The Enlightened

by Dima Zales

  I continue along those lines until I’m convinced the guy won’t end up on the news one day, and then exit his head.

  * * *

  “Are you sure my Guiding will override Kyle’s?” I ask as soon as I’m back in the Quiet.

  “Yes,” Thomas says. “Whoever has the longest Reach will override the other. And Kyle’s doesn’t even compare to yours.”

  “Good. Who’s next?”

  “That man. The big one.”

  Now that he points him out to me, I can’t believe I didn’t notice the guy myself. This dude is as close to a giant as I’ve seen and hard to miss, particularly here, in a room full of scientists. I’m shocked no one suspects him of being up to something. Then again, they might think he’s with security. He does have that sort of look.

  I Read the man and learn that his name is Igor and that he’s indeed here to kill a few people. He’s being Pushed, though killing is not against this guy’s principles. I wonder whether he’ll get the usual amnesia that people get when they’re Guided to do something against their nature.

  I Guide him: Stand by the stage, pretend you’re with college security, and enjoy the lectures. Try to remember as much as you can.

  This might be as unnatural for the brute as killing is to a normal person. Ironically, now that I’ve overridden Kyle’s instructions, he might very well experience amnesia.

  “Who’s next?” I say when I’m done with Igor.

  “That guy, their leader. His name’s Victor,” Thomas says. “Given his file, I suspect he’ll be doing the bulk of the killing. The guy was a sniper back in the day.”

  I walk up to Victor. He’s tall and muscular. Unlike his Neanderthal colleague, he exudes a type of cold intelligence. His demeanor reminds me of Caleb. He’s one of those people who always look like they own the room. I grab his wrist and focus.

  * * *

  Two targets at our six o’clock, we think methodically, planning our shots. We’ll take them out as soon as we see Igor reaching for his weapon. It’ll be fun to practice our marksmanship like this. We haven’t had practice outside of a shooting range in ages. Killing that scum Shkillet in the club a few weeks back doesn’t count. Not from a practice perspective anyhow, since it was nearly a point-blank shot.

  I disassociate. Boy, do I never want to make an enemy of this guy. The way he thinks about shooting someone is cold. Zero regret, zero remorse. He feels the same about killing as I do about making a sandwich—just something you do when you need to.

  I begin my override session.

  You will not shoot anyone. You’re here to expand your intellectual horizons. You will peacefully listen to the lectures, and you will be entertained. After all of this is over, as you lie in bed tonight, you will seriously rethink your life of crime.

  Happy with my Guiding, I exit Victor’s head.

  * * *

  “Can I override my own instructions if I need to?” I ask Thomas when I’m back.

  “Easily,” Thomas says. “It’s just a matter of using up more Reach.”

  “Every time I Guide someone, I use up some of my Reach?”

  “I thought that was obvious. Those of us who actually run out of Reach learn this quickly.”

  “It isn’t obvious,” I say. “I thought Reach only controlled the duration of your influence. How far into the future you can reach.”

  “That’s also the case,” Thomas says, “but every Guiding you do is cumulative, as far as Reach is concerned. I can Guide one person to do what I need for half an hour, or thirty people to do what I want for a minute, depending on what I’m trying to accomplish.”

  “So controlling as many people as my aunt and I can is a difficult feat?”

  “It would be impossible for those with my range of Reach, which is a good thing. You have no idea how much harm someone like Kyle could do if he had your kind of Reach. He wouldn’t need the mob or the patsy. Anyway, we should get back to the task at hand. That guy there, the one with the shades, is the next person you should work on.”

  It takes what feels like an hour before I reprogram all the Russian gangsters in this place. When I’m done, they’re no longer planning on shooting people and handing their weapons to the crazy fall guy. Instead, this conference will set a new record for the number of Russian mobsters paying close attention to a science lecture.

  “This will be our mark,” Thomas says as we make our way out of the hall, referring to the second phase of his plan. “Here, by Row 20.”

