mindjack 04 - origins

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  It was like pushing on a cloud, but I cleared enough of the colors to sense a ball of pure white survival instinct buried in the center. That I knew what to do with. Gripping the ball of white, hard, I crushed it into nothingness, obliterating it into a vacuum that sucked in and subdued the other mess.

  Serena turned the gun sideways, peering at it. “I don’t particularly like guns. Beastly weapons, cold and brutish. I much prefer the mind. Yes, much tidier that way. No mess whatsoever, except when things go pear-shaped, and that was hardly my fault. No one could blame me for that. Could happen to anyone.” She was talking to herself, in that no-filter stream-of-consciousness that happened with people I had handled completely, decoupling the barrier between their conscious and subconscious until they were controlled by their instincts.

  I stood close to her now. “I think you want to give that to me.”

  She smiled brightly. It was a wide, innocent smile, and it tore a small piece of my soul. She handed me the gun.

  “I’m sorry it turned out this way, Serena.” I meant every word. I’d made a terrible mistake with her.

  “Which way?”

  Her questioning green eyes flew wide when I shot the dart into her chest.

  I scrambled to catch her, easing her slowly down, so she wouldn’t bang her pretty head on the concrete floor. Anna, released from Serena’s hold, bolted up from her seat at the table. She grabbed the other gun and pointed it at Serena’s limp body on the ground.

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  Sasha’s eyes were bright and alert now, fear wild in them as he took in the situation. “How did you…” He held a hand up, palm out to Serena, as if to ward her off, even though she was passed out. “No one was able to stop her before.”

  “I almost couldn’t,” I whispered, folding Serena’s arms across her chest and straightening up from the floor. My mission was to save jackers like her, liberate them, make their lives better. I wanted to bring them hope, but some jackers wouldn’t believe in our cause. Some would refuse to fight for more than themselves. Worse, some would prey on others. There was no justice system for jackers, no prison that could hold someone like Serena, save the Feds, and she was probably better off dead than undergoing their experiments. I could simply shoot her, remove the threat that she posed, but my stomach churned, holding that thought in my mind while looking at her peaceful face. If I was unwilling to kill her, letting her continue to menace others was equally unacceptable.

  I took a deep breath and slowly faced Sasha. Every revolution had casualties along the way—I just didn’t expect them to come so early. “Sometimes you have to fire the weapon, Sasha.” He shook his head, taking a half step back, but I wasn’t talking about him.

  I was talking about me.

  I reached deep into Serena’s unconscious mind, still a boiling mass, handling away every instinct that I could figure out and pushing aside the rest. It wasn’t difficult to find, the twined red and black instinct I had seen snake across her mind before. A pre-mindreading psychologist had called it the death drive. I thought of it as an anti-life impulse that lurked in every mind, usually muted and buried under that hard ball of pure white survival instinct. Except in some people, it wasn’t buried so deep. I should have known there was something wrong with her when I saw it the first time. The chaos of her mind made a certain amount of sense now: with that death drive so close to the surface, warring with her survival instinct, it was a kind of mental self-torture.

  And I was about to make it worse.

  I pulled up her death drive, strengthened it, and fashioned a new trigger for it. Every instinct has many triggers: visual cues, sounds, even smells can dredge up an instinctual response from the depths of the mind. For Serena, her death drive would now be sparked by any mental contact with another jacker. It would flare through her other instincts, causing a firestorm that would likely short-circuit her mind. It might drive her insane, and I couldn’t be sure that she would survive it, but it would disable her from harming anyone else.

  And it was better than killing her outright.

  Anna could erase her memories, including any knowledge of us and other jackers’ whereabouts. Then we would release her somewhere remote, maybe downstate Illinois, in hopes that she wouldn’t stumble across any jackers accidentally.

  At least for a while.

  Sasha banged in the back of the factory, clearing racks. Anna had returned from releasing Serena into the wild. A black mood had descended on me. I scooped up the screen off the kitchen table and flopped on the couch, ignoring both Sasha’s motions around the factory, as well as Anna’s frowns and blaring protective instinct.

  The tru-cast was still paused where Anna had stopped it before.

  Kira Moore’s voice sprung from the screen, the shaky camera image still focused on her impassioned face, bright blue eyes shining like an angel. “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.” She panned the camera across the changelings, who were wrestling with a couple of med-techs behind her. The changelings’ hospital gowns twisted around their thin frames as their small hands grasped at the med-techs’ uniforms and their bare feet pawed the tiled floor. They were fighting, mentally and physically, to escape from the hospital and the heinous experiments being conducted on them.

  Fighting for their right to exist.

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

  I paused the screen with a mental nudge. Rewound it, played it again. And again.

  Slowly the tightness in my chest eased. This was what it was all about. This was the fight my parents spent their lives preparing us for, and I was fully committed to it, no matter what difficulties lay ahead. No matter the casualties along the way. I would find the right jackers—full of determination, like Sasha and this girl who had started everything—and we would build the army needed to see the fight through to the end. So that mindjackers like us would have a home to come to. A place to belong.

  Someday.

