The Madness Project (The Madness Method)

by Bralick, J. Leigh

  They exchanged glances, but at a signal from the sergeant they lowered their rifles, and four of the coppers rushed to grab us. I shot Derrin a warning look and submitted to being shoved and dragged toward the barricade.

  “It’s him, isn’t it?” one the policemen asked. “He’s got that same mark. Brazen.”

  Kor came to stand in front of me, holding my gaze for the longest time with something like despair in his eyes. I lifted my chin and stared straight back at him. For a moment he didn’t move at all, then he let out a faint breath and gripped my arm. I grinned, just a little too savagely, and pushed back against the static charge. He hissed in pain and jerked away, glaring at me like I’d bit him.

  “Yes,” he snapped. “That one’s a mage.”

  “What about the other one?” the sergeant asked.

  I didn’t pull my gaze from Kor’s, but hardened it a bit, trying to pass some meaning to him.

  Let him go, I thought. Let him get away…I don’t want his blood on my hands too.

  Kor turned and studied Derrin briefly, then reached out and grabbed his forearm.

  “No,” he said. “That one’s clean.”

  The sergeant shifted his weight. “Should we arrest him for conspiring with the Zealot?”

  I stifled a snort, because that title seemed so foolish to me. I didn’t even know how I’d earned it. For goading a few disgruntled workers into a protest? They were just desperate for a scapegoat, that was all. I’d given them the perfect target.

  “Don’t bother,” Kor said. “As soon as we get this mess cleaned up, it won’t matter.”

  The sergeant didn’t seem entirely convinced, but Kor snapped his fingers at Derrin and pointed him off down the street. Derrin flashed me a bewildered glance but I just nodded and let the guards lead me through the barricade. I didn’t turn around to see Derrin go. I couldn’t. Not if I wanted the guards to believe that Kor was telling the truth.

  All around me the murmur of voices faded away, and I felt dozens of gazes fixed on me, watching me curiously.

  “Leave him to me,” Kor told the guards, once I had been brought in and handcuffed. “I’ll take care of it.”

  The sergeant’s mouth twitched, but he saluted and waved his constables after him. For a few moments Kor and I stood facing one another, him staring at me, me scanning the crowds, desperate to find Hayli.

  “You were supposed to go to the palace,” he said suddenly, voice low.

  My gaze snapped back to his. A faint uneasiness crept over me. “I did,” I gritted. “I went back. Zagger had me arrested. Zagger! He betrayed me. And why is it I think you aren’t surprised about that?”

  “I’m not surprised, but you’ve got it all wrong,” he said. “Foolish boy, don’t you see? It was meant to protect you. We were trying to get you off the streets, not to mention away from the King. We were trying to keep this from happening! But now you’re here and I can’t pretend that you’re not a mage. You’ve had your face plastered all over the city for days now. These people all know who you are. They all know what you are. I’m sorry. We tried. But I can’t protect you anymore.”

  “But…he said it was by the king’s orders,” I said, bewildered. “I was arrested on charges of treason.”

  He gave me a weary look. “Of course he said that. Only the King would have the authority to order your arrest.”

  I closed my eyes, feeling so utterly stupid.

  “You had to think it was real,” Kor murmured. “It broke his heart to do that to you, you know. And for what? Nothing. You had to go and break out of prison and plant yourself right in the middle of all the danger. I never figured you to be such a rash maniac.”

  “Tarik isn’t,” I said. “Shade is. And he’s exactly where he wants to be.” I took a step closer to him. “Understand this. I don’t want to be rescued. And I damn well don’t want to be protected. Keep doing what you’re doing, and leave the rest to me.”

  “What are you planning?”

  I grinned. “I have no idea. But I’m working on it.”

  “Work fast,” Kor said. “And don’t risk messing with this lot. They’re more dangerous than you can imagine.”

