mindjack 04 - origins

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  Summary: Anna Navarro, leader of the Jacker Freedom Alliance, spends her time in FBI Agent Kestrel's secret prison enduring his torments... and awaiting the time for her revenge.

  SEVENTY-ONE. Seventy-two. Seventy-three.

  The muscle burn in my arms makes itself known, a welcome companion inside these walls of white. My cot is neatly made, and I’ve already run the perimeter walls—all forty feet of the ten-by-ten room. By the end of a hundred laps, I was literally climbing the walls with each turn, holding my hospital gown out of the way and getting traction with my bare feet.

  Anything to keep from climbing them figuratively.

  I’m certain that’s part of Agent Kestrel’s plan in grabbing me off the streets of Jackertown and keeping me and the others locked away, isolated in our tiny cells. That, and to probe the limits of our mindjacking skills for his purposes, whatever they are. Kestrel may, in theory, be one of us, but he’s no friend of jackers. I don’t know his ultimate aim, but I don’t have to—you can fight the enemy without being privy to all his detailed plans. I just need to keep Kestrel off guard, avoid divulging any information, and stay alive long enough for my brother, Julian, to come for me. It’s been almost two weeks, but I know nothing will stop him from finding me and liberating all of us. And when Julian gets here, Kestrel will sorely wish he hadn’t.

  Eighty-one. Eighty-two. Eighty-three. Sweat rolls off the tip of my nose and joins the small but growing pool on the white-tiled floor.

  The first time Kestrel paid a visit to my cell, he and his goon brought another jacker prisoner with them. Just a normal one, no extreme abilities that I could detect with a small brush of his mind barrier. It was enough to know he didn’t have an impenetrable mind, like me, and thus was vulnerable to Kestrel’s predations. I doubt Kestrel knew about my ability before he kidnapped me, but he certainly knows now. Losing that tactical advantage is worse than being stuck like a lab rat in Kestrel’s cells. And every day in here is a day lost in building the revolution with my brother. At least Kestrel gave no sign that he knew about my brother’s ability to manipulate people’s instincts. That’s one secret which will stay locked in my head until Kestrel gets to experience it for himself.

  When that regular jacker was brought to my cell, I declined to participate in Kestrel’s sadistic little experiment… and the jacker paid the price for it. Just mental pain. No physical damage that I could discern. I thought it would deter Kestrel if I refused to play his games, but he just came around again—with the same jacker.

  You can take the measure of a man by what he does—the look in his eyes—when faced with torment by someone evil. I still don’t know that jacker’s name, but I know full well the man on the inside. He gave me a nod that told me he understood: I wasn’t just defying Kestrel, I was foiling his experiment by keeping the extent of my abilities a mystery. And it wasn’t just for me, but for all jackers. We were in a fight for the right to exist. My brother would forge a future where we could be free, but he needed time. And numbers. And every tactical advantage we could give him. I gave that jacker prisoner a nod back, acknowledging his willingness to sacrifice for the cause. Bravery like that deserves the kind of respect that allows it to happen.

  But that didn’t make it any easier to watch.

  Ninety-six. Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight. I splay my hands wider on the floor, gaining more grip as they become slick with the sweat gathering on my palms.

  At the end of Kestrel’s last torture session, he injected me with something. A drug he no doubt is testing on more than just me. I was unconscious when they brought me in, but the walls are jacker-proof, not sound-proof. I hear the screams. How many others is hard to say, but I’m not the first to disappear from the streets of Jackertown. I haven’t felt the effects of the drug yet, either physically or mentally, but I’m sure it will come. Which means I’m in a race between that and freedom—

  The door clicks.

  I drop a knee down, trapping my hospital gown on the floor, then roll quickly to my side and face away from the door. I curl into a ball and hope Kestrel thinks his meds have begun to work. Or that maybe the walls are closing in.

  Always let your enemy underestimate you.

  The hard heels of Kestrel’s shoes sound behind me, followed by the softer scrape of boots… and then lighter footfalls. They’ve brought someone to torment again.