  As we walk back to the car and to our bodies, I think about what’s to come. It feels infinitely more doable now than when Thomas first outlined his plan. As I reach for my body to phase out into the real world, I’m filled with dark anticipation.

  It’s really happening. Kyle is going to get what’s coming to him.

  Chapter 21

  The noises of the world return, and I look around. A guy wearing shades and a baseball cap, probably a student, is walking toward us. I phase into the Quiet and Guide him to sell me those items. When I phase out and begin the transaction, the guy wants a hundred bucks for the stuff. I debate Guiding him to give me a better price, but decide it would be too much like stealing and hand him the hundred-dollar bill. It’s bad enough he’s selling me things he wouldn’t have otherwise dreamed of selling.

  “Great disguise,” Thomas says after I put my new gear on. He pulls out his own shades, the kind you often see ‘agents’ wearing. “Let’s take a look in the back.”

  As I’d hoped, the back of his car is an armory.

  “Take this,” he says, handing me a heavy revolver. I take it and tuck it behind my back, under my shirt. I’m getting used to concealing guns gangster-style.

  Thomas straps on a holster under his suit jacket and puts his own gun in. It’s a much fancier piece that has some initials on the handle and even a laser sight. I begin asking whether he has another fancy gun like that when, without a word, Thomas heads toward the building. I follow.

  “Keep your head down,” he says once we enter the conference hall.

  Though the place is the same in the real world as it was in the Quiet, the noise and movements are a stark contrast to our previous excursion. Without much ado, we split up. I walk to my designated right-hand walkway. I’m making sure Kyle doesn’t pass by me, and Thomas is doing the same on his side.

  As I walk through the crowd, I keep track of the row numbers. I’m looking for Row 20—the position Thomas decided was the optimal distance to Kyle’s hideout, and the marker for me to phase into the Quiet and retrieve Thomas.

  My walk is uneventful until Row 25, where I notice a scientist looking at me strangely.

  This guy resembles a tall, overweight version of Bert, but dressed carelessly, like Eugene. I can tell the hatred on his face is not his natural expression. That’s all that registers before the man closes the distance between us and tries to punch me in the stomach.

  Without willing myself to, I quickly move aside. His punch never connects with my midsection. The Bert/Eugene-hybrid dude stumbles. I spot a white-haired woman out of the corner of my eye a second before I feel a sharp pain as she grabs me by the hair, girl-fight style. I grab her wrist and squeeze, gently but firmly.

  “I don’t want to break your hand, lady,” I say.

  She lets go, but I feel another stab of pain, this time in my shoulder. Having had enough of this weirdness and pain, I phase into the Quiet.

  The people around me all have one thing in common: they’re frozen in the process of attacking me. The pain I felt a moment ago was from a guy who stabbed me with a pencil. I’m lucky he didn’t have one of those high-end metal pens on hand, because that would’ve really hurt. As is, his pencil broke off without breaking the skin.

  These random, peaceful-looking people attacking me can only mean one thing. But to confirm my suspicions, I Read the white-haired woman who grabbed my hair.

  As I thought, Kyle Pushed her to attack me.

  Which means he’s spotted me.


  Shit.

  I take a second to change their minds about attacking me, and then run over to Thomas. No one is attacking him, which means Kyle hasn’t noticed him, or else Kyle doesn’t realize we’re here together. If that’s the case, then he might not realize how much trouble he’s really in. Or maybe his Reach only allowed him to control the group that’s attacking me, leaving none to spare on the folks around Thomas. More likely, though, Kyle just didn’t see Thomas, which is great.

  Thomas’s frozen face is looking intently in my frozen self’s direction, watching as I’m getting attacked.

  I touch him on the neck.

  “Darren, I was about to pull you in. I saw those people go at you.”

  “Yeah, it’s Kyle. Guess he saw me.”

  “He must be Splitting and walking the perimeter,” Thomas says. “I was hoping he wouldn’t be this cautious, and if he was, that he’d fail to penetrate our disguises in this crowd.”

  “Doesn’t seem like he knows you’re here.”

