Open Minds

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  The laser-straight road went on for an endless hour. I kept glancing behind me, expecting to see a military vehicle bearing down on me, but there were only scrub brush and low sandstone mesas to break up the scenery. At the first micro town, filled with whitewashed trailers and an enormous school in the middle of nowhere, I ditched the electric car and stole another one. I quickly got back on the road, but it seemed like I wasn’t moving at all, only replaying the same bit of dry, desert highway mile after mile. The brilliant blue sky was the same one I had seen overhead for the last two weeks in the camp, only now it wasn’t broken up by camouflage netting and it seemed almost too blue—like it had scared away the clouds with its brilliance.

  The car was running out of charge, so I stopped at the next tiny Navajo town and switched vehicles again. The Feds seemed to have been thrown off, at least temporarily. The next car had a navigator and more range with its hydro power. I jacked into the mindware and set an autopath to Route 40 and got back on the road.

  Route 40 seemed like a tremendously large highway on the navigator, yet it was only slightly wider than Route 191. Still, I headed west toward Winslow, which the navigator insisted had some decent rail transportation. I wasn’t sure where I was headed, only that I needed to be somewhere with people so I could hide among them until I figured out a plan.

  It was one thing to want to take on the Feds and another thing altogether to know what to do. I was sure the Feds would keep looking for me, even if they were delayed by my sim. After all, by escaping their high-security camp, I had just proven I was a dangerous, new breed of jacker that could defeat their security measures.

  Simon’s last breath kept playing over and over in my mind. I wished he had said something, or I could have read the remnants of his mind. At least linked in to let him know he wasn’t alone. And to say goodbye.

  The afternoon sun blinded me with its glare. An hour later, arriving at Winslow seemed like returning to civilization. Terra-cotta shingle roofs and rows of slender adobe-colored houses spaced to meet the range codes sang of order and normal life. People bustled along the tourist shops and restaurants.

  When I switched to manual controls and pulled up to a parking lot at the edge of downtown, I stopped at the entrance. How was I supposed to park in these tiny spaces that seemed barely big enough for a scooter? I was the clear master of preprogrammed autopaths on open stretches of desert road devoid of other cars, but I hadn’t taken any actual driving lessons. That was supposed to happen next summer, before I got my license. The idea of driving lessons seemed to belong to another lifetime. I circled the lot several times until I found three spaces together. I barely made it into the spot without crashing.

  Before I left the car, I reached out to all the minds around me to turn their focus elsewhere. The tourist at the parking meter, the t-shirt vendor tending his cart, the waitress taking an order at the café—anyone that could possibly see or hear me. I was about to step out of the car when I realized that one man, the docent at the trading-post-turned-visitor-center, was a jacker.

  Even in tiny Winslow, Arizona, there were jackers hiding in plain sight. It made me wonder how many thousands of us there were, all hidden in the reader world.

  His mind barrier was weak, and I could have easily jacked in and controlled him. Instead, I slipped out of the car and padded across the parking lot in the opposite direction from the visitors’ center. If I avoided his notice, he wouldn’t detect the blank spot of my mind in the presence of all the readers.

  Trinket shops and art galleries lined the main street, which traced old Route 66. I turned people’s heads away as I walked past. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten, and an old-fashioned red-and-white diner beckoned from down the street. A bell tinkled as I opened the door. I made sure all seven occupants—including the fry cook—thought their hearing was impaired and kept their eyes away from the door where I stood.

  Cherry pie rotated on a display on the counter. I took a slice and sat on one of the red vinyl stools welded to the floor in front of the bar. The waitress passed by without a glance and took a plate to one of the customers that she could see.

  I was the Invisible Girl—again.

  Maybe someday I would have a normal life, where I could walk into a diner and be served like everyone else. Simon had joined a gang of criminals and lied to everyone he knew, just to have a chance at that. Laney never had the chance to lie, her abilities betraying her before she could even try to pretend.

