Out of Her Mind

by V M Black

  “I know,” Chay repeated, “but Col. Wilkins doesn’t.” The Department of Internal Operations didn’t know about the vampires at all—not in an official capacity, not for long, at any rate. The vampires saw to that. So they couldn’t know the threat that the vampires represented to Chay if he exposed shifters on the national media.

  “And if she calls you on your bluff?” Ophelia pushed.

  “It isn’t a bluff,” Chay said. “Not this time.”

  “But for, what, four shifters, max, you’re willing to blow the top off everything?” She looked like she was torn between outrage and disbelief.

  “Not for them. For all of us,” Chay said. “For all the stupid teenagers they lied to who didn’t pull through.” He turned in his chair to face her squarely. “You know that we can’t even tell her that we have a solution. The only thing keeping the military from dosing three, five, ten times as many soldiers is that they’re scared of the wastage. We take that away, and there are no brakes.”

  Tara’s forehead furrowed in a frown. “It may be worse than that,” she said, breaking into the conversation. “At least some of the changes that happened to my human form when I first became a panther have stayed, like the sharper sight and the sense of smell. I bet the night vision’s there, too. Hang on. I’ve got to try something.”

  She turned abruptly and plunged into the midst of the folding tables in the center of the room. Chay watched her, uncomprehending, until she finally stopped with a noise of victory. Tara picked something up, and before he could react, she stabbed viciously at her other palm.

  She gave a yelp and shook it out, wincing, then looked at it closely for a moment before holding up her hand, palm out, for Chay to see. There was a smear of blood on it, but underneath, the skin was unbroken.

  “Superhuman healing speed? Check,” she said.

  A sudden, cold fear filled Chay’s chest.

  The shifters’ animal forms had always been considered a very small bonus to the military minds who had started the program. In fact, he could count the number of times he’d shifted for an op on his fingers—and have several fingers left over. A panther couldn’t carry an assault rifle with ease, it couldn’t wriggle into body armor, and it had no hands to manipulate objects or a voice with which it could radio information.

  No, it was the human enhancements that had so attracted the military brass. And with Torrhanin’s device, they would be able to dose any soldier, hold him until the first shift took place, and then slap a suppressor on his head. If they could reproduce the suppressors and jigger them so that they weren’t removable, there would be no political fallout from rogue shifters.

  They could literally engineer super-soldiers. And with promises like superhuman strength and healing, idiot teenagers would be signing up in droves. Half those soldiers’ children would be shifters, shifters they would have no idea how to raise without the customs and ethics and culture that regulated shifter society now.

  Oh, they’d try to take steps. Chay knew they would—required vasectomies or some such. But those kinds of operations were extremely dicey when it came to shifters, so there would be another generation. And it would be a catastrophe.

  He realized that Torrhanin might have given him a greater weapon than he’d given the elf. No wonder he’d held it at such a high price. Chay had only thought of all the shifters it could save, not the damage it could do.

  “Chay?” Tara asked, and he realized that he’d been silent for a full minute, staring at the smear of blood on her uninjured hand.

  “We can never let the government know about it,” he ground out. “Never.”

  But secrets had ways of getting out. Only the combined powers of all the vampires in the world kept the existence of most aethers a secret from most people. This wasn’t even a secret. It was a technology. And that was even more dangerous.

  He took a deep breath. Elven gifts had catches. He’d known that. He’d thought the catch would be in what he gave Torrhanin in return, but instead, it was in the device itself.

  As Torrhanin had predicted, Chay still couldn’t wish it undone. That was another truth about dealing with elves: The worst catches of all were the ones that the recipient understood and still took.

  “We should destroy it.” Tara’s eyes were wide, her voice low and clear. She obviously understood the full implications of the technology that had saved her. “I’m not worth it. The others—they aren’t worth it, either. This could affect everyone, everyone in the world—”

  “If Torrhanin created it, others could, too,” Chay said, interrupting her. “Others will. There are part-elves who work for the government. They’re probably hard at work on such a technology even now. For a while, at least, we get the chance to use it purely for good.”

  “She’s right,” Ophelia said flatly. “But so are you.”

  “You have to talk to Torrhanin,” Tara said. “Find out more. Make sure that humans can’t copy it. That the wrong elves won’t.”

  “Too many steps ahead,” Chay said. “First, we need to get more copies of the device and get them onto the seven who are still walking around as humans. Then we need to try to get the two we’re pretty sure have shifted tranqed and given over to us. And finally, we need to find out what’s happened to the two who have completely disappeared.”

  “Deploy field units now to each of the ones we can locate?” Ophelia asked, already typing at the computer.

  “Yes,” Chay said. “Isolate, treat, and then explain. In that order. As soon as I’ve got more copies of the device from Torrhanin, we’ll scramble the teams. I don’t know how long that will take, so just organize them and give them a heads up right now.”

  “Right,” she said crisply.

  Chay tapped the keyboard to bring up an audio link with Narnia, the part of Black Mesa where the elves lived. The word Connecting… blinked for several seconds, and then it timed out. Chay muttered something unflattering about elves who kept breaking his communications systems and fired off a message marked urgent.

