by Jody Wallace
Alfonso inserted a keycard into what appeared to be the side of the dumpster. The blue metal bin, nearly as tall as John, clanked and rolled aside to reveal a dark, concrete stairway. The RC Cola machine people had obviously had a hand in its creation.
I rocked back on my frumpy heels. “Your secret hideout is beneath the trash? This doesn’t bode well.” I covered my mouth and nose. It wasn’t the pukiest garbage I’d ever smelled, but I wanted to hide my smirk.
“It’s the easiest access point,” John said defensively. “No one suspects.”
Gingerly, I followed him down the dank stairwell, Alfonso bringing up the rear. My heels scraped the concrete, and I held onto a cool metal rail as we descended. Paint flecked onto my skin.
The thud of the dumpster closing sounded uncomfortably final. A drippy hallway with a few bare bulbs led straight ahead. Our direction seemed to lead beneath the large metal building. How could there be a secret underground hideaway when you had public gas lines and sewers and utility wires to be considered?
And what did I think I was? A civil engineer?
We traipsed up a set of stairs that ended at a metal door with an obvious key slot, which Alfonso activated. I dropped back so I was third through the doorway.
I didn’t know what to expect inside. Sterile white? Army bunker? Pizza place?
It was nothing close to what I’d imagined. It appeared to be, of all things, a shabby office delineated by cubicle walls. A fluorescent light flickered in a hanging metal fixture, giving the large, middle-aged receptionist a greenish cast.
“Lou Lampey, Cleo Giancarlo.” John indicated me. I met the woman’s wide, bulging eyes and smiled.
“I erase people,” she announced cheerfully. “What do you do?”
This was their eraser? She wasn’t an ominous, scary man with a crew cut and a large gun. She was tanned, sporty and substantial, a motherly person surrounded by a sweet perfume odor.
I opened my mouth to answer and John spoke for me. “She’s a chameleon, Lou. You read the file.”
Lou shrugged, waking her breasts into independent motion beneath her melon-colored tank. “Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. Yuri’s back there. Tell him it’s somebody else’s turn to sit desk, why doncha? I got work to do.”
We edged between cubicles. Lots of people were here for a Saturday. They mostly ignored us, immersed in their computers. I didn’t see anything science fictiony. Nobody levitated or glowed or bent spoons with their brain waves.
I patted John on the sleeve. “Why did you tell Lou I was a chameleon?”
“Yuri will explain that.” We skritched down a hallway carpeted with what appeared to be a giant plastic welcome mat until we reached a door with a frosted glass window. John knocked.
“Come in.” Inside the office, noteworthy only because of the lush greenery and rainforest mural against the back wall, stood an old, bald man whose wrinkles looked like a linen suit after a day of hard wear.
He immediately advanced on me. I immediately backed up.
“Cleo!” He extended his hands.
I was through making skin contact with people who had unknown powers. I retreated until I bumped into Alfonso, avoiding the touch of the new mutant. The guy crowded me, undaunted, until I allowed him to take my hands, wondering if his proximity would allow him a glimpse into my brain.
“Don’t worry, I’m not a sapient specialist.” He spread my arms, inspecting me as if I were a favorite niece he hadn’t seen in years. “Cleo, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”
“Literally?” I tugged my hands. “I make your eyes feel better?” No mask accompanied his words.
“Certainly my spirits.”
I tugged again, but the old man’s grip was like too-tight shoes. From Wal-Mart. “Can you let go now?”
“Sorry. I’m clinging like a vine and we haven’t been introduced.” He dropped my hands without the slightest show of embarrassment. “I’m Yuri Kratochvil, head of YuriCorp.”
I eyed the old man. He looked harmless, but he was the boss. The chief. The Charles Xavier. “You named your company after yourself. Isn’t that a little egotistical?”
“My given name was Bert. I named myself after the company when I took over.”
“If you say so, Mr. Kratochvil.” I squinted, and sure enough, a glimmer danced around him.
