by K. A. Excell
“Is this always here?” I asked.
“It’s usually a little better hidden, but I haven’t had time to replace the camouflage since this afternoon’s game.”
We walked a little further down a hallway that ended in an elevator, where Ms. King tapped her card again, and this time inserted her thumb into the bottom of the reader.
“What’s that one?” I asked.
“Thumb reader. Instead of reading thumb prints, it reads your entire thumb.”
I frowned. “Wouldn’t that be a little bit touchy? What if someone bites their nails?”
“There is a margin of error. Now do hurry—we don’t want to make the medical team wait.”
The elevator emptied into the rotunda. Tonight, it was slow, with only the occasional tactical suit. Some people sat around on benches with tablets in their hands, and I caught a glimpse of candy crush and buried a snort.
“Not much going on here, is there?”
Ms. King’s eyebrows narrowed. “That’s a good thing. Think of us as policemen for neurodivergents. The less we have to step in, the better the day the world is having.”
Somewhere beneath the serenity she was radiating was a twinge of anticipation and—regret? The feelings flashed away as soon as I could see them, to be replaced with caution.
She increased her stride. “There are four elevators in the rotunda. The tactical elevator is in one corner, the Interrogation/Intelligence—we just call it InDep—elevator is opposite it. The Medical and R&D elevator is this one here—” she swiped her card and the elevator dinged. “The one opposite us is for analysis. It’s got some administration offices there, too, but Analysis pretty much runs the place. Everyone just calls it AnAd for short.”
I caught sight of a bunch of plainclothes men and women piling in, chatting amiably the whole way.
“Analysis has its own wing?” I asked. The job sounded kind of like bureaucratic paper pushing, so why did it have more space than R&D?
If it had so much importance, then why wasn’t I assigned there, instead of Tac Dep?
“It’s sub-divided into a dozen different centers that help run everything from Agency funding, to personnel, to Command and Information Systems—CIS. Analysts in the AnAd wing are useless with just about anything else, though. The traits that help them analyze things are crushed under pressure. Yours come alive when you are confronted—you fight. That’s a rare trait, Farina, but one that is going to make you the envy of the entire tactical department.”
And one that I had spent too much blood and pain perfecting. I wondered how many other people in the Tactical Department had learned to fight back after surviving someone like Zach—and then I dismissed the thought. It didn’t matter what was in our past. What we did with our future was what counted.
We hurried out of the elevator and down a hallway. Ms. King stopped at a door labeled “Cards” and tapped her card.
“This is your stop. Someone will come by to take you to your new tactical team when you’re done.”
I stepped inside.
Chapter Fifteen
My tongue was big and heavy, and my hands were fat, fuzzy sausages when I came to. I let my eyes rest—I would have had to peel them open—and watched as the room took form around me. There was a doctor in the corner of the room adjusting charts and noting readings from monitors. The rest of the place was empty—not that the room was large. It could perhaps fit another two people in before it threatened to explode.
There was a knock on the door, and the doctor opened it.
I brushed Tolden’s mind to find it dark, but clear. They were deploying his team as soon as he could gather all its members.
“How is she doing?” he asked.
The doctor shifted. “She’ll be out for another two hours.”
“Wake her up. We need her now.”
The doctor blanched internally. “She’s not cleared to go out in the field, Agent. She just got out of surgery an hour ago. Even after she wakes up, she’s due for a day of testing before she can leave Med Dep.”
I forced my eyes open to see the same grim determination in Tolden’s mind reflected on his face. “So administer an antagonist. I need her now.”
The doctor put his hands on his hips. “You might be the high-and-mighty AIC of Tac 47, but this isn’t your department. She stays until she wakes up, and that is that.”
I took a moment to exercise my jaw. My tongue was a little smaller now, but not quite it’s normal size. Rather than try to speak, I reached out to them, mind-to-mind.
::I assume it’s important—whatever it is?::
Tolden looked past the doctor and met my eyes. “We try not to pull agents from anethstesia unless it’s an emergency.”
The doctor looked from Tolden to me, with fractions of sentences racing through his mind. Finally, he decided on one. “You shouldn’t be awake yet.”
::But here I am.:: I sat up slowly and set my blue lines to stabilizing the world as it tried to rock around me. ::Now, where are my clothes?::
I laced the question with just a little bit of compulsion. Tolden’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t say anything.
A moment later, I was dressed and following him out the door.
I swallowed to try and whet my throat and, after a moment, was confident enough that my voice wouldn’t give out to try and speak.
“I assume you’re my new AIC?”
Tolden stopped and turned around. “For now. I’m agent 52, and Tac 47’s commanding officer—but you already knew that. Ms. King asked me to give this to you.”
He handed me a card with my picture above Agent 32.
“Congratulations—it’s official just in time for your first mission.”
“Which is?”
He shook his head. “I don’t have time to explain it twice. We’re headed to the briefing room where you can meet the rest of the team.” He broke into a jog down the hallway, and I hurried to keep up. “Welcome to the Flex Tac block, kid. Where you have no choice but to stay on top of things.”
