Open Minds

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  Down one flight of stairs was a door labeled 1B. The stairs continued down another level, but this was the door from Kestrel’s forced memories. I very gingerly reached out to brush Granite Guard’s mind and yanked back when he immediately sensed my presence. That might have lost us the element of surprise, which was almost all we had in our favor. I quickly pressed the passring to the door scanner and punched in the code. It opened to a short, gray concrete hallway with Granite Guard sitting in a chair at the far end, propped up against a metal door. His fatigues complemented the military weapons magazine he was reading.

  His head snapped up as soon as we stepped through the door.

  I needed to get closer before he figured out what was wrong, but it was too late. We’d only gone a few steps down the thirty foot hallway, when he pushed me out of the nurse and orderly’s minds and pressed on mine. I jacked back in, and they stopped in their tracks, while he and I wrestled in their minds. The guard charged toward me. I could barely press on his mind barrier, much less control him.

  I grabbed the syringe out of the nurse’s hand. When Granite Guard reached me, I whirled and shoved the syringe into his neck, hoping to get lucky and hit a vein. He roared and yanked out the syringe, and it clattered on the concrete floor. He closed his enormous hand around my throat and pinned me against the wall. All of his attention was focused on trying to jack into my mind. Stars swam before my eyes, but instead of fighting Granite Guard, I jacked the orderly, who grabbed the guard from behind and caused him to lose his grip on me.

  I fell hard to the floor and scrambled away. The nurse stood like a frozen mannequin, so I commanded her to grab the guard as well. While the orderly and nurse clung to him like errant children, I sprinted down the corridor to the door. I waved Kestrel’s passring by the control pad and punched in the code as quickly as I could.

  Then I saw the gun.

  The guard had managed to pull it out while wrestling with the nurse and orderly. I yanked open the door, flung myself inside, and pulled it shut behind me. I didn’t hear any shots.

  Safe behind the locked door, I jacked with all my might into the guard’s mind. The sedative must have gone in, because his mind was slowly weakening as it took hold. He kept trying to work himself free of the orderly and nurse’s grip, but it was a losing battle between my jacking and the sedative, and he soon slumped to the floor. I ordered the nurse to take the gun and keep watch over him until I got back.

  The next time I infiltrated a jacker prison, I was definitely bringing a dart gun.

  My gasping breaths echoed down the hallway, which appeared identical to the image in Kestrel’s mind. Doors with small, high windows lined the corridor, and the smell of antiseptic pervaded the air. A frosted-glass double door loomed at the end.

  I ran from door to door, using the passring to unlock them, and threw the doors open. Each room held a changeling, four boys and three girls, except for one with an empty bed. None were Laney. She must be already in the medical room. I swiped Kestrel’s passring to open the glass doors and surprised the two camouflage-clad technicians inside. They were readers, so I froze them, not wanting to knock them out in case I needed them.

  Laney lay strapped to a gurney and hooked to an IV. An array of probes was attached to a skullcap on her head, and the med techs had been preparing to inject something into her. I tugged off the cap and shoved the tray of syringes away from her bedside. She was still under the effects of the gas, but it was muted. I slowly jacked her out of her gas-induced sleep while I unhooked the IV and started undoing the straps.

  “Kira?” she said when she opened her eyes. “You’re really here? I had a dream about you.”

  “Yeah. I’m really here.” My throat choked up, so I didn’t try to explain any further. I gently probed her mind to see if they had injected anything other than the juice. She seemed fine.

  I cleared my throat. “Can you walk?” She nodded, and I helped her up from the bed. An alarm blared through the room and startled us both so much we almost toppled over. Keeping my grip on Laney, I reached with my mind up to the main floor. The camera-watching guard had seen a video sweep of the disabled guard in the hallway and sounded a security alert. I jacked him to disable the alarm, but I was sure it was too late. This was a military base, and other security personnel would be on the way soon. I knocked him out.

  “What was that?” Laney asked.

