Open Minds
Author: Susan Kaye Quinn
Date: 2013-12-24 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Young Adult; Dystopia; Science Fiction; Paranormal; Fantasy; Romance; Fiction; Supernatural; Paranormal Romance
Description: From Book 1: When everyone reads minds, a secret is a dangerous thing to keep. Sixteen-year-old Kira Moore is a zero, someone who can't read thoughts or be read by others. Zeros are outcasts who can't be trusted, leaving her no chance with Raf, a regular mindreader and the best friend she secretly loves. When she accidentally controls Raf's mind and nearly kills him, Kira tries to hide her frightening new ability from her family and an increasingly suspicious Raf. But lies tangle around her, and she's dragged deep into a hidden underworld of mindjackers, where having to mind control everyone s

Table of Contents

- mindjack short story collection

- author's note

- mind games
- leaving gurnee
- jackertown slang
- raf and julian

- the handler

- chapter ONE
- chapter TWO
- chapter THREE

- the scribe

- chapter ONE
- chapter TWO
- chapter THREE
- chapter FOUR

- keeper

- chapter ONE
- chapter TWO
- chapter THREE
- chapter FOUR
- chapter FIVE
- chapter SIX

- seeds of promise
- DELETED SCENE kestrel's interrogation
- DELETED SCENE drinking the water

- the locksmith

- chapter ONE
- chapter TWO
- chapter THREE
- chapter FOUR
- chapter FIVE

- other works

- about the AUTHOR

Table of Contents
mindjack short story collection

author's note

mind games
leaving gurnee
jackertown slang
raf and julian
the handler

chapter ONE

chapter TWO

chapter THREE

the scribe

chapter ONE

chapter TWO

chapter THREE

chapter FOUR

keeper

chapter ONE

chapter TWO

chapter THREE

chapter FOUR

chapter FIVE

chapter SIX

seeds of promise

DELETED SCENE kestrel's interrogation

DELETED SCENE drinking the water
the locksmith

chapter ONE

chapter TWO

chapter THREE

chapter FOUR

chapter FIVE

other works
about the AUTHOR

Mindjack Short Story Collection copyright © 2015 by Susan Kaye Quinn

Mind Games copyright © 2012

The Handler copyright © 2012

The Scribe copyright © 2012

Keeper copyright © 2014

The Locksmith copyright © 2015

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

Covers by D. Robert Pease
www.WalkingStickBooks.com

and

Steven Novak
www.novakillustration.com

MINDJACK SHORT STORY COLLECTION

This collection of novellas, scenes, flash fiction, and other materials are companion works to the Mindjack Trilogy of novels (Open Minds, Closed Hearts, Free Souls).

Mindjack Saga

READING ORDER

Original Trilogy - Open Minds, Closed Hearts, Free Souls

Mindjack Short Story Collection

Stories in this set are presented in reading order

(with a note for when the novels should be read)

Susan Kaye Quinn's Bestselling YA SF stories...

Singularity Series

The Legacy Human (Book 1)

The Duality Bridge (Book 2)

The Stories of Singularity #1-4 (Novella Box Set)

The Illusory Prophet (Book 3)... coming 2016

Mindjack Novels

Open Minds (Book 1)

Closed Hearts (Book 2)

Free Souls (Book 3)

Mindjack Short Story Collection (Novella Box Set)

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Writing the Mindjack Trilogy has been a wonderful adventure. Part of the fun has been taking side trips with the characters, diving into their background, putting them in settings they normally wouldn't encounter, and imagining scenes that never happened in the novels… but could have. This collection pulls all those side trips into one guided tour of the mindjack universe. I've put them in the order I recommend that you read, which isn't always in a strict chronology of the story, but close. After all, I don't want to spoil any of the discoveries along the way.

I hope you enjoy these tasty tidbits as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Mind Games is a short prequel to the first novel in the Mindjack Trilogy, Open Minds. Told from Raf's point-of-view, this novella not only shows the difficulties Raf had, being in love with the only girl in school who didn't read minds, but also how the mindreading world works from the perspective of a reader. Which is definitely different than how jackers see things.

Summary: Raf, a regular mindreader, wants to take Kira—the only girl in school who doesn’t read minds—to the mindware Games, but his friends have other plans.

Every time I see her, she surprises me.

Not in a charming or tantalizing way, although there’s no question she captivates me. She surprises me because there’s no whisper warning of her presence like with everyone else in Warren Township High, where the dull roar of thoughts from the throng of students in the hallway practically drowns out my own. Sometimes she’ll appear by my side without warning. Or like today, I catch a glimpse of her retreating down the hall. But I never hear her thoughts first. Even if she and I were the only two people in the entire school, I still wouldn’t be able to read her mind. And she can’t read mine either.

And that’s exactly the problem.

Her chocolate brown hair sweeps along her back as she darts between students hurrying to first period. She hesitates as she moves between them, pulling her arms close to her side and trying not to touch anyone. She’s walking away from me, so I tilt my head and let my eyes linger as she clutches her backpack and weaves through the crowd, head down, not looking back. She’s wearing shorts today, and I thank the fickle gods of spring weather for making it unseasonably warm.

Man, you have got to stop thinking about that zero. Tony’s thoughts break through the background din, and I don’t have to glance behind me to know he’s coming up fast.

Her name is Kira. I stab the grimy buttons for my locker code and the door springs open. I shove my gym bag inside, burying the muddy soccer cleats I forgot from the day before.

Tony leans against the paint-chipped locker next to mine, wearing his Blue Devils jersey. Yeah, well, people are starting to think you’re a praver.

Now that I’m paying attention, I catch the sideways thoughts from a trio of girls gliding past with their synchronized steps and identical band shirts. Praver. Ew. Get a real girlfriend, sicko.

Tony throws a glare at the girls. Raf’s not a praver, freaks. What are you? Triplets gone bad?

Their thoughts slither over each other and mix together. In your dreams, Tony… Man, it’s getting worse. Tony scrubs his short-cropped hair with one hand. I know you practically grew up with the girl, but that really doesn’t make it any better.

Thanks for the reminder. I crane to look down the hallway again, but Kira is gone. Next time you need a punch in the face, let me know.

Tony shakes his head. He’s my teammate and co-captain and we spend a lot of time in each other’s thoughts, running plays and devising new psych strategies. He’s always got my back.

Sorry. I quietly shut the cool metal door of my locker so it won’t crash through the cacophony of thoughts filling the hall. I know you’re only looking out for me.
I just wish… My mind flits over the things I wish for Kira and me, a rapid slideshow of kisses, my hands skimming her back, and an image of her in a slinky formal dress after the mindware Games. I quickly shut it down, not wanting that private longing made public, but it’s too late. Mental snickers click from two guys in tight collar jackets across the hall as they echo back an exaggerated picture of Kira in an even more revealing dress. Then they shuffle along, more concerned about making plans for the weekend than harassing me.

Tony lets out a long, low breath. Man, you’ve got it bad. I know. I get it. She’s seriously hot. His sympathy is a shallow pool. But you’ve got to get a grip. Mentally, she’s just a kid, not to mention that you’ll never know what she’s thinking. How can you trust someone like that?

Kira could still go through the change. She’s not even sixteen yet. There’ve been others that have changed late… But my thoughts drift past Tony as he eyes a blonde with mile long legs and short shorts skittering down the hall. She’s barely in range and her name pops into my head. Jessica. She’s a cheerleader from last year’s championship games.

There are plenty of other girls. Tony’s thoughts grab her attention and she tosses her long hair back to get a look at us. Proper ones that have gone through the change and that would be happy to share more than thoughts with you.

Jessica pictures herself in my arms, fingers tangled in my hair. Anytime, Raf. Anytime. Then she bounces out of range.

Tony sends me a smile, and I shiver.

I don’t know this girl, but that doesn’t stop her from wanting to entwine emotions with me in the way that only touching brings. If it were just the physical part, that would be… acceptable. But the idea of sharing emotions with a girl I barely know: it chills a spot deep inside me. While the possibility of doing that with Kira makes my skin feel like it’s scorching the air.

Tony whacks the back of my head, careful to avoid any skin-on-skin contact. Man, I mean it! His thoughts are cut with frustration. It’s not mesh to think about her that way. If you keep it up, people will think you’re actually doing those things, not just fantasizing. The rumor mill is already whispering. He points at me as he backs down the hall. You’ve got a good thing going, Raf. Don’t ruin it.

He’s talking about the popularity that follows me around like a stray I can’t shake, still lingering from last year’s championship win. Girls like Jessica think openly about me and they’re not shy about the things they’d like to do. The first few times I stumbled across their blatant fantasies, I was flattered, and not a little intrigued. But that was before I knew what touching really meant; how deep the sharing went inside my head; the hollow feeling it left behind with girls I didn’t care for. Now I do my best to ignore the offers. If having a reputation as a praver would keep that at bay, it might be worth considering.

I sigh and lumber toward first period. No matter what the mindreaders of Warren Township High think of me, it still won’t change the fact that Kira considers me her best friend. And she would never cross the line to something more unless—until, I tell myself—she changes.

Mr. Friedman’s booming recitation of the opening line of The Iliad crashes over the thought chaos of my first period class. His words are Latin, but his thoughts, which aren’t a language at all, beam the buried meaning of the ancient language directly to our minds. The students’ minds quickly synchronize with Mr. Friedman’s and beat a perfect mental cadence of the poem. Next year, they’ll only mind-teach, but for now, I’m glad for the verbal drumbeat that helps train our minds. It draws my thoughts to Achilles’ anger and away from Kira.

At least until Latin zooms by and the class breaks apart into disparate thoughts again. Then I realize that English is next, my one class of the day with her. I sweep my scribepad off my desk and shove it into my pack. Coach’s dexterity drills do double duty as I zip through the halls, ignoring stray thoughts.

I reach English early and pause in the doorway. The bustle of minds in the hall gives way to scattered thought conversations around the room and Mr. Hampton mind-talking to students up front. Kira scribbles on her scribepad, hair hanging down and hiding her face. A buffer zone surrounds her, an empty seat in every direction. The other students don’t want to partner with the only girl in class—in the whole school, actually—who doesn’t read minds. It’s been going on all year, but it still makes me cringe. She doesn’t have to read thoughts to notice the ring of space around her.

I think of them all as saved seats for me.

I sail down the aisle, ignoring the gaze of two girls in the next row and willing Kira to look up. The metal chair creaks when I drop into the seat behind her, and Kira peeks over her shoulder, giving me a wide smile that sends my heart soaring.

The stocky guy behind me mentally chuckles and his name—Dennis—pops into my head along with his mocking thoughts. I focus on Kira’s clear blue eyes and the tiny freckle on the side of her cheek, like a morning star that only shows up at certain times of the day. The familiar scent of soap and lavender hangs in the air near her, beating back the over baked sneaker smell coming from Dennis.

“Hi.” I hope my whispered voice won’t attract more attention than my thoughts already have. I stow my gear under my seat.

“Hey,” she says, not quite softly enough. The two girls in the next row start thinking about her.

I can’t wait until school is over.

It’s so creepy having her around all the time.

I know, right? You never know what evil things she’s thinking.

I hear she runs through the neighborhoods and peeps in people’s windows. Snooping.

I resist the urge to glare at them, but they hear even that. One scowls at me. Loser.

Praver, thinks the other. Maybe you help her snoop.

Shut up. I focus on Kira, hoping the girls’ thoughts don’t show on my face, where Kira can see them. “Just two more days,” I say. “Then a whole summer of freedom.”

She sighs and glances at the two girls. For a wild moment, I’m afraid she can actually hear their thoughts, but her face settles into a mask of patience. “Yeah,” she says. “I’m in serious need of a break from all the fun, you know? The weekend can’t get here soon enough.”

“Do you have any plans?” I ask. “For the summer, I mean.”

She lifts an eyebrow. I spend a lot of weekends at Kira’s house, when the team isn’t travelling or competing in tournaments, but this Saturday everyone’s going to the Fuse Games. Everyone except Kira, because she wouldn’t exactly fit in at a mindware tournament. Although I would love to see her in one of the Game suits that the girls wear, all skin-tight silver interface cloth and not much else. I squelch that image and focus on Kira’s lips.

They’re moving—she’s said something and I missed it. “Sorry?” I ask.

“You okay, there, soccer stud?” She pretends to inspect my head. “One too many headers in practice yesterday?”

Mental laughter from Dennis rings in my head and I’m glad Kira can’t hear it. “Sorry, just… a lot on my mind.” Which is true. Because I want to ask her to the Gamesdance, but I can’t imagine any way of asking without bringing a look of horror to her face. “So, what are you doing this summer?”

“Hanging out at home, most likely,” she says. “Trying to keep Seamus out of trouble and taking care of Gram.” She traces the non-slip pattern of her desk. “I have a lot of reading to catch up on. How about you? I’ve got some old sim-casts I want to watch. Maybe you can help me get through the backlog?”

She smiles up at me, and I’d like nothing more than to spend the summer with Kira watching old sim-casts. Or pretty much anything else she’d like to do. But I’m leaving, which makes my chest pull tight. “Actually, I’m going away to a camp in Indiana for the summer. I’ll have a chance to practice with the Twisters, and…” I swallow. The fading smile on Kira’s face is ripping me up inside.

“Oh,” she says. “Um, wow. That’s… great. The Twisters, huh? Is that one of your new synchrony bands?”

I laugh, a strangled release of breath. The Twisters are World Cup champions three years in a row. She knows this. “Yeah, they’re an amazing band and they’re letting me play. They heard what a great guitar player I am.”

“Right,” she says. “Like you could actually play a musical instrument.”

Her slim fingers are well-practiced in playing the saxophone, nothing like my clumsy mitts. “Hey, I’m not bad at the Sync Rock Games.” I regret it as soon as her face shadows. I had to mention the Games. What is wrong with me?

She puts on a fake smile, the kind I can see right through. “Wow,” she says, grinning. “Rock hero and soccer champion. Must be hard being you. I bet you have to beat the fans off with a stick these days.”

Before I can say anything, Mr. Hampton’s voice reaches over the mind-noise of the room and yanks everyone’s attention to the front. “Take out your e-slates, class. I’m casting the instructions for your final. Remember, you’ll need your parents to sign off on your isolation while taking the test. No mindreading partners, no friends, no cheating.”

He starts to review the final, talking loudly to focus our mental chatter while drawing notes on the wireless board. The class synchronizes to his voice, and with everyone focusing on him, my stray thoughts aren’t noticed as much.

I study the sliver of Kira’s face that I can still see. Small lines radiate from the corners of her eyes as she studies the sheet Mr. Hampton has cast to our e-slates. Her shoulders cave in, making her slender frame take up even less space in her chair. Her legs pull forward, hiding her bare knees under the desk.

She’s drawing in on herself, as if hiding from the world inside her own skin.

Learning how to read Kira Moore has become a full time occupation for me. I want to know her thoughts, even if they are still trapped inside her head, hidden from the rest of the world. It started last fall when I realized that the girl I’d been friends with since Kindergarten made my heart beat like a crazed monkey whenever she came near. She started to disappear inside herself about the same time, after a pack of girls cornered her in the bathroom and inked a red zero on her cheek with a synth tattoo that took two months to wear off. A sour taste rises up in my throat at the memory. She laughed it off, but I couldn’t miss the red blotches on her face and the tear streaks down it. The need to hug her then was a crazy ache inside me, but I didn’t have the nerve to try.

I run my hands over my face and try to focus on my e-slate.

Of all the girls in school, why did she have to be the one who didn’t change? There’s usually a kid every other year who never changes, whose brain never flips the switch from childhood to adolescence. But why did it have to be her? Every once in a while, Kira lashes out and slices someone to ribbons with that wicked wit of hers. But mostly it’s wearing her down, bit by bit, like a glittering stone made dull by an endless flow of water.

Suddenly, my reasons for spending the entire summer in Indiana sound hollow in my head. A chance to run around a field, kicking a ball? Even with the best kickers in the world, it pales next to watching old sim-casts with Kira and convincing her that she’s important. That she has a place in the world.

A sharp thought from Mr. Hampton pulls me out of my day-dreaming. He doesn’t speak aloud, thank god. Are you so familiar with Lord of the Flies, Mr. Lobos Santos, that you don’t need to review it? It pulls mental twitters from the rest of the class.

My face heats up and I focus on his voice. He doesn’t miss a beat and continues to outline the contents of the final. We spend the rest of the period locked in a point by point review of Othello, which was torturous the first time I read it, as well as several poems I’m certain we never covered in class. Mental muttering around the room tells me I’m not the only one.

Why do we still read stories that predate the mindreading world, anyway? Othello is completely implausible. Everything in that story is built on lies and deception, something that wouldn’t last two minutes now. I can hardly keep my own thoughts private in a high school hallway, much less orchestrate the fall of an important leader. Besides, everyone knows politicians are the most trusted people on the planet—how could they possibly hide anything, being in constant contact with so many people?

While I mull the serious possibility that I will fail my English final, the soft tone of the bell breaks into Mr. Hampton’s review. As I dig my backpack out from under my chair, Kira is up and fleeing the classroom before I can say a word to her. By the time I manage to get my e-slate stuffed in my pack, she’s gone.

I search for her at lunch, but the swirling thoughts in the cafeteria make it difficult to concentrate. Veering between mind-numbing banality and heart-wrenching angst, it’s a rugby scrum of thoughts all tangled with one another, dancing through my head. I decide she’s skipped lunch to take a run, like she often does.

I grit my way through the rest of school, waiting for the final bell. Sprinting through the hall, I inadvertently bump a gangly kid with my bare arm, receiving a nasty mental curse in return. I think an apology, but don’t slow down, determined to reach Kira’s locker before she does. When I turn the corner, she’s there, digging around and pulling out her gym bag.

I stop to take a breath and try to calm my heart, not wanting to look like I sprinted across the school to see her. A cluster of students stand on the opposite side of the hall from her, and a couple of rich kids stroll past, holding hands through their Second Skin gloves. I have a flash of envy that draws a smirk from the boy. I wonder what it would be like to hold hands with Kira like that. I could, even without the Second Skin, since she’s not a mindreader yet. There wouldn’t be any rush of intimate emotion sharing, no mingling of hearts. Kira doesn’t have that emotional suit of armor to protect her from the pravers of the world who might want to take advantage of her. She won’t have it unless—until—she changes. Until then, she’s vulnerable to anyone who might want to run their hands over her. Suddenly, I’m rooted to the carpet, realizing that’s exactly what I want to do.

Maybe I’m a praver after all.

I second guess everything and sourness climbs up my throat. Maybe Tony is right. Maybe I shouldn’t think that way about her. Then Kira peers up from her locker. Her small smile unlocks my legs and I stumble forward, looking like an idiot. I wish more than ever that she could hear my thoughts, so I wouldn’t have to find the right words to say out loud. So she would just know what I think and how I feel. That I want more than anything for her to forget about what other people think. That I want her to come to the Gamesdance with me, my last night in town before I leave for Indiana.

“Hey,” I say. Wow, I’m incredibly brilliant and witty.

She sighs and examines her locker again before answering. “Hey.”

“Look, I was wondering if…”

Raf, Raf, Raf! There you are! The sound of my name pulls my attention behind me. It’s Jessica, the girl from the hall who wanted to run her hands through my hair. Tony said you would be here.

Tony’s not here. I move closer to the locker wall to let her pass, but she comes to a stop next to me. Her perfume is like a toxic cloud that makes my eyes water.

“And you must be Kira,” Jessica says out loud. Kira arches her eyebrows, mirroring the shock that must be on my face. Why is Jessica talking out loud? And to Kira? Are they friends? By Kira’s pinched look, I doubt it.

“Um, that would be me,” Kira says. I’m struggling to figure out what’s going on, glancing between them. Jessica’s thoughts are meant for me, even though she’s smiling at Kira. Tony says you need a date for the Gamesdance and that I would be the perfect girl for you.

Tony’s wrong. I’m not looking for a date. I don’t even know you.

We can certainly change that. Jessica beams a fake smile. “Kira, you’re so cute!” she says. “I could just pinch your cheeks if I had some Second Skin!” Tony says you need a real girl for the dance. Everyone knows you’re making a mistake with this zero, Raf. Just say yes, and I promise you’ll be glad you did.

My mouth drops open as I stare at her. I’m startled by the metallic bang of Kira slamming her locker shut. “I’ll take a pass on the cheek pinching,” Kira says, her voice dripping with ice. “Thanks for the offer, though. See ya around, Raf.” She turns to leave.

“Kira, wait!” I say, barely recovering from the crazy images in Jessica’s mind of me and her at the Gamesdance, slow dancing in formal wear. “I… I wanted to talk to you. About going to the Gamesdance.” I flash a look at Jessica. I don’t know what game you’re playing, but why don’t you go play it with Tony?

Well, that would defeat the purpose. Tony’s not the one who needs help, Raf, you are. Out loud, she says to Kira, “Oh! The Gamesdance! Are you going?”

“I wasn’t planning to.” Kira examines Jessica like she’s not sure if she’s crazy or just stupid. Then she looks at me. “Not quite my scene.”

“Oh, but it could be!” Jessica says. “You don’t need a guy to have fun. You don’t even have to play, you can just watch. There’s a group of us girls going together, to cheer the Gamers on. You should come with us!” Her voice is chipper and light, but her thoughts are filled with dark amusement. She’s enjoying this deception thing she’s doing with Kira, like it’s a shiny new toy, being able to lie. The bottom drops out of my stomach as she pictures her gang of friends tricking Kira into a darkened alley behind the Games. Come with me to the Gamesdance, Raf, or I’ll have Kira as my date.

“Wow,” Kira says, slightly bemused. “That’s really, um, great of you. What was your name again?”

Jessica’s smile is a hideous mask over the thoughts beneath. “Jessica!”

“Ok, Jessica.” Kira gives me a look that says, What in the world, Raf? “I guess that could be fun. Not sure what I’ll do, but I could give it a try.”

“No!” My outburst garners a frown from Kira. “I mean, I don’t think you’d enjoy it.” It sounds lame, but I don’t want to validate everything she’s been thinking about the world. How she doesn’t fit in. How she should assume everyone is out to get her—even though they are.

“Wait,” Kira says. “Didn’t you just say something about going to the Gamesdance?”

“No, Raf’s right.” Jessica schemes for a more devastating way to hurt Kira. My stomach churns. “The Gamesdance isn’t the place for you. You’ve never been, have you, poor thing? It’s not all that great. But we should do something girly and fun, just the two of us. How about shopping? Do you like to shop?”

“Not really.” Kira’s brows pull together.

“Not even for clothes?” Jessica gives a muted shriek. “I know! Makeovers!”

Kira looks uncertain, and my stomach starts to chew a hole in itself. Jessica glances at me. Take me to the Gamesdance, Raf, or I’ll make sure she has a good time with me and my friends.

My mouth goes dry. Jessica and her friends targeting Kira. All summer. While I’m gone. I won’t be here to ward them off or threaten them with retribution. Her brother Seamus will keep an eye on her, but he leaves for WestPoint soon. My mind spins. When is he leaving? Is it the beginning of summer or the end? I can’t remember…

Jessica smiles as she hears my doubts. My fears.

No. I drill into her eyes with mine. Leave her alone. “I don’t think Kira likes makeovers.”

Jessica’s smile grows. You know what I want. “Don’t be such a spoiler, Raf.”

The image of a bright red zero on Kira’s cheek swims up in my mind. Jessica sees it and smirks. I can’t tell whether she did it herself or if she’s echoing the images that circulated through the rumor mill for weeks afterwards.

I clench my fist, take a breath and let it out slow. Okay. Fine. I’ll go with you, if you promise to leave her alone. Belatedly, I tinge it with a threat of my own. If you hurt her, I’ll make sure you regret it.

“Hello?” Kira snaps her fingers in my face. “Still right here…” She looks annoyed. “And I can arrange my own playdates, Raf. Thanks for the help, though.”

Jessica has a cat-eats-bird smile of satisfaction. You won’t be sorry, Raf, I promise. She tosses a smile at Kira, like an afterthought. “See you later, Kira.” She says it brightly, but I hear the threat underneath it.

Jessica saunters down the hall, throwing extra sway in her walk. I glare at her back. You won’t be fooling anyone, Jessica. Everyone will know you blackmailed me into this. I’ll make sure of it.

Everyone will think I’m brilliant, she thinks without glancing back. I’ll be the girl that finally got you back on track, saved you from making a desperately tragic mistake with that zero.

I think several nasty curse words that would horrify my mother, but Jessica’s out of range. When she finally disappears around a corner, Kira folds her arms and fixes a stare on me. “So, you want to tell me what that was all about?” she says. “I swear your girlfriends are getting stranger all the time.”

My head whips back to her. “She’s not my girlfriend!”

“Really?” Kira says. “With the way she was looking at you, and you checking her out all the way to the corner?” She shrugs. “You could do worse, Raf. She seems nice and she’s cute in a trying-way-too-hard kind of way.”

My shoulders drop. “She’s not my girlfriend.” My voice is low, weak. Of course, that’s precisely the rumor Jessica will stir up after the Gamesdance. If I’m lucky, Kira won’t hear it. I grit my teeth. Tony is behind all of this, helping me out by stabbing me in the back.

“Whatever, Santos,” Kira says. “So, are you going to come over this Saturday to help me get through some of those sim-casts?”

Saturday? That’s the Gamesdance. The one I’m apparently going to with Jessica. “Um, no. I can’t, I’m… busy.”

Kira glances down the hall. “Right,” she says. “How about Sunday? No school on Monday. We can stay up late and eat that awesome popcorn my mom likes to buy from the Boy Scouts.”

“I’m…” I swallow. “I’m leaving on Sunday.”

“Oh.” Kira frowns and picks up her gym bag from the floor. “Well, I’m doing Mr. Hampton’s take home test tonight, along with my other finals. Finishing up early. Don’t really see the point in sticking around here, you know? With nothing to do but study, this zero’s getting some A’s and getting out.”

I grimace at her use of the word zero.

“I guess…” She pauses. “I guess this is goodbye then.” She puts on a million watt smile, the one she brings out when things are bleak and getting worse. “Well, have a nice summer, Raf. Have fun with the Twisters, and, you know, don’t break too many hearts in Indiana.” She turns to walk away down the hall.

I should say goodbye. I should tell her to stop, explain what really happened with Jessica. But I don’t say anything, just watch her go.

Maybe Tony is right. Maybe I need to stop waiting for Kira to go through the change. Maybe I need to forget about the fact that I know everything about her: the way she likes her hot cocoa lukewarm and her ice tea ice cold; that she likes her music classical and her runs long and strenuous. Maybe a summer in Indiana is just what I need to forget the way she makes my skin prickle and my heart pound. Maybe I should date someone like Jessica—only less horrible—to help me forget. Even if I doubt it would work.

But I’m certain of one thing: the next time I see Tony, I’m going to punch him in the face.

Kira and Raf’s story is just beginning!

If you haven't read Open Minds, I recommend you read that next.

Book One of the Mindjack Trilogy

When everyone reads minds, a secret is a dangerous thing to keep.

Sixteen-year-old Kira Moore is a zero, someone who can't read thoughts or be read by others. Zeros are outcasts who can't be trusted, leaving her no chance with Raf, a regular mindreader and the best friend she secretly loves. When she accidentally controls Raf's mind and nearly kills him, Kira tries to hide her frightening new ability from her family and an increasingly suspicious Raf. But lies tangle around her, and she's dragged deep into a hidden underworld of mindjackers, where having to mind control everyone she loves is just the beginning of the deadly choices before her.

Flash fiction is just a really short story—meant to be read in a flash (although it takes considerably longer to write). Hemingway's famous flash fiction (which may be an urban myth) evokes an entire story in just six words:

Baby Shoes. Never Worn. For Sale.

Leaving Gurnee is a bit of Mindjack flash fiction, although it is arguably a vignette rather than a story: it represents a scene that occurs between Open Minds and Closed Hearts. Kira refers to the events in Leaving Gurnee briefly, in Closed Hearts, but the events are never actually seen "on screen" in the novels. Leaving Gurnee is told from Xander's point-of-view (the 12-year-old changeling that Kira rescued), and in spite of being a vignette, I think it encapsulates the story of his character.

Xander didn’t sense the clan of mindjackers until it was too late.

Their minds plunged into his, making him fall to his knees. They jacked further into his head, and the soft living room carpet rushed up to meet his face. Through the ragged strands that tangled with his eyelashes, he saw Mrs. Moore hovering over her husband, who had slumped on the couch. The sim-cast Mr. Moore had been watching—Famous American Mindreaders of the 21st Century—still played soundlessly on the wall screen.

The jackers were in control of Xander’s body, but it still jerked involuntarily with the crack-slam sound echoing up the stairs from the first level of the house. Under the circumstances, crashing down the front door seemed a little dramatic. After all, they could have jacked someone to open the door for them and saved the Moore’s home from being damaged.

But Xander had a feeling that inflicting damage was why they were here, just like the haters that had trampled their lawn last week.

From his vantage point on the floor, he couldn’t see the boots stomping up the stairs, but they must have arrived at the top, judging by the way that Mrs. Moore jerked up from crying over her husband.

Run! Xander thought, but the jackers who had disabled his body—he could feel two of them firmly in his head—kept him from reaching out with his mind to link his thoughts to her. And his mouth was busy spilling drool on the carpet. He mentally pushed as hard as he could on the two mindjackers in his head, but they weren’t going anywhere.

Why hadn’t they jacked Mrs. Moore? She was just a mindreader, which meant she was easier to jack than him—Xander at least had some ability to push back. Three bulky figures in long, dark trench coats strode into his field of vision. They didn’t touch her, but Mrs. Moore dropped to the floor all the same, writhing in some kind of pain. Maybe it was only mental pain, not physical, but his wimpy twelve-year-old muscles wouldn’t do much good against them, even if he wasn’t paralyzed on the carpet and mentally locked inside his own head. Two of the clan members bent over Mr. Moore, and blue sparks arced from a small metallic device they held against his neck: tasing him, as if knocking him out wasn’t enough. The third jacker crossed his arms and watched Mrs. Moore’s dance of pain on the floor. A tear slid down to the carpet, blurring Xander’s vision.

At least Kira wasn’t home.

One of the jackers in his head seized on that thought, wrenching it up to the forefront of Xander’s mind.

No, no, no, Xander thought. Don’t think about her. Don’t think about her. He fought against the rock-hard presence of the jackers embedded in his brain, but it was like beating a boulder with a feather. Then Xander realized, with a sick hollowing out of his stomach, why they hadn’t just knocked him out. They must be looking for her: Kira, the world famous jacker who had rescued him and the other changelings from Agent Kestrel’s experimental lab. She had literally saved his life. She was the big sister he never had, and now was his chance to repay her. Protect her.

Only he couldn’t keep the jackers out of his head.

Boots stepped in front of his face, just inches from his nose, the leather tips smelling of spring rain from outside. Xander almost wished they would kick him in the face, rather than whatever they planned to do to his mind. Rough hands grasped him by the shoulder, and a thick muscular arm lurked under the sleeve of the jacker’s trench coat. Xander couldn’t see his face, not that he wanted to.

Where is she? Where is Kira Moore? The thoughts rang like commands in his head, but he resisted the compulsion that rippled through his mind to answer them. Tell them.

Xander mustered a focused thought and threw it at them. Why don’t you jack yourself?

Both jackers pressed deeper, and Xander gagged on their bitter mind-scents—the normal flavor of each jacker’s mind was overwhelmed with a sour bite of anger. A slithering feeling, like a snake crawling down his throat, made his insides twist as they probed through his memories. Searching, searching, replaying his memories like sim-casts on the screen of his mind. He tried throwing up old memories and deflecting the jackers into thoughts about Kira in other places. Not where she is now. Not where she is now.

But it was no use. He knew that. He could try to fight them, but they would get whatever answers they wanted out of him. There were five of them, and only two were in his head. The other three were menacing Mrs. Moore, probably searching for the same information. Being a mindreader, she was even less able to hold them off than he was. Xander’s body convulsed, and he heard a pathetic-sounding moan escape from his paralyzed lips as they tunneled deeper.

WHERE IS SHE?

The command forced an image up from the depths of his memories. Gurnee’s Warren Township High School. Kira at band practice. The band room was crisp and clear in his head: Kira had taken him there, after she had brought him back to live with her family. After she had opened her home to him when his own mother didn’t want him back, once she found out he was a mindjacker. Kira’s family had welcomed him like he was their own son, and here he was, his thoughts betraying Kira with her own kindness.

Xander dry heaved as they pulled back, leaving him panting on the floor. Feeling slowly seeped back into his limbs. They had what they needed and quickly stomped down the stairs.

He rolled over on his side, his hands shaking, his fingers barely under his control. He thrust his hand in his pants pocket, the one now free from the floor, and painfully curled his fingers around his phone. Pulling it out, he used both hands to find the power button to switch it on. He didn’t bother using his hands after that, just jacked into the mindware interface on the phone and sent a scrit message as fast as the software would take it.

Jacker clan. Coming for you. Leave school. Don’t come home.

He dropped the phone on the carpet and rolled back to look at Kira’s parents. Mr. Moore was still passed out, and Mrs. Moore was crying over his body, probably wondering if he was dead or not. Xander didn’t know if his scrit would arrive in time to save Kira. But if nothing else, he would get her parents out of the house and make sure they were safely hidden away.

In case the jacker clan decided to come back for more.

Sometimes all that fantastic worldbuilding done in the course of writing a novel never makes it into the story. Hopefully this happens a lot, because otherwise the novel would be padded with worldbuilding that only peripherally relates to the story and bogs it down.

In Closed Hearts, I created a slum-like place where displaced mindjackers gathered on the outskirts of Chicago, called Jackertown. It is a society of Clans, in some ways reminiscent of the Camp in Open Minds, and there's a delicate power balance between them. Most are involved in some way in jackwork—the trade of mindjacking favors for cash, often facilitated by a contractor, someone who travels between the two segregated worlds of mindreaders and mindjackers. Jackertown isn't as brutal as the Camp and is more business-oriented. But that doesn't mean it's a safe place to be.

Here are some slang terms I dreamed up while creating Jackertown. Many of these terms (jackworker, contractor, wetjack) made it into Closed Hearts, but some did not. When creating slang, I usually come up with several variants for a particular term, only settling on the final one in later drafts.

Someone who does mindjacking for hire, usually jacking mindreaders, but potentially up against mindguards or other jackers. (early version: jobber)

Someone who facilitates contracts for hiring jackworkers. The contractor "rooks" or passes for a mindreader in the general mindreading society, then dons a mask when traveling to Jackertown, so that his identity is unknown there. (early versions: runners, bonders, jackmailers, bloodrunners—for those who traffic in the deadly jacking arts)

Mindjackers who pretend to be mindreaders so that they can hold normal jobs in larger mindreading world.

Mindjackers who kill for money, usually through a contractor. (early version: wetjobbers)

A mindreader who pays for jackwork.

A mindreader who still lives in Jackertown, running businesses or convenience stores useful to the jackers. Not directly under mindjacker control, but "owned" by a Clan.

A mindreader who is captured and turned into a slave in Jackertown. (early version: pawn, puppet)

A mindjacker who brings in mice (mindreaders) for trade to jackers—either for ransom (they get a cut) or for a puppet. Trades mice for cash or favors.

The act of kidnapping a mindreader and bringing them to Jackertown for human trafficking.

Jackwork, or the contracting to exchange mindjack favors for cash.

A group of jackers working together for particular jackwork jobs.

A more permanent group of jackers, gathered together for protection and support.

