Prime Identity

by Robert Schmitt

  “I dunno.” I shrugged. “It just flows down the path of least resistance, I guess.”

  “Exactly. It just flows along whatever path is easiest for it to follow. If it encounters a boulder, it doesn’t topple the boulder over, it flows around it. Your thoughts should follow a similar pattern.”

  “So, my thoughts should... flow?”

  “You shouldn’t be focusing on where you’re going to punch, or on how you’re going to push out the mental intrusions. When you feel a mind smith breaching your thoughts, just keep your end goal in mind, and be mentally agile enough to flow around the roadblocks or traps the mind smith puts up. Does that make any sense?”

  “It kind of does.” I scratched my head as I thought back on my recent failures with the mind smiths I had faced. “I guess I need to think through it.”

  “It’s going to take time. You’ll get there.”

  “Right.”

  “You will. Trust me.”

  I snorted, then lifted the Styrofoam cup in my hand to my lips and took a sip. I almost gagged at the sugary taste of the hot chocolate on my tongue. Coffee, unlike alcohol, wasn’t technically off the table for the next seven months of my pregnancy, as long as I had it in small doses. Still, the fact I needed to limit my intake of the stuff had been enough warning for me to swear off it completely while I was pregnant. Unfortunately for me, I hadn’t thought through how my morning sickness would react to hot chocolate when I got some with Kiara half an hour before.

  I shook my head. “I guess you’re right. It’s just... I know that our friends are out there right now. Eventually being ready isn’t good enough. I have to be ready for whenever she shows up again.”

  “You will be. Stop worrying. Remember, you’re supposed to be acting like a teenage girl.”

  “I mean, like, O. M. G.” I slipped into what I hoped was a convincing valley girl accent, slumping further against the building as I flicked my head back to try and clear my bangs from my face. “She actually said that?”

  “Oookay.” Kiara tried to hide her laughter with a poorly executed cough. “That’s pretty good.”

  “I know, right?” I drawled, then took another sip of hot chocolate.

  I watched the two women in front of me for a brief second, grateful that my eyes were obscured enough by the Ray-Bans I wore that they wouldn’t see I was studying them. They both shot me dirty looks as they passed by. Good. If they were annoyed, it meant they bought my cover.

  “About time for you to head over.” Kiara’s voice sounded once again in my ear.

  “M’kay.” I laughed airily, and yet another woman on the sidewalk near me rolled her eyes and hurried past. “Yeah, I’ll text you once I’m done. Bye.”

  Ending the call, I fished out my other earbud from underneath the infinity scarf around my neck and put it in. A second later, I turned on some pop music and put my phone into my back pocket. I was using just a normal cellphone to talk to Kiara, based on the cover we were going for. While it would be unlikely for anyone I was about to meet to have the equipment to tap into my phone, it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility, so it was something we had to account for. Out of necessity, then, I was going to be out of communication with the team for the rest of this operation.

  I pushed myself away from the wall and strolled down the sidewalk, fishing out a stick of spearmint gum from my coat pocket as I went. I ignored the way the men next to me eyed me as I waited at the crosswalk for the light to change. It was obvious they were undressing me with their eyes, but instead of calling them out, I just hummed the tune pounding in my ears, then gave them a warm smile as the light changed and I crossed the street. The persona I was playing wouldn’t mind their attention in the slightest.

  It only took me a few minutes to cover the six blocks to my target, a hole-in-the-wall restaurant off West Ohio Street in the River North. The woman at the counter leered at me as I stepped in from the street, and her suspicion only grew as I requested a table in the back of the restaurant, but she still grabbed a menu and gestured me forward a second later all the same. As she led me through the cramped and dimly lit floor of the restaurant, I noted that there was only one other customer, an elderly woman who was muttering to herself between spoonfuls of soup. I smiled at the greeter as she put down the menu at the booth next to the stainless-steel door to the kitchen, then slid into my seat with a sigh.