  “Time for us to go.” I ordered the med techs to come with us as I hurried to the double glass doors. A large sign hung on a refrigerator next to the door: “No Food or Drink.” I remembered Kestrel’s warning that I couldn’t stop them, that they would keep doing their research no matter what. I could save these changelings, but there would always be others to take their place.

  I yanked open the refrigerator door, and racks of liquid filled vials clinked together. The labels were covered with medical terms I didn’t understand, but one rack stood separate from the rest on the top shelf. Messy handwriting had scrawled across it: K. Moore.

  A chill ran through me. My blood… or something… my DNA for sure. How could they have possibly gotten it? Then I remembered I had already been through a similar gray corridor with doors. Doors with small, high windows.

  I had been here before.

  When Kestrel interrogated me, I had assumed I was in an FBI building, but I wasn’t. I was here in the hospital. I jacked into the minds of the med techs and found that there was another holding facility—directly below us. The stairwell past door 1B must lead down to another level where they kept prisoners.

  I reached down one floor—there wasn’t anyone in the holding rooms below.

  The polished steel cabinets and cold, tiled floor of the medical room felt familiar. Had I been in this room? Had they taken me here, unconscious like Laney, and experimented on me? A shiver ran up my back and made my hair stand up. Was I different because Kestrel did something to me?

  Someone like me, or even stronger, in Kestrel’s hands… it had to be stopped.

  I grabbed the chilled vials with my name on them and slipped them into Kestrel’s coat pocket, trading them for the silver phone I had stolen. I dialed the number I had memorized.

  Maria answered on the first ring. “Hello?”

  “I found them.” My voice squeaked, so I cleared it. “But it’s even worse than I thought.” I switched the phone to video streaming mode and panned the room, so she could see the gurney with the straps, the trays of syringes, the two camouflaged med-techs standing still with their glassy-eyed looks.

  “Did you get that?” I spoke quietly.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “It’s the basement of the Naval hospital, where they’ve been experimenting on the changelings.” I pointed the phone at the still open refrigerator, filled with racks of vials. “You need to stop them, Maria. Make sure everyone knows what’s going on here.”

  “I need a witness. Someone to verify this before I can tru-cast it. Turn the camera on your face. Talk to me. Tell me what you’ve found.”

  “Are you recording all this?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I imagined what Kestrel would do to my dad if he found out I had exposed his crimes. My plan was to run, hide, make a new life after freeing the changelings. If I went on camera, there would be no hiding after that. And that was assuming we got out alive, which wasn’t going to happen if I stuck around doing an exposé on the medical torment chamber.

  I swallowed hard. “I can’t.”

  “But…”

  I clicked off the phone and then swept my arm through the refrigerator and dumped racks of vials on the floor. Maybe I could slow Kestrel down. Some of them broke on impact, and some went skittering across the floor, making a hazardous mess. I stomped the vials closest to me and ground the glass under the heel of my shoe, but I quickly realized I didn’t have time to destroy them all.

  Laney tugged on my arm. “Kira.”

  I mind-swept the floors above us. Additional security guards gather
ed around the camera-watching guard, trying to decipher why he had switched on the alarm, then turned it off, only to pass out. They were all readers, so I knocked them out as well.

  That added to the general mayhem and would hopefully keep people busy—and away from the loading dock—for a little while.

  I ordered the two med techs to smash the remaining vials and let Laney tug me out of the experiment room. The alarm and the open doors had woken the changelings and drawn them out into the hallway. Two remained in their cots, under heavy sedation. We would need help to get them out, so I redirected the med techs to retrieve the changelings from their cells and linked into the minds of the other six dazed inmates, including Laney.

  Follow me, and I’ll get you out of here.

  Their bare feet padded behind me as I raced to the exit door. The nurse still held the gun on the downed jacker guard. I took the gun and ordered her and the orderly to help the med techs, struggling with their burden of the heavily sedated changelings. They gripped each of the limp inmates by the shoulders and feet, like dead bodies.

  Yeah, not suspicious-looking at all.

