Marked

by Alex Hughes

  There were similar memorials in every major city left in North America, with lists of names as long as this one.

  The names were just barely large enough to read from a few feet. There were four columns on the display on both sides, four columns more than five feet tall. It sobered you, to see such a list. Made you think your own problems were small, even if you didn’t have anyone you could talk to about them.

  I settled back and watched the spiraling waterfalls as they moved through the sculpture. Time passed. I put my rapidly chilling hands in my coat pockets—and they hit the gloves. I smiled without meaning to and pulled them on.

  A mind neared, focused on me in particular and I looked up. The human mind was hardwired to detect that kind of focus, which was why even normals noticed you staring at them. A survival mechanism. In the case of telepaths, survival was not a theoretical concept.

  I stood. “Edgar Stone.”

  He stood, gruffly, hands in the pockets of his antique leather jacket, a faux-fur hat covering most of his head. “Adam Ward.”

  “Please, sit,” I said, gesturing at the park bench.

  He shook his head. “I’ll stand, thanks.” Too cold, his mind leaked. Didn’t want a chilled seat on top of chilled fingers.

  “I’m getting quite a few stray thoughts from you,” I said politely.

  His face went blank, and I suddenly couldn’t see anything in Mindspace but a heavy, shiny mirror. “I am not a student. Watch yourself.”

  Crap, offending him was not my intention.

  “What was it you invited me here for in the first place?” I asked.

  “Apparently you pulled quite a privacy violation the other day.”

  “That was exaggerated,” I said.

  “Maybe.”

  Was I leaking? I checked my shields again. No, still locked up tight, without even the Guild-standard public space.

  “I expect you to conform to the highest standards of ethics during our investigation,” Stone said. “I’d be a lot happier with your police partner, to be honest.”

  “I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

  “Unfortunately I was overruled. It’s felt that if you step out of line, the Guild still has the right to kill you. This is very comforting to some.”

  “Nelson, I take it.” I added in subtext that Kara suspected him.

  Stone shrugged. “Be that as it may, you were expelled for improper behavior and massive betrayal of the Guild’s ideals. There are some who would rather not see you back.”

  “I’ve never liked the way they put that. It was a drug habit, not sexual misconduct.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me!” I took a breath. He was deliberately being difficult. “Listen, I just—”

  “You’ve been assigned to go into the middle of an Enforcement investigation, with a full madness lockdown, and screw with vital evidence—including people’s memories and mental states, directly or indirectly—in the middle of a Guild you now have no part of. Having just proven your ethics have slipped in the last few years. I am concerned.”

  “Sure, my ethics have slipped when it comes to self-defense,” I said. “I fight dirty. I do what it takes to survive. If that’s going to bother your high-and-mighty ethics, then—”

  “You saw it as self-defense?” he interrupted. “The privacy violation.”

  “He was manhandling me at the time,” I said.

  “That’s not how he tells it, and Kara’s testimony has been declared invalid.”

  “Why the hell? Kara’s a levelheaded bureaucrat. Wait. Did she speak for me?”

  “She’s also the grieving survivor of a controversial death that’s being quarantined as a public health issue,” Stone said. “And she hasn’t been the most levelheaded lady lately. Calling you is a perfect example. It’s believed she may have been contaminated. She’s under house arrest. And yeah, she spoke up for you loud and clear. Almost obsessively so.”

  I was surprised, and oddly pleased, that she’d spoken for me. Even so, I said, “Did you call me out here in the cold to insult me? A hell of a way to start a working relationship.”

  A pause, during which I watched the gravity-assisted water float around its tracks.

  “Here’s the thing,” Stone said. “The Guild is a political tangle right now. We have major factions fighting for control of the future course of the organization, and none of them are playing nice.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Rex is trying to use you as a pawn,” Stone said flatly. “And the ethical violation . . . I need to know you’re not some kind of hired spy working for Guild First or one of the families. Especially with the kind of madness potentially in play.”

  “What kind of madness? What kinds are there?”

  “I need to know you’re not some hired spy.”

  I laughed. “A spy? Really? That’s ridiculous. I’m here ultimately because Kara called me. Yeah, I have a debt to pay, and yeah, half the world is threatening me to get me here, but so what? I do, actually, believe in innocent until proven guilty. Let’s find out what happened.”

  He looked at me for a long moment, and then nodded. “And the ethics?”

  “I’ve been working in the interview rooms long enough to believe that people will tell you what they’re thinking eventually with words and body language without you doing a thing. Will I go rummaging around in heads willy-nilly? I’m not planning to. Why, will you?”

  “Now you’re insulting me.”

  I shivered as a particularly cold gust of wind blew some of the fountain water at me. “Let’s call it even. What kind of madness are we talking about here? I need to know what I’m getting into.” And how likely it was I was going to end up in Mental Health, or down in that cell again.

  You really believe in innocent until proven guilty? Subtext he sent along with the words implied a provincial point of view. A naive lie the normals told themselves, not how the world worked.