  “Could this, like, wait?” I kept my eyes on the laminated menu I held in front of me as two men sat down in my booth across the table from me. “I was really hoping to order something before moving on to business.”

  “The shrimp creole is the best thing on the menu.”

  I looked at the man who had spoken, noting that his deep bass didn’t match his height. He was short—maybe only an inch or two taller than me.

  I scrunched up my nose as I looked back at the menu, my already queasy stomach flaring at the thought. “That’s way too spicy for me. I saw some good things on Yelp about the muffulettas, though. Are they any good?”

  “Let’s cut the crap, okay?” The other man grabbed my menu and pulled it down. “What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?”

  “You know why I’m here.”

  I met the second man’s gaze with a bored expression. I recognized him from the information and photos I had gone over with Kiara just that morning. Tyrell Owens. Not the head of the Brotherhood, but high enough in the gang that he was almost certainly on the short list of succession for the organization.

  Ignoring the alarm sounding in my head, I punctuated my next words by blowing a bubble with my gum. “You guys totally screwed the pooch with that little stunt last month. Just what in the hell were you thinking? Going after the Diamondbacks? In broad daylight! Now Chicago’s crawling with so many arbiters you can’t even take a piss without one of them showing up with a napkin.”

  The men bristled at my accusation, but I ignored them. Instead, I looked over at the waitress who had been watching our exchange with a muted expression.

  “Any chance I could get, like, some water or something?”

  She blinked and looked past me at the men seated across from me. A second later, she nodded and scampered away.

  “You’ve got some balls, bitch.” Tyrell put his hand on the table to reveal he was pointing a pistol at me. “Coming in here with a claim like that? What’s to stop me from killing you, right here and now?”

  The gun splintered into a shredded pile of steel the moment he stopped talking. Short-Bass started from the sound, twisting his arm up too, but I disintegrated his gun before he had lifted it up above the table.

  “Word of advice?” I raised an eyebrow and continued to draw on my powers so my eyes would continue to glow. “I prefer to keep things professional between peers, but I won’t if you don’t. So, next time you aim a gun at me? You’d better intend to kill me.” To emphasize my point, I restricted the spacetime around both of their necks, choking them, even as I blew another bubble. “Because, trust me. Next time you threaten me, one of us is going to end up dead. And my money’s not on you walking away from that.

  “Where is that water?”

  I looked around me, searching the restaurant for the waitress. I glanced back at Short-Bass as the spacetime around him began to contort from some energy he was beginning to summon. I wasn’t certain, but based on the fact its hue was strikingly similar to the dissolving energy I had seen on the State Street Bridge a month before, I already had an inkling what kind of energy it was. I locked eyes with him, and some of my airy demeanor evaporated.

  “Don’t try it. You’ll be dead before you even line the shot.”

  The spacetime around him still bristled with the distortion of the energy he was gathering, and for a fraction of a second, I worried things might get messy. But then, as both men’s eyes began to puff out and water, Tyrell slammed his hand on the table, and the energy around Short-Bass dissipated away.

  They both gasped as I released the hold around their neck
s. Short-Bass slumped against the table, while Tyrell hit the table again and gulped down as much air as his lungs would accept.

  “Thank you.” I smiled at the waitress as she put a shaking glass in front of me, then turned back to Tyrell as I took a sip of the water. His face was still swollen, but he seemed to be recovering from his brief hiatus from oxygen. “To answer your question, I don’t have balls. Like, obviously. I’m just a nobody who’s trying to do her job, so I’d appreciate if you’d let me deliver my message so I can be on my way.”

  “Go ahead.” His voice was like sandpaper, but he nodded at me all the same.

  “Tell your men in the kitchen to stand down first.”

  Short-Bass looked incensed. “You don’t—”

  “I told you.” I cut him off. “I prefer extending a professional courtesy to my associates. But if your men keep training their guns on me one second longer, they’re going to discover I can make more things dissolve than just metal.”