  But when the audio was down, Chay knew from experience that emails and instant messaging usually didn’t get through, either. He’d probably need to visit himself.

  Not yet, though. Tara hadn’t eaten since she’d shifted, and he hadn’t finished a meal in almost as long.

  “Tara and I are going to grab dinner, and then I’ll chase down the elf in Narnia. You know the drill, Ophelia. We’ll need brute force and diplomacy, both. Four shifters total per team, and I want at least two large ones per group—bears, big cats, wolves. A coyote or a fox for their persuasiveness. Whoever works best for the final member.”

  “Got it,” she agreed, already at work.

  Chay pushed his chair back from the desk and stood up. “Cafeteria?” he asked, turning to Tara.

  He didn’t miss the slight note of fear in her eyes, but Tara nodded firmly. “Yeah. Cafeteria. After I pee, though. I haven’t done that in weeks, at least not with this body. Alone,” she added firmly.

  “I’ll be here when you get out,” Chay promised.

  A light flashed in her eyes, gone too quickly for him to interpret. “I know.”

  Chapter Ten

  Tara kept pace beside Chay as he led the way down the maze of hallways. The numbers stenciled onto the closed doors changed, and some of the hallways were narrower or wider than the one before, but other than that, they all appeared identical to Tara. With her panther-sharp senses, she could smell far more people here than she had when she’d been taken from her first prison to Chay’s quarters.

  That was only to be expected, with the crowd that had been in the spook shop when Chay had opened the door. But there were more and more new scents as they continued onward, and the lights were often already on when they turned down a new hall.

  Even though she should have been expecting it, she still jumped the first time they turned a corner to see two people standing casually in the middle of the corridor, talking. As they continued, the halls became more and
more crowded until they practically buzzed with people.

  Tara reached for Chay’s hand for reassurance, holding it a little too tightly. She understood that there were a lot of people in Black Mesa, but in her mind, they were somewhere else, over there in a vague sort of way. She’d thought she was ready to face them, but now she was far from sure, and she was having flashbacks to the lecture hall and the terrible things she’d done there.

  Worse, even though these people were all strangers to her, every single one of them knew Chay. Stares and whispers followed their progress. As they approached, people would freeze mid-step, staring at Chay and his savaged hair, and conversations would drop off abruptly. Some of the eyes simply skimmed over her, but others must have guessed who she was, because they stared at her, amazement or hostility on their faces.

  Anxiety built up in Tara’s gut, making her heart race until it hurt and it was hard to breathe. The cafeteria. She’d jumped at the chance because it solidified her freedom, her ability to go out among others with no danger or fear. To know that she could do it was one thing, but to actually walk among people—among parents and children, young people and seniors—that was quite another. She was afraid that she was too much of a coward to keep going, just like she had run away from what she’d done to her best friend and the grief that she’d caused her parents.

  She lifted a hand nervously to the suppressor. It was still there, still secure in whatever way it was adhered to her skin, and there was no sense of the panther lurking in the back of her head.

  Chay stopped, and with a glance around the temporarily empty hall, he said in a low voice, “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m fine,” she said quickly. “The way that you mean, I’m fine. It’s really gone.” Again she ran her fingers over the object behind her ear. “I guess I’m just…having a panic attack,” she said, realizing that’s what it was.

  Tara felt ashamed to admit it. She’d always seen herself as strong. Even the day that the Sudanese government forces had tried to attack the refugee camp, she’d kept a level head. Now she had to ball her free hand into a fist so that it wouldn’t shake.

  Chay put a hand on her shoulder, and as she looked into his eyes, she saw the darkness of his own life. She remembered that he hated crowds now—because of the panther that was still in his head. If anyone understood what she felt, he did.

  “We’ve got this,” he said lightly.

  Tara nodded. “Right. Let’s go. I’m being silly.”

  “It’s not silly,” he said, but he freed his hand from hers to loop his arm over her shoulders and press her body to his side as they started down the hall again. He matched his steps to hers, and even though it made no real difference, Tara felt better, protected, under his arm.

  There was a crowd at the swinging double doors that had the word CAFETERIA over them in capital letters, a knot of people talking in urgent tones. They fell silent as Chay and Tara came into view.

  Tara eyed the doors, which looked universally institutional. They could be from any school or hospital. They were so bland that it was almost crazy to think that they were actually in the depths of a mountain that was populated by hundreds of shape shifters.

  The crowd stepped back, making way for the two of them, and Tara steeled herself under their gaze. The rumor mill appeared to work at double speed because they hardly spared a glance for Chay’s hair now, focusing instead on Tara with varying expressions of fascination.

  More precisely, they were staring at her head. It wasn’t her they were interested in, she realized, but the suppressor that Torrhanin had made for her. The crowd was looking at her and seeing the people they had lost—because as Chay had explained, shifters who weren’t in some kind of trouble rarely ended up at Black Mesa.

  Still, she straightened a little and steeled herself before stepping through those swinging double doors. The room inside was exactly as she’d expected it—rows of folding-style cafeteria tables with wood-grain melamine surfaces.