If you haven't read Closed Hearts, I recommend you read that next.

Book Two of the Mindjack Trilogy

When you control minds, only your heart can be used against you.

Eight months ago, Kira Moore revealed to the mindreading world that mindjackers like herself were hidden in their midst. Now she wonders if telling the truth was the right choice after all. As wild rumors spread, a powerful anti-jacker politician capitalizes on mindreaders' fears and strips jackers of their rights. While some jackers flee to Jackertown—a slum rife with jackworkers who trade mind control favors for cash—Kira and her family hide from the readers who fear her and jackers who hate her. But when a jacker Clan member makes Kira's boyfriend Raf collapse in her arms, Kira is forced to save the people she loves by facing the thing she fears most: FBI agent Kestrel and his experimental torture chamber for jackers.

In Closed Hearts, Raf (Kira's boyfriend) and Julian (the revolutionary jacker who wants Kira to join the cause), meet briefly. It's not a pleasant encounter, well, not for Julian in any event. A writer friend who helped copyedit Closed Hearts asked me to put Raf and Julian in a room together so that they could discuss which one of them would be better for Kira. Which is an interesting question, given that Kira is completely in love with Raf.

Raf takes a seat on the couch of the mages' (jacker revolutionaries') warehouse and glances nervously at the mindjackers milling around him. Julian takes a chair from the kitchen table, turns it backwards, and sits facing Raf. Julian temples his fingers and taps his lips.

Raf: What?

Julian: I just can't figure it out.

Raf: (shifts uncomfortably) Don't hurt yourself trying.

Julian: (smirks) I mean, I can't figure out what she sees in you.

Raf: That's really none of your business, is it?

Julian: Why would Kira want to be with someone she can control so utterly? (waves a hand at Raf) You're just a mindreader. She could jack into your head and make you do anything. Feel anything. Believe anything.

Raf: Kira would never do that.

Julian: (looks skeptical) How would you know?

Raf: I trust her. Besides, she knows I would do anything for her anyway. All she has to do is ask. I'm not the one trying to drag her into some kind of crazy war with the world! You and your demens ideas about jackers being the (makes air quote fingers) next evolution of mankind. All you're going to do is get her killed.

Julian: (narrows his eyes) Oh, and I suppose you can keep her safe? With your vast ability to—what is it you do again? Oh right, read minds. You're like a guppy trying to guard a shark. You can't even keep yourself safe.

Raf: I'll keep her safe by being smart. By helping her hide. And by letting the world figure out its own mess. To me, Kira is the only thing that matters, and I'll do whatever it takes.

Julian: You don't even know what she's capable of.

Raf: (stands) I know better than you ever will.

Julian: (looks up from his chair) Really? I guess you saw that coming, then? Her performance with the changelings? On the tru-casts?

Raf: It doesn't surprise me. That's kind of girl Kira is. Brave. Strong. And she's always looking out for people.

Julian: Which is precisely why she belongs with me. I mean, with us, leading jackers forward, not hiding out in a diner in the suburbs pretending to be a waitress. Wasting her potential. She could be so much more. Will be, as soon as she stops playing mindreader and joins her kind.

Raf: (clenches fist) You leave her alone!

Julian: (stands up from chair) Careful, reader. The only reason you're still standing is because Kira cares about you. Don't push it.

Raf: If you get her hurt, I will kill you.

Julian: I'm not the one you have to worry about.

Kira: (strolls from the back) Um, what's going on?

Julian and Raf eye each other. "Nothing," they both say at once.

Ok, that was entirely too much fun to write.

(Also: it never happened. I'm wiping your memory in 3… 2… 1…)

The Handler takes place in the time period between Open Minds and Closed Hearts, after Kira outs jackers to the world, and just as jackers begin to spontaneously gather in the no-man's-land between downtown Chicago and the New Metro suburbs, in a place soon to be known as Jackertown. Told from Julian's point-of-view, this novella gives insight into his handling ability, as well as a key incident at the beginning of the formation of his revolution.

Summary: The first recruit in Julian Navarro’s mindjacker revolution threatens to derail his plans to ensure jacker freedom in a mindreading world.

Century-old dust coated the portable news screen in my hands, as if this crumbling, abandoned factory could keep the future from coming by choking it with the past. I brushed away the grit and sunk into a couch whose spine had long been broken, only to puff up another musty cloud. I cleared the screen again, then mentally nudged the tru-cast recording on it to play. This was at least the twentieth time I’d replayed it. Maybe the thirtieth. I’d lost count.

The image showed two FBI agents, both mindjackers, in a scene so familiar I had memorized every detail: the agents’ black guns pointed at the camera, glinting from the lobby’s plasma lights; the mindreaders huddled by the receptionist’s desk, trying to keep out of the showdown; even the janitor frozen in his window cleaning at the hospital gift shop, staring at the soon-to-be-famous sixteen-year-old girl wielding the camera phone like a weapon.

At least that’s how I imagined her holding it—maybe because I was inclined to think of everything as a weapon these days. But my imagination would have to suffice, not having been one of the jackers present, on either side of the camera. In fact, I had no idea that Kira Moore was about to reveal the hidden mindjackers of the world until I saw it on the morning tru-cast two weeks ago, along with the rest of the nation.

“It’s like the old days when the first readers were discovered,” Kira was saying. She meant the first mindreaders, long before they became the dominant species on the planet and took over everything, as dominant species tend to do. “What did we do?” she asked. “We put them in prison. We tortured them with experiments. Well, we’re doing it again, to these kids, today.”

The camera phone swept around, the girl’s face dominating the screen and making my heart pound each time I saw it. Not just because I was male and she was undeniably pretty—it was more than that. Her eyes burned electric blue, on fire with a revolutionary fervor. Her pale skin flushed a feverish pink only at the hollows of her cheeks. Was it fear or anger, or the adrenaline rush of the moment? Or was it her instinctual protectiveness of the children sprawled on the floor behind her? She was just a couple of years younger than me, but her youth seemed timeless, radiating an almost otherworldly innocence and determination. I would have given anything to have been there at that moment, dipping into her mind and reading the passions that drove her to this singularly brave act.

On the screen, she sucked in an audible breath, as if pulling herself up to her full angel-wrath. “My name’s Kira Moore, and I’m just like them. I was kidnapped—”

The screen went blank.

“Hey!” My protest bounced off the manufacturing equipment that stood silent and still along the cavernous factory walls. I darted a cold look to my twin sister Anna, working at a nearby wooden table pitted and scarred by a thousand everyday uses. I could mentally flip the tru-cast on again, but I would lose in a mental nudge match over the screen. “I was just getting to the good part.”

“Julian, you need to stop watching that girl and focus on our work.” Anna’s stare underlined her words. My sister had the same dark-haired Latin beauty of our mother, but like our father, her icy blue-eyed glare could freeze the strongest jackers. Maybe because he taught her to shoot more than just looks. Anna picked up one of the half-assembled weapons spread before her and rubbed an oiled cloth over it with strong, practiced strokes.

Anna could glare at me all she liked, but I could see the turbulent, protective instinct that roiled at the back of her skull. Like every instinct, it was a relic from our reptilian ancestors, hidden in our DNA until it sprung forth, an invisible compulsion that ruled our actions. The cool, misty waves of Anna’s strong, protective instinct usually crowded out all the others, but this time a wisp of rosy maternal instinct also curled at the edges.

I sighed. I could change Anna’s instincts, mentally handle them into something not quite so endearing, but manipulating my sister wasn’t just wrong, it was slightly dangerous, given her handiness with a gun and general impatience with me. I could handle that out of her too, but eventually she would make me pay for it. Still, I wished Anna’s protectiveness and attempts to replace our dead parents wasn’t quite so… obvious.

It would make it easier to remain angry with her.

“That girl,” I said, putting some arch in my voice, just to needle her, “was the one who thrust our revolution into the light. Or would you rather still be working in secret? Hiding and pretending to simply be mindreaders?”

Anna hurled my insult back with a sharp glare that found its mark as surely as the black knives she routinely embedded in the factory walls.

I softened my tone. “All I’m saying is that Kira did us a tremendous favor. She changed everything. And, in the process, made our lovely new home possible.” I gestured grandly to the cobwebbed cabinets of the makeshift kitchen area. Anna had recently cleared them of chipped plates and petrified pests to make room for her weapons: several small caliber pistols, a couple of scoped rifles, and an impressive assortment of electric devices. My flip answer didn’t appease her for my slacking in the cleaning-and-arsenal-stocking department, but I knew the revolution wouldn’t be won with guns alone. In fact, I wished we didn’t need Anna’s arsenal at all. We needed to win hearts to our cause with words, not weapons. Starting with the very first recruits I was currently seeking.

So I tried the truth instead.

“Kira’s accomplished more with one act than we could have achieved with an armory packed with weapons,” I said. “She’s just the kind of person we could use in the cause.”

I wished, for the hundredth time, that I could read my sister’s thoughts. Normally, I could slip in through the instinctual minds of readers and jackers alike, but Anna’s thoughts were locked tight behind an impervious barrier. Not that reading her face was particularly difficult, especially when her blue protective instinct shifted abruptly to the red, smoking aggression that normally wrapped around her head.

“Kira is unpredictable and reckless,” Anna said. “Who goes in to rescue a bunch of changelings with nothing but a pistol and no apparent backup plan? From what I hear, she left far more changelings behind in Agent Kestrel’s grasp than she’s ever rescued. That makes her untrustworthy and dangerous as well.” Anna pushed up from the table, grabbed a rag from the counter, and scrubbed at the cabinets, clearing away decades of grit and the earnest work of dozens of spiders. She kept her back to me, like there was nothing more to discuss, but her red-hot fighting instinct, swirling at the back of her mind, gave her away.

FBI Agent Kestrel was the first target of our revolution, but I felt—I knew—that Kira Moore was meant to join us, despite her mysterious disappearance after the rescue. Kestrel was our enemy, and Kira was our friend. It was important to know the difference: the fight ahead would be worse if we cast aside the people who knew how to win it.

I heaved up from the depths of the decrepit couch. “You should stop listening to rumors on the chat-casts.” I placed the still-blank screen on the kitchen table next to my sister’s partially assembled guns. “You know, only half of what you hear on the casts is true…”

“And the other half are twisted lies. The trick is to know which half will kill you.” Anna finished our father’s favorite admonishment with the same look of fervent warning he always wore. “Don’t forget that part, Julian.”

I peered over her shoulder at the dust-draped cabinet. “I think you missed a spot.”

She glowered. I smirked. We called it a draw, as we usually did.

She resumed her cleaning, and I peered down the vast middle of the factory floor. Dust motes danced in the forked streams of light from the high windows. Racks stretched to the ceiling, cluttered with parts for machines that stopped working long ago. It was a warehouse of the past, guarded by white, concrete columns and overseen by the unblinking eyes of plasma lights dangling overhead. Once transformed and forced into the future, it would be large enough to sleep a small army. More jackers were trickling into this nether region of Chicago New Metro every day, but they were forming the same lawless Clans that had fought each other for years. Bringing them together would take more than simply clearing out an abandoned door factory. Our mission was to liberate jackers, not fight them, but we would have to earn the respect necessary to lead them forward.

It’s your words, not your ability, that will encourage others to follow you.

My mother’s words were still fresh, whispered in her lab at the University of Chicago, where my parents’ neuroscience research covered for the real work they did: preparing for the revolution. My childhood was non-stop training for the day when jackers would fight to be free—when we would become the dominant species. When I would fulfill the mission they had entrusted to me.

Their lives, all their work, would be meaningless if we failed.

To bring the Clans together, we needed a coalition of strength, a core group of jackers with extraordinary abilities who could move the revolution forward. Kira was the prototype, the ideal kind of jacker that we needed to recruit. The chat-cast chatter said she possessed unusual abilities, like my sister and me. More importantly, a revolutionary spirit seemed to animate her. She single-handedly took on the entire system with little more than her words and a camera phone, having never fired a shot. We needed someone like her to replace what we lost when the accident claimed my parents’ lives. In the end, they had given us every tool to fulfill their vision of the future, save one: their presence, fighting by our side, when the time came.

I strode toward the center racks, determined to get the transformation under way, when the sound of pounding at the door stopped me.

“Expecting anyone?” Anna asked, pulling a dart gun out of a cabinet drawer. We had only recently fixed the obsolete punch-code lock that held the front door shut.

“I have a recruit coming today,” I said, “but not until this afternoon.” While handling instincts was a highly unusual and useful skill, I was deficient in the normal mindjacker abilities that whoever was pounding on the door would expect. And I doubted they just wanted to talk. “Perhaps you should answer the door.”

Anna pointed her gun at the metal door, no doubt reaching out to mentally surge against the mindfield of the person outside. Anyone trying to jack Anna in return wouldn’t get past her mind’s barrier, but if they tried, they stood a good chance of being jacked or shot. People quickly learned not to mess with my sister.

After a moment, a broad, unnatural smile sprung to life on Anna’s face. “We have a visitor!” The gun clattered when she dropped it on the counter, and she practically sprinted to the door. I stared open-mouthed after her—Anna was never giddy, even when she was a five-year-old girl on Christmas morning. She was born serious. But her instinctual mind had warmed to the sunshine yellow of unfettered happiness as she skipped toward the door.

Something was definitely wrong.

I reached beyond the door just as Anna threw it open, gushing, “Welcome!” to the woman who stood outside. She was young, and her long red hair writhed in the wintery breeze, each wisp seeming to undulate on its own. The woman’s mind jumbled flashes of color in a strobe-like effect that I couldn’t quite grasp. I tried to handle Anna’s placid yellow instinct into something a little more alarmed about the unknown jacker striding past her, but it was somehow locked. Had the woman jacked through Anna’s impenetrable mind barrier or was she just an extremely powerful handler? The intruder’s gaze roamed the dimly lit factory and sparse furnishings until she found me, hovering at the edge of the kitchen.

Then she screamed, loud and raw, and dropped to her knees, a look of pure terror twisting her pale face and pinching her eyes shut.

That was the normal reaction people had when trying to jack me, so I wasn’t surprised. My instinctual barrier protected my mind by digging into the primal part of theirs to conjure every soul-sucking horror they’d ever envisioned. At least, that was what people had told me after it happened. I never felt a thing.

While her red nails clawed at images only she could see, I tried to make sense of her. Instead of the pitch black, chilly blanket of fear that my defenses normally invoked, her mind was a riot of color, some I didn’t even recognize, seething like an animal barely contained by its cage. Black tendrils twisted through the misty kaleidoscope of colors, mesmerizing me for a moment. Then they dissipated, and she climbed to her feet, an impossible grin spreading across her face. She had recovered far too quickly from an encounter with her worst nightmares.

A chill raced up my back, and I reflexively tried to handle the roiling mess that was her mind, but I couldn’t understand it, much less manipulate it. That had never happened before. My mouth ran dry, and I eyed Anna’s discarded dart gun as the woman strode toward me. I could probably take her in a fistfight, but I wasn’t sure what else she could do. My heart thudded in my ears.

“You must be Julian,” she said in a crisp British accent. She slowed her approach, bit her lip, and raked her green eyes across the length of my body. “I must say I’m not disappointed.” The mixed signals were doing a dance on my brain. Trying not to show the tension rippling through my body, I casually picked up Anna’s dart gun and let my hand fall to my side, the gun’s barrel pointing at the floor.

“You have me at a disadvantage,” I said. “And you are?” Grayish flight instinct streaked through the throbbing colors of her mind, but I couldn’t get hold of it. Whatever the woman’s ability, she had managed to get into my headquarters with little more than a saunter. I would rather recruit her than shoot her, but if she was manipulating Anna’s mind from the inside, shooting might be my only option.

“My name’s Serena.” She gave a quick glance to the weapon in my hand, and her sultry smile widened into one of pure excitement. “You’re not planning on using that on me, are you, love?” The gun certainly didn’t frighten her. Instead, she almost seemed to want me to shoot her. A twisted wraith of red and black—aggression and fear—zoomed across the surface of her mind and was gone before I had time to think about what that meant.

I kept the gun pointed at the floor. “Do I need to shoot you? Or will you release Anna from whatever hold you’ve put on her, if I ask nicely?”

She took a half step closer, dropping her voice. “Oh my, Julian.” I couldn’t help but feel the heat from her surge of deep purplish mating instinct. “I would do just about anything, if you asked nicely.”

I frowned and leaned away from her. Anna blinked several times, then glared at us from the doorway, her creepy smile gone. I waved with the hand that held the gun, letting her know I had things under control. Maybe.

Serena stepped closer, forcing me against the cabinet, then rocked back as I leveled the gun at her waist. “You’re just as dangerous as they say, Julian.” Her grin tipped higher in one corner. “And quite easy on the eyes as well. How lucky for me, since I’ve come to join your merry band of jackers.”

“And why would that be?” Word must be getting out that we were looking, but I didn’t expect jackers to break in just to sign up.

“You’ve got quite a reputation going already, love,” she said. “There’s chatter all over the casts about a new jacker who can strike terror into your soul without even jacking into your mind. If anything, the rumors don’t do you justice. That’s a wicked talent you have, scaring the pants off anyone who dares to touch your mind. And it so happens that I’m between Clans at the moment.” Her offer came with an arched eyebrow, suggesting it included more than just joining my Clan. She was early twenties, and her tight fitting, tailored pants, teetering heels, and snug t-shirt showed off her body in a way that seemed as calculated as every other move she was making.

I kept the gun pointed at her. “It didn’t slow you down much.”

She shrugged. Anna came up fast behind her, yanked a gun from a cabinet drawer, and pointed it at Serena’s head. The gun was a small caliber pistol, fully loaded, if I knew my sister. Serena didn’t flinch. As aggressive as this woman was, she was definitely unusual—and unusual was what we were looking for, even if it came tromping through the door uninvited.

I nodded to my sister to get her to stand down. She didn’t move. “What talent do you have that you can disarm Anna here, when most jackers can’t even get into her head?” Including me, I didn’t say. The idea of her jacking Anna made me queasy.

“Oh?” Serena threw a fake surprised look to Anna whose gun barrel would make a neat hole in Serena’s forehead if she decided to pull the trigger. “Are you not normally that easy to manipulate?”

My eyebrows hiked up, and I was honestly surprised that Anna didn’t pull the trigger right then. “She’s a handler, Julian,” Anna said, low and tight.

Hearing it out loud tugged something deep inside me. I had never met another handler. Did Serena see the same colorful ball of instincts at the back of my head? Handler was a term Anna and I used—no one else would know it—and her words were actually asking whether she should put a bullet in Serena’s brain or give her a chance to prove her worth as an ally.

“A handler?” Serena’s voice was less sure now. “Is that what you call… what I do?” A black mist snaked through her mind. Maybe it unnerved her that we might know more about her than she knew herself. “Sorry, love,” she said to Anna, “about my little demonstration on you. Had to make a big entrance, show what I was capable of. You understand.”

Anna didn’t look in an understanding mood.

Serena’s gaze darted to the door. “I am terribly sorry about jacking your girlfriend, Julian. Not quite sure even how I did it. Her head is as hard as a rock.”

So she hadn’t jacked through Anna’s mind barrier. My shoulders relaxed a little. “She’s my sister,” I said. “And we all have unusual abilities here.”

Serena flinched. “I don’t suppose you can forgive my frightfully impolite entrance then, could you? I’m not used to people understanding my, shall we say, peculiarities. Frankly, it’s become quite tiresome, being a freak among freaks all the time.” Her green eyes sparkled with what could be unshed tears or possibly sardonic wit. I couldn’t be sure, but I was more than a little interested in exactly what her peculiarities were. If Serena was a handler like me, we could learn a lot from her, including things about my own abilities that I couldn’t find out any other way. She could be a tremendous asset.

If she refrained from handling my sister again.

I glanced at Anna, but she must have already seen the decision on my face. Her cheek muscle twitched, but she lowered her weapon.

“I think we might have something to talk about after all.” I smiled at the clear relief that washed across Serena’s face.

Serena refused to take the piece of dusty machinery I had just heaved off the grime-coated racks in the middle of the factory. The motor smelled of stale grease, and decades of rust had chewed into every seam.

She crossed her arms. “I’m not a bloody pack mule.”

The motor was a good twenty pounds and would probably crush the toes peeking out from her impractical shoes, if she dropped it. I was tempted to toss the motor to her for real, but instead just pretended. She jerked back, reflexively opening her arms. I placed the greasy motor into them, and she sunk under the weight of it, her expression transforming to horror.

“See if you can find room over there.” I pointed to the shelving opposite us and turned to my own rack before she could see my smirk. Hundreds more boxes and spare parts needed to be cleared out or reclaimed, all left over supplies for the massive door stamping machines. She’d only just arrived, but I couldn’t afford to have people join the cause who weren’t willing to pitch in.

I glanced over my shoulder. She wobbled in her red heels, searching for an open spot for her load. The metal rack screeched in protest when she dropped the motor onto it. Anna, in the kitchen area down at the end of the row, glanced up from rubbing down guns that she had already cleaned an hour ago. She was deliberately keeping her distance, outside my hundred-foot range, so I couldn’t get a read on her instincts, but even at that distance I could see the glare. I pretended not to notice.

Serena stared at her oil-smudged hands, as if discovering an alien lifeform was taking over her body. I snagged another antique motor and carried it over, setting it gently on the rack in order to not draw more attention from Anna.

I pulled a rag from my back pocket and handed it to Serena. “I’m fairly certain it will come off.” Only a valiant effort kept my smirk in check.

She rubbed at the black smudges, but just managed to smear them across her palms. “I may have to reconsider joining your Clan, Julian, if all you want is a janitor to tidy up.”

I folded my arms and leaned against the skeleton rib of the rack. “Oh, I have a lot more I want to accomplish than just cleaning up the place.” I gestured to the building around us. “This factory is hardened against conventional weapons by brick walls that are nearly a foot thick, and it’s large enough that the core of the building provides protection from the standard reach of most jackers. We’ll have to renovate the kitchen and bathroom facilities, but there’s plenty of space to organize and gather the large number of jackers we’ll need for the revolution.”

“Revolution?” Her eyebrows lifted. “I thought you were building a Clan, not an army.”

“There’s much more in the way of change coming, Serena.” I gentled my voice. This was most important: did she understand the stakes? “Revealing jackers to the mindreading world didn’t just make it difficult to hide anymore. It made it imperative that we don’t.” I studied the whirling mass of instincts at the back of her head, and a wisp of flight instinct writhed through the ball, like a vaporous snake. If she were a normal jacker, I could slip through and tap her conscious mind to read her thoughts—but I couldn’t handle something I didn’t understand.

“What are you on about?” she asked. “Not that I’m interested in hiding, mind you.”

I pushed off the rack, standing straight and focusing on her eyes instead of her mind. “What do you think will happen as more and more jackers come out of hiding?”

A frown crinkled her forehead.

“What will happen,” I asked, “when the mindreaders decide we’re not just a frightening possibility, lurking around the corner, hiding in the shadows, but a real threat?”

“Well, they’re just mindreaders,” she said. “What can they do against us?”

“The mind isn’t much of a weapon against a tank or a bomb, Serena, no matter how powerful that mind might be.”

Her frown grew deeper and her instinctual mind writhed with black. I mentally reached out. Maybe I could get hold of that snake of fear and ease it away. Part of me wanted her not to be afraid, but more importantly, I needed to know if I could tame the wildness of her instincts. Control them. I’d never met someone before that I couldn’t…

“Is that what your army’s about, then?” she asked. “Fighting the mindreaders in some kind of grand war? You’re an idealist. A revolutionary.”

“Most definitely.” I grasped the black wisp and flipped it to sunshine yellow. Her face showed no change, just the indulgent smile of someone regarding a misguided, but well meaning, lunatic. Perhaps the flight instinct wasn’t strong enough to have the manipulation cause a visible effect. At least I could handle the bits that I recognized. “We’re not freaks, Serena. And we’re not an anomaly. We’re destined to be the next step in the evolution of mankind, but only if we fight to survive.”

Her smirk grew stronger. “I suppose there are worse Clans to join, than ones destined to rule the world.”

I looked away from the gleam in her eye and studied the rack behind her. Now it was clear. Serena was a mercenary, the kind who was willing to sign up for whatever cause put her on the winning team. I had hoped for more, for someone who would actually believe in the cause we were fighting. I wasn’t sure if it could truly work any other way.

“When we’re done cleaning up, we’ll have enough room to house a good sized Clan,” I said. “But it remains to be seen whether you’ll be joining us.”

Her smile evaporated. She brushed a dangling red lock of hair out of her eyes, leaving a trail of gritty machine grease behind on her forehead. When she wasn’t screaming in terror or leering at me, she was actually attractive. I resisted the urge to wipe away the smudge.

She glanced down the row. “I thought you had decided to keep me on, once your sister declined to shoot me.”

Anna was still fastidiously rubbing down her pistol with machine oil and ignoring us. “You could have stopped her, like you did the first time,” I said quietly to Serena. “Why didn’t you?”

She ground more grease spots into her skin, turning the lily white to pale gray. “I could have,” she said. “At least, I think so. But that frightful talent of yours meant I couldn’t control you, and that was the heart of it. She was clearly important to you, and controlling her wouldn’t have gained me any points. A gamble on my part.” She smiled up at me. “Must have paid off, if I’m still here.”

“Yes, you’re still here.” I returned her smile. “Because I’d like to know more about what you can do.”

“Well, you seem to already know,” she said. “Called it a handler, I believe.”

I waved the term away, not ready to reveal anything. “I’d like to hear it from you. How does it work? Could you reach Anna now, if you chose to?”

Serena squirmed, shifted from foot to foot, examined the machinery next to us, and took a long moment before shoving the rag into my chest. I caught it before it dropped to the floor, and thought she might be storming out next, but instead she spoke. “No, your sister is safely out of my range.” She acted as if I had mentally tortured the words out of her one at a time.

“And you didn’t jack into her head when you controlled her?”

“No.” She studied her hands again, now hopelessly marred with grit and oil.

“Do you normally push through a person’s mindfield barrier first?”

“Mindfield barrier?” She smiled and shifted a little closer. “You have fancy names for all these things, don’t you, pet?”

“Please answer the question.”

She pouted and studied the motor next to her. “Yes, I suppose it’s a barrier. Feels like a slushy muck, not exactly the most pleasant experience.”

I didn’t feel anything like muck when I reached into people’s minds. Anna and my parents said that, for them, mind barriers came both hard and soft. But for me, there was nothing that blocked me from accessing the primal parts of their brains. And it wasn’t so much a matter of searching, as seeing with my mind and understanding in order to control it.

“Once inside,” I said, “do you search for a particular part of the mind, in order to manipulate it?”

“No.” She shifted feet and let out a tight sigh, like I was pulling the words out of her again. I balled up the oily rag and dropped it on the rack, waiting for a better answer.

She watched me, hesitated, then finally said, “I don’t spend any more time in the muck than necessary to get the job done. I just jack in, wish for them to behave differently, and then they do.”

Serena seemed to manipulate instincts intuitively, instead of directly like I did. Which meant she wasn’t truly a handler, or at least not like me. That created a hollow feeling in my stomach that I tried to ignore.

“What did your old Clan think about that?”

Her shoulders hunched up. “They weren’t quite as understanding as you, love,” she said. “Tossed me out on my ear, actually, because I couldn’t quite control it. See, I can make anyone, even your sister, with her head like a bank vault, into my best friend or someone else’s worst enemy. I don’t know how, precisely, and it doesn’t always go the way I plan. Sometimes… something goes wrong. And I think, did I do that? Did I really turn him into a monster that would be capable of…” A black cloud of fear instinct swallowed half of the color churning through her mind.

“What happened?” I asked softly.

She blinked several times, like she was holding back tears. “I was having an argument with the Clan leader’s brother, and he got a bit cheeky with me. Physical, actually.”

The muscles in my shoulders tensed. “Did he hurt you?”

“I’m fairly sure that was the intention.” She shuddered. “I couldn’t help myself, I had to stop him. And then something went wrong. He turned on a younger jacker. By the time the others stopped him, there wasn’t much left of the poor boy’s mind. There was nothing I could do—once it started, I couldn’t stop it. It was like I had unleashed something horrible inside him…”

She peered up at me, eyes shining. I put a hand on her shoulder, feeling it quake underneath her thin t-shirt. A jacking skill as powerful as Serena’s needed to be mastered, simply to keep anyone else from being hurt. I mentally reached out to embrace the inky cloud of fear that had spread through her normally tumultuous mind.

“It’s all right,” I said. “We can learn to control it together.” I exhaled slowly, focusing on wrestling that black instinct back into the depths of her mind and bringing on a flood of peaceful yellow, like the sun breaking through storm clouds. Her face brightened with it, and before I realized what she was doing, she had pulled my face down into a kiss.

The shock of it washed through me, along with a heated breeze from the purple tentacles of her mating instinct. Her lips pressed hard into mine. I didn’t stop her, but my lips barely kept up with hers. It had been so long since I had kissed anyone—mindreaders never held any interest for me, and the icy bath of my instinctual defenses kept most female jackers away. There had been one girl, before I came into my ability, but she never suspected what I would become. Serena leaned into me, seeking to deepen our kiss.

I pulled back.

Her cheeks were flushed, her lips tinged pink with our kiss, and her eyes wide with expectation. It was completely the wrong thing to say at the moment, but I said it anyway.

“I think you should stay with us for a while.”

Her smile told me that was just what she wanted to hear.

I stood at the kitchen sink, working the grease stains off my hands while trying to keep the ice-cold water from splashing my collared shirt and dress pants. The formal attire seemed more appropriate for greeting our first recruit than my earlier dirt-smudged black t-shirt and jeans. Although I supposed this was our second recruit, now that I had officially invited Serena to join us.

Serena was busy clearing racks in the far reaches of the factory, safe from the possibility of future kisses. The more I thought about it, the more kissing Serena seemed like an error in judgment. Playing favorites or getting personally involved with recruits would only sabotage my efforts to build a united coalition of jackers. I would be more careful in the future.

Thankfully, Anna had been too busy cleaning her guns to notice the kiss. She had finished her superfluous cleaning, but several weapons were still laid out on the table.

“You might want to put those away,” I said. “Don’t want to scare off the recruits before they’re even in the door.”

“They should know what they’re getting into,” she said flatly, eyeing her guns. Her protective instinct flared again. Maybe she had seen Serena and me after all.

Heat climbed up my neck. “Things aren’t always what they appear to be.”

She rubbed her temples with both hands then looked up at me. “Just tell me you didn’t promise her anything.”

Helping Serena learn to control her ability wasn’t so much a promise as an offer. And a necessity, if she was to stay with us. “Not that I’m aware of.”

Anna’s shoulders relaxed. A soft knock at the door drew both our attention, but barely, like it was a tentative plea. I noted the time on the screen perched on the kitchen counter.

“I believe our recruit is here.”

“Maybe you should answer the door this time,” Anna said.

I grinned and left her to stow her weapons, mentally reaching through the door before I arrived. The instinctual mind of our guest boiled red and hot, like Anna’s standard state of anger, and I hesitated with my hand on the door latch. I had only contacted this jacker on private message once; he had been referred by Henry, an older friend of the family who still ran the secret laboratory in my parents’ north shore estate. The recruit was a volunteer for one of Henry’s testing trials, which usually meant a jacker on hard times or thrown out by their Clan. Not typically someone who played well with others.

But I trusted Henry more than most people on the planet.

I took a breath and opened the door, letting in a blast of dry winter air. My recruit was a couple of years older than me, with dark brown skin, black curly hair, and even darker, almost fathomless eyes. His face was stoic, showing none of the raging aggression that churned underneath it.

“Sasha, I presume?” I asked.

“And you appear to be Julian.” His voice immediately softened, becoming almost apologetic. “Henry showed me your picture.” Then his eyes narrowed at my crisp, high-collared shirt.

“I am indeed.” I stepped aside. “Won’t you come in?”

Sasha hesitated, eyeing the cavernous and dusty interior of the factory, his body held stiff. I slipped through the angry red mist of his mind to read his thoughts. Most jackers couldn’t sense me, going in through the mind’s back door, so to speak, and I hoped Sasha would be the same. He looked like a powder keg about to go off, and I didn’t want to inadvertently light the fuse.

Why is he so dressed up? Sasha’s thoughts jittered between staying and running. Maybe Henry was lying. This isn’t worth the risk…

“Or,” I said, trying to keep him from bolting, “if you’d like, we could talk outside.” The street was empty. A plastic bottle tumbled lonely and hollow down the sidewalk, flashing cold winks of afternoon sun. Sasha pulled his gray trench coat tighter around his neck.

“Inside will be fine.” He stepped past me, enough that I could close the door behind him, but then stopped. Anna watched Sasha with undisguised suspicion. The dart guns were still on the table.

He turned back to me. “Look, maybe this was a mistake—”

“You’re not in any danger here, Mr…”

He ignored me, his gaze darting about the room but finding only Anna and me. Serena must have wandered off or possibly lain down to rest from her exertion in tidying up. The tension in Sasha’s shoulders ratcheted up until he was hunched over, like an old man. He edged closer and dropped his voice. “Did Henry tell you about me?”

I nodded, wondering why we were whispering. “He said that you had an unusual ability. He didn’t specify what it was.” Which wasn’t entirely true. Henry said Sasha could do something extraordinary with erasing memories, but I wanted to hear it from Sasha himself.

His dark eyes searched mine, as if he could take the measure of me by peering into them. “Did he tell you that I don’t want to use it anymore?” Sasha asked. “Not ever again. I’m not here for that, so if that’s what you want, I might as well leave now, and we’ll just consider this all a misunderstanding.”

Sasha’s instincts had gushed black. The sudden, fierce chill of it made me think he had tried to jack me. But he wasn’t cringing on the floor or screaming in terror—whatever was raising his most basic fear came from the depths of his own mind, not mine.

“You’re afraid to use your ability?” I asked him.

He looked away and examined the machinery that lined the nearby exterior wall. A mask of indifference dropped over his face, but his instincts burst into a writhing red mass. “All I’m saying is that I don’t ever want to do that kind of work again. Henry said…” Sasha faced me with his impassive look locked in place. “He said you would be different. That you would understand that some weapons should never be fired.”

I nodded. Every jacker’s mind was a weapon, one that could easily be used for evil. For Sasha, however, it seemed to be something more. His ability fueled an inferno of fear and anger that he had to keep contained with an iron mask. The need to know what he could do sparked to life inside me.

“I would never force you to use your ability against your will, Sasha,” I said. “You have my promise on that.”

Sasha narrowed his eyes, studying me. No doubt looking for some reason to believe a promise from a jacker he had just met. Anna wouldn’t be too pleased about me making promises to someone barely inside our front door, but I couldn’t recruit people to our cause by forcing them to do things that terrified them. And my curiosity already burned like an itch I couldn’t scratch.

“Can you at least tell me what it is?” I asked, trying not to let too much of that intensity show through in my voice. I swept out a hand, inviting him to the kitchen table where Anna stood, her hands resting on her hips. When I saw she had tucked a pistol in her waistband, I threw her a scowl. Her full military welcome wasn’t making this any easier.

Sasha hesitated a long moment, then strode toward her. He ignored the weapons on the table and met Anna’s defiant glare. Her fingers silently drummed her hip, like they were warming up for shooting. I arrived at Sasha’s side, wishing my sister didn’t have such a hard head in so many ways. Linking a choice thought into her mind would have been very convenient at the moment.