  Tyrell glared at me for a long moment, his upper lip curling in disgust as he seemed to think through his options. I could see the loathing and hatred etched into his expression, saw how dearly he wanted to tell his men to kill me. But I wasn’t afraid by that point. People like him didn’t get to where they were by being stupid. I smiled as he turned toward the kitchen and waved away the men that I knew through my grav-sense were waiting there.

  He turned back to me and nodded. “Say your piece.”

  “So, first off, congratulations!” I raised my voice in a falsely sweet way as I pulled out a business card and slid it across the table toward him. “Your little antics caught the attention of my organization. And, while we don’t normally make a point of worrying ourselves with such... trivial matters? With you guys making such a scene, it’s kind of forced our hand.

  “We want a meeting. Next Thursday. If I were you, I’d make sure all your friends—and I mean, like, all of them—are there. Trust me. It’s going to be better for everyone involved for you not to disappoint my superiors.” I wrinkled my nose as I got to my feet. “Like, OMG. Please don’t be those guys. Last time it literally took me—and I swear, I’m not even, like, exaggerating here—a week to get the blood out from under my fingernails.”

  “Who are you?” he asked, even as I examined my painted fingernails carelessly.

  I smiled as I looked back up at him, then blew and popped one final bubble in my gum. “Like I said: I’m a nobody. I’m the little crusted-over fleck of garbage at the bottom of the can you can never seem to get rid of. Either of you wonder why they only sent one person in here to talk to you? It’s because they don’t give a damn about me. Believe me. I’m, like, the least of your worries from here on out.”

  The two men were quiet as I walked away. I paused as I passed the waitress, then dug through my back pocket and pulled out my wallet.

  “Thank you for the water.” I tilted my head to the side and smiled as I gave her a fifty-dollar bill. Before giving her the chance to say anything, I pushed open the door to the restaurant and disappeared into the sunlight beyond.

  Twenty minutes later, after getting back to the car I had on lease from the hub and sweeping it for bugs, I drove it back to the rendezvous point with Kiara.

  “How’d it go?” She watched me casually as I got out of my car.

  “I think they bought it.” I shrugged and tossed my keys to the man who was waiting next to her. He walked forward and got into the car I had been driving, while Kiara and I got into the car she had been leaning against.

  “I still can’t believe it.” She laughed as she started the car. I looked over to find her looking my way with a grin on her face.

  “What? Is it that hard to believe I was able to convince both the Diamondbacks and the Brotherhood I was a mafia enforcer?”

  “Not really.” She giggled and poked a finger onto my thigh through one of the many rips in the denim jeans I was wearing. “I just can’t believe we actually got you to dress up completely like a teenager, even down to the converses.”

  “Well, it made sense.” I shrugged and popped a bubble in my gum again. “I look too young to be an arbiter, so right off the bat, that threw them off.”

  “You can admit it,” she said, putting the car in gear and pulling it around. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. You really liked playing the part of a teenage girl, didn’t you?”

  “Was it that obvious?”

  “Not really. But I knew what to look for.”

  “Fine.” I blushed, then leaned my head against the window to watch the pedestrians passing by on the sidewalk. “I had... some... fun doing that, okay?”

  “And why shouldn’t you? You make a damn sexy teenager.”

  “Did you see that?” I pointed up into the sky, causing her to glance in the direction I pointed. “That was the last semblance of my masculinity going right out the window.”

  “Oh honey.” She patted me on the thigh while wearing an overly sympathetic expression. “That’s been gone for a while. I think you lost any right to your masculinity when you got the boobs.”

  22

  THE STING OPERATION we pulled on the two rival gangs the next week was a resounding success. We had to call in half of the arbiters in Illinois to pull it off, but the end results were difficult to argue with. Of course, we didn’t get all the gang members, but we got enough of their leadership that both groups would be crippled for years. After all the destruction their fighting had caused the past month, being able to take them down so far was a well-needed victory.

