Open Minds

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  I tipped my head to the back, and a wave of dizziness swept over me. Whether it was from the gas or the heart palpitations, we were running out of time. The only way to keep from passing out was to vent the gas out the back doors—or leave the truck altogether.

  The guards at the perimeter gate had guns. Big guns. Molloy had scrubbed a true memory about one jacker who had shorted out the fences and cut his way through, somehow sprinting across the gas in the no-man’s-land to saw a hole through the outer fence. He was shot. He died right at the fence line and lay there until the next drop shipment when the Feds took his body away.

  I didn’t want to mess with a gun that picked off escaping prisoners half a mile away.

  That meant staying in the truck as long as possible. But we had to reduce the intensity of the gas. If we opened the doors a crack, maybe that would vent enough of the gas to keep us awake. If not, we would have to get out. The truck was slow enough that we could follow along behind and use it as a shield. Then we’d be free of the gas, and I could reach farther and knock out the tower guards sooner.

  I pulled Simon toward the rear of the truck. He stumbled a bit on the way, but caught himself before he fell. We should open the doors, just a crack, I linked the thought to him. So the guards can’t see, in case they’re watching.

  Okay, Simon thought, but the orange mist was fuzzing his brain. Sweat made our hands slippery. I laced my fingers through his for a better grip, and he gave me a smile in return. He was willing to go along with the plan, which was good enough.

  Wrapping my fingers around the hot metal handle of the rear door, I slowly pulled it down, careful to only open it a couple of inches and holding tight in case the door went flapping wide and alerted the guards.

  A blaring horn startled me into losing my grip on the handle. The truck lurched to a stop, sending Simon and me flying toward the front and banging the door shut again. The alarm reverberated through the truck a second time.

  Oh no.

  Any element of surprise was gone; the truck was stopped dead in its tracks and screaming in distress. I scrambled to my feet and towed Simon to the back door. As I flung it open, a wave of hot desert air swept into the truck. I leaped down and brought Simon with me, still tethered by our joined hands. Our hearts continued to pound blood through our brains, and each lungful of gas-free desert air brought more relief. My head started to clear and Simon was more alert.

  What now? he asked as we crouched behind the open back of the truck. I pulled out of Simon’s mind and let the adrenaline pumping through our systems keep our hearts racing. Free of controlling our heart rates, I stretched forward to the limits of my reach, but I couldn’t sense the guards. The dusty windows of the truck obscured the hard-packed road ahead, so I peeked through the slit between the flung-open door and the truck body. The guard post floated on a shimmering layer of desert-heated air. It was tough to gauge how far it was. A thousand feet? Two? Either way, I had to get closer and the truck wasn’t going to help anymore.

  I linked back into Simon’s head. I’ll have to run. I licked away the dryness on my lips from the desert dust and the gas. I’m not close enough yet.

  He shook his head. Not without me.

  His injured leg was still wrapped with the homemade bandages I had made. Simon was in no condition to run, and he would only slow me down. I’ll come back for you once I knock the guards out. I checked the slit again. We don’t have much time. They know something’s wrong.

  Simon shook his head again, and an image of me fleeing the gate without him popped into his mind. I swiped dust out of my eyes. I’m not going to leave you. I promise.

  His thoughts switched to the danger from the guns. Of course, it was risky to leave the truck, but there wasn’t much choice. We weren’t going to escape at all if I didn’t get close enough to knock out the guards. Simon tried to push me out of his head. I didn’t understand why, but I pulled out anyway.

  “I don’t want you to get shot,” he said. “Ruins my chances for escape, you know?” He gave me a half smile, and I couldn’t help returning it.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want to get shot either. If I don’t get moving, we’re never getting out of here.”

  He bit his lip and leaned over me to peek through the slit. “Okay. Run back and forth, not straight at the gate. Make it harder for them to target you. And run fast.”

  I gave him a cockeyed look.

  “Just be careful.” He gave my hand a squeeze before slipping his fingers out from mine.