“I can erase you,” Sasha said to her, and my sister’s hand froze. “I can take away everything that makes you who you are, from your love of these weapons,” he glanced at the table, “to what kind of childhood you had, to the kind of person you want to marry. I can rewrite you into being someone completely new, down to every last personality quirk and habit and memory. Everything that is you would be gone. Permanently.”

The muscles in Anna’s jaw worked. “I doubt that.”

“My sister is probably immune to your charms,” I said, making a desperate bid to lighten the tension. “Seeing how most people can’t jack into her head at all.”

“I don’t think that would be a problem for me,” he said. “All I would need is to touch you.” Anna flinched, even though Sasha had made no move towards her, and I could understand why. I had never heard of a jacker who had to touch someone to use their ability, which made me think Sasha’s ability was very different. And possibly able to breach Anna’s defenses… as well as mine.

The hard edges of Sasha’s mask softened. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt you. But you need to understand that I could destroy everything that you are. That’s what this is. That’s why it’s dangerous. And why I’ve vowed to never do it again, no matter what.” He swallowed and turned to me. “You have my promise on that. I can’t go on killing people’s souls.”

I had no words for that. Air seemed frozen in my lungs as I wondered what price his soul had already paid for his ability.

“Then why are you here?” Anna asked. No one but me would notice the slight shake in her voice, but then again, I could see the flashes of fear gripping her mind as well.

He glanced at her, then turned study me. “Henry convinced me that you wanted to do something more than just whatever it took to survive. That you had some kind of plan to make things better. To make surviving worthwhile.”

Tension drained from me like a receding wave, releasing the breath inside me. “Because surviving isn’t enough, is it?” I asked.

He nodded slowly and a thrill ran up me. This was what I was looking for in a recruit, this drive for a better life for all of us.

“Then Henry sent you to the right place,” I said. “Jackers are taking humanity into a future where every rule will be rewritten. It will be a fight, but in the end, the world will be transformed, and people like you and me and Anna are going to be at the forefront of that change. You have this ability because you have a purpose to serve in carrying us forward.”

Sasha frowned and stepped back, so I held up my hands to reassure him. “I’m not saying that you’ll have to use your ability. I’m saying there’s a reason for you to be here, if only for us to understand how it works, how we might manage it, in others as well as in you. We understand that this is something you were born with, not something that you chose.” I paused, taking a guess at why he had truly come to us. “And that, someday, you’d like to be something more.”

He gave me a suspicious look, like he couldn’t quite believe the words coming out of my mouth. Black tendrils of fear seeped out again, and I fought the very strong temptation to handle them back into place. My mother’s voice tickled my mind; I needed to win him over on my words alone.

He seemed balanced on a knife-edge of indecision. “You won’t make me use it?”

“I gave you my promise.” I stole a look at Anna. Definitely not happy.

Sasha followed my gaze, and a movement along the center row of racks caught our attention. Serena had wandered in from wherever she had been, her hands sporting more black marks. At least she had been trying to help out.

“What kind of trick is this?” Sasha cried, stumbling back from the table. His shoulders went slack, his eyes glassy and staring at the floor. While Serena sauntered over, my mouth hung open.

I shut it and ground out my words. “Release him. Now.”

“Julian, love.” A pitying smile curled up her lips. “You have no idea how dangerous this one is.”

A sick dread worked through my system. “That wasn’t a request,” I said. “Release him.”

Serena reached the kitchen table and casually picked up one of the dart guns. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, pet.” She pointed the gun at me. Anna had her pistol out and trained on Serena’s chest before I could blink, but Serena was just as fast. Anna’s red-hot rage evaporated into a warm yellow mist. She inspected her weapon, then sat down at the table and happily started to disassemble it.

Serena’s instincts still swirled the same confusing mash of colors. I could try to wrestle her for control of Sasha, but she would shoot me long before I won. I reached into the mass of color, hoping she wouldn’t pull the trigger before I figured out what to do with it.

“It seems that you and Sasha have quite a history together,” I said quietly, to keep her calm and talking. I flipped the small vapor trail of fear instinct to peaceful yellow, but it made no difference.

“Unfortunately, yes.” She scrunched her nose up at Sasha, who still stared at the ground. “I had honestly thought there was no one left from my previous Clan. Quite a bad bit of luck, him showing up here.”

“That is unfortunate.” My stomach twisted as I realized her story from before was a complete lie, and that if I didn’t figure out how to control her, we might end up just like her old Clan. I grappled with a green, burning vapor while I inched forward. My stomach lurched as I amped up her mating instinct and lowered my voice, hating the soft tone I had to put into it. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know he would upset you so much. What actually happened with your previous Clan? It might help if you talked about it.”

I subdued the green mist, and a peaceful look descended on her face for a second, but then an angry red fog gushed up. The gun remained pointed at my chest.

“They didn’t have a proper appreciation for my skills,” she said, as if they had offended her by using the wrong fork. “So I conducted a demonstration on the Clan leader’s brother, turning him on his own Clan. It got a bit more out of control than I had anticipated, but honestly, they all got what they deserved with that. It was messy, though, and I didn’t much care for that. Which was why I left before it was all done. Tricky one, this jacker.” She waved the gun at Sasha. Over half of her instincts still writhed with color: wisps of pink, a lava spill of orange, and a puff of pale blue that burned like acid. “He must have stopped the brother somehow, which even I couldn’t do, not once it was started anyway.”

It was like pushing on a cloud, but I cleared enough of the colors to sense a ball of pure white survival instinct buried in the center. That I knew what to do with. Gripping the ball of white, hard, I crushed it into nothingness, obliterating it into a vacuum that sucked in and subdued the other mess.

Serena turned the gun sideways, peering at it. “I don’t particularly like guns. Beastly weapons, cold and brutish. I much prefer the mind. Yes, much tidier that way. No mess whatsoever, except when things go pear-shaped, and that was hardly my fault. No one could blame me for that. Could happen to anyone.” She was talking to herself, in that no-filter stream-of-consciousness that happened with people I had handled completely, decoupling the barrier between their conscious and subconscious until they were controlled by their instincts.

I stood close to her now. “I think you want to give that to me.”

She smiled brightly. It was a wide, innocent smile, and it tore a small piece of my soul. She handed me the gun.

“I’m sorry it turned out this way, Serena.” I meant every word. I’d made a terrible mistake with her.

“Which way?”

Her questioning green eyes flew wide when I shot the dart into her chest.

I scrambled to catch her, easing her slowly down, so she wouldn’t bang her pretty head on the concrete floor. Anna, released from Serena’s hold, bolted up from her seat at the table. She grabbed the other gun and pointed it at Serena’s limp body on the ground.

“It’s all right,” I said.

Sasha’s eyes were bright and alert now, fear wild in them as he took in the situation. “How did you…” He held a hand up, palm out to Serena, as if to ward her off, even though she was passed out. “No one was able to stop her before.”

“I almost couldn’t,” I whispered, folding Serena’s arms across her chest and straightening up from the floor. My mission was to save jackers like her, liberate them, make their lives better. I wanted to bring them hope, but some jackers wouldn’t believe in our cause. Some would refuse to fight for more than themselves. Worse, some would prey on others. There was no justice system for jackers, no prison that could hold someone like Serena, save the Feds, and she was probably better off dead than undergoing their experiments. I could simply shoot her, remove the threat that she posed, but my stomach churned, holding that thought in my mind while looking at her peaceful face. If I was unwilling to kill her, letting her continue to menace others was equally unacceptable.

I took a deep breath and slowly faced Sasha. Every revolution had casualties along the way—I just didn’t expect them to come so early. “Sometimes you have to fire the weapon, Sasha.” He shook his head, taking a half step back, but I wasn’t talking about him.

I was talking about me.

I reached deep into Serena’s unconscious mind, still a boiling mass, handling away every instinct that I could figure out and pushing aside the rest. It wasn’t difficult to find, the twined red and black instinct I had seen snake across her mind before. A pre-mindreading psychologist had called it the death drive. I thought of it as an anti-life impulse that lurked in every mind, usually muted and buried under that hard ball of pure white survival instinct. Except in some people, it wasn’t buried so deep. I should have known there was something wrong with her when I saw it the first time. The chaos of her mind made a certain amount of sense now: with that death drive so close to the surface, warring with her survival instinct, it was a kind of mental self-torture.

And I was about to make it worse.

I pulled up her death drive, strengthened it, and fashioned a new trigger for it. Every instinct has many triggers: visual cues, sounds, even smells can dredge up an instinctual response from the depths of the mind. For Serena, her death drive would now be sparked by any mental contact with another jacker. It would flare through her other instincts, causing a firestorm that would likely short-circuit her mind. It might drive her insane, and I couldn’t be sure that she would survive it, but it would disable her from harming anyone else.

And it was better than killing her outright.

Anna could erase her memories, including any knowledge of us and other jackers’ whereabouts. Then we would release her somewhere remote, maybe downstate Illinois, in hopes that she wouldn’t stumble across any jackers accidentally.

At least for a while.

Sasha banged in the back of the factory, clearing racks. Anna had returned from releasing Serena into the wild. A black mood had descended on me. I scooped up the screen off the kitchen table and flopped on the couch, ignoring both Sasha’s motions around the factory, as well as Anna’s frowns and blaring protective instinct.

The tru-cast was still paused where Anna had stopped it before.

Kira Moore’s voice sprung from the screen, the shaky camera image still focused on her impassioned face, bright blue eyes shining like an angel. “I was kidnapped by the FBI, brought here, and then sent to a prison with hundreds of other kids just like me. For no other reason than who I am.” She panned the camera across the changelings, who were wrestling with a couple of med-techs behind her. The changelings’ hospital gowns twisted around their thin frames as their small hands grasped at the med-techs’ uniforms and their bare feet pawed the tiled floor. They were fighting, mentally and physically, to escape from the hospital and the heinous experiments being conducted on them.

Fighting for their right to exist.

“I’m taking these kids out of here,” Kira was saying, “back home to their families, where they belong.”

I paused the screen with a mental nudge. Rewound it, played it again. And again.

Slowly the tightness in my chest eased. This was what it was all about. This was the fight my parents spent their lives preparing us for, and I was fully committed to it, no matter what difficulties lay ahead. No matter the casualties along the way. I would find the right jackers—full of determination, like Sasha and this girl who had started everything—and we would build the army needed to see the fight through to the end. So that mindjackers like us would have a home to come to. A place to belong.

Someday.

The Scribe takes place in the time period between Open Minds and Closed Hearts, shortly after The Handler, where Sasha first shows up to (very tentatively) join Julian's revolution. Sasha is one of my favorite characters in the series; after reading The Scribe, I think you'll see why. Told from Sasha's point-of-view, this novella demonstrates his scribing ability, as well as gives us a peek into the conflict inside his head. We also get to see more of Ava's ability here than was possible to show in the novels, which are all limited by Kira's point-of-view and her impenetrable mind.

Summary: Sasha Rimbali stopped using his mindjacking skill to erase souls in order to keep from going mad, but when a beautiful female jacker is threatened, he has to decide if there is any cause worth the cost of using his ability one more time.

A knife thunked into the dryboard panel I had just installed, piercing the thin board a mere two feet away from me. I reflexively lashed out with my mind toward my attacker only to run smack into the granite that was Anna Navarro’s mindbarrier. I wasn’t the strongest mindjacker around and, as far as I knew, no one could jack into her mind anyway. I’d probably just riled her by trying. She stood stock-still in her sleeveless black shirt and urban camouflage pants, returning my glare from the opposite side of the training area.

I wanted to ask, Are you insane? Instead, I pushed up the long sleeves of my shirt. “That was a perfectly good dryboard panel, you know.”

“Knife training today,” Anna said, ignoring me. “Or would you prefer close combat training again? Your call, Sasha.”

I swallowed. My bruises were still tender from yesterday’s close combat training. I had quickly learned that she had more muscles than I did, even though I was a guy and had done my fair share of manual labor. I worked the pitch-black knife loose from the board, scowling at the gash it left behind and the extra work I would have to do to repair it. Any complaints would be wasted on Anna—she thought I should be training, not fixing up the place. But the half-finished bathroom wouldn’t dryboard itself, and fighting Anna with a blade wasn’t exactly appealing. I walked the knife over and extended it, handle first. If I played it straight, maybe she wouldn’t actually stab me with it.

“I am certain I don’t want to fight you with one of these.”

“It’s not me you have to worry about.” She eyed me, as if she could size up my capability as a fighter by examining my sawdust-covered jeans and workshirt. Or possibly she was measuring me for a coffin. “You never know when a fight will find you, and you may not always have a choice of weapons.”

She pivoted away from me and threw the knife again, sinking it into one of the hundred-year-old oak beams that held up the converted door factory which served as the headquarters for her future mindjacker revolution. Our revolution. I rolled the words around in my head, but they still didn’t feel right. Her twin brother Julian recruited me into his new Clan as soon as I walked in the door, but I kept wondering if I’d made a mistake. Every other Clan had used me for their own purposes, and I wasn’t convinced Julian would be any different. And Anna seemed positive that I didn’t belong here. I couldn’t blame her for being suspicious—I wouldn’t let someone like me into my Clan either.

“If you’re not going to use your true abilities,” she said, “you’re no better than any other jacker. And sometimes you’ll be on the losing end of the jack.”

I shrugged. Little did she know, I’d been waiting for that to happen for a while. I vowed never to use my ability on anyone again, and one day, an angry jacker would put an end to me because of it. Some days I even welcomed the idea.

“Or,” she continued, “you’ll be closely matched. Then your weapons training could mean the difference between walking away or ending up in someone else’s Clan. From what I’ve heard, that hasn’t worked out so well for you in the past.”

Anna pulled another knife from the back of her pants and lunged at me, slicing the air in front of my face. I jerked out of her slashing reach and stumbled into a 55-gallon drum. It tipped, dumping trash we had cleared yesterday: rags clogged with grease, lumber singed by the laser saw, and machine parts eroded by a hundred years of rust.

I recovered my balance and righted the drum. “You don’t know anything about me.” My gaze locked on the knife as she switched hands and circled me. It was only a rubber training blade, probably dull and not life threatening. Still, I didn’t want to finding out how much it would hurt if she stabbed me with it.

“I know enough to see that your fighting skills could use some work.”

“And maybe I wasn’t clear,” I turned with her, keeping my eyes on the rubber blade, “about not opting for knife training.”

“As much as my brother would like to win this war with his words alone,” Anna said, as if I hadn’t spoken, “it’s going to take more than asking nicely to create a future where we can be free.” She lunged, and I landed a solid blow on the wrist of her knife hand, making her drop forward. My other hand swung a punch to her gut. She blocked it and brought the knife around. I pulled back, but its rough tip dragged across my chest. I swiped at her knife hand, getting nothing but air as she danced away from the engagement.

“Don’t lose track of the knife,” she said.

“Well, there’s a handy tip.” I glowered at her, then took a fighting stance as she circled me again.

“If you’re going to be a part of this Clan,” she switched hands and changed her grip, so the knife now pointed down, “you need to contribute something. I assume that you still don’t want to use your real skill.”

“That would be a good assumption.” Other Clans used my ability—to control, to punish, to gain power—always for the greater glory or security of the Clan. There was a time when I didn’t even know there was something wrong with that. When my mentor, Arlis, found me, I was a dazed changeling horrified at permanently erasing my gym teacher’s mind. He took me in, helped me recover, and taught me how to control my ability to erase a person’s mind, down to every last memory and personality quirk, and rewrite them into someone new. It took a long time for me to realize that anyone who plucks a thirteen-year-old boy out of school and turns him into a weapon isn’t a savior, he’s a monster.

“Your brother, Julian,” I said to Anna, “seems to understand that destroying people’s souls isn’t the most righteous way to fight for his cause.”

She flipped the knife up and down, alternating forward and reverse grips. “Just because he won’t force you to use your ability, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it anyway.”

Her words set my nerves on edge more than the knife. That was the truth that I feared—she and Julian were just waiting for the right moment, the right pressure, to trick or force me into using my ability. I wouldn’t do it, but even thinking about it set off a twitching in my stomach that made it seize up.

She tucked her free hand close, then swiped a back-slashing strike across my neck with the knife. I dodged back, the tip missing by inches, and shot my arm out, knocking the inside of her knife-arm and latching onto her wrist as it swung past. I jerked her arm down and twisted, using her momentum to throw her off balance and trying to break her hold on the knife. As she fell in closer, she hit me clean to my stomach with her free hand, forcing me to double over her and lose all my breath. I twisted harder, and she dropped the knife. I released her and fought for air as I snatched the knife from the floor then scrambled back before she could hit me again.

“Better,” she said, rubbing her wrist.

My lungs sucked in air, but the shakes in my stomach were climbing up my throat. I didn’t want her to see me lose my lunch. I dropped the knife to the floor, where it clattered dully on the oil-stained concrete, and turned away to the bathroom. The door wasn’t installed, but the dryboard gave me a little privacy. I bent over the sink and splashed near-freezing water on my face. The hot water line wasn’t hooked up yet, but the shock of cold successfully quelled the shakes. The mirror reflected back the dripping face of a man ten years older and a lifetime more worn than the thirteen-year-old changeling Arlis had whisked away from school to join his Clan.

Following Arlis had taken me down a path where I had destroyed more souls than I could track. They invaded my sleep, becoming a tangled mess of personalities and histories that nearly drove me mad. I left Arlis behind and worked the handyman trade, but was quickly pulled back into the underground mindjacker Clans. I had sinned so much, what was the point in stopping? There was no redemption for me, no more than it was possible to return the memories and lives I had stolen.

I wanted to believe this Clan with Julian would be different. He was practically bursting with hope for the future. Maybe I could help him deliver on that promise of hope for others, even if there wasn’t any left for me. Perhaps then there would still be a reason for me to exist.

I looked away from the dark, soulless eyes in the mirror, not sure who was I kidding.

I heard Anna scuff the concrete outside the threshold. I swung blindly, missed, and then caught her by the throat with my other hand, shoving her up against the half-constructed wall. I held off on the punch that was about to follow, partly because I didn’t want to put her through the dryboard I had just finished putting up, and partly because she had a crazy sort of grin above my hand clenched around her throat.

Heat rose up my neck and I dropped my hand. “Sorry, I thought you were…”

“I wasn’t,” she said, her eyes lit up. “But maybe I should have been.”

I rubbed the back of my neck, having a hard time meeting her eyes.

“Julian wants you up front,” she said.

“I need to finish work on the bathroom.”

“He has a new recruit coming,” she said. “He wants you to be there.”

I eyed her. “Why?”

She tapped her fingers against the wooden frame I’d put up for the door, avoiding my gaze. “You know he can’t jack, right?”

I narrowed my eyes. I’d seen Julian subdue a jacker from my old Clan that no one else could stop. And he had asked me to jack into his head, just to show me that it couldn’t be done. Jacking Julian wasn’t the normal mental wrestling that one mindjacker did with another, each fighting for control of the other’s mind. When I mentally reached out to push into Julian’s head, all of my nightmares raged out from the depths of my mind, tipping me toward the madness that made me leave Arlis in the first place.

I would never try that again.

“What do you mean, he can’t jack?” I asked. “Julian’s some kind of extreme jacker, like the rest of us. You with your hard head, me with my ability. I don’t understand exactly what he does, but it trumps jacking by a long shot.”

She dropped her hand from the door and looked me in the eyes. “Julian can manipulate your instincts, but he can’t jack you directly. That means anyone he can handle will be easy for him to control, but if he can’t reach their instincts, for whatever reason, he’s virtually powerless.”

“He’s not exactly defenseless,” I countered, a chill running through me.

“Agreed,” she said. “And I thought he could handle anyone, anytime. I never worried about him, until…”

“Until Serena came along,” I finished.

Anna’s jaw worked, the angles of her face flexing under her brown skin. “Look, I don’t know who these recruits are that he’s bringing in, and neither does he. Julian’s far too trusting. Until we know better, we have to assume that every one of them could be another Serena, or even worse.” She had the same brilliant blue eyes as Julian. They both could burn you with a look—his eyes blazing with hope, hers with something more raw. Anger? Hatred? She was legitimately dangerous, yet here she was, frowning with worry about her brother. It almost made her seem human.

“I get it,” I said. “You want to make sure someone’s there who can protect him, in case things go south again.”

“Exactly,” she said. “And I’ve been banished from the new recruit interviews.” She clenched a fist and pressed it against my fresh dryboard. I hoped she wouldn’t put a hole through it.

“I can’t imagine why that is.” I struggled not to laugh in her face. She might have another knife tucked in her pants.

She didn’t take my bait. “Sasha, I need to know.” She laid her palm flat on the wall and leaned closer to me. A reflexive sense of self-preservation made me rock back against the sink. “If it came down to it, and you had to use your ability to protect Julian, would you do it?”

“He said I wouldn’t have to…”

She waved away my protest. “I’m asking you—would you do it? To save him? Because he’s key to everything, the revolution, all of it.”

“I thought you said your cause wouldn’t be won with his words.” I couldn’t help but grin.

“Not on his words alone.” She narrowed her eyes. “Would you be thinking you could have a chance at a new life, if he hadn’t convinced you it was possible? Would you have even tried to come to us, if you hadn’t heard about how different he is?”

Well, she was right about that. Julian could sell ice cream to an Eskimo; or in my case, salvation to a hopelessly lost sinner. Charismatic didn’t touch it. His hope was an infectious disease that had infiltrated my mind.

“No, I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him,” I said. “And I appreciate that he’s willing to take a chance on me. But I’m not going to use my ability on anyone. Ever again. No matter what.” She didn’t know what she was asking, and she didn’t need to know. My victims lived and breathed, but they were hollow copies, empty of the uniqueness they were born with. The simple truth was that I’d rather have my pitiful life end now than destroy another soul. And I couldn’t chance bringing on the nightmares again. They would only carry me off into madness, and who knew what kind of harm I could do then.

She gave a tight nod. That obviously wasn’t the answer she wanted. “I’ll be watching the new recruit from back in the racks. I’ll be nearby, within jacking range, if there’s trouble.”

She pulled a knife, sheathed in a strap-on case, out of a pocket in the leg of her pants and handed it to me. “You know where the guns are,” she said, referring to the ancient wooden cabinets up front in the kitchen area where she kept her arsenal. “Make sure you’re armed before she gets here.”

I took the knife, not sure I would know what to do with it, and even less sure that weapons would make a difference. I strapped it under my pant leg anyway.

Julian’s first recruit, Serena, nearly killed us all before Julian stopped her. She had already wiped out my old Clan, setting one member against the rest, until he killed everyone but me. I only escaped because I managed to steal his soul first. If this new recruit was like Serena, Julian might be able to stop her too. If Julian couldn’t control her, then Anna’s weapons would be all we had.

Because using my ability wasn’t an option I was willing to consider anymore.

I pulled a small caliber pistol from the kitchen cabinet drawer. I wasn’t willing to erase someone to save Julian, but would shoot them if I had to. I had no taste for killing, but if they died the normal way, at least they took their souls with them.

I tucked the shiny, black gun in the back of my pants. Julian watched me, but didn’t say anything, just pierced me with the same intense look he wore when studying the latest news about mindjackers on the tru-cast. I understood why the mindreaders hated us—they could only read thoughts, but we could control them. What I didn’t understand was what Julian got out of analyzing the mindreaders’ protests. The readers acted as if mind-chanting hate messages about jackers would make us all magically disappear. Julian’s revolution was doomed if it relied on convincing the haters of anything. But he had already convinced me that his fight was worthwhile, so I guessed anything was possible.

Then again, Anna said his ability messed with people’s instincts. Maybe he had already played with mine.

I turned away from Julian’s stare and skimmed my hand along the ancient kitchen countertop, worn smooth by a thousand uses. If we would be living in this factory for any length of time, I wanted to install a modern flash oven. Maybe get some decent flooring to cover the cracked concrete.

“Any idea who this recruit is?” I asked casually.

“Just that she contacted me through Myrtle.” At my mystified look, he explained further. “Myrtle’s a friend of our mutual friend Henry’s. She’s set up a halfway house of sorts a few blocks over.” Julian inclined his head toward the south end of the building. More and more jackers were moving into our decrepit slice of Chicago New Metro, and the tru-cast reporters had taken to calling it Jackertown—not the most flattering description, but probably accurate. The place was an abandoned slum, and wayward jackers moving in didn’t improve it much.

“So this new recruit has already been vetted by Myrtle?” I worked the muscles between my shoulder blades, trying to unwind the tension. It had only been a couple weeks since Serena walked in from nowhere.

“Not exactly,” Julian said. “The recruit contacted Myrtle by private message and seemed to already know we were looking. She just wanted Myrtle to set up the meet.”

“So another walk-in,” I said. “Because that went so well before.”

Julian spread his hands wide. “I didn’t know much more about you when you walked through my door.” He smirked, like he knew something I didn’t. Either Julian was far too trusting, as Anna suspected, or his ability to influence people made him dangerously overconfident. He made a mistake with Serena, and he probably shouldn’t have let me in either.

Two sharp raps sounded at the front.

“Could you do the honors?” Julian gestured toward the metal door. An ancient punch code lock was all that we had for security, beyond what we could do with our abilities. And the weapons.

I pulled the gun out of the back of my pants while I strode toward the entrance, lunging out with my mind beyond the door. If there was anything at all suspicious outside, I would shoot first and ask questions later. My mental reach pushed through the relatively weak mind barrier of the person at the door, plunging deep into the soft gel her mind. I got a flash of her personality before she shoved me out again: young, wary of strangers, but also wildly willing to take risks.

I gripped the rough handle of the gun tighter and hesitated at the door. She knew I was there and nothing strange had happened yet. No sudden instinctual need to flee, like Julian’s brain would cause. No impenetrable barrier like Anna’s. Of course, no one could detect my ability with a simple mind surge either—I had to touch my victims before I could use my skill. If she was bent on attacking, she was saving it for later. Maybe once she was inside.

I held the gun at the ready as I opened the door.

Covered from head to toe in black, including a face-hugging Second Skin mask that obscured her features, she wasn’t at all what I expected. Her eyelids moved under the mask, and she minutely cocked her head, so I knew that she could see me.

“Are you going to shoot me or invite me in?” Her voice was strung tight and her right hand slowly flexed, as if it wished for a weapon to counter mine.

“It’s alright, Sasha,” Julian said over my shoulder. “Please invite our guest inside. No reason to keep her waiting out in the cold.” A gust of crisp winter air pulsed over the threshold, as if to underscore Julian’s words.

I eased back, clearing the doorway, but my gun stayed trained on her. She took two steps inside, watching me through her mask and keeping an open path to the door.

“Put the gun away, Sasha,” Julian said. “I’m sure that our guest won’t be any kind of trouble.”

I assumed that he had dipped into her instinctual mind to control her. Or at least made sure she wasn’t a threat. I tucked the gun into the front of my pants, but kept a hand on it.

Julian welcomed her inside with a sweep of his hand. “You won’t need the mask, not if you’re truly interested in joining us. Although I must say, I’m surprised to see a contractor showing up on my doorstep.”

A contractor. The term scratched my mind. Some jackers sold their mindjacking favors to readers, using go-betweens to set up the transaction anonymously. That must be why the mask. But Julian made a good point. Why was a contractor showing up here at all? Julian’s revolutionary business wasn’t the type that would interest mercenaries. There was no money in it that I could see.

“I’ll keep the mask, thanks.” She glanced over her shoulder. Another young woman stepped into the doorway, her long blond hair wisping in the breeze. “I’m only being paid to make sure Ava made safe passage here.”

I tensed my grip on the gun. I should have known to search farther than the door. This Ava person was slender, almost painfully thin—the winter breeze might tumble her down the street with a strong gust. But that meant nothing; it was her mind that posed a threat. I was about to surge into her head when Julian threw a hand across my chest. I wasn’t planning to attack her, I just wanted to know what we were facing. I held back, hoping that he had a plan.

Julian gave the contractor one of his warm, trust-me-I-know-what-I’m-doing smiles. “I can assure you that your charge is in safe hands now.”

Sure, she was safe. The girl had little to fear from us, unless she or her contractor friend made some kind of move. Which was why I had the gun. And the knife strapped to my leg. It was us I was worried about.

The contractor ignored Julian and looked to Ava for confirmation. The girl suddenly beamed a smile straight at me, her wide blue eyes radiating such pure happiness that it startled me—and stilled my twitchy grip on the gun.

“It’s alright.” Ava briefly touched the contractor’s black-sleeved arm. “Sasha thinks I’m safe, and that’s good enough for me.”

My mouth dropped open, and Julian flashed a look to me.

“How do you know my name?” My hand tightened again. Was she reading my thoughts? How was that possible, when I hadn’t felt any kind of mind surge? I would have sensed her in my mind if she had linked in.

Ava glided in front of the contractor and stood uncomfortably close to me. She peered up into my eyes, her slim black jacket shielding her against the chilled wind still gusting in from outside. She was nearly a foot shorter than me, but my body recoiled from her intense gaze.

“I know all about you, Sasha. I’ve been watching you.” She frowned at Julian, then looked back to me. “Can I trust Julian? Is he a good person? Can he keep me safe?”

“I… um…” My voice ran away—having to character witness for Julian, I suddenly didn’t know what to say. Was Julian a good person? I hoped so, because I trusted him with my life these days.

She saved me from answering by nodding. “I had heard about Julian before, but I couldn’t exactly get into his head to find out for myself. Although it wasn’t as bad as when you tried.” The corners of her mouth turned down, then her gaze roamed the factory. “The person hiding in the shadows is also someone I can’t read. That’s why I had to rely on you, Sasha.”

For no reason at all, the soft smile she wafted up to me cut loose the cords that held my shoulders tense, strung tight across my back.

“I’m sorry for peeking in on your thoughts,” she said. “I don’t usually spy, if I can help it.” But her smile held no regret, like she was apologizing for breathing, something she couldn’t help and wouldn’t stop if she could. “But your thoughts told me so much… I figured, if only I could find a way here, to you, then maybe I might be safe again.”

Her words snapped tension back into my shoulders and drove a panicky feeling through my chest like a hot knife. What had she read in my mind? What did she know? I took a step back, and a frown marred the sunshine on her face, like a cloud passing over the sun.

“Well, then,” Julian said, and I couldn’t tell by his voice if he was amused or annoyed. His face showed only his typical intense curiosity. “Maybe you can tell us about this ability of yours to read Sasha’s mind without him knowing. I have to say that’s a skill I haven’t seen before.” He smirked again, but it was clouded. Which made me wonder what his ability was telling him that I didn’t know.

Ava ignored him and turned to the contractor, handing her a tally card she pulled from her jacket pocket. “This is all that I have, and most of it is stolen, so you should change it to unos as soon as possible.”

The contractor took the money and made a quick salute with the card. “Nice doing business with you.” Then she turned and left the door standing wide open in her wake.

I quietly drew in a breath, trying to clear the panic from my chest, then shuffled to the door and shut out the bleak afternoon sun. I took my time reprogramming the punch code. When I turned back, Ava was watching me. Her eyes were alight, intense like Julian’s but softer, the color of the sky on a summer day when you can see for miles. Julian alternated between studying her and flicking glances at me, as if watching a ping-pong match or possibly a chess game with the concentration he gave it.

I decided to play it cool, even though my nerves were still singing alarm bells throughout my body. I crossed my arms and leaned against the now-closed door.

“So are you reading my mind now?” I asked, boring a look into those too-innocent blue eyes. If you are, I’d like you to get the hell out and mind your own business.

“Oh!” she said. “No, of course not. I mean, not that you would know. I’m sorry.” This time her apology seemed real, turning her cheeks red and making her slender fingers work against each other in silent agitation. “I don’t do it all the time. Only when I need to. I promise I won’t do it again. Unless you want me to.”

I don’t want you in my head! The thought came unbidden and ferocious, but she didn’t flinch, so I guessed she was true to her word.

“How does that work, exactly?” Julian asked. “Don’t you have to push through a mindbarrier to read thoughts?” He had templed his hands, tapping them against his lips.

She finally turned the spotlight of her attention to him. “Well, I do in a way, I suppose. I brush against people’s mind barriers. I’m very gentle. They hardly ever notice, and usually they can only tell if they already know that I’m doing it.”

“So you can read their thoughts by simply brushing the surface of their minds?” Julian asked. I recognized the Board of Directors voice he used when diving into things that fascinated him. “You don’t jack inside their heads at all, then?”

“Oh no,” Ava said. “In fact, I can hardly jack at all. At least not very strongly. I’m mostly a linker, really.”

Julian’s lips quirked up at that.

“Well, maybe you didn’t hear,” I said, “but everyone here has an extreme talent.” I glanced at Julian. “I don’t know if being a linker qualifies as extreme.” Although there was no question that her ability to get in my head without my knowledge was making me extremely uneasy.

Her pale face turned even whiter as she grasped my meaning, and my insides wrenched loose. Why did I say that? Part of me wanted to shove her right out the door again. Part wanted to say something to ease the frightened look on her face.

“Please don’t turn me away,” she said. “I… I risked a lot coming here, and…”

“No one’s turning you away.” Julian’s voice gentled, like he was talking her down from bolting. “You’re safe as long as you’re here, and you were right to trust us.” I was glad that he recovered for my idiocy. At the same time, I didn’t like the soft tones he was using with her. My head was ready to explode with the contradictions.

“Just tell us what you can do,” Julian said. “You’ve already shown you have unique skills.”

She took a shuddering breath, and the worry seemed to float right out of her. “I can jack, but not well, and I can’t keep people from jacking me worth a darn.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “I can read thoughts without people realizing I’m in their heads. I can link thoughts too.” She dropped her hand and gazed into Julian’s eyes. “And I can do it at long distances.”

He was entranced. “How far?”

“Miles,” she said. “Tens of miles? Once I reached all the way to Wisconsin, but that was from the northern suburbs of Chicago New Metro. I haven’t tried farther than that.”

“Tens of…” Julian let out a low whistle. “You’re a viewer.”

“A what?”

“You can view at long distances…” His gaze flew a hundred yards away. “I’ve heard of an ability like this, before the change, before mindreaders were common. There were a few people who claimed they could see things at huge distances… but I didn’t think it was real…” His gaze snapped back to her. “That’s an outstanding ability, Ava.”

I could see the gleam in Julian’s eye. He had already decided to invite her to join. But something didn’t add up. She could spy on us long distance, but she only spied when she had to? She was all of a hundred pounds soaking wet, with this crazy ability, but she never jacked anyone? No one was this innocent, especially a jacker. I could picture Anna seething back in the racks, wondering why Julian was letting himself be duped again.

Time for me to inject a little reality. “We don’t know anything about her, Julian.” I ignored the twinge that came when she frowned the tiniest bit. “She says she can do these things, but she could be making all this up. And I’m sure there’s more she’s not telling us.”

“Quite true,” he said, but he sounded more like he was humoring me than doubting her. “Maybe a demonstration is in order.” He turned to Ava. “I have a friend named Myrtle. She’s a rather strong jacker. Her mind’s not impenetrable, like my sister lurking in the back, but I assure you that she’ll push you out of her head if she senses you. She’s a few blocks away. Can you find her?”

Ava fluttered her eyelids closed, and I noticed that her eyelashes were almost invisible against her pale skin, like hand-spun threads of gold from a fairy-tale.

“Yes,” she said in a whisper. “She’s older, a grandma. She’s fond of knitting and the Cubs. And…” Ava paused, then opened her eyes to focus on Julian. “She worries about you, Julian. You remind her of a grandson she had, then lost. He was a dreamer too.”

Julian’s eyes widened and his lips parted as if he was going to say something, but the words got lost before he could form them. I didn’t care for that look at all—he was buying this hook, line, and sinker.

