“Stay still,” she said. She turned to his abdomen and raised her hands. Tiny streamers of baby blue light reached down from her hands to him and he warmed.
“Supported?”
“Yes. Behave, you, so I can heal you. Suck on this towel. You’re severely dehydrated.”
Dave did as told. As he sucked on the damp towel, he overheard an argument and turned toward the voices. The longhaired single-braid woman stood in the center of a half dozen others, all equally worn, dusty, wounded and with ripped clothes; she argued with all of them at once.
“We are not killers,” the longhaired woman said. She no longer held her braid like a rope. She wore the same aura of command on her that Elorie did, but more of an autocrat than Elorie’s team coordinator.
“He’s an assassin,” Evil Dude said; this one hadn’t put his handgun away. Evil Dude didn’t have an accent to Dave’s ear, which meant he hailed from the Rocky Mountain States. “A Dubuque Supported. It’s obvious. You said he was too much of a Mindbound for you to telep. Someone like him is perfect for a job like this.”
“I hate to say this, but the evidence does support it,” another woman said. She spoke with a European accent and looked to be in her late fifties or early sixties; she leaned on a short middle-aged oriental woman with shiny jet-black hair. The older woman had a shiner, while the oriental woman had a first-degree burn on the left side of her face. “Can any of you Portland Supported protect us from him if he attacks?”
Shit.
Dave spat the wet towel out of his mouth. “Beluga elephant! Beluga elephant!” he said, as much a shout as possible. These people were supposed to be on his side!
The longhaired woman and the black man turned to him, instantly. Again, a headache.
Telepaths. They had to be Telepaths.
An unrelenting hunch rang through him, one of recognition. The woman. He knew her. Somehow.
Oh… Shit… Not them.
The group walked over to him. The black man knelt down. The woman with the long braid reached into the black man’s backpack, took out half of a chocolate bar and started to eat.
He knew the man as well.
Somehow, he had known them both, all his life.
Them.
“Alt said there was a Dubuque worshipper on the Ecumenist quest team, not a Dubuque Supported. Who are you, anyway?” the black man asked. He appeared to be in his late thirties, thin, intense and terrifying.
“Dave Estrada.” Dave took a deep breath as the black man nodded. “You’re Ken Bolnick and the woman beside you is Nessa Binglehauser?” Neither reacted. “Am I right?”
“Yes,” the black man said. His eyes went vacant for a moment, intense telepathy with his companions, perhaps?
“I’m impressed,” the older woman said. “If I had been through what he’s been through, I wouldn’t be anywhere near as sharp. Consider how I reacted after the missile hit the jet.”
Missile? Jet?
“I told you I wanted him,” the long braid woman – Nessa – said. “I’ve wanted him ever since we found his blog post. He’s perfect. Alt did good, as usual.” She, Nessa, stood a little above average for a woman, painfully thin. She had a hard pinched face, a hard and older woman who had suffered through a hard life. She looked nasty and forbidding, though part of her grim appearance most likely came from whatever hell she had suffered through today. The fresh coating of grimy dust didn’t help, either.
Found him on the blog, though? His Dubuque stories, perhaps? Impossible. Tiff had anonymized the blog entry. No way could they have fingered him.
Unless there were tricks he hadn’t read about.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
“He’s still a Dubuque Supported,” Evil Dude said. Not to Dave’s surprise, Evil Dude’s handgun still pointed at Dave’s head. “When he shouldn’t be.”
“Fine, Frank, if you want to kill him, then kill him,” the Goth princess said, and arched a smudged eyebrow at Frank a.k.a. Evil Dude. “I think I’ve got him patched up enough that you’ll have to work at it a bit.” She looked up at Nessa, who didn’t react, and scrabbled away.
“Bitch,” Nessa said, her eyes following the Goth princess. She knelt beside Ken and stared at infinity. “Dave, I’m trying to save your life. My people here want to kill you. They think you attacked the rest of Elorie’s team and killed them. Help me out here, please?” Up close, she looked far worse for wear. Five gashes ran down the left side of her face and needed stitching up, open wounds, not bleeding, not oozing anything, just sitting there open and untended.