  I shuffled to the end of the open door and curled my fingers around the hot metal edge. I focused my mind forward one more time, but I still couldn’t sense anything. Taking two large gulps of gas-free air, I gave Simon a nod and tore around the corner of the door.

  The heat of the sun-baked ground burned through the soles of my shoes as they pounded the dirt. I veered off to the right, then left, trying to change direction as randomly as I could. The running and surge of adrenaline pounded my heart, allowing me to focus on stretching farther and farther forward.

  Still nothing.

  It seemed as if the guard gate must not be real, an actual mirage floating above the desert. I kept reaching anyway.

  A rumbling sound rolled across the hard-baked desert floor, and I checked the clear blue sky above. It seemed demens to have thunder without clouds, but I didn’t have time to think about it. A small cloud of dirt rose from the ground to my left, making me jump, and then a second later another roll of thunder.

  I skittered to the right and another puff of dust exploded out of the ground, even closer than before, followed by another rumbling across the desert. My brain finally put it together—they were shooting at me. My legs had new energy down to the soles of my feet, ignoring the burn in my muscles and hopping me back and forth like a crazed jackrabbit. I reached even further forward, until I sensed the barest whisper of the minds of the guards. Still not close enough to jack. Another roll of thunder sounded, but there were no more clouds of dust. The sniper’s aim must be getting worse with my fancy footwork.

  I strained to see details of the guard post through the glare of the desert. Maybe if I could see the guards, I could hone in on those phantom whispers.

  Two more air-crackling peals of rifle shots split the air before I found the mind of the sniper. I made his eyes cross while I sprinted a few more yards, bringing me just close enough. His mind shut down as I knocked him out.

  The thunder booms stopped, but I kept running. I flitted across the minds of the guards, who were now in a full state of panic. Eight. I found one on the radio, calling another guard post for backup. He was a reader, along with the other two guards in the command tower, so I easily knocked them out. That left four more: one wrestling to reload the sniper’s gun, the others manning their own rifles and trying to find me with their scopes.

  None of them were jackers. I knocked them all out.

  I slowed my pace and scanned again for more guards. There were none, but the others would be on the way, and soon. I braced my hands on my knees, wheezing from the run, and reached back to the truck to tell Simon the coast was clear.

  He wasn’t there.

  My head snapped up. The truck sat abandoned on the dirt road a few hundred feet behind me. I scanned twice, three times. There was no one there. Had he run? I swept my mind and eyes out, searching for any sign of him. I found him lying motionless in the dirt a hundred feet away. His mind was a shadow of its normal strength.

  My legs were carrying me to him before I could think what do to. I stumbled and fell forward, skinning my knees and grinding stones into my hands. I scrambled back to my feet, praying he only tripped and fell. When I reached him, his leg was bent back and his eyes were squeezed shut.

  There were no thoughts in his mind. It was hollow like an abandoned room, and when I tried to jack him awake, my efforts only echoed uselessly against the edges. I knelt down to shake him physically as well as mentally, desperate to reach him. “Simon!”

 
; Then a red pool started to spread underneath him. No. My hands fluttered over him, landing where the bullet had gone in. A deep red circle spread from the dark hole. I pressed my hands to the spot and searched through his mind to find a way to fix him. Stop the bleeding! Stop! I commanded his brain, but I couldn’t make it comply. His mind was becoming less substantial with every passing second, as if it was fading away.

  Simon, please wake up! His mind was more ghostly with each failing heartbeat. It sucked me in like a vacuum, deeper and deeper into nothingness. I had to pull back or be dragged into that blackness with him.

  I was staring at him, hands pressed to his chest, when his last breath escaped him.

  A shudder rippled through my arms. I stood and stepped back from Simon’s body. Anger, red and raw, boiled inside me. My hands clenched, sweaty and wet.

  They should pay for what they had done.

  I reached toward the guard tower, seeking out the sniper, but I was too far away. My legs sprinted forward, my arms pumping and my mind stretching. When I was close enough, I found the guard who had shot Simon. Who killed Simon.