“Julian,” I said in a low voice. “This is a parlor trick.”

Julian snapped out of his trance, and I slid a sideways glance to Ava. Again she looked hurt, and it made my stomach clench. I didn’t like how she got into my head, how I noticed every little change on her face, how uncomfortable she made me. Maybe that was her real ability. I couldn’t tell, but I didn’t trust her five ways to Sunday.

“She could say that about anyone,” I added. “Maybe she plucked it out of your head.”

Julian’s eyes narrowed at that, finally. “Well, it’s certainly easy to check.” He pulled a slim, silver phone from his pocket. He must have jacked into the mindware to dial, because he simply held it to his ear and a moment later spoke into it. “Hello, Myrtle. How are you?” He paused. “Would you humor me for a moment and tell me what you’re doing?”

Ava had a patient I-told-you-so look.

Julian smiled. “You know I’m not a Cubs fan,” he said to the phone, “but I’m sure I could find a use for one of your hand-knit scarves.”

“She’s afraid you’re going to let Anna use it to clean guns,” Ava whispered, so that she wouldn’t be heard on the phone.

Julian frowned, holding Ava’s gaze. “Myrtle, I have a new recruit who thinks she can read your mind.” He paused. “Yes, the one who contacted you. Would you mind thinking of a number for me, but don’t say it.”

“Sixty-two,” Ava said. “Wait, no. She changed it to the square root of negative three.”

Julian’s eyebrows hiked up, and even I was taken aback by how fast she had said the response. Like there was no hesitation. Like she had read the mind of a woman three streets over as quickly as the thoughts popped into her head.

“Okay, Myrtle. Tell me.” Julian nodded, as if he never doubted it. “Thank you, Myrtle. No, that’s all for now.” He clicked the phone shut, his gaze still trained on Ava’s. He stepped closer to her and put a hand on her shoulder. I pushed up from the doorway, not sure why that alarmed me so much.

“That’s an impressive ability, Ava,” Julian said. “One I’m sure we could use in the battles ahead of us. But you must be very popular with that skill. Why have you decided to come to us?”

Finally, he was asking the right question.

She peered up into his eyes. “Sasha thinks you’re fighting for something important. That you’re the hope for the future of all of us.”

“Is that so?” Julian flicked glance at me and my face ran hot. If he gave me one of those smirks of his, I swear I would walk out the door. But he didn’t. In fact, he didn’t seem to register my embarrassment at all. Was he just checking on my instincts? I was beginning to feel like there were way too many people inside my head: even I didn’t want to be there, much less have anyone else snooping around.

“The future belongs to us,” he said to Ava. “Humankind is evolving and mindreaders were just the first step. Eventually, jackers will be the dominant species, but only if we fight for it. Only if they don’t destroy us before our numbers make our dominance inevitable. It will take a revolution to change the world, but every revolution has a seed that is its beginning. A start that could be easily snuffed out, if not grown with the right people at the right time.”

She soaked up every word. I had heard it before, but it still pulled at me. That was Julian’s true talent: he found the right words for the right person, the thing that appealed to them on a basic level. Maybe he cheated and used his instinct handling skill. I couldn’t be sure, any more than I could tell if Ava was still inside my head, reading all my doubts.

“There are a lot of the wrong people out there,” she said. “How do you know? That they’re the right person?”

“I ask them what they’re willing to fight for.”

She nodded, as if that made sense, her eyes lit with the same spark of hope I felt when Julian offered me the one thing I needed: a reason to keep going. But I knew why I desperately needed that hope. I had a lot to atone for. Dark secrets that Julian still couldn’t guess at.

What was she hiding?

“Ava,” I said, my voice thick, her name feeling strange on my tongue. She whirled to face me. It took a moment for me to speak when she was looking at me with those bright, happy eyes. “Sorry, but I can’t believe you’re walking in to sign up for a revolution out of the goodness of your heart.”

The corners of her mouth turned down. My hand crept up to rest on the grip of my gun. She was having way too much effect on my emotional state. Something was wrong with that. Maybe she was having the same effect on Julian too.

“Plus it’s hard to believe that your Clan just let you go,” I said. “After all, you claim you can’t fight off a jack, so how could you leave, if they didn’t want you to?” A problem I knew entirely too well. “What are you hiding?”

She left Julian’s side, her movements so smooth that she seemed to glide over to me instead of walking. My heart pounded unevenly as she arrived next to me.

“I have nothing to hide from you, Sasha,” she said. “And it’s only fair. I’ve been in your mind. You can reach into mine and see.”

My heart missed a beat, and I glanced at Julian, who looked surprised but intense. He wasn’t going to stop me this time.

I swallowed and pushed through her soft mind barrier. It gave no resistance at all, almost like a changeling’s or a mindreader’s. Her mindscent reminded me of strawberries baking in a sun-drenched field. She showed me an image of herself, swallowed in a Clan of men. Rough men. Jackers that were brutish, both physically and mentally. Then the image shifted, to those same men breaking into her home and jacking her mother, blond and waifish just like her, into glassy-eyed compliance.

They threatened to hurt my family, Ava thought. I’m not sure how they found me. I never told a soul that I was… different. But when jackers were revealed to the world, I think someone must have suspected. Someone I knew told someone else and eventually they found me.

They forced you to join their Clan? I asked.

She played an image of their rough hands grasping her, forcing her to leave her mother behind. And to serve them. Spy for them. Find other jackers for them. She had edged closer, and I had a hard time drawing in a normal breath. I couldn’t have torn away if Anna had come out of the back with a knife.

How did you escape?

I found you, she thought, and I realized that maybe it was possible to leave. Possible to find someone who would protect me. Once I knew I had somewhere to go, it was easy to leave. She flashed a scene of herself, creeping past sleeping bodies in the dead of night. She paused by the dark shadow of a jacker splayed on a cot, snoring. Even in the weak streetlight falling through the windows, I could see his face: eyes closed, black hair tossed by sleep, a light scar drawing an X across his right eyebrow. A scar I recognized, having been there when he first got it.

Arlis.

I stopped breathing.

He was my Clan leader, she thought. And, once upon a time, he was yours too.

A pulse of fear jolted me. She’s here to bring me back. The thought came fast and without control, tripping on my sudden flash of terror. She must have heard it, because she reached out a small hand and laid it on my chest, over my heart. I flinched away from her touch, like it might burn me.

No, Sasha, she thought. I’m here so you can save me.

I yanked out of her head. My mouth had run dry and I couldn’t form words. I looked to Julian for help, but he was silent, his eyes wide, watching the two of us.

She was telling the truth; she couldn’t lie to me, not while I was in her head like that. She wasn’t here to take me back to Arlis—she was seeking sanctuary from him. She wanted me to keep her safe from the man who had taken me as a boy and turned me into a monster. There was no way I could say no to that. No way I could send anyone, least of all someone as vulnerable as Ava, back into his hands. No way I could let him do to her what he had done to me.

It would be almost as bad as going back myself.

Julian’s expression shifted in a heartbeat, transforming into a wide smile. “I think we would very much like you to join our Clan, Ava.”

I sucked in a ragged breath, my lungs working again, glad Julian had spared me from forming words to say the same thing.

I pounded the hammer, slamming the nail into place with far more power than necessary, driving it in with the first beat, but hitting it a few more times to make sure. The sound deafened me, multiplying a thousand times in the close confines of the bathroom. These new silica fiber dryboards could take the abuse, as long as I didn’t miss the nail, but I might need to get some earplugs. The more I thought about that idea, the more I liked it.

“You enjoy working on things,” Ava said from the doorway, making me jump and miss the nail. “You like building things, instead of destroying them.”

A neat circular dent in the dryboard stared at me. I pushed off my knees and rose up until I towered over her. I slowly took the two nails out from where I held them between my teeth.

“You know,” I said, “I’d really rather not hear your analysis of all that time you were snooping in my head.”

She had the decency to blush and stare at her feet, which were narrow, thin like the rest of her. Almost as small as a child’s. A confusion of guilt and anger heated my face. Why did she have such an effect on me?

“I’m sorry.” She peeked up at me. “I forget that you don’t know me. That happens sometimes. I can’t always keep straight what I’m supposed to know from what I actually know.”

“How about you just forget everything you know about me?” Even as I asked, it sounded ridiculous in my own ears.

She cocked her head to the side, giving me a quizzical look and tapping her chin. “Who are you again?” Then she beamed a smile and stuck out her hand. “Hi! I’m Ava Trinkle. Nice to meet you.”

Her outstretched hand hung in the air, fingers lined up and floating. I waited a beat too long, then switched the hammer to my left hand and shook hers with my right. It was like taking hold of a dove, feather soft and weightless. I took care not to crush it.

“Sasha Rimbali,” I said. “And I’m not particularly pleased to meet you…” When her blond eyebrows drew together, I smiled a little. “Under these unfortunate circumstances,” I finished. Her smile flashed again, blinding me with the delight behind it. It was far too easy to make her smile. It felt like skating out over thin ice, all while knowing it would crack and swallow me whole. Far too much like losing control. And that was a very dangerous feeling for me to have.

I dropped her hand and gripped the cool steel edge of the sink as I leaned back against it. “So, Ms. Trinkle. You get captured by a ruthless Clan, sneak out under the cover of darkness, and join up with another Clan filled with extreme jackers and dangerous talents you don’t even understand.”

She hiked up her eyebrows.

“Ok, you might know a little about what we can do, but still. What makes you think one of us won’t sell you back to Arlis at the first opportunity?” I’d sooner hammer my own head, but she didn’t know that. Or maybe she did.

“I trust you, Sasha,” she said. “You’re not the kind of person who would do that.”

“You have no idea what I’m capable of.” I wondered how she could trust me when she had seen at least some of the things I had done. “And you’re far too trusting. You need to watch that, or you’ll find yourself in trouble so deep even we can’t get you out of it.”

She gave a tentative smile, and a half beat later I realized what I had said. “Not that we’re your babysitters,” I grumbled, somehow making it sound worse. I waved my hand at the hammer-sized hole in my dryboard. “I have work I need to do.” I hoped she would take that as a hint to leave.

“Can I help?” she asked.

I blinked, not expecting that response. “You know how to swing a hammer?”

“Well, no,” she said, biting her lip. I sucked in a breath as my insides did some kind of dance in response to that. “I’m fantastic at painting, though.”

“I’ll let you know when we get to the painting stage.”

She grinned and slipped out of the doorway, casting a last look over her shoulder as she went. I waited until she was gone before I quietly let out the breath I was holding. Then I lined up another nail on the dryboard, ignoring the hole for now, and pounded more fiercely than before. If she stuck around full-time, I would need a lot more construction work that involved pounding on things.

A handful of minutes and two dryboard panels later, Julian stuck his head in the doorway. I rolled my eyes and took the nails from my teeth. It was like Grand Central Station in here.

“You have a minute?” Julian asked.

I gestured to the dryboard, meaning no and knowing that it wouldn’t stop him.

“So, do you want to tell me about you and Ava?” he asked.

“What do you mean, me and Ava?” My shoulders tensed.

“C’mon, Sasha,” he said. “You clearly have a shared history. If she’s going to be part of our team, I need to know what it is.”

“We don’t share a history. We both had the same Clan leader, different times. The one that forced me to use my ability in ways that still give me nightmares.”

“The one she ran away from?”

I nodded. “He’s dangerous, Julian. We can’t send her back there.”

“No, of course not.” He studied me for a moment. “Is that all? You’ve never met before?”

“No.”

He frowned but nodded, then dug his phone out of his pocket. An incoming call lit it up, and he mentally nudged it to answer. The holographic display popped up over the thin silver screen, floating a miniature head in the air.

“Who is this?” Julian asked, his voice flat. “How did you get this number?”

It took me a split second to realize it was Arlis. I jerked back, trying to keep out of the screen’s range. Julian barely noticed, he was so intent on the image hovering above his phone.

“Mr. Navarro!” Arlis boomed from his tiny projection. “I’ve heard a great deal about you, son. You’ve taken our little community quite by storm.”

I shrunk farther away from Julian and his phone, wedging myself into the corner I had marked for a future shower silo, but it didn’t have any doors yet to block Arlis’s view. The bathroom suddenly felt like a tiny box with nowhere to go. But Arlis didn’t seem to notice me.

“And you are?” Julian asked.

“Arlis Specter.” He used the same fatherly tone I remembered too well. “I have a small Clan, not too ambitious, just working the New Metro suburbs, trying to stay on the right side of the Feds. Not unlike you, I’m sure. And I’m hoping we might do a little business.”

My head shook no, my breath frozen in my chest, but Julian focused on the phone.

“Business?” Julian asked.

“I believe you have something that belongs to me.”

Julian’s jaw worked. “You mean someone.”

“Yes, yes.” Arlis’s beefy cheeks bunched up, his smile all the more menacing for being the picture of grandfatherliness. It made me shudder. “She’s a pretty little thing, isn’t she?” His smile disappeared. “But I’d like her back.”

“I’m afraid that’s not going to happen,” Julian said, which allowed me to take a breath again.

“Well, now, maybe you can just put her on the phone,” Arlis said, “and we can have a little chat.”

“That’s not going to happen either. She’s not interested in returning to your Clan.”

“Look, Julian,” Arlis said. “I know the girl is valuable. I’m sure we can work out an arrangement to compensate you for your loss. This is just business. No need for things to get messy and involve the poor girl’s family. I’m sure she’d agree, if you’d put her on the phone.”

Julian’s expression fell as flat as his voice. “Perhaps I’m not making myself clear. Ava is under my protection. Any move against her family will be treated as a direct threat to this Clan, and I assure you that you do not want that to happen.”

“I don’t take kindly to threats, Mr. Navarro.”

“It’s not a threat, Mr. Specter,” Julian said. “It’s a promise. Good day.” The phone went dark, Arlis’s holographic image winking out of existence. Julian looked to me. “I don’t think he saw you, Sasha.”

I nodded then realized the steel nails were biting into my palm hard enough to bring out small trickles of red. I worked my hand to rub the pain away.

“He’ll carry through on his threats, Julian,” I said softly. “He gets rather… obsessed with things.”

Julian nodded. “I’ll send Henry out to her family, right away, to move them to somewhere safe.”

“Good.” My heart still pounded and my breathing was just now catching up, leaving me feeling like I needed to gasp for air.

Julian slipped his phone into his pocket and studied me. “Sasha… would you ever consider using your ability again?”

“You’ve already asked that question,” I said tightly. “The answer hasn’t changed.”

“What if it wasn’t used as a weapon?” Julian asked. “What if it was a tool to ensure justice? Think about it this way: you can take someone who is responsible for all kinds of wrongs and you can rewrite them into someone who can make up for those wrongs. You’re a scribe who can wipe the slate clean. Give them a second chance at salvation, a chance to turn their lives around before it’s too late.”

I narrowed my eyes, knowing exactly what Julian was doing. Using the words that he thought would turn me. Not what I wanted to hear right after a phone call from Arlis. Not when the stakes were keeping Arlis away from me. Away from Ava.

“Arlis doesn’t deserve salvation,” I said. “He deserves to burn in hell.” Like me.

Julian held his hands up. “Okay, okay. It’s just that the threat of it alone could be quite a deterrent. Especially to someone like Arlis, who understands your ability. It was only a thought.”

I didn’t respond. Julian turned and left, busily concentrating on his phone and hopefully dialing Henry to get Ava’s family into protective custody. I leaned against the shower wall and tried to quiet the pounding in my chest.

I wanted to be calm before I found Ava and warned her that Arlis was determined to get her back.

Once I had myself under control again, I wandered toward the front of the factory, taking the long way and weaving through the dusty racks that filled the center of the cavernous building. I hoped to find Ava to talk privately and warn her of the dangers of Arlis. She must know the chance she took in leaving him, since she had lived with him as her Clan leader. But I doubted she knew the extremes he would go to, like I did.

Machine parts and cobwebs clogged the racks, along with the ever-present smell of machine grease. We’d cleared several racks, readying them for Julian’s new recruits, but only a few had been converted to sleeping bunks for me, Anna, and Julian. Now, I supposed, we’d need to make one for Ava, too. There wasn’t much in the way of privacy in the barracks, and a brief thought flitted across my mind of building a few rooms off to the side of the factory. For private meetings or possibly bedrooms. That thought resurrected the skating-on-thin-ice feeling, so I shoved the idea away and strode more earnestly toward the front.

I reached the makeshift kitchen without finding Ava. Julian’s sister Anna sat at the hundred-year-old wooden table, cleaning her guns. There were a half dozen spread in front of her, in various states of disassembly.

“Don’t you ever get tired of doing that?” I asked.

“Nope.” She seemed sore, probably because Julian had let another recruit in that we knew little about. I hadn’t talked to her since Ava arrived.

“She’s not so bad,” I said. “Things could be a lot worse than having a recruit who’s basically a linker.”

“Right.” She sighted down the barrel of a half assembled gun in her hand, then rubbed an oilcloth over it and set it on the table. “Just not sure what Julian’s thinking, collecting a bunch of jackers who barely know how to jack.”

“I know how to jack.”

“You know what I mean. At least Ava’s not afraid to use her ability, such as it is.”

“Gee. Thanks a lot,” I said. “By the way, have you seen her?”

Anna stopped her polishing and looked up. “She’s in back, talking to Julian.” I ignored the twinge that Julian had gotten to her first. “What’s with you two, anyway?”

“Nothing.”

Anna seemed unimpressed.

“We both had the same Clan leader,” I said. “That’s all. And I know what a piece of work he is. Let’s just leave it at that.”

She was going to say more, but then her gaze shifted behind me. I turned to see Julian and Ava coming from the barracks. I must have missed them somehow.

Julian waved his small silver phone, then pocketed it. “Talked to Henry. He’s on his way to pick up Ava’s mother and bring her to a safehouse.”

Ava gave him a warm smile. I didn’t like it, and I could tell Anna didn’t either. I closed my eyes for a moment, determined to get my feelings under control. It was as if I was insanely jealous around her, which made no sense, given that I had known her for less than a day. Maybe it was the looming threat of Arlis back in my life that was making me so… unstable.

Whatever it was, it needed to stop.

I opened my eyes again. “That’s good news.” Ava stared at me with concern. You promised to stay out of my head, I thought. There was no reaction on her face, which trickled relief through me. I guessed she was keeping her promise.

“Henry can move Ava’s mother to our parents’ estate in the North Shore,” said Julian, ignoring us, “until he can get new documents for her and relocate—”

A loud cracking sound split the air, followed by a hollow metallic bang. Before I could twist to see where the noise had come from, Julian slumped to the floor, landing with a dull thud in front of me. I dropped to the floor as well, rolled to the left, and scrambled to the table where Anna had her guns. I saw a flash of camouflage as she skittered across the floor to take cover behind the kitchen cabinets. I tipped the table, scattering guns and putting a shield between myself and whoever had broken through the door. Julian lay twisted on the concrete, a dart sticking out of his chest, which gave me a second’s worth of relief that it wasn’t a bullet hole. Then I realized I couldn’t see Ava.

Boots pounded the cement, surging into the factory. I flung out my mind, trying to gauge how many, while also searching for Ava. My reach plunged into five minds, four of whom shoved me out. The fifth belonged to Ava, just on the other side of the table. I was about to link a thought to her when a volley of pop-whoosh sounds punctuated the air. The boots scuffled, and another volley fired off, stopping and starting in time with my erratic heartbeat.

I was desperate for a weapon. As I remembered Anna’s dumped guns, Ava pivoted around the edge of the table, her small hand pointing a reassembled gun at my head. I spun toward her, rolling sideways on the floor and knocking my legs into hers. Her shot went wide, or at least not into me, and she tumbled down on top of me. I easily wrenched the gun out of her hand.

For a split second, I thought she had betrayed us, but her face was blank, her eyes dead to me. I surged into her head and instantly recognized the hard, marble presence suspended in the softness of her mind, controlling her thoughts and actions.

Arlis.

As I wrestled with him mentally, she fought against me physically, like a tiny wild animal. I wrapped my arms around her, pinning her flailing arms to her side. Arlis had to know it was me, like I knew it was him. More pop-whoosh sounds told me that Anna still fought from the cabinets. After what seemed like a long stretch of time, but was probably just a few seconds, I managed to shove Arlis out of Ava’s mind. She went limp in my arms, her eyelids fluttering, like she was fighting to remain conscious.

I relaxed my hold on her, my hand slippery with sweat as I tried to get a better grip on the gun. I surged out again, finding the four intruders—Arlis plus three of his henchmen—spread along the perimeter, probably taking refuge from Anna’s fire behind the massive door stamping machines that lined the front wall. They pushed back, shoving me all the way to my skull. They were too strong and quickly got inside my head. I fought them, but I was losing control, so I reached my pistol around the table and fired in their general direction. The shots rang out, pinging off machinery and concrete like a hail of metallic bees.

A short scream pulled one of the presences from my mind. More gunfire sounded from the cabinets, like firecrackers smacking the air. Another scream and the pressure in my head lessened again. With only Arlis and one other mind, I managed to push them just outside my head, enough to keep them from controlling me.

Ava stirred to life in my arms. I didn’t know if I could jack Arlis out of her head again. Preemptively, I held her tight against me, keeping my gun hand far from her reach.

“It’s okay, Sasha.” Her voice was clear and light. “He’s not in my head.”

Anna’s mental presence surged against Arlis and his henchman. Together, we pushed them back to their own skulls, and with Ava safe, my hands were free. I reached around the corner again and fired in their direction. A grunt and the lack of mental pushback told me Arlis’s henchman had been hit. That left Anna and me to both mentally press in on Arlis’s head. As we did so, we controlled him enough to immobilize him physically. His gunshots stopped, and Anna and I ceased fire as well.

I motioned to Ava to stay put and climbed to my feet, still hunched behind the table. I crouched as I ran between the table and the nearby sofa, seeing if I could draw any fire, but there was none. Still crouched, I sprinted across the concrete floor.

Arlis lay in a dusty grease spot between a stamping machine and the front wall. His eyes were half-lidded, trying to battle Anna and me in his mind. Seeing me, he struggled to raise his dart gun, but I stepped on his arm, pinning it to the floor. I pointed my gun at his head. My heart pounded in my ears, drowning out all sound other than my own labored breathing. I was about to shoot him when Anna arrived at my side.

Without hesitation, she reached past me and shot Arlis in the chest. I twitched from surprise, but then disappointment rolled through me when I saw the dart in his chest. Anna turned and fired again, taking down Arlis’s henchman, who now lay unmoving with both a dart and a knife sticking out of his gut.

I gripped my gun harder, still pointed at Arlis. Why didn’t she kill him? She should have killed him. I would have killed him if she hadn’t shot him with the dart.

“The others are out.” Anna lowered her weapon. “Are you injured?”

“No.” I should pull the trigger and kill Arlis now, but something about him lying on the ground, his cheeks slack and grey, stopped me. He seemed so much older than the last time I saw him. Worn. Tired.

Anna peered at me. “Is he the one?”

“Yes.” The one who made me what I am. The one who had caused me to ruin so many lives. A tremor in my hand made the gun waver a tiny bit. Why hadn’t I shot him already? What did it matter if he had become an old man since he tormented me?

“Are you going to kill him?”

Her words made me twitch. I turned to look at her. Those startling blue eyes locked onto mine.

“He deserves to die,” I said. A flush of heat crawled up my face, though I doubted she would mind if I shot Arlis.

“So what’s stopping you?”

“I… I’m tired of killing.” The words felt traitorous, slipping out of my mouth, like the truth had escaped in spite of my best efforts to cage it.

“You could rewrite him instead.” She held my gaze. I slowly let the gun drop to my side.

Ava arrived behind me. “Sasha, no.” She pulled my attention to her. “It would be too hard on you. I’ve seen the nightmares. You don’t need to do that anymore.”

“One way or another, you need to stop him,” Anna said. “Or I will, if you would prefer. But he’s not walking out of here.”

She was right, of course. Arlis would come after us again. Or he would track down Ava’s family, just for vengeance. And that was the problem. This felt like cold vengeance, the kind of thing that Arlis would do. It felt like I was trying to take back all that he stole from me by putting a bullet in his brain. Killing Arlis would stop him from doing what he did to me again. What he did to Ava and her family, and who knew how many other people over his lifetime. It would stop the monster.

But I wanted more.

I wanted him to feel sorry. I wanted him to regret what he had done. I wanted him to live a long life carrying the guilt of so many wrongs that he could never put right. I wanted him to spend years trying anyway. I could rewrite him into being someone horrified by the things he did. And somehow that felt more like justice. But that was also giving him another chance, just like Julian said.

My throat closed up. Ava’s hand gripped my arm, a light pressure that almost wasn’t there. I cleared my throat, but didn’t push her away. Instead, I turned to Anna and held my gun out to her. “If I lose control, I want you to use this.”

She frowned, but took the gun. She knew the danger of what I could do, and if nothing else, I knew she wouldn’t hesitate to use force if threatened. If the madness took me this time, she should be able to stop me before I touched anyone else.

Ava’s grip on my arm grew stronger. “Sasha, you don’t have to do this. I don’t want you to do this for me.” Her pretty face drew into lines of pain.

“I’m doing this for me.” I gently pried her fingers from my shirt.

I knelt by Arlis, unconscious at my feet, and touched the first two fingers of my left hand to his sweaty and chilled forehead. I closed my eyes, tunneling deep inside his mind until I reached the cloud of mental connection that enveloped everything: bits of memories, snippets of personality quirks, behaviors and convictions, all wound together like a giant ball of string. No organization, just connection. A set of memories that wove together into a conviction which then threaded into a new behavior. It was the tapestry that made Arlis unique.

I plucked a string and it unraveled, traveling back in time to when he was a child, a boy with few possessions to call his own, but who wanted more. A boy who grew into a man who discovered he had a great power. Who would never be satisfied, always craving what his power could bring him. The tapestry came apart in an endless cascade of memories and emotion that washed through me like a pulse of energy, intense and paralyzing.

I teetered, dizzy with it. Hands were on me, holding me up. My eyes remained squeezed shut.

The pieces of Arlis fought for space inside my head, pushing around my own thoughts and memories. I absorbed him, became him. I held the empty box that was a cruel joke by my foster father on my birthday. I cried silent tears while I bunched up the sheets on my bed, wishing the pain would stop, vowing never to hurt from wanting again.

My mind blew the memory away with caustic sands that eroded me into bits. The pieces lifted like small leaves swirling into the air on a whirlwind. I scrambled, grabbing at them, trying to shape them into a life. My life. Arlis’s life. Any life. But they shredded into a hazy cloud of dust.

I remember you, Sasha, a voice spoke in my head. I know who you are. It was Ava’s voice, like a lighthouse in the cloud, calling me. My own thoughts and memories pulled toward it, beating back the dust of other personalities that threatened to choke them.

I remember you, Sasha, Ava said again, inside my head, urging me on. I collected up the pieces, gathering and shaping them, until they coalesced into a single life.

Mine.

I blinked open my eyes. Arlis lay motionless under my touch. Ava’s hand gripped my arm, anchoring me. I was so light-headed, I might have fallen over, if this tiny girl wasn’t holding me up.

I reached into Arlis’s mind and rewrote him, reassembling the pieces of him to form a new picture and scribing his mind into something better than it was. I left every memory of every wrong act intact, but made them barbs in his mind; thorns that he could never remove and that would remind him of what he had done. Then I crafted a basic need, stronger than any other, stronger than self-preservation itself.

A need to fix what he had done.

That last part drained every parcel of energy I had left. I slumped over, my head falling to my chest, my eyes tugging close.

I fell into Ava, and somehow she held me up.

The training area still reeked of old grease and ancient dust. I circled Ava, tracking her, keeping my eyes on her small hands. They could move pretty fast when she wanted them to. She watched me, her gaze flitting over my body, looking for the next move I would make. She finally worked her way up to my eyes, locking stares with me. Then she broke out into a grin.

I kept my face serious, although the compulsion to smile back was almost overpowering. “This isn’t a game, Ava.”

“It’s not?” she asked, a laugh in her voice.

“Close combat training is important,” I said. “You need to be able to defend yourself.” In case I’m not there, next time. I kept that thought to myself.

She moved lightning quick, leaping out and punching me in the gut, then hopping back and regaining her balance, like a bird on a wire. I barely felt the punch—it was like being batted by a kitten.

I sighed and stood up straight. “Is that all you’ve got? C’mon.” I crooked my fingers, urging her closer. “Hit me as hard as you can.”

She stood straight as well. “I just did.”

“That was pathetic.”

She leaped at me, both arms raised, and brought them down on my chest, beating me with her fists. She knocked me off balance, forcing me to take a step back, but I easily caught her wrists in my hands, holding her close.

“I surprised you that time, didn’t I?” she asked.

“A little.” I couldn’t help but smile. “But now you’re trapped.”

“That’s awful.” She smiled up at me. “Poor me.”

“You’re not taking this seriously.” I didn’t let her go. I liked having her close way too much for that. She didn’t try to move away either.

“I take you very seriously, Sasha,” she said quietly. “Always.”

I was going to kiss her. Someday. Probably soon. Very soon.

But not today.

I spun her till she faced away and locked my arms tight around her. “Try to break my grip,” I instructed.

“But I don’t want to.” I could feel her smile, even though I couldn’t see her face. Definitely kissing her. Very, very soon.

“Ava,” I warned. Her safety could depend on this, and that wasn’t something I was willing to mess with.

She stomped on my foot and shoved her elbow into my gut, both of which actually hurt a little, then she twisted out of my loosened grip and spun to face me, stepping back out of my reach.

She crouched into the fighting stance I had taught her.

“Better,” I said.

She smirked. “Try to grab me.”

“Grab you how?” I pictured grabbing her and kissing her, but I didn’t think that was what she meant. Maybe.

“Any way.”

I shot a hand out to her left shoulder, but just before my hand touched her, she dodged it. I tried grabbing her right wrist, but she whisked her hand away. I lunged for her waist with both hands, but she twirled away right before I got there. She was a slippery eel all of a sudden.

I stopped. “How did you do that?” I tried to keep the surprise out of my voice.

“You know how I promised to keep out of your head?” She gave me a wicked smile. “I don’t always keep that promise.”

I narrowed my eyes, crouched, and lunged for her again. This time she let me catch her.

Probably because I had decided to kiss her after all.

If you haven't read Free Souls, I HIGHLY recommend you read that next (to avoid spoilers).

Book Three of the Mindjack Trilogy

When your mind is a weapon, freedom comes at a price.

Four months have passed since Kira left home to join Julian’s Jacker Freedom Alliance, but the hole in her heart still whistles empty where her boyfriend Raf used to be. She fills it with weapons training, JFA patrols, and an obsessive hunt for FBI agent Kestrel, ignoring Julian’s worries about her safety and repeated attempts to recruit her for his revolutionary chat-casts. When anti-jacker politician Vellus surrounds Jackertown with the National Guard, Kira discovers there’s more to Julian’s concerns than she knew, but she’s forced to take on a mission that neither want and that might be her last: assassinating Senator Vellus before he can snuff out Julian’s revolution and the jackers she’s come to love.

Keeper is a short novella told from Kira's point of view and takes place in the time period between Closed Hearts and Free Souls. Originally, my plan was to write a trilogy of girls' pov novellas to accompany the boys' pov novellas, but that has yet to come to pass (although you'll see a snippet of Anna's point of view in the BONUS flash fiction included in this collection). I may yet write those additional novellas, once I circle back to writing Mindjack again. But don't hold your breath! I need to finish my Singularity series first.

Summary: Seventeen-year-old Kira Moore is determined to be part of the second-chance mission to free her fellow mindjackers from FBI Agent Kestrel's secret prison, but Jacker Freedom Alliance leader Julian believes she's too valuable to risk in the operation.

My arms quiver, but I force myself to finish the tenth pushup.

“All right, Kira, that’s enough,” Anna says, as if she wasn’t the one who ordered me to do them. She has three inches and thirty pounds of muscle on me. The urban camouflage pants hang from her hips like she was born wearing them, and her black t-shirt is barely rumpled from our hour-long session.

I scramble up, dusting the training-floor grime from my hands and acting as if I’m not hopelessly outclassed in sparring with her. Anna is the head of operations for her twin brother Julian’s nascent mindjacker army—we’re only a dozen jackers strong at the moment, but Anna’s bent on whipping us all into shape. She and Julian are convinced a war is coming: one where jackers will be forced to fight the world of mindreaders simply for the right to exist. And I’m determined to be ready when it happens.

Sasha, Julian’s right hand man, smirks from the edge of the training area, his normal sullenness apparently lost to high amusement at my expense. “Are you sure I can’t sell tickets?” he asks. “I’m certain I could make money off this.” He waves a hand encompassing me, Anna, and the thin floor mats we’ve been training on. Anna has marked off this small patch of Julian’s abandoned-door-factory-turned-revolutionary-headquarters for combatants only… and no one crosses her lines. Not even Sasha, whose ability to scribe, or rewrite, minds makes even the strongest jackers give him wide berth.

“Just because you like watching Anna wipe the floor with me,” I say, “doesn’t mean anyone else would be interested.” I shake out my arms, still aching from seven sets of pushups and an hour of trying to prove I’m ready for our upcoming mission. I take a fighting stance opposite Anna, but she just examines me with a cool black-eyed stare. Probably figuring out which body part has been left unbruised.

Sasha breaks into a full smile. “Oh, I can think of a few people who might want to watch a little keeper-on-keeper action.” The way he says it pulls a flush to my already heated face. It is unusual to have two people with impenetrable minds—keepers, as Julian likes to call us, because we can keep our thoughts private—in the same room together, much less engaged in hand-to-hand combat training.

I don’t want to think about who Sasha might be referring to, but an image of our dark-haired revolutionary leader swims up through my thoughts anyway. I shove it away. I’m still getting those strange, unbidden, and entirely inappropriate thoughts about Julian—ever since he manipulated my mating instinct, of all things, to engineer an escape from Kestrel’s prison. I’ve forgiven Julian for that—mostly—but the hot flashes keep coming back.

I’m afraid he’s done something permanent to my brain.

I relax my stance and glare at Sasha, even though it’s not his fault. “Maybe I should tell girlfriend about your keen interest in watching girl fights?”

Ava won’t care, but Sasha stays far from anything that might make her jealous. He returns to scowling. It’s a much better look for him. He turns his back on us and strides away.

I’m still not quite sure where I stand with him. On the one hand, Sasha blames me for outing jackers everywhere and sparking the crackdowns that make Julian’s resistance movement necessary. On the other hand, Sasha helped rescue my mindreader boyfriend, Raf, which counts for a lot, even if I never really got Raf back. His memories were already shredded—everything that was us was gone. All I have left is an empty space where my heart used to be… and a burning need to find the FBI agent and jacker tormenter ultimately responsible: Kestrel.

Sasha and I at least agree on that: every jacker in Julian’s revolution wants Kestrel’s head.

What they don’t know is I plan to get there first.

“Kira.” Anna’s voice makes me twitch.

I jerk my attention back to her. “I’m ready.”

She’s circling me now, back in training mode. I need to prove I’m truly ready, not just to spar, but for the real mission. It’s been weeks since our miserable failed attempt to liberate the jackers in Kestrel’s prison the first time. Julian made us lay low afterward, worried about the backlash that an open assault might bring. But he’s finally given the green light for another op. Another chance to stop Kestrel and his experimental jacker torture chambers once and for all. And I need to be part of it.

Anna gestures with her chin to me, her dark eyes never losing contact with mine. “The pushups may make your muscles tired, but you don’t need muscle power. You should be using the minimum force necessary to neutralize your attacker.”