  Chapter 12 — Hayli

  I crouched in the corner of my metal corral, trying to make myself small as possible. A handful of other mages were in the ring with me, all cuffed like me, and so, powerless. One, a woman with hair like fire, was crying softly, trying not to make a scene. One of them sprawled on the ground, bloody and bruised. He’d probably pitched a fight before that strange weapon had taken him down. I shivered. Only a few minutes back I’d started to get some tingly feeling in my arms and legs, and it hurt like the devil. I never wanted to go through that again.

  But I would risk it in a heartbeat if it meant I could get free. I had to clear away, get back to the Hole, warn the skitters. Warn Shade. Oh, God, if these folks got their hands on him…I didn’t even want to think what they might do with him. I twisted my wrists in their cuffs as I looked around.

  The metal corral had only two rungs, so slipping out under the lower bar would’ve been easy as pie, but not with my hands shackled to the post behind me. If only I had a lockpick…

  “It wouldn’t work,” said a girl sitting close by me, chained to the next vertical post.

  She looked just a bit older than me, with straight dark hair and the clearest blue eyes I’d ever seen.

  “What won’t?” I asked.

  She smiled, faintly. “Escaping. Sorry, I’m a Knack. Cuffs can’t stop my magic.”

  “Can you hear what any of them are thinking?” I asked, jerking my head toward the swarming guards.

  She closed her eyes and bent her head, her hair falling across her face. “Too much noise,” she said after a moment. “I’d have to get closer to them.”

  “I’m a Sculptor,” a young man said, sitting across from me. He stretched toward us, far as his chain would give. “If you could find a guard who’s a bit sympathetic, I could Sculpt him into letting us out.”

  “What then?” I asked, dropping my head back against the metal rung. “That’d just make us open targets for all the other guards.”

  “It was a good thought,” the girl said. “Wish it would work.”

  I jerked my head up suddenly, because just for a second I thought I’d seen a crown of white-gold hair and a white tattoo. There, coming this way… I lurched onto my knees, not even caring how my shoulders twisted or my wrists burned, while my heart pounded like crazy.

  Oh God, he got caught. I was supposed to warn him.

  And I didn’t know what I felt. Grief, regret…and a selfish little flicker of joy.

  A guard was shoving him along, driving him toward the corral across from ours. I held my breath, biting my tongue, waiting and hoping that he’d see me. The girl Knack watched me quietly a moment, then craned her head to try to see behind her.

  “Which one is he?” she murmured. I just stared at her, so she smiled and said, “If you love him that much, I’ve got to see which one he is.”

  I blushed and nodded toward Shade. “Pale hair, white tattoo. Big black coat.”

  She managed to twist around enough to get a goggle of him, and after a tick she turned back, grinning. “I can see why you like him.”

  I scowled, because if she thought I liked him just for his pretty face, she couldn’t be reading my mind at all. Then I got worried that she might have heard me thinking that, and I shot her a cold kind of glare.

  “Please dan’ read my thoughts anymore,” I said. “It’s uncomfortable.”

  She smiled and nodded. “I’ll respect that.”

  I let out a sigh of relief and watched as the guard linked Shade’s cuffs to a post and strode away. Shade jerked his wrists once, looking like he had half a mind to try to tear down the corral with sheer force of will. Then he slouched back, fire in his eyes, chewing at the inside of his cheek as he slowly scanned the other corrals. I held my breath. Wanted to call out to him, but I didn’t need to, because
his gaze suddenly snapped my way.

  “Hayli,” he mouthed.

  I couldn’t read the expression in his eyes. So much pain, so much regret, so much wild hope. My heart turned topsy and I found myself smiling in spite of all that had happened—all that he’d done…and all that I’d done. A smile flickered across his face, then vanished suddenly and he jerked his wrists again, harder than before, making the whole corral shake. One of the guards strode over, waving one of those terrifying electrical guns at him.

  “Stay still or I swear I will use this on you,” he said.

  Shade grinned at him. “Try.”

  “I will do it!” the guard said, waving it again to make a point.

  But a train whistle interrupted his pantomiming, and all the guards stopped milling about as a man in a dark grey hat and military coat climbed up on the Station steps with a loud hailer.