Yuri chuckled. “Please, call me Yuri. Can’t get one past you, Cleo. Which is why you’re here.”
“I thought I was here because your employees dragged me away from my apartment.” I sat in one of the chairs near his desk without being invited. The shoes they’d given me pinched.
Yuri, instead of claiming his executive throne, took the peon chair next to me. He leaned back and stuck out his legs. His skinny ankles were sockless, and he was wearing garden clogs with his nice suit.
“Al, can you get Samantha for me?” he asked. “We might need her.”
Al left. John remained beside the door and leaned against the wall. I was shocked to see a frown on his face. Okay, not really. At some point his face must have frozen like that, proving millions of mothers right.
“Coffee?” Yuri indicated a pot nearly hidden by a bushy plant.
“No, thanks.” They could have dosed it with some drug to make me compliant.
“How about you, John?”
“I had tea this morning.”
I presume he’d had his caffeine after they’d left me in the secret room to fret, gnash my teeth and, you know, nap.
Yuri pointed at the chair beside the coffeepot. “Don’t loom over us like a sequoia, son. Have a seat. Al will make sure we aren’t disturbed.”
John had just settled into the pleather chair when Samantha entered.
“Hey, Pop-Pop.” She inclining her head in greeting. “We’re ready?”
Pop-Pop was an interesting nickname for her boss.
“Didn’t I mention?” she said when she saw my expression. “Yuri’s my grandfather.” She came to stand beside me and, of all things, clasped my hand where it rested on the chair’s arm.
“Excuse me.” I shoved my hands into my lap. What was with these people, touching all the time?
“It’s for your own good.” Samantha rested a palm on my shoulder. Could she affect me through the cheap polyester blend of my black suit jacket? “It’s a safety precaution. Protocol.”
“In every office I know, people are supposed to keep their hands to themselves.” Which didn’t mean people did, especially not on the sly, but I didn’t want Miss Pusher influencing my mood swings. Perhaps being the granddaughter of the boss gave her a certain leeway.
Positioned behind me, Samantha tightened her grip. I didn’t feel warm tinglies or a suspicious change of attitude, so I resisted the urge to smack her hand. In a voice that sounded calculatedly pleasant to my ears, she said, “Let’s just say we’ve had incidents when we introduced ourselves to a new suprasensor. The truth is not always comforting.”
“I already know the truth, and I don’t want to be touched. Or pushed. Or eavesdropped on. Or licked and smelled.” I glanced at John, but he was watching Yuri.
“Your abilities create an interesting challenge keeping things hidden from you until the appropriate time,” Yuri acknowledged. He twiddled his fingers in his lap as if thumb wrestling himself. “Sometimes a new supra knows there are others when we bring her in, but sometimes she’s newly made, a little bean sprout. It’s rare that she’s been flying solo all her life, as you have. The revelation can be unnerving. Samantha assures nobody panics.”
“I’m fine.” I wouldn’t wig unless they described the painful scientific experiments they had slated for me. Then what would I do? My mutant powers didn’t lend themselves to combat.
Yuri met my eyes so I had to focus on his face or be rude. While I didn’t mind being rude, and in fact had been known to make a habit of it, watching someone’s face was the best way to gauge honesty.
“Cleo, there are thousands of individuals in the world capable of using their se
nses more adroitly than the average human. Actually, there are more, but only a percentage are abled to the extent it makes a difference in their daily activities.”
Thousands of people like me? “If that many people could do things like see lies and smell DNA, it would show up on the Internet. Maybe even CNN.”
“Thousands of people have a minor suprasense. It surfaces in a variety of ways, many of which are acknowledged by our society as normal.”
“Or nearly normal,” Samantha added.
“Artists and creative types are examples,” Yuri explained. “Also, people with acute senses used in common ways, such as wine tasters or perfume noses.”
I myself wasn’t over-fond of wine, or any alcoholic beverage, unless it was mixed with mushrooms and chicken. When I was drunk, it was a lot harder to keep my mouth shut after people lied to my face. “How does wine tasting turn into seeing lies?”