“I don’t plan on using minimum force when I catch up with Kestrel.”

“You’ll have a chance at close-combat training later,” she says. “For now, you need to master some basic self-defense moves. They will help you stay alive long enough to complete a mission.”

“Right.” I fall into a fighting stance again. “We’re still on for next week, right?”

“If Sasha can scribe some of the workers to help us get past security, yes,” she says. “It’s still uncertain if we can do that without detection, but surveillance is tracking the staff.” Surveillance means Ava, Julian’s long-distance super-jacker. She can reach with her mind to places I can only dream about, including tracking Kestrel’s prison staff all over Chicago New Metro. Kestrel’s prison masquerades as a psychiatric hospital, so there are nurse, guards, and even regular janitorial workers on staff. Ava’s looking for just the right combination of personnel for Sasha to scribe: they’ll still appear to be working for Kestrel on the outside, but on the inside Sasha will rewrite them into being jacker sympathizers. Plan A relies on them letting us stroll in the front door, break out the jackers held in cells and medical bays, and walk back out again.

“I still like Plan B better,” I say, keeping my gaze on Anna’s hands, watching for the next move that will land me on the floor.

“A frontal assault will draw more notice.”

“It will make a statement,” I point out, knowing she has as much influence on the actual operational plans as her brother. “And Julian likes to blow things up.”

“Using munitions on the front gate won’t convince Julian to put you on the roster.”

No, I think. But it will put him in a better mood. That thought brings up another flush, like Julian’s mood is more important to me than it should be. I stuff that feeling down the black hole that sits in my chest, the empty space where Raf’s love used to live.

Thank God Anna can’t read my thoughts. “You could convince him to put me on the roster.”

“Julian doesn’t want you anywhere near the operation. It would put you at risk, and you’re too valuable of an asset,” she says. “It’s a tactical decision.”

“It’s a stupid decision.” My burning need to go after Kestrel isn’t exactly a secret. Everyone knows I want him dead for what he’s done—Julian better than most. But he has this warped idea that I somehow need protecting. It’s as if he’s saving me for something special. Later. But I want Kestrel taken out now. And I don’t trust anyone else to get that job done.

“Besides,” Anna says, giving a small shake of her head, “you’re not ready.”

“I am ready.” I curl my fists, in case she uses that distraction to prove her point. “And you need my skills on the mission. I can’t reach as far as Ava, but she can only link in. I can get a kill jack at a greater distance than any other jacker you’ve got. Plus I know the layout of Kestrel’s facility better than anyone—”

“I’m not the one you have to convince, Kira.”

I let out a huff of frustration that doesn’t make me feel any better. “I’m not going to get… hurt or killed or whatever it is Julian’s worried about.” I point a closed fist at her. “That’s why I’m letting you give me bruises in places I didn’t know I owned. If you tell Julian I’m in fighting form, then I promise to stay out of trouble. I’ll use minimum force,” I say, lying through my teeth, “jack from a distance, whatever mission parameters you lay out, I’ll adhere to them.”

“I’m all for deploying force when necessary.” She dashes forward, grabs my arm, and tucks it close under her arm. She holds the position, waiting for me to respond, but any way I move, my arm’s going to break.

I jerk backward, trying to slip out of her grip, even though I know it’s useless.

“You’re shorter than your opponent,” she says calmly. “Your advantage is close in.”

I should know this already—we just went over it.

I push forward, unbalancing her enough that I can curl my arm and grapple with her so she can’t get rid of me. Then I try to throw one of the tight jabs she taught me, but she rotates, spinning out of my clumsy attempt to hit her. As she moves, she somehow lifts me off my feet without breaking my arm. I’m tumbling to the mat again before I realize what’s happened.

I lay there, sprawled, for a moment, beating back my urge to growl out my frustration. Then I climb to my feet, slower this time. I feel it, the checkerboard of bruises I’m going to have tomorrow, in every small movement.

“Get close to your much bigger opponent,” I mimic her. “That obviously works for me.”

“A larger opponent has more than size on their side,” she says, her voice neutral. “They have the fear factor as well. Most attackers will naturally use threats or intimidation first, resorting to physical violence last. But your fear is your ally in a fight.”

“You realize that makes no sense at all, right?” I brush the dust from my cargo pants.

“Fear will make your body tense. Your reflexes will sharpen. As long as you expect it and don’t allow it to control you, fear will prime your body to defend itself—or to withstand a blow and continue fighting. Fear heightens your attention, brings your instinct for survival to the fore. Don’t resist it. Use it to your advantage.”

Advantage. Years of combat training and an unnatural addiction to pushups have given Anna a ridiculous physical advantage. We both have impenetrable minds—so we’re equally matched there. Although… perhaps not quite as equal as it appears. We’re both keepers, but I have one ability that, so far, Anna hasn’t given any indication she shares.

I can manipulate my own mind.

I first discovered it in Kestrel’s cells, pumping up my heart rate to fight off the mind-numbing gas he uses to keep jackers sedated. Since coming to Jackertown to join Julian’s revolution a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been toying with that ability. Studying it. Then yesterday I accidentally discovered a trigger in my head that unleashed a torrent of adrenaline throughout my body. It heightened my perception, narrowed my focus, pumped up my breathing and heart rate… and completely freaked me out. I shut it off before it went too far. And I haven’t told anyone else about it because, well, because I wasn’t quite sure I could do it again.

I didn’t properly explore the effects of the adrenaline before, but from what I’ve heard, it’s also supposed to make you hyper strong—maybe strong enough to throw a punch that would make Anna sit up and take notice. It could be just the advantage I need to convince her I’m ready.

Now seems like a good time to find out.

“Ok, fear,” I say to her. “It’s my friend. Got it.” I stretch my arms overhead, pretending to work out the kinks, but I’m actually concentrating on diving deep into my own mind. I focus my gaze on a small scuff of dirt at the top of Anna’s black t-shirt. “Let’s go again,” I say, but I pull all my attention inward, reaching inside my own mind just like I’m jacking into someone else’s. I push past the normal thoughts and emotions that tumble through my head, past the parts that hold memories and control basic bodily functions like heart rate, down to a deeper level.

It’s a mess down there.

Like a plate of spaghetti exploded in my head: connections string all throughout my mind, tethering one wide-flung part to another. I have no idea what they all do, but I stumble around until I find one that feels… familiar. I follow the string—

“Maybe we should stop.” Anna’s voice jerks me back out of my head.

“What? No, I’m fine.” I blink and try to focus again. I just need a few more seconds to follow the string and reach the part that will trigger the adrenaline release.

“Are you sure?” she asks. “You seem distracted.”

“I’m good.” I circle her, focusing on that dirt scuff like my life depends on it. Inside my head, I’ve got the string again. The one that leads me straight to the adrenaline center of my mind. I pluck the neural string, and a signal cascades out, like a mini electrical storm in my brain. I feel it immediately: chemicals gush into my blood stream and race throughout my body. It’s like the fear that Anna talked about, only it’s all under my control: a vibrating energy, trembling throughout my body, just waiting for me to unleash it.

I’m watching the dirt scuff on her shirt, but my adrenaline-heightened perception shows me the minute muscle flinch in her shoulders before she moves.

I block Anna’s jab, knocking her arm aside. Her eyes widen slightly as I move in close, grabbing her shirt and yanking her forward, off balance. I land a punch to her gut, probably the strongest one I’ve ever thrown, fueled by the adrenaline coursing through my arm and finding release in my fist. I expect it to throw her back. Or double her over.

Something.

Instead it’s like I’ve hit a brick wall.

The pain in my fist barely registers before she’s a flurry of motion. I feel hits in three places practically all at once. She has an arm around my neck before I can even react. Then I’m bent in half and wrenched over her hip. She releases me in time to let me fall to the mat.

Again.

I lie on my back, squeeze my eyes shut, and slam my fists into the floor at my sides. Blood pumps in angry bursts through my palms. I don’t think I even made her flinch—

“Sleeping on the job, I see.”

Julian’s voice sends a jolt through me. My eyes pop open, and I wince. He’s shown up at exactly the worst possible time. I fight the protest of my aching muscles to haul myself up from the floor as quickly as I can.

“Just getting some pointers from Anna.” I force myself to keep a straight face as I look up into his dark, smiling eyes. My heart does a small lurch as the smile works its way out to a corner of his mouth. I tell myself it’s just the adrenaline still coursing through my system, and not that he’s damaged my brain in some way that makes my body react every time I have his attention.

He flicks a look to his sister. “I’ve been on the receiving end of a few of those pointers myself.” He leans closer and drops his voice. “It only hurts for a few days afterward, keeper.” The soft way he calls me keeper and the secret smile he gives me both do a number on my stomach.

I pull back. “Sounds like you should hit the training room more often.”

He grins, not at all fooled.

“Kira’s actually an exceedingly fast learner,” Anna says.

I send her a grateful look while Julian’s head is turned toward her.

“Is that right?” he asks her.

Anna levels a suspicious look in my direction, maybe wondering how I landed even that one punch. “She has some interesting skills. And the determination to make the most of them.”

I’m glowing under her words when Julian turns back to me.

“That’s some high praise from my sister,” he says with a smile. “Not that I expected anything less from you.”

I give a quick nod. “You can count on me, boss. I’m all ready for the mission.”

His normally creamy-brown face darkens. “We discussed this.”

I step closer to him, lowering my voice. “Not every jacker in Kestrel’s facility is going to be friendly to our cause, Julian. And some of them will be half crazy from the sedation. You need someone who can handle them. Anna can lead the way, but you’ll need more than one keeper to keep things under control. You really do need me on this mission.”

“I need you in one piece after the mission,” he says coolly. “And I’m not convinced that your highest priority would be to come back that way.”

“I’ll be careful, I swear.” I gesture to Anna, who has turned away, shaking her head, already conceding the fight. “See? Anna thinks I’m ready—”

“No.” His crystal blue eyes drill into mine, implacable.

“But I can help—”

“No.” Anger clouds his face, and he starts to turn away.

I catch his arm, and he turns back. “What do I have to do to prove I’m ready?” I ask, trying not to sound angry, but the words come out clipped anyway. “Just tell me. I’ll do it.”

He takes a breath, like I’m trying him to the limit of his patience. Then he gently lays his hands on my shoulders. With his touch, the blood under my skin pulses, the adrenaline still pounding through it. But my anger kills the instinctual gush of lovey-feelings his touch would normally conjure up.

“I promise you,” he says softly. “You’re going to be a key part of everything, keeper. You’re instrumental to making all of this work. Just… not on this particular mission.”

He drops his hands from my shoulders and gives me a parting regretful look. But this is far from over. If he thinks I’m letting this go, he’s seriously underestimating my hatred for Kestrel. And Anna is right: I have skills and the determination to use them.

I just need to figure out which one will convince Julian he’s making a terrible mistake.

Every shot from my dart gun stabs into the mannequin’s torso with a satisfying thunk. I can hear it even from fifty feet away, where the mannequin is strung up at the end of one lane in an abandoned bowling alley that Hinckley has turned into a shooting range.

“One shot went wide of the target zone,” Hinckley says in a flat voice, showing me a close-up of the mannequin’s chest in an image he’s snapped on his phone.

I push up my safety glasses—overkill for the dart gun, but I plan to shoot real weapons with bullets before I’m done today—and peer at Hinckley’s phone. “It’s fifty feet away and I missed it by less than an inch.”

“Still a miss.”

I wave off his phone. “My dart gun skills aren’t the ones that need work.”

He grunts a wry agreement, stows the phone, and relieves me of my dart gun. Hinckley knows I’m here to train with bullets, not tranq darts, but he likes to start our sessions with the less-lethal stuff. I already know how to shoot a real gun and miss; that’s how Kestrel got away the first time. I had no clue how to aim, and the recoil was completely unexpected. But a lack of training didn’t stop me from getting into situations where my aim was the difference between stopping a cold-blooded killer and letting him escape to torment more jackers.

“What do you want to shoot next?” Hinckley asks as he strides over to the gun cabinet.

“Julian?” I quip.

Hinckley jerks to a stop and gives me a dark look.

I roll my eyes. “I’m just saying it’s hard to change his mind once he’s got an idea in his head.”

He grunts again, but his shoulders are still tense as he turns to select a weapon for me. I shouldn’t joke with him. Hinckley is ex-military, although I didn’t realize that before I arrived a couple weeks ago. The shaggy haircut, ill-kempt clothes, and stringy hands are great camouflage. I knew about his extreme jacker ability to control many jackers at once; I just didn’t realize he had a mind for strategy and a decade of military experience to go with it. I had noticed his tendency to stick close to Anna, once we freed her from Kestrel’s cells. And since she’s been back, he’s spent a lot more time on the training floor, bulking up some of that lankiness in an obsession similar to Anna’s with the pushups. Maybe they read Guns and Ammo together in the back bunks of Julian’s headquarters.

Hinckley returns with a small caliber weapon. It looks lost in his long-fingered hands, but it’s probably just the right size for me.

“Six rounds, loaded, ready to go,” he says.

I take it from him. The cool metal runs a shiver along my fingers. Even though it’s small, the gun is heavy in my hand. I move my finger away from the trigger, keeping discipline like Hinckley taught me last week, then hold the gun with both hands in front of me, aimed at the mannequin. Already I’m picturing Kestrel’s angular face and imagining the slow squeeze of the trigger.

Hinckley lightly rests a hand on top of the gun, lowering it. “I’d rather you didn’t destroy our one tranq dart target.”

“Just visualizing.”

He nods and holds up his other palm. Two ear plugs rest in it. I tuck them in my pocket and follow him over two lanes to where a paper target sits in front of a bullet-ridden backstop. The mechanism that long-ago set up the pins is rusted and silent, just like the rest of the bowling alley. It was abandoned when the mindreaders fled the cities, looking to put more space between them and their mindreading neighbors. The readers still work in the downtown Chicago towers but that leaves a no-man’s-land at the outer edges of the city. The demens—driven mad by the change into mindreaders—haunted this part of the city long before the jackers moved in and set up Jackertown. Now, with Julian leading the way, this dead zone is coming back to life, if only as a place to train for war.

Hinckley gestures to the paper target. “Do you remember our training from last week or do you want to go over it again?”

“I’m good.” I line up the front and rear sights of the gun, then align them with the bottom of the target center, adjusting for the slight lift before the bullet flies to its mark. The safety’s still on.

“Have you started training people for the mission?” I ask, casually, as if this isn’t almost the entire reason why I’m at the range today. I do need target practice as well, but the real reason I normally come to Hinckley’s makeshift range is to clear my mind and quiet the ache left over from losing Raf. The focus required to hit the target, plus visualizing a bullet sinking into Kestrel’s brain, does wonders for my mood.

“You’re still not on the roster, Kira,” Hinckley says.

I lower the gun, but still keep it pointed downrange. “Thanks for the update.” I flick an irritated look at him. “But that wasn’t what I asked.”

“We’re doing a few drills, yes.”

I line up my sights again. “Assault on the gate? Or are you training with the assumption that you’re going to get inside first?”

“Kira.” His voice is quieter now. “If Julian says you’re out, then… that’s it.”

Hinckley would never go against Julian’s orders. I know that. There’s a fierce loyalty to Julian amongst his small band of revolutionaries—I’d say it almost borders on obsession, but I’ve felt it first-hand. He’s fighting for all of us. For what’s right. For the changelings and every jacker that’s ever been locked up by the government for the crime of simply being born. He’s trying to free all of us from prisons made of bars and bigotry. The feeling we have for him… it’s a lot like love.

Too much so, in my case, but that’s just because he messed with my head.

I squeeze my eyes shut and lower the gun. When I open them, Hinckley’s staring at me with an odd look of concern.

“I belong on that op, Hinckley.”

“I know.”

“Can’t you say something to him? Look at the tactical plan? See where you need a keeper?”

“He’ll just send Anna for that.”

I groan and let the gun fall farther, gesturing to him with my now-free hand. “There’s room for two keepers on the mission. And Anna can’t fight off the gas the way I can.”

“True.”

“And I can reach farther than anyone but Ava, and you know he’s not sending her in.”

“Even if he did, Sasha wouldn’t go for it.”

“Exactly!” Sasha is extremely protective of Ava. She’s his girlfriend, but it goes way beyond that. He hovers over her like he’s afraid something terrible will happen at any moment. “Which is why you need me on the op.”

“We do.”

My hope surges up. “So you’ll tell him? Explain to him? Get him to see—”

“He’s the boss, Kira.”

My shoulders slump and a huff of air escapes me.

“We’re going to get Kestrel. Besides…” He hesitates. “You don’t want a repeat of the last time, do you?”

“I lost Kestrel because I was saving your worthless hide!” I try to keep the bitterness out of my voice, but it’s there. I don’t like it. Saving Hinckley was the right move at the time, even if it cost me Kestrel.

His face is stone cold. “I hope you won’t make that choice again.”

“I didn’t mean that, Hinckley.”

“I know you didn’t,” he said grimly. He stares at the distant target. If I jacked into his head right now, I’d probably find him visualizing bullet after bullet sinking into the bullseye. Not that I’d dare to link into his head without asking.

“When I was in the military,” he says quietly, “we never left anyone behind. Then I joined the jacker division.” He glances at me. “I quickly learned they play by a different rulebook. And some people were definitely expendable.”

“You’re not expendable.”

He smirks. “Actually, I am. But you on the other hand…”

I frown. “Kestrel still has changelings in his torture chambers. Kids. He’s single-handedly responsible for more jacker misery than I can even track. Putting him out of business is more important than either one of us.”

He inclines his head in agreement but doesn’t say anything more. Even if he doesn’t agree with Julian’s orders, I know he won’t object to them. And it’s not just because of his military training. He believes in Julian, the way we all do. But I seem to be the only one willing to say Julian’s making a mistake.

I turn away and dig the earplugs out of my pocket with my free hand and clumsily stuff them in my ears. I line up my sights again. “I’m going on that mission.”

I don’t know if Hinckley says anything in response, because I’ve got the plugs in, and I’m focusing on the target. Kestrel’s ice-cold blue eyes stare at me from the bullseye. The hole inside my chest moans like a baleful wind whipping through a forest, empty of all the things Kestrel stole from me. I breathe the wind in, filling up the hole with its tormented sound, taking it deep and slow into my chest like Hinckley taught me last week. I click off the safety and move my finger to the trigger, then exhale, long and low. When the last of the wind leaves me, I gently squeeze the trigger.

The recoil jerks the gun up, but my hold on it is firm. I breathe in the wind again, line up my sights, and fire.

I empty all six rounds into Kestrel’s head.

I don’t need to see Hinckley’s image of the target to know the bullets flew true.

The next day, I’m no closer to figuring out how to get on the roster. It’s time to take it to the boss. Again.

Julian’s been squirreled away all morning in the chat-cast room, the one Sasha built and Hinckley wired up to cast Julian’s revolutionary message farther than the mind-whispered rumor mill of Jackertown. Jackers have been gravitating to this patch of abandoned Chicago New Metro for months, seeking out a haven from the mindreading world that hates them. But that doesn’t mean they all believe in Julian’s ideas about jackers being the next step in the evolution of mankind.

I certainly thought he was more than a little demens when I first met him.

Julian’s had to walk a tight-rope with the other jacker clans, a balance of power that lets the mages—his clan of super-jackers—exist without alienating everyone else. But since I arrived, he’s been talking non-stop about growing the mages from a clan into a movement… and how that takes more than a few Jackertown clans being willing to leave us alone.

It takes a message.

I hesitate outside the chat-cast room, hand on the doorknob, wondering if this is really the best time to disturb him. I hear a voice inside. I can’t make out the words, but I know they belong to Julian. Along with that soft, yet urgent, tone…. the one he uses when talking revolution. The one that convinced me I had to leave my home and join him.

I quietly turn the knob and ease open the door. It makes no sound. Sasha’s been putting his carpentry skills to good use with the supplies he’s been scavenging. Inside is a tiny, well-lit room, flush with the smell of fresh paint and dryboard.

Julian sits at a desk with blank wall behind him and a screen in front. He’s focused, still talking, obviously giving his chat-cast speech. Ava hovers nearby, out of the camera’s range. She’s not looking not at the chat streams that must be scrolling on the screen in response, or the handheld clutched in both her slender hands, but at Julian’s face. Ava is wispy-thin, graceful, and kind-hearted in a way that makes me think her extreme ability is actually niceness, not long-distance viewing. I completely understand why Sasha is crazy in love with her, and she’s the closest thing I have to a best friend now that Raf has vacated that role.

With her blond hair and waifishness, on a normal day, she looks half-angel… but today her face is almost radiant as she gazes at Julian. It sparks a demens kind of jealousy deep inside me. I want to take that feeling out into the alley and beat it into the grimy, broken streets of Jackertown.

These flashes of mushy love for Julian are really starting to annoy me.

I tune in to Julian’s speech as it takes an upswing in cadence, his tone getting stronger along with the words. “There will soon be no hiding for any of us,” he tells his chat-cast followers. I have no idea if there are ten or ten thousand. “No camouflage will be good enough. No haven safe enough. Fear is a powerful thing, my friends. It justifies the worst acts. All we have to do is look to history: all the atrocities committed in the name of safety, of protection, of keeping the world clear of threats, both real and imagined. It’s happened before. It will happen again. And make no mistake: we are a threat.”

Julian pauses, brow slightly furrowed, like he’s contemplating his next words carefully. I’m caught up in it, just like Ava. We’re both hanging, waiting, like his chat-cast audience must be, sitting by their screens and their handhelds, wondering where he’s going with this.

He takes a breath and continues. “We’re a threat because readers believe we are. We’re powerful in ways they don’t understand. And that conjures a nameless, instinctual fear that festers deep inside them. It’s an ancient fear, one left over from the time when deadly things lurked just outside the reach of the caveman’s fire.”

I smile a little. Julian knows more about instinctual responses than anyone else on the planet. It’s his extreme ability, which he calls handling: sensing instincts, manipulating them… controlling them.

Like he did with me.

“But we’re not creatures of the dark,” he continues, his voice deepening slightly. “We may have abilities that conjure those primal fears, but we aren’t monsters. We are human beings. People just like them. We deserve freedom. We deserve the right to live in peace.” He pauses for a breath. “And while the mindreaders may think we are strong, the truth is that we cannot stand alone. None of us, not the strongest jacker among us, is as powerful as a bullet. Or a prison. Or the mind-numbing gas they use to sedate us. We are the next step in the evolution of mankind, but we will not survive if we move into the future as individuals. We cannot do this alone. And now you do not have to, my friends. Our strength will come from our numbers. Our commitment to freedom and to peace. The future is here, my friends, right here, right now, in Jackertown. Come join the Jacker Freedom Alliance. Join our fight to ensure a future for all jackers, everywhere.”

I hold my breath for more, but he’s done. He taps the chat-cast off and leans back, closing his eyes and rubbing both hands across his face. Weariness drags on his shoulders as if the crumbling bricks of Jackertown’s aging brownstones have been suddenly been piled high upon them. It unexpectedly wrenches my heart.

For once, I don’t question it, I just lurch across the rugged industrial carpet to his desk. “Are you all right?” There’s a catch in my voice. Ava is closer, her smile gone. She reaches a hand toward him before I can think about coming around the desk.

Julian startles and drops his hands from his face. “Keeper.” He blinks at me. “I didn’t realize you were…” He glances at the two of us hovering over him and waves Ava back. “I’m fine. I just… I hope someone was listening. I don’t know if my words will be enough.”

Ava’s smile is back to full radiance. “Your words are exactly what they need.”

He gives her a small smile, but it’s enough to banish the fatigue. Ava perks to attention and waves her handheld at the screen on Julian’s desk, synching them. Then she taps the handheld rapidly. “I’ll pull down our traffic from the chat-cast and have Hinckley check it out right away.” She looks up from her small screen. “I’ll have some numbers and a geographic analysis for you soon.”

“Thank you, Ava. That will help.”

The brightness of her smile somehow encompasses both Julian and me. Then she floats across the floor in her light-stepped way. The door closes softly behind her. Julian rises from his chair and comes around his desk, leaning against it and crossing his arms.

“I didn’t think you were interested in the chat-casts.” His smile is a little too pleased with that. I take a half step back. Suddenly the room feels much smaller.

“Speeches are your specialty, Julian, not mine.”

He gives me a look like I’m being ridiculous. “I seem to recall a certain speech you gave on a national trucast. Nothing terribly important. Just changed the world as we know it.”

“That was different.” Outing jackers to the mindreading world on a national trucast doesn’t count as a speech. At the time, I was desperately trying to save a half dozen changelings and myself from heading back to Kestrel’s torment chambers. “I literally had a gun to my head,” I point out.

“We could arrange that, if it works for you.”

“Ha ha,” I say, but I can’t help smiling. His grin in response stirs up another hot flash, so I quickly drop my gaze and pretend to examine the textured non-slip surface on his desk. I need a change in subject. Something that will get us closer to my real purpose for being here. “So, Jacker Freedom Alliance, huh? That’s new.”

“Do you like it?”

“Well, it does get right to the point.” I peek up. His smile is wide, and the hot flash climbs out of my chest and starts to heat my face. I do my best to ignore it. “In any event, your chat-cast should have jackers streaming into Jackertown by the weekend.”

His smile dims. “Maybe. Honestly, I don’t know. Jackers have been hiding for so long. There are so many who think it’s better to rook as a mindreader than to come out as a jacker, much less sign up for a revolution.”

“Okay, so maybe not by the weekend. But soon.” I stop fidgeting with the edge of the desk and look up into his clear blue eyes. “They don’t have to be geniuses to figure it out, even on their own. Senator Vellus’s anti-jacker rhetoric gets more vile every day.”

Julian leans in, closer than I’m comfortable with, but I try not to show it. “Which is why I need you on the chat-cast, keeper. Jackers know you.”

“They hate me.” There are plenty of jackers, like Sasha, who would be happy to get a kill jack on me for exposing the underworld of jackers for all the world to see. And fear.

“They respect you,” he says, eyes sparkling. “Even the ones who would rather stay hidden.”

Julian is half-demens if he believes that. “They’re not going to sign up for your revolution just because I’m part of it. And besides… I just got here. Vellus is still expecting me to do his chat-cast. You know, the one he forced me to agree to and that I skipped town to avoid? I’d be surprised if he doesn’t already have an all-points bulletin out for me. I’d be putting your new Jacker Freedom Alliance in jeopardy if I got on the casts and bragged about being part of the revolution.” I pause. Being this close to him is making my heart pound. I try to breathe in and out, calming it down. It annoys me to no end that he’s making me literally breathless.

“The chat-casts are important, keeper,” he says softly. “If they don’t work, if I fail to bring jackers together… I meant what I said about not being able to do this alone.”

“You’re not alone,” I say. “You’ve already got a dozen jackers willing to give their lives for the cause.” I fling my hand out, gesturing to the headquarters beyond the tiny chat-cast room.

His eyes bore into mine, like he’s trying to decide if I include myself in that list. If I would give my life for his cause. I don’t want to admit that it’s practically all I’m living for right now. I drop my gaze back to the desk. “More jackers will come. I’m sure of it.”

“I need your help to make that happen.”

“I’ll help any way I can,” I say, avoiding his gaze. “Just not on the chat-cast.”

He doesn’t say anything, so I’m forced to drag my gaze away from the invisible swirls of non-slip surface and back to his entirely-too-close face.

“You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?” he asks. “From when I…” He swallows. “…manipulated your instincts.”

And there it is. My face is on fire with embarrassment, but I force myself not to shrink away. Is it obvious? Can he tell that it keeps surging back again and again? “Yeah, well… I am kind of wishing that didn’t happen.”

“I’m sorry, keeper,” he says, and I know he means it. Making him feel bad about it, especially with all his other worries, just makes me cringe. Then I wonder if that’s the instinctual thing flaring back again.

I take a deep breath and let it out slow. This is so messed up.

I shrug. “Hey, it’s over and done with now.” I wish. At this point, I’m just hoping it will fade with time. The last thing I want is him to know it’s still bothering me. He might want to get back inside my head to fix it, and there’s no way that’s happening. Not with the mess that’s in there.

“I’m hoping you won’t hold it against me forever,” he says. “I’d like us to be… friends.”

“Friends?” The hot flash part of me shrinks a little, disappointed that he doesn’t want more than that. At the same time, I’m glad to see it go. It gives me a surge of hope that the hot flashes might get starved out of existence by being explicitly “friends” with Julian. “What exactly would that entail?”

He smiles. “Well, you’d have to tell me when I’m about to do something stupid.”

I smirk and point a chastising finger at him. “It’s stupid to have me on the chat-casts.”

“I didn’t think that part would be hard for you.”

“You’re also stupid for not having me on the mission,” I add.

That kills his smile. “I don’t need you on the mission.”

“Yes, you do.” My voice hikes up. “I can jack farther than anyone you’ve got.”

“We won’t need extended reach once we’re inside.”

“I can fight off the gas.” My words speed up.

“We have the adrenaline patches for that.”

“I’ve… I’ve got a new skill.” I swallow, the words out before I could stop them. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to tell him this yet, but it might convince him to put me on the roster.

His eyebrows hike up. “A new skill. You realize that coming from anyone else, I wouldn’t believe that unless I saw it with my own eyes. But with you… well, you’ve already got a wider range of jacking skills than anyone I know.” He’s watching me keenly now.

“You know the adrenaline you have in those patches?”

He nods.

“I can trigger it. The release of the adrenaline. Without the patch.”

“You mean, trigger its release into your own bloodstream? You can mentally command that?” He absently taps his finger against his lips with that fascinated-professor look he often gets when he’s diving into the details of jacking. “How does that work exactly?”

“It’s… complicated.” It’s not that I don’t want to explain. But I’m not really sure how to describe the spaghetti mess in my head without sounding slightly demens. “But now that I know how to do it to myself, I’m sure, with practice, I could trigger it in someone else as well. Just like I can help them fight off the gas.” It should be simple enough. I haven’t actually done it yet, but…

“That’s very intriguing,” he says. “We’ll definitely have to explore that further. It could be useful in later missions.”

No, no, no. “I could use it on this mission. It’s not too late. I could train—”

He cuts me off with a severe look. “No.”

I want to reach out and shake him. “I can’t go on the chat-casts, but I can do this. This is how I can help the cause.”

“No.” The set of his mouth and the hardness in his eyes makes my stomach clench. If I keep pushing him, he’ll only dig in deeper. I know him well enough to know this is true. I try to rein in the urge smack some sense into him.

“Don’t you think this Friend-in-Chief thing should come with a few perks?” I ask, trying to lighten things up. “Like, say, a special pass for one free mission of my choice.”

“No.” He scowls. Digging in.

“Julian… please.” I’m begging. Gazing up at him, looking pathetic. I don’t care. It works a little. I can see the determination weaken. I look deep into his eyes. “I need this.”

His face softens. “Which is precisely why I can’t let you go, keeper.”

Can’t? Or won’t? I bite back the words before they can spill out.

He looks at me almost tenderly. “Being my friend also means forgiving me when I can’t give you the things you want.”

Disappointment leaks out of me in a long sigh. “This is starting to sound like a pretty lousy job.”

“It probably is.” He drops his gaze to the floor, and I can’t stand it. I don’t know if it’s the left-over instinctual response or just common, human decency, but it makes my heart ache. The boy has the weight of creating a future for jackers on his shoulders, and I’m harassing him about a mission he’s determined not to send me on, for whatever misguided reason. He looks like he really does need a friend, and I’m being anything but.

“Well,” I say, trying to put some cheer back in my voice. “I hope the perks get better as time goes on. Sasha’s too surly to be your Friend-in-Chief anyway.”

He peers at me. “Sasha’s not afraid to tell me what mistakes I’m making either.”

“Well, at least there’s that.”

The heaviness seems to lift from his shoulders. Relief trickles through me. I can’t afford for Julian to be angry with me… at least not until after the mission. Until I’m sure Kestrel has paid for what he’s done.

Besides, Julian has just inadvertently given me two insights: he needs an indisputable reason for me to be on the mission, and I need Sasha to tell Julian he’s making a mistake in leaving me home.

I shrug on a white jacket and put up the hood, letting it hang over my face. It’s not cold out—the crisp fall air and turning leaves of Chicago New Metro are still weeks away—but I don’t want to be too easily identified going for a run through the streets of Jackertown. Just in case one of the less-friendly clans decides to respect me into an early grave. Julian may not want to believe it, but there are jackers who would take their chances on angering him and his mages to have a shot at Kira Moore, Revealer of Jackers Everywhere.

Sasha gestures to my hoodie. “Are we going on a covert op that Julian’s forgotten to tell me about?”

“No, just a run,” I say. “I appreciate you going along for backup, though. I haven’t had a good run for weeks.”

“Not a problem.” He tightens the strap on his running shoes and seems to buy my excuse to get him alone and away from headquarters for my little demonstration. Following Julian’s chat-cast, I spent the better part of the afternoon practicing in secret: triggering the adrenaline; seeing how much I could dose and what it would do; surreptitiously lifting excessively heavy door manufacturing equipment in the back of HQ. I only hope it will be sufficiently impressive to Sasha.

He straightens up from his shoes. “I doubt Julian would let you go alone, anyway.”

“Did you tell him we’re going out?” We’re lingering by the front door, and it’s after dinner, so the kitchen is vacant. I cast a look down the length of Julian’s cavernous converted door factory. Metal racks-turned-bunks fill the center and grease-crusted, ancient machinery line the edges, but Julian is nowhere to be seen.

“Why? Are you avoiding him?” Sasha’s eyes are dark, almost black, like wells that dive deep into his soul. Sometimes they seem empty and sometimes they seem to see right through me.

“You know how he is,” I say, quickly. “Let’s go.”

Sasha’s dark eyebrows draw together, but he pulls open the front door for us, and I dart outside. I jog in place, warming up, until he secures the door, then we take off down the main drag in front of the mages’ headquarters. Jackertown is small—only a half-mile square of occupied buildings at this point—but it’s growing fast.

I reach out mentally to nudge against Sasha’s mind barrier, to let him know I want to mind-link rather than talk aloud. I’ve never linked into his head before, so I’m taking a chance in even asking with that gentle push. From the way Ava talks, that’s not something he normally does. But after a moment of surprise, he slowly lets me in. His mindscent is a wild mix of a hundred different flavors. I can’t pin down any single one of them.

Wow, you’re mindscent is… unique. That thought wasn’t the first one I was planning on linking to him, but I’m startled by the sensation. It’s like swimming in bath filled with a thousand different teas. Or maybe wandering into a perfume factory.

Every soul I scribe leaves a residue, he thinks.

Really? I link to him. So, it’s like you still have a piece of them with you? I’m stunned. I can’t imagine carrying around a reminder of every mind I’ve jacked.

Something like that. He gives me a sideways look as we cross a street, keeping to the sidewalks as we jog past boarded-up brownstones intermixed with occupied ones. I can sense the minds inside, tracking us as we go past. So did you bring me out here to learn more about scribing? His thoughts are tinged with the bittersweetness of sarcasm.

No, I link back. Actually, I wanted to show you something.

He glances at me, waiting for me to continue. We turn a corner and start running the perimeter of Jackertown. It looks the same, except all the buildings are boarded up and there’s no one in sight. Even the occasional wandering demens have learned to keep their distance from Jackertown. In the distance, the lights of downtown Chicago are starting to come on, sparkling in the darkening sky.

I pull back out of his head and say, “It will take me a minute to get ready.”

