by Alex Hughes
Where to start? “You know I wasn’t always an addict, right?”
She gestured for me to continue. Stole a sip of my juice. I moved the glass in front of her. If she wanted the half that was left, she could have it.
“Ten years ago I was a professor,” I said.
“A professor?” she asked, surprised. She ran a few numbers in her head.
“I was young,” I confirmed. “But brilliant. And I had a talent nobody else had had in two generations—I could teach a whole class of students the same lesson at the same time.”
She huffawed. “Really? A teacher that could teach a whole classroom? Awesome talent, that!”
“No, really,” I came back. “Telepathy isn’t like literature. You can’t read a book and understand something immediately. There’s a process. You learn by seeing, by doing, by having someone guide you until you can pick it up on your own. You learn by experience, yours or someone else’s and—”
“You realize I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, right?” Her mouth quirked.
I blew out a long line of air. “Okay. I didn’t teach the basic classes—by the time the students got to me, they were too far into the Guild to ever see a college or want to, but let’s call it PhD-level work. Or, better analogy, the neurosurgery stuff you only get to see three years after you leave medical school.”
I frowned and looked at my hands. “Actually, brain surgery’s a good way to think about deconstruction, only you’re working with the brain’s software, not the physical stuff. Deconstructionist training is practical. You learn to take apart a mind piece by piece, to remove the sane and healthy bits—or to replace them—at will. Mistakes happen—there’ve been personalities changing drastically after a ‘construct’—but there are plenty of coma victims who’ve regained their lives. It’s a worthwhile profession.”
Cherabino shifted in her chair. “Sounds like a double-edged sword to me. If you can bring them out of a coma, I’ll bet you can put them in one.”
I nodded. “There is that. The Guild—heartless, self-interested bastards that they are—” She gave me an ironic look; I ignored it and kept going. “They don’t strictly care how you use the skills. Good, evil, whatever, so long as the evil you practice is affiliated with a major governmental organization and you don’t step on the Guild’s toes in the process. Or else they get involved. And trust me, it is not a good thing when the Guild gets involved.”
She frowned, finished the juice. “You taught the coma stuff?”
“That and other things, the capstone deconstruction training. They only got to take it after they passed about eight rounds of screening and had a strong shot at a job; the Guild doesn’t believe in flooding the market. Depending on the job market in black ops and major metropolitan hospitals, some years I had thirty students, some two. There were a couple of other organizations that hired deconstructionists, but those were the main two, and since I was teaching the class, they could actually fill the jobs as fast as they had openings.”
“Because you were so darn special.”
I shrugged. “They’d been looking for a systematic deconstructionist professor for at least sixty years, since John Xavier got shot in broad daylight in the middle of the Tech Wars. Without a guy like me, you have to apprentice under another structure person for ten years or more, pick things up slowly with a lot of work—that’s how I did it, finishing the work early at twenty-three. They found me when a teacher caught me tutoring two other students at the same time—I was short of sleep, and it seemed more efficient than doing it twice. My whole life changed that night.
“I’m kinda rare, or was. Teaching deconstruction is much harder than it sounds. Maybe five percent of all Guild members can even see the finer structures of the mind, and only a third of that have the control to manipulate them. And then, imagine letting thirty people piggyback on your thoughts as you pluck at the invisible spiderweb strings…keeping the plate in your left hand spinning while your right hand performs delicate brain surgery. Only a lot more so. The brain is forgiving of screwups; the mind not so much. Kill a few cells in a clump somewhere, mostly your brain learns to adapt. Kill a processing router in the back of the software of your mind and you might never think in color again. Or worse, lose the ability to learn new names. Or faces. Or much, much worse. That stuff, you kinda notice—and those are easy mistakes for a deconstructionist to make.
