by Elle Casey
It’s quiet at this time of night, but there’s always someone here. I hang back, peering around the door as Jake enters.
A woman is seated at one of the workstations. Her name is Linda, she’s a scientist, and right now she’s studying something on the screen in front of her. Jake moves silently as a cat, and she doesn’t notice him until he’s right behind her. She jumps as he rests a hand on her shoulder, then relaxes as she sees who’s there. “Jake. What can I do for you? Is there a problem?”
He looks down at her with a slow, lazy smile and my heart picks up a beat. One day he’ll look at me like that. “Just thought you might like some company,” he says.
Ugh.
Linda swivels in her chair to face him and returns his smile. I can tell she’s happy to see him, but when I delve deeper, I hit a wall. A quick check, and I make out the glint of a reflector device in her red hair. Shock punches me in the gut. Since when have the compound staff been shielded?
“Jake, she’s wearing.”
He gives me a small nod. Leaning in close, he pulls her out of the chair, spins her around, and secures her wrists behind her back, all in one super-fast move. Covering her mouth with one hand, he rips the reflector device from her hair with the other, tossing it across the room.
“Kat?”
As I move forward into the room, Linda’s eyes widen. Something flashes in their depths. Fear. Guilt.
Panic flares in her eyes. She won’t look at me, as though that will keep her safe, and she flinches when I step up close. I don’t get it. She’s known me since I was a kid. I’m hardly a scary monster, but she’s pressing against Jake as though he represents safety.
Jake gives her a little shake. “We just want the clarity drug, Linda. Give us that and we won’t hurt you.”
Of course it’s a lie. We want way more than that. We want the truth. But the clarity drug will help us get to that. I slide into the woman’s mind.
“Pink… pink… pink… pink… pink…”
The word is repeated over and over in her head. I almost smile. She’s trying to protect her thoughts. It might work right now, but once I have the drug, I’ll see what she’s so scared of.
“I’ll tell you,” Linda says. “Just don’t let her touch me.”
Jake looks at me, and I back off.
“It’s in the safe.” She nods toward the far wall.
“And the combination?”
She reels off the code.
“You’ll also need a retinal scan,” I tell him. I’ve seen them open the safe before.
Jake hustles Linda across the room. She keeps throwing me these weird glances and I’m getting a bad feeling. At the safe, Jake inputs the code, then forces her head down to the scanner. The walk-in safe clicks open.
Jake pulls a gun from the back of his pants. Not for the first time, I notice how seriously scary he can appear. Dark and dangerous and armed. We might not be military, but we’re military trained. He hands the gun to me. “Shoot her if she moves.” Then he disappears inside.
I study the woman in front of me. Her eyes dart around the room, refusing to make contact. After a minute, Jake appears in the doorway, a black bag in his hand. I can tell he’s already injected himself; his mind is clear. He tosses me a syringe. I catch it, then hand him back the gun.
The sting of the needle is sweet as I push down the plunger and my mind clears. I’m instantly aware of the Tribe all around me. And beneath that, a quiet whisper.
“Katie? Katie? Katie?”
“Sam? Where are you, Sam?”
“I don’t know. But I’m scared and I want to come back.”
I turn my attention to Linda. She backs away. No doubt she believes I still need to touch her. I don’t. With the drug, I can read her every thought, and information floods from her mind. I stagger and almost fall to my knees as the images flash across my inner eye.
“Are you okay?”
I shake my head at Jake’s question, because I’m pretty certain I’ll never be okay again. “Take me to him,” I tell the woman.
She edges toward Jake. She still believes Jake will protect her, but I can tell from his expression that he’s seen at least some of what’s inside her head.
“TAKE ME!” I yell into her face. I’m falling apart, and I need to do this before that happens.
She leads us along a corridor, then down another flight of stairs to the lower level, where I’ve never been before. A double door blocks our way.