He frowns but doesn’t say anything, just keeps pace with me as our shoes slap a rhythm on the grime-covered sidewalks. The steady in-and-out of my breathing works to focus my mind quickly, and I dive deep inside it, searching through the spaghetti mess for the string that leads to my adrenaline release center. My heart is already pounding, but when I pluck the string and dose myself, I don’t hold back… and it makes my heart feels like it’s going to break my ribs on its way out of my chest.

I pull ahead of Sasha, even though I don’t mean to—I’m trying to keep the energy pouring into my muscles leashed until I’m ready to release it. Just as Sasha steps up the pace to match, I let it go.

And then I’m running on air, sprinting ahead like I’ve got rockets for sneakers. I dash a full block in front of him before grabbing a light post to pivot around. I swing too far, spinning full circle, so I decide to climb it instead. I’m halfway up before I look back down. Sasha’s staring at me gap-mouthed. Suddenly, my muscles are jittery and weak. I’m not sure I can keep hold of the pole much longer, so I shimmy down and leap before I can fall. My muscles are like rubber—I rebound from the sidewalk and start running toward him. I reach deep inside my head and turn off the adrenaline. I’m not sure what would happen if I kept pouring that much into my bloodstream, but I don’t need it anymore.

The wide-eyed look on Sasha’s face is all I need.

When he catches up to me, he’s winded. He curls his hand, beckoning me back into his head so we can talk. I mentally scan the area—there are no hidden clan members within earshot—but I link into Sasha’s head anyway.

What was that all about? His eyes are narrowed, and while he’s still catching his breath, I’ve got his full attention.

Adrenaline. I figured out how to dose myself.

And you brought me out here to show me this because… why? You don’t want Julian to know? A frown is carving deep into his forehead.

I throw my hands out, and I can feel my pulse still pounding through them. I told Julian, but he doesn’t get it. Just think what I could do with this, Sasha.

Run away fast? The sarcasm is back, but I can sense his thoughts ricocheting around in his head. He’s imagining tricky scenarios where a little extra burst of speed could come in very handy. Where it would have come in handy the first time, when Kestrel got away.

I try to keep my excitement at bay. Disable a guard before he knows I’m there? Carry someone I normally couldn’t? Even if you scribe half the staff, you can’t get them all. Who knows what new anti-jacker tech they’re going to have this time? This adrenaline dosing does more than the patches. It’s better than just fighting off the gas. And I can do more than just make myself freakishly hyped and strong. I can dose other people, too. Lots of other people. That might be a stretch, since I haven’t even dosed one person yet. But it should work. In theory.

You can? His thoughts show he hadn’t gotten that far with it yet, but it vaguely horrifies him.

Yes. I’d suggest trying it on him, but that doesn’t seem like a good idea, given his reaction. Here’s the thing. This mission to break into Kestrel’s prison and liberate the changelings… it’s important.

I know.

And Julian’s not going to let me go.

He frowns. He has his reasons.

Not good ones. My leg starts to tap with the excess energy still boiling off. Think about it: Julian needs something to bring jackers together. Liberating the changelings and the other jackers Kestrel’s tormenting will do that and getting Kestrel will seal the deal. It’ll show we have the ability to change things. If we don’t use every jacker talent we have at our disposal, and we end up failing… it will have the opposite effect. People will see us as weak. They won’t believe anything Julian says after that.

The idea of losing Kestrel keeps me awake at night, but I can’t even think about what it would be like if Julian’s revolution never got out of its infancy. It makes a shiver crawl up my back, and I have to start pacing back and forth on the broken sidewalk, clenching my fists.

You’re right, Sasha thinks. We need this mission to succeed.

I stop and turn to him. Exactly! I can’t tell if it’s the excess adrenaline or relief that’s making my hands quiver, but I prop them on my hips to keep it from showing. You need to convince him to let me go, Sasha.

He shakes his head. I could tell Julian you’ve suddenly discovered how to teleport, and he’s not going to change his mind. He’s not worried about missing out on your unique talents. He’s worried about you getting hurt. You need to prove to him you’re not going to. In front of a crowd. Make it obvious that he’s worried for no reason. Otherwise… let’s just say, I don’t think he’ll put you at risk unless he’s forced to.

I’m nodding with his thoughts. What do you have in mind?

He nudges me out of his head, and I reluctantly pull back. “Has Anna ever given you lessons in how to fight with a knife?”

My eyes go wide, and I swallow. I slowly shake my head.

He just smirks.

“Knife training?” Anna looks me over like she thinks I might have a head wound. “I thought we might cover some close combat skills first.” She gives an even more concerned look to Sasha standing next to me, like she thinks he’s setting me up.

Which he is, in a way.

“Sasha just mentioned it,” I lie. “It was my idea. I was thinking about what you said about fear being my friend. Knife training sounds pretty scary, so…”

Anna frowns. She’s not buying this at all. “We’ll be using a rubber training blade. There should be minimal danger.”

I deadpan it. “Anna, you’re scary even when you’re unarmed.”

She narrows her eyes, like she’s trying to figure out my angle on this. She’s not saying no, but she’s not getting out the rubber knife yet, either.

I pull out my last stop. “Look, I went running with Sasha yesterday, and we saw something go down in an alley, okay?” I glance at Sasha. He’s keeping quiet, following my lead. “There were too many of them for us to interfere, but it was a mess. Not just jacking, but a knife fight as well. I’d just like to be… prepared. Think of it as advanced self-defense.”

Anna nods. I keep the sigh of relief inside as she strides toward a cabinet at the far side of the training area. Presumably where she keeps her weapons. I briefly wonder what else besides training blades she has in there.

“Nice work,” Sasha says quietly. “Remind me not to believe anything you say ever again.”

“It wasn’t entirely a lie,” I protest. “Knife fighting with Anna conjures up all my fears.”

“Just wait until I bring the audience before you do anything… unusual. Then go through it just like we planned.” He gives me a pointed look then turns away, off to hunt down Julian and bring him back for the show.

I take a deep breath. Unusual. I need something a lot more than unusual if I’m going to force Julian into a position where he can’t say no to putting me on the roster. Sasha walked me through a few knife fighting moves last night. As long as I was dosed on the adrenaline, my moves were faster, my perception was better, but most of all, I had some crazy strength. I could overpower him, literally force the knife from his hand like he was a child. But fighting Sasha and fighting Anna aren’t exactly the same thing, as my aching bruises from our last training session are quick to remind me. Which is why taking her in a knife fight, even a training one with a rubber knife, should prove I can handle just about anyone.

I’m breaking into a cool sweat already.

Anna returns with a grayish blade. She hands it to me.

Rubber sounds soft and squishy but this blade is made of a hard plastic that doesn’t give a millimeter when I try to bend it. This is going to hurt.

She gestures for me to return the blade. When I do, she steps back and takes a fighting stance with her knife gripped in one hand, tip pointed down, close to her body, and her other hand extended. With one overhand strike she could plunge the knife into my chest.

“Where’s my knife?” I ask, sending a nervous glance to the weapons cabinet.

“You don’t get one.”

“What? I—I thought this was knife training.” It’s going to be hard to show off my superior knife fighting skills without a knife.

“It is unlikely you’ll be carrying a knife at the exact time you will be attacked by someone with one. Or that you’ll be able to draw your weapon fast enough. You need to learn how to survive the initial attack first. Then you can hope to find a weapon that can defeat your opponent.”

“All right,” I say, tensing up. “Just take it easy on the beginner, okay?” I can’t trigger the adrenaline until Sasha returns, so for the first half of this fight I’m going to be unarmed. Doubly so, because apparently I’m not even going to have a weapon. I may not have to artificially boost my adrenaline with the way my heart rate is kicking up a notch already.

Anna drops her knife-wielding arm so it hangs at her side. “I don’t know what Sasha said to you, Kira, but this isn’t something you need to learn right now.”

“No, no,” I say, trying to up my enthusiasm level. “I want to do this. Just give me a few pointers first.”

“First of all, use your jacking abilities.”

“Understood.”

“Even if you’re caught off guard, your best defense is mental. But if you’re faced with someone you cannot jack…” She tilts her head in acknowledgment that we’re both keepers, so that’s exactly the position we’re in. “…and they cannot jack you, because you’re a keeper, then it will come down to a physical fight. When a knife is brought into the equation, the fight doesn’t just get more deadly. It changes the rules of how you should engage the attacker. The best move is to stay alive long enough to get away. Or until you can find a superior weapon. Your only objective is to survive.”

“Maybe if I had a knife…”

“Even better if you had a gun,” she says, wryly. “Another reason not to leave headquarters unarmed.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She takes a fighting stance again and starts to circle me, so I mimic her, sans blade. We’re attracting some onlookers already as a few of Julian’s latest recruits wander out from the racks to see what’s happening. I’m hoping we can get through a couple of engagements before Sasha returns, just so I’ll have some idea of how to attack her. Maybe the adrenaline-hyped speed will be enough to outmaneuver her superior experience. Maybe I can manage to take her knife and show with a quick strike that even a novice like me can come out of a dangerous situation alive. If not, then I can go the brute force way, using my adrenaline-enhanced strength to disarm her.

This sounds really good in my head. I have no idea if it will actually work.

“Keep track of the blade,” Anna says as she circles me. “Do everything you can to avoid contact with the knife. Even a small cut, strategically placed, can be deadly.”

“Well, that’s good to know.”

“But if you do get cut, don’t panic,” she says. “Direct your alarm into disabling your opponent or, better yet, escaping.”

“Fear is my friend.”

“Exactly.” She lunges at me, but I can tell she’s taking it slow, giving me time to react. The knife is still pointed down, but she’s back-slashing with it, aiming for my neck. I jerk out of her reach, knocking the back of her arm as it sails slowly past me. The knock is hard enough to make her stumble a little; either that, or she’s completely taking it easy on me. Meanwhile, I dance away.

“Use everything you have.” She’s chastising the weakness of my hit on her arm. “Strength. Surprise. Most of all, move. Agility and speed will get you out of range of the weapon and hopefully enable your escape.”

Strength and speed. If that’s all it takes, I should be able to do this.

I glance around at our spectators, who are growing in number, as Anna straightens and considers her next attack. Sasha and Julian are still absent, but I’m feeling the itchy need to start the adrenaline ramp up now, before they get here. Otherwise, they’re going to arrive to find Anna taking me down with a fake knife to the throat. Not the impression I need to make.

“Protect your face,” Anna says, bringing my attention back to her. “Keep moving. If you’re going to strike, hit hard. Then get away. Got it?”

“Sounds simple enough.” Definitely time for some adrenaline enhancement. As she circles me again, I dive into my head, searching for the string that triggers my adrenaline release. I’m momentarily lost in the spaghetti mess of my mind, and before I can figure out where the string is, Anna lunges again.

This time she’s aiming the knife straight for my gut. A surge of panic grips my heart. I don’t care if it’s a training blade, that plastic knife’s going to hurt. I side-step enough that it glances off my hip. She’s close in, so I wrap my arm around her neck, pulling her closer and wrenching her around. The self-defense moves she taught me kick in, and I try a short-jab punch to her side, but she’s already whipping me around, over her hip. I’m momentarily airborne before I hit the mat. Then she’s on top of me, pinning me to the ground with her arm across my neck. I can’t see it, but the knife digs its point into my side. The pain is only slightly less than the embarrassment.

“Attack the weapon.” Her face is close, clear blue eyes like her brother’s boring into mine. She’s barely breathing hard with the throw. “Only attack your opponent once the weapon is deflected. And only enough to enable your escape.”

Julian and Sasha arrive at the back of the cluster of jackers already gawking at our knife fight just in time to see Anna climb off me. Or rather, to see Anna finish using me as a practice dummy for her knife fighting skills.

Fantastic.

I avoid looking at Julian and take my time getting up, focusing inward to find that adrenaline string. I may need an extra-large dose. My search is taking longer than I expect, my mind grappling simultaneously with figuring out the right approach to take Anna down, watching her circle me, and wading through the neural strings in my mind. She’s flipping the knife up and down, switching her grip, and no doubt considering how she can demonstrate another way I can potentially die by knife attack.

Focus. I fixate on the knife, its twirling motion acting as a hypnotist’s charm as I test each string, moving more by feel than anything else, looking for the familiar-feeling one I’ve triggered before. The one that will give me that edge, so I can attack Anna’s knife before it attacks me. Or take it from her in a burst of unexpected strength and speed.

Anna feints, causing me to jerk away, dancing out of her reach, but then she draws back again. Still circling. Panic is starting to climb up my throat. I shove it back down and mentally stumble over a string that’s humming with energy. I pluck it, sending a signal zinging down its length. A split second later, I realize… that wasn’t the right string.

The bottom drops out of my stomach as I wait through the next heartbeat to see what I’ve just done to myself.

A jittery itch slithers up from my feet, crawling like a thousand centipedes have alighted on my legs. In the fraction of a second it takes me to look down, the feeling has surged my entire body. It’s twitching but just below the skin, like my muscles have come alive with an insane need to move.

Fast.

I look up. Anna’s only now realizing that something’s wrong. There’s six feet between us, but my vision telescopes down, as if space is warping right in front of me. The mutterings of the onlookers mutes, like someone cut the volume, and my muscles scream for me to move, move, move.

I launch myself at Anna.

My legs are like intensely coiled springs that have finally let loose. Anna’s eyes barely have time to go wide before I’ve crossed the space between us in one giant leap. My senses slow as I descend on her, like I’m in a simcast with the speed turned down. I see exactly where my hands are going to land—one grappling her knife-hand wrist, the other shoving into her shoulder to knock her back. I see her make a tiny jerk back before I arrive, but I compensate for it, connecting with her shoulder and tumbling us both to the mat. We’re down, but somehow I’ve got too much energy. I keep going, flipping over her and dragging her by the hand still clenched around her wrist. She rolls with me, landing on top, mouth agape as she tries to wrench her knife-hand free.

Whatever energy is pulsing through my body, it’s like my muscles are super-juiced with speed and flexibility. I contort, arching my back and flipping us both over again, but I lose contact with her knife hand. She’s flat on the mat now, and I try to pin her, knife-hand first, but her hands are moving as fast as mine, flying across my body, jabbing me with her fists and the handle end of the knife. I register the blows in my mind, but there’s no pain. Just a slow pounding in my ears that sounds like a drum but that I know must be my heart beat drowning out every other sound.

Anna’s face twists in concentration. I manage to grab her knife hand again, thinking I can wrench it free, but I don’t have the strength I had the night before with Sasha. My muscles quiver with the need to move, move, move, but there’s no superhuman power behind it. Instead I twist the knife and slam it down on the mat beside our bodies, trying to knock it out of her hand. But the knife just digs into my leg sprawled out to the side. I look at it in a daze, stunned that I misjudged where my own body was. I see my leg quivering and the training blade lying on the ground beside it. My brain can’t make sense of it. Then Anna somehow locks her legs around my midsection and flips me over onto my back again.

Her hand is on my throat, and her legs pin my arms down. Suddenly I’m nothing but a giant, shaking mess. My teeth chatter against the hold she has on me. The knife is back in her hand, but her eyes are wide, like she’s not sure what’s happening.

Neither am I.

She yells at me. Her lips move, and I feel the puffs of warm air brush my face, but there’s no sound. I shake so hard that it seems to dislodge her from where she has me pinned. Or maybe she’s realized that she’s won and is finally letting me go.

Except every muscle in my body is seizing up. I shake like I’m having a convulsive fit. I gasp for air, just now realizing I haven’t taken a breath the entire time… which may have been two seconds or ten. I can’t tell. Dull throbs of pain poke at my leg, and sound rushes back into the world as Julian bends over me.

“Kira!” He grabs hold of my shoulders. “Kira, stay with me.” He says something more, turning to shout orders to the others, but everything dims as blackness sweeps in to cloud my mind. I push against it, diving deep inside my head, searching, searching for the string, the one I triggered, the one that turned me into a super convulsive speed freak. And now feels like it’s going to kill me.

I need to switch it off.

I find it and quell the vibration of the string just as consciousness fades from my mind.

My body hurts in ways I didn’t know it could.

I think about opening my eyes, then reconsider when even that causes small lightning bolts of pain to race across my face. I hold still, eyes closed, taking stock.

The pain is everywhere. Like every single muscle in my body has been strained. But my heart rate is normal. My breathing is calm, although pain follows every rise and fall of my chest. Whatever neural string I accidentally triggered, two things are certain: it made me impossibly fast, and the blowback from that left me feeling like I’d been run over by a truck.

But it was new. And unmistakably powerful. And Julian was there to see it.

I smile a little with that thought, then stop, because even that hurts.

“Sweet dreams?” Julian’s voice surprises me, popping my eyes open. Which is painful enough that I close them again. I wince and blink and creak my head sideways in the direction of his voice.

He’s sitting on a chair next to my bunk in the racks. He smiles when I finally meet his gaze, but it’s strained. I struggle to sit up, but it hurts so much I can’t help sucking in a breath.

“Hey, take it easy,” he says. “You don’t need to go anywhere.”

“You saw it, right?” I manage to whisper. My voice is weak; even swallowing is an effort. But I manage to stabilize myself on the cot, mostly by gripping the edge to keep steady.

“You mean, did I see you nearly kill yourself doing heaven knows what to your own mind? Yes.” He’s not pleased.

“You talked to Sasha,” I guess. The will to fight about it struggles up from somewhere deep inside me. “It was entirely my idea—”

Julian waves me off. “Oh, I’m sure it was.”

“I just need to work on it a little. Then I can be ready for the mission. I can make it work, I promise.”

Julian gives an elaborate sigh. “What am I going to do with you, Kira?”

It’s the first time I’ve heard him use my name in… I can’t even remember. I peer at him, afraid I’ve angered him without really understanding how or why. “Hopefully not firing me as Friend-in-Chief?”

He gives a small smile then shakes his head sadly. “You tried to tell me I was messing up by not putting you on the mission. I didn’t listen.” He sighs again, then gestures to the bunk. “You need to rest up. Training sessions for the assault start tomorrow. You’ll need to have your strength back if you want to be on the roster.”

“If I want to?” I sit up straighter. “You’re letting me go?”

“Yes.” He stands up and half turns away, like he’s going to leave now that he’s delivered that piece of information.

I’m at a loss for a moment, then I rush out the words. “I’ll work on figuring out the neural string I triggered right away! Sasha can help me—”

“No!” Julian turns back to face me, anger suddenly alive on his face. “No. New. Skills.” He says each word slowly, like I’m a child he’s lecturing about playing with scissors.

“But… I don’t understand.” My brain feels fuzzed out from the blowback. Maybe I missed something. “You saw what I could do.”

His shoulders tense up. “I saw what you almost did. I saw you on the floor, shaking like…” He takes a breath. “I didn’t realize how far you’d go, Kira. I don’t want you to kill yourself trying to convince me you need to be on this op.” His shoulders drop a little. “I’ll put you on the mission.” He points a finger at me. “But only if you promise: no new skills. Just the ones we know won’t kill you.”

“It wouldn’t have killed me!” But the truth is, I don’t really know that. I don’t understand at all what I did. I’ll have to study it. Try it out. Probably trigger it a few more times before I can figure out how to control it.

The murderous look on Julian’s face stops me from saying anything about that.

I quickly blurt out, “Whatever you say, boss. No new skills. Got it.” I nod for extra emphasis, then stop, because every muscle in my neck is protesting.

“Promise me, Kira.”

I know what promises mean to him. I look up into his eyes with all the sincerity I can muster in a state of pain. “I promise.”

He seems satisfied with that. Without another word, he turns and strides away. I watch him leave, then slowly, painfully, roll back down on my bunk. A flush of happiness makes my body buzz, easing the aches and pains. My left leg throbs where I think I stabbed myself with the training knife. The assault training tomorrow is going to hurt like crazy.

But I’m going on a mission to kill Kestrel.

I smile wide, close my eyes, and try to rest.

Seeds of Promise is a short Mindjack novella originally written for a charity anthology in coordination with Audiomachine's album Phenomena and inspired by the titular song, Seeds of Promise. The story is told from Anna's point of view and takes place off-screen during Closed Hearts. I literally wrote it while listening to the song (Seeds of Promise) on repeat on my iPhone... so if you're into that sort of thing, check out the song while you read!

Summary: Anna Navarro, leader of the Jacker Freedom Alliance, spends her time in FBI Agent Kestrel's secret prison enduring his torments... and awaiting the time for her revenge.

SEVENTY-ONE. Seventy-two. Seventy-three.

The muscle burn in my arms makes itself known, a welcome companion inside these walls of white. My cot is neatly made, and I’ve already run the perimeter walls—all forty feet of the ten-by-ten room. By the end of a hundred laps, I was literally climbing the walls with each turn, holding my hospital gown out of the way and getting traction with my bare feet.

Anything to keep from climbing them figuratively.

I’m certain that’s part of Agent Kestrel’s plan in grabbing me off the streets of Jackertown and keeping me and the others locked away, isolated in our tiny cells. That, and to probe the limits of our mindjacking skills for his purposes, whatever they are. Kestrel may, in theory, be one of us, but he’s no friend of jackers. I don’t know his ultimate aim, but I don’t have to—you can fight the enemy without being privy to all his detailed plans. I just need to keep Kestrel off guard, avoid divulging any information, and stay alive long enough for my brother, Julian, to come for me. It’s been almost two weeks, but I know nothing will stop him from finding me and liberating all of us. And when Julian gets here, Kestrel will sorely wish he hadn’t.

Eighty-one. Eighty-two. Eighty-three. Sweat rolls off the tip of my nose and joins the small but growing pool on the white-tiled floor.

The first time Kestrel paid a visit to my cell, he and his goon brought another jacker prisoner with them. Just a normal one, no extreme abilities that I could detect with a small brush of his mind barrier. It was enough to know he didn’t have an impenetrable mind, like me, and thus was vulnerable to Kestrel’s predations. I doubt Kestrel knew about my ability before he kidnapped me, but he certainly knows now. Losing that tactical advantage is worse than being stuck like a lab rat in Kestrel’s cells. And every day in here is a day lost in building the revolution with my brother. At least Kestrel gave no sign that he knew about my brother’s ability to manipulate people’s instincts. That’s one secret which will stay locked in my head until Kestrel gets to experience it for himself.

When that regular jacker was brought to my cell, I declined to participate in Kestrel’s sadistic little experiment… and the jacker paid the price for it. Just mental pain. No physical damage that I could discern. I thought it would deter Kestrel if I refused to play his games, but he just came around again—with the same jacker.

You can take the measure of a man by what he does—the look in his eyes—when faced with torment by someone evil. I still don’t know that jacker’s name, but I know full well the man on the inside. He gave me a nod that told me he understood: I wasn’t just defying Kestrel, I was foiling his experiment by keeping the extent of my abilities a mystery. And it wasn’t just for me, but for all jackers. We were in a fight for the right to exist. My brother would forge a future where we could be free, but he needed time. And numbers. And every tactical advantage we could give him. I gave that jacker prisoner a nod back, acknowledging his willingness to sacrifice for the cause. Bravery like that deserves the kind of respect that allows it to happen.

But that didn’t make it any easier to watch.

Ninety-six. Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight. I splay my hands wider on the floor, gaining more grip as they become slick with the sweat gathering on my palms.

At the end of Kestrel’s last torture session, he injected me with something. A drug he no doubt is testing on more than just me. I was unconscious when they brought me in, but the walls are jacker-proof, not sound-proof. I hear the screams. How many others is hard to say, but I’m not the first to disappear from the streets of Jackertown. I haven’t felt the effects of the drug yet, either physically or mentally, but I’m sure it will come. Which means I’m in a race between that and freedom—

The door clicks.

I drop a knee down, trapping my hospital gown on the floor, then roll quickly to my side and face away from the door. I curl into a ball and hope Kestrel thinks his meds have begun to work. Or that maybe the walls are closing in.

Always let your enemy underestimate you.

The hard heels of Kestrel’s shoes sound behind me, followed by the softer scrape of boots… and then lighter footfalls. They’ve brought someone to torment again.

“Get up, Ms. Navarro,” Kestrel says in his cool voice. Calculated and barren. Much like his soul, no doubt. He doesn’t believe my possum act. Probably saw me on camera before he came in.

I roll over to face him, keeping my hands tucked against my chest. They quiver a bit—built up lactic acid making my muscles twitch. Not sure if it fools him, but it’s a nice effect. I slowly raise my gaze from the floor, deliberately putting some lost-puppy look into it, but before I reach Kestrel’s ice-blue eyes, I see who he’s brought for today’s plaything.

A child.

She’s thin, less than a hundred pounds, and barely thirteen. I don’t mentally reach out to test her mind barrier, but I’m certain it’s the soft one of a changeling. If a grown jacker can’t resist Kestrel’s goon, this child will be mentally crushed. I silently thank Kestrel for reminding me of the monster he is.

“Get up,” Kestrel repeats.

I slowly climb to my feet, still pretending that I’m weakened. As I do so, I surreptitiously flex the muscles in my arms, hands, legs, and feet, readying them. The guard—a different one than before—smirks at my shaking hands. I scan his overly beefy body with wide eyes, as though I fear his bulky muscles and lack of noticeable ethics.

“You know the drill, Ms. Navarro,” Kestrel says. “Mr. Tyler will induce a rather unpleasant level of pain in the girl until you evict him from her mind.”

The changeling’s eyes are wide, but I can’t reassure her. Not yet.

“I don’t know if I can.” I keep my voice soft, eyes on Kestrel, afraid I will give myself away if I look at the girl. “I don’t feel so well.”

Kestrel arches an eyebrow, unimpressed. “That would be unfortunate for our young changeling.”

I look Kestrel over. I don’t see a weapon, but he could have one tucked away. A quick mental reach behind and around me—carefully avoiding the three minds in front—shows the disruptor field is still active in the walls, keeping me mentally locked in the room. The only way to open the door is a signal from Kestrel. I could hold him hostage, negotiate my way out, but the most likely outcome is a tranq dart for me. Or worse. And that won’t help the others.

Patience, Anna.

I take a deep breath and vow to keep waiting for Julian. Still… the unnecessary suffering of children is Kestrel’s game, not mine. He tips his head toward the guard and issues a mental command. The goon starts in on the girl. She drops to her knees, clutching her stomach.

No time to waste.

I mentally shove past her soft mind barrier, plunging in to find the guard’s mental presence: a hard marble suspended in the gel of her mind. I fling the goon out, shove him all the way back to his own skull, then plunge deeper into his mind, searching out the parts that control breathing and heart rate. He’s too strong for me to get a kill jack on him, but that’s all right—I wasn’t planning on taking him mentally.

However, fighting for your life is an excellent distraction.

I lunge for the guard and catch him in a blow to the throat that’s slightly wide of target, so it won’t kill him, then I land two more in quick succession, both to his gut. He huffs over, clutching his stomach under the assault. A final side strike to his face whips his head back, and he goes down.

Kestrel reaches me mentally. I yank back into my own head, so he can’t judge my strength. He chases after me, and the pressure is intense as he bears down on my mind barrier. I whirl on him, bat away the dart gun he’s pulled from somewhere, grab hold of his head, shove my knee into his gut, then step back and watch as he sinks to his knees.

I debate a roundhouse kick to the face for his trouble.

I think about this for a full second.

Then I step back. The time isn’t right. I’m sure Kestrel will find a way to punish me for this—I can take it, but I don’t want him hurting the girl. She’s cowering against the door. I don’t link into her mind to see what she’s thinking. She’s already had more violation than she should have to put up. When Julian comes, we’ll put an end to her torment. And the others as well. I only hope my blow to the guard’s head will blur any memories he has of my mental strength. And possibly deter both him and Kestrel from trying again.

I sigh. “I think we’re done for today, Kestrel.”

I take another step back, as far as I can go in my tiny cell, then I drop to the floor and resume my workout.

One hundred. One hundred-one. One hundred-two.

CAUTION: do not read unless you've already read
Free Souls.

This DELETED SCENE takes place during the final chapter of Free Souls. Told from Kira's point-of-view, this scene is really a "missing moment"—something in the novel that happens "off screen." Sometimes the demands of pacing require cutting, and this scene was one of those. In the novel, Kira refers to how Kestrel finally met his end, but this scene shows the events leading up to his demise. In Kestrel's Interrogation, the reader (and Kira) get a peek inside Kestrel's head, which, as she notes, is not a very nice place to be.

I nodded to the two JFA militia standing guard outside the privacy room that served as a temporary prison. They returned my nod, but held their position by the door, hands resting on their small caliber pistols. They had dart guns too, and I knew Hinckley had given them each a thought grenade as well.

Just in case.

The tall one with the blond, sandy hair rapped once on the door. One of the two JFA guards stationed inside the privacy room opened it.

“Ma’am,” he said quietly, holding the door wide open once he recognized me. I stepped inside, just past the swing of the door, and he silently shut it behind my back. A small heater by the door wafted warm air across my hands hanging at my side, chasing away the drafty winter chill of the room. I stood there for a moment, staring at our prisoner. He was zip-tied to a heavy wooden chair in the middle of the room, his head slumped and body slack.

Kestrel must have passed out again.

Hinckley sat at the back of the room, his feet propped on a small table, his chair tipped back and braced against the wall. Something played on the palm-sized screen in his hand, and he waited until I crossed the room before looking up. I gave wide berth to Kestrel, not because I thought he might leap up and bite me, but because I might be tempted to do something similar to him, if I got too close.

“I saved him for you, Kira.” Hinckley gestured with his chin to Kestrel, then looked back to his screen. I examined Kestrel from my far-enough-to-be-safe distance. His chest rose and fell, once, slowly.

“Thanks for not killing him.”

Hinckley shrugged. “Not like it’s up to me.” Then he looked up. “How’s the debate going? Has Anna got her knives out yet?”

“She’s still in favor of a bullet to the head.” I eyed Kestrel, wondering who would get the honors. Seemed like I should be first in line for that. “But so far she hasn’t challenged Julian to a knife throwing contest to decide.”

“He’s still holding out for scribing?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And my mom’s campaigning for it too. I think she wants a piece of him, like the rest of us. Maybe more so.”

My mom was still getting used to her new scribing power, and she didn’t seem to be in a rush to scribe anyone, but she made an exception for Kestrel. Especially once I told her how he had experimented on me, along with hundreds of other jackers. But I hoped Julian wouldn’t agree to let her do it, even if he won the debate raging out in the main meeting area of the JFA headquarters. We could wait for Sasha to recover. Even when he was ready to scribe again, he would have a tough time with Kestrel; I couldn’t imagine what it might do to my mom. I’d already interrogated Kestrel a couple of times, and I could testify to the fact that his head was a dark place to be. That was one reason we kept rotating the interrogators—no one should have to spend that much time in Kestrel’s head, much less take it apart and stitch it back together. The other reason was to simply keep him alive—we needed to get all the information we could out of him. And too many people wanted to put a bullet in Kestrel’s brain.

“I think Mr. Kestrel’s naptime is over,” I said to Hinckley. “Do you have a patch?”

Julian had ordered up some half-strength adrenaline med patches, just enough to rouse Kestrel from his sleep, so we could probe his conscious mind, but not enough for him to keep us out of his head. Kestrel spent most of his time in that half-awake state, lapsing unconscious when the mental torment got to be too much. Or when someone knocked him out in disgust.

Hinckley reluctantly eased his feet off the low table and fished a patch out of the pocket of his camouflage pants. He tried to hand it up to me, but I shook my head and tilted it toward Kestrel. I still didn’t want to get within arm’s distance. Or spitting distance, for that matter.

The rickety wooden chair screeched the floor as Hinckley heaved up and lumbered over to dose Kestrel. The med patch worked fast, and Hinckley was barely back in his chair, watching his game on the screen, when Kestrel gasped in a breath and slowly shook his head, as if he could clear the fuzziness that way.

I shoved into his mind before he could get oriented, pushing through his mindbarrier, which had been softened by the med patch. He tried to push me back out, but he was far too weak. His mindscent was sour, like milk turned bad, and confusion swirled through his head, almost like the scattered electronic misfires that chased each other across the minds of the demens. Only Kestrel’s mind lacked the peppermint scent of madness. He wasn’t demens, at least not as we were used to thinking about that condition. Thanks to his genetic inhibitors, the demens who roamed the Chicago New Metro streets were starting to turn into jackers—and entirely sane ones at that. Which was a good thing, since the demens-turned-jackers tended to be wildly powerful or have exotic new abilities. One that had stumbled into Jackertown just yesterday could mindjack animals—something no one had heard of before. It was strange, and potentially amazing, this new ability to mindtalk to and control the non-human minds on the planet.

The world was changing at a pace no one had expected, least of all me, even though I had been the one to dump Kestrel’s inhibitors into the water in the first place.

Kestrel’s thoughts were coming into coherence now, like a storm gathering strength, dark clouds of malevolence feeding on each other. I pushed through them, shoving him around a bit, just to let him know I was his interrogator for the moment, and he was better off not resisting.

Yesterday I had verified from his memories that there was no antidote for the inhibitors, so today my questions were back to the experiments themselves.

What was the purpose behind your experiments on the changelings? I shoved the question hard into his head, hoping to automatically dredge up some memories, so I wouldn’t have to hunt for them.

Hello to you too, Kira, Kestrel thought. Your turn for the fun today? The clouds of his mind churned, echoing self-loathing thoughts that seemed to welcome the torment that lay ahead. Like he wanted me to come inside and poke at the pain that lay roiling underneath.

I swallowed the sourness at the back of my throat that those thoughts induced. You were trying to reverse the jacker gene expression by studying kids who had recently gone through the change. But you couldn’t fully reverse it. I had found out that much yesterday. So what exactly is in the inhibitors? How do they target the jacker gene?

Aspirin and antibiotics, Kestrel thought, a weak attempt at putting me off, but it didn’t matter. My pointed questions had brought up several memories, pushing through the clouds of his bitter conscious thoughts. I shoved deeper in, catching a memory and forcing Kestrel to replay it in his head. I closed my eyes, trying to see the reconstructed scene through Kestrel’s eyes, feeling his emotions, tasting every impulse that passed through his brain. I gritted my teeth, and Kestrel groaned at the invasion.

This was the hard part of the interrogation. Being Kestrel for a while.

We were back in Kestrel’s cells, the ones at the Chicago Lakeshore Hospital, a demens facility posing a careful facade for Kestrel’s experimental torment chambers for jackers. White and stark and smelling vaguely of antiseptic, the room surged up my own memories, turning my stomach and making me want to grab Kestrel around the neck and choke the life out of him.

This was why I kept my distance.

I pushed deeper into his memory, forcing both him and myself to immerse in it, so that Kestrel couldn’t push it away before I’d gleaned every last thing there was to learn. This memory had popped up for a reason. It must have something important tucked in it.

We stared down at the changeling writhing on the white-tiled floor at our feet, resisting the temptation to physically kick the child. We couldn’t beat the devil out of her; we knew that. We had to be patient and let the serum do its work. The day would come when all of them would have that devil excised from them, but we had to be methodical about bringing that day to bear.

We glanced at the clipboard we held, notes telling us that this was the fifteenth treatment of Serum X1736 for patient 305. Fifteen was more than enough, and she should be feeling the effects; the weakness brought by the suppression of the gene.

We linked minds with Harrier, the guard we had plucked from his covert operations with the Navy to bring him to the true work he was meant to do, here with us. Harrier was in the changeling’s mind, diving through her memories, pulling up painful ones from the past, and inventing new ones of abuses that never happened. He enjoyed his work, the perfect prod to convince the other jacker patients to partake in the experiment.

Harrier was also wrestling with patient 278, an older male jacker who was trying to keep him from mentally ravaging patient 305. Rather unsuccessfully, it seemed.