  I do, actually, I sent back, along with the overtones you only got with a deep-held truth. Evidence and innocent until proven guilty.

  You’ve worked for the normals too long, he sent, with a slight overtone of dark amusement, but that does, actually, make you neutral. I can work with that.

  “The madness,” I prompted.

  “Fine,” he said. “They’re thinking it’s another North Rim.”

  I waited.

  He said nothing.

  “What’s North Rim?” I asked.

  “You don’t know about North Rim? North Rim, Arizona. Twenty-five years after the end of the Tech Wars. The Guild researcher enclave.”

  I racked my brain for ancient school lessons. “You mean the people who researched Ability? The second generation? Went off into the desert and figured out training and mind structure and such.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Could we move this along?” I asked. “I’m freezing my balls off out here. And I need to know.”

  “There’s no reason to teach schoolchildren about how North Rim ended. At least there wasn’t.”

  “Okay?”

  “For the first few years, they were effective. Their disciplines kept getting results and showing us how to better train, how to improve, how to do practically everything with the mind that we know today. Individuals came and went from that commune over a decade, out there in the desert. But then they found a new technique that destroyed the mind’s natural barrier to madness, or they ran into something that amplified their deepest fears and used it against them, or they uncovered a deep mental flaw in the new recruits in the worst way possible. Nobody knows. Whatever happened, someone came down with the first recorded case of madness, a new kind of madness. And then it started spreading. Out of a commune of twenty-eight people, all but three died. One of those was the park ranger at the canyon vis
itor center. She holed herself up in the station and didn’t leave. But the other two made it halfway to Vegas and infected over a hundred fifty other people before they shut it down.”

  I processed that. “How did they shut it down?”

  “They killed anyone infected. Dead. And quarantined anyone who’d come in contact with them until they showed symptoms. The St. George town sheriff remembered the Tech Wars, was a stubborn old bastard, and he pulled the trigger nearly every single time himself. He stopped it, with brute force. After five rounds of contagion.”

  “Five?” I asked, and laughed. “Ludicrous. The odds of anyone infecting another telepath, much less a normal, at more than one remove are tiny. Tiny. It’s the foundation of all the mental health procedures at the Guild.”

  “With everything except this. The madness spread from person to person in a chain. Quick. It didn’t take repeated exposure, and some of the normals were affected too, mind-to-mind, though they couldn’t spread it. Violence came with the illness, homicide and suicide both. Nobody knows what it was. We’ve never seen anything like it. They still wonder what would have happened if that sheriff hadn’t stopped it at the end of a gun.”

  Suddenly it seemed a lot colder out here. “No cure, then?”

  “None that we know of.”

  “Okay. Why—why do you think it’s not a regular kind of mental health transmission right now?” I asked. “Normal person-to-person influence and power of suggestion? The Guild’s notorious for spreading power of suggestion throughout the population. Isn’t that more likely?”

  “We don’t know anything yet. And no matter what the politicians say, Nelson isn’t going to let executions start until we’re sure. If it wasn’t for the outbreak in Antarctica eight years ago, we wouldn’t even be—”

  “What?” I asked. “When was this?”

  He looked at me. “That’s right, you weren’t with the Guild then. They managed to keep it quiet from the normals. Fifty-seven deaths, the last fourteen from a ship docked on the last day. There was only one survivor, a low-level telepath, and he killed all fourteen before killing himself. They say it’s spread by deep mind-to-mind, anything past the public space.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh. That’s why the hullabaloo about the ‘privacy violation.’”

  “Yes. It’s a Guild First policy, but there’s a reason for it. Most of the Guild has adopted it wholeheartedly.” He looked around, then sent me a picture of the official Guild aircar, over the ridge. “We should get back.”

  “Are they really calling for executions?” I asked suddenly.

  “It’s not innocent until proven guilty at the Guild,” Stone said quietly. “It’s truth, and whatever is good for the majority.”

  “As defined by those in power,” I said.

  “As defined by Enforcement, largely, me and my fellows,” Stone said. “There’s a reason we’re separate from the rest of the Guild power structure.”

  He started walking, and I followed.

  I was cynical about the Guild’s system, all too cynical. It bothered me that Stone—a decent guy, from what I could see—could buy in to it so easily. Innocent until proven guilty and evidence really did matter. The Guild’s way assigned blame quickly, then mind-scanned to determine if they were correct. Some of those reads were so clumsy that the suspects were lucky to get off with a two-day migraine. Sometimes they’d been known to lose memories, or have a personality shift for weeks or months or permanently. Damage was routinely done by Enforcement, if needed to find out a truth you were hiding from them or from yourself. I liked trials, I liked innocent until proven guilty, even if the result was less certain. But I also liked walking around without someone else’s madness in my head.

  “You realize that we expect excellent work in exchange for a payment on your debt,” Stone said conversationally.