A few minutes later I arrived sweaty and out of breath at the other side of the compound. Tolden was barely breathing hard.
Domnick Steele, Neal Black, and Tabitha Smith sat around a conference table in uneasy silence. When Tolden and I entered, Neal Black turned with words on the tip of his tongue, and then stopped. His eyes narrowed.
“Two newbies on the same mission, Tolden? Are you trying to get us killed?”
Tolden gave a grim smile. “Smith is here because our target was her grad assignment before his danger rating was moved to One. She’s slated to get her permanent card as soon as Houston is neutralized. Farina here is a full agent as of about five minutes ago; designation, Agent 32.”
Black met my eyes. “You’re the one from the game yesterday?”
I nodded.
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “You can’t pull those laser tricks with a real gun, kid. It’ll be a cold day in summer if I ever let you around a firearm—and you can forget plasma weaponry.”
“What’s her job?” Steele asked.
“She’s running primarily as a Teleprojector, although she is also an analyst and an engineer if we need one.”
Steele stood. “Finally!”
“Sit down, Nick.” Tolden’s voice cracked like a whip, and suddenly Steele was seated again. “You get to go back to CIS when I say, and not a moment before.”
Steele’s lips tightened. “You hardly need me in the field. I can fly the chopper and any drones from my chair in CIS command. She’s running analyst, and you saw her in Ms. King’s game. She’ll be the third Hitter in no time.”
Tolden crossed the room and murmured something in Steele’s ear. The thoughts came and went so quickly I couldn’t grab them, but Steele was suddenly resigned.
Tolden straightened
and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “We have a mission to run, people. There is no time for arguing. Now Farina, get Steele to help you into the tactical suit and listen up. Our target is Doug Houston. His danger rating was moved from Two to One when he reappeared at Martial Academy and assassinated Earl West.”
I gasped as images from Tolden’s mind came through. Pieces of skull and brain tissue were scattered around his office with impact patterns that showed that those pieces had shattered the mirrors and left broken glass everywhere. What was left of Mr. West was slumped in a corner. His face was gone.
“Farina, are you alright?” Steele asked.
I pulled my shields up and caught myself on the table. Tolden pushed a rolling chair my way and I collapsed into it. “What can make a person look like that?” I finally managed as I struggled to regulate racing emotions.
Mr. West had been alive and well only a few hours ago. He’d been making us run laps around the room—and now he was a mash of bone and brain tissue, slumped against the wall. Only a few days ago, he had stood between me and Houston. He was warning me to be careful. He couldn’t be dead.
I tried to scrub the image from my mind, but all I could see was flesh and bone scattered around the room. Flesh and bone that had once been my teacher.
Black twisted his pinky finger in his ear. “Do you want to tone that down?”
“Black!” Tolden snapped.
Black shrugged. “If she’s going to have an emotional come-apart, that’s just fine. She just needs to do it in the privacy of her own mind. I don’t care what kind of time she spent with the guy—”
“Black!”
He shrugged. “Just saying. There are more important things to worry about right now, like her question. Those aren’t normal battle injuries.”
Tolden shook his head. “Medical and R&D have been arguing about the cause of death for the last two hours. Medical says it’s impossible. R&D thinks an impact from an object at terminal velocity could create that kind of shatter pattern.”
Black snorted. “That’s the working theory? There are very few telekinetics with that kind of power rating, and no punk kid is going to have it.”
Steele pulled a cube from his belt and pushed the display onto the table. “Would an E1200 do it?” he asked. The display showed Houston’s profile.
My blue lines snapped up to try and create a working model. I shut them down before they could do more than reconstruct Mr. West’s face. I stared at it a long time, then tore my attention away as Tabitha coughed.
“It wouldn’t be easy—he’ll be weak for another few hours, even with that power rating—but he could do it.”
I noted the projection strength rating next to his energy rating. PS5. That explained how he’d destroyed Smith in the ring—and made him that much more dangerous.
“Analysis and Administration is of the same opinion, which is why we’re heading out now,” Tolden said. “The longer we wait, the more he’ll recover. As far as we know, he has not been trained as an assassin, but we still need to be careful with how we engage him. Our best bet is going to be manipulating him through projection.”
I tore myself out of the profile I was building on Houston and reviewed Tolden’s words as everyone turned to look at me. ::Assassin?:: I asked him silently.
Assassins are telekinetics trained specially to kill using their gift. Imagine someone having the ability to close all the valves of a human heart with only a look. It doesn’t take much power, but it does take years upon years of training. Odds are that Houston does not have that training or he wouldn’t have resorted to that level of force to take West out, Tolden explained silently.
I finished yanking the straps on the tactical suit as Tolden opened his mouth to continue speaking. A knock on the door interrupted what he was going to say. “We’re going to have to finish the briefing in the air.”
The door opened to admit a woman with a tablet in her hand. “Agent 52, your target has been sighted. We’re scrambling the chopper now.”
“Chopper?” Tabitha paled.