  “We have to move now. We’re close enough to where he’s hiding—”

  “Unless he moved,” I interrupt.

  “He wouldn’t have had the time to get more than a few feet,” Thomas says. “And if he doesn’t know I’m here, he might decide to stay put.”

  I walk toward the stage, taking my gun out of the back of my pants. My heart rate increases when I reach the right stage exit where Kyle was hiding just minutes ago. Only Kyle isn’t there. I run down the cavern-like path Thomas and I explored earlier until I get to the first turn of the corridor and almost bump into him.

  Thomas was right. Kyle didn’t get far.

  “He decided to get out of here,” Thomas says from behind me. “Cautious as ever.”

  “Are you ready to do this?” I ask. “Should we pull him in?”

  “Wait.” He walks farther down and positions himself in front of frozen Kyle.

  “You’re hoping he materializes in front of you?” I ask.

  “Yes. But just in case he shows up behind you, I want you to face away. Take the safety off your gun.”

  I do as Thomas says, though it feels odd. If Kyle shows up behind me, I won’t even see Thomas put a bullet in the guy, a sight I’d enjoy.

  “On three,” Thomas says and counts down. When he reaches three, my body tenses. By now, Thomas must’ve touched Kyle to bring him in.

  No one appears in front of me.

  For a second, everything is silent.

  Then I hear a grunt from behind me.

  I turn around and see Kyle holding Thomas in a headlock. Kyle must’ve materialized behind Thomas. I don’t have time to wonder whether Kyle has mastered the ‘show up in unexpected places in the Quiet’ technique. Right now, I need to do one thing and one thing only.

  Raise my gun.

  As I take aim, I hesitate. Even after all the training I’ve received from Caleb, there’s still a chance I might hit Thomas. It takes me only a moment to decide to throw caution to the wind. I should make the shot, and even if I hit Thomas, he’ll just wake up Inert in the real world, which won’t kill him.

  So I take closer aim.

  Kyle looks at me. He must see the determination in my eyes. With his free left hand, he reaches into his vest and pulls out a knife.

  “Thomas, watch out,” I shout, but it’s too late. Even though Thomas bends, breaking out of the headlock, Kyle manages to plunge the knife into Thomas’s thigh, halfway to the hilt.

  Thomas screams.

  Kyle rips the knife out and raises his hand to stab my friend again.

  I shoot at Kyle, squeezing the trigger with a sudden jerk.

  My bullet hits the wall about a foot higher than where Kyle’s head is. Clearly, shooting under intense stress is not a skill I’ve mastered. Still, it wasn’t a wasted bullet, as Kyle doesn’t wait for my next one. He releases Thomas and runs down the corridor.

  Thomas falls to the ground, clutching his thigh.

  I approach him, trying not to look at all the blood.

  “Go after him,” Thomas says through gritted teeth. “Remember the guard you Guided? Kyle can’t learn that he’s blocking the way in the real world.”

  Without hesitating, I run after Kyle. Thomas is right. The best course of action is to get Kyle before he learns that this hallway is a dead end. Then, after we make him Inert, he’ll take this same path and find himself trapped. This, of course, assumes it’s us who’ll make him Inert and not the other way around.

  I hear a gunshot. Then another. And a third.

  I feel no pain, and I’m still in the Quiet, so I assume Kyle missed me. My ears ring as if he shot the gun directly into them.

  Without meaning to, I note the big holes in the wall in front of me. One is about a foot away from where my head was about to be.

  A foot away from being Inert again, a possibility I don’t even want to consider.

  I shoot in Kyle’s general direction and run faster. At least four shots answer mine, and like me, he isn’t aiming, just shooting at random. I think he’s doing this to slow me down. But despite more gunshots, I don’t stop. In a berserker-like mode, I actually speed up.

  As I turn the next corner, another blast sounds in my ears. This one much closer than the others. The bullet misses my shoulder by the width of a finger.

  I return the shot, though Kyle is already behind a corner.

  Then I push my legs to their limits.

