One Wrong Move

by Shannon McKenna

  And she’d done nothing but kill with it.

  Her victims’ eyes haunted her. Looking up at her, strapped down to the gurneys, hooked up to the machines. She wondered if they would all be waiting for her when she stepped across the threshold. Their eyes, reproaching her for all eternity. But she could not worry about eternity.

  Lara was still alive. Still captive. And Rudd still needed to die.

  No time for guilt, but still it twisted, like a blade inside her.

  She should not have involved Nina, either, but the girl was the only person she could think of that had enough intrinsic control of her psi to handle the effects of the drug, even if she had never recognized her abilities for what they were. Helga wished she’d been able to explain, but after four days, the A dose of the Psi-Max 48 had disintegrated the language center in her brain.

  Everything broken down, mixed up. It was up to Nina to figure it out for herself. God help her. And help Lara. Please.

  She’d been watching Nina since she was a child. Lovely girl.

  So gifted and kind. Lara had always been so happy when Nina had come to sit for her, on those evenings when Helga had needed to go out.

  Nina had deserved better than that hellhole she’d been forced to exist in, but Helga had never succeeded in convincing Helen, Nina’s mother, to leave Nina’s stepfather. That bastard pervert Stan had destroyed his wife, but Nina seemed to have come through the fire intact. Subdued, but whole. The stress of her family life had caused the child’s talents to develop naturally, in sheer self-defense. As a result of that, the Psi-Max 48 would not crush her. Or so Helga fervently hoped. Assuming the girl got the B dose in time. Oh, please, God. Please. Not another death on her hands.

  She pushed away the guilt. Any woman would be driven to desperation by what she had been through. They had faked her death, enslaved her, forced her to do cruel, unspeakable things.

  Things that made her hate herself. And they had done it so easily. By constantly reminding her of what they would do to Lara if she did not comply.

  She should have known from the start. The research that led her to psi-max, upon which all her work had been based, was tainted by horror and cruelty. She’d distanced herself from the madman Osterman years ago, and his twisted applications of the formula. She had tried to create something good. Something pure from what was once evil.

  She might have known such a thing would be impossible.

  She’d tried to escape four months ago, but her shield had not been strong enough. Anabel had caught a tail, followed it back.

  Busted. The American slang term drifted up from the garbage heap of her brain. Before she’d been injected, she had been flu-ent in eight languages. They were a jumbled mess, databases dissolved. All that was left was the dialect of Ukrainian she’d spoken in her infancy, and that was slipping, too. A dose of Psi-Max 48 dissolved barriers. All barriers. Even blood vessels, in the end. Unless the B dose was injected in time.

  They had taken Lara to punish her. Mounted a video camera in Lara’s cell so that Helga could watch her daughter’s captivity, minute by minute. It had driven her mad, shaken her down into her composite pieces, to watch her daughter sleep, stare into space, weep. Exercise, meditate. Eat the small, bland meals they gave her. Vomit them up, more often than not. Week after week.

  Thinner and paler every day. Enduring it, completely alone, never even knowing why. Lara thought her mother had died in that research facility fire three years ago.

  Then Helga caught the frequency, the way one caught a bad smell. Anabel’s bright, toxic mental sparkle. She was sending out questing tendrils to the limits of her range, about twenty feet.

  Anabel was enhanced, at peak dose. There was no evading her.

  And Helga could not move anyway. She heard footsteps. Smelled Anabel’s perfume, sensed her body heat. Helga forced her eyes to open. The lids were so heavy, like lead. Her own frail body barely made a bump in the sheet.

  Anabel was dressed like a health care professional. White coat, ID badge. Hair swirled in a neat updo. Smiling, pleased with herself.

  “Helga,” Anabel murmured. “At last. We missed you.”

  “Go to hell,” she whispered, in Ukrainian, but with a telepath, it hardly mattered.

  Helga gathered thoughts, feelings, with their vaporous dangling tails. Stuffed them into that still, calm place inside where no air moved.

  “You were injected five days ago, Helga,” Anabel went on cheerfully. “And you do not look good. This suggests to me that maybe you weren’t being completely honest with us about the effects of Psi-Max 48. Maybe you were trying to poison us? Oh, Helga.” Anabel looked hurt. “How could you? After all we’ve been to each other.”