  “Get up, Ms. Navarro,” Kestrel says in his cool voice. Calculated and barren. Much like his soul, no doubt. He doesn’t believe my possum act. Probably saw me on camera before he came in.

  I roll over to face him, keeping my hands tucked against my chest. They quiver a bit—built up lactic acid making my muscles twitch. Not sure if it fools him, but it’s a nice effect. I slowly raise my gaze from the floor, deliberately putting some lost-puppy look into it, but before I reach Kestrel’s ice-blue eyes, I see who he’s brought for today’s plaything.

  A child.

  She’s thin, less than a hundred pounds, and barely thirteen. I don’t mentally reach out to test her mind barrier, but I’m certain it’s the soft one of a changeling. If a grown jacker can’t resist Kestrel’s goon, this child will be mentally crushed. I silently thank Kestrel for reminding me of the monster he is.

  “Get up,” Kestrel repeats.

  I slowly climb to my feet, still pretending that I’m weakened. As I do so, I surreptitiously flex the muscles in my arms, hands, legs, and feet, readying them. The guard—a different one than before—smirks at my shaking hands. I scan his overly beefy body with wide eyes, as though I fear his bulky muscles and lack of noticeable ethics.

  “You know the drill, Ms. Navarro,” Kestrel says. “Mr. Tyler will induce a rather unpleasant level of pain in the girl until you evict him from her mind.”

  The changeling’s eyes are wide, but I can’t reassure her. Not yet.

  “I don’t know if I can.” I keep my voice soft, eyes on Kestrel, afraid I will give myself away if I look at the girl. “I don’t feel so well.”

  Kestrel arches an eyebrow, unimpressed. “That would be unfortunate for our young changeling.”

  I look Kestrel over. I don’t see a weapon, but he could have one tucked away. A quick mental reach behind and around me—carefully avoiding the three minds in front—shows the disruptor field is still active in the walls, keeping me mentally locked in the room. The only way to open the door is a signal from Kestrel. I could hold him hostage, negotiate my way out, but the most likely outcome is a tranq dart for me. Or worse. And that won’t help the others.

  Patience, Anna.

  I take a deep breath and vow to keep waiting for Julian. Still… the unnecessary suffering of children is Kestrel’s game, not mine. He tips his head toward the guard and issues a mental command. The goon starts in on the girl. She drops to her knees, clutching her stomach.

  No time to waste.

  I mentally shove past her soft mind barrier, plunging in to find the guard’s mental presence: a hard marble suspended in the gel of her mind. I fling the goon out, shove him all the way back to his own skull, then plunge deeper into his mind, searching out the parts that control breathing and heart rate. He’s too strong for me to get a kill jack on him, but that’s all right—I wasn’t planning on taking him mentally.

  However, fighting for your life is an excellent distraction.

  I lunge for the guard and catch him in a blow to the throat that’s slightly wide of target, so it won’t kill him, then I land two more in quick succession, both to his gut. He huffs over, clutching his stomach under the assault. A final side strike to his face whips his head back, and he goes down.

  Kestrel reaches me mentally. I yank back into my own head, so he can’t judge my strength. He chases after me, and the pressure is intense as he bears down on my mind barrier. I whirl on him, bat away the dart gun he’s pulled from somewhere, grab hold of his head, shove my knee into his gut, then step back and watch as he sinks to his knees.

  I debate a roundhouse kick to the face for his trouble.<
br />
  I think about this for a full second.

  Then I step back. The time isn’t right. I’m sure Kestrel will find a way to punish me for this—I can take it, but I don’t want him hurting the girl. She’s cowering against the door. I don’t link into her mind to see what she’s thinking. She’s already had more violation than she should have to put up. When Julian comes, we’ll put an end to her torment. And the others as well. I only hope my blow to the guard’s head will blur any memories he has of my mental strength. And possibly deter both him and Kestrel from trying again.

  I sigh. “I think we’re done for today, Kestrel.”

  I take another step back, as far as I can go in my tiny cell, then I drop to the floor and resume my workout.

  One hundred. One hundred-one. One hundred-two.