“Retinal scan,” I say to Jake, and he grabs her and shoves her face up close to the scanner. The doors slide open.
I stare through the open gap, fear and need warring inside me.
“You don’t have to do this,” Jake says.
And I know he’s seen what’s inside the room. “Yes, I do.”
His shock is fading and red-hot anger is rolling off of him in waves. He gestures to the woman. “Do you need her again?”
I shake my head and stand impassive as his big hands wrap around her throat. I sense her fear, a moment of intense panic as Jake’s fingers tighten, and then her neck snaps. The thoughts stop abruptly.
Her body crumples to the floor and I try to feel some sense of remorse. But I feel nothing. I’ve been inside her mind. She didn’t even see us as human, just experiments, things grown in test tubes. Didn’t see Sam. That’s how she had been able to listen to his screams while they…
I look away from the body, back to the open doors. Can I bear to see what they’ve done to him? If I close my eyes, I still hear him whispering through my mind, and I know it’s no echo from the past. It’s from here and now and in that room.
My feet don’t want to move.
I glance up to find Jake watching me. “Let me do this for you.”
“No.”
Taking a deep breath, I step over the crumpled body and into the room beyond. It’s a cross between an operating theater and a laboratory, but I don’t take much of it in. Instead, my attention is focused on the body lying on the gurney in the center. My heart squeezes and I can’t breathe, as though all the air has been sucked from the room. I take a step forward, my hand reaching out. He’s hooked up to IV’s, and wires lead to various monitors; I’m almost fooled into believing he’s still alive. His face has a serene expression.
The top of his skull is missing, and the entire contents of his head are… just gone.
A scream rises up in my throat and I ram my fist in my mouth.
Across the room, a machine beeps and a screen flickers to life. I drag my gaze from my brother’s body and step closer. I hear the words in my head as they flash up simultaneously on the screen. “Katie. Katie. Katie.”
“Sam!”
I whirl around, but his body lies unmoving.
“Help me…”
I stare at the words on the screen as they sound in my head. Sam’s voice. What’s happening? How could he be talking to me when he’s dead? He has no brain.
“Oh, shit.”
I wrench my attention to Jake. He’s staring at something off to the left. I follow his gaze, and bile rises up in the back of my throat. I try to make sense of what I’m seeing.
A brain floating in a tank of clear liquid.
I stumble toward it, reach out, and touch my fingertips to the clear glass.
“Katie.”
I blink back tears. “Sam.”
“Help me.”
Such pain and loneliness behind the words, and I let the tears roll down my cheek. I know what he wants; I’m just not sure I’m strong enough. “We can take you away from here. It’s a life, Sam. We’ll still be together.”
“It hurts. I want to be free.”
That’s all he’s ever wanted. But this is losing him all over again. I rest my forehead against the cool glass. I have to be strong. For Sam. For a minute I concentrate, searching out the others, joining with them, joining with Sam, so he won’t feel alone.
“Thank you.”
Then I take a deep breath and wrench the wires fro
m the tank. The screen flickers and dies.
I stand for long moments as the last of his consciousness drains away, leaving the empty place in my head. Then I push myself up and turn to face Jake, ignoring the pity in his eyes. Later, I’ll think about Sam. Now we need to get away. No way am I staying here a moment longer.
“There’s something else I found out from her.” I wave a hand toward the body of the woman. “About the clarity drug.” It’s important, and I need to tell Jake in case he hasn’t picked it up. “The drug doesn’t enhance our powers like we were told. They’ve been putting a sedative in the drinking water. The drug merely counteracts the sedative’s effects.”
They’re crippling us on purpose?” He scrubs a hand through his hair. “Bastards.”
Yeah. “Let’s get out of here.”
* * *
The sun is rising as we drive, heading north toward Scotland and hopefully some answers. We stole a van and all the equipment and weapons we could get our hands on. Then we torched the place. A fitting funeral pyre for Sam—he would have been impressed.