What’s his strength level? we asked Harrier. We kept our linked thoughts cool, dispassionate, trying to disguise our eagerness for a scrap of evidence that showed we were making progress.

Down to a seven, Harrier thought, still intent on keeping patient 278 from his pathetic attempts at rescuing patient 305.

We glanced at our clipboard. He was an eight just last week. Excellent. A thrill ran through us. What about the changeling?

Several dead spots, Harrier thought.

We need to be precise, Mr. Harrier, we thought impatiently.

Harrier searched the changeling’s mind, something we refrained from doing. Dipping into jackers’ minds was as distasteful to us as their existence. We didn’t want to contaminate ourselves with contact with them any more than strictly necessary for the purposes of the experiments. Of course, linking with Harrier’s mind was something of a pleasure, given his enjoyment of our mission and common understanding of our purpose.

Eight, Harrier thought. One of the dead spots is especially large, in the prefrontal cortex.

We checked the clipboard again. Nearly double from the last round of tests. The damaged neurons, especially in the regions where the jacking ability seemed concentrated, were a side effect, but a small price to pay for the results we were achieving. However, with this much damage, patient 305’s usefulness in the tests would soon come to an end. We would have Harrier dispose of her in the city. She might survive the demens that roamed there, or she might not, but that was of no concern to us. She had served her purpose already.

I jerked out of Kestrel’s memories, the mental vertigo jarring as we mentally separated. I bent over, taking deep draughts of air into my lungs and trying to breathe away the queasiness. It was more than I could take, seeing the changelings like this. Tasting his callous disregard for them. I knew better. I should have pulled out sooner.

But I’d seen something new in Kestrel’s memory, so it was worth it. The spots—the dead zones I’d seen in so many changelings—they were like a roadmap to the jacking-areas of the brain. I would have to start there, if I were to try to reverse the effects that Kestrel had induced in so many innocent kids. And those jacking zones… they might be more sensitive to the inhibitors as well. I would try to make a true map of those to guide my efforts in healing not only the changelings, but the others affected by the inhibitors that Kestrel had designed and that I had put into the water.

If that was even possible.

Hinckley was on his feet. “Hey, are you okay?” He came up next to me, looking like he wanted to pat my back or something, but hesitated, all six foot plus of him teetering awkwardly.

I waved him off. “I’m good. Just, you know…”

Hinckley threw a disgusted look at Kestrel, who was likewise sucking in deep breaths to recover from the invasion of his mind that I had just put him through. His head was hanging down, so he didn’t see Hinckley’s expression.

“Yeah,” Hinckley said. “A regular psychopath playground in there, isn’t it?”

Kestrel rumbled a low chuckle, deep in his chest, and I felt Hinckley’s iron-band strength gripping my arm before I realized I had pulled it back to throw a punch at Kestrel’s face.

“Easy,” Hinckley said. “You weren’t too happy the last time you tried that, remember?”

I stared at my tightly clenched fist and Hinckley’s long-fingered hand wrapped around my wrist, holding me back.

I gave him a wide-eyed look. “I swear, it’s just automatic.” I relaxed, and Hinckley released me.

“I know the feeling.”

I nodded, shaking out my fist and rubbing my wrist. “Thanks.” It was a good thing I kept my distance. I really did want Kestrel alive long enough to answer all our questions.

Hinckley shrugged and shuffled back to his seat.

I worked the tension out of my neck by rolling my head. “I think I’m going to take a break.”

Hinckley nodded without answering, and Kestrel let out a snort. I whipped my head back to him. He was looking up at me now, cold steel-blue eyes piercing and very much alert, in spite of the med patch.

“Am I too much for you, Kira?” he asked. “I always knew you were weak, under all that pretense and bravado.”

“Don’t piss me off, Kestrel,” I said. “I’m one of the few people who still wants you alive.”

“Yes, you are,” he said with a half smile that creeped me out. “One of the very few, I imagine.”

I shook my head and turned away from him, back to Hinckley. “I’ll be back in the morning. Are you doing watch duty overnight?”

Hinckley pointed to the screen in his hand, as if it was obvious he was staying for the duration.

“All right,” I said. “Don’t kill him before I come back.”

“You got it, boss,” he said, already absorbed in watching his game.

But by the next morning, Kestrel was dead.

It wasn’t any of us who finally did him in. Hinckley just found his stone cold body the next morning, still strapped to the chair, no obvious signs of a struggle or abuse. He had thought Kestrel was sleeping, but then he couldn’t rouse him. Kestrel must have killed himself, although no one could figure out exactly how. I had contemplated something similar once—using my mind to stop my heart—to escape Kestrel’s torments and deprive him of using me for his evil ends. I didn’t know if Kestrel had such an ability, but then for all my hate fantasies over time, I never really knew much about the man. But if anyone would know how a jacker could commit suicide, it would be him.

I couldn’t bring myself to regret he was dead, but I did wish we had pulled all the answers out of his head before he put an end to his hateful existence. And finding him dead in his chair made me flat angry.

No one had got to put a bullet in him after all.

CAUTION: do not read unless you've already read
Free Souls.

This DELETED SCENE takes place during the final chapter of Free Souls. Told from Kira's point-of-view, this scene is another "missing moment." In the novel, Kira refers to Julian arguing with her about not shying away from drinking the water after the inhibitors are dumped into it. In Drinking the Water, the reader gets to see that confrontation, as well as some of Kira's concerns about the two people—Julian and Anna—who know the truth about who put the inhibitors in the water to begin with.

I stared at the glass of water in front of me. It sat alone on the battered wooden table, tiny bubbles of air dotting the inside of the glass. A drop clung to the side, above the water line, slowly working its way down. I’d drawn the water straight from the tap, and it was clear except for a few mysterious bright spots gleaming along the surface where the distortions of the glass bent and focused the dim light of the room.

The water looked pure. Innocent.

But I knew it was filled with genetic inhibitors that would poison my brain.

The privacy room was drafty, the Chicago winter seeping in through the outside brick wall, but my face felt hot, probably from the pounding of my heart. A tap-tap-tapping sound drew my attention. My hand beat a nervous rhythm against the side of my chair. I stilled it by gripping the rough wood of the seat, the edge of which bit into my legs even through my regulation JFA camouflage pants. The sharpness of it cut through my agitation and helped to focus my thoughts. The room was empty except for me, the furniture, and the glass of water. I had locked the door behind me, glad for the chance to take this first drink alone. There would have to be many more, but the first looked to be even more difficult than I thought. I pried my hand from the seat, shook the nerves away, then reached for the glass.

A pounding on the door made me jerk, and I nearly knocked over the water.

“Occupied!” I yelled, as if the closed—and locked—privacy room door wasn’t enough of a hint.

“Kira! There you are,” Julian’s voice came through the door. The doorknob rattled. “Let me in.”

I sighed and tucked my hand under my leg. “What part of ‘privacy room’ don’t you understand?” I only half hoped that would drive him away. Knowing Julian, it would take a lot more. I contemplated gulping down the water then sauntering over to the door with a dribble running down my chin, just to see how red his face could get, but that wasn’t really fair. Julian meant well, even if he was wrong.

“Kira.” His voice was calm now, restrained, but it had taken him a moment to get into that state. “Open the door. I want to talk to you.”

I sighed again, resigning myself to the fight. I pushed up from the chair and dragged my feet to the door. When I pulled it open, Julian nearly fell into the room. He must have been ready to break down the door if I didn’t let him in. It made my heart sing and cry at the same time, a mixture that sapped the strength from my shoulders and dragged them down.

Julian righted himself, then caught sight of the glass, still half full on the table. “Did you…”

“Not yet,” I said. “But you’re welcome to join me.” I swept my hand into the room, and when he hesitantly took a step inside, I closed the door behind him. That’s when I noticed he had a bottle of water in his hand. “Brought your own supplies, I see.” I brushed past him then threw a grin back to let him know I was joking.

He shook his head and followed me to the table, placing the water bottle in the center and moving the glass to the end furthest from me, as if I were a toddler, and he had to keep the poison out of reach. I gave him a dirty look.

“This,” he gestured to the bottle, “is for you. I’ve had a few JFA members out looking. They had to buy out four convenience stores, but now we’re stocked, at least for a while. We can find more when that runs out.”

I picked up the water bottle and handed it back to him. “I don’t need this.”

“Yes, you do,” he said, refusing to take it. His striking blue eyes blazed at me. “We all want you to drink it, Kira. You’re one of the few here who might be able to fix the effects of the inhibitors. You need to drink it. We need your skills if we’re going to understand how to combat the effects, whatever they end up being.”

It had only been a day since I had dumped the inhibitors in the water. Julian and Anna were the only ones who knew I was responsible. She was still angry, judging by her silence and the amount of time she had spent in the training room since she found out, but Julian had almost immediately understood and forgiven me. He seemed to automatically give me the benefit of the doubt, saying we would make the best of it, whatever came. But no one really knew exactly what that would be, and everyone was leery of taking the first drink. There was talk of avoiding it as long as possible, even though that was an illusion at best. Water wasn’t just in our glasses, it was in our food, in our laundry, on the plates we washed and in the showers we took. There was really no avoiding it, even if the first instinct was to try. I could just imagine the pressure Julian must have brought to get them to horde water bottles meant only for me. The irony of it made my stomach twist a little more and made me even more determined to drink what was in the glass. Especially considering that I was the one who poisoned it in the first place.

“Yes, I’m the only one—at least that we know of—that can sense the changes, assuming people will let me into their heads.” I set the water bottle on the table. “But I can do that just as easily, even better, in my own head. Which is precisely why I need to be the first to take a drink. We need to get ahead of this thing, so we know what’s coming. Besides, someone has to do it, and I might as well set an example.”

“I’ve already taken the first drink,” Julian said softly. “So you don’t need to worry about that.”

My eyebrows hiked up, and I couldn’t help sweeping a look over him, as if I could see anything different from the outside. He was dressed in a JFA standard-issue, black turtleneck, with tan cargo pants. The tight-fitting shirt stretched over the bandage that still gripped his upper arm, covering his wound from the grazing bullet at the water station battle. He was injured and still healing; the last thing he should have done was drink poisoned water.

My gaze traveled back up to his eyes, but I couldn’t see any difference there either. I took his hand, warm against the cool of the room, and led him to the musty couch that was shoved up against the wall.

We eased onto the couch together, knees close, and I peered into his eyes. “Does it feel any different?” I asked quietly.

“No.” His gaze didn’t waver from mine.

“Let me in,” I said.

“It won’t matter, Kira.”

“Just let me try.” I waited for his nod—an indication that he had pulled back his automatic defenses to allow me into his mind—then mentally reached forward and dipped inside. It was like a large empty room, and my reach bounced around the edges, searching for him. But of course he wasn’t there. And he had no mindscent whatsoever.

I told you it wouldn’t work. His thoughts chased me with their echoes. You can’t interface with my mindfield, not the way you can with everyone else.

Because you’re on a different frequency, or something, right?

Yes.

Maybe the inhibitors won’t work on you, then. But I still want to check. Maybe if you didn’t pull your defenses back all the way. I closed my eyes, steeling myself for the onslaught of terror that Julian’s defenses would raise up from my instinctual mind. Relax it a little, and I’ll see if I can push through the crazy stuff to reach you.

My body was tense, but instead of a horror show deluging my senses, the warm feel of Julian’s lips on mine shocked my eyes open. His hand gently held my cheek, and I closed my eyes again, leaning into the kiss.

I’d much rather do this than scare you half to death. Julian brushed his hand through my hair, pulled me deeper into the kiss, then slid his other hand slowly down my side and curved it around my back. He moved closer, inching our bodies to nearly touching. Waves of warmth pulsed through me, starting with his lips on mine, reaching my toes, then surging up again.

He was trying to distract me from drinking the water. And doing an excellent job of it.

The hand at the small of my back pressed me closer, but I resisted, putting a speedbump in front of the runaway train that was his kiss. You’re trying to change the subject.

Were we talking about something? he asked, but his lips curved a smile as he moved to trail kisses along my jaw.

“Julian,” I said, my voice whispery.

“Yes,” he breathed against me, his fingertips drawing hot traces on my cheek. My mind blanked when he kissed the side of my neck, then I forced myself to push away. He didn’t release me entirely, but his velvet touches on my body stilled.

“I have to do it.” I glanced at the glass of water still sitting on the table, then looked into his clear blue eyes.

“No you don’t.” He sighed and tucked the hair he had mussed behind my ear. “You shouldn’t. There’s no one in the JFA who thinks you should drink the water. They all know what you did—breaking Sasha out of prison, saving me from Kestrel. You’re their hero, Kira. They don’t want you to suffer for it. Besides, the JFA needs your skills, just the way they are.”

“Nothing’s going to be the way it was anymore.” I was only a hero because they didn’t know what I had really done, and I was still trying to figure out why Julian had forgiven me so quickly. And if that forgiveness would last, once the effects were known. I pulled back from him, but then reached back to touch my hand to his cheek. “Well, there are some things I hope won’t change.”

He closed his eyes briefly, and I decided that it was time. If I didn’t do it now, I was going to lose my nerve altogether. I got up from the couch, strode quickly over to the table, and snatched up the glass. It was like being back in Kestrel’s cells again, only this time, I was giving myself the serum and the experiment was voluntary.

I chugged the water down in a series of gulps. About half way through it felt like it was choking me, but it was all in my head. The water was the same, foul-tasting city water that we always had flowing from the taps in Jackertown. I set the glass down and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, breathing deep to recover from holding it while I drank.

Julian had come up behind me, and now that the glass was safely on the table, he wrapped his arms around my waist and pressed his face in my hair. “You’re incredibly stubborn.”

“You like me that way.” I smiled and turned in his arms to peer up into his eyes, but my smile faded with the intense look on his face. Would Julian still feel the same way about me, once the effects were fully felt on everyone, including him? I could live with dead spots in my brain, but I wasn’t sure if I could live with the damage that was to come—not to me, but to others—knowing that I was responsible for it.

“I’ll like your stubbornness better when it doesn’t put you in danger all the time.” Julian held my gaze for a long moment, then closed his eyes and rested his forehead on mine.

I lifted up on my toes to kiss him, just lightly. “Some things are worth the risk, remember?” I hoped it was true, and I prayed Julian would still forgive me, once all of this was done.

“What idiot said that?” he said, but a hint of the smile was back.

“I believe that was you,” I said. “Although, now that I think about it, I think you blamed me for it.”

“That sounds about right.”

His eyes were open again, and he gave me a look that said kissing was in our near future. Which made my heart jump, but I wanted to get one thing straight first. “Whatever happens, I’m going to need you by my side. So, don’t plan on taking any vacations for awhile, okay?”

He grinned. “Yes, boss.” He ducked his head and added more softly, “I’m not going anywhere.”

Then he kissed me, and I forgot about the water for a while.

The Mindjack Trilogy is a story about a world where everyone reads minds, except one girl… who then learns she can control them instead. When I finished the trilogy in 2012, I thought I was done—three novels and three novellas seemed like nice round numbers. I knew for sure Kira’s story had been told, and at the time, there was no other Mindjack character I felt could compete with the Girl Who Changed The World.

And then Zeph came along and unlocked my mind.

It started with a simple request from Samuel Peralta (in 2015). “Hey Susan, why don’t you write a story for our telepath anthology?”

Telepaths… I might have a few thoughts about those kinds of characters.

The seeds were already sown to write more Mindjack stories—Keeper, a short Mindjack novella, was written more than a year after the trilogy was “done.” All the Mindjack novellas and flash fiction throw light on the shadowy corners of character backstory that couldn’t be covered in the main books, but I had yet to dream up a character who would fit into the world after Mindjack: a world where peace came at the price of unsettling change, and the push of a reset button had wholly transformed the landscape. Any story that came after Mindjack would require a whole new cast of characters. The Telepath Chronicles seemed the perfect opportunity to explore something that was completelynew within the Mindjack universe, but which might yet be able to carry forward into that altered landscape.

With that nudge, Zeph and his locksmith power came into being. I purposely wrote my piece for the Telepath Chronicles as Zeph’s origin story—this is where he came from before Kira changed the world of mindjackers and mindreaders forever. I won’t be writing the rest of Zeph’s story until later (after I finish writing my Singularity series), but as soon as I envisioned Zeph’s ability, I knew it had the power to change the world again… and that made his story worth writing.

When you read Open Minds, you won’t find Zeph there. He’s waiting for Kira to finish her story before he begins to tell his. I hope this taste will be enough to tide you over until I write the rest of it.

Like Zeph’s story, most of my works delve into the science of the mind (and the heart): from controlling minds (Mindjack) to collecting life energy debts (Debt Collector) to the intersection of technology and tradition in a retro past (The Dharian Affairs). My Singularity series takes that one step further, exploring the mind-body-soul connection as our bodies literally intersect with technology in a future world of hyperintelligence, sentient machines, and the legacy humans who live with them. I like to pose social-moral questions in my stories that leave just enough wiggle room for my readers to ask, what would I do?

Special hugs and telepathic kisses to all the readers of the Mindjack series over the years—you are the people who set my writing career in motion, and I’ll forever be grateful for that.

Summary: In a world filled with mindreaders, Zeph is a mindjacker who wants to stay hidden—even if it means the cute mindreader in his Latin class is forever out of his reach. He locks and unlocks minds for a ruthless mindjacker Clan in exchange for protection and the chance to have a normal life with his parents and little sister. But when a girl he doesn’t know reveals the existence of mindjackers to the world, Zeph is forced to make a choice: unlock—and ultimately destroy—the mind of a young jacker changeling… or turn his back on everyone he loves.

The mind is a puzzle, just waiting to be unlocked. Or re-locked, as the case may be.

The girl sitting in the chair in front of me is cute: long, shiny brown hair, little freckles that she’s probably outgrowing, and wide blue eyes that are staring straight into mine. Her name is Sarah, and she’s a mindjacker like me—well, not exactly like me, but she would fit in at my high school just fine. She looks my age, maybe a junior, but she’s probably older. Marshall doesn’t like underage jackers in his Clan—says we get in too much trouble. He made an exception for me, but only because of what I can do. Sarah’s just a normal jacker, at least for the moment. She looks like the kind who’s sweet to everyone, has a pet cat named Meow-Meow, and knows how to hide really well in the regular mindreading population.

Too bad I have to hurt her.

“Come on, Zeph,” Marshall says to me. “Get on with it.” He’s looming behind her chair, intimidating her with his six-foot-two frame, as if being a powerful mindjacker in his own right and hauling her into the Clan’s decrepit warehouse at six in the morning isn’t enough reason to completely freak out the girl.

Sarah. Her name is Sarah.

I try to remember their names. It seems like the decent thing to do.

“You want this done fast, or do you want it done right?” I ask. It’s a rhetorical question, because there’s no speed or finesse involved in what I do. It’s either on or off, done or not-done. But Marshall is the leader of a Clan of thuggish and brutal mindjackers, not a rocket scientist, and besides, he doesn’t really understand what I do. I barely understand it myself. I just know I can lock Sarah’s mind tighter than the datafiles at the Pentagon. Which would be a great target for a jacker with an impenetrable mind, a keeper like Sarah is about to become, but that isn’t actually going to be her mission. I don’t know the details of her real mission—it’s not my business to know.

I’m just the locksmith.

“I want it done now,” Marshall barks at me over her head.

Sarah flinches. Her delicate hands wrestle with each other in her lap.

Marshall pulls out his phone and activates the holographic mindware interface. Must be checking his busy calendar. “She’s gotta meet up with the corporate guys in an hour.”

“Corporate guys?” I ask. Marshall’s sending the girl in for corporate espionage? I resist the urge to shake my head at all the ways that’s going to fail.

“Yeah.” He puts away his phone, then scratches his chin, like it’s using all his brain power to explain this to me. “They were supposed to contract out a keeper from Clan Molloy, but those guys imploded last week.”

I frown, trying to think if I know anyone in Clan Molloy. Their territory is on the seedy north side of Chicago New Metro and ours is in the Northwest Suburbs, but the Clans cross paths every once in a while. Not that I get friendly with other jackers, but there are a few who aren’t complete jerks.

“What do you mean, imploded?” I ask.

“Like boom, the whole Clan is in FBI custody.”

I whistle low. “Someone rat them out?” Now I’m really trying to remember who I know in Clan Molloy. And if they know where I live. And if the FBI is tormenting that knowledge out of them as I’m sitting here doing Marshall’s dirty work.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I think maybe they had a mole.”

I give a nervous laugh. “Right? I mean, how can a whole Clan go down at once without someone on the inside?” I’m not a mole for the FBI, but I’m always skating the edge with Marshall, so if someone was going to be pegged for being a mole, it would probably be me. I’m odd man out in the Clan, given what I can do, and the other jackers keep their distance. Not that I blame them. I wouldn’t like a guy who could lock me inside my own head, either. But the minute I stop being useful to Marshall is the minute the rest of Clan decides to take their I never really liked that guy tensions out on me. Even if I could leave unscathed, I can’t afford to be without Marshall’s protection. Staying out of the FBI’s clutches wouldn’t be too hard—those guys are messed up in what they do to jackers, but they’re also fairly inept. I’m more worried about another Clan finding me. Because there are worse Clans than Marshall’s. A lot worse.

“Doesn’t matter,” he says gruffly, ending the discussion with a wave of his hand. “Just means we get to step in and give the customer what he wants.”

Right. The corporate guys. “It’ll take at least an hour for her to recover,” I warn him. Marshall should know this, but maybe he’s forgotten. It’s not like I do it that often, and he’s a busy guy, what with all the thuggery and petty crime he’s involved in.

Marshall lowers his voice. “Just get it done, Zeph.”

Fine. Enough messing around.

I look back to Sarah. Most of the color is gone from her face. “Is this going to hurt? Because no one said anything about recovery.” She bites her lip.

Marshall’s giving me the look, like it’s my job to close the deal with Sarah. She’s not from our Clan, which means he recruited her from another one just for the job. Or maybe she’s on loan, voluntarily or not. He could have scouted her straight out of school, for all I know. But whenever he brings someone for me to lock—or worse, unlock—he never gives them all the details. Says he likes to keep things on a need-to-know basis, but the truth is most wouldn’t sign up for this if they knew the price. Not that they always get a choice. Like that guy last month who backed out on one of Marshall’s schemes and ended up with half his mind erased, the rest scrambled, and a new tendency to drool when he talks.

I shudder. I don’t want to see anything like that happen to Sarah. So I sigh and lean forward in my chair, hands clasped, elbows on my knees, giving Sarah my best it’ll be okay look… even though it won’t.

“I won’t lie to you,” I say, totally lying to her. “It’ll hurt a little, but not for long. You might have a headache for a while afterward. But once I’m done, no one will be able to jack into your head. So there’s that. Plus you’ll be all set for the job.” I glance at Marshall, because I have no idea what the specifics of the job are, but he’s nodding, so I continue. “Then you’ll come back here, I’ll undo it, and everything will be back to normal.” That part at least is true. Assuming she comes back. They don’t always.

She’s quaking a little, but she nods, and looks to Marshall. “Then I get paid, right?”

“Just like I said.” Marshall folds his beefy arms.

Sarah hesitates, like she’s going to question him further, but then she doesn’t. And she really doesn’t need to worry about that part. For all the illegal activities he runs, Marshall’s strangely honest. He’ll hold up his end of the bargain if she does.

Sarah turns back to me.

“Ready?” I ask. Because it’s nice to ask. They’re never ready.

She swallows and nods once more.

I reach out with my mind and brush her mind barrier, just to give her a little warning, and to get a sense of how hard this one’s going to be. The scent of sun-baked strawberries fills the back of my throat. Her mind-scent is probably the same flavor as the lip gloss she wears when she goes out on a date with her boyfriend. I’ve always wondered if those lip glosses taste the same as they smell, a little too-sweet and artificial, but mouth-watering nonetheless. I wouldn’t know—never had the chance to kiss a girl. Not for lack of wanting, mind you. I’m as red-blooded-straight as any other seventeen-year-old male. Just never met a girl jacker who would have anything to do with me, and kissing mindreaders is all kinds of wrong.

Focus, Zeph, I tell myself.

I should have grabbed a coffee or something before coming in.

I close my eyes and push on through Sarah’s mind barrier. It isn’t very tough, but reaching deep into any mind is a creepy sensation, like shoving your hand into a bowl full of raw ground beef. It gives, but there’s serious interference between the two mind fields. I have no idea why that translates into the sensation of cold meatloaf gushing between my fingers, but it does. The mind is a strange thing.

I’m not a tremendously strong mindjacker, and she shoves me back out pretty easily.

I open my eyes again and try not to chastise her. “You need to let me in.” Strictly speaking, this isn’t true. I can lock her mind without having to be on the inside, but I’ve been hiding that little tidbit from Marshall, and I’d rather keep any small advantage for as long as I can. Never know when you need something like that in your back pocket. Besides, Sarah’s here at least somewhat voluntarily. I don’t know all the specifics of the deal she made with Marshall—sometimes he’ll threaten—but it sounds like he’s cut her in on the deal, whatever it is. Either way, Sarah shouldn’t be working against me.

“Sorry,” she says. The hairs on her arms are raised. I know it’s not pleasant for her either, but it’s about to get a whole lot worse. No need to prolong it more than necessary.

“It’s all right,” I say, trying to keep my voice soothing. “Just relax, let me in, and we’ll be done before you know it.”

She nods and closes her eyes, taking a breath and letting it out through pursed lips.

She’s extra cute when she does that. Makes me feel about ten times worse for what I’m about to do. I close my eyes again, not because I need to relax, but because I don’t want to see her face when I lock her.

I reach for her mind field again, and this time, I slip in no problem. Deep inside her head like this, I can hear all her thoughts, feel all her emotions. That overbaked strawberry scent hits the back of my throat again, and the basic information about her pops up like a digital display in the front of my brain. Sarah Zuckerman, nineteen, freshman at Harper College. I ignore all that and stretch my mind field presence inside hers. It expands, like the fingers of my mind flexing outward, until my mind field basically fills the same space as hers. I could do the reverse, surrounding her field from the outside, floating above the contours of her mind barrier rather than mushrooming out from the inside to coat it. It doesn’t matter. What I’m doing is syncing up my mind field with hers and feeling out the parameters of it. Like taking a sonar map of the surface of the moon. Her map is unique, just like she is. And once I’ve got a fix on it, that’s when I can shift things, move them around. Smooth the bumps, raise the minuscule peaks, dig the valleys a little deeper. Changing the map alters her mind field’s capabilities. I don’t know what each peak or valley is for; I’m just operating by feel. It’s like I’m a safecracker, only I’m turning the tumblers in her brain until each clicks into place and locks her mind down.

She screams.

Even though I expect it, my whole body jolts. I’ve got a good grip on the chair, so fortunately I don’t fall out and give myself away with how much I hate this part. The screaming lasts about ten seconds, until the last tumbler falls into place, and then I’m done.

She stops screaming.

I open my eyes.

Tears stream down her pretty face, and I have that sick feeling I get every time. Like what I’m doing is so wrong there’s no right-thing I can ever do in the world to make up for it. Her face is still scrunched with the pain. It’s not as bad now as it was when I was locking her down, which is why she’s not screaming, but I’ve left her with a killer headache. I don’t know why it hurts, exactly, but it’s not hard to imagine: I just changed her mind field into something different. There must be some kind of effect from that. Some pushback from the brain. Or maybe it triggers one of the pain centers for some reason. Like I said, I don’t really understand how it works. I just do it.

Then her face goes slack, and she starts to tip sideways.

I’m out of my chair so fast it falls backward, but I manage to catch her before she goes head-first into the concrete floor.

What in the sweet mercy… ? She’s thin, and not too tall, but she’s dead weight in my arms.

“What in the… what did you do, Zeph?” Marshall asks, his mouth gaping at me.

I have no idea, and I’m freaking out. “I don’t know! This has never happened before.” I struggle to keep hold of her and lift her back into the chair.

Marshall isn’t helping, he’s just standing there, staring. Sarah’s body is completely limp—I can’t even get it to stay upright in the chair. The seat is just a flimsy plastic thing on metal feet, and suddenly it slides out from under us. I nearly drop her, but somehow I slow her fall enough to ease her to the floor without thumping her head.

I’m still cradling her in my arms. “Sarah!” I can hear the panic in my own voice. “Sarah, wake up.”

I hold her with one arm and use my other hand to pry open one of her eyelids. All I see are the whites, and it jolts me. My stomach heaves, and I yank my hand back. Oh my god, please don’t be dead.

“Is she okay?” Marshall looms over us.

“I don’t know!” My voice has hiked up a whole octave. I put two fingers to her neck, trying to find a pulse. They taught us how in first aid class freshman year, but it’s a complete blur to me now, and I have no idea what to do. I feel something pounding in my fingertips, but I can’t be sure it’s not my own heart echoing there. But then she moans and moves away from my touch. Relief flushes through me. I pull in a full breath for the first time since she keeled over.

“Sarah.” I pat her cheek gently. “Sarah, you need to wake up.”

She moans again and scrunches her face. Her eyes slit open, and she peers up at me. I’m still holding her close in my arms. She hunches her shoulders as she flails around, trying to escape my hold. I try to let her go without letting her fall. She ends up on the floor, scuttling away from me on all fours, not turning her back, in case I might hurt her. Again.

My heart is pounding so hard it actually hurts my chest. I’m so relieved she’s alive, I almost feel sick from it, but at the same time… what in the world did I just do?

I climb unsteadily to my feet, and Sarah does the same. Standing up seems to spike her headache, because she gasps and clutches her head with both hands.

Finally Marshall springs into action and hurries to her side to keep her from tipping over again. “Okay, all right, all done. You’re going to be fine now.”

He holds her upright with one beefy arm around her shoulder, then picks up the chair from the floor and sets it upright for her. She sits down, but just doubles over, holding her head. That’s what she should be doing. That’s the normal reaction: splitting headache, maybe a little nausea. An hour’s rest, and it will pass.

Passing out is definitely not on the symptom list.

Marshall gives me a look like I should clear out. And for once, I agree.

“I have to get to class.” My voice sounds wooden. My feet aren’t moving yet—I’m still staring wide-eyed at Sarah as she clutches her pretty brown hair and cries softly. I’m afraid she might fall over again if I take my eyes off her.

“Go, Zeph,” Marshall says, not unkindly. I think he’s speaking softly for Sarah’s sake. “But I want you back here after school. I’ve got another job for you.”

Somehow that punches me in the gut even harder than watching Sarah cry. I’m sure I’m making some kind of horrified face, but Marshall is back to looking at Sarah and doesn’t see it. My gut twists in a soup of emotion.

What did I just do to this girl?

Sarah. Her name is Sarah.

I swallow and force my feet to move. I grab my backpack on my way out the door.

I cruise into Fremd High School just as the whisper-soft bell signals the start of class, but it’s like walking into another world. The real world, where everyone reads minds and is perfectly normal with normal lives and normal problems. Like which prom dress to buy. Or who to have on your synchronized mindware team at the gameplex. Or how to pass Latin, the dead language that’s not dead anymore, because mindreaders are weird. The students in the halls of Fremd don’t know anything about the hidden underworld of mindjackers I belong to.

And keeping it that way is job one when I’m here.

Now that the bell’s rung, the halls are deathly quiet. Of course, they were silent before that, too, and the complete lack of audible sounds other than the occasional sneeze will continue all day long. As much as Marshall is a thug and a thief and a person I generally don’t like—just like most jackers, because really, none of us are to be trusted, not when we lie about everything we are and everything we do—even with all that, at least with him I can talk out loud. Here, in the regular mindreading world, the silence is oppressive. Unless I’m linked into their minds, pretending to be one of them. But now, since everyone’s gone to class, and the neatly carpeted halls are empty, the silence reigns.

I hurry to first period Latin just so I don’t have to linger in the creepy vacuum of sound. Mrs. Holt has already started her lesson, because she thinks all students are terminally slow and she has to use every second to save us from being left behind.

Now that I’m in thought-range, I link into her mind. Sorry I’m late, Mrs. Holt. I keep the linking light, so she thinks she’s just receiving my mind waves, like the rest of her twenty-three students. At the same time, I link a weaker echo of that thought to the rest of the class, so no one’s the wiser to the jacker in their midst.

Take a seat, Mr. MacKay. She doesn’t even turn from the board.

A twitter of laughter flits through the minds of the class, but they barely look up from their scribepads, already working on the lesson sheet Mrs. Holt has cast to them. I try to be easy to ignore. Just background noise in the cacophony of thoughts rippling through the classroom. If they had any idea they weren’t just sensing my thoughts, that I was actually jacking into their heads… well, they wouldn’t be quite so focused on their Latin. Linking thoughts is the weakest form of jacking—not much different than mindreading—but it’s still jacking. I could just as easily make them all stand up, strip down, and dance naked around the classroom.

Not that I’ve actually considered that.

Often.

When you’re done with the worksheet, cast it back to me. Mrs. Holt’s mindwaves wash over the classroom. Even Eddy Jenkins in the back can hear her thoughts, but that’s about as far as they’ll reach. I can jack a lot farther, but I only worry about linking within the standard mindreading range. I grip my backpack and work my way past the rows of chairs. Then I see an open seat behind Tessa McIntyre. She doesn’t notice as I slide into it; she’s bent over her worksheet, her left-handed scribblings wandering all over her scribepad. A quick brush of her mind tells me she’s doing those doodles she likes to make. She probably finished the worksheet before most of the class even sat down. She’s just that smart and fast.

I know a lot about Tessa. More than I probably should.

I dig out my scribepad and attempt to catch up.

Since thought waves have a sort of universal translator built in, language isn’t a barrier for the in-person stuff. And once people got used to that, they started moving toward a common written language, too. Latin is increasingly winning out as the most-used. Why Latin? Again, mindreaders are strange. But it’s required for college, so that’s all I need to know. Marshall’s just waiting for me to get out of school so he can set me up as a full-time hoodlum, but I’ve always thought of college as the best way to go. Forget jackers. Immerse myself in the mindreading world. Full-scale, full-time pretending. See if I can stand to make a life that way. It wouldn’t be bad with someone like Tessa.

I’m still working on the finer points of that plan.

I try to focus on the worksheet.

Veto, vetare, vetui, vetitus. To forbid. To prohibit.

We’re just conjugating for warmups, but it’s like the universe is reminding me to stay out of Tessa McIntyre’s head. Most readers’ thoughts are boring synchronized drivel or rumor-mongering group-think, but Tessa is… different. It’s not just that she’s cute, although she’s definitely that, too. Long reddish-brown hair. Big brown doe eyes that have this crazy mix of intelligence and innocence. She stares off into space a lot, which gives me a chance to check her out. And her skin is this amazing ivory-pale-white with a hint of color in her cheeks… like she’s perpetually blushing, only I know she doesn’t wear makeup. She thinks a lot about how the beauty of a thing is more about the unique form of that thing, and how makeup is stupid and pointless because it just covers that up that unique quality.

I definitely linger in Tessa’s head way more than I should.

I finish my worksheet and cast it up front to Mrs. Holt. We’ve moved on to translating Julius Caesar’s Commentaries. Mrs. Holt is giving her usual play-by-play historical sim, recreating the scene in her mind as she imagines Caesar would have lived it, complete with visuals and emotional subtext. She’s pretty good at it, better than most teachers, and her students are captivated by the experience. And Mrs. Holt’s version of Caesar is pretty hot, if the sighs and thoughts of the girls in class are any indication. She clearly enjoys her source material.

I tune out Mrs. Holt and check out what Tessa’s working on so hard.