  CAUTION: do not read unless you've already read Free Souls.

  This DELETED SCENE takes place during the final chapter of Free Souls. Told from Kira's point-of-view, this scene is really a "missing moment"—something in the novel that happens "off screen." Sometimes the demands of pacing require cutting, and this scene was one of those. In the novel, Kira refers to how Kestrel finally met his end, but this scene shows the events leading up to his demise. In Kestrel's Interrogation, the reader (and Kira) get a peek inside Kestrel's head, which, as she notes, is not a very nice place to be.

  I nodded to the two JFA militia standing guard outside the privacy room that served as a temporary prison. They returned my nod, but held their position by the door, hands resting on their small caliber pistols. They had dart guns too, and I knew Hinckley had given them each a thought grenade as well.

  Just in case.

  The tall one with the blond, sandy hair rapped once on the door. One of the two JFA guards stationed inside the privacy room opened it.

  “Ma’am,” he said quietly, holding the door wide open once he recognized me. I stepped inside, just past the swing of the door, and he silently shut it behind my back. A small heater by the door wafted warm air across my hands hanging at my side, chasing away the drafty winter chill of the room. I stood there for a moment, staring at our prisoner. He was zip-tied to a heavy wooden chair in the middle of the room, his head slumped and body slack.

  Kestrel must have passed out again.

  Hinckley sat at the back of the room, his feet propped on a small table, his chair tipped back and braced against the wall. Something played on the palm-sized screen in his hand, and he waited until I crossed the room before looking up. I gave wide berth to Kestrel, not because I thought he might leap up and bite me, but because I might be tempted to do something similar to him, if I got too close.

  “I saved him for you, Kira.” Hinckley gestured with his chin to Kestrel, then looked back to his screen. I examined Kestrel from my far-enough-to-be-safe distance. His chest rose and fell, once, slowly.

  “Thanks for not killing him.”

  Hinckley shrugged. “Not like it’s up to me.” Then he looked up. “How’s the debate going? Has Anna got her knives out yet?”

  “She’s still in favor of a bullet to the head.” I eyed Kestrel, wondering who would get the honors. Seemed like I should be first in line for that. “But so far she hasn’t challenged Julian to a knife throwing contest to decide.”

  “He’s still holding out for scribing?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And my mom’s campaigning for it too. I think she wants a piece of him, like the rest of us. Maybe more so.”

  My mom was still getting used to her new scribing power, and she didn’t seem to be in a rush to scribe anyone, but she made an exception for Kestrel. Especially once I told her how he had experimented on me, along with hundreds of other jackers. But I hoped Julian wouldn’t agree to let her do it, even if he won the debate raging out in the main meeting area of the JFA headquarters. We could wait for Sasha to recover. Even when he was ready to scribe again, he would have a tough time with Kestrel; I couldn’t imagine what it might do to my mom. I’d already interrogated Kestrel a couple of times, and I could testify to the fact that his head was a dark place to be. That was one reason we kept rotating the interrogators—no one should have to spend that much time in Kestrel’s head, much less take it apart and stitch it back together. The other reason was to simply keep him alive—we needed to get all the information we could out of him. And too many people wanted to put a bullet in Kestrel’s brain.

  “I think Mr. Kestrel’s naptime is over,” I said to Hinckley. “Do you have a patch?”

  Julian had ordered up some half-strength adrenaline med patches, just enough to rouse Kestrel from his sleep, so we could probe his conscious mind, but not enough for him to keep us out of his head. Kestrel spent most of his time in that half-awake state, lapsing unconscious when the mental torment got to be too much. Or when someone knocked him out in disgust.

  Hinckley reluctantly eased his feet off the low table and fished a patch out of the pocket of his camouflage pants. He tried to hand it up to me, but I shook my head and tilted it toward Kestrel. I still didn’t want to get within arm’s distance. Or spitting distance, for that matter.

  The rickety wooden chair screeched the floor as Hinckley heaved up and lumbered over to dose Kestrel. The med patch worked fast, and Hinckley was barely back in his chair, watching his game on the screen, when Kestrel gasped in a breath and slowly shook his head, as if he could clear the fuzziness that way.