As I watched the slick operation, I realized Jake and the others had been ready for this. How long since they truly believed in our controllers? Had we all clung to those beliefs because they were all we had ever known?
Dawn isn’t far away when something makes me turn to Jake. “Stop!”
He glances from the road and quirks a brow.
“I need to go back,” I say.
“No you don’t.”
“I have to go to the committee meeting. I have to tell them what was done to us.”
Jake snorts in disbelief. “You seriously think they don’t know?”
Did I? I had to believe that not everyone was evil. Despite Sam—or maybe because of him—I’m not yet ready to give up on my belief in a new and better world. Sam believed in it. I owe this to him.
“It doesn’t matter. I have to try. And I have a plan.”
He pulls up on the side of the road and twists in his seat so he’s facing me. “Are you sure?”
I nod.
“Then we all go.”
“No. I need to convince them we aren’t a threat. That will be much easier on my own. Besides, if it all goes wrong, then I’ll need you to rescue me.”
He’s silent for a minute, and I can sense him probing my mind, testing my resolve. “Or get a little revenge if they put your brain in a jar and hook you up to a computer.”
I force a smile. “Yeah, that too.”
Then he nods.
* * *
Twelve men raise their heads as I push open the door and step into the room. Varying expressions flash across their faces. The colonel is there, shock and fear clear in his eyes. For once he isn’t wearing the reflector device, but then I’m probably the last person he expects to see here. I briefly tap into his mind. Bastard. As expected, he’s trying to cover his ass. If nothing else I’ll make that impossible. And one day I’ll kill him.
I give him a slight smile and he flinches.
The colonel tried to sell us to the committee as a weapon. I need to convince them we can offer so much more.
I search the rest of the group. Some good, some bad. All of them afraid of what they don’t understand and can’t control. I suspect that will always be the way. I settle on Senator Gilpin. While his face is blank of expression, his mind is filled with curiosity. I speak directly to him.
“I’d like to offer you a world with no more lies…”
A Word from Nina Croft
I’ve always been a little self-indulgent when it comes to writing. While I write mainly romance, I write all sorts of romance—contemporary, paranormal, thrillers, science fiction… whatever appeals to me in the moment. But it occurred to me recently that maybe I should concentrate on one genre for a while. I asked my fabulous editor for advice and was supremely happy when she suggested I write another science fiction series.
So here I am, plotting a new series. It will be a sort of contemporary sci-fi, happening in the near future, and following the adventures, romantic and otherwise, of a rogue covert agent group known as the Tribe. It’s going to involve most of my favorite sci-fi tropes: telepathy, gene modification, advanced evolution, aliens, and my all-time favorite, time travel. Hey, if I’m going to stick to one genre, I want everything I can get in there.
When I was considering what to write for The Telepath Chronicles, I decided to visit the Tribe, to see what they were up to before the start of the series.
The result was maybe a little darker than I normally write, but the Tribe needed a kick in the pants to get out from under their controllers and start to question just who and what they are. And that was the basis for “No More Lies.”
About the Author
Nina Croft was born in the north of England but headed south at the age of eighteen. She studied marine biology at London University before training to be a chartered accountant. Having worked a number of years in London, the urge to head south hit again. This time it took her to Zambia, on the shores of the beautiful Lake Kariba, where she spent four years working as a volunteer. It left her with a love of the sun and a dislike of regular employment. Since then, Nina has a spent a number of years mixing travel, whenever possible, with work, whenever necessary.
After traveling extensively in India, Southeast Asia, and Africa, Nina has now settled down to a life of writing and almond-picking on a remote farm in southern Spain, between the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Mediterranean Sea. She shares the farm with her husband, three dogs, a horse, two goats, two cats, and a three-legged Vietnamese pot-bellied pig.
You can find out more about Nina and her books at www.ninacroft.com
Word-Bound
by MeiLin Miranda
Campbell tugged at his mom’s hand. “Hey! The bus is coming!”
