We had almost reached the exit when I saw Rand’s dark head bobbing in and out of the crowd ahead of us. He fought his way upstream, shoving kids with trays as he pushed through the narrow doorway. I turned to Elle who switched her grip to balance her tray on one arm and held out the other for mine, and when my hands were free I grabbed Rand by the shoulders and planted his feet firmly on the floor. The guard had stopped droning, and Rand had his full attention.
“Hey kid, calm down. What’s going on?”
He looked up at me for just a second, then his face screwed up and he fell against my chest. He was crying.
Aw, hell. I glanced at Karen whose face was tight.
Somebody’s dead. One of his friends.
One of the kids?
Yeah.
Aw, hell.
I took him by the shoulders and pulled him away from me, giving him what I hoped was a comforting squeeze while shook him a little. “Snap to, okay, buddy? You can’t do this here. Straighten up.”
I felt like an asshole. You shouldn’t have to say that to a little kid who’s just lost a friend. You shouldn’t have to deal with things like little kids losing friends and guys with automatic weapons looking like they’re ready to pounce.
“You got that under control?” the guard barked at me.
“Yes, sir. We’re fine. Sorry, sir.”
I turned Rand around to walk in front of me. All the other kids had spun back around when the guard spoke and we were moving in quick, orderly fashion. I kept my hands on Rand’s shoulders as I marched him out and over to a table and sat him down next to me. The girls followed and sat across from us. I knew it about killed Karen not to cuddle him.
Karen and Rand were about as tight as siblings could be. They came here when Karen and I were five and Rand was only two. I think their parents might have coped with having a telepath around, but having a toddler literally bouncing off the walls probably made them glad for the excuse of the Ability-Affected Persons Civil Responsibility Disclosure Act—the law that required citizens to notify the government of suspected Talents. It also required parents to allow them to be taken to State Schools to be trained under the authority of the National Institutes for Ability Control.
The last few years had been especially hard on them—
more for Karen, I think. She and I had turned twelve and were moved up to Senior Section together, while Rand was left behind in Intermediate. We were hardly able to see him at all until he got old enough to catch up to us again. Karen had taken a big step back from him, and that was hard on her too, but she knew she couldn’t keep fussing over him. We were too old for that. NIAC let us socialize, let us form friendships, but they frowned on deep relationships that might get in the way of their own agenda. If two people seemed to care more about each other than they cared about getting along with NIAC and sticking to the program, well, there were a bunch of other State Schools a kid could be transferred to. Got a problem with that? Then there was always Detention.
Elle slid my tray across to me and I shoved my paper napkin at Rand. “All right now, mop up, kid. Take it easy.
This ain’t the place and you know it, so man up.” That sounded harsh. It was harsh. But I just couldn’t let him make a scene and show weakness. Not in front of the guards, not in front of so many other Talents, kids he’d be facing off against on the field or in the classroom, who’d be looking for weaknesses to exploit in order to impress the instructors. I kept my hand clamped to his shoulder, and that was all the support I could offer.
Karen’s face had a look of intense concentration. She was sorting through Rand’s jumbled thoughts, trying to get the whole story. “Eat your lunch,” I told her sharply, jolting her out of her study. “And that goes double for you, kid.
Take mine, I’ll go get another.” I shoved my tray in front of Rand.
“I’m not hungry,” he whined.
“Ask me if I care. You’ve been bouncing around like a maniac and I’m sure you put in a good workout before you got your bad news. So eat something, whether you like it or not, or you’ll crash and burn before the day’s over.”
“Says the guy who was dodging fireballs.” Elle’s tray slid across the table and stopped in front of me. “You eat, and listen to your own advice. I’ll get another.” She was gone before I could argue.
“Come on, kid, let’s dig in. We’ll talk this out later. I promise.” I was more than ready to lead by example. A big guy like me needs a lot of calories in the first place, and morphing, holding the more complicated forms under stress, dodging fireballs, getting healed…I was starving and if I didn’t fill up now I was gonna tank big-time before food was offered again.
* * *
“Did I mention what a bad idea this is?” I reached up and adjusted the tag in the neck of uniform shirt I was wearing. It was itching my neck.
“Only five or six times,” said Elle, who was walking beside me along the quiet, dimly lit corridor.
On her other side, Karen grunted irritably. “But you’ve been thinking it non-stop. At this point I think I’d prefer your daydreams about—”
“Hey now,” I interrupted on cue. Karen wasn’t really about to out me in front of Elle, she just wanted to annoy me.
But what did she expect? That I would be thrilled when the two of them snuck out of the Girls’ Dorm and came looking for me, bearing the dirty laundry of NIAC personnel? I’d said it then and I’d say it again, sneaking around trying to find information about the story Rand had told us was a bad idea.
“Please,” Karen drawled, “don’t say it again.”
“Just keep your nose in your clipboard and look officious.”
“Is that even a word?” Elle asked.
“It is,” I told her. Sure, I liked hanging out and joking with my friends, but with Karen wearing the white lab coat of a NIAC researcher or technician, me disguised as a guard, Elle walking between us as the subject under study, the three of us so where we were not supposed to be, and lighthearted banter was not where my head was.