“But it’s worth doing. You could help a person who’d just had a head injury to reroute that processor to another part of the mind. You could help a man see movement for the first time ever or recognize his wife’s face for the first time in years. That’s the cool stuff, the stuff you’d pay anything for, the stuff the Guild charges the sun and the moon for. That is what I could teach a man (or a woman, or a monkey, so long as he was Abled) to do—in four years or less compared to the fifteen years to get one guy trained. I made the Guild unthinkable amounts of money.”
“Not that you’re confident or anything.”
“Not at all.”
“So why aren’t you still doing it?”
I looked away. “I couldn’t. After I got hooked on Satin, the numbers worked in the beginning. But I couldn’t teach anymore—I couldn’t do two impossible things at once, not even after they locked me in a box for two weeks to make me dry out.”
Her eyes went blank as she processed that, but I went on, unable to stop.
“The only thing worse than not having a deconstructionist teacher is having one who’s worthless to you. The Guild let me know I wasn’t welcome in no uncertain terms.”
I studied the old wooden dining table where we were sitting, her case notes spread out. It had been that final rejection by the Guild that had made me turn to the poison even worse, that made me fall off the wagon so badly, it took a team of cops and a truly traumatic memory to begin to find me again. The Guild did not want me anymore—and no one treats you worse than the best friend you’ve betrayed.
I went outside for a cigarette—or three. I wasn’t sure why I’d told her all of that. It had been a long, long time since I’d talked about that. I wondered if it changed anything, if she’d trust me any better now. I stood there, smoking, trying to decide. Probably not, I settled on. It wouldn’t change freaking anything.
I walked in the house and shut the door. She threw me a blanket with excessive force. I caught it, but the top still hit me in the face. I forced the fabric down. Pylar. What?
“What’s this?”
She gave me a look. “You’re on the couch.”
I looked at the short, gray, overstuffed couch four feet to my right, then back at her. “There’s no way I’m going to fit on that.” For one thing, it was almost long enough for a short sixth grader to lie down on lengthwise. Almost. For another thing, I was a long time out of sixth grade. I reined in my temper.
“I can get you a pillow,” Cherabino said, with no expression. “Or you can take the floor. Your choice.”
I rearranged my grip on the blanket, trying to gather up the part that was falling. I had one shot at this, if I really meant to protect her. “Look, Cherabino, the couch—not that I’m criticizing it—is too short. I’ll never fit. And more importantly,” I said over the top of her protest, “it’s way too far from you. The whole point of me being here is to make sure nothing happens to you. There’s no way I can do that if you’re all the way in the bedroom with the door closed. No way.”
She crossed her arms and set her face. “If you think I’m letting you in my bedroom, you’re crazy.” But in the back of her head she paused, remembering we faced a telepath and teleporter. And that maybe, if all of the talk was true, I had a few skills to fight him. She still didn’t trust me.
“I’m not leaving you. If that means I sleep on your floor, that’s what it means. I’ve slept on far worse than that, trust me. Even I can’t control the Inverse Square Law.”
Her eyebrows drew together. “The what?”
I sighed, dropped the blanket, and pulled my hand
s through my hair in exasperation. It had been a stressful night, damn it; I didn’t want to have to explain every little thing. “Telepathy obeys the laws of physics like everything else—unless something funky is going on, the farther away you are, the weaker the connection gets. That goes double if you’re not paying attention—and I’d like to get some sleep tonight if I can.”
“You’ll get plenty of sleep on the couch.” She was being stubborn on purpose. Whatever had made her wary before was still here now. I wished mind reading could help more at the moment, but she wasn’t really thinking, just reacting to whatever her latest deal was. I didn’t have time for this.
“Sure. I could sleep on the couch. But that would defeat the purpose of being here at all. Minding—mental bodyguarding—is not my specialty. It never was. The little bit of practice I do have is over a decade old. Honestly, I can’t sleep and watch and wake up immediately for anybody but me, not for sure. You get attacked thirty feet away—for real this time, through the window of your bedroom, say—I might sleep through it. If the back of my head doesn’t feel personally threatened.