“It doesn’t, though I suppose there could be a suprasensor who could taste lies. John tells me your ability seems to be a combination of vision, touch and hearing. Having acuity in three senses is incredible, Cleo. You’re as rare as a ghost orchid.”
“You said there were thousands of people like me.” Even among mutants I was the freak. How fair was that?
“Thousands of suprasensors. Most have a single heightened sense. Taste and smell are linked and often considered a unit.”
Samantha’s hand on my shoulder was like a lead weight. A bomb waiting to drop. “Does anyone,” I asked, “have the ability to run faster than a speeding bullet or never get wrinkles?”
Yuri laughed. “Not that we’ve discovered. The supra abilities we’ve registered so far spring from the central nervous system—the five senses—and the connections our synapses and neural network make when processing input from the world around us. What it boils down to is some of us are able to exploit a great deal more information than others. It’s that simple.”
“Like cats can hear the crinkle of the treat bag from anywhere?” I asked.
“That’s one way to look at it. Some touch sensors like my granddaughter function more assertively and can influence hormones and neural responses in others.”
As Yuri talked, I grew less anxious. What he was saying made sense. All people are different, right? Why wouldn’t brains connect in different ways? Why would everyone’s noses and eyes and skin work exactly the same way?
“Take you, for instance. Your suprasenses give you the ability to detect when someone’s lying. It’s a known fact people exhibit physiologically during deceptive behavior. Your senses distinguish these reactions, and your brain translates them into a visual image. What you can do is brilliant and precious.”
“John told the receptionist I was a chameleon. Is that what you call people like me?”
“No, a chameleon is someone who can be overlooked. We’ve been assuming you have this secondary ability because you escaped notice so long. A chameleon’s skin releases chemicals that cause others to view him as so unthreatening, they cease to notice him.”
“That explains why I was such a wallflower at all those high school dances,” I said, when the fact was, I’d never gone to dances. You needed a date for that. The lies of high school boys, when you’re a high school girl, are tantamount to the end of the world.
“Chameleoning one of the least understood abilities, but it’s common, as these things go. When a person has more than one skill, the second is generally chameleon. But let’s concentrate on what we know for certain.” Yuri leaned toward me, his wrinkles pulling themselves into lines of interest. “Why don’t you describe your ability, Cleo?”
Was it safe to talk to these people? I wanted to. I wanted to with an urgency I’d never experienced, not even when I thought my ill-gained knowledge could help somebody. I wanted to tell them everything—how much I hated it, how much it had made my life a living hell.
“Half the time I can’t see people clearly. Isn’t that ironic?” I said. “So many people are dishonest. When they lie, I see an aura around their face, like a mask. Sometimes I can even see...this will sound crazy...”
“It won’t,” Yuri assured me with a smile. He had beautiful teeth.
“Sometimes I can see lips on the mask saying different words than the person is saying.” I paused. “I taught myself to read lips.”
“What do the masks tell you?” Samantha asked.
She made it sound as if she were asking what the voices told me. I wriggled my shoulder and she released me.
“The mask tells me the truth.” I crossed my arms. “I see it more the older I get. I’m becoming wise to the ways of liars and men.”
“Much more reliable than a polygraph,” Yuri concluded with great satisfaction.
“If she thinks she knows the truth, her brain could play tricks on her,” Samantha said.
“It’s no trick.” I’d had ample opportunity to refute that notion when I came up with it myself. Mask reading had proven right time and again. “Do you think I want to be this way? Do you realize how hard it is to get through a typical day when everybody around you lies?”
Yuri patted my knee, and I forced myself not to twitch. “Don’t ever regret what you can do, Cleo. It’s a gift.”
“It doesn’t feel like one.” I rebounded a little with Yuri’s understanding. “Especially not when I see things I don’t want to see.”