  Helga gasped and twitched as the mental probe sank in, like a heavy hook thrown into her flesh. The woman didn’t bother to be gentle. It was breaking and entering, poking, jabbing, knocking things over.

  “Don’t think you can play your new illusion trick, Helga, like you did on Roy,” Anabel whispered. “I am so on to you. Roy’s just a dog.”

  Helga stayed calm while Anabel ravaged. Stillness surrounding her secrets. Floating separate, apart from the ransacking invader.

  “Roy and his Arbatov thugs killed Yuri,” Anabel said. “But not before they dragged every last detail out of his thick brain that would stick. Let’s see . . . Joseph, right? Your ex-husband? And the B dose?”

  Anabel felt the jolt of alarm in Helga’s mind. She tittered.

  “You can’t block me. You made Psi-Max 48 a binary drug, hmm?

  Naughty, naughty! You thought you’d inject us, and then be able to control us by withholding the B dose? You thought you could cut us a deal, Helga?”

  I had to try. Helga whimpered, writhing. Blood trickled from her nose into her throat, making her cough.

  “Nina!” Anabel crooned, triumphantly, at the goodies she prized out of Helga’s mind. “Nina Christie. The New Dawn Shelter. We’ve got her already. Yuri gave her to us. She’s meat, Helga. And we’ll get Joseph, too. They’ll tell me everything.

  They always do.”

  Helga tried to stop the tail as it flicked out of control—

  But Anabel caught it, with her lightning mental reflexes, and followed it down to the source. “Oh!” she whispered. “You’re still fussed about Lara? A little late to worry about her now.

  You’ve signed her death sentence, you dumb cow. Some mother you are. We’ll tell her how badly you handled everything . . . before we kill her.”

  Helga writhed, arching in the bed. Anabel stared down, bright blue eyes white-rimmed and burning, face contracted in a feral snarl.

  “Tell me now, Helga,” she hissed. “Tell me where the B dose is, and maybe Lara’s death will be a little quicker. Tell me! ”

  Helga twitched as that probe got closer and closer to the dark hiding place. Another second, and Anabel would be inside, sacking the inner sanctum. Think, you idiot, think.

  She glimpsed that face, reflected in the shiny paneled surface of the medical equipment on the nearby table, and baited the trap, tossing up a thought tail for that vain bitch to catch. Mirror, mirror . . .

  Anabel took the bait, like a trout after a fly. She looked into the reflection, and for a brief moment, she caught sight of herself and was distracted by the way that the glitter of the teardrop diamonds in her ears set off the perfectly sculpted angle of her jaw . . . now!

  Helga punched into the other woman’s unguarded mind, and Anabel’s reflected image transformed. Her skin wrinkled, horrified blue eyes bulging in dark sockets, her lips shriveling from lengthening teeth. Her skin withered, splitting like old leather.

  Maggots boiled out.

  Anabel opened her mouth to scream, but maggots squirmed out of her mouth, too. She went down to the floor, gurgling and thrashing.

  Helga watched her fall. Anabel made noise, but she couldn’t hear it. So far away. People were rushing into the room, but she was falling backward, arms out, into the waters of the dark lake.


  One lingering thought linked her to the chaos of pain, strife. One last desperate wish.

  Nina, please try.

  And the dark water accepted her, closing over her head.

  Chapter 5

  Nobody here. Nobody here.

  Nina huddled on the subway seat, twisting her hands together until her fingers were colorless. Scared to death, but not of being noticed. On the contrary.

  It was like she had no walls around her mind. Other people’s thoughts were trampling through her head as if it were their own.

  Mind reading. It was the only concept that would come to her, but as a definition it wasn’t quite right. “Reading” implied a deliberate act, a seeking out. This wasn’t deliberate. This was more along the lines of being crushed by stampeding wild animals.

  Maybe she was crazy. Or else really, really stoned on Aunt Helga’s mystery drug. She preferred the second option. As an explanation, it was simpler, more reductive. Comforting, even.

  Temporary.