  The gun was cold and creepy in my hand as I led the small posse of jacker kids, an orderly, a nurse, and two med techs out of the medical prison and up the stairs.

  If anyone was watching the cameras, they’d have quite a show.

  But chaos reigned above as medical personnel swarmed around the guards. Some had donned gas masks, thinking there had been an attack that caused the mass fainting. Some set up a perimeter to keep patients and visitors away from the security desk.

  Our shuffling group neared the loading dock doors, and I peered through the window to see a military police jeep come to a screeching halt behind the linen service van.

  Oh no.

  Two camouflage-clad guards with large, shiny black guns hopped out of the jeep and stalked toward the loading dock. I didn’t know if they were jackers or not, but I couldn’t take the chance of probing them to find out. I threw my hands out to stop our group in its tracks and edged backward, praying the guards hadn’t seen us. We shuffled down the hall as fast as a group of barefoot kids and two unconscious changelings carried by adults can go. We stuck out like a troupe of clowns at a funeral.

  I shoved open the cancer ward’s doors, retracing my steps through the hospital. Maybe we could make it out the front to Kestrel’s car. There was no way I could fit all the changelings into one car, but maybe we could steal another ride. We had to move fast. The heavy footsteps of the guards pounded in the corridor behind us, but they passed by the cancer ward and kept going.

  We stumbled through the double doors and past the elevators out to the lobby. I jammed to a stop again, with changelings bumping and jostling into me. There were a half dozen armed guards and two jacker agents charging through the lobby. Before I had a chance to think, they spotted us, and eight weapons targeted our heads. Their shiny barrels were narrow and lethal. These were not dart guns. I suddenly remembered I had a gun in my hand and reflexively pointed it back at them.

  At the same time, an intense pressure pounded my head. The jacker agents had shoved me back into my own head, and the six changelings were struggling to fight them off. The nurse, orderly, and med-techs slowly came out of their daze, and started to put the two changelings they were carrying on the floor.

  The agents crept toward us, guns still aimed at our group of barefoot children.

  “Stop there!” I held my gun straight out, hoping they couldn’t see the tip of it shaking like a leaf in the fall breeze. They paused, still trying to jack into my head. After a moment, they seemed to realize that they couldn’t, so they switched tactics. The orderly straightened up and lunged toward me. I danced out of the way, and struggled to jack into his mind, ordering him to stay down where he had stumbled to the lobby floor. He staggered and then collapsed on the floor as two changelings grabbed hold of him. I mentally wrestled with the two agents as they jacked into the nurse’s and the med-techs’ minds. The nurse teetered in her white-soled shoes, uncertain whether she should attack me or have a seat, but the med-techs rushed at me. The other four changelings, still struggling under the assault from the jacker agents, latched onto them and pulled them to the floor.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot!” I screamed across the lobby, still keeping my gun trained on the lead agent’s head. But I wouldn’t shoot, I knew that. And the agent seemed to know it too.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the janitor, still standing by the gift shop. I didn’t have to reach into his mind to know he understood. He knew who we were, and that we were hopelessly outgunned. Outjacked. He held my gaze for a moment, then dropped his eyes to the floor and turned his back on us.

  I looked back to the agent and a triumphant smile had crept onto his face. To him, all of this was containable. Once the agents had us under control, they could wipe the minds of everyone here, mop up after they had returned us to the experiment room in the basement prison below. We would disappear, like Simon and all the others in the camp. And no one would come looking for us, because no one would even know that it had happened.

  My hand with the gun twitched and a red haze of anger clouded my mind. I wanted to shoot the lead agent before the changelings and I lost the mental and physical wrestling match we were locked in. Make him pay for everything the Feds had done. Pay for the experiments. Pay for killing Simon. If I killed him fast enough, maybe I could shoot the other agent as well. Then it would be easy to jack the reader guards long enough for us to escape. But it was much more likely that I would end up with a bullet in me, like Simon. Bleeding out on the hospital floor was no different than bleeding into desert dust. Dead was dead. Worse, some of the changelings might get shot too. Even the patients and visitors, frozen in fear at the periphery of the lobby where they had shrunk back as far as the room would allow, might be caught in the cross fire.