“On the other hand, five feet away, three feet away, your presence is going to overlap me enough in Mindspace I’ll wake up automatically in self-defense. Fighting. If anything happens, we’re going to need my instincts working for us.”
She did not look happy; her wariness was overcoming her good sense. And her face said, bullshit, as she twisted her hair back with a pink rubber band. That was usually a move she did right before a physical fight. Or when she felt like fighting. It had been a long night with too much tension, and we were both on edge. Even so, I couldn’t afford to give in.
I met her eyes and took a wild guess. “I’m not trying to take advantage of you. I can do the floor, as long as it’s right next to the bed. I’ll do the floor, no problem. I’m just trying to keep you safe.”
I felt the comment register. She shook her head and finally told me the truth. “I don’t want you that close to me, not while I’m sleeping. You don’t have the self-control.”
I answered the unspoken question. “Maybe not about the drug. Maybe not about a lot of things. But this, this I’ve got. You don’t have to worry about that. Not today. Not any day. Not if you don’t want it.”
She opened her mouth to say something, and I could see this could take forever. And like it or not, I really did want to get some sleep tonight.
I reached out and inserted a thought, my thought flavored with the sound of my voice so she couldn’t possibly mistake it. If I wanted to take advantage, I don’t need you to be asleep. Then, slowly, I trailed soft points of pleasure down her spine.
She shivered and looked away.
“I’ll be on the floor,” I said firmly.
“Fine,” she said, and turned on her heel, every line of her body angry. “But stay out of my head.”
Her bedroom carpet was pink. Well, peach. And it didn’t match the rest of the room, which was brown and beige, down to the checkered comforter and brown curtains. It didn’t match Cherabino.
It was soft, and reasonable to sleep on—which was good, since I was lying on it now and had to sleep—but it was pink. I was vaguely offended.
Cherabino was tucked away two feet above me, trying to sleep and failing, dressed in full-length pajama pants and a ridiculously large T-shirt. I don’t know why she’d put up such a fight. This wasn’t exactly glamorous. No man woke up in the morning thinking, I’ll sleep on my coworker’s pink carpet today. Not remotely.
Now, if she would only go to sleep, I could try to do the same. I sighed. If she’d stop jumping every time there was a noise…
“You still there?” I heard faintly through the darkness.
“Yes. Go to sleep!”
I stayed up a long time, torturing myself with my last few days at the Guild, with Kara’s betrayal, with the head of training stripping off my patch and literally throwing me out of the meeting room. I would do anything not to face that again—and I wanted my drug. Of course I wanted my drug right now, with things falling apart. But I wasn’t going to get it. Paulsen’s rough disbelief, the contempt of the other interviewers, Swartz’s disappointment, all played over and over in my head. I knew it would be worse if I’d actually shot up, a lot worse. But it was plenty bad enough.
Like fate or a capricious Higher Power flexed its muscles, in that moment I saw my vision again: Cherabino abused and beaten on the floor; myself dying. Bradley yelling at me, specifically, like he knew me. The old woman’s scarf in my hands. This was personal, and as much as I wanted to run away—into Satin—into somewhere else, I knew that if I did, I’d never forgive myself.
I had to fix this. I had enough crap to look through when I stared at the mirror. I didn’t need any more.
CHAPTER 14
In the morning, a horrible ringing woke me up far too early.
Cherabino was up, gun trained in less than two seconds on the phone on her nightstand. I blinked at her very nice butt, outlined through the pajamas.
“Sorry,” she said, sheepishly. “It’s new.” She put the gun down on the nightstand and picked up the handset.
She frowned. I felt her decision to lie, to make it seem less suspicious that I was there. She didn’t want Paulsen getting the wrong idea. “He’s on my couch. Want me to wake him up?”
Huh?
“Just a second.” She held the phone against her shoulder, fidgeted for a long moment. “Okay, he’s here.” She held out the phone to me.