  I shoved into his mind before he could get oriented, pushing through his mindbarrier, which had been softened by the med patch. He tried to push me back out, but he was far too weak. His mindscent was sour, like milk turned bad, and confusion swirled through his head, almost like the scattered electronic misfires that chased each other across the minds of the demens. Only Kestrel’s mind lacked the peppermint scent of madness. He wasn’t demens, at least not as we were used to thinking about that condition. Thanks to his genetic inhibitors, the demens who roamed the Chicago New Metro streets were starting to turn into jackers—and entirely sane ones at that. Which was a good thing, since the demens-turned-jackers tended to be wildly powerful or have exotic new abilities. One that had stumbled into Jackertown just yesterday could mindjack animals—something no one had heard of before. It was strange, and potentially amazing, this new ability to mindtalk to and control the non-human minds on the planet.

  The world was changing at a pace no one had expected, least of all me, even though I had been the one to dump Kestrel’s inhibitors into the water in the first place.

  Kestrel’s thoughts were coming into coherence now, like a storm gathering strength, dark clouds of malevolence feeding on each other. I pushed through them, shoving him around a bit, just to let him know I was his interrogator for the moment, and he was better off not resisting.

  Yesterday I had verified from his memories that there was no antidote for the inhibitors, so today my questions were back to the experiments themselves.

  What was the purpose behind your experiments on the changelings? I shoved the question hard into his head, hoping to automatically dredge up some memories, so I wouldn’t have to hunt for them.

  Hello to you too, Kira, Kestrel thought. Your turn for the fun today? The clouds of his mind churned, echoing self-loathing thoughts that seemed to welcome the torment that lay ahead. Like he wanted me to come inside and poke at the pain that lay roiling underneath.

  I swallowed the sourness at the back of my throat that those thoughts induced. You were trying to reverse the jacker gene expression by studying kids who had recently gone through the change. But you couldn’t fully reverse it. I had found out that much yesterday. So what exactly is in the inhibitors? How do they target the jacker gene?

  Aspirin and antibiotics, Kestrel thought, a weak attempt at putting me off, but it didn’t matter. My pointed questions had brought up several memories, pushing through the clouds of his bitter conscious thoughts. I shoved deeper in, catching a memory and forcing Kestrel to replay it in his head. I closed my eyes, trying to see the reconstructed
scene through Kestrel’s eyes, feeling his emotions, tasting every impulse that passed through his brain. I gritted my teeth, and Kestrel groaned at the invasion.

  This was the hard part of the interrogation. Being Kestrel for a while.

  We were back in Kestrel’s cells, the ones at the Chicago Lakeshore Hospital, a demens facility posing a careful facade for Kestrel’s experimental torment chambers for jackers. White and stark and smelling vaguely of antiseptic, the room surged up my own memories, turning my stomach and making me want to grab Kestrel around the neck and choke the life out of him.

  This was why I kept my distance.

  I pushed deeper into his memory, forcing both him and myself to immerse in it, so that Kestrel couldn’t push it away before I’d gleaned every last thing there was to learn. This memory had popped up for a reason. It must have something important tucked in it.

  We stared down at the changeling writhing on the white-tiled floor at our feet, resisting the temptation to physically kick the child. We couldn’t beat the devil out of her; we knew that. We had to be patient and let the serum do its work. The day would come when all of them would have that devil excised from them, but we had to be methodical about bringing that day to bear.

  We glanced at the clipboard we held, notes telling us that this was the fifteenth treatment of Serum X1736 for patient 305. Fifteen was more than enough, and she should be feeling the effects; the weakness brought by the suppression of the gene.

  We linked minds with Harrier, the guard we had plucked from his covert operations with the Navy to bring him to the true work he was meant to do, here with us. Harrier was in the changeling’s mind, diving through her memories, pulling up painful ones from the past, and inventing new ones of abuses that never happened. He enjoyed his work, the perfect prod to convince the other jacker patients to partake in the experiment.