Tempered

by Britt Ringel

  The little girl smiled but looked away self-consciously.

  Kat rose awkwardly before turning to the father. “If you give me my pistol back, I’ll be on my way.”

  The man hesitated. “We have a deal, right?”

  “I promise I’ll leave peacefully. I never meant any harm and your family has helped me more than you know.”

  His hand offered Kat her weapon.

  She fumbled with it. It took her several attempts to position it correctly in her hand and reload before she emerged from under the tarp. She took long but uneven strides for the back street she’d come from and called over her shoulder, “Thank you again, Ivy.” Rain showered her as she stepped from the alley’s protection. The storm had not diminished during her rest and her shivering intensified under its assault.

  After scanning the street for Tears, Kat hobbled down the muddy road to the next intersection. She turned the corner and trotted one block north to the Strip, utterly exhausted by the time she reached it. She risked a glance around the corner toward the Beggar’s Market gate halfway down the block. The guards were wearing plastic bags over their yellow shirts and taking what modest shelter the gate offered. Kat searched unsuccessfully for signs of Tears or her agents.

  The Beggar’s Market ran all the way east to the corner where Kat stood. Ramshackle barricades merged with boarded brick buildings to block all unauthorized passage into the market proper. A mixture of bricks, wood and tin sheets covered the windows and doors, eliminating any hope for entry except through the main gate. Kat had seen market guards patrol the entire perimeter to confirm the integrity of the barriers. With the storm raging, she had little fear of encountering guards making rounds.

  Kat trotted across the Strip to one of the boarded up buildings, a two-story structure with a severe lean. She stood shivering at its side and pressed her hands to the cool surface. Her head leaned wearily forward until her forehead came to rest on the brick and mortar. She worked to steady her uneven breathing and gain a modicum of control. She pushed pain and exhaustion away and focused inward. Slowly, carefully, she prodded at the gateway to the abyss inside her. Prying gently, the door stubbornly yawned open.

  She took only what she hoped she needed from her unknown reserves. The pounding drumbeat inside her head amplified in tempo and power as she channeled the psionic energy outward. Her knees buckled under the strain but a square breach a meter wide appeared in the wall. Kat groaned in relief and crawled through the gap.

  The space she entered was virtually empty. Only debris from spalling bricks littered the edges of the room. She lay immobile on the dirty floor for a time, finally out of the elements and feeling safely hidden. The pain of the push’s end assaulted her and passed yet she remained immobile. She could stay here forever. Just close her eyes and drift off to sleep. Surely, she’d feel better when she awoke. A distant part of her wondered if she’d die in her sleep. Another part wasn’t sure she cared. At least it would be peaceful and on her own terms. Sadler’s image floated to the forefront of her mind as counterargument. He’d never find her. He’d never know what happened. Maybe he’d think that she left without him. Abandoned him. “Dammit.”

  Kat rolled onto her stomach. Dust caked to her as she floundered. She pushed herself to her knees. “I’m coming, Sadler.”

  The trip through the brick building was short in distance but long in effort. Feeble light leaking from the covered windows barely illuminated her path through the decrepit structure but the way was mercifully clear of obstacles. Anything of value had been taken long ago. Nothing went unused in Shantytown.

  She peered through windows on the far side of the building to find the most secluded exit. A side door, blockaded from the inside, led to a deserted alley inside the market. She could find no reserves for a psionic push and it took Kat nearly a half hour to pry the wooden boards from the frame. Thunder covered the shrieks of protesting nails and screws. When she finally opened the door, she stepped back into the wind and rain.

  It took Kat a few minutes to gain her bearings inside the bazaar. She was farther east than her normal shopping haunts. The market seemed nearly empty and most of the vendors were closed. Windows were shuttered and open tents had canvas sides rolled to the ground. She tried to stay close to the few customers braving the weather as she made her way to Reynolds’ shack. Soaking wet, caked in mud and with inflamed hands that glowed a fierce cherry red, she knew trying to blend in was useless. Her face now burned as well and Kat couldn’t imagine what the metal mirror in Reynolds’ shack might reveal. The toll of the last hour made her steps slow and unsteady.