  Soon enough, I found myself in a final matchup at the end of the last day of my internship, which fell on the end of the first full week of February. Because of the timing of my maternity leave, it was also my last day on the job. It would be close to eight months before I could be back on the beat again, so I felt particularly motivated to put on a good showing that final time around. I shouldn’t have been surprised, then, that Kiara had me facing not one, but three opponents.

  As I watched the three arbiters fan out on the opposite side of the combat arena, my eyes stayed trained on the ancient man in the middle of the other two, who was one of the most powerful mind smiths in the Midwest. While he wouldn’t present anything of a physical threat, he was unquestionably my most dangerous opponent in the arena. The other two combatants were no slouches either—one was a replicator, and the other was a techie in a mech suit, but I kept my focus on the mind smith all the same.

  I dove behind a metal barrier as the techie raised a gauntleted hand toward me. A bolt of yellow plasma slammed into it a moment later, super-heating the metal within seconds. I slid away from the barrier only seconds later, my back already seared from the heat. Not for the first time, I wished Kiara would let me wear more than just my workout clothes during these sparring sessions.

  I waved my hand to snap a strong field of warped spacetime around the top of the arena, where four small drones from the techie’s suit had risen into the air to get a sight on me behind my barrier. The microjets on the drones whined under the strain of increased gravity, but with a flicker of concentration, I increased the gravity by a few orders of magnitude, and the drones went slamming down into the concrete floor of the arena. A buzzing started to fill my brain, but rather than fight it, I opened my perception up as much as I could to everything around me and focused on keeping my mind clear of any thought. Self-preservation became my only goal, a thought so basic I hoped it wouldn’t be something the mind smith could manipulate against me.

  My eyes went wide as I twisted to the side and rolled a few feet to my right. A bolt of lightning arced into the ground where I had been, sent by the replicator. As a rule, replicators didn’t possess any powers of their own. Instead, they relied on stealing the powers of others. Luckily, I knew this replicator only copied the powers of others—if she had been the variety of replicator that took them away from the original user, my assessment of the threat she posed would have gone up considerably.

  My eyes met hers,
and she smiled. Of every arbiter’s powers she could have borrowed to bring into this match, she had chosen Greg’s. I sighed and raised my eyebrows as I flicked a hand toward her, the buzzing in my ears flaring as I focused on using my powers.

  I raised my other hand to put up a strong shield of negative curvature between me and the techie, even as the replicator crashed back into the wall of the room, pulled by a rolling wave of gravity. The techie, who had shot a net of webbing at me, held his hands up as the net stopped in mid-air and rebounded on him. The net, rather than wrap around him, shredded apart from the wires along the vambraces of his armor, which sputtered angry red sparks as the netting touched them.

  Without looking, I held two fingers toward the replicator, sensing the distortion of spacetime around her as she gathered electrical energy as a vivid purple aura condensing around her. A moment later, she punched her open hand toward me to release the lightning she had gathered into her hand. My eyes flickered to the mind smith, who hadn’t moved or opened his eyes since the match had begun. As I stared at him, though, his eyes snapped open in alarm. I warped an immensely strong filament of spacetime that followed the path the electricity would take toward me, though I diverted it a few feet from me and bent the filament instead to point toward the mind smith.

  The electricity exploded across the room in a brilliant flash that nearly blinded me, but in the instant before it reached me, it twisted around to follow the filament of nearly collapsed spacetime. At the end of the filament, the electricity split out into a million brilliant arcs of light, covering the entire wall where the mind smith stood. Even as the buzzing slammed through my thoughts and nearly overpowered me, I kept my eyes and focus trained on the mind smith as several branches of the electricity converged on him.

  A crippling wave of pain smashed into my head, somehow being transferred to me from the mind smith as he crumpled to the ground. I stumbled to my knees, even as I fought to keep my mind relaxed despite the pain seizing across my brain.

  “Mindslip’s vital signs are stable.” Kiara’s voice broke through my pain, and I spared a glance up to the speakers built into the roof of the arena. “But he’s out of this match.”