  There were only a few dozen people in the broad, echoing room, less than a tenth of what it could hold, and Tara relaxed slightly. Still, they struck her as looking somehow staged, artificial, even. Then she remembered what Annie had told her several months ago: Chay bought solid-colored tee-shirts and black leggings in bulk and issued them to anyone who needed them, making the inhabitants of Black Mesa often look like the cast of a cut-rate Star Trek knockoff.

  Annie had been almost eerily right. The thought made Tara smother a slightly hysterical giggle as she let Chay steer her toward the food service area.

  The smell of it hit her then—delicious smells that made her stomach cramp with hunger. Unlike an elementary school, the buffet was self-serve, and she grabbed a plastic tray and eagerly began scooping food onto it—turkey, gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and even homemade cranberry sauce, all the fixings of a Thanksgiving spread.

  “Oh, my God, I don’t think I’ve ever smelled anything so good,” Tara said, relaxing. One of the cooks, who was changing out the tray of green bean casserole, treated her to a broad smile. “What’s this?” she asked Chay, nodding at a container of some kind of greens.

  “Collards, for the Southerners,” he explained.

  Tara shrugged, adding that to her tray, too, and ending with a fat slice of pumpkin pie. There was no checkout at the end of the line, so she filled up a cup with soda and made a beeline for an empty table. By the time Chay had caught up to her, she was three quarters of the way through the sweet potatoes.

  “This is so much better than it was before,” she said, covering her mouth with one hand as she chewed between words. “Am I just that hungry, or is this awesome now?”

  Chay took a cautious bite of his food, and a peculiar expression crossed his face. “It’s better,” he granted. “A lot better. The kitchen took advantage while I was gone, it looks like.”

  She giggled, feeling truly human for the first time since she’d come to Black Mesa. “Good for them.”

  “There were reasons why I asked that it be run like it was. Practical reasons.” He took another bite. “Frozen foods are at least as good for you as fresh, you know.” His tone was didactic, severe.

  “Mm-hmm,” she said, unaccountably amused to see this new, defensively prickly side of him emerge.

  “And it’s far more practical to use preserved foods whenever possible,” he continued. He dug into his potatoes, which dripped with brown turkey gravy. “Not only will it keep in the case of emergency, but it limits our contact with the outside world as much as possible.”

  “I’m sure it does.” Tara attacked the gravy-drenched turkey.

  He looked at his forkful of stuffing with a rueful expression. “But I think that the residents might riot if I demand that they go back now.”

  Tara hid her smile behind her paper napkin, hearing in that concession the fact that he, too, preferred the better food—however impractical it might be.

  “I think they might, too.” She lapsed into silence for several minutes until she had taken the edge off her hunger, and then, picking at the pumpkin pie at a more sedate pace, she asked, “So why have a cafeteria at all? Why have all these people down here? Hundreds, you said. How many are there now?”

  He looked down at his smart watch. “Cortana, what’s the population of Black Mesa?”

  The tinny voice replied. “The actual population of Black Mesa is currently four hundred ninety-eight. The expected population is four hundred twenty-nine.”

  Tara blinked. “That’s a big discrepancy.”

  Chay shook his head. “I don’t know what the elves are up to now.”

  She shook her head. “Anyway, a lot of people live here permanently now. Why can’t they have houses of their own? Or if not entire houses, apartments with kitchens. Most of the base seems to be empty, so it can’t be that you’re running out of room.”

  She chose her questions carefully, casting them as guesses when she knew that they were true for a fact.


  Chay shook his head. “It’s more practical—”

  “Lots of things are practical that most people don’t find tolerable,” Tara said. “It’d be practical for everyone to live as close to their work as possible, as long as there were grocery stores nearby. But most people consider lots of other things than just closeness when they decide where to live.”

  “I suppose,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said, “Mr. Practical. Let’s talk about your chair.”

  “My chair?”

  “Your chair,” she repeated firmly. “In the spook shop.”

  “It’s a practical chair,” he objected. “It’s the right height, and I can sit on it.”

  She cut another bite of pie. “It’s definitely not ergonomic. So that means it’s not as practical in the long run as one that is, because you’re probably a lot more likely to get injured using it. Therefore—not practical.” She smiled triumphantly across the table at him as she popped the bite into her mouth.

  That made him chuckle. “So, for what impractical reason do you think I like it?”

  “The same reason people like most things. It’s comfortable to you. But you in particular? I think you’re a lot more set in your ways than you’d like to think.” She stopped herself before she said too much, changing tack. “I think that you have certain values that you hold really highly. And I think they’re all good values—saving people, keeping them safe, keeping your secrets. But I think that maybe sometimes you don’t weigh other people’s values as highly as you do your own. You…make them change chairs.”

  He looked around the cafeteria, with its scattered groups of people. “Jen Hardison does a really good job feeding everyone.”

  “I’m sure she does,” Tara said. “And I’m sure a lot of people would rather have her cooking every night than having to do their own meals. But there are families here, Chay. And how long have some of them been here?”