“Dubuque made me into a Grade Three Supported part way through the mission. I’m not sure, but I think he’s cut me loose for my failures.”
“That fits my analysis,” the Goth princess said. “He hadn’t much Supported left…”
“Loser Lady One, shut up,” Nessa said.
“Find me a pack of cigarettes and then I’ll take the deal.”
Nessa glowered at the woman and the Goth princess backed off, silent. Nessa turned to the others. “He’s not dangerous. I can’t read his mind, but I know he’s not dangerous.”
“Ken?” the older woman said. “How about you?”
“He’s dangerous,” Ken said. “Strange…not physically dangerous. Hell. Okay, okay, I get it now. He’s dangerous because he knows something that’s going to let us follow the rest of Elorie’s crew and get ourselves into yet more shit.”
Ken spoke as if he knew Elorie; then Dave remembered Elorie’s story of how she got recruited. Nessa and Ken had been with the Recruiter when he found Elorie.
“They’re not all dead?” Evil Dude said.
“Correct,” Ken said. “We were running out of rubble to search anyway. I think the only ones who died were the two we found.”
Mohammed and Darrel. Elorie had indeed made it out alive. Relief flooded Dave.
“They triggered a trap,” Dave said.
“Trap?”
Dave explained his experiences, ending with his belief that someone set up Elorie’s team to die. Both Ken and Nessa’s faces paled; the older woman’s face grew angry.
“Uffie?” Ken said, seeing the older woman’s reaction.
Uffie, the older woman, pointed at Dave. “He, he…” Uffie bit her lip. “He betrayed them by not following Dubuque’s instructions. He’s responsible for the two deaths.”
“You’re a little cavalier there about placing blame, Uffie,” Nessa said. “Or is this one of your variety of special feelings?”
“Correct,” Uffie said. Nessa implied Uffie was a Telepath, which confused Dave. She had a different presence than Ken and Nessa. They came on like insane wild animals. Uffie was flustered and weak. If insane, she hid it well; no, she just looked too stressed for a woman her age. How, though, had she read his mind?
“Well, I say you’re wrong,” Nessa said. “There’s a hell of a lot more going on here than just one Dubuque Supported disobeying orders. He certainly didn’t cause our disaster.”
Uffie nodded. “True. But what I said was true, as well.”
“I go back and forth on that myself,” Dave said. “If Elorie hadn’t touched the magical trap, and only fallen into the link by touching her companions, would she have broken the trap?”
“Yes,” Ken said.
“Uh?” Uffie. “How do you know that, Ken?”
“I’ve studied this crap, and from what I know, the answer is yes. If she’s an Immune, as Dave says, and she got linked into the magic, she would have broken the magic,” Ken said. “That’s how Immunes work.”
If he had followed Elorie’s lead, she still would have broken the magic. Relief flooded into him, his best self-blaming answer tossed away, just like the others.
“Okay, how about this,” Uffie said. “If Dave hadn’t triggered a fight, then they would have all escaped, or had the chance to escape. Because things happened out of sequence, because he triggered a fight, they weren’t all able to escape once Elorie had destroyed the magical trap.”
> Dave’s face fell.
“Or they could have all died, which I have a hunch was the plan,” Nessa said. “I think you’re reading too much into this.” The last she said nose to nose with Uffie. “Back off.”
The oriental woman put her hands on both Uffie and Nessa’s shoulders. “Calm, calm. Too long a day, too much adrenaline, not enough food. Both of you are thinking with your emotions.”
“Alright, alright, point made,” Nessa said. She gestured, nonchalant, and a canteen of water slowly floated over to her hand. She drank. “Dave. Where is this whatever-it-is we need to find?” She still didn’t look at him when she spoke.
“There’s a map, or was, before the floor gave way. On the top of one of the shelf benches in the top room. Watch out, there’s still active magic…”
“We know,” Nessa said. “Ken, Loser Lady 1, Party Boy – fetch.”
Party Boy was another of the men of the group, one who had been hanging back. Ken shrugged and stood.
“You want some time alone with Dave?” Ken said.
“Yes,” Nessa said. “All of you, leave me alone.”
