by V. St. Clair
“You’re right, they’re all horrible people who exchanged their humanity for armor and Talents and the right to torment everyone else. Wouldn’t you agree, Hera? How do you know of this Topher fellow, anyway?”
Hera’s compressed lips were razor-thin, and the words seemed drawn out of her against her will when she said, “He’s the reason Risa Vorhees lost a cherished friend.” She looked disgusted, unable to even say Topher’s name out loud.
Ana had never seen true hatred in Hera’s eyes before and her mouth dropped open in shock. She knew the monster who killed Risa’s young friend was still out there, but hearing about him—learning his name, made things more real somehow.
Max looked stunned by the revelation, but said, “I’m sorry to hear that. Given the choice between him and Fox, he was definitely the better of the two, but I guess there really is no such thing as a good Provo-Major.” Then he added, “He seems young to be such a monster.”
“Young?” Ana blurted out dumbly, the image she had been building in her head of a middle-aged man laughing nefariously over the body of a young boy shattering abruptly. “I thought all of the Majors were at least in their thirties…”
“This guy looked about my age,” Max shrugged, still glancing uncomfortably at Hera. “I thought they were all older too, but this guy must have done something to get promoted to such a high post so quickly.”
Hera frowned and said, “There are only a few ways to become a Provo-Major, and it is a post you can only apply to by invitation of the Viceroy.” She looked disgusted by the entire organization. “You either have to be very well-connected and politically powerful, or you have to kill a lot of people.”
Max raised his eyebrows at this ominous revelation and said, “I wonder which route Topher took to get to the top.”
Hera scowled and said, “He killed a lot of people. Who do you think masterminded the Halstead massacre and put down the rebellion at Corithans?”
Ana’s mouth dropped open and she said, “But thousands of people died in those conflicts! Someone our age did that?” Both of the battles were famous, with various portions of them broadcast for the world to see to discourage further rebellion.
“How did you escape the Augenspire?” Hera glossed over the entire thing, refocusing them on what mattered and staring darkly at Maxton.
Max clearly struggled to refocus after learning the man he thought was ‘decent’ for a Provo was actually a monster, but eventually he recovered enough to answer.
“I was determined to escape that hellhole or die trying, so when Fox came to visit me the next time, I saw he was drunk or high off of something and decided to take my chances. I told him I knew where you were all this time and was lying about it before, and that I could bring him to you. I thought he wouldn’t believe me, because it’s supposed to be impossible to lie through Veritan, but he seemed to buy it for some reason. He said something about telling the Viceroy things were too quiet at the Academy but—” he paused here, “—but Topher had them doing something in the finance district instead.”
Hera raised an acknowledging eyebrow at this but said nothing.
“He brought me out to the emergency stairwell so I could use my Gift again, but he bound my hands so I couldn’t fight against him. I wanted to bring us to a packed bakery downtown, to increase my chances of escaping and maximizing the number of witnesses, but the door brought me to a women’s bathroom instead.”
“Where he met you,” Hera looked at Ana for the first time since Max had started talking.
She nodded confirmation and said, “The two of them just appeared from thin air all of a sudden, and Max shouted for me to run, but then…”
Here she hesitated, for it would cost her something to reveal the truth about herself. Not even her allies knew the full extent of her Gift, but since the enemy now knew, she could see nothing to gain by not telling her friends everything as well.
“Yes?” Hera’s blue eyes were penetrating, willing her to go on. If she was being honest with herself, Ana had always felt there was something Hera knew she was holding back all this time. She could sense it sometimes in the weight of the older woman’s gaze, though Hera had never pressed the issue before.
“Fox and I made eye contact before he got to his feet, and I—well, you see…my Gift is a little more extensive than I’ve ever revealed to anyone before,” she admitted.
“Fox said you were a psychic,” Max stated bluntly, and Lolly and her husband gasped comically. Even Hera looked shocked.
“I’m not a psychic!” Ana snapped, frustrated. “It’s—look, you all know I always seem to know when I’m in danger.” The others nodded at this, with the exception of Maxton. “Well, it isn’t random. I can kind of connect to other people’s brains by making eye contact with them. I do it on a subconscious level automatically every time I make eye contact with someone, actually. That’s how I get alerted to danger, by seeing it in their eyes, so it only works if the other person knows something about the danger I’m in.”
“The thing is,” she continued in a rush, determined to get it all out now, “if I go too deep—if I see too far into what lies behind someone’s eyes at any given moment—they become aware of my presence. It’s a connection that works in two directions once people become aware of it: if I can see into them, they can see into me. Normally I stay on the surface to prevent that from happening. The only thing I’m really aware of is if someone is intending to harm me, or knows of harm that may come to me. That pings a warning in my head, and I either have to risk looking deeper, or try to figure out what the danger is on my own.”
“So if a bus flies around the corner and mows you down, you won’t have any knowledge of it beforehand?” Max asked curiously.
“Not unless I make eye contact with someone who knows the bus is going to run over me before it happens, no,” Ana confirmed. “So I don’t truly always know when I’m in danger, I’ve just gotten lucky so far and most of the threats to me have been from people, not random accidents. Which is actually kind of terrible, if you think about it.”
