-two.” One of his own, of course. It wiped out short-term memory. It wasn’t a total brainwipe; that would have to wait. Verd wanted to see if merely wiping the short-term memory would solve the trauma without losing some of the data. There might be something he could salvage out of this.

  As the tech continued to sob—though it seemed now it was with relief—Verd left. So. The machine hadn’t broken Rachel, Rachel had broken the machine. It ran itself out trying to feed her new stimuli through the relays; kaboom, shortly after she expired. Evidently there was no way that the human mind could see all of the futures at once and still stay sane. He had the feeling that when the autopsy report came back, the cause of death would be an aneurysm or at least look suspiciously like one.

  Maybe a metahuman psion . . . but . . . no. No, Matthew March had been a metahuman as well as a psion, and he’d set fire to himself rather than live with what was in his head. Probably the only thing that could survive that sort of barrage and make sense of it would be a precognitive with a relative-time-dilation talent. In other words, an OpFour. Even an OpFive, if there was such a thing.

  Which left him only one option. The one creature he knew that could do everything he wanted, but was certainly not going to be as easy as Ms. Hiller to bring into the company. Back to Plan A.

  “Angel-napping.” Khanji would have a cow. Better not tell her. He cued up his PDA, this time using voice. Nothing for Khanji to “accidentally” run across that way. Good thing his PA knew when to keep her trap shut. “Miss Grancher? Would you please send a nicely worded invitation on the appropriately respectful stationary to People’s Blade for a meeting at her earliest convenience? Khanjar does not need to be informed.”

  “Sir?” the PA said, before he could disconnect. “You need to supply a new head of Echo Medical.”

  “Oh, right, I had completely forgotten.” That’s what he had originally been working on before the unfortunate business with Rachel had cropped up. He opened a new window on his PDA, scanning through the files linked from his desk computer. “Let’s see . . . this one. Bella Dawn Parker. Send the relevant paperwork to my desk; you know the drill, Miss Grancher.” He had to grin at that a little. Parker wasn’t an MD, she was a rebel against the rules, and on top of that, her chief claim to fame was as the fanboi’s fave hottie from the “Sexiest Healers of Echo” calender. He could justify the promotion on the basis of Echo needing a fresh take and a friendly, well-known face. She would have everyone mad at her within twenty-four hours of taking the desk. In forty-eight, Echo Medical would be in chaos. And as soon as his plan to weed out the troublemakers moved into high gear, they would be losing metas almost as soon as they hit triage.

  At least one thing had gone right today.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Leap of Faith

  MERCEDES LACKEY AND CODY MARTIN

  “What the hell have I done?” John stared out over the Atlanta skyline, beer forgotten in his hand. It was late. He hadn’t been able to sleep. He’d been playing that interaction with the—well, she thought she was an angel—in his mind, over and over. She thought she was an angel, which didn’t speak too well for her mental stability. And he’d gone and kissed her.

  Why did I do that? Everything had been going so well. She was strange as hell, granted; she had her delusion, she knew things that no one else did, and seemed capable of anything. But she never really asked anything of him; she was just there with him, sharing moments without taking.

  But this was a complication. He didn’t need complications. Especially right now. Life was complicated enough. So far, he’d had Blacksnake come calling, twice, and neither time had been exactly a laugh riot. Echo had tried to recruit him, too, though with a damn sight less “prejudice.” He was still settling in with the CCCP; they were a whole different kind of weird on their own. Between Bear’s antics, Unter’s grousing, and Natalya’s penchant for throwing ceramics at people, it was a lot to take in and adjust to. He’d been his neighborhood’s version of law enforcement and “physical conflict mediator” for a while, but being part of a uniformed and sanctioned force again was going to take a lot of getting used to.