“Hey, it’s no big deal,” Steele said. “I’m the primary pilot, and I’ve been running those things since I could walk.” He glared at Tolden a moment. “I’d rather be running it from a joystick in CIS—”
“—but we don’t always get what we want,” Tolden finished sternly. “Now let’s go.”
Black didn’t budge. Instead, he folded his arms and fixed Tolden with a glare. “I’m not taking both of them. The brunette’s still got three broken ribs and a cracked collarbone, and the black haired one isn’t cleared for weapons use. I don’t care what AnAd says, this is suicide.”
Tolden looked at Steele, then back at Black. “Houston is Smith’s graduate assignment, so she’s been studying him in-depth. She has intel that isn’t in the files yet. I don’t need to tell you what happens if we go in without all the information we can get.”
“Then she stays here with a direct link to whatever bots Steele’s using.”
Tolden looked at Smith, who was frowning at the ground. “Black’s right. You won’t be much use against Houston when it comes time to take him down—but I don’t like the idea of leaving you here. Tac 47 works as a team, and the team stays on-site so we have what we need when things go sideways.”
“I can’t spend very much time on a helicopter,” she said. I could feel the shame in her mind, and the analysis overriding it. She processed sounds the same way I processed sight. There would be too much interference from the sound of the helicopter for her to think, let alone be helpful. Headphones helped, but they also tended to muffle her analysis tools.
“I see. Well then, I guess you’ll be staying. I’ll have CIS patch the feed from Steele’s drones into this room. You’ll have a direct line into our com system. If you think of anything at all, I need you to tell us,” Tolden said.
“I will.”
“Then let’s go. We’re late for our ride.”
We jogged through the halls until we reached the underground helipad. The prep-pilot handed the chopper off to Steele, who climbed in the front seat. Tolden took the seat behind his, facing Tabitha, which left me facing Black on the other side. I slammed the headphones over my ears and clicked the harness closed as the chopper dipped forward. My stomach dropped as it swayed to the side and the wind drove my hair into my eyes and mouth. I gathered it into a ponytail as Tolden resumed the briefing.
“We’re going to run a mass approach and keep hidden until Houston’s defenses are down. Farina, your job is going to be to talk him down. Use your projection to convince him that we are on his side.”
Someone’s voice came over the speakers in my headphones. Was it Tabitha? I dismissed that question as Black identified the sound for me. Of course it was Tabitha. She was the only one who was supposed to be on coms with us. Still, just because she was the only voice who was supposed to be in my ear didn’t mean something unexpected couldn’t have happened.
“We have to stay out of the vicinity or he’ll hear us coming,” Tabitha said.
Tolden’s eyes narrowed. “There’s nothing like that in the file. Does he have an undocumented analysis skill?”
“Houston has an auditory memory. If he can hear it, he processes it. You can’t have that many people that close to him without him knowing—and then he’ll never trust Farina.”
“So what? Drop a bomb and leave?” Black asked.
Tolden snared my eyes with his. “How comfortable are you with your gift, Farina?”
Can you handle Houston yourself?
“What’s the alternative?” I asked. I’d never used much persuasion, and wasn’t the best at manipulation in class—but if it was the only way to put Houston behind bars, I would do it.
Tolden frowned. “Let Black have his head and turn this retrieval mission into a strike. Ms. Green won’t be happy, but it’s better than risking the t
eam against a possible assassin.”
“But you’re Tac 47, right? Your missions—the ones Ms. King lets us study, anyway—are legendary! What happened to beating impossible odds?” Tabitha asked.
Nila.
I could feel the name radiating from all of them, and even see some images of a black haired, slender beauty with a gun in one hand and a tablet in the other. Who was she? A teammate, perhaps?
Finally, Tolden answered. “I won’t lose another agent in the field. If that means our success rate goes down, then so be it. We live to fight another day. Now Farina, can you convince Houston to come with you, or not?”
I bit my lip as the blue lines on my vision computed the odds. The calculations were overlaid by the image of Mr. West’s skull scattered across the classroom. After a moment of silence, I looked back up at him. “With what factors I already know, there is a fifty-two percent chance that I can persuade him to come. Failing that,” I closed my fist on the plasma pulser in my hand and felt its reassuring tingle. “I can hold him off long enough for help to arrive.”
Black scoffed. “You’re no match for him.”
I squared my shoulders and looked him in the eye as new numbers rose. “I have a ten percent higher pain threshold than he does, and I’m eighteen percent more adaptable with a two-point-eight percent margin for unidentified factors. I’ve seen him fight for real, so I have his patterns on file. Beyond that, I trust my numbers. Let me go in.” I laced those last words with just a hint of compulsion.
Tolden nodded. “Go in, then. Steele, do you have a lock on him?”
“Shut up and let me work, old man. Miss DEXDA will find him in a moment. She’s sorting through civilians right now.”
“Miss Dexda?”
“Discrete Exploration Delinquent Analysis drone,” Tolden said. “Steele’s eyes in the sky.”
“He’s flying that thing and the helicopter?” I asked. That was a talent I’d like to have.