  So much noise. If she shut her eyes, hid in the gray fuzz, it helped, but the second she opened her eyes and caught sight of someone, their thoughts slammed into her mind, full force. The train squealed on a curve as it braked. Nina peeked to check the station sign—

  . . . she’ll kill herself if I leave her, but I’ll kill her myself if I don’t . . .

  It was the guy across from her. Her eyes had brushed over him to read the sign. Young, wispy dark goatee, John Lennon glasses, tattered jeans. Eyes red and puffy from smoking too much pot.

  The frantic buzz of chronic desperation that emanated from him had snagged her mind.

  Images flooded in. Peter. Bass player. His manic-depressive girlfriend, Jodie, was on a downswing. His belly hurt like a spear was stuck through it. So afraid of coming back from a gig, finding her in the bathroom, dead. Her empty eyes telling him that it was all his fault.

  She jerked her gaze away, squeezed her eyes shut. I’m imagining this. I’m fried on Aunt Helga’s drug, my mind creating things that aren’t there. His name is probably Brad or James or Tom. Not Peter.

  But sensible self-talk was irrelevant. She couldn’t ride the subway with her eyes squeezed shut. If she was tripping on some powerful hallucinogen, well, tough titties. She’d just figure out how to function normally in spite of it. Junkies did it all the time.

  So. A plan. She’d compensate for the drug, with her own more-or-less solid map of reality as she remembered it from her old, unaltered days. Solid. That was her. Nina Christie, solid as a rock.

  She focused on breathing, to calm the terror that bubbled and fizzed. She opened her eyes, face turned from Peter. Her gaze brushed over a petite black girl with intricately braided and beaded hair, staring down at her red peep-toe sandals. The look on the girl’s face sucked her into a slipstream of emotions: shame, fear, dread . . .

  . . . keep the baby? How’m I supposed to feed a baby if Tyrone doesn’t want it? Ma’ll throw me out, she hates my guts already. . . .

  Nina refused to flinch. Solid as a rock. Stay calm. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t look at faces. Looking at faces triggered it.

  At that moment, a heavy man with a suit and a combover sat down next to her. His massive body pressed against hers. The contact made the volume of his thoughts blare in her head.

  . . . stuck-up prick. I’ll teach him to talk trash about me, that lying son of a bitch. Firing me in front of Pam and Miriam, fucking bastard . . .

  I’ll burn his house with his whole fucking family inside—

  Nina jerked to her feet. The guy’s eyes were half closed in his heavy face, lost in his revenge fantasy. Reveling in the image of burning his ex-boss in his bed, the man screaming while flames licked—

  It hurt her head. She felt lacerated, stabbing lights blinding her. She wanted to vomit. To be alone, in the dark, in the fetal position. She stumbled down the subway car, trying not to touch anyone, look at anyone, shoving through a dense web of thoughts, feelings. Wispy trails clung to her, the strongest ones wrapping around her like cobwebs.

  . . . just can’t face another round of chemo. . . .

  . . . God, I wish he would call me. Why isn’t he calling me . . . ?

  . . . where will I find money to buy Angie’s meds this time . . . ?

  . . . rat bastard. Probably boning that man-stealing whore right now, this very moment . . . dirty bitch . . .

  Nina flung open the door at the end, gasping for air, and launched herself out onto the jointed metal platform. The noise hurt, but not as much as the contorted emotional worlds inside other people’s heads.

  And she’d always considered herself an empathetic person.

  Hah. She had no clue. No clue at all.

  The next car was as crowded as the one she’d left. She couldn’t face the gauntlet again, so she clung to the door handle outside, teeth clenched, bones rattling while the train spat out of the tun-nel and into a station. Get a grip. She couldn’t just cower between the cars on a blind subway ride to nowhere. Toughen up, girl.

  Those people at the hospital had been chasing her, specifically. It had to be related to Helga Kasyanov. She did not believe that her pursuers were, in fact, zombie ghouls. Her map of reality did not stretch that far, and never would. But seeing them as a symbol of death was a message from her subconscious mind that they meant her ill. She’d seen their eyes as they chased her.