“I know, sweetie.” Hayley pulled him gently away from the curb until the blue-and-gold bus hummed to its near-silent stop and the doors swung open. She picked her giggling son up by his slightly sticky hands, swung him inside, and fumbled for the bus pass in her bag. She flashed it at the sensor and let Campbell pull her toward the seats, prattling all the way. “Momma? Mom? Let’s sit here. We’re gonna sit here. ’Kay? Sit here, Momma.” At least he didn’t take them all the way to the back where the teenaged boys sat.
Hayley boosted him onto the window seat and plopped down beside him. The older woman across the aisle looked up from her knitting and smiled at them expectantly. Hayley smiled back, but as seconds ticked by, the other woman’s expression turned from friendliness to offense; Hayley finally, dimly heard the annoyance emanating from her, mere murmurs against Hayley’s straining mind. “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you,” she apologized. “I’m word-bound.”
The woman looked embarrassed. “Oh, that a’ right, on’y say guh mornin’,” she muttered through lips unused to speech.
The bus was silent, but that wasn’t unusual. Everyone was staring at them. That wasn’t unusual, either. To them, she was an uncomfortable cipher—an incomprehensible blank—unable to hear thoughts, unable to send thoughts. The curiosity, pity, and scorn pouring from the other passengers must have been loud; even Hayley sensed it, though it was a mere wisp compared to what a thoughtful person would sense. A thoughtful person would hear their actual, projected thoughts, not just inarticulate whispers of projected emotion.
She was glad Campbell couldn’t sense any of it. Yet.
Campbell was standing on the seat, looking out the window as the streets scrolled by, city turning to suburb. The bus slowed down at a busy intersection, efficiently threading its way through the driverless commercial traffic. Campbell started jumping up and down as they passed a corner ice cream shop. “Look, Momma, ithe cream! C’we get ithe cream? Let’s go, Momma, stop the bus. Mom, ithe cream! Mom!”
Hayley wrapped a practiced, protective arm around her son and shushed him. “Maybe after we see the doctors, Cammy, but only if you don’t jump on the seat, okay? Be still, or you’ll have to s
it down.”
A snicker came from the teenagers in the back of the bus, but Hayley didn’t turn around. “Quack,” one of them said aloud. The rest dissolved into sniggers.
Hayley’s neck stiffened; for once, she was grateful she couldn’t talk to people the thoughtful way. She always tried not to react outwardly, but it was hard. It’d been hard all her life.
“Quack,” said the teenager, louder this time. The giggling increased. “Quack, quack,” mocked a few other boys. “Quack!” Soon the back of the bus was filled with quacking and derisive laughter. The other passengers looked away.
Tiny wads of paper hit the back of Hayley’s head; they bounced off Campbell’s still-baby-round cheek. He turned to see where they were coming from. “Quack!” he giggled.
And that was enough for the older woman across the aisle. She stood up, swaying against the bus’s movement, and faced the teenagers. Hayley couldn’t hear what she was thinking, but if her body language was any indication, it was ferocious enough to shame the boys into sullenness.
The woman turned to her. “I am sorr’,” she said, slow and exaggerated. “I am real sorr’. You do not deserfit.” She projected pity, as if she were shouting in Hayley’s ear. In a way, she was.
Hayley smiled, tiny and forced, and the woman nodded and sat back down. Hayley was grateful, but the pity was as hard to take as the boys’ mockery of her voice.
Campbell was watching her now, no longer giggling but somber and vaguely scared. He always picked up on her moods, even though the doctors said he was profoundly word-bound—even more word-bound than she was. He crawled into her lap, to comfort her as much as himself.
Hayley hugged him close for a moment, doing her best to be reassuring and probably failing. It wasn’t just the teenagers. It wasn’t the teenagers at all. She smoothed her son’s hair back behind his soft, pink ear. Soon the doctors would drill a hole, right there.