  He lifted the device to his lips and said, “Escort the Jixy prisoners to the train. Five Jixies per car, except the Zealot. He will ride in the first car under guard. Chain the others to the hitching rings. Let’s get this done in an orderly fashion!”

  The Zealot? Who’s the Zealot?

  I cast an anxious glance at Shade, but he just shot me a pointed kind of look and leaned his head back, closing his eyes. Of course, it would have to be Shade.

  The guards saluted, and one by one they dragged us off to the train. I lost Shade in the chaos. The black-haired girl disappeared, too, and I found myself shackled into a train car with an older man with a swirling blue tattoo on his bare chest, and a whimpering boy a few years younger than me. The shadows were too thick to see my other car-mates. We waited, and waited, and waited. My hands got prickly and my shoulders ached by the time the whistle blew, then the train bucked forward and wrenched my shoulders again and stung my hands, and I could barely keep my feet.

  In the darkness of the car I lost track of time. The boy kept muttering under his breath, and someone deeper in the shadows was praying out loud. Presently the boy fell silent, then, quietly, he joined his voice to hers. The blue-tattooed man murmured with them, under his breath, and before I knew it, I was praying with them too.

  They’re going to kill us all, the crow whispered in my mind. Pretend to ship us off somewhere safe, but it is a death sentence. We can’t survive.

  If you’re ganna be a gloomy bird, keep your beak shut, I told her. Shade’ll get us out of here.

  * * * *

  Two, maybe three hours had passed when the whistle screamed and the train stuttered to a stop. Our car was completely dark besides the slats of light creeping in past the door, so we had no ken where we’d got. Not until the guards came and threw back the door, flooding the car with blinding daylight. Once my eyes adjusted, I saw the stark lines of a huge building looming up over us, all darkish and drab with only a few sparse windows to be seen.

  “What is that place?” I whispered.

  Someone said, “It’s Esobor. It’s a Ministry building.”

  A Ministry building? Out here?

  “Quiet!” said one of the guards outside our car.

  They came in and unchained us, leading each of us down to the landing. Farther down the track I heard a sudden commotion and a frantic shouting. Three mages were all trying to run, trying to jump through the train cars and get clear to the river beyond. The guards didn’t bother with their electrical weapons. They just gunned them all down with their rifles, without a word, without hesitation. Just killed them all, like rabby dogs.

  I staggered, choking on a gasp, and stared at the bodies. If I’d thought about trying to run…how could I now? Maybe the crow was right. We were all going to die.

  The guards shepherded us through a maze of chain fences into the building, which looked more like an empty factory than anything. It seemed to be one enormous room, with just a few first and second story offices on the sides and a walkover that looked fit to collapse. Bright electrical bulbs hung from the high roof, pooling pale light on the floor. There was just one door, a grobbing huge sliding door that some of the guards bolted from the outside once we’d all got in.

  The other guards locked us up like chattel around the edges of the room, fixing our cuffs to metal rings that kept us well clear of each other. I finally caught a goggle of Shade after the rest of us had been secured. Two guards marched him in, but they didn’t chain him with the rest of us. They held on to him out there in the middle of the floor, where all of us could see him.

  Someone came out of one of the offices, dressed in a long white coat.

  Cold horror prickled over me. Dr. Kippler.

  He strolled out onto the open floor, surveying the line of us with a cold kind of smile. I bowed my head, praying with every ounce of my being that he wouldn’t recognize me. He didn’t. He turned and stopped in front of Shade, folding his arms behind his back.

  “So, you’re the one they call the Zealot.”

  Shade just stared at him and didn’t say a word.

  “The question is, what makes you so special?” Dr. Kippler asked, studying him from head to toe. “You look ordinary enough.”

  He pulled out his brass pocket watch device and passed it across Shade’s forehead, then bent to examine its gauges. A minute and he didn’t move, then he called over another scientist from the office. They conferred over the device for a tick, then Kippler folded it into his pocket and stared at Shade.

  “That should be impossible,” he said.

  “I’m an impossible sort of person,” Shade said, making me smile.

