Out of Her Mind

by V M Black

  “I can do that for you,” Chay said quietly.

  Tara stepped into the thick leggings and pulled them up over her hips. They were looser than she remembered them. She looked down at her hips, which were still generous, and snorted. “You’d think that I would have lost more weight, however long I was there.”

  “You get some nourishment from the panther, as I understand it,” Chay said. “Don’t ask me to explain it. You could ask Torrhanin, if you’d like, and he’ll talk about it as long as you can put up with it, but I don’t think it’ll make much more sense for you.”

  “So I guess there’s one upside to being shoved into limbo,” she said with black humor.

  “You were perfect before,” Chay said firmly.

  “You like big women?” Tara teased. “So I’m not perfect now?”

  “Thick’s the word,” he said. “Not big. And I like you. You define beauty. So you were perfect then, and you’re perfect now. You’ll be perfect when—”

  He broke off abruptly, as if he were afraid that he was saying too much.

  Tara bit her lip and nodded, blinking hard again, overwhelmed with fear? Gratitude? She didn’t even know. Crybaby, she scolded herself. It didn’t help much to realize it, though.

  “What’s the date?” she asked then. “I have to know. What’s today?”

  He looked down at his smart watch, and with a voice that was perfectly level, he said, “November twenty-second.”

  Tara’s breath shook in her lungs, and she swallowed hard as she nodded again. The fatal day that she’d turned into a panther for the first time had been October second. She’d lost nearly two months. Two months of madness, of nonexistence—

  She snapped that thought off at the root. She wasn’t mad now, and she wouldn’t ever be again. Planting that thought firmly in her mind, she dug under her clothes to find her shoes and slipped them on.

  Chay had finished dressing and had crossed to the door that led to his spook shop, and she joined him there.

  “Food first,” she said, as much to herself as to him. Her thoughts needed to be on the future right now, not in the past. “Then I want to go outside.” She realized that she was issuing orders in his facility, and she added, somewhat lamely, “If that’s okay with you.”

  Chay gave her that slow smile. “Anything for you.” He turned the lever door handle. “The cafeteria’s serving right now. Would you like to eat there, or do you want to take a tray to an empty suite?”

  “I want to be around people again,” Tara said with a force of longing that surprised her. She’d always craved space, silence. But after being shut away for so long, she wanted to be among others just to prove to herself that she could.

  He nodded. “Then the cafeteria it is.” And with that, he swung open the door to reveal a room packed with people.

  Tara had the sudden, crazy thought that she had summoned the crowd with her last comment. She wouldn’t have thought that the spook shop could even hold that many people, much less imagine why they’d want to be there. She froze, gaping at them, and she didn’t know whether she was more astonished to see them there or they were to see her.

  Chay began to laugh, and Tara’s cheeks instantly flamed bright red as she remembered the sounds she’d made in his arms a mere half hour before.

  Every eye in the room was on her, the expressions of the gathering fixed in varying shades of shock and disbelief. Tara put together the panther’s memories and realized what they must all be here for—to comfort their friend and leader at a time of his loss.

  His loss of her.

  Meanwhile, beside her, Chay practically cackled at them all, draping a possessive arm over Tara’s shoulders and hugging her to his side even as he shook with the force of his laughter.

  “Torrhanin did it,” he finally managed. “God, you should see your faces! You all look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He took a deep, steadying breath. “The elf’s made some device that stops you from shifting. Blocks the beast entirely. And I’ll have one soon for anyone who wants one.”

  The last statement rang victoriously through the room, and the crowd rippled with reaction, murmurs spreading and increasing in volume as everyone took his announcement in. Tara remembered what he’d said about all the people he’d known who had permanently been damaged by the beast—those who had lost to it immediately, in their first few shifts, as well as those for whom the beast within meant that they were always on edge, with a hair trigger that could be pulled at any moment with disastrous results.

  The elven device changed all that—not just for her but for anyone who needed it.

  “A shame it’s so late.” The voice rose above the other excited conversations, sending a wave of silence through the crowd. It had come from a blonde woman who was standing next to Liam Mansfield, her brow furrowed.

  “We all know people the device might have helped if it had come sooner, Ophelia,” Chay said, hugging Tara a little tighter.

  The woman shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about the other new panthers.”

  Chapter Nine

  At that, Chay snapped an order, and the spook shop emptied out in under a minute, only Ophelia and Tara remaining.

  “If you’d checked your messages, you would have heard,” the woman was saying, looking severe. She was probably a decade older than Chay, but she used a tone as if she were his mother. “There have been panther sightings and maulings and people going missing in the wilderness up and down the coasts, and two man-eaters have already been killed. Both black. Both jaguars.”

  “The connection to Tara?” Chay demanded, releasing Tara to go to his workstation.

  Ophelia shrugged, following him to sit at another section of the desk. She began tapping at the keyboard, and a moment later, a series of screens jumped up in front of Chay.

  “No one knows,” Ophelia said as Tara trailed over to stand behind Chay’s chair. “No one even knows who they were before they shifted. They were too far gone to change back when they were shot, so there’s no way to match them with missing persons reports from across the state—if even that would be enough.”