  Now she was in a government medical facility somewhere, and no one knew about it. No one knew Simon was dead. Only the Feds, with their secret jacker camp, had any idea what was going on. And if they caught up to me, I would disappear for real, like Laney and Simon.

  They probably had an all-points bulletin out for me already.

  Cameras!

  I scanned the room wildly for a moment and let out a long low breath when I saw there were no cameras in this tiny diner off Route 66. But that wouldn’t be true everywhere. I needed to be more careful.

  I went to find a fork and grabbed a glass of water from the half dozen the busboy had queued up. My throat was still recovering from the gas and the desert and the hours of driving, so I took my time with the bites and sips. When I was done, I stacked my dishes by the busboy’s pile and opened the door slowly to avoid ringing the bell.

  Across the street from the diner was the Posada Hotel, which the navigator had told me was also the train station. Crossing the red cobbled road, I ducked into the shaded arches that framed the train station entrance. I shoved open the green dust-covered doors and stepped into the dark polished-wood interior.

  The schedule board showed two daily trains out of Winslow—one heading west to Los Angeles, and one heading east to… Chicago. An empty feeling hollowed out my bones.

  Chicago.

  Home.

  It was dangerous to go home. Probably the worst place I could pick. But I needed my dad’s help to figure out a plan. And part of me still wanted to know why he hadn’t told me the truth, leaving me to the mercy of Simon and the Clan.

  I focused on the schedule. The eastbound train came once each day at six in the morning. That was more than twelve hours away. The empty train depot had no cameras, only southwestern artwork on the walls. I slipped through the doors connecting the train station to the hotel. As long as there were no cameras, I could persuade the hotel clerk to give me a room. I would hole up until the train came and hope the Feds didn’t find me before morning.

  Then I would go home and make things right.

  The rumbling sounded like far-off thunder, but I knew it was only the crack of the rifle.

  A changeling zigzagged across the desert, her bare feet kicking up puffs of dust as she ran. I lined up my sights, correcting for the distance, the rippling atmospheric effects of the heat, and the motion of my target: a dangerous mutant jacker escaping from prison. All I had to do was gently squeeze the trigger and her blood would soak into the parched ground…

  I gasped and bolted upright on the fold-out sleeper bench. I reflexively reached out to scan the occupants of the train, but there were still no jackers on board. Fields of prairie grass whipped past the window.

  I wasn’t a sniper. I didn’t kill anyone. I was heading home.

  The night before had been a fitful struggle to sleep as I twisted myself up in the hotel sheets only to wake and untwist them again. Fatigue pulled on me the next morning, so I opted for a sleeper cabin on the train. Jacking an image of my Grandma O’Donnell into the conductor’s mind, along with a postcard I had stolen and ripped into the size of a train ticket, had won me a tip of his hat and an escort to my room. He offered the seventy-five-year-old woman he saw before him a bottle of water and left me in a room that was slightly larger than my closet at home. I locked the thin, metal door and sank deep into the sofa. The motion of the bullet train lulled me into a stupor, while we rocketed toward Chicago. Sleep must have claimed me… until the nightmare had startled me awake.


  I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes to clear the remnants of sleep and swung my feet over the edge of the sofa.

  So far, the Feds hadn’t come crashing through the door of my micro-sized cabin. Maybe they had given up looking for me altogether. Or maybe they were waiting at Chicago’s Union Station to arrest me when I disembarked. My luck didn’t go so far as to have no cameras at the guard gate back at the camp. They could probably figure out who had escaped, in spite of not doing a regular attendance roll-call at the camp.

  Even if I wasn’t caught on camera, they might piece it together once they found the dead boy in the desert. I wondered what they had done with Simon’s body. My stomach twisted as I pictured him dying under my hands. The true memories of the smiles and kisses were swallowed up by that last moment. At least my memories of Simon were in my mind somewhere and hadn’t been stolen.