  She’d felt their evil. She was convinced. And so? What now?

  The F train slowed. Coming up on Second Avenue, which reminded her of . . . she groped, and the lightbulb lit up in her overstressed brain. The driver! Yuri Marchuk lived in Alphabet City! He knew what Helga had said, and she needed a translator for Helga’s recording, now that Asshole Aaro had withdrawn his linguistic help. True, some legwork and phone calls would find her someone else who was competent, as Aaro had so helpfully pointed out, but she was on the verge of a breakdown on a random subway ride, and voilà, she had ended up in Yuri’s neighbor-hood. It was fate. Why look farther? Assuming the guy spoke English at all, of course, but hell, she could try.

  As if she would meekly wait on Aaro’s convenience. Jerk. It pissed her off all over again, thinking about his grudging offer to call her back when it suited his schedule. Giving her attitude after what she’d been through. She was going to have words with Lily, about exposing her to such a butthead. Rude, insensitive, provocative son of a bitch.

  She wrenched open the door to the subway car as the train shuddered to a stop, waiting until the others filed out. She cringed mentally, held her blanket of gray, fuzzy mental static tight around her.

  No cobwebs clung to her this time. She felt them tickle her consciousness, but they didn’t snag. She was grimly amused.

  Getting her back up about Asshole Aaro’s bad manners had steadied her nerves. To the point where she could actually keep a shield up.

  It was kind of funny. Almost.

  She fished in her pocket for the address that Bruno’s friends had procured for her as she slogged her way up the endless flights of stairs. She emerged onto Second Avenue, blinking in the blazing sunshine, and oriented herself to walk east. Three avenue blocks, then left onto B, and up a few short cross streets, and—no. Wait. What on earth . . . ?

  Her neck prickled. A snarl of cars blocked the street entrance to Yuri’s block. The sidewalk and street seethed with people.

  She edged closer, checked the address. Consulted the map, the street signs. This was the place. Short, narrow, cramped buildings. Flashing lights. Cop cars. Uniforms swarming. Yellow crime scene tape. Ambulance. An air of grim emergency. Goose bumps popped out on her neck.

  She looked around for someone to ask. Spotted a young goth woman with lots of facial piercing. She revved up her shield of gray fuzz, and braced herself, just in case the makeshift barrier didn’t hold.

  “Do you know what happened here?” she asked the girl

  “They killed Yuri Marchuk,” the girl replied, her eyes bright and shining with unsavory excite
ment. “Tortured him and killed him! He was my downstairs neighbor! Holy shit, it totally could’ve been me!”

  Horror blotted out everything for a moment. The girl’s words blurred, then comprehension blared back. “. . . cut him to pieces!

  Marya came home from work, found him all cut up! Marya’s coming out now!”

  A square, frizzed, bottle-blond woman in her thirties was being escorted from the building, flanked by police officers.

  Eyes wide, staring at nothing. She stumbled as if she couldn’t quite feel her legs.

  The police officers escorted her toward a waiting ambulance.

  Her hands and shirt were stained with blood.

  The sun blazed down, but Nina shuddered with cold. Her teeth clacked. She’d lost the thread of the girl’s prattle. Couldn’t look away from Marya’s frozen, staring face. It was dragging her in, pulling . . .

  Oh, no. Oh, please, no. Not her. Not this.

  Like a magnet sucking her straight into the other woman’s experience. Mind, heart and body. It hit her like a hammer. Papa.

  Shock, disbelief. Blood. His face. His hands. His ears. His eyes.

  Oh, Papa. Images, superimposed over the mangled red mess on kitchen floor that could not possibly be Papa. Holding her in his arms, feeding her vareniki . Yelling, laughing, breath heavy with vodka.

  Playing with her son. A good grandpa. His hands. His ears. His eyes.

  God, his eyes.

  Images assailed her, gruesome, bright-edged. Colors surreally bright, especially the awful, arterial red. She couldn’t separate herself from Marya’s trauma. It was too strong, too loud. It blotted her out.

  The girl’s voice poked like a needle jabbing. Her hand clutched Nina’s sleeve, tugging. “. . . you OK? Hey! You on drugs, or something?”