  In other words, he reminded me who held my leash. “I do good work,” I said.

  • • •

  Stone parked in the member-only garage on the back side of the Guild’s main skyscraper. Two other buildings towered to our left, with the lower garden area jutting out of the tallest one halfway up. The garage, which should have been half-empty and buzzing with people going to and fro (in the present and in Mindspace), was strangely empty of all emotion.

  The member entrance was a double set of doors down the hall, in sight of the atrium but not within in. There had always been a camera there, to track who came in and out of the Guild. The camera was still there, with two new ones I assumed recorded at different frequencies. The Guild had never had the hang-ups about recording the normals did, but this seemed excessive.

  Ahead were four security guards, extended rope barriers funneling us straight ahead to them, and to the large machine behind them. It was a long, multiple-textured arch in shape, with flashing lights and strange matte panels above a low chair with a headrest and what looked like automatic restraints, currently deactivated. The dark-colored chair was inset with shiny metal circles along the back and in the headrest, circles that looked similar to the monitoring devices the Guild used to screen schoolchildren for Ability.

  “What is this?” I asked, wary.

  The first guard said, in a low, bored voice, “It’s for your own protection.”

  Sure. And being locked up or destroyed—according to Stone, the only recourses—was for the Guild’s protection, not mine.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “How about I keep my mind to myself and we’ll call it even?”

  Stone held up his Enforcement badge. “We don’t have time for this. Give me the form and we’ll move through.”

  “It’s for everyone now. New rules, new lockdown. Sorry.” He didn’t look very sorry.

  “Fine,” Stone said gruffly. He sat in the chair.

  A low buzzing came from the machine as one of the guards powered it up. Then a sense of wrenching pressure and an Escher-like impossible bubbling and twisting of space—and then it was over. The red lights on the arch turned to green. Stone let out a small pain sound.

  Now with sweat dripping down his face, he stood, wobbly. He rebuilt his former stoicism, then walked to the wall to wait for me.

  I thought about leaving then, about turning all the way around and getting out of Dodge. Kara could fend for herself. I didn’t need extra trouble in my life; I had plenty with the police. I needed to stay on the wagon and stay healthy.

  “If you want to test the Guild’s threats concerning failure, turn right around,” Stone said. “Otherwise move.”

  “Just so you know I’m not happy about it.” I walked up to the Throne of Frightening Lights and sat.

  A guard hit a few buttons on the side of the arch, then that sound as it powered up.

  Pain—unimaginable pain—as someone put my mind through an invisible blender. Razor blades pulled apart every shred of me from every other—

  And then it was over. Utterly, completely over. My entire being rang with the sudden silence.

  The guard in front of the arch pulled his eyebrows together in a worrisome look. “No madness, but you’re not exactly a—”

  “Does he pass or not?” Stone asked.

  “He passes.”

  I staggered to my feet, unwilling to be in this horrible chair any longer than necessary. I pushed off and duck-stepped away, to the far wall. I stood against it, breathing, trying to recover.

  One guard laughed to the other. I suppressed the urge to throw that pain at them. I had things to do today. I couldn’t be in that cell again, not now.

  Obviously it had been far, far too long since I’d been through pain desensitization at the Guild. But even when I’d done that, even when I’d been there, it wasn’t like this. We hadn’t had our minds shredded for no more than a test. We’d been treated with respect, not like cattle in a line. Even if the threat was imminent, there was something about the whole thing that
left a bitter taste in my mouth.

  I didn’t feel like holding out my mind for the cattle prod again, and if the rank-and-file Guild members were used to it, well, that didn’t make it right.

  The guards gave us a yellow flag to pin to our badges, a flag that said we’d been cleared this day, and we moved on.

  • • •

  “You seem out of sorts,” Stone told me as I trotted after him. Enforcement had their own floors set into the basements of the professional building—far more basements than I’d known about previously. We were traveling to the third-level underground, something that required a special elevator and a flat rectangular key that fluoresced in the light. Tech, I was betting, even if only the lightest possible touch of living circuits and bioluminescence.

  “I don’t like all the security,” I said. “I don’t like having my mind shredded when I haven’t even been exposed yet.”

  He turned around. “It’s necessary. If we have another North Rim on our hands, it will get worse before it gets better.”

  “Even so, all you have so far is a suicide and a madness report, I assume in the usual fashion. It doesn’t add up to anything this frightening yet.” Did it? Was I just lying to myself to avoid facing the real danger I was under?

  “Over a hundred people have checked themselves into Mental Health, some with third-degree exposure. It’s a problem, Ward. A much bigger problem than you realize.”

  The elevator dinged and the doors opened. The hallway was dimly lit, long, with a tiled floor and doors on both sides spaced widely apart. Straight ahead was a set of double doors with small windows that leaked light onto the patterned tile.

  “We need to go. I don’t know how much longer we can hold the body, so that’s our first step.” He strode toward the doors.