  By the time Kat turned into the cul-de-sac, she was shivering uncontrollably again. Her vision dimmed but her destination lay just ahead. The service window was closed, unsurprising considering the weather. Kat placed one foot in front of the other, stumbling to the side of the clinic. She pounded on the door weakly as her legs collapsed from under her.

  Chapter 20

  I’m floating. No, I’m being carried. Kat forced her eyes open to narrow slits. Sadler hovered over her, grinning widely. No, he was grimacing horribly. Voices spoke with a rushed cadence but in a foreign language. Why weren’t they speaking in English? Her head bounced off the examination table and Sadler winced. He looked her in the eyes and soothed her with babble.

  A damp, wool blanket appeared from nowhere and covered her. Were they going to pull it over her head? Did they think she was dead? She fought to keep her eyes open but they rolled back and darkness took her. She floated again, this time above the room and the muffled voices transformed into perfect clarity…

  “She should be here by now!” Sadler declared angrily while pacing back and forth across the front room of Reynolds’ shack. “I’m going to go look for her.” His hand reached for the side door. Rapid knocking on the opposite side startled him. He looked suspiciously between Reynolds and Tabitha before calling in a hopeful voice, “Kat?” His hand hesitated near the doorknob.

  “No,” replied a woman on the other side of the tin door. “I’m a friend of Cat. Isn’t she here?”

  Sadler cracked the door and inspected the woman. His green eyes narrowed. “How do you know her?” The wind buffeted the door, threatening to rip it from his hand.

  Blue eyes studied him with equal suspicion. “We both graduated from the same school,” she answered vaguely. Her eyes skipped past Sadler and locked on to Tabitha. “Her! That woman… um, Tabitha. She knows me.”

  He eased the door open wider. “Tabby, do you know her?”

  From her perch on Reynolds’ threadbare chair and shivering under a wool blanket, Tabitha frowned. “Yeah, she helped kidnap me.”

  “You’re Tess?” Sadler asked while stepping aside.

  The woman took a final glance over her shoulder before entering. She was dripping wet and her auburn hair had darkened to the color of chocolate. She gathered her drenched locks and pulled them from her face before hugging herself. “We picked a hell of a day to overthrow the Society,” she mumbled.

  “You’re Tess,” Sadler repeated, this time a statement and not a question.

  The woman nodded. “Where’s Cat? Is she okay?”

  Reynolds left the front room but quickly returned with a small, dry towel. She offered it to Tess. “Here, sweetie. You’ll catch your death.”

  Tess took the towel with a grateful nod and began to dry her arms. She returned her gaze to Sadler and smiled. The expression took years from her. “You’re Sadler.”

  He stepped back slightly. “Are you reading my mind right now? Lolz mentioned you.”

  The name seemed to affect Tess profoundly as her face turned wistful. “I can’t read thoughts, I can only project them.” She wiped her cheeks dry before continuing, “I’m not even very good at doing that. Half the time, my target receives only impressions and feelings rather than actual messages.”

  “But Lolz said you could sense other people like you,” Sadler pressed.

  Tess ran the towel through her
hair. She still dripped on the shack’s floor. “I can. I feel echoes of psionic energy. Sensitivity is hard to explain without having a common frame of reference but yes, I can sense and differentiate between types of psionic abilities. I can’t read minds though, not like poor Lolz.”

  “Poor Lolz? She was psychotic.”

  Tess dipped her chin slightly in concession. “Hudson wasn’t always like that. I tried to warn her keepers that they were overusing her, breaking her, but her abilities were just too damned convenient. Interrogations are a breeze when you have a strong telepath in the room.” She placed the damp towel around her neck. “They pushed and pushed until her psyche cracked. Then she did the rest.” She dabbed at her face again with the corner of the towel. “She didn’t deserve her fate, not what Cat did, but before that. Hudson was a young, beautiful human being and the Society treated her like a disposable thing.” Tess’ shoulders sagged. “There’s another telepath coming behind her, Oscar. He’s only eight years old but he has powerful potential.” Her frown deepened and she chewed her lip briefly. “I couldn’t hide his ability so he’s being groomed to be the next Lolz. They’ll destroy that little boy just like they did poor Hudson.”