  The Scribe takes place in the time period between Open Minds and Closed Hearts, shortly after The Handler, where Sasha first shows up to (very tentatively) join Julian's revolution. Sasha is one of my favorite characters in the series; after reading The Scribe, I think you'll see why. Told from Sasha's point-of-view, this novella demonstrates his scribing ability, as well as gives us a peek into the conflict inside his head. We also get to see more of Ava's ability here than was possible to show in the novels, which are all limited by Kira's point-of-view and her impenetrable mind.

  Summary: Sasha Rimbali stopped using his mindjacking skill to erase souls in order to keep from going mad, but when a beautiful female jacker is threatened, he has to decide if there is any cause worth the cost of using his ability one more time.

  A knife thunked into the dryboard panel I had just installed, piercing the thin board a mere two feet away from me. I reflexively lashed out with my mind toward my attacker only to run smack into the granite that was Anna Navarro’s mindbarrier. I wasn’t the strongest mindjacker around and, as far as I knew, no one could jack into her mind anyway. I’d probably just riled her by trying. She stood stock-still in her sleeveless black shirt and urban camouflage pants, returning my glare from the opposite side of the training area.

  I wanted to ask, Are you insane? Instead, I pushed up the long sleeves of my shirt. “That was a perfectly good dryboard panel, you know.”

  “Knife training today,” Anna said, ignoring me. “Or would you prefer close combat training again? Your call, Sasha.”

  I swallowed. My bruises were still tender from yesterday’s close combat training. I had quickly learned that she had more muscles than I did, even though I was a guy and had done my fair share of manual labor. I worked the pitch-black knife loose from the board, scowling at the gash it left behind and the extra work I would have to do to repair it. Any complaints woul
d be wasted on Anna—she thought I should be training, not fixing up the place. But the half-finished bathroom wouldn’t dryboard itself, and fighting Anna with a blade wasn’t exactly appealing. I walked the knife over and extended it, handle first. If I played it straight, maybe she wouldn’t actually stab me with it.

  “I am certain I don’t want to fight you with one of these.”

  “It’s not me you have to worry about.” She eyed me, as if she could size up my capability as a fighter by examining my sawdust-covered jeans and workshirt. Or possibly she was measuring me for a coffin. “You never know when a fight will find you, and you may not always have a choice of weapons.”

  She pivoted away from me and threw the knife again, sinking it into one of the hundred-year-old oak beams that held up the converted door factory which served as the headquarters for her future mindjacker revolution. Our revolution. I rolled the words around in my head, but they still didn’t feel right. Her twin brother Julian recruited me into his new Clan as soon as I walked in the door, but I kept wondering if I’d made a mistake. Every other Clan had used me for their own purposes, and I wasn’t convinced Julian would be any different. And Anna seemed positive that I didn’t belong here. I couldn’t blame her for being suspicious—I wouldn’t let someone like me into my Clan either.

  “If you’re not going to use your true abilities,” she said, “you’re no better than any other jacker. And sometimes you’ll be on the losing end of the jack.”

  I shrugged. Little did she know, I’d been waiting for that to happen for a while. I vowed never to use my ability on anyone again, and one day, an angry jacker would put an end to me because of it. Some days I even welcomed the idea.

  “Or,” she continued, “you’ll be closely matched. Then your weapons training could mean the difference between walking away or ending up in someone else’s Clan. From what I’ve heard, that hasn’t worked out so well for you in the past.”

  Anna pulled another knife from the back of her pants and lunged at me, slicing the air in front of my face. I jerked out of her slashing reach and stumbled into a 55-gallon drum. It tipped, dumping trash we had cleared yesterday: rags clogged with grease, lumber singed by the laser saw, and machine parts eroded by a hundred years of rust.

  I recovered my balance and righted the drum. “You don’t know anything about me.” My gaze locked on the knife as she switched hands and circled me. It was only a rubber training blade, probably dull and not life threatening. Still, I didn’t want to finding out how much it would hurt if she stabbed me with it.

  “I know enough to see that your fighting skills could use some work.”

  “And maybe I wasn’t clear,” I turned with her, keeping my eyes on the rubber blade, “about not opting for knife training.”

  “As much as my brother would like to win this war with his words alone,” Anna said, as if I hadn’t spoken, “it’s going to take more than asking nicely to create a future where we can be free.” She lunged, and I landed a solid blow on the wrist of her knife hand, making her drop forward. My other hand swung a punch to her gut. She blocked it and brought the knife around. I pulled back, but its rough tip dragged across my chest. I swiped at her knife hand, getting nothing but air as she danced away from the engagement.

  “Don’t lose track of the knife,” she said.

  “Well, there’s a handy tip.” I glowered at her, then took a fighting stance as she circled me again.

  “If you’re going to be a part of this Clan,” she switched hands and changed her grip, so the knife now pointed down, “you need to contribute something. I assume that you still don’t want to use your real skill.”