Hera said nothing to this; she hadn’t broken eye contact with Ana even though the others kept looking away after learning she could connect to their minds via their eyes.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but if the Provo ever found out I have the ability to see into people’s heads they would lock me up or kill me for sure, since I refuse to work for them in any capacity.” There was a pleading, self-justifying note in her voice, and at last Hera blinked, exhaled, and spoke.
“I do not blame you, Ana. We all have our secrets and our reasons for keeping them. Am I to understand, from your explanation of your Gift, that you looked into Major Fox’s mind when you made eye contact?”
“Yes,” Ana admitted sheepishly. “I was so stunned to see a Major for the first time in real life, I panicked and saw too far. I wired right into his brain, which was weirdly disjointed and cloudy, actually. I thought it was the enhancers and Talents at first, blocking me out, because I’ve never tried to use my Gift on anyone with either—but if he was intoxicated then that probably explains it better.” She frowned at the memory. “I saw a garbled tangle of thoughts floating at the top of his mind: he was planning to kill Max in some terribly painful way, and he is part of a plot to murder the Viceroy because he is too soft on the Gifted…”
“WHAT?!” Lolly and her husband yelled in unison. Even Hera’s eyebrows went so high they almost disappeared into her hairline.
Ana closed her eyes and struggled to call up the memory of it, but it had been too blurry and fast for her to glean any more details.
“I don’t know the specifics. I just got the impression he thinks the Viceroy is too soft on the Gifted and wants peace too badly. I think Fox is the type who wants war, who thinks he’s better than us and we should all be exterminated or enslaved or something, just like the good old days...”
“That matches my impression of him from our lovely torture sessions together,” Max
added helpfully. “Even when he knew I didn’t have any useful information for him, he kept torturing me just for the fun of it. Doesn’t surprise me he wants to try round-two of the Great War and go for broke on exterminating the Gifted.”
“I don’t see how it would help anything,” Ana grumbled. “Even if they could kill us all off, more people would become Gifted every year so they would have to keep it up forever. Gifts usually aren’t hereditary.”
Max shrugged, not having a better answer for her.
“This is deeply troubling,” Hera stood up and turned her back on the room, staring off into space. “The Viceroy has made some small concessions to encourage peace between the Gifted and his government, but he hasn’t gone nearly far enough. The last thing we want is to overthrow him, only to replace him with someone even worse, especially if members of the Provo-Major are chomping at the bit for another attempt at genocide.”
“So you don’t want to kill the Viceroy now, because his own people want to take him out?” Max asked skeptically.
“Our goal was never to murder him unless it was unavoidable,” Ana explained. “Unlike the Viceroy who started the Great War, we know we’ll never get peace if we try to wipe out the entire ruling family and all the Provo to boot. We just want to expose the corruption in the government and either convince the Viceroy to play nice with us, or remove him from office. His family has been in charge of this planet for too long, and look where it’s gotten us.”
Hera had been staring off into space, but she abruptly turned back to face the others and said, “Ana, you are absolutely certain Fox is part of a movement to assassinate the Viceroy because of his stance on the Gifted?” There was such intensity in her eyes Ana almost feared being burned by it.
“I can only tell you what I saw in that brief moment we were connected. When I was linked to him, he had the thought in his mind, but I can’t swear it means it’s actually true. It could be a dream he had, or an errant thought caused by whatever drugs he was on, or something else entirely. I’m more of a reader than a psychic.”
Hera pursed her lips in disappointment but didn’t reprimand Ana over this lack of specificity.
“What are those things you’re carrying?” Lolly asked her, mostly to the break the tense silence between them.
Ana frowned down at the metal brackets she had set on the table in front of her, and at the ring of chips still clutched in her hand. She had forgotten about them entirely until now, though they slipped around her sweaty palm.
“I grabbed them off of Fox when he was trying to kill me,” she admitted. “These two brackets become a sword when they’re activated…well, Max knows more about them than me. Also, there’s a knife stuck in one of the support beams down in the basement, which Fox threw through the door after us. It looks like standard issue military gear, nothing special, so we left it there for now.”
“My knowledge of ion-swords is—” Max started at the same time Lolly blurted out, “You stole weapons off a Provo-Major?”
Hera motioned for Lolly to be quiet and gave the metal brackets an appraising glance, much more interested in them than she had been before.
Max began again. “I don’t really know much about them, just what the other Major told me,” he admitted, glossing over Topher’s name this time. “There were a few different brackets on Fox’s belt—for different-sized ion-swords, I think. The ends are polarized to the hilt in some way, because they float into position on their own when the hilt is activated. And because the magnetic field in my cell interfered with whatever field they generate, the sword fell apart when he came into my cell.”
“How do you activate it?” Hera asked curiously, and Ana picked up the hilt and grasped it firmly to show her. When her grip was tight enough, the metal bracket on the table floated through the air and rotated into position, locking into place in midair as the orange light flared to life between the two ends. Most of the people at the table jumped in surprise, and Lolly said, “I’ve seen that on television before, in the old war footage.”