  As I sprint, I feel that strange sensation that I first experienced on the Brooklyn Bridge and a few times since—a feeling like I’m about to phase into the Quiet, but hit a mental wall that prevents it.

  I shake my head to clear it and turn into the alcove area we scoped out during our recon. And that’s when I hear the sound of a thousand thunderclaps. The pain in my ears is instantly followed by a blast of agony in my right arm, as if someone took a baseball bat to it. A baseball bat made of red-hot iron. The impact causes me to drop my gun.

  He shot me, part of my brain screams. A wave of nausea hits me.

  With great effort, I ignore the pain in my arm and look up to see Kyle reloading his weapon.

  As I look at him, my anger rekindles and turns into a wave of pure hatred. The bloodlust hits me harder than the gunshot to my arm. The thin veil of civility is gone, and I want to claw and bite the object of my fury until he’s ripped into shreds. Except I’m in no position to do anything but watch as he shoots me. I don’t accept this, though. Acting without thought, I run up to the wall. With my left hand, I grab the heavy, framed painting of wine bottles and launch it at Kyle.

  As the thing flies, I hear the click of Kyle’s reloaded weapon.

  I get lucky. The corner of the frame hits him right in the face. In the seconds of confusion that it buys me, I close the distance between us.

  Still acting without deliberate thought, I execute a move that part of me knows is from Krav Maga. My left palm secures Kyle’s wrist, and my right palm hits the gun, sending waves of pain to my brain as it connects.

  My reward is Kyle’s screams, and shortly thereafter, the metal clink of the gun hitting the floor.

  I look at Kyle’s hand. His finger is so unnaturally bent that I have to assume it’s broken. It seems that the move I executed created a fulcrum point around the midsection of the gun. And that, combined with the fact that his finger was on the trigger and the physics of how fingers don’t bend to the side, caused this rather favorable development. I hope it hurts even worse than it looks.

  To my shock, the injury doesn’t stop Kyle from forming a fist, an action that must hurt like a motherfucker. Like me, he must be running on pure adrenaline.

  He throws a punch at my head, and I instinctively block it with my right elbow while using the left to hit Kyle in the jaw. My counter hit connects with his face, but I’m too overwhelmed with pain to rejoice. Having a shot-up right arm is not optimal for hand-to-hand combat.

  Kyle recovers from my hit much too quickly and reaches for his vest. That’s where the knife
is, I remember in an instant.

  Instead of hitting him, I use Kyle’s momentary distraction to note the location of his fallen gun. The gun is right under my feet, but if Kyle gets that knife out, the gun may as well be a light year away.

  It’s time to do something reckless.

  I consciously execute a move I’ve only experienced in someone’s memories. I think it’s called a round kick. It’s a move kickboxers regularly execute, but financial analysts not so much. The biggest danger is that I’ll lose my balance.

  My execution is perfect.

  My foot connects with the side of Kyle’s head with a loud smack.

  I don’t even lose my balance, and mentally thank Caleb for all his training.

  Kyle is stunned. I capitalize on this with an uppercut, choosing to strike out with my uninjured left arm this time.

  The result reminds me of what boxers often look like after a knockout blow. Kyle looks like he’s about to fall. His eyes glaze over, and he almost looks drunk.

  It’s now or never. I bend over, reaching for his gun, but as I do, I remember something.

  Feigning a loss like this is Kyle’s signature move. He would beat me with this trick at least six out of ten times when we used to play Mortal Kombat or other fighting games—back when I was a kid and thought he was my uncle.

  If that’s what he’s doing, I know I’m fucked. But at this point, I’m committed to picking up that gun, so I just do it.

  Once I have the gun in my hand, I straighten and see that my fear was justified. Just like in all those virtual matches of the past, I fell for his ploy, but this time, the fight is real. Kyle is holding the knife by the blade and has his hand positioned for a throw.

  Only he’s not releasing the knife for some reason.

  Is the bastard toying with me? Is he waiting for me to raise my gun by an inch, giving me hope, before he offs me?

  “Don’t,” Kyle says.