  “That would be a good assumption.” Other Clans used my ability—to control, to punish, to gain power—always for the greater glory or security of the Clan. There was a time when I didn’t even know there was something wrong with that. When my mentor, Arlis, found me, I was a dazed changeling horrified at permanently erasing my gym teacher’s mind. He took me in, helped me recover, and taught me how to control my ability to erase a person’s mind, down to every last memory and personality quirk, and rewrite them into someone new. It took a long time for me to realize that anyone who plucks a thirteen-year-old boy out of school and turns him into a weapon isn’t a savior, he’s a monster.

  “Your brother, Julian,” I said to Anna, “seems to understand that destroying people’s souls isn’t the most righteous way to fight for his cause.”

  She flipped the knife up and down, alternating forward and reverse grips. “Just because he won’t force you to use your ability, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it anyway.”

  Her words set my nerves on edge more than the knife. That was the truth that I feared—she and Julian were just waiting for the right moment, the right pressure, to trick or force me into using my ability. I wouldn’t do it, but even thinking about it set off a twitching in my stomach that made it seize up.

  She tucked her free hand close, then swiped a back-slashing strike across my neck with the knife. I dodged back, the tip missing by inches, and shot my arm out, knocking the inside of her knife-arm and latching onto her wrist as it swung past. I jerked her arm down and twisted, using her momentum to throw her off balance and trying to break her hold on the knife. As she fell in closer, she hit me clean to my stomach with her free hand, forcing me to double over her and lose all my breath. I twisted harder, and she dropped the knife. I released her and fought for air as I snatched the knife from the floor then scrambled back before she could hit me again.

  “Better,” she said, rubbing her wrist.

  My lungs sucked in air, but the shakes in my stomach were climbing up my throat. I didn’t want her to see me lose my lunch. I dropped the knife to the floor, where it clattered dully on the oil-stained concrete, and turned away to the bathroom. The door wasn’t installed, but the dryboard gave me a little privacy. I bent over the sink and splashed near-freezing water on my face. The hot water line wasn’t hooked up yet, but the shock of cold successfully quelled the shakes. The mirror reflected back the dripping face of a man ten years older and a lifetime more worn than the thirteen-year-old changeling Arlis had whisked away from school to join his Clan.

  Following Arlis had taken me down a path where I had destroyed more souls than I could track. They invaded my sleep, becoming a tangled mess of personalities and histories that nearly drove me mad. I left Arlis behind and worked the handyman trade, but was quickly pulled back into the underground mindjacker Clans. I had sinned so much, what was the point in stopping? There was no redemption for me, no more than it was possible to return the memories and lives I had stolen.

  I wanted to believe this Clan with Julian would be different. He was practically bursting with hope for the future. Maybe I could help him deliver on that promise of hope for others, even if there wasn’t any left for me. Perhaps then there would still be a reason for me to exist.

  I looked away from the dark, soulless eyes in the mirror, not sure who was I kidding.

  I heard Anna scuff the concrete outside the threshold. I swung blindly, missed, and then caught her by the throat with my other hand, shoving her up against the half-constructed wall. I held off on the punch that was about to follow, partly because I didn’t want to put her through the dryboard I had just finished putting up, and partly because she had a crazy sort of grin above my hand clenched around her throat.

  Heat rose up my neck and I dropped my hand. “Sorry, I thought you were…”

  “I wasn’t,” she said, her eyes lit up. “But maybe I should have been.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck, having a hard time meeting her eyes.

  “Julian wants you up front,” she said.

  “I need to finish work on the bathroom.”

  “He has a new recruit coming,” she said. “He wants you to be there.”

  I eyed her. “Why?”

  She tapped her fingers against the wooden frame I’d put up for the door, avoiding my gaze. “You know he can’t jac
k, right?”

  I narrowed my eyes. I’d seen Julian subdue a jacker from my old Clan that no one else could stop. And he had asked me to jack into his head, just to show me that it couldn’t be done. Jacking Julian wasn’t the normal mental wrestling that one mindjacker did with another, each fighting for control of the other’s mind. When I mentally reached out to push into Julian’s head, all of my nightmares raged out from the depths of my mind, tipping me toward the madness that made me leave Arlis in the first place.

  I would never try that again.

  “What do you mean, he can’t jack?” I asked. “Julian’s some kind of extreme jacker, like the rest of us. You with your hard head, me with my ability. I don’t understand exactly what he does, but it trumps jacking by a long shot.”

  She dropped her hand from the door and looked me in the eyes. “Julian can manipulate your instincts, but he can’t jack you directly. That means anyone he can handle will be easy for him to control, but if he can’t reach their instincts, for whatever reason, he’s virtually powerless.”

  “He’s not exactly defenseless,” I countered, a chill running through me.

  “Agreed,” she said. “And I thought he could handle anyone, anytime. I never worried about him, until…”

  “Until Serena came along,” I finished.

  Anna’s jaw worked, the angles of her face flexing under her brown skin. “Look, I don’t know who these recruits are that he’s bringing in, and neither does he. Julian’s far too trusting. Until we know better, we have to assume that every one of them could be another Serena, or even worse.” She had the same brilliant blue eyes as Julian. They both could burn you with a look—his eyes blazing with hope, hers with something more raw. Anger? Hatred? She was legitimately dangerous, yet here she was, frowning with worry about her brother. It almost made her seem human.