  Tara remembered how the pressure of all the people around her at college would so often become too much to bear in the last few months. When that happened, she’d drive to a nearby state park or national forest with overnight camping and lose herself in the wilderness for the weekend until she found her balance again.

  Now she recognized the feeling of being trapped as having come from the panther inside her, fighting to get out and take control. If she’d followed her impulses, she would have been out in the woods when she’d first shifted instead of in a lecture hall. If that had happened, she would have become one of those man-eaters, and no one would ever have known what had happened to her.

  “What about missing campers?” she asked, pursuing that thought. “I know they’re killing people, but maybe some of the missing are actually shifters. So if someone went in and didn’t come out again.…”

  The woman went pale. “I’d assumed that all the missing campers were victims.”

  Tara shook her head. “The day I changed, all I wanted was to get off campus, to drive out to the mountains. The other shifters might have had the same feeling, and then they might have gotten stuck as panthers.”

  The woman nodded sharply and brought up a list of names in a few keystrokes. “These are the missing people,” she said as Tara crossed to stand behind her. Ophelia put asterisks next to several names. “And these are the ones who have not been positively identified from their remains.”

  Tara looked at the marked names. A couple of them looked strangely familiar. One especially nagged at the corner of her memory.

  “John Johnson. John Johnson. I know that name,” she said. “Can you find a picture of him?”

  The woman tapped at her keyboard, and a photo popped up. The features didn’t help her figure out who he was, not exactly, but there was something around his eyes that increased her sense of fa
miliarity. Ophelia kept typing, and more information appeared—pictures, addresses, bank accounts, all flooding across the screen. None of it helped jog her memory in the least.

  “I thought you might have been exposed when you were a kid.” Chay kicked against the floor, sending his chair sliding across the tiles next to her so that he could get a better view of the screen that she was staring at. “It was an old military strain from about twenty years ago, so it might have been that long ago. And your dad was in the Army. I’m sure that will be connected.”

  Tara sent her mind back to her early childhood. An Army connection.… Suddenly, everything snapped into place.

  “That’s it!” she exclaimed, straightening abruptly. “Kindergarten. No, I had old Mrs. Briggs, so that makes it first grade. John Johnson, the kid with a double name. He was in my first grade class. Came in that year. It was a lab school on the base. Fort Huachuca. Some kind of experimental thing. There was only one class for each grade level, and it only covered elementary school. That’s why my sister didn’t go—she was already in middle school. It was shut down after second grade, so we all went to the local public school after that.”

  Ophelia’s hands danced across the keyboard, and her screen jumped between program windows. “Of the seven missing people whose remains haven’t been identified, four are between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-seven,” she said.

  “The others could be dead, or they could be false leads,” Chay said.

  She nodded tightly. “Exactly.”

  “Children,” Chay spat, wheeling his battered chair back over to his workstation. He began to swear even as he typed with blinding speed. When he finally snapped his mouth shut on the final curse, he took a deep breath and said in a voice that sent chills through Tara’s body, “It makes sense. It makes perfect sense. The shifter factor never worked as well as the powers that be wanted them to.”

  He continued, “No one above the age of nineteen is admitted into the program because of the dangers of shifting at an advanced age. About one in ten still go rogue, and most of the rest suffer permanent psychological effects, sometimes debilitating. The program developers must have thought that they’d be able to make their own safe pet shifters by exposing children to it.”

  “They gave some of us our immunizations at school,” Tara said as the memory surfaced. “One year. And my mom flipped out because she said I didn’t need any.”

  “Exactly,” he said grimly.

  “But it didn’t work,” Tara protested. “You said that the shifter factor should trigger a change within six weeks. But it didn’t, not for anybody. Somebody would have realized it if kids had started changing into panthers.”

  “That’s just it,” Chay said, his mouth a hard line. “It didn’t seem to work. Maybe that’s why they pulled the plug on it. Or maybe it attracted the attention of someone who realized that experimenting on the kids of service members wasn’t worth the PR cost no matter how well it turned out.” He hit the enter key, and a window popped up.

  Tara blinked at the picture of Buffalo Lab School in Fort Huachuca, which had taken over an ugly 1960s administration building. A corner of the parking lot had received a raised edging of landscaping timbers and had been filled with pea gravel to make a kind of playground containing a seesaw, swing, slide, and merry-go-round. Treeless and surrounded by asphalt, the playground had often been blisteringly hot in the fall and spring, blasted by the Arizona sun.

  “That’s the school,” she said.

  Chay kept working. “It was open for six years,” he said. “There’s no list of students in the official records, of course. Certainly never was online. But I bet somewhere, someone.…” He trailed off, his fingers still moving. He was silent for so long that Tara’s legs started to get stiff, standing lock-kneed behind him, and she pulled up a chair next to him, watching him pour through pages and pages of search results and text.