  It was too much. I couldn’t risk getting them all killed.

  I turned my gun sideways, my finger off the trigger, and held both hands up in front of me, the universal sign of surrender. The agent’s smile curved higher.

  An image of Raf floated through my mind. I should have kissed him when I had the chance. I wondered if his lips were as soft as they looked or if they would sear mine like Simon’s always had.

  Now I would never find out.

  That’s when I realized I still had the phone in my other hand. With the push of a button, I could expose Kestrel, the Feds, and everything they had done to us. I could stop them from taking me and the changelings back down to the basement, to disappear forever. But if Kestrel knew I had blown the cover on his experiments, he was sure to make my dad pay for it. And I would be spilling the biggest secret of all, the one my family had spent their entire lives keeping. There would be no pretending, no hiding among readers. No normal life for me, for any of us. Ever again.

  The lies would stop.

  With my eyes still locked on the lead agent, I linked into the phone’s mindware and dialed Maria, giving silent thanks to whoever invented the speakerphone option.

  “Thank God, Kira! It’s about time you…” She cut herself off, probably taking in the scene, which I was now streaming to her.

  “Are you getting a good signal, Maria?” I asked.

  The speakerphone drew the sharp attention of everyone in the room. The smile on the agent’s face died.

  “Yes.” Her voice was cautious, slow.

  “I have a tru-cast story for the Trib. It’s about an agent of the federal government who threatened to shoot a group of children in a hospital. Are you getting all this?”

  “Yes, I have a very good visual on the gun.”

  The agent’s gun wavered. I didn’t have to link into his mind to know what he was thinking. Did he want to be on a tru-cast, trying to explain why he was going to shoot down a group of innocent children in a hospital? Did he want to be responsible for that?

  “These kids were being held in a basement prison, right here at the Naval h
ospital,” I continued for the benefit of Maria’s tru-cast and for the agent whose gun was still pointed at my head. “They were being held for no other reason than having a special ability, a new ability to link into other people’s heads. Just because they have an ability we don’t understand, doesn’t mean they deserve to be in prison. To be experimented on. It’s like the old days when the first readers were discovered. What did we do? We put them in prison. We tortured them with experiments. Well, we’re doing it again, to these kids, today.”

  I swept the phone around, so it had a good shot of my face, and the changelings sprawled on the floor behind me. I took a jittery breath for courage. “My name’s Kira Moore, and I’m just like them. I was kidnapped by the FBI, brought here, and then sent to a prison with hundreds of other kids just like me. For no other reason than who I am.” I panned across the changelings, slowly. I could only imagine what it must look like to Maria, barefoot changelings in their hospital gowns, still holding onto the med-techs and the orderly to keep them down while mentally wrestling with the agents to control the readers’ minds.

  “I’m taking these kids out of here, back home to their families, where they belong.”

  I rotated the camera back to the lead agent and I could see the decision had settled into his face. This was above his pay grade. “This is Kestrel’s mess,” he said, loud enough that it could be captured on my phone. I was pretty sure he did that on purpose. “Let him clean it up.” He slowly lowered his gun. Louder, he said, “A simple misunderstanding, I’m sure.” The second agent looked warily at him, but he lowered his weapon, and the guards did the same.

  The agents left the changelings’ minds and everyone slowly stood up, faces not quite sure. The guards and agents stepped aside, making a path for us to walk out the front door.

  For a moment, I was terrified it was a trap. But if they took us down now, it would all be on camera. I linked into the nurse, orderly, and med-techs’ minds, our unwitting accomplices in the escape. Please. Help us. I would let them decide. If they didn’t want to help, I wouldn’t force them. Somehow, between the changelings and me, we would manage to get the two unconscious kids out the door. I wasn’t exactly sure where we would go from there, but if nothing else, we could walk. We just needed to get off base property before the agent changed his mind about letting us loose.