  Unlike Raf, whose memory had been wiped by Agent Kestrel. Raf remembered nothing of that night at the warehouse when he found out my secret and held my hand and told me that everything would be fine. But that memory was emblazoned in my mind. Someday, I hoped Kestrel would pay for stealing Raf’s true memories. In the meantime, I wanted Raf to know the truth.

  About me. About everything.

  I lay back on the foam-cushioned bench and imagined the words that I would use to explain. Hours of train ride lay ahead of me, plenty of time to choose my words and plan for station cameras and transportation. I only hoped there wouldn’t be jacker FBI agents waiting.

  ~*~

  I stole a Cubs baseball hat from a poor kid who was coming to Chicago New Metro to visit his grandma. There was no way to make up for it, so I erased the memory of the hat from his mind. I shuffled through the Union Station crowd, clutching a stolen jacket and ducking my head away from potential cameras. Halfway to the transfer station, I changed my mind and reached back to restore the boy’s true memory. Better to think he lost it, than to have a memory stolen from him, no matter how small.

  I gave a fake tally card to the station attendant and got a transfer ticket that would take me out on the T-94, with a switch to the T-41 taking me all the way to Gurnee. Ancient brownstones whizzed past my window seat, jammed up against one another. I shuddered at the idea of so many people living so close together. The sun sank below the horizon and transformed the Chicago skyline into jagged glittering teeth. I was glad I would be out of the city before it got dark.

  When I finally reached the Gurnee stop on the T-41, I was momentarily confounded. The autocab wouldn’t accept a fake tally card, and I didn’t have any real unos on me, so I ended up walking. The trim, neat yards and equally-spaced, spindly houses of my town looked the same, but my skin prickled as though every darkening shadow held a jacker agent. I reached out and swept the neighboring streets, just to be sure.

  I stopped several blocks away from my house at a park where Raf and I used to play as kids. I reached across the suburban houses to scan my home. It was one thing to suspect the Feds might stake out my house, and quite another to find two jacker agents parked outside. I slumped into a swing and pumped my legs. The street lights flickered on to hem the edges of the park with spotlights. The swings and I were hidden in the gloom.

  I brushed the agents’ minds, keeping it light so they wouldn’t sense me. They were watching the Cubs game on their phones and not paying much attention to their stakeout. I flitted across the minds inside my house and was surprised to find Seamus home, as well as my mom and dad. Of course they would have recalled my dad back from his overseas duty when this whole thing went down, but Seamus should be at school. Mom seemed to agree, as she was deep in an argument with him about returning to West Point.

  The hard marbles of the agents’ presence were jacked into both their minds, yet were strangely absent from my dad’s mind. It wasn’t because he had an Impenetrable Mind like me. I could easily have pushed past his medium-hard mind barrier, if I wanted. My dad wasn’t a linker, but he wasn’t the strongest jacker I’d come across either.

  Just average.

  My shoulders sagged. Maybe my dad wouldn’t have the answers I needed after all.

  The agents probably stayed out of my dad’s mind by the same kind of jacker code that existed in the camp—jacking into a jacker’s mind was asking for a fight. Unless he was working with them. A shiver ran down my back. No. My dad seemed to tolerate the agents’ presence in Mom’s and Seamus’s minds as a condition of staying in our home.

  I swallowed. The Feds might arrest my family too.

  I couldn’t reach any deeper into Mom’s or Seamus’s minds without alerting the agents. They weren’t very strong jackers, and I could probably knock them out before they suspected my presence. But why wouldn’t the Feds put their strongest jackers on surveillance duty? Maybe it was a trap. If I knocked them out, the Feds would swoop in and capture me. Or worse, take my family, once they knew I was watching. Make me turn myself in.

  The park grew darker as the last of the sun’s light disappeared from the day. The agents couldn’t know I was home, but I needed help and answers from my dad. He paced alone in his room, and his thoughts skittered between hatred for Agent Kestrel and ways to convince him to release me from the camp. Well, we had our feelings for Agent Kestrel in common. My dad sat down on the edge of the bed and nervously bounced his leg.