  He was still unconscious. I tunneled deep into his mind and slowed his heart. I wondered if he would die slowly like Simon, life leaking out of him, never knowing what happened. The gunman’s heart thudded, a slow gong in his chest, and his mind began to soften and grow empty, like Simon’s. Pictures of a young girl and a woman with brown, shining hair flashed through it. His daughter. His wife. He wanted to keep them safe from the dangerous jackers in the camp.

  I jerked back out of his head and stumbled over a rock I couldn’t see through the blur of tears in my eyes. I fell and scraped my hands on the hard-baked ground. The pain raked through my mind like a razor-sharp claw.

  What am I doing?

  I wanted him to pay for killing Simon. But… those images… I couldn’t. I ground my hands into the fire-hot dirt as I pushed off the ground, standing and rubbing my eyes with the backs of my hands. Reaching forward again, I sped up the guard’s heart until it was beating normally.

  Simon’s body lay in the dirt behind me. It was wrong that he was dead. Wrong that he was lying in the dust and would never get up again.

  My feet were glued to the desert floor.

  Simon should be coming with me. To convince me to live a life of lies with him. To start over somewhere new. To pretend that we were normal. He should be next to me, trying to get me to open the gates and free the Clan and the rest of the jackers the Feds had sent here.

  The camp was a shrouded, desert-camouflaged mound in the distance. If I jacked the tower guard to open the inner gates, Molloy and his Clan would almost certainly kill the guards. And then the entire camp would be loose, heading to whatever town was closest in this desert wasteland. A thousand camp-hardened jackers descending on a town full of defenseless readers. A chill rippled through me, picturing what some of those jackers might do, then the chill settled into a cold pool in my stomach. Daniel and the other changelings like Laney—how could I leave them behind, stuck in prison full of monsters?

  In the distance, a dust cloud trailed from a pair of trucks racing along the periphery of the fence. The other guards. They were coming, and I was still a thousand feet from the gate.

  I promised I would let all the prisoners all go.

  I lied.

  My legs unlocked, and I raced toward the command tower, waking the guard and ordering him to open the outer perimeter gate. The oncoming trucks were much faster than me, but they were stuck hugging the edge of the fence. My legs burned as I ran, but a single thought seared into my head. A promise. I’ll come back for you. Somehow, I would free the changelings I was leaving trapped behind the camp’s fence. Somehow, I would make the Feds pay for killing Simon.

  By the time I flew through the outer gates, the approaching trucks still weren’t close enough for me to reach. A truck parked near the gate had a passkey dangling from the dash. I jacked into the mindware interface, and the metallic taste stung the back of my tongue as I switched the truck to manual controls.

  I climbed in and gripped the joystick, pulling onto the makeshift dirt road leading away from the guard tower. My hands felt slippery, like the joystick was greased. I glanced down to find it smeared with something dark and red. My stomach lurched, and I used my shirt to hastily wipe away Simon’s blood from the hard, plastic grip. I rubbed my hands on my shirt until the slippery feeling was gone. My chest was so tight that I could barely pull in a breath.

  I left the jacker camp behind as fast as the truck would take me.

  It had taken four washings, with soap, to get Simon’s blood off my hands.

  The blood had seeped into my cuticles and under my fingernails and dried while I drove like mad away from the camp. I stuffed my blood-smeared t-shirt deep in the trash can of the Navajo Lutheran Thrift Shop bathroom and slipped my arms through the shirt I had stolen. My hands shook so badly, it was difficult to get the hot pink t-shirt over my head. Then I sat on the cold, miniature-tiled floor and hugged myself hard. My teeth chattered from the shaking, so I clamped my hand over my mouth and focused on breathing through my nose.

  Simon was dead.

  I couldn’t stop the bleeding. I couldn’t even wake him. He died alone on the desert floor. My stomach lurched, as it had countless times since I left the camp.

  Simon had run out and gotten himself killed. But why? Why did he leave the truck, where he was safe, when all he had to do was wait for me to jack the guards?

  I knew why, but the truth made me want to twist up my pink shirt and scream. He had told me why. “I don’t want you to get shot.” He had tried to draw their fire, by running out after me.