They left. Nessa sat down beside Dave and watched her team get to work.
“You think Uffie’s right, don’t you?” Nessa said.
Dave nodded. He had levered himself up to a sitting position, where he could examine his wound. It was open and ugly looking, but with the dried blood removed, the wound looked like someone had taken a bite out of his abdomen, just under his rib cage. His arms went all pins and needles looking at his wound, and fresh sweat beaded his body. In the world he lived in, wounds didn’t look like this on living people.
“What I did was a betrayal,” Dave said. “I disobeyed the answer Dubuque gave to my prayer. He wouldn’t answer my prayers afterwards.”
Nessa snorted. “No big loss. Prayers are overrated anyway.”
“Huh? My prayers to Dubuque kept me alive and functional after my chronic cadmium poisoning became terminal.”
“Sure. Someone else suffered, then.”
“What?” Without warning, he found himself angry with the woman. Nessa’s attitude pissed him off.
“Trust me as a Telepath, I know these things,” Nessa said. “All my life, I’ve heard people praying for help, tens of thousands of people. You know what? Prayer is utter foolishness.”
Why in the hell was she picking a fight with him? “So, what, you don’t believe in the 99 Gods?”
“No, I’m saying prayer by the masses is a zero sum game,” Nessa said. “For you, philosophy, for me, it’s something rubbed in my face until I understood. God, or the 99 Gods, can’t give out miracles to everyone without contradictions. Give to one, take from another. Prayer is pathetic, if you give it any thought. Prayer is nothing but ‘I’m special, gimme what I want’ egotism run amok, exactly the sort of muddy thinking I expect from non-Telepaths. You shouldn’t pray for physical miracles save in the most horrible disasters.”
“But, but…” Dave gathered himself, his anger now flowing like water. Prayer saved his life! “How dare you judge God? How dare…”
“I dare what I want to dare,” Nessa said. “So do you; so does everybody. Nobody, save us poor Telepaths, who don’t have any choice, ever understands how a prayer request is always a demand to hurt someone else.”
“I can understand the problem with prayers for fame and wealth, but how can a prayer request for healing or health hurt someone else?” Dave said. “No way.”
“Think quotas and limited resources,” Nessa said.
“God’s infinite love isn’t big enough?” Dave said. “I hadn’t known you were so strong a non-believer.”
“Non-believer?” Nessa said, and barked a laugh. “I know God has limited resources because He told me so Himself not too long ago.”
What, Dave asked himself, do you say to such a comment?
“Besides, Dubuque, who isn’t God, certainly is playing with limited resources,” Nessa said. “When he answered your prayers and kept your transplanted kidney from crapping out from a different variety of cadmium poisoning than the rest of your body, he didn’t answer all those other prayers from all those others who wanted help.”
“Dubuque didn’t answer my prayer, God did. Dubuque was just the intermediary,” Dave said. How did Nessa know any of this stuff?
Nessa sighed. “Bullshit, Dave. The prayer stuff is Dubuque all the way. This is something a Telepath can sense. You’re named Dave, aren’t you?”
Dave nodded. This strange woman knew about the kidney transplant without being told, but couldn’t remember his name and had conversations with God? He knew Telepaths were insane, but experiencing their insanity was a whole different thing.
“When I’m at my best, I can be a million or so people,” Nessa said, answering his unasked question. “I’ve been Oklahoma City – it was a spy mission to find out how tightly Dubuque held on to an old acquaintance, Cosmo, so sue me – and I’ll tell you, Dubuque’s no more working with unlimited resources and doing God’s infinite work than the Post Office or the Women’s Shelters are. He’s just as resource-bound.”
Dave parsed through Nessa’s unfamiliar commentary. “Hold it, there. You just admitted God’s infinite. So He’s not resource bound, and your whole…”
“God’s infinite, but so’s creation, in all the dimensions of space and time, which you don’t understand now but likely will in a few years. They’re even the same order of transfinite,” Nessa said. With utter certainty. She made Dave’s head ache.
What was some crazy like Nessa doing even knowing the word ‘transfinite’, anyway? “So what are you saying is since Dubuque healed me in particular he was doing me in particular a favor?”