  I hesitated, afraid he might inadvertently tip off the surveillance crew outside. I took a deep breath and linked a thought to him. Dad. His mind-scent reminded me of early morning dew.

  He jerked up from the bed. Kira! The thought was so strong, I was afraid he had said it aloud.

  Be quiet! They might hear you. I almost jacked in and made it a command, which made my stomach clench. I wanted answers, but not the way Molloy got them out of Simon.

  It’s okay. The agents outside aren’t monitoring my thoughts.

  I know. I wanted to explain, yet at the last second, I held back. If my dad knew what I was capable of, Kestrel could drill through his mind to find it. It was dangerous to talk to my dad at all, but I needed his help.

  Kira, where are you? he thought. I’ve been trying to get you released. How did you get out? His mind was a jumble of guesses, but I couldn’t tell him anything about that without tipping my hand to Kestrel.

  That’s not important. He reached out and searched for me, but he couldn’t sense me three blocks away in the park. His reach was the same as an ordinary jacker. And you should stop reaching for me, in case you alert the agents.

  Right. He pulled back and tried to figure out how I reached him if he couldn’t reach me. Then a dread filled him, as he wondered what else I could do that he couldn’t.

  This sparked a flare of anger that I threw at him. Why didn’t you tell me you were a jacker?

  He cringed under the force of my thoughts, and I pulled back a little. I’m sorry, Kira! We didn’t think… your mom and I thought it would be best if you didn’t know. Until you were older. And then you didn’t change, and we thought maybe…

  You thought I would be a zero, like Grandma. I didn’t try to hide my bitterness. No sense letting the family mental reject in on the big family secret: hey Kira, not only aren’t you a reader, you’re not a jacker either! Sorry about your luck. In some twisted way, maybe they were trying to spare my feelings, but it only felt like lies.

  Grandma O’Donnell was a jacker, Kira, he thought.

  My thoughts turned upside down. What?

  She was one of the very first ones, and a strong jacker, too, he thought. But she saw what happened to her dad. You remember the experiments the government did on Great-Grandpa Reilly and the other early readers—she didn’t want that happening to her.

  So, she pretended to be a zero? For her whole life?

  Yes, he thought. It upset your mom a lot.

  Because she was embarrassed. I know. The bitterness came back, a foul taste in my mouth. No one had ever said it out loud, but I had always known. Appearances were important to my mom, even in her semi-heremi
ta lifestyle. I had embarrassed her, just like her mom.

  No! Anger colored his thoughts. Because your mom had to keep it a secret from everyone. You know how hard it is for readers to keep secrets.

  A dull ache pulled at my chest.

  My reader-mom had to keep Grandma O’Donnell’s jacker-secret her entire life. No wonder my mom kept her distance from people outside the family. Grandma’s secret had cost my mom a lot.

  The stars peeked through the nighttime haze at the park. If I had known my mom was so good at keeping secrets, I would have trusted her with mine. And if she knew Grandma’s secret, then she must have known Dad’s too.

  So when Mom met you…

  I knew she could keep my secret as well, he finished.

  But you didn’t think I could! Never mind that I had lied to them; they had lied to me first.

  You were young, and we thought you might still change, he thought. It’s hard enough for adult readers to keep secrets, but for changelings it’s practically impossible. We couldn’t have your changeling thoughts running around the school.

  Well, thanks for nothing! I pulled out of his head, all the way back to my own. The swing had come to a rest, and my feet dragged in the wood chips piled below it. I kicked them, and they flew out and disappeared into the millions of wood chips filling the park. I knew Dad was right, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. I curled my fists around the swing chains and wondered if they had told Seamus. Did he know the big Moore family secret, all this time? That generations of mutant jackers filled our family tree?