  “Tess,” Reynolds said from across the room, “what do you mean you couldn’t hide his ability?”

  Tess swallowed and lifted her chin. Her voice hardened with resolve. “I grew up inside the Society. As a child, they subjected me to the same indoctrination programs and schooling techniques that all psi-positives go through but I refused to believe the programming.”

  She pointed between Reynolds and herself. “Our backgrounds are different. Our biochemistries are different but I’m just as human as you, and just as oppressed. They taught us that we were born to protect humanity but that we were never meant to be a part of it. They taught us that Pelletier’s Syndrome is proof we were never supposed to fit into human society. That, without their cure, we were aberrations and meant to die. But with Sunthetic’s cure, we blossomed into humanity’s guardians. That was the sole purpose of our abilities. Our reason for existing. Without the Society, we die as infants. With their therapy and training, we nobly serve Sunthetic’s enlightened vision to guide humanity to a brighter place.

  “I never believed their propaganda. I saw the truth. After the Collapse, the mega-corps divided what remained and designed a system to keep their power. For you, the structure creates the divide between citizens and non-citizens. For us, it dictates that we are less than human and simply tools for their ‘better’ society. They taught you to obediently follow their laws or lose everything. They taught us that our very purpose was to destroy anything and anyone that might threaten Sunthetic’s vision. But it’s not true. We need a human’s compassion more than we need a psi-positive’s brutality.”

  Tess waved in a wider gesture and continued, “Our futures will never change until the mega-corporations change. And Sunthetic will never change until the Pelletier’s Society is gone. We’re too powerful a weapon. Too easily used. No regime should dictate the tasks we’ve performed and certainly not covertly.” She pulled the damp towel from her neck and placed it on the examination table. “I refused to hate but was too afraid to act. Growing up, I worked hard not to develop my telepathy, to deny the Society another tool to suppress humanity. Instead, they used my secondary ability, my psionic sensitivity, to help them classify the future generations of psi-positives. It was a more benevolent endeavor but I was still assisting an evil cause.”

  She looked at Reynolds and inhaled deeply. Her eyes saw past the doctor, into the past and to a frail child she couldn’t help. “This brings me to the answer to your question. The first psi-positive I purposely mislabeled was a little girl named Florence Perez. She was just nine years old at the time and taking fledgling steps into manifesting her abilities. Her spatial awareness was truly superhuman. She could observe anything exactly, could intuit three dimensional problems such as the precise movements a person had taken in a room simply by perceiving any and every disturbance within it. Her ability seemed almost magical, even to me. It also granted her an insight into ballistics that would have made her the most lethal sniper in history.” Her head dropped. “They would’ve conditioned Florence into believing the philosophy of addition through subtraction. She’d become a cold-blooded murderer, killing people who were inconvenient to Sunthetic, all the while believing her assassinations somehow served humanity. I didn’t want this path for her and said my sensitivity suggested a weak eidetic, a girl with a low-grade photographic memory. Once she manifested, the Society tested her for recall and found her wanting. Yes, she could make incredibly complex and insightful conclusions about the environment around her but she couldn’t seem to remember much after she’d left the testing rooms.” Tess’ hands came up, covering her face as she admitted with a choked voice, “They expelled her. Made her disappear because she wasn’t useful enough. I killed her, really. It’s just someone else pulled the trigger.”

  She exhaled as if purging the memory. “I became much more cautious after that, only mislabeling truly pivotal psi-positives and in ways that, I hoped, would ensure they’d still be used but not to their full potential.”

  Sadler watched as the woman struggled with her emotions. After a long pause, he said, “Lolz said that Kat was mislabeled. Was that your doing?”