  “These energy readings are extraordinary.” Kippler turned to the other scientist, facing away from Shade, but their voices carried across that vasty silence. “I’m not sure that the standard procedure will even work with him. If we slip and don’t capture him…”

  “You could always try,” Shade said helpfully.

  “I think we ought to try the EMS device instead,” the other scientist said. “He’s too dangerous to risk a failed capture.”

  I jumped, because I recognized his voice, though I’d never caught a good glimpse of his face. Toma, the scientist who had been with Kippler in the basement of the Science Ministry.

  “Electromagnetic suppression?” Shade asked, tilting his head back, looking a bit bored.

  “How would you even know that?” Toma cried.

  Shade grinned. “Burns you up a bit, does it?”

  “Shh,” Kippler said suddenly, holding up a hand. He cocked his head, like he was listening, then turned slowly to the line of us. “One hundred mages, all rendered powerless by simple handcuffs. Except…” He walked up and down the line, waving his brass device. “Except the mental powers. Because right now, I’ll be damned if one of you isn’t trying to manipulate my emotions.”

  He glanced down at his device, then stopped suddenly, right in front of the young man who’d been in the corral with me. The mage just smiled at him.

  “Not very wise,” Kippler said, and snapped his fingers.

  Without any warning, the nearest guard shouldered his rifle and fired three rapid shots, and the mage collapsed in his chains. A few other mages cried out, but Shade got terribly pale, anger burning like lightning in his eyes.

  “That’s four mages I’ve watched you murder,” Shade said. “I will kill four of these guards.”

  Kippler nodded, dismissive. “Right. Of course you will. Toma, let’s deal with him first, then process the rest of these mages. They’re almost done setting up the examination room.”

  Toma bowed and took a few steps back, but he didn’t say a word. I wondered if he still thought it was wrong, what they were doing. What they meant to do. Because the way these guards killed us so easily, I couldn’t pretend any of us would be leaving this place alive.

  Chapter 13 — Tarik

  I kept an eye on Hayli, even as the two scientists debated over what they would do with me. She seemed to be enduring well enough, but I could see the bird instinct in her wild eyes, looking always and everywhere for a way to escape
. I only wanted to comfort her, but I couldn’t, not across all this distance.

  “Come on,” Kippler said suddenly, waving me and my guards forward.

  He pointed us to a strange device along the opposite wall. I’d noticed it when they brought me in, but I hadn’t had a good chance to examine it. I frowned at the thing, wondering what madman had developed it, praying that it hadn’t been Dr. Alokin. The EMS device resembled an open semi-circular chamber, with something like a medical stretcher standing vertical beneath a crown-shaped ring of brass. A multitude of wires sprouted from the top of it, like some sort of bizarre tree, twisting away into the shadows behind a console of ominous-looking dials and gauges.

  It would figure, I thought with a wry smile, that this would be the first—and maybe only—crown I ever wear.

  “You really suppose this will work on me?” I asked Kippler as the guards marched me forward. “You really believe you can switch off my magic like an electrical lamp by sticking me in that thing?”

  “Quiet,” Kippler snapped, standing at the console. “It’s really just an inversion of the hypnosis device we use. That device amplifies the electro-magnetic impulse that seems somehow linked to your magic. This one suppresses it. Smothers it, if you will. You won’t be able to do anything after we’re done for you.” He narrowed his eyes. “Permanently.”

  “And this is your first time testing it, isn’t it?”

  Dr. Kippler frowned. “I have no doubts that it will work, if that’s what you’re asking.

  I smiled and turned to survey the room. Four guards had been left posted outside the building’s huge door, with six guards standing in a row across the inside of it. I had two guards flanking me, and I counted perhaps eight others on the floor. Two squads. I could handle that, if I could just get the chance.

  I turned to watch Toma as he worked on the stretcher, untying all the multiple straps so they could fasten me in. He glanced at me over his shoulder, a closed, quiet kind of look, then he turned to Kippler.

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to switch his cuffs from back to front. Otherwise we won’t be able to tie him down properly.”