Hera nodded and said, “We now know the name of it and a bit about how it works, which is an advantage we lacked before.” She moved her hand slowly closer to the orange light, stopping when it hovered just above the beam. “No heat coming off of it, but I suppose it is a high enough intensity to cut through most common materials.”
“I tried cutting Fox’s arm off with it,” Ana added helpfully, “but his armor blocked it. It obviously hurt him, but it didn’t cut through him at all.”
Max shrugged this off and said, “The armor will probably hold up to almost anything. Only a few people on the whole planet are allowed to know its composition or do maintenance on it, and if you believe rumors, they aren’t allowed to ever leave the Augenspire.”
“If the ion-sword isn’t even hot, how is it any good at cutting through things?” Lolly’s husband asked skeptically. “I assumed it was a cauterizing weapon of some sort, burning through materials and sealing the cut behind it.”
Ana shrugged and said, “I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s very stable light. When I tried to cut Fox with it, the places where the ion-sword made contact burst away in scattered light, leaving a hole in the middle of the sword, which almost immediately filled with fresh light, but still. It makes me think that the light source is in the hilt itself and is just constantly being refreshed as it takes hits and scatters, though our technologists can probably tell us for sure.”
The others contemplated this for a long moment until Hera said, “A problem for another day. What else did you take from Fox?” Her eyes were on the ring in Ana’s hand, and she brought it forward and set it on the table.
At first she hadn’t known what the little electronic chips all around the ring were, because she hadn’t had much time to get a good look at them when she was fighting for her life. Both ends of each ring were capped with little plastic snaps to protect them from damage, but as she got a closer look at all the intricate circuitry and the miniscule labels etched into them, they could only be one thing.
“Holy shit,” Max blurted out into the silence. “Ana, don’t tell me you stole a Provo-Major’s Talents tonight.”
“Max…” Ana said softly, her fingers and toes strangely numb with awe. “I think I stole a Provo-Major’s Talents tonight.”
And not just one or two of them, which would have been an unheard of achievement.
She’d stolen the entire set.
Well, if we didn’t have their attention before, we do now.
8
Jessamine Elaria
Jessamine sprang awake at the sound of banging on her bedroom door and lurched out of bed reflexively, landing on the floor on her knees and using the side of the bed for cover as she grabbed the dagger and shield-stick from beneath the mattress pad. She blinked through her lightheadedness at having rolled out of bed so quickly and gripped the narrow black rod so it could register her fingerprints and vital signs. The reassuring buzz of the shield springing to life filled her ears, though of course it wasn’t the kind of shield one could see with the naked eye.
Her brain finally caught up and she realized this wasn’t an assassination attempt. No one was in the room with her, and surely a killer wouldn’t be banging on the outer door of her quarters to notify her of their presence before breaking in.
The shield might be invisible, but the weight of it had increased exponentially since she activated it—the unfortunate byproduct of using a shield-stick. It was older technology, though still effective against most basic weapons, but all of the energy pulses and magnetic routing on it created a high counter-force, which translated as weight on the shield-stick itself. Jessamine imagined it feeling similar to the old movies from Earth, where people carried actual wooden and metal shields in combat.
Her armor had better shielding on it, and the weight was dispersed across her entire body, making it much more tolerable to carry around when activated—and without requiring a hand to hold it in upright—but she didn
’t sleep in her armor.
She got to her feet and deactivated the shield-stick, holding it loosely in the same hand gripping the dagger. She spit a half-curled strand of red hair out of her mouth as she crossed the length of her bedroom and through the open double-doors leading to the foyer. Now in the main sitting room of her private quarters, she could hear what the Hanna was yelling through the other side of her closed door.
“Vicerina! There’s been an emergency; you must wake up! The Provo-Major are assembling in the High Chamber!”
Jessamine paused with her hand on the doorknob, surprised. The High Chamber was typically only in times of great emergency.
She pulled open the door and faced the attendant on the other side, one of the select staff members allowed onto the top floor to serve the ruling family. This was Jessamine’s personal assistant, and had been since she was a child. Hanna was wide-eyed and plainly terrified, and Jessamine swallowed her own worry of the unknown awaiting her.
“How soon will they be assembled in the High Chamber?” Jessamine asked in a businesslike tone, forcing herself to suppress her emotions and deal with the issue at hand.
“Immediately, Vicerina,” the woman replied. “There are four Provo-Major out on assignment right now, but the emergency coms have been activated to call them back.”
Jessamine raised her eyebrows in surprise. In a sufficiently fast speeder, they could return from any part of the planet in less than twelve minutes. She had no idea how long ago they had been summoned, but it didn’t leave her much time to prepare.
“I understand,” Jessamine said, though she didn’t. “Thank you for alerting me.”
Hanna inclined her head and left, and Jessamine shut the door and hurried back into her bedroom to change clothing. If her father was assembling his Provo for an unscheduled meeting at midnight, this was definitely not the sort of thing she should attend in her pajamas.