  He shook his head. “This is too slow. It’ll take days at this rate. What I really need is—”

  “The mind-net?” Ophelia interrupted, standing and going over to one of the white folding tables. “No one else wanted to touch it, but Torrhanin left it here in case you wanted it again.”

  Tara recoiled slightly as the older woman handed the device over, but Chay took it instantly. After only a momentary hesitation in which he muttered something about trusting elves, he set it on his head.

  ***

  This time when Chay fell through the lightning-shot darkness, he knew exactly what to do. He held the images of the missing people firmly in his mind, and in seconds, he was rocketing across the internet, tearing through layers of security to plunge down deep into a network of social profiles and government databases. He emerged with more names, childhood photos, dates and facts that all slotted into place in his mind. He held them with one thought, then scoured the web for any mention of Buffalo Lab School at Fort Huachuca, touching Google and Bing with one extended thought and dancing among a thousand search results, deeper and deeper until he had everything.

  There was so little to find—a mention here or there, a casual newspaper listing of honor roll students, a notation in an occasional educational journal. In its scant six years of existence, the school appeared to have made very little mark on the world.

  Except that Chay knew better. He knew that every picture might represent a child whose life had been destroyed by someone’s reckless experiments, every name another one whose innocence had been ravaged. The ripples would reach out to touch so many more people—parents, siblings, spouses, children. And the people they had killed, or would kill, when the beast took control.

  Every one of those photographs and offhand mentions was just more oil thrown on the fire of Chay’s rage. In this place, he had no body, only the idea of one, but his thoughts themselves had power, and his anger made his mind run so fast that the burden of it distorted the mind-space around him.

  Chay came up against the thick-walled servers of the Pentagon, and his tools sprang to his fingertips at the first thought of them, drilling through the layers and throwing him into a tangle of servers. He followed the scent of the information that he sought, deploying his search algorithms so quickly, one after another, that his own servers back at Black Mesa became sluggish to his demands.

  Finally, he found it: the files, hidden away in a folder in a legacy server that ground to wakefulness at his entrance. Full of things that important people wished could be forgotten but were too sensitive to destroy completely.

  He didn’t have to read the files. Not here. He simply touched them, and the information poured into his skull. Names, the dates, the code names and subject numbers. It made him sick to read, but he plowed through it, opening his mind to everything, coming up on the other side with it all laid out neatly in space beside his brain.

  Chay now had a list of every child who had been subjected to the Army’s experiments, and he reached outward with his mind in a dozen directions at once, each one clutching a name and a picture, scouring every record that he could find for more information.

  Then he pulled back, out of the darkness, shooting along the threads of his awareness back to his body.

  He blinked, realizing that his eyes had been open the entire time, and he lifted the mind-net from his head.

  “What is it?” Tara asked. “What were you looking for?”

  “Names,” he said. “Names and information.” He rubbed his temples—the mind-net was painless, but what he’d learned within it was so immediate in his brain that he couldn’t distance himself from it the way he could with something he’d merely read. It was like it had become a part of himself, and what he’d learned was terrible. He looked at Tara, and he saw overlaid with her image the picture of the smiling, snaggle-toothed first grader that she’d been.

  “Here,” he said, jerking his hands down to pull the keyboard closer. “Ophelia, I’m sending you a list. We have to get to these people as fast as we can. We’ve already lost so many.…”

 
; He began to assemble the files he’d gathered, sending her everything he knew about the subjects of the research who were still alive.

  Two hundred and twenty-three children had passed through the school in the six years of its operation. Of them, twenty-one had been chosen for the program, Tara among them. Those children had shown no signs of shifting for the duration of the project, which had been declared first a failure and then a potential scandal. The ordering of those events hadn’t been lost on Chay, with all its cynical implications.

  But what had happened to the children after they’d left the school had been anything but normal. Five of them had died from accidents or suicide in the following two decades—the panthers within driving them to recklessness or despair without ever breaking through. Of the remaining sixteen, six excluding Tara were now missing. The two dead panthers could be traced to two names, and at least two more were probably out in the mountains even now.

  There were nine others whose whereabouts could be identified—one in prison, another in a mental health facility, and the seven others scattered across the United States and the globe.

  “These are the people we need to reach now,” Chay said, firing off the list. “I’ll have to get Col. Wilkins’ help with the missing ones and the ones in the mountains.”

  “This scandal could be huge,” Ophelia said. “She’ll want to shoot on sight.”

  “If she does that, the scandal gets leaked,” Chay said bluntly. “Everything gets leaked.”

  “Who will believe it?” Tara asked. “I wouldn’t have.”

  He gave her a level look. “I can make them believe.”

  “That means we wouldn’t be secret anymore,” Ophelia protested. “Not the artificial shifters, and not the natural ones, either. The consequences of that—”

  “I know,” Chay said. It wasn’t just the universal law of all the different shifter communities that their existence stay a secret to society at large, it was also the de facto law of no small number of other non-human aether groups. That included the vampires, who were especially merciless at suppressing or destroying anything that worked against their interests. Few things could make the different vampire factions unite. Someone threatening to expose the existence of an aether society was one of them.