“Light dawns finally,” Nessa said. “Want some gummy chocolates?”
Dave winced and shook his head. “So you think Dubuque’s evil?”
Nessa took a grimy package of gummy chocolates out of her burnt, ripped and bloodstained purse and plopped one into her mouth. “No, I think he’s just another of the 99 Gods,” she said, a mumble around a full mouth. With a start, Dave realized Nessa wore a dress, a fancy silk blouse (now ruined), sensible pumps, hose, and carried a purse. You would have to be insane to be down in the underground cities in clothes like this, or at least have a Telepath like Ken able to levitate you around.
“Dubuque’s a religious leader, Nessa. Holy and…”
“His thugs have tried to kill me five different times,” Nessa said, edgy temper in her voice. “Six if you count the fucking missile that hit the fucking jet I was fucking riding earlier today.”
Missile. Jet. Those words again. “A missile hit your jet?” Nessa nodded. “How’d you survive? How did all of you survive?” Too much of Nessa’s world didn’t involve logical sense.
“Ken. Oh, and the fact I took over everyone else’s mind to stop them from panicking and doing stupid things when the jet came apart around us at 30,000 feet and we got sprayed by exploding jet fuel etcetera etcetera etcetera,” Nessa said, in a ‘just another day’s work’ sort of voice.
Dave’s eyes boggled. “Crazy. How in the hell…” He composed himself. “Then Ken has the power of one of the 99 Gods. I never heard any hints of this. If he has godlike power, why were you in a jet to begin with?”
“Fear,” Nessa said. “The less Ken and I act like normal humans, the less we are normal humans. That leads us down the road to being Blind Toms. Evil Telepaths. People who think they’re God.”
“Now?”
“Now. Well yes, there’s now. We had to go overboard or we would have died. Our actions have pushed us too far down a very black road, I’m afraid. I’m counting on you, Dave, to bring us back.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m not sane.”
“You don’t say.”
“Be polite.” Nessa smiled. “You and my left sock need to sit down some day and hash things out on the subject. Dave, I get my sanity from those around me. You’re important for my sanity.”
“I’m a Psychic, or at least that’s what I’ve been told,” Dave said. “Don’t my mental shields make me the wrong sort of person for helping your sanity?”
“No. The strength of your mental shields makes you the best. My problem is with the conscious thoughts of others with readable minds,” Nessa said. “I’ll lean on your mind, my subconscious to your subconscious to use Ken’s term, and I’ll be saner.”
“What does this do to the people you’re with?”
“For Psychics like you? Same as for Mindbound. Nothing. Being around me might even help you – ease your worries, cut down on your angst, that sort of thing. You won’t be picking up as much unconscious telepathy as you normally would.”
“You’ve convinced me,” Dave said. “You’re crazy. There’s no way I’m going to be your stability slave.”
“Right, of course,” Nessa said. “For one thing, I don’t trust you yet.”
“Good.”
“Which is why I have to do this.” To Dave’s total shock, Nessa leaned over to him, grabbed him, and kissed him. Not a sisterly peck, but a tongue-entwining overtly sexual kiss. Dave tried to scramble away, but weak as he was, Nessa didn’t have any problem violating him.
Although the more she kissed him the less this felt like a violation and the more this felt like another betrayal of Elorie. This wasn’t an unpleasant kiss at all; Nessa tasted of chocolate and dust. He felt like he floated on air.
Nessa broke the kiss. “Well, that didn’t work,” she said. “Unbutton your shirt.” She started to unbutton her own.
“I’ll do no such…”
“Look, Dave, your life depends on this. Cooperate a little,” Nessa said, instantly back to autocratic bitch. With her shirt unbuttoned, he noticed her belly held a telltale pregnancy bulge.
“Tell me why.”
“I’m seeing into your mind.”
“I thought you couldn’t.”
“I can’t. I’ve never met someone with mental shields as strong as yours. That’s why I need more skin contact. Even with my Portland enhancements.”
Stranger and stranger. He wondered if he could understand her better if he gave up on trying. “What will this do to me?”
99 Gods: Betrayer Page 52