“This is it,” Karen said, stopping in front of a door. She looked around. “No cameras, and I don’t hear anyone nearby.”
“That’s good, because if anyone hears this, we’re gonna have some explaining to do.” The form I had taken was one of the guards I was saw fairly often, a guy pretty close to my own size and muscle mass. Unfortunately, the girls had brought me a uniform, but no boots and all I had were my sneakers. They were black and would probably pass if anyone stopped us, but for this, it was gonna hurt. “Stand back.” I snapped a kick at the lock. Son of a… Had to kick it twice before the door swung inward. We hurried in.
Elle wrapped her hands around the busted lock and closed her eyes. When she pulled them away the door looked good as new. She shut the door and locked us in. I let myself morph back to my real form with a sigh of relief.
“Ethan, these file cabinets are locked.”
“Of course they are.” I broke those locks and we commenced rifling. “I got some more out of Rand before I finally got him to sleep. His friend in the Intermediates told him that they took five kids almost two weeks ago. They came back a week ago with their heads shaved, bandages on their scalps, and acting strange. Over the last week, two of them, his friend Chaz and some other kid, collapsed with seizures and died. Now they’ve notified five more kids in the Section that they’ve been selected for a special project. It’s supposed to start Monday.”
“That’s pretty much what I got out of his head earlier—
except it was a lot messier than your version,” Karen confirmed.
“Anderson’s got something to do with it.” Elle got our attention with that one. She was sitting on the desk with a file labeled Confidential. “What happened to Rand’s friend is a later phase in an experiment that started at Everlast. The round of…procedures—the surgeries they did two weeks ago—the results haven’t been what they expected. So they’ve flown Anderson in, as a successful test subject, so the doctors involved can
study him before the next round.”
“Test subject for what? What kind of surgeries?”
“They’re doing brain implants. Computer chips. For mind control.”
We all let that sink in for a moment. It made sense. Who would these paranoid monsters want to control more than a Talent who had the power to control them?
“It does make sense.” Karen said. “It felt like there was something really wrong with that Anderson guy—”
“You’re telling me,” Elle growled in a dry tone.
“More than just being a creep, though. I wasn’t sure how to describe it, but it was like…not all his thoughts were his own. Now the one about you—that was all him, all horny guy with no respect. That was about showing off. Getting away with something like that—approved by an instructor even—that’s one of the few shows of power he’s capable of.
And power’s important to him because he feels powerless.
He feels…leashed.”
“You sound like an empath.”
“I’m just trying to put clearer words to it. His thought is kind of non-verbal a lot of the time.”
“Ok, whatever,” I ground out. I didn’t want to talk about this guy, let alone hear about his feelings or how his evil little mind worked. I still wanted to pound him into the ground. “Anything else in those files, Elle?”
“Yeah, but I don’t even know what I’m reading.” She looked at Karen. “We’re going to have to take this back to Angeline.”
“No,” I said, “no, no, no. I don’t care if she does understand everything she reads, we’re not stealing files.”
“Well, I guess we could always bring Angeline down here,” Karen pondered. “We’d probably need two ‘guards’ to pull that off. Think you get another one of the guys to help out?”
“You want to sneak five people around the restricted zone after lights out?”
“He’s kinda cute when he’s about to explode. Don’t you think he’s kinda cute, Elle?”
“Give him a break. Look, Ethan, I understand your concern—”
“Oh, I’m real glad to hear that.”
“—but kids are dying. Little kids. Are dead. These,” she held up the files, “are definite plans for hacking into more little kids’ heads and cutting into their brains, making them into slaves of—“
“Okay, okay. Get off your moral high-horse before you crack your head. I get it. But I get to sit next to you on the bus ride to Everlast.”
I couldn’t believe I just said that. I felt my cheeks get hot. Elle blushed. Behind a file folder, Karen rolled her eyes at me.
“Get what you’re getting and let’s get out of here,” I snapped.
* * *
“Okay, we go up this wall. There’s an access door on the roof that’s going to get us in real close to where they’re housing Anderson.”
The girls hadn’t wasted any time getting Angeline to explain the file to them. Elle had already been ready to go on a crusade for these kids, and Angeline had told her she believed she might have the very Talent that could help them. So without me as the voice of reason, they came up with this great plan to visit Anderson, which had Elle and me staring up the side of this building the next night.
Elle squinted up and tugged on her braid. “Ethan, I can’t climb that.”
“I know, don’t worry about that. We can do this two ways. I could climb up and lower down a rope and then pull you up. But you’d have to wait down here by yourself while I made climb. I think it would be better if I just carried you up on my back. If…uh…that’s okay with you.”
“You can do that?”
“Uh...yeah.” I felt like an idiot. I didn’t want to sound like I was bragging or showing off or something, but I wanted her to understand she’d be safe. “Look, I’m a shapeshifter, right? It pretty much means I can give myself as much muscle mass as I need. The only thing is that I’ll need my arms, so you’ve got to be sure to hold on. It shouldn’t take too long, though.”
“Yeah, okay, I can do that.”