  And it worked.

  Tears spilled down my face, and I bunched my knees tighter to my chest, rocking back and banging against the tiled wall of the bathroom. He had sacrificed himself to make sure I got out, but it didn’t make sense that he would run out to catch a sniper’s bullet for me. We weren’t Romeo and Juliet in some demens tragedy. Or did he actually love me after all of the lies and betrayals?

  Simon had lied to me from the beginning. He knew long before I did that I was different—that my Impenetrable Mind was unique, something he had never seen before. That my hard head and extra range gave me an edge over other jackers and the Feds. That I was something they didn’t expect.

  That maybe I was the one who could change things.

  Someone needed to free the changelings that were still trapped in the camp. And someone had to stop the experiments the Feds were conducting on kids like Laney. With my Impenetrable Mind and my dad’s help, maybe I could do more than just make things right at home. Maybe I could do something about those horrors. Then Simon’s death would count for something.

  I suspected that Simon knew that too.

  I angrily brushed the tears away to clear my vision. Simon had paid a huge price to make sure I got out of the camp. I wouldn’t waste that by crying in the bathroom and letting myself get caught again. The Feds were probably tracking me already.

  I pushed myself up from the floor, clenching and unclenching my fists. Avoiding the mirror above the sink, I splashed my face several times and then cupped my hands, gulping down water to soothe my gas-ravaged throat. My hand didn’t shake so badly when I pulled open the bathroom door.

  When I came into the thrift shop, I made sure the short Navajo woman behind the counter was busy folding scarves and the even shorter Navajo grandma was focused on sorting clothes in the back room, jacking them to ignore me as I left in my new hot pink t-shirt.

  As I stepped out of the thrift shop, a blast of dry desert air whipped the tears off my face. When I had left the camp, the truck’s navigator had directed me northeast, across the hard-baked desert to a paved road, and fifteen miles later, I came upon the tiny town of Rock Point, Arizona. The Navajo Lutheran Church complex dominated the town, with a church and school in addition to the thrift shop. The buildings were old and too close together, as if frozen in time and covered
with a hundred years of desert dust.

  Patches of scrub brush were scattered between a half dozen trailers and a hydrogen charger station. I had left the truck where I had crashed it—smashed into a pole by the charger station that had appeared out of nowhere when I had tried to park under a covered awning. Driving was a lot simpler than parking, it seemed.

  Maybe the Feds would come after me once they revived the guards and made sure there wasn’t a full-scale prison break. At the very least, they could track the truck’s navigator. I needed to keep moving, and for that I had to get a new vehicle.

  I rounded the corner of the Thrift Shop, and my heart stuttered. A camouflage-colored military-style truck had parked behind my crashed one, half under the awning. I ducked back out of sight and tentatively reached out with my mind. One of the reinforcement guards from the camp was heading toward the charger-station shop. He was a reader, and I almost reflexively knocked him out, but that would only alert the Feds to my presence. And there might be more guards on the way.

  I reached into the mind of the shop owner, an older Navajo man, and planted a sim. I made him believe he had seen me come in with the truck. I was driving erratically, as if maybe I had been shot. He saw my bloody hands when I came in, and I forced him to give me some food and water. Then I left out the back, heading out on foot into the scrub brush. When the guard entered his shop, the older man relayed my carefully crafted sim and conjectured that I must be heading out to the nearby sandstone bluffs to hole up in the caves there.

  I quieted my gasping breaths while the guard hurried out of the shop, jumped in his truck, and chased my sim across the desert. I had bought myself a little time, but I didn’t know how much.

  I reached back into the Thrift Shop to scan the minds of the two ladies. The younger one always left her rusted electric car unlocked and parked in back. I edged around the building and started it up. The manual joystick was difficult to turn, but I managed to quietly slide out onto Highway 191. Her relic of a vehicle didn’t have a navigator, so I lifted from her mind that civilization was to the south. The Feds shouldn’t be searching for me in an ancient electric car. I tried to drive like I hadn’t just broken out of prison.