“What if you’re blindfolded? Or in a dark room?” John tapped his finger to his lips, a frown creasing his forehead. I’d just shared my deepest wound with them, and instead of commiserating about my hard life, Mr. Frown wanted to know how it worked. He could at least pretend to feel sorry for me.
“Are you figuring out how to lie to me, John?”
John straightened, his eyebrows arching, but Yuri answered for him. “We need to understand your limits so we can help you use your skill more effectively.”
“Can I turn it off?”
Secretive glances were exchanged that didn’t include me.
“We don’t know,” Yuri admitted. “Aside from blocking them physically, can you turn off your eyes? Your ears?”
I swiveled and glared at John. “You said you could turn your nose off . Why can’t I turn it off?”
Samantha grabbed my shoulder. “I’m not going to spazz,” I snapped at her. “Let me go.” I tilted myself forward in the chair to put as much distance between us as I could without scooting into the floor.
“Protocol,” Samantha said smugly.
I definitely didn’t like her. Definitely.
“Cleo, there are still things we don’t understand about suprasenses. They vary for everyone.” Yuri pointed at his face. “When you see the masks, do they resemble the people beneath them? Describe my face while I...”
I didn’t want to watch Yuri’s face. I wanted answers about the real-world implications of my being discovered by the suprasensor Illuminati. This changed everything for me—everything!—and they were treating it like a science lesson.
“Enough about me.” They probably knew it all, anyway. “Tell me about you. What kind of business is YuriCorp? It’s not like you can advertise yourself in the phone book as mutants for hire.”
“We’re not mutants,” Samantha said. “Shelve that attitude if you want to make any friends around here.”
My jury of one cantankerous woman was still out as to whether or not I wanted friends around here. “Can I call you freaks?”
“Cleo, I know you’re trying to get under our skin. It won’t work.” But her grip tightened and I felt a tingle right before my desire to annoy her subsided.
It felt so peculiar to know I wanted to provoke her but have no urge to do it. I returned to my original topic. “You keep insisting you don’t have anything to do with the government and the X-Files. What do you do? How do you get the money to maintain yourself in such...” I searched for the perfect word. “Luxury?”
Yuri had watched us argue and finally spoke. “You’re skeptical and apprehensive. This isn’t what
you expected, is it?”
I shook my head. He didn’t need my precious gift to conclude that.
“What we do is lucrative, but most of our profits go to other ventures.”
I opened my mouth to ask what ventures, but Yuri beat me. “Suprasensor monitoring, research and development, and training.”
“Sounds like spying. Which you keep saying you don’t do. Everything you’ve been saying is true, or at least you believe it. Normal people don’t go this long without lying.”
“We practiced,” Yuri admitted. “We wanted to be able to put you at ease.”
Was it a sad indictment of human nature that they had to practice being honest? “You probably just practiced how to lie without me figuring out.”
“We’ve told no outright lies. We don’t want to trick you. We just want to hire you.”
“But you haven’t told me what YuriCorp does and what you want me for.” I was beginning to get a bad feeling about this, even with their sincerity, even with Samantha’s hand on my shoulder. “Is what you do legal?”
“Of course it’s legal.” Yuri leaned forward, unblinking and intense. I felt like I was about to be handed the Big Secret.
“We don’t draw attention to ourselves, Cleo. It’s the foremost rule for every registered suprasensor, for every supra-run business. As much as possible, we obey the laws of the countries we’re in.”
“Don’t make waves.” That I understood.
“Ask yourself this. What could we do to generate the most income for the least effort—aided by our skills, of course—so we can concentrate on other matters? Keep in mind it needs to be an area with flexible best practices and minimal oversight, so our unconventional way of conducting business won’t stand out.” His spiel sounded more than a little rehearsed.
“Something Internet-related? Oh, wait, I have it. Nobody understands clothing design these days. You’re in the fashion industry.”
Yuri smiled. “Our skills wouldn’t allow us a higher profit margin than your average citizen in those areas.”
“You’re private investigators,” I tried next. “You track down missing persons and cheating spouses, and you hired yourselves to find me.”