I turned around and Elle clambered onto my back, wrapping her arms around my neck, legs around my waist, and making me really glad Karen wasn’t here to read my thoughts. I leapt up for the first handhold, testing our weight, and then started climbing.
“Is this why you didn’t want to bring Karen?” Elle asked in my ear.
“Karen doesn’t have any business climbing buildings in the middle of the night. Not that you do either.”
“You’re very protective of her.”
What’s that supposed to mean?
“I guess. I mean, yeah, I am. Do you know why I’m on probation?”
“What do you mean, ‘on probation’?”
“I mean, like, one more strike and I’m on the next bus to Everlast. You didn’t know that?”
“Why would they send you to Everlast, Ethan? You never do anything wrong.”
“Nothing except sneak around the restricted zone after hours, steal files, carry girls up the sides of buildings.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah.” I pulled us over the edge of the roof. Elle slipped away from me and I shook out my arms, let my form settle, caught my breath, while she sat beside me in the shadows. I wanted to take a minute to let my form settle, so this was probably as good a time as any to clear this up. “I’m sorry, I just figured you and Karen talk so much… Don’t look so worried. It’s not a big deal, I just thought, since you asked about Karen and me—”
“I didn’t mean to—”
I cut her off, figuring we didn’t have all night to do the awkward word dance thing. “When I came here, I was one of those kids who had a lot of trouble controlling their Talent. I had a really bad temper and my Talent feeds on that. On stuff like anger and frustration. So I was like any other kid with a bad temper who had trouble controlling it and sometimes lashed out, except that when I lashed out, I lashed way out.
And it may not surprise you to learn that coming here didn’t really help out with that a whole lot.”
“What? You take a little kid away from his family and put him into a military institution with a bunch of freaks and he doesn’t immediately find inner peace?”
“I know, right? What can I tell you, I was a tough case.
Long story short, Karen decided to get into my head and start saving me from myself. She said I was supposed to have an inner voice of reason or something, and since I lacked it, she was going to be it. And she’s pretty much been in my head ever since.”
“She never said.”
“I may not give her enough credit on the whole privacy thing. She really, literally, saved my life. It was close, though. I was really angry and it took me a long time to get it under control. It’s been years since my temper’s been a problem, but they’re still waiting for me to screw up again.”
Yeah, trouble controlling my temper. That’s all there was to it. This was such an over-simplification I was afraid my nose was gonna start growing.
“I don’t think I’ve ever even heard you raise your voice.
I almost think you’re making all this up.”
“Anyway, I didn’t let Karen come because we didn’t need her for this and it seemed too risky to try to look after both of you. I did go on record, right, about hating this whole idea? I don’t think any of us should be doing this.”
“Yeah, you mentioned. So, um, thanks for doing this. I know you didn’t have to get involved.”
“Why are we doing this? I mean, why are you? What possible reason could you have for wanting to help Anderson?”
“It’s not so much him, it’s the little kids, you know?
Angie thinks I can actually help them. It’s hard for me to believe she’s right about that, but if she is, I’ve got to do it.
But I want to try it on Anderson first. So I don’t get their hopes up. And Anderson…he’s a jerk and stuff, but he’s still a person. And he’s a Talent—one of us, not one of them, you know?”
“Yeah
, I guess.” I found my feet and held out my hand to her. “Let’s go fix the jerk.”
A few minutes later we were in Anderson’s private room and he was looking at us skeptically.
“You’re going to fix me? Fix what?”
“She’s talking about trying to disconnect,” I jerked my chin in an imitation of his tick, “that chip,” I did it again, “in your head.”
He glared at me. “That’s impossible.”
“What have you got to lose? Or do you enjoy being their pet monkey? Or is it more like a robot?”
“Ethan, cut it out,” Elle said. “Look, I fix things, okay. I can see how they used to be and I can fix them. Like the lock on the door. Or if you broke a dish. I think I might be able to see how your brain was, before the chip, and make it that way again. The chip would still be there, but we’re talking about…disconnecting it from the circuit.”
“So if this works, it will still seem to them like it’s receiving their signals and delivering them, but I won’t hear them anymore?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what your experience will be. I don’t even know if this will work.”
“And why are you even here?”
“Because they’ve started working on a bunch of little kids here, and they’ve got a bunch more they’re starting in on next week,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. So you’re using me as a guinea pig before you go mess with the kids’ brains.”
“Basically,” Elle said honestly.
“Yeah, all right. Do your thing.”
“All right, just sit back and try to relax,” Elle said, moving around behind his chair. Her hands settled on his shorn hair and I sort of wished Karen was around to tell me what he was thinking. Elle’s eyes were closed, and she frowned in concentration. Anderson continued looking at me, but then his eyes lost focus. His pupils dilated. Elle’s hands were moving over his scalp and then I saw a tear fall from the corner of her eye. I got up just in time to catch her as she stumbled back from Anderson’s chair.
“What? What is it? Did that hurt you?”
She reached up brushed the corner of her eye with the heel of her hand. “No. No, I’m fine, Ethan.” But she was leaning into me and I wasn’t sure. “Anderson? Are you okay?”