  A faint smile curled Tess’ thin lips. “I was twenty-three years old when they brought in baby Kallista. This was four years after Florence died. The first time I felt Kallista… it’s almost closer to tasting their power than feeling it. Hers was warm and sweet and wonderful. She was everything that our first cognitive was not. I knew that she would be different. She positively glowed with the spark of humanity. I’m surprised that Em couldn’t sense it. Maybe she did. Even after indoc and training, I still could feel that spark. Despite the darkness they layered over her, she still had a strong sense of self. The only way her spark kept burning was because she refused to let them smother it.

  “I watched her grow up. I witnessed the terrible toll they exacted on her that the other psi-positives never saw. I was afraid she’d break just like Lolz but she didn’t. I took a chance and worked with her. She did what no other psi-positive has ever done.”

  Tess looked Sadler directly in the eye. “Pre-Cat is the key to changing all our futures. Remember that. The hopes of those who want out of the Pelletier’s Society rest with her, as do the futures of all the children whose lives will be stolen. Without Pre-Cat, we are all lost.”

  “You just said you took a chance and worked with Kat. How?” Sadler asked.

  A feeble rap on the door behind Tess interrupted her reply. She turned, opened it and gasped at the horrible sight before her. Kat saw herself collapse at the door.

  Chapter 21

  Darkness shrouded her. Something warm covered her eyes. Rain drove a staccato beat on the tin roof above.

  “She’s coming around.” Maggie.

  “I can’t believe how bad her hands are.” Sadler.

  “They’re hideous. Look how gross her fingers are.” Tabitha.

  Kat felt someone lift her left hand.

  Reynolds’ voice pierced the dark veil. “It’s stage two frostbite for sure. I’ve never had to treat it before but I think she’ll fully recover.”

  “It’s impossible to get frostbite in the desert, you bumpkin,” Tabitha chastised. “She looks like she got burned. You’re just a Trodden doctor so what do you know anyway?”

  “Will she still be able to travel like this, Doctor?”

  “I think so. It’ll be painful to walk but it shouldn’t aggravate her condition.”

  “This was Tears’ work.” Tess.

  Her hand was gently placed down and a compress lifted from her eyes. “Kat? Can you hear me?” It was Reynolds again. “I want you to try to open your eyes, honey.”

  Kat fluttered her eyelids. She expected intense light but the relative darkness surprised her. Sadler and Reynolds huddled close. They appeared hazy an
d Kat blinked several times to clear her vision.

  “Can you see me, Kat?” Reynolds asked.

  “Yes,” she croaked. Her extremities were on fire. “How bad?”

  Reynolds lightly smoothed the hair near her face. “You’ll recover, I promise. Your hands and feet were frostbitten. No dead tissue though and just a couple of blisters on your left foot. No blood in the blisters is a very good sign. You won’t lose any of your toes. Your hands and nose suffered to a lesser degree but they’ll hurt for a while too. Just rest, dear.”

  “Pistol?”

  Sadler waved it in front of her with a flourish. “Right here. We had a heck of a time prying it out of your hand. You knocked on the door and basically fainted.”

  Her throat felt dry despite the wet weather. “How long?”

  Behind Sadler, Tess leaned against the closed service window several steps away. “You’ve been out a few hours. Your friends say this place is safe, that the Society doesn’t know about it yet.”

  Kat tensed and walked her thoughts back to every time she’d interacted with Reynolds. She’d never paid credits to the doctor. In fact, the doctor didn’t even accept credits. Lolz and her agents had been here but were dead. The only person who knew of her friendship with Maggie was Sadler. She felt some of the tension release from her body. The parts of her not on fire ached with a profound soreness. She let her eyes close.

  “What happened to you, Kat?” Sadler asked.

  “I walked into a trap inside the tenement. Tears and a couple of agents ambushed me.” Anger lent strength to her voice.

  “Did she shoot ice from her hands or something?”

  Kat smiled slightly at the thought but shook her head. “Nothing that dramatic. The temperature just dropped… and kept dropping. I didn’t even realize it at first and before I knew it, I was freezing to death.”