  Then there was what had pushed him into the arms of the CCCP in the first place; Echo, Blacksnake, and of course the ever present shadow of the Program. The first two had taken a keen interest in him once things had started to come back together after the Invasion. Echo was too busy to waste too many resources on him. Blacksnake was another matter; they had already sent two recruiters, with the caveat that refusing the offer included a ticket to the morgue. Whether they didn’t want to draw any heat down on themselves from the CCCP, or if they were just tired of having teams go missing completely, John couldn’t say. He hadn’t run into any more of their goons since, but that could always change in an instant.

  As bad as Blacksnake was, the Program was far worse. Just because he’d knocked out one facility, that didn’t mean there weren’t more. They didn’t get tired of losing people. They didn’t run out of money. They didn’t worry about pissing anyone off. If they wanted something, they got it, or they killed it. Maybe both. Joining the CCCP was more about getting extra protection for the neighborhood from any fallout that might befall him than it was about saving his own hide. He just hoped that when—not if—they came for him, that not too many other people would get hurt. It was too late to run again; they’d tear up the entire neighborhood and everyone in it, if they had to; he didn’t have any doubts about that. It wasn’t about the money and time spent, or the effort; knowing the sort of people behind the Program, they’d keep coming after him simply on principle.

  John, in typical boneheaded fashion, had just made things that much worse. With a kiss.

  “It would’ve been better if she slapped ya, moron.” But Sera had reciprocated. And what did that mean? “That’s she’s crazier than I am.” Dammit all. He knew exactly why he’d done that; he wanted to, simple as that. But why did he want to kiss her? Why did he want her? It wasn’t as if he couldn’t get women. Even Bella had flirted with him—she hadn’t meant anything really by it, but he could probably work on that. He wouldn’t abuse his position to trawl around the neighborhood, but there were plenty of other neighborhoods in Atlanta. What the hell kept him around her, as opposed to anyone else?

  This was another thing he couldn’t run from. Things had changed for him; it was slowly draining from his constitution to be able to run from the big problems. The Program had done that to him, turning him into a fugitive. The Invasion and everything since . . . well, it had changed everyone. John couldn’t deny his growing feelings for “Atlanta’s Angel,” and he sure as hell couldn’t stop them. Right now he just wanted to understand the whole stinking mess. And maybe try and figure out if he had done something unbelievably stupid.

  He could just tell her not to co
me around. He could just cut all of his contacts to the most impersonal level.

  He could, but he already knew that he wouldn’t. Besides, he doubted that very much in this world could keep her from seeing him if she wanted to.

  He could try, though. If he really wanted to . . .

  But just the thought of that . . . made his insides knot up a little. Made him feel hollow inside. And gave him an ache in the back of his throat.

  You don’t want her to stop coming around, bonehead. God, even his own self-deprecating thoughts were starting to sound like Vic’s chiding. This was eating at him; he had to figure it out. Part of it was safety; he cared about her, and didn’t want his past to catch up with the both of them. He just couldn’t let this rest, or else he really wouldn’t be able to sleep anymore. There was one thing that was digging at the back of his mind, the key to this. It seemed like it was just out of his reach, but if he could get it he’d know.

  “Well, genius, let’s go ’bout this logically. Somethin’ is different. Yeah, yeah, besides the fact that ya like a gal.” He took a swig of his beer absentmindedly. “Somethin’ is there now where there wasn’t anythin’ before. Nothin’ else has been doin’ it all these years on the run. So what is it?”

  Well, for the first time, he’d been concentrating on something other than pure survival. He had a squat, regular meals, and a sort of security in CCCP. He wasn’t living hour to hour. So now he had time to think . . . and to feel again.

  He brought the beer bottle up to his lips again, but stopped short. It had hit him. I’m not lonely anymore when I’m around her. I feel accepted; like I’m a part of the damned world again, instead of a shadow up against the edges. John set the beer bottle down on the ledge, unfinished. “I’ll be a son of a bitch. That’s it.” He stared out at the city, mulling over this revelation. “Okay. Now what do I do with that?”