I stood and took it, watching Cherabino carefully. She grabbed the gun and moved away a bit.
“Yes?” I said into the phone.
There was a long pause at the other end.
“Hello?”
Paulsen’s voice was testy. “You and Cherabino have been called into Fulton County. Atlanta PD thinks it’s another of our murders. They want you there five minutes ago.”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to do fieldwork for a while?”
“Who told you that?”
“The captain.”
“What in hell you were doing going to the captain with that vision of yours I’ll never know. I’m your boss. You should have come to me!”
“You were busy,” I said.
She growled into the phone. “Out of leash, I told you. Twice. If you didn’t have the best close rate of any of the interrogators, I swear this would be the very…” A pause. “Get up and get to that scene, ASAP. Don’t give me any more grief. I’ll handle the captain.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Um, ma’am?”
“What??!?”
“Where are we going?”
“Oh. Hold on.” Clattering sounds came over the line. After a moment, she found what she needed and read me the address, on Ponce de Leon.
“How far down is that?” I asked.
“Near the old City Hall East.”
I frowned. “That’s almost in Midtown!”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” Paulsen said. “Now get there. I’m not going to have detectives from another zone waiting around on our clock.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, hanging up.
I looked up at Cherabino. Her hair was sticking straight up on one side, pillow marks on her cheek. Her pajama pants were imprinted with teddy bears, an interesting contrast with the oversized police department shirt. I could see she didn’t have on a bra, and I had to look away before I embarrassed myself.
“Another case?” she asked.
“Yeah.” I grabbed my bag from the floor. “Atlanta city cops think they’ve found another one of our murders down by old City Hall East. We’re supposed to be there ASAP. Can I borrow your bathroom?”
She pointed me to the one in the hall, her brain waves slow, tired.
I threw my bag on the counter and closed the door. If we were going to somebody else’s territory, I needed to shave.
While I waited for Cherabino to finish her shower—and so I wouldn’t picture the process—I sat down by the phone in her dini
ng room. My stomach roiled, unhappy with the fruit-and-nuts oatmeal. I’m sure stress had nothing to do with it.
Cherabino had left the number on a scrap of torn paper on the dining room table. I stared at it for a long moment, called Swartz for courage.
He’d been up for hours, of course, and was just about ready to go to school. “What are you waiting for?” he said pointedly. “Call her. You have to face the fear, or it gets power over you. More every day.”
He let me chitchat a little longer before he told me, “Now call her,” and hung up.
I stared at the piece of paper for a long time before I dialed.
The phone rang, and I answered Kara’s hello with who it was and the fact that this wasn’t social. “I’m working with the DeKalb County police. I was the one who called you yesterday to report the abuse and”—I gritted my teeth—“ask for your help.”
On the other end of the phone, there was a long, long silence. Then I heard a funny clicking, Kara tapping her teeth with her tongue the way she did when she was thinking. It was like a stab to the heart, and it made me angry all over again. “What do you need exactly?” she asked me.
Kara was Guild to the core; her whole family was Guild, and while she only rated a heavy four on the telepath scale (and only with touch), her Jumping marks were off the charts. She was trained, she was smart, and as she’d proven by me, slavishly devoted to the Guild and to its whole ethical and political system. She had all the right background and connections—and the Ability—to be a good political courier. I’d known, we’d discussed, from there it was a short step to big-city politics, and then to the international stage. So it made sense she would be the city attaché. It also made sense she’d be the one handling the call from DeKalb; as much as metro Atlanta cared about jurisdiction and breaking up the city, the Guild didn’t give a damn. But that didn’t mean I had to like it. It didn’t mean I had to like it at all.
I made a fist. Let it go. Looked down. I could do this. I would do this. “Can you meet this afternoon?”
“Where?”
“The AT&T plaza, by the ice cream place. Do you remember?” We’d stopped for dessert on a date there once. It gave me heartburn to suggest it, but there was a very good reason to meet there in particular, so I’d suck it up.