She’s drawing fairies with delicate wings in some Japanese art style. I like it when she draws. What comes out on the pad isn’t always connected to the thoughts roaming around in her head. In fact, sometimes it’s wildly different, like a little window into her soul. I keep that thought to myself, broadcasting only the expected thoughts about Mrs. Holt’s breathless reenactment of Caesar’s war campaign.

It’s not like Tessa’s the cutest girl in school. There are all kinds of hot girls in my classes, and I could date any one of them I wished… if I were the kind of guy who thought “mind control” was the same as “dating.” This is why kissing readers is just wrong: even if I’m not jacking a girl explicitly, at a minimum I’m linking into her head and lying to her about it. Lying about who I am and what I am. Solid relationship material there.

This is also why I keep to myself as best as a guy can in a high school where everyone reads minds. Usually there’s not much temptation to get involved with readers—most of them are far too into that synchronized group-think thing that sends shivers up my back. But, once in a while… there’s a girl like Tessa.

An image of Sarah-the-mindjacker pops into my head. She’s the only girl I’ve ever actually held in my arms—and it was because she passed out. Worse, it was something I did to her. I still don’t understand what happened. I’ve locked a dozen people before. Unlocked them, too. Nothing like this ever happened. The whole thing gives me a sick feeling inside, like when I first discovered I was a jacker. I was just a kid, hoping for the adolescent change into a mindreader to happen, just like I hoped Stacey Jenkins would kiss me sometime before seventh grade ended. One minute, my mom is interrupting my holo game to yell at me about setting the table for dinner, and the next… she’s passed out on the floor. At first, I didn’t even know I did it. I was crying over her—a blubbering, freaking-out mess—and then she woke up. Only that time I felt it. Like a wish come true, only with more electrical brain activity. A storm in my brain had blown out my mother’s lights… until I turned them back on.

It was out of control and scared me witless, just like with Sarah today. I thought I might be one of the demens—those people who go through the change into mindreaders and end up crazy on the other side. But a few days later, I got scouted by a Clan leader, and I quickly learned all about being a mindjacker. Donovan taught me things. Like how to reach into a man’s mind and slow down his heart until it simply stopped. And how to erase a woman’s memory so she doesn’t even know her own family. Who teaches a kid stuff like that? Donovan’s more ruthless than Marshall could ever dream of being. He made me do things I’d rather forget, but it was during one of his more brutal lessons that I finally discovered I could lock. And that was my ticket out. I locked him into his own head and got as far away as possible.

The end-of-period tone breaks the classroom’s thoughts from their translation work, and the normal chaos of closely held mental conversations takes over—random thoughts about lunch or plans later in the day or panicked attempts at finishing the work. I pull back because they won’t notice me gone from their minds now, and I like focusing on Tessa. I don’t link anything in particular to her—don’t want to draw her attention by standing out from the crowd—but she’s slow to pack up her stuff, and I’m in no hurry to get to my next class.

English next, she thinks. No time to draw. Maybe in third period. That golden-scaled dragon with feathers was so pretty, but I don’t do well with feathers— She glances my way and catches me staring at her.

Hi! I link the spastic thought to her quickly. Because being caught obviously thinking something that the person next to you can’t hear? That’s how jackers get found out. Man, I’ve got to be more careful. I really like your pictures. I mean, drawings. Your art. Sweet mercy, I’m ramble-linking.

She stares at me, unblinking. You were looking at my art?

Well, yeah, I mean—

But you weren’t thinking about it.

Uh-oh. Yeah, I was. I try for the bald-faced lie. Readers don’t lie, so she should buy it. I was thinking how great—

No you weren’t. Her stare is cool.

Oh man.

I can tell, she thinks.

I try not to look panicked.

When people look at my art, she thinks, I can tell. You weren’t. She’s giving me this stone-cold stare. She knows something is wrong.

No, no, no. Please don’t make me jack you. But I keep that thought to myself and take a breath. I… um… Man, I’m totally scrambling. Well, this is kind of embarrassing.
But I sort of wait until you’re not here to peek at your work. I could jack her if I had to. I can erase all of it from her memories. No one else is paying attention to us, so it would just be her. But this is the closest thing to a conversation I’ve had with her, and… I don’t really want her to forget it.

She frowns, and it’s cute. Really cute. Strangely, she doesn’t think I’m stalking her, she just thinks my words don’t make sense. Which of course they don’t.

How can you peek at my work when I always have my scribepad with me? She frowns as she tucks the scribepad into her satchel.

It’s true. She doesn’t let it out of her grasp. I go big with an epic lie. You do sometimes. Probably don’t remember is all. Like last week in math you left your seat for a minute. And a couple weeks ago in Latin, Mrs. Holt called you up for something.

You’re in my math class?

I am, indeed, although clearly she’s never noticed. I have three classes with her: first period Latin, fifth period math, and… Yeah. I’m in your biology class, too.

She cocks her head to the side. Eighth period?

Uh huh. I’m not really stalking her, I tell myself. She’s just… different. And I notice different. Because no one really notices me, and I have to keep it that way, but it gets pretty freaking boring sometimes.

You’re kind of strange. Her thoughts aren’t mean. There’s no sour aftertaste in her mind-scent to indicate fear. In fact, her steady wildflower field mind-scent is calming to me somehow. It ratchets down my panic. Not least because she seems to have bought the lie.

Yeah, I’m a little weird. There’s a twitch in my shoulders that I hope she doesn’t notice. All I can think is, You have no idea, Tessa-the-wildflower-girl. But I keep that thought to myself, too.

Do you want to walk with me to my locker? she thinks in that straightforward way that mindreaders do. Unlike jackers, there’s no secrecy with readers. No lies. All the embarrassing stuff is right out there, along with the honest heartfelt things. They’re like kittens that way, all innocent and vulnerable. Well, the nice ones, anyway. Like Tessa. The evil ones are like Satan with a side order of nasty.

Sure. Sounds good, I link back. Somehow agreeing to walk with her makes heat rise up in my face. I stuff my scribepad in my backpack and scramble to follow her. It occurs to me that I’ve never actually done this before: walked with a girl between classes. I shake my head at myself when Tessa’s back is turned. What am I doing?

Do you like fairies? Tessa’s thoughts are back to that random rumble I like. I draw a lot of fairies. I like the way they’re human but not quite. Maybe that’s why you like my art?

I follow her out into the hall, careful to link an echo of my thoughts to everyone nearby. Don’t want to get caught again. Well, no, I’m not really into them, but the way you draw them is… mesh.

Mesh? She frowns at me over her shoulder, like I’ve morphed into something even stranger than she originally thought.

Yeah, mesh. How can she not know what mesh is? Nice. Cool? I like it.

She squints at me. I know what mesh means.

My pulse picks up again. Well, sure. Of course.
It’s the style of your art, I think. It’s different. What do you call it?

She smiles and relaxes. It’s a pre-Change Japanese style. You’ve probably never heard of it.

The Change was almost a hundred years ago, when pharmaceuticals in the water flipped everyone into being mindreaders. I don’t know if there were mindjackers in the beginning, but somewhere along the way, we started popping up in the population, too.

See? I link to her. Pre-Change art. How mesh is that?

She gives me a small smile, and it makes my heart do this weird convulsing thing. She’s always got a serious or daydreamy look on her face—I’ve never seen her smile before.

Man, am I in trouble here.

I bite my lip as we reach her locker. I should just make up some excuse and walk away now. Before I get any more entangled in Tessa and her art and her life. She opens the door of her locker, and it’s papered with her drawings. They’re mostly bright and pretty, except for one on the door. It’s a picture of her with wings—I can tell by the reddish hair and the dark-brown oversized eyes. She’s crying in the picture, and there’s a ring of glaring faces all around her.

I recognize the scene: it’s what readers do when they want to harass someone. They circle around and beat them up with their vile, Satan-like thoughts. I cringe just looking at it—it conjures a pain that worms deep inside me. Tessa catches my expression, then gets a strange look on her face. I quickly realize I’m busted again, my expression not matching my blank-to-her thoughts.

I flick a look to the picture, trying to cover for it. Did they hurt you?

She frowns, but lets it go. No. She pulls a paper doodle pad out of her locker and closes it. I was just a changeling. They thought they could drive me demens. I keep the drawing as a reminder that it didn’t work.

The ache in my chest stabs a little deeper.

That’s messed up, I link to her. Do they still do it? Harass you, I mean? I want to scour her memories, find the pravers who hurt her, and jack them into vandalizing the school’s office, or some other crime that will get them tossed out. Only I don’t want to go digging through Tessa’s memories—I’d be no better than the guys who hurt her in the first place. The anger inside me is… unexpectedly fierce. I take a breath and let it out.

It’s always a mistake to get involved with mindreaders, Zeph.

Reminding myself of this doesn’t actually help.

Tessa hikes her satchel up higher on her shoulder. No, they don’t bother me anymore.
I ignore them, mostly, and they just kind of ignore me back. Guess
I’m not worth the trouble.

We start walking toward her next class.

Why can’t all mindreaders be sons and daughters of evil? Why do some of them, like Tessa, have to be cute? And brave. And different.

She’s worth the trouble, something deep inside my chest tells me. But it’s wrong. Starting something with her would be… just too hard. And dangerous. I can still feel Sarah’s body in my arms like a lead weight—and she’s a jacker. A reader like Tessa would be utterly defenseless against any jackers who decided they wanted to come after me, for any multitude of grievances. Plus, hanging with Tessa would mean lying to her constantly. I might be able to live with that—I do it all the time—but she doesn’t need a hidden underworld of criminals in her life. I shake my head. I don’t want people like Donovan, or even Marshall, anywhere near someone like Tessa.

We reach her English class. She smiles at me again. Thanks for the walk. See you in math?

Her smile twists up my insides. Yeah, I link back. But I’ve already decided: when I get to math, I’m not sitting next to her. I’m going to ignore her, just like everyone else does, and sit as far away from her as I can. And keep out of her head as much as possible.

She smiles her goodbye, and I stand there, watching her go.

Jackers and readers: we’re like lions and lambs. Forget the parable, I tell myself. They don’t lie down together without someone ending up as lunch.

I hurry away from her and toward my next class.

I successfully avoid Tessa for the rest of the day. I’m a sufficiently large enough jerk to her that I don’t think she’s going to offer to show me her art again. Or let me walk her between classes. I tell myself this is for the best… about a hundred times on the long walk home.

I linger behind the crowd, so the sidewalks are empty and I don’t have to link to anyone. The skinny suburban houses are filled with mindreaders, but the building ordinances keep the identical gray-and-cream-colored homes spaced far enough apart that the readers don’t have to listen to the thoughts of their neighbors. Or the moody high school kid walking down their sidewalk. For me, it’s a chance for some clear head space. The wind ruffles the leaves, and an occasional autocab rumbles by, but it’s mostly quiet. A squirrel makes a temporary racket by hurtling through the blanket of fall leaves that have dropped with the cooling Chicago weather.

By the time I reach my house and use my passkey to get into the garage, I’ve nearly convinced myself that I’m some kind of hero for being a jerk to Tessa and keeping her out of my life. I pass through the kitchen and see a muffin massacre on the table—Olivia, my eleven-year-old sister, plowed through the snacks pretty fast in my absence. Which makes me wonder how long I dragged my feet on the way home: Olivia usually arrives the same time I do.

“Hey, Livvy!” I shout. “Where you at?”

I listen for her response as I toss my backpack on the couch. No answer.

I go scouting for her. I’m supposed to watch Liv after school, until Mom and Dad get home on the train from their corporate jobs downtown, but Marshall wants me to come in today, so we’re going to need a different plan.

“Liv!” I take it up a notch. There’s no excuse for her not to answer, other than she thinks she’s too big for babysitters. Which means she’s good for keeping it a secret when I skip out on babysitting duty. Mom and Dad are both mindreaders, but Livvy hasn’t gone through the change yet, and they won’t be able to read her thoughts. Which Liv and I work to our mutual advantage as much as possible.

“Livvy, I’m serious, where—” I round the corner to the living room and stop in my tracks. She’s working the living room holo game like mad, dancing as she fights through hordes of tentacle creatures. She must have the wireless buds in her ears, because when she sees me she nearly jumps out of her skin and lands back on the couch like she’s having a heart attack.

I can’t help cracking up.

She pulls the earbuds out. “Oh my god, Zeph! You scared me to death!”

“I scared you?” I glance at the pile of tentacled splatter-corpses on the screen. “You’re fighting hideous creatures from the deep, but you’re scared of me?”

“You’re much uglier.” She sticks her tongue out at me.

“Thanks, champ.” But I smile. She’s about as big as a midget, but she’s got all the attitude I could hope for in a little sister. And she’s one of the few people I don’t have to jack. We talk out loud. We keep secrets from everyone else. I’m seriously dreading the day she goes through the change and becomes just like the rest of them.

Livvy pauses her game with a flick of her wrist. “You gonna play? Alien Tentacles Invasion. I modded it to play pre-Change, but standard play is mindware interfaced. We can do both.”

“You know, someday Mom’s going to figure out you hacked the game console. Besides, don’t you have homework today?”

“Nah. I finished it in gym.” She shrugs.

Which is possible; Livvy’s smart. But she’s also a slacker when it comes to school. I give her a skeptical look, but I’m not going to press it.

“Listen, can you do me a favor?” I ask. “I need to go meet some guys. Can you tell Mom I was here, playing Reader City all afternoon with you? I’ll get back before she comes home.”

“What’s in it for me?”

I choke. “What? Seriously, Liv?”

“I’m thinking I deserve something for my trouble.”

I shake my head. “When did you become Uncle Harlow?” He’s the crazy uncle who’s always wheedling some favor out of our dad.

“There’s an expansion pack I was thinking about: Tentacles II.” She gives me her best fake-winning smile.

“Mom doesn’t even want you playing Tentacles I.”

“Precisely.”

I heave a sigh, like I can’t believe the hard bargain she’s driving, but I have to work to keep the grin in check. Besides, I have a pretty big stash of unos in my room. Marshall pays me every once in a while, and it’s not like I spend my money on dates or anything.

“Okay,” I say, like I’m totally giving into her. “But if Mom finds out, we’re going down together.”

“Deal.” She digs her fallen earbuds out from the couch cushion, pops them in, and goes back to fighting holographic aliens.

I shake my head, fish out my phone, and call up an autocab. When I joined Marshall’s Clan, he gave me a tally card loaded with cash so I could get to the warehouse when he wanted me. Works for me—it’s easier than taking the bus. When the autocab arrives, I program the autopath and ease back in the seat for the ride. It’s pretty short—Marshall’s territory in the Northwest Suburbs isn’t that big. His warehouse headquarters is an abandoned consignment store with storage in back. It’s not large, but then, it’s not like anyone lives there. And the fifty or so jackers he has in his Clan don’t usually all meet at the same time. For security, he says, but I think he just likes to keep us separate in case we want to conspire against him.

The jacker at the back door knows me and lets me in. There are a lot more people inside than when I left this morning. Which immediately makes me suspicious. And nervous. They’re all mid-twenties guys, muscular, a few with tattoos. There’s one girl in a heavy trench coat, also mid-twenties. They’re like a small mindjacker army, probably two dozen in all, and they’re scattered around the storage area, in clusters of twos and threes, in between the racks of clothing and stacks of furniture left behind when the store closed.

I do my best to play it cool and stride right up to Marshall. He’s talking with a guy almost as big as he is, and I vaguely recognize him as one of Marshall’s right-hand men. I think his name is Jackson. They’re not talking out loud, but they’re obviously having a conversation—which throws my alarm level up another three notches.

Jackers don’t mind-talk unless they’ve got something to hide.

“Hey,” I say, interrupting whatever they’re discussing. I’m hoping I can get in and out of whatever’s going down here as fast as possible. “Marshall, my kid sister needs me back home. How about I come back tomorrow, and we can do whatever you need then?” I throw a quick glance at the other jackers around the room. My arrival hasn’t stirred up too much interest. Then I realize they’re having wordless conversations, too. My heart’s beginning to thud audibly in my ears.

“Have you seen the news, Zeph?” Marshall asks, his face grim.

What? I blink. “Um, no. Been at school all day, then came straight here.” I glance again at the other jackers. A few have handheld screens, obviously watching some tru-cast. “What’s up?”

Marshall and Jackson exchange a glance, and probably a linked thought or two. Sweat starts to break out at the back of my neck.

Marshall folds his arms and stares down at me. He’s trying to intimidate me. Not a good sign. “What did you do to that girl this morning, Zeph?”

“Sarah?” I ask, my throat getting thick. “I told you, I don’t know. I mean, I just locked her, like you asked.” Something’s gone wrong. Really wrong. I glance at the tru-cast-watching members of the Clan. “Why? Did the operation go sideways? Is it on the news or something?”

Marshall frowns. “No, that’s something else.” He shakes his head, frowning at his feet and chewing his lip. I’ve never seen the guy nervous before, not like this. It unnerves me.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

He sighs and lifts his chin to Jackson, who’s been watching us this whole time, holding back. Now Jackson takes off for the front of the storage area, toward the defunct storefront. Marshall grabs my undivided attention by putting a beefy hand on my shoulder. I try not to cringe under his touch.

“Look, Zeph, you’re a good kid,” he says. “But you did something to that girl, and if you know what it is, you need to come clean and tell me right now.”

Holy mother, help me. “I swear, Marshall, I’ve never seen anyone pass out like that. I mean, is she okay now? Did something happen?”

“You could say that.” He sighs. “We sent her on this gig, just a simple corporate job. She was only supposed to jack the guy with the biometric ID, get into where they lock up their codes, tap it, then get out again. The only reason we needed a keeper at all was in case they had a jacker on security somewhere. Our customer didn’t want any possibility of it being tracked back to him.”

“So… did the lock not hold or something?” I’ve never had that happen either, but something was definitely off with Sarah. Maybe her mind field shifted back after a while.

“No, it held.” Marshall scrunches up his face like he’s still trying to figure it out. “Only when she went to jack the guy, she didn’t really jack him. She… did something else. The guy’s mind is scrambled now. He’s in some kind of coma. Sarah kind of lost it, on camera, in the corporate headquarters.”

“Holy crap.” Panic is reaching up and strangling me now.

Marshall nods. “Yeah. It’s a mess, Zeph, and I don’t like cleaning up messes.”

I swallow. “I swear, I don’t know what happened. Maybe if I can talk to her, I can figure out what—”

“The FBI got her.”

“What?” My eyes bug out. My outburst attracts attention from the others, so I struggle to rein it in. “Couldn’t you pull her out or something?”

Marshall’s rock-hard look makes me shrink back. I shouldn’t be questioning him, not like that.

“They got to her before we could.” He lets that sink in. Being caught in the Feds’ net is bad. Really bad. Epic, one-way-ticket bad. But I’m not sure if Marshall reaching her first would have actually been better. Either way, I screwed up, and there are all kinds of people paying the price, not least Sarah. Whatever I did somehow scrambled her head on the inside, instead of just locking it up on the outside. And now the Feds have her… I close my eyes and turn half away from Marshall, rubbing my hand across my forehead. I honestly have no idea what went wrong.

And that scares the crap out of me.

“You got something to tell me, Zeph?” Marshall’s voice is hard, like a stone he’s going to break me with if I don’t come up with the right answer.

I suck in a breath and turn back to him. “I honestly wish I knew what happened, Marshall.”

He squints at me, but I think he believes me. Maybe. “Well, whatever you did to Sarah, how about you make sure it doesn’t happen again?”

I nod, a bit too vigorously. Something past my shoulder catches Marshall’s eye. I twist to see. Jackson’s bringing a kid in from the storefront. A scrawny kid. This kid makes my little sister Olivia look big.

I throw a panicked look to Marshall. “What’s this?”

Marshall’s rock-hard look doesn’t flinch. “This is your next job, Zeph. Don’t screw it up.”

The bottom drops out of my stomach. I look back to the kid as Jackson marches him over. I can hardly believe he’s old enough to be a jacker or a reader—most don’t change until at least thirteen or fourteen. It can happen younger, but this kid looks like he’s in elementary school. Twelve at the most. Or he’s really small for his age.

Either way… I’ve never locked, or unlocked, a changeling before, and now… I don’t even know if I can do it right anymore for an adult.

My stomach ties itself in a knot so tight, I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.

“C’mon man.” I’m pleading Marshall to let me out of this. “He’s just a kid.”

“He’s not just a kid,” Marshall says, his voice as hard as his muscular arms, which are now flexing in agitation. The kid is seated in a chair Jackson brought for him. He’s so scared he’s not even crying, he’s just shaking like a mouse. “He’s part of that Molloy Clan.”

“I thought those guys were all taken by the Feds.”

“They were—except for this one.” Marshall juts his chin to the kid. “And that other one who’s been on every tru-cast for the last hour.”

I narrow my eyes. “I don’t understand. What’s on the news?”

Marshall grimaces, looks at the kid like he’s got the secrets to the universe trapped inside his head, then lets out a sigh and waves over Jackson, who brings his handheld with him. The screen is small, but it’s easy to see the stylishly dressed tru-cast reporter posing for the camera. Red lines of text scroll across the bottom, her captured mindwaves rendered into words for her mindreading audience. She’s saying something about mindjackers.

Holy… what? Mindjackers are on the news?

My heart rate kicks into overdrive. I jack into the mindware interface on the screen and rewind the program. The metallic taste of the interface tastes especially bitter as I search for more details. I freeze the tru-cast when it pops up an image of two FBI agents, guns pointed at the camera, which shakes slightly, like it’s a handheld. The Feds are in what looks like a hospital lobby, and the words scrolling along the bottom obviously don’t belong to them. Someone else’s words are narrating the image.

It’s like the old days when the first readers were discovered, the text is saying. My mind is whirling. Did somebody out mindjackers on camera? Who would do that? What jacker in their right mind would expose themselves, not to mention the rest of us? As if in answer to that question, the camera swings to show the face of the girl holding it. It must be the camera on her phone. The text identifies her as Kira Moore, but she looks a lot like Tessa—pale skin, pink in the cheeks, long brown hair, only this Kira girl has blue eyes that are blazing in anger. She shifts the camera to capture a bunch of kids in hospital gowns sprawled on the floor behind her, fighting with guards of some kind.

I was kidnapped by the FBI, the text along the bottom is saying, brought here, and then sent to a prison with hundreds of other kids just like me. For no other reason than who I am.

I mentally nudge the screen to stop. I don’t need to see any more. My brain is stunned into a kind of suspended animation, where everything slows down, all sound disappears, and there are only my thoughts banging around inside my head.

This girl just told the world about us. The world. Now everyone knows we exist. From now on, everyone will look slant-eyed at their neighbors, wondering if they’re jackers. In one, brief, clarifying moment, I can see it all unfolding: neighbors turn us into the FBI, who lock us up. Mobs of frightened readers demand the police root us out and hunt us down. Then the experiments begin. The torture. The fight to figure out what we are, so they can stop us. So readers can feel safe again. It’s everything every jacker has been afraid of since the moment we first knew what we were.

How dare this girl put everyone in danger by revealing us to the world?

I slowly hand the screen back to Marshall. My hand is shaking a little, so I make a fist of it to keep it still.

“This girl,” I say, my voice thick. “She’s part of Clan Molloy?”

“That’s right,” Marshall says. “At least, we think so. They were all taken down at once, and no one’s seen them since. But this girl on the national tru-cast? Her school is in Clan Molloy territory.”

“What about this one?” I ask, gesturing to the kid in the chair. He’s still shaking, but he’s gone pale now as well. “Is he part of the Clan?”

“Same territory.”

I frown at him. “What’s he say about it?”

“That’s what we want to know,” Marshall says. “He’s not a keeper, but he’s got a pretty hard head. I want you to crack it open, so we can see what’s inside.”

My stomach twists so bad I nearly gag.

I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that this Kira girl has outed mindjackers to the entire world, making my life, and every jacker’s life, a lot more dangerous. As if it weren’t dangerous enough. And now… Marshall wants me to unlock this kid.

It’s bad enough when I lock someone down—but that’s nothing compared to unlocking them. The brain resists it. Hard. The jackers who come back to be unlocked tell me it feels like I’m literally cracking open their skull with a claw hammer. At least they signed up for it voluntarily. Some opt out and decide to just stay locked. But for the ones where it’s involuntary… Marshall’s only asked me once to unlock a mind that didn’t want to be unlocked. And that was because he was going to drill inside it with five of his friends.

That’s the kind of thing that leaves a person with just pieces of a mind afterward.

I stare at the kid. His eyes are like those oversized ones in Tessa’s picture. The one where she’s being tormented by the other readers, because they’re just plain evil. Only now I’m the one who’s going to do that… and this kid isn’t going to survive to draw pictures about it later to remind himself how strong he is.

He’ll be lucky to survive it at all.

I nod to Marshall and take a seat in front of the kid. But I know, deep in my gut, I can’t do this. My heart wants to pound up through my temples and out of my head. I have a sick, dizzy feeling, like things are spinning out of control around me. I take a shuddering breath and try to tick through what I know. Just the facts.

The world knows about mindjackers now.

I’m a mindjacker.

My family is not.

This kid is going to die if I unlock him.

Marshall is a thug and a jacker.

Marshall knows where my family lives.

If I walk away from this, I’m on my own.

Being on my own just got a lot more dangerous.

They’re like pieces of a puzzle. The contours of the moon, ridges and valleys, dips and peaks, all fitting together to make one contiguous whole… I just have to shift it around, change the pieces, smooth out the bumps, until the tumblers click into place… and it will all make sense again.

Marshall’s waiting for me. Jackson and another of his thugs have come over to watch, presumably because they’ll be drilling through the kid’s mind. Three adults against one kid, plus me, the locksmith to break him open. The kid is about to pass out, he’s hyperventilating so badly.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath, like I’m preparing to do the job. I reach out and lightly brush every jacker mind in the room. They don’t notice. This is another thing I’ve kept in my back pocket: the fact that I can brush minds undetected. I’ve been saving it for a rainy day, and the end of times for mindjackers qualifies as a pretty bad day. I lightly touch every mind, so I know where they all are. My mind field is spread thin among them, touching them lightly, mapping their contours, taking their unique measurements. When I’ve got them all figured out, every one of the twenty-three in the warehouse and the one outside the door…

I start locking them all.

The screams are deafening. I jerk up from the chair at the same time I open my eyes. The kid has fallen off his chair, and he’s shaking so bad on the floor, it’s like he’s having an epileptic fit. But he’s small, so I grab his arm and hoist him up from the ground. I step over Marshall’s writhing body on the floor and haul the kid across the expanse of the warehouse as fast as I can. As soon as he gets his feet under him, I dig out my phone. I’m hailing an autocab before we even reach the door. We push past the fallen jacker guard outside and keep going. I’ll only be able to hold the lock while I’m in range of the warehouse, which means about a hundred feet or so. I go to the very edge of my range, hand still gripping the arm of the kid because I’m afraid he’ll panic and run, and I wait for the autocab.

It takes a really long time. Probably a full thirty seconds.

Marshall’s going to be so pissed.

As soon as the autocab arrives, I shove the kid in, climb in after him, and release everyone in the warehouse. They’ll have migraines for a day, but I haven’t locked them. Just spun their tumblers for a while; they’ll go back to the original maps. I hope. I did it all by feel, and sweet mercy, I’ve never done anything like this before.

I hope I haven’t done something awful, something… different… like I did with Sarah.

I can’t worry about that now.

Now, my only concern is how to stay alive.

I drop the kid off at his house. I tell him he should watch out for Marshall—that he’s going to come looking for us both. It would be better if the kid wasn’t there when Marshall showed up. The kid says he’s going to tell his parents he’s a jacker, and I hope he does. And that it works out. But I can’t worry about that now.

At home, Livvy’s done playing her game. When I stride into the living room, she’s hanging her head off the couch, reading something on her screen.

“Hey, Zeph,” she says, looking at me upside down. “You’re back.”

I choke up, and there’s a pain in my chest that’s making it hard to breathe, so I just nod and head upstairs. I have to pack before my parents get home.

My room’s a mess. Clothes everywhere, my sheets spilling half on the floor, bits of a toy hydrocar I took apart a million years ago and never put back together piled up in the corner. I grab my backpack, dump out my scribepad, and stuff in a few changes of clothes. I grab a photo frame that’s always scrolling through old pictures. I haven’t updated it in forever. It goes in with the one hoodie I own that doesn’t have Fremd across the chest.

Because I can’t have anyone tracing me back to here.

I grab the stash of unos, and I’ve still got Marshall’s tally card. That should get me to Wisconsin. Then I can jack my way from there. The pain in my chest is reaching critical by the time I come back downstairs. I can’t afford to say goodbye to my folks. I’d have to jack them to let me go, and I don’t think I could take doing that right now. They’ll figure out what happened once they watch the news.

Not least because I’m going to tell Olivia.

I stand at the threshold to the living room, just watching her play some game on her tablet. I wait until she notices me.

She rolls up to sitting the normal way. “Hey, are you making dinner tonight? Or are we waiting for Mom and Dad?”

I swallow down the lump in my throat. “You’ll have to wait for Mom and Dad today, champ. I’m taking off.”

“Again? I thought you were back.” She gives me a cockeyed look, but she’s not terribly concerned.

I shuffle over and sit on the edge of the couch, just on the arm. I want to hug her goodbye, but I don’t think I can. Not and actually make it out the door.

“Livvy?” I start, then choke up again.

She sets down her tablet and sits at attention. “Yeah?” She’s wary now, like she knows something’s up, just not exactly what.

“I’m leaving.”

“I know.”

“I’m not coming back.”

She just blinks, looking at me like I’ve gone demens right in front of her. “Huh?”

“Have you seen the news today?”

She shrugs. Livvy doesn’t really watch the news. I know this.

“When you watch it, you’ll know why I have to leave.”

She glances at the wall screen, but it’s turned off. “What, did you like rob a bank or something?”

I smile. A small laugh works its way past the lump in my throat. I decide I want to hug her after all, so I do. Halfway through the hug, I think she figures out I’m serious, because she’s not letting go of me.

“Livvy, I gotta go,” I say, ducking my head and wrenching away from her.

“But… I don’t want you to go.”

I nod, blinking so I can see while I’m backing away. “Someday I’ll come back.”

She has this panicked and confused look on her face.

That’s more than I can take, so I turn and practically run out of the house. I hail an autocab with my phone by feel because I can’t really see anything through my blurred vision. I’ll take the autocab a few towns over, get out of the suburbs, then catch a train. Go as far as the unos will take me. Then I’ll have to think about how to make it in the world as a reader. I’ll have to forge some papers or jack someone into doing it for me. Find a job or jack my way into that. It’ll be tricky to avoid the Clans, but they’ll likely be lying low as well. I’ll have to be constantly on my guard until I can establish a new identity, build some trust, have a cover that works as well as being just a regular mindreading kid in a high school full of mindreaders.

Because there’s one thing I know for sure: the world isn’t ready for mindjackers.

Not yet. And probably not ever.

They’ll hunt down every last one of us, and the only ones who’ll survive will be the ones who are best at blending in. Being a locksmith won’t keep me alive, but being invisible might.

Once I’m in the autocab with the path programmed in, I do the one last thing that will give me half a chance to survive in this new world where mindjackers are no longer hidden. Where Clans are going to be fighting each other or on the run or hunted down. I’ll need all my jacking skills to be able to pass for a reader, but there’s one thing I’ll need to protect myself from the worst jackers out there: a mind so hard no one can breach it.

I take a deep breath.

I grip the seat of the autocab.

And I lock myself.

No one can hear my screams as the autocab carries me away.

~*~

WANT MORE MINDJACK SAGA?

Make sure you subscribe to my newsletter to find out when Zeph's novel trilogy (the new Mindjack series) will be released (note: it will be after I finish writing Singularity).

NEW SERIES from Susan Kaye Quinn...

young adult SF

What would you give to live forever?

Singularity Series

The Legacy Human (Book 1)

The Duality Bridge (Book 2)

The Stories of Singularity #1-4 (Novella Box Set)

The Illusory Prophet (Book 3)... coming 2016

Seventeen-year-old Elijah Brighton wants to become an ascender—a post-Singularity human/machine hybrid—after all, they’re smarter, more enlightened, more compassionate, and above all, achingly beautiful. But Eli is a legacy human, preserved and cherished for his unaltered genetic code, just like the rainforest he paints. When a fugue state possesses him and creates great art, Eli miraculously lands a sponsor for the creative Olympics. If he could just master the fugue, he could take the gold and win the right to ascend, bringing everything he’s yearned for within reach… including his beautiful ascender patron. But once Eli arrives at the Games, he finds the ascenders are playing games of their own. Everything he knows about the ascenders and the legacies they keep starts to unravel… until he’s running for his life and wondering who he truly is.

The Legacy Human is the first in Susan Kaye Quinn’s new young adult science fiction series that explores the intersection of mind, body, and soul in a post-Singularity world… and how technology will challenge us to remember what it means to be human.

~*~

Check out the MINDJACK SAGA!

ebook, print, audio

READING ORDER

Novels

Open Minds (Book 1)

Closed Hearts (Book 2)

Free Souls (Book 3)

Mindjack Short Story Collection (Novella Box Set)

THE MINDJACK SAGA: There are three novels in the original Mindjack trilogy (Open Minds, Closed Hearts, Free Souls), as well as five novellas that accompany the series... and plans for another trilogy in the works (see Susan’s latest novella, The Locksmith, for a peek at a new Mindjack character for the coming trilogy).

watch the live-action trailer

a NEW Mindjack character...

CLICK HERE
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More Susan Kaye Quinn Stories

The Royals of Dharia
sweet royal romance

Romance, sword fights, and skyships...

Third Daughter (Book 1)

Second Daughter (Book 2)

First Daughter (Book 3)

Aniri is the Third Daughter of the Queen of Dharia—and she has zero royal duties. She’s just the backup daughter, in case her older sisters’ arranged marriages don’t quite work out. But then the impossible happens—a marriage proposal. From a barbarian prince in the north, no less. And if Aniri refuses, the threat of their new flying weapon might bring war. So she agrees, only to discover the prince has his own secrets… and that saving her country may end up breaking her heart.

This Bollywood-style royal romance takes you to an alternate East Indian world filled with skyships, saber duels, and lots of royal intrigue.

The Debt Collector
cyberpunk, future-noir series

What's your life worth on the open market?

ebook, print, audio

Season One

Season Two
dark, gritty, sexy... recommended for 17+

Watch the Debt Collector trailer on YouTube.

I think of Debt Collector as a kind of grown-up Mindjack, only instead of mindreading and mindjacking, the titular Debt Collectors can suck the life energy from one person and transfer it to another "more deserving" person. It's a chilling future-noir where going into debt risks a lot more than your credit rating.

Find all of Susan's works here.

(available in ebook, print, and audio)

Susan Kaye Quinn grew up in California, where she wrote snippets of stories and passed them to her friends during class. Her teachers pretended not to notice and only confiscated her notes a couple times. She pursued a bunch of engineering degrees (Aerospace, Mechanical, and Environmental) and worked a lot of geeky jobs, including turns at GE Aircraft Engines, NASA, and NCAR. Now that she writes novels, her business card says "Author and Rocket Scientist" and she doesn't have to sneak her notes anymore.

Which is too bad.

All that engineering comes in handy when dreaming up paranormal powers in future worlds or mixing science with fantasy to conjure slightly plausible inventions. For her stories, of course. Just ignore that stuff in her basement.

Susan writes from the Chicago suburbs with her three boys, two cats, and one husband. Which, it turns out, is exactly as much as she can handle.

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